I implemented my script as a lazy-evaluated list. You can seed it with starting values like "Once upon a time" or "It was a dark and stormy night" or even "I'm sorry Mr. Pizza Man, I ran out of money. Is there any other way me and my 20 lesbian sorority sisters can pay for that Italian Sausage?"
It'll keep giving you new lines based on the ones before it. The only boundary condition I put on the list length was the eventual heat death of the universe (likelihood of being eating by a grue = 1)
It got its trial run on the TV show Lost. The producers would just keep requesting lines until they filled their time slot. Then they'd just cut to black and play an ominous screeching violin sound at the end of each episode and call it "suspense." It had a couple bugs though where it would get stuck in these self-consistent story loops that made it seem like there was some deeper meaning. We'd have to go in and tweak something every now and then just to get it to move on. The most embarrassing error was where it would dump out 4 8 15 16 23 42 repeatedly which was just some garbage in memory after reading an unterminated string.
Agreed. This is one of the biggest frustrations with the Netflix/Amazon Prime streaming. But as a silver lining, I have found a ton of really good older or obscure indie stuff that I never would have encountered any other way.
A: Hey, I heard you Facebooked Facebook. B: Yeah, I did. I looked at Facebook's Facebook and sure enough Facebook says her name is Facebook. A: Haha. I wonder if she has a brother named Twitter. B: What's Twitter?
With the estate tax (aka "death tax") in place, this could be a fantastic source of funding for the gov't. Every time there's an accident and one of the billionaires on board dies, half their estate will go to the gov't and half to their heirs. NASA could use these funds to pay for the shuttle replacement program.
I had pretty much exactly the same take as you up until I bought my e-reader a couple months ago. I find it perfect for two cases that don't have some of the downsides you've listed. 1) Reading materials I don't care about keeping. For me that's periodicals and pulp-fiction style novels. I've never had any interest or desire in rereading or sharing any of the magazines or newspapers I read, so inevitably they get thrown in the recycling bin when I'm complete. That's a lot of waste and bulk. It's also very useful for getting access to some foreign language papers that would be very expensive to acquire in paper form here in the States. Same applies for pulp novels. I enjoy reading some Stephen King-style stuff every now and then. It's entertaining, but I'm never interested in rereading it or sharing it, generally. Price plays a bigger factor here though, since the paper versions are usually so cheap. If the eBook is more expensive, I avoid it. 2) Books where the convenience factor outweighs everything else. For me this is typically programming books and other reference materials. These books are usually big and bulky, and depending on the scope of what you're working on, you may need access to several different ones. And since I program at work for work and home for fun, I'd often run into the problem of having the book I'm looking for in the wrong place. The eReader makes it easy to have access to my full library of programming books when needed. I do try to go DRM free here wherever possible. Thankfully O'Reilly has a really nice policy with eBooks, so I have been able to stay 100% DRM free so far.
These cases may not apply to you or you may have different ways of dealing with the issues my eReader solves for me. But I read my eReader every day, and I read paper books every day. They complement each other, with the way I use them.
approach to fighting vehicle theft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Thieves can easily use it to harvest spare change ( ) Remote starts and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money (x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop vehicle theft for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it ( ) Users of cars will not put up with it ( ) Chrysler will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from thieves ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many car companies cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential passengers (x) Car thieves don’t care about invalid keys ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s car or truck
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for car keys ( ) Open roadways in foreign countries (x) Ease of searching tiny valid keyspace of a mechanical key (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new mechanical things ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of keys (x) Huge existing software investment in Keyloq ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than Keyloq to attack (x) Willingness of users to insert keys into doors ( ) Armies of rust-riddled pickup trucks ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all locking approaches (x) Extreme profitability of car theft ( ) Joe jobs and/or vehicle theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with car thieves (x) Dishonesty on the part of car thieves themselves ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) Keyloq algorithms should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) Countermeasures should not involve registration fraud or insurance fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public roads ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Unlocking car doors should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your key makers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time keys are cumbersome ( ) I don’t want the government opening my car door ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of a cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.
(emphasis mine)
A man who claims companies are losing millions due to network latency sells tools to monitor network latency? A reliable source, I'm sure.
Ditto. And to the others who claim current display tech is too much, I do this daily for work (1600x1200 resolution, millions of colors) and have done so for years. It worked great on the 1.5Mbps cable connection I had a few years back. I've run 1920x1080 on my laptop from public wifi connections with no problems either. Bandwidth hasn't really been a limiting factor in my experience. Latency can be killer, though.
Competition. Right now Netflix service is fantastic, in large part because their survival as a company depends on them being very good. If Microsoft/Apple/Google/Boxee/Hulu/Roku/etc all decide that they don't want to try anymore and let Netflix have the whole market, there is no incentive for Netflix to improve or even maintain their product at a reasonable price. As a happy Netflix subscriber, I want there to be as many competitors as possible to keep them honest so I can _stay_ a happy subscriber. And I do use several of those other services, so relative quality does affect my usage and if Netflix doesn't stay competitive I won't stay subscribed.
Ditto. At most I'll skip over an article I'm not interested in, but it's never random access. The Kindle (and I would assume other e-readers) has a handy next/previous article button so it's actually easier to skip an article or two on an e-reader than in a print mag.
As I understand it, women aren't quite as obsessed with appearance as men. Though I'm betting she wouldn't mind a husband with a pleasant personality for a change.
I watch TV. But usually I'm streaming Netflix or watching iTunes content on the Apple TV. I no longer have cable. I have rabbit ears attached to my TV for watching sporting events and PBS stuff for the kids.
If only God had thought to implement the universe in Haskell. We'd be bug-free, though it IS kind of hard to imagine a universe without side-effects...
I also feel the lack buttons is holding the iphone back, despite what 'focus groups' claim about the buttons, you simply end up wasting screen real estate with onscreen buttons.
What would those extra buttons do? I don't think the use of the extra buttons on Android and WP7 are that much of an advantage.
I disagree. Having the "Home", "Menu", and "Back" buttons in the same place for every app is a godsend. Many iPhone/iPod apps are fairly consistent, but not all, and as the GP said, they all take valuable screen real estate.
I suggest borrowing from the radio spectrum naming convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_spectrum#Bands)
sub-bang: typical daily life Extremely low bang (ELB): smashing your thumb with a hammer Super low bang (SLB): combustion cycle of a gasoline engine Ultra low bang (ULB): what your wife suffers through after a Taco Bell dinner. Very low bang (VLB): nuclear reactor core Low bang (LB): the center of the sun Medium bang (MB): A typical night with your mom High bang (HB): This experiment Very high bang (VHB): Spinal Tap amplifier setting Ultra high bang (UHB): Super Nova Super high bang (SHB): Poor translation of Japanese video game subtitles Extremely high bang (EHB): The actual big bang Terabang (TB): Costs you $39.99/mo, automatic renewal
Slashdot Mirror
I implemented my script as a lazy-evaluated list. You can seed it with starting values like "Once upon a time" or "It was a dark and stormy night" or even "I'm sorry Mr. Pizza Man, I ran out of money. Is there any other way me and my 20 lesbian sorority sisters can pay for that Italian Sausage?"
It'll keep giving you new lines based on the ones before it. The only boundary condition I put on the list length was the eventual heat death of the universe (likelihood of being eating by a grue = 1)
It got its trial run on the TV show Lost. The producers would just keep requesting lines until they filled their time slot. Then they'd just cut to black and play an ominous screeching violin sound at the end of each episode and call it "suspense." It had a couple bugs though where it would get stuck in these self-consistent story loops that made it seem like there was some deeper meaning. We'd have to go in and tweak something every now and then just to get it to move on. The most embarrassing error was where it would dump out 4 8 15 16 23 42 repeatedly which was just some garbage in memory after reading an unterminated string.
Can we stop calling them leaks and start calling them press releases? Nobody is fooled by this anymore.
Agreed. This is one of the biggest frustrations with the Netflix/Amazon Prime streaming. But as a silver lining, I have found a ton of really good older or obscure indie stuff that I never would have encountered any other way.
A: Hey, I heard you Facebooked Facebook.
B: Yeah, I did. I looked at Facebook's Facebook and sure enough Facebook says her name is Facebook.
A: Haha. I wonder if she has a brother named Twitter.
B: What's Twitter?
I assume it would honk the horn and whistle.
"I er-uh couldn't be happier with how that went." -- Mayor Quimby
With the estate tax (aka "death tax") in place, this could be a fantastic source of funding for the gov't. Every time there's an accident and one of the billionaires on board dies, half their estate will go to the gov't and half to their heirs. NASA could use these funds to pay for the shuttle replacement program.
Ditto. But on the plus side, it did give me a reason to change my password to something much stronger than it used to be.
...because I thought this was about shoddy hats.
Umm... Do you realize what site you're on? 'Round here, trying to dissect the appeal of a game like Angry Birds IS fun!
This is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever read. I'm regretting not reading it on my Kindle, so I could forget it quicker.
I had pretty much exactly the same take as you up until I bought my e-reader a couple months ago. I find it perfect for two cases that don't have some of the downsides you've listed.
1) Reading materials I don't care about keeping. For me that's periodicals and pulp-fiction style novels. I've never had any interest or desire in rereading or sharing any of the magazines or newspapers I read, so inevitably they get thrown in the recycling bin when I'm complete. That's a lot of waste and bulk. It's also very useful for getting access to some foreign language papers that would be very expensive to acquire in paper form here in the States. Same applies for pulp novels. I enjoy reading some Stephen King-style stuff every now and then. It's entertaining, but I'm never interested in rereading it or sharing it, generally. Price plays a bigger factor here though, since the paper versions are usually so cheap. If the eBook is more expensive, I avoid it.
2) Books where the convenience factor outweighs everything else. For me this is typically programming books and other reference materials. These books are usually big and bulky, and depending on the scope of what you're working on, you may need access to several different ones. And since I program at work for work and home for fun, I'd often run into the problem of having the book I'm looking for in the wrong place. The eReader makes it easy to have access to my full library of programming books when needed. I do try to go DRM free here wherever possible. Thankfully O'Reilly has a really nice policy with eBooks, so I have been able to stay 100% DRM free so far.
These cases may not apply to you or you may have different ways of dealing with the issues my eReader solves for me. But I read my eReader every day, and I read paper books every day. They complement each other, with the way I use them.
Where else can you get paid $100k+ a year to gripe all day on Slashdot about how crappy your job is?
Your post advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting vehicle theft. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Thieves can easily use it to harvest spare change
( ) Remote starts and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(x) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop vehicle theft for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
( ) Users of cars will not put up with it
( ) Chrysler will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from thieves
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many car companies cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential passengers
(x) Car thieves don’t care about invalid keys
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s car or truck
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for car keys
( ) Open roadways in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching tiny valid keyspace of a mechanical key
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new mechanical things
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of keys
(x) Huge existing software investment in Keyloq
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than Keyloq to attack
(x) Willingness of users to insert keys into doors
( ) Armies of rust-riddled pickup trucks
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all locking approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of car theft
( ) Joe jobs and/or vehicle theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with car thieves
(x) Dishonesty on the part of car thieves themselves
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) Keyloq algorithms should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) Countermeasures should not involve registration fraud or insurance fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public roads
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Unlocking car doors should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your key makers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time keys are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government opening my car door
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
That's not a news article, it's an advertisement.
High-frequency trading networks, which complete stock market transactions in microseconds, are vulnerable to manipulation by hackers who can inject tiny amounts of latency into them. By doing so, they can subtly change the course of trading and pocket profits of millions of dollars in just a few seconds, says Rony Kay, a former IBM research fellow and founder of a cPacket Networks, a Silicon Valley firm that develops chips and technologies for network monitoring and traffic analysis.
(emphasis mine)
A man who claims companies are losing millions due to network latency sells tools to monitor network latency? A reliable source, I'm sure.
Ditto. And to the others who claim current display tech is too much, I do this daily for work (1600x1200 resolution, millions of colors) and have done so for years. It worked great on the 1.5Mbps cable connection I had a few years back. I've run 1920x1080 on my laptop from public wifi connections with no problems either. Bandwidth hasn't really been a limiting factor in my experience. Latency can be killer, though.
Competition. Right now Netflix service is fantastic, in large part because their survival as a company depends on them being very good. If Microsoft/Apple/Google/Boxee/Hulu/Roku/etc all decide that they don't want to try anymore and let Netflix have the whole market, there is no incentive for Netflix to improve or even maintain their product at a reasonable price. As a happy Netflix subscriber, I want there to be as many competitors as possible to keep them honest so I can _stay_ a happy subscriber. And I do use several of those other services, so relative quality does affect my usage and if Netflix doesn't stay competitive I won't stay subscribed.
Ditto. At most I'll skip over an article I'm not interested in, but it's never random access. The Kindle (and I would assume other e-readers) has a handy next/previous article button so it's actually easier to skip an article or two on an e-reader than in a print mag.
As I understand it, women aren't quite as obsessed with appearance as men. Though I'm betting she wouldn't mind a husband with a pleasant personality for a change.
That was 1 error in 25 characters in that sentence. You've exceeded the 95% accuracy rate, so you did in fact earn that A.
I watch TV. But usually I'm streaming Netflix or watching iTunes content on the Apple TV. I no longer have cable. I have rabbit ears attached to my TV for watching sporting events and PBS stuff for the kids.
If Obama doesn't get his shit together by 2012, I'll gladly write 'jollyreaper' in on my ballot.
If only God had thought to implement the universe in Haskell. We'd be bug-free, though it IS kind of hard to imagine a universe without side-effects...
I also feel the lack buttons is holding the iphone back, despite what 'focus groups' claim about the buttons, you simply end up wasting screen real estate with onscreen buttons.
What would those extra buttons do? I don't think the use of the extra buttons on Android and WP7 are that much of an advantage.
I disagree. Having the "Home", "Menu", and "Back" buttons in the same place for every app is a godsend. Many iPhone/iPod apps are fairly consistent, but not all, and as the GP said, they all take valuable screen real estate.
I suggest borrowing from the radio spectrum naming convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_spectrum#Bands)
sub-bang: typical daily life
Extremely low bang (ELB): smashing your thumb with a hammer
Super low bang (SLB): combustion cycle of a gasoline engine
Ultra low bang (ULB): what your wife suffers through after a Taco Bell dinner.
Very low bang (VLB): nuclear reactor core
Low bang (LB): the center of the sun
Medium bang (MB): A typical night with your mom
High bang (HB): This experiment
Very high bang (VHB): Spinal Tap amplifier setting
Ultra high bang (UHB): Super Nova
Super high bang (SHB): Poor translation of Japanese video game subtitles
Extremely high bang (EHB): The actual big bang
Terabang (TB): Costs you $39.99/mo, automatic renewal
Awesome! That's why Americans weigh so much more than their European counterparts. It's not obesity, it's inflation!