To address the privacy concerns, how about a system where you pay for eBooks via Bitcoin, and your private key for bitcoin transactions is what is used to unlock the eBook? You can always just generate a new Bitcoin ID per book if you wanted to...
(oh wait, you could also transfer all funds out of the bitcoin ID you used to purchase the book, then share the book and the private key that no longer holds any value, so shhh - don't tell the publishers this part)
Yeah, that quote bothered me too - I'm thinking, why not just design it with the least friction with the air to start with - why have it be less efficient at slow speeds in other words?
Unless Clanet was referring to the design process itself - use an elastic model in a wind tunnel (or simulate the whole thing) and observe it's deformation to determine the shape with the least friction with the air (or call it coefficient of drag, like everyone else does:-)
At first I was thinking it might have been typical media-distorted science, but when they threw in that quote from Clanet, it seemed more that the science is hard to take seriously too.
But isn't the shuttle itself up for sale? So I guess we're just upset this guy was only getting $3 million for the information, vs. $28.8 million we'd get if we could get the PRC to buy the shuttle itself?
My first thought too - My blackberry has a GPS reciever in it, but the feature is turned off by Verizon because they want to charge a monthly premium for their navigation service, which is unnecessary with GPS enabled and software installed on the handset itself. Irritatingly, it disables the GPS for other applications (GPS Trace logging for OpenStreetMap anyone?) and I don't need the navigation service enough to want to pay every month for it.
Why the patent, I couldn't guess, unless it is as others here are saying - patent it so you can sue carriers who want to implement the system to prevent them from crippling the iPhone.
Isaac Asimov... was a Russian-born American author and professor of biochemistry, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books.
I would have thought that most people would conside professors of biochemistry to be scientists...
Isn't the metadata where the filesystem would keep track of what blocks are available to be re-used? How could another process start using those data blocks if you haven't updated the meta-data to record them as avilable for re-use?
For truncation, doesn't the truncation happen by writing the metadata?
I wonder if that would hold up "But officer. The GPS told me to!"
'fraid not. I just bought a Navagon GPS navigator, and it had a EULA like screen the first time it turned on, requiring me to click to acknowledge that local traffic laws and directions of traffic officers take precedence over it's directions.
When I first read that headline, I read it as a headset that enables one to control the mind, vs. using the mind to control something. Perhaps that's because I'm listening to the 7th Son trilogy over at podiobooks.com...
I've been using Cerberus Helpdesk software for a number of years for an internal IT ticket tracking system at work. It does have several features we're not using, which are intended for external facing setups - an end user web interface with knowledgebase searching / ticket managment, plugin authentication to several different other systems so your users don't necessarily need yet another password, SLA based ticket due dates, open vs. gated ticket queues.
Anyway, it's PHP/MySQL - they went away from "optimized" (obscured) PHP code years ago, so the source is there - the user forums have a custom mods area, and they have a single-email-address version that's free. It was pretty cheap when we bought it for multi-domains as well. The only part that's closed soruce is the email parser that checks the license key as it receives email to turn into tickets.
Wow, Handing over privacy-sensitive information to the government is free speech, so they can turn around and claim the information is a state secret? Does that make anyone elses' brain hurt just trying to come up with an argument as to why that seems wrong? Each piece may make sense, but string them together, and the whole seems to me to violate the intent of every piece they're using.
Using slight offsets with multiple jetting modules is perfectly understandable - it's hard to make the jets physically close enough to get the resolutions desired. Getting them too close makes it hard to make the walls between ink paths stiff enough to prevent mechanical cross-talk - the drop ejecting pressure wave in one ink path could bow the wall enough to cause a pressure wave in adjacent ink paths.
The two ways I know of to increase effective resolutions, one is to use multiple jetting modules offset from one another, as in this case. Another is to use a saber angle - position the print head at an angle other than perpendicular to the motion of the medium (paper), such as \ or / instead of |. This does mean the jets have to fire with a time offset to make a a line perpendicular to the paper path, and it reduces the total width, so it's probably better for single-head narrow printing swath applications, like the label printer in the video. I know of assembly-line print-on-cardboard barcode printers that use a saber angle as well.
See, that's where I'm not sure what they mean by "dots per inch", and how it might relate to pixels per inch (a pixel having more than the 4 - 6 ink colors) - I liked the last calculation best, because I was basing it on the number of jets in the printhead - they didn't say 70,400 jets per color, just a total of 70,400 jets, so unless they're using Versajet(tm) or something similar to specify multiple drop sizes, it would only be one bit per jet per firepulse.
I've seen another company's single-pass industrial inkjet systems pumping out images at comparable speeds, but to get that performance in such small devices is quite impressive.
As for the bandwidth question:
lets see, 70,400 jets but they have different size printers, so we'll go with the document printer's specs:, 1600 dpi and a page per second give you 11 inches per second minimum, for a full coverage (US letter size) print, that would be:
8.5 * 1600 = 13,600 jets on the document printer
1600 * 11 = 17,600 firings per second, for a bandwidth of 13,600 * 17,600 = 239,360,000, or about 2.4 Mbps, so that's doable.
The large format printer would be another matter, but the dpi might well be much lower (billboard-size pictures don't often face "close" scrutiny) If it's not, then:
51 * 1600 = 81,600 jets wide, so we'll probably assume the 70,400 is the wide-format printhead?
In that case, at 70,400 / 51" = 1380 dpi. If we assume the same resolution in the paper-movement direction, we'd get
1,380 * 12 = 16,560 firings per second, for a bandwidth of
70,400 * 16,560 = 1,165,824,000, or ~ 1.2 Gbps - still not impossible, with, say, 10-GigE, but nothing to sneeze at, and not solved all that long ago...
In my area, there's an ISP that's also a CLEC (Competing Local Exchange Carrier - they offer dialtone). They're building out fiber to buildings for Ethernet and telephony services, and would like to get into video (TV) but since they're a small company, they just can't do it if they're going to be required to build-out to the non-profitable areas. It's not just a matter of raising prices for everyone to subsidize the sparsely-populated areas, it's a matter of not having the access to the capital required to do such a build-out in the first place. That, and the "densely populated" areas around here are not big enough to make the subsidization idea feasable even if the build-out could be done.
Here's another perspective - the telco's are only offering DSL in specific areas - sure it's probably primarily for technical reasons - certain radius from the CO for DSL to work, but if they can "cherry pick" for DSL, why not the rest of the services they offer.
On the other hand, arguments about large numbers of rural residents not having phone or electric sevice now if the build-out requirements were never in place are hard to ignore, and high-speed internet is being considered a basic necessity by more and more people as time goes on. Perhaps the FCC doesn't agree about that, or perhaps they figure having wide-spread fiber deployments at all would be a better starting point to eventually get fiber to rural areas than if fiber wasn't in the city/town at all.
Actually, at the company where I work, we sell a development printer and the cartridges come in two parts, the printhead, and an empty fluid container. Researchers or industrial R&D people can fill it with whatever fluid they want to experiment with. These cartridges are comparable in price to commercial inkjet cartridges. Granted, the ones we sell don't have ink in them, but when you consider that some biomedical research chemicals are well over $2,000/liter, and the printer system is in the low 5-digit price range, the cartridges are not that expensive a component of the whole setup.
And no, the custom software required to run all this doesn't run on Linux.
Disclaimer: I just work in IT, and the info above is not official, just what I've picked up by helping others at the company with their computers, and being generally interested in what they do.
I think you might be confusing the canned meat product SPAM(TM) from Hormel(TM), with either "Spam" or "spam", ie. junk e-mail.
I remember reading somewhere once that Hormel doesn't mind the world using the word spam to refer to junk email, but they'd prefer people not use their registered trademark of (all caps) SPAM when doing so....
I was thinking you could hack the laptop to popup a web form telling them they just won some cool prize, and all they have to do is fill in their name, address, phone, SSN,...
Better yet, maybe pop up a window that looks like an IM from a customer service rep at a well known on-line retailer that asks for shipping address confirmation for the even better laptop that the previous owner had "ordered"....
IANADSH (DNS server hacker), but if filtering the NTP packets is computationally prohibitive, how about hacking a DNS server to selectively reply to your NTP server's hostname with either the correct IP if it's found to be a DIX member or something else if it's outside your legitimate service audience. If the primary DIX.dk name server can't be hacked, use a cname for gps.dix.dk and point it to a hostname served by a hacked DNS server that does have a BGP feed and RIPE database?
I can think of three alternative DNS responses that would both eliminate traffic to the DIX backbone, with differing side-effects: 1) Reply with another CNAME pointing to pool.ntp.org 2) Reply with 127.0.0.1 3) Reply with the IP of a server on D-Link's network (or a CNAME record pointing to a DNS entry in dlink.com)
Of course, if d-link isn't running their own NTP server anywhere, they could probably easily filter all packets going to port 123 so it wouldn't be as much of a DDOS as what they're doing to your server, but it might get their attention, especially if the sheer bandwidth is high enough.
Just a thought - I figure the first time a device does the DNS lookup, the lookup will take longer, but then DNS servers will cache (and the clients might too) but the NTP packets shouldn't get delayed at all by this scheme.
Kensiko has had an "email mouse" for at least a couple years now (I bought one some time ago - it was the cheapest mouse in the store at the time) and it too was only for outlook or other MAPI clients, but the scroll-wheel lit up solid when powered, and flashed when a message was detected. No extra action when clicking on it though, and no IM.
I could see this as useful for a home user who could glance across the room to see if they needed to sit down at the computer. Especially if it's a stay-at-home parent with a home-based business.
It doesn't fit my needs, but that doesn't mean it's not useful to enough people to make it worth developing and selling.
I don't know about that - think about it this way - if you write excellent code, and can sell support contracts for a product that has few if any flaws, (such as to corporate types who need that warm fuzzy of a finger to point if something goes wrong, even if it's unlikely to do so) you get your money for very little work, after you cover your initial development costs.
Just tonight I have been reading some more on different IQ tests and some of their limitations, and the information may be relavent to your discussion on the linearity of intelligence over time.
Many IQ tests have relatively low ceilings- the max score on some is as low as 135. Also, IQ testing is often based on percentiles, which are based on age peers. In other words, a 5 year old who gets a 135 won't necessarily know the same things as an 8 year old who gets the same score. Because of this, even moderatly gifted children can hit the ceiling of many tests by age 12, and exceptionally or profoundly gifted can hit ceilings of even gifted-centric IQ tests as early as 8 years of age.
So, is it that the intelligence levels out, or that our ability to measure intelligence can't keep up with wherever it ends up going? (linear or otherwise)
Another post in this thread indicated they hadn't used much of the math/science they learned in school - the same may be true of many gifted individuals as adults - they may choose lifestyles where their gifts or talents do not make them noteworthy enough to be studied or in the news.
If you're referring to the resolution ouput of the video card, that would work, but with the users I've worked with, the images are often fine at a high resolution, but text throughout the OS and all apps is just too small to read (esp. with 19??x1200 15" laptop screens). Adjusting the font size at the OS level hasn't worked well from Windows 3.1 through XP because many apps don't seem to check font sizes, so many dialog boxes are unusable. I haven't used linux as a desktop OS enough to have played around with font sizes to know if the problem exists there or not.
vi was my stopping point some time ago when attempting to learn dvorak. I found typing the few english sentences in the web-based drill to be physically much more comfortable than in qwerty, but then I thought about vi. I don't think about h,j,k,l for cursor movement anymore, just left, down, up, right; so those keys probalby should be position-mapped. For the rest of the vi keys, I do think of the letter using it as a mnemonic, (i)nsert, (a)ppend, (d)elete, etc. so merely mapping all the command positions would not be helpful.
Basically, I had the same question as the grandparent, and didn't find any answers, so I stuck with qwerty on my MS Natural Pro (can't stand the vertical insert/home/PGUP etc. keys on the elite).
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To address the privacy concerns, how about a system where you pay for eBooks via Bitcoin, and your private key for bitcoin transactions is what is used to unlock the eBook? You can always just generate a new Bitcoin ID per book if you wanted to... (oh wait, you could also transfer all funds out of the bitcoin ID you used to purchase the book, then share the book and the private key that no longer holds any value, so shhh - don't tell the publishers this part)
Shouldn't that be: "If it happens sooner then you're not doing it, right?"
Unless Clanet was referring to the design process itself - use an elastic model in a wind tunnel (or simulate the whole thing) and observe it's deformation to determine the shape with the least friction with the air (or call it coefficient of drag, like everyone else does :-)
At first I was thinking it might have been typical media-distorted science, but when they threw in that quote from Clanet, it seemed more that the science is hard to take seriously too.
Why the skies? Doesn't that ship just show up where it probably shouldn't be?
But isn't the shuttle itself up for sale? So I guess we're just upset this guy was only getting $3 million for the information, vs. $28.8 million we'd get if we could get the PRC to buy the shuttle itself?
Why the patent, I couldn't guess, unless it is as others here are saying - patent it so you can sue carriers who want to implement the system to prevent them from crippling the iPhone.
I would have thought that most people would conside professors of biochemistry to be scientists...
Isn't the metadata where the filesystem would keep track of what blocks are available to be re-used? How could another process start using those data blocks if you haven't updated the meta-data to record them as avilable for re-use? For truncation, doesn't the truncation happen by writing the metadata?
'fraid not. I just bought a Navagon GPS navigator, and it had a EULA like screen the first time it turned on, requiring me to click to acknowledge that local traffic laws and directions of traffic officers take precedence over it's directions.
When I first read that headline, I read it as a headset that enables one to control the mind, vs. using the mind to control something. Perhaps that's because I'm listening to the 7th Son trilogy over at podiobooks.com...
Anyway, it's PHP/MySQL - they went away from "optimized" (obscured) PHP code years ago, so the source is there - the user forums have a custom mods area, and they have a single-email-address version that's free. It was pretty cheap when we bought it for multi-domains as well. The only part that's closed soruce is the email parser that checks the license key as it receives email to turn into tickets.
Here's the product website
Wow, Handing over privacy-sensitive information to the government is free speech, so they can turn around and claim the information is a state secret? Does that make anyone elses' brain hurt just trying to come up with an argument as to why that seems wrong? Each piece may make sense, but string them together, and the whole seems to me to violate the intent of every piece they're using.
The two ways I know of to increase effective resolutions, one is to use multiple jetting modules offset from one another, as in this case. Another is to use a saber angle - position the print head at an angle other than perpendicular to the motion of the medium (paper), such as \ or / instead of |. This does mean the jets have to fire with a time offset to make a a line perpendicular to the paper path, and it reduces the total width, so it's probably better for single-head narrow printing swath applications, like the label printer in the video. I know of assembly-line print-on-cardboard barcode printers that use a saber angle as well.
See, that's where I'm not sure what they mean by "dots per inch", and how it might relate to pixels per inch (a pixel having more than the 4 - 6 ink colors) - I liked the last calculation best, because I was basing it on the number of jets in the printhead - they didn't say 70,400 jets per color, just a total of 70,400 jets, so unless they're using Versajet(tm) or something similar to specify multiple drop sizes, it would only be one bit per jet per firepulse.
I've seen another company's single-pass industrial inkjet systems pumping out images at comparable speeds, but to get that performance in such small devices is quite impressive.
As for the bandwidth question:
lets see, 70,400 jets but they have different size printers, so we'll go with the document printer's specs:, 1600 dpi and a page per second give you 11 inches per second minimum, for a full coverage (US letter size) print, that would be:
8.5 * 1600 = 13,600 jets on the document printer
1600 * 11 = 17,600 firings per second, for a bandwidth of
13,600 * 17,600 = 239,360,000, or about 2.4 Mbps, so that's doable.
The large format printer would be another matter, but the dpi might well be much lower (billboard-size pictures don't often face "close" scrutiny) If it's not, then:
51 * 1600 = 81,600 jets wide, so we'll probably assume the 70,400 is the wide-format printhead?
In that case, at 70,400 / 51" = 1380 dpi. If we assume the same resolution in the paper-movement direction, we'd get
1,380 * 12 = 16,560 firings per second, for a bandwidth of
70,400 * 16,560 = 1,165,824,000, or ~ 1.2 Gbps - still not impossible, with, say, 10-GigE, but nothing to sneeze at, and not solved all that long ago...
In my area, there's an ISP that's also a CLEC (Competing Local Exchange Carrier - they offer dialtone). They're building out fiber to buildings for Ethernet and telephony services, and would like to get into video (TV) but since they're a small company, they just can't do it if they're going to be required to build-out to the non-profitable areas. It's not just a matter of raising prices for everyone to subsidize the sparsely-populated areas, it's a matter of not having the access to the capital required to do such a build-out in the first place. That, and the "densely populated" areas around here are not big enough to make the subsidization idea feasable even if the build-out could be done.
Here's another perspective - the telco's are only offering DSL in specific areas - sure it's probably primarily for technical reasons - certain radius from the CO for DSL to work, but if they can "cherry pick" for DSL, why not the rest of the services they offer.
On the other hand, arguments about large numbers of rural residents not having phone or electric sevice now if the build-out requirements were never in place are hard to ignore, and high-speed internet is being considered a basic necessity by more and more people as time goes on. Perhaps the FCC doesn't agree about that, or perhaps they figure having wide-spread fiber deployments at all would be a better starting point to eventually get fiber to rural areas than if fiber wasn't in the city/town at all.
And no, the custom software required to run all this doesn't run on Linux.
Disclaimer: I just work in IT, and the info above is not official, just what I've picked up by helping others at the company with their computers, and being generally interested in what they do.
I think you might be confusing the canned meat product SPAM(TM) from Hormel(TM), with either "Spam" or "spam", ie. junk e-mail. I remember reading somewhere once that Hormel doesn't mind the world using the word spam to refer to junk email, but they'd prefer people not use their registered trademark of (all caps) SPAM when doing so....
I was thinking you could hack the laptop to popup a web form telling them they just won some cool prize, and all they have to do is fill in their name, address, phone, SSN,... Better yet, maybe pop up a window that looks like an IM from a customer service rep at a well known on-line retailer that asks for shipping address confirmation for the even better laptop that the previous owner had "ordered"....
IANADSH (DNS server hacker), but if filtering the NTP packets is computationally prohibitive, how about hacking a DNS server to selectively reply to your NTP server's hostname with either the correct IP if it's found to be a DIX member or something else if it's outside your legitimate service audience. If the primary DIX.dk name server can't be hacked, use a cname for gps.dix.dk and point it to a hostname served by a hacked DNS server that does have a BGP feed and RIPE database?
I can think of three alternative DNS responses that would both eliminate traffic to the DIX backbone, with differing side-effects:
1) Reply with another CNAME pointing to pool.ntp.org
2) Reply with 127.0.0.1
3) Reply with the IP of a server on D-Link's network (or a CNAME record pointing to a DNS entry in dlink.com)
Of course, if d-link isn't running their own NTP server anywhere, they could probably easily filter all packets going to port 123 so it wouldn't be as much of a DDOS as what they're doing to your server, but it might get their attention, especially if the sheer bandwidth is high enough.
Just a thought - I figure the first time a device does the DNS lookup, the lookup will take longer, but then DNS servers will cache (and the clients might too) but the NTP packets shouldn't get delayed at all by this scheme.
Kensiko has had an "email mouse" for at least a couple years now (I bought one some time ago - it was the cheapest mouse in the store at the time) and it too was only for outlook or other MAPI clients, but the scroll-wheel lit up solid when powered, and flashed when a message was detected. No extra action when clicking on it though, and no IM.
I could see this as useful for a home user who could glance across the room to see if they needed to sit down at the computer. Especially if it's a stay-at-home parent with a home-based business.
It doesn't fit my needs, but that doesn't mean it's not useful to enough people to make it worth developing and selling.
I don't know about that - think about it this way - if you write excellent code, and can sell support contracts for a product that has few if any flaws, (such as to corporate types who need that warm fuzzy of a finger to point if something goes wrong, even if it's unlikely to do so) you get your money for very little work, after you cover your initial development costs.
Just tonight I have been reading some more on different IQ tests and some of their limitations, and the information may be relavent to your discussion on the linearity of intelligence over time.
Many IQ tests have relatively low ceilings- the max score on some is as low as 135. Also, IQ testing is often based on percentiles, which are based on age peers. In other words, a 5 year old who gets a 135 won't necessarily know the same things as an 8 year old who gets the same score. Because of this, even moderatly gifted children can hit the ceiling of many tests by age 12, and exceptionally or profoundly gifted can hit ceilings of even gifted-centric IQ tests as early as 8 years of age.
So, is it that the intelligence levels out, or that our ability to measure intelligence can't keep up with wherever it ends up going? (linear or otherwise)
Another post in this thread indicated they hadn't used much of the math/science they learned in school - the same may be true of many gifted individuals as adults - they may choose lifestyles where their gifts or talents do not make them noteworthy enough to be studied or in the news.
If you're referring to the resolution ouput of the video card, that would work, but with the users I've worked with, the images are often fine at a high resolution, but text throughout the OS and all apps is just too small to read (esp. with 19??x1200 15" laptop screens). Adjusting the font size at the OS level hasn't worked well from Windows 3.1 through XP because many apps don't seem to check font sizes, so many dialog boxes are unusable. I haven't used linux as a desktop OS enough to have played around with font sizes to know if the problem exists there or not.
Basically, I had the same question as the grandparent, and didn't find any answers, so I stuck with qwerty on my MS Natural Pro (can't stand the vertical insert/home/PGUP etc. keys on the elite).