I'd change banks if I were you. I mean, if they require IE for internet access, chances are they keep the account databases on Microsoft software, so why in the world would you trust them with your money? I mean, I like Microsoft and all, but...
Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done, you know:-).
Most college EE programs would only have a semester or two of chip design, with a stupid silly project at the end. It wouldn't be much help when you start working on your first real project.
Besides, chip design is not all that different from FPGA design, unless you get into the really hard stuff, like, maybe, analog, RF, or high-speed digital. A C64 is neither high-speed, nor analog, so I'd say, an ASIC design could be even easier than an FPGA, 'cause you'd have better routing flexibility and more gates available. The chips could be harder to get fabricated, though, and VERY expensive to debug.
GPS has been always designed so that the civilian signals could be shut down, if necessary. These days it would be a much harder decision, since GPS is relied upon by so many civilian users (probably many more than military users), and turning it off would be a safety hazard for planes, etc.
As far as hard decisions are concerned, we all know already how good Bush is at taking those.
Have you ever opened your phone? It's stuffed solid with electronics. There is no space for any considerable amount of explosives - unless you remove some parts, breaking the radio part. This is why the gate security sometimes ask you to turn the phone on for them, to make sure it's still a phone, and not a bomb in a phone case. With the phone still operational, you could probably put in enough explosives to take off the phone user's finger. Downing a plane would take a lot more.
I went through providers over the years. I don't pick them by the ability to get a signal on the plane, mind you, but it never hurts to do a little test:
1. Verizon CDMA-800 kinda works when the plane's still low, and you might get a signal at cruse altitude every now and then. That phone also had analog roaming, and it picked up analog signal sometimes.
2. TDMA works quite well.
3. GSM-1800 doesn't work AT ALL.
BTW, if any of you don't understand how come the FAA worries about something as insignificant as a ell phone disrupting avionics, you can do a little experiment - put your cell next to a car radio and call it. I'm not sure how likely you'd be to have the same effect with CDMA and analog, but GSM phones time-multiplex the channel, and most radios would pick up the multiplex frequency, which would come out of your speakers as rather unplesant loud hum, akin to a modem sound.
Simple - abandon software patents, and cut down the times for the other patents back to what they were to start with.
The reason to have a patent system is to encourage the inventors to promote and freely disclose their inventions, rather than keeping them to themselves. Not to protect inventors rights, or anything like that.
In other words, I'm getting screwed anyways, since I don't have money for bogus patents. Nor for non-bogus patents, for that matter.
Not that there is such a thing as a non-bogus software patent. Tell me, people, can one of you come up with a single example of a non-bogus software patent? Like something you'd look at and think "Ah, clever!"?
Because any software patent I had the honor of reading so far was bogus, wicked, money-grabbing, asshole-lawyer enriching, not-worth-paper-it's-printed-on, trivial piece of crap, that any sophomore Comp.Sci. student would come up with in 30 minutes or less. Man, am I upset, or what..
"..to be considered harmful someday"? I mean, gimme a break, dude, if you think its harmful just write "MD5 is harmful", but "to be considered...someday"?
I only adblock the sites whose ads annoy me, i.e. blink in my face. I suppose, many people are like me. Make a non-blinking ad, and we will be too lazy to: right-click>adblock>kill-the-tail-of-the-line>ente r
Hence, we will see the ad. Which is a hell of a lot better for you, advertizers, than us getting pissed at you as we activate adblock while keeping our eyes off the pesky banner.
Publish a picture of yellow snow in the antarctic and I'll look at the photolog...in the Antarctic - the piss freezes on the fly, and drops to the ground in little yellow piss-ice-balls - didn't you know?
how about making backup of your life into several TB harddisk?
That assumes that each neuron in your brain stores on the order of a kilobit of information, and in reality it's more like one bit, or a few. An arevage 120 GB harddrive should be quite enough to back up a human brain, perhaps even several times over.
or, put it further, will there be a day that we can backup our mind and soul and reboot yourself in truely inorganic form?
Lawnmover man.
By that day, will it be possible to be 'teleported' to different planet, simply sending you 'life and soul.zip' to a different clone machine via planetary communication link?
While sending the contents of ones memory seems not far from practical, the 'soul' part is somewhat trickier. Noone really knows WTF it is, and whether. Noone has ever seen or felt it. Yet everyone seems to think that there is something to your persona besides just the memory banks and your body, and much religious belief is based on that assumption. If there really is something that could be called 'soul', there is no reason to think that it could be zipped up and sent over a comm channel - after all, memories are just information, but this 'soul' part of you is supposedly not.
And, by that day, what is the definition of human and machine?
Usually the reason that it becomes hard to see the difference between 2 things (like human and machine in your example), it's because there really isn't all that much difference. So, by the time the question "what's the definition of human and machine" becomes relevant, the right answer might well be "who cares?".
btw, will this be a movie plot of an upcomming blockbuster?
I thought this has been the topic of blockbusters since the fifties.
You can also imagine that police officer shooting you, and saying that it has a mind of its own... In other words, anyway you twist it, you lose. Such is technology...
..they'd be marketing to your brain when you played online games..
They are doing this even now... just using your eyes and ears to get to your brain:) - you just stopped noticing. What makes you think the ads sent directly to your brain down the electrodes would be any more annoying?
The city could also adjust the light to switch to red right just as you are entering the intersection, and station a cop nearby to collect the revenue stream. I know a few small towns around where I live that would definitely not pass on an opportunity like this if it were available.
Well, you'd need a frame rate and resolution higher than a camera phone can provide...quite yet. I bet you could do well with just speed and position inputs, and you can get those off of a camera picture. The ball is small, and has little spin energy, not enough to throw you off. The random bouncing off the barriers between the numbers is much worse, and is hardly predictable.
But you don't need a lot of accuracy. If you predict 1-in-36 correctly, you're breaking even. Predict 1-in-30, and you'll need a pickup truck to haul the cash home.
I thought geeks were, like, in a higher-payed part of the population. Why is it that bum housing interesting to slashdot readers? I mean, this one's not the first article about cardboard and the like houses on slashdot... Are we, like, anticipating post-post-post-y2k depression any time soon? I thought there were no more.com bubbles left to burst, at least for a good while...
Oh, fuck, get a life already. We're not the first country around to have a moron president, and, what, people usually live through this. I mean, he can't put, like everyone in jail.
Isn't that, like, what god invented cellphones for? I mean, sounding like you're on the toilet, when you're, like, actually taking a dump in the bushes... or something...
Slashdot Mirror
..website of my bank. I'm forced to use IE here.
I'd change banks if I were you. I mean, if they require IE for internet access, chances are they keep the account databases on Microsoft software, so why in the world would you trust them with your money? I mean, I like Microsoft and all, but...
kazaa?
Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done, you know:-).
Most college EE programs would only have a semester or two of chip design, with a stupid silly project at the end. It wouldn't be much help when you start working on your first real project.
Besides, chip design is not all that different from FPGA design, unless you get into the really hard stuff, like, maybe, analog, RF, or high-speed digital. A C64 is neither high-speed, nor analog, so I'd say, an ASIC design could be even easier than an FPGA, 'cause you'd have better routing flexibility and more gates available. The chips could be harder to get fabricated, though, and VERY expensive to debug.
So, after all, Pinky and the Brain will have their day?
GPS has been always designed so that the civilian signals could be shut down, if necessary. These days it would be a much harder decision, since GPS is relied upon by so many civilian users (probably many more than military users), and turning it off would be a safety hazard for planes, etc.
As far as hard decisions are concerned, we all know already how good Bush is at taking those.
Have you ever opened your phone? It's stuffed solid with electronics. There is no space for any considerable amount of explosives - unless you remove some parts, breaking the radio part. This is why the gate security sometimes ask you to turn the phone on for them, to make sure it's still a phone, and not a bomb in a phone case. With the phone still operational, you could probably put in enough explosives to take off the phone user's finger. Downing a plane would take a lot more.
I went through providers over the years. I don't pick them by the ability to get a signal on the plane, mind you, but it never hurts to do a little test:
1. Verizon CDMA-800 kinda works when the plane's still low, and you might get a signal at cruse altitude every now and then. That phone also had analog roaming, and it picked up analog signal sometimes.
2. TDMA works quite well.
3. GSM-1800 doesn't work AT ALL.
BTW, if any of you don't understand how come the FAA worries about something as insignificant as a ell phone disrupting avionics, you can do a little experiment - put your cell next to a car radio and call it. I'm not sure how likely you'd be to have the same effect with CDMA and analog, but GSM phones time-multiplex the channel, and most radios would pick up the multiplex frequency, which would come out of your speakers as rather unplesant loud hum, akin to a modem sound.
Simple - abandon software patents, and cut down the times for the other patents back to what they were to start with.
The reason to have a patent system is to encourage the inventors to promote and freely disclose their inventions, rather than keeping them to themselves. Not to protect inventors rights, or anything like that.
In other words, I'm getting screwed anyways, since I don't have money for bogus patents. Nor for non-bogus patents, for that matter.
Not that there is such a thing as a non-bogus software patent. Tell me, people, can one of you come up with a single example of a non-bogus software patent? Like something you'd look at and think "Ah, clever!"?
Because any software patent I had the honor of reading so far was bogus, wicked, money-grabbing, asshole-lawyer enriching, not-worth-paper-it's-printed-on, trivial piece of crap, that any sophomore Comp.Sci. student would come up with in 30 minutes or less. Man, am I upset, or what..
Yes, you just have to know how to ask *evel grin*
With undescended testicles there is no reason to fear laptops - body heat does the trick just fine:-).
"..to be considered harmful someday"? I mean, gimme a break, dude, if you think its harmful just write "MD5 is harmful", but "to be considered...someday"?
I only adblock the sites whose ads annoy me, i.e. blink in my face. I suppose, many people are like me. Make a non-blinking ad, and we will be too lazy to: right-click>adblock>kill-the-tail-of-the-line>ente r
Hence, we will see the ad. Which is a hell of a lot better for you, advertizers, than us getting pissed at you as we activate adblock while keeping our eyes off the pesky banner.
..stolen Humvee..
As long as you haven't stolen it from me:-)
Wouldn't that rather be:
Publish a picture of yellow snow in the antarctic and I'll look at the photolog. ..in the Antarctic - the piss freezes on the fly, and drops to the ground in little yellow piss-ice-balls - didn't you know?
how about making backup of your life into several TB harddisk?
That assumes that each neuron in your brain stores on the order of a kilobit of information, and in reality it's more like one bit, or a few. An arevage 120 GB harddrive should be quite enough to back up a human brain, perhaps even several times over.
or, put it further, will there be a day that we can backup our mind and soul and reboot yourself in truely inorganic form?
Lawnmover man.
By that day, will it be possible to be 'teleported' to different planet, simply sending you 'life and soul.zip' to a different clone machine via planetary communication link?
While sending the contents of ones memory seems not far from practical, the 'soul' part is somewhat trickier. Noone really knows WTF it is, and whether. Noone has ever seen or felt it. Yet everyone seems to think that there is something to your persona besides just the memory banks and your body, and much religious belief is based on that assumption. If there really is something that could be called 'soul', there is no reason to think that it could be zipped up and sent over a comm channel - after all, memories are just information, but this 'soul' part of you is supposedly not.
And, by that day, what is the definition of human and machine?
Usually the reason that it becomes hard to see the difference between 2 things (like human and machine in your example), it's because there really isn't all that much difference. So, by the time the question "what's the definition of human and machine" becomes relevant, the right answer might well be "who cares?".
btw, will this be a movie plot of an upcomming blockbuster?
I thought this has been the topic of blockbusters since the fifties.
For example: Spilled Dew on my keyboard.
I better like the classical: my dog ate it!
You can also imagine that police officer shooting you, and saying that it has a mind of its own... In other words, anyway you twist it, you lose. Such is technology...
..they'd be marketing to your brain when you played online games..
... just using your eyes and ears to get to your brain:) - you just stopped noticing. What makes you think the ads sent directly to your brain down the electrodes would be any more annoying?
They are doing this even now
The city could also adjust the light to switch to red right just as you are entering the intersection, and station a cop nearby to collect the revenue stream. I know a few small towns around where I live that would definitely not pass on an opportunity like this if it were available.
Well, you'd need a frame rate and resolution higher than a camera phone can provide...quite yet. I bet you could do well with just speed and position inputs, and you can get those off of a camera picture. The ball is small, and has little spin energy, not enough to throw you off. The random bouncing off the barriers between the numbers is much worse, and is hardly predictable.
But you don't need a lot of accuracy. If you predict 1-in-36 correctly, you're breaking even. Predict 1-in-30, and you'll need a pickup truck to haul the cash home.
I thought geeks were, like, in a higher-payed part of the population. Why is it that bum housing interesting to slashdot readers? I mean, this one's not the first article about cardboard and the like houses on slashdot... Are we, like, anticipating post-post-post-y2k depression any time soon? I thought there were no more .com bubbles left to burst, at least for a good while...
Oh, fuck, get a life already. We're not the first country around to have a moron president, and, what, people usually live through this. I mean, he can't put, like everyone in jail.
...You don't sound like you're on the toilet.
Isn't that, like, what god invented cellphones for? I mean, sounding like you're on the toilet, when you're, like, actually taking a dump in the bushes... or something...