Now that the FCC is moving towards a broadcast flag for radio, how long until all radio broadcasts must be digital, forever ending the experimentation with crystal radio sets?
Well, on the TV side, 2006. Not certain about radio. Nice to know many of our wonderful TV Sets with rabbit ears won't work anymore. But then again, it seems most people are on cable or satelite these days.
Comcast is monitoring traffic. GMail is monitoring content.
In real life terms, that is the difference between saying "Hey, you've sent out 5,000 envelopes at the post office this week. Is something going on?" and "Here's the mail in your mailbox. By the way, we opened it, scanned it with a computer, and found 'you should get a new house' in one of your letters, so we dropped a few advertisements for mortgage brokers and real estate agents in that letter."
Disclaimer: I have nothing against GMail. They are doing computerized scanning for catch words and catch phrases to try to target their advertisements better so as to be able to make a profit off of advertising and thus be able to justify doing a service like this. Last time I checked, they aren't doing more than that, and nothing that would really invade your privacy, because the data doesn't get used for anything except the targeted marketing system.
If you're worried about other privacy concerns, then worry more about Carnivore and such things.
From a privacy standpoint, I honestly don't think that "gathering" or "having" information is as much a deal as "how you use it". Consider that all the information that is not point to point encrypted can easily be read by any transit system and be processed in any way.
I don't mind them showing me an advertisement for Online Photo Printing if my mother sends me an email about how wonderful this picture she took was. I -DO- mind if they then proceed to start sending my mother advertisements for online photo printing, or decide to grab the photo my mother sent me, sign me up for a free trial with an online photo printing place, and send me the printed photo by post to show me how great their service is.
The vast majority of users (Those who are not misbehaving somehow) shouldn't need to worry about what information as much as how it is used. The rest who are misbehaving have more to worry about than GMail.
You know those Sensormatic tags that look like a "White bandaid with two metallic (foil) dots in the middle"... Those are simple RF alarm tags with a fuse-like thing in the middle connecting the antennas. The 'gun' burns out the circuit in the middle, thus deactivating the tag.
Or, just cover the tag tightly with your water-filled hand against your water-filled body and not have the RF reach out and set off the alarm.
Disclaimer: this is in NO WAY an invitation, encouragement, or otherwise saying that it is a good idea to steal anything from any store using this system. This information was gleaned entirely from working at a store that used this system.
What if they use it as simply "70-bit alarm tags"? With the Chemical A, B, C, D, etc concept...
Your idea: "If we see B, D (0101) try to leave the building, stop it." *Spritz* "Oh, 1111 can leave, no problem."
My idea: "A is fine and just an indicator. B is 'Make sure the person doesn't have any big bags'. C is 'Search the person for illegal documents'. D is 'shoot on sight'." Then 1010 (Search the person for illegal document removal) becomes *Spritz!* 1111... and that could be painful.
So, what if bit 56 means "The object this is on has a value of at least $100." and bit 57 has a value "The object this is on is sensitive intelligence" in the company? Spraying extra alarm tags doesn't help.
Of course, at that point, it also becomes a question of "What if this Snickers Bar uses bit 56 to mean 'expires in January'?" and you happen to carry that into work?
I would expect that they would have to narrow it down to "If C, D, and E are present, the person shouldn't have it." Which really just makes it more complicated alarm tags.
The point you bring up is quite valid as well... If you have a paper that is A and C (1010) (A picture of a llama) stacked on top of a paper that is A and D (1001) (A picture of Tux) and you read it from 10 feet away, the reader will NOT say that you have two pieces of paper, but rather that you have one sheet labeled "1011" (The critical evidence in the court case that may not leave the building, and if anybody tries to take it out, shoot first and ask questions later.)...
An extreme example, of course... But still... Scary...
At the same time, the amount of blood flowing through your hand, as opposed to the amount of blood flowing through your head, is substantially lower. So, your hand in ice water will chill more easily, since it has no outer bone casing, and less of an incoming source of heat, whereas your head has substantially more blood flowing to it, and, as he pointed out, a skull around the brain.
Another thing to consider... Hold your hand only in ice water, and see if your arm doesn't become cold. As the original poster pointed out, the blood flowing out will be quite cold, and thus cool the rest of the body.
And a final concen not mentioned, is the fact that the body's thermostat is up in the brain. When somebody is suffering from heat stroke, putting ice on the back of their neck will make them FEEL cooler all over, and actually worsen the situation, since it chills the brain and causes it to think "My body is cold! Must increase heat production!"
Overall, if it was JUST the brain, no problem. But since the body is an integrated system, I wonder if this is really a proper approach.
While I can understand people being upset about privacy, at the same time, I know WHY this happened. I used to live in Garden Grove, on Gilbert St, about 1/2 a mile from a cyber cafe.
Now first, for a bit of a disclaimer, I happen to be one of the sort of people who would have run a cyber cafe there myself if I could, and when my internet connection wasn't available for three months here in Colorado, the local Cyber Cafe was a savior. And I happen to like my privacy too.
However, let's go back in time a bit. It got to the point where cybercafes became literally gang hangouts and even resulted in deaths.
But it was NOT because they were geeky, or because they had computers, or because they had violent video games. (In fact, bear in mind that the Cybercafes there are really NOT all that useful for doing work or such at. They're 99% CounterStrike and UT, and if you ask the workers for SSH or a VPN tunnel, they'll look at you funny ) It was simply because they had "Fun things for bored teens to do, and were open until 4 am.". So they got slapped with restrictions in an attempt to cull the gang activity... and these restrictions also really hurt the cybercafe as a whole.
Now, bear in mind, there's nothing quite as unpleasant as going past the cyber cafe at the end of the street and finding literally 20 police cars there, lights flashing enough to give a blind man a convulsion, however, at the same time, that police response also netted 4 people who had outstanding warrants out for various violent acts.
So, really, it was a point of "The cafes didn't do enough to protect folks, so the city came in and overreacted."
I just hope that sometime, some folks can find a happy medium.
Re:A note on the bygone simplicty of software
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Hello World!" Shouldn't be 7 frikkin megs because you're pulling in God knows what class libraries, this can be 42 byte program if you really try.
30 bytes.:) Push the following through Debug.exe...
a
push cs
pop ds
mov dx, 10E
mov ah, 9
int 21
mov ax, 4C00
int 21
e 10e 48 65 6c 6c 6f 2c 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 21 0A 0D 24
rcx
1e
n hello.com
w
q
And it will happily create a 30-byte working hello.com
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
Interesting thing to consider... I'm going to have to look up the source, or perhaps somebody can confirm or deny it, but apparently somebody researched program start up time. They had a way to cause complex programs, things like MS Word, Photoshop, and such, to effectively "Load Instantly". Double-click, and it was up in 2 seconds or less. And people did not like that. People felt more secure with slower-loading times, generally being happy when it was around 7-15 seconds. They effectively felt that the software was "Doing More" and "More capable" if it took that long to load, and that if it loaded instantly, it must not be much. So Microsoft went and slowed down their own loads a bit. But then other software loaded quickly... So, Windows artificially slowed down the loading of other software to help Microsoft's software look better.
Anybody have more info on this?
Feaping Creaturism
on
KISS
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think that Nextel might be the only ones to do well with that idea, and then MAYBE only barely. Consider this:
"What does this phone do?"
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone book, and has this nifty flashlight."
I could see more people asking WHY the phone has a flashlight than thinking it to be a "Good Feature". Most folks would consider it an unneeded 'bell and whistle' feature that creates an excuse to charge $50 more for the phone. As opposed to:
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone numbers, coordinates with your computer, plays games in full color, takes pictures of anything you see fit to take pictures of, sends them to any email address, allows you to play games whenever you are bored or want to spend sone time, lets you send an IM to unobtrusively keep in touch with your coleagues on the go, allows you to play realistic-sounding music for your ring tones, or even record your OWN sound for your ringer..." (And of course 50 other features that sound cool).
Now, see? THIS would strike people as "It does all that for only $99?! COOL!"... However, being able to -USE- all that without a doctorate is another matter for some folks.
Overall, it's simple: The more things they can put on paper under the "features" section, the more likely folks are to buy it if the price is decent, and they think the features will be fun. They never give the DETAILS of the features that would cause people to reconsider.
For example, when I worked for T-Mobile, I had to explain to folks that yes, they could "download" their address book to their phone, like it said in the features, but they had to do it two entries at a time from the T-Mobile web site. Oh, yes, and it used a SMS message to send each entry (At cost, oftentimes). And of course, nothing quite as fun as dealing with an upset parent whose daughter had used 13,000 SMS Text messages in one month by using AIM on her phone... It seems so SIMPLE, and easy to use... and makes a huge bill.
Overall, people are interested in INTERESTING bells and whistles. "I can get a digital camera for $199 or I can get a PHONE with a diital camera and all these other features for $150...", and a flashlight is not considered 'Interesting' to most people. ("I can get a flashlight for $5, or a phone with one for $150...")
Yes, they actually DO 'technically' work... however, you have to either be VERY close (1 foot or less) from the source of the transmission, or you need to be ready to see it going off constantly due to cordless phones if you set it too sensitive. (Says the guy who worked for Radio Shack for a while). Whenever we saw one of those leave the store, we knew it would be back in a day or two.
Think about it... It basically detects all 'strong' radio frequencies in a number of ranges, but it is NOT directional. SOOooo, if you want to sweep it over your body to see if somebody has wired a bug into your clothes, shoes, or pen, it's good to go, however, for anything else, it's not that great. For the average person, it's useless. That is, unless you like saying "Look! This thing beeps just before my cordless phone rings!".
I suppose this has been brought up before, and everybody knows already except me, but with all the fowl-ups regarding the USPTO, has anybody ever considered suing THEM for the problems they have caused? Put some responsibility back into their actions, and make it harder for such a rediculous things that are happening these days.
Or even if we don't go as far as suing them, work to get SOMETHING done about it. Compile a list of what WOULD have been frivilous lawsuits were it not for the USPTO's failure to operate properly, and get the ball rolling on making some changes. heck, even Google News has plenty of hits in less than a month on the issue. Should be plenty of fodder on/. too.
I figure, if there are enough failures in their system for/. to have a whole icon devoted to the follies they create, then there should be SOME basis for starting an organized review and maybe a bit of a smackdown.
The "morons" buying into spam advertisements are making quite a bit of money. They bow down to the Almighty Buck.
Think about it...
"Your message sent to 65 million valid email addresses for only $150!"
Okay, so, now say, you get a 0.005% hit rate (As described by , and a 0.001% actual sale rate and your product sells for a profit of $50. That's 3250 people giving the spam a second thought, and 650 actually buying your product. Which equates to $32,500 in your pocket, or a $32,350 profit on your advertising revenues... That's over 21,500 percent gain on cost of advertising.
Now, you go tell those folks who buy these advertisements that they are stupid to pay $150 to help them make $32K, and see how they respond.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that the FCC is moving towards a broadcast flag for radio, how long until all radio broadcasts must be digital, forever ending the experimentation with crystal radio sets?
Well, on the TV side, 2006. Not certain about radio. Nice to know many of our wonderful TV Sets with rabbit ears won't work anymore. But then again, it seems most people are on cable or satelite these days.
Comcast is monitoring traffic.
GMail is monitoring content.
In real life terms, that is the difference between saying
"Hey, you've sent out 5,000 envelopes at the post office this week. Is something going on?"
and
"Here's the mail in your mailbox. By the way, we opened it, scanned it with a computer, and found 'you should get a new house' in one of your letters, so we dropped a few advertisements for mortgage brokers and real estate agents in that letter."
Disclaimer: I have nothing against GMail. They are doing computerized scanning for catch words and catch phrases to try to target their advertisements better so as to be able to make a profit off of advertising and thus be able to justify doing a service like this. Last time I checked, they aren't doing more than that, and nothing that would really invade your privacy, because the data doesn't get used for anything except the targeted marketing system.
If you're worried about other privacy concerns, then worry more about Carnivore and such things.
From a privacy standpoint, I honestly don't think that "gathering" or "having" information is as much a deal as "how you use it". Consider that all the information that is not point to point encrypted can easily be read by any transit system and be processed in any way.
I don't mind them showing me an advertisement for Online Photo Printing if my mother sends me an email about how wonderful this picture she took was. I -DO- mind if they then proceed to start sending my mother advertisements for online photo printing, or decide to grab the photo my mother sent me, sign me up for a free trial with an online photo printing place, and send me the printed photo by post to show me how great their service is.
The vast majority of users (Those who are not misbehaving somehow) shouldn't need to worry about what information as much as how it is used. The rest who are misbehaving have more to worry about than GMail.
You know those Sensormatic tags that look like a "White bandaid with two metallic (foil) dots in the middle"... Those are simple RF alarm tags with a fuse-like thing in the middle connecting the antennas. The 'gun' burns out the circuit in the middle, thus deactivating the tag.
Or, just cover the tag tightly with your water-filled hand against your water-filled body and not have the RF reach out and set off the alarm.
Disclaimer: this is in NO WAY an invitation, encouragement, or otherwise saying that it is a good idea to steal anything from any store using this system. This information was gleaned entirely from working at a store that used this system.
Your idea:
"If we see B, D (0101) try to leave the building, stop it." *Spritz* "Oh, 1111 can leave, no problem."
My idea:
"A is fine and just an indicator. B is 'Make sure the person doesn't have any big bags'. C is 'Search the person for illegal documents'. D is 'shoot on sight'."
Then 1010 (Search the person for illegal document removal) becomes *Spritz!* 1111... and that could be painful.
So, what if bit 56 means "The object this is on has a value of at least $100." and bit 57 has a value "The object this is on is sensitive intelligence" in the company? Spraying extra alarm tags doesn't help.
Of course, at that point, it also becomes a question of "What if this Snickers Bar uses bit 56 to mean 'expires in January'?" and you happen to carry that into work?
I would expect that they would have to narrow it down to "If C, D, and E are present, the person shouldn't have it." Which really just makes it more complicated alarm tags.
The point you bring up is quite valid as well... If you have a paper that is A and C (1010) (A picture of a llama) stacked on top of a paper that is A and D (1001) (A picture of Tux) and you read it from 10 feet away, the reader will NOT say that you have two pieces of paper, but rather that you have one sheet labeled "1011" (The critical evidence in the court case that may not leave the building, and if anybody tries to take it out, shoot first and ask questions later.)...
An extreme example, of course... But still... Scary...
At the same time, the amount of blood flowing through your hand, as opposed to the amount of blood flowing through your head, is substantially lower. So, your hand in ice water will chill more easily, since it has no outer bone casing, and less of an incoming source of heat, whereas your head has substantially more blood flowing to it, and, as he pointed out, a skull around the brain.
Another thing to consider... Hold your hand only in ice water, and see if your arm doesn't become cold. As the original poster pointed out, the blood flowing out will be quite cold, and thus cool the rest of the body.
And a final concen not mentioned, is the fact that the body's thermostat is up in the brain. When somebody is suffering from heat stroke, putting ice on the back of their neck will make them FEEL cooler all over, and actually worsen the situation, since it chills the brain and causes it to think "My body is cold! Must increase heat production!"
Overall, if it was JUST the brain, no problem. But since the body is an integrated system, I wonder if this is really a proper approach.
Now first, for a bit of a disclaimer, I happen to be one of the sort of people who would have run a cyber cafe there myself if I could, and when my internet connection wasn't available for three months here in Colorado, the local Cyber Cafe was a savior. And I happen to like my privacy too.
However, let's go back in time a bit. It got to the point where cybercafes became literally gang hangouts and even resulted in deaths.
But it was NOT because they were geeky, or because they had computers, or because they had violent video games. (In fact, bear in mind that the Cybercafes there are really NOT all that useful for doing work or such at. They're 99% CounterStrike and UT, and if you ask the workers for SSH or a VPN tunnel, they'll look at you funny ) It was simply because they had "Fun things for bored teens to do, and were open until 4 am.". So they got slapped with restrictions in an attempt to cull the gang activity... and these restrictions also really hurt the cybercafe as a whole.
Now, bear in mind, there's nothing quite as unpleasant as going past the cyber cafe at the end of the street and finding literally 20 police cars there, lights flashing enough to give a blind man a convulsion, however, at the same time, that police response also netted 4 people who had outstanding warrants out for various violent acts.
So, really, it was a point of "The cafes didn't do enough to protect folks, so the city came in and overreacted."
I just hope that sometime, some folks can find a happy medium.
30 bytes. :) Push the following through Debug.exe...
a
push cs
pop ds
mov dx, 10E
mov ah, 9
int 21
mov ax, 4C00
int 21
e 10e 48 65 6c 6c 6f 2c 20 57 6f 72 6c 64 21 0A 0D 24
rcx
1e
n hello.com
w
q
And it will happily create a 30-byte working hello.com
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
Interesting thing to consider... I'm going to have to look up the source, or perhaps somebody can confirm or deny it, but apparently somebody researched program start up time. They had a way to cause complex programs, things like MS Word, Photoshop, and such, to effectively "Load Instantly". Double-click, and it was up in 2 seconds or less. And people did not like that. People felt more secure with slower-loading times, generally being happy when it was around 7-15 seconds. They effectively felt that the software was "Doing More" and "More capable" if it took that long to load, and that if it loaded instantly, it must not be much. So Microsoft went and slowed down their own loads a bit. But then other software loaded quickly... So, Windows artificially slowed down the loading of other software to help Microsoft's software look better.
Anybody have more info on this?
"What does this phone do?"
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone book, and has this nifty flashlight."
I could see more people asking WHY the phone has a flashlight than thinking it to be a "Good Feature". Most folks would consider it an unneeded 'bell and whistle' feature that creates an excuse to charge $50 more for the phone. As opposed to:
"Well, it makes calls, stores your phone numbers, coordinates with your computer, plays games in full color, takes pictures of anything you see fit to take pictures of, sends them to any email address, allows you to play games whenever you are bored or want to spend sone time, lets you send an IM to unobtrusively keep in touch with your coleagues on the go, allows you to play realistic-sounding music for your ring tones, or even record your OWN sound for your ringer..." (And of course 50 other features that sound cool).
Now, see? THIS would strike people as "It does all that for only $99?! COOL!"... However, being able to -USE- all that without a doctorate is another matter for some folks.
Overall, it's simple: The more things they can put on paper under the "features" section, the more likely folks are to buy it if the price is decent, and they think the features will be fun. They never give the DETAILS of the features that would cause people to reconsider.
For example, when I worked for T-Mobile, I had to explain to folks that yes, they could "download" their address book to their phone, like it said in the features, but they had to do it two entries at a time from the T-Mobile web site. Oh, yes, and it used a SMS message to send each entry (At cost, oftentimes). And of course, nothing quite as fun as dealing with an upset parent whose daughter had used 13,000 SMS Text messages in one month by using AIM on her phone... It seems so SIMPLE, and easy to use... and makes a huge bill.
Overall, people are interested in INTERESTING bells and whistles. "I can get a digital camera for $199 or I can get a PHONE with a diital camera and all these other features for $150...", and a flashlight is not considered 'Interesting' to most people. ("I can get a flashlight for $5, or a phone with one for $150...")
Yes, they actually DO 'technically' work... however, you have to either be VERY close (1 foot or less) from the source of the transmission, or you need to be ready to see it going off constantly due to cordless phones if you set it too sensitive. (Says the guy who worked for Radio Shack for a while). Whenever we saw one of those leave the store, we knew it would be back in a day or two. Think about it... It basically detects all 'strong' radio frequencies in a number of ranges, but it is NOT directional. SOOooo, if you want to sweep it over your body to see if somebody has wired a bug into your clothes, shoes, or pen, it's good to go, however, for anything else, it's not that great. For the average person, it's useless. That is, unless you like saying "Look! This thing beeps just before my cordless phone rings!".
I suppose this has been brought up before, and everybody knows already except me, but with all the fowl-ups regarding the USPTO, has anybody ever considered suing THEM for the problems they have caused? Put some responsibility back into their actions, and make it harder for such a rediculous things that are happening these days.
/. too.
/. to have a whole icon devoted to the follies they create, then there should be SOME basis for starting an organized review and maybe a bit of a smackdown.
Or even if we don't go as far as suing them, work to get SOMETHING done about it. Compile a list of what WOULD have been frivilous lawsuits were it not for the USPTO's failure to operate properly, and get the ball rolling on making some changes. heck, even Google News has plenty of hits in less than a month on the issue. Should be plenty of fodder on
I figure, if there are enough failures in their system for
The "morons" buying into spam advertisements are making quite a bit of money. They bow down to the Almighty Buck.
Think about it...
"Your message sent to 65 million valid email addresses for only $150!"
Okay, so, now say, you get a 0.005% hit rate (As described by , and a 0.001% actual sale rate and your product sells for a profit of $50. That's 3250 people giving the spam a second thought, and 650 actually buying your product. Which equates to $32,500 in your pocket, or a $32,350 profit on your advertising revenues... That's over 21,500 percent gain on cost of advertising.
Now, you go tell those folks who buy these advertisements that they are stupid to pay $150 to help them make $32K, and see how they respond.
Different methods are definitely needed.