It's a long way from brilliant, but all my designs are now on Youmagine.com - which I see is starting to get some really interesting stuff posted (far better than any of the tat I've come up with!;-).
It's run by Ultimaker, so in theory vulnerable to the same problems as Thingiverse, but Ultimaker are quite responsive to their user base, so may do as we've suggested and create a foundation to run it instead. They're also a much smaller company, so don't expect quick turnaround as they're resource constrained, or indeed for this to be any sort of problem for some years yet (although YMMV).
The other good thing about Youmagine (and Ultimaker) is that they're European, and so not hamstrung by US patents, or indeed the litigation thereof.
Get onto https://www.writetothem.com/ and type in your postcode. Tell your MP that you don't care who he/she is, or how good their record for your local area. Tell them that because they're affiliated with the major parties that are either condoning this, or failing to do anything to stop it you no longer feel you can vote for them. Tell them you're going to vote for one of the smaller parties - you're not sure who just yet, but will look into it and pick one that seems like it's acceptable, just so long as it's not any of 'the big three'.
We already have protected witness testimony - lots of spooks have testified in court and have never been directly identified. Sorry, that one doesn't wash.
As I said above - the more reasons you can think of to make this secret, the more reasons there are to make it public. It's the wonderful irony of the whole thing.
I agree, but all the more reason we need this to be public. If what you suggest actually took place, then letting the government introduce secret trials for something as trite as some double-standards isn't anywhere near reason enough to allow it.
The wonderful contradiction of secret courts - if it's worth making secret, then it's almost definitely worth making public. I hope it ends up the latter - otherwise every tom, dick and harry being tried for anything worse than a parking violation will push for a secret trial just to slow the whole process down.
In which case, a TomTom will do a far better job than any factory-fit in-car system I've ever seen. I don't know why the car manufacturers don't either just copy TomTom exactly, or just license the technology. Instead, they insist on making crappy UIs that are either hard to use, slow to use, or outright dangerous or all three, crappy navigation that doesn't properly take into account reality, let alone that XYZ feature changed 5 years ago and still isn't right in this years maps, crappy/non-existent speed camera maps, crappy voices/customisation and make it really hard (or very expensive) to upgrade the maps (or core software).
For not much money, you can buy a TomTom and solve all these issues. Sure, it doesn't know how much fuel you have in your car, but actually, something the car manufacturers seem to do quite well is to be able to tell you how much fuel you have left in miles left to travel. I'll let you have the speed sensor thing though - although not all factory-fit systems bother to use one.
FWIW, I wonder why the car manufacturers don't talk to TomTom and work out a way to link an external device to the car (so you get the advantages of both solutions). That way, they could supply an 'external device' in a box in the boot and then let you upgrade that whenever you like. Sure, I won't go to my dealership to pay the 300% mark-up for the replacement - I'll go to Amazon instead. I'd be a happier customer though, and might be more inclined to pay the extra for such a feature next time (or this time, for that matter).
That's a good point, and one of the weird things about VR - either you want 100% immersion, or you actually want very little. The crazy irony is that for VR to be really cool, you need the headset to be able to 100% replicate what the world is like without wearing it. That is, it needs cameras on it so that you can see as if you didn't have the headset on, and likewise microphones and headphones to do the same for sound. Once you've got that working, then start over-laying the degrees of immersion that you want (my personal requirement is to simulate a massive super-highres monitor floating in front of me to go with my physical keyboard that's sat on the desk.
Good luck getting any of this past your marketing department and PHB though. They're too pre-occupied with simulating things poking you in the eye to show-off how cool their headset is to worry about what people might actually want.
> Meyer stresses, is that it "must aid the agency mission. It is developmental and helps all stakeholders understand that we have rules in effect," he added
Aside from the poor editorial prose, here's what he really means:
"If you're a potential whistleblower, you must disclose to your immediate manager. It's the only way we'll ever know who all the people that work for us aren't really 'for' us, such that we might put them on projects 'more in keeping' with their principles and standards".
How on earth you can have a whisteblower hiding out in Russia (of all places!) in fear of the repercussions of his actions and say people should come forward is beyond me. At the very least, he should be in the US, on a (fair) public trial with known potential outcomes. Without that, no one is trustworthy.
Only if use use a Monster cable between your cable box and your TV. For those watching satellite, you'll only get the benefit on clear days, because as everyone knows, clouds obscure the sky and so degrade the signal. Getting a specially woven satellite dish can help - talk to your local representative for your options.
The mythical highly technically competent grandmother?
I never knew the Gnome folks were trying to keep things 'grandmother' friendly. I get along with Gnome (mostly because I can't be arsed to install anything else), but easy to use it ain't.
at a maximum of 25mph, you're not going near an expressway. Any accident you do have will likely be a bit of a bump rather than a crash (unless it's caused by someone else, going much faster, driving into you - but the risk of that is the same if the car you're in is autonomous or not).
Going on... The City of London is often also called "the square mile" because it's a really very small part of the blob of the UK called "London". All of the London councils dwarf the City in both number of people resident and square miles covered. The rest of london has somewhere between 6 and 10 million residents.
The City has a population of something like 7000 people, yet has something like >5,000,000 visitors every working day. To some extent, it makes sense not to let 7000 people define the local government policy for so may visitors (just about all of whom work for one of the areas employers).
However, by the same token, those employers shouldn't be defining local government (or in this case, local police) policy. The City Police have asked for things like this before, and mostly been rebuffed, as seems reasonable, given who/what they represent.
As the GP notes, We the People have never been asked if we'd like this sort of thing to go on - but then we actually don't pay for the City Police directly, as it is really paid for by the Corporation of London, who are paid for by the businesses within it. Hence we have this fscked up setup where there's a (small) police force for hire by whomever pays the most. That wouldn't be so bad if they just stayed in the square mile, but sadly they're starting to see their remit as "the Internet" as well. We the People could argue that the actions of the City Police brings the actions of the wider police force into disrepute though, I guess (not such a bad idea actually, now I think of it).
The moral of the story is: If you receive an "official" communication from some police force or other, politely decline to do what they ask unless they can provide a court order. This will keep you out of trouble for longer than trying to be "helpful". Our judges might not be perfect, but for the most part they won't furnish the City Police with a court order for something as flimsy as this.
As a consumer through the transatlantic bullshit filter, I can say I've never heard of a good number of those films. Given we do get (by our standards) some pretty shitty films come across the pond, those ones must be truly horrific.
I did something similar purely for laziness reasons. My laptop was on FC16 until a couple of weeks ago (because it did everything I needed it to). The online update facility was long-gone, and I had to really search to find the FC17 install media, but once found, upgraded to a very broken FC17 quite quickly. I got it working by manually setting up a wired network connection and running "yum update" which fixed everything. From then on, 'fedup' took me through 18, 19 and onto 20 in a matter of hours.
I agree the release frequency is fast - that's sort of the point though. As time's gone on though, updating the entire OS has got easier and easier. 'fedup' makes it so easy it's not much different from doing the usual package updates. However, "leaving it until later" makes the job quite a bit harder, so I wouldn't recommend it.
At werk we use Redhat Enterprise, and my previous employer used Centos. I like both, but getting vaguely up to date versions of some stuff is really tedious. In many cases we end up compiling our own versions of things because that way we get the versions we want without needing to 'pollute' our systems with umpteen packages from $random_repo on the Internet. Probably not so much a concern for a home PC, but it's all part of the trade-off between stability and update frequency.
I would go further and say that anyone visiting London should set aside 10-20 pounds to take a black cab somewhere. While in the cab, ask the driver something (as obscure as you think of) about London and the streets/buildings thereof. Then sit back, and marvel at how much he/she knows. Then ask them something about football, politics, or the price of $commodity, the behaviour of young people, cyclists or something else - then marvel at just how much they can talk about any given subject;-)
Honestly, I love to travel, but in no place I've ever been is it possible to get a taxi (or limo, on the occasions I've been in one) that's anywhere as good as just any black cab you pulled over on a street corner in London.
That's not to say they shouldn't be without competition, but they're right to protect their excellent reputation and unique position. Uber will probably suffer scale as other have done - Addison Lee (for example) used to be excellent, but nowadays have some pretty awful drivers who are quire frankly a bit scary. I'm sure Uber will go the same way eventually...
Just as Lessig's campaign can be contributed by non-USians (and for the Brits here - remember the UK follows the US almost blindly after about 10 years), so can the Pirate Party's campaign here in the UK (to get them into Europe). A shameless plug, by why not fling them a dollar or two as well: http://www.pozible.com/project... ?
Pff! All that soon-to-have money and yet no imagination, huh? Buy an old diesel Navy submarine and have it refitted. Maybe cut some windows into the hull - that'll mean you can only go down to maybe 50 metres instead of 350, but that's still plenty, and if you get lost you can just look out of the windows to see where you are without having to worry about using sonar.
I'd imagine surfacing your submarine in Monaco's marina will turn far more heads than your ridiculous yacht moored a mile offshore;-) (besides, a submarine is phallically shaped, so works better in metaphorical dick measuring competitions)
Oh, and be sure to use Postgres or MySQL for your on-board systems - it'll scale plenty well for a long time before you need to go all 'web scale' with a NoSQL DB.
How about the Microsoft Engine XP gets designed into a variety of cheap cars and some specialist vehicles like combine harvesters, diggers, the 'crawler' that Nasa use to move rockets and a few others). Since most of those vehicles weren't galvanised, they've all got so rusty that nearly all of them have been replaced with new cars (some of which has Microsoft Engine 7, but some have Apple or Linux engines of various types).
The problem now becomes that there are a few old vehicles still running the Microsoft Engine. Their owners have taken good care of them, so they're not rusty and they're still road-legal. However, they don't have all the fancy lane guidance, GPS and airbags of their more modern counterparts. That means they're more dangerous if they are involved in an accident, but otherwise much the same as their modern counterparts if they aren't. The roads are getting busier though, and the chances of anyone being in an accident have gone up (although it's unclear if you're more likely to be in a bad accident, or just a bump/scratch type incident).
How long should Microsoft be required to supply spare parts for the old Microsoft Engine XP? Good question... and should the car makers that decided to put Microsoft Engine XP be required to stock parts if Microsoft decide to stop doing so? If so, how long for? Lastly, who pays for all this? After all, Microsoft gave parts for their engine away for free in the early days, and you could buy a contract to give you parts for free after that. Now who should do what in all this?
Just because you can write a mobile app, doesn't mean you should. I'm capable of it, but I don't because there's no point making another crappy version of $whatever. I'm not going to be as motivated as the other people already in the market, so so I'll 'fail'. Having an idea of yet another way to hoover up people's personal information isn't a guarantee of success - and actually most things like that require lots of marketing and other efforts, which have a high cost when you're yet to make any money.
However, all that said, it's a nice sideline, if you've got a good idea that's fun/interesting/useful/cute/timely. If it's something you can do without sacrificing your normal earning/studying time, or more of your savings than you can afford, then go for it - the cost of entry is pretty low, and it's kinda fun.
The best entrepreneurial advice I ever saw was "scratch your own itch". If you're not doing that, you'll get bored and either hate what you're doing, or more likely you'll just let it grow old without looking after it. Either of those outcomes means it's unlikely to be worth your time.
That form factor is almost perfect for working whilst sitting on a train (trains: something we have, and use a lot here in Europeland). You plonk the main unit on the table and the keyboard in your lap - yes, yes, I know I could do that with an ordinary laptop, but that's not nearly as cool as something like this. You'd have to stuff the spare space behind the screen with a few arduinos and breadboards, lots of loose wires and maybe a few flashing LEDs for good measure though.
The only thing that could make this form factor better would be to use a one-eye augmented reality headset, or full VR headset in place of the screen;-)
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is that we're VHS, and killed off the early, but actually superior, BetaMax?
It's a long way from brilliant, but all my designs are now on Youmagine.com - which I see is starting to get some really interesting stuff posted (far better than any of the tat I've come up with! ;-).
It's run by Ultimaker, so in theory vulnerable to the same problems as Thingiverse, but Ultimaker are quite responsive to their user base, so may do as we've suggested and create a foundation to run it instead. They're also a much smaller company, so don't expect quick turnaround as they're resource constrained, or indeed for this to be any sort of problem for some years yet (although YMMV).
The other good thing about Youmagine (and Ultimaker) is that they're European, and so not hamstrung by US patents, or indeed the litigation thereof.
Get onto https://www.writetothem.com/ and type in your postcode. Tell your MP that you don't care who he/she is, or how good their record for your local area. Tell them that because they're affiliated with the major parties that are either condoning this, or failing to do anything to stop it you no longer feel you can vote for them. Tell them you're going to vote for one of the smaller parties - you're not sure who just yet, but will look into it and pick one that seems like it's acceptable, just so long as it's not any of 'the big three'.
We already have protected witness testimony - lots of spooks have testified in court and have never been directly identified. Sorry, that one doesn't wash.
As I said above - the more reasons you can think of to make this secret, the more reasons there are to make it public. It's the wonderful irony of the whole thing.
I agree, but all the more reason we need this to be public. If what you suggest actually took place, then letting the government introduce secret trials for something as trite as some double-standards isn't anywhere near reason enough to allow it.
The wonderful contradiction of secret courts - if it's worth making secret, then it's almost definitely worth making public. I hope it ends up the latter - otherwise every tom, dick and harry being tried for anything worse than a parking violation will push for a secret trial just to slow the whole process down.
In which case, a TomTom will do a far better job than any factory-fit in-car system I've ever seen. I don't know why the car manufacturers don't either just copy TomTom exactly, or just license the technology. Instead, they insist on making crappy UIs that are either hard to use, slow to use, or outright dangerous or all three, crappy navigation that doesn't properly take into account reality, let alone that XYZ feature changed 5 years ago and still isn't right in this years maps, crappy/non-existent speed camera maps, crappy voices/customisation and make it really hard (or very expensive) to upgrade the maps (or core software).
For not much money, you can buy a TomTom and solve all these issues. Sure, it doesn't know how much fuel you have in your car, but actually, something the car manufacturers seem to do quite well is to be able to tell you how much fuel you have left in miles left to travel. I'll let you have the speed sensor thing though - although not all factory-fit systems bother to use one.
FWIW, I wonder why the car manufacturers don't talk to TomTom and work out a way to link an external device to the car (so you get the advantages of both solutions). That way, they could supply an 'external device' in a box in the boot and then let you upgrade that whenever you like. Sure, I won't go to my dealership to pay the 300% mark-up for the replacement - I'll go to Amazon instead. I'd be a happier customer though, and might be more inclined to pay the extra for such a feature next time (or this time, for that matter).
Just make sure you have the right back end capacity. It's usually just a matter of checking your logs.
That's a good point, and one of the weird things about VR - either you want 100% immersion, or you actually want very little. The crazy irony is that for VR to be really cool, you need the headset to be able to 100% replicate what the world is like without wearing it. That is, it needs cameras on it so that you can see as if you didn't have the headset on, and likewise microphones and headphones to do the same for sound. Once you've got that working, then start over-laying the degrees of immersion that you want (my personal requirement is to simulate a massive super-highres monitor floating in front of me to go with my physical keyboard that's sat on the desk.
Good luck getting any of this past your marketing department and PHB though. They're too pre-occupied with simulating things poking you in the eye to show-off how cool their headset is to worry about what people might actually want.
> Meyer stresses, is that it "must aid the agency mission. It is developmental and helps all stakeholders understand that we have rules in effect," he added
Aside from the poor editorial prose, here's what he really means:
"If you're a potential whistleblower, you must disclose to your immediate manager. It's the only way we'll ever know who all the people that work for us aren't really 'for' us, such that we might put them on projects 'more in keeping' with their principles and standards".
How on earth you can have a whisteblower hiding out in Russia (of all places!) in fear of the repercussions of his actions and say people should come forward is beyond me. At the very least, he should be in the US, on a (fair) public trial with known potential outcomes. Without that, no one is trustworthy.
Only if use use a Monster cable between your cable box and your TV. For those watching satellite, you'll only get the benefit on clear days, because as everyone knows, clouds obscure the sky and so degrade the signal. Getting a specially woven satellite dish can help - talk to your local representative for your options.
The mythical highly technically competent grandmother?
I never knew the Gnome folks were trying to keep things 'grandmother' friendly. I get along with Gnome (mostly because I can't be arsed to install anything else), but easy to use it ain't.
at a maximum of 25mph, you're not going near an expressway. Any accident you do have will likely be a bit of a bump rather than a crash (unless it's caused by someone else, going much faster, driving into you - but the risk of that is the same if the car you're in is autonomous or not).
Going on... The City of London is often also called "the square mile" because it's a really very small part of the blob of the UK called "London". All of the London councils dwarf the City in both number of people resident and square miles covered. The rest of london has somewhere between 6 and 10 million residents.
The City has a population of something like 7000 people, yet has something like >5,000,000 visitors every working day. To some extent, it makes sense not to let 7000 people define the local government policy for so may visitors (just about all of whom work for one of the areas employers).
However, by the same token, those employers shouldn't be defining local government (or in this case, local police) policy. The City Police have asked for things like this before, and mostly been rebuffed, as seems reasonable, given who/what they represent.
As the GP notes, We the People have never been asked if we'd like this sort of thing to go on - but then we actually don't pay for the City Police directly, as it is really paid for by the Corporation of London, who are paid for by the businesses within it. Hence we have this fscked up setup where there's a (small) police force for hire by whomever pays the most. That wouldn't be so bad if they just stayed in the square mile, but sadly they're starting to see their remit as "the Internet" as well. We the People could argue that the actions of the City Police brings the actions of the wider police force into disrepute though, I guess (not such a bad idea actually, now I think of it).
The moral of the story is: If you receive an "official" communication from some police force or other, politely decline to do what they ask unless they can provide a court order. This will keep you out of trouble for longer than trying to be "helpful". Our judges might not be perfect, but for the most part they won't furnish the City Police with a court order for something as flimsy as this.
As a consumer through the transatlantic bullshit filter, I can say I've never heard of a good number of those films. Given we do get (by our standards) some pretty shitty films come across the pond, those ones must be truly horrific.
I did something similar purely for laziness reasons. My laptop was on FC16 until a couple of weeks ago (because it did everything I needed it to). The online update facility was long-gone, and I had to really search to find the FC17 install media, but once found, upgraded to a very broken FC17 quite quickly. I got it working by manually setting up a wired network connection and running "yum update" which fixed everything. From then on, 'fedup' took me through 18, 19 and onto 20 in a matter of hours.
I agree the release frequency is fast - that's sort of the point though. As time's gone on though, updating the entire OS has got easier and easier. 'fedup' makes it so easy it's not much different from doing the usual package updates. However, "leaving it until later" makes the job quite a bit harder, so I wouldn't recommend it.
At werk we use Redhat Enterprise, and my previous employer used Centos. I like both, but getting vaguely up to date versions of some stuff is really tedious. In many cases we end up compiling our own versions of things because that way we get the versions we want without needing to 'pollute' our systems with umpteen packages from $random_repo on the Internet. Probably not so much a concern for a home PC, but it's all part of the trade-off between stability and update frequency.
I would go further and say that anyone visiting London should set aside 10-20 pounds to take a black cab somewhere. While in the cab, ask the driver something (as obscure as you think of) about London and the streets/buildings thereof. Then sit back, and marvel at how much he/she knows. Then ask them something about football, politics, or the price of $commodity, the behaviour of young people, cyclists or something else - then marvel at just how much they can talk about any given subject ;-)
Honestly, I love to travel, but in no place I've ever been is it possible to get a taxi (or limo, on the occasions I've been in one) that's anywhere as good as just any black cab you pulled over on a street corner in London.
That's not to say they shouldn't be without competition, but they're right to protect their excellent reputation and unique position. Uber will probably suffer scale as other have done - Addison Lee (for example) used to be excellent, but nowadays have some pretty awful drivers who are quire frankly a bit scary. I'm sure Uber will go the same way eventually...
Just as Lessig's campaign can be contributed by non-USians (and for the Brits here - remember the UK follows the US almost blindly after about 10 years), so can the Pirate Party's campaign here in the UK (to get them into Europe). A shameless plug, by why not fling them a dollar or two as well: http://www.pozible.com/project... ?
I'm a bit like that, but I bring a gun to a game of solitaire ;-)
Not to be confused with Pirate Reality (ARRR).
Pff! All that soon-to-have money and yet no imagination, huh? Buy an old diesel Navy submarine and have it refitted. Maybe cut some windows into the hull - that'll mean you can only go down to maybe 50 metres instead of 350, but that's still plenty, and if you get lost you can just look out of the windows to see where you are without having to worry about using sonar.
I'd imagine surfacing your submarine in Monaco's marina will turn far more heads than your ridiculous yacht moored a mile offshore ;-) (besides, a submarine is phallically shaped, so works better in metaphorical dick measuring competitions)
Oh, and be sure to use Postgres or MySQL for your on-board systems - it'll scale plenty well for a long time before you need to go all 'web scale' with a NoSQL DB.
How about the Microsoft Engine XP gets designed into a variety of cheap cars and some specialist vehicles like combine harvesters, diggers, the 'crawler' that Nasa use to move rockets and a few others). Since most of those vehicles weren't galvanised, they've all got so rusty that nearly all of them have been replaced with new cars (some of which has Microsoft Engine 7, but some have Apple or Linux engines of various types).
The problem now becomes that there are a few old vehicles still running the Microsoft Engine. Their owners have taken good care of them, so they're not rusty and they're still road-legal. However, they don't have all the fancy lane guidance, GPS and airbags of their more modern counterparts. That means they're more dangerous if they are involved in an accident, but otherwise much the same as their modern counterparts if they aren't. The roads are getting busier though, and the chances of anyone being in an accident have gone up (although it's unclear if you're more likely to be in a bad accident, or just a bump/scratch type incident).
How long should Microsoft be required to supply spare parts for the old Microsoft Engine XP? Good question... and should the car makers that decided to put Microsoft Engine XP be required to stock parts if Microsoft decide to stop doing so? If so, how long for? Lastly, who pays for all this? After all, Microsoft gave parts for their engine away for free in the early days, and you could buy a contract to give you parts for free after that. Now who should do what in all this?
Just because you can write a mobile app, doesn't mean you should. I'm capable of it, but I don't because there's no point making another crappy version of $whatever. I'm not going to be as motivated as the other people already in the market, so so I'll 'fail'. Having an idea of yet another way to hoover up people's personal information isn't a guarantee of success - and actually most things like that require lots of marketing and other efforts, which have a high cost when you're yet to make any money.
However, all that said, it's a nice sideline, if you've got a good idea that's fun/interesting/useful/cute/timely. If it's something you can do without sacrificing your normal earning/studying time, or more of your savings than you can afford, then go for it - the cost of entry is pretty low, and it's kinda fun.
The best entrepreneurial advice I ever saw was "scratch your own itch". If you're not doing that, you'll get bored and either hate what you're doing, or more likely you'll just let it grow old without looking after it. Either of those outcomes means it's unlikely to be worth your time.
That form factor is almost perfect for working whilst sitting on a train (trains: something we have, and use a lot here in Europeland). You plonk the main unit on the table and the keyboard in your lap - yes, yes, I know I could do that with an ordinary laptop, but that's not nearly as cool as something like this. You'd have to stuff the spare space behind the screen with a few arduinos and breadboards, lots of loose wires and maybe a few flashing LEDs for good measure though.
The only thing that could make this form factor better would be to use a one-eye augmented reality headset, or full VR headset in place of the screen ;-)
Or how about digging out deep trenches alongside the fault line and filling them up with foam to absorb some of the shock wave?
Great idea - thanks. Up until now I just had my speakers on mute. This is better :-)