Yeah, good idea, except I have cats. The false alarms would be a bit of a problem!
Well, I suppose I should have clarified: the computer emails/pages you, you check your email drop for suspicious pics, and call the cops yourself if needed.
I have mine record movements while out as well as speak "Intruder alert, intruder alert" hoping to scare any would-be burglers away while snapping their photo.
If you really want to scare the burglars away, have the computer scream, "Silent Alarm Activated! Silent Alarm Activated!" Or, more seriously, have it quietly dial out and page you (or "text" you) while it's emailing pics. That way you could call the cops and they might catch the guy in the act.
I'm not saying Paypal is without problems. Clearly they have their share. But at least make some kind of minor effort to get your facts straight.
Yes, of course... Paypal would never wrongfully suspend accounts!
MSNBC Article fragment: Millions of PayPal users received an e-mail this week offering them a chance to receive a little money just for filling out an online form -- and for once, the e-mail wasn't a fake.
The notice tells PayPal customers that they may be eligible to receive payment as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement the eBay-owned Web signed last month. The suit alleged that, beginning in 1999, PayPal unfairly froze thousands of user accounts, preventing consumers from getting access to their money.
In the settlement, PayPal agreed to set aside $9.25 million to compensate users who feel they were treated unfairly. The company admits no wrongdoing.
The last time I used Paypal, there was no easy, or even relatively hard to find published number to reach anyone. From Paypalsucks.com (wielding an axe to grind):
PayPal has so many unhappy customers, that they make it very difficult to find and use their telephone system for support. You have to ask yourself just what kind of company has such a huge service load that it has to resort to such tactics. You should also know that PayPal's hiding of it's phone number and deleting customer's emails was one of the principle issues why they agreed to pay $9.1million dollars to settle the class auction lawsuit brought on EFTA (Electronic Funds Transfer Act) violations.
I also recall there was a WSJ or NYT interview with the founder of Paypal and he touted the limited ability of people to contact the company as a cost saving benefit.
If you don't think I'm stating the facts, look at my moniker. These are known facts! Besides, I was shooting for funny.
Maybe paypal should be incharge. Me: Hello paypal someone cracked your systems and stole my balance. PayPal: Oh really? Tough Titties! *click*
That's not what PayPa1 would do. They'd suspend your account and the accounts of anyone who has ever transferred funds to, or received funds from your account. There would be no way to talk to a representative, as they do not publish telephone numbers and only autoresponders are "manning" the email server. Should a human-like creature ever interact with you at any point in the exchange, it will be to inform you that, 1) you will never get your money back, 2) your account will remain suspended until Jesus and all of his disciples personally send notarized letters vouching for your innocence, and 3) that they have already faxed your account and personal information to a Russian law enforcement agent who contacted them a day before the alleged theft occurred.
Those classes exist, assuming you have a Vocational-Technical High School in your county. You can even enroll in both the regular High School and take "shop" in the afternoons at the Vo-Tech to get the best of both worlds. Solid academics and a trade skill. They're probably a bit more scarce in the fly-over states, but there are some really good schools out there.
That is unless you have 200 positions you are applying for. In which case, there is something wrong with your method. It's better to focus on a few good jobs than to go apply for everything and anything.
Focusing on a few good jobs is a great idea if you're willing to let your job search last quite a while. The area that I live in is bleeding dozens of highly qualified technical people into the job market every month (with a few thousand dropped into the job pool just a year ago). There aren't enough jobs to go around, companies get hundreds of qualified applicants for each position and everybody is taking their time in hiring. I have not seen an entry-level tech job posted in more than two years, I have no idea what people coming out of college are doing if they haven't gotten a job through an internship program. Well, I figure they're fleeing upstate and moving to the city...
Perhaps have a two-tiered system of top picks which are high maintenance contact (send resume, call, check back, network) and the lower maintenance resume spam at all moving targets with some degree of follow-up. Though if you're unemployed, you might consider making it all high maintenance contact...
Not quite right. Remember a lot of scientists' careers ride on the precision of processing here, whereas these amateur guys aren't going to lose face.
Yes, they would. The serious amateur cares just as much about precision and correctness as the serious scientist. The only difference between the two is that the amateur does something because he enjoys it, while the scientist does it because she gets paid (and may or may not enjoy the work).
FTFA "The goal of the Fast Infoset project is to generate interest among developers and eventually create a standardized binary format." I'm not sure why they think that one has to come before the other.
Because standards written in a vacuum tend to suck. Why wouldn't you want input from developers with different backgrounds and needs, then cherry pick the best ideas (many of which you didn't think of), toss out universally reviled ones, and implement a broad, useable standard?
That's not as impressive a number as it sounds... remember, during the years 1991-1998, we killed 1 million children in Iraq. That's over 100K per year. So actually, things have gotten better over there since we invaded...
We'll see, it's hard to get mortality and morbidity rates when the invasion destroyed the infrastructure for collecting that data. I'm sure it's on the list, right after the government "elections"...
Oh, and America can't claim full credit for the deaths of those innocent children. The 1999 report by UNICEF showed that mortality in children under age 5 were double what they were 10 years before. So at best, America murdered half a million children due to sanctions. I think destroying an entire government infrastructure already damaged by massive sanctions is just icing on the cake.
You're not thinking this very well through. There's no need to use a short range antenna -- use a long range antenna, and decode the transmitted signal. Then you can see where every car so-bugged (using the same transmitters and frequency) in town is.
Who really knows what the guy was doing? Maybe he was pointing out stars to his kid and the airplane crossed the path of the beam. Can you track the cockpit window of a plane a few miles away moving over a hundred miles an hour? Sure, he was an idiot for pointing at the helicopter, too, but there's apparently no law against that.
And how likely is it that the type of handheld, battery powered laser pointer used at star parties can blind someone from a mile or more away? The beam would have diverged at least an inch, too much to cause retinal damage unless it was a pretty expensive, much less portable model. At best, the pilots were momentarily startled by the beam momentarily hitting the glazing of the window. They're lying or embellishing the story, the moron is pressured by the government to cop a plea (or we'll make life really difficult and expensive for you and your family) and everybody thinks the gummint is looking out for the real terrorists.
Someone should find out the specifics of the distance between the plane and the moron and do some tests before the "PATRIOT" act claims another victim.
If there were a Pave the Earth Society, I would nominate the geniuses behind this plan.
Is combining utilities distribution, mass transit, freight railways, commuting traffic, long-haul hazardous waste traffic, and oil and gas pipelines into one, easy to attack target a good idea?
There are no mirrors. Adding a mirror to the construction would be a lot of physical work, not to mention: where would you put the mirror?
How would this be any more difficult than mounting a sheet of plate glass at a 45 degree angle? You would have a mirror mounted below and parallel to the plate glass. The laptop would then be oriented upright and pushed back on the platform closer to the camera. It's really quite simple. See ascii below for obfuscation.
However, the price tag of the robotic mission is between $1 billion and $2 billion, almost the cost of a new space telescope.
Heck, you could shave a few hundred thousand off that pricetag if you built a new HST around the "backup" primary mirror made by Kodak (which was figured and tested correctly). NASA would just have to get it from The National Air and Space Museum.
i wonder what the turnaround time will be. probably a few days. too bad its not open-source. we'd have a patch in a few hours.
Well, if was open source, I would hope that the programmers ignored typical variable and function naming conventions and used all lowercase letters. How many patches (spaced a few hours apart) do you think it would take before the original problem, and all resulting problems from untested patches were repaired?
Valve has already had a number of years to make this game, and damn near a year of stable code. They don't need another black eye by rushing out a patch without testing it thoroughly.
Is there a facility in STEAM to create CDs of the game(s)? There's nothing in the official FAQ. I'm tempted by STEAM (even though it's probably overloaded), but if I can't make a hardcopy, I'd rather wait until I head out to the mall. Then the decision is DVD edition or CD?
I also wonder what would happen if you outfitted a traditional, spinning drive with ``many, many read:write heads''? That should speed things up just as much as shaking the drive, I would think.
This has been done. The IBM 3380 had four actuators, though it was about as large as a refrigerator. Conner developed the Chinook, a dual actuator drive that was expensive, fast, loud, and produced gobs of heat in a PC.
I can only go by my own observation from standing in line for an hour and a half, the observation of people I know who voted there throughout the day, what my coworker's friend, an intern at the county board of elections said, and an op-ed article flaming the election board in the local paper.
I'msure this is only the first of many, many such stories we wil hear.... No paper audit trail in many places. fun fun fun
I'm sure that for each of these stories reported, 5 or more go unreported/undiscovered.
6 out of 10 voters to my precinct were not listed in the roll book at the polling place. Many of these people were long time voters, all were given provisional ballots. Their names and signatures were on the master list, but magically never made it to the polling place. The reason? A "mistake," and in a predominately Democratic area, by a predominately Republican elections board. Hmmm. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, my name was on the list, although I'm not registered as a Democrat...
Hey, but what does it matter at this point? Election's over, and there's a few countries to run. With Republicans in charge of everything, America should be on track to Bush's ideal. Let the good times roll!
If you're planning on flying, please, please, please don't be in front of me on line at the insecurity checkpoint with one of these chock full of gadgets.
Yes, because the media is always right and always reports accurately especially when they have reliable Iraqi civilians feeding them information. And the media is unbiased of course. I understand what the Israeli's go through with the media reports having now heard how ours and the world's reports what happens here. It's a lot different from reality.
Those pesky journalists should just stick their noses in the more prurient affairs where they belong. That way, stories like these will go unreported.
Sorry, how does a prayer that something happens constitute a threat? No where in that post did she say she was going to do it or encouraging anyone else to do it. (Unless you count God) She was merely expressing a hope that it does.
He must be inundated with those sorts of wishes. What if God does take her up on it? What can the Secret Service do to protect their charge? They'll take a bullet for him, but can they take a lightning bolt? A plague? A swarm of locusts o'er the land?
I put it to you that God should not be tempted further in this matter. He has already sent a deadly pretzel and a Segway at the President. The next move could be a leaky bathroom faucet.
TiVo has already been hacked (and TiVo doesn't punish for it), so how long do you think it'll be between when TiVo allows program sharing and someone hacks it so you can avoid these new rules?
Yes, but those hacks, if I'm not mistaken, reduce the functionality of the Tivo to that of my spare computer with an ATI All-in-Wonder card and 160GB drive. Tivo was an interesting experiment. It's destined to die:
1) It annoys the advertisers with the 30-second skip (is that still there?)
2) It pisses off the network programmers who think that sandwiching one good show between two crappy shows will increase viewership of the crappy shows.
3) It really pisses off PPV and premium channel content owners who think that nobody should ever be allowed to have an analog copy of the event, much less a digital one.
They're annoying the very people with the money to buy legislation that will outlaw DVRs! Or at least make them useless (Broadcast flag). I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
Disclaimer: I don't have a Tivo, but I know two people that do.
Where's the polling data to back these numbers up? Just clicking on the link to Wisconsin shows Bush with a 92% likelihood of winning, even though the headline states, "Kerry and Bush Remain Tied Among Likely Voters in Wisconsin". I wanna see sources, not magic numbers.
With the election being likely another 50/50 split, the real deciding factor is going to be how much voter fraud is going to occur, how much electoral fraud (Diebold is looking forward to delivering Ohio's votes to the President!), the margin of error with the voting machines, margin of error with the humans checking the voting machines, and the likelihood of another Florida.
Actually, if we can determine the probability of another Florida, we already know the outcome of the election (5 Bush, 4 Gor...er, Kerry) and we can all sleep in on Nov 2!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, good idea, except I have cats. The false alarms would be a bit of a problem!
Well, I suppose I should have clarified: the computer emails/pages you, you check your email drop for suspicious pics, and call the cops yourself if needed.
I have mine record movements while out as well as speak "Intruder alert, intruder alert" hoping to scare any would-be burglers away while snapping their photo.
If you really want to scare the burglars away, have the computer scream, "Silent Alarm Activated! Silent Alarm Activated!" Or, more seriously, have it quietly dial out and page you (or "text" you) while it's emailing pics. That way you could call the cops and they might catch the guy in the act.
I'm not saying Paypal is without problems. Clearly they have their share. But at least make some kind of minor effort to get your facts straight.
Yes, of course... Paypal would never wrongfully suspend accounts!
MSNBC Article fragment:
Millions of PayPal users received an e-mail this week offering them a chance to receive a little money just for filling out an online form -- and for once, the e-mail wasn't a fake.
The notice tells PayPal customers that they may be eligible to receive payment as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement the eBay-owned Web signed last month. The suit alleged that, beginning in 1999, PayPal unfairly froze thousands of user accounts, preventing consumers from getting access to their money.
In the settlement, PayPal agreed to set aside $9.25 million to compensate users who feel they were treated unfairly. The company admits no wrongdoing.
The last time I used Paypal, there was no easy, or even relatively hard to find published number to reach anyone. From Paypalsucks.com (wielding an axe to grind):
PayPal has so many unhappy customers, that they make it very difficult to find and use their telephone system for support. You have to ask yourself just what kind of company has such a huge service load that it has to resort to such tactics. You should also know that PayPal's hiding of it's phone number and deleting customer's emails was one of the principle issues why they agreed to pay $9.1million dollars to settle the class auction lawsuit brought on EFTA (Electronic Funds Transfer Act) violations.
I also recall there was a WSJ or NYT interview with the founder of Paypal and he touted the limited ability of people to contact the company as a cost saving benefit.
If you don't think I'm stating the facts, look at my moniker. These are known facts! Besides, I was shooting for funny.
Maybe paypal should be incharge.
Me: Hello paypal someone cracked your systems and stole my balance.
PayPal: Oh really? Tough Titties! *click*
That's not what PayPa1 would do. They'd suspend your account and the accounts of anyone who has ever transferred funds to, or received funds from your account. There would be no way to talk to a representative, as they do not publish telephone numbers and only autoresponders are "manning" the email server. Should a human-like creature ever interact with you at any point in the exchange, it will be to inform you that, 1) you will never get your money back, 2) your account will remain suspended until Jesus and all of his disciples personally send notarized letters vouching for your innocence, and 3) that they have already faxed your account and personal information to a Russian law enforcement agent who contacted them a day before the alleged theft occurred.
Those classes exist, assuming you have a Vocational-Technical High School in your county. You can even enroll in both the regular High School and take "shop" in the afternoons at the Vo-Tech to get the best of both worlds. Solid academics and a trade skill. They're probably a bit more scarce in the fly-over states, but there are some really good schools out there.
That is unless you have 200 positions you are applying for. In which case, there is something wrong with your method. It's better to focus on a few good jobs than to go apply for everything and anything.
Focusing on a few good jobs is a great idea if you're willing to let your job search last quite a while. The area that I live in is bleeding dozens of highly qualified technical people into the job market every month (with a few thousand dropped into the job pool just a year ago). There aren't enough jobs to go around, companies get hundreds of qualified applicants for each position and everybody is taking their time in hiring. I have not seen an entry-level tech job posted in more than two years, I have no idea what people coming out of college are doing if they haven't gotten a job through an internship program. Well, I figure they're fleeing upstate and moving to the city...
Perhaps have a two-tiered system of top picks which are high maintenance contact (send resume, call, check back, network) and the lower maintenance resume spam at all moving targets with some degree of follow-up. Though if you're unemployed, you might consider making it all high maintenance contact...
Not quite right. Remember a lot of scientists' careers ride on the precision of processing here, whereas these amateur guys aren't going to lose face.
Yes, they would. The serious amateur cares just as much about precision and correctness as the serious scientist. The only difference between the two is that the amateur does something because he enjoys it, while the scientist does it because she gets paid (and may or may not enjoy the work).
FTFA "The goal of the Fast Infoset project is to generate interest among developers and eventually create a standardized binary format." I'm not sure why they think that one has to come before the other.
Because standards written in a vacuum tend to suck. Why wouldn't you want input from developers with different backgrounds and needs, then cherry pick the best ideas (many of which you didn't think of), toss out universally reviled ones, and implement a broad, useable standard?
That's not as impressive a number as it sounds... remember, during the years 1991-1998, we killed 1 million children in Iraq. That's over 100K per year. So actually, things have gotten better over there since we invaded...
We'll see, it's hard to get mortality and morbidity rates when the invasion destroyed the infrastructure for collecting that data. I'm sure it's on the list, right after the government "elections"...
Oh, and America can't claim full credit for the deaths of those innocent children. The 1999 report by UNICEF showed that mortality in children under age 5 were double what they were 10 years before. So at best, America murdered half a million children due to sanctions. I think destroying an entire government infrastructure already damaged by massive sanctions is just icing on the cake.
You're not thinking this very well through. There's no need to use a short range antenna -- use a long range antenna, and decode the transmitted signal. Then you can see where every car so-bugged (using the same transmitters and frequency) in town is.
Are there any off the shelf detectors/receivers?
Oops, butterfingers! Now you're a terrorist!
Who really knows what the guy was doing? Maybe he was pointing out stars to his kid and the airplane crossed the path of the beam. Can you track the cockpit window of a plane a few miles away moving over a hundred miles an hour? Sure, he was an idiot for pointing at the helicopter, too, but there's apparently no law against that.
And how likely is it that the type of handheld, battery powered laser pointer used at star parties can blind someone from a mile or more away? The beam would have diverged at least an inch, too much to cause retinal damage unless it was a pretty expensive, much less portable model. At best, the pilots were momentarily startled by the beam momentarily hitting the glazing of the window. They're lying or embellishing the story, the moron is pressured by the government to cop a plea (or we'll make life really difficult and expensive for you and your family) and everybody thinks the gummint is looking out for the real terrorists.
Someone should find out the specifics of the distance between the plane and the moron and do some tests before the "PATRIOT" act claims another victim.
If there were a Pave the Earth Society, I would nominate the geniuses behind this plan.
Is combining utilities distribution, mass transit, freight railways, commuting traffic, long-haul hazardous waste traffic, and oil and gas pipelines into one, easy to attack target a good idea?
There are no mirrors. Adding a mirror to the construction would be a lot of physical work, not to mention: where would you put the mirror?
..mirror \ _| laptop
How would this be any more difficult than mounting a sheet of plate glass at a 45 degree angle? You would have a mirror mounted below and parallel to the plate glass. The laptop would then be oriented upright and pushed back on the platform closer to the camera. It's really quite simple. See ascii below for obfuscation.
Observer \ glass Camera
Never fear kids ... currently the big guy upstairs is ramping up production for human v2.0, all kinds of new features and bug fixes.
It's not the upgrade that I fear, it's the reboot...
However, the price tag of the robotic mission is between $1 billion and $2 billion, almost the cost of a new space telescope.
Heck, you could shave a few hundred thousand off that pricetag if you built a new HST around the "backup" primary mirror made by Kodak (which was figured and tested correctly). NASA would just have to get it from The National Air and Space Museum.
i wonder what the turnaround time will be. probably a few days. too bad its not open-source. we'd have a patch in a few hours.
Well, if was open source, I would hope that the programmers ignored typical variable and function naming conventions and used all lowercase letters. How many patches (spaced a few hours apart) do you think it would take before the original problem, and all resulting problems from untested patches were repaired?
Valve has already had a number of years to make this game, and damn near a year of stable code. They don't need another black eye by rushing out a patch without testing it thoroughly.
Is there a facility in STEAM to create CDs of the game(s)? There's nothing in the official FAQ. I'm tempted by STEAM (even though it's probably overloaded), but if I can't make a hardcopy, I'd rather wait until I head out to the mall. Then the decision is DVD edition or CD?
I also wonder what would happen if you outfitted a traditional, spinning drive with ``many, many read:write heads''? That should speed things up just as much as shaking the drive, I would think.
This has been done. The IBM 3380 had four actuators, though it was about as large as a refrigerator. Conner developed the Chinook, a dual actuator drive that was expensive, fast, loud, and produced gobs of heat in a PC.
I can only go by my own observation from standing in line for an hour and a half, the observation of people I know who voted there throughout the day, what my coworker's friend, an intern at the county board of elections said, and an op-ed article flaming the election board in the local paper.
I'msure this is only the first of many, many such stories we wil hear.... No paper audit trail in many places. fun fun fun
I'm sure that for each of these stories reported, 5 or more go unreported/undiscovered.
6 out of 10 voters to my precinct were not listed in the roll book at the polling place. Many of these people were long time voters, all were given provisional ballots. Their names and signatures were on the master list, but magically never made it to the polling place. The reason? A "mistake," and in a predominately Democratic area, by a predominately Republican elections board. Hmmm. Maybe I'm reading too much into that, my name was on the list, although I'm not registered as a Democrat...
Hey, but what does it matter at this point? Election's over, and there's a few countries to run. With Republicans in charge of everything, America should be on track to Bush's ideal. Let the good times roll!
Or are you just a terrorist?
If you're planning on flying, please, please, please don't be in front of me on line at the insecurity checkpoint with one of these chock full of gadgets.
Looks neat, though.
Yes, because the media is always right and always reports accurately especially when they have reliable Iraqi civilians feeding them information. And the media is unbiased of course. I understand what the Israeli's go through with the media reports having now heard how ours and the world's reports what happens here. It's a lot different from reality.
Those pesky journalists should just stick their noses in the more prurient affairs where they belong. That way, stories like these will go unreported.
Sorry, how does a prayer that something happens constitute a threat? No where in that post did she say she was going to do it or encouraging anyone else to do it. (Unless you count God) She was merely expressing a hope that it does.
He must be inundated with those sorts of wishes. What if God does take her up on it? What can the Secret Service do to protect their charge? They'll take a bullet for him, but can they take a lightning bolt? A plague? A swarm of locusts o'er the land?
I put it to you that God should not be tempted further in this matter. He has already sent a deadly pretzel and a Segway at the President. The next move could be a leaky bathroom faucet.
TiVo has already been hacked (and TiVo doesn't punish for it), so how long do you think it'll be between when TiVo allows program sharing and someone hacks it so you can avoid these new rules?
Yes, but those hacks, if I'm not mistaken, reduce the functionality of the Tivo to that of my spare computer with an ATI All-in-Wonder card and 160GB drive. Tivo was an interesting experiment. It's destined to die:
1) It annoys the advertisers with the 30-second skip (is that still there?)
2) It pisses off the network programmers who think that sandwiching one good show between two crappy shows will increase viewership of the crappy shows.
3) It really pisses off PPV and premium channel content owners who think that nobody should ever be allowed to have an analog copy of the event, much less a digital one.
They're annoying the very people with the money to buy legislation that will outlaw DVRs! Or at least make them useless (Broadcast flag). I'm surprised they've lasted this long.
Disclaimer: I don't have a Tivo, but I know two people that do.
Where's the polling data to back these numbers up? Just clicking on the link to Wisconsin shows Bush with a 92% likelihood of winning, even though the headline states, "Kerry and Bush Remain Tied Among Likely Voters in Wisconsin". I wanna see sources, not magic numbers.
With the election being likely another 50/50 split, the real deciding factor is going to be how much voter fraud is going to occur, how much electoral fraud (Diebold is looking forward to delivering Ohio's votes to the President!), the margin of error with the voting machines, margin of error with the humans checking the voting machines, and the likelihood of another Florida.
Actually, if we can determine the probability of another Florida, we already know the outcome of the election (5 Bush, 4 Gor...er, Kerry) and we can all sleep in on Nov 2!