Yeah I've always wondered about that myself. Doesn't seem like it solves much of the problem when there's still so much of the old currency still in circulation.
I would think they would have some sort of a cutoff where the old would no longer be accepted, although you could still take it to a goverment office somewhere to exchange it (centralized places where they would have the equipment available to verify its authenticity much more easily and accurately than banks/merchants). That would seem to me to be the only way to really flush all the counterfeit money out of the system without burning a lot of innocent people the way it works now.
Because then Diebold et al. wouldn't be able to charge hundreds of millions more every 2-3 years for new software/hardware.
It truly shocks me how we are replacing whole sale technology that was long-life and relatively secure with technology that is vastly more expensive both to purchase and to maintain (how long will these touch screen machines last before they will need to be replaced) and that is inherently insecure and subject to fraud on scales that were simply impossible before.
The only thing that gives me some hope is faith in just how rotten a lot of people are. Given the ridiculous number of weaknesses and opportunites for malfeasance in electronic voting systems rolled out and to be used in the Nov election, I believe the temptation will be too great for too many, resulting in a level of fraud that Joe Voter simply won't be able to ignore. In a perfect world it would be fixed now, before we through a major election into chaos, but better to be fixed later than not at all I suppose.
Ignore the other people who replied, I don't think they bothered to read the article. The lubricant on the disc surface is just to help protect it from damage (platters are already have a protective layer, but this new one has better characteristics at high speed and is simpler to apply because it doesn't require seperate adhesives).
The term lubricant probably wasn't the best choice, rather it's just a protective film.
Supposedly at the high RPMs of top of the line drives, the film currently used can ripple or even spin off entirely after prolonged usage which leaves the disc more vulnerable to head contact or armature resting.
If you had to distill Libertarianism down to a single belief, it's that people have a right to do with their time and property what they wish.
Most political parties in some domain or other want to force people to use their time and property in the way they themselves see fit. Whether it's Democrats who want to see people spend their time and property supporting their ideal of society economically (helping the poor, cleaning the environment, educating the masses, etc). Or Republicans who want to force people to live their lives according to religious mores (sexuality, drug use, patriotism, abortion, etc).
The same is true for most 3rd parties as well, they have their own particular agenda and have no qualms about using force to get other people to do as they think best. I don't doubt the individuals have good intentions, and really think that they are doing what is best in the long run, and that the means is justified by the end goal.
Libertarians aren't working toward some ideal society, or trying to stamp out the "evils" of modern living. They believe there are fundamental rights that should be recognized and respected held by all human beings.
Now a lot of benefits flow from that recognition, but you have to understand that allowing people the freedom to succeed also means that on an individual level they will also have the freedom to fail. Freedom without consequences is no freedom at all.
I honestly don't know if a true Libertarian society is possible, there's an awful lot of people out there that will fight tooth and nail to be able to enforce their own ideas of how people should spend their time and dispose of their property. Both liberals and conservatives alike. But please don't confuse them with Libertarians, it's a tragic misunderstanding to say such a thing.
In principle there's no reason. In reality though, the tradeoff between space consumed and the difficulty of re-encoding to wav/managing has to be in my benefit.
I've found a few good lossless compression formats, but none of them in my experience have robust and friendly tools for managing the compressed music to make it availabe for reencoding in other formats. Also there's the issue of needing over double the space during that process unless I want to sit down and go album by album, deleting as I go.
In other words, it's just easier over all to maintain my archive in uncompressed WAV.
Over the past year I've been saving my CD and cassete tape collection to WAV files because I'm both concerned about the physical media they are on deteriorating further and because I like being able to quickly convert to new compression formats as they come out. But with a little over 600 titles, that adds up to a huge amount of storage.
While I don't think I would ever trust anything other than a hard drive to be the sole holder of this material, it would be nice to be able to have a backup or two, and CDs get me right back where I am in terms of the space occupied by the originals. DVDs save some room, but still not enough to make it hassle free.
I think one of the big trends on the horizon as we go to larger and larger capacities will be a move towards loss compression formats.
Just watch a DVD on a plasma screen if you think there would be no benefit lol. And with the increased format sizes coming up (HD-DVD and DVD Audio) it will only get worse.
We've lived with JPGs, MP3s, and MPEG encoding for so many years that I think most of us just take it for granted that you have to live with a little loss in quality, but it's not a given, it's just a tradeoff required by current storage/throughput limitations.
So if simulation hones skills and makes later real life training more effective, breeding filial feelings and approval, why would it only apply in ostensibly positive situations?
Why would this not apply just as much to Grand Theft Auto and its ilk?
If you're going in the wrong direction, moving faster isn't going to help you get where you should be going.
Bush is wasting literally hundreds of billions of dollars on actions that are not only not addressing why terrorists are attacking us but are making us more vunerable in the process.
Kerry has shown little inclination of moving where we need to go, but at least he won't sink us that much further in debt while greasing the wheels toward further tragedy the way Bush/Cheny are.
It wouldn't surprise me if Bush has good intentions, but in the real world it's outcomes and consequences that matter, not intentions.
It's not 2008, it's 2005, so they only have to return it if they drop out before their freshman year is over.
The iPod remains the property of Duke University until the end of the spring 2005 semester, at which time the student becomes the owner. If for any reason the student is not enrolled at Duke University during the 2004-2005 academic year, he/she must return the iPod to the university in good working condition.
I agree, if you want a personalized, well done RPG experience you can get it with a small group of your friends and any one of the many tabletop RPG systems out there. (NWN has some elements of it, but still depends far too much on prescripting to ever provide the wonderful on the fly turns in plot and action that make table top gaming so enjoyable and memorable.)
But to deliver this sort of experience on a scale past 10 or 20 people just isn't possible while maintaining the quality level.
And that's what's so exciting I think about getting into this area, taking a concept that is currently not possible to implement, and figuring out how to do it.
And on a side note, if you're successful, online RPGs will be far from the only area where this technology will find use. I suspect that in twenty years we'll be talking about the person that finally nails the problem the same we think about Linus Torvalds or Gordon Moore today. Even very brilliant people just shake their heads now and scoff at the impossiblity of the task. I know I do lol, but there's always a solution, you just have to find it.
Yeah that was my bad, I was just going from what a salesman told me a while back at a Fry's store, it seem to make sense given the name, but couldn't have been more wrong lol.
Heh, I was wrong, was just repeating what a salesman at Fry's told me it was, I should know better than to trust anything those guys say, they never know what they're talking about.
Last week I overheard one of them telling a guy looking at laptops in a conspiratorial hush hush voice that AMD chips run at a lower frequency than Pentiums do, and he was showing him in the System Properties panel the "proof." I couldn't resist and went over and asked him performance ratings, and if it was a bad thing, why Intel was moving away from straight gigahertz ratings themselves now too.
Re:MPC: possibly the next standard?
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This isn't a new standard, it's just an after effect applied to existing signals. In the same way that high end sets have special filters such as a comb filter which gets rid of the jagged comb like fingers from rapidly moving objects on interlaced TV images, this is something that just makes existing TV look better. In other words, there will be HDTV sets with this, and HDTV sets without it. Although if it is as cheap to integrate as they suggest then it might become common on all sets (and other display devices).
Since they are supposedly coming out with sets later this year, I would probably wait myself if I were about to drop a couple grand on a new set and get a look at the technology in the show room.
Maybe it's because we're spoiled with the high resolution of computer monitors, but I can barely stand to watch normal TV, even the majority of the newer plasma/LCD TVs have horrible images. There's a lot of room for improvement. The best ones I've seen in my opinion are DLP rear projection sets, but then I haven't really kept up with it the last year or so, so there might be better looking stuff out there now.
A data save and OS reinstall is 1.5 to 2 hours minimum. That is a known quantity going in.
The fix to the problem however is of unknown duration. It could be 5 minutes, it could be an hour, it could be 10 hours. Only once the problem has been fixed will the time taken be known.
This is the reason people often end up spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to wrangle their computer into behaving properly again. At any given moment in the trouble shooting process, the fact a solution could be minutes away keeps people from committing to the known slog that a reinstall will entail.
Are you actually suggesting that anytime anything goes wrong where a fix is not immediately apparent, data should be backed up and the OS and software reinstalled? I suspect if you add up the time spent doing this over and over will quickly reach into the same ridiculous territory that hammering away trying to fix problems without reinstalling incurs.
Granted, for some people who have extensive experience with these issues, they can get a gut feeling for when a problem is too much to try to mess with and a reinstall is the wiser choice, but that experience doesn't come freely. But outside of being a psychic and knowing beforehand how long something will take to fix (or to know that it cannot be fixed), I really don't see a reinstall at every problem that crops up as a the viable solution you suggest it is.
With the capacity, throughput, and rewritability being claimed by the company, the issue of fragility is readily solved through any number of different means. It's just an engineering problem. Data redundancy, robust error checking, hardier media (diamond coatings, enclosures, smaller form factor, etc), etc.
But it won't surprise me if between now and a product launch the specs are brought way down. While it makes great press now, cooler business heads usually prevail and squelch any advancement too far ahead of the current tech, preferring to milk the techonology over many years, a la 1X, 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X etc etc like we saw with CDs, and now seeing again with DVDs.
He was just using a bird as an example of something unexpected, and your reasoning is the same reasoning that would have led to the disaster all over again. Relying solely on logic and assumming high probability is the same as a sure thing, without occasionally taking the time to verify your conclusions by looking out your window to see what is going on in reality can on rare occassions result in spectuarly poor judgements.
As the saying goes, he's got bigger fish to fry. The California state budget is always a headache, but it is a major one right now, with massive cuts in all sorts of politically sensitive areas like education already taken, there isn't a lot of areas left to cut from. This was a big part of his campaign coming in, and he bought some time with a huge loan that was approved by voters, but reducing the deficit is a much higher priority for him then protecting an out of state companies profits (and come on, you can't exactly paint MS as feeding starving babies on the stump).
It's a fine line semantically between discrimination and bigotry.
But it's a necessary part of life to discriminate, you can hardly avoid it on one level or another. But if you ask someone why they made a discrimination between various options, they can give you their reasons.
Bigots for the most part will reply with that's juat the way it is, and will be unable to ellucidate the path their reasoning took to the discrimination. Why don't you want your daugther to marry person of race X? I just don't, it's wrong. Etc., etc.
Graham gives some decent reasons, so I would hardly call him a language bigot.
But to motivate you to do what? Look at what people do for money. Look at the things people do never receiving a dime for it.
There are some serious qualitative differences between those two global groups of actions. It seems more often the case that great art comes from subsistence funding, just enough to allow the creator to live while he/she creates. Additional funds don't have any where near the impact they do in so many other endeavors. In fact, if you look through large grant artwork, one might even conclude there is a negative impact.
It's a pretty big leap to go from wrenches to a console controller. Also, how many geeks hang out at home depot lol?
It's hardly a worthless article, the simplicity can certainly matter with how much respect you give to the authors, but it really doesn't have much to do with the utility value of an idea most people wouldn't have thought of on their own.
Hehe, are you sure? It seems to me like a couple tiles of the size shown in the picture are a heck of a lot simpler and more cost effective than a freely rotating sphere of a size big enough to both fit a person and have a small curve (you have to go pretty large, over 20 feet diameter, before you get away from a strongly pronounced curvature).
Their idea is actually quite clever, and perhaps more importantly, could be something that would end up being relatively low cost.
I wouldn't want to try to get litigation insurance though, I can readily see people falling and hurting themselves (through little fault of the product, lot of clumsy people out there) and sueing them.
They're not marketing this as a desktop keyboard replacement so the comparison is specious. It's being marketed as an input device for situations where a full keyboard is either unwieldy or impractical.
The WPM comparison is to thumb input devices or stylus/writing recognition devices. If you can bang out 100 WPM on either of those I would be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I've always wondered about that myself. Doesn't seem like it solves much of the problem when there's still so much of the old currency still in circulation.
I would think they would have some sort of a cutoff where the old would no longer be accepted, although you could still take it to a goverment office somewhere to exchange it (centralized places where they would have the equipment available to verify its authenticity much more easily and accurately than banks/merchants). That would seem to me to be the only way to really flush all the counterfeit money out of the system without burning a lot of innocent people the way it works now.
Because then Diebold et al. wouldn't be able to charge hundreds of millions more every 2-3 years for new software/hardware.
It truly shocks me how we are replacing whole sale technology that was long-life and relatively secure with technology that is vastly more expensive both to purchase and to maintain (how long will these touch screen machines last before they will need to be replaced) and that is inherently insecure and subject to fraud on scales that were simply impossible before.
The only thing that gives me some hope is faith in just how rotten a lot of people are. Given the ridiculous number of weaknesses and opportunites for malfeasance in electronic voting systems rolled out and to be used in the Nov election, I believe the temptation will be too great for too many, resulting in a level of fraud that Joe Voter simply won't be able to ignore. In a perfect world it would be fixed now, before we through a major election into chaos, but better to be fixed later than not at all I suppose.
Ignore the other people who replied, I don't think they bothered to read the article. The lubricant on the disc surface is just to help protect it from damage (platters are already have a protective layer, but this new one has better characteristics at high speed and is simpler to apply because it doesn't require seperate adhesives).
The term lubricant probably wasn't the best choice, rather it's just a protective film.
Supposedly at the high RPMs of top of the line drives, the film currently used can ripple or even spin off entirely after prolonged usage which leaves the disc more vulnerable to head contact or armature resting.
If you had to distill Libertarianism down to a single belief, it's that people have a right to do with their time and property what they wish.
Most political parties in some domain or other want to force people to use their time and property in the way they themselves see fit. Whether it's Democrats who want to see people spend their time and property supporting their ideal of society economically (helping the poor, cleaning the environment, educating the masses, etc). Or Republicans who want to force people to live their lives according to religious mores (sexuality, drug use, patriotism, abortion, etc).
The same is true for most 3rd parties as well, they have their own particular agenda and have no qualms about using force to get other people to do as they think best. I don't doubt the individuals have good intentions, and really think that they are doing what is best in the long run, and that the means is justified by the end goal.
Libertarians aren't working toward some ideal society, or trying to stamp out the "evils" of modern living. They believe there are fundamental rights that should be recognized and respected held by all human beings.
Now a lot of benefits flow from that recognition, but you have to understand that allowing people the freedom to succeed also means that on an individual level they will also have the freedom to fail. Freedom without consequences is no freedom at all.
I honestly don't know if a true Libertarian society is possible, there's an awful lot of people out there that will fight tooth and nail to be able to enforce their own ideas of how people should spend their time and dispose of their property. Both liberals and conservatives alike. But please don't confuse them with Libertarians, it's a tragic misunderstanding to say such a thing.
In principle there's no reason. In reality though, the tradeoff between space consumed and the difficulty of re-encoding to wav/managing has to be in my benefit.
I've found a few good lossless compression formats, but none of them in my experience have robust and friendly tools for managing the compressed music to make it availabe for reencoding in other formats. Also there's the issue of needing over double the space during that process unless I want to sit down and go album by album, deleting as I go.
In other words, it's just easier over all to maintain my archive in uncompressed WAV.
Over the past year I've been saving my CD and cassete tape collection to WAV files because I'm both concerned about the physical media they are on deteriorating further and because I like being able to quickly convert to new compression formats as they come out. But with a little over 600 titles, that adds up to a huge amount of storage. While I don't think I would ever trust anything other than a hard drive to be the sole holder of this material, it would be nice to be able to have a backup or two, and CDs get me right back where I am in terms of the space occupied by the originals. DVDs save some room, but still not enough to make it hassle free. I think one of the big trends on the horizon as we go to larger and larger capacities will be a move towards loss compression formats. Just watch a DVD on a plasma screen if you think there would be no benefit lol. And with the increased format sizes coming up (HD-DVD and DVD Audio) it will only get worse. We've lived with JPGs, MP3s, and MPEG encoding for so many years that I think most of us just take it for granted that you have to live with a little loss in quality, but it's not a given, it's just a tradeoff required by current storage/throughput limitations.
So if simulation hones skills and makes later real life training more effective, breeding filial feelings and approval, why would it only apply in ostensibly positive situations?
Why would this not apply just as much to Grand Theft Auto and its ilk?
If you're going in the wrong direction, moving faster isn't going to help you get where you should be going.
Bush is wasting literally hundreds of billions of dollars on actions that are not only not addressing why terrorists are attacking us but are making us more vunerable in the process.
Kerry has shown little inclination of moving where we need to go, but at least he won't sink us that much further in debt while greasing the wheels toward further tragedy the way Bush/Cheny are.
It wouldn't surprise me if Bush has good intentions, but in the real world it's outcomes and consequences that matter, not intentions.
I agree, if you want a personalized, well done RPG experience you can get it with a small group of your friends and any one of the many tabletop RPG systems out there. (NWN has some elements of it, but still depends far too much on prescripting to ever provide the wonderful on the fly turns in plot and action that make table top gaming so enjoyable and memorable.)
But to deliver this sort of experience on a scale past 10 or 20 people just isn't possible while maintaining the quality level.
And that's what's so exciting I think about getting into this area, taking a concept that is currently not possible to implement, and figuring out how to do it.
And on a side note, if you're successful, online RPGs will be far from the only area where this technology will find use. I suspect that in twenty years we'll be talking about the person that finally nails the problem the same we think about Linus Torvalds or Gordon Moore today. Even very brilliant people just shake their heads now and scoff at the impossiblity of the task. I know I do lol, but there's always a solution, you just have to find it.
I figure keyboards are like oil in a car, you should just replace them every 2-3 months.
For 15-20 bucks a pop I enjoy having fully responsive keys without all that scarey shit lurking a half inch from my fingers all day.
Kind of like swimming in the open ocean with god knows what lurking in the depths just below you.
Yeah that was my bad, I was just going from what a salesman told me a while back at a Fry's store, it seem to make sense given the name, but couldn't have been more wrong lol.
Heh, I was wrong, was just repeating what a salesman at Fry's told me it was, I should know better than to trust anything those guys say, they never know what they're talking about. Last week I overheard one of them telling a guy looking at laptops in a conspiratorial hush hush voice that AMD chips run at a lower frequency than Pentiums do, and he was showing him in the System Properties panel the "proof." I couldn't resist and went over and asked him performance ratings, and if it was a bad thing, why Intel was moving away from straight gigahertz ratings themselves now too.
This isn't a new standard, it's just an after effect applied to existing signals. In the same way that high end sets have special filters such as a comb filter which gets rid of the jagged comb like fingers from rapidly moving objects on interlaced TV images, this is something that just makes existing TV look better. In other words, there will be HDTV sets with this, and HDTV sets without it. Although if it is as cheap to integrate as they suggest then it might become common on all sets (and other display devices).
Since they are supposedly coming out with sets later this year, I would probably wait myself if I were about to drop a couple grand on a new set and get a look at the technology in the show room.
Maybe it's because we're spoiled with the high resolution of computer monitors, but I can barely stand to watch normal TV, even the majority of the newer plasma/LCD TVs have horrible images. There's a lot of room for improvement. The best ones I've seen in my opinion are DLP rear projection sets, but then I haven't really kept up with it the last year or so, so there might be better looking stuff out there now.
A data save and OS reinstall is 1.5 to 2 hours minimum. That is a known quantity going in.
The fix to the problem however is of unknown duration. It could be 5 minutes, it could be an hour, it could be 10 hours. Only once the problem has been fixed will the time taken be known.
This is the reason people often end up spending ridiculous amounts of time trying to wrangle their computer into behaving properly again. At any given moment in the trouble shooting process, the fact a solution could be minutes away keeps people from committing to the known slog that a reinstall will entail.
Are you actually suggesting that anytime anything goes wrong where a fix is not immediately apparent, data should be backed up and the OS and software reinstalled? I suspect if you add up the time spent doing this over and over will quickly reach into the same ridiculous territory that hammering away trying to fix problems without reinstalling incurs.
Granted, for some people who have extensive experience with these issues, they can get a gut feeling for when a problem is too much to try to mess with and a reinstall is the wiser choice, but that experience doesn't come freely. But outside of being a psychic and knowing beforehand how long something will take to fix (or to know that it cannot be fixed), I really don't see a reinstall at every problem that crops up as a the viable solution you suggest it is.
With the capacity, throughput, and rewritability being claimed by the company, the issue of fragility is readily solved through any number of different means. It's just an engineering problem. Data redundancy, robust error checking, hardier media (diamond coatings, enclosures, smaller form factor, etc), etc.
But it won't surprise me if between now and a product launch the specs are brought way down. While it makes great press now, cooler business heads usually prevail and squelch any advancement too far ahead of the current tech, preferring to milk the techonology over many years, a la 1X, 2X, 4X, 8X, 16X etc etc like we saw with CDs, and now seeing again with DVDs.
Actually it's been suggested that she faked it for money.
n al /main587049.shtml
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/05/natio
He was just using a bird as an example of something unexpected, and your reasoning is the same reasoning that would have led to the disaster all over again. Relying solely on logic and assumming high probability is the same as a sure thing, without occasionally taking the time to verify your conclusions by looking out your window to see what is going on in reality can on rare occassions result in spectuarly poor judgements.
As the saying goes, he's got bigger fish to fry. The California state budget is always a headache, but it is a major one right now, with massive cuts in all sorts of politically sensitive areas like education already taken, there isn't a lot of areas left to cut from. This was a big part of his campaign coming in, and he bought some time with a huge loan that was approved by voters, but reducing the deficit is a much higher priority for him then protecting an out of state companies profits (and come on, you can't exactly paint MS as feeding starving babies on the stump).
It's a fine line semantically between discrimination and bigotry. But it's a necessary part of life to discriminate, you can hardly avoid it on one level or another. But if you ask someone why they made a discrimination between various options, they can give you their reasons. Bigots for the most part will reply with that's juat the way it is, and will be unable to ellucidate the path their reasoning took to the discrimination. Why don't you want your daugther to marry person of race X? I just don't, it's wrong. Etc., etc. Graham gives some decent reasons, so I would hardly call him a language bigot.
But to motivate you to do what? Look at what people do for money. Look at the things people do never receiving a dime for it.
There are some serious qualitative differences between those two global groups of actions. It seems more often the case that great art comes from subsistence funding, just enough to allow the creator to live while he/she creates. Additional funds don't have any where near the impact they do in so many other endeavors. In fact, if you look through large grant artwork, one might even conclude there is a negative impact.
It's a pretty big leap to go from wrenches to a console controller. Also, how many geeks hang out at home depot lol?
It's hardly a worthless article, the simplicity can certainly matter with how much respect you give to the authors, but it really doesn't have much to do with the utility value of an idea most people wouldn't have thought of on their own.
Hehe, are you sure? It seems to me like a couple tiles of the size shown in the picture are a heck of a lot simpler and more cost effective than a freely rotating sphere of a size big enough to both fit a person and have a small curve (you have to go pretty large, over 20 feet diameter, before you get away from a strongly pronounced curvature).
Their idea is actually quite clever, and perhaps more importantly, could be something that would end up being relatively low cost.
I wouldn't want to try to get litigation insurance though, I can readily see people falling and hurting themselves (through little fault of the product, lot of clumsy people out there) and sueing them.
This is why:
http://reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml
They're not marketing this as a desktop keyboard replacement so the comparison is specious. It's being marketed as an input device for situations where a full keyboard is either unwieldy or impractical.
The WPM comparison is to thumb input devices or stylus/writing recognition devices. If you can bang out 100 WPM on either of those I would be surprised.