Man, even business writers from Yahoo! News can't tell memory from storage. From the article: "And after Google announced plans for Gmail, a free e-mail service touting massive amounts of memory, Microsoft said it would boost free memory on its Hotmail accounts."
Dude, since when do free email sites give out free memory? As much as I would like to upgrade from 512MB to a gig... Or maybe they mean their email servers have lots of memory! Aha, that must be it.
In my opinion, it is a good thing to be able to prove what votes are linked to a receipt.
A person could still refuse to reveal who they voted for. The checksum could be encrypted with a password that the voter provides. That way, an exploited poor person could still refuse to tell their boss who they voted for. Even if the boss STOLE their receipt from their hands and ran to check it out, he couldn't get the results without a password.
If they are exploited or fired because of that, then it's identical to a person who did not use e-voting and refuses to tell someone who they voted for anyway. At that point it's an issue for the court system.
Every voter gets a receipt when they vote giving them a long, encrypted key.
The computers instantly tally the votes at the end of election day and post the results to a website.
The interesting part would be that the website allows voters to plug in their key. Given a valid key, the website would return the names of the candidates that person voted for. The function that tells the voter who they voted for would be the SAME function that went through every valid key at the end of the voting day and tallied up the results.
Also, to ensure that that the information the key links to is not tampered with, each receipt would have an encrypted checksum of the voter's choices.
This way, any voter could be sure that their vote counted. Any voter can claim fraud if and only if their key does not return a vote that matches the checksum. The only other room for fraud would be if somebody added extra "imaginary" voters to the database, which could be caught by counting the number of valid receipts scanned in on voting day and comparing it to the number of valid keys in the database.
The issue of privacy would be protected because each receipt would have no identifying information on it (in case you lost your receipt).
Seriously, before I saw this article I was just looking at handhelds today for a few hours online. I've never owned one, so what I did is wrote down a list of things that I would want in a handheld, and I suddenly realized that the only way I would carry something like that around is if it all fit in my flip phone that I already carry around.
So I made my list (802.11b, color backlit touchscreen, stylus, removable memory storage, email, and sync-able with contacts and meeting schedules on my PC). The problem I kept running into is no WIFI! These "smart-phones" all want you to connect through their cell-phone frequencies and charge you per minute/kilobyte. What I want is the option to connect to 802.11x networks and surf for FREE.
I did find a few phones with WIFI, but NONE of them in a flip-phone enclosure. They all are GEEK sized (cargo pants not included). So I looked into the possibility of keeping the giant cell phone in my pocket and using a completely wireless mic/earpiece (bluetooth). That almost looked appealing until I saw that bluetooth headsets cost a pretty penny (10,000 pennies to be more exact).
OK, so I finally find one that looks like what I need... the Samsung SP-i600 is most expensive flip phone I've ever seen ($470 AFTER $180 rebate!). It doesn't even come with WIFI or bluetooth, but it is expandable via an SD I/O expansion slot. I was even sorta seriously considering it until I saw the battery life -- "Up to 2.3 hours continuous digital talk time or 4 days of continuous digital stand-by time." That's HALF the battery life of my low end freebie cell phone!
Someone please tell me there's something better???
I'm pretty new to running linux at home. I've tried Mandrake on my laptop and didn't really like it.
After installing Ubuntu last night I gotta say I'm hooked. For the first time I upgraded my kernel to 686 architecture and installed ndiswrapper to get my wireless PCMCIA card working.
Installing the new kernel and ndiswrapper packages was a breeze. So far the toughest part of setting up Ubuntu was the initial hard drive partitioning. If you don't let it format your entire disk automatically, you have to know exactly what partitions you want and what file systems to put on each. I actually used my old Mandrake install CD to handle that part, then used Ubuntu as my actual install!:-)
The article briefly touches on morality as a possible deterrent for this technology. Does anyone here have a problem with the ethics of interfacing directly with a human brain?
Personally, I don't see the ethical dilemma. Even if things progressed to the point of "improving" on the human body, does anyone see this as an ethical no-no? I'd like to hear your reasons.
There's actually at least 5 degrees of freedom. According to the article, the kid can move a cursor and cause clicks by dwelling on the cursor. That means UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, and CLICK.
This is so not going to take off. I use emoticons only when there's one that perfectly fits my current attitude. Now you have an entire 3-D body misrepresenting your mood, body language, and physical appearance in real time?!
jondoty5: wow, ur hot! i luv the way you occasionally shift your weight and blink.
hotchick21334523: thnx!
Why not use a net of some sort? I'd rather net something than try to thread it with a needle.
Falling 400 feet per minute is 4.5mph. I guess they thought the mph stat sounded too boring.
So it's moving 20mph horizontal and 4.5mph vertical and that's an 8.5 difficulty. Assuming 10 out of 10 difficulty represents the hardest possible, no helicopter pilot can catch a capsule going faster than 23.5mph vertical and 5.3mph horizontal.
I guess it'll be cool to watch. Anybody know if it'll be on TV?
Perhaps schools are teaching typing less because they are finding that by the time children come to these classes, they have already developed their own methods of typing.
I know that when I went to grade school and began typing classes (in the late 80's, early 90's) I had already developed my own 6 fingered method. So I blended that with the home-row style and came out with what I use now. 60+ wpm, and it's not the stationary-wrist home row style. It just works differently.
I agree that spending time on computer skills would be more effective than spending lots of time correcting years of improvised typing habits.
Actually, I do think that Walmart/whatever will give up the shelf space for 120 games for an unproven console. It's happened before. Initially they get great sales on new game systems, not based on the merits of the console, but on the novelty of the idea. Nintendo DS has a whole lot of novelty with that 2-screen approach. In my opinion, two screens is not a good idea, but marketers know that at this stage, a new product from nintendo is going to sell at least enough for them to clear their inventory.
Instead, try to keep up with the demands and needs of users.
I totally agree with this. Linux doesn't need to have a flashy filesystem in order to attract users. It already does what us users want - it satisfies our desire for supervillain global domination.
Without the heavy taboos and social imfluence regarding oral sex, why would there be an emotional scar [if a child took a cumshot in the face from a grown man]?
There would be an emotional scar because sexual abuse is more than just a "taboo." A young child would be horribly disturbed by the act of a grown man ejaculating in their face. That's unhealthy, immoral, vulgar, and disturbing no matter what "taboos" are in your culture.
The gunshot wound is an exaggeration relative to a cumshot in the first place. In the scope of sexual abuse, taking cum in the face would be on par with, let's say, a punch in the face on the violence side.
So being attacked physically can be emotionally troubling, but not as much as sexual abuse in my opinion.
Call it wishful thinking, but when I clicked on the article I was under the impression it would comment on the importance of software lasting 200 years on a DIGITAL MEDIUM. I mean, that would be wonderful. Some digital source that won't scratch, break, corrode, or otherwise become corrupted until hundreds of years have passed.
But alas, this article is concerned with software as a whole being built to last. Sure, that's a nice idea and all. But really the importance of long-standing software applications varies from application to application.
I find it much more annoying that the discs I put my software on will fail after a few years!
One of my close friends works in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy answering customer calls and "solving" their problems. Best Buy does all sorts of shady stuff. If you pay with a credit card, they track your purchases. Then they flag you if you return an excessive amount of items or other things of the like.
Guess what else - they don't answer your call in the order it was received. Nope - if they know who is on the line waiting for service, the computer checks your purchase history. Then it gives you better service if you've been feeding their budget better.
Oh, one last thing. Slashdotters might appreciate this one - they lie over the phone during technical difficulties. You see, it looks pretty bad when they're helping a customer on the phone with their PC and the Best Buy PCs are crashing, so they say "Sorry, our system is currently UPDATING" hehe, LIARS!
Re:Small-scale wifi from balloons.
on
Broadband Blimps
·
· Score: 1
What advantage would an AP have if it were 300 feet in the air? It would only be that much farther from the people trying to access it on the ground!
You're kidding me. These kids may have never used a computer before, and you're suggesting they start compiling their own code?
My GOSH that will take a lot of hand-holding. You can't just sit a class of kids in front of a computer and invite them all to start writing programs. First of all, it takes a special kid to even be interested in that. And secondly, it takes education! You're assuming the teachers there know how to program? Or perhaps you're inviting the children to RTFM? I doubt they will even have an internet connection, so these kids would really be at a loss for any good programming tutorials.
I say you first get them used to how a computer works, and THEN let them run educational software that will teach them things.
Now, if you know of a good software tool that will walk the children through writing code, THAT would be a better start. Not a blinking command prompt.
I myself am a recent B.S. in C.S. grad (Notre Dame class of 2003). It took me nine months of searching to get a development job in C++. And when one finally came through, sure enough the interview was set up by a friend of my family's from church.
I disagree with the need for an internship anywhere. I worked a lame-a$$ job in a warehouse for a few months while I was searching. The pay wasn't that great, but it was quite an experience and really makes me appreciate being a software engineer now. Internships can be just as hard to find as a career.
While most of these positions may claim they're looking for 5+ years experience, there really are entry-level jobs hidden between them. I say hidden because it seems like you'll never find them in an ad or online. You hear about it through word-of-mouth. God knows I thought it would never happen, but magically I had two job offers after nine months of nothing. The problem is that I'm not very outgoing or superconnected. Social networking is tough. But it's strange how life just works out sometimes.
Not only that, but no good way to stop SPAMMERS from paying. By this I mean that spammers can still pay a small fee to send email. I don't want spam even if they think it's worth a penny to send. I just want it all filtered out.
The Postal System still sends out junk mail, and THOSE people are paying for it. Wouldn't it be nice if it were all just blocked.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, even business writers from Yahoo! News can't tell memory from storage. From the article:
"And after Google announced plans for Gmail, a free e-mail service touting massive amounts of memory, Microsoft said it would boost free memory on its Hotmail accounts."
Dude, since when do free email sites give out free memory? As much as I would like to upgrade from 512MB to a gig... Or maybe they mean their email servers have lots of memory! Aha, that must be it.
In my opinion, it is a good thing to be able to prove what votes are linked to a receipt.
A person could still refuse to reveal who they voted for. The checksum could be encrypted with a password that the voter provides. That way, an exploited poor person could still refuse to tell their boss who they voted for. Even if the boss STOLE their receipt from their hands and ran to check it out, he couldn't get the results without a password.
If they are exploited or fired because of that, then it's identical to a person who did not use e-voting and refuses to tell someone who they voted for anyway. At that point it's an issue for the court system.
How about this:
Every voter gets a receipt when they vote giving them a long, encrypted key.
The computers instantly tally the votes at the end of election day and post the results to a website.
The interesting part would be that the website allows voters to plug in their key. Given a valid key, the website would return the names of the candidates that person voted for. The function that tells the voter who they voted for would be the SAME function that went through every valid key at the end of the voting day and tallied up the results.
Also, to ensure that that the information the key links to is not tampered with, each receipt would have an encrypted checksum of the voter's choices.
This way, any voter could be sure that their vote counted. Any voter can claim fraud if and only if their key does not return a vote that matches the checksum. The only other room for fraud would be if somebody added extra "imaginary" voters to the database, which could be caught by counting the number of valid receipts scanned in on voting day and comparing it to the number of valid keys in the database.
The issue of privacy would be protected because each receipt would have no identifying information on it (in case you lost your receipt).
Guys, I feel really sorry for Best Buy after reading this article. In fact, I'm ashamed of myself for buying those 25DVD-Rs for only 10 bucks...
I feel the sudden urge to go visit them and stock up on USB cables, spools of Cat-5 and monster cables!!
::cough::200% markup::cough::
Seriously, before I saw this article I was just looking at handhelds today for a few hours online. I've never owned one, so what I did is wrote down a list of things that I would want in a handheld, and I suddenly realized that the only way I would carry something like that around is if it all fit in my flip phone that I already carry around.
So I made my list (802.11b, color backlit touchscreen, stylus, removable memory storage, email, and sync-able with contacts and meeting schedules on my PC). The problem I kept running into is no WIFI! These "smart-phones" all want you to connect through their cell-phone frequencies and charge you per minute/kilobyte. What I want is the option to connect to 802.11x networks and surf for FREE.
I did find a few phones with WIFI, but NONE of them in a flip-phone enclosure. They all are GEEK sized (cargo pants not included). So I looked into the possibility of keeping the giant cell phone in my pocket and using a completely wireless mic/earpiece (bluetooth). That almost looked appealing until I saw that bluetooth headsets cost a pretty penny (10,000 pennies to be more exact).
OK, so I finally find one that looks like what I need... the Samsung SP-i600 is most expensive flip phone I've ever seen ($470 AFTER $180 rebate!). It doesn't even come with WIFI or bluetooth, but it is expandable via an SD I/O expansion slot. I was even sorta seriously considering it until I saw the battery life -- "Up to 2.3 hours continuous digital talk time or 4 days of continuous digital stand-by time." That's HALF the battery life of my low end freebie cell phone!
Someone please tell me there's something better???
I'm pretty new to running linux at home. I've tried Mandrake on my laptop and didn't really like it. :-)
After installing Ubuntu last night I gotta say I'm hooked. For the first time I upgraded my kernel to 686 architecture and installed ndiswrapper to get my wireless PCMCIA card working.
Installing the new kernel and ndiswrapper packages was a breeze. So far the toughest part of setting up Ubuntu was the initial hard drive partitioning. If you don't let it format your entire disk automatically, you have to know exactly what partitions you want and what file systems to put on each. I actually used my old Mandrake install CD to handle that part, then used Ubuntu as my actual install!
The article briefly touches on morality as a possible deterrent for this technology. Does anyone here have a problem with the ethics of interfacing directly with a human brain?
Personally, I don't see the ethical dilemma. Even if things progressed to the point of "improving" on the human body, does anyone see this as an ethical no-no? I'd like to hear your reasons.
There's actually at least 5 degrees of freedom.
According to the article, the kid can move a cursor and cause clicks by dwelling on the cursor. That means UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, and CLICK.
This is so not going to take off. I use emoticons only when there's one that perfectly fits my current attitude. Now you have an entire 3-D body misrepresenting your mood, body language, and physical appearance in real time?!
jondoty5: wow, ur hot! i luv the way you occasionally shift your weight and blink.
hotchick21334523: thnx!
Why not use a net of some sort? I'd rather net something than try to thread it with a needle. Falling 400 feet per minute is 4.5mph. I guess they thought the mph stat sounded too boring. So it's moving 20mph horizontal and 4.5mph vertical and that's an 8.5 difficulty. Assuming 10 out of 10 difficulty represents the hardest possible, no helicopter pilot can catch a capsule going faster than 23.5mph vertical and 5.3mph horizontal. I guess it'll be cool to watch. Anybody know if it'll be on TV?
Perhaps schools are teaching typing less because they are finding that by the time children come to these classes, they have already developed their own methods of typing.
I know that when I went to grade school and began typing classes (in the late 80's, early 90's) I had already developed my own 6 fingered method. So I blended that with the home-row style and came out with what I use now. 60+ wpm, and it's not the stationary-wrist home row style. It just works differently.
I agree that spending time on computer skills would be more effective than spending lots of time correcting years of improvised typing habits.
Actually, I do think that Walmart/whatever will give up the shelf space for 120 games for an unproven console. It's happened before. Initially they get great sales on new game systems, not based on the merits of the console, but on the novelty of the idea. Nintendo DS has a whole lot of novelty with that 2-screen approach. In my opinion, two screens is not a good idea, but marketers know that at this stage, a new product from nintendo is going to sell at least enough for them to clear their inventory.
Instead, try to keep up with the demands and needs of users.
I totally agree with this. Linux doesn't need to have a flashy filesystem in order to attract users. It already does what us users want - it satisfies our desire for supervillain global domination.
Without the heavy taboos and social imfluence regarding oral sex, why would there be an emotional scar [if a child took a cumshot in the face from a grown man]?
There would be an emotional scar because sexual abuse is more than just a "taboo." A young child would be horribly disturbed by the act of a grown man ejaculating in their face. That's unhealthy, immoral, vulgar, and disturbing no matter what "taboos" are in your culture.
What part of "assuming the child is not killed" did you not understand?
(But I applaud you on your level-headedness nonetheless.)
The gunshot wound is an exaggeration relative to a cumshot in the first place. In the scope of sexual abuse, taking cum in the face would be on par with, let's say, a punch in the face on the violence side.
So being attacked physically can be emotionally troubling, but not as much as sexual abuse in my opinion.
Dude,
I'd rather have my child take a gunshot than a cumshot. (assuming the gunshot doesn't kill him)
I'm not kidding. An emotional scar is worse than a physical one.
Call it wishful thinking, but when I clicked on the article I was under the impression it would comment on the importance of software lasting 200 years on a DIGITAL MEDIUM. I mean, that would be wonderful. Some digital source that won't scratch, break, corrode, or otherwise become corrupted until hundreds of years have passed.
But alas, this article is concerned with software as a whole being built to last. Sure, that's a nice idea and all. But really the importance of long-standing software applications varies from application to application.
I find it much more annoying that the discs I put my software on will fail after a few years!
One of my close friends works in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy answering customer calls and "solving" their problems. Best Buy does all sorts of shady stuff. If you pay with a credit card, they track your purchases. Then they flag you if you return an excessive amount of items or other things of the like.
Guess what else - they don't answer your call in the order it was received. Nope - if they know who is on the line waiting for service, the computer checks your purchase history. Then it gives you better service if you've been feeding their budget better.
Oh, one last thing. Slashdotters might appreciate this one - they lie over the phone during technical difficulties. You see, it looks pretty bad when they're helping a customer on the phone with their PC and the Best Buy PCs are crashing, so they say "Sorry, our system is currently UPDATING" hehe, LIARS!
What advantage would an AP have if it were 300 feet in the air? It would only be that much farther from the people trying to access it on the ground!
You're kidding me. These kids may have never used a computer before, and you're suggesting they start compiling their own code?
My GOSH that will take a lot of hand-holding. You can't just sit a class of kids in front of a computer and invite them all to start writing programs. First of all, it takes a special kid to even be interested in that. And secondly, it takes education! You're assuming the teachers there know how to program? Or perhaps you're inviting the children to RTFM? I doubt they will even have an internet connection, so these kids would really be at a loss for any good programming tutorials.
I say you first get them used to how a computer works, and THEN let them run educational software that will teach them things.
Now, if you know of a good software tool that will walk the children through writing code, THAT would be a better start. Not a blinking command prompt.
/home/jondoty#bringmemyfood
command not recognized.
LOL, so not only did they steal code -- they stole buggy code!
;-)
If there's one thing I learned in school, it's to be careful who you cheat off of
I myself am a recent B.S. in C.S. grad (Notre Dame class of 2003). It took me nine months of searching to get a development job in C++. And when one finally came through, sure enough the interview was set up by a friend of my family's from church.
I disagree with the need for an internship anywhere. I worked a lame-a$$ job in a warehouse for a few months while I was searching. The pay wasn't that great, but it was quite an experience and really makes me appreciate being a software engineer now. Internships can be just as hard to find as a career.
While most of these positions may claim they're looking for 5+ years experience, there really are entry-level jobs hidden between them. I say hidden because it seems like you'll never find them in an ad or online. You hear about it through word-of-mouth. God knows I thought it would never happen, but magically I had two job offers after nine months of nothing. The problem is that I'm not very outgoing or superconnected. Social networking is tough. But it's strange how life just works out sometimes.
Hang in there buddy, I'm rootin' for ya.
Not only that, but no good way to stop SPAMMERS from paying. By this I mean that spammers can still pay a small fee to send email. I don't want spam even if they think it's worth a penny to send. I just want it all filtered out.
The Postal System still sends out junk mail, and THOSE people are paying for it. Wouldn't it be nice if it were all just blocked.