OP says nobody is thinking about costs. However the Japan Space Elevator Association (http://www.jsea.jp in Japanese) in addition to covering technical and engineering also considers business and legal issues. Their site says they are the only group to cover legal. I once attended a meeting of theirs and a manager from a leading aerospace company was in charge. Their website also mentions someone's estimate of about 200M USD to build a megafloater island not counting cost of the station and elevator itself.
FWIW here is a video from JSETEC 2011 shot in Fujinomiya City, Shizuoka Prefecture on August 7 showing a climber built by Takane Matsumoto of Team Aquarius. Certainly it's cool that something like his climber exists! I don't know how high it went but I think they were going for 600m altitude. Anyway I expect these groups would welcome anybody who wanted to investigate building a loop instead. I am not involved with these guys but some of the posts here suggest LAN parties to play the latest first person shooter is of greater value than what these guys are doing, all I can say is that kind of thinking is what leads to the utterly morally bankrupt society and economy that is currently on world display. Hint I am not talking about the country that just got hit by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters. Where's Slashdot's geek cred?
The Japan Space Elevator Association (http://www.jsea.jp in Japanese) in addition to covering technical and engineering also considers business and legal issues. And here is a video from JSETEC 2011 shot in Fujinomiya City, Shizuoka Prefecture on August 7 showing a climber built by Takane Matsumoto of Team Aquarius. Certainly it's cool that something like his climber exists! I don't know how high it went but I think they were going for 600m altitude. Anyway I expect these groups would welcome anybody who wanted to investigate building a loop instead.
P.S. I would like to add that I was assuming he was a consultant not an employee. It makes a lot of difference. However, he should have just left and demanded full severance pay due to their requiring him to do something illegal. I still think the BSA is not a friend of society.
Thanks for your reply. I do agree with what you say generally.
However, he didn't have to take the job. As far as I can see instead of walking away or trying harder to educate the customer, he decided to betray them and make a buck off of them. This is not ethical and it will make people distrust software consultants. I imagine customers see a consultant as someone who you pay to look at the dirty laundry and tell you what to do. Then they leave and the customer decides whether to do it or not.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law I would like to mention, since there is a good film about it recently, the Vichy Regime. I understand copyrights have to be paid however I would rather not have my own software licenses be paid rather than creating a society based on snitches.
The idea that a hired consultant would on his own initiative attempt to profit by snitching, and not to a legal entity or even the software vendor but to a company that makes its living out of lawsuits, is just repugnant. It's a breach of trust. Maybe Autocad will ask BSA to negotiate license payments with this company but afterwards the consultant might get sued. When I do work I also have to sign an NDA usually and I could imagine getting into a lot of trouble if I acted like this guy did. And I could see this attitude ending up causing more companies to demand oppressive contracts before hiring consultants.
Just my 2 cents, not a lawyer, and perhaps if my business was like Autocad's I would feel differently. But I am just imagining the customer's side and wondering if this guy is telling the truth to the world right now. How do we know he didn't extort them and when they refused to pay he went to get his money from the BSA by telling those vultures confidential internal information about the compliance problem? If the company was liquid they probably would have paid. So how do we know this wasn't just some untrustworthy guy who is trying to cover his tracks online now? How do we know the company wasn't planning on paying as soon as they had money? Whatever. I would never recommend this guy to go to any current or potential client of mine. Clearly there are many companies with compliance problems however I would go broke trying to fix every instance and not focusing on the bottom line. Unless I was also a snitch to the BSA.
As a consultant, this is not ethical activity even though you might think so.
When you turned around an bit your employer you lost credibility, because they hired you to give them your professional expertise.
Refuse to work for them or to do an illegal act, but there is something extremely ugly about enjoying turning someone in, especially when they came to ask for your help. Obviously they were not thinking of it as a crime, or that a copy of software has an intrinsic value.
Unfortunately I can't see anyone ever, ever hiring you who knows about this incident. I recommend you rethink your approach to the world and change your username. Google will prove to any prospective employer who knows how to use a search engine that you are a viper.
Personally, I was in a similar situation. A customer said they need me to do something that I would expect is illegal. I told them I could not have anything to do with that. I took the money for the work I did and decided this is not a company I can have a future working with. I realized that I am not a perfect moral judge, and that the livelihoods of everyone in the company and all their past and future work, is not valueless or worthy of vigilante punishment.
I saw my duty clearly as: 1) Document the request for myself. 2) Don't do something illegal, especially since it could come back and bite me too. 3) Explain to the employee why this is bad. Even if the company's livelihood might depend on it, pragmatically this is a bad judgement. 4) Since the employee told me that management already knew about it, and that it is very important to the company, we discussed with his boss and one higher person. I will have to discuss it with the president too probably. 5) If they get snippety with me for some other reason, which is likely considering they are not totally ethical themselves, I can remind them about it in the future. Not as a threat, but to explain I am dealing with them fairly and professionally, and like a lawyer I am not going to divulge corporate secrets but on the other hand I expect payment as agreed and not to be forced to do anything illegal. If they end up being total jerks, just get away from them. But deliver on my own promises. 6) Consider how to more easily avoid this kind of situation in the future, especially regarding sales and product development issues.
At any rate, the BSA is known as a rotten organization from what I have read on the net and being a tattletale is a very pernicious way to make a living. In particular, causing irremediable harm to many people because of what is basically a victimless crime is really not a classy move at all.
Finally, you should realize that many, many people in the software engineering business become a bit mentally imbalanced, very subtly of course, but I have often seen people become robotic or bofh-ish, thinking their own logic is universal law and anyone with another opinion is worthy of being stamped on. It is probably an occupational illness. I could understand a young engineer falling ill that way but as a professional consultant you ought to take an oath like the Hippocratic Oath doctors take. Do no harm and so on.
You need people skills and to treat your customers with more respect, frankly. People who have other priorities than software licenses are not necessarily criminals, they probably don't know any better and your job is to educate them. If you can't deal with them, or believe they are criminals then just don't work with them.
Your own moral position is so iffy they might even be able to sue you, or ruin your career, especially if you have received money or signed a contract with them. Personally, I would not want to have to worry about someone who I decided is criminal to track me down and make more trouble for me out of some twisted mania that has nothing to do with me. My own advice: change your username, change your approach, find a way to get classier customers, and do a good job and then make a swift exit.
In addition to the above posts about reflecting away heat from above, may I suggest you wet down the pavement in advance. This will reduce the heat coming from the hot pavement below which may otherwise reach dangerous temperatures.
There may be a debate about whether Internet connectivity is a human right or requisite to citizenship. However it should be clear that low bandwidth is a constraint on economic growth, education and advancement. Mobile bandwidth is not just about updating Facebook on the train, especially as all kinds of computing and communication can be done outside the office, or when on a business trip, at a customer's office, etc. I submit that lower mobile tariffs will greatly increase a region's competitiveness in many ways, and this is not just about country vs. country. With android and ipad style terminals becoming very popular, outdated concepts such as "roaming" become medieval rapacious toll-gates on the highway. Astoundingly my HTC Evo 4G cannot do global cellular voice roaming which my last phone (NTT Docomo) did. Global roaming in Europe a few years ago cost me about $500 for 1 week. I would prefer to use the Android Skype client but 4G global roaming, if available, would be far more. I submit that city, region, state and national governments should quickly attempt to remove these trade barriers, and cities on their own should attempt to create barrier-free roaming agreements with each other. It is juvenile from a civilization perspective and an economic perspective for carriers to refuse interoperability and enforce rapacious fees when it hurts the governments and populations that make it possible for them to make such a profitable business.
It may be useful to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It is a book about the horrors of the meatpacking industry back in the beginning of the 20th C. Things have changed quite a lot, but believing that change is comprehensive requires an expectation that actual conditions are frequently reported without feat of reprisal, and that appropriate action is then taken. I have a suspicion that corporate interests have conspired to make opaque the ingredients and methods used in fast food and even supermarket meats.
Android HTC Evo 4G, shot a bunch of photos and must send to someone. Not so easy to get multiple photos off the phone, if you want to select them with a UI so you know what photos you are sending.
My solution after googling was, Get Astro file manager Get Dropbox for android Now you can open Astro, go to/sdcard/DCIM, use thumbnails view, select Multi Select mode, and touch a bunch of photos. Then you make a zip file by clicking New (folder icon) and Zip file. (Old version had zip file as an icon on the top of the screen IIRC.) Then touch and hold on the zip file you made, and select Send and then Dropbox. Go to the destination folder, Public if you want to share with a link, you can go up by clicking the back arrow button. It will get synced to your computer too. Finally when your computer tells you it was downloaded, control click (mac) or maybe right click in windows, select Dropbox > Copy Url, then open mail client and write an email, pasting in the download link.
That is the best solution I found so far. Why not google? Well I have gigs of spam in there and I don't want to link my android phone to that account. maybe there is a better way but I don't know it yet. Upload one file, easy just click and hold > send. Many files, not so easy. Other option is to use a shell over usb from mac and pull the files with adb.
My HTC Evo has HDMI output. Not that I would use it, but I could see impulse buying a movie while walking home and popping on the tube, if the resolution is good enough.
Just put a 1 megabit/sec camera feed on it and you're over. FWIW within Japan you get similar insane speed but again a similar 300GB cap as far as I know. Not that I have ever run into such a cap. But it may affect a video application I'm planning now. If they would just give a clear service menu as to what it costs to get the real thing. But that would be like a contract that lets you run your own ISP and would likely be at least twice the price.
You could get a virtual linux box at linode.com, it's very cheap and mail servers are some of the common uses for them.
That said, I noticed when I traveled to a home on Verizon that they do indeed block port 25 when trying to send mail via my linode based mail server, and the solution was to go to an alternate port number and configure my mail server to accept it. This turns out to be pretty common with broadband providers like Verizon. I would not trust Verizon to not block 25 even if they say it is a business connection. Incoming is another matter.. If blocked then you need to complain.
Great! It will be a big sun-hot arrow pointing right back at us saying, "Here are some young pushovers!"
It's very cool but I'd like to see the engineering plan.. can we currently afford to build it nor fix it unless we have industrial nanotech that can eat up huge mountains and turn it into high tensile steel..?
Meanwhile that tiny joint above the engine looks like the weak point. Aside from all the other parts that get hit by pebbles in orbit around Barnard's Star at 12% of c..
P.S. Not to sound so high and mighty, for what it's worth I did enable the satellite tracking on my phone so that it can be found if lost or stolen, though I'm not sure if it will really work since the batteries could die, it could be turned off or put in a box, etc. And I just remembered thanks to you that I should really add some code to my laptop so that it can be found if stolen, though it will probably just be a matter of phoning home to my own server, since I am proficient enough to hack something up for that purpose. Of course if you are Will Smith and government assassins are on your trail then that's a bad idea!;) enjoy your purchases. Just let other people use it the way they want. The latest crop of phones and I think cameras too let you upload to the Internet from your device. It's an issue that should be examined.
> I *like* cameras that incorporates metadata. This protects me from lawsuits Because you are not a journalist shooting something the government of whichever country you are in at the time dislikes. Most photographers do not use metadata to protect themselves from lawsuits, nor is that the reason why metadata is added. There is an author tag, which you can set, but serial numbers are probably to identify flaws and other data is probably meant to aid the photographer's software in trying to enhance it. Similarly, no customers are choosing cameras based on whether or not metadata is available. They might in the future if metadata can be demonstrated to be very useful such as in finding similar angles from the Internet for 3D composition.
>People misuse printers to print out pedophilia Using "think of the children" and "pedophilia scum" is a common and idiotic straw man. There are no pedophiles being caught today via copiers, they are all on the Internet the news says (I could be wrong). Copier tracking is I expect used to track industrial correspondence in the event of crimes. Like how the copiers sometimes keep a copy of everything copied on a hard disk. I hope they are not doing this sort of thing in libraries since that would damage things the Constitution guarantees, at least in the U.S.A., though after 9/11 maybe it is happening there too (unless cool librarians sniff it out).
>counterfeiting Sure they will not copy bills, but no, don't be silly. My understanding from the news anyway is that the North Koreans or whoever does the copying makes perfect "super" engraving plates that make indistinguishable copies. Hence the new-fangled printing they are coming up with. You are talking about 10-20 years ago maybe but I doubt it is really true about copiers being that good. People doing that get caught easily because the paper is different, as far as I know.
> threatening letters (my sister got several I'm sorry to hear about your family's experience but no, they are not going to find and convict your sister's stalker with a piece of copy paper. Probably it is not going through a copier you see.
> I just can't get that excited about anyone being able to trace what I print back to me. I can't think of a situation where I would care. Because you are (if you are writing honestly) living in a safe, unthreatening environment and have never found a situation yet in which you would care. This is quite different from reality for many people. Understand for example that the U.S.A. is forcing many countries to follow its standards, sometimes through secret pacts, and sometimes they are working with governments that really do not think like the U.S. government ought to think. And sometimes situations change, at any rate copier constellations are perhaps not the worst tragedy but the points you are making all sound quite like straw men (tricky) to me.
On the other hand I'm sure there are many who think the same way as you mention, such as my own father. He has told me I'm not doing anything wrong so why should I worry. On the other hand, you could be Aung San Suu Kyi and get arrested by a corrupt government in your house for 15 years. If you think I am joking, I had the honor of attending a journalist's gathering where one of the top Chinese dissidents spoke. He actually was pleading the case of the average Chinese who is quite human but not seen or known well by the West due to the projections of their leaders.
So 1 billion people are living in an unreal situation and buying copiers, and using Internet messaging and so on from the West and they are very vulnerable to being tracked. Their future could rest on how well this surveillance technology is embedded in their infrastructure. And that will affect your children or grandchildren. I use China as an example since it is so far away. Civil rights in the U.S. also have changed often in its history too.
As for the tracking of your laptop, heartbeat, etc. that is very nice and sounds useful. I believe curren
I have found an interesting program called exiftool), a great command line tool for linux, mac osx and windows (there is apparently a windows gui too).
Yes, the latest professional cameras do indeed embed a lot of information including the photographer's name, multiple lens and body serial numbers, etc. This does not change the file name or creation date in the file system. Also the metadata I saw includes F-stop, exposure, etc. Perhaps if it had a sat chip there would be geographic coordinates on it. So the only way to be sure is to just erase all metadata not just a few tags.
It is important to understand that there is a lot (several pages) of metadata, some of which may be in binary format, which may not all be shown by the kinds of programs used by consumers ordinarily. Of course you can stare at the output of "strings" until you are blue in the face but ultimately you have to trust some tool that it has found all the metadata.
So far exiftool is what I trust but I know this is a best effort kind of thing. It seems that different manufacturers include different information, and the amount is far beyond what is needed to display an image. If the embedded data gets steganographed or otherwise hidden in the file it won't be easily found since people will not know it is there.
I started looking at these programs because a photographer asked me to sell his photos and was uncomfortable about personal data being left in files being handed to other people he didn't know. Not so unusual I would imagine.
Perhaps these cameras provide this data for the photographer's own records. But I think manufacturers should definitely include a template (a list of tags or byte offsets, not just "delete all") for an open tool like exiftool, which they guarantee, as part of their contract with the purchaser, will delete all metadata or embedded data. Then they are legally required to specify all tags. Otherwise I don't see how you can be sure you have anonymized your photos.
Speaking as someone who has worked with photojournalists I can assure you that such is to be desired. Perhaps it could be said that unless this comes to pass, no modern journalist can be said to be shielded from potential witch hunts, once his or her digital media is released to the Internet.
These guys are stark raving lunatics and they're not too smart either.
They or their customers have a billing relationship with just about everyone.
About that greedy slide 6. It also could be read as showing that they are not part of the economy engendered by their lines. Of course phone companies didn't used to make a margin on contracts that were discussed over their phone lines, or products that were purchased over their phone lines.
But they are in a position to make it easier for people to buy things online without requiring a credit card. In other words, enabling impulse buys to the long tail (maybe it's a short tail but still huge). By adding purchases to the end of your monthly bill they can become part of the economy engendered by the Internet and they should make the lines free to enable more use not less.
There's no reason why a shifty company like PayPal should mop up the street, shifty companies like these guys whose addresses we can find out are also welcome to join the game. Just imagine the windfall they could make if they ask people to "charge up" their account like Skype. They could make millions a day easily, who needs VISA?
Instead? Monetizing YouTube by traffic sniffing. Feh! Amateurs.
Okay yes constants, but as you know this is only known really well for our light cone and epoch, and even then many caveats.. speed of light changes when traveling through different substances / states of matter. Red shift changes depending on gravitational potential relative to the source, or to expanding spacetime, etc. as wikipedia tells us..
The Caps Lock key is the only toggle button (which saves its state of being "down" or "up") on the keyboard usually. So not only is it important to some people, it also is the only way to signal to the system and various programs that are running on it at the same time, that they all should take a certain action (like "quit") when the caps lock state changes. I realized this and used it in an art work where photos sent to us were pulled down and put into a scriptable slide show program's photo queue. All programs could see the state of the Caps Lock so it was possible to send them all a signal at the same time by releasing it. Of course a search key is neat too, I don't understand why not more keys instead of less.
and you will see it is not a sudden invention out of nowhere. The pixels used to be electromagnetically activated metal pillars whereas they are using shape memory alloy. Perhaps the part about how they are using the alloy mechanically is new?
[12] I. Poupyrev, T. Nashida, S. Maruyama, J. Rekimoto, and Y. Yamaji. Lumen: interactive visual and shape display for calm computing. In Proc of SIGGRAPH ’04, page 17. ACM.
Shape-changing interfaces encode information by modifying the shape of the device, using any of a number of different approaches. Pin-based displays use a matrix of elements that move up and down. Horev [7] describes how one might design a TactoPhone, in which the back of the phone is a morphing surface for displaying animated tactile icons. His video prototype shows how it might be used to provide location information. Lumen [12] is a 2D low-resolution pin- based display that controls the height and color of individual 'pixels'. Shape Memory Alloy provides noiseless, smooth and continuous actuation. Although notification through the haptic channel, SMA threads are fragile and are not very responsive.
By tagging as first source, the publisher implicitly allows inclusion in a news search application. Using Google's tag means allowing specificially Google. Other news companies may not be in as good a position. Google is also then free to copy text from any other source running the same story since the first source allows it. Google no longer needs to try figure out which source was first. And, Google now becomes non-evil and a champion for being precise about authorship, which reflects on its academic search application. And, it makes it easy for Google to target independent journalists to hire in some way in the future. Perhaps it will start that project in Australia if Murdoch really gets them steamed.
The ability to discover simple to control systems that operate as analogues to more advanced physics is wonderful and not some fake trick as some comment posters suggest.
Check out this page where the kitchen sink phenomenon is shown as well as another analogue for an event horizon, the "fish in the stream" analogue. (Where water flow is faster than a fish's top speed, a fish will hit a point of no return.) Found by googling for: physics analogue kitchen.
This page has some interesting explanations and also mentions there are other analogues that for example suggest answers to the still open question of what happens at planck lengths where space is expected to become grainy or net-like.
There is another page that describes another use of the same circular hydraulic jump in the kitchen sink, saying that it is a three-way analogue: "The connection between ocean bores, stellar gases, and the swirl of water in the kitchen sink is a splendid example of a three-way physical model." So with white holes brought in maybe this is a four-way analogue now. This page is quite a fun read and describes in detail why the hydraulic jump appears. It also describes how this is like the shock wave caused by the upwelling of gas from a star's surface meeting gas that is falling back onto the sun.
Slashdot Mirror
OP says nobody is thinking about costs. However the Japan Space Elevator Association (http://www.jsea.jp in Japanese) in addition to covering technical and engineering also considers business and legal issues. Their site says they are the only group to cover legal.
I once attended a meeting of theirs and a manager from a leading aerospace company was in charge. Their website also mentions someone's estimate of about 200M USD to build a megafloater island not counting cost of the station and elevator itself.
FWIW here is a video from JSETEC 2011 shot in Fujinomiya City, Shizuoka Prefecture on August 7 showing a climber built by Takane Matsumoto of Team Aquarius. Certainly it's cool that something like his climber exists! I don't know how high it went but I think they were going for 600m altitude. Anyway I expect these groups would welcome anybody who wanted to investigate building a loop instead. I am not involved with these guys but some of the posts here suggest LAN parties to play the latest first person shooter is of greater value than what these guys are doing, all I can say is that kind of thinking is what leads to the utterly morally bankrupt society and economy that is currently on world display. Hint I am not talking about the country that just got hit by earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters. Where's Slashdot's geek cred?
The Japan Space Elevator Association (http://www.jsea.jp in Japanese) in addition to covering technical and engineering also considers business and legal issues. And here is a video from JSETEC 2011 shot in Fujinomiya City, Shizuoka Prefecture on August 7 showing a climber built by Takane Matsumoto of Team Aquarius. Certainly it's cool that something like his climber exists! I don't know how high it went but I think they were going for 600m altitude. Anyway I expect these groups would welcome anybody who wanted to investigate building a loop instead.
P.S. I would like to add that I was assuming he was a consultant not an employee. It makes a lot of difference. However, he should have just left and demanded full severance pay due to their requiring him to do something illegal. I still think the BSA is not a friend of society.
Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I do agree with what you say generally.
However, he didn't have to take the job. As far as I can see instead of walking away or trying harder to educate the customer, he decided to betray them and make a buck off of them. This is not ethical and it will make people distrust software consultants. I imagine customers see a consultant as someone who you pay to look at the dirty laundry and tell you what to do. Then they leave and the customer decides whether to do it or not.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law I would like to mention, since there is a good film about it recently, the Vichy Regime. I understand copyrights have to be paid however I would rather not have my own software licenses be paid rather than creating a society based on snitches.
The idea that a hired consultant would on his own initiative attempt to profit by snitching, and not to a legal entity or even the software vendor but to a company that makes its living out of lawsuits, is just repugnant. It's a breach of trust. Maybe Autocad will ask BSA to negotiate license payments with this company but afterwards the consultant might get sued. When I do work I also have to sign an NDA usually and I could imagine getting into a lot of trouble if I acted like this guy did. And I could see this attitude ending up causing more companies to demand oppressive contracts before hiring consultants.
Just my 2 cents, not a lawyer, and perhaps if my business was like Autocad's I would feel differently.
But I am just imagining the customer's side and wondering if this guy is telling the truth to the world right now. How do we know he didn't extort them and when they refused to pay he went to get his money from the BSA by telling those vultures confidential internal information about the compliance problem? If the company was liquid they probably would have paid. So how do we know this wasn't just some untrustworthy guy who is trying to cover his tracks online now? How do we know the company wasn't planning on paying as soon as they had money? Whatever. I would never recommend this guy to go to any current or potential client of mine. Clearly there are many companies with compliance problems however I would go broke trying to fix every instance and not focusing on the bottom line. Unless I was also a snitch to the BSA.
As a consultant, this is not ethical activity even though you might think so.
When you turned around an bit your employer you lost credibility, because they hired you to give them your professional expertise.
Refuse to work for them or to do an illegal act, but there is something extremely ugly about enjoying turning someone in, especially when they came to ask for your help. Obviously they were not thinking of it as a crime, or that a copy of software has an intrinsic value.
Unfortunately I can't see anyone ever, ever hiring you who knows about this incident. I recommend you rethink your approach to the world and change your username. Google will prove to any prospective employer who knows how to use a search engine that you are a viper.
Personally, I was in a similar situation. A customer said they need me to do something that I would expect is illegal. I told them I could not have anything to do with that. I took the money for the work I did and decided this is not a company I can have a future working with.
I realized that I am not a perfect moral judge, and that the livelihoods of everyone in the company and all their past and future work, is not valueless or worthy of vigilante punishment.
I saw my duty clearly as:
1) Document the request for myself.
2) Don't do something illegal, especially since it could come back and bite me too.
3) Explain to the employee why this is bad. Even if the company's livelihood might depend on it, pragmatically this is a bad judgement.
4) Since the employee told me that management already knew about it, and that it is very important to the company, we discussed with his boss and one higher person. I will have to discuss it with the president too probably.
5) If they get snippety with me for some other reason, which is likely considering they are not totally ethical themselves, I can remind them about it in the future. Not as a threat, but to explain I am dealing with them fairly and professionally, and like a lawyer I am not going to divulge corporate secrets but on the other hand I expect payment as agreed and not to be forced to do anything illegal. If they end up being total jerks, just get away from them. But deliver on my own promises.
6) Consider how to more easily avoid this kind of situation in the future, especially regarding sales and product development issues.
At any rate, the BSA is known as a rotten organization from what I have read on the net and being a tattletale is a very pernicious way to make a living. In particular, causing irremediable harm to many people because of what is basically a victimless crime is really not a classy move at all.
Finally, you should realize that many, many people in the software engineering business become a bit mentally imbalanced, very subtly of course, but I have often seen people become robotic or bofh-ish, thinking their own logic is universal law and anyone with another opinion is worthy of being stamped on. It is probably an occupational illness. I could understand a young engineer falling ill that way but as a professional consultant you ought to take an oath like the Hippocratic Oath doctors take. Do no harm and so on.
You need people skills and to treat your customers with more respect, frankly. People who have other priorities than software licenses are not necessarily criminals, they probably don't know any better and your job is to educate them. If you can't deal with them, or believe they are criminals then just don't work with them.
Your own moral position is so iffy they might even be able to sue you, or ruin your career, especially if you have received money or signed a contract with them. Personally, I would not want to have to worry about someone who I decided is criminal to track me down and make more trouble for me out of some twisted mania that has nothing to do with me. My own advice: change your username, change your approach, find a way to get classier customers, and do a good job and then make a swift exit.
In addition to the above posts about reflecting away heat from above, may I suggest you wet down the pavement in advance.
This will reduce the heat coming from the hot pavement below which may otherwise reach dangerous temperatures.
There may be a debate about whether Internet connectivity is a human right or requisite to citizenship.
However it should be clear that low bandwidth is a constraint on economic growth, education and advancement.
Mobile bandwidth is not just about updating Facebook on the train, especially as all kinds of computing and communication can be done outside the office, or when on a business trip, at a customer's office, etc.
I submit that lower mobile tariffs will greatly increase a region's competitiveness in many ways, and this is not just about country vs. country. With android and ipad style terminals becoming very popular, outdated concepts such as "roaming" become medieval rapacious toll-gates on the highway.
Astoundingly my HTC Evo 4G cannot do global cellular voice roaming which my last phone (NTT Docomo) did. Global roaming in Europe a few years ago cost me about $500 for 1 week. I would prefer to use the Android Skype client but 4G global roaming, if available, would be far more.
I submit that city, region, state and national governments should quickly attempt to remove these trade barriers, and cities on their own should attempt to create barrier-free roaming agreements with each other. It is juvenile from a civilization perspective and an economic perspective for carriers to refuse interoperability and enforce rapacious fees when it hurts the governments and populations that make it possible for them to make such a profitable business.
It may be useful to read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. It is a book about the horrors of the meatpacking industry back in the beginning of the 20th C.
Things have changed quite a lot, but believing that change is comprehensive requires an expectation that actual conditions are frequently reported without feat of reprisal, and that appropriate action is then taken.
I have a suspicion that corporate interests have conspired to make opaque the ingredients and methods used in fast food and even supermarket meats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
I had and solved this problem today.
Android HTC Evo 4G, shot a bunch of photos and must send to someone.
Not so easy to get multiple photos off the phone, if you want to select them with a UI so you know what photos you are sending.
My solution after googling was, /sdcard/DCIM, use thumbnails view, select Multi Select mode, and touch a bunch of photos.
Get Astro file manager
Get Dropbox for android
Now you can open Astro, go to
Then you make a zip file by clicking New (folder icon) and Zip file. (Old version had zip file as an icon on the top of the screen IIRC.)
Then touch and hold on the zip file you made, and select Send and then Dropbox.
Go to the destination folder, Public if you want to share with a link, you can go up by clicking the back arrow button.
It will get synced to your computer too.
Finally when your computer tells you it was downloaded, control click (mac) or maybe right click in windows, select Dropbox > Copy Url, then open mail client and write an email, pasting in the download link.
That is the best solution I found so far. Why not google? Well I have gigs of spam in there and I don't want to link my android phone to that account. maybe there is a better way but I don't know it yet. Upload one file, easy just click and hold > send. Many files, not so easy. Other option is to use a shell over usb from mac and pull the files with adb.
Evil x sqrt(2)/2 ?
My HTC Evo has HDMI output. Not that I would use it, but I could see impulse buying a movie while walking home and popping on the tube, if the resolution is good enough.
Just put a 1 megabit/sec camera feed on it and you're over.
FWIW within Japan you get similar insane speed but again a similar 300GB cap as far as I know.
Not that I have ever run into such a cap. But it may affect a video application I'm planning now.
If they would just give a clear service menu as to what it costs to get the real thing.
But that would be like a contract that lets you run your own ISP and would likely be at least twice the price.
I totally will not use the site because it requires FB.
Went in and tried though.
Let me just make a normal account there.
M.R.
You could get a virtual linux box at linode.com, it's very cheap and mail servers are some of the common uses for them.
That said, I noticed when I traveled to a home on Verizon that they do indeed block port 25 when trying to send mail via my linode based mail server, and the solution was to go to an alternate port number and configure my mail server to accept it. This turns out to be pretty common with broadband providers like Verizon. I would not trust Verizon to not block 25 even if they say it is a business connection. Incoming is another matter.. If blocked then you need to complain.
Great! It will be a big sun-hot arrow pointing right back at us saying, "Here are some young pushovers!"
It's very cool but I'd like to see the engineering plan.. can we currently afford to build it nor fix it unless we have industrial nanotech that can eat up huge mountains and turn it into high tensile steel..?
Meanwhile that tiny joint above the engine looks like the weak point. Aside from all the other parts that get hit by pebbles in orbit around Barnard's Star at 12% of c..
The bottom of the page where it shows a funny quote usually now shows in huge typeface to me, "You will be run over by a bus.".
Now where the heck did that sig come from? I really don't need to see that.
P.S. Not to sound so high and mighty, for what it's worth I did enable the satellite tracking on my phone so that it can be found if lost or stolen, though I'm not sure if it will really work since the batteries could die, it could be turned off or put in a box, etc. And I just remembered thanks to you that I should really add some code to my laptop so that it can be found if stolen, though it will probably just be a matter of phoning home to my own server, since I am proficient enough to hack something up for that purpose. Of course if you are Will Smith and government assassins are on your trail then that's a bad idea! ;) enjoy your purchases. Just let other people use it the way they want. The latest crop of phones and I think cameras too let you upload to the Internet from your device. It's an issue that should be examined.
> I *like* cameras that incorporates metadata. This protects me from lawsuits
Because you are not a journalist shooting something the government of whichever country you are in at the time dislikes.
Most photographers do not use metadata to protect themselves from lawsuits, nor is that the reason why metadata is added. There is an author tag, which you can set, but serial numbers are probably to identify flaws and other data is probably meant to aid the photographer's software in trying to enhance it.
Similarly, no customers are choosing cameras based on whether or not metadata is available. They might in the future if metadata can be demonstrated to be very useful such as in finding similar angles from the Internet for 3D composition.
>People misuse printers to print out pedophilia
Using "think of the children" and "pedophilia scum" is a common and idiotic straw man. There are no pedophiles being caught today via copiers, they are all on the Internet the news says (I could be wrong). Copier tracking is I expect used to track industrial correspondence in the event of crimes. Like how the copiers sometimes keep a copy of everything copied on a hard disk. I hope they are not doing this sort of thing in libraries since that would damage things the Constitution guarantees, at least in the U.S.A., though after 9/11 maybe it is happening there too (unless cool librarians sniff it out).
>counterfeiting
Sure they will not copy bills, but no, don't be silly. My understanding from the news anyway is that the North Koreans or whoever does the copying makes perfect "super" engraving plates that make indistinguishable copies. Hence the new-fangled printing they are coming up with. You are talking about 10-20 years ago maybe but I doubt it is really true about copiers being that good. People doing that get caught easily because the paper is different, as far as I know.
> threatening letters (my sister got several
I'm sorry to hear about your family's experience but no, they are not going to find and convict your sister's stalker with a piece of copy paper. Probably it is not going through a copier you see.
> I just can't get that excited about anyone being able to trace what I print back to me. I can't think of a situation where I would care.
Because you are (if you are writing honestly) living in a safe, unthreatening environment and have never found a situation yet in which you would care. This is quite different from reality for many people. Understand for example that the U.S.A. is forcing many countries to follow its standards, sometimes through secret pacts, and sometimes they are working with governments that really do not think like the U.S. government ought to think. And sometimes situations change, at any rate copier constellations are perhaps not the worst tragedy but the points you are making all sound quite like straw men (tricky) to me.
On the other hand I'm sure there are many who think the same way as you mention, such as my own father. He has told me I'm not doing anything wrong so why should I worry. On the other hand, you could be Aung San Suu Kyi and get arrested by a corrupt government in your house for 15 years. If you think I am joking, I had the honor of attending a journalist's gathering where one of the top Chinese dissidents spoke. He actually was pleading the case of the average Chinese who is quite human but not seen or known well by the West due to the projections of their leaders.
So 1 billion people are living in an unreal situation and buying copiers, and using Internet messaging and so on from the West and they are very vulnerable to being tracked. Their future could rest on how well this surveillance technology is embedded in their infrastructure. And that will affect your children or grandchildren. I use China as an example since it is so far away. Civil rights in the U.S. also have changed often in its history too.
As for the tracking of your laptop, heartbeat, etc. that is very nice and sounds useful. I believe curren
I have found an interesting program called exiftool), a great command line tool for linux, mac osx and windows (there is apparently a windows gui too).
Yes, the latest professional cameras do indeed embed a lot of information including the photographer's name, multiple lens and body serial numbers, etc. This does not change the file name or creation date in the file system. Also the metadata I saw includes F-stop, exposure, etc. Perhaps if it had a sat chip there would be geographic coordinates on it. So the only way to be sure is to just erase all metadata not just a few tags.
It is important to understand that there is a lot (several pages) of metadata, some of which may be in binary format, which may not all be shown by the kinds of programs used by consumers ordinarily. Of course you can stare at the output of "strings" until you are blue in the face but ultimately you have to trust some tool that it has found all the metadata.
So far exiftool is what I trust but I know this is a best effort kind of thing. It seems that different manufacturers include different information, and the amount is far beyond what is needed to display an image. If the embedded data gets steganographed or otherwise hidden in the file it won't be easily found since people will not know it is there.
I started looking at these programs because a photographer asked me to sell his photos and was uncomfortable about personal data being left in files being handed to other people he didn't know. Not so unusual I would imagine.
Perhaps these cameras provide this data for the photographer's own records. But I think manufacturers should definitely include a template (a list of tags or byte offsets, not just "delete all") for an open tool like exiftool, which they guarantee, as part of their contract with the purchaser, will delete all metadata or embedded data. Then they are legally required to specify all tags. Otherwise I don't see how you can be sure you have anonymized your photos.
Speaking as someone who has worked with photojournalists I can assure you that such is to be desired. Perhaps it could be said that unless this comes to pass, no modern journalist can be said to be shielded from potential witch hunts, once his or her digital media is released to the Internet.
These guys are stark raving lunatics and they're not too smart either.
They or their customers have a billing relationship with just about everyone.
About that greedy slide 6. It also could be read as showing that they are not part of the economy engendered by their lines. Of course phone companies didn't used to make a margin on contracts that were discussed over their phone lines, or products that were purchased over their phone lines.
But they are in a position to make it easier for people to buy things online without requiring a credit card. In other words, enabling impulse buys to the long tail (maybe it's a short tail but still huge). By adding purchases to the end of your monthly bill they can become part of the economy engendered by the Internet and they should make the lines free to enable more use not less.
There's no reason why a shifty company like PayPal should mop up the street, shifty companies like these guys whose addresses we can find out are also welcome to join the game. Just imagine the windfall they could make if they ask people to "charge up" their account like Skype. They could make millions a day easily, who needs VISA?
Instead? Monetizing YouTube by traffic sniffing. Feh! Amateurs.
Okay yes constants, but as you know this is only known really well for our light cone and epoch, and even then many caveats.. speed of light changes when traveling through different substances / states of matter. Red shift changes depending on gravitational potential relative to the source, or to expanding spacetime, etc. as wikipedia tells us..
The Caps Lock key is the only toggle button (which saves its state of being "down" or "up") on the keyboard usually. So not only is it important to some people, it also is the only way to signal to the system and various programs that are running on it at the same time, that they all should take a certain action (like "quit") when the caps lock state changes. I realized this and used it in an art work where photos sent to us were pulled down and put into a scriptable slide show program's photo queue. All programs could see the state of the Caps Lock so it was possible to send them all a signal at the same time by releasing it.
Of course a search key is neat too, I don't understand why not more keys instead of less.
Interesting but patentable?
Google for
haptic shape memory
haptic display
and you will see it is not a sudden invention out of nowhere. The pixels used to be electromagnetically activated metal pillars whereas they are using shape memory alloy. Perhaps the part about how they are using the alloy mechanically is new?
NHK and Tokyo U. in 2008 develop touch panel/braille display
Harvard research
It talks about shape memory alloy in pixel sized units.. So did Microsoft get this idea from the Russian and 4 Japanese below?
Reference 12 is from a well known source in 2004:
[12] I. Poupyrev, T. Nashida, S. Maruyama, J. Rekimoto, and Y. Yamaji. Lumen: interactive visual and shape display for calm computing. In Proc of SIGGRAPH ’04, page 17. ACM.
By tagging as first source, the publisher implicitly allows inclusion in a news search application. Using Google's tag means allowing specificially Google. Other news companies may not be in as good a position.
Google is also then free to copy text from any other source running the same story since the first source allows it.
Google no longer needs to try figure out which source was first.
And, Google now becomes non-evil and a champion for being precise about authorship, which reflects on its academic search application.
And, it makes it easy for Google to target independent journalists to hire in some way in the future. Perhaps it will start that project in Australia if Murdoch really gets them steamed.
The ability to discover simple to control systems that operate as analogues to more advanced physics is wonderful and not some fake trick as some comment posters suggest.
Check out this page where the kitchen sink phenomenon is shown as well as another analogue for an event horizon, the "fish in the stream" analogue. (Where water flow is faster than a fish's top speed, a fish will hit a point of no return.) Found by googling for: physics analogue kitchen.
This page has some interesting explanations and also mentions there are other analogues that for example suggest answers to the still open question of what happens at planck lengths where space is expected to become grainy or net-like.
There is another page that describes another use of the same circular hydraulic jump in the kitchen sink, saying that it is a three-way analogue: "The connection between ocean bores, stellar gases, and the swirl of water in the kitchen sink is a splendid example of a three-way physical model." So with white holes brought in maybe this is a four-way analogue now. This page is quite a fun read and describes in detail why the hydraulic jump appears. It also describes how this is like the shock wave caused by the upwelling of gas from a star's surface meeting gas that is falling back onto the sun.