Your company is out of control. People walking around with USB fobs means the information is not being managed securely, so information about your sales and customers for example is likely to leak from the company, and the company is unable to monitor and back things up. Such action is grounds for dismissal at companies in my area which are also legally bound to certain procedures to protect the personal information of customers when over 500 customers are involved. $3K sounds a bit steep but likely it is $500 for RAID storage, $500 for planned maintenance into the future and $2000 for labor. Personally I do not think it is right for IT to be charging department budgets because it stifles expansion and leaves them wide open for people with ideas like you and your colleagues. You guys need to sit down with IT and the management and discuss this issue before you open yourselves up to more risk. It's an accident waiting to happen. P.S. You don't have viruses on your network either do you?
No sweat, in the winter time my alfa's driver side door would freeze *open*. I had to drive around holding the door closed until the latch unfroze, more than once. That said, those buses with alfa engines in them created an impression that stuck with me a long time. And of course alfa failed in the U.S., twice I think. Just issued a new car in Japan though, they seem to have gotten out of their troubles mostly.
Good thing he says he's pals with Bush. Or is that because of the family links to the CIA? All Putin's doing is what he's good at. Doing what Cisco and Yahoo taught China to do, and adding a helping of 20th century Russian self-hatred and sado-control. It's too bad really, all the guy's imagination and efforts are completely warped into a useless direction that will mean nothing in the future. Making pro-Kremlin sites is okay, I was going to say he should make pro-space and pro-biotech engineering sites but on the other hand with his type of mind they will all be warped to nuclear missile and biowarfare. Good way to throw a country's future in the trashcan!
Italy ought to be a fabulous space construction country given their amazing creativity and success with high performance machines (of which race cars are the most obvious). Heck I had an Alfa Romeo (you know the poor man's ferrari) when I was in high school and always kept a magazine page on my wall that said Victories in Series. They just kept winning. Sure the electrical system absolutely sucked but the rest of the car was amazing, far better than the price I paid at the Oldsmobile dealer. If you want to put down Italy you will have to fight all the Italian food and car lovers and if you still can't believe it then just ride on a city bus in Italy. Those things have more pick-up than a U.S. police car. As Italian craftsmanship seems to just shine brighter and brighter the more money you throw at it, which is more than I can say for most countries, I'd imagine they could definitely do some awesome stuff with a little space budget. Which indeed, they have.
As another poster mentioned, the patent is not what people are saying.
When you input text on a computer in say Japanese, you generally type phonetic spellings (in English letters usually, or maybe using a difficult phonetic keyboard layout if you are very hardcore) which are then converted by a front end processor (FEP) into a list of possible homonyms from which you choose the one you want. Some statistically aware "Artificial Intelligence" subsystem picks good choices for you (which is why the ATOK - probably meaning alphabet to kanji I guess - commercial system is available for on some phones/pdas, it's smart).
Anyway, Google may have some patent about key layout or key stroke order, but they are not listed on the homepage of the guy who did the analysis mentioned by OP, nor is that what the patent number referenced by the article's illustration is about.
So a smart FEP is important to people. The free SKK or EGG that comes with the XEmacs I use sucks. (Based on experience of old software though). ATOK is smart. I haven't read the whole patent (20060230350) but it is basically about combining google searches by other users with the user's own preferences (presumably text input/browsing/gmail history), and the user's location, all to supplement the dictionary, fuel a disambiguation engine, and generally replace or supplement the intelligence of existing FEPs. At least it would work for all languages at once is the idea, and also it would be smart about your locality and interests, so as it says and another poster noted, the subsystem could be aware of ethnic restaurants in your area if you seem to be texting about that.
So since google is inside your phone, your own texting and email, and for all I know even your address book (names to telephone numbers concordance) - though that might cross the privacy line - will fuel the intelligence of other people's phones too. And though I am not sure it is implied in the patent, it would seem that every keystroke a user of a gphone makes would be treated as input to help decide what ads to send you.
In other words, all your keystrokes belong to us. If you realize you have absolutely no privacy using a gphone, since it is basically a terminal to the googleplex cloud, no problem. However it seems likely that just as the recent aol search history fiasco showed, and which I determined by checking some of the data myself, it is very difficult to remove all identifying or dangerous data from such a datastream, and in particular it should be relatively easy to maliciously inject false data, pornographic or hate text into it as well. So google will do well to be a little conservative here and buy a leading FEP solution from a provider that has done the tough work already and gone over it by hand. Otherwise you might very well see some strange things surfacing in the suggestions the gphone subtly gives you.
It would be worth it to me since I don't use texting for important information, if the phone was free, though the kicker is that I do use my Internet enabled phone to look up phone numbers and addresses/maps of places I'm going that day, heck I sometimes check gmail with it and do google searches right now. So come to think of it google already knows a shitload about me. Hmm maybe that's not so cool after all. I'd like to be able to limit the information that goes out like that, but of course that's impossible.
Gmail is free because you agree to give that info to them, and google search results are of course their bread and butter. Well I guess you agree to part with a little of your life and hold them to not screwing with you. So far, so good. I guess this is why "Google does no evil". It's the only way to drive their business model. Since they seem ethical so far I guess I would buy a gphone. At least until they have voice recognition too.
In the case of the OP's dance video the kids are actually dancing in the kitchen to the music, you can't remove the music without removing the entire record of their life that is shown here. Music is part of our culture. So it seems quite reasonable as fair use to me anyway (I Am Not A Lawyer).
However I made a video of my nephews last Christmas, it was my first one but done reasonably well I think on my Mom's new macbook. Maybe 20 scenes, much editing, and stellar performances by two little kids. Now it is a home movie, but I've thought of putting it on youtube (if my sis agrees). It's maybe 5 minutes long and uses bits of a bunch of tracks mixed from an ABBA cd that their Dad loves.
Is this fair use now? I still think so.
But one of the kids wants to be an actor (at least now he does). In fact he's acted on stage. I was thinking it might be cool to release it on youtube for Christmas this year and maybe put adsense or some such ads on, or a paypal donate jar, and if it does it could go to their education or hobbies (the other one likes science).
Now if you put ads on is it still fair use? Not sure. It certainly is a home movie, and they would be just as thrilled if it got a big number of hits and had no ads or any money anyway. Also I want to distribute film commercially in the future so I'd like to do the right thing. I wonder what the best way to go about this is. I can either give up on the ad idea, or maybe get an agreement to pay a few percent to abba somehow if any money came in, what is the general thinking? It's not like a feature film where you would pay for rights up front I think.
Sliding in sideways and navigating into a parking spot looking straight at it was quite cool. That, and being able to just stand up and walk straight ahead right out of your car, were cool.
The robot seemed neat, though I'd prefer a sexy British gal's voice; its voice seems designed to sound like the blue robot cat from the 24th century, Doraemon (which they should license as fast as they darned can). As I got to reading these comments though I liked the idea of slugging it too.
When I sat in a car once in the U.S. that had lower insurance rates because a robot arm would fasten the seatbelt tightly against you on closing the door, and I hated it. So I started wondering if you could lift the robot out like R2D2. I thought it might be fun (I hope it doesn't mean I'm sick) to hang it upside down from the car ceiling by a string attached to its feet (if it has any).
It would also be quite cool though if it could still talk, letting it be charged in the socket magnetically some other way like an ipod, so that you could take it out and maybe carry it along with you. It might make a useful light when you go camping and maybe have a GPS so you wouldn't get lost, it could keep a couple of cans of beer cold, etc.
Hi, yes I didn't claim it would cover the full 250K obviously. I expect between 10% and 30% of that might be attributable to something else.
> money has not been received for those items. not sure about that but okay
> People buying extras in case they break: There is a one-year full warranty and for a few bucks you can get a 3-year replacement warranty. Spending $400 just so I wouldn't have to buy the warranty, doesn't make sense for anyone. it does for military and corporations perhaps. also for testers who might brick a phone. or for people who want to be cool and have a supply they can sell on eBay if they get sold out..
> Buying but waiting for contract to expire: Why? They will still be available (probably I mean you are waiting for your old phone contract to expire. But you want the iPhone now before it gets sold out, and so you can say you got it. And maybe you had a birthday, etc.
> Buying but pissed/waiting for unlock: There are unlocks for both the old and the new firmware, those would be counted as 'hacked' "buying but pissed" would not.
> Buying for use outside US: again, how is this not hacked then? okay
> Try and unlock/analyze/reverse engineer: again, how is this not hacked? this is not by users of hacked devices. but anyway maybe only a thousand or less could have been bought by competitors. okay.
> Miscounted or in transit: Miscounts are difficult since they're either sold or not, that number they DO know (otherwise their finances wouldn't be right) they can indeed be in transit or waiting to be unlocked, but not 250,000, probably not even 10,000. I never said 250K.
> Employees/associates who bought it up to make a killing: Well, eventually they are re-sold and either activated or hacked, they won't sit on it until eternity Eventually is meaningless since the count/estimate was made at a specific point in time Given that iPod was such a huge seller it seems possible that some groups could have bought a ton on speculation.
> People who want revenge by making them loose money: There are better ways to do it (go into the stock market, buy lots of stock, then dump them) than to buy a non-subsidized phone It might be enough to push someone who is teetering away from activating, and it is much easier than the ways you say. Just don't go through an annoying procedure (assuming the phone has already been unconnected).
> Interviewing will be more problematic because hacking is 'illegal' in the US, so people won't be forthcoming about it nor can you round up everybody that bought a phone. Well you could make a widget for the iphone, or a website, and you could allow people to visit from ordinary pcs even to make anonymous responses too.
You gotta love it when people explaining things to investors paint things in a zero sum world as if being more forceful in math makes them look better. The difference in their equation may also be due to: christmas gifts, or blended, as previously posted fell off the truck (stolen merchandise) people buying extras in case they break buying for kids or boyfriend/girlfriend but deciding to give to someone else who deserves it more buying but not really needing it yet (waiting for current contract to expire) buying but pissed at AT&T / waiting for an unlock solution to surface buying for use/testing outside U.S. buying to try and unlock (hackers of all ages) buying to try and unlock/analyze/reverse engineer (competitors) miscounted or in transit perhaps employees / associates of Apple/AT&T or others who bought up to make a killing people who want to take revenge on AT&T snooping by making them lose money.
Granted 250K units is a lot. Probably AT&T wiretapping, inconvenient service locations and the horror stories of thousand dollar phone bills has made people hold back. But the only way to really know is to interview people who bought iphones and add up the stats.
Only thing to add is well two things. 1. In Japan, many phones are only available from a certain wireless phone service company. If you look at NTT DoCoMo they have a certain product code for a minimum feature set and then a number of manufacturers can choose to build one with their own interpretation, style, and additions to it. The U.S. with a primitive phone market (except for the iPhone) is far more demanding. It seems to mean that it will be difficult for phone manufacturers to use telecom companies to fund manufacturing in the U.S. and might even point to more lock-in financing programs where you have to guarantee to use the phone for 2 years. I can only hope a lot of different companies all try different models to see what sticks. 2. I want a mac book pro in a laptop with slide-out full keyboard. With ZFS and multi-touch. So do I wait even longer or should I buy a cheaper macbook as soon as possible?
That sucks. Zudeo had a really neat public section onthe New York Film Festival and I saw a bunch of trailers very quickly at resolutions too big for my screen even and great sound. Paprika was very cool. Since I'm planning a film festival and a low-cost distribution outlet for independent directors I thought something like Zudeo might be perfect. But the net cafe I go to just said they aren't going to allow p2p (seems to me their upstream shuts them off for an hour!) which is the only net cafe in the world to say that, and now comcast is being a jerk-off. I could understand throttling users so each gets an average bandwith, if you really are hurting them, but it makes no sense. All they have to do is put a mirror inside their network and everyone can enjoy service without bunching up their upstream. They don't get that legal uses are increasing and p2p is the only way (besides hard to configure multicast) to do cheap delivery. It's almost like they don't want anyone else but them to deliver you your video. I want to be able to have a high quality scaling video service, and am thinking of zudeo or something like it, but we need more tools to help ISPs support these services before usage goes through the roof and they freak and turn it off before it gets settled. They could get a whole new revenue stream too, though technically it should be unnecessary I'd consider giving them a cut if they would manage downloads to a million users by setting up fast torrent servers and cutting the crap. These companies should use some of that $200 billion to fund software development instead of becoming all pointy.
Excellent, maybe the lawyers can feed on each other and dissolve in their own stew!:) They are the facilitators of the Decline of the American Empire. (which is a movie and will probably be a chapter in the history books, unfortunately).
I have often thought of Robert Heinlein's take on it. His future history has "The Year They Killed The Lawyers" (in Number of the Beast), in an alternate reality.
*SPOILER* One place our adventurers find is a country that ensures that people are pilot and careful not to cause others harm even unintentionally, through a draconian practice called "balancing" (literal eye for an eye) which among other things has eradicated drunk driving and sexual crimes. Trying to look up something called "The Year They Killed The Lawyers" to understand what happened in the local library got the librarian asking them why they required access to sealed records. However, the intrepid adventurers still choose the area as an oasis of safety, while acknowledging that some unbearable people they know wouldn't last long there.
I think one side of the U.S. downfall is the narcissistic cronyism of the neocons, another side is the MAFIAA and all the corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and another side is the abject idiocy of the telecoms from AT&T all the way down to the cable guys. But it all might take a turn for the better if there was a sudden shortage of lawyers. Maybe Americans would turn to churches, community arbiters and the Mafia like they do in Japan where justice is not really available unless you make it your life's crusade and even then it won't make you rich.
What is speed of gpu card evolution?
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GPU Gems 3
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I saw a bunch of nvidia's nice desk-side gpus in a glassed-in projection room run by sgi at an industrial vr show. Being able to throw two or more at the data flow lets them drive a 4K image (of a sportscar), though even then it looked underpowered.
But those little boxes (I guess this is the NVIDIA Quadro Plex series) go for over $20K each. At the current rate of progress, (when) will that drop in price and size to something that can fit inside a desktop or laptop, presumably with a giant asic one day? It will be sheer envy to buy this gorgeous book and have to deal with Vista, and still be underpowered. So I'd rather dream about a linux machine instead. What investment in linux/nvidia qudroplex will allow the book's high end procedures to work today?
I was intrigued about why the names of those tiger stripe cracks are middle eastern cities. Googling I found this article which notes that there is a convention of naming features on this moon after places in the Arabian Nights. The page is cool and tells you what a sulcus is. And there's is a link on that page to a giant 6mb map with names of features on it.
Last week I met a very charming guy at a conference. He is one of the top engineers at Yahoo and has a middle eastern name. I kept thinking God, I hope he doesn't have to go through all kinds of shit on his return flight.
Looking back on the whole history of all the war, terror, decrees, TSA, and what have you, it certainly seems that the current situation (i.e., the U.S. would find it necessary and make it possible to severely monitor and restrict the movements of its own populace) could have been easily extrapolated from before our badly managed adventurism in the middle east. At least back to when the CIA was funding these guys and later when an oil-backed Presidential Family took office.
Personally I had expected some kind of war for any reason in the area, to "mop things up" before the bad guys got higher technology, but I was too young to expect this. The guys in power however are a different story. You have to wonder if the current situation was not indeed expected, in fact planned for as a reasonable price for the events that were to be undertaken. Since most people probably would have opted for a more just and safer foreign policy if they had been told how things would change domestically, and since most recent decrees are flatly unconstitutional without invocation of an emergency executive power, that would make the planning an actions taken way back when to have been treasonous.
It certainly is possible that most people, even all people, are not happy now with the results of what they felt were the best actions and responses they could take, but it certainly seems reasonable to suggest they be forced to defend their actions and at any rate, in the interests of fairness, to disqualify themselves in order to prevent the unseemly image of having profited in many ways from the destruction of what most Americans hold dear. That such auto-disqualification has not come to pass is why the administration and its supporters appear to many to be frankly corrupt, irresponsible and unworthy of the public trust.
Perhaps things will change and history will see this as the low point of a cycle, on the other hand it is eminently possible that history will view these events in the context of rising economic and technological might outside the U.S., correlated to the Internet's growth and the rise of the unprecedented power held by U.S. corporations over labor, government and the media, and that historians will attempt to explain this gestalt as the reason why the U.S. fell and never came back, or if it did come back then in some fractured 21st century way irrevocably severed from the society and history prior to the 1990s.
Personally, I think most of what I am is defined by the 70s and early 80s (whereas the late 80s were fake and the 90s were a period of chaotic vibration in response to macro events), and just as I tried my best to discover where this fabled "Internet" was when I was a little kid, and then helped build a little bit of it later on, it feels like now we are in a new phase in which many things are out of control while simultaneously not having been deployed very well, and that such a split with the past is unhealthy and perhaps reminiscent of schizophrenia writ upon society at large. Folks, we need a doctor.
I knew 3 answers to the Fermi Paradox. Either intelligence quickly builds into quiet-looking shells like in Charlie Stross' Accelerando, or by virtue of being conscious we humans have somehow carved out a light cone or domain excluding other intelligences, some wierd cocoon: it is impossible physically to communicate because other domains have other physics. There's a neat scifi story about that too. The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one. Now a fourth: the universe really is out to get us. Not just out to get aggressive monkeys that want to learn high-energy physics, but even to the point of making a state flip ever so often. I think this last one (today's news) is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon but nevertheless it is a future killer, something harder to understand than the burning out of the stars in the far future. None of these are very nice ideas but I hope some physicists will step up to answering what the latest theory says about when it might happen and whether it could operate on a patchwork basis, killing other civilizations while our planet was still cooling.
Yes but they will be in the explosion / decaying orbit / orbital detritus trajectory where you *don't* want to be and have therefore thrown the money. So it is going to be a bit evanescent..
This is so dumb. It costs so much money to move the currency, which is manufactured on Earth, up into space! Although it would be funnier if they looked like poker chips. Could be soft too.
But if you get a lot of money, you might have a lower chance of survival due to the lost delta-V. Although you could indeed throw the money away from you to build up a vector.
Everyone knows you need galactic credits, and you can exchange them with digital wallets that verify your identity. Those of course are way too heavy. Maybe each is so expensive because earthlings are at the mercy of more powerful galactic economies?
Also Leiji Matsumoto, author of the wildly popular manga (and anime) series Ginga Testudo (Galaxy Express 999) among others (000 is a cool one too) also had an asteroid named after him. Though I can't figure out how to find it. I remember when I was reading the manga for the first of many times and being totally blown away by a proud note that some friendly astronomers had named an asteroid after him. Matsumoto envisioned an adventurous boy and a mysterious woman on a danger-filled trip to planets around the galaxy on the most advanced spaceship, which in order to combat homesickness was camouflaged as a much-loved steam locomotive passenger train.
I just noticed a day ago that a lot of html files I had stored on a usb hdd (my ipod) had had a line introduced, an iframe going to chinaons.com with some garble after it that might be Chinese. It was really disconcerting. Not just because of the line which was easily removed, but because Virus Buster would DELETE the files.
I would really like to be able to make certain folders on my ipod read-only password protected when I plug it in, so I know this isn't happening.
Someone mentioned htDig. I would just like to mention that I had much success with it. It's a C++ based crawler and search engine with customizable templates. I built a mod_perl wrapper to search 60 databases, a total of 1GB and got response times of about 0.1 seconds per query, including fuzzy searching. Actually it has so many thinks to tweak it is crazy. However this was a while ago and you may want to check the others mentioned here.
Use money on infrastructure not licenses
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The 700MHz Question
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Mobile phone spectrum auctions in Europe were so expensive they destroyed the industry. The money received from spectrum sales are not significant though compared to the value of what the spectrum facilitates in terms of our economy. There is no longer a good reason to auction, except that those have been the rules. It used to be that a telecom company had to show they had money so they could roll out infrastructure responsibly, however we have found that even with $200bn they still can't do it. Rather, I believe the money spent on licenses should be spent on municipal infrastructure, possibly with a nonprofit designated to ensure these networks are upgraded and managed. Or even by a company with Google-type thinking. If they must auction then give part of the money to nonprofits that could be given part of the spectrum too. Because of the need to recoup license investments, telecom companies are led away from using metrics of customer satisfaction, price, coverage, neutrality and usefulness which are now proving to be more important.
I have some questions. Maybe somebody with a 20KV power supply and rubber boots could find this out..
1. Would work with other polar solutions? Of course you want one that won't combust..
2. It seems this must be in operation at small scales, where static electricity easily makes huge charges? link
3. If you took 2 icicles and made a V out of them could you make a Jacob's Ladder high voltage traveling arc with them? (maybe the tips would shoot off into someone's eye so we should use ice blocks tilted away from each other) Would the arc melt the ice where it touches, melting just enough ice into water to maintain an arc? Maybe it could be started by wetting the blocks or painting a line of iron filings or silver paint on each side?
4. This sounds like it might have some parallels with the cellular structures formed by convection and magnetic fields in the sun?
5. What can be done with this at a household scale with just static no scary generators? It would seem a 0.5mm gap is within body voltage range, or 2-3mm with clothing static. (see above link). I was wondering if water could be made to climb up a stepped (or spirally lined) bowl, or wander across a stroked fresnel lens. Though I guess a web-like cloth thing would be more of a gap..
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Your company is out of control. People walking around with USB fobs means the information is not being managed securely, so information about your sales and customers for example is likely to leak from the company, and the company is unable to monitor and back things up. Such action is grounds for dismissal at companies in my area which are also legally bound to certain procedures to protect the personal information of customers when over 500 customers are involved. $3K sounds a bit steep but likely it is $500 for RAID storage, $500 for planned maintenance into the future and $2000 for labor. Personally I do not think it is right for IT to be charging department budgets because it stifles expansion and leaves them wide open for people with ideas like you and your colleagues. You guys need to sit down with IT and the management and discuss this issue before you open yourselves up to more risk. It's an accident waiting to happen. P.S. You don't have viruses on your network either do you?
No sweat, in the winter time my alfa's driver side door would freeze *open*. I had to drive around holding the door closed until the latch unfroze, more than once. That said, those buses with alfa engines in them created an impression that stuck with me a long time. And of course alfa failed in the U.S., twice I think. Just issued a new car in Japan though, they seem to have gotten out of their troubles mostly.
Good thing he says he's pals with Bush. Or is that because of the family links to the CIA? All Putin's doing is what he's good at. Doing what Cisco and Yahoo taught China to do, and adding a helping of 20th century Russian self-hatred and sado-control. It's too bad really, all the guy's imagination and efforts are completely warped into a useless direction that will mean nothing in the future. Making pro-Kremlin sites is okay, I was going to say he should make pro-space and pro-biotech engineering sites but on the other hand with his type of mind they will all be warped to nuclear missile and biowarfare. Good way to throw a country's future in the trashcan!
Italy ought to be a fabulous space construction country given their amazing creativity and success with high performance machines (of which race cars are the most obvious). Heck I had an Alfa Romeo (you know the poor man's ferrari) when I was in high school and always kept a magazine page on my wall that said Victories in Series. They just kept winning. Sure the electrical system absolutely sucked but the rest of the car was amazing, far better than the price I paid at the Oldsmobile dealer. If you want to put down Italy you will have to fight all the Italian food and car lovers and if you still can't believe it then just ride on a city bus in Italy. Those things have more pick-up than a U.S. police car. As Italian craftsmanship seems to just shine brighter and brighter the more money you throw at it, which is more than I can say for most countries, I'd imagine they could definitely do some awesome stuff with a little space budget. Which indeed, they have.
As another poster mentioned, the patent is not what people are saying.
When you input text on a computer in say Japanese, you generally type phonetic spellings (in English letters usually, or maybe using a difficult phonetic keyboard layout if you are very hardcore) which are then converted by a front end processor (FEP) into a list of possible homonyms from which you choose the one you want. Some statistically aware "Artificial Intelligence" subsystem picks good choices for you (which is why the ATOK - probably meaning alphabet to kanji I guess - commercial system is available for on some phones/pdas, it's smart).
Anyway, Google may have some patent about key layout or key stroke order, but they are not listed on the homepage of the guy who did the analysis mentioned by OP, nor is that what the patent number referenced by the article's illustration is about.
So a smart FEP is important to people. The free SKK or EGG that comes with the XEmacs I use sucks. (Based on experience of old software though). ATOK is smart. I haven't read the whole patent (20060230350) but it is basically about combining google searches by other users with the user's own preferences (presumably text input/browsing/gmail history), and the user's location, all to supplement the dictionary, fuel a disambiguation engine, and generally replace or supplement the intelligence of existing FEPs. At least it would work for all languages at once is the idea, and also it would be smart about your locality and interests, so as it says and another poster noted, the subsystem could be aware of ethnic restaurants in your area if you seem to be texting about that.
So since google is inside your phone, your own texting and email, and for all I know even your address book (names to telephone numbers concordance) - though that might cross the privacy line - will fuel the intelligence of other people's phones too. And though I am not sure it is implied in the patent, it would seem that every keystroke a user of a gphone makes would be treated as input to help decide what ads to send you.
In other words, all your keystrokes belong to us. If you realize you have absolutely no privacy using a gphone, since it is basically a terminal to the googleplex cloud, no problem. However it seems likely that just as the recent aol search history fiasco showed, and which I determined by checking some of the data myself, it is very difficult to remove all identifying or dangerous data from such a datastream, and in particular it should be relatively easy to maliciously inject false data, pornographic or hate text into it as well. So google will do well to be a little conservative here and buy a leading FEP solution from a provider that has done the tough work already and gone over it by hand. Otherwise you might very well see some strange things surfacing in the suggestions the gphone subtly gives you.
It would be worth it to me since I don't use texting for important information, if the phone was free, though the kicker is that I do use my Internet enabled phone to look up phone numbers and addresses/maps of places I'm going that day, heck I sometimes check gmail with it and do google searches right now. So come to think of it google already knows a shitload about me. Hmm maybe that's not so cool after all. I'd like to be able to limit the information that goes out like that, but of course that's impossible.
Gmail is free because you agree to give that info to them, and google search results are of course their bread and butter. Well I guess you agree to part with a little of your life and hold them to not screwing with you. So far, so good. I guess this is why "Google does no evil". It's the only way to drive their business model. Since they seem ethical so far I guess I would buy a gphone. At least until they have voice recognition too.
In the case of the OP's dance video the kids are actually dancing in the kitchen to the music, you can't remove the music without removing the entire record of their life that is shown here. Music is part of our culture. So it seems quite reasonable as fair use to me anyway (I Am Not A Lawyer).
However I made a video of my nephews last Christmas, it was my first one but done reasonably well I think on my Mom's new macbook. Maybe 20 scenes, much editing, and stellar performances by two little kids. Now it is a home movie, but I've thought of putting it on youtube (if my sis agrees). It's maybe 5 minutes long and uses bits of a bunch of tracks mixed from an ABBA cd that their Dad loves.
Is this fair use now? I still think so.
But one of the kids wants to be an actor (at least now he does). In fact he's acted on stage. I was thinking it might be cool to release it on youtube for Christmas this year and maybe put adsense or some such ads on, or a paypal donate jar, and if it does it could go to their education or hobbies (the other one likes science).
Now if you put ads on is it still fair use? Not sure. It certainly is a home movie, and they would be just as thrilled if it got a big number of hits and had no ads or any money anyway. Also I want to distribute film commercially in the future so I'd like to do the right thing. I wonder what the best way to go about this is. I can either give up on the ad idea, or maybe get an agreement to pay a few percent to abba somehow if any money came in, what is the general thinking? It's not like a feature film where you would pay for rights up front I think.
Sliding in sideways and navigating into a parking spot looking straight at it was quite cool. That, and being able to just stand up and walk straight ahead right out of your car, were cool.
The robot seemed neat, though I'd prefer a sexy British gal's voice; its voice seems designed to sound like the blue robot cat from the 24th century, Doraemon (which they should license as fast as they darned can). As I got to reading these comments though I liked the idea of slugging it too.
When I sat in a car once in the U.S. that had lower insurance rates because a robot arm would fasten the seatbelt tightly against you on closing the door, and I hated it. So I started wondering if you could lift the robot out like R2D2. I thought it might be fun (I hope it doesn't mean I'm sick) to hang it upside down from the car ceiling by a string attached to its feet (if it has any).
It would also be quite cool though if it could still talk, letting it be charged in the socket magnetically some other way like an ipod, so that you could take it out and maybe carry it along with you. It might make a useful light when you go camping and maybe have a GPS so you wouldn't get lost, it could keep a couple of cans of beer cold, etc.
That's no comet!
Hi, yes I didn't claim it would cover the full 250K obviously.
I expect between 10% and 30% of that might be attributable to something else.
> money has not been received for those items.
not sure about that but okay
> People buying extras in case they break: There is a one-year full warranty and for a few bucks you can get a 3-year replacement warranty. Spending $400 just so I wouldn't have to buy the warranty, doesn't make sense for anyone.
it does for military and corporations perhaps. also for testers who might brick a phone. or for people who want to be cool and have a supply they can sell on eBay if they get sold out..
> Buying but waiting for contract to expire: Why? They will still be available (probably
I mean you are waiting for your old phone contract to expire. But you want the iPhone now before it gets sold out, and so you can say you got it. And maybe you had a birthday, etc.
> Buying but pissed/waiting for unlock: There are unlocks for both the old and the new firmware, those would be counted as 'hacked'
"buying but pissed" would not.
> Buying for use outside US: again, how is this not hacked then?
okay
> Try and unlock/analyze/reverse engineer: again, how is this not hacked?
this is not by users of hacked devices. but anyway maybe only a thousand or less could have been bought by competitors. okay.
> Miscounted or in transit: Miscounts are difficult since they're either sold or not, that number they DO know (otherwise their finances wouldn't be right) they can indeed be in transit or waiting to be unlocked, but not 250,000, probably not even 10,000.
I never said 250K.
> Employees/associates who bought it up to make a killing: Well, eventually they are re-sold and either activated or hacked, they won't sit on it until eternity
Eventually is meaningless since the count/estimate was made at a specific point in time Given that iPod was such a huge seller it seems possible that some groups could have bought a ton on speculation.
> People who want revenge by making them loose money: There are better ways to do it (go into the stock market, buy lots of stock, then dump them) than to buy a non-subsidized phone
It might be enough to push someone who is teetering away from activating, and it is much easier than the ways you say. Just don't go through an annoying procedure (assuming the phone has already been unconnected).
> Interviewing will be more problematic because hacking is 'illegal' in the US, so people won't be forthcoming about it nor can you round up everybody that bought a phone.
Well you could make a widget for the iphone, or a website, and you could allow people to visit from ordinary pcs even to make anonymous responses too.
You gotta love it when people explaining things to investors paint things in a zero sum world as if being more forceful in math makes them look better. The difference in their equation may also be due to:
christmas gifts, or blended, as previously posted
fell off the truck (stolen merchandise)
people buying extras in case they break
buying for kids or boyfriend/girlfriend but deciding to give to someone else who deserves it more
buying but not really needing it yet (waiting for current contract to expire)
buying but pissed at AT&T / waiting for an unlock solution to surface
buying for use/testing outside U.S.
buying to try and unlock (hackers of all ages)
buying to try and unlock/analyze/reverse engineer (competitors)
miscounted or in transit perhaps
employees / associates of Apple/AT&T or others who bought up to make a killing
people who want to take revenge on AT&T snooping by making them lose money.
Granted 250K units is a lot. Probably AT&T wiretapping, inconvenient service locations and the horror stories of thousand dollar phone bills has made people hold back. But the only way to really know is to interview people who bought iphones and add up the stats.
Only thing to add is well two things.
1. In Japan, many phones are only available from a certain wireless phone service company. If you look at NTT DoCoMo they have a certain product code for a minimum feature set and then a number of manufacturers can choose to build one with their own interpretation, style, and additions to it. The U.S. with a primitive phone market (except for the iPhone) is far more demanding. It seems to mean that it will be difficult for phone manufacturers to use telecom companies to fund manufacturing in the U.S. and might even point to more lock-in financing programs where you have to guarantee to use the phone for 2 years. I can only hope a lot of different companies all try different models to see what sticks.
2. I want a mac book pro in a laptop with slide-out full keyboard. With ZFS and multi-touch. So do I wait even longer or should I buy a cheaper macbook as soon as possible?
That sucks. Zudeo had a really neat public section onthe New York Film Festival and I saw a bunch of trailers very quickly at resolutions too big for my screen even and great sound. Paprika was very cool. Since I'm planning a film festival and a low-cost distribution outlet for independent directors I thought something like Zudeo might be perfect. But the net cafe I go to just said they aren't going to allow p2p (seems to me their upstream shuts them off for an hour!) which is the only net cafe in the world to say that, and now comcast is being a jerk-off. I could understand throttling users so each gets an average bandwith, if you really are hurting them, but it makes no sense. All they have to do is put a mirror inside their network and everyone can enjoy service without bunching up their upstream. They don't get that legal uses are increasing and p2p is the only way (besides hard to configure multicast) to do cheap delivery. It's almost like they don't want anyone else but them to deliver you your video. I want to be able to have a high quality scaling video service, and am thinking of zudeo or something like it, but we need more tools to help ISPs support these services before usage goes through the roof and they freak and turn it off before it gets settled. They could get a whole new revenue stream too, though technically it should be unnecessary I'd consider giving them a cut if they would manage downloads to a million users by setting up fast torrent servers and cutting the crap. These companies should use some of that $200 billion to fund software development instead of becoming all pointy.
Excellent, maybe the lawyers can feed on each other and dissolve in their own stew! :) They are the facilitators of the Decline of the American Empire. (which is a movie and will probably be a chapter in the history books, unfortunately).
I have often thought of Robert Heinlein's take on it. His future history has "The Year They Killed The Lawyers" (in Number of the Beast), in an alternate reality.
*SPOILER*
One place our adventurers find is a country that ensures that people are pilot and careful not to cause others harm even unintentionally, through a draconian practice called "balancing" (literal eye for an eye) which among other things has eradicated drunk driving and sexual crimes. Trying to look up something called "The Year They Killed The Lawyers" to understand what happened in the local library got the librarian asking them why they required access to sealed records. However, the intrepid adventurers still choose the area as an oasis of safety, while acknowledging that some unbearable people they know wouldn't last long there.
I think one side of the U.S. downfall is the narcissistic cronyism of the neocons, another side is the MAFIAA and all the corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and another side is the abject idiocy of the telecoms from AT&T all the way down to the cable guys. But it all might take a turn for the better if there was a sudden shortage of lawyers. Maybe Americans would turn to churches, community arbiters and the Mafia like they do in Japan where justice is not really available unless you make it your life's crusade and even then it won't make you rich.
I saw a bunch of nvidia's nice desk-side gpus in a glassed-in projection room run by sgi at an industrial vr show. Being able to throw two or more at the data flow lets them drive a 4K image (of a sportscar), though even then it looked underpowered.
But those little boxes (I guess this is the NVIDIA Quadro Plex series) go for over $20K each. At the current rate of progress, (when) will that drop in price and size to something that can fit inside a desktop or laptop, presumably with a giant asic one day? It will be sheer envy to buy this gorgeous book and have to deal with Vista, and still be underpowered. So I'd rather dream about a linux machine instead. What investment in linux/nvidia qudroplex will allow the book's high end procedures to work today?
I was intrigued about why the names of those tiger stripe cracks are middle eastern cities. Googling I found this article which notes that there is a convention of naming features on this moon after places in the Arabian Nights. The page is cool and tells you what a sulcus is. And there's is a link on that page to a giant 6mb map with names of features on it.
Last week I met a very charming guy at a conference. He is one of the top engineers at Yahoo and has a middle eastern name. I kept thinking God, I hope he doesn't have to go through all kinds of shit on his return flight.
Looking back on the whole history of all the war, terror, decrees, TSA, and what have you, it certainly seems that the current situation (i.e., the U.S. would find it necessary and make it possible to severely monitor and restrict the movements of its own populace) could have been easily extrapolated from before our badly managed adventurism in the middle east. At least back to when the CIA was funding these guys and later when an oil-backed Presidential Family took office.
Personally I had expected some kind of war for any reason in the area, to "mop things up" before the bad guys got higher technology, but I was too young to expect this. The guys in power however are a different story. You have to wonder if the current situation was not indeed expected, in fact planned for as a reasonable price for the events that were to be undertaken. Since most people probably would have opted for a more just and safer foreign policy if they had been told how things would change domestically, and since most recent decrees are flatly unconstitutional without invocation of an emergency executive power, that would make the planning an actions taken way back when to have been treasonous.
It certainly is possible that most people, even all people, are not happy now with the results of what they felt were the best actions and responses they could take, but it certainly seems reasonable to suggest they be forced to defend their actions and at any rate, in the interests of fairness, to disqualify themselves in order to prevent the unseemly image of having profited in many ways from the destruction of what most Americans hold dear. That such auto-disqualification has not come to pass is why the administration and its supporters appear to many to be frankly corrupt, irresponsible and unworthy of the public trust.
Perhaps things will change and history will see this as the low point of a cycle, on the other hand it is eminently possible that history will view these events in the context of rising economic and technological might outside the U.S., correlated to the Internet's growth and the rise of the unprecedented power held by U.S. corporations over labor, government and the media, and that historians will attempt to explain this gestalt as the reason why the U.S. fell and never came back, or if it did come back then in some fractured 21st century way irrevocably severed from the society and history prior to the 1990s.
Personally, I think most of what I am is defined by the 70s and early 80s (whereas the late 80s were fake and the 90s were a period of chaotic vibration in response to macro events), and just as I tried my best to discover where this fabled "Internet" was when I was a little kid, and then helped build a little bit of it later on, it feels like now we are in a new phase in which many things are out of control while simultaneously not having been deployed very well, and that such a split with the past is unhealthy and perhaps reminiscent of schizophrenia writ upon society at large. Folks, we need a doctor.
Hi, I found it. The story is called "Blowups Happen" and part of the plot is mentioned in Wikipedia. I don't want to spoil it for you though.
I knew 3 answers to the Fermi Paradox. Either intelligence quickly builds into quiet-looking shells like in Charlie Stross' Accelerando, or by virtue of being conscious we humans have somehow carved out a light cone or domain excluding other intelligences, some wierd cocoon: it is impossible physically to communicate because other domains have other physics. There's a neat scifi story about that too. The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one. Now a fourth: the universe really is out to get us. Not just out to get aggressive monkeys that want to learn high-energy physics, but even to the point of making a state flip ever so often. I think this last one (today's news) is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon but nevertheless it is a future killer, something harder to understand than the burning out of the stars in the far future. None of these are very nice ideas but I hope some physicists will step up to answering what the latest theory says about when it might happen and whether it could operate on a patchwork basis, killing other civilizations while our planet was still cooling.
Yes but they will be in the explosion / decaying orbit / orbital detritus trajectory where you *don't* want to be and have therefore thrown the money. So it is going to be a bit evanescent..
This is so dumb. It costs so much money to move the currency, which is manufactured on Earth, up into space! Although it would be funnier if they looked like poker chips. Could be soft too.
But if you get a lot of money, you might have a lower chance of survival due to the lost delta-V. Although you could indeed throw the money away from you to build up a vector.
Everyone knows you need galactic credits, and you can exchange them with digital wallets that verify your identity. Those of course are way too heavy. Maybe each is so expensive because earthlings are at the mercy of more powerful galactic economies?
Also Leiji Matsumoto, author of the wildly popular manga (and anime) series Ginga Testudo (Galaxy Express 999) among others (000 is a cool one too) also had an asteroid named after him. Though I can't figure out how to find it. I remember when I was reading the manga for the first of many times and being totally blown away by a proud note that some friendly astronomers had named an asteroid after him. Matsumoto envisioned an adventurous boy and a mysterious woman on a danger-filled trip to planets around the galaxy on the most advanced spaceship, which in order to combat homesickness was camouflaged as a much-loved steam locomotive passenger train.
I just noticed a day ago that a lot of html files I had stored on a usb hdd (my ipod) had had a line introduced, an iframe going to chinaons.com with some garble after it that might be Chinese. It was really disconcerting. Not just because of the line which was easily removed, but because Virus Buster would DELETE the files.
I would really like to be able to make certain folders on my ipod read-only password protected when I plug it in, so I know this isn't happening.
Someone mentioned htDig. I would just like to mention that I had much success with it. It's a C++ based crawler and search engine with customizable templates. I built a mod_perl wrapper to search 60 databases, a total of 1GB and got response times of about 0.1 seconds per query, including fuzzy searching. Actually it has so many thinks to tweak it is crazy. However this was a while ago and you may want to check the others mentioned here.
Mobile phone spectrum auctions in Europe were so expensive they destroyed the industry. The money received from spectrum sales are not significant though compared to the value of what the spectrum facilitates in terms of our economy. There is no longer a good reason to auction, except that those have been the rules. It used to be that a telecom company had to show they had money so they could roll out infrastructure responsibly, however we have found that even with $200bn they still can't do it. Rather, I believe the money spent on licenses should be spent on municipal infrastructure, possibly with a nonprofit designated to ensure these networks are upgraded and managed. Or even by a company with Google-type thinking. If they must auction then give part of the money to nonprofits that could be given part of the spectrum too. Because of the need to recoup license investments, telecom companies are led away from using metrics of customer satisfaction, price, coverage, neutrality and usefulness which are now proving to be more important.
I have some questions. Maybe somebody with a 20KV power supply and rubber boots could find this out..
1. Would work with other polar solutions? Of course you want one that won't combust..
2. It seems this must be in operation at small scales, where static electricity easily makes huge charges? link
3. If you took 2 icicles and made a V out of them could you make a Jacob's Ladder high voltage traveling arc with them? (maybe the tips would shoot off into someone's eye so we should use ice blocks tilted away from each other) Would the arc melt the ice where it touches, melting just enough ice into water to maintain an arc? Maybe it could be started by wetting the blocks or painting a line of iron filings or silver paint on each side?
4. This sounds like it might have some parallels with the cellular structures formed by convection and magnetic fields in the sun?
5. What can be done with this at a household scale with just static no scary generators? It would seem a 0.5mm gap is within body voltage range, or 2-3mm with clothing static. (see above link). I was wondering if water could be made to climb up a stepped (or spirally lined) bowl, or wander across a stroked fresnel lens. Though I guess a web-like cloth thing would be more of a gap..
Hi-res: http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/brightburst/Cloud.jpg