Japan has a strong law and companies must follow certain procedures for storage of over 500 names, which has a major effect on business. It hasn't increased security per se, considering the thefts in the news, but if you could show they did not follow the law they would be liable I think. As for the U.S. my guess (IANAL) would be that you'd have to get info about how they stored your data and what happened, and then prove their negligence, and who knows if there is even a precedent (groklaw?)
Look no farther than Japanese cell phone net service to see what you would lose when you lose neutrality.
There is a new site called R25.JP heavily advertised in Japanese subways now. I think they have a free magazine for finding jobs.. anyway the site says you get free news, free ring tone downloads, free horoscopes etc. etc.
But you are still paying your packet fee which is not cheap. At least not if you have the most popular provider, NTT DoCoMo. The free ring tones and other services require you to register your unique ID built into your phone so they can track you. The news all sucks, it's tabloid stuff with stock quotes inserted. Put another way, I built a little program so I could read books that are past their copyright terms, on my phone while on the train (you can't browse from the memory stick, doh). Everything is great but it is costing me $30 to read a free book. Maybe more. Everything has a price but the things you usually get are still free, though they suck and ruin your privacy, while your fair uses cost tons of money, and you are constantly being drawn to for-pay services. Like last time I tried to look up the time of the last train and how to get home.. I really wanted to know and figured the freely posted schedules must be online but no, you get drawn into signing up for one of a number of monthly billed services which I don't want! What is this crap. I have over $200 per month bill for a single mobile phone and I don't do shit with it.
P.S. responding to my own post, the radiosky.com site did provide a couple of answers. It definitely IS a good idea to get a ham license, and being a ham is closely linked to radio astronomy and also to being able to build circuits. So definitely I was on track with this wish of mine, maybe I should get cracking on the books!
Second, the same site has a simple description of a radio telescope. It notes that while you basically get an amplitude graph by pointing at the same direction in the sky as the Earth turns under you, you can image the sky two dimensionally by doing that for 24 hours, then tilting the telescope 5 degrees down, doing it another day, and so on, building up strips. Of course 5 degrees is big. You can apparently do "radio astronomy" with lots of kinds of antennas, like a Yagi for instance, but the question seems to be how good the resolution and how appropriate for astronomy.
Not having a liscense or even having ever used ham equipment I cannot tell you. But I sure would like to know things like antenna design and analog/digital electronics.. because I have always wondered about how much amateur radio astronomy could be done on the ultra cheap with a minimum of hardware and a pc. I have an 8 in. telescope but live in a very overcast and light drenched city, so I think about that a lot. Also have often been intrigued by digital circuit design and it would seem that is also part of the modern ham. So I often pick up a qx magazine and look at the pretty pictures!
On a side track I wonder if anyone could tell me, is it possible to do imaging of planetary circuits with a standard size amateur dish? Also is it even possible to do radio astronomy with something like a foil fresnel lens you could unfold and lay on the ground with a vertical pole at the center. neat faq here. I have wondered about how to image with a radio telescope, but perhaps if you caused the pole to vibrate, or perhaps put the lens on a vibrating (scanning) platform? Well thanks for the info and pick up the license, why not?
Neat this might give a way to measure viscosity of an atmostphere of a distant planet. On the other hand, might interfere with trying to identify ET constructions. Every regular polygon we find we are going to now start looking at whether there is some rotating fluid involved.
Obviously you can't predict evolution perfectly, but it is an extremely complicated (one could say the most complicated) mechanism in existence and so with a good understanding of the dynamics, organisms, their biology and environments you might very well be able to do something useful. For example the increasing of temperature gradually is in fact one such attempt.
If you had a very good understanding for example of a given gene and its mutations in an organism throughout history and in different evironments, you ought to be able to predict something of how it would act if inserted into another organism, and if it is a very successful gene it may have a great impact on "evolution". But it is probably 99% fantasy if you think those picture books illustrating "future creatures" are going to be what will come to pass.
The only meaningful answer to this question is, if you have full control over the environment can you direct evolution of an organism to develop in your desired direction. Of course this is possible, happens every day in the lab. But once you get away from talking about the evolution of say a given gene, and start talking about what a creature looks like, I think this is beyond our current knowledge though possibly not out of reach if we had far more powerful, half-sentient computers handling most of it. We are talking more about genetic engineering though now, not evolution. Possibly if we had a way to describe biomes and evolutionary stresses on organisms it might be possible to predict things like giraffes' necks elongating. Deducing the structure of an eye or a human's gait would seem to be far more difficult.
I used to sometimes try to approximate different fonts particularly typewriter-like serif fonts like courier. Even now sometimes I emphasize things by adding serifs.
However probably all caps would be easiest to read I would imagine, that or using grid paper which helped you to keep discipline. Of course this is assuming you don't use something to help capture in advance, like Anoto's system.
I just had a flashback from all those movies where you see ICBM operators get a phone call and they whip out a notebook in which they write in grease pencil the all caps code word using military speak (alpha, romeo, etc.). Now those would probably be readable by OCR I bet. Of course things like the Omnipage have been around for I think 20 years, and I see a bunch of OCR programs in freshmeat.net.
On the other hand you might just try shooting your index cards at a captcha cracker, it might just work.
If they really wanted to run P languages on JVM they should just support the Parrot project and offer programmers and code to it. It will run Java and P languages (starting with Perl) if enough great programmers are interested in it. The last YAPC in Tokyo had Larry Wall saying "Now we're just waiting for Guido". Well I noted before there is a group of Java people making their own JVM somewhere and these kinds of people are needed for a strong interlanguage system that lets everyone use each other's objects and libraries. The point that wxwidgets and not Java is selected for cross-platform projects shows that Java may be doing great things but not exactly what people thought it would do. I'm not involved in Parrot but I can see that Sun's experience with the JIT JVM would be useful.
Thank google for google.. It's a story of USC and UDC (Universal Display Corp. near Princeton U) Though it seems they need to make sure it doesn't get wet, and looks like a target for thieves who want the platinum or iridium in every molecule.. Interesting that one article says current incadescents are 15 lumens/watt (true?) while OLED is now at 20 with potentially 60 l/w in near future. I thought those led/dry cell driven pocket torches produced 30 lumens though.. google keys: Professor Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California oled
I tried it out a little. It looks similar to an interface I designed two years ago for an ICal based system in which students can make appointments with coaches without sharing email addresses. Except of course, the similarities are due to ICal not any genius on my part of course. And Google's looks better, and this sort of thing works better with AJAX. But I can say for sure it takes a good deal of work to do what they are doing and I only did a little bit of it. Probably lots of other/.ers have felt the pain.. I used Perl which is great but had to read ICal specifications since fully built modules were not really really there yet (partly). Better now probably.
At the time I was building an interface for input, and in fact was about to decided to skip ICal as we kept simplifying the spec, but ended up having a coordinator enter coaches' calendars using Outlook and uploading the ics files via ftp to a publically accessible folder. They were rendered in the (unfortunately read-only) phpicalendar program. I actually tried to write those ics files on the fly from the server to phpicalendar but no go, and it would take a while too, so just wrote to the ics file directly a VCALENDAR structured file.
One thing for sure is that these calendaring apps, Google's included, are way too hard for ordinary people to use, or have reasons I think why they would fall into disuse unless artificially made into required items. They need a much simpler version of the interface for ordinary people, and they need some more interfaces with the outside world. At the moment it looks too branded and google being happy about google in google's universe. It's a search engine right? They say they have public calendars but you can't find them (maybe somewhere after you log in?). They say you can publish events from your site but it is really unclear.
What they have to be is a calendaring hub like that site which has tons of public calendars. Give a unique name or short url to everybody's calendars whether on google or not, and let people use simpler interfaces in Google Calendar (or without logging in even) to write into calendars so permissioned. They should make it a nobrainer for people to be able to access a stream of events as an rss feed or something better, and similarly for anyone to publish their events without having to wade hip deep into their web app. Well maybe I'll add that to my next version!:) Only thing is I really don't want to try to compete with google. Conceivably they could beat phpicalendar for rendering public calendars, if there are any, but while slick their interface has lots of little HCI (usability) problems too. It's okay if Google's a moving target but I might want to wait and see which way they move before doing anything that could connect to them. An API spec would be useful.
It is my sober opinion based on a sample set of one that the really nasty side effects fall into different categories and some are alleviated by controlling purity and dilution. Since the body can indeed burn alcohol (though I am not clear on it actually producing any usable calories), my own experience is that a nasty headache can be virtually eliminated by drowning the body in water. It doesn't seem to require a lot, compared to all the beer I would drink (this is maybe 10-20 yrs ago though, I don't drink much now), as long as I got home a quart or so of water would do the trick. Even now, drinking a liter of mineral water is proof against a headache, forget and I get one before I even get to sleep sometimes. So I believe much of the hangover is actually dehydration.
Also I believe (less scientific proof available) there is a bunch of poisoning or other interference with the body caused by manmade additives and other impurities, either due to poor quality or inherent in a certain liquor. Those guys who made high quality (?) vodka by passing cheap stuff through commercial filters is another example it seems.
This leads me to believe that drinking water or including in the drink something that breaks down to a lot of water is good for you, higher purity drinks are good, a way to wash alcohol and impurities out of the system through tons of water or perhaps by adding easily antagonised/captured chemical groups to the substances so they can be dumped out of the body is good. This latter possibility sounds like the quote from TFA and suggests that maybe you could still get drunk but you could get sobered up with a sobering elixir like in the scifi.
The really nasty side effects are killing people with drunk driving. If people had the option of choosing alcohol analog based drinks and they actually tasted good, it might really improve safety on the road.
When I was in high school I participated in the ACSL (American Computer Science League) contest among high schools which still is running. It seems similar, they had a written test on computer science related things and a series of practical team programming problems. It was a blast when our team beat the champion (we were Montclair Kimberly, I think it was the 82-83 contest). Seems like the ACM contest has more interesting and difficult problems, looks like knowledge of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing might even be useful! Looking forward to seeing the results (the programs) if they are published.
If it is all marketdroid buzzwords you should probably start looking for another employer, your department just got borged and projects will start failing. The buzzwords are being used to fool clients into paying a lot more money than they should, based on some simple tech and some slick graphic design probably. Then the smirking marketdroids will get on your case to do impossible things while pointing to their pseudologic which has absolutely no foundation or referents to reality and physical processes as known by mankind. There is no chance that you will be able to convince someone without a brain that he does not in fact have one. Your fault is in being honest and enthusiastic, while hoping to do a good, responsible job despite the presence of droids above you in the organization. Possible reactions include 1) resume writing 2) BOF tactics 3) lateral move within organization 4) do minimum and wait to get canned when they screw up 5) offer to be skewered and rotisseried at medium heat. Or possibly if it is not clear they will win, 6) do what you are told while putting 5PM, overtime and ownership of your own work into the contract.
I don't know about these guys but the idea of 25x compression is not in itself a problem. Depends on your definitions, data, and time and computing resources. For example wavelet based "fractal" compression IIRC gave a 400:1 ratio for certain features, plus actually generating data to make zoomed in photos look realistic. Fractals and other functions can also be used to compress data losslessly if you have a hairy enough library and computer, from what I remember. But when they start talking about MP3s etc then it starts sounding like BS. And the post? What does "a terabyte on a disk" mean anyway? ++ to more slashdot meaningless posts.
Negroponte has I believe said IIRC from one of his presentations that as tech improves, the $100 pricepoint could be maintained but keep improving the machine. To me, this means that as an economy improves the machine will appear cheaper while becoming more powerful.
People used to laugh at him about even being able to do it for $100, the key I think he had said was a $30 LCD. Looks like he did it.
Consider there are perhaps the same number of geniuses (in literature, chemistry, particle physics, politics, whatever) born per million in population in the third world as in say the U.S.A. or other countries. The number of Nobels handed out would seem to speak more of the educational system. What if there is no way for geniuses to get more than grade school teaching?
Imagine the same exact you was born in the third world. If you are a slashdot geek maybe you are a self-starter and just need the machine in your hands. Personally I used Pascal, 6502 Assembler and two flavors of Basic on my Apple ][ and it was great. But I was so frustrated having hear a whisper of something called the Internet (not public then) and being able to figure out how to reach it. Got stuck in BBSs and finally the Source (Compuserve). They were not really the gateways to knowledge I was trying to find but I used what I could get to. Screw politics and economic systems. Tell me you wouldn't want that machine. I used to dream of something called a Dynabook described in the World Book Encylopedia's Year Book, in which you could make a character move around using Smalltalk commands. I saw it in my sleep. Of course these kids need medicine and food, this assumes that is available for at least smart kids.
I helped support a Cambodian school for children with no parents called Future Light. A friend who started it got Apple to donate a bunch of Macs, and it is growing perhaps the next generation of Cambodia's leaders, at least as that friend believes.
A representative from Nigeria at a conference I remember said you cannot solve everything with IT - there is a problem finding firewood, and the worst problem is the brain drain from rural to the city. Maybe these machines would help support the rural populace too. Assume the smartest people you have ever met live in an economically disadvantaged locale. Are you telling me they couldn't do anything with a laptop like this which makes its own grid lan?
Gives an exciting new meaning to the term, "hash collision". (-duck-)
Actually these things are pretty cool. But I don't want my airline seats to be attached with these things. I want them real solid so it takes guys hours to replace them. I don't want to worry about a lightning strike or embedded vulnerability disabling them or something!
One thing for sure, I don't want to wade through a zillion thumbnails of screenshots like some people upload to demonstrate what a new OS looks like.
I often make demonstration screenshots for presentation of what my software looks like, or will look like if the client chooses to pay me to build it. The Gimp is very useful here.
Since the eyes glaze over very quickly, and it takes effort to make a good sample screen, I usually make a bare minimum necessary to give the user an idea of how it works / why it is important they buy it. This is 1 or max 2 screens for a general demo, or if I want to do a little manual animation in person then maybe 4 or 5 (only to a client who understands software). By animation I mean that I describe a user interaction in a couple sentences and flip through the printouts to illustrate.
I don't need to see a zillion screenshots of every panel available, or a zillion menus all dropped down and moused over. I want to sell the thing, or to get someone excited about a concept. You need to spend time with the Gimp or Photoshop and make something that is clear and 1) makes the client think the software exists and is not vaporware, and 2) simulates a real user experience, so you have something concrete to point at when you discuss it. A couple Impress slides may also be useful but the key is to have the absolute minimum necessary. Sometimes I make a screen that is not really a screen, but a picture of an object, to start off the client saying "Hey what's that?" so you can think cinematically. You don't always need a whole screen either, sometimes a closeup is useful too.
The idea of making a one time pad out of a universally available information resource just seems real silly. It may be the easiest, highest volume, highest quality source of random data, but we have already in the past see ideas like large key space and computational complexity fall to one advance or another. It strikes me that even if there are 80,000 sources in the sky, that can be narrowed down quite a bit if you just look at the direction they are pointing their radio telescopes. Or are they using some secret hidden radio telescopes to capture quasar data? There may be some small ones but I think most are really, really big. You could probably tell the angle they are pointed at from a satellite. Also, if this encryption method gets used a lot you have to expect that more information about the route the data takes gets known. It seems to me there are a more limited number of radio telescopes with this system installed than there are say labs with a more traditional random data generator.
I read over and over again The Cyberiad which IIRC was a tale of a fierce competition between human inventors in the far future building absolutely monstrous robots to outdo each other. Also Tales of Pix the Pilot was great. The Infocom text adventure (Zork-like z engine) version of Solaris was cool though unsolvable I think. There was another one resembling Kafkaesque movie Berlin I think entitled memoirs in a bathtub. I'd like to find these again in ascii, The Cyberiad filled my head with dreams and had a big effect on me.. great story!
I don't know about these guys' system but it isn't a breakthrough. Unless you count total loss of public anonymity a breakthrough. Anyway I've seen videos from a structured light scientist, and this is published at least in ACM Siggraph, of what I believe is 60Hz 3D reconstructions using a video camera. Yes that is 16.6 ms per frame. Or if you want 2 frames you are still below 40 ms. Looking for the guy's name again but google for "structured light video camera 3d reconstruction 60Hz" and you get a bunch of papers some from Stanford. The video I saw showed reconstruction of sculpture being turned by hand in front of a video camera, also the google links show crime scene registry, etc.
I don't know about other slashdotters but I could have used this maybe when I was first starting out on the Source (forerunner to Compuserve) with my Apple II and Hayes 300 bps modem (you can read the words as they roll in).. But that was 25 years ago. To say this is common knowledge is an understatement. The problem is nobody gets taught this shit in elementary, middle or high school. I've watched what I typed online at way back to BBS days and as a matter of course google myself once in a while. Everyone is googling, so if you don't you are just going to voluntarily lose an edge. What is scary now is the same thing will be happening with video, and worse will come when ubiquitous video gets ubiquitously tagged and stored. We are just at a point in time between back then and that future time. Only big difference is myspace becoming popular among teenagers, ascent of google, and massively litigous society being warped by doublethinking neocons. I think that's all I want to say with this login.
Honestly that cathode watch looked cool. But in reality I have this great self winding analog watch which I do where as an accessory for an important client maybe, but I am constantly resetting the thing and it tears my nails to do so. You take your watch off to type, etc., and the main thing is that phones tell the time and you always have your phone, so then you have two clocks. My phone has 5 alarms and a perpetual calendar too. So what happens is, I leave my watch at home and whenever I put it on I know it's the wrong time. A couple times I've even hidden it because I didn't bother to set it and didn't want the other person to see it too closely and notice I'm wearing a watch that can't tell the time. So.. self-winding watches used to be cool but these days the best geek watch is going to be a linux or java equipped smartphone with Internet connectivity and show me one with a nice keyboard please. Analog nerd is cool too but if you are going to be a net nerd then count its storage capacity or bandwidth to see how cool it is maybe.
I was going to rant about the aches I had wedging Suse and RH8/9 in that order into my 5 year old Dell Inspiron 7.5K which was computer of the year at the time. About how I got W2K English on it and they refused to give me a Japanese version of the OS, or how I still don't know of a mousepad or internal modem driver that matches what the W2K partition had 5 years ago.
But.. I just typed linux and dell into google and found linux.dell.com. It looks like they are doing something. Not that you can trust them as far as you can throw them, but they are not deaf and if someone would just explain to the CEO he will get a lower pricepoint if he just supplies drivers and one popular distro in the box, we might get somewhere. Now if he could just lean on the printer manufacturers.. Put it this way. I depended on a few brave souls who had done what I wanted to do on the same laptop model maybe 6 months earlier, and still did a lot of homebrew hacking to make it work, mostly. Maybe their models are all so disparate in hardware that no nonprofit could keep up, but surely Dell could give a machine every 3-6 months to a nonprofit lab that would make darned sure everything worked well. Do that once per distro and he's got it solved.
Slashdot Mirror
reference
Japan has a strong law and companies must follow certain procedures for storage of over 500 names, which has a major effect on business. It hasn't increased security per se, considering the thefts in the news, but if you could show they did not follow the law they would be liable I think. As for the U.S. my guess (IANAL) would be that you'd have to get info about how they stored your data and what happened, and then prove their negligence, and who knows if there is even a precedent (groklaw?)
Look no farther than Japanese cell phone net service to see what you would lose when you lose neutrality.
There is a new site called R25.JP heavily advertised in Japanese subways now. I think they have a free magazine for finding jobs.. anyway the site says you get free news, free ring tone downloads, free horoscopes etc. etc.
But you are still paying your packet fee which is not cheap. At least not if you have the most popular provider, NTT DoCoMo. The free ring tones and other services require you to register your unique ID built into your phone so they can track you. The news all sucks, it's tabloid stuff with stock quotes inserted. Put another way, I built a little program so I could read books that are past their copyright terms, on my phone while on the train (you can't browse from the memory stick, doh). Everything is great but it is costing me $30 to read a free book. Maybe more. Everything has a price but the things you usually get are still free, though they suck and ruin your privacy, while your fair uses cost tons of money, and you are constantly being drawn to for-pay services. Like last time I tried to look up the time of the last train and how to get home.. I really wanted to know and figured the freely posted schedules must be online but no, you get drawn into signing up for one of a number of monthly billed services which I don't want! What is this crap. I have over $200 per month bill for a single mobile phone and I don't do shit with it.
Second, the same site has a simple description of a radio telescope. It notes that while you basically get an amplitude graph by pointing at the same direction in the sky as the Earth turns under you, you can image the sky two dimensionally by doing that for 24 hours, then tilting the telescope 5 degrees down, doing it another day, and so on, building up strips. Of course 5 degrees is big. You can apparently do "radio astronomy" with lots of kinds of antennas, like a Yagi for instance, but the question seems to be how good the resolution and how appropriate for astronomy.
On a side track I wonder if anyone could tell me, is it possible to do imaging of planetary circuits with a standard size amateur dish? Also is it even possible to do radio astronomy with something like a foil fresnel lens you could unfold and lay on the ground with a vertical pole at the center. neat faq here. I have wondered about how to image with a radio telescope, but perhaps if you caused the pole to vibrate, or perhaps put the lens on a vibrating (scanning) platform? Well thanks for the info and pick up the license, why not?
Neat this might give a way to measure viscosity of an atmostphere of a distant planet. On the other hand, might interfere with trying to identify ET constructions. Every regular polygon we find we are going to now start looking at whether there is some rotating fluid involved.
Obviously you can't predict evolution perfectly, but it is an extremely complicated (one could say the most complicated) mechanism in existence and so with a good understanding of the dynamics, organisms, their biology and environments you might very well be able to do something useful. For example the increasing of temperature gradually is in fact one such attempt.
If you had a very good understanding for example of a given gene and its mutations in an organism throughout history and in different evironments, you ought to be able to predict something of how it would act if inserted into another organism, and if it is a very successful gene it may have a great impact on "evolution". But it is probably 99% fantasy if you think those picture books illustrating "future creatures" are going to be what will come to pass.
The only meaningful answer to this question is, if you have full control over the environment can you direct evolution of an organism to develop in your desired direction. Of course this is possible, happens every day in the lab. But once you get away from talking about the evolution of say a given gene, and start talking about what a creature looks like, I think this is beyond our current knowledge though possibly not out of reach if we had far more powerful, half-sentient computers handling most of it. We are talking more about genetic engineering though now, not evolution. Possibly if we had a way to describe biomes and evolutionary stresses on organisms it might be possible to predict things like giraffes' necks elongating. Deducing the structure of an eye or a human's gait would seem to be far more difficult.
I used to sometimes try to approximate different fonts particularly typewriter-like serif fonts like courier. Even now sometimes I emphasize things by adding serifs.
However probably all caps would be easiest to read I would imagine, that or using grid paper which helped you to keep discipline. Of course this is assuming you don't use something to help capture in advance, like Anoto's system.
I just had a flashback from all those movies where you see ICBM operators get a phone call and they whip out a notebook in which they write in grease pencil the all caps code word using military speak (alpha, romeo, etc.). Now those would probably be readable by OCR I bet. Of course things like the Omnipage have been around for I think 20 years, and I see a bunch of OCR programs in freshmeat.net.
On the other hand you might just try shooting your index cards at a captcha cracker, it might just work.
If they really wanted to run P languages on JVM they should just support the Parrot project and offer programmers and code to it. It will run Java and P languages (starting with Perl) if enough great programmers are interested in it. The last YAPC in Tokyo had Larry Wall saying "Now we're just waiting for Guido". Well I noted before there is a group of Java people making their own JVM somewhere and these kinds of people are needed for a strong interlanguage system that lets everyone use each other's objects and libraries. The point that wxwidgets and not Java is selected for cross-platform projects shows that Java may be doing great things but not exactly what people thought it would do. I'm not involved in Parrot but I can see that Sun's experience with the JIT JVM would be useful.
Try this (mplayer barfs unless you download it first)
movie
Thank google for google..
It's a story of USC and UDC (Universal Display Corp. near Princeton U)
Though it seems they need to make sure it doesn't get wet, and looks like a target for thieves who want the platinum or iridium in every molecule..
Interesting that one article says current incadescents are 15 lumens/watt (true?) while OLED is now at 20 with potentially 60 l/w in near future. I thought those led/dry cell driven pocket torches produced 30 lumens though..
google keys: Professor Mark Thompson of the University of Southern California oled
At the time I was building an interface for input, and in fact was about to decided to skip ICal as we kept simplifying the spec, but ended up having a coordinator enter coaches' calendars using Outlook and uploading the ics files via ftp to a publically accessible folder. They were rendered in the (unfortunately read-only) phpicalendar program. I actually tried to write those ics files on the fly from the server to phpicalendar but no go, and it would take a while too, so just wrote to the ics file directly a VCALENDAR structured file.
One thing for sure is that these calendaring apps, Google's included, are way too hard for ordinary people to use, or have reasons I think why they would fall into disuse unless artificially made into required items. They need a much simpler version of the interface for ordinary people, and they need some more interfaces with the outside world. At the moment it looks too branded and google being happy about google in google's universe. It's a search engine right? They say they have public calendars but you can't find them (maybe somewhere after you log in?). They say you can publish events from your site but it is really unclear.
What they have to be is a calendaring hub like that site which has tons of public calendars. Give a unique name or short url to everybody's calendars whether on google or not, and let people use simpler interfaces in Google Calendar (or without logging in even) to write into calendars so permissioned. They should make it a nobrainer for people to be able to access a stream of events as an rss feed or something better, and similarly for anyone to publish their events without having to wade hip deep into their web app. Well maybe I'll add that to my next version!
Also I believe (less scientific proof available) there is a bunch of poisoning or other interference with the body caused by manmade additives and other impurities, either due to poor quality or inherent in a certain liquor. Those guys who made high quality (?) vodka by passing cheap stuff through commercial filters is another example it seems.
This leads me to believe that drinking water or including in the drink something that breaks down to a lot of water is good for you, higher purity drinks are good, a way to wash alcohol and impurities out of the system through tons of water or perhaps by adding easily antagonised/captured chemical groups to the substances so they can be dumped out of the body is good. This latter possibility sounds like the quote from TFA and suggests that maybe you could still get drunk but you could get sobered up with a sobering elixir like in the scifi.
The really nasty side effects are killing people with drunk driving. If people had the option of choosing alcohol analog based drinks and they actually tasted good, it might really improve safety on the road.
When I was in high school I participated in the ACSL (American Computer Science League) contest among high schools which still is running. It seems similar, they had a written test on computer science related things and a series of practical team programming problems. It was a blast when our team beat the champion (we were Montclair Kimberly, I think it was the 82-83 contest). Seems like the ACM contest has more interesting and difficult problems, looks like knowledge of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing might even be useful! Looking forward to seeing the results (the programs) if they are published.
If it is all marketdroid buzzwords you should probably start looking for another employer, your department just got borged and projects will start failing. The buzzwords are being used to fool clients into paying a lot more money than they should, based on some simple tech and some slick graphic design probably. Then the smirking marketdroids will get on your case to do impossible things while pointing to their pseudologic which has absolutely no foundation or referents to reality and physical processes as known by mankind. There is no chance that you will be able to convince someone without a brain that he does not in fact have one. Your fault is in being honest and enthusiastic, while hoping to do a good, responsible job despite the presence of droids above you in the organization. Possible reactions include 1) resume writing 2) BOF tactics 3) lateral move within organization 4) do minimum and wait to get canned when they screw up 5) offer to be skewered and rotisseried at medium heat. Or possibly if it is not clear they will win, 6) do what you are told while putting 5PM, overtime and ownership of your own work into the contract.
I don't know about these guys but the idea of 25x compression is not in itself a problem. Depends on your definitions, data, and time and computing resources. For example wavelet based "fractal" compression IIRC gave a 400:1 ratio for certain features, plus actually generating data to make zoomed in photos look realistic. Fractals and other functions can also be used to compress data losslessly if you have a hairy enough library and computer, from what I remember. But when they start talking about MP3s etc then it starts sounding like BS. And the post? What does "a terabyte on a disk" mean anyway? ++ to more slashdot meaningless posts.
Negroponte has I believe said IIRC from one of his presentations that as tech improves, the $100 pricepoint could be maintained but keep improving the machine. To me, this means that as an economy improves the machine will appear cheaper while becoming more powerful.
People used to laugh at him about even being able to do it for $100, the key I think he had said was a $30 LCD. Looks like he did it.
Consider there are perhaps the same number of geniuses (in literature, chemistry, particle physics, politics, whatever) born per million in population in the third world as in say the U.S.A. or other countries. The number of Nobels handed out would seem to speak more of the educational system. What if there is no way for geniuses to get more than grade school teaching?
Imagine the same exact you was born in the third world. If you are a slashdot geek maybe you are a self-starter and just need the machine in your hands. Personally I used Pascal, 6502 Assembler and two flavors of Basic on my Apple ][ and it was great. But I was so frustrated having hear a whisper of something called the Internet (not public then) and being able to figure out how to reach it. Got stuck in BBSs and finally the Source (Compuserve). They were not really the gateways to knowledge I was trying to find but I used what I could get to. Screw politics and economic systems. Tell me you wouldn't want that machine. I used to dream of something called a Dynabook described in the World Book Encylopedia's Year Book, in which you could make a character move around using Smalltalk commands. I saw it in my sleep. Of course these kids need medicine and food, this assumes that is available for at least smart kids.
I helped support a Cambodian school for children with no parents called Future Light. A friend who started it got Apple to donate a bunch of Macs, and it is growing perhaps the next generation of Cambodia's leaders, at least as that friend believes.
A representative from Nigeria at a conference I remember said you cannot solve everything with IT - there is a problem finding firewood, and the worst problem is the brain drain from rural to the city. Maybe these machines would help support the rural populace too. Assume the smartest people you have ever met live in an economically disadvantaged locale. Are you telling me they couldn't do anything with a laptop like this which makes its own grid lan?
Gives an exciting new meaning to the term, "hash collision". (-duck-)
Actually these things are pretty cool. But I don't want my airline seats to be attached with these things. I want them real solid so it takes guys hours to replace them. I don't want to worry about a lightning strike or embedded vulnerability disabling them or something!
One thing for sure, I don't want to wade through a zillion thumbnails of screenshots like some people upload to demonstrate what a new OS looks like.
I often make demonstration screenshots for presentation of what my software looks like, or will look like if the client chooses to pay me to build it. The Gimp is very useful here.
Since the eyes glaze over very quickly, and it takes effort to make a good sample screen, I usually make a bare minimum necessary to give the user an idea of how it works / why it is important they buy it. This is 1 or max 2 screens for a general demo, or if I want to do a little manual animation in person then maybe 4 or 5 (only to a client who understands software). By animation I mean that I describe a user interaction in a couple sentences and flip through the printouts to illustrate.
I don't need to see a zillion screenshots of every panel available, or a zillion menus all dropped down and moused over. I want to sell the thing, or to get someone excited about a concept. You need to spend time with the Gimp or Photoshop and make something that is clear and 1) makes the client think the software exists and is not vaporware, and 2) simulates a real user experience, so you have something concrete to point at when you discuss it. A couple Impress slides may also be useful but the key is to have the absolute minimum necessary. Sometimes I make a screen that is not really a screen, but a picture of an object, to start off the client saying "Hey what's that?" so you can think cinematically. You don't always need a whole screen either, sometimes a closeup is useful too.
The idea of making a one time pad out of a universally available information resource just seems real silly. It may be the easiest, highest volume, highest quality source of random data, but we have already in the past see ideas like large key space and computational complexity fall to one advance or another. It strikes me that even if there are 80,000 sources in the sky, that can be narrowed down quite a bit if you just look at the direction they are pointing their radio telescopes. Or are they using some secret hidden radio telescopes to capture quasar data? There may be some small ones but I think most are really, really big. You could probably tell the angle they are pointed at from a satellite. Also, if this encryption method gets used a lot you have to expect that more information about the route the data takes gets known. It seems to me there are a more limited number of radio telescopes with this system installed than there are say labs with a more traditional random data generator.
I read over and over again The Cyberiad which IIRC was a tale of a fierce competition between human inventors in the far future building absolutely monstrous robots to outdo each other. Also Tales of Pix the Pilot was great. The Infocom text adventure (Zork-like z engine) version of Solaris was cool though unsolvable I think. There was another one resembling Kafkaesque movie Berlin I think entitled memoirs in a bathtub. I'd like to find these again in ascii, The Cyberiad filled my head with dreams and had a big effect on me.. great story!
I don't know about these guys' system but it isn't a breakthrough. Unless you count total loss of public anonymity a breakthrough. Anyway I've seen videos from a structured light scientist, and this is published at least in ACM Siggraph, of what I believe is 60Hz 3D reconstructions using a video camera. Yes that is 16.6 ms per frame. Or if you want 2 frames you are still below 40 ms. Looking for the guy's name again but google for "structured light video camera 3d reconstruction 60Hz" and you get a bunch of papers some from Stanford. The video I saw showed reconstruction of sculpture being turned by hand in front of a video camera, also the google links show crime scene registry, etc.
I don't know about other slashdotters but I could have used this maybe when I was first starting out on the Source (forerunner to Compuserve) with my Apple II and Hayes 300 bps modem (you can read the words as they roll in).. But that was 25 years ago. To say this is common knowledge is an understatement. The problem is nobody gets taught this shit in elementary, middle or high school. I've watched what I typed online at way back to BBS days and as a matter of course google myself once in a while. Everyone is googling, so if you don't you are just going to voluntarily lose an edge. What is scary now is the same thing will be happening with video, and worse will come when ubiquitous video gets ubiquitously tagged and stored. We are just at a point in time between back then and that future time. Only big difference is myspace becoming popular among teenagers, ascent of google, and massively litigous society being warped by doublethinking neocons. I think that's all I want to say with this login.
Honestly that cathode watch looked cool. But in reality I have this great self winding analog watch which I do where as an accessory for an important client maybe, but I am constantly resetting the thing and it tears my nails to do so. You take your watch off to type, etc., and the main thing is that phones tell the time and you always have your phone, so then you have two clocks. My phone has 5 alarms and a perpetual calendar too. So what happens is, I leave my watch at home and whenever I put it on I know it's the wrong time. A couple times I've even hidden it because I didn't bother to set it and didn't want the other person to see it too closely and notice I'm wearing a watch that can't tell the time. So.. self-winding watches used to be cool but these days the best geek watch is going to be a linux or java equipped smartphone with Internet connectivity and show me one with a nice keyboard please. Analog nerd is cool too but if you are going to be a net nerd then count its storage capacity or bandwidth to see how cool it is maybe.
I was going to rant about the aches I had wedging Suse and RH8/9 in that order into my 5 year old Dell Inspiron 7.5K which was computer of the year at the time. About how I got W2K English on it and they refused to give me a Japanese version of the OS, or how I still don't know of a mousepad or internal modem driver that matches what the W2K partition had 5 years ago.
But.. I just typed linux and dell into google and found linux.dell.com. It looks like they are doing something. Not that you can trust them as far as you can throw them, but they are not deaf and if someone would just explain to the CEO he will get a lower pricepoint if he just supplies drivers and one popular distro in the box, we might get somewhere. Now if he could just lean on the printer manufacturers.. Put it this way. I depended on a few brave souls who had done what I wanted to do on the same laptop model maybe 6 months earlier, and still did a lot of homebrew hacking to make it work, mostly. Maybe their models are all so disparate in hardware that no nonprofit could keep up, but surely Dell could give a machine every 3-6 months to a nonprofit lab that would make darned sure everything worked well. Do that once per distro and he's got it solved.