Boy this was a shocker. Anybody notice the domain the story comes from? iwon.com may belong to askjeeves, but I KNOW I get spam from iwon.com that I never signed up for.
And look at all their (apparently lucrative) advertisers! Let's see, you can buy Hoodia, Investigate Anyone Anywhere, incredible reload the page and there are more and more banners and text ads.
What is scary is that it looks partially legit, in that my guess is they actually do run some kind of lottery (I wonder what the legal basis is for running a lottery on the net, sounds awfully lucrative). But I am pretty sure that iwon spams, and that their advertisers are bigger spammers.
So if the article is about a "cheeky" move by a Nigerian posing as the head of the antifraud department, then I find a spammer posing as a news site, carrying a news story about how spam pays off, and getting paid to do it by spammers, who are getting their page hits from slashdotters who hate spam, to be a utter masterpiece of cheekiness. My hat is off to you Iwon, you won!
Another thing I would like to note for all those slashdotters who are still laughing and unconvinced (and especially the dude who got past the lame filter and posted an all caps Bush spam message). I am guessing that any people who still get caught by these things are disadvantaged somehow.
Either they are kids with money, or depressed, or schizophrenic, or fanatically religious, or something, but they are missing something in the immune system that everyone else has. Personally I find the all capitals letters to be especially worrisome. There is most likely a large amount of mental illness in the world not being treated, or treated unsuccessfully, or the result of a temporary fugue of some sort such as normally makes people suicidal. Maybe there are even people who figure someone, anyone else could use the money better than themselves and this is a way of hurting themselves.
At the very least, it is now mainstream knowledge that just about anyone will cave in if shouted at and abused enough. I strongly believe that the shadiness of Iwon, and the sheer volume of spam with its various types of shouting, exerts a significant pressure on people. This story is about how that works really well, about how it is a natural outcome of a burgeoning, talented, but wild west style country, and about how it still pays if you walk the fine line like Iwon.com does.
It sounds like a primer that the flopped dotcommers of the next thread should have read before going through their money. One dotcom they mention closed down before using all its cash, while one scammer in the article made 250 million bucks, about 10 times as much, only gave back a tenth of it, and presumably had a nother 200 million left after the 2 years of prison! Who's laughing now?
Also I don't know about net profit for the whole venture but Zeta has apparently been selling a lot in Germany according to a Zeta person I met at a show recently.
I heard a presentation by the president of Mysql a year or two ago. I believe he claimed they were the biggest open source company and they seemed to be making a profit.
It just might also be that Sony has been finding the next generation requires hurdling some massive hurdles.
Though my guess is this is a "leak" to try and get M$ off guard. Meanwhile the PS3 being launched earlier.. Anyway it's not like anybody who knows what they're talking about is talking right? Not that this silly bit of news is startling enough to make me want to RTFA.
GraphViz which lets you draw graphs (has perl module too) in different formats including SVG. I believe I once saw a subroutine call tree drawn in it from perl profiler.
I figure as we get higher up and into the terahertz lots of important things in cells are going to start vibrating, and deeper than just skin level too.
But what about if I close my eyes while talking on the phone, or focus near or far, or ice them maybe? I'd think the eyelids act as a radiation barrier, a heat sink, and also apply tears to the cornea. Wouldn't you think these could be more effective than something in a petri dish?
I RTFA and it doesn't sound like a MS Office user on Windows XP with a nice machine needs it. I think they're going after the wrong crowd!
1. I don't get why using SATA instead of PCI for data xfer is making it infinitely more useful. Dumb! Put another FPGA on there and watch scientific users grow.
2. Or put base libraries and CPAN on there, with Perl on XILINX then we're cooking! How about a benchmark with compiling a big app?
3. Obviously it would be a big win for when the network is faster than your storage. We are close to that now and some locations will have it this year (gigabit ethernet to the home). Personally I have 100 Mbps (so they say) but on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K 450MHz RH9 laptop I get 1 Mbps much more often, maybe maxed at around 10 Mbps once due to I/O and memory, plus the lack of fast sites. But if there was a service that let me download a movie at 100 Mbps or more I'd need this device. My guess is some other slashdotters already do..
4. I was thinking this might be nice when you are downloading big chunks of data for analysis, it seems you would save a lot of power, heat and time by skipping the physical movement in your hard disk.
I'd like to see some benchmarks that make use of this in cases when you would expect it to be useful. And I'd like to see it work in Linux over PCI with some more computing power on another FPGA for you to flash your own apps in.
Soudns fabulous! Doh, shoulda worked at Apple. Anybody actually use this? I would have thought you'd hear more about it if it greatly stimulated chats. Perhaps you can only talk to one person at a time, or iChat requires a video camera? Comments pls if experience with it.
Sure I also figured this was non-news picked up by an illiterate news agency (nice oxymoron!) but then RTFA and found the cocktail party reference. (People started sideband conversations with new/old acquaintances).
When you are in an airport, elevator or dentist's office and stuck in some frustrating situation with a stranger, often you will strike up a conversation with them commenting about the idiocy, commisserating, and so on. The above mail loop sounds like it was novel enough and big enough for the participants that they felt like they were in such a situation and "made the most of it".
Two days ago I was stuck by a train station due to an earthquake in Tokyo that caused all trains to be delayed by two hours. For some reason that comaraderie did not come to pass, possibly because people could easily leave the station (in my case small groups hung out at a nearby cafe and talked among themselves).
When you get email being sent to a lot of people from someone, and you can see the other people's names, still you don't generally start side conversations with them. Part is that you probably don't know them well enough; the journalists in this case did in some cases at least. But also, in group emails I think people tend to jump right down to the body of the message and while perhaps some people read the To: and CC: lines with interest, it is not a feeling that there are a lot of people with you reading the message concurrently. The journalists were all reading it within an hour or two on a given morning.
This makes me wonder if more of a chat-like element could be introduced into email. If you could see a photo or video of the other recipients, and maybe open a chat with some if you could see they were online at the same time, would that not increase the potential for communication among members of a group mailing? Certainly you can easily email people directly whom you have see on an ordinary mailing list, but I think a decision is made that you are "on a mailing list" and then if you have something you don't want the whole list to get, "whether you should send a private message" to someone you don't know. So I only reply privately to the list owner and people who reply to me, usually, and conversely don't put thank yous on the main list.
It may sound unintuitive to computer geeks but if you consider the convivial atmosphere of these convivial journalists mostly happily distracted one morning by an explosion of mail from tons of somewhat related people, I think it suggests the possibility of a different mode of network communication that even if only text based, could mix positive elements of video conferencing, IRC and threaded discussion sites, possibly as an add-on to a mail client.
At the risk of sounding silly and with my hubris level ratched up real high? I'd like to suggest a couple alternatives which might be combined.
1. Mittens (less work I think per finger, more room for heating/cooling lines, less fabric and surface area). Also, enough surface area to be able to bind magnetically to tools maybe, and everyone knows mittens are warmer.
2. Robotic waldo claws, titanium and plastic hand simulacra and radical tentacles (as another poster also recommended waldos). Keeping the hand inside the end of the arm with a metal/rubber waldo attached to the outside (making your arms a bit longer basically) would have some definite advantages. First, you don't have to worry about puncturing your glove, you can get more strength into the waldo than your muscles provide, no pressure to work against, could be controlled by someone else, you could have more than two waldos coming out of your suit (either you multitask between them or you get someone to operate others), they could be shaped like tentacles or wrenches or whatever is best for space work, you can use materials best for space work without having to worry about bendability, temperature, or radiation protection, and you can use very thin or tiny waldo elements scaled down from your hand for tiny places, with mechanical aids adding precision (i.e. lock to an axis, etc.). Finally, consider that while you could just imagine having a single metal hand stuck at the end of a lengthened arm, looking like a deep sea diver's suit, it is also possible to imagine a plasticine hand virtually identical to that of man, but made with titanium bones and superplastic muscles. Considering that evolution and our brains have gotten this far with the current design, it may be best to simply use the same design but beef it up for outer space. If well integrated with the astronaut with advanced haptics technology, it could become like a "ghost hand" and very intuitive to use with fine control. Lastly, about those tentacles. Well yes, space anime does make good use of tentacles, and Doctor Octopus likes them, but I'm thinking that outer space might indeed be like the deep sea in that a large number of highly deformable tentacles could be extremely useful, if the mental barriers to efficient control can be overcome. Certainly it could be possible to mimic a hand with a bundle of fine tentacles, but I am mainly thinking about being able to grip and hold in place multiple large objects, hold oneself down so you don't float away when you try to screw something down, etc. If you could imagine yourself to be more of a fanciful creature from the undersea world than a landlubber biped, you might be able to imagine some improvements. Personally I like the idea of a utility tentacle that will grab onto secured parts to steady you when you are about to float away, and perhaps a couple additional ones that you can use to orient one or two parts in relation to your body while you are working on them.
3. muscle magnification. As someone said was posted earlier which I didn't know. If you have motors in your gloves they could detect where your are trying to move it and then supply more strength. Apparently the original post mentioned nerve signal sensing though I don't know if that's necessary. Also, use of memory metal and other active materials might be useful, and maybe a glove that makes it easier to (ratchet) close than open might be possible.
A combination of the above ideas might be useful, for example if you have a mitten and pull out the area between thumb and fingers to make it a convex box (maybe narrowing wrist to maintain pressure), you can then freely move your fingers and wrist to control a waldo. The movement of the hand could in fact be sensed by laser scanners built into the glove interior, possibly augmented if needed for precision work by having the astronaut first put on a silk glove with barcode-like patterns all over it and a non-slip interior coating. For manhandling big heavy things, coping with tiny things, or makin
Two other posters prefer 1) an authorization rather than identification based approach, and 2) maintenance of walls between i.e. their bank and their doctor. Well credit card and insurance companies make this a bit messy but I digress.
It seems to me both posters are completely correct in capturing the general attitudes everyday people have about this sort of thing, or would have if it was translated into a verbal explanation of what somebody was offering to do for you ("I'll make it so you can just check a box and your bank and doctor will be able to talk to each other").
My first analysis of the rules was that it boiled down to an essential conflict between "Do as little evil as possible" and "We must do some evil".
This tension is artificial and derives from the author's treatment of an assertion (that globally verifiable identity between meatspace and cyberspace is necessary) as equivalent to a philosophical or religious law, or at least a position of unanimous agreement. This position is not only false, but also makes the author suspect of ulterior motives considering his employer, notwithstanding the list of authors provided (which is what kept me reading to a point).
However if one wishes to create a viable business system on the net that reflects the (putative) sovereign status of a human being over his or her own person, the architecture should work differently.
In particular, open standards, one-way only authorization hashes, and user-initiated transactions rather than corporate-initiated transactions, would seem to be more appropriate.
As an example consider that one's social security number is both very insecure and very important to an individual. Same for a credit card number. Having a database which obviously links an individual's real world identity to such a number, and making the database available through an imperfect system to a virtually unlimited number of agents with their own motives, means that as time goes on the probability of one's identity being publically divulged approaches 1.
On the other hand, if you personally create a data structure (say an xml file) using an open standard (say for insurance claims) and encrypt it in such a way that part is only readable by one person on a given insurance company's staff, and further encrypt it so that only your doctor and yourself can see the other bits, well that sounds like an authorization based approach and I would have far less to worry about that. It would certainly make the FBI's job a bit harder but they can always get a court order to make the insurance agent and doctor talk, if it's that important.
My point is that the author's strategy is fatally contaminated by his employment by Microsoft. There are other logical constructs one could make to guide system development, for example one could try to make the net more anonymous and more user-centric, and place stronger legal liability on the corporate entities that use, store and transmit the data. Individuals are empowered to use the system as a homeowner uses his telephone and the circuit created for a call.
It is not necessary to do evil at all. The only people who think so are those who have been trained to see people as objects instead of seeing them as the kings of inviolate kingdoms whom the system must serve with sincerity and humility.
The paper makes some good points but I submit that the general agreement that identity is needed online which the author suggests exists, does not in fact exist. People need to be able to trust companies they buy things from, and assurance that they are not "fly by night" operations, i.e. that you can call the better business bureau or the police on them, is what makes commerce possible. That, or just paying cash. I think the author needs to get back to the concrete reality of just how our economy currently works, so long as he is getting around to making suggestions about underlying infrastructure, and think about whether or not people really want this kind of thing.
Okay so they are talking about assigning an emoticon text string to a pixel array that (supposedly both) sides of a communication agree to display.
Here is a challenge, and then a list of other brainstorming potential challenges for you to think about. (I came up with them before I remembered the best challenge of all).
In 1995 I was involved in one of the first ISPs in Tokyo, Cyber Technologies International (CTI, www.cyber.ad.jp). Our engineers created maybe the first 3D Java chat in the world. IIRC you in fact would type ascii emoticons while chatting to someone else online using this Java client, and an avatar would change its expression (i.e. new bitmap shown) depending on your smiley. IIRC they were like pacman faces and you had a few onscreen at once.
Here are some other ideas that might be related to potential challenges:
On my Apple II (Integer Basic) with 16KB language card, when booting the pascal IDE you would get an alternate characterset (font) in which different keys actually looked like faces, if I remember correctly.
Japan has had far more complex emoticons for a very long time.
Japanese fonts have long included faces and in particular current Japanese cell phones allow input in various alphabets (kanji, english, arabic numbers, and symbols). The symbols (square bitmaps) are common to all users of a given handset (or manufacturer) and include many kinds of tiny faces with different expressions, or hearts or other symbols which are currently used as a new kind of written language by young girls. So prior art. For example, the heart key is transmitted as a numeric (or ascii?) code and reconstituted as an image, but also is read as a Japanese word. Very close (maybe inverted here) to what M$ wants to claim.
Some PHP based chats I remember had an automatic conversion of smiley emoticons to small bitmaps that would be embedded in your chat on the bbs at least prior to 2004.
MUDs, MOOs and chat programs may have something similar here.
Often a programmer will choose to specify an icon or other bitmap in a program as a string of ascii characters, to be displayed as an image. While not as highly compressed as an emoticon (which the patent submission does not in fact define), it will work on any system the executable can run on, and as a communication between programmer and user is equivalent to that which is claimed.
Emoticons are in fact displayed as pixel arrays already. A tall, thin font could easily make it 19x19 pixels. And there is also no reason to specify 19x19, presumably 8x8 or 20x16 would also infringe.
There is little difference between them making an arbitrary unicode font and what they are claiming.
thepalace.com and other graphic chats shold be looked at, Sony for example liscensed a nordic one I believe.
Tic Tac Toe played on the computer, or Tetris for that matter, are prior art
Incidentally I've seen camera/projector combos aimed from the ceiling down toward a wall mounted whiteboard. A pod sprouting a few of these would be awesome.
Like another poster mentioned, this article is so un-DYI it took my breath away. Buying a cheap projector, lcd intended for projector and turning the lights off is NOT DYI, it's a 20 years old idea. The LumenLab link above is tons more interesting, though it didn't answer the two main questions I've had for a loooong time as I also want something like this, mainly low cost/heat/power LEDs and the lens/mirror setup for more than just straight ahead projection.
1. I don't want a small room that would love a 6 foot image to death, to turn into a hothouse because of all the heat generated. I would much rather find a way to get enough LEDs to approximate 3500 lumens, without presumably generating any heat.
2. I'd like to plaster as much of the room with focused data, in other words using mirrors, some kind of fisheye or telescopic lens, or perhaps a conic mirror. This also means I need the highest resolution possible, though multiple panels might be acceptable.
3. The main aims are to make a planetarium and also to experiment with interfaces. In other words a cheap CAVE / CAVERN system would be real nice.
If anybody can point to / provide info about what kind of a setup would be needed to replace the giant radiator with cold LEDs, please post on!
This should properly be a separate thread, and the lenovo stuff isn't the answer, but here it is. I've been trying to figure out what is the absolute cheapest solution to create response systems for large (50-3000 person) computer-assisted meetings (CAM).
Generally this is done by buying each person a laptop, or a few people at a small table share one. Way too expensive. I then heard schools (in the U.S.?) were using something with success called a pad system which is apparently either a single keypad, or perhaps just a multiple choice response voting unit.
What I want is something that is the cheapest good performance solution so that every person in a large auditorium can type in a question or opinion.. say up to 1 kilobyte, and have it transmitted to a central unit. The clients should have a simple display, though even a little one line lcd would do it, and it should work in asian or whatever other languages too. The network connection can be ethernet or better yet wireless, and it would be nice if it could be chargeable since even running power cables to every seat is a pain. Of course, mobile phone email is one solution, if everyone already has one. But the closer it looks to an ordinary keyboard the better, since older guys who don't send phone email will also be using it.
Oh and it should cost $100 or less if possible. I wonder if it is possible to have a slow linux box with 802.11 and a tiny lcd display for under that price?
Someone should tell the BBC about the way to use bittorrent. I'm getting 150-200 kilobytes/sec with 100 seeds and 24 peers. It seems someone gets a full copy every 10 seconds or so.. and it is 2:00 pm June 4 in Japan. That is, after downloading the four mp3s they had with wget and curl, I looked at the other two links in the thread, and though one was taken down the other link is fine. By trying to download via bittorrent at various times the BBC should be able to see the amount of demand from geeks with a minimum of ingenuity and how the swarm grows etc. It certainly would be cheaper for them if they just did that and released a torrent!
By the way I recently got a lot more interested in classical music from a manga called Nodame Cantalibre which is still growing at 12 issues (Japanese only so far). It is about classical music students and a fun and fascinating look at music school and the post graduation world for classical musicians. I'm looking for classical sheet music / lessons on the net for guitar (or piano perhaps).
I absolutely loved the tv series and saw it a number of times.. twice at U. Tokyo in a whole night with geeks lying beneath a projection monitor. Personally I enjoyed the TV better than the movies.
Although if they are going to cut anything out, I'd say they could start with everything drawn in crayon! The directors apologized to everyone when they said there was too little time and it would have to become two movies.
I think the ending and photorealistic portions especially indicate the movie was intended to try to talk directly to the people who are getting fucked up in Japanese society. It is powerful, wish Columbine etc. kids had this sort of thing, or even me when I was a lot younger and getting beat up in school. Anyway it certainly broke a lot of new ground in the skin tight spacesuit genre for which I am quite appreciative, but society is still quite fucked up here so I don't know if it succeeded in its overall mission. Anyway if the dubbed thing is so bad get a DVD set if there is one.
Consider Gates is probably the top authority in the world about the pressures and urges driving a company with the prevalence, power, influence on government and business, and sheer cash of Microsoft.
You aren't ever going to see publicized whether M$ has been amazingly incompetent or actually forced to produce bad software by FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. (tinfoil notwithstanding).
Listen to the guy who has the most experience screwing people over with software and getting away with it in spades.
He's also the richest guy in the world and if anybody could afford to develop and install something enhancing in his own brain, it's him. Listen to him when he chooses not to do so.
Maybe the only people to install chips will be underprivileged, weak ego, poor, controlled people?
I've used linux as my main machine for some years and always laugh at viruses but unfortunately now have to install XP and office on a pc that is lying around (1 GHz+) so I can test a wxperl based system I'm building. I figure I may do my email mainly on XP too now and use it as my main work machine until I buy a new one. I had to buy XP and Office but through a friend at Micro$oft so hopefully Mr. Gates has not made a fortune off me.
Anyway, I just bought a new 90Mbps router (about 50 bucks!) and would like to know the real best way to make sure I don't get infected. Which I really don't wantto happen. Companies where I work all use Virus Buster, but is ClamAV (cygwin or native port) good enough? I figure I'll turn on all firewall etc., have Microsoft Update add all the patches and maybe get a backup HD and I'll be relatively safe. I could use some nifo from people who have done exactly this - is there a free alternative and if not what is absolutely necessary? Thanks!
Slashdot Mirror
Boy this was a shocker. Anybody notice the domain the story comes from? iwon.com may belong to askjeeves, but I KNOW I get spam from iwon.com that I never signed up for.
And look at all their (apparently lucrative) advertisers! Let's see, you can buy Hoodia, Investigate Anyone Anywhere, incredible reload the page and there are more and more banners and text ads.
What is scary is that it looks partially legit, in that my guess is they actually do run some kind of lottery (I wonder what the legal basis is for running a lottery on the net, sounds awfully lucrative). But I am pretty sure that iwon spams, and that their advertisers are bigger spammers.
So if the article is about a "cheeky" move by a Nigerian posing as the head of the antifraud department, then I find a spammer posing as a news site, carrying a news story about how spam pays off, and getting paid to do it by spammers, who are getting their page hits from slashdotters who hate spam, to be a utter masterpiece of cheekiness. My hat is off to you Iwon, you won!
Another thing I would like to note for all those slashdotters who are still laughing and unconvinced (and especially the dude who got past the lame filter and posted an all caps Bush spam message). I am guessing that any people who still get caught by these things are disadvantaged somehow.
Either they are kids with money, or depressed, or schizophrenic, or fanatically religious, or something, but they are missing something in the immune system that everyone else has. Personally I find the all capitals letters to be especially worrisome. There is most likely a large amount of mental illness in the world not being treated, or treated unsuccessfully, or the result of a temporary fugue of some sort such as normally makes people suicidal. Maybe there are even people who figure someone, anyone else could use the money better than themselves and this is a way of hurting themselves.
At the very least, it is now mainstream knowledge that just about anyone will cave in if shouted at and abused enough. I strongly believe that the shadiness of Iwon, and the sheer volume of spam with its various types of shouting, exerts a significant pressure on people. This story is about how that works really well, about how it is a natural outcome of a burgeoning, talented, but wild west style country, and about how it still pays if you walk the fine line like Iwon.com does.
It sounds like a primer that the flopped dotcommers of the next thread should have read before going through their money. One dotcom they mention closed down before using all its cash, while one scammer in the article made 250 million bucks, about 10 times as much, only gave back a tenth of it, and presumably had a nother 200 million left after the 2 years of prison! Who's laughing now?
Also I don't know about net profit for the whole venture but Zeta has apparently been selling a lot in Germany according to a Zeta person I met at a show recently.
I heard a presentation by the president of Mysql a year or two ago. I believe he claimed they were the biggest open source company and they seemed to be making a profit.
It just might also be
that Sony has been finding
the next generation requires
hurdling some massive hurdles.
Though my guess is this is a
"leak" to try and get M$ off
guard. Meanwhile the PS3 being
launched earlier.. Anyway it's
not like anybody who knows what
they're talking about is talking
right? Not that this silly
bit of news is startling enough to
make me want to RTFA.
GraphViz which lets you draw graphs (has perl module too) in different formats including SVG. I believe I once saw a subroutine call tree drawn in it from perl profiler.
I figure as we get higher up and into the terahertz lots of important things in cells are going to start vibrating, and deeper than just skin level too.
But what about if I close my eyes while talking on the phone, or focus near or far, or ice them maybe? I'd think the eyelids act as a radiation barrier, a heat sink, and also apply tears to the cornea. Wouldn't you think these could be more effective than something in a petri dish?
I RTFA and it doesn't sound like a MS Office user on Windows XP with a nice machine needs it. I think they're going after the wrong crowd!
1. I don't get why using SATA instead of PCI for data xfer is making it infinitely more useful. Dumb! Put another FPGA on there and watch scientific users grow.
2. Or put base libraries and CPAN on there, with Perl on XILINX then we're cooking! How about a benchmark with compiling a big app?
3. Obviously it would be a big win for when the network is faster than your storage. We are close to that now and some locations will have it this year (gigabit ethernet to the home). Personally I have 100 Mbps (so they say) but on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K 450MHz RH9 laptop I get 1 Mbps much more often, maybe maxed at around 10 Mbps once due to I/O and memory, plus the lack of fast sites. But if there was a service that let me download a movie at 100 Mbps or more I'd need this device. My guess is some other slashdotters already do..
4. I was thinking this might be nice when you are downloading big chunks of data for analysis, it seems you would save a lot of power, heat and time by skipping the physical movement in your hard disk.
I'd like to see some benchmarks that make use of this in cases when you would expect it to be useful. And I'd like to see it work in Linux over PCI with some more computing power on another FPGA for you to flash your own apps in.
Soudns fabulous! Doh, shoulda worked at Apple. Anybody actually use this? I would have thought you'd hear more about it if it greatly stimulated chats. Perhaps you can only talk to one person at a time, or iChat requires a video camera? Comments pls if experience with it.
Thanks,
Matt
Sure I also figured this was non-news picked up by an illiterate news agency (nice oxymoron!) but then RTFA and found the cocktail party reference. (People started sideband conversations with new/old acquaintances).
When you are in an airport, elevator or dentist's office and stuck in some frustrating situation with a stranger, often you will strike up a conversation with them commenting about the idiocy, commisserating, and so on. The above mail loop sounds like it was novel enough and big enough for the participants that they felt like they were in such a situation and "made the most of it".
Two days ago I was stuck by a train station due to an earthquake in Tokyo that caused all trains to be delayed by two hours. For some reason that comaraderie did not come to pass, possibly because people could easily leave the station (in my case small groups hung out at a nearby cafe and talked among themselves).
When you get email being sent to a lot of people from someone, and you can see the other people's names, still you don't generally start side conversations with them. Part is that you probably don't know them well enough; the journalists in this case did in some cases at least. But also, in group emails I think people tend to jump right down to the body of the message and while perhaps some people read the To: and CC: lines with interest, it is not a feeling that there are a lot of people with you reading the message concurrently. The journalists were all reading it within an hour or two on a given morning.
This makes me wonder if more of a chat-like element could be introduced into email. If you could see a photo or video of the other recipients, and maybe open a chat with some if you could see they were online at the same time, would that not increase the potential for communication among members of a group mailing? Certainly you can easily email people directly whom you have see on an ordinary mailing list, but I think a decision is made that you are "on a mailing list" and then if you have something you don't want the whole list to get, "whether you should send a private message" to someone you don't know. So I only reply privately to the list owner and people who reply to me, usually, and conversely don't put thank yous on the main list.
It may sound unintuitive to computer geeks but if you consider the convivial atmosphere of these convivial journalists mostly happily distracted one morning by an explosion of mail from tons of somewhat related people, I think it suggests the possibility of a different mode of network communication that even if only text based, could mix positive elements of video conferencing, IRC and threaded discussion sites, possibly as an add-on to a mail client.
At the risk of sounding silly and with my hubris level ratched up real high? I'd like to suggest a couple alternatives which might be combined.
1. Mittens (less work I think per finger, more room for heating/cooling lines, less fabric and surface area). Also, enough surface area to be able to bind magnetically to tools maybe, and everyone knows mittens are warmer.
2. Robotic waldo claws, titanium and plastic hand simulacra and radical tentacles (as another poster also recommended waldos). Keeping the hand inside the end of the arm with a metal/rubber waldo attached to the outside (making your arms a bit longer basically) would have some definite advantages. First, you don't have to worry about puncturing your glove, you can get more strength into the waldo than your muscles provide, no pressure to work against, could be controlled by someone else, you could have more than two waldos coming out of your suit (either you multitask between them or you get someone to operate others), they could be shaped like tentacles or wrenches or whatever is best for space work, you can use materials best for space work without having to worry about bendability, temperature, or radiation protection, and you can use very thin or tiny waldo elements scaled down from your hand for tiny places, with mechanical aids adding precision (i.e. lock to an axis, etc.). Finally, consider that while you could just imagine having a single metal hand stuck at the end of a lengthened arm, looking like a deep sea diver's suit, it is also possible to imagine a plasticine hand virtually identical to that of man, but made with titanium bones and superplastic muscles. Considering that evolution and our brains have gotten this far with the current design, it may be best to simply use the same design but beef it up for outer space. If well integrated with the astronaut with advanced haptics technology, it could become like a "ghost hand" and very intuitive to use with fine control. Lastly, about those tentacles. Well yes, space anime does make good use of tentacles, and Doctor Octopus likes them, but I'm thinking that outer space might indeed be like the deep sea in that a large number of highly deformable tentacles could be extremely useful, if the mental barriers to efficient control can be overcome. Certainly it could be possible to mimic a hand with a bundle of fine tentacles, but I am mainly thinking about being able to grip and hold in place multiple large objects, hold oneself down so you don't float away when you try to screw something down, etc. If you could imagine yourself to be more of a fanciful creature from the undersea world than a landlubber biped, you might be able to imagine some improvements. Personally I like the idea of a utility tentacle that will grab onto secured parts to steady you when you are about to float away, and perhaps a couple additional ones that you can use to orient one or two parts in relation to your body while you are working on them.
3. muscle magnification. As someone said was posted earlier which I didn't know. If you have motors in your gloves they could detect where your are trying to move it and then supply more strength. Apparently the original post mentioned nerve signal sensing though I don't know if that's necessary. Also, use of memory metal and other active materials might be useful, and maybe a glove that makes it easier to (ratchet) close than open might be possible.
A combination of the above ideas might be useful, for example if you have a mitten and pull out the area between thumb and fingers to make it a convex box (maybe narrowing wrist to maintain pressure), you can then freely move your fingers and wrist to control a waldo. The movement of the hand could in fact be sensed by laser scanners built into the glove interior, possibly augmented if needed for precision work by having the astronaut first put on a silk glove with barcode-like patterns all over it and a non-slip interior coating. For manhandling big heavy things, coping with tiny things, or makin
Two other posters prefer 1) an authorization rather than identification based approach, and 2) maintenance of walls between i.e. their bank and their doctor. Well credit card and insurance companies make this a bit messy but I digress.
It seems to me both posters are completely correct in capturing the general attitudes everyday people have about this sort of thing, or would have if it was translated into a verbal explanation of what somebody was offering to do for you ("I'll make it so you can just check a box and your bank and doctor will be able to talk to each other").
My first analysis of the rules was that it boiled down to an essential conflict between "Do as little evil as possible" and "We must do some evil".
This tension is artificial and derives from the author's treatment of an assertion (that globally verifiable identity between meatspace and cyberspace is necessary) as equivalent to a philosophical or religious law, or at least a position of unanimous agreement. This position is not only false, but also makes the author suspect of ulterior motives considering his employer, notwithstanding the list of authors provided (which is what kept me reading to a point).
However if one wishes to create a viable business system on the net that reflects the (putative) sovereign status of a human being over his or her own person, the architecture should work differently.
In particular, open standards, one-way only authorization hashes, and user-initiated transactions rather than corporate-initiated transactions, would seem to be more appropriate.
As an example consider that one's social security number is both very insecure and very important to an individual. Same for a credit card number. Having a database which obviously links an individual's real world identity to such a number, and making the database available through an imperfect system to a virtually unlimited number of agents with their own motives, means that as time goes on the probability of one's identity being publically divulged approaches 1.
On the other hand, if you personally create a data structure (say an xml file) using an open standard (say for insurance claims) and encrypt it in such a way that part is only readable by one person on a given insurance company's staff, and further encrypt it so that only your doctor and yourself can see the other bits, well that sounds like an authorization based approach and I would have far less to worry about that. It would certainly make the FBI's job a bit harder but they can always get a court order to make the insurance agent and doctor talk, if it's that important.
My point is that the author's strategy is fatally contaminated by his employment by Microsoft. There are other logical constructs one could make to guide system development, for example one could try to make the net more anonymous and more user-centric, and place stronger legal liability on the corporate entities that use, store and transmit the data. Individuals are empowered to use the system as a homeowner uses his telephone and the circuit created for a call.
It is not necessary to do evil at all. The only people who think so are those who have been trained to see people as objects instead of seeing them as the kings of inviolate kingdoms whom the system must serve with sincerity and humility.
The paper makes some good points but I submit that the general agreement that identity is needed online which the author suggests exists, does not in fact exist. People need to be able to trust companies they buy things from, and assurance that they are not "fly by night" operations, i.e. that you can call the better business bureau or the police on them, is what makes commerce possible. That, or just paying cash. I think the author needs to get back to the concrete reality of just how our economy currently works, so long as he is getting around to making suggestions about underlying infrastructure, and think about whether or not people really want this kind of thing.
If the software you make works for the general case then it will also work for 19 x 19 pixel images, which will infringe.
Here is a challenge, and then a list of other brainstorming potential challenges for you to think about. (I came up with them before I remembered the best challenge of all).
In 1995 I was involved in one of the first ISPs in Tokyo, Cyber Technologies International (CTI, www.cyber.ad.jp). Our engineers created maybe the first 3D Java chat in the world. IIRC you in fact would type ascii emoticons while chatting to someone else online using this Java client, and an avatar would change its expression (i.e. new bitmap shown) depending on your smiley. IIRC they were like pacman faces and you had a few onscreen at once.
Here are some other ideas that might be related to potential challenges:
Thanks a bunch for the pointers, will certainly look into it. Of course, it might be a good way to heat the apartment in the winter time..!
Incidentally I've seen camera/projector combos aimed from the ceiling down toward a wall mounted whiteboard. A pod sprouting a few of these would be awesome.
1. I don't want a small room that would love a 6 foot image to death, to turn into a hothouse because of all the heat generated. I would much rather find a way to get enough LEDs to approximate 3500 lumens, without presumably generating any heat.
2. I'd like to plaster as much of the room with focused data, in other words using mirrors, some kind of fisheye or telescopic lens, or perhaps a conic mirror. This also means I need the highest resolution possible, though multiple panels might be acceptable.
3. The main aims are to make a planetarium and also to experiment with interfaces. In other words a cheap CAVE / CAVERN system would be real nice. If anybody can point to / provide info about what kind of a setup would be needed to replace the giant radiator with cold LEDs, please post on!
Generally this is done by buying each person a laptop, or a few people at a small table share one. Way too expensive. I then heard schools (in the U.S.?) were using something with success called a pad system which is apparently either a single keypad, or perhaps just a multiple choice response voting unit.
What I want is something that is the cheapest good performance solution so that every person in a large auditorium can type in a question or opinion.. say up to 1 kilobyte, and have it transmitted to a central unit. The clients should have a simple display, though even a little one line lcd would do it, and it should work in asian or whatever other languages too. The network connection can be ethernet or better yet wireless, and it would be nice if it could be chargeable since even running power cables to every seat is a pain. Of course, mobile phone email is one solution, if everyone already has one. But the closer it looks to an ordinary keyboard the better, since older guys who don't send phone email will also be using it.
Oh and it should cost $100 or less if possible. I wonder if it is possible to have a slow linux box with 802.11 and a tiny lcd display for under that price?
This is wonderful, great, stupendous stuff! But I could have sworn I saw this site a few weeks ago. Is this news Slashdot?
A new sense of the term "data retrieval". 2005: Computing can now be equated with torture
By the way I recently got a lot more interested in classical music from a manga called Nodame Cantalibre which is still growing at 12 issues (Japanese only so far). It is about classical music students and a fun and fascinating look at music school and the post graduation world for classical musicians. I'm looking for classical sheet music / lessons on the net for guitar (or piano perhaps).
Although if they are going to cut anything out, I'd say they could start with everything drawn in crayon! The directors apologized to everyone when they said there was too little time and it would have to become two movies.
I think the ending and photorealistic portions especially indicate the movie was intended to try to talk directly to the people who are getting fucked up in Japanese society. It is powerful, wish Columbine etc. kids had this sort of thing, or even me when I was a lot younger and getting beat up in school. Anyway it certainly broke a lot of new ground in the skin tight spacesuit genre for which I am quite appreciative, but society is still quite fucked up here so I don't know if it succeeded in its overall mission. Anyway if the dubbed thing is so bad get a DVD set if there is one.
You aren't ever going to see publicized whether M$ has been amazingly incompetent or actually forced to produce bad software by FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. (tinfoil notwithstanding).
Listen to the guy who has the most experience screwing people over with software and getting away with it in spades.
He's also the richest guy in the world and if anybody could afford to develop and install something enhancing in his own brain, it's him. Listen to him when he chooses not to do so.
Maybe the only people to install chips will be underprivileged, weak ego, poor, controlled people?
Thank you *very* much for your help. Much appreciated.
Regards from Tokyo,
Matt
Thank you *very* much for your help.
That's great information, I appreciate it.
Regards from Tokyo,
Matt
I've used linux as my main machine for some years and always laugh at viruses but unfortunately now have to install XP and office on a pc that is lying around (1 GHz+) so I can test a wxperl based system I'm building. I figure I may do my email mainly on XP too now and use it as my main work machine until I buy a new one. I had to buy XP and Office but through a friend at Micro$oft so hopefully Mr. Gates has not made a fortune off me.
Anyway, I just bought a new 90Mbps router (about 50 bucks!) and would like to know the real best way to make sure I don't get infected. Which I really don't wantto happen. Companies where I work all use Virus Buster, but is ClamAV (cygwin or native port) good enough? I figure I'll turn on all firewall etc., have Microsoft Update add all the patches and maybe get a backup HD and I'll be relatively safe. I could use some nifo from people who have done exactly this - is there a free alternative and if not what is absolutely necessary? Thanks!