A fun graphical view of this is to read the discussion thread of the daily Woot! item, you'll see a gradient-shaded US map with the 50 states indicating the purchase rate. Today's item, a pair of pedometers isn't particularly high tech, so not a great example. But they are selling well in Utah, poorly in Alabama, Alaska and North Dakota. I've never checked to see if this is scaled by population. Almost everything on Woot! sells poorly in West Virginia.
This sort of thing may stimulate a wider interest in practical application of camouflage techniques.
"Ah... It's not a swimming pool. It's a reflecting pool. I checked the rules. There's no rule against putting in a reflecting pool. It's very tranquil. You'd like it."
I gave my Mom a call -- first time I've used that resource on Slashdot -- but she's the only person I know who still has a paper encyclopedia in the house. I asked her to look up the FBI. Interestingly enough, her copy of the "World Book" doesn't have a reproduction of the seal in the article. Just a picture of a couple of cadets at the training academy.
Don't know if they didn't include that because of this law or it just didn't make the cut given the space available. Either way, it's not there. I'd be interested in knowing if any other publisher includes the seal in the FBI entry.
And no, I don't live in her basement and she wasn't at your house, either.
In SVG format, which I suspect is the real issue here.
I figure that you're referring to the counterfeiting scenario, right? I can imagine that would be a concern with an excellent reproduction of currency. It's not hard to imagine a situation where someone could use that for nefarious means, and the better the reproduction the better the chance of success. To pass fake currency, you've got to give it to someone who now has the opportunity to closely examine it. At their leisure, too, since they get to keep it if they accept it.
But a department insignia? If someone is looking to make fake credentials, I don't think total fidelity is absolutely required. It's not like you're gonna pose as an FBI agent, flash your badge, and have someone go "Wait a tick, I gotta get me my magnifier."
And just to be nerdly, on the other end of the spectrum, I don't think making the seal 5 meters across without pixelization is gonna enhance its believability either. "I'm the real agent, my badge is bigger."
Cry me a river, Thiessen. You're a company man, through and through. Your comments about national security are about as neutral and even-handed as a BP exec's comments on the Spill. You had your chance, you blew it, and you want to keep a wrap on it.
Your post seems to convey that people attempting to essentially illegally "wiretap" a cellphone for presumably malicious purposes are going to give half a care about FCC regulations...
I'd say something about "fail" but I think it goes without saying at this point.
Presumably, if you're interested in a "pseudo-femtocell" as poetmat mentions in the post to which the GP is replying, you're not doing it for malicious purposes so much as providing cell service somewhere that doesn't get proper coverage from the outside network. In certain buildings, certain terrain, neighborhoods with insufficient towers, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that "legitimate" femtocells are used for.
I think you have "failed" to consider that this is the application that TooMuchToDo was referring to, not wiretapping or even necessarily doing anything malicious.
They also make the same calculators in versions which are open and programmable so this is just stupid. All you'll end up doing is getting them banned from exams and then you won't want to own one so you just shot yourself in the foot.
You'd probably be shooting future students in the foot, so it's not nearly as bad an idea as you make it out to be. You could argue that this is also a bad idea, but we trash or risk trashing the future in so many other more serious ways this is pretty small potatoes.
Duh. Not only did I get the joke, but it was already modded funny before I replied. Just because I give a half-serious reply to a joke doesn't mean I didn't get the joke. Or were you just hoping to get modded "Insightful" for saying "Whoosh"?
That's the reason why I will never ever go to the US.
http://www.dumblaws.com/
I might do something accidently wrong and face prison. No, thank you.
True, we've got several websites dedicated to exposing stupid/antiquated/ridiculous laws in the US. But just because a given country doesn't have a website dedicated to its dumb laws doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't have any. So I'm not sure if you can be certain that any state is completely dumb-law-free, "absence of evidence" and all.
Squirrels on Transformers sounds like a hipster band
The little guys explode when they get across the terminals, strangely they don't learn from their mistakes.
That would be a great name, One that the great Dave Barry would appreciate.
BTW, on lower voltage transformers, like the ones that step down a few kilovolts to a few hundred volts in residential neighborhoods, the squirrels often carbonize, leaving behind little charcoal sculptures of squirrels that look something like Han Solo in carbonite.
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
What I read in IEEE spectrum a few months ago was that it wasn't the production capacity that would be strained, but the transformers in residential areas. This surprised me, but the article stated that in many areas, the cooling capacity of the local transformers was undersized since they would be underutilized at night and would therefore cool off at that time.
That seems strange to me, since in the temperate climes, the hottest part of the year also has the shortest nights -- I wouldn't think the cooling benefit of lower usage at night would be so great, and it's not like your gonna swap out transformers on May Day and Halloween and ship them to the other hemisphere on an exchange program. I also don't think that this is a common practice in my part of the US because my Dad was a power EE, and he talked to me a lot about his job and never once mentioned this. They had a lot of transformer problems: squirrels grabbing two terminals, birds building nests (it's nice and warm), wrong oils used in filling them, PCB remediation, guys at the fiberglass plant busting the nearby insulators with glass beads shot from slingshots. But I sure don't remember anything about undersized radiator capacity. Hardly proof -- and maybe things changed since -- but it makes me skeptical.
You may be partially on to something. Many items are "too cheap to fix" now. If your TV breaks, you don't see which tube blew. If the lawnmower stops running, there's not much that's replaceable (save the entire engine). If your car or washing machine stops running, there's a good chance that fixing it would require diagnostic equipment exceeding the value of the item - you take it to get repaired or you replace it.
While I agree with your premise, I disagree with your conclusion. While a greater number of components were accessible and could be theoretically fixed by the end user, I suspect that in reality it didn't happen. Your average person didn't open their TV to see what tube burned out. If the washing machine quit working, they didn't go at it with a schematic and a multimeter. They called someone to come fix it. The same thing happens today except that in many cases it's easier/cheaper to replace something rather than fix it.
Average people did actually pull the tubes out of TVs and radios and take them down to Radio Shack or the local drug store or a TV shop, put the tubes -- one-by-one --in a tester, find which one was bad and buy a replacement. Not everyone, of course. Many people did get a repairman to come to the house or take it in to be fixed (depending on size). Enough people did this that any decent size drugstore or general merchandiser would have a self-service tube testing console.
Prefabricated plastic toys were common enough that parents complained that the toys they had as a child were better, but they were simple - you needed to use your imagination to have fun with them.
I don't know if I'd classify them as "simple". Perhaps, as you say, they were imagination-stimulating. Maybe more so than modern plastic toys, I haven't been the market for those yet, as my kid is only 18 months.
System Seven. An "assault weapon" style toy with a propeller launcher, parachute launcher, "decoder" device, periscope. Sophisticated and perhaps role-play stimulating in concept. In practice there were only so many variations of sending secret messages to your friends 20 feet away by parachute capsule. Looked way cooler than it was.
Dark Tower. Sophisticated and fun, but not really creative. If made today, I'm sure it would have some media tie-in.
Microvision. A handheld electronic game with multiple game cartridges available. Featured a touchpad and knob, cartridges were also overlays to create custom keypads and also to augment the graphics. Not as technologically advanced as a game boy and its heirs, but no more creativity stimulating.
Speak & Spell. It talked in a synthetic voice and taught spelling. Whether or not this was creative depends on your opinion about learning to spell. TI built this in part to create a market for its very sophisticated DSP chips
Lite Brite. Been around longer than me. This one would be considered simple and potentially creative, although most kids (including me) just used the premade templates. Looks like you can still get new ones.
Etch a Sketch. Simple for sure. Not quite building blocks simple. Lots of fun trying to make any particular image with the limitation that you couldn't lift the stylus and stop drawing and also by the very-difficult-to-make diagonal or curvy line. 50 years old this year! Still in production.
So, not all toys from the era were simple. And not all were creative toys. But some were both. I find it interesting that the less technologically advanced toys from that time -- and earlier -- are still in production. The more sophisticated ones, not so much.
So you've saved up some money and you want to show the world how important science and math are to you. You've chosen for some odd reason to do that by purchasing something that will only benefit yourself. I would suggest you consider ways that your money could be used to help more people further or enter science:
Nothing wrong with occasionally treating yourself. I'd just skip the tattoo and buy decent booze. The hangover and regret won't last as long.
There's so many people around here with ugly tattoos, I can't tell the derelicts and heroin addicts apart from the rest of the community at the can-deposit refund counter.
This lawyer is most likely an opportunistic political hack, scoring points by throwing some red meat to the fundie crowd in his own community. It's not like we don't have nutballs like that here in the US. And we've got violentreligiousextremists here, too.
Fundamentalism and extremism -- no matter what the religion -- is the problem. It leads the unbalanced and easily influenced to do crazy things, and it a great way for anyone with political ambition to recruit a loyal following.
Slashdot Mirror
And Alabama once again ranked #1 in "States Most Likely To Ban New Technology As Work of a Witch."
Whenever my state ranks 2nd in something bad, or 49th in something good, I just smile and say: "Thanks Alabama".
A fun graphical view of this is to read the discussion thread of the daily Woot! item, you'll see a gradient-shaded US map with the 50 states indicating the purchase rate. Today's item, a pair of pedometers isn't particularly high tech, so not a great example. But they are selling well in Utah, poorly in Alabama, Alaska and North Dakota. I've never checked to see if this is scaled by population. Almost everything on Woot! sells poorly in West Virginia.
This sort of thing may stimulate a wider interest in practical application of camouflage techniques.
"Ah... It's not a swimming pool. It's a reflecting pool. I checked the rules. There's no rule against putting in a reflecting pool. It's very tranquil. You'd like it."
Liberals don't generally think about return on investment...
Like when they started the Iraq war?
I gave my Mom a call -- first time I've used that resource on Slashdot -- but she's the only person I know who still has a paper encyclopedia in the house. I asked her to look up the FBI. Interestingly enough, her copy of the "World Book" doesn't have a reproduction of the seal in the article. Just a picture of a couple of cadets at the training academy.
Don't know if they didn't include that because of this law or it just didn't make the cut given the space available. Either way, it's not there. I'd be interested in knowing if any other publisher includes the seal in the FBI entry.
And no, I don't live in her basement and she wasn't at your house, either.
In SVG format, which I suspect is the real issue here.
I figure that you're referring to the counterfeiting scenario, right? I can imagine that would be a concern with an excellent reproduction of currency. It's not hard to imagine a situation where someone could use that for nefarious means, and the better the reproduction the better the chance of success. To pass fake currency, you've got to give it to someone who now has the opportunity to closely examine it. At their leisure, too, since they get to keep it if they accept it.
But a department insignia? If someone is looking to make fake credentials, I don't think total fidelity is absolutely required. It's not like you're gonna pose as an FBI agent, flash your badge, and have someone go "Wait a tick, I gotta get me my magnifier."
And just to be nerdly, on the other end of the spectrum, I don't think making the seal 5 meters across without pixelization is gonna enhance its believability either. "I'm the real agent, my badge is bigger."
This is fun, you could say:
"... the head of any department or agency of the United States ... shall be ... imprisoned ... "
Aw, c'mon. You stole that trick from Breitbart!
Cry me a river, Thiessen. You're a company man, through and through. Your comments about national security are about as neutral and even-handed as a BP exec's comments on the Spill. You had your chance, you blew it, and you want to keep a wrap on it.
That is all.
Your post seems to convey that people attempting to essentially illegally "wiretap" a cellphone for presumably malicious purposes are going to give half a care about FCC regulations...
I'd say something about "fail" but I think it goes without saying at this point.
Presumably, if you're interested in a "pseudo-femtocell" as poetmat mentions in the post to which the GP is replying, you're not doing it for malicious purposes so much as providing cell service somewhere that doesn't get proper coverage from the outside network. In certain buildings, certain terrain, neighborhoods with insufficient towers, that sort of thing. The sort of thing that "legitimate" femtocells are used for.
I think you have "failed" to consider that this is the application that TooMuchToDo was referring to, not wiretapping or even necessarily doing anything malicious.
They also make the same calculators in versions which are open and programmable so this is just stupid. All you'll end up doing is getting them banned from exams and then you won't want to own one so you just shot yourself in the foot.
You'd probably be shooting future students in the foot, so it's not nearly as bad an idea as you make it out to be. You could argue that this is also a bad idea, but we trash or risk trashing the future in so many other more serious ways this is pretty small potatoes.
I would have asked him how a passive cable knows which bits in the stream are the colors.
A prism's also passive, and it knows how to separate colors. The wires just do the same thing, right?
See you and raise.
Duh. Not only did I get the joke, but it was already modded funny before I replied. Just because I give a half-serious reply to a joke doesn't mean I didn't get the joke. Or were you just hoping to get modded "Insightful" for saying "Whoosh"?
I stand by my statement.
Then don't get arrested. It's generally not hard to avoid.
I believe a "Whoosh!" is in order.
That's the reason why I will never ever go to the US.
http://www.dumblaws.com/
I might do something accidently wrong and face prison. No, thank you.
True, we've got several websites dedicated to exposing stupid/antiquated/ridiculous laws in the US. But just because a given country doesn't have a website dedicated to its dumb laws doesn't necessarily mean it doesn't have any. So I'm not sure if you can be certain that any state is completely dumb-law-free, "absence of evidence" and all.
I hope members of the fourth estate feel threatened by this and run to this guy's aid.
They've been AWOL or worse for a while now.
Squirrels on Transformers sounds like a hipster band The little guys explode when they get across the terminals, strangely they don't learn from their mistakes.
That would be a great name, One that the great Dave Barry would appreciate.
BTW, on lower voltage transformers, like the ones that step down a few kilovolts to a few hundred volts in residential neighborhoods, the squirrels often carbonize, leaving behind little charcoal sculptures of squirrels that look something like Han Solo in carbonite.
It isn't an argument when it is fact.
People misusing / misspelling brand names is one of the most annoying things ever.
Worse than cancer and heart disease put together!
If the electric cars go home and charge at night, no, they won't strain the grid. Power is overproduced at night (you actually can't spin down the generators all the way, so they produce power even if nobody wants it.)
What I read in IEEE spectrum a few months ago was that it wasn't the production capacity that would be strained, but the transformers in residential areas. This surprised me, but the article stated that in many areas, the cooling capacity of the local transformers was undersized since they would be underutilized at night and would therefore cool off at that time.
That seems strange to me, since in the temperate climes, the hottest part of the year also has the shortest nights -- I wouldn't think the cooling benefit of lower usage at night would be so great, and it's not like your gonna swap out transformers on May Day and Halloween and ship them to the other hemisphere on an exchange program. I also don't think that this is a common practice in my part of the US because my Dad was a power EE, and he talked to me a lot about his job and never once mentioned this. They had a lot of transformer problems: squirrels grabbing two terminals, birds building nests (it's nice and warm), wrong oils used in filling them, PCB remediation, guys at the fiberglass plant busting the nearby insulators with glass beads shot from slingshots. But I sure don't remember anything about undersized radiator capacity. Hardly proof -- and maybe things changed since -- but it makes me skeptical.
While I agree with your premise, I disagree with your conclusion. While a greater number of components were accessible and could be theoretically fixed by the end user, I suspect that in reality it didn't happen. Your average person didn't open their TV to see what tube burned out. If the washing machine quit working, they didn't go at it with a schematic and a multimeter. They called someone to come fix it. The same thing happens today except that in many cases it's easier/cheaper to replace something rather than fix it.
Average people did actually pull the tubes out of TVs and radios and take them down to Radio Shack or the local drug store or a TV shop, put the tubes -- one-by-one --in a tester, find which one was bad and buy a replacement. Not everyone, of course. Many people did get a repairman to come to the house or take it in to be fixed (depending on size). Enough people did this that any decent size drugstore or general merchandiser would have a self-service tube testing console.
Prefabricated plastic toys were common enough that parents complained that the toys they had as a child were better, but they were simple - you needed to use your imagination to have fun with them.
I don't know if I'd classify them as "simple". Perhaps, as you say, they were imagination-stimulating. Maybe more so than modern plastic toys, I haven't been the market for those yet, as my kid is only 18 months.
A few of mine from the 70s and 80s included:
So, not all toys from the era were simple. And not all were creative toys. But some were both. I find it interesting that the less technologically advanced toys from that time -- and earlier -- are still in production. The more sophisticated ones, not so much.
So you've saved up some money and you want to show the world how important science and math are to you. You've chosen for some odd reason to do that by purchasing something that will only benefit yourself. I would suggest you consider ways that your money could be used to help more people further or enter science:
Nothing wrong with occasionally treating yourself. I'd just skip the tattoo and buy decent booze. The hangover and regret won't last as long.
There's so many people around here with ugly tattoos, I can't tell the derelicts and heroin addicts apart from the rest of the community at the can-deposit refund counter.
"...I don't care if your husband just died defending my freedom"
Which freedom was that then. The freedom to drive an SUV? The freedom to invade other countries on bullshit pretences? The freedom to be a douchebag?
This is the rest of the world, fuck you America
This may help.
Islam - a religion of peace. Are you serious?
This lawyer is most likely an opportunistic political hack, scoring points by throwing some red meat to the fundie crowd in his own community. It's not like we don't have nutballs like that here in the US. And we've got violent religious extremists here, too.
Fundamentalism and extremism -- no matter what the religion -- is the problem. It leads the unbalanced and easily influenced to do crazy things, and it a great way for anyone with political ambition to recruit a loyal following.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
--Halons razor
You're spitting hairs with that razor. Whether the guy (or machine) that counts the votes is incompetent or malicious, you've still got a problem.