But you don't need vision to use most web services. Using vision to drive a car is common sense. Using vision to communicate through email (it's friggin TEXT) is... uhh....
What you would think if passing your calculus class required turning you to pass an advanced spelling test? If getting hired for a programming job meant you had to learn to pick your nose and fling it? If UPS required your mother to be drug-tested so you could send a package? Or if an e-mail service made you decrypt some visual obfuscation in order to use their system?
It's not about having things handed to you. Duh. A grown-up blind person will realize he/she is not going to be able to drive a car. But to tell someone that, because they can't see, they can't use e-mail? Sure, you could always go to another service, but what happens when all of the free services are doing this, and all of the services which don't do this vision exam require you to pay? That's discrimination. How about if I charge you more to eat dinner, just because of your gender, or your hair color?
Plus, the problem with these obfuscated letters and stuff is that it makes using robots to sign up for online services more difficult, since you have to write more code to decypher these images, but neural networks can be good at filtering out noise. (Shhh!)
Those are more mathematical problems than software things, though, I would say. But, I don't think math should be patented, either... it's really too noble of a thing to be burdened by marketplace dynamics.
Something really bothers me about software patents, but I'm not sure what.
Is it that computer technology is a new generation every 2 years? Is it that I feel there is usually only one "right" way for software to do something, so patenting that way means that we simply will not have an alternative to some commercial software? (What do you guys think of patenting linked lists?) Is it because I feel software (except for some very specialized packages marketed to businesses) should not cost money?
Am I worried about software patents being too broad? Will the patent office know that you shouldn't grant a patent for "message passing between kernel and userspace," but maybe a patent for "employing such-and-such prioritizing queue with such-and-such algorithm for message passing between such-and-such sections of a such-and-such type of kernel and a multiprogramming userspace" would be OK? Or would that even be OK?
Code is terribly easy to produce, costs nothing, and doesn't need to be tested (Computers are extremely predictable machines, if built properly.
In fact, if you are a careful coder, you can be 99% sure your code will work on the first try, and never have problems.). There is really no R&D cost associated with code, other than (1) paying the people who write it, (2) electricity costs to run the computers so they can type it rather than writing it on paper or something, (3) electricity costs to run the computers that allow testing to catch human errors.
Code should be copyrightable, because people take time and effort to make it. Code has value, and that is why people want to patent their techniques or sell their code, but I don't think code has a R&D cost, so I don't see why it makes sense to patent it.
Or maybe I just don't understand patents? I always figured that if a company had to spent a lot of money to figure out how to do something, other people weren't supposed to leech their ideas without having to help pay off the cost. But I don't think code really works that way.
"SCO sues IBM over wild sex" "IBM wild sex brings in millions in revenue" "Here, at CorporateAmerica, we value our wild sex.." "Wild sex is an important lubricant of the computer business world" "It is illegal to steal your employer's wild sex." "After a while, some wild sex falls into public hands" "Without wild sex, life as we know it could not exist." "Ask Slashdot: I don't like people using wild sex. Is there something better than wild sex?" the answer: No.
Sorry... I skimmed through, and my brain threw out that part, because it didn't make much sense at the time. I was thinking of my friend's house-wide A/V system which is just one stream.
Why buy six soundcards when you could buy one soundcard, six transistors, and a handful of wires to connect to the parallel port? Synchronizing six sound cards would be a nightmare, but turning on and off different outputs for one sound source is rather easy.
If this is really the case, a little bit of tweaking (removing something like if(m[0].nAxis == 3)) to either the kernel's PS/2 driver, XFree86, or gpm ought to do the trick.
Let us know how it goes, because I may be doing a very similar setup in the future!:)
Seems some moderators can't tell passionate responses or heated discussion from trolling and flaming:)
There's something about convenience that seems really important to some people... I wouldn't give up my computer either, but I guess I'm not part of the intended market.
Some people may be able to spend $700 on something this small, but I just know that small, delicate electronics are tough to take care of. If it was $300, I wouldn't object so much, because I wouldn't mind spending another $300 if it broke.
Btw, TVs and VCRs used to be a lot easier to fix before the age of solid-state components in everything;)
My point is... the small size isn't a good enough benefit to justify all the problems with having such a small machine.
Consider a modern microprocessor. It is easily replaceable. If it were hard to find replacements for, people would complain about not being able to repair the circuitry inside themselves when their processor fried. When computers were still a rare thing, processors took up entire cabinets, but if any small piece should fail, that individual piece could be repaired or replaced.
Miniaturization brings both benefits and consequences. If these things reach mass production, though, it may not be such a problem. Would you really spend $700 for something that small and hard-to-replace? Dumbass.
Why spend $700 on it, when you could spend $400 on an equally-powered, larger (not as easy to lose, sturdy/rugged), and easier to repair, maintain, and upgrade, system?
Unless these things become as common cell phones, there won't be much point to them, except for some very "sophisticated" businessmen.
Also, what about DNS? If your server name is cartman and its address is annelid2, what about a server whose name is annelid2 whose address is cartman? You'd need to reserve a special character to denote IP addresses, and that means another character that has to be escaped and processed differently in all sorts of programs now. True, the hex-colon notation requires rewrites, but it's much more obvious whether you're writing a hostname or an IP address.
(Hah. thehun is a blessing and also a curse, because there are a million imitators that suck.)
But yeah, for information, there's TONS of stuff out there. I've actually found that the best way to find a really cool page is to start with something specific, punch in a very careful and exact google query, look at the first 10 or 20 hits, and find the one that seems to be the most all-around informative, and bookmark it. If you're really clever, you can categorize your bookmarks, but I'm lazy and I don't (grep is my friend).
PotatoBob: Hey, can I place an order AcmeCoSales: Of course. To where is this being shipped? PotatoBob: 17 Applebrook Lane, Milwaukee AcmeCoSales: What is your order? PotatoBob: One Potato Gun, model XM-4201B AcmeCoSales: Is that everything? PotatoBob: Yes AcmeCoSales: Your total is $134.99 PotatoBob: That can't be right. AcmeCoSales: It is correct. That is the price in our catalog. PotatoBob: No, it's not. AcmeCoSales: Yes, it is. *** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 20% *** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 40% *** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 60% *** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 80% *** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 100% *** User AcmeCoSales has Signed Off.
I love studying languages but I have extreme difficulties commiting words to long-term memory. My vocabulary hasn't grown since I was about 7 or 8 years old; it's a good thing that I had a huge vocabulary for a child of that age.
Can people like me still learn to speak languages fluently? Do we just need more intense experience and practice?
But, on topic, this whole sort of thing is exceptionally cool =) My friend and I designed a 24-bit microprocessor once capable of running a securely multiuser, multiprogramming operating system, but we never built it.... too complicated, too much work, not enough money, not enough time:)
Re:but it's more humane!
on
Chicken Run
·
· Score: 1
Wait, what would the assistant be doing?
Hrmm...
Btw, props to michael for run-lola-run:) Damn great movie!
It may help profiling a bit, though, because it will take focus off of the idea that "blacks and hispanic are more criminal" and instead point to "inner city areas are more criminal" which is ultimately more fair. I think it is much better to say "people from this area tend to do this or this" rather than "people of this ethnicity tend to do this or this." Of course, racists everywhere will surely find relationships between these crime statistics and the distribution of ethnicity and forget that correlation and causation are two different things and that life is a very complex system that is poorly described by simple ideas and simple answers.
Plus, this will help officers know what *kinds* of crimes to be looking out for.
But.. just rambling, as always.
Precrime department
on
Crime Prediction
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Mr. Smith, you will commit a murder tomorrow morning at 2:34 PM. You will murder your wife. We are taking you into our custody now.
But what about... Mr. Smith, you will break free from our custody tomorrow and attack a security guard in the process. Thus, we are taking you into our custody now.
I like paradoxes, but not when they're amber. I like paradoxes, even though my name's not Bamber.
RTF can't do everything DOC can do, so it's really not compatible. Plus, ideally, the source code to the converter could be released in a *highly* obfuscated format compilable under any POSIX/ANSI system, or if that's not good enough, stripped binaries could be made available that would require very little operating system functionality (all functionality needed would be well-documented), meaning they could be run under some sort of free emulator. For example, ReactOS on FreeDOS on Bochs running MS-DOC2RTF.EXE or some such, with network emulation to talk to a fake samba server on a virtual network that would let it access local files. It would be klunky and slow, but it would work, and it would always let you get your data. I'm not so sure about requirements (a) and (c) but (b) sounds good to me.
Slashdot Mirror
But you don't need vision to use most web services. Using vision to drive a car is common sense. Using vision to communicate through email (it's friggin TEXT) is... uhh....
What you would think if passing your calculus class required turning you to pass an advanced spelling test? If getting hired for a programming job meant you had to learn to pick your nose and fling it? If UPS required your mother to be drug-tested so you could send a package? Or if an e-mail service made you decrypt some visual obfuscation in order to use their system?
It's not about having things handed to you. Duh. A grown-up blind person will realize he/she is not going to be able to drive a car. But to tell someone that, because they can't see, they can't use e-mail? Sure, you could always go to another service, but what happens when all of the free services are doing this, and all of the services which don't do this vision exam require you to pay? That's discrimination. How about if I charge you more to eat dinner, just because of your gender, or your hair color?
Plus, the problem with these obfuscated letters and stuff is that it makes using robots to sign up for online services more difficult, since you have to write more code to decypher these images, but neural networks can be good at filtering out noise. (Shhh!)
Those are more mathematical problems than software things, though, I would say. But, I don't think math should be patented, either... it's really too noble of a thing to be burdened by marketplace dynamics.
Something really bothers me about software patents, but I'm not sure what.
Is it that computer technology is a new generation every 2 years? Is it that I feel there is usually only one "right" way for software to do something, so patenting that way means that we simply will not have an alternative to some commercial software? (What do you guys think of patenting linked lists?) Is it because I feel software (except for some very specialized packages marketed to businesses) should not cost money?
Am I worried about software patents being too broad? Will the patent office know that you shouldn't grant a patent for "message passing between kernel and userspace," but maybe a patent for "employing such-and-such prioritizing queue with such-and-such algorithm for message passing between such-and-such sections of a such-and-such type of kernel and a multiprogramming userspace" would be OK? Or would that even be OK?
Code is terribly easy to produce, costs nothing, and doesn't need to be tested (Computers are extremely predictable machines, if built properly.
In fact, if you are a careful coder, you can be 99% sure your code will work on the first try, and never have problems.). There is really no R&D cost associated with code, other than (1) paying the people who write it, (2) electricity costs to run the computers so they can type it rather than writing it on paper or something, (3) electricity costs to run the computers that allow testing to catch human errors.
Code should be copyrightable, because people take time and effort to make it. Code has value, and that is why people want to patent their techniques or sell their code, but I don't think code has a R&D cost, so I don't see why it makes sense to patent it.
Or maybe I just don't understand patents? I always figured that if a company had to spent a lot of money to figure out how to do something, other people weren't supposed to leech their ideas without having to help pay off the cost. But I don't think code really works that way.
You could call it "wild sex"!
"SCO sues IBM over wild sex"
"IBM wild sex brings in millions in revenue"
"Here, at CorporateAmerica, we value our wild sex.."
"Wild sex is an important lubricant of the computer business world"
"It is illegal to steal your employer's wild sex."
"After a while, some wild sex falls into public hands"
"Without wild sex, life as we know it could not exist."
"Ask Slashdot: I don't like people using wild sex. Is there something better than wild sex?" the answer: No.
Sorry... I skimmed through, and my brain threw out that part, because it didn't make much sense at the time. I was thinking of my friend's house-wide A/V system which is just one stream.
:)
OK, I take it back. Ignore my post
Why buy six soundcards when you could buy one soundcard, six transistors, and a handful of wires to connect to the parallel port? Synchronizing six sound cards would be a nightmare, but turning on and off different outputs for one sound source is rather easy.
As soon as you can have *real* cybersex, these things will skyrocket in popularity.
If this is really the case, a little bit of tweaking (removing something like if(m[0].nAxis == 3)) to either the kernel's PS/2 driver, XFree86, or gpm ought to do the trick.
:)
Let us know how it goes, because I may be doing a very similar setup in the future!
Seems some moderators can't tell passionate responses or heated discussion from trolling and flaming :)
;)
There's something about convenience that seems really important to some people... I wouldn't give up my computer either, but I guess I'm not part of the intended market.
Some people may be able to spend $700 on something this small, but I just know that small, delicate electronics are tough to take care of. If it was $300, I wouldn't object so much, because I wouldn't mind spending another $300 if it broke.
Btw, TVs and VCRs used to be a lot easier to fix before the age of solid-state components in everything
My point is... the small size isn't a good enough benefit to justify all the problems with having such a small machine.
Consider a modern microprocessor. It is easily replaceable. If it were hard to find replacements for, people would complain about not being able to repair the circuitry inside themselves when their processor fried. When computers were still a rare thing, processors took up entire cabinets, but if any small piece should fail, that individual piece could be repaired or replaced.
Miniaturization brings both benefits and consequences. If these things reach mass production, though, it may not be such a problem. Would you really spend $700 for something that small and hard-to-replace? Dumbass.
Why spend $700 on it, when you could spend $400 on an equally-powered, larger (not as easy to lose, sturdy/rugged), and easier to repair, maintain, and upgrade, system?
Unless these things become as common cell phones, there won't be much point to them, except for some very "sophisticated" businessmen.
Kid: Mom, what happens when I unplug the Nintendo from that funny-looking box and plug it into a normal socket?
Mom: Shit.
(Please see: http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/
These are the words of the dark lord Sauron.
Sorry for being incredibly OT.)
SCO = Salty, chewy, and objectionable. Like badly-cooked calamari.
Also, what about DNS? If your server name is cartman and its address is annelid2, what about a server whose name is annelid2 whose address is cartman? You'd need to reserve a special character to denote IP addresses, and that means another character that has to be escaped and processed differently in all sorts of programs now. True, the hex-colon notation requires rewrites, but it's much more obvious whether you're writing a hostname or an IP address.
(Hah. thehun is a blessing and also a curse, because there are a million imitators that suck.)
But yeah, for information, there's TONS of stuff out there. I've actually found that the best way to find a really cool page is to start with something specific, punch in a very careful and exact google query, look at the first 10 or 20 hits, and find the one that seems to be the most all-around informative, and bookmark it. If you're really clever, you can categorize your bookmarks, but I'm lazy and I don't (grep is my friend).
Hence, "What technological advances would be required?"
Basically, we need an undefeatable system where nobody can screw with anybody else's data. Quantum encryption may be the first step...
So where will this tax go, exactly? State-sponsored exercise programs for gamers?
How will they determine who gets admitted? A short vocabulary quiz with things like "frag", "gg", "lag", "bfg" ?
Also, wouldn't this be burning bad karma and burning fat at the same time?
PotatoBob: Hey, can I place an order
AcmeCoSales: Of course. To where is this being shipped?
PotatoBob: 17 Applebrook Lane, Milwaukee
AcmeCoSales: What is your order?
PotatoBob: One Potato Gun, model XM-4201B
AcmeCoSales: Is that everything?
PotatoBob: Yes
AcmeCoSales: Your total is $134.99
PotatoBob: That can't be right.
AcmeCoSales: It is correct. That is the price in our catalog.
PotatoBob: No, it's not.
AcmeCoSales: Yes, it is.
*** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 20%
*** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 40%
*** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 60%
*** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 80%
*** You have warned user AcmeCoSales. His/her warning level is now 100%
*** User AcmeCoSales has Signed Off.
I love studying languages but I have extreme difficulties commiting words to long-term memory. My vocabulary hasn't grown since I was about 7 or 8 years old; it's a good thing that I had a huge vocabulary for a child of that age.
:)
Can people like me still learn to speak languages fluently? Do we just need more intense experience and practice?
But, on topic, this whole sort of thing is exceptionally cool =) My friend and I designed a 24-bit microprocessor once capable of running a securely multiuser, multiprogramming operating system, but we never built it.... too complicated, too much work, not enough money, not enough time
Wait, what would the assistant be doing?
:) Damn great movie!
Hrmm...
Btw, props to michael for run-lola-run
It may help profiling a bit, though, because it will take focus off of the idea that "blacks and hispanic are more criminal" and instead point to "inner city areas are more criminal" which is ultimately more fair. I think it is much better to say "people from this area tend to do this or this" rather than "people of this ethnicity tend to do this or this." Of course, racists everywhere will surely find relationships between these crime statistics and the distribution of ethnicity and forget that correlation and causation are two different things and that life is a very complex system that is poorly described by simple ideas and simple answers.
Plus, this will help officers know what *kinds* of crimes to be looking out for.
But.. just rambling, as always.
Mr. Smith, you will commit a murder tomorrow morning at 2:34 PM. You will murder your wife. We are taking you into our custody now.
But what about...
Mr. Smith, you will break free from our custody tomorrow and attack a security guard in the process. Thus, we are taking you into our custody now.
I like paradoxes, but not when they're amber.
I like paradoxes, even though my name's not Bamber.
RTF can't do everything DOC can do, so it's really not compatible. Plus, ideally, the source code to the converter could be released in a *highly* obfuscated format compilable under any POSIX/ANSI system, or if that's not good enough, stripped binaries could be made available that would require very little operating system functionality (all functionality needed would be well-documented), meaning they could be run under some sort of free emulator. For example, ReactOS on FreeDOS on Bochs running MS-DOC2RTF.EXE or some such, with network emulation to talk to a fake samba server on a virtual network that would let it access local files. It would be klunky and slow, but it would work, and it would always let you get your data. I'm not so sure about requirements (a) and (c) but (b) sounds good to me.
How else would you eval something :)
Depending on the time period:
"Is it IBM? If not, you're fired." or "Is it IBM? If so, you're fired."
A "gb" is a groucho bit.
There are 10^30 * 8 * 2^30 grouchobits in a gibibyte.