The summary describes TiVo as kind of a glorified cable box. However I believe (from personal experience) that TiVo's greatest feature is that it lets you cut the cable altogether. TiVo can act as a DVR for your antenna -- a feature that is a reason many stay with cable nowadays -- and supplements free, local programming with thousands of on-demand shows over the internet. I am over 25 miles from the nearest TV transmitter and I can still receive dozens of local channels with excellent quality and better reliability than satellite.
I no longer pay outrageous cable or satellite bills. I installed a rooftop antenna that, including amplifier, antenna, and mounting hardware, cost less than a once month subscription to my satellite provider. If you are dissatisfied with cable/satellite pricing, programs, and paying to be advertised to, then stop paying them!
Works for salaried employees in a different way. My company gives me 5 days of sick time per year, no questions asked. But I have doctors appointments, and I have young kids, and I have a wife with a chronic illness.
Company policy is that every hour out of the office that is not officially sick or vacation time must be made up by the end of the week. This results in me having to put in 11 hour days while still sick just to meet my weekly 40-hour requirement, saving the sick time for when my son needed surgery or my wife was admitted to the hospital for a week.
What amazes me is the things which weren't predicted.
Look to the authors to find better predictions. Greg Bear predicted the future of the internet and media fairly well in Queen of Angels in 1990, and William Gibson actually invented the term "Cyberspace" (not to mention the entire cyberpunk genre) in 1984 with his novel Neuromancer.
It's an app from the ACLU which lets you one-touch photograph or video an event and upload it to a secure location. (There is also plenty of useful information and now-what guides for interacting with police, laywers, an arrest, etc.) A very useful app [that I did not write].
Spread the word. Get the eyes watching the watchers.
Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war?
Because people buy the stuff they make (I dunno who, but their top-line stuff makes money somehow), and because, once they've replaced it with something newer and better, the price drops fast so the rest of us can build a nice, inexpensive gaming machine.
I can't believe people would be willing to do this.
I can think of plenty of industries where this is already done to some degree -- a Google maps integration would likely only help things. A few examples:
National Park Service rangers (often using radios, at the moment)
The trucking/shipping industry (OmniTRACS and the like)
Utility work (dunno... GPS?)
Large scale mining/quarry/construction work (again, radios)
Medical, security, and service at amusement parks (again, radios -- I've done this, it's pretty important to be able to know where person X or the guy with Y equipment is at any time)
And plenty more, I'm sure. In many cases, these employees are already given a work radio or phone to keep in contact. I doubt that most of these employees take their radios home, why would they take home their company phones?
I know people are worried about scope creep and big brother and the like, but this isn't as groundbreaking as it seems. Employers have had the ability to call you at home for a long time, now, and company vehicles are often very well tracked, yet most of us don't worry about our boss watching us sleep.
Did you actually look at the product description? It is an excellent example of Google organizing, compiling, and putting in one easy to use place information that most businesses already use to operate day-to-day. The groundbreaking feature is Google's ability to process the data...... just take a look.
So those parents send their kids to US schools to avoid a curriculum focused too much on rote memorization?
How many Chinese nationals do you know? Having gone to a university with a large contingent of non-U.S.-citizens, I can tell you that these American schools really are valued for their ability to educate beyond memorization tasks. I have heard many such stories from those who have come here to study.
And it extends into the high school realm, as well. The city where I grew up was quite popular for immigrants due to the low cost of living coupled with good jobs in the medical and engineering fields. As a result, I had many friends who had gone to school in Russia, Latvia, Moldova, China, etc. before moving here. There were many who had their multiplication tables memorized well ahead of me, or could name every country in Europe or Africa, but I heard again and again how much even these high-school-age students recognized the quality of the education they were receiving in this public school.
We have had 0 people in wheel chairs come through. It's all a waste.
One does not need a wheel chair to be considered handicapped. In fact, there are a great many conditions and illnesses that are invisible to the average observer that could still make it quite difficult to walk the extra distance, compared to your average Joe.
I have quite a bit of exposure to this, as my wife works with the National Marfan Foundation. People with Marfan may just look a bit taller than average, but have plenty of hidden issues from reduced lung volume to heart valve leakage to aortic distension to a number of CHD's which combine to leave them quite breathless and near collapse after physical exertion that wouldn't make most people break a sweat.
Now, it is not impossible for them to make it across the parking lot from a distant parking space (in most cases, at least). But if you base your determination of handicap-accessibility-need based on whether or not someone can walk at all, you are missing the point. The ADA requirements are meant to give a break and a helping hand to people who have great difficulty doing what you and I can do every day.
Well. You had a good point there until you turned into a troll. Try leaving off the unnecessary flaming, next time, and more people will hear and listen to your valid point.
And now this kid has gone one better than the tall tale, actually living inside the corporate complex of a major tech company.
I guess it's the "major tech company" part that makes this shocking, right?
Where I went to grad school, it wasn't uncommon to have at least a few students living (and I mean with their sleeping bags, pizza boxes, toiletries, etc.) in a lab or storage room for long periods of time -- months or more -- in lieu of paying the high rent near campus. There were always the whispered stories of x student being caught trying to wash himself in the chemical safety shower or y post-doc who finally ran afoul of faculty after using his office as his kitchen.
oltage against high resistance is known to produce large amounts of heat (that's how stove plates work)
No, not quite. Power dissipated (in this case the "heat") is V^2/R. Higher resistance means less power. Stove elements work by putting mains voltage across a fairly low resistance, causing plenty of current, power, and heat. In actuality, 110 Vrms is not enough to produce much in the way of a burn.
Now, you are correct about the bloodstream being a good conductor. It is quite rare that a live wire will directly contact the bloodstream, though -- but it does not need to. The resistance of human skin is non-linear, and is actually lower at higher voltages. Additionally, there is plenty of capacitance involved in the body's circuit*, meaning that the full impedance at 60 Hz is lower than just the DC resistance. If there is a route through the heart, and the "let-go threshold" has been exceeded, then even 110 V can be deadly -- no burns necessary.
*The human body model capacitance is only 150 pF, but this represents the body's capacitance to the outside world. The actual capacitance through a narrow layer of skin is many orders of magnitude higher, though I can't get a good source for the actual value.
Yeah... the group that applauds this man and the group that wanted punishment for the mother are not the same. In fact, they are generally quite opposed to each other.
Are hackers just evil and nefarious and out to hurt people in the hospital for the lulz? I doubt it.
Well, two issues, here. First, you seem to be assuming "hacker" roughly equates to "guy who messes with computer-stuff for the heck of it". There most certainly are hackers/crackers (depending on your preferred use of the term) who harm people and systems, sometimes for money, sometimes for fame, sometimes for fun.
Aside from that, a hacked medical device makes for a really easy way to kill someone from a moderate distance and leave very little trace of whodunit. And I'm not even going to begin to consider all the reasons a person may have for wanting to kill, or even simply extort via credible death threats.
It's not limited to hospitals, either. I have Type I Diabetes (the autoimmune strikes-randomly and needs-insulin-to-survive type) and so I always wear an insulin pump jacked into my abdomen. In the pump, there is an insulin cartridge which contains a large reservoir of insulin -- injecting 1/20th of the reservoir could kill me if I'm not treated quite quickly. Injecting the whole thing is a death sentence if I'm not already in a hospital bed and hooked up to an IV. The kicker is that the device has RF access, and is likely hackable. I have turned off the RF from day one (partially due to the battery drain, partially due to my worries of a possible hack or mis-delivery) and sacrificed some of the pump's features, but most pump users will not do this.
It's a glaring vulnerability in a life-or-death system.
You can't tear someone open every month when you need to adjust their insulin pump.
I understand your point, but... As a user of an insulin pump myself, I'd like to clarify that it is an external device, usually carried on the belt or in a pocket, as it needs to be refilled every few days and adjusted quite often. There are implantable insulin pumps in existence, but these are primarily for research purposes, and are not commercial devices to treat diabetes.
although that's really a church by church decision.
I'd say region by region, rather than it being driven by denomination. I was going to a church in Los Altos (not far from Google Headquarters) in 2008, and smartphones were the medium of choice for following along in the scriptures. First iPhones and later the G1 when it debuted...
Fast forward two years, and I moved to Fremont, about 15 miles counterclockwise around the bay. In church there, one day, I pulled out my HTC phone and and was met with questioning stares. I raised a question about a scripture and was asked "Wait, you can read the Bible on that thing?"
Different regions, different people, same church, different attitudes toward a great many things -- technology included.
The "diseases of civilization" (heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, alzheimers), are all variants of chronically elevated insulin levels, which, fun fact, is caused by excess carbohydrate consumption.
Not quite. I'll give you one out of five (diabetes -- and that's only Type II. Type I is entirely autoimmune and is not caused by insulin levels, diet, etc.). As for the rest...
Heart disease? Limited hardening of the arteries can occur due to high blood glucose levels, but this manifests in the extremities, not the heart. More important is the progressive age-related thickening, combined with the buildup of the cholesterol plaques which cause heart disease. Note that the American Heart Association states that low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets such as the Atkins diet actually increase the risk of heart disease.
Cancer? So many different causes are known, from viral to radiation-related chromosomal damage to genetics to potential telomere issues... Insulin? It seems odd that our body would produce a carcinogen. I've never heard of this before, got any references?
Obesity? Calories are calories, and they make you gain weight. It is certainly cheaper to eat a high-carbohydrate diet than it is to eat a high-fat/high-protein diet, but the diet is a cause of high insulin levels, not an effect of them.
Alzheimer's? Where did you get this one? Alzheimer's is caused by the brain failing to properly cut and fold its own proteins, creating plaques that travel throughout the brain and destroy neurons. In fact, research shows that Alzheimer's patients have reduced levels of insulin in the cerebrospinal fluid. There has been quitea bitof research on this horrible disease posted to Slashdot recently,
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Okay, so where do you draw the line? Welfare? An unemployment check while looking for a new job? Social Security that they themselves paid taxes for for years?
Can people not vote if they drive on public roads, because they'll probably just support the government spending more money to fix up their roads and improve traffic conditions, which is unfair to all of us non-road-users? Or what about tax-supported public universities? Especially the bright kids who receive scholarships -- that's just a bare bones government handout, right?
but wasn't Paul (or one of the anonymous authors writing under the Paul psuedonym) responsible for the decree that priests of the Catholic Church be celibate in order to focus their energies on God?
In the context of the rest of the epistle (i.e. letter), the advice is being given to missionaries, basically. I.e. when you are out travelling and spreading the word, don't also be running around trying to hook up with the locals -- it kind of messes with the message you are trying to teach. Do that before or after, not during.
It's generally thought that Paul himself was a widower when he left on his travels, as marriage was a prerequisite for his pre-conversion status as a Pharisee.
Slashdot Mirror
The summary describes TiVo as kind of a glorified cable box. However I believe (from personal experience) that TiVo's greatest feature is that it lets you cut the cable altogether. TiVo can act as a DVR for your antenna -- a feature that is a reason many stay with cable nowadays -- and supplements free, local programming with thousands of on-demand shows over the internet. I am over 25 miles from the nearest TV transmitter and I can still receive dozens of local channels with excellent quality and better reliability than satellite.
I no longer pay outrageous cable or satellite bills. I installed a rooftop antenna that, including amplifier, antenna, and mounting hardware, cost less than a once month subscription to my satellite provider. If you are dissatisfied with cable/satellite pricing, programs, and paying to be advertised to, then stop paying them!
No one wants to work on christmas eve because they got sick earlier in the year.
*sigh*
Yup, I'll be back at work on December 26th.
Works for salaried employees in a different way. My company gives me 5 days of sick time per year, no questions asked. But I have doctors appointments, and I have young kids, and I have a wife with a chronic illness.
Company policy is that every hour out of the office that is not officially sick or vacation time must be made up by the end of the week. This results in me having to put in 11 hour days while still sick just to meet my weekly 40-hour requirement, saving the sick time for when my son needed surgery or my wife was admitted to the hospital for a week.
Sad that most of Slashdot is against it because of the colour of their ties.
Have you been reading the same comments that I have? As I'm not quite certain where you discovered that most everybody opposes it...
What amazes me is the things which weren't predicted.
Look to the authors to find better predictions. Greg Bear predicted the future of the internet and media fairly well in Queen of Angels in 1990, and William Gibson actually invented the term "Cyberspace" (not to mention the entire cyberpunk genre) in 1984 with his novel Neuromancer.
Riiiight. I was wondering how War Mammoths fit into your master plan of altering reality.
Do you realize what this means?
Given sufficient time and mana, we could simulate a game of Magic within a game of Magic!
Vaguely related
This: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406764,00.asp
It's an app from the ACLU which lets you one-touch photograph or video an event and upload it to a secure location. (There is also plenty of useful information and now-what guides for interacting with police, laywers, an arrest, etc.) A very useful app [that I did not write].
Spread the word. Get the eyes watching the watchers.
Okay, I watched the clips. I saw the before and after pictures.
And I didn't see the faintest hint of resemblance. Am I the only one?
Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war?
Because people buy the stuff they make (I dunno who, but their top-line stuff makes money somehow), and because, once they've replaced it with something newer and better, the price drops fast so the rest of us can build a nice, inexpensive gaming machine.
I can't believe people would be willing to do this.
I can think of plenty of industries where this is already done to some degree -- a Google maps integration would likely only help things. A few examples:
National Park Service rangers (often using radios, at the moment) The trucking/shipping industry (OmniTRACS and the like) Utility work (dunno... GPS?) Large scale mining/quarry/construction work (again, radios) Medical, security, and service at amusement parks (again, radios -- I've done this, it's pretty important to be able to know where person X or the guy with Y equipment is at any time)And plenty more, I'm sure. In many cases, these employees are already given a work radio or phone to keep in contact. I doubt that most of these employees take their radios home, why would they take home their company phones?
... just take a look.
I know people are worried about scope creep and big brother and the like, but this isn't as groundbreaking as it seems. Employers have had the ability to call you at home for a long time, now, and company vehicles are often very well tracked, yet most of us don't worry about our boss watching us sleep.
Did you actually look at the product description? It is an excellent example of Google organizing, compiling, and putting in one easy to use place information that most businesses already use to operate day-to-day. The groundbreaking feature is Google's ability to process the data...
So those parents send their kids to US schools to avoid a curriculum focused too much on rote memorization?
How many Chinese nationals do you know? Having gone to a university with a large contingent of non-U.S.-citizens, I can tell you that these American schools really are valued for their ability to educate beyond memorization tasks. I have heard many such stories from those who have come here to study.
And it extends into the high school realm, as well. The city where I grew up was quite popular for immigrants due to the low cost of living coupled with good jobs in the medical and engineering fields. As a result, I had many friends who had gone to school in Russia, Latvia, Moldova, China, etc. before moving here. There were many who had their multiplication tables memorized well ahead of me, or could name every country in Europe or Africa, but I heard again and again how much even these high-school-age students recognized the quality of the education they were receiving in this public school.
At the very least you must surely have MoO2 or Master of Magic.
Whelp. There goes my next few weeks.
We have had 0 people in wheel chairs come through. It's all a waste.
One does not need a wheel chair to be considered handicapped. In fact, there are a great many conditions and illnesses that are invisible to the average observer that could still make it quite difficult to walk the extra distance, compared to your average Joe.
I have quite a bit of exposure to this, as my wife works with the National Marfan Foundation. People with Marfan may just look a bit taller than average, but have plenty of hidden issues from reduced lung volume to heart valve leakage to aortic distension to a number of CHD's which combine to leave them quite breathless and near collapse after physical exertion that wouldn't make most people break a sweat.
Now, it is not impossible for them to make it across the parking lot from a distant parking space (in most cases, at least). But if you base your determination of handicap-accessibility-need based on whether or not someone can walk at all, you are missing the point. The ADA requirements are meant to give a break and a helping hand to people who have great difficulty doing what you and I can do every day.
Well. You had a good point there until you turned into a troll. Try leaving off the unnecessary flaming, next time, and more people will hear and listen to your valid point.
And now this kid has gone one better than the tall tale, actually living inside the corporate complex of a major tech company.
I guess it's the "major tech company" part that makes this shocking, right?
Where I went to grad school, it wasn't uncommon to have at least a few students living (and I mean with their sleeping bags, pizza boxes, toiletries, etc.) in a lab or storage room for long periods of time -- months or more -- in lieu of paying the high rent near campus. There were always the whispered stories of x student being caught trying to wash himself in the chemical safety shower or y post-doc who finally ran afoul of faculty after using his office as his kitchen.
oltage against high resistance is known to produce large amounts of heat (that's how stove plates work)
No, not quite. Power dissipated (in this case the "heat") is V^2/R. Higher resistance means less power. Stove elements work by putting mains voltage across a fairly low resistance, causing plenty of current, power, and heat. In actuality, 110 Vrms is not enough to produce much in the way of a burn.
Now, you are correct about the bloodstream being a good conductor. It is quite rare that a live wire will directly contact the bloodstream, though -- but it does not need to. The resistance of human skin is non-linear, and is actually lower at higher voltages. Additionally, there is plenty of capacitance involved in the body's circuit*, meaning that the full impedance at 60 Hz is lower than just the DC resistance. If there is a route through the heart, and the "let-go threshold" has been exceeded, then even 110 V can be deadly -- no burns necessary.
*The human body model capacitance is only 150 pF, but this represents the body's capacitance to the outside world. The actual capacitance through a narrow layer of skin is many orders of magnitude higher, though I can't get a good source for the actual value.
How American...
Differing points of view? Well, yes, actually.
Are hackers just evil and nefarious and out to hurt people in the hospital for the lulz? I doubt it.
Well, two issues, here. First, you seem to be assuming "hacker" roughly equates to "guy who messes with computer-stuff for the heck of it". There most certainly are hackers/crackers (depending on your preferred use of the term) who harm people and systems, sometimes for money, sometimes for fame, sometimes for fun.
Aside from that, a hacked medical device makes for a really easy way to kill someone from a moderate distance and leave very little trace of whodunit. And I'm not even going to begin to consider all the reasons a person may have for wanting to kill, or even simply extort via credible death threats.
It's not limited to hospitals, either. I have Type I Diabetes (the autoimmune strikes-randomly and needs-insulin-to-survive type) and so I always wear an insulin pump jacked into my abdomen. In the pump, there is an insulin cartridge which contains a large reservoir of insulin -- injecting 1/20th of the reservoir could kill me if I'm not treated quite quickly. Injecting the whole thing is a death sentence if I'm not already in a hospital bed and hooked up to an IV. The kicker is that the device has RF access, and is likely hackable. I have turned off the RF from day one (partially due to the battery drain, partially due to my worries of a possible hack or mis-delivery) and sacrificed some of the pump's features, but most pump users will not do this.
It's a glaring vulnerability in a life-or-death system.
You can't tear someone open every month when you need to adjust their insulin pump.
I understand your point, but... As a user of an insulin pump myself, I'd like to clarify that it is an external device, usually carried on the belt or in a pocket, as it needs to be refilled every few days and adjusted quite often. There are implantable insulin pumps in existence, but these are primarily for research purposes, and are not commercial devices to treat diabetes.
although that's really a church by church decision.
I'd say region by region, rather than it being driven by denomination. I was going to a church in Los Altos (not far from Google Headquarters) in 2008, and smartphones were the medium of choice for following along in the scriptures. First iPhones and later the G1 when it debuted...
Fast forward two years, and I moved to Fremont, about 15 miles counterclockwise around the bay. In church there, one day, I pulled out my HTC phone and and was met with questioning stares. I raised a question about a scripture and was asked "Wait, you can read the Bible on that thing?"
Different regions, different people, same church, different attitudes toward a great many things -- technology included.
Hey there now. You should really put a warning on a link that contains that much concentrated smugness.
The "diseases of civilization" (heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, alzheimers), are all variants of chronically elevated insulin levels, which, fun fact, is caused by excess carbohydrate consumption.
Not quite. I'll give you one out of five (diabetes -- and that's only Type II. Type I is entirely autoimmune and is not caused by insulin levels, diet, etc.). As for the rest...
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Okay, so where do you draw the line? Welfare? An unemployment check while looking for a new job? Social Security that they themselves paid taxes for for years?
Can people not vote if they drive on public roads, because they'll probably just support the government spending more money to fix up their roads and improve traffic conditions, which is unfair to all of us non-road-users? Or what about tax-supported public universities? Especially the bright kids who receive scholarships -- that's just a bare bones government handout, right?
but wasn't Paul (or one of the anonymous authors writing under the Paul psuedonym) responsible for the decree that priests of the Catholic Church be celibate in order to focus their energies on God?
In the context of the rest of the epistle (i.e. letter), the advice is being given to missionaries, basically. I.e. when you are out travelling and spreading the word, don't also be running around trying to hook up with the locals -- it kind of messes with the message you are trying to teach. Do that before or after, not during.
It's generally thought that Paul himself was a widower when he left on his travels, as marriage was a prerequisite for his pre-conversion status as a Pharisee.