Google has announced and given some examples of their new Flash based ads. They seem to vary from average size to full screen-width Flash advertisements, with some interactive abilities. 'Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds, images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both. Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google(TM) content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. Oh my god those are beautiful. Just beautiful. Whole new products I never wanted to hear anything about done in a new artsy kind of way. Exclusive interviews with bands that I've never heard of or cared about or allowed commercial radio to shove down my throat brought right to my computer screen... without even asking! And the band is trying to sell me a hybrid car!
So tell me, when I'm trying to use MySpace to reply to a distant friend & my browser slows to a crawl because there's five flash video advertisements of a lonely girl on a webcam waiting to talk to me--that's the kind of experience you want to proliferate through to every site using Google Ads?
How will this affect people on slow connections like out in the boonies operating on a 56k phone line connection? I'm kind of afraid those users are just going to be squished & that Google will leave it to the sites themselves to figure that out while the sites themselves will expect Google to take care of it.
Wait, did you hear that? I believe that was the sound of every single router and switch crying out in anguish.
Ads that are designed to appeal to my eye & take up obnoxious amounts of bandwidth? It must be... THE FUTURE!
In all seriousness, this is all very bad news to me. A bloated delivery system (by definition it must be since it provides 'content rich' functionality) being forced to a large percent of the internet in the name of delivery unsolicited advertisement. And it's all legal and--get this--is unveiled like it's a new great feature.
The simple concept of character based content delivery system is dead.
...it is recirculated once the book goes out of print; many books have the same ISBN but only one in print book at a time can use it. One minor correction, from ISBN.org, I found:
ISBN CAN NEVER BE REUSED: Once an ISBN is assigned to a title, it CANNOT BE REASSIGNED even if the title goes out of print. In addition to being an order fulfillment tool, the ISBN is a bibliographic element in cataloging. It is printed on catalog cards, in catalogs and entered in national and international databases. So it always has to be the same book, it's never 'recycled.'
...The fact that the lawyer, killed on Niko's first mission, would bring up video games, makes it clearly a reference to me... And the fact that Niko is a regular guy just looking to make some money & very eager to kill a certain lawyer to start off his career makes it clearly a reference to me!
Can I join you in this suit, Jack? Perhaps a class action lawsuit? I'll meet you in your office tomorrow at noon using methods of subterfuge... er I mean when you invite me up to discuss this lawsuit.
What was your address again? "The magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane?" It's so very hard to remember when you're all over the road.
P.S. I hope the president has gotten back to you about your appeal to him. Your entertainment is endless & I highly value it, it would be a shame to have men in clean white suits censoring your communications to the outside world. Truly, it would.
For those of you who bought SCOX stock in hopes that they would win this case, you had better sell it. In the past 20 minutes, it has dropped from $0.66 to $0.37 cents (and still is dropping).
We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations. Would you care to list those products, support & services?
According to your market data your net income was a $16.6 million loss. And when your total revenue was under $30 million, you really shouldn't even try to keep operating. Why is this Chapter 11? I guess it's going to come down to one unkillable lawyer with SCO tattooed on his chest. At that point, we'll have to call an exorcist.
Well yes and no. I mean, the fact is: Google's existence and success required Microsoft to have been successful previously to create the platform that allowed them to go on and connect people to their search servers. Translation: There were no other operating systems before us. Networking did not exist. Microsoft is GOD. Everything that happens from this point on only happens because we allowed it, we are the original creator, the original thought vector of computing itself. We are the beginning & the end--the Alpha & the Omega! *eyes roll back up into head as lightening strikes in the background*
Now, Microsoft's business is not to control the platform per se, but in fact to allow it to be exploited by the world's developers. The fact that we have it out there gives us a good business, but in some ways it doesn't give us an advantage over any of the other developers in terms of being able to utilise it. Translation: Microsoft maintains a symbiosis with malware developers. Alongside that, we give away free software to universities so that students use it. Then we charge hundreds of dollars for an individual to program the.NET framework. It's free to get the framework's runtime environment on your machine (like Java) but in order to develop anything useful for it, you have to pay us money (unlike Java). In 'some ways' (which I won't list) other developers have an advantage over us because they aren't closed minded to other technologies. Also, we will define standards and strong arm them into the community or make it look like the community made the decision to accept them. Then we will charge you money to develop for them. Remember, we want you to exploit our platform so in the end we can exploit your dependence on us. It's a standard bait and switch procedure. Something looks free then we step in and reveal the cost once you're dependent on it.
For example, as much as our Virtual Earth product uses a lot of local 3D rendering technology, so does Google Earth. So I think there will be other ways in which we distinguish ourselves and where our knowledge of the platform and ability to continually evolve it, will be a business advantage for us. Translation: Remember when we copied Google in the whole mapping and Google Earth thing? Yeah, that was actually totally our idea. I don't recall who came first but I'm certain it was Microsoft. What we'll probably do is use our income in other markets to make sure that nobody ever hears about things like NASA's World Wind again. Remember how we lost money on the XBox? Doesn't matter! And we'll lose money on Virtual Earth too if we have to. It's really too bad Google is doing the same thing because we could have totally been making bank off of Virtual Earth from day one if there wasn't a free alternative. It's all a game to see who can get the most developers hooked first, we'll see where it goes from there.
It is just the difference between being part of the infrastructure of the internet as well as competing directly in the service or client capability as well. Translation: Microsoft is bigger than Jesus.
--
I think this article should have been filed under "It's Funny, Laugh" as the notion that Microsoft 'laid the foundation' for anything is humorous. Did this man ever stop and consider that technology and advancements in networking or bandwidth made Google possible? That the early Google founders themselves may have had something to do with their fate? This was more of a marketing pitch than an interview.
I think someone should point out to this man that simply because Microsoft became successful doesn't mean that another technology wouldn't have risen to fill the same gap.
Like my father always told me, there ain't no shame in being humble. I think Microsoft is forgetting that humility is a virtue & if they continue to talk like they're the savior of man then they're never going to fix the flaws that plague them. This is the classic example of business tactics & marketing trumping technology & progress.
As many know, I am anti-copyright to begin with, but I wonder why Knight isn't setting up to sue VH1 for "stealing" "his" content and rebroadcasting it. Probably because his assertion that they stole his content is just as laughable as their assertion that he stole their content. Unless they showed the whole thing, there is this concept of 'fair use' and, I'm sorry to inform you, it applies to companies as well as individuals.
If you make your own little film & a company releases snippets of it on their station with commentary (exactly what happened here), they should be protected just as you would be if you took 30 seconds worth of film from a Tom Cruise movie and over dubbed it with hilarious Scientology remarks at opportune times.
Not only did they take his content, but they also attempted to defend his content via the (fraudulent) DMCA and call it their own. I think you should really read up on this. He can counter sue for the damages incurred from them demanding he take it down, maybe even cover his time and any legal fees he had but nothing more than that. And it would be awful hard for him to define a missing video on his YouTube site in terms of dollars.
From the Faq:
15. How much do you think it will cost for a rover to get to the Moon and sustain itself throughout the competition?
Traditionally, prizes have encouraged people to invest a wide range of resources. Lindbergh was one of few to spend less than the prize amount during the Orteig prize--others, like Admiral Byrd, spent nearly $100,000, or four times the $25,000 prize value. It has been reported that Mojave Aerospace Ventures spent significantly more than the $10 million purse to win the Ansari X PRIZE. Teams are willing to spend more than the prize value, as they get to keep their intellectual property and capitalize on it. In the case of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, we expect some teams to be willing to spend more than the value of the prize. Other teams may be able to complete the mission at or below the value of the Grand Prize purse. I don't think comparing the prize reward from a 1919 prize award of flying from Paris to NYC is accurate. I mean, people had already been flying. How many people put things into orbit, much less on the moon?
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million. Granted you're only expected to send one and it's only to the moon, NASA does already have the infrastructure & experienced personel to do this. Even an 1/8 of that cost is 3 times the prize money.
Add the requirements of a 500 meter 'rove' and hi def 'Mooncast' and I think you're looking at too much risk for any person--possibly any company.
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough. I know it may sound ridiculous but I personally think $300 million would start to entice competition. What intellectual property would you have in the end? You would have patents on specifically design tools for getting a piece of machinery to the moon only capable of Mooncasts & 500 meters of roving. I'm not so sure any company would try to enter this competition as it is a major investment and a major risk with very little gain.
A slightly more expensive but somehow even more random method is to seed the generator against the words and phrases that come out of the mouth of South Carolina's Miss Teen USA.
But in all seriousness, I wonder how this compares to the Mersenne Twister (Java implementation & PDF)that I use at home? I am almost sure this new proposed method is more efficient and faster, when will there be (I know, I'm lazy) a universal implementation of it?:)
Also, this may be a stupid question, but I wonder how one measures the 'randomness' of a generator? Is there a unit that represents randomness? I mean, it would be seemingly impossible to do it using observation of the output so I guess all you can do is discuss how dependent it is on particular prior events and what they are, theoretically. Can you really say that this is 'more random' than another one because you have to know so much more before hand about the particular machine & its fingerprint in order to predict its generated number?
The OSS Solution to the Linux Wi-Fi Problem I'm confused, this article did not propose an OSS solution for the Wi-Fi problem at all. In fact, it just told me things I already know from first hand experience that I've posted about before.
What confuses me so much (and I really am ignorant in this department) is why the ethernet chipsets were seemingly conquered right off the bat? I tried my first Linux distro (debian) in 2001 and ever since then no matter what the machine, no matter what the distro, no matter how confused I was the NICs always came up ready to go when I installed Linux. I've done this on a lot of machines, from obscure to well known Dells and used most of the major distributions. They just 'worked' and it was good.
Now, wireless is here and for some reason, there must be a thousand different manufacturers with their own proprietary chipsets with completely different drivers & BIOS data on the flash memory stored in those chips because I've only had Ubuntu work once out of the box on a Linksys PCI WiFi card. Why? Why isn't that standardized? What do the companies gain from that? Is it because of the ever changing standards that the chips are so wacky? Is it because the A, B, G, N, etc. protocols? I don't understand this because I've never coded drivers.
I understand what MadWiFi & OpenHal are trying to do. I now know to look for "Atheros" chipsets when I buy my wireless stuff but they are often more well known brands and more expensive. A reason I switched to Linux was to save money in college, not spend more on the hardware.
Maybe a more helpful article would be detailing the real underlying issue--that these no name brands that get huge rebates at CompUSA or where ever (Hawking Technologies, generic boxes, etc.) are targeting Windows because of the number of users. How do you change their minds or show them a market for an OSS driver? Is there a way to even open up a channel of communication with them to discover how to write drivers for their chispets? How do you convince them it's worth their time/resources?
That would be a solution moving forward.
The next best thing would be to post an article about how to get started making these drivers. I'm a coder (though not the greatest one) with a little bit of free time. How do I start? How do I get access to the BIOS pages on the chipsets? What do I do with that, how does the Linux kernel use it? What books do I read that teach me how to start with a chipset I know nothing about, have no resources on the data or mechanics and then poke it, prod it until I know enough about it that I can set it up for the kernel to use it?
Excerpt from the enclosed rebates:
Congratulations on the purchase of your new Intel Core 2 Duo! To apply to recieve your $100.00 rebate in 6 to 8 weeks, please enclose your original reciept, this completed form & the original UPC from the product in a self addressed stamped envelope and send it to:
INTEL CORE 2 DUO REBATE OFFER LONG NAMED CLEARINGHOUSE PLACE
c/o Vastech
888 Bestgate Road
Suite # The Dumpster Behind Denny's
Annapolis, MD 21401 Yeah, be sure to check the address on those things. Also, I believe the Vatican uses Vastech to handle all their "Children's Letters to God" mail.
No, this is a new program, which they're closing because of privacy and budget concerns. It was meant to replace the old program which was closed because of privacy and budget concerns. And to be sure, there will be another program which will be closed eventually because of privacy and budget concerns. When they first came here, this was all a free country. Everyone said they were daft to build a data-mining program in a free country, but they built in all the same, just to show us. It sank into the swamp due to privacy & budget concerns. So they built a second one. That sank into the swamp due to privacy & budget concerns. So they built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp due to privacy & budget concerns. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the most oppressive, easily abused, unseen, effective only against its citizens that paid for it data-mining program.
Pointless but cool. Whoever wrote that doesn't have much imagination for application.
The thing that impressed me was I believe I saw a standard Sobel operator filter that extracts lines based on the derivatives of a pixel and its neighbors. Now in computer vision oftentimes this is used to simplify complex scenes so that region/structural analysis can be done.
You know when you're developing computer vision applications for robots, it sure would help to be able to code an algorithm & take it outside to test it against different light sources and scenarios so you get an idea of what needs to be tweaked.
Plus if your robots have hardware restrictions, this system can enforce them to give you an idea of realtime lag.
I could see this being a very valuable tool in the realms of academia & robotics. I realize the original idea is for ACII art, as mentioned, but there are some real applications here.
"If you look closely right around 34 seconds you can see what looks like the other set of jaws chewing." I don't believe that is what you are seeing.
From the original source of information and in the Journal Nature's News, these jaws are definitely not for chewing. If you look at the images of x-rays you will see that these are more 'hooks' or teeth than jaws.
In the rest of the articles, they talk about this mearly being the method by which the eel pulls the food down or holds on to it. I don't believe any fish (or snakes for that matter) really 'chew' their food.
I think what you are seeing in that video is the extra skin around the inner part of the mouth billow out as the animal attempts to suck the food in (which as mentioned, most fish do). I don't know a lot about eels so I can't verify that the eel in that video is a moray eel much less one of the kinds that have that kind of device to ingest food. There's over 200 species of moray eels so I guess it would be futile to try and verify it. Still an interesting video but I predict you would see that kind of action when any fish feeds.
... then make a Slashdot account and submit it there. You caught me. Oh how you've ruined years of careful plotting and planning. I am not eldavojohn, I am actually a Czech researcher named Dr. David Vokrouhlicky. I have slowly been posting careful karma whoring posts and submitting story after story all in the name of eventually publishing my research and getting it on the front page of Slashdot.
Yes, it was a long arduous endeavor. Gaining people's trust, making foes of others. It was an ingenious plan to boost the popularity and public acceptance of my paper... and I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!
Well, the gig is up, that hole was actually created by Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak. Ohhh, no, I've wasted my life! Who would have thought such a ridiculously elaborate and circuitous plan to tilt the scientific world towards accepting my theories based on computer models could have been foiled by an internet user named Cheezymadman!?
Before I dive in, I have to say that I don't think you adequately explained the requirements here. In one part you seem concerned about configuration, in another you seem concerned about security & finally it seems to come down to being too sophisticated for the user.
I'm not sure which one you value the most. But, assuming we need all three, I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything. Yes, it's geared for children but I guess you're kind of dealing with... well, in some cases degenerated minds. I don't say that to be mean but ironically my four year old cousin and my 80 year old grandfather have some of the same needs when it comes to high tech gadgets.
One step up from that would be to use a premade Live CD of Ubuntu or Dragonfly or some other easy live Linux OS. You show them how to reboot with it and then they can surf like that. The downside is they can't save anything to disk but the upside is they can't save anything to disk:). Granted, this may violate your sophistication requirement (and destroy caching), it has the huge benefit of going "Oooops, time to simply reboot."
You know, the last college I attended had labs where you had administrative privileges but they reverted to a system restore point nightly. As a result, there would be screwed up machines but only for a day or week at most.
But, if we assume you don't want to reboot with a live CD of the OLPC or Ubuntu, you could instead simply turn off cookies & turn off javascript. Why? Because javascript is the devil. I think it has some of the most flawed type casting (if I can call it that) out there today. It's not a "type safe" language. And the proliferation of JSON objects in Javascript is frightening. But once you eliminate cookies & javascript, you also eliminate a lot of functionality.
I would suggest giving them the flash plugin (pending system requirements) as it's not so bad anymore. That and they'll probably want to watch YouTube videos of their offspring. I think that is a fair trade being as the latest Flash plugin is fairly secure.
So, I would finally recommend you give them plain jane mozilla firefox with no javascript or cookies & the flash plugin. It probably wouldn't hurt to jack the security meter up to the top and just tell them that sites they can't access are bad sites anyways.
Once again, I could use more requirements before giving you a final assessment but the above two options sound like they would come pretty close to satisfying your (and their) needs. These were made under the assumptions that these people suffer from learning disabilities in their old age and, as a result, you cannot host training sessions whereby you show them safe & secure internet usage.
In the end, I predict that some of the users are going to find a way to make it hard for you and them. I suggest starting with the lightest steps and only progressing forward as necessary.
d00d, i see you're a subscriber. Yeah, the $5 was a lot. I mean, it was a lot! Nearly broke me if I recall. Then I had to go into my user preferences and set it to never use my subscription pages. What brown nosing work! That one time fee of five American dollars is quite the payment, but I think if you ask them real nice, they may be able to work out a payment or leasing plan for you. Look into it.
i just wanted to know, can you tell me what it's like to be a complete fucking limpwristed brown noser? Somedays it's really really hard. I mean, I think to myself, "How can I add to the conversation surrounding this story?" More importantly, I try to make it a rule to post only once to each story because if someone can refute my ideas then I should have prepared for that. I don't just value the ability to hold an opinion, but more so the ability to see all points of view and take them into consideration on your initial assessment of the situation. I'm a big fan of General Buck Turgeson and so I "Hate to judge before all the facts are in," and therefore, I consider my best comments to be those with little or no responses. I've been wrong thousands of times, was even wrong in the above post in that I thought delisting status came at under a quarter, not a dollar. But, hell, someone corrected me, good for them. Can't argue stuff like that. A lot of times, I don't even post I just read others comments because I really don't have anything to add (imagine that!).
As for my limp wrists, I'm quite sensitive about that and I would appreciate it if you left that out of the conversation. I had a freak teapot lifting accident when I was 8 and ever since then, I haven't been able to lift my knuckles above my ulnae & radii. Go ahead and laugh, all the kids did, I've learned to deal with it and push on. Oftentimes when I look in the mirror I see a fat, slower, stupider Lance Armstrong looking back at me. If Lance beat cancer, I can with God's help beat this horrible limp wrist affliction. Don't even get me started on the birthmark on my nose.
you're so fucking pathetic that it nearly makes me ill. Well, go ahead and add me to your foes and give your foes a -5 modifier. You'll never see my comments again. You do know that Slashdot has that feature, right? I don't understand why it makes you ill. Did I crawl the intarweb to your computer and force you to read my comments and apply them to your skin or else you get the hose again? Truly baffling to me that my posts have the power to be an ailment.
So tell me, oh valued Anonymous Coward, what did you add to the conversation with your comment?
Can't SCO just die already? Hey, don't worry, their stock is around 60 cents and was at 44 cents. If they drop below a quarter a share, they get delisted (just like SGI). As far as Wall Street (and investors are concerned), you might as well be dead once that happens.
You can tell how much each of their moves is worth by watching their stock. Lose the Unix case, your stock drops from $1.56 to $0.44. Make a shill appeal and win back 16 cents. Laughable at best.
Annoying? Yes. Something to worry about? Not at all in my opinion.
These have been considered junk stocks for awhile. Now they're simply laughable junk stocks. Expect to see them in your spam e-mails with scams claiming they'll be opening at a nickel and closing at a dime.
So I'm going to try & compare this to water to citizens, but I recognize it's not the greatest comparison--people need water to survive, most people don't need wi-fi to survive, etc.
Back in the day, when a town was being settled, they would have a well. I think it still works this way in most rural parts of third world countries. You thirsty? Walk down to the well & pull up a bucket.
What did you pay for that facility? Probably very little--if anything at all. Someone fronted the stone and labor to drill the well the whole bucket rope system was a one time cost.
Years later, people got sick of this... why? The water wasn't the greatest quality, you had to actively go to the well, it might be limited during dry spells, someone devious could poison the water, etc. So we now pay the city to ensure that water is delivered us via a system of tubes and that it is potable.
The attempt for AT&T or Earthlink to blanket wi-fi is kind of like the last step in this equation. Except there currently are no town wells (with the exception of some establishments implementing free wi-fi). I think we need a 'town well' style implementation before we advance to full blown municipal need. There's plenty of people out there right now getting by just fine with no wi-fi, they don't know why they should pay $2.87 a month (that's just a guess, by the way) in taxes for something they don't think they need. Likewise, there were probably settlers drinking from streams that didn't think an intricate pipeline of water to every home was necessary.
So what's the solution here?
Enter mesh networks, something similar to how the OLPC is supposed to function. I submitted a story a while ago about Meraki, a startup that is threatening Google's push to blanket San Francisco in wi-fi. They are basically giving out solar powered routers for people to mount in their homes that will become part of a mesh network.
It's kind of like the town well approach: low start up initial cost that someone pays, at first it will be limited and a bit cumbersome, it will probably be very vulnerable to attacks, the people that don't think they need it will still get some low quality service for free, etc.
Will city wide mesh networks be the final answer & solution to the municipal wi-fi demand? I don't know. I would doubt it since I wouldn't see it working in the countryside very well and so I think the ultimate municipal wi-fi will indeed be local government run and include massive coverage via some sort of technology I don't know enough about.
I think it's necessary to have this intermediate stage because it will give businesses, people & institutions the power to experiment with the unlimited possibilities that a city WAN would provide. I think wi-fi as a municipal service is a great idea for everywhere but I acknowledge that I make a lot more than the average citizen of the world.
If I were Chicago or a large city government, I would be seeking the attempts of companies like Meraki that want to build mesh networks and look at ad hoc networks as a temporary or starting solution. They may not be the best but it something to experiment with and learn from before you implement the final solution.
Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was NOT compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws. From the Wikipedia page (and as linked on the related Slashdot articles):
On May 29, 2007, A federal judge ordered TorrentSpy to begin monitoring its users' activities and to submit these logs to the Motion Picture Association of America. TorrentSpy's attorney, Ira Rothken, has stated that TorrentSpy would likely turn off access to U.S. users before it started monitoring anyone, since such monitoring is in violation of TorrentSpy's own privacy policy.[1] As of August 24, 2007, TorrentSpy has been closed to United States users. Looks like they finally got around to it... although it wasn't ordered by a judge, a US judge certainly left them no choice.
I wonder if this can be accessed from the United States through Tor.
I also wonder if I have to start worrying about other sites blocking American users simply out of fear & safety from the United States MPAA/RIAA run court system? I used to feel sorry for Chinese people who had to suffer from their government's censorship and now I have to wonder if I'm going to start suffering from other servers censoring me based on my government's actions.
United States Magistrate Judge Carla Woehrle: After pleading guilty, you are hereby sentenced to confinement at your house... Marc Hoaglin: No change in lifestyle there. Judge Carla Woehrle:... and to serve up to 6 months jail time... Marc Hoaglin: Sure, why not? I'll get a chance to lift some weights. Judge Carla Woehrle:... and to install government monitoring software on your computer... Marc Hoaglin: I guess that's only fair. Judge Carla Woehrle:... that only runs on Windows. Marc Hoaglin: DO NOT WANT!!!
The artist on that first disc: ABBA. Huh, that's funny because I always thought that the first discs were of the Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauß. I read about it yesterday on an actual article that isn't written like a comedian was drunk. From the article in the summary,
And lastly -- hey, hey, hey, wait just another second, those video games aren't going anywhere... And lastly, I want you to know exactly how close the manufacturing of that very first CD came to killing -- and I mean killing deader than Elvis -- the entire music industry. Maybe ABBA's "The Visitors" was the first commercially released CD in the United States but even Wikipedia says there were 16 different discs released in Japan first, it wasn't until a year later they came to the United states and all sixteen of them couldn't be ABBA. Furthermore they were popular at the time, how could that kill the music industry? There was only trash on Blu-Ray for a while but that doesn't mean other movies aren't going to come out. Ugh, I hate articles that are written poorly & contain pointless interjections making fun of my age. Of all the news sources you could link to, this one is pure trash.
He also forgot the part where they re-released a few new or live tracks on a disc just to make the die hard fans buy into another medium. That kind of practice really makes me sick. Of course, we're doomed to see it repeated until the end of time in the name of making another buck.
They had to used CGI to edit the landing area shorter, to make it look like it landed closer to the edge than it actually did, because the bus actually jumped farther than it should have. (And they edited out the camera rig it smashed into.) Um, there was no gap. The gap was edited in. In all sources I've found, they even talk about the ramp.
According to Wikipedia, you don't know what you're talking about:
Notes
One of the most famous scenes in the film shows the bus jumping across a gap in an elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp while still under construction. Both sides of the gap are at identical heights, making it impossible that the jump would work in real life. According to the "Making of..." feature that accompanied the DVD release, the stunt used a ramp and really did traverse fifty feet in the air. To handle the sudden jolt on landing, the stunt bus had no passengers aboard and the driver was wearing a shock-absorbing harness.
The gap in the highway was added through CGI; note the flock of digital seagulls added by the special effects company to enhance the realism of the scene. While the flyover ramp is shown to be essentially all complete and paved, except for the gap, in actual construction that gap in the road deck would have been fixed before the guardrail and asphalt is added. You may also note if you look closely, when the bus is flying over the bridge that is under construction the gap between the two bridges was edited in. And IMDB.com seems to agree:
The bus jump scene was done twice, as the bus landed too smoothly the first time. The bridge was actually there, but erased digitally. So you seem to have your facts wrong there. Please cite your source, I would find this interesting as I've always heard the above.
You should really write the authors of that paper though, I think they'd get a kick out of your comments and they'd love to add you as a data point.
...there is too much data, and they have too few people and resources to sift through it all. Actually, that's kind of what worries me. There isn't going to be any 'discovery' of crimes use to this at all. I fear for this only to be abused.
I can run through a horror scenario and I'll even welcome the tinfoil hat comments.
Your son gets a speeding ticket & tells a cop to "go fuck himself." There's nothing exactly illegal with that. Annoyed and upset, the policeman writes down the vehicle's make, model & license plate. The officer returns to his precinct and proceeds to monitor your sons vehicle. Your son happens to surpass the speed limit & the officer promptly issues a speeding ticket... and another... and another. Where ever your son goes at night, this policeman checks it and waits for him to show up at the wrong place at the wrong time to nail him with a crime. Law of parties can be a very powerful charge.
See the problem with this 'tool' is that any law enforcement with an ax to grind or whatever motive can wait for you to slip up. Everyone breaks the law, it's just a question of when. That's what worries me. This is like entrapment or some crazy idea of your government viewing you as guilty until everything is monitored and you're proven innocent. Everyone is human and therefore makes mistakes and this spells bad news for anyone who crosses the police or is the target of racial prejudice.
Long story short, it's not useful to 'discover' criminal activity & is just begging to be abused. We have warrants for a reason, get them in place on this!
Orson Scott Card
I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you when he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on, I am your teacher. - Ender's Game
In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist. - Ender's Game And similar to that is his quote on war:
You can't defeat a powerful enemy unless you understand him completely, and you can't understand him unless you know the desires of his heart, and you can't know the desires of his heart until you truly love him.
Hiding from your enemy is the same as letting him win. - Seventh Son Quotes from Sun Tzu
To know your Enemy, you must become your Enemy.
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time. I think it's clear that you must respect your enemy to even compete against them. If you don't respect that Microsoft has a great marketing, legal & business development department, you aren't going to get far. Know your enemy, understand them, respect them--only then can you become greater than them.
Poking fun at them is only a sign of overconfidence as Luke once said to Darth Vadar & Emperor Palpatine
Your overconfidence is your weakness.
Slashdot Mirror
So tell me, when I'm trying to use MySpace to reply to a distant friend & my browser slows to a crawl because there's five flash video advertisements of a lonely girl on a webcam waiting to talk to me--that's the kind of experience you want to proliferate through to every site using Google Ads?
How will this affect people on slow connections like out in the boonies operating on a 56k phone line connection? I'm kind of afraid those users are just going to be squished & that Google will leave it to the sites themselves to figure that out while the sites themselves will expect Google to take care of it.
Wait, did you hear that? I believe that was the sound of every single router and switch crying out in anguish.
Ads that are designed to appeal to my eye & take up obnoxious amounts of bandwidth? It must be
In all seriousness, this is all very bad news to me. A bloated delivery system (by definition it must be since it provides 'content rich' functionality) being forced to a large percent of the internet in the name of delivery unsolicited advertisement. And it's all legal and--get this--is unveiled like it's a new great feature.
The simple concept of character based content delivery system is dead.
...it is recirculated once the book goes out of print; many books have the same ISBN but only one in print book at a time can use it. One minor correction, from ISBN.org, I found: ISBN CAN NEVER BE REUSED: Once an ISBN is assigned to a title, it CANNOT BE REASSIGNED even if the title goes out of print. In addition to being an order fulfillment tool, the ISBN is a bibliographic element in cataloging. It is printed on catalog cards, in catalogs and entered in national and international databases. So it always has to be the same book, it's never 'recycled.'
...The fact that the lawyer, killed on Niko's first mission, would bring up video games, makes it clearly a reference to me... And the fact that Niko is a regular guy just looking to make some money & very eager to kill a certain lawyer to start off his career makes it clearly a reference to me!Can I join you in this suit, Jack? Perhaps a class action lawsuit? I'll meet you in your office tomorrow at noon using methods of subterfuge
What was your address again? "The magical man, from Happy Land, who lives in a gumdrop house on Lolly Pop Lane?" It's so very hard to remember when you're all over the road.
P.S. I hope the president has gotten back to you about your appeal to him. Your entertainment is endless & I highly value it, it would be a shame to have men in clean white suits censoring your communications to the outside world. Truly, it would.
For those of you who bought SCOX stock in hopes that they would win this case, you had better sell it. In the past 20 minutes, it has dropped from $0.66 to $0.37 cents (and still is dropping). We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their business critical operations. Would you care to list those products, support & services?
According to your market data your net income was a $16.6 million loss. And when your total revenue was under $30 million, you really shouldn't even try to keep operating. Why is this Chapter 11? I guess it's going to come down to one unkillable lawyer with SCO tattooed on his chest. At that point, we'll have to call an exorcist.
--
I think this article should have been filed under "It's Funny, Laugh" as the notion that Microsoft 'laid the foundation' for anything is humorous. Did this man ever stop and consider that technology and advancements in networking or bandwidth made Google possible? That the early Google founders themselves may have had something to do with their fate? This was more of a marketing pitch than an interview.
I think someone should point out to this man that simply because Microsoft became successful doesn't mean that another technology wouldn't have risen to fill the same gap.
Like my father always told me, there ain't no shame in being humble. I think Microsoft is forgetting that humility is a virtue & if they continue to talk like they're the savior of man then they're never going to fix the flaws that plague them. This is the classic example of business tactics & marketing trumping technology & progress.
If you make your own little film & a company releases snippets of it on their station with commentary (exactly what happened here), they should be protected just as you would be if you took 30 seconds worth of film from a Tom Cruise movie and over dubbed it with hilarious Scientology remarks at opportune times. Not only did they take his content, but they also attempted to defend his content via the (fraudulent) DMCA and call it their own. I think you should really read up on this. He can counter sue for the damages incurred from them demanding he take it down, maybe even cover his time and any legal fees he had but nothing more than that. And it would be awful hard for him to define a missing video on his YouTube site in terms of dollars.
Traditionally, prizes have encouraged people to invest a wide range of resources. Lindbergh was one of few to spend less than the prize amount during the Orteig prize--others, like Admiral Byrd, spent nearly $100,000, or four times the $25,000 prize value. It has been reported that Mojave Aerospace Ventures spent significantly more than the $10 million purse to win the Ansari X PRIZE. Teams are willing to spend more than the prize value, as they get to keep their intellectual property and capitalize on it. In the case of the Google Lunar X PRIZE, we expect some teams to be willing to spend more than the value of the prize. Other teams may be able to complete the mission at or below the value of the Grand Prize purse. I don't think comparing the prize reward from a 1919 prize award of flying from Paris to NYC is accurate. I mean, people had already been flying. How many people put things into orbit, much less on the moon?
Just to put this into perspective, the pair of Mars rovers cost NASA $820 million. Granted you're only expected to send one and it's only to the moon, NASA does already have the infrastructure & experienced personel to do this. Even an 1/8 of that cost is 3 times the prize money.
Add the requirements of a 500 meter 'rove' and hi def 'Mooncast' and I think you're looking at too much risk for any person--possibly any company.
Frankly, I don't think $30 million is enough. I know it may sound ridiculous but I personally think $300 million would start to entice competition. What intellectual property would you have in the end? You would have patents on specifically design tools for getting a piece of machinery to the moon only capable of Mooncasts & 500 meters of roving. I'm not so sure any company would try to enter this competition as it is a major investment and a major risk with very little gain.
A slightly more expensive but somehow even more random method is to seed the generator against the words and phrases that come out of the mouth of South Carolina's Miss Teen USA.
:)
But in all seriousness, I wonder how this compares to the Mersenne Twister (Java implementation & PDF)that I use at home? I am almost sure this new proposed method is more efficient and faster, when will there be (I know, I'm lazy) a universal implementation of it?
Also, this may be a stupid question, but I wonder how one measures the 'randomness' of a generator? Is there a unit that represents randomness? I mean, it would be seemingly impossible to do it using observation of the output so I guess all you can do is discuss how dependent it is on particular prior events and what they are, theoretically. Can you really say that this is 'more random' than another one because you have to know so much more before hand about the particular machine & its fingerprint in order to predict its generated number?
What confuses me so much (and I really am ignorant in this department) is why the ethernet chipsets were seemingly conquered right off the bat? I tried my first Linux distro (debian) in 2001 and ever since then no matter what the machine, no matter what the distro, no matter how confused I was the NICs always came up ready to go when I installed Linux. I've done this on a lot of machines, from obscure to well known Dells and used most of the major distributions. They just 'worked' and it was good.
Now, wireless is here and for some reason, there must be a thousand different manufacturers with their own proprietary chipsets with completely different drivers & BIOS data on the flash memory stored in those chips because I've only had Ubuntu work once out of the box on a Linksys PCI WiFi card. Why? Why isn't that standardized? What do the companies gain from that? Is it because of the ever changing standards that the chips are so wacky? Is it because the A, B, G, N, etc. protocols? I don't understand this because I've never coded drivers.
I understand what MadWiFi & OpenHal are trying to do. I now know to look for "Atheros" chipsets when I buy my wireless stuff but they are often more well known brands and more expensive. A reason I switched to Linux was to save money in college, not spend more on the hardware.
Maybe a more helpful article would be detailing the real underlying issue--that these no name brands that get huge rebates at CompUSA or where ever (Hawking Technologies, generic boxes, etc.) are targeting Windows because of the number of users. How do you change their minds or show them a market for an OSS driver? Is there a way to even open up a channel of communication with them to discover how to write drivers for their chispets? How do you convince them it's worth their time/resources?
That would be a solution moving forward.
The next best thing would be to post an article about how to get started making these drivers. I'm a coder (though not the greatest one) with a little bit of free time. How do I start? How do I get access to the BIOS pages on the chipsets? What do I do with that, how does the Linux kernel use it? What books do I read that teach me how to start with a chipset I know nothing about, have no resources on the data or mechanics and then poke it, prod it until I know enough about it that I can set it up for the kernel to use it?
INTEL CORE 2 DUO REBATE OFFER LONG NAMED CLEARINGHOUSE PLACE
c/o Vastech
888 Bestgate Road
Suite # The Dumpster Behind Denny's
Annapolis, MD 21401 Yeah, be sure to check the address on those things. Also, I believe the Vatican uses Vastech to handle all their "Children's Letters to God" mail.
The thing that impressed me was I believe I saw a standard Sobel operator filter that extracts lines based on the derivatives of a pixel and its neighbors. Now in computer vision oftentimes this is used to simplify complex scenes so that region/structural analysis can be done.
You know when you're developing computer vision applications for robots, it sure would help to be able to code an algorithm & take it outside to test it against different light sources and scenarios so you get an idea of what needs to be tweaked.
Plus if your robots have hardware restrictions, this system can enforce them to give you an idea of realtime lag.
I could see this being a very valuable tool in the realms of academia & robotics. I realize the original idea is for ACII art, as mentioned, but there are some real applications here.
From the original source of information and in the Journal Nature's News, these jaws are definitely not for chewing. If you look at the images of x-rays you will see that these are more 'hooks' or teeth than jaws.
In the rest of the articles, they talk about this mearly being the method by which the eel pulls the food down or holds on to it. I don't believe any fish (or snakes for that matter) really 'chew' their food.
I think what you are seeing in that video is the extra skin around the inner part of the mouth billow out as the animal attempts to suck the food in (which as mentioned, most fish do). I don't know a lot about eels so I can't verify that the eel in that video is a moray eel much less one of the kinds that have that kind of device to ingest food. There's over 200 species of moray eels so I guess it would be futile to try and verify it. Still an interesting video but I predict you would see that kind of action when any fish feeds.
... then make a Slashdot account and submit it there. You caught me. Oh how you've ruined years of careful plotting and planning. I am not eldavojohn, I am actually a Czech researcher named Dr. David Vokrouhlicky. I have slowly been posting careful karma whoring posts and submitting story after story all in the name of eventually publishing my research and getting it on the front page of Slashdot.Yes, it was a long arduous endeavor. Gaining people's trust, making foes of others. It was an ingenious plan to boost the popularity and public acceptance of my paper
Well, the gig is up, that hole was actually created by Rumfoord and his dog, Kazak. Ohhh, no, I've wasted my life! Who would have thought such a ridiculously elaborate and circuitous plan to tilt the scientific world towards accepting my theories based on computer models could have been foiled by an internet user named Cheezymadman!?
Before I dive in, I have to say that I don't think you adequately explained the requirements here. In one part you seem concerned about configuration, in another you seem concerned about security & finally it seems to come down to being too sophisticated for the user.
... well, in some cases degenerated minds. I don't say that to be mean but ironically my four year old cousin and my 80 year old grandfather have some of the same needs when it comes to high tech gadgets.
:). Granted, this may violate your sophistication requirement (and destroy caching), it has the huge benefit of going "Oooops, time to simply reboot."
I'm not sure which one you value the most. But, assuming we need all three, I would suggest something like the OLPC as an everything. Yes, it's geared for children but I guess you're kind of dealing with
One step up from that would be to use a premade Live CD of Ubuntu or Dragonfly or some other easy live Linux OS. You show them how to reboot with it and then they can surf like that. The downside is they can't save anything to disk but the upside is they can't save anything to disk
You know, the last college I attended had labs where you had administrative privileges but they reverted to a system restore point nightly. As a result, there would be screwed up machines but only for a day or week at most.
But, if we assume you don't want to reboot with a live CD of the OLPC or Ubuntu, you could instead simply turn off cookies & turn off javascript. Why? Because javascript is the devil. I think it has some of the most flawed type casting (if I can call it that) out there today. It's not a "type safe" language. And the proliferation of JSON objects in Javascript is frightening. But once you eliminate cookies & javascript, you also eliminate a lot of functionality.
I would suggest giving them the flash plugin (pending system requirements) as it's not so bad anymore. That and they'll probably want to watch YouTube videos of their offspring. I think that is a fair trade being as the latest Flash plugin is fairly secure.
So, I would finally recommend you give them plain jane mozilla firefox with no javascript or cookies & the flash plugin. It probably wouldn't hurt to jack the security meter up to the top and just tell them that sites they can't access are bad sites anyways.
Once again, I could use more requirements before giving you a final assessment but the above two options sound like they would come pretty close to satisfying your (and their) needs. These were made under the assumptions that these people suffer from learning disabilities in their old age and, as a result, you cannot host training sessions whereby you show them safe & secure internet usage.
In the end, I predict that some of the users are going to find a way to make it hard for you and them. I suggest starting with the lightest steps and only progressing forward as necessary.
As for my limp wrists, I'm quite sensitive about that and I would appreciate it if you left that out of the conversation. I had a freak teapot lifting accident when I was 8 and ever since then, I haven't been able to lift my knuckles above my ulnae & radii. Go ahead and laugh, all the kids did, I've learned to deal with it and push on. Oftentimes when I look in the mirror I see a fat, slower, stupider Lance Armstrong looking back at me. If Lance beat cancer, I can with God's help beat this horrible limp wrist affliction. Don't even get me started on the birthmark on my nose. you're so fucking pathetic that it nearly makes me ill. Well, go ahead and add me to your foes and give your foes a -5 modifier. You'll never see my comments again. You do know that Slashdot has that feature, right? I don't understand why it makes you ill. Did I crawl the intarweb to your computer and force you to read my comments and apply them to your skin or else you get the hose again? Truly baffling to me that my posts have the power to be an ailment.
So tell me, oh valued Anonymous Coward, what did you add to the conversation with your comment?
You can tell how much each of their moves is worth by watching their stock. Lose the Unix case, your stock drops from $1.56 to $0.44. Make a shill appeal and win back 16 cents. Laughable at best.
Annoying? Yes. Something to worry about? Not at all in my opinion.
These have been considered junk stocks for awhile. Now they're simply laughable junk stocks. Expect to see them in your spam e-mails with scams claiming they'll be opening at a nickel and closing at a dime.
So I'm going to try & compare this to water to citizens, but I recognize it's not the greatest comparison--people need water to survive, most people don't need wi-fi to survive, etc.
... why? The water wasn't the greatest quality, you had to actively go to the well, it might be limited during dry spells, someone devious could poison the water, etc. So we now pay the city to ensure that water is delivered us via a system of tubes and that it is potable.
Back in the day, when a town was being settled, they would have a well. I think it still works this way in most rural parts of third world countries. You thirsty? Walk down to the well & pull up a bucket.
What did you pay for that facility? Probably very little--if anything at all. Someone fronted the stone and labor to drill the well the whole bucket rope system was a one time cost.
Years later, people got sick of this
The attempt for AT&T or Earthlink to blanket wi-fi is kind of like the last step in this equation. Except there currently are no town wells (with the exception of some establishments implementing free wi-fi). I think we need a 'town well' style implementation before we advance to full blown municipal need. There's plenty of people out there right now getting by just fine with no wi-fi, they don't know why they should pay $2.87 a month (that's just a guess, by the way) in taxes for something they don't think they need. Likewise, there were probably settlers drinking from streams that didn't think an intricate pipeline of water to every home was necessary.
So what's the solution here?
Enter mesh networks, something similar to how the OLPC is supposed to function. I submitted a story a while ago about Meraki, a startup that is threatening Google's push to blanket San Francisco in wi-fi. They are basically giving out solar powered routers for people to mount in their homes that will become part of a mesh network.
It's kind of like the town well approach: low start up initial cost that someone pays, at first it will be limited and a bit cumbersome, it will probably be very vulnerable to attacks, the people that don't think they need it will still get some low quality service for free, etc.
Will city wide mesh networks be the final answer & solution to the municipal wi-fi demand? I don't know. I would doubt it since I wouldn't see it working in the countryside very well and so I think the ultimate municipal wi-fi will indeed be local government run and include massive coverage via some sort of technology I don't know enough about.
I think it's necessary to have this intermediate stage because it will give businesses, people & institutions the power to experiment with the unlimited possibilities that a city WAN would provide. I think wi-fi as a municipal service is a great idea for everywhere but I acknowledge that I make a lot more than the average citizen of the world.
If I were Chicago or a large city government, I would be seeking the attempts of companies like Meraki that want to build mesh networks and look at ad hoc networks as a temporary or starting solution. They may not be the best but it something to experiment with and learn from before you implement the final solution.
I wonder if this can be accessed from the United States through Tor.
I also wonder if I have to start worrying about other sites blocking American users simply out of fear & safety from the United States MPAA/RIAA run court system? I used to feel sorry for Chinese people who had to suffer from their government's censorship and now I have to wonder if I'm going to start suffering from other servers censoring me based on my government's actions.
United States Magistrate Judge Carla Woehrle: After pleading guilty, you are hereby sentenced to confinement at your house ... ... and to serve up to 6 months jail time ... ... and to install government monitoring software on your computer ... ... that only runs on Windows.
Marc Hoaglin: No change in lifestyle there.
Judge Carla Woehrle:
Marc Hoaglin: Sure, why not? I'll get a chance to lift some weights.
Judge Carla Woehrle:
Marc Hoaglin: I guess that's only fair.
Judge Carla Woehrle:
Marc Hoaglin: DO NOT WANT!!!
That's correct, enjoy them at Project Gutenberg or the Online Books Project at U Penn. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the one by Plumly ...
He also forgot the part where they re-released a few new or live tracks on a disc just to make the die hard fans buy into another medium. That kind of practice really makes me sick. Of course, we're doomed to see it repeated until the end of time in the name of making another buck.
According to Wikipedia, you don't know what you're talking about: Notes
One of the most famous scenes in the film shows the bus jumping across a gap in an elevated freeway-to-freeway ramp while still under construction. Both sides of the gap are at identical heights, making it impossible that the jump would work in real life. According to the "Making of..." feature that accompanied the DVD release, the stunt used a ramp and really did traverse fifty feet in the air. To handle the sudden jolt on landing, the stunt bus had no passengers aboard and the driver was wearing a shock-absorbing harness.
The gap in the highway was added through CGI; note the flock of digital seagulls added by the special effects company to enhance the realism of the scene. While the flyover ramp is shown to be essentially all complete and paved, except for the gap, in actual construction that gap in the road deck would have been fixed before the guardrail and asphalt is added. You may also note if you look closely, when the bus is flying over the bridge that is under construction the gap between the two bridges was edited in. And IMDB.com seems to agree: The bus jump scene was done twice, as the bus landed too smoothly the first time. The bridge was actually there, but erased digitally. So you seem to have your facts wrong there. Please cite your source, I would find this interesting as I've always heard the above.
You should really write the authors of that paper though, I think they'd get a kick out of your comments and they'd love to add you as a data point.
...there is too much data, and they have too few people and resources to sift through it all. Actually, that's kind of what worries me. There isn't going to be any 'discovery' of crimes use to this at all. I fear for this only to be abused.I can run through a horror scenario and I'll even welcome the tinfoil hat comments.
Your son gets a speeding ticket & tells a cop to "go fuck himself." There's nothing exactly illegal with that. Annoyed and upset, the policeman writes down the vehicle's make, model & license plate. The officer returns to his precinct and proceeds to monitor your sons vehicle. Your son happens to surpass the speed limit & the officer promptly issues a speeding ticket
See the problem with this 'tool' is that any law enforcement with an ax to grind or whatever motive can wait for you to slip up. Everyone breaks the law, it's just a question of when. That's what worries me. This is like entrapment or some crazy idea of your government viewing you as guilty until everything is monitored and you're proven innocent. Everyone is human and therefore makes mistakes and this spells bad news for anyone who crosses the police or is the target of racial prejudice.
Long story short, it's not useful to 'discover' criminal activity & is just begging to be abused. We have warrants for a reason, get them in place on this!
Poking fun at them is only a sign of overconfidence as Luke once said to Darth Vadar & Emperor Palpatine Your overconfidence is your weakness.