It's so hard to keep the fiction part of SF going these days. Lucas is working toward Star Trek's Holodeck.
Have been waiting for this technology to worm its way into society since Data and Jordie met Professor Moriarty. But simply inserting characters into their own known environment is just the beginning. Don't like how DeNiro handled Raging Bull? How about Stan Laurel instead? George C. Scott in Love Story playing Ali McGraw's part? Steven Seagal in It's A Wonderful Life? The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
So is the opportunity for cries of plagiarism, but that's another discussion.
The good thing about an electronic wallet is you don't have to worry about making change.
I'd fanatasized at one time about a form of paper money in a basic denomination that could 'majically' adhere to itself, through some sort of magnetic or velcro-ish property.
So, no need to break that $20; you'd just tear off what you need.
Of course, if you carried around large amounts of cash it would get difficult to fold.
I concur that info storage with no moving parts (discounting of course the actual workhorse - electrons) is the way to go.
However, CPU/Ram/Video is what I've been using to spec new machines for folks going on at least five years now.
The average Joe will never come close to exhausting their drive space, though as Video/Music more & more moves to the desktop (Society is not yet ready for the cloud, we still like having our stuff close at hand) the definition of average Joe is of course changing.
Yes, everyone has different needs, but by and large, when getting a new machine, pay more attention to Video performance than you do storage capacity. You'll be sorry if you didn't.
Simple fix. Create a boilerplate agreement wherein that specific episode (original broadcast and any subsequent repeats) of the show is explicitly licensed to reproduce the work at no charge. Enter into this agreement with the copyright holder. Voila, no CC license to violate.
It's not the viruses per se, but the user that lets them in the door. Are you using a mail client that defaults to HTML view and allowing JS to run? Do you click on that popup you've never noticed before that says your system is infected? Do you ever empty your temp folder (either system or user)? Do you have a decent system monitor (SysInternals procexp is good) to detect which app might be causing weird bahavior? Do you ever look in the drivers folder, sys32 or other known hangouts of "potential bad guy" files? Ever check the registry (another plug for SI, autoruns can be quite useful) to see what's happening at startup?.
This is a downward spiral. Some bright kid will make a patch to override M$'s disabling of the TCP stack. M$ will issue a patch to override that. Rinse & repeat. As usual, they're using a sledgehammer where a scalpel is preferred.
Perhaps Windoze should just incorporate Git & cron; every 5 seconds you make a hash of the hard drive, with 2 weeks of reversion available. Just click on the smiley-face & viri be gone! (Along with any recent emails, documents, installed apps. What price security?)
Oh, you *are* running the latest i7 with 16 gigs of memory on WinDoze, aren't you? Would be quite hardware intensive to keep up with such a frenetic backup schedule. Be prepared for a constant hourglass.
I hear folks on the moon are looking for raw materials. Why not just build a recycling center there? We've already expended energy getting all that stuff out of the gravity well, would make sense to help build up our Lunar presence with no-longer-needed materials hanging around in orbit.
It really doesn't matter. If I want to follow someone, I can, up until the time I'm trespassing (venturing into the driveway to attach the device might apply here).
Polite? Probably not. Illegal? No. Using a tool to assist with trailing someone must also be legal, we use tools to help us all the time.
All this will do is lower the cost of anti-surveillance technology (more tools to help the other side's trail remain hidden). Perhaps GM's latest "premium" accessory will be a scrambler. That helps the economy, right?
Having "enjoyed" the Chicago Public School System, my take is that it was about the worst one could endure. If Daley is bitching about it, he ought to look into the past. Nothing has changed since his father's time, and Dad died over 30 years ago now.
In the early 70's we moved back home from L.A. to Chicago, toward the end of 4th grade. Out West the year before I'd been in an experimental half-n-half class with kids the next grade up. There were all sorts of neat things to challenge our young minds, like the day we learned about cilia. We took the tallest kid (a 4th grader, of course), stood him upside down in the courtyard outside the classroom, and fed him various things: 7-Up, peanut-butter, crackers, olives, water, bits of hot dog; then had him gauge how easy it was to swallow. Yes, those little hairs really *do* help pull the food down, even if it's up.
That first day back in Chicago, one of the big lessons was to come up with a word starting with a 'k' sound. Yikes.
Having (I thought, quite humorously) chosen 'cantankerous', the teacher & I never really got along.
The next year, one day the teacher was explaining subtraction. "What's 3 from 8?". A couple kids managed to answer 5. "Good, now what's 8 from 3?" I thought everyone knew about negative numbers, but was the only to give the correct answer. She told me I was wrong. I protested, indicating the big number line above the chalkboard. It clearly went to -100. No, said the teacher in that authoritative voice that can shut up any 10 year old, "You cannot take 8 from 3".
So by the 5th grade you're still not supposed to know that mathematically, something less than zero exists. Incredible. I never did figure out what the actual lesson was that day.
Now, it wasn't all dark ages. In 6th grade I got to go with some friends a couple days a week to an advanced class at another school. They'd been going since the year before but having come back to town late in the 4th grade I missed out at first. We did all sorts of things: made our own newspaper, gave puppet shows to earlier grades, learned other languages, played a board game called "Moon Management" that I'd love to find again (not Avalon Hill. I've looked), which taught economics, environmental and social skills to the younger mind set. It was *much* more rewarding than the regular classes.
We moved again, to rural Illinois, so I missed out on going to the Lane, a more technically oriented high school. Many of my friends from the advanced class went.
I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies here. Was it just a really bad batch of teachers, simply too many kids (averaging 30 per class, with the schools one huge box that took a block, and contained all grades), bad curriculum?
No matter what, perhaps Mr. Daley is engaging in a little shadow projection here.
There are 2 main alternatives. Alas, only one is free:
1) The free one is called "Ubuntu".
2) The other one is very shiny, and very expensive, but the good news is it comes with a free computer. Its name is "Snow Leopard".
As an approach to solving a problem, this one uses a sledgehammer where a scalpel would be more effective.
Want to keep students from surfing/twittering/ewe-tubing/etc. while in class? DISABLE THEIR WIFI. It would cost a few bucks to shield the classrooms, but easily doable.
Worried about students "typing a lecture verbatim"? Surely at least one professor out there is old enough to remember shorthand.
This is the same old, tired story, blaming the tool for its use. The true problem is the worker-bee/lazy oaf cycle that human generations always go through. We're in the former now. We'll be back on track in a bit.
Which is NOT to say, of course that ALL students are lazy! It's just the general pattern of the generational cycle.
Yes. Bite the bullet, find a copy of Mavis Beacon v5 in the dollar bin somewhere, and learn Dvorak.
There are other tutor programs, but back in '89 when I switched from hunt'n'pecker to Dvorak that was the latest version. It also inexplicably happens to be the last one that offers Dvorak lessons. These days she'll help you with your Spanish, but not Dvorak. I wrote the company some years back but never got a meaningful reply as to why they discriminate in this manner.
If you're on a lot of machines, install it as a separate language so the current state will show up near the tray (I use Swedish, as SV looks a little like DV). That way, when it accidentally gets switched or I forget & leave it that way, the normal user of that machine can see why they're typing gibbering & ALT-LEFT-SHIFT back to Q mode.
As Anonymous Coward pointed out (and Pythagoras earlier discovered) music is math.
Humans are good at modeling what they see around them, so it's no wonder someone has come up with a way to make a pretend (sic) composer.
Naturally, the closer it gets to emulating whatever data it was fed (i.e., its world view), the more we humans will appreciate that output as being "in the style" of established works.
The Turing Test here would be to see it come up with a NEW form of music, one completely original, but that still pleases the ear.
In the late 70's, one of my high school classes was a vocational IT study, located on a local Community College campus. I was lucky, being in the 2nd year of the program; the 1st year the building trades class was still assembling the structure, and there was no link to the UI mainframe so the IT students just had bookwork.
One part of the class was learning punch cards, so we had to re-type existing code. That was really boring, so I'd figure out ways to fit song lyrics into the 80 available columns.
Though I didn't like all their tunes, "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult was a favorite, so that's one of the ones that got entered.
Of course I could never turn that work in. But when grading time came, the teacher got all flustered, said he remembered seeing me tap away with all the other students, couldn't imagine what happened to the work, he must have lost it, really sorry, here's an "A" anyway. OK?
OK.
So, did I cheat? I really did learn to operate Mr. Hollerith's machine (and even got to use that skill later, after enlisting in USAF). I just didn't actually push the same buttons as did the rest of the class.
...that we should teach touch-typing in school. So long is it's Dvorak, not that horribly antiquated, 19th century Qwerty cr*p.
So far as incentive goes, one would think the insurance, industry would be interested in a method that reduces one's daily finger travels from sixteen miles to one. Less RSI, less claims to pay out.
Slashdot Mirror
It's so hard to keep the fiction part of SF going these days. Lucas is working toward Star Trek's Holodeck.
Have been waiting for this technology to worm its way into society since Data and Jordie met Professor Moriarty. But simply inserting characters into their own known environment is just the beginning. Don't like how DeNiro handled Raging Bull? How about Stan Laurel instead? George C. Scott in Love Story playing Ali McGraw's part? Steven Seagal in It's A Wonderful Life? The possibilities are, quite literally, endless.
So is the opportunity for cries of plagiarism, but that's another discussion.
The good thing about an electronic wallet is you don't have to worry about making change.
I'd fanatasized at one time about a form of paper money in a basic denomination that could 'majically' adhere to itself, through some sort of magnetic or velcro-ish property.
So, no need to break that $20; you'd just tear off what you need.
Of course, if you carried around large amounts of cash it would get difficult to fold.
Unfortunately, it is possible for a toddler to be used as a weapon delivery system.
Under that warped and paranoid point of view, we have no choice but to pat down little Timmy.
The creepy part is the TSA agent who saves the teddy bear's full body scan for later viewing.
mkdir oo | cd oo | wget http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/stable/3.2.1/OOo_3.2.1_src_core.tar.bz2 | tar -xzvf OOo_3.2.1_src_core.tar.bz2 | *alter at will* | ./configure | make | make install | enjoy
You are not allowed to read the next sentence in this comment.
I concur that info storage with no moving parts (discounting of course the actual workhorse - electrons) is the way to go.
However, CPU/Ram/Video is what I've been using to spec new machines for folks going on at least five years now.
The average Joe will never come close to exhausting their drive space, though as Video/Music more & more moves to the desktop (Society is not yet ready for the cloud, we still like having our stuff close at hand) the definition of average Joe is of course changing.
Yes, everyone has different needs, but by and large, when getting a new machine, pay more attention to Video performance than you do storage capacity. You'll be sorry if you didn't.
Curious title for the software, considering it's a WinDoze only product.
Simple fix. Create a boilerplate agreement wherein that specific episode (original broadcast and any subsequent repeats) of the show is explicitly licensed to reproduce the work at no charge. Enter into this agreement with the copyright holder. Voila, no CC license to violate.
It's not the viruses per se, but the user that lets them in the door. Are you using a mail client that defaults to HTML view and allowing JS to run? Do you click on that popup you've never noticed before that says your system is infected? Do you ever empty your temp folder (either system or user)? Do you have a decent system monitor (SysInternals procexp is good) to detect which app might be causing weird bahavior? Do you ever look in the drivers folder, sys32 or other known hangouts of "potential bad guy" files? Ever check the registry (another plug for SI, autoruns can be quite useful) to see what's happening at startup?.
This is a downward spiral. Some bright kid will make a patch to override M$'s disabling of the TCP stack. M$ will issue a patch to override that. Rinse & repeat. As usual, they're using a sledgehammer where a scalpel is preferred.
Perhaps Windoze should just incorporate Git & cron; every 5 seconds you make a hash of the hard drive, with 2 weeks of reversion available. Just click on the smiley-face & viri be gone! (Along with any recent emails, documents, installed apps. What price security?)
Oh, you *are* running the latest i7 with 16 gigs of memory on WinDoze, aren't you? Would be quite hardware intensive to keep up with such a frenetic backup schedule. Be prepared for a constant hourglass.
If the stolen domain's whois info does match your own, just use the registrar's admin contact reset procedure.
Faxing your letterhead, a utility bill & a gov't photo ID with name & address matching on all three should allow you to reclaim the domain.
Then change the info to your company's & it's all good.
I hear folks on the moon are looking for raw materials. Why not just build a recycling center there? We've already expended energy getting all that stuff out of the gravity well, would make sense to help build up our Lunar presence with no-longer-needed materials hanging around in orbit.
It really doesn't matter. If I want to follow someone, I can, up until the time I'm trespassing (venturing into the driveway to attach the device might apply here).
Polite? Probably not. Illegal? No. Using a tool to assist with trailing someone must also be legal, we use tools to help us all the time.
All this will do is lower the cost of anti-surveillance technology (more tools to help the other side's trail remain hidden). Perhaps GM's latest "premium" accessory will be a scrambler. That helps the economy, right?
Just curious that the title of this story ways "Top Authors Make eBook Deal" yet once again it seems to be all about the publisher...
Yes, one often can just click on the smiley face and have hordes of unknown, unattributed and unappreciated coders do all the work.
Yet, there's something to be said for RTFM.
Give it a shot, and if you do magically learn something, please try to pass it along...
Having "enjoyed" the Chicago Public School System, my take is that it was about the worst one could endure. If Daley is bitching about it, he ought to look into the past. Nothing has changed since his father's time, and Dad died over 30 years ago now.
In the early 70's we moved back home from L.A. to Chicago, toward the end of 4th grade. Out West the year before I'd been in an experimental half-n-half class with kids the next grade up. There were all sorts of neat things to challenge our young minds, like the day we learned about cilia. We took the tallest kid (a 4th grader, of course), stood him upside down in the courtyard outside the classroom, and fed him various things: 7-Up, peanut-butter, crackers, olives, water, bits of hot dog; then had him gauge how easy it was to swallow. Yes, those little hairs really *do* help pull the food down, even if it's up.
That first day back in Chicago, one of the big lessons was to come up with a word starting with a 'k' sound. Yikes.
Having (I thought, quite humorously) chosen 'cantankerous', the teacher & I never really got along.
The next year, one day the teacher was explaining subtraction. "What's 3 from 8?". A couple kids managed to answer 5. "Good, now what's 8 from 3?" I thought everyone knew about negative numbers, but was the only to give the correct answer. She told me I was wrong. I protested, indicating the big number line above the chalkboard. It clearly went to -100. No, said the teacher in that authoritative voice that can shut up any 10 year old, "You cannot take 8 from 3".
So by the 5th grade you're still not supposed to know that mathematically, something less than zero exists. Incredible. I never did figure out what the actual lesson was that day.
Now, it wasn't all dark ages. In 6th grade I got to go with some friends a couple days a week to an advanced class at another school. They'd been going since the year before but having come back to town late in the 4th grade I missed out at first. We did all sorts of things: made our own newspaper, gave puppet shows to earlier grades, learned other languages, played a board game called "Moon Management" that I'd love to find again (not Avalon Hill. I've looked), which taught economics, environmental and social skills to the younger mind set. It was *much* more rewarding than the regular classes.
We moved again, to rural Illinois, so I missed out on going to the Lane, a more technically oriented high school. Many of my friends from the advanced class went.
I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies here. Was it just a really bad batch of teachers, simply too many kids (averaging 30 per class, with the schools one huge box that took a block, and contained all grades), bad curriculum? No matter what, perhaps Mr. Daley is engaging in a little shadow projection here.
There are 2 main alternatives. Alas, only one is free:
1) The free one is called "Ubuntu".
2) The other one is very shiny, and very expensive, but the good news is it comes with a free computer. Its name is "Snow Leopard".
...and of course, if I wasn't so lazy in failing to proof before clicking 'submit', I would have used the word 'latter' instead...
As an approach to solving a problem, this one uses a sledgehammer where a scalpel would be more effective.
Want to keep students from surfing/twittering/ewe-tubing/etc. while in class? DISABLE THEIR WIFI. It would cost a few bucks to shield the classrooms, but easily doable.
Worried about students "typing a lecture verbatim"? Surely at least one professor out there is old enough to remember shorthand.
This is the same old, tired story, blaming the tool for its use. The true problem is the worker-bee/lazy oaf cycle that human generations always go through. We're in the former now. We'll be back on track in a bit.
Which is NOT to say, of course that ALL students are lazy! It's just the general pattern of the generational cycle.
Yes. Bite the bullet, find a copy of Mavis Beacon v5 in the dollar bin somewhere, and learn Dvorak.
There are other tutor programs, but back in '89 when I switched from hunt'n'pecker to Dvorak that was the latest version. It also inexplicably happens to be the last one that offers Dvorak lessons. These days she'll help you with your Spanish, but not Dvorak. I wrote the company some years back but never got a meaningful reply as to why they discriminate in this manner.
If you're on a lot of machines, install it as a separate language so the current state will show up near the tray (I use Swedish, as SV looks a little like DV). That way, when it accidentally gets switched or I forget & leave it that way, the normal user of that machine can see why they're typing gibbering & ALT-LEFT-SHIFT back to Q mode.
As Anonymous Coward pointed out (and Pythagoras earlier discovered) music is math.
Humans are good at modeling what they see around them, so it's no wonder someone has come up with a way to make a pretend (sic) composer.
Naturally, the closer it gets to emulating whatever data it was fed (i.e., its world view), the more we humans will appreciate that output as being "in the style" of established works.
The Turing Test here would be to see it come up with a NEW form of music, one completely original, but that still pleases the ear.
In the late 70's, one of my high school classes was a vocational IT study, located on a local Community College campus. I was lucky, being in the 2nd year of the program; the 1st year the building trades class was still assembling the structure, and there was no link to the UI mainframe so the IT students just had bookwork.
One part of the class was learning punch cards, so we had to re-type existing code. That was really boring, so I'd figure out ways to fit song lyrics into the 80 available columns.
Though I didn't like all their tunes, "Godzilla" by Blue Oyster Cult was a favorite, so that's one of the ones that got entered.
Of course I could never turn that work in. But when grading time came, the teacher got all flustered, said he remembered seeing me tap away with all the other students, couldn't imagine what happened to the work, he must have lost it, really sorry, here's an "A" anyway. OK?
OK.
So, did I cheat? I really did learn to operate Mr. Hollerith's machine (and even got to use that skill later, after enlisting in USAF). I just didn't actually push the same buttons as did the rest of the class.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Spam.
What else besides glasses would one have to wear?
What about Quark? Would be nice to see Gene/Gene on the airwaves again.
BTW, Forrest J. Ackerman coined the phrase "Sci-Fi" to honor early science fiction editor Hugo Gernsback, who was also into radio (think Hi-Fi).
Forrey was a great man, but really blew it with this horrid nickname. Trufen pronounce it "Skiffy".
...that we should teach touch-typing in school. So long is it's Dvorak, not that horribly antiquated, 19th century Qwerty cr*p.
So far as incentive goes, one would think the insurance, industry would be interested in a method that reduces one's daily finger travels from sixteen miles to one. Less RSI, less claims to pay out.