There are tons of human-powered means of transportation, like shoes, bikes, skateboards, and scooters. But few of these are of sufficient technological interest to warrant a mention on Slashdot. This is about news for nerds, not news for powerless transportation consumers.
Let's kill the fat rich people!
on
GeekCorps v2.0
·
· Score: 2
THarris from Geekhalla writes on their site: "The air-conditioned expatriate havens - I've seen a few now already in my week here - annoy me. As I see fat, rich people inconsiderately acting as they wish with no regard whatsoever for the people around them it just makes me want to SPIT!(This is accepted here, I've heard so I hock a loogie now in honour of all those kind and gentle people who make the effort.) Cheers my comrades. We can make the difference. Not all of us are ignorant, obnoxious buffoons. We know it's true. See you at the street-stalls and market places.
I'll see the rest of you in HELL!!"
It seems presumptuous to be in foreign land for a week and decide that the fat "ex-pats" are all ignorant, obnoxious buffoons. It's particularly surprising given Tim's well-traveled upbringing. Such aggressive language seems ill-considered from a group that would do well to bring the local community together, rather than broaden its divisions.
Geekhallans may not have talked to those they demonize. In many cases white Africans have been there for generations, so if they're pre-judging national origin of these so-called ex-pats based on skin color, they may be surprised to learn family histories.
If the wealthy seem fenced off from their community, or neighborhoods seem racially segregated, here's an article from Salon that may broaden your perspective: Rape, robbery and anguish in the new South Africa. Ghana is certainly very different from South Africa, but there are examples across Africa of racial intolerance that can lead to such divisions. For that matter, "fat, rich" Americans usually live very separately from their less fortunate fellow citizens, as well.
To condemn a group of people as ignorant without understanding their perspective is ironic.
As was previously noted, the rules apply
to technology created/procured after mid-2001. But
it wouldn't hurt to change what you've got anyway.
With thousands of pages, I'd write a program
to read through all of them, labeling whether they
seem to be okay as is, or if not list what elements
may need work, the most common example being "add alt
tags to images," but also audio or video files that
could use transcription, server-side image maps, and
that sort of thing. If all your html files are on one
server, this is pretty easy, but you could also modify a
web crawler to scan multiple servers. There are web-based
checkers that do this sort of thing, including W3C's own
HTML validator,
but you'll probably want to write your own, dealing only
with the issues you find really require changes.
As to what you're looking for, I'd spend some time
browsing your sites using lynx. Navigation
and comprehension doesn't have to be perfect, but
it should seem basically usable. The W3's guidelines
give all sorts of specific suggestions, but for the
most part, browsing in lynx and applying common sense
will obviate the areas that need work.
Some of JLab's pages are very visual, but most just
need alt tags added. For pages that need changes,
look at http://www.jlab.org,
which has essentially one image cut into 30 GIFs to
allow pretty mouse-over highlights on its links.
There are essentially three choices for this sort of
page.
1) Parallel pages. Put a "text-friendly version" link
at the top, with a parallel, text-friendly version.
This is only necessary for certain pages - keep links
on the pages the same and just put alternate versions
of each page as it's needed. And I wouldn't go text-only,
just text-friendly....
2) Text-only makeover. Redo the page to cut out the
unnecessary graphical frills you put so much work into
creating, thereby having *only* a text-friendly version.
3) Dual-use makeover. Redo the page to use unnecessary
frills, but with text-friendliness in mind as well.
This doesn't really take any more work than the doing a
text-unfriendly design, but since you're doing it over,
text-unfriendly design, but since you're doing it over,
it's certainly a hassle.
Ultimately I think dual-use, accessible design is what
the legislation in question is trying to encourage.
"We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date."
Unfortunately they don't mention what their core strengths are in the letter. They essentially tell us it's not creating content or dealing with customers, which seems quite insightful, but what is it they're good at? Corporate acquisitions and downsizing?
Slashdot and it's sibling Andover companies lose a million dollars about every 3.5 days, so it's easy to see where in that environment, people would extrapolate that you can't do much with a million bucks. (That's *net* loss, mind you, they spend a lot more).
To see a non-nanobudget, check the annual report on andover.net's "investors relations" (PDF only). I love the cover, a giant "O" asking investors to "Open Up." Fair warning, given what they ask you to swallow!
A storage expert writes: "Personally, I don't think this is going
to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies
making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be
much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom
drives hit the market."
Yeah, an idiot I know actually bought a mechanical hard drive
the other day! $180 down the tubes for 30 gigabytes. Talk about
old-school.
I told him, "ya know, it's 2001, you can get 30 gigs worth of
non-volatile stick memory these days." Sure it retails for
around $100,000, but it's quiet, and you can sleep without
fear of mechanical failure.
It's almost criminal that stores are still allowed to sell
mechanical hard drives, let alone manufacturers allowed to
continue "innovations" on such passe technology.
True, many are fly-by-nights. But many porn sites have been around for several years, and a handful have gross annual revenues exceeding $100 million. These larger companies forbid direct referrals in non-opt-in e-mail, but some allow "laundered" referrals...that is, the e-mail directs you to a website at joeschmoe.com, and joeschmoe.com refers to you to the porn site.
I'm sure it varies tremendously depending on the targetting of the spam, but one published example is LifeMinders.com, who say their opt-in mail lists get click-throughs from one in ten recipients. Seems way high, but part of their schtick is that ask what you're interested in when you sign up...their whole business model is sending "helpful reminder messages," and it really is legitimately an opt-in system.
But even if it's totally untargetted, undesired mail, so what if only one in a thousand click on a link? The cost of e-mail is very low, and the returns can be high. With porn sites, for example, referral fees are typically $20-40 per person who joins with a credit card, so if one in 50,000 recipients sign up, and you send ten million messages (not uncommon), that means 200 signups, or $4000-$8000 for one hard day of spamming. You have some real costs at that level, and certainly lots of hassles with complaints and account closures, but people obviously find it worth the trouble, or such spam wouldn't be so common.
Bruce writes: I think you can make it cheap, but I don't see it reaching the $20 price point unless the cell phone companies heavily subsidize it, which means
you'd need a monthly charge.
I've seen Family Radio Service two-way radios for under $20 at Best Buy or one of those stores. They're operating at 467 MHz, so it's lower, but in the ballpark. And unlike this phone, they have an audio amp & real speaker, replacable battery, multi-part plastic housing (at least three molds - front, back, and battery door, likely requiring manual assembly), real (non-membrane) buttons, external antenna (rather than a loop antenna on the circuit board), and probably some LED and/or LCD info (can't remember offhand). Just the packaging on these things, with two-piece vacuum molded clear plastic with an eye-grabbing four-color insert, are relatively expensive.
Strip all that out using an earphone you stick in your ear, one-use battery placed & soldered as a circuit board component, no case (it's integrated with the circuit board), no display or blinking lights, basically cheap out on any component you can, and $10 seems quite feasible with mass market production.
I don't know about the stuff specific to cell phones, but I've designed circuits with short-range 300-433 MHz data transceivers. It's a different RF thing altogether, but even in quantities of a few dozen, you can build them for under $20 (production cost not consumer price).
Landfill hell? Did you see the size of this thing? A single daily newspaper subscription would probably take the space of several hundred of these phones per day. This would be trivial for landfills.
The numbers are to the left of center in the larger photo, and the 3 button looks decidedly lower than the two button. Although the unit in the smaller photo is a different design altogether, with better aligned numbers, and white-on-black writing. The web site looks like that of a typical struggling startup, with pics of prototypes. Possibly doctored, possibly poorly designed, but either way not unusual for a cash-strapped startup. Doing final quality three-color artwork on a prototype intended to raise venture capital wouldn't be a priority.
Are you kidding? The Sun 4500 article was ganked from epinions too! You just replaced that after the scam came to light this morning!
And what are you talking about Philip [i.e., you] only owned the domain name, his name is all over the site on the grand opening announcement archived on Google.
I don't know if you're doing this as a joke at this point, like a weird performance art piece, or if you're just a compulsive liar.
So redir, the registered admin for the site, was lying about all those communications with the editor, which by your description above would be you? (You're the one who wrote the announcement of reviewboard's opening, and approve the submissions). He made up dozens of factual mis-statements? Another editor at Reviewboard (I'm not sure who works on it besides you and redir) changed the content of the article in response to allegations here?
What about the fact that the article on the 10K clearly states that you're the author? I quote, "Sun Enterprise 10000 By Chris Chabot".
From Google, looking up info on Chris Chabot, I found a reference to a site on "rb.chabotc.com". If you go there, you'll find a slightly older copy of Reviewboard. It has a link to the E10K article at http://rb.chabotc.com/Section/Cover/E10k. And on that article, you'll find that it lists the date of the configuration availability as "12/29/00".
One of the points of contention in this discussion has been that someone said they thought it originally said 12/29/00, then changed to 3/29/00. The discrepency between rb.chabotc.com's and reviewboard.com's article is further proof of ReviewBoard's lie and coverup. I hope other people will post verification of what I'm saying before the copy on rb.chabotc.com is changed again. Meta date tag I'm looking at says 2001-01-02 17:58:27. That date is not dynamically updated as another newbie pointed out, as you can see from looking at other reviews on RB.
You'll also find Chris Chabot, the allegedly reported admin of hundreds of Sun 10Ks, to have written reviews of laptops for Reviewboard, and even the article announcing the grand opening of Reviewboard! Sorry Chris, can't change that one, it's archived on Google.
Chris also used to post on occasion on Slashdot, under user chabotc, and has posted help requests to a linux-kernal mailing list.
I realize most of this thread has addressed the greater issues of how to raise children and provide a balanced education and such, and that's really a more interesting topic.
But to address just the question asked, here's my suggestion: get a JameCo catalog or visit jameco.com, and see what educational kits and/or books they have involving the BASIC Stamp. (Or see the manufacturer's site, parallaxinc.com.) This is a puny little computer that's programmed in BASIC. If the kid likes electronics, it's a nice way of combining that with programming. You can start out with simple things (flashing LEDs), and build up to more complicated things, like insect robots...what 9 year old geek wouldn't enjoy that! There are many areas of programming to learn, and embedded microcontrollers like the Stamp avoid a lot like structured programming and operating systems, but they teach the basics, emphasize efficiency, and can just be a lot of fun.:-)
If you look at
spamhaus.org's page on marketingmasters.com, in addition to tidbits like the last four ISPs from which they've been terminated, you'll find the reasons cited for blackholing marketingmasters.com's IP address, as well as blackholing Media3.net's other addresses. This is part of MAPS RBL SOP (standard operating procedure). You may not like what they do, but they're operating within their guidelines here.
Under MAPS RBL clause III of Blackholing Due to Spam Support Services, the IP address 209.211.253.74 is now elegible for addition to the RBL.
Under MAPS RBL clause IX of Blackholing Due to Spam Support Services, if the host media3.net is knowingly providing Spam Support Services by knowingly hosting the marketingmasters.com Spam Service Site, parts of (up to all of) media3.net's netblock may be nominated to the MAPS RBL.
If you want to read the clauses directly, check out http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/candidacy.html#ByAss ociation, which outlines the criteria and reasons for including spam support companies in the RBL. The essence of their criteria is "providing any service which uses internet resources to support spamming activity," although they go into more detail as well.
> ``We will include appropriate sponsors, merchandising, books, and computer games,'' Grabosch said. ``We need all these revenues in order to finance this project.''
Sure they glossed over asking NASA or the ISS about this. But say you've been on the ISS a couple months, hear a knock on the airlock, and see some bloke with a keg of St. Pauli Girl, fresh T-shirts, and the newly released Playstation IV. You gonna turn 'em away?
> I wonder who has the AdWord "sex"? I bet those people got a lot of bang for their buck!
Actually, nobody is currently paying for the AdWord "sex," precisely because of the lack of bang for your buck. The cost per impression seems cheap, 1.5 cents, but with a tiny text ad, most click-throughs are horrible. If one in a 100 click on your link (and it'd have to be a great or deceptive ad to get that), that's $1.50 a surfer. Goto.com will give you a much better targetted click for $0.15/clickthrough (not impression) on the term "sex," which is what might be deemed closer to "market value."
Gambling is about the most expensive search term you'll find on Goto, and for that you'll see people competing on Google for the AdWords exposure. But for most other AdWords users, I have a tough time believing they're making a profit on the ads. More likely they're either ignorant (ad agencies might be out of touch with a client's sales), or they're justifying it as "building market share."
You'll note that a large number of common terms have no AdWords purchased, like cars, drugs, sex, and cds. (AdWords are the ads on the right, not at the top). It could be the newness of AdWords, but I think it's more due to advertisers realizing the poor return on advertising. The ads are unobtrusive to a fault. They could give better clickthroughs while sticking to all-text ads by allowing advertisers to use larger fonts, different fonts, or even just bold instead of plain size=1 and size=2 Arial.
As a result, Google is leaving probably 98% of their AdWords ad space white, making $0, rather than price the space more competitively, allowing more eye-catching text ads, or otherwise making ad sales more attractive.
On the up side, their software for creating, placing, and tracking ads is top notch. They've got an excellent process in place. I don't think they've hit the right answer yet, but they've got a great technical infrastructure from which to try new things.
Moore's law predicted transistor density, not speed,
and is only rather approximate. If you interpret it
as speed doubling every 18 months (or quadrupling
every 3 years), then based on the 2 MHz 8080 in 1974,
we should now have half terahertz CPUs.
Obviously that doesn't hold very well. If you want to
do some kludged curve fitting based on Intel's history,
here are some data points.
1986 16 MHz i386 DX
1989 25 MHz i486 DX
1993 66 MHz Pentium
1996 150 MHz Pentium Pro
1997 200 MHz Pentium II
1999 500 MHz Pentium III
2001 1500 MHz Pentium IV
The 1.5 MHz Pentium IV was an unusually large leap.
In a kludged algorithm, you could interpret that as
an accellerating pace, or as a leap that's likely
to be followed by a lull. So really, it doesn't
tell you much, except that Intel's prediction
seems optimistic based solely on historical trends.
While you often hear "you can't put a value on a human life," we do it all the time. Juries do it when they award damages for deaths. We do it ourselves, probabilistically, when we decide how much various safety features are worth to us in a car. Or which airline to ride...lots of people will take ValuJet (now AirTran) at half the cost of reputable airlines despite their safety record.
Let's put a value on human life of, say, $10 million, for the sake of argument. (US juries seem to value US lives at $1 or $2 million, so $10 million worldwide leaves a big margin of error). So Iridium will pay $10 million if someone gets hit. They're staring at a 1:250 chance (dubious, but that's NASA's guess) at paying that. Then they're expected cost of hitting people is $10,000,000/250, or $40,000. Now do you think they can find a way of launching 74 satellites into higher orbits for less than $40,000?
Damn would it be ironic if I was the one who got hit.:-)
> there is some good news coming.
Apparently a really cool director's cut with some 14 extra scenes is going to be released either on DVD or even possibly in some theaters as a late
release reel.
Take a bad movie by a bad director, add on a half hour of what the director felt were the most worthless scenes of the movie, and that's "good news coming?" To whom? A future incarnation of MST3K?
How about Cliff or someone else at./ post an addendum on the first paragraph of the main posting: "[BEWARE: Seems to be a total scam, read discussion]". I know you have to watch your wording to avoid a possible lawsuit, but you also seem open to lawsuits if you do nothing after the scam is exposed. While it's easy to justify inaction as "only a moron would click on the link and buy it without reading the discussion," with 100,000 readers (total wild guess), you have to figure a few would do such a thing. They'll be out $250 each, and that's exactly what the scam's perpetrator counted on. The longer you have a front-page advertisement and link on./, the greater the perpetrator's reward, and the more encouraged other scam artists will be to pull these sorts of stunts. This is obviously a lot more pro than the "video game collection on eBay" hoax, and I'll be anything garners at least a few thousand dollars for the effort.
Slashdot Mirror
There are tons of human-powered means of transportation, like shoes, bikes, skateboards, and scooters. But few of these are of sufficient technological interest to warrant a mention on Slashdot. This is about news for nerds, not news for powerless transportation consumers.
THarris from Geekhalla writes on their site: "The air-conditioned expatriate havens - I've seen a few now already in my week here - annoy me. As I see fat, rich people inconsiderately acting as they wish with no regard whatsoever for the people around them it just makes me want to SPIT!(This is accepted here, I've heard so I hock a loogie now in honour of all those kind and gentle people who make the effort.) Cheers my comrades. We can make the difference. Not all of us are ignorant, obnoxious buffoons. We know it's true. See you at the street-stalls and market places.
I'll see the rest of you in HELL!!"
It seems presumptuous to be in foreign land for a week and decide that the fat "ex-pats" are all ignorant, obnoxious buffoons. It's particularly surprising given Tim's well-traveled upbringing. Such aggressive language seems ill-considered from a group that would do well to bring the local community together, rather than broaden its divisions.
Geekhallans may not have talked to those they demonize. In many cases white Africans have been there for generations, so if they're pre-judging national origin of these so-called ex-pats based on skin color, they may be surprised to learn family histories.
If the wealthy seem fenced off from their community, or neighborhoods seem racially segregated, here's an article from Salon that may broaden your perspective: Rape, robbery and anguish in the new South Africa. Ghana is certainly very different from South Africa, but there are examples across Africa of racial intolerance that can lead to such divisions. For that matter, "fat, rich" Americans usually live very separately from their less fortunate fellow citizens, as well.
To condemn a group of people as ignorant without understanding their perspective is ironic.
As was previously noted, the rules apply to technology created/procured after mid-2001. But it wouldn't hurt to change what you've got anyway.
With thousands of pages, I'd write a program to read through all of them, labeling whether they seem to be okay as is, or if not list what elements may need work, the most common example being "add alt tags to images," but also audio or video files that could use transcription, server-side image maps, and that sort of thing. If all your html files are on one server, this is pretty easy, but you could also modify a web crawler to scan multiple servers. There are web-based checkers that do this sort of thing, including W3C's own HTML validator, but you'll probably want to write your own, dealing only with the issues you find really require changes.
As to what you're looking for, I'd spend some time browsing your sites using lynx. Navigation and comprehension doesn't have to be perfect, but it should seem basically usable. The W3's guidelines give all sorts of specific suggestions, but for the most part, browsing in lynx and applying common sense will obviate the areas that need work.
Some of JLab's pages are very visual, but most just need alt tags added. For pages that need changes, look at http://www.jlab.org, which has essentially one image cut into 30 GIFs to allow pretty mouse-over highlights on its links. There are essentially three choices for this sort of page.
1) Parallel pages. Put a "text-friendly version" link at the top, with a parallel, text-friendly version. This is only necessary for certain pages - keep links on the pages the same and just put alternate versions of each page as it's needed. And I wouldn't go text-only, just text-friendly....
2) Text-only makeover. Redo the page to cut out the unnecessary graphical frills you put so much work into creating, thereby having *only* a text-friendly version.
3) Dual-use makeover. Redo the page to use unnecessary frills, but with text-friendliness in mind as well. This doesn't really take any more work than the doing a text-unfriendly design, but since you're doing it over, text-unfriendly design, but since you're doing it over, it's certainly a hassle.
Ultimately I think dual-use, accessible design is what the legislation in question is trying to encourage.
"We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date."
Unfortunately they don't mention what their core strengths are in the letter. They essentially tell us it's not creating content or dealing with customers, which seems quite insightful, but what is it they're good at? Corporate acquisitions and downsizing?
Slashdot and it's sibling Andover companies lose a million dollars about every 3.5 days, so it's easy to see where in that environment, people would extrapolate that you can't do much with a million bucks. (That's *net* loss, mind you, they spend a lot more).
To see a non-nanobudget, check the annual report on andover.net's "investors relations" (PDF only). I love the cover, a giant "O" asking investors to "Open Up." Fair warning, given what they ask you to swallow!
A storage expert writes: "Personally, I don't think this is going to be an issue in the near future. We already have companies making fast, solid-state ram drives. It can't be much longer before the first fast solid-state eprom drives hit the market."
Yeah, an idiot I know actually bought a mechanical hard drive the other day! $180 down the tubes for 30 gigabytes. Talk about old-school.
I told him, "ya know, it's 2001, you can get 30 gigs worth of non-volatile stick memory these days." Sure it retails for around $100,000, but it's quiet, and you can sleep without fear of mechanical failure.
It's almost criminal that stores are still allowed to sell mechanical hard drives, let alone manufacturers allowed to continue "innovations" on such passe technology.
True, many are fly-by-nights. But many porn sites have been around for several years, and a handful have gross annual revenues exceeding $100 million. These larger companies forbid direct referrals in non-opt-in e-mail, but some allow "laundered" referrals...that is, the e-mail directs you to a website at joeschmoe.com, and joeschmoe.com refers to you to the porn site.
I'm sure it varies tremendously depending on the targetting of the spam, but one published example is LifeMinders.com, who say their opt-in mail lists get click-throughs from one in ten recipients. Seems way high, but part of their schtick is that ask what you're interested in when you sign up...their whole business model is sending "helpful reminder messages," and it really is legitimately an opt-in system. But even if it's totally untargetted, undesired mail, so what if only one in a thousand click on a link? The cost of e-mail is very low, and the returns can be high. With porn sites, for example, referral fees are typically $20-40 per person who joins with a credit card, so if one in 50,000 recipients sign up, and you send ten million messages (not uncommon), that means 200 signups, or $4000-$8000 for one hard day of spamming. You have some real costs at that level, and certainly lots of hassles with complaints and account closures, but people obviously find it worth the trouble, or such spam wouldn't be so common.
Bruce writes: I think you can make it cheap, but I don't see it reaching the $20 price point unless the cell phone companies heavily subsidize it, which means you'd need a monthly charge.
I've seen Family Radio Service two-way radios for under $20 at Best Buy or one of those stores. They're operating at 467 MHz, so it's lower, but in the ballpark. And unlike this phone, they have an audio amp & real speaker, replacable battery, multi-part plastic housing (at least three molds - front, back, and battery door, likely requiring manual assembly), real (non-membrane) buttons, external antenna (rather than a loop antenna on the circuit board), and probably some LED and/or LCD info (can't remember offhand). Just the packaging on these things, with two-piece vacuum molded clear plastic with an eye-grabbing four-color insert, are relatively expensive.
Strip all that out using an earphone you stick in your ear, one-use battery placed & soldered as a circuit board component, no case (it's integrated with the circuit board), no display or blinking lights, basically cheap out on any component you can, and $10 seems quite feasible with mass market production.
I don't know about the stuff specific to cell phones, but I've designed circuits with short-range 300-433 MHz data transceivers. It's a different RF thing altogether, but even in quantities of a few dozen, you can build them for under $20 (production cost not consumer price).
Landfill hell? Did you see the size of this thing? A single daily newspaper subscription would probably take the space of several hundred of these phones per day. This would be trivial for landfills.
The numbers are to the left of center in the larger photo, and the 3 button looks decidedly lower than the two button. Although the unit in the smaller photo is a different design altogether, with better aligned numbers, and white-on-black writing. The web site looks like that of a typical struggling startup, with pics of prototypes. Possibly doctored, possibly poorly designed, but either way not unusual for a cash-strapped startup. Doing final quality three-color artwork on a prototype intended to raise venture capital wouldn't be a priority.
Are you kidding? The Sun 4500 article was ganked from epinions too! You just replaced that after the scam came to light this morning! And what are you talking about Philip [i.e., you] only owned the domain name, his name is all over the site on the grand opening announcement archived on Google. I don't know if you're doing this as a joke at this point, like a weird performance art piece, or if you're just a compulsive liar.
So redir, the registered admin for the site, was lying about all those communications with the editor, which by your description above would be you? (You're the one who wrote the announcement of reviewboard's opening, and approve the submissions). He made up dozens of factual mis-statements? Another editor at Reviewboard (I'm not sure who works on it besides you and redir) changed the content of the article in response to allegations here? What about the fact that the article on the 10K clearly states that you're the author? I quote, "Sun Enterprise 10000 By Chris Chabot".
From Google, looking up info on Chris Chabot, I found a reference to a site on "rb.chabotc.com". If you go there, you'll find a slightly older copy of Reviewboard. It has a link to the E10K article at http://rb.chabotc.com/Section/Cover/E10k. And on that article, you'll find that it lists the date of the configuration availability as "12/29/00".
One of the points of contention in this discussion has been that someone said they thought it originally said 12/29/00, then changed to 3/29/00. The discrepency between rb.chabotc.com's and reviewboard.com's article is further proof of ReviewBoard's lie and coverup. I hope other people will post verification of what I'm saying before the copy on rb.chabotc.com is changed again. Meta date tag I'm looking at says 2001-01-02 17:58:27. That date is not dynamically updated as another newbie pointed out, as you can see from looking at other reviews on RB.
You'll also find Chris Chabot, the allegedly reported admin of hundreds of Sun 10Ks, to have written reviews of laptops for Reviewboard, and even the article announcing the grand opening of Reviewboard! Sorry Chris, can't change that one, it's archived on Google.
Chris also used to post on occasion on Slashdot, under user chabotc, and has posted help requests to a linux-kernal mailing list.
"It's about time?" Seems to me it's just a couple months too late, actually.
Makes you wonder why NASA was backing Buchanan.
I realize most of this thread has addressed the greater issues of how to raise children and provide a balanced education and such, and that's really a more interesting topic.
:-)
But to address just the question asked, here's my suggestion: get a JameCo catalog or visit jameco.com, and see what educational kits and/or books they have involving the BASIC Stamp. (Or see the manufacturer's site, parallaxinc.com.) This is a puny little computer that's programmed in BASIC. If the kid likes electronics, it's a nice way of combining that with programming. You can start out with simple things (flashing LEDs), and build up to more complicated things, like insect robots...what 9 year old geek wouldn't enjoy that! There are many areas of programming to learn, and embedded microcontrollers like the Stamp avoid a lot like structured programming and operating systems, but they teach the basics, emphasize efficiency, and can just be a lot of fun.
If you look at spamhaus.org's page on marketingmasters.com, in addition to tidbits like the last four ISPs from which they've been terminated, you'll find the reasons cited for blackholing marketingmasters.com's IP address, as well as blackholing Media3.net's other addresses. This is part of MAPS RBL SOP (standard operating procedure). You may not like what they do, but they're operating within their guidelines here.
s ociation, which outlines the criteria and reasons for including spam support companies in the RBL. The essence of their criteria is "providing any service which uses internet resources to support spamming activity," although they go into more detail as well.
Under MAPS RBL clause III of Blackholing Due to Spam Support Services, the IP address 209.211.253.74 is now elegible for addition to the RBL.
Under MAPS RBL clause IX of Blackholing Due to Spam Support Services, if the host media3.net is knowingly providing Spam Support Services by knowingly hosting the marketingmasters.com Spam Service Site, parts of (up to all of) media3.net's netblock may be nominated to the MAPS RBL.
If you want to read the clauses directly, check out http://www.mail-abuse.org/rbl/candidacy.html#ByAs
> ``We will include appropriate sponsors, merchandising, books, and computer games,'' Grabosch said. ``We need all these revenues in order to finance this project.''
Sure they glossed over asking NASA or the ISS about this. But say you've been on the ISS a couple months, hear a knock on the airlock, and see some bloke with a keg of St. Pauli Girl, fresh T-shirts, and the newly released Playstation IV. You gonna turn 'em away?
> I wonder who has the AdWord "sex"? I bet those people got a lot of bang for their buck!
Actually, nobody is currently paying for the AdWord "sex," precisely because of the lack of bang for your buck. The cost per impression seems cheap, 1.5 cents, but with a tiny text ad, most click-throughs are horrible. If one in a 100 click on your link (and it'd have to be a great or deceptive ad to get that), that's $1.50 a surfer. Goto.com will give you a much better targetted click for $0.15/clickthrough (not impression) on the term "sex," which is what might be deemed closer to "market value."
Gambling is about the most expensive search term you'll find on Goto, and for that you'll see people competing on Google for the AdWords exposure. But for most other AdWords users, I have a tough time believing they're making a profit on the ads. More likely they're either ignorant (ad agencies might be out of touch with a client's sales), or they're justifying it as "building market share."
You'll note that a large number of common terms have no AdWords purchased, like cars, drugs, sex, and cds. (AdWords are the ads on the right, not at the top). It could be the newness of AdWords, but I think it's more due to advertisers realizing the poor return on advertising. The ads are unobtrusive to a fault. They could give better clickthroughs while sticking to all-text ads by allowing advertisers to use larger fonts, different fonts, or even just bold instead of plain size=1 and size=2 Arial.
As a result, Google is leaving probably 98% of their AdWords ad space white, making $0, rather than price the space more competitively, allowing more eye-catching text ads, or otherwise making ad sales more attractive.
On the up side, their software for creating, placing, and tracking ads is top notch. They've got an excellent process in place. I don't think they've hit the right answer yet, but they've got a great technical infrastructure from which to try new things.
Moore's law predicted transistor density, not speed, and is only rather approximate. If you interpret it as speed doubling every 18 months (or quadrupling every 3 years), then based on the 2 MHz 8080 in 1974, we should now have half terahertz CPUs.
1974 2 Mhz
1977 8 Mhz
1980 32 Mhz
1983 128 Mhz
1986 512 Mhz
1989 2048 Mhz
1992 8192 Mhz
1995 32768 Mhz
1998 131072 Mhz
2001 524288 Mhz
Obviously that doesn't hold very well. If you want to do some kludged curve fitting based on Intel's history, here are some data points.
1986 16 MHz i386 DX
1989 25 MHz i486 DX
1993 66 MHz Pentium
1996 150 MHz Pentium Pro
1997 200 MHz Pentium II
1999 500 MHz Pentium III
2001 1500 MHz Pentium IV
The 1.5 MHz Pentium IV was an unusually large leap. In a kludged algorithm, you could interpret that as an accellerating pace, or as a leap that's likely to be followed by a lull. So really, it doesn't tell you much, except that Intel's prediction seems optimistic based solely on historical trends.
While you often hear "you can't put a value on a human life," we do it all the time. Juries do it when they award damages for deaths. We do it ourselves, probabilistically, when we decide how much various safety features are worth to us in a car. Or which airline to ride...lots of people will take ValuJet (now AirTran) at half the cost of reputable airlines despite their safety record.
:-)
Let's put a value on human life of, say, $10 million, for the sake of argument. (US juries seem to value US lives at $1 or $2 million, so $10 million worldwide leaves a big margin of error). So Iridium will pay $10 million if someone gets hit. They're staring at a 1:250 chance (dubious, but that's NASA's guess) at paying that. Then they're expected cost of hitting people is $10,000,000/250, or $40,000. Now do you think they can find a way of launching 74 satellites into higher orbits for less than $40,000?
Damn would it be ironic if I was the one who got hit.
> The transistors are only 3 Atoms thick
:-)
Of course its leads still had to be spaced 0.1" apart for breadboarding, but damn are they thin!
After several decades of quiet contemplation, the 16 bit message, mysteriously enough, was 42.
> there is some good news coming. Apparently a really cool director's cut with some 14 extra scenes is going to be released either on DVD or even possibly in some theaters as a late release reel.
Take a bad movie by a bad director, add on a half hour of what the director felt were the most worthless scenes of the movie, and that's "good news coming?" To whom? A future incarnation of MST3K?
How about Cliff or someone else at ./ post an addendum on the first paragraph of the main posting: "[BEWARE: Seems to be a total scam, read discussion]". I know you have to watch your wording to avoid a possible lawsuit, but you also seem open to lawsuits if you do nothing after the scam is exposed. While it's easy to justify inaction as "only a moron would click on the link and buy it without reading the discussion," with 100,000 readers (total wild guess), you have to figure a few would do such a thing. They'll be out $250 each, and that's exactly what the scam's perpetrator counted on. The longer you have a front-page advertisement and link on ./, the greater the perpetrator's reward, and the more encouraged other scam artists will be to pull these sorts of stunts. This is obviously a lot more pro than the "video game collection on eBay" hoax, and I'll be anything garners at least a few thousand dollars for the effort.