Neilsen does not control what appears on your TV. I know this for a fact because I used to work there, and my husband still doed. All Neilsen does is gather information about what shows people watch and sell that information to the various media companies. It's still 100% CBS' call what to do with their airtime. Getting back on the real subject... I'm upset that Jericho has been cancelled (supposedly), just as I'll be doubly upset the day House goes off the air (which hopefully will be a long way off). Between those two, CSI, and occasionally Idol, that's all that I find worth watching on TV. Well, and reruns of Star Trek (TOS) on one of the local stations.
Are there "better" things to do with my time? Maybe, but since my voice doesn't really matter in the big picture (i.e. against war, human rights, etc), and many of the "better" things are just plain outside of my physical capabilities, I'd rather put my efforts into something where I might actually stand a chance of changing the outcome.
Sure it should - if Intel weren't outright trying to kill their competition. To Intel, this isn't about having two worthy competitors in the 'market.' It's about having one monopoly.
To Negroponte, this about putting technology into the hands of the kids and letting them learn and grow - a purely philanthropic work, and that's coming direct from him. Intel has NO RIGHT to do what they're doing anymore than Microsoft has a right to keep trying to kill ALL of their competition.
Is it better, in the overall grand sceme of things, to have 33 million happy, growing kids using the OLPC project and the Classmate combined, or 3 million less-than-happy kids using only the Classmate?
Having a waiting list wouldn't work any better than the current situation, since there's nothing stopping someone from setting their bot to watch for those lists to start accepting names - it might actually make things worse, since the time a legit user has to register the domain and grab it from the squatter goes from a matter of seconds or perhaps a minute or two to just plain zero.
On the other hand, picture codes are a useable way to stop the bots for a while. Let's extend the idea a bit: give the registrar a *massive* database of easily-recognizeable pictures (hundreds of thousands, I figure). When a registration page is generated and the picture added, the server should first apply a light noisify filter with a randomly-generated seed. That is, each time the picture is used, the seed for the noisify filter is different, which should pretty much eliminate any chance of a squatter keeping a database of images/hashes. Not noisy enough to make it a problem for the user, just enough to upset the file's hash. Other simple alterations can be applied to the picture such as brightness, tint, maximum number of colors, etc. With all of those randomly-chosen alterations, the chances that any given picture will hash exactly the same twice should approach zero.The user then identifies the picture they see and viola, one registered domain name.
Only downside I see to this is that it would increase the amount of bandwidth necessary to transmit the image, since noise is hard to compress and caching previous images becomes an exercise in futility. CPU power in altering the image might be a factor as well... What kind of per-hour registration rates are we seeing these days?
If it's humanly possible, a registrar should also require the new owner of a domain to put some useful content on the page pointed to by the domain within 3 months of registering the it. If in that amount of time, the domain still clearly points to a park/squat page, then the domain should be pulled and the cost redunded less some prorated amount. I'm sure most of us know that it takes almost no real effort to throw together a quick but decent front page while the real content is being crafted.
I should mod you down for kowtowing to an ISP, but I'd rather reply. The ISP sold me unlimited/unmetered access at some given speed, for a flat monthly rate, through which I download stuff constantly. If they don't have the actual, real bandwidth to keep up with my use of what I paid for, IT IS THEIR FAULT, PERIOD.
Either charge a flat rate and lower the speed to compensate for the believed overuse, or charge a per-bit rate for the higher speed.
I watched the youtube video and just about fell out of my chair as I watched what might as well have been a real-life Optimus Prime transform exactly the way he does in the cartoon! I have to ask....If what I've seen in the trailers is what I think I've seen, then why on earth isn't the upcoming movie going to use thwe sdame transform sequence used in that Youtube clip!? I'm still going to watch the movie when it comes out (well, when it hits DVD probably), but I feel utterly let down by whoever is responsible./me sighs heavily.
Not any more possible than it would be for Epson to claim ownership/copyright on something I drew and then printed out with my Stylus CX5000. Sure the image itself could be copyrighted, but the moment the government gets its proverbial hands on it and starts using it for something widespread like an ID, all bets are off. Besides, who is to say the government didn't pay the image artist a fair royalty, or better, just contracted someone to do the work for whatever compensation seems fit?
IANAL, but it seems to me that "useful arts" doesn't have to mean that said work of "art" (whether it be a painting or a fake ID) need be useful in the sense that you can actually do something functional with it (as you'd use a wrench to tighten a bolt). Useful can also mean something merely fills some random, intangible role that is best filled by a piece of art. I can, for example, "use" a painting of a vase and flowers to brighten up or add color to a room, yet I can't replace that painting with the real thing because of lack of space and a rule against adding permanent fixtures to the walls (e.g. a shelf to hold said vase).
My husband is an amateur photographer, and I would argue that the pictures he takes are just as much works of art as a painting of the same subject. If someone were to use one of his photos for whatever reason, without giving him credit for that photo, it's be just a big a violation of copyright as would making a copy of a DVD borrowed from a friend, the library, Blockbuster, etc.
Your company made a critical error - where the hell are the total light output measures for the products you're helping to push? You know, those magic numbers usually measured in Lumens? Telling us how many watts the light uses is fine and all, but without knowing the total light output from one of the bulbs, one can't properly calculate the total savings or cost of these new bulbs.
One of these 2.5W LED bulbs costs $36.95 according to OptiLED's calculator. A 100W-equivalent GE Compact Flourescent bulb costs about $8 for a three-pack at Wal*Mart (and produces a nice warm yellow-white light). If I need 10 OptiLED lamps (total of $369.50) to equal the normal light output from one 100W-equivalent CF bulb ($2.67-ish), then my energy savings only amount to about one watt (26-2.5*10=1), and my initial cost has gone up well over two orders of magnitude (369.50/2.67=138.39).
At one watt difference and 14c per kWH (or 0.014 cents per watt/hour), I'd have to burn one of these bulbs for just over 26202 hours (2.997 years burning continuously 24/7/364.25), just to break even. Let's be more realistic and say I turn my lights on for about 8 hours a day.. It would take me almost nine years just to use up those 26202 hours and break even.
I really hope my math is off a bit, but somehow I doubt it. So, show us the total light output or take a hike.
This clearly falls under the category of "stuff that matters." You know, the second half of Slashdot's slogan? If the goings-on in the government of the country most of us live in doesn't matter, well, I don't even know how to finish that sentence.
Between this news and Congress ordering the Prez to withdraw tropps from Iraq this morning, all I can say is that it's about G-D damned time someone stood up to these two. Maybe our country still has a chance?
When I first glanced at "cosmic missing link" part of the subject, I thought "finally, they've found an answer to all this dark matter/energy" business. Then I read the summary. *sigh*
This reminds me of something a friend did in a similar vane; for whatever reason, he gets pissed off and takes his keyboard, smashes it over the monitor in disgust. Keys everywhere, he tells me.
/me pulls herself up off the floor, still in tears from laughing.
You know, I tried reading that page once... and failed miserably (guess that makes me a dumbass?)
I've always wondered... aside from calling the guy a crackpot or similar, can someone translate that page into something that makes sense? The Wikipedia page on it doesn't really explain this guy's concept any more than it clearly explains quantum physics to the layperson (subatomic particles, I get, but quarks? fermions? wtf?)
At which point you proceed not to square two, but straight to square three and just rip/encode that ISO into an AVI or something else you can easily play.
Seriously though, I recognise that there are problems playing these broken discs on hardware players, which have a high probability of honoring every little DRM-related flag the DVD author sees fit to use, but what exactly what would prevent one of these broken discs, or an ISO of it, from working under XINE or other such tools which happily ignore the control-freak BS found on some discs?
I can't remember the company or the project name, but back in the late 90's (?) there was a standalone drive that you could hook to your computer or another audio device, that would let you record something new over the original content of a commercial CD. The commercial depicted a teenager anxiously popping a new CD into his portable player in anticipation of some new band he'd heard about, only to be thoroughly disappointed by their music.
How it worked or whether it was a hoax is anyone's guess. Google doesn't seem to have anything relating to it, either.
Depending on how you'd actually implement the rest of the cloak, the "wearer" wouldn't necessarily have to be blind. Take your cloaked object, let's assume the cloaking material is a solid or at least is applied to a solid surface, and punch two very tiny holes in exactly opposite sides of the object. The holes only need to be a couple milimeters in diameter - just large enough to point a camera at to see through. Now place a mirroring system like those used by teleprompters (where they float the text in front of the camera for the subject to read, but the camera only sees the subject and not the text) in front of each camera, and a projector aimed at each mirror. Each projector outputs whatever is captured by the camera on the opposite side of the cloaked object, while at the same time monitors inside the object display the cameras' images.
Given the nature of the military and the technology we have today, the whole camera+projector+mirror array could probably be made into a single compact unit no larger than a bottle of nail polish.
Of course this would only be of limited help, but it's a start. You could also design the material around the holes to compensate both in light collected and light projected (even if you have to scatter the light - think of how the glow from a street lamp partially obscures the lamp housing itself), and use that in conjunction with the camera/teleprompter idea. Either way, the observer wouldn't see anything significant relative to the rest of the cloaked region (I'm assuming the result would look something like the cloak in Predator, rather than near-perfect like in Star Trek.)
Oh dear G-D where do I start? "Cheap" is a totally relative term; the more money you make, the more expensive something has to get before you no longer call it "cheap". Being on a fixed income, my husband and I see the lower end of that scale quite regularly, and this is what we see when we look at the price of various new items:
Cheap computers, the internet, Slashdot, the ability to have millions of people hear your whine
Two of our computers, which are definitely not top of the line, set us back a total of close to $1500 a year ago, all of which was paid for from an insurance settlement (got rear-ended and left with permanent injuries)... hardly what I'd call cheap (the other two very low-end boxes we have were built from spare, used parts). Internet access? Strictly a luxury for most, a necessity for others, and it's hardly cheap if you can't stand dial-up speeds (think $10 for dial-up, about $30 for 3mbps DSL, or $45 for 7mbps cable). When you have to pay a recurring expense, it ceases to be cheap after some point in time. Slashdot and whining go hand-in-hand in some people's minds, but both are mostly just an artifact of the existance of the Internet.
Radios, televisions, iPods, and cellphones
As with any electronics, you get what you pay for. If you can ignore that, you still have to buy stuff that is good enough to tolerate (cheap radios sound like shit, cheap TV's will kill your vision, large TV's suitable for those with already-poor vision are $1500+). An iPod runs 80-$250 depending on model, plus the cost of the music you put on them will add up, if you're honest. Cell phones? Sure, $25 will get you one, and then you get dinged for 25 cents a unit in airtime, with a minimum of one unit per call (where one unit generally equals one minute in-area or 30 seconds roaming).
Books. Cheap affordable books
Cheap? Maybe. I can't comment on the price of books today, but the last time I bought a book it set me back $25 and fell apart within a couple of years (a programming manual, and it was a paperback at that).
Affordable and available medicine. MRI, ultrasounds, EEG, stents, bypass surgeries, artificial knees, safe childbirth, etc
Now I know you must be living outside the US. Health care is far from affordable for most people. Sure, there's Medicare if you're disabled or elderly, but that still costs around $150 a month if you don't qualify for QMB. For the rest of us who don't have it, all of the above medical proceedures are simply out of reach except in emergency situations (in which case you get saddled with a bill for thousands of dollars). Medicine, while easily available, isn't cheap if you need anything modern or otherwise not available in a generic form (insulin comes to mind).
Modern dentistry, healthy teeth
Tell that to the 5 teeth I've lost since I started needing dental care again (before the last few years, my last need for dental work was sometime in my teens). There is a reason free dental services are so few and far between, and generally only cover extractions rather than basic repairs (let alone more complicated things like root canals or crowns), and that reason is money. An extraction runs anywhere from $150 to $250 if you have to pay for it, and if you want an implant to replace the tooth the dentist extracted for free, that's another $1500. Not sure on the cost of basic repairs, but they're not cheap either, or dentists who have free services would offer repairs as well.
Cheap eyeglasses, hearing aids
Like electronics, you get what you pay for - my glasses and lenses were free and it shows (metal is corroding, one earpiece/lens joint is soldered). AFAIK, this is the only pair I can get from the one service that exists here, so I'm stuck with chipped and scratched lense
How about - perish the thought - renaming the image? Ok, it's a temporary solution, so maybe set up your site (assuming you can) such that your webserver periodically renames the image and alters your HTML accordingly? Sure legit users will still eat some of your bandwidth, but then again, they already are, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Are there "better" things to do with my time? Maybe, but since my voice doesn't really matter in the big picture (i.e. against war, human rights, etc), and many of the "better" things are just plain outside of my physical capabilities, I'd rather put my efforts into something where I might actually stand a chance of changing the outcome.
To Negroponte, this about putting technology into the hands of the kids and letting them learn and grow - a purely philanthropic work, and that's coming direct from him. Intel has NO RIGHT to do what they're doing anymore than Microsoft has a right to keep trying to kill ALL of their competition.
Is it better, in the overall grand sceme of things, to have 33 million happy, growing kids using the OLPC project and the Classmate combined, or 3 million less-than-happy kids using only the Classmate?
On the other hand, picture codes are a useable way to stop the bots for a while. Let's extend the idea a bit: give the registrar a *massive* database of easily-recognizeable pictures (hundreds of thousands, I figure). When a registration page is generated and the picture added, the server should first apply a light noisify filter with a randomly-generated seed. That is, each time the picture is used, the seed for the noisify filter is different, which should pretty much eliminate any chance of a squatter keeping a database of images/hashes. Not noisy enough to make it a problem for the user, just enough to upset the file's hash. Other simple alterations can be applied to the picture such as brightness, tint, maximum number of colors, etc. With all of those randomly-chosen alterations, the chances that any given picture will hash exactly the same twice should approach zero.The user then identifies the picture they see and viola, one registered domain name.
Only downside I see to this is that it would increase the amount of bandwidth necessary to transmit the image, since noise is hard to compress and caching previous images becomes an exercise in futility. CPU power in altering the image might be a factor as well... What kind of per-hour registration rates are we seeing these days?
If it's humanly possible, a registrar should also require the new owner of a domain to put some useful content on the page pointed to by the domain within 3 months of registering the it. If in that amount of time, the domain still clearly points to a park/squat page, then the domain should be pulled and the cost redunded less some prorated amount. I'm sure most of us know that it takes almost no real effort to throw together a quick but decent front page while the real content is being crafted.
Either charge a flat rate and lower the speed to compensate for the believed overuse, or charge a per-bit rate for the higher speed.
I watched the youtube video and just about fell out of my chair as I watched what might as well have been a real-life Optimus Prime transform exactly the way he does in the cartoon! I have to ask....If what I've seen in the trailers is what I think I've seen, then why on earth isn't the upcoming movie going to use thwe sdame transform sequence used in that Youtube clip!? I'm still going to watch the movie when it comes out (well, when it hits DVD probably), but I feel utterly let down by whoever is responsible. /me sighs heavily.
No, that would be Ghostscript in the Shell.
Not any more possible than it would be for Epson to claim ownership/copyright on something I drew and then printed out with my Stylus CX5000. Sure the image itself could be copyrighted, but the moment the government gets its proverbial hands on it and starts using it for something widespread like an ID, all bets are off. Besides, who is to say the government didn't pay the image artist a fair royalty, or better, just contracted someone to do the work for whatever compensation seems fit?
My husband is an amateur photographer, and I would argue that the pictures he takes are just as much works of art as a painting of the same subject. If someone were to use one of his photos for whatever reason, without giving him credit for that photo, it's be just a big a violation of copyright as would making a copy of a DVD borrowed from a friend, the library, Blockbuster, etc.
One of these 2.5W LED bulbs costs $36.95 according to OptiLED's calculator. A 100W-equivalent GE Compact Flourescent bulb costs about $8 for a three-pack at Wal*Mart (and produces a nice warm yellow-white light). If I need 10 OptiLED lamps (total of $369.50) to equal the normal light output from one 100W-equivalent CF bulb ($2.67-ish), then my energy savings only amount to about one watt (26-2.5*10=1), and my initial cost has gone up well over two orders of magnitude (369.50/2.67=138.39).
At one watt difference and 14c per kWH (or 0.014 cents per watt/hour), I'd have to burn one of these bulbs for just over 26202 hours (2.997 years burning continuously 24/7/364.25), just to break even. Let's be more realistic and say I turn my lights on for about 8 hours a day.. It would take me almost nine years just to use up those 26202 hours and break even.
I really hope my math is off a bit, but somehow I doubt it. So, show us the total light output or take a hike.
This clearly falls under the category of "stuff that matters." You know, the second half of Slashdot's slogan? If the goings-on in the government of the country most of us live in doesn't matter, well, I don't even know how to finish that sentence.
Between this news and Congress ordering the Prez to withdraw tropps from Iraq this morning, all I can say is that it's about G-D damned time someone stood up to these two. Maybe our country still has a chance?
Like any real programmer, G-D uses 8 bit unsigned ints. :-)
Cellphone: check
Cell carrier that cares little for privacy: check
Barcode by Microsoft: check
Connects to a website: check
'nuff said?
When I first glanced at "cosmic missing link" part of the subject, I thought "finally, they've found an answer to all this dark matter/energy" business. Then I read the summary. *sigh*
Thanks, I needed that laugh :-)
(It's a joke. Laugh. I'm referring to the kashrut's 1:60 accidental mixture rule)
I've always wondered... aside from calling the guy a crackpot or similar, can someone translate that page into something that makes sense? The Wikipedia page on it doesn't really explain this guy's concept any more than it clearly explains quantum physics to the layperson (subatomic particles, I get, but quarks? fermions? wtf?)
Seriously though, I recognise that there are problems playing these broken discs on hardware players, which have a high probability of honoring every little DRM-related flag the DVD author sees fit to use, but what exactly what would prevent one of these broken discs, or an ISO of it, from working under XINE or other such tools which happily ignore the control-freak BS found on some discs?
er, the product name, even.
How it worked or whether it was a hoax is anyone's guess. Google doesn't seem to have anything relating to it, either.
Given the nature of the military and the technology we have today, the whole camera+projector+mirror array could probably be made into a single compact unit no larger than a bottle of nail polish.
Of course this would only be of limited help, but it's a start. You could also design the material around the holes to compensate both in light collected and light projected (even if you have to scatter the light - think of how the glow from a street lamp partially obscures the lamp housing itself), and use that in conjunction with the camera/teleprompter idea. Either way, the observer wouldn't see anything significant relative to the rest of the cloaked region (I'm assuming the result would look something like the cloak in Predator, rather than near-perfect like in Star Trek.)
Oh dear G-D where do I start? "Cheap" is a totally relative term; the more money you make, the more expensive something has to get before you no longer call it "cheap". Being on a fixed income, my husband and I see the lower end of that scale quite regularly, and this is what we see when we look at the price of various new items:
Two of our computers, which are definitely not top of the line, set us back a total of close to $1500 a year ago, all of which was paid for from an insurance settlement (got rear-ended and left with permanent injuries)... hardly what I'd call cheap (the other two very low-end boxes we have were built from spare, used parts). Internet access? Strictly a luxury for most, a necessity for others, and it's hardly cheap if you can't stand dial-up speeds (think $10 for dial-up, about $30 for 3mbps DSL, or $45 for 7mbps cable). When you have to pay a recurring expense, it ceases to be cheap after some point in time. Slashdot and whining go hand-in-hand in some people's minds, but both are mostly just an artifact of the existance of the Internet.
As with any electronics, you get what you pay for. If you can ignore that, you still have to buy stuff that is good enough to tolerate (cheap radios sound like shit, cheap TV's will kill your vision, large TV's suitable for those with already-poor vision are $1500+). An iPod runs 80-$250 depending on model, plus the cost of the music you put on them will add up, if you're honest. Cell phones? Sure, $25 will get you one, and then you get dinged for 25 cents a unit in airtime, with a minimum of one unit per call (where one unit generally equals one minute in-area or 30 seconds roaming).
Cheap? Maybe. I can't comment on the price of books today, but the last time I bought a book it set me back $25 and fell apart within a couple of years (a programming manual, and it was a paperback at that).
Now I know you must be living outside the US. Health care is far from affordable for most people. Sure, there's Medicare if you're disabled or elderly, but that still costs around $150 a month if you don't qualify for QMB. For the rest of us who don't have it, all of the above medical proceedures are simply out of reach except in emergency situations (in which case you get saddled with a bill for thousands of dollars). Medicine, while easily available, isn't cheap if you need anything modern or otherwise not available in a generic form (insulin comes to mind).
Tell that to the 5 teeth I've lost since I started needing dental care again (before the last few years, my last need for dental work was sometime in my teens). There is a reason free dental services are so few and far between, and generally only cover extractions rather than basic repairs (let alone more complicated things like root canals or crowns), and that reason is money. An extraction runs anywhere from $150 to $250 if you have to pay for it, and if you want an implant to replace the tooth the dentist extracted for free, that's another $1500. Not sure on the cost of basic repairs, but they're not cheap either, or dentists who have free services would offer repairs as well.
Like electronics, you get what you pay for - my glasses and lenses were free and it shows (metal is corroding, one earpiece/lens joint is soldered). AFAIK, this is the only pair I can get from the one service that exists here, so I'm stuck with chipped and scratched lense
If games affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in dark rooms, munching on pills and listening to repetative electroinic music. Oh, wait...
Naw, just send Dust Puppy down there, he should fit.
How about - perish the thought - renaming the image? Ok, it's a temporary solution, so maybe set up your site (assuming you can) such that your webserver periodically renames the image and alters your HTML accordingly? Sure legit users will still eat some of your bandwidth, but then again, they already are, right?