(no subject)

The parking outside the local school at 9am and 3:20pm is getting worse and worse, with people treating the no parking signs/lines as their own personal space. Or double (or triple) parking instead. Much easier than parking a few yards away and, you know, walking.

They've tried having a traffic warden attend - sadly not issuing tickets - as a warning. This worked. For about three days.

My personal solution, if I'm not alllowed to impose the death penalty, would be to make the children carried in the cars stand up at assembly and speak for five minutes on 'why my parents / guardians think the parking laws do not apply to them'.

A few months ago, there was a fuss in the Evening Standard about someone stickering 4WD cars with 'this car is killing the environment' stickers that were impossible to remove without damaging the paint. Apparently, you could get them by asking a hotmail address. Unfortunately, they didn't say which...

... 'cos I'd love to have some that say 'I don't give a shit about other people's children'.

(no subject)

Thinking about sources of money... what bits of electronic equipment are not currently possible because of the lack of cheap but serious processing power? It'd need to be reasonably simple, given the cpu power, and desirable enough to sell a million or so. You can have a TV output and a USB port on it. And a CPU that can do 600 MIPS but costs a couple of dollars.

If I look at what I do that needs crunch power, there's chess, but that wouldn't sell enough - 99.999+% of the chess players in the world can't beat the current portable chess computers.

Real-time MPEG-4 video encoding would be good, but you'd need too many other things (video grabbing h/w etc)

A portable audio recorder that does real-time MP3 encoding would be possible - use it as a portable (dictation, meetings, bootlegs etc) and attach it to a PC via the USB.

Paul, anything in the cryptography line? Phone scramblers don't need that much crunch, and I doubt there's the market for something to break codes the hard way (although it'd pay well)

If your friends were normal people...

... they would not know you.

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