Corporations can own assets. At the least, all the money and property that Arthur Anderson has can be seized. Which makes any stock that the owners of the company have (which is probably a significant chunk of their wealth) worthless.
Umm...right. Objects at high speed relative to each other meeting up in the air - see SDI for why that's tough (though, granted, in SDI one side is trying not to be hit). Even if they could dock perfectly, you've still got an instant high acceleration and mechanical vibrations that could easily damage the sounding rocket (to say nothing of anything inside the rocket). Oh, and once these tethers have given up some of their momentum to swing the rockets higher (you're not going to have a counterweight on each swing that you can detach, at least without a bunch of launches by other means and without a steady stream of travellers which doesn't exist beforehand), how do these tethers stay in the air?
Tethers are slightly more real than the space elevator, granted. But there are far better ways to do SSTO that are even closer to reality...
We've had kinda-anti-red (turquoise), kinda-anti-blue (beige), and now kinda-anti-green (salmon)...so, will the next one be kinda-anti-white or kinda-anti-black?
I think "asynchronous" is the difference you're looking for. Normal computers only fire on a given clock pulse. Neurons fire whenever their excitation level (which is a function of when their inputs have fired) passes a certain threshold.
It's how most American families have better access to medical care (and better quality medical care, at that), or don't have to worry as much about putting food on the table (indeed, too much food has become a problem) or getting access to transportation so as to have a wider variety of jobs to choose from...in addition to consumer stuff like having more TVs.
If you really want to work 18 hours a day for wages below today's legally mandated minimum, you're free to do so (if you can find an employer who would go along), but most Americans reject such misery. Your "garbage" is what most people want and freely choose. Or, if you really think this lifestyle is ideal and would prefer to live where that was the only option, maybe you should ask China about immigration. I know, you'll probably just dismiss anything I say out of anger, but seriously...if you're so unhappy here, and you would be happier there, then why not go there?
Check the studies. Most of them account for inflation - though, granted, only counting the basics (food, housing, etc.) and not stuff like movie tickets in "cost of living". Even with inflation accounted for, standards of living are up.
The American family in the 1950s only had only the father working. Today the mother, father and teens work!
The mother and teens get paid to work now, partially because they are free to do labor that benefits other people (or not, by their whim; some choose to work). That doesn't mean they worked any less back then.
Technology improves and factories produce more and more with less labor, but the preponderance of the profits are going to the factory owners so the workers are actually getting poorer.
Nope, sorry. In real dollars, workers have been getting more money. Granted, the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but even the common American laborer today has a standard of living that the rich of olden days could only dream about. The data is out there; I encourage you to check it for yourself.
That said, there are also those who are genuinely horrified that the commoners have been getting better lives. They wish a return to the old days for everyone, if only because they fear their relative opulence is meaningless unless everyone else suffers. Some honestly believe that, in this return, they can somehow keep themselves exempt, and become like gods upon humanity. They therefore spread myths and lies about how the common people are worse off today than they used to be...and you, friend, seem to have fallen for their propaganda. (Would it be fair to call them "evil", since they wish ill upon everyone but themselves?)
And yet the nations do not care to. Which means it is up to individuals.
Would you care to put in the effort to, say, get the only lunar mining/processing/construction colony up and running? Big effort, yes, but also big rewards if done properly...
Ironic, isn't it? Revolutions intended to benefit one class - say, just the workers at the expense of the upper crust - tend only to produce a new exploited/exploiter distinction. Meanwhile, revolutions intended to benefit everyone across the board, deliberately allowing someone to be exploited if they so wish it, wind up reducing this exploitation overall.
The one thing I want to know is why you say "you might well be able to score 1 GHz processors for $500 each".
Note that I also said "with bulk discounts on that scale". This would presumably be a custom order straight from the chip manufacturer, not over the counter as most individuals buy.
Do you know how your Memory prices might change if you go with a i386 architecture?
I did a quick price check, and Mac memory was what I found prices for first. Just shop around online and check the prices. Given the amount of memory involved relative to what's available over the counter, OTC prices probably are more accurate here...but the points is that memory costs << CPU costs here, therefore memory costs practically don't matter for pricing out the whole computer.
As for getting "university grants", I don't think it would be a problem, IF we ever developed a process for imaging a brain.
Which is part of the reason I suggested doing lower animals first. There are products on the market now that do a reasonable simulation of an insect's nervous system - not just in input and output, but in what goes on inside. Of course, given as they are insect equivalents, they're good for little more than toys, and are marketed as such.
I can think of an invasive way to map brains that's less drastic than what you described. It requires some extremely small robot that can walk along neurons without damaging them, and knows where it is within the brain (possibly with the aid of a helmet worn while the robot traverses the brain). As it goes along, it notes which neurons are connected to which, by how many synapses, and counting the receptors inside the synapses to determine the "weight" each synapse places on its' neighbors' firings. With the weight function mapped, the synapse can be modelled as a variable in a neural network, and the robot goes on to the next. The neural network storing this information spawns off new neurons as they are discovered by the robots. The feedback function for human neurons is already partially known (it's mostly association: a synapse that fires gets strengthened regardless of whether the firing was "good" or "bad" with respect to the desired results - the "desired" connections get strengthened or weakened by deliberate firing or avoidance, i.e. thinking about a topic to remember it or not thinking about it to forget it, once it is known whether the association is desired - with some random noise thrown in to allow truly new synapses). This feedback would have to be included to allow to modelled human to learn and remember: any living animal (especially a human) is a dynamic system, therefore attempts to recreate one with a completely static, unchanging system can, IMO, at best create statues of the animal - but we want the animal itself.
This would be a slow process, of course, so you'd need a lot of robots to get it done in any reasonable amount of time. Say, 10^14 synapses divided by 10^10 robots...if it takes a minute to measure a synapse and move on to the next, that's 10^4 minutes, or just under a week. That's assuming the robots work nonstop, don't break down, and have enough power so they don't need to recharge.
Do reply, I'll be checking this.
Just out of curiosity, how are you finding this thread? Bookmarked, or some other means? Also, would it be preferable to move the discussion to email? (My email address is spam-blocked on this forum, but Slashdot's blocking is usually easy for a person to figure out.)
So? The AOL mail server and client is your software. Why not just upgrade it to meet your needs (while still serving the existing customers)? Or, say, develop an alternate, employee-only mail client that can later be rolled out to the customers (Mail v.next)?
Perhaps now they'll come out with products that are usable by businesses, then find out it's not that much effort to let home users use the same quality as well? One can wish...
If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files. It can also enforce naming conventions (say, "enter your name w/out spaces", "enter the job number" (if you have job numbers), "enter one word to uniquely describe this file", "select the file format" (with "Word", not ".doc", as what they see even though ".doc" is the actual value)...concatenate those to make the filename, and there you go. Most browsers in use today can support this...
Terrorism: an action or set of actions that cause terror.
Any action that we do causes terror in those who can not accept that most people in the world can think for themselves. Unfortunately, a number of said people, inspired by their sincere beliefs that they are among the few capable of having a clue and deciding things, have taken positions in government, where they can pass laws.
Not that I'm worried about this law. It is prior restraint of speech, which has already been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court; the first time it is used against anything of even vaguely questionable illegality (to say nothing of actual legitimate content), precedent leaves little choice for any judge but to strike the law down.
Of course not. That's part of the point of having corporations do the government's dirty work: corporations, being non-government agencies even when acting as agents of the government, are not subject to regulations like the FOIA.
You can have the greatest code in the world, but no one to sell it (vis: any number of all-engineer, no-sales companies that have gone bankrupt). Does this mean the engineer did a sloppy job?
Conversely, you can have barely working code, and have armies of marketers and salespeople (vis Microsoft). The engineer clearly was not as productive as the last example, but the results are higher $.
Possibly. Possibly not. Practical fuel cell lifespan is not yet known over as wide a variety of applications as, say, gasoline or batteries, but the core problem is that machines like these just tend to take More Power Than That.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, shell scripts can't be bribed, only their operators.
That's right, we're all cursed. That's why stuff like this happens. ;)
Corporations can own assets. At the least, all the money and property that Arthur Anderson has can be seized. Which makes any stock that the owners of the company have (which is probably a significant chunk of their wealth) worthless.
I don't think it had a specific color. Maybe its scales were like a chameleon's, to go with its translation talent?
Umm...right. Objects at high speed relative to each other meeting up in the air - see SDI for why that's tough (though, granted, in SDI one side is trying not to be hit). Even if they could dock perfectly, you've still got an instant high acceleration and mechanical vibrations that could easily damage the sounding rocket (to say nothing of anything inside the rocket). Oh, and once these tethers have given up some of their momentum to swing the rockets higher (you're not going to have a counterweight on each swing that you can detach, at least without a bunch of launches by other means and without a steady stream of travellers which doesn't exist beforehand), how do these tethers stay in the air?
Tethers are slightly more real than the space elevator, granted. But there are far better ways to do SSTO that are even closer to reality...
We've had kinda-anti-red (turquoise), kinda-anti-blue (beige), and now kinda-anti-green (salmon)...so, will the next one be kinda-anti-white or kinda-anti-black?
I think "asynchronous" is the difference you're looking for. Normal computers only fire on a given clock pulse. Neurons fire whenever their excitation level (which is a function of when their inputs have fired) passes a certain threshold.
It's how most American families have better access to medical care (and better quality medical care, at that), or don't have to worry as much about putting food on the table (indeed, too much food has become a problem) or getting access to transportation so as to have a wider variety of jobs to choose from...in addition to consumer stuff like having more TVs.
If you really want to work 18 hours a day for wages below today's legally mandated minimum, you're free to do so (if you can find an employer who would go along), but most Americans reject
such misery. Your "garbage" is what most people want and freely choose. Or, if you really think this lifestyle is ideal and would prefer to live where that was the only option, maybe you should ask China about immigration. I know, you'll probably just dismiss anything I say out of anger, but seriously...if you're so unhappy here, and you would be happier there, then why not go there?
Check the studies. Most of them account for inflation - though, granted, only counting the basics (food, housing, etc.) and not stuff like movie tickets in "cost of living". Even with inflation accounted for, standards of living are up.
The American family in the 1950s only had only the father working. Today the mother, father and teens work!
The mother and teens get paid to work now, partially because they are free to do labor that benefits other people (or not, by their whim; some choose to work). That doesn't mean they worked any less back then.
Technology improves and factories produce more and more with less labor, but the preponderance of the profits are going to the factory owners so the workers are actually getting poorer.
Nope, sorry. In real dollars, workers have been getting more money. Granted, the gap between the rich and the poor has been growing, but even the common American laborer today has a standard of living that the rich of olden days could only dream about. The data is out there; I encourage you to check it for yourself.
That said, there are also those who are genuinely horrified that the commoners have been getting better lives. They wish a return to the old days for everyone, if only because they fear their relative opulence is meaningless unless everyone else suffers. Some honestly believe that, in this return, they can somehow keep themselves exempt, and become like gods upon humanity. They therefore spread myths and lies about how the common people are worse off today than they used to be...and you, friend, seem to have fallen for their propaganda. (Would it be fair to call them "evil", since they wish ill upon everyone but themselves?)
And yet the nations do not care to. Which means it is up to individuals.
Would you care to put in the effort to, say, get the only lunar mining/processing/construction colony up and running? Big effort, yes, but also big rewards if done properly...
I think the poster was talking about weapons in space, more than resources.
Ironic, isn't it? Revolutions intended to benefit one class - say, just the workers at the expense of the upper crust - tend only to produce a new exploited/exploiter distinction. Meanwhile, revolutions intended to benefit everyone across the board, deliberately allowing someone to be exploited if they so wish it, wind up reducing this exploitation overall.
The one thing I want to know is why you say "you might well be able to score 1 GHz processors for $500 each".
Note that I also said "with bulk discounts on that scale". This would presumably be a custom order straight from the chip manufacturer, not over the counter as most individuals buy.
Do you know how your Memory prices might change if you go with a i386 architecture?
I did a quick price check, and Mac memory was what I found prices for first. Just shop around online and check the prices. Given the amount of memory involved relative to what's available over the counter, OTC prices probably are more accurate here...but the points is that memory costs << CPU costs here, therefore memory costs practically don't matter for pricing out the whole computer.
As for getting "university grants", I don't think it would be a problem, IF we ever developed a process for imaging a brain.
Which is part of the reason I suggested doing lower animals first. There are products on the market now that do a reasonable simulation of an insect's nervous system - not just in input and output, but in what goes on inside. Of course, given as they are insect equivalents, they're good for little more than toys, and are marketed as such.
I can think of an invasive way to map brains that's less drastic than what you described. It requires some extremely small robot that can walk along neurons without damaging them, and knows where it is within the brain (possibly with the aid of a helmet worn while the robot traverses the brain). As it goes along, it notes which neurons are connected to which, by how many synapses, and counting the receptors inside the synapses to determine the "weight" each synapse places on its' neighbors' firings. With the weight function mapped, the synapse can be modelled as a variable in a neural network, and the robot goes on to the next. The neural network storing this information spawns off new neurons as they are discovered by the robots. The feedback function for human neurons is already partially known (it's mostly association: a synapse that fires gets strengthened regardless of whether the firing was "good" or "bad" with respect to the desired results - the "desired" connections get strengthened or weakened by deliberate firing or avoidance, i.e. thinking about a topic to remember it or not thinking about it to forget it, once it is known whether the association is desired - with some random noise thrown in to allow truly new synapses). This feedback would have to be included to allow to modelled human to learn and remember: any living animal (especially a human) is a dynamic system, therefore attempts to recreate one with a completely static, unchanging system can, IMO, at best create statues of the animal - but we want the animal itself.
This would be a slow process, of course, so you'd need a lot of robots to get it done in any reasonable amount of time. Say, 10^14 synapses divided by 10^10 robots...if it takes a minute to measure a synapse and move on to the next, that's 10^4 minutes, or just under a week. That's assuming the robots work nonstop, don't break down, and have enough power so they don't need to recharge.
Do reply, I'll be checking this.
Just out of curiosity, how are you finding this thread? Bookmarked, or some other means? Also, would it be preferable to move the discussion to email? (My email address is spam-blocked on this forum, but Slashdot's blocking is usually easy for a person to figure out.)
So? The AOL mail server and client is your software. Why not just upgrade it to meet your needs (while still serving the existing customers)? Or, say, develop an alternate, employee-only mail client that can later be rolled out to the customers (Mail v.next)?
Perhaps now they'll come out with products that are usable by businesses, then find out it's not that much effort to let home users use the same quality as well? One can wish...
If FTP is too complex for your clients, why not set up an easier interface - say, a CGI script to upload files. It can also enforce naming conventions (say, "enter your name w/out spaces", "enter the job number" (if you have job numbers), "enter one word to uniquely describe this file", "select the file format" (with "Word", not ".doc", as what they see even though ".doc" is the actual value)...concatenate those to make the filename, and there you go. Most browsers in use today can support this...
They even say as much:
"It's built for precise positioning and smooth velocity control; it's not built for speed,"
I suspect NASA's engineers are rolling their eyes at their PR crews' headline just as much as we are.
And if the mail server (and its logs) are under control of the spammer, so the logs can be faked too...?
Terrorism: an action or set of actions that cause terror.
Any action that we do causes terror in those who can not accept that most people in the world can think for themselves. Unfortunately, a number of said people, inspired by their sincere beliefs that they are among the few capable of having a clue and deciding things, have taken positions in government, where they can pass laws.
Not that I'm worried about this law. It is prior restraint of speech, which has already been ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court; the first time it is used against anything of even vaguely questionable illegality (to say nothing of actual legitimate content), precedent leaves little choice for any judge but to strike the law down.
Of course not. That's part of the point of having corporations do the government's dirty work: corporations, being non-government agencies even when acting as agents of the government, are not subject to regulations like the FOIA.
You can have the greatest code in the world, but no one to sell it (vis: any number of all-engineer, no-sales companies that have gone bankrupt). Does this mean the engineer did a sloppy job?
Conversely, you can have barely working code, and have armies of marketers and salespeople (vis Microsoft). The engineer clearly was not as productive as the last example, but the results are higher $.
Hmm. Good point.
(Figured I'd post this since I can't mod you up.)
You misspelled "bought and paid for". ;)
but would that even be enough?
;)
Possibly. Possibly not. Practical fuel cell lifespan is not yet known over as wide a variety of applications as, say, gasoline or batteries, but the core problem is that machines like these just tend to take More Power Than That.