The web server says "hey, here's a cookie you can store for me, if you like, and send it back later to assist me. Do with it as you please." The user's browser either ignores it, or later sends a copy. If this isn't consent, I don't know what the hell is. So the HTTP protocol itself already ensures that all websites are compliant.
I would so like to see you argue like that before a judge. Do you honestly believe that a computer can agree to something for its user without the user knowing about it in a way the law would accept? Sorry, but I don't believe that it is possible and I have a hard time to believe that something along the way of "but the user could have changed his browser settings so he gets a chance to agree" would work either.
For international users there is also often the problem that some of the questions make no sense. I never was to anything I could compare to a high school as the system is different here. So the number of questions is even smaller. I also saw a system you had to select two questions. From two lists of 4 non overlapping questions. So even there reducing the number of possibilities.
But what really annoys me is, when one of those things only accepts characters and perhaps numbers and even limits the length (I think Yahoo Mail did that, but I am not sure, I just filled the field with random stuff and forgot it).
The idea that there is no further use for it than to deorbit garbage is crazy.
Why? That is exactly what it was designed for. It carries supplies to the ISS, then is a bit of storage/extension to the space station and uses its fuel to lift the ISS so it doesn't fall out of orbit. When the surplus fuel is burnt, it is loaded with garbage, does two deorbit burns and enters the atmosphere. And then provides a spectacular light show.
Of what use would a space craft without fuel and loaded with garbage be to anybody? As all the things it does have to be done, I don't see where the problem is. Leaving it in orbit would just be creating dangerous space debris, so that is no option. The changes needed to make it reusable would seriously drive the price up, would have the issues the space shuttle shows (wear on material, high cost of maintenance) and would limit the loading capabilities. So to repeat, it does exactly what it was designed to do.
What baffles me is that you say it doesn't happen in Europe (or at least not as much). Please, what is your secret to pulling that off?
Laws are so complicated that most politicians don't understand it either and fear that their amendments might cause something entirely different? I really have no clue, but I always wondered the same, how can you attach something completely different to a law and later enforce it like it seems possible in the US? I find my countries laws hard enough to read, but only because of arcane language, US laws are even formatted in a way that I often have the suspicion that the pages got swapped someway.
They're the same assets in 2D and 3D. We take the 3D assets and we 'shoot' em from a locked-down isometric point of view, then we turn those assets into 2D sprites. It looks very similar between the two formats.
So they intend to render the 3D stuff and use that. But honestly that whole "interview" strikes me as odd. They can't talk about this, can't show that, they are not allowed to tell what happened with Firefly. They can't tell us the style of their artwork or the game play.
For me it sounds like complete vaporware. I don't have the impression they actually have anything that works. I doubt there is any artwork done yet or can you imagine a game company passing on the ability to promote their game they want to release this year? I am not so sure you can just take 3D assets and turn them into useful 2D ones for a game. Things which work in 3D don't always work so well in an iso metric view. I simply don't understand the problems to go straight to 3D, if they have the 3D assets and the game mechanics. Especially if they have been developing on Firefly in 3D, shouldn't they have the code to do a 3D version yet?
To me that whole thing sounds like a company in need of a new round of VC financing.
And of what use would that be? Reflectance is not very dependent on wavelength for most materials. Only thin materials close to the range of lambda / 2 to lambda / 4 and transparent materials with an optical density different than the surrounding medium at surfaces (refraction and dispersion) show big differences in wavelength. Other materials reflectance is only lightly dependent on wavelengths. The magnetic permeability basically defines how strong it is via the Fresnel equation for dielectric reflection. Metals show the strongest wavelength dependence with different angles, materials like plastic show nearly none.
So how would you use the results of different wavelengths without knowing the material, as you couldn't calculate the angles from the observed image. Besides, what do you think red, green and blue are? Additionally many digital cameras actually capture infrared light, some have IR filter built in (so it won't work) and it depends on the lens (some materials and coating used in lenses absorb IR light). There are some web sites about that subject (Google Search)
What escapes me is, how you want to use a polarizer to block wavelengths as it is not very selective. Technically you call devices blocking wavelengths "filters" and you can get quite a lot of colors commercially (and many B&W photographers have a handfull of really colorfull ones). But again I don't see, how that would help to reconstruct 3D information.
I found the press release by the university (press release (in German) is here) and it contains a bit more information. They also checked areas with known deviations of the magnetic field and found, that the cows seem to react stronger to the magnetic north than the geographic north.
Let's see what C++ is missing.
C++ vs Ruby, Python,
1. No REPL in c++. For a large project, it takes a while to try out an algorithm.
Not in C++, but in VS is the ability for incremental compilation. But honestly I think it is one of the worst things to use to program. It leads to the "hmm, lets use -1. Nope, +1? Yes, it works. That has to be correct then" approach which leads to terrible code which is adapted to exactly one example data set. REPL is not needed in any programming method I am familiar with.
That is something I sure don't miss at all and I have programmed in Smalltalk which at least has a much more powerful version of that idiom. Sorry.
2. Generators && Closures && lambdas
Lambdas will be in C++0x (hopefully). Closures would probably violate one of the fundamental principles of C++: "If you don't use it, you don't pay for it". Generators (if you are talking about what I think you are) would need the ability to dynamically extend the program. Apart from the obvious security problems that can pose, it doesn't sound as if there was any way to add that to C++ in a way the standard could describe, as it would depend on linker semantics of the underlying OS (if you even have an OS) and that traditionally isn't specified in a C++ (or C) standard.
3. Strong "reflection" capabilities too, which means that code can inspect, load and modify other code (in Java, C# too).
That is a rarely needed capability in my opinion and has the same issue as "Generators". C++ is and was not intended to be able to modify its own code. Though a way to access typing information at compile time would often help with templates and so some new things in that respect are also in the draft for C++0x.
LISP and C# has the above, plus
1. Static Typing
As is C++. Or is that one of those philosophic things that C++ has cast operators allowing to interpret anything as anything else? That is a result of the intent to still maintain the ability to work very close to the hardware. But apart from a problem with static_cast (downcasts in an inheritance hierarchy) the "new" casts will not violate the static typing or at least tell you they do and in what way.
2. LISP possible has the more generic syntax conceivable, and code can extend the language to suit the domain. A consequence of Code itself being Data.
3. Concurrency (one of those things 0x is supposed to solve) is simpler in a language which supports functional programming.
Concurrency is only simpler in a pure functional language (side effects free), so Lisp doesn't belong in that category either (because of "let"). And side effect free languages have big problems to define interaction with some kind of UI. There is no free lunch.
So basically your complaint is, that C++ is not LISP. So why don't you just program in Lisp then and instead want to turn C++ into something unthinkable? Or can you imaging working in a language where you can cast a pointer to a lambda function into a char*, add 5 to that pointer and cast it again to access the second statement in the lambda function?
And what exactly do you think is different for rasterizers? Ever heard the term "pixel shaders"? That is exactly what can be used to do procedural texturing on GPUs now. At that level there is no difference between the two systems. A rasterizer will have to evaluate the function per subpixel and so will a raytracer. As soon as additional environmental information is needed, a raytracer has the advantage that you only need to fire additional rays, a rasterizer needs more programming effort. But neither is very cheap.
A rather simple example are silky surfaces. They require a high amount of tests into the environment as they result from a surface which scatters light into many directions (microfacet model). To calculate such a surface you send rays into the scene from each pixel where you hit such a material. The density of rays you need depends on the surface roughness.
It is rather unimportant if you do that sampling by sending rays or by environment mapping. Both have there advantages and disadvantages.
In Germany it can be both. If the piracy has a commercial background, it can end up in criminal court. But for cases with few files and more on a personal scale, it is highly unlikely to end up there. A criminal case without significant damage often ends up being closed before going before a judge. Then there is the way to seek damages in civil court.
Why those simple cases get into the realm of a prosecutor is rather simple, you need a way to turn the captured IP addresses into a street address. And that is what the industry can't do, the rather strong privacy laws basically make it impossible for the industry to get that mapping legally (and it explains why they lobbied for a new law going into effect soon which is supposed to allow it, if the Bundesverfassungsgericht (German equivalent of the Supreme Court) doesn't stop that law). Currently they need a prosecutor who has that authority. Normally those cases are closed, but the street address is already in the files. Now the lawyer of the copyright holder can exercise his rights to see those files and so gets the address to sue before a civil court for damages. And that is, why that stuff ends up in the workload of prosecutors. And they started to define rules when they will close those cases right away.
In Europe there is no import tax on software as far as I know. Though to find out about that some years ago I had to dig through the lengthy German list and belive me, it took some time to find it in the section labeled something like "Weapons and Nuclear Devices". Basically Software was taxed and treated mostly like ammunition in the past, at least in Germany, so similar export restrictions existed. I haven't dug through the current listing, it is even more confusing.
The number of German or Itallian consumers is small compared to those who use English and the price reflects the marginal production costs per unit.
Easy to dispel. If that was true, then why is the English version of Dreamweaver CS3 in Germany more expensive than the German version? To show a German E-Shop, there you can see, that the German version is 557 Euro while the English version is 582 Euro.
Part of the differences are VAT (in Germany currently 19% and also to be paid on transport costs) and the longer time for warranty (6 months if the merchant can't prove you did something wrong and then 18 months if you can prove the problem existed at the time you bought the device). Although I never seen warranty worth anything with software. But the English version won't be different from what you buy in the US, it is probably the exact same package.
Also how much do you think needed to be translated between CS2 and CS3? Shouldn't most of the translations already exist?
Because I would guess, that the other things get much more expensive. I would guess, that few personell would like to live in some remote Alaskan or Canadian village, so you will have to pay them more, if you can even find some. Then you need a lot of power, I somehow doubt that that is available so easily either. Next is the problem with connectivity. A single connection is not exactly a good thing for a datacenter, you want to have redundancy. Also you have to move the equipment, whenever new hardware is needed you have to ship it to a remote place. And lastly, I would expect it will cost a lot to get experts to your datacenter in the wild when something goes wrong and you need to get the guys from the company which designed the cooling or electrical system or any other of the systems you can't do by yourself to your remote datacenter.
All together I have doubts that it would really help to put datacenters in relatively remote areas and even when put into bigger cities, some of the effects probably still have a noticeable effect on the costs. Also just having a heatsink won't work, you still need to have a way to get the heat from your equipment away, so you don't even save all of the costs of cooling.
It isn't, but there was a rather strange lawsuit about open wireless access. I don't remember what it was about specifically (fraud, hacking, child porn,...), but something ileagal was executed from that network. As the owner had an open access wireless router and could not provide any logs or other data to identify the real perpetrator, he was charged as an accomplice, I think.
This is entirely from memory, I think it was about two years ago.
Eclipse also has many large problems that have never been fixed despite it--gasp--being open source. Its version of IntelliSense has bugs up the ass, such as not always displaying private methods and member variables until you backspace and retype the object name (and if that was intentional, then somebody has some explaining to do as to where the hell their HCI guys were). These bugs are annoying enough that, despite Eclipse's arguably better features, I am less productive in Eclipse than I am in the closed source Visual Studio.
Funny that you give that example, as in VS.2005 IntelliSense was basically completely broken for C++ projects having multiple projects in a solution. I often had the example, that it could find the definition of something in one file and not in another one. That is ctrl-tab to the next file, select the same class/function/whatever and it wouldn't find it. Additionally it keeps updating that "database" all the time, sucking up a lot of CPU. VS.2008 is only gradually better, at least it is much faster to rebuild its database.
The GPGPU scheme is, after all, a re-invention of the vector processing of old. Vector processors died out, however, because there were too few users to support. Now that there's a commercially viable reason to make these processors (PS3 and video games), they are interesting again.
Since when have "vector processors died out"? The "Earth Simulator" for example used the NEC SX-6 CPU, currently the SX-9 is sold. Vector processors never died out and were in use for what they are best at. The GPU and the Cell are no match for either processor, first they both are only fast in single precission mode and much slower when they have to do double precission (the second generation of Cell is better at double precission) and they both have a weak memory subsystem when compared to a true VPU. It is slow and they can only use small memories. As far as I know the Cell can't even chain it's VPUs, something which was standard since the Cray-2 on VPUs.
If you're using uninitialized memory to generate randomness, it wasn't very random in the first place.
It is only one source for the entropy pool and the SSL "fix" was a Debian maintainer running valgrind on OpenSSL, finding a piece of code where uninitialized memory was accessed, "fixed" it and a "similar piece" and accidently removed all entropy from the pool. The result of that is, that all ssh-keys and ssl-certs created on Debian in the last 20 months are to be considered broken. (Debian Wiki SSLkeys on the scope and what to do)
It didn't in the last 11 years, it seems not everything bearing the name "NT" is doomed from the start. Besides, Windows NT wasn't bad either. The first flight of NT 07 was in September of '97 and there was no serious accident yet.
IANAL, but it would seem that a court having already decided this exact issue would pretty much kill their case. Wallace lost on summary judgment, which means that the court in that case found that, even if everything he said was true (and that was doubtful), he could not prevail.
In other words, that claim is very likely to go nowhere, fast. The judge in the Wallace case was a well-respected anti-trust expert, too.
The Skype case is in Munich, Germany, a US court does not exactly set any precedent here. But I doubt the decision will be much different to how it would be if it was, as the GPL has been upheld quite often in Germany as well.
But what if the companies hiring these datacenter contractors decide that they want to be green? Then these datacenter contractors will simply do some half-assed unproven carbon-offset like dumping iron into the oceans or planting trees in a place that can't support them (cheap real estate like tundra or desert wins here--especially if it is done in the 'future' while the offset company is preparing its sites).
Or use power from renewable energy sources, use energy efficient power supplies and switch to cooling via normal air when the temperature is low enough. Incidently, this is the gist of this page (in German), it is from 1&1 the biggest hoster in Germany. Germany incidently has a carbon tax and companies pay taxes based on the power they consume (very simplified). The last sentence is "Auch die 1&1 Rechenzentren in den USA sollen im nächsten Jahr auf klima-neutralen Strom umgestellt werden." and translates to "Also the 1&1 data centers in the USA are intended to be switched to climate-neutral power next year.". Incidently the number 2 here Strato (page in German) does something similar. They also use power from renewable sources and reduced power consumption within 2 years by 30%.
Using less power obviously is in their best interest and has the added benefit of being very easy to advertise.
Things like Adwords is a large toilet that we used to flush money down. Anything that makes our $$$ go further we are all for.
And you think that one of the companies receiving those $$$ is interested to make a change to earn less? Or is it rather a change to charge more as they can then "prove" that the more ads they deliver, the more sales will be generated? How long until they propose that they track your customers and then charge you extra because one of your customers looked at one of the ads 10 days ago and so "obviously" the ad served by them was what made the sale (and so you have to pay more for the ad)?
We might know tons about terrestrial life, but we know nothing about how life could begin in a different environment.
And that doesn't strike you as a reason "we" are looking for familiar signs? How would you interpret things as life if you don't know how it would work, what it would consume and what produce? We would need to be able to closely inspect the planet to tell if we found life. But if we find familiar conditions, where we know with a high probability that certain reactions won't happen "naturally" and that the signature of products can't be produced in their relation to each other by natural processes (at least with a high probability), we have a much higher chance to tell life from other effects. Even so we still couldn't be sure.
So I would say looking for conditions known to be able to support life is the only thing which can do, because it is unclear if we would understand forms of life working completely differently to be alive.
The people who invented ASN.1 have actually spent rather more than a few minutes thinking about this stuff of course, and it might be a good idea to read what they have written before you claim those problems are insoluble.
Bleh, I have implemented big parts of an ASN.1 parser 10 years ago. If you suggest that instead of XML then I am sorry I bothered to reply. I actually have created binary file formats (that were written and read by a MSB and a LSB machine) before and I became very, very careful and think long about it before I do it again.
Hmm, so if I can't read Finnish it proves that written languages are impossible? Email the Journal of Linguistics and them your important discovery!
Sorry? I thought it was you who wrote the following:
And decent human programmers can read them with a debugger or from a hexdump in a file, or write a tool to dump them as a human friendly ASCII during development.
So you mean only the original implementor can do that? So what if a project gets passed on to the next developer or there are a lot of programmers each one responsible for a small part? I can easily search for an XML-tag in the code, how do you search for 0x16? Is it 0x16 in the code, is it 22, or perhaps 026? Or could it be that (1 << 4 | 6)? I know how code is usually documented and how "easy" it is to follow a program which has grown organically over some years. Binary file formats suck as long as they aren't thoroughly documented as it is nearly impossible to search for anything in the code as you never know how the value you see in the file (or where your application crashes when reading it) was created. Also debugging binary formats is time consuming as you need additional tools to decode the format to readable format. And that even assumes the conversion tools is up to date all the time and bug free.
Slashdot Mirror
I would so like to see you argue like that before a judge. Do you honestly believe that a computer can agree to something for its user without the user knowing about it in a way the law would accept? Sorry, but I don't believe that it is possible and I have a hard time to believe that something along the way of "but the user could have changed his browser settings so he gets a chance to agree" would work either.
For international users there is also often the problem that some of the questions make no sense. I never was to anything I could compare to a high school as the system is different here. So the number of questions is even smaller. I also saw a system you had to select two questions. From two lists of 4 non overlapping questions. So even there reducing the number of possibilities.
But what really annoys me is, when one of those things only accepts characters and perhaps numbers and even limits the length (I think Yahoo Mail did that, but I am not sure, I just filled the field with random stuff and forgot it).
Wennebostel is just the name of the village. See Wedemark.
Why? That is exactly what it was designed for. It carries supplies to the ISS, then is a bit of storage/extension to the space station and uses its fuel to lift the ISS so it doesn't fall out of orbit. When the surplus fuel is burnt, it is loaded with garbage, does two deorbit burns and enters the atmosphere. And then provides a spectacular light show.
Of what use would a space craft without fuel and loaded with garbage be to anybody? As all the things it does have to be done, I don't see where the problem is. Leaving it in orbit would just be creating dangerous space debris, so that is no option. The changes needed to make it reusable would seriously drive the price up, would have the issues the space shuttle shows (wear on material, high cost of maintenance) and would limit the loading capabilities. So to repeat, it does exactly what it was designed to do.
Laws are so complicated that most politicians don't understand it either and fear that their amendments might cause something entirely different? I really have no clue, but I always wondered the same, how can you attach something completely different to a law and later enforce it like it seems possible in the US? I find my countries laws hard enough to read, but only because of arcane language, US laws are even formatted in a way that I often have the suspicion that the pages got swapped someway.
From the article:
So they intend to render the 3D stuff and use that. But honestly that whole "interview" strikes me as odd. They can't talk about this, can't show that, they are not allowed to tell what happened with Firefly. They can't tell us the style of their artwork or the game play.
For me it sounds like complete vaporware. I don't have the impression they actually have anything that works. I doubt there is any artwork done yet or can you imagine a game company passing on the ability to promote their game they want to release this year? I am not so sure you can just take 3D assets and turn them into useful 2D ones for a game. Things which work in 3D don't always work so well in an iso metric view. I simply don't understand the problems to go straight to 3D, if they have the 3D assets and the game mechanics. Especially if they have been developing on Firefly in 3D, shouldn't they have the code to do a 3D version yet?
To me that whole thing sounds like a company in need of a new round of VC financing.
And of what use would that be? Reflectance is not very dependent on wavelength for most materials. Only thin materials close to the range of lambda / 2 to lambda / 4 and transparent materials with an optical density different than the surrounding medium at surfaces (refraction and dispersion) show big differences in wavelength. Other materials reflectance is only lightly dependent on wavelengths. The magnetic permeability basically defines how strong it is via the Fresnel equation for dielectric reflection. Metals show the strongest wavelength dependence with different angles, materials like plastic show nearly none.
So how would you use the results of different wavelengths without knowing the material, as you couldn't calculate the angles from the observed image. Besides, what do you think red, green and blue are? Additionally many digital cameras actually capture infrared light, some have IR filter built in (so it won't work) and it depends on the lens (some materials and coating used in lenses absorb IR light). There are some web sites about that subject (Google Search)
What escapes me is, how you want to use a polarizer to block wavelengths as it is not very selective. Technically you call devices blocking wavelengths "filters" and you can get quite a lot of colors commercially (and many B&W photographers have a handfull of really colorfull ones). But again I don't see, how that would help to reconstruct 3D information.
I found the press release by the university (press release (in German) is here) and it contains a bit more information. They also checked areas with known deviations of the magnetic field and found, that the cows seem to react stronger to the magnetic north than the geographic north.
Not in C++, but in VS is the ability for incremental compilation. But honestly I think it is one of the worst things to use to program. It leads to the "hmm, lets use -1. Nope, +1? Yes, it works. That has to be correct then" approach which leads to terrible code which is adapted to exactly one example data set. REPL is not needed in any programming method I am familiar with.
That is something I sure don't miss at all and I have programmed in Smalltalk which at least has a much more powerful version of that idiom. Sorry.
Lambdas will be in C++0x (hopefully). Closures would probably violate one of the fundamental principles of C++: "If you don't use it, you don't pay for it". Generators (if you are talking about what I think you are) would need the ability to dynamically extend the program. Apart from the obvious security problems that can pose, it doesn't sound as if there was any way to add that to C++ in a way the standard could describe, as it would depend on linker semantics of the underlying OS (if you even have an OS) and that traditionally isn't specified in a C++ (or C) standard.
That is a rarely needed capability in my opinion and has the same issue as "Generators". C++ is and was not intended to be able to modify its own code. Though a way to access typing information at compile time would often help with templates and so some new things in that respect are also in the draft for C++0x.
As is C++. Or is that one of those philosophic things that C++ has cast operators allowing to interpret anything as anything else? That is a result of the intent to still maintain the ability to work very close to the hardware. But apart from a problem with static_cast (downcasts in an inheritance hierarchy) the "new" casts will not violate the static typing or at least tell you they do and in what way.
Concurrency is only simpler in a pure functional language (side effects free), so Lisp doesn't belong in that category either (because of "let"). And side effect free languages have big problems to define interaction with some kind of UI. There is no free lunch.
So basically your complaint is, that C++ is not LISP. So why don't you just program in Lisp then and instead want to turn C++ into something unthinkable? Or can you imaging working in a language where you can cast a pointer to a lambda function into a char*, add 5 to that pointer and cast it again to access the second statement in the lambda function?
And what exactly do you think is different for rasterizers? Ever heard the term "pixel shaders"? That is exactly what can be used to do procedural texturing on GPUs now. At that level there is no difference between the two systems. A rasterizer will have to evaluate the function per subpixel and so will a raytracer. As soon as additional environmental information is needed, a raytracer has the advantage that you only need to fire additional rays, a rasterizer needs more programming effort. But neither is very cheap.
A rather simple example are silky surfaces. They require a high amount of tests into the environment as they result from a surface which scatters light into many directions (microfacet model). To calculate such a surface you send rays into the scene from each pixel where you hit such a material. The density of rays you need depends on the surface roughness.
It is rather unimportant if you do that sampling by sending rays or by environment mapping. Both have there advantages and disadvantages.
In Germany it can be both. If the piracy has a commercial background, it can end up in criminal court. But for cases with few files and more on a personal scale, it is highly unlikely to end up there. A criminal case without significant damage often ends up being closed before going before a judge. Then there is the way to seek damages in civil court.
Why those simple cases get into the realm of a prosecutor is rather simple, you need a way to turn the captured IP addresses into a street address. And that is what the industry can't do, the rather strong privacy laws basically make it impossible for the industry to get that mapping legally (and it explains why they lobbied for a new law going into effect soon which is supposed to allow it, if the Bundesverfassungsgericht (German equivalent of the Supreme Court) doesn't stop that law). Currently they need a prosecutor who has that authority. Normally those cases are closed, but the street address is already in the files. Now the lawyer of the copyright holder can exercise his rights to see those files and so gets the address to sue before a civil court for damages. And that is, why that stuff ends up in the workload of prosecutors. And they started to define rules when they will close those cases right away.
In Europe there is no import tax on software as far as I know. Though to find out about that some years ago I had to dig through the lengthy German list and belive me, it took some time to find it in the section labeled something like "Weapons and Nuclear Devices". Basically Software was taxed and treated mostly like ammunition in the past, at least in Germany, so similar export restrictions existed. I haven't dug through the current listing, it is even more confusing.
Easy to dispel. If that was true, then why is the English version of Dreamweaver CS3 in Germany more expensive than the German version? To show a German E-Shop, there you can see, that the German version is 557 Euro while the English version is 582 Euro.
Part of the differences are VAT (in Germany currently 19% and also to be paid on transport costs) and the longer time for warranty (6 months if the merchant can't prove you did something wrong and then 18 months if you can prove the problem existed at the time you bought the device). Although I never seen warranty worth anything with software. But the English version won't be different from what you buy in the US, it is probably the exact same package.
Also how much do you think needed to be translated between CS2 and CS3? Shouldn't most of the translations already exist?
Because I would guess, that the other things get much more expensive. I would guess, that few personell would like to live in some remote Alaskan or Canadian village, so you will have to pay them more, if you can even find some. Then you need a lot of power, I somehow doubt that that is available so easily either. Next is the problem with connectivity. A single connection is not exactly a good thing for a datacenter, you want to have redundancy. Also you have to move the equipment, whenever new hardware is needed you have to ship it to a remote place. And lastly, I would expect it will cost a lot to get experts to your datacenter in the wild when something goes wrong and you need to get the guys from the company which designed the cooling or electrical system or any other of the systems you can't do by yourself to your remote datacenter.
All together I have doubts that it would really help to put datacenters in relatively remote areas and even when put into bigger cities, some of the effects probably still have a noticeable effect on the costs. Also just having a heatsink won't work, you still need to have a way to get the heat from your equipment away, so you don't even save all of the costs of cooling.
It isn't, but there was a rather strange lawsuit about open wireless access. I don't remember what it was about specifically (fraud, hacking, child porn, ...), but something ileagal was executed from that network. As the owner had an open access wireless router and could not provide any logs or other data to identify the real perpetrator, he was charged as an accomplice, I think.
This is entirely from memory, I think it was about two years ago.
Funny that you give that example, as in VS.2005 IntelliSense was basically completely broken for C++ projects having multiple projects in a solution. I often had the example, that it could find the definition of something in one file and not in another one. That is ctrl-tab to the next file, select the same class/function/whatever and it wouldn't find it. Additionally it keeps updating that "database" all the time, sucking up a lot of CPU. VS.2008 is only gradually better, at least it is much faster to rebuild its database.
Since when have "vector processors died out"? The "Earth Simulator" for example used the NEC SX-6 CPU, currently the SX-9 is sold. Vector processors never died out and were in use for what they are best at. The GPU and the Cell are no match for either processor, first they both are only fast in single precission mode and much slower when they have to do double precission (the second generation of Cell is better at double precission) and they both have a weak memory subsystem when compared to a true VPU. It is slow and they can only use small memories. As far as I know the Cell can't even chain it's VPUs, something which was standard since the Cray-2 on VPUs.
It is only one source for the entropy pool and the SSL "fix" was a Debian maintainer running valgrind on OpenSSL, finding a piece of code where uninitialized memory was accessed, "fixed" it and a "similar piece" and accidently removed all entropy from the pool. The result of that is, that all ssh-keys and ssl-certs created on Debian in the last 20 months are to be considered broken. (Debian Wiki SSLkeys on the scope and what to do)
It didn't in the last 11 years, it seems not everything bearing the name "NT" is doomed from the start. Besides, Windows NT wasn't bad either. The first flight of NT 07 was in September of '97 and there was no serious accident yet.
Nope, see the EUs case against Microsoft. Anti-Trust laws are common in Europe as well.
The Skype case is in Munich, Germany, a US court does not exactly set any precedent here. But I doubt the decision will be much different to how it would be if it was, as the GPL has been upheld quite often in Germany as well.
Or use power from renewable energy sources, use energy efficient power supplies and switch to cooling via normal air when the temperature is low enough. Incidently, this is the gist of this page (in German), it is from 1&1 the biggest hoster in Germany. Germany incidently has a carbon tax and companies pay taxes based on the power they consume (very simplified). The last sentence is "Auch die 1&1 Rechenzentren in den USA sollen im nächsten Jahr auf klima-neutralen Strom umgestellt werden." and translates to "Also the 1&1 data centers in the USA are intended to be switched to climate-neutral power next year.". Incidently the number 2 here Strato (page in German) does something similar. They also use power from renewable sources and reduced power consumption within 2 years by 30%.
Using less power obviously is in their best interest and has the added benefit of being very easy to advertise.
And you think that one of the companies receiving those $$$ is interested to make a change to earn less? Or is it rather a change to charge more as they can then "prove" that the more ads they deliver, the more sales will be generated? How long until they propose that they track your customers and then charge you extra because one of your customers looked at one of the ads 10 days ago and so "obviously" the ad served by them was what made the sale (and so you have to pay more for the ad)?
And that doesn't strike you as a reason "we" are looking for familiar signs? How would you interpret things as life if you don't know how it would work, what it would consume and what produce? We would need to be able to closely inspect the planet to tell if we found life. But if we find familiar conditions, where we know with a high probability that certain reactions won't happen "naturally" and that the signature of products can't be produced in their relation to each other by natural processes (at least with a high probability), we have a much higher chance to tell life from other effects. Even so we still couldn't be sure.
So I would say looking for conditions known to be able to support life is the only thing which can do, because it is unclear if we would understand forms of life working completely differently to be alive.
Bleh, I have implemented big parts of an ASN.1 parser 10 years ago. If you suggest that instead of XML then I am sorry I bothered to reply. I actually have created binary file formats (that were written and read by a MSB and a LSB machine) before and I became very, very careful and think long about it before I do it again.
Sorry? I thought it was you who wrote the following:
So you mean only the original implementor can do that? So what if a project gets passed on to the next developer or there are a lot of programmers each one responsible for a small part? I can easily search for an XML-tag in the code, how do you search for 0x16? Is it 0x16 in the code, is it 22, or perhaps 026? Or could it be that (1 << 4 | 6)? I know how code is usually documented and how "easy" it is to follow a program which has grown organically over some years. Binary file formats suck as long as they aren't thoroughly documented as it is nearly impossible to search for anything in the code as you never know how the value you see in the file (or where your application crashes when reading it) was created. Also debugging binary formats is time consuming as you need additional tools to decode the format to readable format. And that even assumes the conversion tools is up to date all the time and bug free.