The underlying question is to what degree can we moderate global climate changes? That's a tough one.
To the extent that human activities contribute to the climate changes, we have some room for action. For instance, we know that our CO2 production is one of the driving forces, so we can decrease that. A Tom Sawyer strategy of getting everyone to whitewash their roofs, parking lots, and streets would bring surface reflectance closer to what it was before the industrial revolution (and this would be particularly beneficial in the urban hot spots that have been driving a lot of local climate abberations).
But the really tough nut is that any of these approaches are very long term, and no current human society (with the possible exception of China) knows how to implement plans that will take a hundred years or more to come to fruition. This has not always been the case: European cathedrals and other large monuments show that as a species we have had the capacity for this kind of thing. But have we lost it along the way?
I do not think that means what you think it means.
Please read up on it; the 3 second rule is a matter of Newtonian physics and human reaction times (compounded over several drivers). It is not just somebody thinking it would be a good idea.
Cruise control is good thing, in rural Wyoming. It has no useful function, and is too often dangerous, when the amount of traffic on the road exceeds 50% of the road's safe carrying capacity.
We have the technology... cruise control should be tied to GPS and central traffic control networks and automatically shut down for everybody when conditions make it unsafe. But how likely is that to ever happen? It violates Ferengi logic: there is no profit in it.
A better alternative is to recognize that the skills needed to navigate lethal vehicles on a congested road exceed the skills needed to pilot small aircraft under visual flight rules-- and the dangers to third parties from drivers are a lot higher than from non-commercial pilots. By all reason, it should be a lot harder to get and maintain a drivers license than a basic pilots license. But again, that violates Ferengi logic. You can't sell as many cars if you require drivers to learn and demonstrate how to operate them safely.
If drivers were properly licensed, then cruise control would be a lot safer. As it is, cruise control is too often a crutch used by persons with weak driving skills in the belief that if they don't have to worry about maintaining their speed, they can more safely focus on other driving tasks. That is a fallacy: if you cannot control your vehicle's speed manually through the development of good habits, you are an unsafe driver who is refusing to learn the basic skills needed to develop better driving habits.
You are not the first to encounter this kind of problem. The traditional answer is to not mess with the Fortran, but to put a wrapper around it in the language of your choice and leave the Fortran internals alone.
From your description of the limitations of the Fortran code, I get the strong sense that this would be the best approach for you to take. It can be very difficult to tease out the reasoning behind some of those archaic Fortran constructions: they tended to be blends of methods to deal with hardware limitations that we don't have any more and also methods of dealing with computational limitations that are STILL present. E.g, when code was written to optimize buffering for a slow read-the-tape operation, it can be too easy to fail to see that it was also written to handle some kinkiness in the underlying differential expressions, or to exploit an edge case, or assure that some follow-on operation in another module would receive enough significant digits that its results would be better than garbage.
Just treat the Fortran library as a black box object and wrap the interface you want around it. You will find it easier to do, much easier to debug, and vastly easier to convince your colleagues that what you've done can be relied upon. You will also develop skills in wrapping old code for new purposes that could become an important part of your career.
Thanks for the link to Forbes story; reading it was sadly enlightening. It got me to do some quick research in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The PTO runs under its own agency regulations, and while these do recognize the crime of fraud, the regulations specify that when this is discovered, the redress will be disallowing the patent. Nothing more. There is no provision for holding any of the individuals involved accountable for their fraudulent acts.
So unless there is some general provision in the CFR that could be brought to bear, persons filing for patents do in fact become members of an elite group who are held to a different standard under Federal law than is the case for persons claiming similar ownership of property rights in any of the fifty states (such as filing for title to a vehicle or boat, etc). I believe that misrepresenting yourself as the owner of the $75,000 Rolls Royce you are selling is a felony in any state. But claiming ownership of I.P. of greater value that you know belongs to somebody else is okay under PTO regulations if you can get away with it. And it is really okay under PTO regulations if you DON'T get away with it-- you simply don't get away with it, that time.
I don't think that encouraging that kind of dishonesty is a good thing for the business community, or for society.
Most likely none, since it's not actually a crime.
That doesn't seem to fit with the rest of USA law. Is it not a crime to defraud an agency of the Federal Government? Or is there a different standard of law that applies to corporations and corporation officers than to mere citizens?
What sanctions can be brought against Ozzie if it can be shown that he withheld knowledge of prior art? Can he personally see jail time for this?
Since this would be a Federal crime, how would Slashdot request an FBI investigation of Ozzie's allegedly criminal behavior?
Should we put it to a vote or will someone just step forward and do whatever is necessary to inform the FBI?
Putting a man on Mars, while definitely cool, could easily be just another "been there, done that" vacation from steady progress, like the later Apollo missions were.
Beginning an assessment of lunar resources is the next significant step we can take. What is up there? Anything that we can use as rocket fuel, or as structural material? Can concrete prefabs made of lunar regolith be shipped down to LEO for use in stone space stations at a lower cost than sending exotic materials up from Earth? That's actually likely. Also, while the Moon is very poor in heavy elements in general, it has been collecting meteors for a few billion years: are there any local deposits of iron and nickel that we could use? Something just 0.35% the size of New Jersey (equivalent to the Mesabi Range of Minnesota)? That is a pretty small dot on a lunar map, but just one find like that would provide enough high grade steel for more than a hundred years of spaceship manufacture. How about other minerals? Is there a rich splash of pitchblend nodules near the surface of the regolith in some lunar sea?
We will need the equivalent of several Lewis and Clark expeditions to begin to estimate the potential up there. Much of this will be done by robots, but it makes sense to have many of these robots under the control of lunar explorers, who could easily do first hand inspections of unexpected findings. The explorers would be also experimenting with how to live under conditions that are harsher than Mars in many ways, but also much easier to support from Earth when problems arise.
At the same time we are exploring the Moon, we can be putting more robots on Mars, and sending more satellites to rendezvous with near Earth objects of interest. Perhaps we will find that we can use lunar resources to reduce the costs of these other programs. There are certainly things the Moon experience can teach us that will help make these other probes, and the eventual manned Mars station, more successful.
It would require an active system that listened for each bat's vocalizations, then constructed a faux echo that would seem to come from the danger zone by using multiple speakers with carefully tuned amplitudes and delays. The audio pick-ups and speakers don't have to weigh very much or be very powerful: you are attempting to mimic the sounds reflected from a sheet of plywood. So several of these could be mounted within the blades without adding significantly to their mass. The software would be interesting, different from but similar in complexity to the brains of an electronic fuel injection system in a car (cue car analogy). Forth might be a good development language.
It would be fun to construct a testing facility for this. See if you could get bats to fly in patterns around imaginary stalactites.
These techniques should work-- provided the only data in the files that are being compared is the image data. If other data has been overlaid on an image by steganography, then that is likely to confuse any attempt to identify the image with the greatest fidelity to the original.
I can't think of any way to assess how often steganography is currently being used on the web. Its use is growing; the number of downloads of steganographic software is increasing. There is software available that can test for the presence of a steganographic overlay in a suspected jpeg file with some reliability. But if the problem is determining whether one of the 250 snapshots taken at the Company Picnic and being uploaded to Flikr is also loaded with the recipe for the Company's Secret Sauce... I don't think there is any effective way to do that kind of screening.
Is Original Poster actually looking for a way to bulk scan for the use of steganography? It seems to me that this an emerging problem in corporate espionage.
Doesn't FedEx still route everything through one central location, and do all the sorting from that one spot? That's a helluvalot simpler problem than USPS, where there is some level of sorting and routing at every one of the 75,000 US Post Offices. FedEx can get by with a single point of failure system, but the USPS has to continue to work no matter what kinds of regional disasters might impact it: it has to use a distributed model.
Obviously the USPS has a lot more Linux installations to do. But it is impressive that they have managed as many as they have in the first year, without any major SNAFUs.
COBOL runs quite fast; it is a compiled language that was designed from the start for compiler optimization of business logic code. Think in terms of well written C.
COBOL's reputation for being slow has to do with writing the programs, and dates back to its earliest days when code had to be written as SET RIDICULOUSLYLONGVARIABLENAME EQUAL TO 2 PLUS 2. Development time sped up a lot when Gracie was finally convinced that RIDICULOUSLYLONGVARIABLENAME = 2 + 2 would work as well (the original approach had to do with coders handprinting the instructions on coding forms that were then given to keypunch operators who knew nothing about computer languages but could type really fast and accurately... so long as their fingers didn't have to reach too far from the home keys).
I was never found of COBOL in school, and never did much with it. But I agree with others that anyone who has worked with a couple of programming languages could probably master COBOL in a matter of hours: in retrospect, it is basically a simple and obvious language. What I probably could not do is reverse engineer some of the constructs that were used back in the day: a lot of weird code was developed to work around hardware limitations that no one born after 1980 will have ever seen. Much of that wasn't documented well, and I think that is why old COBOL programmers are in demand. They remember that this particular type of data structure was used to optimize read-write operations on dual high speed tapes... to a younger programmer it just looks like arbitrary stupidity and they don't know what to do with it.
Of course you could get a dramatic speed improvement running Apple ][ code on any emulation, even another 6502 machine. One of the Apple ][ features is that it was underclocked by 50% to run cool enough that it didn't need a fan and you rarely had to reseat chips that were climbing out of their sockets from thermal creep (the bane of all those poor fools who were messing about with the Trash-Eighties).
Once I was the proud owner of what might have been the very first second hand Apple ][+ on the market between San Francisco and Portland. It had a fully populated lower 48 of RAM! Dual 5.25" floppy drives on ribbon cables! Use it during prime time on TV and ruin the reception of all your neighbors, who couldn't imagine what could be causing those squirmy worms that distorted their Dukes of Hazzard show!
Ah! I am SO glad that those days are now distant memories!
NYCL and others who know a thing or two about USA law:
My understanding at the moment is that if a Judge decides that the issue is an equitable one rather than a legal one, there is no need for a jury. And that in an equitable case, the Judge's duty is to determine what is fair compensation for the actual damages done. It doesn't seem like there can be any punitive damages awarded in an equity judgment.
Would this mean that Judge Gerstner could decide in favor of the RIAA, and award them compensation based on $0.79 per proven instance of copyright infringement, if that seemed the fair thing to do?
It would seem that if she decides this is an issue of equity, then the awards written into the DMCA would be guidelines that she might feel would only apply to commercial infringers who press a hundred thousand copies of a CD (which is apparently the kind of infringement that the USA Congress had in mind when they wrote the law). That it would not be equitable to impose those fines on a casual copyright infringer who may have cost the record companies a dozen sales (if that). So maybe this is a good thing?
... Google is not that secure judging from their security track record.
Citation please? Because I can't find anything through the search engines about Google ever losing client data, or client data on Google ever being compromised.
I did find stories about malware taking advantage of Windows vulnerabilities to capture data through some Google add-ons, such as the search bar. The stories I looked at indicated that this was not happening on Macs or Linux machines... it appears to be limited to compromised client computers running Microsoft software, and appears to be variants of known Microsoft vulnerabilities.
That said - business doesn't store it's money in a bank. There are more lucrative investments than any bank.
Someone needs to learn about business money management.
A retailer grossing $7 million a year will typically run more than $20 million through its bank accounts during that year. There are the accounts that accumulate revenue from sales and collected recievables. Funds from these are periodically transferred to short term bank accounts like Certificates of Deposit until the accumulation is large enough to be worthy of a strategic investment decision. There are the checking accounts used to pay vendors, and often there are CDs or similar instruments used for managing known upcoming payables, like semiannual lease payments. There are the payroll accounts mentioned in parent post. There are discretionary funds accounts so that unexpected urgent expenses can be met (cost of opening the parking lot after the freak June snowstorm, etc), and to allow immediate exploitation of unanticipated opportunities (the freight company calls to say it has 5 trucks loaded with 150 palettes of silk scarfs that were destined for a business that has bankrupted; interested in buying these Right Now at cost of shipping, so it can free its trucks for other obligations?)
Perhaps this is what parent post meant when it said But, the real money is kept working in the business. It is kept working, in the business's many bank accounts.
At a minimum, each dollar earned by a company will go through at least one revenue accumulation account and at least one debt payable account, and the profits will go through additional accounts on their way toward long term investment or dividend payment. So for most businesses, you can basically multiply their gross revenue by 2+ to estimate how many dollars they are running through their bank accoputs each year.
And now the first shall be last:
Google's unique specialty is handling huge volumes of information in a secure and efficient manner. Data stored on Google's world-wide system of interconnected server farms is as secure as the gold in Fort Knox: it is safe from any natural disaster, it is safe from any unauthorized access or destruction. Since only the client corporation would have the key to Google's encryption, even if a blackhat were able to somehow get a copy of the data, they would need the resources of a government to make any sense of it. There is no way any company that is not a direct competitor of Google could provide an equivalent level of protection. No business could do this in house; it would bankrupt them (unless they turned it into a profit center, but then they would become a Google competitor).
Storing data in the cloud on Google or a competitor is a sensible business strategy, that would free up IT personnel to do the security work that still would need to done (making sure Windows machines are clean of keyboard loggers, screen scrapers and other malware; physically protecting the local net; monitoring for attacks and abuse, keeping a weather eye for news of the first Linux or Mac malware (bound to happen sometime in the next 10 years), and so on.
I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email.
Yeah! That would be like letting another company handle your company's finances. Down with banks and their hideously invasive checking accounts and credit cards!
For your business to store its data on Google's servers would be be as totally fsckin' stupid as storing its money in a bank! Much better to rely on your own security forces, strongboxes, armored cars, and safes!
That's quite an assertion. But it could also be the case that we have all the algorithms we need to produce a sentient machine that would then independently develop its own intelligence. But that we simply have not been putting the different algorithms together in the correct fashion.
Maybe the box of Legos we've got already has all the pieces we need to build this cathedral, and we just need to learn to put them together to make archways and flying buttresses rather than simple walls. Maybe we don't need any of the specialized Legos that we think might be in that next bigger box on the store shelf; maybe we only need to learn how to stack what we've got in more sophisticated ways.
I, for one, have looked through your post and don't see any of the "pertinent facts" you claim to present to us.
Quite frankly, I don't care about the details of how any particular group of Christians pretends to do their cannibalistic feasting. Celebrating the torture and murder of a God or a human as a means to attain a state of ecstatic grace that surpasses all understanding is an absurd thing to devote one's life to, and the practice has inflicted much pain and suffering on the world. Euphemisms about the "Lamb of God" and so forth are self-serving attempts to keep from seeing the horror of what Jesus started in that upper story room. He definitely wanted to shock his apostles with that horror, so why do the christian churches try so very hard to whitewash it?
The only good Christian is a post-christian. Then, and only then, can the Goddess-given human capability of Reason work with the Goddess-given human capability of Perceiving Beauty to craft this world toward the more excellent place it can become. Not some other World. Not some AfterLife. This world. Listen to the wombat. He speaks a high truth.
If there is a God worthy of worship Out There, He or She will understand that "One world at a time" is a reasonable human goal for making things better.
A timeline's width is strongly related to the pen used to draw it.
I think the problem here is that "long" is one of those unrecognized English homonyms. In one sense, it refers to a measure of distance; in a very different sense, it refers to a measure of time. "Length" as a descendant of "long" has inherited this as well.
Another common English homonym is "read". It means the exercise of literacy skills in one sense, and the ability to extract meaning from an unworded visual presentation in another sense. Thus someone who can read a page may not know how to read a contour map, while someone else who is very good atreading the signs of changing weather may be entirely illiterate. (Once there were two very distinct words: the literacy form was "read" while the use of other visual skills was "rede", but they converged and we're stuck with experts who know how to read the winds and tides and currents but cannot read or write at all.)
Slashdot Mirror
Close, but no cigar.
The underlying question is to what degree can we moderate global climate changes? That's a tough one.
To the extent that human activities contribute to the climate changes, we have some room for action. For instance, we know that our CO2 production is one of the driving forces, so we can decrease that. A Tom Sawyer strategy of getting everyone to whitewash their roofs, parking lots, and streets would bring surface reflectance closer to what it was before the industrial revolution (and this would be particularly beneficial in the urban hot spots that have been driving a lot of local climate abberations).
But the really tough nut is that any of these approaches are very long term, and no current human society (with the possible exception of China) knows how to implement plans that will take a hundred years or more to come to fruition. This has not always been the case: European cathedrals and other large monuments show that as a species we have had the capacity for this kind of thing. But have we lost it along the way?
wrt the 3 second rule:
I do not think that means what you think it means.
Please read up on it; the 3 second rule is a matter of Newtonian physics and human reaction times (compounded over several drivers). It is not just somebody thinking it would be a good idea.
if I'm blasting people that clump traffic with an airhorn, am I just part of the jerk population that's helping traffic flow or just a jerk?
Or are you an instigator of road rage, and bucking for an early Darwin Award from Smith and Wesson? Something to consider.
Cruise control is good thing, in rural Wyoming. It has no useful function, and is too often dangerous, when the amount of traffic on the road exceeds 50% of the road's safe carrying capacity.
We have the technology... cruise control should be tied to GPS and central traffic control networks and automatically shut down for everybody when conditions make it unsafe. But how likely is that to ever happen? It violates Ferengi logic: there is no profit in it.
A better alternative is to recognize that the skills needed to navigate lethal vehicles on a congested road exceed the skills needed to pilot small aircraft under visual flight rules-- and the dangers to third parties from drivers are a lot higher than from non-commercial pilots. By all reason, it should be a lot harder to get and maintain a drivers license than a basic pilots license. But again, that violates Ferengi logic. You can't sell as many cars if you require drivers to learn and demonstrate how to operate them safely.
If drivers were properly licensed, then cruise control would be a lot safer. As it is, cruise control is too often a crutch used by persons with weak driving skills in the belief that if they don't have to worry about maintaining their speed, they can more safely focus on other driving tasks. That is a fallacy: if you cannot control your vehicle's speed manually through the development of good habits, you are an unsafe driver who is refusing to learn the basic skills needed to develop better driving habits.
You are not the first to encounter this kind of problem. The traditional answer is to not mess with the Fortran, but to put a wrapper around it in the language of your choice and leave the Fortran internals alone.
From your description of the limitations of the Fortran code, I get the strong sense that this would be the best approach for you to take. It can be very difficult to tease out the reasoning behind some of those archaic Fortran constructions: they tended to be blends of methods to deal with hardware limitations that we don't have any more and also methods of dealing with computational limitations that are STILL present. E.g, when code was written to optimize buffering for a slow read-the-tape operation, it can be too easy to fail to see that it was also written to handle some kinkiness in the underlying differential expressions, or to exploit an edge case, or assure that some follow-on operation in another module would receive enough significant digits that its results would be better than garbage.
Just treat the Fortran library as a black box object and wrap the interface you want around it. You will find it easier to do, much easier to debug, and vastly easier to convince your colleagues that what you've done can be relied upon. You will also develop skills in wrapping old code for new purposes that could become an important part of your career.
Thanks for the link to Forbes story; reading it was sadly enlightening. It got me to do some quick research in the Code of Federal Regulations.
The PTO runs under its own agency regulations, and while these do recognize the crime of fraud, the regulations specify that when this is discovered, the redress will be disallowing the patent. Nothing more. There is no provision for holding any of the individuals involved accountable for their fraudulent acts.
So unless there is some general provision in the CFR that could be brought to bear, persons filing for patents do in fact become members of an elite group who are held to a different standard under Federal law than is the case for persons claiming similar ownership of property rights in any of the fifty states (such as filing for title to a vehicle or boat, etc). I believe that misrepresenting yourself as the owner of the $75,000 Rolls Royce you are selling is a felony in any state. But claiming ownership of I.P. of greater value that you know belongs to somebody else is okay under PTO regulations if you can get away with it. And it is really okay under PTO regulations if you DON'T get away with it-- you simply don't get away with it, that time.
I don't think that encouraging that kind of dishonesty is a good thing for the business community, or for society.
Most likely none, since it's not actually a crime.
That doesn't seem to fit with the rest of USA law. Is it not a crime to defraud an agency of the Federal Government? Or is there a different standard of law that applies to corporations and corporation officers than to mere citizens?
What sanctions can be brought against Ozzie if it can be shown that he withheld knowledge of prior art? Can he personally see jail time for this?
Since this would be a Federal crime, how would Slashdot request an FBI investigation of Ozzie's allegedly criminal behavior? Should we put it to a vote or will someone just step forward and do whatever is necessary to inform the FBI?
Do first thing's first.
Putting a man on Mars, while definitely cool, could easily be just another "been there, done that" vacation from steady progress, like the later Apollo missions were.
Beginning an assessment of lunar resources is the next significant step we can take. What is up there? Anything that we can use as rocket fuel, or as structural material? Can concrete prefabs made of lunar regolith be shipped down to LEO for use in stone space stations at a lower cost than sending exotic materials up from Earth? That's actually likely. Also, while the Moon is very poor in heavy elements in general, it has been collecting meteors for a few billion years: are there any local deposits of iron and nickel that we could use? Something just 0.35% the size of New Jersey (equivalent to the Mesabi Range of Minnesota)? That is a pretty small dot on a lunar map, but just one find like that would provide enough high grade steel for more than a hundred years of spaceship manufacture. How about other minerals? Is there a rich splash of pitchblend nodules near the surface of the regolith in some lunar sea?
We will need the equivalent of several Lewis and Clark expeditions to begin to estimate the potential up there. Much of this will be done by robots, but it makes sense to have many of these robots under the control of lunar explorers, who could easily do first hand inspections of unexpected findings. The explorers would be also experimenting with how to live under conditions that are harsher than Mars in many ways, but also much easier to support from Earth when problems arise.
At the same time we are exploring the Moon, we can be putting more robots on Mars, and sending more satellites to rendezvous with near Earth objects of interest. Perhaps we will find that we can use lunar resources to reduce the costs of these other programs. There are certainly things the Moon experience can teach us that will help make these other probes, and the eventual manned Mars station, more successful.
This idea has enough merit to be worth exploring.
It would require an active system that listened for each bat's vocalizations, then constructed a faux echo that would seem to come from the danger zone by using multiple speakers with carefully tuned amplitudes and delays. The audio pick-ups and speakers don't have to weigh very much or be very powerful: you are attempting to mimic the sounds reflected from a sheet of plywood. So several of these could be mounted within the blades without adding significantly to their mass. The software would be interesting, different from but similar in complexity to the brains of an electronic fuel injection system in a car (cue car analogy). Forth might be a good development language.
It would be fun to construct a testing facility for this. See if you could get bats to fly in patterns around imaginary stalactites.
These techniques should work-- provided the only data in the files that are being compared is the image data. If other data has been overlaid on an image by steganography, then that is likely to confuse any attempt to identify the image with the greatest fidelity to the original.
I can't think of any way to assess how often steganography is currently being used on the web. Its use is growing; the number of downloads of steganographic software is increasing. There is software available that can test for the presence of a steganographic overlay in a suspected jpeg file with some reliability. But if the problem is determining whether one of the 250 snapshots taken at the Company Picnic and being uploaded to Flikr is also loaded with the recipe for the Company's Secret Sauce... I don't think there is any effective way to do that kind of screening.
Is Original Poster actually looking for a way to bulk scan for the use of steganography? It seems to me that this an emerging problem in corporate espionage.
Thanks for the corrections. I still have a COBOL manual around, somewhere, I think. But the last time I opened it was nearly 20 years ago.
Doesn't FedEx still route everything through one central location, and do all the sorting from that one spot? That's a helluvalot simpler problem than USPS, where there is some level of sorting and routing at every one of the 75,000 US Post Offices. FedEx can get by with a single point of failure system, but the USPS has to continue to work no matter what kinds of regional disasters might impact it: it has to use a distributed model.
Obviously the USPS has a lot more Linux installations to do. But it is impressive that they have managed as many as they have in the first year, without any major SNAFUs.
COBOL runs quite fast; it is a compiled language that was designed from the start for compiler optimization of business logic code. Think in terms of well written C.
COBOL's reputation for being slow has to do with writing the programs, and dates back to its earliest days when code had to be written as SET RIDICULOUSLYLONGVARIABLENAME EQUAL TO 2 PLUS 2. Development time sped up a lot when Gracie was finally convinced that RIDICULOUSLYLONGVARIABLENAME = 2 + 2 would work as well (the original approach had to do with coders handprinting the instructions on coding forms that were then given to keypunch operators who knew nothing about computer languages but could type really fast and accurately... so long as their fingers didn't have to reach too far from the home keys).
I was never found of COBOL in school, and never did much with it. But I agree with others that anyone who has worked with a couple of programming languages could probably master COBOL in a matter of hours: in retrospect, it is basically a simple and obvious language. What I probably could not do is reverse engineer some of the constructs that were used back in the day: a lot of weird code was developed to work around hardware limitations that no one born after 1980 will have ever seen. Much of that wasn't documented well, and I think that is why old COBOL programmers are in demand. They remember that this particular type of data structure was used to optimize read-write operations on dual high speed tapes... to a younger programmer it just looks like arbitrary stupidity and they don't know what to do with it.
Of course you could get a dramatic speed improvement running Apple ][ code on any emulation, even another 6502 machine. One of the Apple ][ features is that it was underclocked by 50% to run cool enough that it didn't need a fan and you rarely had to reseat chips that were climbing out of their sockets from thermal creep (the bane of all those poor fools who were messing about with the Trash-Eighties).
Once I was the proud owner of what might have been the very first second hand Apple ][+ on the market between San Francisco and Portland. It had a fully populated lower 48 of RAM! Dual 5.25" floppy drives on ribbon cables! Use it during prime time on TV and ruin the reception of all your neighbors, who couldn't imagine what could be causing those squirmy worms that distorted their Dukes of Hazzard show!
Ah! I am SO glad that those days are now distant memories!
NYCL and others who know a thing or two about USA law:
My understanding at the moment is that if a Judge decides that the issue is an equitable one rather than a legal one, there is no need for a jury. And that in an equitable case, the Judge's duty is to determine what is fair compensation for the actual damages done. It doesn't seem like there can be any punitive damages awarded in an equity judgment.
Would this mean that Judge Gerstner could decide in favor of the RIAA, and award them compensation based on $0.79 per proven instance of copyright infringement, if that seemed the fair thing to do?
It would seem that if she decides this is an issue of equity, then the awards written into the DMCA would be guidelines that she might feel would only apply to commercial infringers who press a hundred thousand copies of a CD (which is apparently the kind of infringement that the USA Congress had in mind when they wrote the law). That it would not be equitable to impose those fines on a casual copyright infringer who may have cost the record companies a dozen sales (if that). So maybe this is a good thing?
I am so confused.
... Google is not that secure judging from their security track record.
Citation please? Because I can't find anything through the search engines about Google ever losing client data, or client data on Google ever being compromised.
I did find stories about malware taking advantage of Windows vulnerabilities to capture data through some Google add-ons, such as the search bar. The stories I looked at indicated that this was not happening on Macs or Linux machines... it appears to be limited to compromised client computers running Microsoft software, and appears to be variants of known Microsoft vulnerabilities.
Taking the last point first:
That said - business doesn't store it's money in a bank. There are more lucrative investments than any bank.
Someone needs to learn about business money management.
A retailer grossing $7 million a year will typically run more than $20 million through its bank accounts during that year. There are the accounts that accumulate revenue from sales and collected recievables. Funds from these are periodically transferred to short term bank accounts like Certificates of Deposit until the accumulation is large enough to be worthy of a strategic investment decision. There are the checking accounts used to pay vendors, and often there are CDs or similar instruments used for managing known upcoming payables, like semiannual lease payments. There are the payroll accounts mentioned in parent post. There are discretionary funds accounts so that unexpected urgent expenses can be met (cost of opening the parking lot after the freak June snowstorm, etc), and to allow immediate exploitation of unanticipated opportunities (the freight company calls to say it has 5 trucks loaded with 150 palettes of silk scarfs that were destined for a business that has bankrupted; interested in buying these Right Now at cost of shipping, so it can free its trucks for other obligations?)
Perhaps this is what parent post meant when it said But, the real money is kept working in the business. It is kept working, in the business's many bank accounts.
At a minimum, each dollar earned by a company will go through at least one revenue accumulation account and at least one debt payable account, and the profits will go through additional accounts on their way toward long term investment or dividend payment. So for most businesses, you can basically multiply their gross revenue by 2+ to estimate how many dollars they are running through their bank accoputs each year.
And now the first shall be last:
Google's unique specialty is handling huge volumes of information in a secure and efficient manner. Data stored on Google's world-wide system of interconnected server farms is as secure as the gold in Fort Knox: it is safe from any natural disaster, it is safe from any unauthorized access or destruction. Since only the client corporation would have the key to Google's encryption, even if a blackhat were able to somehow get a copy of the data, they would need the resources of a government to make any sense of it. There is no way any company that is not a direct competitor of Google could provide an equivalent level of protection. No business could do this in house; it would bankrupt them (unless they turned it into a profit center, but then they would become a Google competitor).
Storing data in the cloud on Google or a competitor is a sensible business strategy, that would free up IT personnel to do the security work that still would need to done (making sure Windows machines are clean of keyboard loggers, screen scrapers and other malware; physically protecting the local net; monitoring for attacks and abuse, keeping a weather eye for news of the first Linux or Mac malware (bound to happen sometime in the next 10 years), and so on.
I think it's more about letting another company handle your company's email.
Yeah! That would be like letting another company handle your company's finances. Down with banks and their hideously invasive checking accounts and credit cards!
Wow.
I cannot believe that you loaded that metaphorical shotgun with spaghetti and fired it at the wall.
Now clean up your metaphorical mess and don't do that again.
Yeah!
For your business to store its data on Google's servers would be be as totally fsckin' stupid as storing its money in a bank! Much better to rely on your own security forces, strongboxes, armored cars, and safes!
AI needs new algorithms to progress.
That's quite an assertion. But it could also be the case that we have all the algorithms we need to produce a sentient machine that would then independently develop its own intelligence. But that we simply have not been putting the different algorithms together in the correct fashion.
Maybe the box of Legos we've got already has all the pieces we need to build this cathedral, and we just need to learn to put them together to make archways and flying buttresses rather than simple walls. Maybe we don't need any of the specialized Legos that we think might be in that next bigger box on the store shelf; maybe we only need to learn how to stack what we've got in more sophisticated ways.
I, for one, have looked through your post and don't see any of the "pertinent facts" you claim to present to us.
Quite frankly, I don't care about the details of how any particular group of Christians pretends to do their cannibalistic feasting. Celebrating the torture and murder of a God or a human as a means to attain a state of ecstatic grace that surpasses all understanding is an absurd thing to devote one's life to, and the practice has inflicted much pain and suffering on the world. Euphemisms about the "Lamb of God" and so forth are self-serving attempts to keep from seeing the horror of what Jesus started in that upper story room. He definitely wanted to shock his apostles with that horror, so why do the christian churches try so very hard to whitewash it?
The only good Christian is a post-christian. Then, and only then, can the Goddess-given human capability of Reason work with the Goddess-given human capability of Perceiving Beauty to craft this world toward the more excellent place it can become. Not some other World. Not some AfterLife. This world. Listen to the wombat. He speaks a high truth.
If there is a God worthy of worship Out There, He or She will understand that "One world at a time" is a reasonable human goal for making things better.
A timeline's width is strongly related to the pen used to draw it.
I think the problem here is that "long" is one of those unrecognized English homonyms. In one sense, it refers to a measure of distance; in a very different sense, it refers to a measure of time. "Length" as a descendant of "long" has inherited this as well.
Another common English homonym is "read". It means the exercise of literacy skills in one sense, and the ability to extract meaning from an unworded visual presentation in another sense. Thus someone who can read a page may not know how to read a contour map, while someone else who is very good atreading the signs of changing weather may be entirely illiterate. (Once there were two very distinct words: the literacy form was "read" while the use of other visual skills was "rede", but they converged and we're stuck with experts who know how to read the winds and tides and currents but cannot read or write at all.)
No, that's diameter of the earth's orbit around the sun. A year would be the circumference which is 940 million kilometers.
No, that's a year's true length. Not to be confused with its durational "length".
OP had it right: a year's width is 2 AU, on the average.