When really no-one bumps in the limits of DRM, what is the use of the DRM? It's designed to put restrictions on what one can do with a digital file: if no-one ever meets those restrictions there is no use to include it in the first place.
You may try... I doubt it will work. Water molecules are polar, that is due to their structure one side is a little positive charged, the other side negative. That is why an electrical field influences water molecules.
Oil (gasoline) is apolar, also one of the main reasons oil and water do not mix.
Those huge efficiencies come from various simple reasons:
A small engine, leaving such a car usually underpowered.
No safety cage, crumple zones, air bags, etc: less weight to carry around.
Small sizes.
And of course ideal conditions when testing.
That said, efficiencies for small and even medium sized cars of better than 30 kmpl (1:30, or 70 mpg) should be no problem for modern technology, without compromising on safety and comfort.
[...]devices that perform sexually acts on you,[...]
This is a bad example in your list, as they are nothing new.
They are still available these days, as they were in the 70s. Usually not for sale. Typical monikers for these devices that do not charge directly for their operations are "girlfriend", "boyfriend", "mistress", "husband" or "wife". If in need you can always try to rent them, this version is often called "prostitute" or "hooker", though in many countries sold under euphemisms as "escort" or "masseuse".
This post is not a recommendation of their use, particularly not while driving. While their use may have a bad effect on your fuel usage, the main concern is safety.
The proper blind testing of course would be to install it in say ten cars, seven or eight where it actually works, and the other ones an identically looking device that is simply not functional.
Then either choose ten identical cars (as identical as possible), or first follow the drivers for say a month or two and record their fuel use without the device, and after that for some period of time with the device (or the placebo) installed, and check the differences.
It sounds bull to me that you can so easily change the viscosity of an apolar fluid with electricity. Most of the molecules in gasoline are nonpolar, and not even polarisable, so I doubt an electrical field has much influence if any at all on such a liquid.
I really don't think "the masses" are worried about DRM. They don't care - as long as it is not in their face.
DVDs all contain DRM, no-one has a problem with that. Only the geeks, who insisted on playing DVDs on unsupported platforms, until the DRM was broken of course.
Then there is something like, what's it called, HDCM or so? To prevent high-def content being sent to displays that do not support that standard. That is also something that doesn't seem to take off, and from what I hear here has a lot of problems. It gets in your face, it blocks people from playing their content, and then and only then the DRM becomes an issue. But that's for small numbers only now, most can't afford that.
All in all I think blu-ray may be nice but there is no need for ordinary people to upgrade. You only see an increase in image quality if you also invest in a large, decent quality HDTV. And that is a big investment, too big for most people, even when the economy were in good shape.
It is the law of diminishing returns. The step from VHS to DVD was great in both convenience and quality, and small in terms of cost: only a new, inexpensive player was needed. Same for vinyl to CD, all that was needed was a CD player to have the better quality.
Now to get really better quality (there is no increase in convenience I believe, decrease maybe due to the digital restrictions included), one not only needs an (inexpensive) blu-ray player, also a new (expensive) display is required. The existing TV just doesn't do it, no difference between normal DVD and blu-ray.
Don't put all your servers physically close together, but spread them out over two or more locations. Then you eliminate the single point of failure.
As argued in a previous comment, this experiment is great for distributed computing, where your servers become expandable. One failing in that case doesn't affect the overall business.
Control of complete army units by thought alone... mind reading helmets... using thought directly as a means of communication... I'm surprised this story is not tagged "borg" already. It sounds pretty much like that.
Mr Beckerman is only one person (well and a couple of associates maybe) and thus has a limited capacity, while the RIAA legal machine will simply hire more lawyers when their number of lawsuits increases, giving them a virtually unlimited capacity. So this law suit is bad news as Mr Beckerman may be able to defend himself, but any time spent on this defense, is time not spent on other lawsuits he has against the RIAA and possibly other suits for other clients (it would surprise me if Mr Beckerman would exclusively do RIAA suits really, he has a business to run after all).
anyone who's ever installed the Flash player plugin can't work on Gnash
If that is so I'm really impressed there are people who can still work on it. Particularly considering that gnash developers must have some personal interest in flash technology.
Unless they really mean "installing" and not "having it pre-installed and using it"
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
on
Google Chrome, Day 2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Gmail running faster must be the JavaScript. From test results it seems that is the strongest point of the browser: JavaScript performance. Plus some other interesting features such as each tab it's own process. But JavaScript performance is of course what they are after: then Google Docs will run much much better, making it more attractive for people to start using.
What makes me wonder is how Google manages to put out a browser, that's seemingly so complete. It's not an easy job: Firefox has been in development for about a decade now, after the open-sourcing of Netscape.
Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones? And considering page rendering speed, it is highly optimised. Or lots of features other browsers have are missing.
And how do they manage to get JavaScript work so lightning fast? Looking at the graphs, FF is two, three times as fast as IE, but both are nothing compared to Chrome. Did they write it from scratch, or highly optimised an existing JavaScript implementation? Both options sound pretty impressive to me. It can't be easy to get so quick JavaScript execution - why else can't FF and IE not get anything near this speed.
I can't test the browser myself unfortunately; my desktops run Linux and this laptop is OS/X. It sounds like a pretty impressive job what they did.
Anyone has any ACID/2/3 test results in Chrome? That would be really interesting.
I do avoid certain airliners (I live in Asia, here there are real differences between liners in terms of service and safety even), even when they are cheaper. Many people here have preference for specific airlines.
Please note that you just classified fire as a form of life. As it collects energy from its surroundings and can replicate.
No I didn't: fire doesn't store any energy, it transforms energy to a lower form of energy without storing it, and in the meantime creates more of a chemical stability. Carbon in it's purest form has a fairly high energy level, so does oxygen. The combination of the two, carbon dioxide, is a much more stable compound. So fire is doing the opposite thing of what life would try to do: it lowers the energy stored in the chemistry of an environment, while life increases this chemical energy.
[...] ad providers to start making their clients use an impossible to block local caching system) but this a smart feature for those who don't wish to block ads completely.
Not likely that this is going to happen for two reasons.
1. The advertiser wants to know how many page impressions there have been. How often has the ad been viewed. If the content provider themselves is going to do this, that control is gone, and the content provider can just make up any number of ads served just to send a bigger bill to the advertiser.
2. If the advertisements are cached on the content provider's site, then not only the content provider has to take care of keeping them up-to-date and making sure they are served randomly and rotated etc, they also have to pay for the bandwidth of serving those ads. The latter is easily charged back of course, the first part not. I don't think many content providers are interested to do more than putting a simple script in their page that takes care of the advertising.
I don't use AdBlock Plus on my main computers, however I do use it on my EEE as that computer often connects over my mobile, and those bytes cost more (both in money and in time).
However I do have FlashBlock installed on all my other computers. That incidently blocks over half of the ads, which is actually the main reason for me to install it: those ads are irritating because they are moving, flashing, making noise, whatnot. The non-irritating banners and so are still all there.
I'm basically OK with advertising, I consider it a necessary evil, but I am not OK with ads that are distracting you so much that it becomes impossible to focus on the text just next to it. And after installing AdBlock those are gone. The decent ads are still all there.
Now if only more people would do like that maybe the advertisers would get the message and stop using Flash for their ads, but go back to basic banner images and the like. That would really be an improvement.
If your bank has proper security, it is not that bad. With proper security I mean using one-time tokens for authorising transactions - if an attacker gets your password they can see your account and transactions (until you change the password during a next session on another computer). Not nice, but also not killing. They can not empty your bank account.
Unfortunately many banks still think that such an arrangement is unnecessary, or too complex... when traveling for half a year through Europe I had my password and a paper list of one-time codes with me. That worked fine for me, I could at least reasonably safely use untrusted computers.
The only thing that could be an issue for stealing your money would be a very sophisticated man in the middle attack, where the MiM changes your order to the bank, while still presenting you with the order you think you enter.
What many scientists look for in remote planets is chemical imbalance, from an energetic point of view. Chemical imbalance may not be the only result of the existence of life, or even a guaranteed result, it is very reasonable to look for that as both core aspects of life would cause such a chemical imbalance.
A typical aspect of life (at least life as we know it, and what we commonly consider "living") is a mechanism that is doing something with energy: usually storing energy using chemical reactions. As a result there is a lot of matter on earth that is not in a very low energy level, e.g. oil and coal. The ultimate source of this energy could be light (most lifeforms on earth use this energy source - directly or indirectly), but other sources are also possible, think of sulfur-reducing bacteria near hot wells, using sulfur and maybe also heat as energy source. The sulfur getting in that high-energy form thanks to the heat in the core of the earth reducing the sulfur to it's elemental form, later oxidations by the bacteria release energy.
A second typical aspect of life is self-replication. This is a necessity of survival: even if an individual would not age, there are always accidents and diseases that will put an end to an individual. So self-replication is also a requirement. And I suspect that most, if not all self-replication reactions take energy, for the simple reason that self-replication means a decrease in entropy in the matter used to create this copy. Again energy is stored: releasing the molecules and restoring the entropy will result in the release of energy as well.
So for non-life to become life, I'd say a system should be able to replicate itself, and to collect energy from it's surroundings. That I think is the most basic requirement for what one could call "life".
We're talking about life here after all... we know on earth that life can be found virtually anywhere. And after all, an environment what we call "extreme", some microbes may call "nice and comfortable".
Those microbes may well consider us to be an extremophile!
To "commercialise" a technology may also simply mean "make it ready for large-scale production", where large scale is anything practically usable, big enough to get a couple dozen watts out of.
I can imagine that no matter what the tech will remain too hard for the average diy slump dweller - maybe not the baking, but the wiring and installing involved plus the basic understanding of what you're doing. Nothing wrong with that, great opportunity for many people to set up their own solar-cell baking business.
What stroke me much more was the "patented" part. That does not match with the ubiquitous production they envision. Unless the patents come with a default free license, and they are applied for just to prevent other companies lock up the technology.
Very light on details, the article - the prizes this girl won and seminars etc she attended got more attention than the actual product.
CmdrTaco has a child? And is living with it apparently? That must mean he has a long-term relation with a female... usually children do come with a mother after all. I hope this doesn't mean he's going to be too disconnected from the rest of the/. demographic!
Mods, go ahead, mod me off-topic, I deserve it. I have some karma to burn. I just wanted the above to be said.
Why would you fly when your destination is only a three-hour trip away? With transport to and from airports (usually well away from where you are and are going to), the liners requiring you to arrive hours in advance, you spend easily more than three hours on a flight, and that is excluding the actual flying time. And the added convenience of having your car with you at destination.
A solar cell is not persistent: they have a limited life time. So it is an issue whether the energy you get out of them is more than the energy put in to make them.
The easiest measure for a layman (albeit far from accurate) is the total cost. How much does a solar kWh cost, and how much does a conventional kWh cost? If solar energy is cheaper, then certainly they are energy positive. Assuming no government subsidies either way of course.
Slashdot Mirror
When really no-one bumps in the limits of DRM, what is the use of the DRM? It's designed to put restrictions on what one can do with a digital file: if no-one ever meets those restrictions there is no use to include it in the first place.
You may try... I doubt it will work. Water molecules are polar, that is due to their structure one side is a little positive charged, the other side negative. That is why an electrical field influences water molecules.
Oil (gasoline) is apolar, also one of the main reasons oil and water do not mix.
'nuff said
Those huge efficiencies come from various simple reasons:
That said, efficiencies for small and even medium sized cars of better than 30 kmpl (1:30, or 70 mpg) should be no problem for modern technology, without compromising on safety and comfort.
My Opel Kadett 1.2S, built in 1983 and owned by me around the year 2000 commonly did 1:18, or 42 mpg.
[...]devices that perform sexually acts on you,[...]
This is a bad example in your list, as they are nothing new.
They are still available these days, as they were in the 70s. Usually not for sale. Typical monikers for these devices that do not charge directly for their operations are "girlfriend", "boyfriend", "mistress", "husband" or "wife". If in need you can always try to rent them, this version is often called "prostitute" or "hooker", though in many countries sold under euphemisms as "escort" or "masseuse".
This post is not a recommendation of their use, particularly not while driving. While their use may have a bad effect on your fuel usage, the main concern is safety.
The proper blind testing of course would be to install it in say ten cars, seven or eight where it actually works, and the other ones an identically looking device that is simply not functional.
Then either choose ten identical cars (as identical as possible), or first follow the drivers for say a month or two and record their fuel use without the device, and after that for some period of time with the device (or the placebo) installed, and check the differences.
It sounds bull to me that you can so easily change the viscosity of an apolar fluid with electricity. Most of the molecules in gasoline are nonpolar, and not even polarisable, so I doubt an electrical field has much influence if any at all on such a liquid.
I really don't think "the masses" are worried about DRM. They don't care - as long as it is not in their face.
DVDs all contain DRM, no-one has a problem with that. Only the geeks, who insisted on playing DVDs on unsupported platforms, until the DRM was broken of course.
Then there is something like, what's it called, HDCM or so? To prevent high-def content being sent to displays that do not support that standard. That is also something that doesn't seem to take off, and from what I hear here has a lot of problems. It gets in your face, it blocks people from playing their content, and then and only then the DRM becomes an issue. But that's for small numbers only now, most can't afford that.
All in all I think blu-ray may be nice but there is no need for ordinary people to upgrade. You only see an increase in image quality if you also invest in a large, decent quality HDTV. And that is a big investment, too big for most people, even when the economy were in good shape.
It is the law of diminishing returns. The step from VHS to DVD was great in both convenience and quality, and small in terms of cost: only a new, inexpensive player was needed. Same for vinyl to CD, all that was needed was a CD player to have the better quality.
Now to get really better quality (there is no increase in convenience I believe, decrease maybe due to the digital restrictions included), one not only needs an (inexpensive) blu-ray player, also a new (expensive) display is required. The existing TV just doesn't do it, no difference between normal DVD and blu-ray.
Don't put all your servers physically close together, but spread them out over two or more locations. Then you eliminate the single point of failure.
As argued in a previous comment, this experiment is great for distributed computing, where your servers become expandable. One failing in that case doesn't affect the overall business.
Control of complete army units by thought alone... mind reading helmets... using thought directly as a means of communication... I'm surprised this story is not tagged "borg" already. It sounds pretty much like that.
Mr Beckerman is only one person (well and a couple of associates maybe) and thus has a limited capacity, while the RIAA legal machine will simply hire more lawyers when their number of lawsuits increases, giving them a virtually unlimited capacity. So this law suit is bad news as Mr Beckerman may be able to defend himself, but any time spent on this defense, is time not spent on other lawsuits he has against the RIAA and possibly other suits for other clients (it would surprise me if Mr Beckerman would exclusively do RIAA suits really, he has a business to run after all).
anyone who's ever installed the Flash player plugin can't work on Gnash
If that is so I'm really impressed there are people who can still work on it. Particularly considering that gnash developers must have some personal interest in flash technology.
Unless they really mean "installing" and not "having it pre-installed and using it"
Gmail running faster must be the JavaScript. From test results it seems that is the strongest point of the browser: JavaScript performance. Plus some other interesting features such as each tab it's own process. But JavaScript performance is of course what they are after: then Google Docs will run much much better, making it more attractive for people to start using.
What makes me wonder is how Google manages to put out a browser, that's seemingly so complete. It's not an easy job: Firefox has been in development for about a decade now, after the open-sourcing of Netscape.
Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones? And considering page rendering speed, it is highly optimised. Or lots of features other browsers have are missing.
And how do they manage to get JavaScript work so lightning fast? Looking at the graphs, FF is two, three times as fast as IE, but both are nothing compared to Chrome. Did they write it from scratch, or highly optimised an existing JavaScript implementation? Both options sound pretty impressive to me. It can't be easy to get so quick JavaScript execution - why else can't FF and IE not get anything near this speed.
I can't test the browser myself unfortunately; my desktops run Linux and this laptop is OS/X. It sounds like a pretty impressive job what they did.
Anyone has any ACID/2/3 test results in Chrome? That would be really interesting.
I do avoid certain airliners (I live in Asia, here there are real differences between liners in terms of service and safety even), even when they are cheaper. Many people here have preference for specific airlines.
Please note that you just classified fire as a form of life. As it collects energy from its surroundings and can replicate.
No I didn't: fire doesn't store any energy, it transforms energy to a lower form of energy without storing it, and in the meantime creates more of a chemical stability. Carbon in it's purest form has a fairly high energy level, so does oxygen. The combination of the two, carbon dioxide, is a much more stable compound. So fire is doing the opposite thing of what life would try to do: it lowers the energy stored in the chemistry of an environment, while life increases this chemical energy.
[...] ad providers to start making their clients use an impossible to block local caching system) but this a smart feature for those who don't wish to block ads completely.
Not likely that this is going to happen for two reasons.
1. The advertiser wants to know how many page impressions there have been. How often has the ad been viewed. If the content provider themselves is going to do this, that control is gone, and the content provider can just make up any number of ads served just to send a bigger bill to the advertiser.
2. If the advertisements are cached on the content provider's site, then not only the content provider has to take care of keeping them up-to-date and making sure they are served randomly and rotated etc, they also have to pay for the bandwidth of serving those ads. The latter is easily charged back of course, the first part not. I don't think many content providers are interested to do more than putting a simple script in their page that takes care of the advertising.
I don't use AdBlock Plus on my main computers, however I do use it on my EEE as that computer often connects over my mobile, and those bytes cost more (both in money and in time).
However I do have FlashBlock installed on all my other computers. That incidently blocks over half of the ads, which is actually the main reason for me to install it: those ads are irritating because they are moving, flashing, making noise, whatnot. The non-irritating banners and so are still all there.
I'm basically OK with advertising, I consider it a necessary evil, but I am not OK with ads that are distracting you so much that it becomes impossible to focus on the text just next to it. And after installing AdBlock those are gone. The decent ads are still all there.
Now if only more people would do like that maybe the advertisers would get the message and stop using Flash for their ads, but go back to basic banner images and the like. That would really be an improvement.
If your bank has proper security, it is not that bad. With proper security I mean using one-time tokens for authorising transactions - if an attacker gets your password they can see your account and transactions (until you change the password during a next session on another computer). Not nice, but also not killing. They can not empty your bank account.
Unfortunately many banks still think that such an arrangement is unnecessary, or too complex... when traveling for half a year through Europe I had my password and a paper list of one-time codes with me. That worked fine for me, I could at least reasonably safely use untrusted computers.
The only thing that could be an issue for stealing your money would be a very sophisticated man in the middle attack, where the MiM changes your order to the bank, while still presenting you with the order you think you enter.
What many scientists look for in remote planets is chemical imbalance, from an energetic point of view. Chemical imbalance may not be the only result of the existence of life, or even a guaranteed result, it is very reasonable to look for that as both core aspects of life would cause such a chemical imbalance.
A typical aspect of life (at least life as we know it, and what we commonly consider "living") is a mechanism that is doing something with energy: usually storing energy using chemical reactions. As a result there is a lot of matter on earth that is not in a very low energy level, e.g. oil and coal. The ultimate source of this energy could be light (most lifeforms on earth use this energy source - directly or indirectly), but other sources are also possible, think of sulfur-reducing bacteria near hot wells, using sulfur and maybe also heat as energy source. The sulfur getting in that high-energy form thanks to the heat in the core of the earth reducing the sulfur to it's elemental form, later oxidations by the bacteria release energy.
A second typical aspect of life is self-replication. This is a necessity of survival: even if an individual would not age, there are always accidents and diseases that will put an end to an individual. So self-replication is also a requirement. And I suspect that most, if not all self-replication reactions take energy, for the simple reason that self-replication means a decrease in entropy in the matter used to create this copy. Again energy is stored: releasing the molecules and restoring the entropy will result in the release of energy as well.
So for non-life to become life, I'd say a system should be able to replicate itself, and to collect energy from it's surroundings. That I think is the most basic requirement for what one could call "life".
We're talking about life here after all... we know on earth that life can be found virtually anywhere. And after all, an environment what we call "extreme", some microbes may call "nice and comfortable".
Those microbes may well consider us to be an extremophile!
To "commercialise" a technology may also simply mean "make it ready for large-scale production", where large scale is anything practically usable, big enough to get a couple dozen watts out of.
I can imagine that no matter what the tech will remain too hard for the average diy slump dweller - maybe not the baking, but the wiring and installing involved plus the basic understanding of what you're doing. Nothing wrong with that, great opportunity for many people to set up their own solar-cell baking business.
What stroke me much more was the "patented" part. That does not match with the ubiquitous production they envision. Unless the patents come with a default free license, and they are applied for just to prevent other companies lock up the technology.
Very light on details, the article - the prizes this girl won and seminars etc she attended got more attention than the actual product.
CmdrTaco has a child? And is living with it apparently? That must mean he has a long-term relation with a female... usually children do come with a mother after all. I hope this doesn't mean he's going to be too disconnected from the rest of the /. demographic!
Mods, go ahead, mod me off-topic, I deserve it. I have some karma to burn. I just wanted the above to be said.
Why would you fly when your destination is only a three-hour trip away? With transport to and from airports (usually well away from where you are and are going to), the liners requiring you to arrive hours in advance, you spend easily more than three hours on a flight, and that is excluding the actual flying time. And the added convenience of having your car with you at destination.
A solar cell is not persistent: they have a limited life time. So it is an issue whether the energy you get out of them is more than the energy put in to make them.
The easiest measure for a layman (albeit far from accurate) is the total cost. How much does a solar kWh cost, and how much does a conventional kWh cost? If solar energy is cheaper, then certainly they are energy positive. Assuming no government subsidies either way of course.