Suppose they did break into the teacher's home. So, they could be charged with breaking and entering, trespassing, and theft. What would their sentence be? For a first offense, community service and a small fine. If they had a long rap sheet, they might get some prison time, but it would be measured in months, not years.
Not sure where you live, but in Texas their sentence would be the death penalty, with homeowner legally acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
Your second option is not possible (as stated) unless the database links individual people to individual votes, which in turn violates ballot secrecy (with traditional voting, when you enter a ballot, you don't write your name on it, and while the auditor can count the number of votes, they can never know who voted for them).
The digital voting controls should be similar to traditional voting (count how many people entered/left and compare to number of votes), but NEVER record the voters identity on the ballot. Auditor or not, this knowledge is reserved for the voter and nobody but the voter.
The "tyranny of the minority" you refer to can mean two different things.
If you refer to the rich and powerful controlling the country, then it is called an oligarchy and is nothing new. The US constitution specifically tried to address one form of oligarchy, although the success at preventing less overt forms is debatable. In particular, you must be very careful about the means and ideology you choose at fighting oligarchy, or you might end up following this guy. Also see this proof that we'll be fucked no matter how we act.
- Printed voting receipt - All code open source, all architecture fully documented and publicly available - No person-vote information recorded in database (database lists people as "voted" or "not voted", as soon as person enters a vote it changes to "voted" and won't allow another vote, while a separate database increments a counter for a particular candidate. These two databases are NOT linked together. - No timestamps to ensure manual matchmaking between people and votes are not possible.
Ah hell. I could come up with lots of other reasonable suggestions, but its not like any of this will ever be implemented.
Can you elaborate how exactly "assymetry follows from that"?
The government is nothing but a representation, by and for the people. If the people are the bunch of fearmongering neighbor-haters, so will be the government. Of course, the government has more power, so the problems are much more noticeable, but in the end it just acts like an amplifier - garbage in, (much louder) garbage right back out.
Maybe the people should start looking for the source of the government problems in their own behavior, rather than just pointing fingers (finger-pointing is another people's feature brilliantly represented by the government)
For the average consumer and hobbyist gamer, an increase in graphics processing power is much more noticeable than CPU.
Consider the fact that for the past 10 years or more sound cards have pretty much stayed the same. A 10 year old sound card will do pretty much anything a modern sound card will, and the price of a new card also remained constant. In fact, since the introduction of the popular 5.1/7.1 surround sound systems, I don't think there has been anything new. It's more of a commodity than a luxury now.
With video cards heck yea it's different, because every year there are new games that use better graphics and require more processing power. I think the trend will sooner or later stop, when all graphics cards will already be able to simulate any graphics a human eye can see, just like sound cards have been able to simulate any sound a human ear can hear, for the past 10 years or more.
The question is when. I call ~15-20 years before computer graphics will be movierealistic with any card. After that, it'd be more about what you DO with the graphics, rather than what you CAN do. Which is very good. Maybe once the technical rush is over, we see more CREATIVE and APPROPRIATE use of graphics for the title in question rather than just improving technical benchmarks.
Sure, AVs operate on a practically outdated concept of finding "true" viruses, trojans, etc. Sure, you may use that as a good premise saying that AVs are either inadequate or outright useless.
If the program does crap but it secretly said in the EULA it'd do crap and you were too dumb to notice, AVs are not going to stop it.
If the program is a resource hog, or spies on you in ways you'd never want but which nontheless are not illegal by law, AVs won't stop it.
If the program serves you so much ads your dual-core behaves like a 486DX, AVs damn well aren't going to stop it, or they'll get sued by the owner of said program.
AVs are only designed to, and will only attempt to fight, programs that fall into clearcut and outright illegal definitions (wipes your disk data, installs a backdoor to your root, uses your computer as a bot in a zombie network, etc).
If you want to fight stuff like adware, spyware, slowware, and other crapware that does not fall for the fairly strict definition of outright malignant viruses/trojans, get something like AdAware or SpyBot or something else. AVs won't do the trick.
Cheap? Cool. Large size? even better. Energy efficient? Meh, I'm not in Greenpeace, but sure. And I'm even willing to believe it's reasonably reliable.
But how come nobody's concerned aobut the the IO speed? I wouldn't be too concerned about reading, but if writing/rewriting requires real-time rebuilding of gates, wouldn't it be snail-slow?
The IO of even regular hard drives already becomes a significant factors as drives grow exponentially larger and speed stays the same as always. If this is even slower, it'd become a serious deterrent.
Why haven't schools switched to all Linux? Linux teaches students about computers Windows teaches students how to use Windows
No. Linux teaches students about Unix-like computers. Your statement only follows insofar that most popular non-Windows computers are Unix-like.
Linux tends to be used by more computer-savvy people than Windows, so it is no wonder that most Linux users would indeed feel comfortable around ANY OS. But just because a higher proportion of Linux people are smart with computers than Windows people, it does not follow that it is LINUX which provides that advantage. In other words, people use Linux because they are smart, NOT people are smart because they use Linux.
Imagine that you have two identical people who are equally interested or disinterested in computers, and train one in Linux (and NOTHING but Linux) and the other in Windows (and NOTHING but Windows), and assume they both don't care about anything else and won't do any research other than just use the system for basic tasks (so you don't have the Linux geek browsing tech sites while the Windows dork plays Solitaire all day).
Then take them both and put them infront of, say, an Apple OSX (nearest major mid-ground OS I can think of, it has Unix-like internals but more of Windows-like GUI). I fail to see the Linux guy have a substantial advantage over the Windows guy.
Not if you have sign a contract as a condition of purchase which obligates you to do whatever the contract says, and which is the condition of the seller selling you the item.
Don't assume that a signed contract will not be enforced just because you don't think it's "right". "Unenforcability" is actually much weaker than many would like to believe, and most things shorter than contractual submission into slavery can and will be enforced.
Of course, you don't have to sign anything when buying used iPhones from someone other than Apple, but that's a separate story.
A business doesn't have to cater to what's BEST for the customer. A business needs, and ONLY needs, to provide the following two points:
- A better product value (this includes technical specs, service quality, license agreement, and of course price) than any other competitor can offer; - A NET gain for the customer for purchasing the product (in other words, no matter how objectively "crappy" the product is, the customer will be more satisfied buying the product than not buying it.
Out of the whole range of options which satisfies the above two points, a business will always choose one that is best for the BUSINESS, not the customer.
E.g. If more people cared about carrier lock-in and less about the flashy buttonless display, then they wouldn't buy iPhone in particular, would they? Can't say I'm terribly thrilled by Apple's tactics, but I find it perfectly fair that in a free market society where competition to Apple DOES exist, Apple has the full right to say "either take our products how they are and with all strings attached, or take a hike".
If you don't like this business model, then you do not support free market in principle (not preaching whether that is good or bad, just stating the fact).
Decided by question of fact, not question of law. Instead of "not liable in principle" it's "not liable because they couldn't prove it". Judge's favorite way of avoiding responsibility for a legal precedent for hundreds of years.
But at least it shows you why choosing a judge in such cases is a much better option for the defendant than a trial by jury - technicalities count, precisely for the reason that judges have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, while juries prefer to take the big-bang approach.
I still think that the perspective should be just a LITTLE bit more oriented towards the user. The response of "it's not the kernel, it's the userspace, so go whine to someone else" is akin to the "You are in a hot-air balloon, Sir" joke - true but not useful.
I'm a user. I have a printer/GPU/whatever. It doesn't work on my Linux-running machine. I don't know or care whether it's a userspace or kernel issue. Heck, I don't even know the difference between the two. Hell, my only association with the word "kernel" is "the part of the nut that you eat", and all the word "userspace" reminds me of that I really should try and get a bigger cubicle. I just want my friggin' printer to work! And as far as I know, either Linux (and to me Linux refers to the WHOLE GNU/Linux suit) either DOES it or it DOESN'T.
If there are too many kernel programmers for the kernel problems to solve, then maybe more should try to specialize in userspace drivers, or whatever happens to be the problem that currently needs to be solved (and PLEASE don't get started about how "they don't get paid so don't tell them what to do", because all you do is reinforce MS's primary argument to "why Linux isn't as good as Windoze").
I like Linux as much as the next geek, but unlike the Fundamentalist Linuxist (who will undoubtedly mod me down as Troll for my insolent heresy towards the Sanctity of the Linux Kernel) I keep my eyes open about issues from the perspective of those who need those issues fixed, not in the Ivory Tower of Theoretical Separation of Kernel and User Space on which far too many people are sitting).
You may (or may not) have a legally-legitimate case to sue about, but suing as a "pre-emptive strike" against potentially being sued yourself is pretty dumb.
1. Opens the basis for countersuit for a variety of reasons, including both the original "infringement", or even, ironically, a "frivolous lawsuit" countersuit from *AA. Sure, you will probably not be found liable. But they can afford to spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers, can you?
2. Attracts undue attention. How many of those videos removed from YouTube actually result in prosecution? Close to none, specifically because *AA employs such indiscriminate shotgun tactics at removing online material, and for the vast majority of cases they don't have enough evidence to sue. You just painted a big target on yourself saying "sue me" (whether you actually infringed copyright or not is frankly not that important to anyone concerned).
Talk to a lawyer before going head-over-heels suing someone like the *AA for taking your video off a site that doesn't even belong to you, ma-am. Have you been wronged? Yes. Are the people who took down your video total a-holes? Absolutely. Does that mean you can go right in and hold em up for cash? Not so quick. *AA's methods only work for themselves. Unlike the *AA, you do not have the money, expertise, or political connections to be able to pull something like that. You may be right, but you'll still get screwed, and you gotta be either very brave, very rich, or very stupid to do what you did. So which one it's gonna be?
Cape Breton is one of the southernmost parts of Canada.
There are clear physical advantages to building spaceports (or any space launch pads) close to the equator, for reasons other than weather. Gravity is lowest at the equator, due to two reasons: one being Earth an oblate shape and thus an equatorial point is furthest from core and thus has least gravity, the other being the centrifugal spin of the Earth which is strongest at the equator. Put together, this accounts for about 2% less weight, which does not seem much, but does make a difference.
If you have noticed, both the USA and USSR chose to build their spaceports as south as possible. The most used USA launch spot is in Florida, and in the USSR the Bainokur cosmodrome is located in Kazakhstan, which is not even a part of Russia anymore, but clearly the benefits gotta outweigh the logistical and political diffculties.
Back on topic of this particular case, once the choice of the country (Canada) has been made, Nova Scotia would seem like a good solution due to the reasons outlined above. The question comes, why Canada? LM is a US company, has huge ties to the defense industry, lots of political connections, and the US in general is more business-friendly than Canada. I find it very hard to believe LM would get out of Canada (be it government, commerce, industry ties, or simply geographical settings) anything they couldn't get in the US. Any ideas?
Hate to burst your bubble, but while grid computing can certainly achieve strong speeds, it is not quite AS fast as you might think.
The entire SETI@HOME project (biggest grid computing project on the net) pumps out 274 teraflops. By comparison, Blue Gene L (first in series) pumps out 360 teraflops, and newer versions will achieve petaflop range, much faster than similar anticipation for grid computing projects.
Sure, you might say, that just like supercomputers evolve, so does grid computing. The problem is that a supercomputer is built for a particular purpose, while grid computing is saturated by all the stuff you can do with it (SETI, protein folding, cancer research, or whatever). Now I'm not saying any of these projects is not totally awesome, nor trying to put down the spirit of the community, but as more and more projects compete with each other for user's CPU, the individual share per project will drop. If you combine all grid computing projects put together with all supercomputers put together, the supercomputers win by a huge margin, and even if every single PC on the world would be hooked to a grid project when not used for its primary purpose, it would still unlikely to beat the sum total for dedicated supercomputer power as far as raw computational capability goes.
And it gets even worse if you account for centralized management of all the computing tasks, coordination, error and fake result checking, and simply the lag of transmitting all the grid packets across the net.
Grid computing projects are a very interesting and useful concept, but they won't ever replace supercomputers. Nor should they. They each are good for their own purpose.
Agree to that. The 6x gravity on Earth vs moon, as well as all ballistic and overheating problems associated with the atmosphere, would not be present on the moon. For other issues it's vice versa, like requiring a completely airtight compartment for lunar landing and withstanding the pressure difference (BTW, due to properties of material resistance, building a vessel that has internal pressure higher than external (spaceship, lander) is MUCH tougher than a vessel with external pressure higher than internal (submarine).
The lunar lander used in the Apollo programs would never be able to perform a landing on Earth. And building an Earth lander for use on the moon would grossly inflate your fuel use compared to what you need, increasing the lander's weight and worsening consequences of a potential fuel leak/ignition.
The difference in conditions is not trivial at all, it is different to the point where the resources required to build such a "vessel" exceed the transferable benefit.
Oh, and the $2M prize for any kind lunar lander prototype is a joke. Try $200M.
I fully admire the eagerness of individual contributors, anonymous or not, to improve Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, not all edits which are good-intended actually contribute to the overall quality. Of course, edits which fix simple things like revert vandalism, fix a typo, update a number etc, are all good. But the rest pose a potential problem. First off, newcomers, while well-intented, simply do not know the way Wikipedia works. They may include unsourced or poorly sourced material, insert a POV without even realising it, piss off another editor by being careless (and thus start an edit war) etc.
But even those edits which do not break any Wikipedia rules or guidelines still can cause damage, this time much more subtle. The thing is, a (good) Wikipedia article is not just a collection of facts, even if every single fact is relevant, neutral, sourced, and deserves to be in the article. An article is a unified piece of work. It should flow to the reader, not bump. Information must be properly organized and related to each other. A major suffering of Wikipedia is the so-called "contribution creep", where people just keep dumping more and more facts into the article. The result is grossly disproportional coverage of some sections compared to others, a huge overemphasis on bullet-point lists rather than coherent paragraphs, lots of small factoids which while each good on their own right, do not belong together, parts of articles being outdated compared to other parts, and a lot of other problems which make Wikipedia look like a search result by Google rather than a real encyclopedia.
Early on, Wikipedia's first priority was to fill its databank with stuff, and all contributions (other than those breaking policy) were welcome. Recently, WP is at the stage of more stringent enforcement of policies, as well as guidelines and styleguides. And by all means, that is very important and should be the first priority. But it's not enough to be a good encyclopedia. Making sure everything is neutral, notable, verifiable, attributed, legal, and formatted according to style, is all sub-article tasks, which you apply to a particular sentence, paragraph, or image. But then you have to pause for a moment and look at an article at the big picture. Does it flow smoothly? Are all sections balanced? Are all parts equally updated? Would an average reader get a proportional representation from the article?
You can easily handle the sub-article problems (those that break a clearcut policy or guideline) contributions from anonymous edits (as well as non-anonymous edits). But "Contribution creep" is biggest problem to the overall article, where there is no clearcut right or wrong. And that's why, no matter how important anonymous edits are to Wikipedia (and they certainly are), the already developed articles should be marked as "revised" and new contributions screened before updating them. Not because of potential vandalism or policy violations (those are easy to fix), but precisely to manage contribution creep and make sure well-intented contributions don't introduce speedbumps to an article and break its coherent organization and flow.
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Your second option is not possible (as stated) unless the database links individual people to individual votes, which in turn violates ballot secrecy (with traditional voting, when you enter a ballot, you don't write your name on it, and while the auditor can count the number of votes, they can never know who voted for them).
The digital voting controls should be similar to traditional voting (count how many people entered/left and compare to number of votes), but NEVER record the voters identity on the ballot. Auditor or not, this knowledge is reserved for the voter and nobody but the voter.
The "tyranny of the minority" you refer to can mean two different things.
If you refer to the rich and powerful controlling the country, then it is called an oligarchy and is nothing new. The US constitution specifically tried to address one form of oligarchy, although the success at preventing less overt forms is debatable. In particular, you must be very careful about the means and ideology you choose at fighting oligarchy, or you might end up following this guy. Also see this proof that we'll be fucked no matter how we act.
On the other hand, you could be referring to the vocal minority problem, which, true, was not addressed in the constitution because they were not a problem at the time, but thanks to which we now live in the wonderful world of (insert-continent-here)-Americans, whites-first-is-racism-but-blacks-first-isn't, and inability to ever get anything done except through force.
- Printed voting receipt
- All code open source, all architecture fully documented and publicly available
- No person-vote information recorded in database (database lists people as "voted" or "not voted", as soon as person enters a vote it changes to "voted" and won't allow another vote, while a separate database increments a counter for a particular candidate. These two databases are NOT linked together.
- No timestamps to ensure manual matchmaking between people and votes are not possible.
Ah hell. I could come up with lots of other reasonable suggestions, but its not like any of this will ever be implemented.
Can you elaborate how exactly "assymetry follows from that"?
The government is nothing but a representation, by and for the people. If the people are the bunch of fearmongering neighbor-haters, so will be the government. Of course, the government has more power, so the problems are much more noticeable, but in the end it just acts like an amplifier - garbage in, (much louder) garbage right back out.
Maybe the people should start looking for the source of the government problems in their own behavior, rather than just pointing fingers (finger-pointing is another people's feature brilliantly represented by the government)
So one is a corporate outlet for streaming their shows, while the other one is a hobbyist amateur creative outlet.
They compete with each other how, exactly? How is one the killer of another, when they operate in a completely different niche?
It is all simply about the benefit for the buck.
For the average consumer and hobbyist gamer, an increase in graphics processing power is much more noticeable than CPU.
Consider the fact that for the past 10 years or more sound cards have pretty much stayed the same. A 10 year old sound card will do pretty much anything a modern sound card will, and the price of a new card also remained constant. In fact, since the introduction of the popular 5.1/7.1 surround sound systems, I don't think there has been anything new. It's more of a commodity than a luxury now.
With video cards heck yea it's different, because every year there are new games that use better graphics and require more processing power. I think the trend will sooner or later stop, when all graphics cards will already be able to simulate any graphics a human eye can see, just like sound cards have been able to simulate any sound a human ear can hear, for the past 10 years or more.
The question is when. I call ~15-20 years before computer graphics will be movierealistic with any card. After that, it'd be more about what you DO with the graphics, rather than what you CAN do. Which is very good. Maybe once the technical rush is over, we see more CREATIVE and APPROPRIATE use of graphics for the title in question rather than just improving technical benchmarks.
Sure, AVs operate on a practically outdated concept of finding "true" viruses, trojans, etc. Sure, you may use that as a good premise saying that AVs are either inadequate or outright useless.
If the program does crap but it secretly said in the EULA it'd do crap and you were too dumb to notice, AVs are not going to stop it.
If the program is a resource hog, or spies on you in ways you'd never want but which nontheless are not illegal by law, AVs won't stop it.
If the program serves you so much ads your dual-core behaves like a 486DX, AVs damn well aren't going to stop it, or they'll get sued by the owner of said program.
AVs are only designed to, and will only attempt to fight, programs that fall into clearcut and outright illegal definitions (wipes your disk data, installs a backdoor to your root, uses your computer as a bot in a zombie network, etc).
If you want to fight stuff like adware, spyware, slowware, and other crapware that does not fall for the fairly strict definition of outright malignant viruses/trojans, get something like AdAware or SpyBot or something else. AVs won't do the trick.
Cheap? Cool. Large size? even better. Energy efficient? Meh, I'm not in Greenpeace, but sure. And I'm even willing to believe it's reasonably reliable.
But how come nobody's concerned aobut the the IO speed? I wouldn't be too concerned about reading, but if writing/rewriting requires real-time rebuilding of gates, wouldn't it be snail-slow?
The IO of even regular hard drives already becomes a significant factors as drives grow exponentially larger and speed stays the same as always. If this is even slower, it'd become a serious deterrent.
Linux tends to be used by more computer-savvy people than Windows, so it is no wonder that most Linux users would indeed feel comfortable around ANY OS. But just because a higher proportion of Linux people are smart with computers than Windows people, it does not follow that it is LINUX which provides that advantage. In other words, people use Linux because they are smart, NOT people are smart because they use Linux.
Imagine that you have two identical people who are equally interested or disinterested in computers, and train one in Linux (and NOTHING but Linux) and the other in Windows (and NOTHING but Windows), and assume they both don't care about anything else and won't do any research other than just use the system for basic tasks (so you don't have the Linux geek browsing tech sites while the Windows dork plays Solitaire all day).
Then take them both and put them infront of, say, an Apple OSX (nearest major mid-ground OS I can think of, it has Unix-like internals but more of Windows-like GUI). I fail to see the Linux guy have a substantial advantage over the Windows guy.
Not if you have sign a contract as a condition of purchase which obligates you to do whatever the contract says, and which is the condition of the seller selling you the item.
Don't assume that a signed contract will not be enforced just because you don't think it's "right". "Unenforcability" is actually much weaker than many would like to believe, and most things shorter than contractual submission into slavery can and will be enforced.
Of course, you don't have to sign anything when buying used iPhones from someone other than Apple, but that's a separate story.
A business doesn't have to cater to what's BEST for the customer. A business needs, and ONLY needs, to provide the following two points:
- A better product value (this includes technical specs, service quality, license agreement, and of course price) than any other competitor can offer;
- A NET gain for the customer for purchasing the product (in other words, no matter how objectively "crappy" the product is, the customer will be more satisfied buying the product than not buying it.
Out of the whole range of options which satisfies the above two points, a business will always choose one that is best for the BUSINESS, not the customer.
E.g. If more people cared about carrier lock-in and less about the flashy buttonless display, then they wouldn't buy iPhone in particular, would they? Can't say I'm terribly thrilled by Apple's tactics, but I find it perfectly fair that in a free market society where competition to Apple DOES exist, Apple has the full right to say "either take our products how they are and with all strings attached, or take a hike".
If you don't like this business model, then you do not support free market in principle (not preaching whether that is good or bad, just stating the fact).
Decided by question of fact, not question of law. Instead of "not liable in principle" it's "not liable because they couldn't prove it". Judge's favorite way of avoiding responsibility for a legal precedent for hundreds of years.
But at least it shows you why choosing a judge in such cases is a much better option for the defendant than a trial by jury - technicalities count, precisely for the reason that judges have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, while juries prefer to take the big-bang approach.
I still think that the perspective should be just a LITTLE bit more oriented towards the user. The response of "it's not the kernel, it's the userspace, so go whine to someone else" is akin to the "You are in a hot-air balloon, Sir" joke - true but not useful.
I'm a user. I have a printer/GPU/whatever. It doesn't work on my Linux-running machine. I don't know or care whether it's a userspace or kernel issue. Heck, I don't even know the difference between the two. Hell, my only association with the word "kernel" is "the part of the nut that you eat", and all the word "userspace" reminds me of that I really should try and get a bigger cubicle. I just want my friggin' printer to work! And as far as I know, either Linux (and to me Linux refers to the WHOLE GNU/Linux suit) either DOES it or it DOESN'T.
If there are too many kernel programmers for the kernel problems to solve, then maybe more should try to specialize in userspace drivers, or whatever happens to be the problem that currently needs to be solved (and PLEASE don't get started about how "they don't get paid so don't tell them what to do", because all you do is reinforce MS's primary argument to "why Linux isn't as good as Windoze").
I like Linux as much as the next geek, but unlike the Fundamentalist Linuxist (who will undoubtedly mod me down as Troll for my insolent heresy towards the Sanctity of the Linux Kernel) I keep my eyes open about issues from the perspective of those who need those issues fixed, not in the Ivory Tower of Theoretical Separation of Kernel and User Space on which far too many people are sitting).
To the Panicking Suing Lady:
You may (or may not) have a legally-legitimate case to sue about, but suing as a "pre-emptive strike" against potentially being sued yourself is pretty dumb.
1. Opens the basis for countersuit for a variety of reasons, including both the original "infringement", or even, ironically, a "frivolous lawsuit" countersuit from *AA. Sure, you will probably not be found liable. But they can afford to spend hundreds of thousands on lawyers, can you?
2. Attracts undue attention. How many of those videos removed from YouTube actually result in prosecution? Close to none, specifically because *AA employs such indiscriminate shotgun tactics at removing online material, and for the vast majority of cases they don't have enough evidence to sue. You just painted a big target on yourself saying "sue me" (whether you actually infringed copyright or not is frankly not that important to anyone concerned).
Talk to a lawyer before going head-over-heels suing someone like the *AA for taking your video off a site that doesn't even belong to you, ma-am. Have you been wronged? Yes. Are the people who took down your video total a-holes? Absolutely. Does that mean you can go right in and hold em up for cash? Not so quick. *AA's methods only work for themselves. Unlike the *AA, you do not have the money, expertise, or political connections to be able to pull something like that. You may be right, but you'll still get screwed, and you gotta be either very brave, very rich, or very stupid to do what you did. So which one it's gonna be?
Cape Breton is one of the southernmost parts of Canada.
There are clear physical advantages to building spaceports (or any space launch pads) close to the equator, for reasons other than weather. Gravity is lowest at the equator, due to two reasons: one being Earth an oblate shape and thus an equatorial point is furthest from core and thus has least gravity, the other being the centrifugal spin of the Earth which is strongest at the equator. Put together, this accounts for about 2% less weight, which does not seem much, but does make a difference.
If you have noticed, both the USA and USSR chose to build their spaceports as south as possible. The most used USA launch spot is in Florida, and in the USSR the Bainokur cosmodrome is located in Kazakhstan, which is not even a part of Russia anymore, but clearly the benefits gotta outweigh the logistical and political diffculties.
Back on topic of this particular case, once the choice of the country (Canada) has been made, Nova Scotia would seem like a good solution due to the reasons outlined above. The question comes, why Canada? LM is a US company, has huge ties to the defense industry, lots of political connections, and the US in general is more business-friendly than Canada. I find it very hard to believe LM would get out of Canada (be it government, commerce, industry ties, or simply geographical settings) anything they couldn't get in the US. Any ideas?
CAN run Linux and RUNS Linux are not quite the same thing.
:-)
To put things in perspective, 99% of PCs in the world CAN run Linux.
Hate to burst your bubble, but while grid computing can certainly achieve strong speeds, it is not quite AS fast as you might think.
The entire SETI@HOME project (biggest grid computing project on the net) pumps out 274 teraflops. By comparison, Blue Gene L (first in series) pumps out 360 teraflops, and newer versions will achieve petaflop range, much faster than similar anticipation for grid computing projects.
Sure, you might say, that just like supercomputers evolve, so does grid computing. The problem is that a supercomputer is built for a particular purpose, while grid computing is saturated by all the stuff you can do with it (SETI, protein folding, cancer research, or whatever). Now I'm not saying any of these projects is not totally awesome, nor trying to put down the spirit of the community, but as more and more projects compete with each other for user's CPU, the individual share per project will drop. If you combine all grid computing projects put together with all supercomputers put together, the supercomputers win by a huge margin, and even if every single PC on the world would be hooked to a grid project when not used for its primary purpose, it would still unlikely to beat the sum total for dedicated supercomputer power as far as raw computational capability goes.
And it gets even worse if you account for centralized management of all the computing tasks, coordination, error and fake result checking, and simply the lag of transmitting all the grid packets across the net.
Grid computing projects are a very interesting and useful concept, but they won't ever replace supercomputers. Nor should they. They each are good for their own purpose.
Should be 7,500 lunar landers. :-) Moreover, each one should be designed from scratch.
That Facebook is worth 750 lunar landers.
Agree to that. The 6x gravity on Earth vs moon, as well as all ballistic and overheating problems associated with the atmosphere, would not be present on the moon. For other issues it's vice versa, like requiring a completely airtight compartment for lunar landing and withstanding the pressure difference (BTW, due to properties of material resistance, building a vessel that has internal pressure higher than external (spaceship, lander) is MUCH tougher than a vessel with external pressure higher than internal (submarine).
The lunar lander used in the Apollo programs would never be able to perform a landing on Earth. And building an Earth lander for use on the moon would grossly inflate your fuel use compared to what you need, increasing the lander's weight and worsening consequences of a potential fuel leak/ignition.
The difference in conditions is not trivial at all, it is different to the point where the resources required to build such a "vessel" exceed the transferable benefit.
Oh, and the $2M prize for any kind lunar lander prototype is a joke. Try $200M.
I fully admire the eagerness of individual contributors, anonymous or not, to improve Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, not all edits which are good-intended actually contribute to the overall quality. Of course, edits which fix simple things like revert vandalism, fix a typo, update a number etc, are all good. But the rest pose a potential problem. First off, newcomers, while well-intented, simply do not know the way Wikipedia works. They may include unsourced or poorly sourced material, insert a POV without even realising it, piss off another editor by being careless (and thus start an edit war) etc.
But even those edits which do not break any Wikipedia rules or guidelines still can cause damage, this time much more subtle. The thing is, a (good) Wikipedia article is not just a collection of facts, even if every single fact is relevant, neutral, sourced, and deserves to be in the article. An article is a unified piece of work. It should flow to the reader, not bump. Information must be properly organized and related to each other. A major suffering of Wikipedia is the so-called "contribution creep", where people just keep dumping more and more facts into the article. The result is grossly disproportional coverage of some sections compared to others, a huge overemphasis on bullet-point lists rather than coherent paragraphs, lots of small factoids which while each good on their own right, do not belong together, parts of articles being outdated compared to other parts, and a lot of other problems which make Wikipedia look like a search result by Google rather than a real encyclopedia.
Early on, Wikipedia's first priority was to fill its databank with stuff, and all contributions (other than those breaking policy) were welcome. Recently, WP is at the stage of more stringent enforcement of policies, as well as guidelines and styleguides. And by all means, that is very important and should be the first priority. But it's not enough to be a good encyclopedia. Making sure everything is neutral, notable, verifiable, attributed, legal, and formatted according to style, is all sub-article tasks, which you apply to a particular sentence, paragraph, or image. But then you have to pause for a moment and look at an article at the big picture. Does it flow smoothly? Are all sections balanced? Are all parts equally updated? Would an average reader get a proportional representation from the article?
You can easily handle the sub-article problems (those that break a clearcut policy or guideline) contributions from anonymous edits (as well as non-anonymous edits). But "Contribution creep" is biggest problem to the overall article, where there is no clearcut right or wrong. And that's why, no matter how important anonymous edits are to Wikipedia (and they certainly are), the already developed articles should be marked as "revised" and new contributions screened before updating them. Not because of potential vandalism or policy violations (those are easy to fix), but precisely to manage contribution creep and make sure well-intented contributions don't introduce speedbumps to an article and break its coherent organization and flow.
Sure, you can recover from 1 disk loss, but what about 2?
RAID 6 is your friend.