The whole argument of "Gentoo 'wants' you to update a lot of things" is trivially debunked. Gentoo isn't a distro per se, it is a meta-distribution. I have worked in environments where Gentoo was used on servers, desktops, and what have you. The "solution" to Gentoo's frequent changes is simple: maintain your own portage tree mirror, which you keep frozen until you are good and ready to roll out the next major update (which of course you only do after extensive testing, like any Suse, Red Hat, or debian update). You define your own in-house releases, not Gentoo (and you graft security updates to your own tree as they come out--this isn't difficult, as each security update is announced by package).
This is trivial to do, and leads me to suspect the person putting forward the argument against using Gentoo (or any other well-engineered distribution) on servers either has an agenda, hasn't taken much time to ponder the issue, or doesn't understand the technology.
Follow Australia and get rid of the useless penny! What we did was phase out our 1 and 2 cent coins and now just round up or round down to the nearest 5 cents. Works well.
Or better yet, drop a digit after the decimal, ditch pennies and nickels both and have dimes as the smallest coin. Instead of $9.99 for a product, it will be $9.9. Round to the nearest tenth the way we round to the nearest 100th today. End of problem--at least until inflation makes dollars worth dimes.
As a US citizen living abroad I sympathise with other residents of the Americas taking umbrage with our appropriation of an entire continent's name. However, there isn't really any sensible replacement. USAian looks and sounds stupid, so you will never get 300+ million people adopting it, no matter how sympathetic they are to your point. Every other identifier for folks from the US, from "yank" to "gringo" has derogatory connotations, so you won't see us stampeding to change our label to that either.
The fact is that we've been called Americans for over two hundred years, and the etymology of the word stems quite clearly from the name of the country "United States of America." Since Unitidians and Statsians are too generic, American is the term that evolved.
I suppose we could start calling ourselves "Americans of US citizenship" or some other stupid, ungainly term, but anyone doing so would be trivially identified as a politically correct dogmatist of gargantuan proportions, and probably laughed at almost as much as those who use USian, or other inane terms like "Sie" as a singular gender neutral pronoun ("their" may be grammatically wrong, but at least it doesn't sound utterly contrived--but I digress.).
So, if someone can come up with a sensible replacement for "American" that doesn't sound like PC newspeak or involve multiple words, and isn't derogatory, I will entertain the notion of adopting it. But until that happens, I will consider calling myself American, with due apologies to the other residents of America who also happen to be able to call themselves Belizian/Brazilian/Mexican/etc., and don't have 300+ million Americans demanding they should change their centuries-old national identifier.
1) The Telegraph leans to the right. This report may be nothing more than a shill to shut down Google Earth.
George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their supporters are just stupid enough to try something like this. It will do them exactly no good.
2) That said, it does seem reasonable that insurgents might be able to make use of Google Earth for some targeting information. Since the data is generally fairly stale, though, one wonders just how useful it would actually be.
Yes, I'm sure insurgents can use Google Earth to find a location they're interested in targeting. And I'm sure they'll find paper maps just as useful if the authorities shut down Google Earth. Or has Baghdad's street layout become a state secret?
C# 2.0 is lightyears ahead of Java. But compared to other languages, Java shows signs of severe mental retardation, and C# 2.0 looks like a preschooler.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
In the past I have worked with trading companies on various exchanges (FTSE in London, NYSE in New York, CBOE & CME in Chicago, etc.). It doesn't get much more "real world" than winging around millions of dollars, pounds, and euros electronically in markets where seconds can mean the difference between profit and loss. Many of the infrastructure components for the real-time trading systems used were written in Python (the speed of development and platform flexibility made it invaluable), so your notion that Python programming isn't done in "the real world" is more than a little misguided. Of course, if your "real world" is limited to the subset of computers running Microsoft Windows, then I can understand how your impressions of "real-world" computing may have been skewed.
Of course, I quite like Ruby, but Python is very nice for what it does, and has many more real-world applications already in use than you realize.
I would transit MDW at 500 AGL quite frequently
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UFOs In the News
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When I was flying in and out of Midway Chicago airport, I would be transitioned routinely over the airport, midfield anywhere from 45 degress to perpendicular to the active runway. As you said, it keeps you out of the flightpath of any aircraft using the crossing runway. Typical altitudes were 500-1000 AGL, well below 1900 feet. These were typically single engine small aircraft, Cessna 172s, Pipers, and my own Beech Sundowner.
I just renewed my passport last month, despite having a little over 3 years left before it would have expired. Now I'm damn glad I did...in ten years time, when I have no choice but to renew again, at least I won't be getting Version 1.0 of the US Government's Made-to-be-cracked ePassport.
Okay, for the second part. Please explain the scientific value of your definition and why the IAU would want to lump all orbiting bodies into one group instead of, say, defining several classes of stellar companions, ranging from gas giants on the large side to KBOs on the small end.
do both. "planet" as a generic term, specific types of planets, planetoids, etc. in parallel. We already do that with gas giants vs. ice giants vs terrestrial planets.
It's a boneheaded definition, unnecessarilly complicated.
A stellar object: any object of sufficient mass (Z) to become a star, or the remains of such an object (e.g. black dwarf, black hole) A brown dwarf is an object of mass greater than Y, but less than Z A planet is a non-stellar object of at least mass X but less than Y, which may or may not be orbiting a stellar object or brown dwarf (it can be floating free in space, beholden to no star). A moon is an object orbiting a non-stellar object of larger mass. A planetoid is an object greater than mass W but less than X An asteroid is an object with mass less than W but greater than V. A dust mote is an object with mass less than V (add more definitoins as desired. Stones, rocks, pebbles anyone?).
Obviously a planet can also be a moon if it is orbiting another planet of larger mass. Feel free to define a lower bound for the definition of a moon, to exclude ring particle material, small artificial satellites, etc. But really, this approach is very straightforward and holds up regardless of prevailing theory, and doesn't involve any boneheaded definitions that result in the Earth having a moon but Pluto having only a "companion planet so diminutive as to only be called a planet by pedantic astromers working from boneheaded defintions in a desperate attempt to keep pluto on the list of planets".
Definitions of planets involving barycenters, theories of formation, and orbital characteristics are IMHO flawed. Mass should be the definiting factor, with death matches between astronomers of dissenting camps to be fought to determine exact values of V, W, X, and Y. Z should be obvious based on phsycial requirements to sustain a stellar fusion reaction.
This took me five minutes of typing. Why are these geniuses having such a difficult time of it?
OK, here's the answer. Make the definition arbitrary and exact, using values we can measure and be certain of, that won't change with whatever the planet-formation-theory de jour is.
1. A planet is an object that orbits a star and has a mass greater than X and has a radius large enough to not be a black hole 2. A moon is an object that orbits a planet, planetoid, or astreroid 3. A planetoid is an object that orbits a star and has a mass greater than Y but less than X, and has a radius large enough to not be a black hole 4. An planetesimal is a rocky object that orbits a star and has a mass less than Y, and a radius large enought o not be a black hole. 5. A star is an object that burns (more precise definition of nuclear processes to differentiate between brown dwarf and star can be inserted here)
Now, please feel free to fight to the death over appropriate values of X and Y. And frankly, who gives a shit whether pluto is a planet, planetoid, or planetesimal? It's not like it is suddenly going to fall out of orbit because it doesn't like our definition.
What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?
Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.
It also doesn't explain why rural canada has faster and cheaper consumer bandwidth available than downtown Chicago (I live in downtown Chicago, and what I pay $70/month for is slower than what folks I know in rural Alberta pay $25 CND for). Canada is a larger country, with less dense industrialization, and is far better wired and serviced for internet connectivity than our densely populated metropolitan city centers.
So I call bullshit. Our position as last place among industrialized nations when it comes to Internet connectivity has absolutely nothing to do with our nation's size, and everything to do with a corrupt government in bed with corrupt telcos and corrupt copyright cartels deliberately keeping connectivity artificially slow and prices artificially high. Of course, the war spending that's putting us into record debt isn't helpful, but nor is it directly responsible.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
I use the proprietary nvidia drivers on 64-bit Gentoo builds running on AMD dual dual-core and single-core opterons, Athlon64 (both dual and single core), and 64-bit AMD laptops. All work just fine, even with the most current (2.6.17-gentoo-r4) kernels.
Now granted, Gentoo requires a bit of build time (compiling from source), and if you haven't created scripts to automate the build process, requires a bit of manual configuration, but the ease of updates and maintenance make it well worthwhile, and the ability to use cutting edge software, and often difficult to install on other platform projects such as transcode, blender, mplayer, ffmpeg, etc. with ease makes the time investment well worthwhile. Being able to do this on 64-bit (and having done so for the last two years) is icing on the cake.
I've also had decent luck with Suse, but I find their older kernels, older software, non-obvious nvidia support (beyond the default 2d VESA) and binary-based updates a little aggrivating. However, a big plus for the impatient is a quick install that takes less than an hour, vs. a day or two to install Gentoo. The best of both worlds of course is to have multiple root partitions set aside, put Suse on one to get started, and build a Gentoo build on a second partition in a chrooted environment. Then, once the build is done, just reboot into the new Gentoo build and enjoy. Since you're running 64-bit, it's not like performance will be killed during the build.:-)
In any event, all of this is to point out that Nvidia drivers work perfectly fine in a 64-bit environment, and that there are at least two distros that work with them perfectly. So enjoy your new 64-bit box!
From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical. Of course to us it's clearly not. Thus the flaw of the hand-wringing over "the singularity" is illustrated--it suffers from the classic error of attempting to evaluate the future in the context of today. Of course when we get to the future, we'll be in the future too--so it doesn't matter what we think now.
That is exactly right. In my book Autonomy I take issue with the term singularity, and in fact describe the unpredicatability and unknowability of the future as a horizon instead. Not an "event horizon", which implies discontinuous change (a "singularity"), but a simple, everyday horizon, like the one each of us sees every day due to the curvature of our planet. Just as we cannot see California from New York, or Paris from London, so to we cannot see the post-human daily grind (or understand it) from the early twenty-first century. My argument is very similar to yours: from the point of view of the caveman, the invention of archery is a singularity granting their descendents godlike powers to kill at a distance. From the point of view of Native Americans the invention of ships was a singularity, granting godlike powers to Europeans to emerge from the water and conquer their empires. Likewise for the invention of steam power, electricity, and hundreds of other world-changing technologies I've not mentioned.
Each change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, whether explosive or gradual, has been contiguious. There has not been a "discontinuity", nor will there be one. Indeed, the closer we get to Vinge's "Singuarity" the better we grasp what form it might take. By the time we reach that point in the exponential curve, we will likely see it as just another step in the gradual, contiguous progression of life and technology. We may do so with what to us today are godlike powers of reason and intelligence, but to us (or our descendents then), it will just be another day at the office, using our common sense and everyday tools that augment our abilities, just as the first sharp rock augmented our ancestors' ability to dress the meat of the animal they killed for dinner.
Well, here's a more chilling thought... what would happen if China forbade its companies to EXPORT to the US for some indefinite period of time?
A Chinese boycott of sales to America is the least of their power.
China is the main financier of the American government's debt. Yes, that $400 to $500 billion Baby Bush has put us in the hole for fighting his family's personal vindetta in Iraq at America's expense (both in tax dollars and human lives).
If China gets really annoyed with us, they can simply stop buying US Bonds and put the government (and the economy) into freefall overnight. Yes, thanks to Bush's unprecedented deficit China could engineer the complete collapse of our economy, and probably our ability to govern, that easily.
If they decide they don't want to go that far, they could do anything from a boycot more limited than you describe (refuse to export some product we really need and watch our economy spasm without actually collapsing), to invading and annexing Taiwan (goodbye affordable computing for the next 5-10 years).
Really, Bush has put us so far into hawk to the Chinese that they really can call the shots, anytime they like. They just haven't seen any advantage in doing so so blatently or crassly.... yet.
But with America's current diplomatic and strategic incompetence, one is forced to wonder how much longer it will be, and conclude "probably not much."
If we as a race are any indication, and we're all we have to go by, it's safe to assume the opposite. The more advanced we've become, the less valuable human life has become.
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
War - While wars go on today, they are less acceptable to most. 100 years ago war was considered an integral part of diplomacy. Today it is consider a failure of diplomacy
Human Rights - 100 years ago it was an alien concept. Even with the Bill of Rights in the US, and the Magna Carta in the UK, there was always the presumption that "others" (be they of a different religion, ethnicity, or nationality) had less rights than "us." A universal set of rights that applied to everyone was not a mainstream idea.
Slavery As others have said, it isn't legal in too many places these days (is it anywhere), and its practice is fringe and utterly unacceptable. 300 years ago the opposite was true, and 600 years ago it was nearly ubiquitious
Women's Rights Women were property a century ago, with no right to vote in most places, and no right to choose. Instead they were property of their husbands (and unable to own property of their own in many places), and their bodies became chattal of the state and church for nine months the moment they got pregnant. While there are those that seek to revert to such a state, even in right-leaning America 70% of the population opposes such a move, and in more enlightened countries the notion is even less acceptable.
I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.
Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.
Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.
So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.
However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas
iirc, it was SCO who paid mysql money for them to support SCO users, not the other way around.
Right. I went back and read TFA, and Mysql is NOT sponsoring this. Neither is HP. They are offering Mysql and HP "training," and smearing those company's names in the eyes of those who don't read carefully enough (the poster I replied to, and myself to name two).
I stand corrected: Again, MYSQL and HP are NOT Sponsors of SCO's laughable ploy, and probably have nothing whatsoever (or as little as possible) to do with SCO.
taking a grand from SCO doesn't have to cost you your integrity. there's no commit to do any development is there? just go through the training. sleep through it even! or is there some fine print that i missed?
You have a contractual relationship with a company that is on record for stating that contracts are to be used as weapons against their customers/partners/employees.
Sign a contract with a venemously litigious company like SCO and unless you have a lot of capital to spend on lawyers (one hell of a lot more than the $1000 they're offering), SCO owns your ass (and any code you write might well be considered "tainted").
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that.
I'm confused by this post. I just have to ask you to clarify...
Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?
No, I think he means mysql is evil because they are sponsoring SCO's disgusting attempt to buy their way out of the history books and back into mainstream corporate and technology circles. I happen to agree...MySQL is more evil than companies like HP et.al. for the very reason he cited: they are in the free software community, they know the issues, and they certainly cannot be ignorant of how Darl McBride and SCO tried to steal GNU/Linux from its creators (yes, steal, because if McBride et.al. had succeeded in their fraud, the creators of the Linux kernel, and perhaps the wider GNU community, would have been denied the right to legally use their own creations), and they've chosen to sponsor this despite that knowledge. At least a big company like HP may not have followed this (all the SCO bruhaha could be beneath their radar).
I agree that sponsoring an evil knowing its full implications is an act of greater maliciousness than sponsoring an evil in ignorance of its full implications, and MySQL certainly appears to fall in the former category.
It's a pity...I actually like their product. Time to give postgres a gander I suppose.
The Germans can and do work during the semester breaks, and that internships in Germany (or at least, the one's I did at Bayer-Leverkusen) were substantive, and could last a month or two if your break was long enough. So as far as I know, there is no formal limit on how much a student can work during their studies, at least as a "Werkstudent".
However, when I was at the TH-Darmstadt (as an exchange student for two semesters) I found the study/homework situation to be very similar to what you describe in Belgium. Homework amounted to optional excersizes, ungraded, and the entire semester grade was derived from a single final exam called a "klausur." However, said exams tended to be more comprehensive than you describe in Belgium (though not universally so), and while they might have an oral component, they often did not. I would say most of the finals I took (required for me to get course credit at the University of Illinois) were approximately the same level of difficulty as those I took at U of I.
But the lack of homework, and the ability to cram for a klausur the last couple of weeks and do reasonably well, certainly meant coming out of a course with less long-term retention and practical, applicative experience than a similar course in the states. On the other hand, the Germans must take a large, truly final exam to graduate, which very rigorously tests their knowledge of all they've learned throughout their entire college experience. In addition, they must do a "diplomarbeit", which is similar to what we would call a thesis. This compensates, and means stuff learned years earlier must be reviewed and/or relearned, whereas in the states we may have long since forgotten most of what we learned in that sophomore course we aced. Germans like to consider their Diplom the equivelent of an American masters, but in my experience it actually comes in somewhere between a Bachelors of Science and a Masters (it is more than a bachelor's degree, less than a masters degree). Americans like to consider the Bachelors of Science as equal to a German diplom, which is equally inaccurate.
For the most part, I find these comparisons less-than-useful and often quite rife with bias (and I'm sure my take on it is no exception). Europeans take their degrees more seriously than American B.S. or B.A. degrees, we take our degrees more serious than theirs. Neither stance is particularly justified, and both stances underscore the respective prejudices of each society. As for this article, I agree with with another post. There are a plethora of successful startups in the UK, and in contental Europe, and while the US may have more VC capital to throw around, or more investors willing to throw it around, lets not forget the number of successful startups that have been subsequently ruined by the VC capital they received (and the strings attached to it).
Alas, no joy. Clicking on the register link leads to a windows download. There appears to be no way to even register without downloading some crappy windows program. As I run GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, this makes this a complete nonstarter.
If they adhered to standards at all, and let you sign up through an HTML interface and configure your SIP gateway/router yourself (as you've described above) it would be interesting. However, since I can't even sign up for the service without buying and polluting my machine with Microsoft Spyware(tm)/Microsoft Virus Fractory(tm), the service is regrettably less than useless.
Hitler and Stalin were atheist, eh?... they killed more then over the last century then Muslims, Christians and Jewish history combined.
Hitler was a devout Catholic who enjoyed the vocal support of the Clergy, both protestant (Lutheren) and Catholic. The holocaust was a christian crusade against the Jews... one they conviniently disowned and through a bit of revisionist slight of hand managed, somehow, to convince those unschooled in history to accept as an "athiest" regime when in point of fact it was anything but.
is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer....And on the other hand, such a wonderfully circular logic loop cannot be debated. 'If I cannot see any source of wrong doing', says the conspiracy nut, 'Then it must be deliberately concealed from me, hence a conspiracy!'
He probably thought referencing the obvious, that we have well documented misbehavior on the part of the Microsoft (convicted monopolist, victim testimony going back decades, and numerous enough to fill rooms with filing cabinets full of depositions), didn't need to be belabored. When you introduce that minor detail, his logic ceases to the circular. His mistake for not referencing widely known facts (Microsoft's conviction for abusing their monopoly, the courts findings of fact, etc.), but given that we know Microsoft broke the law, that we have reams of depositions describing their anti-competative and, yes, evil, practices in detail, it is not cicular reasoning to point out that this low level functionaries protestations to the contrary, and claims that the very people engaging in this activity are "ethical", have no bearing on reality, nor to cite an example of working for the mob (or any other bad organization) as hardly evidence to the contrary.
We are being asked to believe Microsoft's upper management is extremely "ethical" by a Microsoft employee who thinks working there is pretty good, and hasn't himself been privy to the illegal decisions we know as a matter of public record that organization has made.
It is absurd to expect us to dismiss facts in the public record in favor of anectdotal pretestations to the contrary by MSFT employees (whether or not they're being paid to say such things), and insulting to our intelligence to boot.
Oh, and to the other bonehead in a related thread calling people "stupid" for citing Microsoft as evil, with the comment "evil is people suffering, not a clippy icon", (a) the latter is typical a joke at MS expense (c.f. humor, sense of, and the need to get one), and (b) what exactly do you think the dozens of companies that were destroyed by Microsoft's illegal, anti-competative behavior, and hundreds if not thousands of employees who were displaced as a result, were doing? Throwing a party? MS has broken the law, and in so dooing ruined lives, damaged businesses, and wrecked livlihoods. That alone is evil in most ratioinal people's book. Add to that the suffering their products cause (I've known people to lose entire weekends with tech support trying to get their windoze boxes running, and have been brought to tears. Not through any fault of their own, but because the Dell Notebook they owned, and the Microsoft software on it, weren't fit for public consumption), and one can make a very compelling case that the company is indeed evil by any definition, regardless of what its paid minions may say.
The western press isn't perfect at detecting liars. As a result, they should shut up and say nothing at all.
What a bunch of bozos.
Am I pissed at the western press for giving Bush a free pass for so many years, and still showing a suprising lack of backbone even today? You bet. Does that mean the press offers nothing of value (even on those subjects it slants in ways I disagree with)? No.
So a couple of government-friendly bloggers decided to stage a hoax and mimic a shutdown so many bloggers have actually experienced at the hands of that same government, just to draw out the press and discredit their message that "censorship is wrong."
Well, maybe they're congratulating themselves, but I'm not buying their criticism. The press is imperfect, and downright wrong from time to time. Reporters are often lazy, doing more googling and reprinting of press releases than actual research, and courage seems to be lacking from many news organizations (and others appear to be outright owned by supporters of the current conservative regimes in many places, including Australia and the USA).
However, faking a blog shutdown in a way that mimics dozens of real shutdowns, then screaming 'ha ha! fooled you you dumb free speech westerners' is like staging your own kidnapping, hiding out, then going public with how stupid the news media is for reporting your disappearance and possible kidnapping. The media has plenty of faults, but not detecting every case of fraud and deliberate deception is hardly a reason to dismiss every news they report, particularly with respect to repressive regimes.
Hell, if the media were able to detect hoaxes and lies so easilly, Bush, Blair, and their respective administrations would get a whole lot less airtime, and we wouldn't be busy fighting a war in Iraq instead of fighting the War on Terror we were supposed to be fighting in that other country, hundreds of miles to the east... what was it called again? Oh yeah, Afghanistan.
"Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information
Um, no, that's wrong.
Bremmermann's Limit is the maximum computational speed in the physical universe (as defined by relativity and quantum mechanical limitations) and is approximately 2 x 10^47 bits per second per gram (or, for those who prefer sexagesimal, one jezend, 60^11, bits per second per gram).
Bousso's covariant entropy bound also called the holographic bound is a theoretical refinement on the Bekenstein Bound that may define the limit of how compact information may be stored, based on current understanding of quantum mechanical limits, and is theorized to be equal to approximately one yezend (60^37, or ~10^66) bits of information contained in a space enclosed by a spherical surface of 1 sq. cm.
Given this, 1 kg of matter can perform approximately 2 x 10^50 bit operations per second per kilogram, in a space much smaller than 1 liter of space. Of course, other physical constraints (non-quantum related) probably limits us to a couple of orders of magnitude less computation, in a couple of orders of magnitude more space, but of course what those limits might be is very speculative
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The whole argument of "Gentoo 'wants' you to update a lot of things" is trivially debunked. Gentoo isn't a distro per se, it is a meta-distribution. I have worked in environments where Gentoo was used on servers, desktops, and what have you. The "solution" to Gentoo's frequent changes is simple: maintain your own portage tree mirror, which you keep frozen until you are good and ready to roll out the next major update (which of course you only do after extensive testing, like any Suse, Red Hat, or debian update). You define your own in-house releases, not Gentoo (and you graft security updates to your own tree as they come out--this isn't difficult, as each security update is announced by package).
This is trivial to do, and leads me to suspect the person putting forward the argument against using Gentoo (or any other well-engineered distribution) on servers either has an agenda, hasn't taken much time to ponder the issue, or doesn't understand the technology.
Follow Australia and get rid of the useless penny! What we did was phase out our 1 and 2 cent coins and now just round up or round down to the nearest 5 cents. Works well.
Or better yet, drop a digit after the decimal, ditch pennies and nickels both and have dimes as the smallest coin. Instead of $9.99 for a product, it will be $9.9. Round to the nearest tenth the way we round to the nearest 100th today. End of problem--at least until inflation makes dollars worth dimes.
As a US citizen living abroad I sympathise with other residents of the Americas taking umbrage with our appropriation of an entire continent's name. However, there isn't really any sensible replacement. USAian looks and sounds stupid, so you will never get 300+ million people adopting it, no matter how sympathetic they are to your point. Every other identifier for folks from the US, from "yank" to "gringo" has derogatory connotations, so you won't see us stampeding to change our label to that either.
The fact is that we've been called Americans for over two hundred years, and the etymology of the word stems quite clearly from the name of the country "United States of America." Since Unitidians and Statsians are too generic, American is the term that evolved.
I suppose we could start calling ourselves "Americans of US citizenship" or some other stupid, ungainly term, but anyone doing so would be trivially identified as a politically correct dogmatist of gargantuan proportions, and probably laughed at almost as much as those who use USian, or other inane terms like "Sie" as a singular gender neutral pronoun ("their" may be grammatically wrong, but at least it doesn't sound utterly contrived--but I digress.).
So, if someone can come up with a sensible replacement for "American" that doesn't sound like PC newspeak or involve multiple words, and isn't derogatory, I will entertain the notion of adopting it. But until that happens, I will consider calling myself American, with due apologies to the other residents of America who also happen to be able to call themselves Belizian/Brazilian/Mexican/etc., and don't have 300+ million Americans demanding they should change their centuries-old national identifier.
1) The Telegraph leans to the right. This report may be nothing more than a shill to shut down Google Earth.
George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their supporters are just stupid enough to try something like this. It will do them exactly no good.
2) That said, it does seem reasonable that insurgents might be able to make use of Google Earth for some targeting information. Since the data is generally fairly stale, though, one wonders just how useful it would actually be.
Yes, I'm sure insurgents can use Google Earth to find a location they're interested in targeting. And I'm sure they'll find paper maps just as useful if the authorities shut down Google Earth. Or has Baghdad's street layout become a state secret?
C# 2.0 is lightyears ahead of Java. But compared to other languages, Java shows signs of severe mental retardation, and C# 2.0 looks like a preschooler.
Unfortunately I have to develop software in the real world. This (for the most part anyway) completely rules out every language you suggested. It sounds like you lack experience programming in the real world.
In the past I have worked with trading companies on various exchanges (FTSE in London, NYSE in New York, CBOE & CME in Chicago, etc.). It doesn't get much more "real world" than winging around millions of dollars, pounds, and euros electronically in markets where seconds can mean the difference between profit and loss. Many of the infrastructure components for the real-time trading systems used were written in Python (the speed of development and platform flexibility made it invaluable), so your notion that Python programming isn't done in "the real world" is more than a little misguided. Of course, if your "real world" is limited to the subset of computers running Microsoft Windows, then I can understand how your impressions of "real-world" computing may have been skewed.
Of course, I quite like Ruby, but Python is very nice for what it does, and has many more real-world applications already in use than you realize.
When I was flying in and out of Midway Chicago airport, I would be transitioned routinely over the airport, midfield anywhere from 45 degress to perpendicular to the active runway. As you said, it keeps you out of the flightpath of any aircraft using the crossing runway. Typical altitudes were 500-1000 AGL, well below 1900 feet. These were typically single engine small aircraft, Cessna 172s, Pipers, and my own Beech Sundowner.
We need people to die..
Fine. You first.
I just renewed my passport last month, despite having a little over 3 years left before it would have expired. Now I'm damn glad I did...in ten years time, when I have no choice but to renew again, at least I won't be getting Version 1.0 of the US Government's Made-to-be-cracked ePassport.
Okay, for the second part. Please explain the scientific value of your definition and why the IAU would want to lump all orbiting bodies into one group instead of, say, defining several classes of stellar companions, ranging from gas giants on the large side to KBOs on the small end.
do both. "planet" as a generic term, specific types of planets, planetoids, etc. in parallel. We already do that with gas giants vs. ice giants vs terrestrial planets.
It's a boneheaded definition, unnecessarilly complicated.
A stellar object: any object of sufficient mass (Z) to become a star, or the remains of such an object (e.g. black dwarf, black hole)
A brown dwarf is an object of mass greater than Y, but less than Z
A planet is a non-stellar object of at least mass X but less than Y, which may or may not be orbiting a stellar object or brown dwarf (it can be floating free in space, beholden to no star).
A moon is an object orbiting a non-stellar object of larger mass.
A planetoid is an object greater than mass W but less than X
An asteroid is an object with mass less than W but greater than V.
A dust mote is an object with mass less than V
(add more definitoins as desired. Stones, rocks, pebbles anyone?).
Obviously a planet can also be a moon if it is orbiting another planet of larger mass. Feel free to define a lower bound for the definition of a moon, to exclude ring particle material, small artificial satellites, etc. But really, this approach is very straightforward and holds up regardless of prevailing theory, and doesn't involve any boneheaded definitions that result in the Earth having a moon but Pluto having only a "companion planet so diminutive as to only be called a planet by pedantic astromers working from boneheaded defintions in a desperate attempt to keep pluto on the list of planets".
Definitions of planets involving barycenters, theories of formation, and orbital characteristics are IMHO flawed. Mass should be the definiting factor, with death matches between astronomers of dissenting camps to be fought to determine exact values of V, W, X, and Y. Z should be obvious based on phsycial requirements to sustain a stellar fusion reaction.
This took me five minutes of typing. Why are these geniuses having such a difficult time of it?
OK, here's the answer. Make the definition arbitrary and exact, using values we can measure and be certain of, that won't change with whatever the planet-formation-theory de jour is.
1. A planet is an object that orbits a star and has a mass greater than X and has a radius large enough to not be a black hole
2. A moon is an object that orbits a planet, planetoid, or astreroid
3. A planetoid is an object that orbits a star and has a mass greater than Y but less than X, and has a radius large enough to not be a black hole
4. An planetesimal is a rocky object that orbits a star and has a mass less than Y, and a radius large enought o not be a black hole.
5. A star is an object that burns (more precise definition of nuclear processes to differentiate between brown dwarf and star can be inserted here)
Now, please feel free to fight to the death over appropriate values of X and Y. And frankly, who gives a shit whether pluto is a planet, planetoid, or planetesimal? It's not like it is suddenly going to fall out of orbit because it doesn't like our definition.
What country has the largest square footage of industrialized space in the world?
Every time some other country's telco produces a better service than our own, this comes up. It didn't explain why consumers can't get 100mbps in our most dense cities, or 1gbit, and it still doesn't explain why we can't get 2.5gbps now. Even in the places that already have fiber to the home, the best I can do on FiOS is 30M/5M for $180. Meanwhile ATT seems to be giving up on SBC's fiber deployment, at least for this iteration. According to that article they're possibly hoping to come out ahead sometime in the hazy future with 100mbps connections.
It also doesn't explain why rural canada has faster and cheaper consumer bandwidth available than downtown Chicago (I live in downtown Chicago, and what I pay $70/month for is slower than what folks I know in rural Alberta pay $25 CND for). Canada is a larger country, with less dense industrialization, and is far better wired and serviced for internet connectivity than our densely populated metropolitan city centers.
So I call bullshit. Our position as last place among industrialized nations when it comes to Internet connectivity has absolutely nothing to do with our nation's size, and everything to do with a corrupt government in bed with corrupt telcos and corrupt copyright cartels deliberately keeping connectivity artificially slow and prices artificially high. Of course, the war spending that's putting us into record debt isn't helpful, but nor is it directly responsible.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
I use the proprietary nvidia drivers on 64-bit Gentoo builds running on AMD dual dual-core and single-core opterons, Athlon64 (both dual and single core), and 64-bit AMD laptops. All work just fine, even with the most current (2.6.17-gentoo-r4) kernels.
:-)
Now granted, Gentoo requires a bit of build time (compiling from source), and if you haven't created scripts to automate the build process, requires a bit of manual configuration, but the ease of updates and maintenance make it well worthwhile, and the ability to use cutting edge software, and often difficult to install on other platform projects such as transcode, blender, mplayer, ffmpeg, etc. with ease makes the time investment well worthwhile. Being able to do this on 64-bit (and having done so for the last two years) is icing on the cake.
I've also had decent luck with Suse, but I find their older kernels, older software, non-obvious nvidia support (beyond the default 2d VESA) and binary-based updates a little aggrivating. However, a big plus for the impatient is a quick install that takes less than an hour, vs. a day or two to install Gentoo. The best of both worlds of course is to have multiple root partitions set aside, put Suse on one to get started, and build a Gentoo build on a second partition in a chrooted environment. Then, once the build is done, just reboot into the new Gentoo build and enjoy. Since you're running 64-bit, it's not like performance will be killed during the build.
In any event, all of this is to point out that Nvidia drivers work perfectly fine in a 64-bit environment, and that there are at least two distros that work with them perfectly. So enjoy your new 64-bit box!
From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical. Of course to us it's clearly not. Thus the flaw of the hand-wringing over "the singularity" is illustrated--it suffers from the classic error of attempting to evaluate the future in the context of today. Of course when we get to the future, we'll be in the future too--so it doesn't matter what we think now.
That is exactly right. In my book Autonomy I take issue with the term singularity, and in fact describe the unpredicatability and unknowability of the future as a horizon instead. Not an "event horizon", which implies discontinuous change (a "singularity"), but a simple, everyday horizon, like the one each of us sees every day due to the curvature of our planet. Just as we cannot see California from New York, or Paris from London, so to we cannot see the post-human daily grind (or understand it) from the early twenty-first century. My argument is very similar to yours: from the point of view of the caveman, the invention of archery is a singularity granting their descendents godlike powers to kill at a distance. From the point of view of Native Americans the invention of ships was a singularity, granting godlike powers to Europeans to emerge from the water and conquer their empires. Likewise for the invention of steam power, electricity, and hundreds of other world-changing technologies I've not mentioned.
Each change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, whether explosive or gradual, has been contiguious. There has not been a "discontinuity", nor will there be one. Indeed, the closer we get to Vinge's "Singuarity" the better we grasp what form it might take. By the time we reach that point in the exponential curve, we will likely see it as just another step in the gradual, contiguous progression of life and technology. We may do so with what to us today are godlike powers of reason and intelligence, but to us (or our descendents then), it will just be another day at the office, using our common sense and everyday tools that augment our abilities, just as the first sharp rock augmented our ancestors' ability to dress the meat of the animal they killed for dinner.
Well, here's a more chilling thought... what would happen if China forbade its companies to EXPORT to the US for some indefinite period of time?
.... yet.
A Chinese boycott of sales to America is the least of their power.
China is the main financier of the American government's debt. Yes, that $400 to $500 billion Baby Bush has put us in the hole for fighting his family's personal vindetta in Iraq at America's expense (both in tax dollars and human lives).
If China gets really annoyed with us, they can simply stop buying US Bonds and put the government (and the economy) into freefall overnight. Yes, thanks to Bush's unprecedented deficit China could engineer the complete collapse of our economy, and probably our ability to govern, that easily.
If they decide they don't want to go that far, they could do anything from a boycot more limited than you describe (refuse to export some product we really need and watch our economy spasm without actually collapsing), to invading and annexing Taiwan (goodbye affordable computing for the next 5-10 years).
Really, Bush has put us so far into hawk to the Chinese that they really can call the shots, anytime they like. They just haven't seen any advantage in doing so so blatently or crassly
But with America's current diplomatic and strategic incompetence, one is forced to wonder how much longer it will be, and conclude "probably not much."
As others have said, Bullshit with a capital "B".
I could go on (the acceptability of massive civilian casualties during the first two wars, up to and including the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, vs. the unacceptability of even modest collatoral damage today, etc. etc.), but you get the idea. Human life has seldom if ever been prized so highly as it is today.
... and the stimulus for growth that will push our species into addressing and developing further refinements in ethics, diplomacy, and the wisdom to use military force (or not) as needed. As with any challenge, we will either rise to the occasion or fail.
For the love of God, the level of surveillance that the anglosphere tolerates is unfathomable by the standards of 1,000 years ago.
Hardly. The surveillance was done by a different entity 1000 years ago, namely the Catholic church. Its mechanism was low-tech...guilt and mentally batter your subjects into such a perpetual state of guilt and then encourage them to go the "confession" and receive absolution. Everyone reported their sins to the local priest, and often discussed their "concerns" with said priests likewise. Even kings had their confessors...which gave the church an immense level of day-to-day surveillance of an entire continent during the middle ages that is still unrivaled even today.
Even 50, 20, 10 years ago (hell, today for that matter), if you think government serveillance of your life in the big city is bad (and it is IMHO very bad, and very dangerous), it is nothing to what your family and neighbors make a point of knowing about you when you live in a small community. Talk about "Big Brother", try adding "Big Aunt", "Big Sister", "Big Cousin", "Big Mother", "Big Father, "Big Neighbor", "Big Gossip Down the Street", etc. to that.
So your arguments are false on their face, and as for reasons not to venture into space, spurious and irrelevant at best. Space brings with it problems and solutions, just as the discovery of America did, and every other migration and advance of the species has over the millennia. If and when we do meet another sentient species, that too will bring with it challenges
However, if we cower in our little corner and forsake progress because we fear it, then failure (as in the end of the species in the nearer term) is no longer merely a possibility...it becomes a certainty, and along with it our certain extinction, the next time the planet experiences one of its many recurring major disas
iirc, it was SCO who paid mysql money for them to support SCO users, not the other way around.
Right. I went back and read TFA, and Mysql is NOT sponsoring this. Neither is HP. They are offering Mysql and HP "training," and smearing those company's names in the eyes of those who don't read carefully enough (the poster I replied to, and myself to name two).
I stand corrected: Again, MYSQL and HP are NOT Sponsors of SCO's laughable ploy, and probably have nothing whatsoever (or as little as possible) to do with SCO.
taking a grand from SCO doesn't have to cost you your integrity. there's no commit to do any development is there? just go through the training. sleep through it even! or is there some fine print that i missed?
You have a contractual relationship with a company that is on record for stating that contracts are to be used as weapons against their customers/partners/employees.
Sign a contract with a venemously litigious company like SCO and unless you have a lot of capital to spend on lawyers (one hell of a lot more than the $1000 they're offering), SCO owns your ass (and any code you write might well be considered "tainted").
HP, I could care less about (their computers are cheap, and their calculators are nothing like they used to be), but I thought that MySQL had a decent set of morals. The fact that they could maintain enterprise support while still offering an open-source version is an indication of that.
I'm confused by this post. I just have to ask you to clarify...
Are you saying that MySQL is immoral/evil because they *gasp* charge for some things they invest time and money to develop, or is my sarcasm meter broken?
No, I think he means mysql is evil because they are sponsoring SCO's disgusting attempt to buy their way out of the history books and back into mainstream corporate and technology circles. I happen to agree...MySQL is more evil than companies like HP et.al. for the very reason he cited: they are in the free software community, they know the issues, and they certainly cannot be ignorant of how Darl McBride and SCO tried to steal GNU/Linux from its creators (yes, steal, because if McBride et.al. had succeeded in their fraud, the creators of the Linux kernel, and perhaps the wider GNU community, would have been denied the right to legally use their own creations), and they've chosen to sponsor this despite that knowledge. At least a big company like HP may not have followed this (all the SCO bruhaha could be beneath their radar).
I agree that sponsoring an evil knowing its full implications is an act of greater maliciousness than sponsoring an evil in ignorance of its full implications, and MySQL certainly appears to fall in the former category.
It's a pity...I actually like their product. Time to give postgres a gander I suppose.
The Germans can and do work during the semester breaks, and that internships in Germany (or at least, the one's I did at Bayer-Leverkusen) were substantive, and could last a month or two if your break was long enough. So as far as I know, there is no formal limit on how much a student can work during their studies, at least as a "Werkstudent".
However, when I was at the TH-Darmstadt (as an exchange student for two semesters) I found the study/homework situation to be very similar to what you describe in Belgium. Homework amounted to optional excersizes, ungraded, and the entire semester grade was derived from a single final exam called a "klausur." However, said exams tended to be more comprehensive than you describe in Belgium (though not universally so), and while they might have an oral component, they often did not. I would say most of the finals I took (required for me to get course credit at the University of Illinois) were approximately the same level of difficulty as those I took at U of I.
But the lack of homework, and the ability to cram for a klausur the last couple of weeks and do reasonably well, certainly meant coming out of a course with less long-term retention and practical, applicative experience than a similar course in the states. On the other hand, the Germans must take a large, truly final exam to graduate, which very rigorously tests their knowledge of all they've learned throughout their entire college experience. In addition, they must do a "diplomarbeit", which is similar to what we would call a thesis. This compensates, and means stuff learned years earlier must be reviewed and/or relearned, whereas in the states we may have long since forgotten most of what we learned in that sophomore course we aced. Germans like to consider their Diplom the equivelent of an American masters, but in my experience it actually comes in somewhere between a Bachelors of Science and a Masters (it is more than a bachelor's degree, less than a masters degree). Americans like to consider the Bachelors of Science as equal to a German diplom, which is equally inaccurate.
For the most part, I find these comparisons less-than-useful and often quite rife with bias (and I'm sure my take on it is no exception). Europeans take their degrees more seriously than American B.S. or B.A. degrees, we take our degrees more serious than theirs. Neither stance is particularly justified, and both stances underscore the respective prejudices of each society. As for this article, I agree with with another post. There are a plethora of successful startups in the UK, and in contental Europe, and while the US may have more VC capital to throw around, or more investors willing to throw it around, lets not forget the number of successful startups that have been subsequently ruined by the VC capital they received (and the strings attached to it).
I just visited sipdiscount.com.
Alas, no joy. Clicking on the register link leads to a windows download. There appears to be no way to even register without downloading some crappy windows program. As I run GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, this makes this a complete nonstarter.
If they adhered to standards at all, and let you sign up through an HTML interface and configure your SIP gateway/router yourself (as you've described above) it would be interesting. However, since I can't even sign up for the service without buying and polluting my machine with Microsoft Spyware(tm)/Microsoft Virus Fractory(tm), the service is regrettably less than useless.
Hitler and Stalin were atheist, eh?... they killed more then over the last century then Muslims, Christians and Jewish history combined.
... one they conviniently disowned and through a bit of revisionist slight of hand managed, somehow, to convince those unschooled in history to accept as an "athiest" regime when in point of fact it was anything but.
Hitler was a devout Catholic who enjoyed the vocal support of the Clergy, both protestant (Lutheren) and Catholic. The holocaust was a christian crusade against the Jews
is quite possible to have worked for the mob, be well treated, and not see any nefarious activity. It is not only possible but likely (and therefore infinitely reasonable) that such activities will be concealed from such an observer. ...And on the other hand, such a wonderfully circular logic loop cannot be debated. 'If I cannot see any source of wrong doing', says the conspiracy nut, 'Then it must be deliberately concealed from me, hence a conspiracy!'
He probably thought referencing the obvious, that we have well documented misbehavior on the part of the Microsoft (convicted monopolist, victim testimony going back decades, and numerous enough to fill rooms with filing cabinets full of depositions), didn't need to be belabored. When you introduce that minor detail, his logic ceases to the circular. His mistake for not referencing widely known facts (Microsoft's conviction for abusing their monopoly, the courts findings of fact, etc.), but given that we know Microsoft broke the law, that we have reams of depositions describing their anti-competative and, yes, evil, practices in detail, it is not cicular reasoning to point out that this low level functionaries protestations to the contrary, and claims that the very people engaging in this activity are "ethical", have no bearing on reality, nor to cite an example of working for the mob (or any other bad organization) as hardly evidence to the contrary.
We are being asked to believe Microsoft's upper management is extremely "ethical" by a Microsoft employee who thinks working there is pretty good, and hasn't himself been privy to the illegal decisions we know as a matter of public record that organization has made.
It is absurd to expect us to dismiss facts in the public record in favor of anectdotal pretestations to the contrary by MSFT employees (whether or not they're being paid to say such things), and insulting to our intelligence to boot.
Oh, and to the other bonehead in a related thread calling people "stupid" for citing Microsoft as evil, with the comment "evil is people suffering, not a clippy icon", (a) the latter is typical a joke at MS expense (c.f. humor, sense of, and the need to get one), and (b) what exactly do you think the dozens of companies that were destroyed by Microsoft's illegal, anti-competative behavior, and hundreds if not thousands of employees who were displaced as a result, were doing? Throwing a party? MS has broken the law, and in so dooing ruined lives, damaged businesses, and wrecked livlihoods. That alone is evil in most ratioinal people's book. Add to that the suffering their products cause (I've known people to lose entire weekends with tech support trying to get their windoze boxes running, and have been brought to tears. Not through any fault of their own, but because the Dell Notebook they owned, and the Microsoft software on it, weren't fit for public consumption), and one can make a very compelling case that the company is indeed evil by any definition, regardless of what its paid minions may say.
The western press isn't perfect at detecting liars. As a result, they should shut up and say nothing at all.
... what was it called again? Oh yeah, Afghanistan.
What a bunch of bozos.
Am I pissed at the western press for giving Bush a free pass for so many years, and still showing a suprising lack of backbone even today? You bet. Does that mean the press offers nothing of value (even on those subjects it slants in ways I disagree with)? No.
So a couple of government-friendly bloggers decided to stage a hoax and mimic a shutdown so many bloggers have actually experienced at the hands of that same government, just to draw out the press and discredit their message that "censorship is wrong."
Well, maybe they're congratulating themselves, but I'm not buying their criticism. The press is imperfect, and downright wrong from time to time. Reporters are often lazy, doing more googling and reprinting of press releases than actual research, and courage seems to be lacking from many news organizations (and others appear to be outright owned by supporters of the current conservative regimes in many places, including Australia and the USA).
However, faking a blog shutdown in a way that mimics dozens of real shutdowns, then screaming 'ha ha! fooled you you dumb free speech westerners' is like staging your own kidnapping, hiding out, then going public with how stupid the news media is for reporting your disappearance and possible kidnapping. The media has plenty of faults, but not detecting every case of fraud and deliberate deception is hardly a reason to dismiss every news they report, particularly with respect to repressive regimes.
Hell, if the media were able to detect hoaxes and lies so easilly, Bush, Blair, and their respective administrations would get a whole lot less airtime, and we wouldn't be busy fighting a war in Iraq instead of fighting the War on Terror we were supposed to be fighting in that other country, hundreds of miles to the east
"Although we'd all like Moore's Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information
Um, no, that's wrong.
Bremmermann's Limit is the maximum computational speed in the physical universe (as defined by relativity and quantum mechanical limitations) and is approximately 2 x 10^47 bits per second per gram (or, for those who prefer sexagesimal, one jezend, 60^11, bits per second per gram).
Bousso's covariant entropy bound also called the holographic bound is a theoretical refinement on the Bekenstein Bound that may define the limit of how compact information may be stored, based on current understanding of quantum mechanical limits, and is theorized to be equal to approximately one yezend (60^37, or ~10^66) bits of information contained in a space enclosed by a spherical surface of 1 sq. cm.
Given this, 1 kg of matter can perform approximately 2 x 10^50 bit operations per second per kilogram, in a space much smaller than 1 liter of space. Of course, other physical constraints (non-quantum related) probably limits us to a couple of orders of magnitude less computation, in a couple of orders of magnitude more space, but of course what those limits might be is very speculative