there are AFAIK no companies that make nanotubes in sufficient quantity and quality to feed the demand for the tubes at the moment
yes, this is true. However, if you took the time to read the article you would read that the process described grows the nanotubes in place (using a chemical process).
unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community..
yes, this is true. However, in the future everybody will be a gamer. Everybody wants immersive VR, whether they realize it or not. All you have to do is dangle a superintelligent earpiece in front of people, and they will *want* one. Don't give me some bullshit about how 3 GHz should be enough for anybody.
It's difficult to compare apples and oranges, or a digital with an analog computer, but x bits plus current state as input and one bit out sounds like one simple operation to me.. and not "at least x" operations as you claim.
How do you figure that a 'copy operation' counts as computation? I perform one operation and make 1000 copies and all of a sudden that's 1000 operations?
My pc has a gig of ram, which is 8x10^9 bits. I suppose you think that when I turn my pc off and thus write 0's to all those locations that it is performing 8x10^9 computations?
While my pc is on, the dram is refreshed 60 times per second. If copying counts as "at least an op", then just the refresh cycles perform 4.8*10^11 operations per second. It also has a cpu and video processor that do a few computations now and again. How many operations are done by the scan refresh in my monitor?
My brain performs more than 330 trillion ops/sec (stuff like image analysis, speech recognition, "AI",...)
The human brain has between 10 billion and 100 billion neurons. They can fire up to 100 times per second. 100 billion * 100/second is only 10 trillion per second.
So we must assume that either:
1. you have an enormous brain (3.3 trillion neurons would weigh about 50kg), or
2. that they fire very quickly, (you overclocked your brain and run around with a heatsinking hat and have to eat 20x a day) or
3. that you do some 'thinking' without using neurons.
Hmm, that last option seems to be the most reasonable. How's that working out for you, anyway?
The same things happened when the pentium was introduced.
1. they were expensive
2. there was no software that took advantage of new pentium-specific instructions
3. there was a dearth of pentium dev tools
Meanwhile, the 486 seemed to meet everyone's needs. When pentiums were running at 90 MHz, companies offered cheap, souped up 486 chips running at 120+, for years after the pentium was introduced.
Also, there seems to be some confusion about address space and RAM. Having a 32 bit address doesn't just limit you to 4GB of RAM (without bending over backwards). There are reasons why you want your address to be larger than the amount of RAM you plan to support. Basically, a program might want to say to the operating system: when I ask for the information in this range of 'memory' addresses, what I really want is the information in this range of this file on disk. It's a little difficult to explain why this is a good thing, unless you're a programmer and already know why. It just is.
I think I understated the additional resources needed to track each email while it's being sent. In my opinion, it is an absolutely crushing burden and no ISP can afford to check with the sender for each email they receive.
If I understand you right, you want a mail server to keep track of all the to/from email combinations that it's sent out lately and respond yes/no to a given combination if asked. Eg, antiprime@hotmail sends email to ralico@yahoo. Hotmail keeps track of "antiprime/ralico@yahoo". Several minutes, hours or days later, yahoo asks hotmail "antiprime/ralico@yahoo"? hotmail replies "yes", so the email is delivered. An excellent idea, but one that won't solve the problem.
As a spammer, I can open a new free web-based email account every day and send spam from it. If you prevent me from doing that:
As a spammer, I'll open up a new account every day with a stolen credit card, send out a flood of email then disappear.
Barring that, I'll register a new domain and just have it reply "yes" to all queries. Block it, and it's only $15 for me to register a new one and begin again.
Even if you prevent the above, you have to keep records of who sent email to whom. This potentially violates privacy, slows down already bogged-down mailservers, which in turn increases mail lag and downtime.
So after all that, you have to ask yourself if jumping through this particular set of hoops in hopes of solving the spam problem is any better than jumping through the current set of hoops. At any rate, it isn't 'easy'.
I've wondered why more ISPs don't adopt this strategy to make themselves unattractive to spammers
How about, because they dont want to drive away legitimate customers. There's no way I'd authorize my ISP to charge $10k to my credit card, if (in their sole discretion) I was promoting spam. Ten grand is a lot of money to most people, and we don't want some fubar at the ISP to break our bank account. Personally, I won't give a credit card number to an ISP under any circumstances, even if they promise to take nothing but the monthly access fee.
Suppose I'm a youthful prankster, the type who writes viruses for fun in his basement. One day, I'll have the bright idea to send out spam with the phone numbers of legitimate businesses, such as stock brokerages or ISPs. People will start automatically blocking their email brokerage statements.
I am also in favor of this. Charge a tenth of a cent to send an email. At least that will encourage spammers to pare down their lists a little bit.
Suppose the cost still upsets someone, despite its being under a dollar a year for most people. Charge a few cents to send an email and pay a similar amount to receive email. That way the only people charged are those who send more email than they receive. And really, those people should be charged something.
Suppose I'm a spammer. All I need to do is forge a valid return address? Just let me start at the top of my shitlist and work my way down. It's not like an email spammer has any shortage of email addresses or people trying to shut him down.
A policy to shut up and let people die in peace allways leaves fewer survivors and a worse off future after the disaster.
Personally, I'm *fine* with not being notified about a killer asteroid that's headed our way. Just as long as they notify Hamilton Hill.
It's his job to be notified in just such an emergency, since he can contact The Batman, who will then pass on a message to the rest of the Superfriends. No worries.
Get drunk to simulate the slow response time, then try to navigate through your favorite modern windowing shell without using a mouse, tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for: exactly the same effect. For advanced nostalgia, futz with your monitor and display settings so everything's a shade of green and black.
I had a similar experience, withdrew $200 and counted. The machine shorted me $20. So next time I was in the credit union, I mentioned it to a clerk. She looked up the transaction and said they had me on record as withdrawing $180, and that their ATM accounting is full of little checks and balances. I have never ever been given grief at a credit union when I questioned their ATM's accuracy. This is just one of many reasons to not deal with a large impersonal bank if you can help it. The folks at your local branch may be all personable, but when 'Corporate' barks an order from half a world away it's their job to snap to, even if it's not fair to the customers.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be made from a carbon nanotube composite, probably not pure nanotubes.
There are nanotube composite materials that are strong enough to do the job.
there are AFAIK no companies that make nanotubes in sufficient quantity and quality to feed the demand for the tubes at the moment
yes, this is true. However, if you took the time to read the article you would read that the process described grows the nanotubes in place (using a chemical process).
unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community..
yes, this is true. However, in the future everybody will be a gamer. Everybody wants immersive VR, whether they realize it or not. All you have to do is dangle a superintelligent earpiece in front of people, and they will *want* one. Don't give me some bullshit about how 3 GHz should be enough for anybody.
I wanna see one of these in a dead fly.
Every good hoax has an element of truth behind it.
>> The largest meteorite collected was 7.5 pounds Since when size is measured in pounds?!?!?
> Actually, it didn't say that its *size* was 7.5 pounds - it just said that the mass of the
> largest was 7.5 pounds
Since when is mass measured in pounds?!?!?
seems to be a dollar short as well.
64 bits BAHHH, back in my day we had 2, and we were happy with the both of them! Youngsters.
Yeah, but we only needed two since all our programming was done with 1's and the letter 'o'.
It's difficult to compare apples and oranges, or a digital with an analog computer, but x bits plus current state as input and one bit out sounds like one simple operation to me.. and not "at least x" operations as you claim.
Each connection is at least an op.
How do you figure that a 'copy operation' counts as computation? I perform one operation and make 1000 copies and all of a sudden that's 1000 operations?
My pc has a gig of ram, which is 8x10^9 bits. I suppose you think that when I turn my pc off and thus write 0's to all those locations that it is performing 8x10^9 computations?
While my pc is on, the dram is refreshed 60 times per second. If copying counts as "at least an op", then just the refresh cycles perform 4.8*10^11 operations per second. It also has a cpu and video processor that do a few computations now and again. How many operations are done by the scan refresh in my monitor?
My brain performs more than 330 trillion ops/sec (stuff like image analysis, speech recognition, "AI",...)
The human brain has between 10 billion and 100 billion neurons. They can fire up to 100 times per second. 100 billion * 100/second is only 10 trillion per second.
So we must assume that either:
1. you have an enormous brain (3.3 trillion neurons would weigh about 50kg), or
2. that they fire very quickly, (you overclocked your brain and run around with a heatsinking hat and have to eat 20x a day) or
3. that you do some 'thinking' without using neurons.
Hmm, that last option seems to be the most reasonable. How's that working out for you, anyway?
The same things happened when the pentium was introduced.
1. they were expensive
2. there was no software that took advantage of new pentium-specific instructions
3. there was a dearth of pentium dev tools
Meanwhile, the 486 seemed to meet everyone's needs. When pentiums were running at 90 MHz, companies offered cheap, souped up 486 chips running at 120+, for years after the pentium was introduced.
Also, there seems to be some confusion about address space and RAM. Having a 32 bit address doesn't just limit you to 4GB of RAM (without bending over backwards). There are reasons why you want your address to be larger than the amount of RAM you plan to support. Basically, a program might want to say to the operating system: when I ask for the information in this range of 'memory' addresses, what I really want is the information in this range of this file on disk. It's a little difficult to explain why this is a good thing, unless you're a programmer and already know why. It just is.
I think I understated the additional resources needed to track each email while it's being sent. In my opinion, it is an absolutely crushing burden and no ISP can afford to check with the sender for each email they receive.
Here's a good reference on smtp. Hope that helps.
If I understand you right, you want a mail server to keep track of all the to/from email combinations that it's sent out lately and respond yes/no to a given combination if asked. Eg, antiprime@hotmail sends email to ralico@yahoo. Hotmail keeps track of "antiprime/ralico@yahoo". Several minutes, hours or days later, yahoo asks hotmail "antiprime/ralico@yahoo"? hotmail replies "yes", so the email is delivered. An excellent idea, but one that won't solve the problem.
As a spammer, I can open a new free web-based email account every day and send spam from it. If you prevent me from doing that:
As a spammer, I'll open up a new account every day with a stolen credit card, send out a flood of email then disappear.
Barring that, I'll register a new domain and just have it reply "yes" to all queries. Block it, and it's only $15 for me to register a new one and begin again.
Even if you prevent the above, you have to keep records of who sent email to whom. This potentially violates privacy, slows down already bogged-down mailservers, which in turn increases mail lag and downtime.
So after all that, you have to ask yourself if jumping through this particular set of hoops in hopes of solving the spam problem is any better than jumping through the current set of hoops. At any rate, it isn't 'easy'.
I've wondered why more ISPs don't adopt this strategy to make themselves unattractive to spammers
How about, because they dont want to drive away legitimate customers. There's no way I'd authorize my ISP to charge $10k to my credit card, if (in their sole discretion) I was promoting spam. Ten grand is a lot of money to most people, and we don't want some fubar at the ISP to break our bank account. Personally, I won't give a credit card number to an ISP under any circumstances, even if they promise to take nothing but the monthly access fee.
An excellent idea that won't work. Here's why.
Suppose I'm a youthful prankster, the type who writes viruses for fun in his basement. One day, I'll have the bright idea to send out spam with the phone numbers of legitimate businesses, such as stock brokerages or ISPs. People will start automatically blocking their email brokerage statements.
I am also in favor of this. Charge a tenth of a cent to send an email. At least that will encourage spammers to pare down their lists a little bit.
Suppose the cost still upsets someone, despite its being under a dollar a year for most people. Charge a few cents to send an email and pay a similar amount to receive email. That way the only people charged are those who send more email than they receive. And really, those people should be charged something.
But it isn't that easy.
Suppose I'm a spammer. All I need to do is forge a valid return address? Just let me start at the top of my shitlist and work my way down. It's not like an email spammer has any shortage of email addresses or people trying to shut him down.
A policy to shut up and let people die in peace
allways leaves fewer survivors and a worse off
future after the disaster.
Personally, I'm *fine* with not being notified about a killer asteroid that's headed our way. Just as long as they notify Hamilton Hill.
It's his job to be notified in just such an emergency, since he can contact The Batman, who will then pass on a message to the rest of the Superfriends. No worries.
Making a totally bullshit analysis
You damn right it's bullshit. Zebra are really safe drivers.
Get drunk to simulate the slow response time, then try to navigate through your favorite modern windowing shell without using a mouse, tie the power cord to your ankle to simulate random rebooting that you somehow blame yourself for: exactly the same effect. For advanced nostalgia, futz with your monitor and display settings so everything's a shade of green and black.
ob You had zeros? We had to use the letter 'o'.
story that isn't a dupe.
give it a couple days
1) deprive people of human rights
2) pirate music
3) ??????
4) PROFIT!
That would work better if you started with underwear.
Perhaps, 1) Underwear that deprives people of human rights
Scary, huh? Kinda makes you think, doesn't it?
Ouch, that hurts. Well, let's go shopping.
I had a similar experience, withdrew $200 and counted. The machine shorted me $20. So next time I was in the credit union, I mentioned it to a clerk. She looked up the transaction and said they had me on record as withdrawing $180, and that their ATM accounting is full of little checks and balances. I have never ever been given grief at a credit union when I questioned their ATM's accuracy. This is just one of many reasons to not deal with a large impersonal bank if you can help it. The folks at your local branch may be all personable, but when 'Corporate' barks an order from half a world away it's their job to snap to, even if it's not fair to the customers.