The public defender is absolutely right. If you don't want other people surfing on your connection, it takes seriously five seconds to click a checkbox and enter a password on your router. If you leave your router open to all connections, that should legally mean that you desire to share your connection with others, since that is what will inevitably occur with such a setup. Leaving your router open like this is akin to bringing a box of donuts to work and leaving it open on the lunchroom tables.
When I read the title about a microchip fan, I thought they were talking about micromechanics--I may have the name wrong but I'm talking about tiny miniature mechanical systems that can be integrated into a chip-like package, like a microscopic gearbox that was demonstrated a while back. But this is way cooler: Generating a tiny corona wind by way of physics and chemistry to create a flow of air is definitely a breakthrough, and in retrospect (which is always 20/20), using a fan to cool a chip is rather the brute-force method. I really hope to see self-cooling chips with this technology. They mentioned the lack of sound. Imagine the upcoming laptops with solid state hard drives having a solid state cooling system too. Totally silent computing! Not to mention what it will do for battery life.
While I haven't read any of Banks' works yet, being that I'm in the U.S. and therefore must dig to find them, I think this idea of Space Opera is intriguing because it could give the story a "timeless" sort of air. In the other types of SciFi, where a special effort is made to describe the technology, there is the problem that many of these ideas depend on areas of physics or chemistry that are conjured up by the author in an attempt to explain away impossibilities. For example, the impossibility of traveling quickly to the other side of the galaxy is answered by "inventing" technology that can do warp speed, hyperspace, or one of many other explanations. This is not what I call "timeless" because future developments in physics could later diminish a story's appeal, since it would no longer seem plausible. However, Space Opera appears to base itself on human (or humanoid) interactions, which is one area that will never change, no matter what kind of technology there happens to be. Interactions between people in, say, the 1700's might have been limited for the most part to their own town, and interactions today are limited to our planet. In some futuristic setting, these interactions might span a much larger area, such as the galaxy, but although the scale will have changed, the basic elements will not. This "timelessness" is what I find intriguing by this description. It will be nice to go digging someplace to find one of these books.
What this really exposes is not a bug in any kernel. Indeed, the story states that the "bug" exists in both the BSD and Linux kernels. It really exposes something fascinating about the development process: Code is written based on certain assumptions and a working theory of how the code will function once put into use, but the only way to really know how well it works is to hand it over to the ultimate judge of code correctness--the computer--by running the code. If it works, case closed. Now it's entirely possible that the kernel developers never heard of this obscure nuance of the Intel processor. Then one day, the compiler changed, and with it, the assumptions changed. Mature code that has been declared good years ago seemingly breaks. Now it's easy to blame the code, but really this is a deletion of a feature from the compiler. Nevertheless, it exposes the fact that ultimately, no matter what tools we use and no matter how well we think our code through, you can only consider the code good once it runs and appears to do what it's supposed to.
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The public defender is absolutely right. If you don't want other people surfing on your connection, it takes seriously five seconds to click a checkbox and enter a password on your router. If you leave your router open to all connections, that should legally mean that you desire to share your connection with others, since that is what will inevitably occur with such a setup. Leaving your router open like this is akin to bringing a box of donuts to work and leaving it open on the lunchroom tables.
When I read the title about a microchip fan, I thought they were talking about micromechanics--I may have the name wrong but I'm talking about tiny miniature mechanical systems that can be integrated into a chip-like package, like a microscopic gearbox that was demonstrated a while back. But this is way cooler: Generating a tiny corona wind by way of physics and chemistry to create a flow of air is definitely a breakthrough, and in retrospect (which is always 20/20), using a fan to cool a chip is rather the brute-force method. I really hope to see self-cooling chips with this technology. They mentioned the lack of sound. Imagine the upcoming laptops with solid state hard drives having a solid state cooling system too. Totally silent computing! Not to mention what it will do for battery life.
While I haven't read any of Banks' works yet, being that I'm in the U.S. and therefore must dig to find them, I think this idea of Space Opera is intriguing because it could give the story a "timeless" sort of air. In the other types of SciFi, where a special effort is made to describe the technology, there is the problem that many of these ideas depend on areas of physics or chemistry that are conjured up by the author in an attempt to explain away impossibilities. For example, the impossibility of traveling quickly to the other side of the galaxy is answered by "inventing" technology that can do warp speed, hyperspace, or one of many other explanations. This is not what I call "timeless" because future developments in physics could later diminish a story's appeal, since it would no longer seem plausible. However, Space Opera appears to base itself on human (or humanoid) interactions, which is one area that will never change, no matter what kind of technology there happens to be. Interactions between people in, say, the 1700's might have been limited for the most part to their own town, and interactions today are limited to our planet. In some futuristic setting, these interactions might span a much larger area, such as the galaxy, but although the scale will have changed, the basic elements will not. This "timelessness" is what I find intriguing by this description. It will be nice to go digging someplace to find one of these books.
What this really exposes is not a bug in any kernel. Indeed, the story states that the "bug" exists in both the BSD and Linux kernels. It really exposes something fascinating about the development process: Code is written based on certain assumptions and a working theory of how the code will function once put into use, but the only way to really know how well it works is to hand it over to the ultimate judge of code correctness--the computer--by running the code. If it works, case closed. Now it's entirely possible that the kernel developers never heard of this obscure nuance of the Intel processor. Then one day, the compiler changed, and with it, the assumptions changed. Mature code that has been declared good years ago seemingly breaks. Now it's easy to blame the code, but really this is a deletion of a feature from the compiler. Nevertheless, it exposes the fact that ultimately, no matter what tools we use and no matter how well we think our code through, you can only consider the code good once it runs and appears to do what it's supposed to.