Going 200 miles from ground to orbit is, from the standpoint of space exploration, almost inconsequential
The first 200 miles are the expensive bit. You have to carry the fuel to fight the gravity. and the fuel to carry the fuel that fights the gravity. And so on until you end up with massive booster rockets, etc.
Once you're in orbit, getting other places is a lot cheaper. If we have cheap orbital shots, we'd have had a decent space station decades ago and probably explored other planets by now. _____
At the top end of the technology curve (i.e. US, EU), population is _dropping_.
Once people have enough, they stop having so many kids and they just lay back and enjoy life.
Once the developing nations hit that point, their population growth will dwindle to nothing too, and everything will calm down.
Of course, we need to worry about the fact that your average first world person consumes a massive amount of resources, but we're working on that one. _____
The original submitter doesn't think we can achieve vision or reasoning in a computer.
How does he think people do it? Does he believe in a soul that handles all of this?
It's very simple. We're made of matter. Therefore anything we do can be done 'artificially' once we can manipulate matter on a small enough scale. _____
If you're transferring files from a friend and you're a bit bursty adn so are they, you end up downloading a lot more slowly than you could in theory. (imagine that you spend 30 seconds each minute running at half speed and so do they, you only spend (on average) 15 seonds each minute downloading at maximum speed).
If you've got a high-bandwidth cache in between you can get a 50% higher throughput. Also, if the file has been cached beforehand (because someone else downloaded it) you can get it at your maximum speed.
What's needed is some P2P at the high end, to allow for seamless mirroring and reporting, with the lower end being more heirarchy based.
That way (for instance) you ask your local server for a file and it uses a P2P method to retrieve that file across the network of 'big servers', then sends it to you. That way your dial-up connection isn't slowing down the large scale network. _____
Even if you don't like Katz, I advise you to pick up this book.
If nothing else, it highlights some of the paradigm changes in the world of computer games and also all the different things that you have to think about when you're playing even a simple game.
At the time, I bumped into an interview with Tarantino. Apparently he'd been near the Gump people at the Oscars and had said "You _were_ kidding, right?" and they'd been delighted that _somebody_ got it.
They _weren't_ being serious. It was a satire of the american dream. _____
Why would you want to run servers if anyone can use them?
Put yourself in AOL's shoes. Suddenly you have to let people use your servers and get nothing in return. Will you (a) happily carry on paying for those servers or (b) wait for Microsoft, etc. to produce their own AOL compatible messaging servers and then stop paying for your own now that MS are carrying the load?
You have to allow people to make money, or they won't play the game. _____
You are depriving the original owner of their _time_. They put the time in, knowing that they would be compensated for it, because that's what the law says.
You are then changing this implicit contract they had and stealing that time they spent. _____
It's no different to spending months increasing your C++ skills, or years becoming a chaess Grand-Master, or learning to play the piano, or becoming the worlds fastest skateboarder.
All of these things are personal choices. We become obsessed with something and decided to be the best we can be. The choice (if it is a choice) of what to be obsessed by is mere aesthetics.
Personally, I prefer to be a synthesist. I like being pretty good at lots of things rather than the best at one thing. _____
AFAIK, English is the worlds biggest second language. If two people from different countries want to communicate, english is the most likely common denominator.
As you are introduced to the larger world, t makes sense to learn the language used there. In order for this to be Mandarin, you'd need a massive influx of Mandarin speakers _and_ people learning to speak Mandarin as their international language. Not likely at the moment, but certainly possible later if China makes a big push for internet access for all. If, instead, they merely contine introducing people to the internet in dribs and drabs, the slow conversion will continue. _____
It beats SQL Server for many basic tasks and can cope with tables up to 2GB in size quite happily.
It can also use ODBC to connect to the back end of your choice, allowing scaling to SQL Server or Oracle or whatever you like.
If you'd like to select some data, I'll happily run off some benchmarks for you.
Quake is opensourced. If you want to add things into that, you can do what you like.
Quake 3 is written in such a way that _anyone_ can program new goodies into it. Rocket Arena isn't released by ID, it's released by some guys who wanted to release some cool addons for it.
Try and do a bit of research before you start calling people names
The one advantage Radio has over your CD collection is that it can introduce you to new music. If there was a local rock/goth/industrial music station, I'd listen to it, purely to hear music I might like that I've never heard of before.
Say a cent per 5 minutes. That's 12 cents an hour. For the amount of music I listen to, that's around $160 per year. Which is the same as 13 albums (ish). Which is about what I buy (give or take). And the money would go straight to the people who make the music. so every time I listen to a song by REM, REM get a cent (or thereabouts). And I get to listen to any song I like at any time.
Not a chance. Imagine that the side of the tank is displaying what you'd see if you were at right angles to the tank and looking straight at it.
Now, move through 30 degrees. The display is still showing the old picture, but you're seeing it from the wrong angle, so you're seeing a distorted version of the wrong image. It would stand out like a sore thumb.
Now, a pseudo random image would porbably vanish under your notice a lot faster
Slashdot Mirror
Because on £15 headphones, on a portable MP3 player, while walking about, I can't hear the difference.
Which means I can fit about an hour of music in 32MB.
_____
Going 200 miles from ground to orbit is, from the standpoint of space exploration, almost inconsequential
The first 200 miles are the expensive bit. You have to carry the fuel to fight the gravity. and the fuel to carry the fuel that fights the gravity. And so on until you end up with massive booster rockets, etc.
Once you're in orbit, getting other places is a lot cheaper. If we have cheap orbital shots, we'd have had a decent space station decades ago and probably explored other planets by now.
_____
At the top end of the technology curve (i.e. US, EU), population is _dropping_.
Once people have enough, they stop having so many kids and they just lay back and enjoy life.
Once the developing nations hit that point, their population growth will dwindle to nothing too, and everything will calm down.
Of course, we need to worry about the fact that your average first world person consumes a massive amount of resources, but we're working on that one.
_____
Last time I checked, over 95% of people were using Windows or Mac to access the web.
I'm not sure that the corps care about the tiny market share increase enough to have a site that doesn't look as nice.
Sure, it's nice to have a 'flash/non-flash' option on the first screen, but that means doing two websites. How many corps want to pay for that?
_____
The original submitter doesn't think we can achieve vision or reasoning in a computer.
How does he think people do it? Does he believe in a soul that handles all of this?
It's very simple. We're made of matter. Therefore anything we do can be done 'artificially' once we can manipulate matter on a small enough scale.
_____
If you're transferring files from a friend and you're a bit bursty adn so are they, you end up downloading a lot more slowly than you could in theory. (imagine that you spend 30 seconds each minute running at half speed and so do they, you only spend (on average) 15 seonds each minute downloading at maximum speed).
If you've got a high-bandwidth cache in between you can get a 50% higher throughput. Also, if the file has been cached beforehand (because someone else downloaded it) you can get it at your maximum speed.
_____
What's needed is some P2P at the high end, to allow for seamless mirroring and reporting, with the lower end being more heirarchy based.
That way (for instance) you ask your local server for a file and it uses a P2P method to retrieve that file across the network of 'big servers', then sends it to you. That way your dial-up connection isn't slowing down the large scale network.
_____
Even if you don't like Katz, I advise you to pick up this book.
If nothing else, it highlights some of the paradigm changes in the world of computer games and also all the different things that you have to think about when you're playing even a simple game.
_____
At the time, I bumped into an interview with Tarantino. Apparently he'd been near the Gump people at the Oscars and had said "You _were_ kidding, right?" and they'd been delighted that _somebody_ got it.
They _weren't_ being serious. It was a satire of the american dream.
_____
I see all sorts of untargetted ads all day and I don't like them.
I don't want to see ads for products I don't want. I want to see ads for products I _do_ want.
_____
Cheap Option: An Nvidia MX Card. Speedy, but cheap. Then I could play UT at a reasonable speed.
Medium option: A Tivo - theoretically launched in the UK, damned if I can get my hands on one.
Expensive option: Terabit optical connection to my house. then I could play UT online at a reasonable speed. And download porn at the same time!
_____
You don't 'hand over' space. You charge them for it.
True, the amount you can charge them is set, but you can'tdo that with IM without a drastic change in the protocol.
And if the protocol is open, people will just get round that.
_____
Was I the only one who read that and wondered why you'd need a peering arrangement on an event horizon?
I mean, surely your data would take longer to retrieve?
_____
Why would you want to run servers if anyone can use them?
Put yourself in AOL's shoes. Suddenly you have to let people use your servers and get nothing in return. Will you (a) happily carry on paying for those servers or (b) wait for Microsoft, etc. to produce their own AOL compatible messaging servers and then stop paying for your own now that MS are carrying the load?
You have to allow people to make money, or they won't play the game.
_____
You are depriving the original owner of their _time_. They put the time in, knowing that they would be compensated for it, because that's what the law says.
You are then changing this implicit contract they had and stealing that time they spent.
_____
Take the Money and Run.
If your idea is a good one, you can always find a new domain name. And you'll have all that extra money to make your idea worthwhile.
_____
It's no different to spending months increasing your C++ skills, or years becoming a chaess Grand-Master, or learning to play the piano, or becoming the worlds fastest skateboarder.
All of these things are personal choices. We become obsessed with something and decided to be the best we can be. The choice (if it is a choice) of what to be obsessed by is mere aesthetics.
Personally, I prefer to be a synthesist. I like being pretty good at lots of things rather than the best at one thing.
_____
AFAIK, English is the worlds biggest second language. If two people from different countries want to communicate, english is the most likely common denominator.
As you are introduced to the larger world, t makes sense to learn the language used there. In order for this to be Mandarin, you'd need a massive influx of Mandarin speakers _and_ people learning to speak Mandarin as their international language. Not likely at the moment, but certainly possible later if China makes a big push for internet access for all. If, instead, they merely contine introducing people to the internet in dribs and drabs, the slow conversion will continue.
_____
Foxpro is quite ridiculously fast.
It beats SQL Server for many basic tasks and can cope with tables up to 2GB in size quite happily.
It can also use ODBC to connect to the back end of your choice, allowing scaling to SQL Server or Oracle or whatever you like.
If you'd like to select some data, I'll happily run off some benchmarks for you.
The GPL _forces_ you to release your source code. That is not libertarian.
Quake is opensourced. If you want to add things into that, you can do what you like.
Quake 3 is written in such a way that _anyone_ can program new goodies into it. Rocket Arena isn't released by ID, it's released by some guys who wanted to release some cool addons for it.
Try and do a bit of research before you start calling people names
The one advantage Radio has over your CD collection is that it can introduce you to new music. If there was a local rock/goth/industrial music station, I'd listen to it, purely to hear music I might like that I've never heard of before.
I'd pay for streaming audio.
Say a cent per 5 minutes. That's 12 cents an hour. For the amount of music I listen to, that's around $160 per year. Which is the same as 13 albums (ish). Which is about what I buy (give or take). And the money would go straight to the people who make the music. so every time I listen to a song by REM, REM get a cent (or thereabouts). And I get to listen to any song I like at any time.
I'd pay for a streaming service like that.
Not a chance. Imagine that the side of the tank is displaying what you'd see if you were at right angles to the tank and looking straight at it.
Now, move through 30 degrees. The display is still showing the old picture, but you're seeing it from the wrong angle, so you're seeing a distorted version of the wrong image. It would stand out like a sore thumb.
Now, a pseudo random image would porbably vanish under your notice a lot faster
Because IMHO is easily pronouncable, it makes a perfect word. I know a couple of people who use it.
Pronounced IMM-HOE