If they can't stop the fires burning why don't they just harness as much heat as they can from the crater? Seems easier to tap energy from that than that burning underground mine in USA.
> Typical of Gates, that he's investing into a speculative solution into solving a problem he has a large responsibility for
OK I'll bite.
1) He's in the IT industry, so he certainly doesn't have a large personal responsibility for the global warming problem, there are far more who have a higher responsibility. 2) He's also funding research into better nuclear reactors[1] this is probably his main bet 3) This seawater stuff is probably more of a contingency plan or side bet - e.g. the nuclear stuff doesn't work or is thwarted by idiots, and nobody else has come up with a viable alternative.
I'm sure they can find military uses for something similar (e.g. to help blast stuff to bits). So it might happen, but not for "low cost energy" reasons.
The default uses winkey as the "base key" (since alt is more likely to clash with stuff than winkey). I personally set it up to use alt since it's easier to press for me. Perhaps I should make alt the default...
Basically instead of requiring users to try to solve something harder[1] than the "halting problem" by deciding whether a program will "halt or not" (evil or not), you have the program state up-front the maximum limits of what it will do, and if the user agrees (or the proposed limits are signed by a trusted party) the operating system will run the program while enforcing those limits. Yes most users won't be good at auditing the limits, but some people can do it, it's much easier to audit a sandbox than to figure out whether a program is a trojan or not. It's not 100%, nothing ever will be, but it's definitely better than UAC, or SELinux.
I doubt I'm the first person to propose this. But it's hard to implement on current entrenched operating systems - won't be backward compatible and secure.
However, if there's a new operating system for this thought stuff, then why not have something like this?
It's not like people should be running Microsoft Office etc directly in their mind-augmenters. A better way to do it would be to have your mind-augmenter being a ThoughtOS on some dedicated "superPDA" hardware. You can then connect it to a normal computer, and your mind-augmenter is appears like another keyboard+mouse (HID). So you can control the normal computer via your brain computer.
[1] Even though in theory it is impossible to generally solve the halting problem, in practice there will be a few cases which are solvable. In contrast deciding whether some program is a trojan or not is harder since you usually do not have all the inputs or a true description of the program (which you have for the halting problem).
> Why bother with something as kludgish as hacking on a feature to a largely incompatible framework when a better alternative exists?
Because it works with Windows and works well enough for me[1]? I use Linux and BSD for my servers, and Windows for desktop stuff. Not likely to change that anytime soon[2].
A few years back I was using KDE at work, I made my suggestion to KDE back then and I think before the Awesome window manager existed.
[1] Helps when I have a single small laptop screen and need to copy and paste amongst different documents, refer to more than one document/webpage, while editing/creating another document. Just click on the various windows I want to work with, press alt+0, and voila, alt+<1-9> get assigned to the various windows. Or alt+shift+<n> to specifically assign alt+<n> to the current window.
[2]There's desktop stuff I use that doesn't run on Linux (and too much server stuff that doesn't work so well on Windows;) ).
Alt-tab allows quick switching between two active tasks, but is not as quick for more than two. In the end I gave up waiting, and actually wrote something to do that in Windows (my current workplace is a mainly Windows environment): http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/
It's handy enough for me whenever I need to work with more than two windows. It doesn't work with all app windows ( e.g. those using the ITaskList_Deleted property ). But I think I'm the only user anyway. I guess everyone else is happy enough with "alt-tab" and clicking.
Lots of people get impressed with stuff like 10/GUI ( http://10gui.com/ ) but it would be slower if you actually need to use it for stuff, after all I don't see how it can even switch tasks faster than "alt tab". It's only good for Hollywood;).
Thought-based interfaces are already appearing, so what would be a better UI than all that flashy animated 3D crap would be the ability to link "thought macros" to arbitrary actions or objects/items.
Then I would only have to think "command" (this would be a unique thought macro - not thinking of the word command), "recall", [thought macro of object follows] (object retrieved), "send to" [thought macro of Bob here], "confirm", "uncommand" (to get out of command mode).
3 years later Joe Sixpack is still using the same CD and it turns out there are exploitable bugs in it.
Even if there aren't remote kernel exploits, I bet since it's inconvenient to wait 2 minutes, Joe uses the exploitable unpatched browser to check his email (esp if he needs info in the email to do some bank/financial transactions).
FWIW, I think phishing is just much easier. Most people will enter their usernames and passwords anywhere, and use the same username and password for everything.
probability of bank screwing up (e.g. going bust) * amount you lose from bank screwing up vs: probability of hacker stealing your money * amount of money hacker steals.
Most LCD monitors can't refresh that fast anyway (60Hz), so when you're rendering a locally stored and cached page, you'll start to hit that limit (about 16 milliseconds).
That's why the potato gun is further to the left from the screen (otherwise the spud would go past before Chrome is done), and they used paint on a speaker which I think is moving slower than sound (which travels about 5.6 metres in 16 milliseconds ). If you really want to see sound waves travel through air there are various methods:
> Further, the DMCA prevents you from circumventing these measures, so it is, in fact, illegal to make pretty much any copy of the game
You don't have to circumvent DRM (as per the DMCA) to make a copy of the game. The pirates/hackers circumvent the DRM (might even be legal in their country).
So you buy the game, and then download (leech) a working copy to use as you please, courtesy of the pirates/hackers.
Win-win right? The game company gets your money, you get a working copy and the hackers get to show how 1337 they are.
Not a problem to me. Downloading is legal in some countries. AFAIK in my country (Malaysia) distribution is illegal (e.g. uploading), but downloading isn't, so as long as you don't use P2P (or are a leecher) you're legal;). I think they plan to change the law soon.
Copying is not the same as stealing.
Laws dealing with stealing have been around for thousands of years and far more proven in their long term usefulness to society than copyright laws.
Yeah my colleagues at work have that "sent from my cellphone" or "Sent from my mobile device" stuff.
It's useful for the reason you mention - informing recipients that it was via a mobile device.
That way recipients can hopefully handle things as you mentioned and also not expect you to easily read a huge microsoft visio attachment on your mobile device and respond usefully:).
I dunno about in China, but from what I see many of the Chinese in my country don't care so much whether you bow or not, what matters at the end of the day is how much discount/profit you give;).
From what I see that's why the US Gov/leaders can keep playing the "China bogeyman/evil" card to the stupid voters for all they want. Doesn't matter a big deal to the Chinese Government (except as a barter chip in negotiations? ) - as long as the US shuts up on real issues whenever the Chinese government asks whether the trillions the US owes them are safe or not.
BTW, just because the US owes China trillions doesn't necessarily mean US is in very deep shit. The US owes China in US dollars. Not Chinese currency. Guess who has the power to create as much US dollars as they need? So it's not the same thing as a normal person owing US dollars to someone else. A normal person cannot legally create US dollars for themselves. Of course doing so would hurt the US, but they still have that option. It's not like Zimbabwe printing their money, the rest of the world can just laugh at them. If the US really prints a lot of money, the rest of the world buying/selling (e.g. oil, wheat, CPUs) and lending in US dollars isn't going to be laughing (owing is different;) ).
Slashdot Mirror
There could be many different sorts - e.g. mini blackhole:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1290235.ece
Whether it is a blackhole or not, whatever happened at Donegal was rather impressive. If it's lightning it'll be pretty amazing too.
Just add some choice expletives?
If they can't stop the fires burning why don't they just harness as much heat as they can from the crater? Seems easier to tap energy from that than that burning underground mine in USA.
Cost too much?
That's why it's funny because if Google really did anything about protecting privacy the various Governments wouldn't like it.
Imagine if the warrants come in and Google said: "Sorry can't help, we've taken 100% effective measures to protect user privacy".
> Typical of Gates, that he's investing into a speculative solution into solving a problem he has a large responsibility for
OK I'll bite.
1) He's in the IT industry, so he certainly doesn't have a large personal responsibility for the global warming problem, there are far more who have a higher responsibility.
2) He's also funding research into better nuclear reactors[1] this is probably his main bet
3) This seawater stuff is probably more of a contingency plan or side bet - e.g. the nuclear stuff doesn't work or is thwarted by idiots, and nobody else has come up with a viable alternative.
[1] http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2010/02/bill_gates_goes_nuclear.html
Looks like the mods here hate you too since you're modded off-topic (even though your post is more on-topic than most posts :) ).
Maybe you could try posting "accept +1 Insightful". It worked for some slashdotter earlier (who went for +1 Funny).
I'm sure they can find military uses for something similar (e.g. to help blast stuff to bits). So it might happen, but not for "low cost energy" reasons.
> It would be cool to have a cheap way to find out what microbes are on the human forehead and armpits.
Or arteries.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071120095413.htm
http://www.perio.org/consumer/bacteria.htm
With this they might be able to find other diseases which could be caused by infection and not solely "lifestyle".
If you have access to Win2K/Windows XP/Windows 7 you can try it:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/files/
The default uses winkey as the "base key" (since alt is more likely to clash with stuff than winkey). I personally set it up to use alt since it's easier to press for me. Perhaps I should make alt the default...
That's where something like my other suggestion might be helpful:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
Basically instead of requiring users to try to solve something harder[1] than the "halting problem" by deciding whether a program will "halt or not" (evil or not), you have the program state up-front the maximum limits of what it will do, and if the user agrees (or the proposed limits are signed by a trusted party) the operating system will run the program while enforcing those limits. Yes most users won't be good at auditing the limits, but some people can do it, it's much easier to audit a sandbox than to figure out whether a program is a trojan or not. It's not 100%, nothing ever will be, but it's definitely better than UAC, or SELinux.
I doubt I'm the first person to propose this. But it's hard to implement on current entrenched operating systems - won't be backward compatible and secure.
However, if there's a new operating system for this thought stuff, then why not have something like this?
It's not like people should be running Microsoft Office etc directly in their mind-augmenters. A better way to do it would be to have your mind-augmenter being a ThoughtOS on some dedicated "superPDA" hardware. You can then connect it to a normal computer, and your mind-augmenter is appears like another keyboard+mouse (HID). So you can control the normal computer via your brain computer.
[1] Even though in theory it is impossible to generally solve the halting problem, in practice there will be a few cases which are solvable. In contrast deciding whether some program is a trojan or not is harder since you usually do not have all the inputs or a true description of the program (which you have for the halting problem).
> Why bother with something as kludgish as hacking on a feature to a largely incompatible framework when a better alternative exists?
;) ).
Because it works with Windows and works well enough for me[1]? I use Linux and BSD for my servers, and Windows for desktop stuff. Not likely to change that anytime soon[2].
A few years back I was using KDE at work, I made my suggestion to KDE back then and I think before the Awesome window manager existed.
[1] Helps when I have a single small laptop screen and need to copy and paste amongst different documents, refer to more than one document/webpage, while editing/creating another document. Just click on the various windows I want to work with, press alt+0, and voila, alt+<1-9> get assigned to the various windows. Or alt+shift+<n> to specifically assign alt+<n> to the current window.
[2]There's desktop stuff I use that doesn't run on Linux (and too much server stuff that doesn't work so well on Windows
Being able to quickly link arbitrary tasks/windows with hotkeys would be more useful to me, as such I proposed this:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=121349
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesignersPlayground/KeyboardShortcuts
Alt-tab allows quick switching between two active tasks, but is not as quick for more than two. In the end I gave up waiting, and actually wrote something to do that in Windows (my current workplace is a mainly Windows environment): http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/
It's handy enough for me whenever I need to work with more than two windows. It doesn't work with all app windows ( e.g. those using the ITaskList_Deleted property ). But I think I'm the only user anyway. I guess everyone else is happy enough with "alt-tab" and clicking.
Lots of people get impressed with stuff like 10/GUI ( http://10gui.com/ ) but it would be slower if you actually need to use it for stuff, after all I don't see how it can even switch tasks faster than "alt tab". It's only good for Hollywood ;).
Thought-based interfaces are already appearing, so what would be a better UI than all that flashy animated 3D crap would be the ability to link "thought macros" to arbitrary actions or objects/items.
Then I would only have to think "command" (this would be a unique thought macro - not thinking of the word command), "recall", [thought macro of object follows] (object retrieved), "send to" [thought macro of Bob here], "confirm", "uncommand" (to get out of command mode).
3 years later Joe Sixpack is still using the same CD and it turns out there are exploitable bugs in it.
Even if there aren't remote kernel exploits, I bet since it's inconvenient to wait 2 minutes, Joe uses the exploitable unpatched browser to check his email (esp if he needs info in the email to do some bank/financial transactions).
FWIW, I think phishing is just much easier. Most people will enter their usernames and passwords anywhere, and use the same username and password for everything.
Yeah and anyone care to work out:
probability of bank screwing up (e.g. going bust) * amount you lose from bank screwing up
vs:
probability of hacker stealing your money * amount of money hacker steals.
Most LCD monitors can't refresh that fast anyway (60Hz), so when you're rendering a locally stored and cached page, you'll start to hit that limit (about 16 milliseconds).
That's why the potato gun is further to the left from the screen (otherwise the spud would go past before Chrome is done), and they used paint on a speaker which I think is moving slower than sound (which travels about 5.6 metres in 16 milliseconds ). If you really want to see sound waves travel through air there are various methods:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbomsOPSSII&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSFwH0BVd3Q
Look at the network packets. If the browser is fetching the ads, you'll see network traffic from the various ad sites.
For people with slow network connections (like me), Firefox with noscript+adblock can be significantly faster than Chrome in many/most cases.
Downloading the ads but not displaying them will still interfere with the other network downloads.
> Further, the DMCA prevents you from circumventing these measures, so it is, in fact, illegal to make pretty much any copy of the game
You don't have to circumvent DRM (as per the DMCA) to make a copy of the game. The pirates/hackers circumvent the DRM (might even be legal in their country).
So you buy the game, and then download (leech) a working copy to use as you please, courtesy of the pirates/hackers.
Win-win right? The game company gets your money, you get a working copy and the hackers get to show how 1337 they are.
Not a problem to me. Downloading is legal in some countries. AFAIK in my country (Malaysia) distribution is illegal (e.g. uploading), but downloading isn't, so as long as you don't use P2P (or are a leecher) you're legal ;). I think they plan to change the law soon.
Copying is not the same as stealing.
Laws dealing with stealing have been around for thousands of years and far more proven in their long term usefulness to society than copyright laws.
> I believe they'd probably be happier driving nails through their balls than having to fork over that kind of cash.
I wouldn't be happier especially if:
1) They are my balls
2) The 1 million dollars weren't mine in the first place
Yeah, it all depends on the rules and fine print.
And if it turned out the initial winner was cheating, it's likely that the next person to do it (without cheating) wins.
Heh, I wonder what his wife thinks of him playing computer games now... How much does a 401k record keeper job pay?
Was it really a typo by a human trader though?
Could it be a bug in an automatic computer trading program? I doubt it'll be due to a bug in the "casino" software...
If they think it's right to reverse those trades, should they be reversing only those trades? Why not all?
Yeah my colleagues at work have that "sent from my cellphone" or "Sent from my mobile device" stuff.
:).
It's useful for the reason you mention - informing recipients that it was via a mobile device.
That way recipients can hopefully handle things as you mentioned and also not expect you to easily read a huge microsoft visio attachment on your mobile device and respond usefully
I dunno about in China, but from what I see many of the Chinese in my country don't care so much whether you bow or not, what matters at the end of the day is how much discount/profit you give ;).
;) ).
From what I see that's why the US Gov/leaders can keep playing the "China bogeyman/evil" card to the stupid voters for all they want. Doesn't matter a big deal to the Chinese Government (except as a barter chip in negotiations? ) - as long as the US shuts up on real issues whenever the Chinese government asks whether the trillions the US owes them are safe or not.
BTW, just because the US owes China trillions doesn't necessarily mean US is in very deep shit. The US owes China in US dollars. Not Chinese currency. Guess who has the power to create as much US dollars as they need? So it's not the same thing as a normal person owing US dollars to someone else. A normal person cannot legally create US dollars for themselves. Of course doing so would hurt the US, but they still have that option. It's not like Zimbabwe printing their money, the rest of the world can just laugh at them. If the US really prints a lot of money, the rest of the world buying/selling (e.g. oil, wheat, CPUs) and lending in US dollars isn't going to be laughing (owing is different
> What makes you so sure they'd even bother to look for evidence on your local computer?
;).
Only if they planted it there
Not sure what the cops do in China, but in many parts of the world the police can take your stuff as part of their investigations.
If you're lucky, you might get your stuff back just before it's obsolete...
If you're unlucky, the police might do a bad job of investigating the crime and somehow get child-porn onto your computer.