Well if quantum computing is good at parallel processing, then it would be good for animals to simulate multiple "what if" situations rapidly.
For example a background process considering possible escape routes: "what if I jumped on to (various portions of) that branch or other branches, would they hold my weight, would they lead to better escape routes?". All considered in parallel.
Then the animals start simulating each other (predicting the decisions of a potential competitor/predator is very useful), and then end up (infinitely?) recursively simulating themselves (aka consciousness?).
Not saying it's definitely quantum computing we're using, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, after all if quantum computing is practical - it'll be a useful thing to have.
Anyway humans (and animals) often don't bother to think about "what if" till too late;).
Sounds strange. Why would there be smoke coming out from the car?
After all, if I made a car bomb to blow stuff up, there wouldn't be smoke coming out from the car, and the only way they are going to handle it is to blow up the car (first surrounding the car with sand bags, water barrels, explosive proof fabrics etc).
I'd just rig up car alarms (ultrasonic, IR motion detectors etc) to prevent the car and bomb from being tampered with. Depending on the situation, the first few "You are too close to the car! Stand back!" audible warnings may not trigger the bomb.
So how would you defuse that BEFORE the bomb goes off? Say you have 2-4 hours till peak hour.
Smoke coming out from car, and bomb defused. Quite amazing.
Unless it transparently encrypts your data (like some viruses used to), you can just take the drive out, attach it to another machine and copy your data out.
And even if it did encrypt your stuff, if your machine+malware wasn't doing any TPM stuff, you should be able to get the key.
Anyway, unless the hacker is part of a megacorp like Sony, they wouldn't do such stuff - because they'd go to jail. It's easier for a small corp to wiggle out of installing adware, but only megacorps get to hold people's data ransom.
"charging the fewer high risk customers more they can charge the rest of their customers less" "This is a text-book example of how free markets can accomplish good things."
But is it actually cheaper or not? Do they actually charge the rest of their customers less?
After all another poster said: "You might think so, but Manitoba has one of the lowest overall insurance rates in the whole country"
To be fair we will have to factor in any public money the Government puts in or takes out from the insurance scheme. But it seems that Manitoba is doing OK:
Quote: "Manitoba Public Insurance reported net income from annual operations of $68.4 million, thanks to a strong economy and investment revenue. This was reduced to $8.7 million after the corporation provided customers with a $59.7 million premium rebate."
How many private insurance companies are going to do that? The CxO's will get multi million dollar bonuses and say it's their right after all they did a good job.
In my opinion, "the free market" is quite overrated. I'm not against it of course, just too many people seem to blindly worship it or something. They forget it's _their_ job to be the "Invisible Hand". If you have good people in charge, even a crappy system can work ok.
Here's my light bulb joke for you:
Q: How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Free market economists don't change lightbulbs, they prefer to write their papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to do it for them
Not possible unless there are bugs or holes (intentional or not) in the virtualization technology.
If you create the "Matrix" first and run everything in it, the rootkit can create it's own "Matrix" and re-execute things in it but it'll always be stuck in the _first_ "Matrix" IF you do it right. There is no way out, there is no "waking up".
For example: if I run an Amiga emulator on my Windows/Linux desktop, an Amiga rootkit can do whatever it like and take over the Amiga, it could even run it's own Amiga emulator and relaunch the O/S in it, but unless there's a bug in my emulator, it's not going to be able to take over my desktop. I could shut it down at will, I could even pause it and change the memory, registers, NOP the rootkit etc. I could restore a pristine image from a snapshot.
So barring any bugs or "strange NSA/Neo features";), there is NO way the rootkit is going to "start up first".
But of course, most people don't do things right, and probably (and probably partly because) current x86 VT is still primitive and buggy.
Most malware nowadays is so obvious (after all they're there to do something - mail spam, click spam, DoS etc) and still most people hardly notice them.
Also any such rootkit wouldn't work if the O/S starts off virtualized in the first place so that the rootkit would be "trapped". Then you can scan for the rootkit from "outside".
Of course this assumes no bugs in the virtualization stuff. But as we know there are tons of bugs in CPUs;).
To call that a scam is to misunderstand how things work.
Even if banks lent only their deposits they could create lots of money.
Say P deposits 100 into bank A. (so P has 100 in a bank) Q borrows 100 from bank A, and puts it in bank B. (so Q has 100 in a bank) R borrows 100 from bank B and puts it in bank C. (so R has 100 in a bank). S borrows 100 from bank C and puts it in bank A. (so bank A now has deposits of 200 - and lendings of 100, so it can lend 100 more! Whoopee! )
Now if R wants to take out 100 from bank C, does that mean bank C must suddenly force S to pay? Or does that mean R can't get that 100? I don't think so.
So how do you propose preventing that creation of money? And is it really a bad thing? It's not just banks, I could write you an IOU and instantly create money.
Anyway, currently central banks control the amount of money floating out there with interest rates (and various other means - like that fractional reserve thing, regulations on lending etc). Given that 2% own more than 50% of the wealth, all you need to do is influence 2-5%.
By raising interest rates, people reduce borrowings, and increase deposits into banks - the rich 2% people care a lot about money so they will make their money move about accordingly. The really poor can't get loans and don't have any money:).
Actually, the USA has it easy because _currently_ almost everything is traded in US Dollars.
1) There can be lots of US dollars floating about being held by other countries (in order to trade) - more US dollars outside USA than inside. 2) The US Gov can just print more US dollars (borrow, issue bonds etc) to give itself money and automatically slightly reduce the wealth of other countries.
If some other country was in the US's current financial state it would probably have a financial crisis by now.
Of course, given that the US has borrowed a LOT of money (a lot from Japan and China), its lenders aren't inclined to call in the loans and have the whole scheme collapse. Remember if you borrow USD50K from a bank, the bank can be rather nasty to you when you can't pay. But if you borrow USD billions or even trillions, banks start being really nice to you even if you have problems paying.
So Japan and China lend the US Gov money, the US Gov prints more money, and the US citizens etc buy stuff from Japan and China. Everyone gets more US Dollars (overall). It's a pretty crazy scheme when you think about it, and it will eventually blow up or collapse. But meantime it's lasted longer than many of the less crazy schemes;).
That said, burning tons of that money in Iraq probably shortens the life expectancy of the scheme.
Well given that such planes usually have their main fuel tanks in the wing, whether the wing is aluminium or not is less important than whether the fuel tanks and control stuff in the wing are designed to take bullets or not.
1) You learn how the wing breaks when put under that sort of load. 2) You learn how this particular batch of wing breaks when it's new. 3) You get a chance to find out that the test environment is not good enough to cope with a wing breaking;).
And if another wing ever breaks, and you have the broken wing pieces, you'd probably be in a better position to figure out what happened than if you never broke the wing in the first place. Then if really desperate and clueless you can then attempt to break a new wing of the same batch. If it breaks at a different load or a different way, then you might have your "Aha moment".
Now whether it's worth it or not is a different matter. Since the plane is far more likely to crash/fail for other reasons than a wing failing. When was the last time a plane crashed primarily due to the main wing breaking (not flaps failing or engines falling off or something smashing into the wing and breaking it)?
Don't let airplanes crash into populated areas then;).
Seriously though - the odds of a plane crash are already quite low.
I'm not going to be worried about carbon dust from a plane crash giving me cancer.
Especially when I already eat stuff like sausages, non-pesticide free vege, meat from antibiotic pumped animals, fish from polluted seas. And I drive a car, cross busy streets every now and then.
So something else is far far far more likely to kill me first.
Well according to me (nobody), software is what you configure/modify, hardware is what someone else configures/modifies.
OK so it's not 100% accurate, but it works well enough for me:)[1].
In my first job I used to reprogram modems. Most other people treated modems as "hardware only devices". Now the same can be said for DVD drives, phones, etc.
[1] Strictly speaking, most hardware nowadays contains a lot of software which only a few would bother with.
And I claim most people can learn to like something.
There's such a thing as acquired taste. So you could choose to acquire a taste for altruism, even if you don't have a strong innate liking for it.
Or you could choose it as a long term objective decision - many people do things that aren't pleasurable to them, but they get a sense of achievement at the end - even if it's just "Yeeha! Completed my goal".
Well the line between "some bits stored in the hardware" and hardware get quite blurry nowadays.
If some change is nonvolatile is it hardware? And whether some change is difficult or easy quite depends on who is tasked to do the change (as I mentioned earlier - hacker or nonhacker).
If the USA nukes China, there's a lot they can do in retaliation.
If I were China, I'd already have a fair number of special forces people staying in the USA and other places. I mean we're supposed to believe a small bunch of people managed to take down the WTC etc. So how much could a trained elite team backed by China do?
Also, if China wanted to cause major damage to the USA in retaliation and didn't care about honourable methods, they don't even need to nuke a place in USA. They could nuke/attack some other places and make it look like the USA did it (after all who's been doing the nuking so far?). There are already lots of people who are anti-USA who'd believe that the USA did it, and they just don't hate the USA enough _yet_. After the "retaliatory strikes" there'd be tens of millions _actively_ willing to destroy the USA in revenge.
The USA would then need to find new sources of oil, and totally close its borders (a huge cost).
Uh, almost everything has software nowadays, and that includes most x86 CPUs (microcode).
To Joe Public, a wireless router would be all hardware. But to Joe Hacker, a wireless router would be mainly software.
The manufacturer of one of my DVD drives released firmware updates that allowed it to support dual layer DVDs - over time they added better support and more features.
If they hired smarter+competent people, I bet you could get the same amount of work done with the smart people working normal work hours and the _computers_ working 24 hour days.
And the resulting code would be a lot better.
After all a good programmer is supposed to be making the computer do the "stupid + hardworking" stuff.
How many geniuses are you aware of who can work 12 hours nonstop at genius level, _day_after_day_.
Whereas there are obviously too many people who can work 12 hours at "stupid/incompetent".
Suse dropped the ball for 10.2. The software management and update stuff is slow in 10.0. But in 10.2 it is extremely slow. I don't know about 10.1 (seems the suse support people claim 10.2 is an improvement over 10.1, and they are aware of the problem - this was when I submitted a bug to complain).
Maybe 10.3 will be better. But I suggest a test drive first.
I have no idea what they are doing that requires the software mgmt/update stuff to be so slow. I turned off their ZMD (Zen/Enterprise) crap and it's still slower. apt is magnitudes faster (we run apt to update stuff on our suse 10.2 servers).
That said, other than that, 10.2 is not bad (except I prefer the classic KDE, vs the "Vista style" KDE which 10.2 defaults to - you can switch it by right clicking). I think suse makes a decent linux desktop.
But, suse better make the software update and management stuff FASTER.
Slashdot Mirror
Well if quantum computing is good at parallel processing, then it would be good for animals to simulate multiple "what if" situations rapidly.
;).
For example a background process considering possible escape routes: "what if I jumped on to (various portions of) that branch or other branches, would they hold my weight, would they lead to better escape routes?". All considered in parallel.
Then the animals start simulating each other (predicting the decisions of a potential competitor/predator is very useful), and then end up (infinitely?) recursively simulating themselves (aka consciousness?).
Not saying it's definitely quantum computing we're using, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, after all if quantum computing is practical - it'll be a useful thing to have.
Anyway humans (and animals) often don't bother to think about "what if" till too late
Sounds strange. Why would there be smoke coming out from the car?
After all, if I made a car bomb to blow stuff up, there wouldn't be smoke coming out from the car, and the only way they are going to handle it is to blow up the car (first surrounding the car with sand bags, water barrels, explosive proof fabrics etc).
I'd just rig up car alarms (ultrasonic, IR motion detectors etc) to prevent the car and bomb from being tampered with. Depending on the situation, the first few "You are too close to the car! Stand back!" audible warnings may not trigger the bomb.
So how would you defuse that BEFORE the bomb goes off? Say you have 2-4 hours till peak hour.
Smoke coming out from car, and bomb defused. Quite amazing.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Or photograph of course.
But why did he have to take out the toilet seat? Shouldn't it then have been permanently removed?
Unless it transparently encrypts your data (like some viruses used to), you can just take the drive out, attach it to another machine and copy your data out.
And even if it did encrypt your stuff, if your machine+malware wasn't doing any TPM stuff, you should be able to get the key.
Anyway, unless the hacker is part of a megacorp like Sony, they wouldn't do such stuff - because they'd go to jail. It's easier for a small corp to wiggle out of installing adware, but only megacorps get to hold people's data ransom.
"charging the fewer high risk customers more they can charge the rest of their customers less" "This is a text-book example of how free markets can accomplish good things."
0 7/nr_PUB_Highlights.html
But is it actually cheaper or not? Do they actually charge the rest of their customers less?
After all another poster said: "You might think so, but Manitoba has one of the lowest overall insurance rates in the whole country"
To be fair we will have to factor in any public money the Government puts in or takes out from the insurance scheme. But it seems that Manitoba is doing OK:
http://www.mpi.mb.ca/English/newsroom/articles/20
Quote: "Manitoba Public Insurance reported net income from annual operations of $68.4 million, thanks to a strong economy and investment revenue. This was reduced to $8.7 million after the corporation provided customers with a $59.7 million premium rebate."
How many private insurance companies are going to do that? The CxO's will get multi million dollar bonuses and say it's their right after all they did a good job.
In my opinion, "the free market" is quite overrated. I'm not against it of course, just too many people seem to blindly worship it or something. They forget it's _their_ job to be the "Invisible Hand". If you have good people in charge, even a crappy system can work ok.
Here's my light bulb joke for you:
Q: How many free market economists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Free market economists don't change lightbulbs, they prefer to write their papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's invisible hand to do it for them
Not possible unless there are bugs or holes (intentional or not) in the virtualization technology.
;), there is NO way the rootkit is going to "start up first".
If you create the "Matrix" first and run everything in it, the rootkit can create it's own "Matrix" and re-execute things in it but it'll always be stuck in the _first_ "Matrix" IF you do it right. There is no way out, there is no "waking up".
For example: if I run an Amiga emulator on my Windows/Linux desktop, an Amiga rootkit can do whatever it like and take over the Amiga, it could even run it's own Amiga emulator and relaunch the O/S in it, but unless there's a bug in my emulator, it's not going to be able to take over my desktop. I could shut it down at will, I could even pause it and change the memory, registers, NOP the rootkit etc. I could restore a pristine image from a snapshot.
So barring any bugs or "strange NSA/Neo features"
But of course, most people don't do things right, and probably (and probably partly because) current x86 VT is still primitive and buggy.
Most malware nowadays is so obvious (after all they're there to do something - mail spam, click spam, DoS etc) and still most people hardly notice them.
;).
Also any such rootkit wouldn't work if the O/S starts off virtualized in the first place so that the rootkit would be "trapped". Then you can scan for the rootkit from "outside".
Of course this assumes no bugs in the virtualization stuff. But as we know there are tons of bugs in CPUs
Do the 2% who own more than 50% of the wealth in the world eat at Sizzler or Outback Steakhouse.
:).
:).
And even if they do, does affect their costs that much? Don't think so
Easier to have money policies that make 2% happy than make 90% happy
And if you are one of the money worshippers/lovers, guess who you care about.
Go figure.
To call that a scam is to misunderstand how things work.
:).
;).
Even if banks lent only their deposits they could create lots of money.
Say P deposits 100 into bank A. (so P has 100 in a bank)
Q borrows 100 from bank A, and puts it in bank B. (so Q has 100 in a bank)
R borrows 100 from bank B and puts it in bank C. (so R has 100 in a bank).
S borrows 100 from bank C and puts it in bank A. (so bank A now has deposits of 200 - and lendings of 100, so it can lend 100 more! Whoopee! )
Now if R wants to take out 100 from bank C, does that mean bank C must suddenly force S to pay? Or does that mean R can't get that 100? I don't think so.
So how do you propose preventing that creation of money? And is it really a bad thing? It's not just banks, I could write you an IOU and instantly create money.
Anyway, currently central banks control the amount of money floating out there with interest rates (and various other means - like that fractional reserve thing, regulations on lending etc). Given that 2% own more than 50% of the wealth, all you need to do is influence 2-5%.
By raising interest rates, people reduce borrowings, and increase deposits into banks - the rich 2% people care a lot about money so they will make their money move about accordingly. The really poor can't get loans and don't have any money
Actually, the USA has it easy because _currently_ almost everything is traded in US Dollars.
1) There can be lots of US dollars floating about being held by other countries (in order to trade) - more US dollars outside USA than inside.
2) The US Gov can just print more US dollars (borrow, issue bonds etc) to give itself money and automatically slightly reduce the wealth of other countries.
If some other country was in the US's current financial state it would probably have a financial crisis by now.
Of course, given that the US has borrowed a LOT of money (a lot from Japan and China), its lenders aren't inclined to call in the loans and have the whole scheme collapse. Remember if you borrow USD50K from a bank, the bank can be rather nasty to you when you can't pay. But if you borrow USD billions or even trillions, banks start being really nice to you even if you have problems paying.
So Japan and China lend the US Gov money, the US Gov prints more money, and the US citizens etc buy stuff from Japan and China. Everyone gets more US Dollars (overall). It's a pretty crazy scheme when you think about it, and it will eventually blow up or collapse. But meantime it's lasted longer than many of the less crazy schemes
That said, burning tons of that money in Iraq probably shortens the life expectancy of the scheme.
Definitely some Israelis appeared to be rather happy with USA's 9/11:
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=123885
Whether it's just their strange sense of humour or something else. Who knows.
Personally I don't believe the official stories by the US and Israeli Gov.
The "Urban Moving" company sure sounds suspicious to me.
Well given that such planes usually have their main fuel tanks in the wing, whether the wing is aluminium or not is less important than whether the fuel tanks and control stuff in the wing are designed to take bullets or not.
What do you learn? Lots of stuff.
;).
1) You learn how the wing breaks when put under that sort of load.
2) You learn how this particular batch of wing breaks when it's new.
3) You get a chance to find out that the test environment is not good enough to cope with a wing breaking
And if another wing ever breaks, and you have the broken wing pieces, you'd probably be in a better position to figure out what happened than if you never broke the wing in the first place. Then if really desperate and clueless you can then attempt to break a new wing of the same batch. If it breaks at a different load or a different way, then you might have your "Aha moment".
Now whether it's worth it or not is a different matter. Since the plane is far more likely to crash/fail for other reasons than a wing failing. When was the last time a plane crashed primarily due to the main wing breaking (not flaps failing or engines falling off or something smashing into the wing and breaking it)?
Chuck Norris doesn't need to make a wingless plane fly.
Even the Earth will get out of Chuck Norris's way.
And apologize while doing it.
Don't let airplanes crash into populated areas then ;).
Seriously though - the odds of a plane crash are already quite low.
I'm not going to be worried about carbon dust from a plane crash giving me cancer.
Especially when I already eat stuff like sausages, non-pesticide free vege, meat from antibiotic pumped animals, fish from polluted seas. And I drive a car, cross busy streets every now and then.
So something else is far far far more likely to kill me first.
The Mac has moved FROM 68k to powerpc to x86.
So if anything, the Mac has shown that people are choosing x86.
The two big x86 pigs in the market are ugly, but they've both got high tech rockets strapped to them and they are outflying the "elegant eagles".
And guess what - somehow the pigs are even consuming less power than most of those eagles for the same level of performance.
I wouldn't bet against the x86. Intel themselves have tried at least twice to get rid of it, and failed.
Well according to me (nobody), software is what you configure/modify,
:)[1].
hardware is what someone else configures/modifies.
OK so it's not 100% accurate, but it works well enough for me
In my first job I used to reprogram modems. Most other people treated modems as "hardware only devices". Now the same can be said for DVD drives, phones, etc.
[1] Strictly speaking, most hardware nowadays contains a lot of software which only a few would bother with.
And I claim most people can learn to like something.
There's such a thing as acquired taste. So you could choose to acquire a taste for altruism, even if you don't have a strong innate liking for it.
Or you could choose it as a long term objective decision - many people do things that aren't pleasurable to them, but they get a sense of achievement at the end - even if it's just "Yeeha! Completed my goal".
Well the line between "some bits stored in the hardware" and hardware get quite blurry nowadays.
If some change is nonvolatile is it hardware? And whether some change is difficult or easy quite depends on who is tasked to do the change (as I mentioned earlier - hacker or nonhacker).
If the USA nukes China, there's a lot they can do in retaliation.
If I were China, I'd already have a fair number of special forces people staying in the USA and other places. I mean we're supposed to believe a small bunch of people managed to take down the WTC etc. So how much could a trained elite team backed by China do?
Also, if China wanted to cause major damage to the USA in retaliation and didn't care about honourable methods, they don't even need to nuke a place in USA. They could nuke/attack some other places and make it look like the USA did it (after all who's been doing the nuking so far?). There are already lots of people who are anti-USA who'd believe that the USA did it, and they just don't hate the USA enough _yet_. After the "retaliatory strikes" there'd be tens of millions _actively_ willing to destroy the USA in revenge.
The USA would then need to find new sources of oil, and totally close its borders (a huge cost).
Go figure.
Uh, almost everything has software nowadays, and that includes most x86 CPUs (microcode).
To Joe Public, a wireless router would be all hardware. But to Joe Hacker, a wireless router would be mainly software.
The manufacturer of one of my DVD drives released firmware updates that allowed it to support dual layer DVDs - over time they added better support and more features.
There'll be benefits if every few years citizens could vote for someone to be sent there (one way/return).
;).
American Idol? Survivor?
How about "Vote Em Off The Planet"
But you're right, just orbital would be good enough.
"do good" is much safer than "do no evil".
Someone could say "slightly bad is not evil".
If they hired smarter+competent people, I bet you could get the same amount of work done with the smart people working normal work hours and the _computers_ working 24 hour days.
And the resulting code would be a lot better.
After all a good programmer is supposed to be making the computer do the "stupid + hardworking" stuff.
How many geniuses are you aware of who can work 12 hours nonstop at genius level, _day_after_day_.
Whereas there are obviously too many people who can work 12 hours at "stupid/incompetent".
Suse dropped the ball for 10.2. The software management and update stuff is slow in 10.0. But in 10.2 it is extremely slow. I don't know about 10.1 (seems the suse support people claim 10.2 is an improvement over 10.1, and they are aware of the problem - this was when I submitted a bug to complain).
Maybe 10.3 will be better. But I suggest a test drive first.
I have no idea what they are doing that requires the software mgmt/update stuff to be so slow. I turned off their ZMD (Zen/Enterprise) crap and it's still slower. apt is magnitudes faster (we run apt to update stuff on our suse 10.2 servers).
That said, other than that, 10.2 is not bad (except I prefer the classic KDE, vs the "Vista style" KDE which 10.2 defaults to - you can switch it by right clicking). I think suse makes a decent linux desktop.
But, suse better make the software update and management stuff FASTER.