If you get tons of debris 40,000km up, who has the most satellites there to lose?
You think north korea would care as much? China? India?
It costs a lot more to defend a satellite against this than to destroy a satellite. It's also not too hard to disguise a killer satellite as a civilian satellite (but this would have to be in a "normal" orbit travelling in the same direction as other satellites- makes it a bit harder to be very damaging).
I don't see why one should spend so much money on space weapons. A few dozen _cheap_ satellites with explosives and hard to deflect shrapnel (glass?) can make tons of orbits useless. How it could work - someone just has to stop broadcasting the relevant keepalive signals, or broadcast a "trigger" signal and the shrapnel satellites will blow up and wipe various orbits within a day.
So your mucho expensive space weapons better be parked in different orbits or be capable of moving significantly. And you better be able to decide and use them quickly.
If stuff happens we'd probably lose use of the prime orbit regions, for quite a long time.
South Africa is probably more violent per capita. But the USA is near the top per capita. Do some searches on www.nationmaster.com. e.g. crime->violent assaults.
For some reason the total population figures are now removed for many countries like USA and UK, so they don't show up near the top in per capita stats, even though they belong there. So you'll have to do your own calculations - US population being about 300M, and UK being about 60M and south africa being about 40M?
BTW though the violent assault rates are high for US and UK, the murder rates aren't that high compared to other countries. I interpret this as the hospitals being pretty good at saving people. But there may be some other explanation...
Money is and has always been an artificial concept. Artificial but very useful.
Gold as money is about as artificial as other currencies. Except it's harder to print gold than it is to print money:) (there are pluses and minuses to that[1]).
Still, it doesn't make the value of gold fixed. If I have the last few loaves of bread in the world and you are hungry and have one ton of gold, one loaf of bread could be worth many kilos of gold.
[1] Won't go into all that. Do note though that someone else can legitimately dig out gold (thus increasing supply), whereas other currencies can only legally be created by some authority.
"a cost, that's all. if i'm not a freq. flier, then i don't get it. "
Without special and expensive measures, WiFi signals won't stop abruptly outside Continental's lounge. So you should be able to use it unless there are thugs to keep you away OR they set up a system so that only their frequent flier club people can sign on and get access (which will probably cost Continental much more than just providing free service on a "what you see is what you get" basis).
WiFi should never be regarded as secure and guaranteed.
Massport are doing something terribly wrong if legitimate WiFi actually interferes with their important systems.
Even if tons of top scientists are in the US, it doesn't automatically mean you'd get a successful Manhattan or Apollo project.
You could end up with the Space Shuttle for instance. While the shuttle kinda works, it's not really exploring any new frontiers. And not what I would call a success at all.
The talent has to be managed and channelled. Not everyone can do that. Steve Jobs seems to be quite good at it (often requiring stuff to be "insanely great" AND more importantly being able to tell the difference in most cases).
Just would like to point out that according to popular doctrine christians are saved, and by "saved" it means that they still "make it" even if they are killed (whether in a catastrophe or not).
Most christians probably aren't that clear on a lot (most?) of the details of their religion. It's not necessarily a showstopper for them though - after all it's not like you have to memorize and do 100 things.
However, this does sometimes result in believers saying/doing quite a number of stupid or annoying or even false/bad things.
Yeah, especially when somehow the US can't even seem to afford decent voting systems...
Can't afford to pay for better systems and methods to pick the leaders of the most powerful nation, but can afford to spend many many billions on Iraq...
I still can't seem to find opteron _tower_ servers from IBM, HP or Sun (not even talking about Dell). And I don't think it's AMD's fault...
You can get 1U rack servers from those 3. And a 3U model from Sun. But if you want a "lowish end" cheap tower server you can't get it from any of the big names. Talking about something like one of Dell's PE 1800 servers.
The "bang for buck" sort of stuff. Say what you like, but you do pay a fair bit more for rack stuff and you can't stick 4 normal-sized SCSI drives in a 1U, or stick a fair number of NICs or other stuff in them. Tower servers generally make better "swiss army knife" servers.
Sure, one can get stuff from the "whitebox" manufacturers, but often there aren't enough PCI-X slots, or the frigging cooling/power isn't good enough[1], or you can't get 3 year next business day support with parts and labour (around the world would be good too)...
Sure us geeks can build servers. But most of us aren't paid to build servers for our companies - we have better things to do than to build, test, repair, and retest servers. At most we order a bunch, test them when they arrive, and tell the vendor - "This one is broken. Not paying. Swap it for something that works, and do by tomorrow".
[1] At my workplace we got three 1U servers from a noname manufacturer - and the CPUs _regularly_ throttle down due to heat (they use P4 class CPUs - nope I wasn't the one who ordered them).
At my workplace I run Win XP in a vmware virtual machine.
If stuff goes weird, I just click on revert and things are back to normal. Any data that I want to be persistent is saved on a mapped "share" that's on the host system.
That said, I've had more problems with vmware crashing my host system running linux than with Windows 2000/XP going belly up.
You don't like mod_perl? Use fast_cgi. mod_perl is useful if you really need to modify how apache behaves. But if you just want a faster version of CGI, try fastcgi.
It's not as fast as mod_perl, since your program is now a separate process from apache and they talk via sockets or something, but if you're going to use perl or some other interpreted/bytecode language, the magnitudes of the speed difference aren't likely to be your main problem (the algorithms, architecture and hardware probably affect the speed more).
PHP is really badly designed, only recently they've started fixing some of the stuff. But lots of the bad things are actually popular PHPisms - take them away and PHP starts to be as "difficult" as perl.
For example stuff like magic quotes, track vars are STUPID and DANGEROUS and should never have been there in the first place. But they were made part of PHP and tons of ignorant/stupid people actually thought they were great and used them. addslashes is stupid too. Tons of sloppy thinking.
Most people don't really completely know English, and it is full of weird exceptions and anachronisms. However that doesn't stop lots of people from using it, and English remains arguably one of the most useful languages in the world.
Look at tons of slashdotters here who have atrocious English - even if it's apparently their "mother tongue".
Despite all their elegance etc, LISP and its close relatives have not caught on.
The solid state drive will be limited by the _single_ SATA interface to about 100+MB/sec. If it supported SATA II, then maybe it won't be so bad.
You can get 100+MB/sec transfers from 4 x SATA 7200 RPM HDDs in a RAID10 configuration. Looking at the benchmarks the iram device isn't really that much faster - copy of small files = 12MB/sec, copy of large files = 100MB/sec.
How can 4 HDDs plus a SATA card be more expensive? Many motherboards already come with 2 SATA channels. Adding another two channels is only USD10-15. Four channel cards are about USD30 which is still cheaper. As you mentioned 4 HDDs will be the same price as 4GB.
Even if I don't disconnect the power from my computer, the power company might. Not all countries have as reliable a power supply as Sweden. And some countries like mine have thunderstorms that can cause power interruptions (a nearby lightning strike can cause circuit breakers to trigger). I have UPSes for my computers, but they are just to allow automated orderly shutdowns.
When unpowered this device can only hold your data for up to 16 hours. There's no feature that automatically saves that data to some genuinely nonvolatile storage.
I don't regard 16 hours as nonvolatile. Because if I have any data that I regard as important on the device, I or someone I trust must be much less than 16 hours away from the computer, at any time. Sure I do backups, but still 16 hours sucks.
As it is, I still think it is a stupid implementation. There could be specialized uses for this but it's an expensive toy in most cases.
US politicians saying that "a company cannot be allowed to profit from deceit"?
What next? Investigations into where all the money actually went in Iraq? Go do a search for: budget audit iraq.
"CPA staff identified at one ministry that although 8,206 guards were on the payroll, only 602 guards could be validated," the audit report states. "Consequently, there was no assurance funds were not provided for ghost employees."
If all the US people are bothered about is "sex scenes" in computer games, they really have skewed priorities.
Please stop drinking the kool-aid.
Hmm, maybe it's all the thimerosal in the vaccines - so lots of people nowadays have damaged brains and so can't really think straight?
But the PCI slot won't provide power if the system is really turned off...
They should use HDD power connectors and you can use it as a one-to-one substitute for a HDD. As it is, it's a STUPID implementation.
Also it's not USD100 if you want 4GB of storage.
Anyway, if you want speed, it's better to get one of those RAID cards with multiple SATA connectors- then do a RAID10 with many drives. Or SCSI cards with multiple channels +15krpm drives if you've the budget for that. A 15krpm drive can do sequential transfers at nearly 100MB/sec.
If you're talking about random access seek times AND only need 4GB of storage, then try this: Get 4 x 200GB SATA drives. With RAID10 use only the fastest 2GB of each drive (for RAID0 use 1GB of each drive). Or try it with 4 x 15krpm SCSI drives.
I bet the seek times aren't going to be that bad if you limit yourself to 1% of each drive.
While there are some people who want to be crippled or lose a limb, most people don't. And unfortunately not everyone gets a choice in that matter.
The same goes for losing ones mind.
I'm not talking about "false and unfair ideals". Talking about - most people would like to have a nice working pair of arms, legs. And a reasonably working mind.
Don't tell me if one of your friends is really drunk and insists on driving or doing something stupidly dangerous, you'll let them "just be who they want to be". Most drunks sober up on their own, but some need serious medical attention - otherwise they would die. And I'd say all are better off if there are good and capable friends around to help.
"If I am constantly given negative stimuli, would the baseline not drop, making me feel happier in general, even though absolute quality of life remains unchanged?"
Probably not. You might risk a shorter lifespan too.
I think it's a bit like eating. You eat, you feel full. After a while you get hungry again. Eating is not so important for some people, but important for others etc. So if something bad happens to you, you get really sad for a while, but you tend to bounce back to your norm[1] (which could be "mildly sad"). That said some study has shown that most people take about 8 years to recover from loss of a spouse[2].
However there are some unfortunate people who feel like they are starving all the time (even though they are very well nourished).
But if you're just a normally "mildly sad" person, not a clinically depressed person, you might be able to change your norm by willing it. For some people, just the act of forcing a smile improves the mood somewhat. Could be like body building - strengthen your happiness muscles:).
I'm not sure how crappy your life is.
In our imperfect world, sadness is useful, like pain. But chronic sadness is about as useful as chronic pain.
Hopefully stuff like this pacemaker is actually one of the tools that can actually work and help people.
Slashdot Mirror
But debris staying in orbit could be the desired outcome.
In which case explosive satellites containing a few hundred kilos of glass and metal shrapnel can cause a lot more damage...
If you get tons of debris 40,000km up, who has the most satellites there to lose?
You think north korea would care as much? China? India?
It costs a lot more to defend a satellite against this than to destroy a satellite. It's also not too hard to disguise a killer satellite as a civilian satellite (but this would have to be in a "normal" orbit travelling in the same direction as other satellites- makes it a bit harder to be very damaging).
I don't see why one should spend so much money on space weapons. A few dozen _cheap_ satellites with explosives and hard to deflect shrapnel (glass?) can make tons of orbits useless. How it could work - someone just has to stop broadcasting the relevant keepalive signals, or broadcast a "trigger" signal and the shrapnel satellites will blow up and wipe various orbits within a day.
So your mucho expensive space weapons better be parked in different orbits or be capable of moving significantly. And you better be able to decide and use them quickly.
If stuff happens we'd probably lose use of the prime orbit regions, for quite a long time.
It's like MAD but in space.
South Africa is probably more violent per capita. But the USA is near the top per capita. Do some searches on www.nationmaster.com. e.g. crime->violent assaults.
For some reason the total population figures are now removed for many countries like USA and UK, so they don't show up near the top in per capita stats, even though they belong there. So you'll have to do your own calculations - US population being about 300M, and UK being about 60M and south africa being about 40M?
BTW though the violent assault rates are high for US and UK, the murder rates aren't that high compared to other countries. I interpret this as the hospitals being pretty good at saving people. But there may be some other explanation...
Money is and has always been an artificial concept. Artificial but very useful.
:) (there are pluses and minuses to that[1]).
Gold as money is about as artificial as other currencies. Except it's harder to print gold than it is to print money
Still, it doesn't make the value of gold fixed. If I have the last few loaves of bread in the world and you are hungry and have one ton of gold, one loaf of bread could be worth many kilos of gold.
[1] Won't go into all that. Do note though that someone else can legitimately dig out gold (thus increasing supply), whereas other currencies can only legally be created by some authority.
Huh? Who's talking about breaking into WiFi networks?
You sure you replied to the right comment?
"a cost, that's all. if i'm not a freq. flier, then i don't get it. "
Without special and expensive measures, WiFi signals won't stop abruptly outside Continental's lounge. So you should be able to use it unless there are thugs to keep you away OR they set up a system so that only their frequent flier club people can sign on and get access (which will probably cost Continental much more than just providing free service on a "what you see is what you get" basis).
WiFi should never be regarded as secure and guaranteed.
Massport are doing something terribly wrong if legitimate WiFi actually interferes with their important systems.
Didn't help Xerox or a few others that much.
Even if tons of top scientists are in the US, it doesn't automatically mean you'd get a successful Manhattan or Apollo project.
You could end up with the Space Shuttle for instance. While the shuttle kinda works, it's not really exploring any new frontiers. And not what I would call a success at all.
The talent has to be managed and channelled. Not everyone can do that. Steve Jobs seems to be quite good at it (often requiring stuff to be "insanely great" AND more importantly being able to tell the difference in most cases).
As long as you can sell the product to monkeys and make a profit who cares about QA?
You were Doomed...
Macs still aren't that great for new users as long as "double clicking" is important.
Clicking is easy. Click and hold is ok for most people. drag and drop is a tad harder.
But double clicking is just difficult for new users.
Just would like to point out that according to popular doctrine christians are saved, and by "saved" it means that they still "make it" even if they are killed (whether in a catastrophe or not).
Most christians probably aren't that clear on a lot (most?) of the details of their religion. It's not necessarily a showstopper for them though - after all it's not like you have to memorize and do 100 things.
However, this does sometimes result in believers saying/doing quite a number of stupid or annoying or even false/bad things.
"America NEEDS to get its priorities straight."
Yeah, especially when somehow the US can't even seem to afford decent voting systems...
Can't afford to pay for better systems and methods to pick the leaders of the most powerful nation, but can afford to spend many many billions on Iraq...
I still can't seem to find opteron _tower_ servers from IBM, HP or Sun (not even talking about Dell). And I don't think it's AMD's fault...
You can get 1U rack servers from those 3. And a 3U model from Sun. But if you want a "lowish end" cheap tower server you can't get it from any of the big names. Talking about something like one of Dell's PE 1800 servers.
The "bang for buck" sort of stuff. Say what you like, but you do pay a fair bit more for rack stuff and you can't stick 4 normal-sized SCSI drives in a 1U, or stick a fair number of NICs or other stuff in them. Tower servers generally make better "swiss army knife" servers.
Sure, one can get stuff from the "whitebox" manufacturers, but often there aren't enough PCI-X slots, or the frigging cooling/power isn't good enough[1], or you can't get 3 year next business day support with parts and labour (around the world would be good too)...
Sure us geeks can build servers. But most of us aren't paid to build servers for our companies - we have better things to do than to build, test, repair, and retest servers. At most we order a bunch, test them when they arrive, and tell the vendor - "This one is broken. Not paying. Swap it for something that works, and do by tomorrow".
[1] At my workplace we got three 1U servers from a noname manufacturer - and the CPUs _regularly_ throttle down due to heat (they use P4 class CPUs - nope I wasn't the one who ordered them).
hmm interesting. So what was happening in the end?
I suspect a lot of the productivity increases come from the employees actually caring about their work.
If the bosses don't care about the employees, that's definitely one reason less to be so productive...
The reason why perl is so useful is because of CPAN ;).
Uh that's why they are called smart folders. They're only for smart people ;).
Wrapping up?
At my workplace I run Win XP in a vmware virtual machine.
If stuff goes weird, I just click on revert and things are back to normal. Any data that I want to be persistent is saved on a mapped "share" that's on the host system.
That said, I've had more problems with vmware crashing my host system running linux than with Windows 2000/XP going belly up.
You don't like mod_perl? Use fast_cgi. mod_perl is useful if you really need to modify how apache behaves. But if you just want a faster version of CGI, try fastcgi.
It's not as fast as mod_perl, since your program is now a separate process from apache and they talk via sockets or something, but if you're going to use perl or some other interpreted/bytecode language, the magnitudes of the speed difference aren't likely to be your main problem (the algorithms, architecture and hardware probably affect the speed more).
PHP is really badly designed, only recently they've started fixing some of the stuff. But lots of the bad things are actually popular PHPisms - take them away and PHP starts to be as "difficult" as perl.
For example stuff like magic quotes, track vars are STUPID and DANGEROUS and should never have been there in the first place. But they were made part of PHP and tons of ignorant/stupid people actually thought they were great and used them. addslashes is stupid too. Tons of sloppy thinking.
Most people don't really completely know English, and it is full of weird exceptions and anachronisms. However that doesn't stop lots of people from using it, and English remains arguably one of the most useful languages in the world.
Look at tons of slashdotters here who have atrocious English - even if it's apparently their "mother tongue".
Despite all their elegance etc, LISP and its close relatives have not caught on.
You'll get more bandwidth from 4 SATA HDDs.
The solid state drive will be limited by the _single_ SATA interface to about 100+MB/sec. If it supported SATA II, then maybe it won't be so bad.
You can get 100+MB/sec transfers from 4 x SATA 7200 RPM HDDs in a RAID10 configuration. Looking at the benchmarks the iram device isn't really that much faster - copy of small files = 12MB/sec, copy of large files = 100MB/sec.
How can 4 HDDs plus a SATA card be more expensive? Many motherboards already come with 2 SATA channels. Adding another two channels is only USD10-15. Four channel cards are about USD30 which is still cheaper. As you mentioned 4 HDDs will be the same price as 4GB.
Even if I don't disconnect the power from my computer, the power company might. Not all countries have as reliable a power supply as Sweden. And some countries like mine have thunderstorms that can cause power interruptions (a nearby lightning strike can cause circuit breakers to trigger). I have UPSes for my computers, but they are just to allow automated orderly shutdowns.
When unpowered this device can only hold your data for up to 16 hours. There's no feature that automatically saves that data to some genuinely nonvolatile storage.
I don't regard 16 hours as nonvolatile. Because if I have any data that I regard as important on the device, I or someone I trust must be much less than 16 hours away from the computer, at any time. Sure I do backups, but still 16 hours sucks.
As it is, I still think it is a stupid implementation. There could be specialized uses for this but it's an expensive toy in most cases.
US politicians saying that "a company cannot be allowed to profit from deceit"?
What next? Investigations into where all the money actually went in Iraq? Go do a search for: budget audit iraq.
"CPA staff identified at one ministry that although 8,206 guards were on the payroll, only 602 guards could be validated," the audit report states. "Consequently, there was no assurance funds were not provided for ghost employees."
If all the US people are bothered about is "sex scenes" in computer games, they really have skewed priorities.
Please stop drinking the kool-aid.
Hmm, maybe it's all the thimerosal in the vaccines - so lots of people nowadays have damaged brains and so can't really think straight?
But the PCI slot won't provide power if the system is really turned off...
They should use HDD power connectors and you can use it as a one-to-one substitute for a HDD. As it is, it's a STUPID implementation.
Also it's not USD100 if you want 4GB of storage.
Anyway, if you want speed, it's better to get one of those RAID cards with multiple SATA connectors- then do a RAID10 with many drives. Or SCSI cards with multiple channels +15krpm drives if you've the budget for that. A 15krpm drive can do sequential transfers at nearly 100MB/sec.
If you're talking about random access seek times AND only need 4GB of storage, then try this:
Get 4 x 200GB SATA drives. With RAID10 use only the fastest 2GB of each drive (for RAID0 use 1GB of each drive). Or try it with 4 x 15krpm SCSI drives.
I bet the seek times aren't going to be that bad if you limit yourself to 1% of each drive.
While there are some people who want to be crippled or lose a limb, most people don't. And unfortunately not everyone gets a choice in that matter.
The same goes for losing ones mind.
I'm not talking about "false and unfair ideals". Talking about - most people would like to have a nice working pair of arms, legs. And a reasonably working mind.
Don't tell me if one of your friends is really drunk and insists on driving or doing something stupidly dangerous, you'll let them "just be who they want to be". Most drunks sober up on their own, but some need serious medical attention - otherwise they would die. And I'd say all are better off if there are good and capable friends around to help.
"If I am constantly given negative stimuli, would the baseline not drop, making me feel happier in general, even though absolute quality of life remains unchanged?"
:).
/ memory.html
a ge.poll .reut/index.html
Probably not. You might risk a shorter lifespan too.
I think it's a bit like eating. You eat, you feel full. After a while you get hungry again. Eating is not so important for some people, but important for others etc. So if something bad happens to you, you get really sad for a while, but you tend to bounce back to your norm[1] (which could be "mildly sad"). That said some study has shown that most people take about 8 years to recover from loss of a spouse[2].
However there are some unfortunate people who feel like they are starving all the time (even though they are very well nourished).
But if you're just a normally "mildly sad" person, not a clinically depressed person, you might be able to change your norm by willing it. For some people, just the act of forcing a smile improves the mood somewhat. Could be like body building - strengthen your happiness muscles
I'm not sure how crappy your life is.
In our imperfect world, sadness is useful, like pain. But chronic sadness is about as useful as chronic pain.
Hopefully stuff like this pacemaker is actually one of the tools that can actually work and help people.
[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/0502
[2]
http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/03/17/marri