Short version: Tabs are a taskbar at the top of the screen. Which IMHO is the superior place to place a application switcher/launcher, I reason thus:
All applications have their menu, toolbars and window buttons at the top of the windows, thats where you work to control the application, and above that the application window controls, and when you want to go a level above that to switch windows: Why is it then that application windows are switched by the bottom of the screen, almost universally? It's a almost unesscessary break in flow. Chromium is a good example of the tab paradigm working neatly.
Newsworthy? Turntables have been outselling guitars for a decade. Vinyl has been on the comeback supposedly since the 90s when the dance music scene really took off. In reality it's done more than comeback, it's a mature underground industry with a huge turnover. It's been the weapon of choice for a DJ since year dot, even though digital mixing has come along way.
Vinyl consumers tend to buy alot of records, I used to live with a couple of DJs who had on the order of 7000 records between them. Yes that does sounds more the numbers used to describe MP3 collections. Who buys CDs like that?
I spent a few months working in a music store, we sold turntables on a daily basis along with gazillions of dance, hip hop and old records, we sold about three guitars a month.
Vinyl taught me to love music again, taught me to listen rather than just have it in the background. It's very tactile and you can even see the patterns made by different sound in the surface. However I've found it frustrating to the point I don't put on records just for listening very often. You see, in theory vinyl offers great sound quality because of the analog format. In practice vinyl it doesn't 99% of the time, you can never get perfect reproduction without great effort (keeping the damn things clean for a start) and the records eventually wear out. Oh don't talk to me about the price of decent needles, I'll cry.
How android works is analogous to a virtual machine already. If you've rooted your Android phone you don't really have full root access to what runs underneath the Linux variant.
My phone is smart because it runs a Linux distro that allows for root access when required.
The linux you have root too is really running a layer above the the radio software etc. This is why rooting your 'droid is (reasonably) safe, you stilll don't get root to fsck with the fundamentals of the phone and bring down the local 3G network. On a side note, your user-level applications run in their own sandboxed userids and not the logged in the user as such. More to the point the application space runs in Java which has virtual machine like qualities and I can see many tricks possibly to get android running very nicely alongside anything else.
Oh and it's Linux too.
Android at least seems to be ripe for VMware to play with. The difficulty would be any non-linux/unix derived smartphone OS (ahem Windows mobile ahem).
Virtualisation would have seemed this way on PCs in the 90s, with machines starved for then-expensive RAM. What I remember of virtualisation in the early days is it was slow and you'd never consider virtualising anything for a production environment. I would have laughed if you told me you could run 2,4,10 VMs feasibily on one server.
Of course, that smartphones will begin to follow moores law the same way, we'll see much more memory space and cpu horsepower in the same power envelope very soon, so any question of necessary resources (eventually) is moot.
Yet, it may be possible on existing hardware with some trickery, indeed VMs run fast now, almost native for some tasks, and this on x86. Yet, ARM is the default for smartphones, near native speed for ARM? Indeed we should throw out our experience on other platforms. The question then is how does virtualisation stack up on it? Is it a better or worse instruction set? Considering the x86 set needed additions to really speed up virtual machines.
Hit it with something. Seriously, the obvious solution is to spam your environment with small projectiles, track them, see what bounces off something. Or blow on it it: tracking motion of air/turbulence as air movement in the environment is changed by the objects presence.
Point is if you have a object perfectly cloaked to a good swathe of the electromagnetic spectrum there are still other ways it impinges on it's environment. Accoustics, sound waves (although they may be easy to cloak also) etc.
Good design with a GUI means documentation is not needed IMHO.
Back in the day, two decades ago when I was first starting out with comptuers and learning dos/unix, you really had to look up the documentation and study how things worked, because the interface was a epic discoverablity and learning curve failure.
Then came the GUI revolution, everything changed. Since then, I can't think how many times I've downloaded a application and just started using it, figuring it out on the fly and slowly moving up to more advanced usage. It is what I expect from applications.
Good design means documentation is seldom needed, and for basic applications never needed at all. A GUI gives you a lot of room and many methods to present contextual information to a user. At worst they can click on a link to take them to further detail. Having meaningful and plain english descriptions and other information right in the interface mean studying the documentation is utterly not necessary.
But we've had another paradigm shift since then, away from the GUI desktop app the next generation of application, a web app. These needs no documentation, because the format of a web page *is* a document itself, at least has evolved from that, and is a format that fundamentally begs to be descriptive and visual.
Going back to linux reccently and having to use a man pages it suddenly occured to me how primitive and out-of-date linux documenation is. Basicly, man pages predate the era of the hyperlink. It ironic that Google is a superior help tool to much of what comes with applications.
The solution for linux then is a wave of right-brain web-savvy thinking. Developers are never going to spend time writing comprehensive technical documentation for all levels of use, and having done such technical writing myself I would not wish it on my enemies. The solution is in the web paradigm, link relevant helpful information in context, embed the help right in there, rather than send users off to Google.
You know what.. Google *is* a command line interface, and a good one, how ironic.
These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.
"We are finding them too difficult to control" is how I read this. I suspect they are basically saying Google doesn't want too many ultra smart individuals that care way too much about Google, because they reach a critical mass that becomes difficult for upper managment (with it's lesser prerequisite of brilliance) to control. Lets face it, stupid staff are obedient, and if not easy to fire. Simple but in this case having far more brains-on-a-stick at far too higher density is a liability. I've often said managers are uncomfortable hiring people significantly smarter than they are, but a whole seething hive of the industries top brains probably makes them wake up in the night and scream.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of hearing about 'Cl1mategate' as are many others who like me will not be Googling it in order to make it disappear. I'm waiting to be unenthused about Tigergate which will be hitting google in 3...2...1...
6) Climate change or unchange is moot, to the point it's a distraction. Our civilisation is founded on exhaustable fossil fuel reserves that we depend on to support given population and a particular standard of living. Its not about transport, we depend on petroleum for everything from shampoo, fertiliser, pesticides, all plastics, medicines, food additives, santisiers. We forget about all the other uses for petroleum that we depend on and fret about not getting our electric cars. Any significant change in fossil fuel supply at a global level, without time for civilisation to adapt will result in either depopulation due to famine and disease, or economic collapse and a crash in the standard of living and or a combination of both. The every increasingly interconnected nature of the global economy makes it more likely to fall down all at once. Finally to finish the job of civilisational collapse, our war like nature could mean we burn the last reserves... fighting over the last reserves.
Scarily, some of the experts think the cost of crude doesn't actually need to ramp up too fast over a few years to a decade in order to make things very painful.
Just because climate changes occurred before humanity existed doesn't mean we can't cause changes as well, or that we shouldn't be concerned and mitigate future changes regardless of whether we are the original trigger.
Our industrial processes are massive. Pretending that this has no effect on the environment or that we shouldn't care about the environment is willfully short sighted.
To add to your point, massive indeed: we've bumped up the ammount of CO2 in the atmosphere from a pre industrial 350 ppm to past 450ppm and climbing. In the absence of all other evidence to say any impact we have would be minimal is ignorant. CO2 levels is something we have a reliable measure of. The burden of proof is one anyone to show it's going to do nothing.
What the denalists can't show is that the aforementioned empirical asston of greenhouse gases we've spewed out is completely harmless, because it is impossible to prove a negative.
FTFY.
Theory is validated by being shown not be false. You can show someone was not at a murder scene by confirming a alibi, thus a negative has been proven.
You didn't read let alone understand my post. I never attempted to account for the last decade of no warming, so I infact agree with you (however the cooling is even more unproven than warming, still plauisble however).
I merely point out the elephant in the room, which since we are talking about convienience in arguements, is conviently left out of debates. I go on to asert, that the presence of elephant implies that there is infact a possiblity of there being an pachyderm of some sort in the vicinity. But I can't prove the negative so I may be making baseless asertions.
You are clearly excercising your freedom to asert pretty much anything including something I didn't say. Standard internet discourse.:)
Caution: Science being done badly. Whats new? Science is meant to be pristine and perfect? If climate scientists have to cook the books to get politicians to do something then it says two things. Our understanding of climate is inadequate for the questions we need to answer. That we have major major problems at a politicial level, perhaps even to the demise of civilisation.
We've dumped a metric assload of carbon into the atmosphere and we can measure it (we have actually boosted greenhouse gases about 40% from the level pre-industrial era). there is no way this could be anything but very very bad.
If the world isn't observably warming up, or not over the last decade, but that is purely by a stroke of luck, and buys us time to actually do something. What the denalists can't show is that the aforementioned empirical asston of greenhouse gases we've spewed out is completely harmless, because simple reliable science say it can't be, and indeed hasn't been in prehistory.
I have Android phone in NZ and the paid apps were unavailable for months on the Vodafone network, even with after market firmware which should have enabled paid apps. For a long while Vodafone could not provide any information when asked about this. This was/has also been occuring in China South Africa, Ireland, Brazil, Israel, Switzerland, and a few other countries. However the reasons vary and one should not attribute to malice what could be attributed to red tape (um.. same thing?).
How many Windows machines also have a linux distribution installed? I would bet a tangible percentage of the windows market share would also have a Linux distribution in dual boot. Bare in mind here Net Applications market share research is based on visits to web pages. There is a way that many more linux installations could be hiding out there: It's plausible a good number of such systems may see Windows used for surfing/chilling, but linux not heavily used for visits to web pages. In any case clearly 1.2% market share does not fairly characterise the total number of non-server linux installations on PCs.
Do any 'dotters know of any research out there where someone surveyed the major distributions to gather statistics on the number of active installations?? As they should be able to get this data from updates downloaded from repositories etc. and then work towards finding a total number of systems in use. I would presume Microsoft has excellent statistics on usage from monitoring their update servers.
Just as a typewriter's mechanism is kind of worn uniquely by the Author's use having bashed the words tangibly into the paper, I suppose the laptop hinge would be worn, or the power button the PC chassis.
Maybe just sell me the the hard drive, I can marvel the was authors work briefly held by the platters as they spun.
How does that not hold the same romance as the type writer? What? No, I dont need to get out more..
Queensland is in Australia, not New Zealand, he formerly lived in N.Z. and like most NZers in trouble with the law, moved to Australia. Australia does have a extradition treaty with the U.S.
It appears that New Zealand does extradite to the U.S.
I guess the question is whether or not the U.S. will request it.
New Zealand != Australia, the man lives in Queensland, an Australian state. That must be a north american understanding of geopraphy I detect. You see, Australia is just a small island somewhere to the south of New Zealand and the continent of Tasmania... um...wait..
Translation: I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work.
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Arrington is providing (a) his services as a sort of ideal end-user (i.e. if this one tech-savvy guy really, really wants a thing that works exactly like this, there's probably a market for it) and (b) a ready-made market in the shape of his extensive and influential (in tech circles) audience. The latter indeed took hard work to amass, but he's not the one who actually built the CrunchPad.
If internet piracy goes away, people will move to phyiscal media.
You see there isn't a respectable IT firm anywhere in a developed nation that doesn't have a bit of a 'Swap Club', sharing pirated material by USB drives, SD cards and cheap terabyte class drives around the office. Back in the day they shared stuff on CD-R because the internet was rubbish. Now these things are now ubiqutous, inexpensive and expendable. Terabyte range drives are less than 10c per gig for a while now, if you find a good deal.
What happens when these things inevitably become alot smaller and alot cheaper?
What really scares me is what might be done to try to control this form of piracy.
So say you get kicked off the net - how do they enforce this? Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen ways to browse the net semi-anonymously (coffee shop, library, college, neighbors wi-fi etc etc). Not to mention having internet access at work - does that mean I'd be denied employment world-wide for messing around on the net?
*faceplam* You don't realise those services will dry up because the service providers won't want to face the liability. Nobody is going to run open wi-fi if it could mean they were libable for what other people will do with it. Public internet will evaporate, and what does remain will be draconian perhaps even to the point of blocking encrypted traffic and unusual ports, or worse anything but allowed approved domain names from Big Content.
Eventually even trying to hide your activity over the internet could be considered illegal.
Throughout human history crackpots and experts alike have been predicting the end of the world is near. It is unfortunate that when the world really does end from an unexpected event, these people will appear to be right.
China does not need to regulate. Populations stabilise and then shrink as the stand of living rises, generally speaking. Japan and Gemmany are good examples of a declining birth rate, and many developed nations are experience the same thing since the last quarter of the 20th century.
What is interesting, and what the researcher has quantified, is that energy consumption continues inexorably, as birth rate stalls and declines in developing nations the energy consumed per head goes up.
What a no brainer, that at a global level humanity follows the rules of biological and physicial systems just like anything else.
In the face of this. I must ask slashdot a question of morality: Is it best for me consume resources like mad, because if I don't waste it frivolously, someone else will? Or do I conserve as much as I can, even though someone will then find it easier to extend their carbon footprint to take up space I have since freed, at least I would have done the right thing?
Or is it best just live with a statisticly average eco footprint and try to push for political change so we can finally have break-even fusion or volunteerily commit mass suicide?
In this case, do I really need that tinfoil to make hats for my family? Should I stop pouring concrete for my underground bunker?
Reading the actual paper was like a breath of fresh air, this guy is on to something. It also forecasts doom and gloom.. mind you, so do all the other models? It doesn't really matter what theoretical model we use to account for the empircal data flowing already, the outcome is the same: We are screwed. Our elders have thrown a party and paid for it by mortgaging our future.
Mr Kurzweil hurry up with that uploading stuff, I don't want to be in meatspace when the shit hits the fan.
Slashdot Mirror
Short version: Tabs are a taskbar at the top of the screen. Which IMHO is the superior place to place a application switcher/launcher, I reason thus:
All applications have their menu, toolbars and window buttons at the top of the windows, thats where you work to control the application, and above that the application window controls, and when you want to go a level above that to switch windows: Why is it then that application windows are switched by the bottom of the screen, almost universally? It's a almost unesscessary break in flow. Chromium is a good example of the tab paradigm working neatly.
But I don't think this is Next Big Thing (tm)...
Newsworthy? Turntables have been outselling guitars for a decade. Vinyl has been on the comeback supposedly since the 90s when the dance music scene really took off. In reality it's done more than comeback, it's a mature underground industry with a huge turnover. It's been the weapon of choice for a DJ since year dot, even though digital mixing has come along way.
Vinyl consumers tend to buy alot of records, I used to live with a couple of DJs who had on the order of 7000 records between them. Yes that does sounds more the numbers used to describe MP3 collections. Who buys CDs like that?
I spent a few months working in a music store, we sold turntables on a daily basis along with gazillions of dance, hip hop and old records, we sold about three guitars a month.
Vinyl taught me to love music again, taught me to listen rather than just have it in the background. It's very tactile and you can even see the patterns made by different sound in the surface. However I've found it frustrating to the point I don't put on records just for listening very often. You see, in theory vinyl offers great sound quality because of the analog format. In practice vinyl it doesn't 99% of the time, you can never get perfect reproduction without great effort (keeping the damn things clean for a start) and the records eventually wear out. Oh don't talk to me about the price of decent needles, I'll cry.
My phone is smart because it runs a Linux distro that allows for root access when required.
The linux you have root too is really running a layer above the the radio software etc. This is why rooting your 'droid is (reasonably) safe, you stilll don't get root to fsck with the fundamentals of the phone and bring down the local 3G network. On a side note, your user-level applications run in their own sandboxed userids and not the logged in the user as such. More to the point the application space runs in Java which has virtual machine like qualities and I can see many tricks possibly to get android running very nicely alongside anything else.
Oh and it's Linux too.
Android at least seems to be ripe for VMware to play with. The difficulty would be any non-linux/unix derived smartphone OS (ahem Windows mobile ahem).
Virtualisation would have seemed this way on PCs in the 90s, with machines starved for then-expensive RAM. What I remember of virtualisation in the early days is it was slow and you'd never consider virtualising anything for a production environment. I would have laughed if you told me you could run 2,4,10 VMs feasibily on one server.
Of course, that smartphones will begin to follow moores law the same way, we'll see much more memory space and cpu horsepower in the same power envelope very soon, so any question of necessary resources (eventually) is moot.
Yet, it may be possible on existing hardware with some trickery, indeed VMs run fast now, almost native for some tasks, and this on x86. Yet, ARM is the default for smartphones, near native speed for ARM? Indeed we should throw out our experience on other platforms. The question then is how does virtualisation stack up on it? Is it a better or worse instruction set? Considering the x86 set needed additions to really speed up virtual machines.
Hit it with something. Seriously, the obvious solution is to spam your environment with small projectiles, track them, see what bounces off something. Or blow on it it: tracking motion of air/turbulence as air movement in the environment is changed by the objects presence.
Point is if you have a object perfectly cloaked to a good swathe of the electromagnetic spectrum there are still other ways it impinges on it's environment. Accoustics, sound waves (although they may be easy to cloak also) etc.
Good design with a GUI means documentation is not needed IMHO.
Back in the day, two decades ago when I was first starting out with comptuers and learning dos/unix, you really had to look up the documentation and study how things worked, because the interface was a epic discoverablity and learning curve failure.
Then came the GUI revolution, everything changed. Since then, I can't think how many times I've downloaded a application and just started using it, figuring it out on the fly and slowly moving up to more advanced usage. It is what I expect from applications.
Good design means documentation is seldom needed, and for basic applications never needed at all. A GUI gives you a lot of room and many methods to present contextual information to a user. At worst they can click on a link to take them to further detail. Having meaningful and plain english descriptions and other information right in the interface mean studying the documentation is utterly not necessary.
But we've had another paradigm shift since then, away from the GUI desktop app the next generation of application, a web app. These needs no documentation, because the format of a web page *is* a document itself, at least has evolved from that, and is a format that fundamentally begs to be descriptive and visual.
Going back to linux reccently and having to use a man pages it suddenly occured to me how primitive and out-of-date linux documenation is. Basicly, man pages predate the era of the hyperlink. It ironic that Google is a superior help tool to much of what comes with applications.
The solution for linux then is a wave of right-brain web-savvy thinking. Developers are never going to spend time writing comprehensive technical documentation for all levels of use, and having done such technical writing myself I would not wish it on my enemies. The solution is in the web paradigm, link relevant helpful information in context, embed the help right in there, rather than send users off to Google.
You know what.. Google *is* a command line interface, and a good one, how ironic.
These people are actually important to have outside of Google. They're very Google people that have the right philosophies around these things, and it's important that we not hire these guys. It's better for the ecosystem to have an honest industry, as opposed to aggregating all this talent at Google.
"We are finding them too difficult to control" is how I read this. I suspect they are basically saying Google doesn't want too many ultra smart individuals that care way too much about Google, because they reach a critical mass that becomes difficult for upper managment (with it's lesser prerequisite of brilliance) to control. Lets face it, stupid staff are obedient, and if not easy to fire. Simple but in this case having far more brains-on-a-stick at far too higher density is a liability. I've often said managers are uncomfortable hiring people significantly smarter than they are, but a whole seething hive of the industries top brains probably makes them wake up in the night and scream.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of hearing about 'Cl1mategate' as are many others who like me will not be Googling it in order to make it disappear. I'm waiting to be unenthused about Tigergate which will be hitting google in 3...2...1...
(Do you see what 1 d1d there?)
6) Climate change or unchange is moot, to the point it's a distraction. Our civilisation is founded on exhaustable fossil fuel reserves that we depend on to support given population and a particular standard of living. Its not about transport, we depend on petroleum for everything from shampoo, fertiliser, pesticides, all plastics, medicines, food additives, santisiers. We forget about all the other uses for petroleum that we depend on and fret about not getting our electric cars. Any significant change in fossil fuel supply at a global level, without time for civilisation to adapt will result in either depopulation due to famine and disease, or economic collapse and a crash in the standard of living and or a combination of both. The every increasingly interconnected nature of the global economy makes it more likely to fall down all at once. Finally to finish the job of civilisational collapse, our war like nature could mean we burn the last reserves ... fighting over the last reserves.
Scarily, some of the experts think the cost of crude doesn't actually need to ramp up too fast over a few years to a decade in order to make things very painful.
Further reading: Anything on Easter Island.
Just because climate changes occurred before humanity existed doesn't mean we can't cause changes as well, or that we shouldn't be concerned and mitigate future changes regardless of whether we are the original trigger. Our industrial processes are massive. Pretending that this has no effect on the environment or that we shouldn't care about the environment is willfully short sighted.
To add to your point, massive indeed: we've bumped up the ammount of CO2 in the atmosphere from a pre industrial 350 ppm to past 450ppm and climbing. In the absence of all other evidence to say any impact we have would be minimal is ignorant. CO2 levels is something we have a reliable measure of. The burden of proof is one anyone to show it's going to do nothing.
What the denalists can't show is that the aforementioned empirical asston of greenhouse gases we've spewed out is completely harmless, because it is impossible to prove a negative.
FTFY.
Theory is validated by being shown not be false. You can show someone was not at a murder scene by confirming a alibi, thus a negative has been proven.
You didn't read let alone understand my post. I never attempted to account for the last decade of no warming, so I infact agree with you (however the cooling is even more unproven than warming, still plauisble however).
:)
I merely point out the elephant in the room, which since we are talking about convienience in arguements, is conviently left out of debates. I go on to asert, that the presence of elephant implies that there is infact a possiblity of there being an pachyderm of some sort in the vicinity. But I can't prove the negative so I may be making baseless asertions.
You are clearly excercising your freedom to asert pretty much anything including something I didn't say. Standard internet discourse.
Caution: Science being done badly. Whats new? Science is meant to be pristine and perfect? If climate scientists have to cook the books to get politicians to do something then it says two things. Our understanding of climate is inadequate for the questions we need to answer. That we have major major problems at a politicial level, perhaps even to the demise of civilisation.
We've dumped a metric assload of carbon into the atmosphere and we can measure it (we have actually boosted greenhouse gases about 40% from the level pre-industrial era). there is no way this could be anything but very very bad.
If the world isn't observably warming up, or not over the last decade, but that is purely by a stroke of luck, and buys us time to actually do something. What the denalists can't show is that the aforementioned empirical asston of greenhouse gases we've spewed out is completely harmless, because simple reliable science say it can't be, and indeed hasn't been in prehistory.
I have Android phone in NZ and the paid apps were unavailable for months on the Vodafone network, even with after market firmware which should have enabled paid apps. For a long while Vodafone could not provide any information when asked about this. This was/has also been occuring in China South Africa, Ireland, Brazil, Israel, Switzerland, and a few other countries. However the reasons vary and one should not attribute to malice what could be attributed to red tape (um.. same thing?).
Fragmentation means all projects suffer just a little more of not being able to put the much needed cut and polish in or those extra needed features.
Classic authoritarian mistake of thinking, if I just kill off some dudes pet project, then he will do exactly what I want.
A cow is a race horse designed by commitee.
How many Windows machines also have a linux distribution installed? I would bet a tangible percentage of the windows market share would also have a Linux distribution in dual boot. Bare in mind here Net Applications market share research is based on visits to web pages. There is a way that many more linux installations could be hiding out there: It's plausible a good number of such systems may see Windows used for surfing/chilling, but linux not heavily used for visits to web pages. In any case clearly 1.2% market share does not fairly characterise the total number of non-server linux installations on PCs.
Do any 'dotters know of any research out there where someone surveyed the major distributions to gather statistics on the number of active installations?? As they should be able to get this data from updates downloaded from repositories etc. and then work towards finding a total number of systems in use. I would presume Microsoft has excellent statistics on usage from monitoring their update servers.
Just as a typewriter's mechanism is kind of worn uniquely by the Author's use having bashed the words tangibly into the paper, I suppose the laptop hinge would be worn, or the power button the PC chassis.
Maybe just sell me the the hard drive, I can marvel the was authors work briefly held by the platters as they spun.
How does that not hold the same romance as the type writer? What? No, I dont need to get out more..
Queensland is in Australia, not New Zealand, he formerly lived in N.Z. and like most NZers in trouble with the law, moved to Australia. Australia does have a extradition treaty with the U.S.
It appears that New Zealand does extradite to the U.S.
I guess the question is whether or not the U.S. will request it.
New Zealand != Australia, the man lives in Queensland, an Australian state. That must be a north american understanding of geopraphy I detect. You see, Australia is just a small island somewhere to the south of New Zealand and the continent of Tasmania... um...wait..
Translation: I'd like to cash in on Arrington's hard work.
I have no reason to doubt that Arrington is being screwed here, and that he does in fact have intellectual property rights that are being trampled on, but how much hard work did he actually do on this thing? My understanding is that he mostly said, "I want this thing with these specs at this price, make it happen" and his manufacturing partner is the one that actually built it.
Arrington is providing (a) his services as a sort of ideal end-user (i.e. if this one tech-savvy guy really, really wants a thing that works exactly like this, there's probably a market for it) and (b) a ready-made market in the shape of his extensive and influential (in tech circles) audience. The latter indeed took hard work to amass, but he's not the one who actually built the CrunchPad.
Then.. Arrington = Manager ?
If internet piracy goes away, people will move to phyiscal media.
You see there isn't a respectable IT firm anywhere in a developed nation that doesn't have a bit of a 'Swap Club', sharing pirated material by USB drives, SD cards and cheap terabyte class drives around the office. Back in the day they shared stuff on CD-R because the internet was rubbish. Now these things are now ubiqutous, inexpensive and expendable. Terabyte range drives are less than 10c per gig for a while now, if you find a good deal.
What happens when these things inevitably become alot smaller and alot cheaper?
What really scares me is what might be done to try to control this form of piracy.
So say you get kicked off the net - how do they enforce this? Just off the top of my head I can think of a dozen ways to browse the net semi-anonymously (coffee shop, library, college, neighbors wi-fi etc etc). Not to mention having internet access at work - does that mean I'd be denied employment world-wide for messing around on the net?
*faceplam* You don't realise those services will dry up because the service providers won't want to face the liability. Nobody is going to run open wi-fi if it could mean they were libable for what other people will do with it. Public internet will evaporate, and what does remain will be draconian perhaps even to the point of blocking encrypted traffic and unusual ports, or worse anything but allowed approved domain names from Big Content.
Eventually even trying to hide your activity over the internet could be considered illegal.
Throughout human history crackpots and experts alike have been predicting the end of the world is near. It is unfortunate that when the world really does end from an unexpected event, these people will appear to be right.
China does not need to regulate. Populations stabilise and then shrink as the stand of living rises, generally speaking. Japan and Gemmany are good examples of a declining birth rate, and many developed nations are experience the same thing since the last quarter of the 20th century.
What is interesting, and what the researcher has quantified, is that energy consumption continues inexorably, as birth rate stalls and declines in developing nations the energy consumed per head goes up.
What a no brainer, that at a global level humanity follows the rules of biological and physicial systems just like anything else.
In the face of this. I must ask slashdot a question of morality: Is it best for me consume resources like mad, because if I don't waste it frivolously, someone else will? Or do I conserve as much as I can, even though someone will then find it easier to extend their carbon footprint to take up space I have since freed, at least I would have done the right thing?
Or is it best just live with a statisticly average eco footprint and try to push for political change so we can finally have break-even fusion or volunteerily commit mass suicide?
In this case, do I really need that tinfoil to make hats for my family? Should I stop pouring concrete for my underground bunker?
Reading the actual paper was like a breath of fresh air, this guy is on to something. It also forecasts doom and gloom.. mind you, so do all the other models? It doesn't really matter what theoretical model we use to account for the empircal data flowing already, the outcome is the same: We are screwed. Our elders have thrown a party and paid for it by mortgaging our future.
Mr Kurzweil hurry up with that uploading stuff, I don't want to be in meatspace when the shit hits the fan.