The read-modify-write penalty for overwriting existing data in-place is huge (even with attempts to minimize it with smart block mapping) and not worth the very minor increase in areal density. It's a bad sign that the storage industry was forced to adopt this because it means better encoding technologies are further off in the future than originally anticipated. Brick wall.
If it means that rotating media no longer has a write performance advantage over flash, then it is a very poor compromise indeed.
Google, Yahoo, and Facebook weren't this vocal before the Snowden Chronicles. Disingenuous bullshit from all. This is only damage-control so they can continue making more money, it has nothing to do with your rights. Bootlicker.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Sure. It's damage control but look at it from their point of view. They are getting orders from a secret court. If they complain in a manner that is legal, nobody hears it. Nothing changes. If they complain in a manner that could get the public's attention, employees risk criminal prosecution, the company loses credibility (because it looks like they are the ones collaborating), AND nothing may change. Damned if you don't. Double damned if you do.
After Snowden, the damage is done, and their best course of action is to raise as much of a stink as much as possible. Which still looks lame because the law is written to squash effective opposition and no one wants to go to jail over this.
I'm sure you think you would be willing to be the hero. But do you really want to be prosecuted for a federal offense in a secret court?
According to TFA, genetic damage during cell division is slowed. Brain aging would be affected little, at least directly. So few new neurons are produced during adulthood that for a long time, it was thought that all the neurons that a human would ever have were present at birth. Still, having a healthier support system for the brain should reduce cell death.
Further, there is still the potential for other advances to add the ability to generate new neurons. There is no particular reason why aging needs to be conquered with a single method.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
Which is an obstacle trivially removed by a bit of well understood government regulation. And if the 60's economy had kept going through today, we would probably have that already.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a worker utopia: Foreign competition became a real threat, for the first time since WWII. Instead of a clamoring to reduce working hours, there was a clamoring to free businesses from regulation so they could compete more effectively with whatever nation seemed ready to eat or lunch.
Without government controls businesses do whatever they think is more profitable and it just cheaper to pay fewer people to work 40 hour weeks than it is to pay more people to work less. Benefits and infrastructure costs scale with employees, not the number of hours they work. It's even better if you can scare them into working more than 40 hour weeks while still only paying them for 40 hour weeks.
The exception is low paid hourly workers, where it is cheapest to limit hours to part time so you can dispense with paying any benefits at all. Now since these positions are almost always service roles with no foreign competition, you might think that something could be done with such travesties. But no such luck. Government controls would ruin us all. After all, if we paid pizza delivery guys more then the Chinese would take over the pizza business. Or maybe it is because other businesses would become uncompetitive if the cost of pizza went up.
I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.
Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.
What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet." - Newt Gingrich, 2000
He didn't do that either. Al Gore was involved in the creation of NREN, the successor to Arpanet and NSFnet and the immediate predecessor to the commercialized Internet we have today. But the Internet already existed and had for several years, dating no later than 1983, with the creation of a gateway between Arpanet and CSnet.
This chart is nearly useless, as it doesn't account for the average distance traveled per country.
Not necessarily useless, just the answer to a different question. You are focused on "how safe are the roads?" but this chart is about "how safe are the people?". Driving less is as valid a means of reducing risk of road fatality as making safer roads. Maybe if the US had better public transportation and less urban sprawl there would be fewer traffic fatalities.
Previous studies on mice lacking Rev-ErbA showed decreased skeletal muscles, metabolic rate, and running capacity. Such mice appeared fated by their genetics to live as couch potatoes.
When Burris' group administered SR9009 to these mice to activate the Rev-Erb protein, the results were remarkable. The metabolic rate in the skeletal muscles of the mice increased significantly. The treated mice were not allowed to exercise, but despite this they developed the ability to run about 50 percent further before being stopped by exhaustion.
So they created some broken mice and then treated them with a drug that reversed what they broke. And, what do you know? The effects were reversed too.
I'd like to see a followup on unmodified mice to see if they also benefit. If Rev-ErbA is already present and active at normal levels, the drug may not do anything.
So any fetus that survives these trials is generally in good shape at birth. If that baby is female, eggs are then quickly produced for the next generation before much new genetic rot can take place.
Consciousness is defined as, roughly, conscious personal experience.
Bingo! Consciousness is defined in terms of itself.
We *know* we have conscious experience.
Actually. No. We think we have conscious experience. We believe this. We don't know it. We don't even really know what it means to say that we do.
Consciousness is nothing more than a place holder for a reason to believe that we are special. It is that something that we are supposed to have that makes us different from everything else. As our machines gain more and more similar behavior, the definition of consciousness will be tightened more and more to exclude them.
So let me get this straight. These people are commuting out of the city they live in to go to work on company supplied buses and this is causing the city to loose money? It would be no different if they drove themselves to work. These people may be even less likely to live in the city if they had to drive themselves everyday. In which case the city would get nothing from them.
These part time residents compete with full time residents for housing. Rents go up and sales go down because people who would live and work in the City and spend more money there are forced out. Maybe they don't even work in SF, collectively nudging jobs and business elsewhere because working in San Francisco isn't nearly as desirable if you can't live there.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, the recession is technically over.
Which doesn't mean it can't come back later.
It seems to me that if you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth to call it recession, you should also need two consecutive quarters of positive growth to call it an expansion or recovery
One quarter of weak growth doesn't really tell you anything.
The helicopter needs a lot more room to land. Now this isn't terribly important until the "jetpack" is cleared for flying in populated areas but if/when it is the ability to land in a very small space will be a big deal.
Rail is far more efficient. The track itself is cheap, the major cost is actually buying the land. There is very little friction resistance as well.
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
So put up a chain link/plexiglass fence around it. Or better yet, worry less about drunks. Build the fence for cows anyway though.
In populated areas, the residents will look at the fence as an eyesore and file endless lawsuits to stop it. If you elevate, they will still file endless lawsuits. The only way to satisfy the nimbys is to build it underground. This costs a fortune but it would be exact same for Hyperloop.
Hyperloop doesn't solve any of the land use issues. It just removes the option to lay simple track on bare ground. Going down the unpopulated parts of the I5 corridor is the easy part for both Hyperloop and High Speed Rail. It just ignores the difficulties of getting in and out of cities. For instance, I5 doesn't even go to San Francisco and finding an acceptable connection from the the Central Valley to the Bay Area has been probably *the* biggest land use problem for High Speed Rail.
My biggest issue is when people tell me that I can't use Google Maps as my GPS. I'm NOT going to buy a Garmin device! My 4" tablet is my GPS!
It wouldn't help anyway. The exception is only for navigation systems built into the car. An add-on gps, even if dedicated to the task is still illegal to use while driving in California.
With there being such an extensible UI, you can just create your own preferences button and dialog and share it with the rest of the world.
And next time you want to go into the city, you can learn all the skills required to construct a train or motor vehicle from scratch, and then you can share them with the rest of the world.
Don't be ridiculous. We're all about automation. Instead of providing a working but rather inflexible rail system, we will provide you with a fantastic machine that will quickly build any kind of train you can imagine as long as you can describe it accurately using our custom variant of lisp.
"The researchers processed the nonmetallic fraction of waste circuit boards into a powder and found that it adsorbed metals like copper, lead, and zinc"
I'm not going to read the article (I am a slashdot user after all), but where in the world of electronic waste do you find PCBs without any metal? That would mean they don't have any traces or solder joints... unlikely to say the least.
Two layer PCB's with the surface metal already stripped off. More likely left over material when odd shaped PC boards were cut from rectangular sheets.
RIM, whether they like it or not, is transitioning into a services company.
I wonder if this is the route we will see MS take.
Why not? It's the standard progression for large tech companies in decline. Services are an effective way to extract profit from established mind share when products are fading. The big iron companies have all gone down this road.
Control Data, which survives as Ceridian, a pure services company Unisys, which used to make mainframes is now an IT services company DEC merged into Compaq into HP which has threatened to turn pure services IBM still makes products but service revenue dominates
>> with their student debt they can't afford to move
If your worldly possessions don't comfortably fit in a car by the end of your undergrad, you're doing it wrong. (And I would I suspect your debt problems go beyond student loans.)
It doesn't take much furniture to not comfortably fit into a car and it's usually cheaper than living somewhere that is furnished. Of course, the usual solution is to abandon/give away said furniture because it was never all that valuable any way.
If your wage prospects are so dismal that you can't afford to buy a new bed then I guess you might have a problem.
still need some to pickup and drop packages and remote drivers will cost more then just an driver doing it all.
The sending and receiving depots have people to load and unload. I can't see it being used for end point deliveries without extensive additional automation. However, for moving packages between depots, it would work fine.
That's what would be a step further. Being able to direct my car to come pick me up and not bother me with the details of how it got there.
Remotely piloted vehicles might useful for long haul trucking. It would be easier to drive in shifts this way if the drivers did not have to be physically present. They could even get a decent "night"'s sleep in a bed when not driving.
Google plans to offer its own business-class services on Fiber. Can't have people running their own servers as competition. This company tends to claim support for whatever is politically popular among techies and then quietly go back on it when it affects their bottom line.
Have they gone back, though? Speaking as a strong supporter of personal servers and one who has been running such servers on consumer grade Internet connections for 15 years, this is first time I've heard it suggested that Net Neutrality implied that ISP's needed to allow servers on their consumer Internet offerings.
Net Neutrality, as I've understood it, means that an ISP must treat the packets to and from the Internet the same. For example: They should not impair packets from Yahoo or give preferential treatment to packets from Google. It means no matter who you are or how much money you have not have to bribe ISP's, as long as you can host a server, your customers will be able to reach it. It does not say that any ISP must always allow their customers to connect servers directly to their network.
I think that geeks are seeing "Don't be evil" and assuming that this means that if Google is on their side on some issues that Google has to be on their side on all issues.
My 'dumb' router is never going to decide my fridge needs to route through china to send my grocery list to my phone.
Actually, it might. The quick and easy smart device schemes I have seen require that all communication between devices route through an external server. If hosting starts migrating to China and local infrastructure to to short circuit these paths doesn't become pervasive in the mean time, you might very well find that your fridge talks to your phone via China.
What sort of people get their teeth drilled often enough that this is an option? If you have good teeth, do you really want the unnecessary drilling to put this device in? Even if you have bad teeth, how often do you need those fillings replaced? Do you really want to take them out early just you can change the battery in this device?
And then there is the problem of what happens if the device does not survive the hostile environment inside a human mouth and starts leaking whatever toxic chemicals it is made of.
Worse than that. It will practically be a requirement to overdose and kill yourself to be competitive.
Indeed. In racing, any advantage that is not forbidden is mandatory.
So, if you eliminate rules prohibiting doping then all competitive athletes will have to max out on drugs, steroids, and red blood cell enhancements. "Max" will be whatever allows the most performance while still allowing the athlete the stay alive long enough to finish the race. Some will go over. The rest won't live much past their time in the spot light.
Slashdot Mirror
The read-modify-write penalty for overwriting existing data in-place is huge (even with attempts to minimize it with smart block mapping) and not worth the very minor increase in areal density. It's a bad sign that the storage industry was forced to adopt this because it means better encoding technologies are further off in the future than originally anticipated. Brick wall.
If it means that rotating media no longer has a write performance advantage over flash, then it is a very poor compromise indeed.
Google, Yahoo, and Facebook weren't this vocal before the Snowden Chronicles. Disingenuous bullshit from all. This is only damage-control so they can continue making more money, it has nothing to do with your rights. Bootlicker.
-- Ethanol-fueled
Sure. It's damage control but look at it from their point of view. They are getting orders from a secret court. If they complain in a manner that is legal, nobody hears it. Nothing changes. If they complain in a manner that could get the public's attention, employees risk criminal prosecution, the company loses credibility (because it looks like they are the ones collaborating), AND nothing may change. Damned if you don't. Double damned if you do.
After Snowden, the damage is done, and their best course of action is to raise as much of a stink as much as possible. Which still looks lame because the law is written to squash effective opposition and no one wants to go to jail over this.
I'm sure you think you would be willing to be the hero. But do you really want to be prosecuted for a federal offense in a secret court?
According to TFA, genetic damage during cell division is slowed. Brain aging would be affected little, at least directly. So few new neurons are produced during adulthood that for a long time, it was thought that all the neurons that a human would ever have were present at birth. Still, having a healthier support system for the brain should reduce cell death.
Further, there is still the potential for other advances to add the ability to generate new neurons. There is no particular reason why aging needs to be conquered with a single method.
Ok, maybe that was harsh.
Every wonder why there is more and more un/underemployment? It's because we can do more with less. By eliminating rote jobs we gain efficiency. The utopian ideal envisioned in the 60s is that we would all be working 10-15 hour work weeks by the 90s through automation and computer technology making things more efficient.
What they completely missed is that a human will trade roughly 2000 hours per year of their life to make enough money for food and shelter. Computers and robots don't really matter, it's just that each human can produce more stuff for those 2000 hours. There is no need to let them work less or pay them any more. You just need fewer of them.
Which is an obstacle trivially removed by a bit of well understood government regulation. And if the 60's economy had kept going through today, we would probably have that already.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a worker utopia: Foreign competition became a real threat, for the first time since WWII. Instead of a clamoring to reduce working hours, there was a clamoring to free businesses from regulation so they could compete more effectively with whatever nation seemed ready to eat or lunch.
Without government controls businesses do whatever they think is more profitable and it just cheaper to pay fewer people to work 40 hour weeks than it is to pay more people to work less. Benefits and infrastructure costs scale with employees, not the number of hours they work. It's even better if you can scare them into working more than 40 hour weeks while still only paying them for 40 hour weeks.
The exception is low paid hourly workers, where it is cheapest to limit hours to part time so you can dispense with paying any benefits at all. Now since these positions are almost always service roles with no foreign competition, you might think that something could be done with such travesties. But no such luck. Government controls would ruin us all. After all, if we paid pizza delivery guys more then the Chinese would take over the pizza business. Or maybe it is because other businesses would become uncompetitive if the cost of pizza went up.
I'm surprised that the inventor of The Internet would make such erroneous claims.
Of all places, Slashdot really ought not to fall victim to such an erroneous meme.
What Al Gore actually said: "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
"In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."
- Newt Gingrich, 2000
He didn't do that either. Al Gore was involved in the creation of NREN, the successor to Arpanet and NSFnet and the immediate predecessor to the commercialized Internet we have today. But the Internet already existed and had for several years, dating no later than 1983, with the creation of a gateway between Arpanet and CSnet.
This chart is nearly useless, as it doesn't account for the average distance traveled per country.
Not necessarily useless, just the answer to a different question. You are focused on "how safe are the roads?" but this chart is about "how safe are the people?".
Driving less is as valid a means of reducing risk of road fatality as making safer roads. Maybe if the US had better public transportation and less urban sprawl there would be fewer traffic fatalities.
From TFA:
Previous studies on mice lacking Rev-ErbA showed decreased skeletal muscles, metabolic rate, and running capacity. Such mice appeared fated by their genetics to live as couch potatoes.
When Burris' group administered SR9009 to these mice to activate the Rev-Erb protein, the results were remarkable. The metabolic rate in the skeletal muscles of the mice increased significantly. The treated mice were not allowed to exercise, but despite this they developed the ability to run about 50 percent further before being stopped by exhaustion.
So they created some broken mice and then treated them with a drug that reversed what they broke. And, what do you know? The effects were reversed too.
I'd like to see a followup on unmodified mice to see if they also benefit. If Rev-ErbA is already present and active at normal levels, the drug may not do anything.
Can you explain how two thirty year old adults are able to form a zero year old baby?
Yes, actually. It's a combination of limited cell division and selection.
Men produce huge numbers of sperm. Sperm with damaged dna tend not to win the race to the egg.
Women produce far fewer eggs but they do it early in life before much damage can accumulate.
If the zygote does end up with damaged DNA, it usually aborts spontaneous. In fact, about 70% of conceptions abort spontaneously.
So any fetus that survives these trials is generally in good shape at birth. If that baby is female, eggs are then quickly produced for the next generation before much new genetic rot can take place.
Is it space elevator time yet?
Perhaps not.
However, there does appear to be at least one fly in the ointment - material stability. It seems that if you have more than one strand of Carbyne that contacts another one, cross-links will form and will degrade the material’s strength. Money quote from the article; “This barrier suggests the viability of carbyne in condensed phase at room temperature on the order of days”
Consciousness is defined as, roughly, conscious personal experience.
Bingo! Consciousness is defined in terms of itself.
We *know* we have conscious experience.
Actually. No. We think we have conscious experience. We believe this. We don't know it. We don't even really know what it means to say that we do.
Consciousness is nothing more than a place holder for a reason to believe that we are special. It is that something that we are supposed to have that makes us different from everything else. As our machines gain more and more similar behavior, the definition of consciousness will be tightened more and more to exclude them.
So let me get this straight. These people are commuting out of the city they live in to go to work on company supplied buses and this is causing the city to loose money? It would be no different if they drove themselves to work. These people may be even less likely to live in the city if they had to drive themselves everyday. In which case the city would get nothing from them.
These part time residents compete with full time residents for housing. Rents go up and sales go down because people who would live and work in the City and spend more money there are forced out. Maybe they don't even work in SF, collectively nudging jobs and business elsewhere because working in San Francisco isn't nearly as desirable if you can't live there.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, the recession is technically over.
Which doesn't mean it can't come back later.
It seems to me that if you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth to call it recession, you should also need two consecutive quarters of positive growth to call it an expansion or recovery
One quarter of weak growth doesn't really tell you anything.
The helicopter needs a lot more room to land. Now this isn't terribly important until the "jetpack" is cleared for flying in populated areas but if/when it is the ability to land in a very small space will be a big deal.
That's actually a problem past a certain speed. At least in the U.S., they don't allow trains to travel at high speeds in populated areas because they can't usefully stop if somebody walks across the rail. They can't stop because there is very little friction possible. With a closed tube, you don't have that risk, so you can shoot through downtown L.A. doing 250 MPH.
So put up a chain link/plexiglass fence around it. Or better yet, worry less about drunks. Build the fence for cows anyway though.
In populated areas, the residents will look at the fence as an eyesore and file endless lawsuits to stop it. If you elevate, they will still file endless lawsuits. The only way to satisfy the nimbys is to build it underground. This costs a fortune but it would be exact same for Hyperloop.
Hyperloop doesn't solve any of the land use issues. It just removes the option to lay simple track on bare ground. Going down the unpopulated parts of the I5 corridor is the easy part for both Hyperloop and High Speed Rail. It just ignores the difficulties of getting in and out of cities. For instance, I5 doesn't even go to San Francisco and finding an acceptable connection from the the Central Valley to the Bay Area has been probably *the* biggest land use problem for High Speed Rail.
My biggest issue is when people tell me that I can't use Google Maps as my GPS. I'm NOT going to buy a Garmin device! My 4" tablet is my GPS!
It wouldn't help anyway. The exception is only for navigation systems built into the car. An add-on gps, even if dedicated to the task is still illegal to use while driving in California.
With there being such an extensible UI, you can just create your own preferences button and dialog and share it with the rest of the world.
And next time you want to go into the city, you can learn all the skills required to construct a train or motor vehicle from scratch, and then you can share them with the rest of the world.
Don't be ridiculous. We're all about automation. Instead of providing a working but rather inflexible rail system, we will provide you with a fantastic machine that will quickly build any kind of train you can imagine as long as you can describe it accurately using our custom variant of lisp.
"The researchers processed the nonmetallic fraction of waste circuit boards into a powder and found that it adsorbed metals like copper, lead, and zinc"
I'm not going to read the article (I am a slashdot user after all), but where in the world of electronic waste do you find PCBs without any metal? That would mean they don't have any traces or solder joints... unlikely to say the least.
Two layer PCB's with the surface metal already stripped off. More likely left over material when odd shaped PC boards were cut from rectangular sheets.
I wonder if this is the route we will see MS take.
Why not? It's the standard progression for large tech companies in decline. Services are an effective way to extract profit from established mind share when products are fading. The big iron companies have all gone down this road.
Control Data, which survives as Ceridian, a pure services company
Unisys, which used to make mainframes is now an IT services company
DEC merged into Compaq into HP which has threatened to turn pure services
IBM still makes products but service revenue dominates
>> with their student debt they can't afford to move
If your worldly possessions don't comfortably fit in a car by the end of your undergrad, you're doing it wrong. (And I would I suspect your debt problems go beyond student loans.)
It doesn't take much furniture to not comfortably fit into a car and it's usually cheaper than living somewhere that is furnished. Of course, the usual solution is to abandon/give away said furniture because it was never all that valuable any way.
If your wage prospects are so dismal that you can't afford to buy a new bed then I guess you might have a problem.
still need some to pickup and drop packages and remote drivers will cost more then just an driver doing it all.
The sending and receiving depots have people to load and unload. I can't see it being used for end point deliveries without extensive additional automation. However, for moving packages between depots, it would work fine.
That's what would be a step further. Being able to direct my car to come pick me up and not bother me with the details of how it got there.
Remotely piloted vehicles might useful for long haul trucking. It would be easier to drive in shifts this way if the drivers did not have to be physically present. They could even get a decent "night"'s sleep in a bed when not driving.
Google plans to offer its own business-class services on Fiber. Can't have people running their own servers as competition. This company tends to claim support for whatever is politically popular among techies and then quietly go back on it when it affects their bottom line.
Have they gone back, though? Speaking as a strong supporter of personal servers and one who has been running such servers on consumer grade Internet connections for 15 years, this is first time I've heard it suggested that Net Neutrality implied that ISP's needed to allow servers on their consumer Internet offerings.
Net Neutrality, as I've understood it, means that an ISP must treat the packets to and from the Internet the same. For example: They should not impair packets from Yahoo or give preferential treatment to packets from Google. It means no matter who you are or how much money you have not have to bribe ISP's, as long as you can host a server, your customers will be able to reach it. It does not say that any ISP must always allow their customers to connect servers directly to their network.
I think that geeks are seeing "Don't be evil" and assuming that this means that if Google is on their side on some issues that Google has to be on their side on all issues.
My 'dumb' router is never going to decide my fridge needs to route through china to send my grocery list to my phone.
Actually, it might. The quick and easy smart device schemes I have seen require that all communication between devices route through an external server. If hosting starts migrating to China and local infrastructure to to short circuit these paths doesn't become pervasive in the mean time, you might very well find that your fridge talks to your phone via China.
What sort of people get their teeth drilled often enough that this is an option? If you have good teeth, do you really want the unnecessary drilling to put this device in? Even if you have bad teeth, how often do you need those fillings replaced? Do you really want to take them out early just you can change the battery in this device?
And then there is the problem of what happens if the device does not survive the hostile environment inside a human mouth and starts leaking whatever toxic chemicals it is made of.
Worse than that. It will practically be a requirement to overdose and kill yourself to be competitive.
Indeed. In racing, any advantage that is not forbidden is mandatory.
So, if you eliminate rules prohibiting doping then all competitive athletes will have to max out on drugs, steroids, and red blood cell enhancements. "Max" will be whatever allows the most performance while still allowing the athlete the stay alive long enough to finish the race. Some will go over. The rest won't live much past their time in the spot light.