Now THERE is an argument for SSDs and punch cards if I ever heard one. And paper, there will always be paper.
But the suns magnetic field can't just increase by a few orders of magnitude, so it has to be induced by a solar flare. A hemisphere sized geomagnetic storm however first has to hit the power lines quite hard to produce strong magnetic fields, and then humanity will have other problems.
Not just mainstreamlined but also compressed into less than two hours. So you get a version which cuts out half the important bits or leaves non-readers with a half baked experience.
I hope for more Science Fiction in series format, though hopefully one with a pre-written story arch and not one which meanders around for half the time like BSG (or, as I have heard, Lost) to make more money at the expense of sense. Digital distribution without the backing of a TV station but instead costing $1 or $2 per episode plus "sponsored by" advertisement might just make it feasible.
Or maybe distribute obligatory reading material (~2-3 pages) before the viewing so you can build a more complex tale on top of that without having the need for characters to repeat (for them) unbelievably obvious facts and still lose half the viewers.
Now that I think about it, doing "real science" at home would be quite an interesting, nay, awesome hobby. A hobby community doing (anonymous) peer review and mutual reproduction of results. Maybe putting a few urban myths to rest.
And you could include schools in that, there is probably a lot of stuff out to discover which requires keep observation, measurement and then perhaps the help of a statistician to help sort the data. Counting number of animals and species in different kinds of gardens (all kept clean, lot of exotic plants, with a fish(less) pond etc.), dental caries vs. preferred school meal/drink, oh, and repeating the rats on drug experiment Rat Park - providing free heroin to rats has a remarkably unintuitive outcome. And schools collaborating nationwide and thus getting a large enough sample size could probably dig up something really remarkable. To say nothing of the large term effects wrt. science literacy.
Yes, information can only be transmitted at light speed. (Except [gravity] information [..])
No, that would break the universe. Gravity is also limited by by c. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity says: The speed of gravity in general theory of relativity is equal to the speed of light in vacuum, c.
But look at who got the extra money, in large parts it was exported overseas and is still being exported there. I wonder how much of the negative trade deficit comes from just that.
Money raised from this tax would stay within the country and when used wisely can foster new technology. Much better than giving billions each year into the hands of, well... you need a tagline to sell it: terrorist sympathizers! (Not the Saudi gov't itself, but quite a few of it's citizen). Oil prices will go up inevitably, better to prepare for the future now. And since many corporations don't look beyond the next quarter, this sadly is the only way.
Yes, IIRC by the same mechanism Venus has a lot of relatively heavier elements (Carbon, Oxygen, Sulfur), but barely any Hydrogen if you compare it to Earth and count the oceans as part of the atmosphere.
Water (gas) is split by solar radiation higher up, and the light hydrogen is carried upwards, and some of these particles bump into each other and often enough these bumps add up to escape velocity for one particle. Supposedly solar winds also play a significant role, and as Mars and Venus don't have a magnetic field anymore to protect them, over the eons all the hydrogen was lost. One more factor for the Drake Equation!
The recent anti-sat missiles which China and the USA tested just took out satellites which were in low earth orbit, 400km max. This satellite is in a geosynchronous orbit, which is about 36,000 km high (and for reference, the moon is 380,000 km away, so a moon-earth Lagrange point would make a little more sense).
And these anti-sat missiles don't even have to reach a 400 km orbit, an epileptic orbit which would intersect with earth again (but happens to intersect with another satellite first) is sufficient, that is why they could be launched from a warship. Not that taking down a geostationary sat would be impossible - since they don't zip overhead with 25,000 km/h it could actually be easier, but these weapons are not build for it and would need another booster base.
Indeed, fellow literate:) - And troll is such a harsh word...
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
by stupidity.
(not saying whose)
Does it think too far ahead and thus has the same problems as IPv6? Does some other technology make it obsolete for carriers? Such as maybe the technology of deep packet inspection and bundling known internet streams into one.
Quantum computers can turn some problems that require exponential time to solve into a polynomial time.
you mean transforming nondeterministic polynomial (NP, or deterministic exponential) into polynomial (P) problems, then this is wrong:
"There is a common misconception that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. That is not known to be true, and is generally suspected to be false."
The word "some" doesn't save you either, if you do it for one NP-complete problem, you'd just gotten yourself a Fields Medal:)
And on the other end(s) of the loudspeaker, is the idea of multicasting going anywhere? After radio more and more TV, eventually in HD, will be streamed and having a full 1-1 connection for every client seems terribly wasteful.
Is multicast tied too tighly to IPv6, already obsolete, can it be jury-rigged into IPv4 by the ISP and a smart enough router? I always feel bad when listening to a niche radio station for the bandwidth cost I incurr...
Is this for real or did I misunderstand what this is about?
These set-top boxes will be loaded with image identification software, given targets (but nothing that is on DVD already and some other phony limitations) and the scan the output continuously for a matches. If they find one they will scream "Hah, Pirate!" and cut the output. Oh brother!
And when they find something, they most certainly won't send that data back over the wire, right?!
I was sortof following your argument until there...
On the long run, any coal you don't dig up and burn for energy is an ace up your sleeve on the international energy market: "Sure, we are interested in your coal, but better make a new offer else we'll have a closer look at our cubic kilometers of coal still buried under waiting-to-be-blown up mountains. And it would be a shame if something happened to the coal price, right?"
Naively looking at Ironman (well, 1) as a science fiction movie (it does star a technology-loving closet-nerd after all) shows that it gets most science stuff wrong as usual.
Ignoring the effects such harsh accelerations would have on a person (and the lack of an internal waste management system), it e.g. suffers from The One Secret Prototype syndrome. Technology is tightly coupled with the first implementation, and nobody but the creator understands it and nobody ever copied the blueprints. Research is done by the Lone Scientist, in this case at least a Good Guy and not a fringe groups which makes absurd advances on their own, and without anyone else noticing. Other effects of technology such as the quite advanced AI available and the power source per-se are ignored to concentrate on the action part. I wonder how well part 2 does in these areas.
That stuff your uncle used to deal with wasn't a weaponized aerosol either.
Even a very dedicated and professional group couldn't properly weaponize anthrax: The Japanese Aum sect, which later opted for sarin gas to attack the Tokio Subway, tried that twice and didn't kill anyone with it.
Greg Egan had a nice extrapolation (spoilers) in his Wang's Carpets short (later expanded in the novel Diaspora) that on top of such a large biomass, or rather inside it, a completely virtual world is computed. I.e. the computation substrate is not silicon but biomass following certain rules. This computed universe did not interact with the outside world (and that world lacking predators, it didn't have to) but just created a virtual self contained world.
nicotine addiction [..] Cold turkey is the only method that actually works [..]
Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties. However, only after coadministration with an MAOI, such as those found in tobacco, nicotine produces significant behavioral sensitization, a measure of addiction potential. (source)
When when the first step is switching to an nicotine administration method which then is easier to quit, I'd say that makes it easier to actually quit. However, since nicotine itself is not that harmful these might become as commonplace as coffee is now as a stimulating drug.
Wrong, it has 74.4 GiB (Giga binary bytes), and 79.9 GB. And another perfect reason to switch. With bigger harddrives the discrepancy between base-10 and base-2 only becomes bigger, so the sooner we leave these digital imperial units, the better!
Also, isn't 10.10 the perfect version number to do the switch?
Yes, it is not that this could dissolve (or "destroy") and entire communities, such as blind peoples braille alphabet or deaf peoples sign language. There was actually a case where parents wanted their child to be deaf as well. Cochlear implants are seen quite critical by some. I'm not sure where to stand on this issue. Maybe communities which enhance themselves collectively will replace those.
As to tetrachomats and their obvious evolutionary advantages, there is the corresponding hypothesis that being colorblind makes it easier for you to spot certain shapes.
What I have had in mind for a long is something even more mobile - a credit card sized micro computer with a number pad and a simple LCD display. Sortof like a calculator.
The OS on that has the public key of the bank and it has it's own private key for the owner (and the bank the corresponding public key). Thus it could use any medium to communicate with the bank, no matter how insecure. Maybe via a USB-dongle which you attach to the PC you are using. For online banking, you just go onto the bank site, no login there, and when asked for credentials you enter these on the card. Transactions get shown on the display of this unit, "You are about to transmit $349 to someShop.com, enter PIN" etc. As long as customers know to only trust their cards you could use the most malware infested PC in an internet café and nothing would come of it. And even if some phisher convinces the hapless user that their card is broken and they have to enter the PIN on some phishing website, they still don't have the public key and thus can't do anything with it.
You could also use that in your grocery store, and prepare offline packages (with your public key) "pay $56 for this meal to the owner", enter your PIN and the waiter sticks the card somewhere it can communicate with your bank.
Right, newer distributions mount/tmp as tmpfs as well. No such thing on my ancient install, so I use/dev/shm. That defaults to half the available RAM, which I think is more than the default for/tmp. Talking about RAM for file storage: Being able to just tell the OS to keep a certain file cached no matter what the scheduler says would be nice too (wasn't the sticky bit on files used for that a long time ago?).
As for cluttering,/tmp gets cleaned upon reboot (that doesn't happen anymore?), and since I shut down for the night...
Tiered Storage - "on the fly" support for that is something I would love to see:
All your files are on on big 2TB rotating-rust* HD
The OS automatically uses a 10 or 20 GB SSD to cache the parts which are accessed most.
Then of course the usual RAM cache on top of that.
And CPU cache on top of that, thus - 4 tiers!
I'd prefer that software solution to a hardware solution since the OS knows so much more about which files it would make sense to cache and which aren't worth it. Also, you could overrule the prediction algorithms easily to cache the music you want to listen to or the database you are working on. I actually use/dev/shm (a Linux tmpfs in RAM) often to store quickly changing files.
* I know iron oxides aren't used anymore, but I still like the mental image:)
The summary mentions dynamic programming; but this book contains nothing about dynamic programming. (A particular method suitable to problems with optimal substructure that can be used in a subset of cases where recursion can be used and typically generates results very quickly.)
Yes, "calling code dynamically" is not the classic dynamic programming approach: Think of Pascal's triangle, each field is the sum of it's two predecessor in the previous row. You could calculate such a field by calling a recursive function, as parent suggests, but that is very inefficient: Consider the first two calls, to the top-left and top-right. These then do another call, and they overlap (rhombus-like): The top-right of the left with the top-left of the right. Here you could re-use the result if you had cached it, but since you start from the bottom you can't do that. And the redundancies become worse and worse the higher you go up.
So a dynamic programming approach is to start from the top and remember the result for a row, then start the next one. It is used where recursion might describe the problem properly, but makes it's implementation inefficient. Doing long Levenshtein distance calculations (transforming one string into another with a minimum of steps) is done in this way as well, resulting in O(n^2) runtime instead of, err, something like O(2^n) runtime IIRC because you have to do a recursive call for an insertion, a deletion or a replacement, i.e. 3 calls, while navigating through all possible character substitution paths in the string1 vs string2 matrix.
Slashdot Mirror
Now THERE is an argument for SSDs and punch cards if I ever heard one. And paper, there will always be paper.
But the suns magnetic field can't just increase by a few orders of magnitude, so it has to be induced by a solar flare. A hemisphere sized geomagnetic storm however first has to hit the power lines quite hard to produce strong magnetic fields, and then humanity will have other problems.
Not just mainstreamlined but also compressed into less than two hours. So you get a version which cuts out half the important bits or leaves non-readers with a half baked experience.
I hope for more Science Fiction in series format, though hopefully one with a pre-written story arch and not one which meanders around for half the time like BSG (or, as I have heard, Lost) to make more money at the expense of sense. Digital distribution without the backing of a TV station but instead costing $1 or $2 per episode plus "sponsored by" advertisement might just make it feasible.
Or maybe distribute obligatory reading material (~2-3 pages) before the viewing so you can build a more complex tale on top of that without having the need for characters to repeat (for them) unbelievably obvious facts and still lose half the viewers.
Now that I think about it, doing "real science" at home would be quite an interesting, nay, awesome hobby. A hobby community doing (anonymous) peer review and mutual reproduction of results. Maybe putting a few urban myths to rest.
And you could include schools in that, there is probably a lot of stuff out to discover which requires keep observation, measurement and then perhaps the help of a statistician to help sort the data. Counting number of animals and species in different kinds of gardens (all kept clean, lot of exotic plants, with a fish(less) pond etc.), dental caries vs. preferred school meal/drink, oh, and repeating the rats on drug experiment Rat Park - providing free heroin to rats has a remarkably unintuitive outcome. And schools collaborating nationwide and thus getting a large enough sample size could probably dig up something really remarkable. To say nothing of the large term effects wrt. science literacy.
Yes, information can only be transmitted at light speed. (Except [gravity] information [..])
No, that would break the universe. Gravity is also limited by by c. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity says: The speed of gravity in general theory of relativity is equal to the speed of light in vacuum, c.
[..] directly caused by energy prices rising.
But look at who got the extra money, in large parts it was exported overseas and is still being exported there. I wonder how much of the negative trade deficit comes from just that.
Money raised from this tax would stay within the country and when used wisely can foster new technology. Much better than giving billions each year into the hands of, well... you need a tagline to sell it: terrorist sympathizers! (Not the Saudi gov't itself, but quite a few of it's citizen). Oil prices will go up inevitably, better to prepare for the future now. And since many corporations don't look beyond the next quarter, this sadly is the only way.
Yes, IIRC by the same mechanism Venus has a lot of relatively heavier elements (Carbon, Oxygen, Sulfur), but barely any Hydrogen if you compare it to Earth and count the oceans as part of the atmosphere.
Water (gas) is split by solar radiation higher up, and the light hydrogen is carried upwards, and some of these particles bump into each other and often enough these bumps add up to escape velocity for one particle. Supposedly solar winds also play a significant role, and as Mars and Venus don't have a magnetic field anymore to protect them, over the eons all the hydrogen was lost. One more factor for the Drake Equation!
Too high.
The recent anti-sat missiles which China and the USA tested just took out satellites which were in low earth orbit, 400km max. This satellite is in a geosynchronous orbit, which is about 36,000 km high (and for reference, the moon is 380,000 km away, so a moon-earth Lagrange point would make a little more sense).
And these anti-sat missiles don't even have to reach a 400 km orbit, an epileptic orbit which would intersect with earth again (but happens to intersect with another satellite first) is sufficient, that is why they could be launched from a warship. Not that taking down a geostationary sat would be impossible - since they don't zip overhead with 25,000 km/h it could actually be easier, but these weapons are not build for it and would need another booster base.
Indeed, fellow literate :) - And troll is such a harsh word...
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. (not saying whose)
Does it think too far ahead and thus has the same problems as IPv6? Does some other technology make it obsolete for carriers? Such as maybe the technology of deep packet inspection and bundling known internet streams into one.
Quantum computers can turn some problems that require exponential time to solve into a polynomial time.
you mean transforming nondeterministic polynomial (NP, or deterministic exponential) into polynomial (P) problems, then this is wrong:
"There is a common misconception that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. That is not known to be true, and is generally suspected to be false."
The word "some" doesn't save you either, if you do it for one NP-complete problem, you'd just gotten yourself a Fields Medal :)
And on the other end(s) of the loudspeaker, is the idea of multicasting going anywhere? After radio more and more TV, eventually in HD, will be streamed and having a full 1-1 connection for every client seems terribly wasteful.
Is multicast tied too tighly to IPv6, already obsolete, can it be jury-rigged into IPv4 by the ISP and a smart enough router? I always feel bad when listening to a niche radio station for the bandwidth cost I incurr...
Is this for real or did I misunderstand what this is about?
These set-top boxes will be loaded with image identification software, given targets (but nothing that is on DVD already and some other phony limitations) and the scan the output continuously for a matches. If they find one they will scream "Hah, Pirate!" and cut the output. Oh brother!
And when they find something, they most certainly won't send that data back over the wire, right?!
Indeed, that is what Web 2.0 is all about:
You generate all the content, they make all the money!
Stupid hippie.
I was sortof following your argument until there...
On the long run, any coal you don't dig up and burn for energy is an ace up your sleeve on the international energy market: "Sure, we are interested in your coal, but better make a new offer else we'll have a closer look at our cubic kilometers of coal still buried under waiting-to-be-blown up mountains. And it would be a shame if something happened to the coal price, right?"
Naively looking at Ironman (well, 1) as a science fiction movie (it does star a technology-loving closet-nerd after all) shows that it gets most science stuff wrong as usual.
Ignoring the effects such harsh accelerations would have on a person (and the lack of an internal waste management system), it e.g. suffers from The One Secret Prototype syndrome. Technology is tightly coupled with the first implementation, and nobody but the creator understands it and nobody ever copied the blueprints. Research is done by the Lone Scientist, in this case at least a Good Guy and not a fringe groups which makes absurd advances on their own, and without anyone else noticing. Other effects of technology such as the quite advanced AI available and the power source per-se are ignored to concentrate on the action part. I wonder how well part 2 does in these areas.
That stuff your uncle used to deal with wasn't a weaponized aerosol either.
Even a very dedicated and professional group couldn't properly weaponize anthrax: The Japanese Aum sect, which later opted for sarin gas to attack the Tokio Subway, tried that twice and didn't kill anyone with it.
Greg Egan had a nice extrapolation (spoilers) in his Wang's Carpets short (later expanded in the novel Diaspora) that on top of such a large biomass, or rather inside it, a completely virtual world is computed. I.e. the computation substrate is not silicon but biomass following certain rules. This computed universe did not interact with the outside world (and that world lacking predators, it didn't have to) but just created a virtual self contained world.
nicotine addiction [..] Cold turkey is the only method that actually works [..]
Technically, nicotine is not significantly addictive, as nicotine administered alone does not produce significant reinforcing properties. However, only after coadministration with an MAOI, such as those found in tobacco, nicotine produces significant behavioral sensitization, a measure of addiction potential. (source)
When when the first step is switching to an nicotine administration method which then is easier to quit, I'd say that makes it easier to actually quit. However, since nicotine itself is not that harmful these might become as commonplace as coffee is now as a stimulating drug.
79,919,312,896 Bytes (74.4GB).
Wrong, it has 74.4 G i B (Giga binary bytes), and 79.9 GB. And another perfect reason to switch. With bigger harddrives the discrepancy between base-10 and base-2 only becomes bigger, so the sooner we leave these digital imperial units, the better!
Also, isn't 10.10 the perfect version number to do the switch?
Yes, it is not that this could dissolve (or "destroy") and entire communities, such as blind peoples braille alphabet or deaf peoples sign language. There was actually a case where parents wanted their child to be deaf as well. Cochlear implants are seen quite critical by some. I'm not sure where to stand on this issue. Maybe communities which enhance themselves collectively will replace those.
As to tetrachomats and their obvious evolutionary advantages, there is the corresponding hypothesis that being colorblind makes it easier for you to spot certain shapes.
What I have had in mind for a long is something even more mobile - a credit card sized micro computer with a number pad and a simple LCD display. Sortof like a calculator.
The OS on that has the public key of the bank and it has it's own private key for the owner (and the bank the corresponding public key). Thus it could use any medium to communicate with the bank, no matter how insecure. Maybe via a USB-dongle which you attach to the PC you are using. For online banking, you just go onto the bank site, no login there, and when asked for credentials you enter these on the card. Transactions get shown on the display of this unit, "You are about to transmit $349 to someShop.com, enter PIN" etc. As long as customers know to only trust their cards you could use the most malware infested PC in an internet café and nothing would come of it. And even if some phisher convinces the hapless user that their card is broken and they have to enter the PIN on some phishing website, they still don't have the public key and thus can't do anything with it.
You could also use that in your grocery store, and prepare offline packages (with your public key) "pay $56 for this meal to the owner", enter your PIN and the waiter sticks the card somewhere it can communicate with your bank.
Did I just solve online banking security? :)
ZFS offers this already, they call it the L2ARC, you can read about it here: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test
Oh, wow! I am even more impressed by ZFS now. Thanks for sharing, This is probably worth a separate Slashdot story.
Right, newer distributions mount /tmp as tmpfs as well. No such thing on my ancient install, so I use /dev/shm. That defaults to half the available RAM, which I think is more than the default for /tmp.
/tmp gets cleaned upon reboot (that doesn't happen anymore?), and since I shut down for the night...
Talking about RAM for file storage: Being able to just tell the OS to keep a certain file cached no matter what the scheduler says would be nice too (wasn't the sticky bit on files used for that a long time ago?).
As for cluttering,
I'd prefer that software solution to a hardware solution since the OS knows so much more about which files it would make sense to cache and which aren't worth it. Also, you could overrule the prediction algorithms easily to cache the music you want to listen to or the database you are working on. I actually use /dev/shm (a Linux tmpfs in RAM) often to store quickly changing files.
:)
* I know iron oxides aren't used anymore, but I still like the mental image
The summary mentions dynamic programming; but this book contains nothing about dynamic programming. (A particular method suitable to problems with optimal substructure that can be used in a subset of cases where recursion can be used and typically generates results very quickly.)
Yes, "calling code dynamically" is not the classic dynamic programming approach: Think of Pascal's triangle, each field is the sum of it's two predecessor in the previous row. You could calculate such a field by calling a recursive function, as parent suggests, but that is very inefficient: Consider the first two calls, to the top-left and top-right. These then do another call, and they overlap (rhombus-like): The top-right of the left with the top-left of the right. Here you could re-use the result if you had cached it, but since you start from the bottom you can't do that. And the redundancies become worse and worse the higher you go up.
So a dynamic programming approach is to start from the top and remember the result for a row, then start the next one. It is used where recursion might describe the problem properly, but makes it's implementation inefficient. Doing long Levenshtein distance calculations (transforming one string into another with a minimum of steps) is done in this way as well, resulting in O(n^2) runtime instead of, err, something like O(2^n) runtime IIRC because you have to do a recursive call for an insertion, a deletion or a replacement, i.e. 3 calls, while navigating through all possible character substitution paths in the string1 vs string2 matrix.