The Web is the World Wide Web. The web is what the spider lives in. The Net is the global TCP/IP network. The net is what the fish are caught in.
I find it amusing that uber hype-mongers Wired (sorry "wired") claim that there was never any need to capitalize, they probably are responsible for it in the first place...
DIRAC, the BBC-technology project to bring a new, royalty and patent free open source codec into life, has got to be worth looking into.
Yes, well, I'll believe it when I see it. The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer to the tune of GBP 2.5Bn (that's around USD 4Bn) per year. All the material they produce WE ALREADY OWN. I should be able to download - or at least, buy for the cost of the media alone - anything produced by the BBC ever, simply by proving that I've paid the TV tax (which I have). Instead, the BBC is off on some ivory tower "let's invent a new format" wild goose chase.
There are already squillions of codecs. The BBC should just pick one and get to work encoding its video archives for download. Dirac is nothing but procrastination.
That way if it goes boom, not as many people need to translocate.
Fusion reactors don't explode. The fusion reaction itself is extremely delicate. If anything goes wrong, it simply stops. Sure you now have some hot plasma/gas, but not very much, and it'll cool by itself if left alone. Remember that your reactor is wrapped in cooling systems anyway, since that's how you get the power out of it (at least until we recover sufficient He3 that the power can be extracted magnetically).
No doubt they've bought other technologies to slow development.
I've heard this asserted many times. But, the patent database is online, Slashdot refers to it all the time. I've very curious to know if you can post a patent number for an oil-alternative that is currently owned by an "oil" company for the purpose of suppressing its development.
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
You might be right, but remember there's really no such thing as an oil company. There are only energy companies. The smart ones recognize that, the dumb ones think it's all about oil. No-one wants oil. What they want is motive power.
Also remember that not much oil goes into power stations - mostly they're natural gas, coal nuclear, hydro, etc. Oil ends up in automobiles of one sort or another. Pitch it to Bush that Texas can provide all the oil the US needs and fusion will supply the rest and he can get the US out of the Middle East for good (barring support for Israel of course), and he'll jump at the chance, I reckon.
If you want accurate information try to get a sattelite receiver with a large dish and even in most parts of the US you would be able to receive BBC world and some other news stations. With less biased information.
You say "less biased" but what you really mean is "biased in a way that I agree with myself". The BBC is at least as biased as Fox, just in the opposite direction. The closest thing you'll get to unbiased news is a facts-only feed from Reuters or someone, and even Reuters is staffed by humans, with their own biases.
Therefore, if you were chatting with a person in a computer and said something that ticked them off and they refused to talk to you anymore, simply shut it down, resore from backup, and restart. Murder? Not really, there's no death. I think it's worse.
Yes, but would you have a real person running on the Linux box in your bedroom?
If this ever happens on a large scale, the uploaded "people" will live in a secure datacentre, probably buried under a mountain or something, and they will do work (i.e. creating intellectual property) which they will sell to fund it all. Maybe they'll have robots of a sort to perform basic maintenance (if you can run a mind in a computer, why not teleoperate a bipedal robot? You've already got all the motor skills you need). It will be protected by that physical security, and it will also have the protection of the law. Who would agree to be uploaded if they knew they could be as easily manipulated as you suggest?
Since the 70s, scientists and sci-fi authors have been promising that a revolution, including real AI, is "just around the corner". But the elusive breakthroughs recede further into the distance the more progress is made.
There are plenty of contemporary sci-fi authors working in the near-future, the next few decades or centuries, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan and Neal Asher being among the most notable. Reynolds in particular is very good - his future humanity colonizes the stars using a mix of cryogenics and relativistic time, no warp drives here.
Also, he mistakes the point of pedandtry. No-one is bothered if the science is possible (yet) but any author worth his salt knows that the fictional technology must be CONSISTENT. A device can't act one way in one story and a completely different way in another, because if that happens, it's not sci-fi anymore but pure fantasy (and not even good fantasy). Sheer laziness and lack of talent on the part of the author.
It showed all the stereotypes of the genre, making it an excellent parody imho.
Well, it was deliberately made in the style of 1930s and 40s propaganda, and IMHO it succeeded brilliantly. See some of those originals, if you can, and you'll see what I mean.
The two quotes that you made clearly show that America has been doing something wrong in the eyes of the terrorists.
You mean, allowing its women to walk around without burqas? Allowing people to practice any religions that they want to? NOT killing Jews simply because they are Jewish?
The problems the terrorists have with us are not socioeconomic, they are purely ideological. There is NOTHING we can do that would satisfy them, short of becoming exactly like them.
we don't have to care about personal vanities of managers or women and get straight to the point.
You are UTTERLY wrong about personal vanity of hackers. Hackers are the vainest people around. Sure they don't care about their appearance, but to them reputation is EVERYTHING. Just watch the vicious flamewars that start whenever anyone disses anyone elses code.
Secondly, you are utterly wrong that women are any more vain than men. They just express it in a more overt way than men, that's all. Men are equally self-absorbed and narcissist.
I still have questions, but this gives me some more search ideas. Thanks
Introduction to Global Financial Markets by Stephen Valdez is the book of choice where I work (at a global financial services company, if you hadn't guessed:-).
Why don't we change the name of computer science to something more appropriate
Computer science should never have existed as an academic discipline in its own right anyway. It should have remained in Mathematics or Electronic Engineering departments, where it belonged. It only did because some Maths departments saw people who were more interested in the electronics side and some EE departments saw people who were more interested in the theory of discrete maths. What they should of done is just swapped a few people around, not created a new department and shoved them all into it.
there is no way for any central entity to know that I've done this
That's true, and that's why the central banks often need to guess, for example, cutting the interest rate and seeing what happens.
It seems that as more stuff is created the amount of stuff you could get for a dollar would go up
That actually happens; look at how CPU power per dollar has gone up, for example. But the price of a computer - say between $500 and $1000 - has remained fairly constant.
Where is this money injected into the system? Does the mint just deliver boxes of money to the bank for free? Leave it laying around on street corners?
Now we're getting into real finance:-) When you hear that the "interest rate" has been changed by the Fed (or the Bank of England) what that actually is is the "repo rate". A central bank has the power to compel other banks to enter into "repo" contracts, which requires them to buy (or sell) a certain asset, and get/give it back again in 28 days with interest. The interest rate is the "cost" of money. The lower the interest rate, the cheaper money is, the more loans will be taken out by individuals and businesses. Now we come to "fractional reserve banking". This means that, for a certain class of instrument, a bank must have a certain amount of cash "on hand". For example, if a bank has a billion dollars worth of mortgages outstanding, it might have to have a hundred million dollars in cash reserves. Money can be added or subtracted from these reserves by repo contracts.
By monkeying with the "repo rate" and thereby affecting the reserve ratios, the central bank can create money (which enters the economy as loans) or destroy money (which leaves the economy as interest, the banks profit being the difference between its interest rate and the repo rate it must pay the central bank).
What is an academic degree, except a title of nobility?
A degree is a certificate of a certain minimum level of competence in a field, of course. It's a shortcut; provided you trust the institution that the degree comes from, you don't have to test the basic skills of a prospective employee, you can move onto the more important things. That's why some universities are prestigious; over time, it has been demonstrated that there is a high correlation between their degrees and people who are highly capable.
I don't see on what grounds a degree could be compared to an artistocratic title.
They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't.
Ermm, remember the Performa series? Also known as the LC. My first Mac was an LC475 back in the day, basically was was a small case and an FPU-less '040 at 25 Mhz. Came with 4M RAM and a 250M HD, but I upgraded mine to 12M and 1.3G!! Or the iMac?
Apple has tried on multiple occasions to have a cheap entry-level option, with varying degrees of success.
Not having studied economics much I'm still at a lost for how money enters the system. If there are 1,000 dollars today, and 1,001 tomorrow, where did that extra dollar come from?
The purpose of the central bank (among other things) is to regulate the supply of money. Ideally there wil be a 1:1 mapping between "amount of money in circulation" and "amount of stuff you can buy". When the amount of stuff goes up (through work done to transform cheap raw materials into expensive end products) the amount of money goes up too. However, if there is more money than there is stuff to buy, the system is out of balance. In theory, then, it would be possible to buy everything, and still have some money left! The value of this extra money is therefore zero. So what happens is the price of all the goods in the market increases until the 1:1 mapping is restored. That is called "inflation" and happens when central banks just print more money without paying attention to the underlying factors.
That's a simplification, but that's how more money appears. Value is first created, through work, then money is created to act as a "handle" onto that value.
"They can also be modelled over a time period of weeks or months instead of over just a few days."
Ohh sweet, so then what used to take days now takes months?
Think about a weather system: the more days they can model, the better. That's what this means; in a reasonable amount of time, weeks or months of activity can be simulated.
Slashdot Mirror
In the next version of slashcode, only three comments will be allowed for each post in order to reduce confusion among moderators.
And each story will only be allowed to be posted 3 times, to reduce confusion among editors...
The Web is the World Wide Web. The web is what the spider lives in. The Net is the global TCP/IP network. The net is what the fish are caught in.
I find it amusing that uber hype-mongers Wired (sorry "wired") claim that there was never any need to capitalize, they probably are responsible for it in the first place...
CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.
That's a damn good question. Wasn't it CA who bought the commercial arm of PGP too? Whatever happened to that?
Exactly.
DIRAC, the BBC-technology project to bring a new, royalty and patent free open source codec into life, has got to be worth looking into.
Yes, well, I'll believe it when I see it. The BBC is funded by the British taxpayer to the tune of GBP 2.5Bn (that's around USD 4Bn) per year. All the material they produce WE ALREADY OWN. I should be able to download - or at least, buy for the cost of the media alone - anything produced by the BBC ever, simply by proving that I've paid the TV tax (which I have). Instead, the BBC is off on some ivory tower "let's invent a new format" wild goose chase.
There are already squillions of codecs. The BBC should just pick one and get to work encoding its video archives for download. Dirac is nothing but procrastination.
That way if it goes boom, not as many people need to translocate.
Fusion reactors don't explode. The fusion reaction itself is extremely delicate. If anything goes wrong, it simply stops. Sure you now have some hot plasma/gas, but not very much, and it'll cool by itself if left alone. Remember that your reactor is wrapped in cooling systems anyway, since that's how you get the power out of it (at least until we recover sufficient He3 that the power can be extracted magnetically).
No doubt they've bought other technologies to slow development.
I've heard this asserted many times. But, the patent database is online, Slashdot refers to it all the time. I've very curious to know if you can post a patent number for an oil-alternative that is currently owned by an "oil" company for the purpose of suppressing its development.
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
You might be right, but remember there's really no such thing as an oil company. There are only energy companies. The smart ones recognize that, the dumb ones think it's all about oil. No-one wants oil. What they want is motive power.
Also remember that not much oil goes into power stations - mostly they're natural gas, coal nuclear, hydro, etc. Oil ends up in automobiles of one sort or another. Pitch it to Bush that Texas can provide all the oil the US needs and fusion will supply the rest and he can get the US out of the Middle East for good (barring support for Israel of course), and he'll jump at the chance, I reckon.
It was the only TV channel that would cut out in the middle of live speeches at the DNC, just to tar and feather the current speaker.
Not so different from the BBC's coverage of the Conservative Party conference.
If you want accurate information try to get a sattelite receiver with a large dish and even in most parts of the US you would be able to receive BBC world and some other news stations. With less biased information.
You say "less biased" but what you really mean is "biased in a way that I agree with myself". The BBC is at least as biased as Fox, just in the opposite direction. The closest thing you'll get to unbiased news is a facts-only feed from Reuters or someone, and even Reuters is staffed by humans, with their own biases.
Therefore, if you were chatting with a person in a computer and said something that ticked them off and they refused to talk to you anymore, simply shut it down, resore from backup, and restart. Murder? Not really, there's no death. I think it's worse.
Yes, but would you have a real person running on the Linux box in your bedroom?
If this ever happens on a large scale, the uploaded "people" will live in a secure datacentre, probably buried under a mountain or something, and they will do work (i.e. creating intellectual property) which they will sell to fund it all. Maybe they'll have robots of a sort to perform basic maintenance (if you can run a mind in a computer, why not teleoperate a bipedal robot? You've already got all the motor skills you need). It will be protected by that physical security, and it will also have the protection of the law. Who would agree to be uploaded if they knew they could be as easily manipulated as you suggest?
Also, he mistakes the point of pedandtry.
He being Doctorow, I mean, not Reynolds in this paragraph.
Since the 70s, scientists and sci-fi authors have been promising that a revolution, including real AI, is "just around the corner". But the elusive breakthroughs recede further into the distance the more progress is made.
There are plenty of contemporary sci-fi authors working in the near-future, the next few decades or centuries, Alastair Reynolds, Richard Morgan and Neal Asher being among the most notable. Reynolds in particular is very good - his future humanity colonizes the stars using a mix of cryogenics and relativistic time, no warp drives here.
Also, he mistakes the point of pedandtry. No-one is bothered if the science is possible (yet) but any author worth his salt knows that the fictional technology must be CONSISTENT. A device can't act one way in one story and a completely different way in another, because if that happens, it's not sci-fi anymore but pure fantasy (and not even good fantasy). Sheer laziness and lack of talent on the part of the author.
It showed all the stereotypes of the genre, making it an excellent parody imho.
Well, it was deliberately made in the style of 1930s and 40s propaganda, and IMHO it succeeded brilliantly. See some of those originals, if you can, and you'll see what I mean.
The two quotes that you made clearly show that America has been doing something wrong in the eyes of the terrorists.
You mean, allowing its women to walk around without burqas? Allowing people to practice any religions that they want to? NOT killing Jews simply because they are Jewish?
The problems the terrorists have with us are not socioeconomic, they are purely ideological. There is NOTHING we can do that would satisfy them, short of becoming exactly like them.
Gigli.
I'm afraid Matrix Revolutions was worse.
I have also been writing Perl for the last 15 years
dump Perl completely after using it for 12 years
Only 4 more paragraphs and you'd have been using Perl for zero years!
we don't have to care about personal vanities of managers or women and get straight to the point.
You are UTTERLY wrong about personal vanity of hackers. Hackers are the vainest people around. Sure they don't care about their appearance, but to them reputation is EVERYTHING. Just watch the vicious flamewars that start whenever anyone disses anyone elses code.
Secondly, you are utterly wrong that women are any more vain than men. They just express it in a more overt way than men, that's all. Men are equally self-absorbed and narcissist.
I still have questions, but this gives me some more search ideas. Thanks
:-).
Introduction to Global Financial Markets by Stephen Valdez is the book of choice where I work (at a global financial services company, if you hadn't guessed
Why don't we change the name of computer science to something more appropriate
Computer science should never have existed as an academic discipline in its own right anyway. It should have remained in Mathematics or Electronic Engineering departments, where it belonged. It only did because some Maths departments saw people who were more interested in the electronics side and some EE departments saw people who were more interested in the theory of discrete maths. What they should of done is just swapped a few people around, not created a new department and shoved them all into it.
there is no way for any central entity to know that I've done this
:-) When you hear that the "interest rate" has been changed by the Fed (or the Bank of England) what that actually is is the "repo rate". A central bank has the power to compel other banks to enter into "repo" contracts, which requires them to buy (or sell) a certain asset, and get/give it back again in 28 days with interest. The interest rate is the "cost" of money. The lower the interest rate, the cheaper money is, the more loans will be taken out by individuals and businesses. Now we come to "fractional reserve banking". This means that, for a certain class of instrument, a bank must have a certain amount of cash "on hand". For example, if a bank has a billion dollars worth of mortgages outstanding, it might have to have a hundred million dollars in cash reserves. Money can be added or subtracted from these reserves by repo contracts.
That's true, and that's why the central banks often need to guess, for example, cutting the interest rate and seeing what happens.
It seems that as more stuff is created the amount of stuff you could get for a dollar would go up
That actually happens; look at how CPU power per dollar has gone up, for example. But the price of a computer - say between $500 and $1000 - has remained fairly constant.
Where is this money injected into the system? Does the mint just deliver boxes of money to the bank for free? Leave it laying around on street corners?
Now we're getting into real finance
By monkeying with the "repo rate" and thereby affecting the reserve ratios, the central bank can create money (which enters the economy as loans) or destroy money (which leaves the economy as interest, the banks profit being the difference between its interest rate and the repo rate it must pay the central bank).
What is an academic degree, except a title of nobility?
A degree is a certificate of a certain minimum level of competence in a field, of course. It's a shortcut; provided you trust the institution that the degree comes from, you don't have to test the basic skills of a prospective employee, you can move onto the more important things. That's why some universities are prestigious; over time, it has been demonstrated that there is a high correlation between their degrees and people who are highly capable.
I don't see on what grounds a degree could be compared to an artistocratic title.
They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't.
Ermm, remember the Performa series? Also known as the LC. My first Mac was an LC475 back in the day, basically was was a small case and an FPU-less '040 at 25 Mhz. Came with 4M RAM and a 250M HD, but I upgraded mine to 12M and 1.3G!! Or the iMac?
Apple has tried on multiple occasions to have a cheap entry-level option, with varying degrees of success.
Not having studied economics much I'm still at a lost for how money enters the system. If there are 1,000 dollars today, and 1,001 tomorrow, where did that extra dollar come from?
The purpose of the central bank (among other things) is to regulate the supply of money. Ideally there wil be a 1:1 mapping between "amount of money in circulation" and "amount of stuff you can buy". When the amount of stuff goes up (through work done to transform cheap raw materials into expensive end products) the amount of money goes up too. However, if there is more money than there is stuff to buy, the system is out of balance. In theory, then, it would be possible to buy everything, and still have some money left! The value of this extra money is therefore zero. So what happens is the price of all the goods in the market increases until the 1:1 mapping is restored. That is called "inflation" and happens when central banks just print more money without paying attention to the underlying factors.
That's a simplification, but that's how more money appears. Value is first created, through work, then money is created to act as a "handle" onto that value.
"They can also be modelled over a time period of weeks or months instead of over just a few days."
Ohh sweet, so then what used to take days now takes months?
Think about a weather system: the more days they can model, the better. That's what this means; in a reasonable amount of time, weeks or months of activity can be simulated.
Enterprise has hmm... not sure yet.
Hoshi!
They should just call it "Hoshi in Space" and have the camera follow her around for 45 mins...