Apparently we're going to have to do the 60's-70's again to reintroduce people who weren't paying attention at the time to what it looks like when the country actually gets messed up. OMG, the economy is only growing at a 2.5% annualized rate and unemployment is over 5%!!!@!!!@!!
This is actually quite a traditional thing; what we used to call Letters of Marque were issued to pirates to 'legalize' their attacks on the enemy. While these were banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the US is not a signatory to that treaty, and theoretically Congress could issues these permissions (it's a power specifically granted them in the Constitution).
I think you're right and that is the limitation on current implementations; AFAIK there's no theoretical limit on the improvements we might get in that area, though.
A capacitor has to hold the positively and negative charged portions of itself nearby, but electrically isolated; to keep the insulation from being crushed (opposite charges attract, remember) requires a certain physical strength proportinal the the charge stored that will put at least a top-end limit on capacitor capacity.
Interestingly, this is dependent (duh) on the strength (energy) of chemical bonds, so IIRC, the theoretical limit for capacitors is actually pretty much the same as for chemical fuels or batteries. (Now, small electric motors are more efficient than small engines, so electric systems can be a huge win, although the fuel system don't have to carry their own oxidizer...blah blah blah.)
Pretty much anything non-nuclear (you can throw flywheels, nanotech windup springs, and what have you in, too), should in a perfect world max out at roughly the same magnitude because they're all fundamenentally dependent on that chemical bond strength.
But this isn't an N-body problem, it's a 1-body problem. They can look at the actual ex-post-facto positions of the planets, and ignore the satellite's gravitational pull on them.
Of course, now you might need hyper-precise measurements of planetary position, but at least the N-body mess is out of the way.
new operating system that works to three state bits, stores its configuration in jpegs, uses venn diagrams and tonal whistles instead of WIMP and communicates with hardware not by interrupts, but by a "alphabetical sort queue" principle
So if $4.7B is the reserve, what's the significance of the $13,823,000?
A random number? A secret message indicating the bidder (they can't say during bidding, and no, 18323 is not a valid US zip code)? Google revenues while I was writing this message?
"The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy. I'm not sure what you're really driving at here.. who's the "you" in this sentence, and why isn't "the you" represented by "the government"?
"The Government" does not always (usually) operate by consensus, thus the need to protect (especially minorities) against uncompensated takings. More to the point, government often can be accurately modeled as a bunch of lying crooks.
First of all, your economics is silly; this kind of hardware has high fixed costs, so you almost always maximize profit by maximizing sales (or close to it). Nobody is preventing a nonprofit from buying classmates and giving them away at a loss, if that's the problem.
But the real problem is worse than that; you assume nonprofits follow their charter without fail. What happens in practice is that nonprofits eventually end up working to maximize prestige and cushy jobs at nonprofits, regardless of their ostensible goals, because that's the behaviour that gets rewarded. Negroponte apparently thinks he's entitled to a monopoly on this hardware class because his intentions are pure; no such luck.
If you're willing to depend on a net connction, you could use some sort of VNC pointing at individual virtual machines running on central hosts, and make them into portable thin clients. That could be a neat solution... I'm not sure it doesn't foil the point of having laptops in the first place, though, depending on user needs.
Refining and transporting gasoline is more energy-expensive than you'ld think, and piston engines really aren't very good.
Tesla has some possibly biased numbers indicating than they win big, with their 3-1 efficiency advantage down to 2-1 once you factor in the coversion costs you're talking about.
It's theoretically possible to get around this problem with the some public-key tricks; it doesn't authenticate the remote host if you do it that way, but I believe the only feasible attack would be a man-in-the-middle proxy where you have to impersonate each side to the other (which would be a lot of cycles, for an ISP). I guess you could also really secure it with something like (exactly like?) SSL certificates, too. Looking at RFCs, it looks like there's been some work on this, but I can't tell how much.
IPSec would thwart this sort of attack (since it encrypts at the IP layer, you can't forge a RST packet in the TCP header). Yeah, it costs more CPU, but that's not a problem for modern PC clients, and I suspect Google can handle it, too. Is it time for this to become SOP?
Now, whether MS would be cooperative in that, I dunno... I know XP supports it, but not too much about configuration specifics.
That's clever. What you really want is a router/NAT in front of your home net that held incoming RST packets for, say, 250ms, and then dropped rather than forwarding them if they were followed by data packets. (Any of the current traffic-shaping modules easily capable of this?)
Comcast could still *block* the connection, but then they'd have to be using some kind of statefull firewall, which is much more expensive and doubtful to be worth the bother.
Nice idea, but it may not make sense. As has been pointed out, you need skilled programmers, and you need good support. Your only sensible bet would be to hire a local shop to customize and support one of the existing GPLed POS solutions... but unless you're already a good-sized chain, that isn't likely to be much cheaper than buying proprietary, and may be more expensive.
Now, if a company already supporting an OS POS is in your area, that's a promising option; but the economics likely won't work out if you're basically the only paying user.
IIRC, the block checksums are stored in the inode, not with the individual blocks. It turns out that one of the main failure modes of modern disks isn't reading a few bits wrong, but missing slightly on a seek and actually returning the wrong block! Block-included checksums won't find this, since it's still a valid block...
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Apparently we're going to have to do the 60's-70's again to reintroduce people who weren't paying attention at the time to what it looks like when the country actually gets messed up. OMG, the economy is only growing at a 2.5% annualized rate and unemployment is over 5%!!!@!!!@!!
Hopefully we can avoid disco this time.
Well, here you go, then.
Certainly determining warming/cooling on a short scale is surprisingly much argued.
You throw out the data for 1992, following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.
Obviously, the answer to global warming is a system of manually operated volcanos. Any public-spirited supervillians reading out there?
We're not. IIRC, last year was the coolest in two decades, once you adjust for major volcanic eruptions.
I've had Basilisk processes!
/proc/[procid] would freeze. As you might guess, this was a huge PITA.
Anything that opened
This is actually quite a traditional thing; what we used to call Letters of Marque were issued to pirates to 'legalize' their attacks on the enemy. While these were banned by the 1856 Declaration of Paris, the US is not a signatory to that treaty, and theoretically Congress could issues these permissions (it's a power specifically granted them in the Constitution).
I think you're right and that is the limitation on current implementations; AFAIK there's no theoretical limit on the improvements we might get in that area, though.
A capacitor has to hold the positively and negative charged portions of itself nearby, but electrically isolated; to keep the insulation from being crushed (opposite charges attract, remember) requires a certain physical strength proportinal the the charge stored that will put at least a top-end limit on capacitor capacity.
Interestingly, this is dependent (duh) on the strength (energy) of chemical bonds, so IIRC, the theoretical limit for capacitors is actually pretty much the same as for chemical fuels or batteries. (Now, small electric motors are more efficient than small engines, so electric systems can be a huge win, although the fuel system don't have to carry their own oxidizer...blah blah blah.)
Pretty much anything non-nuclear (you can throw flywheels, nanotech windup springs, and what have you in, too), should in a perfect world max out at roughly the same magnitude because they're all fundamenentally dependent on that chemical bond strength.
But this isn't an N-body problem, it's a 1-body problem. They can look at the actual ex-post-facto positions of the planets, and ignore the satellite's gravitational pull on them.
Of course, now you might need hyper-precise measurements of planetary position, but at least the N-body mess is out of the way.
If you rupture the air tank, absolutely!
new operating system that works to three state bits, stores its configuration in jpegs, uses venn diagrams and tonal whistles instead of WIMP and communicates with hardware not by interrupts, but by a "alphabetical sort queue" principle
.Net?
Wait, is that Vista or
You can get essentially the same keyboard (with some different layout options, as well) in PS/2 or USB, new, from a company called Unicomp:
Unicomp 104-key keyboard
It's not a real keyboard if you can't beat a man to death with it.
Um, hypothetically, I mean.
So if $4.7B is the reserve, what's the significance of the $13,823,000?
A random number? A secret message indicating the bidder (they can't say during bidding, and no, 18323 is not a valid US zip code)? Google revenues while I was writing this message?
Any ideas?
"The Government" is supposed to be "the people" in a democracy. I'm not sure what you're really driving at here.. who's the "you" in this sentence, and why isn't "the you" represented by "the government"?
"The Government" does not always (usually) operate by consensus, thus the need to protect (especially minorities) against uncompensated takings. More to the point, government often can be accurately modeled as a bunch of lying crooks.
First of all, your economics is silly; this kind of hardware has high fixed costs, so you almost always maximize profit by maximizing sales (or close to it). Nobody is preventing a nonprofit from buying classmates and giving them away at a loss, if that's the problem.
But the real problem is worse than that; you assume nonprofits follow their charter without fail. What happens in practice is that nonprofits eventually end up working to maximize prestige and cushy jobs at nonprofits, regardless of their ostensible goals, because that's the behaviour that gets rewarded. Negroponte apparently thinks he's entitled to a monopoly on this hardware class because his intentions are pure; no such luck.
Capitalism works. Deal with it.
If you're willing to depend on a net connction, you could use some sort of VNC pointing at individual virtual machines running on central hosts, and make them into portable thin clients. That could be a neat solution... I'm not sure it doesn't foil the point of having laptops in the first place, though, depending on user needs.
There's a minor technical problem with marching that army from China to Taiwan or Japan...
China's navy is probably a match for Taiwan's; Japan's is clearly superior, and the US Navy is on a whole other scale.
Refining and transporting gasoline is more energy-expensive than you'ld think, and piston engines really aren't very good.
Tesla has some possibly biased numbers indicating than they win big, with their 3-1 efficiency advantage down to 2-1 once you factor in the coversion costs you're talking about.
It's theoretically possible to get around this problem with the some public-key tricks; it doesn't authenticate the remote host if you do it that way, but I believe the only feasible attack would be a man-in-the-middle proxy where you have to impersonate each side to the other (which would be a lot of cycles, for an ISP). I guess you could also really secure it with something like (exactly like?) SSL certificates, too. Looking at RFCs, it looks like there's been some work on this, but I can't tell how much.
IPSec would thwart this sort of attack (since it encrypts at the IP layer, you can't forge a RST packet in the TCP header). Yeah, it costs more CPU, but that's not a problem for modern PC clients, and I suspect Google can handle it, too. Is it time for this to become SOP?
Now, whether MS would be cooperative in that, I dunno... I know XP supports it, but not too much about configuration specifics.
That's clever. What you really want is a router/NAT in front of your home net that held incoming RST packets for, say, 250ms, and then dropped rather than forwarding them if they were followed by data packets. (Any of the current traffic-shaping modules easily capable of this?)
Comcast could still *block* the connection, but then they'd have to be using some kind of statefull firewall, which is much more expensive and doubtful to be worth the bother.
Except that the Senate vote against it was 98-0...
Nice idea, but it may not make sense. As has been pointed out, you need skilled programmers, and you need good support. Your only sensible bet would be to hire a local shop to customize and support one of the existing GPLed POS solutions... but unless you're already a good-sized chain, that isn't likely to be much cheaper than buying proprietary, and may be more expensive.
Now, if a company already supporting an OS POS is in your area, that's a promising option; but the economics likely won't work out if you're basically the only paying user.
IIRC, the block checksums are stored in the inode, not with the individual blocks. It turns out that one of the main failure modes of modern disks isn't reading a few bits wrong, but missing slightly on a seek and actually returning the wrong block! Block-included checksums won't find this, since it's still a valid block...