In a voter-controlled nation such as the United States (or Canada), the powerful must control the minds of the populace in order to maintain power. This is done through propaganda.
In totalitarian nations such as China (or the former Soviet Union) a strong propaganda machine is not needed because it is not necessary to have the approval of the people.
Robots are a pay-once type of deal; you don't need to pay again unless they break.
Uh, no. Think of the boring ol' robots they use to make cars. These are replaced every few years as the parts wear out. They aren't always as cost-effective as you might like.
Now for space exploration, robots are really good. Consider the Apollo mission. Most of the payload was just stuff to keep three people alive in a completely hostile environment. Robots just need electricity.
In some organizations it is going the other way. One large organization I know of is very likely to go to Linux on the desktop: they have huge investments in Solaris and HP/UX, and they're worried that people will leave if forced to use NT. Gradually young linux advocates like us will infiltrate everything (you want to hire someone competent with computers? Chances are they've played with Linux a fair bit), and it will gradually get more support.
But the US spends about $300 billion per year on military, and Costa Rica spends nothing. That's $1000 per year more of your taxes going to killing innocent Serbians. Maybe this could be better spent too, eh?:)
This is great spam proofing, because nobody knows the answer to this.
Hey, if it stops you from flaming me by mail, all the better.:) If anyone really wants to email me, they can look up the city name (it ain't Toronto!).
Interesting that this has lit such nationalist sentiments on both sides.
It's actually necessary to consider the issue more deeply. We (Canadians) don't need to buy health insurance, our taxes pay for that. Curiously enough, our fresh vegetables, mostly imported from California, cost as much in Canadian dollars as they cost in Califoria in US dollars. Many other products such as housing are also less expensive.
Our taxes are high compared to the US, but (as the UN has time and time again stated) we have a high standard of living, and have no slums nearly as bad as what is very common in the States. There are places in your cities where it is not safe to go ever; this is not true here.
So really it balances out pretty closely. The "National Post," a right-wing newspaper, continuously demands lower taxes to stem the "brain drain" of emigrants to the US, but this drain is more than compensated for by well-educated foreign immigrants; also, surveys of those leaving suggest that lower taxes are not a high priority for them.
Yes, the Sun 3/50 is a sturdy machine. I set one up for my brother as an Xterm (also a loaded 3/60 with 24 MBytes of memory). But the damn thing cost about $10,000 for a base system in 1985!
Big servers like Sun Enterprises and large HPs are still sturdily build, like the large servers of yore.
At this university they record our MAC addresses as well, but as I have a Sun, I can change the number to whatever I like. (I've heard some PCI eth cards do this now too; anybody know?)
During the term I need to keep it the same because the port is configured to only respond to a card with the appropriate MAC address. This lets you connect only one machine, so you can't share (unless you can set up IP MASQ, but we all know how terribly difficult that is.;) )
First of all, I think the idea of educating people is a good thing. Don't get me wrong!
But, according to Johan Galtung's Rank Disequilibrium theory of war, educating the poor, if done by itself, can encourage violent revolutions.
The theory goes like this: when people are wealthy, educated, respected, and their skills are being well used, they are not likely to revolt. Likewise, if they are poor, uneducated, abused, and ignored they are likely to be resigned to their lot, and be not likely to revolt. However, people who are a mix, eg poor but educated and unable to get a worthwhile job, are unhappy and are therefore more likely to revolt.
This theory suggests that to cause a civil war, one should:
Create universities, producing an intellectual class
Make few positions available where the education can be used effectively
Institute mass education
Make no other changes, so the populace is educated but given no opportunity to better themselves with any correstponding rise in economic status or power.
Galtung does not suggest by this that 3rd world countries should be kept in their "underdog" position, but that development should be done on several fronts simultaneously.
Why would you expect that it would degrade faster?
If it's just solid-state components, it should be expected to either wear out quickly (not built well enough) or practically never (it's just silicon).
Electronics that break fail not because of the chips wearing out (unless extremely new), but rather by traces being cut and such. (Poor connections is also troublesome.) Component-value shifting can be a problem for large components (solitary resistors and capacitors, especially), but not for stuff etched in silicon. We're still using a VIC-20 as a clock; the only problem is the timing capacitors have changed value enough that it loses about a minute every hour.:}
Actually, they replace the robots very frequently in car assembly plants, so being able to work on different designs is not a particularly important point.
Human's take a very long time to wear out, and take little maintenance (OK, a few cokes and a pizza now and again, but no oil, replacement bearings, etc).
Real Mac users don't use Microsloth products either. They use QuarkXPress, Pagemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, BBEdit. These are the big programs, not some crap from Microsloth.
What we need is a snappy little program that sends an enormous quantity of valid-looking information in their format. That way they'll be unable to determine what's real and what's realistic giberish.
Actually, I'd really like to have hardware schematics for my computer. If someone were to manufacture a LART I'd buy one just for the sake of having the schematics. (Also darn useful for robotics, I'd expect.)
As is hardly news, it's possible to sell Free Software, RMS has been doing it for a very long time (selling tapes of emacs, for example). RedHat is a newer example of the same.
I quote from a "Business Protection Agreement" that I signed to work at a computer company.
I heareby assign to $company all my rights in and to all inventions, discoveries, know-how, technical or commercial information, computer programs in any form, written materials, data bases, intergrated circuit topologies, plans, diagrams, drawings, models and other things (collectively referred to as "inventions") which I may conceive, develop or reduce to practice during the period of my contract with $company and which:
relate, directly or indirectly, to $company's present or reasonably forseeable future business or research development; or
result from any work performed by me for $company; or
are created or made using any equipment, supplies, facility, resources or Confidential Information
whether or not they are made during or after working hours, on or off $company's premises, or alone or with others.
It goes on, but you get the point. I don't own it, just because I wrote it after 5 pm.
Not really. Learning English as a second language is very difficult compared to other languages. I started doing a gratis Esperanto course about two weeks ago, and already know a considerable fraction of the language. The rules of Esperanto are very simple and logical, so learning it is way easier than English (or even French or Latin, which are better structured than English).
If you use pure oxygen as the source of oxygen (!), then the result will be mostly pure water. But using air as a source of oxygen will cause contaminants from the air. Quantities may be low enought to be relatively harmless.
After all, burning pure octane (C8H18) should produce 8 CO2 and 9 H2O molecules, but if you analyse automobile emissions you get nasty nitrates and ozone.
Also, the inside of the engine is not made of gold or platinum, so it will react to a limited degree (quite limited or it wouldn't last long).
Now low earth orbit is starting to become possible for aircraft. To a significant extent, this is a result of the National Aerospace Plane (which curiously enough, was conceived by engineers working on the Avro Arrow)
Be happy NASA did that work, or you wouldn't have low orbits possible from aircraft.
Also, NASA would love to forget about this low earth orbit crap. Carl Sagan and others have been haranguing it for years to do some Real Work. Funding has been cut, so they have been required to change to the "faster, better, cheaper" model. It's a good idea; some $200 million probes will be lost. But no $5 billion probes are lost.
The Soviets beat the US into orbit, were damn close for the moon, yet none of their Mars probes survived. That NASA has been successful shows a great deal of technichal excellence.
The greatest hope for space exploration is China. They have a big space program, which will, hopefully, scare the Americans into spending more on space to beat the "Communists", like they did against the Soviet Union.
Second is their a new all digital standard for connecting these to video cards
It's not a standard, but the new 22" Apple LCD monitors (not all that new) work with a special digital video card, providing a digital signal to the monitor (this is what I remember, I can't find any mention of it on the site). You can only get the monitor with a G4 desktop and card. Quite likely the accompanying MacOS has special drivers for it.
IEEE's Spectrum magazine, which appears to not be online (!), has an article in the Feb. 2000 issue about using magnetic RAM — just when the reason it's called a "core dump" was fading into the distant past:')
Apparently these new iron memories would change in one clock cycle, but would then hold the state. (I can't recall the exact details of how it works, it was too late when I read it last night.) I got the impression that it could be used like EEPROM or flash-EEPROM, except sufficiently fast and inexpensive to be used for main memory.
One of the major things stopping amateur musicians (like myself) from recording is the cost of studio time. My idea is to set up a web site that allows people to download MP3s legally and quickly, but not distribute them further. The ad revenues from the site could (help?) pay for studio time for good amateur musicans. Of course some sort of verification that one has skill would be necessary. Does anyone know how much studio time costs and what sort of ad revenue would be required?
(I'm saying that the music should not be further distributed, of course, to protect ad revenues. There shouldn't be much need, if the site is sufficiently fast. And "unofficial" redistribution isn't worth worrying about, we just don't want some rogue site mirroring our work and getting his own ad revenue.)
Well, I said this because OO is more maintainable. There has already been discussion of this (all you people working when I sleep!). Maybe I'm wrong, maybe everything should be written in assembler instead of OO.:')
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In totalitarian nations such as China (or the former Soviet Union) a strong propaganda machine is not needed because it is not necessary to have the approval of the people.
I don't know about a WINE equivalent, but there is Basilisk, a Mac emulator. It requires an image of a real ROM, but I understand it's quite good.
Uh, no. Think of the boring ol' robots they use to make cars. These are replaced every few years as the parts wear out. They aren't always as cost-effective as you might like.
Now for space exploration, robots are really good. Consider the Apollo mission. Most of the payload was just stuff to keep three people alive in a completely hostile environment. Robots just need electricity.
Junkbuster does something similar.
In some organizations it is going the other way. One large organization I know of is very likely to go to Linux on the desktop: they have huge investments in Solaris and HP/UX, and they're worried that people will leave if forced to use NT. Gradually young linux advocates like us will infiltrate everything (you want to hire someone competent with computers? Chances are they've played with Linux a fair bit), and it will gradually get more support.
People will pay for it through taxes, yes.
But the US spends about $300 billion per year on military, and Costa Rica spends nothing. That's $1000 per year more of your taxes going to killing innocent Serbians. Maybe this could be better spent too, eh? :)
This is great spam proofing, because nobody knows the answer to this.
Hey, if it stops you from flaming me by mail, all the better. :) If anyone really wants to email me, they can look up the city name (it ain't Toronto!).
Interesting that this has lit such nationalist sentiments on both sides.
It's actually necessary to consider the issue more deeply. We (Canadians) don't need to buy health insurance, our taxes pay for that. Curiously enough, our fresh vegetables, mostly imported from California, cost as much in Canadian dollars as they cost in Califoria in US dollars. Many other products such as housing are also less expensive.
Our taxes are high compared to the US, but (as the UN has time and time again stated) we have a high standard of living, and have no slums nearly as bad as what is very common in the States. There are places in your cities where it is not safe to go ever; this is not true here.
So really it balances out pretty closely. The "National Post," a right-wing newspaper, continuously demands lower taxes to stem the "brain drain" of emigrants to the US, but this drain is more than compensated for by well-educated foreign immigrants; also, surveys of those leaving suggest that lower taxes are not a high priority for them.
Yes, the Sun 3/50 is a sturdy machine. I set one up for my brother as an Xterm (also a loaded 3/60 with 24 MBytes of memory). But the damn thing cost about $10,000 for a base system in 1985!
Big servers like Sun Enterprises and large HPs are still sturdily build, like the large servers of yore.
At this university they record our MAC addresses as well, but as I have a Sun, I can change the number to whatever I like. (I've heard some PCI eth cards do this now too; anybody know?)
During the term I need to keep it the same because the port is configured to only respond to a card with the appropriate MAC address. This lets you connect only one machine, so you can't share (unless you can set up IP MASQ, but we all know how terribly difficult that is. ;) )
First of all, I think the idea of educating people is a good thing. Don't get me wrong!
But, according to Johan Galtung's Rank Disequilibrium theory of war, educating the poor, if done by itself, can encourage violent revolutions.
The theory goes like this: when people are wealthy, educated, respected, and their skills are being well used, they are not likely to revolt. Likewise, if they are poor, uneducated, abused, and ignored they are likely to be resigned to their lot, and be not likely to revolt. However, people who are a mix, eg poor but educated and unable to get a worthwhile job, are unhappy and are therefore more likely to revolt.
This theory suggests that to cause a civil war, one should:
Galtung does not suggest by this that 3rd world countries should be kept in their "underdog" position, but that development should be done on several fronts simultaneously.
Why would you expect that it would degrade faster?
If it's just solid-state components, it should be expected to either wear out quickly (not built well enough) or practically never (it's just silicon).
Electronics that break fail not because of the chips wearing out (unless extremely new), but rather by traces being cut and such. (Poor connections is also troublesome.) Component-value shifting can be a problem for large components (solitary resistors and capacitors, especially), but not for stuff etched in silicon. We're still using a VIC-20 as a clock; the only problem is the timing capacitors have changed value enough that it loses about a minute every hour. :}
Human's take a very long time to wear out, and take little maintenance (OK, a few cokes and a pizza now and again, but no oil, replacement bearings, etc).
Real Mac users don't use Microsloth products either. They use QuarkXPress, Pagemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator, BBEdit. These are the big programs, not some crap from Microsloth.
What we need is a snappy little program that sends an enormous quantity of valid-looking information in their format. That way they'll be unable to determine what's real and what's realistic giberish.
Actually, I'd really like to have hardware schematics for my computer. If someone were to manufacture a LART I'd buy one just for the sake of having the schematics. (Also darn useful for robotics, I'd expect.)
As is hardly news, it's possible to sell Free Software, RMS has been doing it for a very long time (selling tapes of emacs, for example). RedHat is a newer example of the same.
I quote from a "Business Protection Agreement" that I signed to work at a computer company.
I heareby assign to $company all my rights in and to all inventions, discoveries, know-how, technical or commercial information, computer programs in any form, written materials, data bases, intergrated circuit topologies, plans, diagrams, drawings, models and other things (collectively referred to as "inventions") which I may conceive, develop or reduce to practice during the period of my contract with $company and which:
whether or not they are made during or after working hours, on or off $company's premises, or alone or with others.
It goes on, but you get the point. I don't own it, just because I wrote it after 5 pm.
Not really. Learning English as a second language is very difficult compared to other languages. I started doing a gratis Esperanto course about two weeks ago, and already know a considerable fraction of the language. The rules of Esperanto are very simple and logical, so learning it is way easier than English (or even French or Latin, which are better structured than English).
I wrote a program to calculate the Mandelbrot set in Postscript, as well as a few simpler fractals. If you're interested, you can find them here.
If you use pure oxygen as the source of oxygen (!), then the result will be mostly pure water. But using air as a source of oxygen will cause contaminants from the air. Quantities may be low enought to be relatively harmless.
After all, burning pure octane (C8H18) should produce 8 CO2 and 9 H2O molecules, but if you analyse automobile emissions you get nasty nitrates and ozone.
Also, the inside of the engine is not made of gold or platinum, so it will react to a limited degree (quite limited or it wouldn't last long).
Be happy NASA did that work, or you wouldn't have low orbits possible from aircraft.
Also, NASA would love to forget about this low earth orbit crap. Carl Sagan and others have been haranguing it for years to do some Real Work. Funding has been cut, so they have been required to change to the "faster, better, cheaper" model. It's a good idea; some $200 million probes will be lost. But no $5 billion probes are lost.
The Soviets beat the US into orbit, were damn close for the moon, yet none of their Mars probes survived. That NASA has been successful shows a great deal of technichal excellence.
The greatest hope for space exploration is China. They have a big space program, which will, hopefully, scare the Americans into spending more on space to beat the "Communists", like they did against the Soviet Union.
It's not a standard, but the new 22" Apple LCD monitors (not all that new) work with a special digital video card, providing a digital signal to the monitor (this is what I remember, I can't find any mention of it on the site). You can only get the monitor with a G4 desktop and card. Quite likely the accompanying MacOS has special drivers for it.
Apparently these new iron memories would change in one clock cycle, but would then hold the state. (I can't recall the exact details of how it works, it was too late when I read it last night.) I got the impression that it could be used like EEPROM or flash-EEPROM, except sufficiently fast and inexpensive to be used for main memory.
(I'm saying that the music should not be further distributed, of course, to protect ad revenues. There shouldn't be much need, if the site is sufficiently fast. And "unofficial" redistribution isn't worth worrying about, we just don't want some rogue site mirroring our work and getting his own ad revenue.)
Well, I said this because OO is more maintainable. There has already been discussion of this (all you people working when I sleep!). Maybe I'm wrong, maybe everything should be written in assembler instead of OO. :')