(Yes, the parent to this was probably a troll, but I thought I'd post this for people who are interested in some reasonably accurate information)
Actually... yes they do. Stick some coins in a pay phone and listen. A real pay phone, not a COCOT. As another poster said, they have learned in recent days to turn off the mic until the call is made, or apply a band pass filter to not let coin tones in through the mic. However, there are a LOT of payphones out there that can still be operated with a red box.
Another trick with red boxes is that the 10-10-XXX numbers don't have access to all the info from the phone company, and once you get to their version of insert money, the band pass filters tend to be turned off, and your red box will happily work on most pay phones. Of course, line quality using this for local calls sucks. It costs more, but if you're using a red box, that obviously doesn't matter, now does it.
Oh, and don't defraud the phone company. They may be greedy assholes, but it's still illegal and immoral.
Let's consider Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise. This is not a fallacy, it's true. As an amateur composer, I can compose and print a piece of music in a tenth of the time it would take me to do by hand.
Aah, and in your own statement, you negate yourself! The initial statement says NOTHING about speed! You could still sit there with a piano, a pencil, and some msuical score paper and 'record' your music, then play it back reading from what you wrote and using the amazing technology known as a rubber eraser, fix your typos.
I'm not saying that doing something orders of magnitude faster is not a big help, but you need to keep some perspective. The automation and speed of computers seems to me (and I'm guilty of this myself) to have encouraged sloppiness in many areas. His example of the letter that other people have attacked I think is misunderstood. The point he is trying to make is that with all the geegaws on word processors these days, people spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about trivia and end up writing beautiful (or horrendously ugly) letters with absolutely horrid content.
Back to computers allowing people to do more things...
Your point about scientific research is very accurate, and is one of the few points where I think he is wrong. In my work, there are some things that I occaisonally do that a person could not do by hand within their lifetime, I think, especially not with any useful level of accuracy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast for an example) . However, the masses aren't doing this kind of thing with computers. They are using them mostly as glorified typewriters, post offices, and game cupboards. For businesses, add to that filing cabinets and adding machines.
Related: The myth of the paperless office of the future: while some companies are finally getting on the ball and using computers to truly use less paper, most office use more paper because computers and printers make it easier to generate gobs of it.
Computers certainly have aided some forms of progress, but one must not overlook the retrograde movements they've brought about, nor overestimate what they have really done.
You're machine's not going to be doing anything but playing the game when you're using it for that, so who cares if you have to reboot into windows?
Some people have 1 pc that they have a small website hosted on, or whatever. Some people just don't like windows. Some people's computers (mine included) don't run stabily under windows, but work like a charm under linux. A Toyota Camry would probably serve all the needs of anyone who wanted a sedan (except perhaps price), and yet I don't think anyone would argue that having multiple different models of sedans on the market is a good thing. Yes, people can dual boot, but not everyone wants to. Also, rebooting requires closing down all your applications. What if I'm working on a project and just need a 5 minute respite to vent some frustration? Fully rebooting a computer twice can easily take 10 minutes!
Does it really matter that much what operating system you're running your games under?
Ok... Does it really matter what OS your browser runs under? Your word processor? Your IRC client? Your screensaver? Your email app? Your IDE?
See where I'm going with this? If OS really didn't matter, then we wouldn't have so bloody many of the damn things.
The real problem is that even when there is a linux port available, people buy the windows version anyway.
That's a problem, but is orthogonal to what I was referring to. The chicken and egg problem that I pretty clearly stated is that people won't make linux games if the technology and hardware support aren't there, and the technology and hardware support won't be there if people aren't making games (or other software that uses it, e.g. CAD, video editing) for linux.
If most games start being having linux & windows versions released simultaneously and the games generally work equally well on either platform, then I bet the linux users won't be buying the windows versions. Again, you have the chicken & egg and critical mass problems. As long as the majority of games are targeted at windows, the pinux gamers will either dual boot to run the game on windows where it works better, or will have a second computer with the gaming hardware in it. The latter category provide a good bit of resistance to switching over to linux games, until all the games they want to play often have good linux versions.
Linux needs to be able to handle multimedia out of the box, for almost any soundcard/network card/video card. Until this happens, what's the point of pushing Linux as a gaming OS? Don't put the cart before the horse.
Getting on the road usually happens faster if you're training the horse at the same time as you build the cart:) I agree that there are hardware support problems, but we can work on the hardware-independent stuff using the hardware that is supported at the same time as working on the support for new hardware.
Mostly, when I hear news like this, I want to tell people 'right tool for the right job'. Right now, the right tool for gaming is Windows. I wish it weren't so, but I also wish that the cheapest place to buy quality hand-tools wasn't Sears Roebuck.
While I'm a strong proponent of the right tool right job mentality, I'm also well aware of the chicken and egg problem. If nobody tries to push linux into being a gaming platform, it will never become one.
And lets face it, while hackers might be good at developing fun games, they're usually not good at developing ones with a lot of artwork. Text based games aren't groundbreakers any more and graphic artists don't often want to work for free, from what I've seen. Yes, they could be like lots of us open source give it away programmers, but it is everyone's right to ask for compensation for their work.
So, the upshot of this, as I see it, is that if you want linux to become a gaming platform, you need commercial entities that are pushing it. Like any new technology and market, it will be small and unpopular for a while. Once it gains critical mass, things won't be so tight. Until then, we need companies like Loki that combine money with an overall good faith effort to develop the market and technology.
While I don't really give a damn about videogames, I know that the more games you can play on linux, the more people will use linux, and all users of linux benefit, at least indirectly, from an increased user base.
And as far as things like Wine go, yes, they're neat, and are a useful interim solution, but Wine will always be slower than running the software natively in Windows by the very nature of how it works and what it is. You don't tend to run servers and other intensive processes in emulation, why should you run games, which will often chew up all the resources they can to run as well as possible?
In a one fan solution, is it better to have the fan sucking air into a case or sucking air out?
Hmm... I'm not entirely sure, but I think that it's close to a toss up. However, if I was going to pick one or the other, I'd have to go with the one pushing air in. That gives you 2 slight advantages.
One, it means that there is a high velocity cool air stream blowing over something (though not necessarily what you'd want it to). Two, it means that the pressure inside the case will be slightly higher than the outside pressure, which will make most of the small holes expell air instead of sucking it in (as they would if the 1 fan blew air outwards). If you put an air filter on the fan blowing air inwards, then the upshot will be that not much dust ends up inside your case.
Another thing to consider when placing fans in a not-so-small case is convection. Hot air rises. So put intake fans near the bottom of the case and exhaust fans near the top. That way convection currents will aid them, not fight them.
PS, are these fans bad with high loads because they use brushless engines, giving poor torque?
Actually, I think it has more to do with the blade design. DC motors give highest torque when in a stall condition, brushless are no exception to this (incidentally, this is part of why deisel locomotives actually use the engines to run generators which then drive electric motors on each wheel). The motor will not likely reach stall, however.
Try cupping your hand on each side of one of these fans so that no air can flow. The motor is slowed a good bit, but the blades still spin just fine. The blade design is optimized for moving the most air possible, not for overcoming friction. Blowers are designed to make a high velocity stream that can overcome more friction than fans.
The problem with your argument about cubic feet and flow rate is in the basics of fluid flows. Given a presure on a fluid in a duct/pipe/whatever, the flow rate goes up with the fourth power of the diameter! This is why, as you correctly pointed out, fans don't scale down well, and thus a bigger fan is much better.
However, when you get small cases, you get small spaces for air to move through, and thus reduced flowrates regardless of fan size. The CFM rating on a fan assumes no significant load on the fan. The types of fans used in pc cooling cannot handle large resistance to flow; their cfm will drop like a rock.
Blowers (the things with a rotating circular mouse cage thing) do a lot better, but are noisier and don't move air nearly as fast in the first place.
A problem is NP-Complete if:
1. It is in NP.
2. Any other problem in NP can be reduced (read: "converted") to it in polynomial time.
Last I heard, not all NP problems could be reduced to NP-complete. The definition for NP-complete that I've always heard is that NP-complete is a subset of NP and that all NP-complete problems can be reduced to each other (I suppose in poly time is implcit here). There are some (though not many I think) problems that are in NP but not NP-complete.
Do you have any fear that the mere fact that you chose Slashdot for your first interview might hurt your chances of getting the job? After all, Slashdot is a renegade group of hackers bent on destroying Microsoft, and they aren't likely to appoint someone who they think will just drive Microsoft into the ground.
As at least one other person has pointed out, it's not condoning the bad stuff, it's deliberately ignoring EVERYTHING. MIT does this so that they have some claim to common carrier status for their internet service. Many other schools (including mine) do the same thing for the same reason. If they once start policing any of the illegal activity on their networks, they risk becoming liable for ALL of it. Given the nature of college students, any intelligent person will avoid any liability for ANYTHING they do, be it computerized or not!
Most reasonable countries and reasonable laws are aware of the contract killer/spammer/whatever. What makes you think these laws will be any exception? I would expect that a well worded anti-spam law would choose its phrasing such that it didn't matter how many levels of indirection there were; if you are anywhere in the chain of "spam him" instructions, you're guilty.
Remember, The Man(tm) may be an asshole, he may be an ignoramus, but he is very rarely a moron. Morons aren't very threatening and if they are, they are easily controlled and manipulated into doing something less threatening.
I know this sounds cruel, but it is how nature works.
If people are starving, the solution probably is NOT to import food. That is a temporary, unstable problem, and it will only make things worse in the long run (more food => more people => bigger famine when the imports stop).
Trying to introduce agriculture also probably isn't such a great idea. Most of the areas that suffer from mass famine right now are not capable of supporting agriculture on a level that would aleviate famine.
The solution, cruel as it sounds, is for there to be fewer people.
People dying of hunger is the NATURAL result of there being more people than food. We don't mourn the natural cycles in population of other creatures on this planet due to cycles in population of their food (this is a classic first semester differential equations thing). We should not overly mourn our own population cycles.
To paraphrase Ghandi, If the entire population of India was brought up to the base poverty level of England, it would strip the planet bare in a few years.
The Z80 is indeed still ubiquitous. The average car has at least a dozen of them from what I've heard. I wouldn't be surprised if your VCR (and other stereo components, at least the ones that have big fancy displays) had one. Many vending machines run on them, from what I've heard. The things litterally cost only pennies, so it's not like you'd save much money on the hardware going with simpler logic, and writing the control software is probably easier (and thus cheaper) than doing something with more deidcated / specialized hardware.
Linux has more or less zero control over data/instruction caches in the cpu. That's all done in hardware, maybe cpu microcode.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that dcache/icache refers to dentry and inode caches, which are internal kernel structures representing files & directories, iirc.
Random bugfix really does deserve a cranial whallop, though.
Mary Doria Russel
I have to concur. The Sparrow and Children of God were two of the most moving books of any genre I have ever read.
And in the genre of the rare female sci-fi writer, I am horrified that nobody has mentioned Ursula LeGuin in any of the highly moderated comments. She has written many excellent novels. IMHO, one of the marks of a great fiction writer is one whose stories carry a ring of truth to them, even though they are fiction. LeGuin's stories fullfil this marvelously for me.
For those of you new to her writing, my personal recommendations for books to get you started are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Telling, and Rocannon's World. IIRC, she has won several Hugo & Nebula awards.
One of the funniest things in an airport was some ignorant woman with one of the small cellphones, who kept using it like a walkie talkie. She'd hold it up to hear ear to listen, and then hold it in front of her face to talk, and back again. I had to try hard not to laugh out loud, since she looked like she could have thrown me to my destination airport:)
I think the real problem with this would be the amount of traffic needed to negotiate the dynamic routing paths, especially considering the possible range. Also, TCP can only handle 30 hops. That would make this rather diffcult to implement well without lots of fixed access points.
The only way to make the dynamic routing work well that I can think of would be to not really publish routes, but rather have a way to discover other routing nodes in your vicinity, and incorporate gps, so you know roughly where your destination is and each routing node routes to the closest adjacent node to the destination. That would certainly be inefficient, tho.
The postal service has not been anywhere near self sufficient in years, perhaps even decades. I believe it's current funding is well into the billions of dollars.
Also, the postal service has a government mandated monopoly on basic letter services. It is illegal to send non-urgent mail through any other carrier than the post office. I believe the law defines urgent as something requiring a response in less than some number of days (don't remember the number).
Any data carrying signal must include a range of wavelengths
Fiber optics with current technology transmit all the data on a single optical wavelength. The technology to do multiple wavelengths has been in development for a while, but we haven't hit serious barriers with a single wavelength, so this technology hasn't been commercialized.
And the rate at which a light is pulsed doesn't affect its propogation rate. That would violate all sorts of laws of physics.
The real reason why you must do the electrical conversion and back is that several sources combine to cause slight variations in the time bits of light take to get from one end of the fiber to the next. Chaos and imperfections in the glass effectively blur the time dimension of the signal at the output end, so you must clean the signal periodically.
This has nothing to do with the fact that different wavelengths of light travel at different speeds through matter. That causes chromatic aberation in lenses, which is one of the reasons why big telescopes use only mirrors. But since there is on a single color of light going through the fiber, there cannot be any chromatic aberration. -Matt
While monoculture may be a problem, one of the bigger problems is that the bovine populations in Europe were, until very recently (European Union), almost totaly isolated from each other. Now that trade barriers have been killed, there is much more trade of bovine stuff between the countries and so these isolated populations are now in relatively close contact. Each population has evolved its own set of diseases (at least local variants) and immunities. The net result is like what happened to the natives all over the world when Europeans brought smallpox through. Epidemic. Massive Death. -Matt
How much they could've sued for?!
Try how much do you think they paid the movie producers for product placement and other forms of indirect advertising! I'll bet it's well into the tens of millions. -Matt
Slashdot Mirror
(Yes, the parent to this was probably a troll, but I thought I'd post this for people who are interested in some reasonably accurate information)
... yes they do. Stick some coins in a pay phone and listen. A real pay phone, not a COCOT. As another poster said, they have learned in recent days to turn off the mic until the call is made, or apply a band pass filter to not let coin tones in through the mic. However, there are a LOT of payphones out there that can still be operated with a red box.
Actually
Another trick with red boxes is that the 10-10-XXX numbers don't have access to all the info from the phone company, and once you get to their version of insert money, the band pass filters tend to be turned off, and your red box will happily work on most pay phones. Of course, line quality using this for local calls sucks. It costs more, but if you're using a red box, that obviously doesn't matter, now does it.
Oh, and don't defraud the phone company. They may be greedy assholes, but it's still illegal and immoral.
Let's consider Fallacy 2: Computers Allow People to Do things They Could Not Do Otherwise. This is not a fallacy, it's true. As an amateur composer, I can compose and print a piece of music in a tenth of the time it would take me to do by hand.
...
Aah, and in your own statement, you negate yourself! The initial statement says NOTHING about speed! You could still sit there with a piano, a pencil, and some msuical score paper and 'record' your music, then play it back reading from what you wrote and using the amazing technology known as a rubber eraser, fix your typos.
I'm not saying that doing something orders of magnitude faster is not a big help, but you need to keep some perspective. The automation and speed of computers seems to me (and I'm guilty of this myself) to have encouraged sloppiness in many areas. His example of the letter that other people have attacked I think is misunderstood. The point he is trying to make is that with all the geegaws on word processors these days, people spend inordinate amounts of time worrying about trivia and end up writing beautiful (or horrendously ugly) letters with absolutely horrid content.
Back to computers allowing people to do more things
Your point about scientific research is very accurate, and is one of the few points where I think he is wrong. In my work, there are some things that I occaisonally do that a person could not do by hand within their lifetime, I think, especially not with any useful level of accuracy (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/blast for an example) . However, the masses aren't doing this kind of thing with computers. They are using them mostly as glorified typewriters, post offices, and game cupboards. For businesses, add to that filing cabinets and adding machines.
Related: The myth of the paperless office of the future: while some companies are finally getting on the ball and using computers to truly use less paper, most office use more paper because computers and printers make it easier to generate gobs of it.
Computers certainly have aided some forms of progress, but one must not overlook the retrograde movements they've brought about, nor overestimate what they have really done.
Hmm ... this sounds like a good thing. Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to get the books re-bound?
You're machine's not going to be doing anything but playing the game when you're using it for that, so who cares if you have to reboot into windows?
... Does it really matter what OS your browser runs under? Your word processor? Your IRC client? Your screensaver? Your email app? Your IDE?
Some people have 1 pc that they have a small website hosted on, or whatever. Some people just don't like windows. Some people's computers (mine included) don't run stabily under windows, but work like a charm under linux. A Toyota Camry would probably serve all the needs of anyone who wanted a sedan (except perhaps price), and yet I don't think anyone would argue that having multiple different models of sedans on the market is a good thing. Yes, people can dual boot, but not everyone wants to. Also, rebooting requires closing down all your applications. What if I'm working on a project and just need a 5 minute respite to vent some frustration? Fully rebooting a computer twice can easily take 10 minutes!
Does it really matter that much what operating system you're running your games under?
Ok
See where I'm going with this? If OS really didn't matter, then we wouldn't have so bloody many of the damn things.
The real problem is that even when there is a linux port available, people buy the windows version anyway.
That's a problem, but is orthogonal to what I was referring to. The chicken and egg problem that I pretty clearly stated is that people won't make linux games if the technology and hardware support aren't there, and the technology and hardware support won't be there if people aren't making games (or other software that uses it, e.g. CAD, video editing) for linux.
If most games start being having linux & windows versions released simultaneously and the games generally work equally well on either platform, then I bet the linux users won't be buying the windows versions. Again, you have the chicken & egg and critical mass problems. As long as the majority of games are targeted at windows, the pinux gamers will either dual boot to run the game on windows where it works better, or will have a second computer with the gaming hardware in it. The latter category provide a good bit of resistance to switching over to linux games, until all the games they want to play often have good linux versions.
Linux needs to be able to handle multimedia out of the box, for almost any soundcard/network card/video card. Until this happens, what's the point of pushing Linux as a gaming OS? Don't put the cart before the horse.
:) I agree that there are hardware support problems, but we can work on the hardware-independent stuff using the hardware that is supported at the same time as working on the support for new hardware.
Getting on the road usually happens faster if you're training the horse at the same time as you build the cart
Mostly, when I hear news like this, I want to tell people 'right tool for the right job'. Right now, the right tool for gaming is Windows. I wish it weren't so, but I also wish that the cheapest place to buy quality hand-tools wasn't Sears Roebuck.
While I'm a strong proponent of the right tool right job mentality, I'm also well aware of the chicken and egg problem. If nobody tries to push linux into being a gaming platform, it will never become one.
And lets face it, while hackers might be good at developing fun games, they're usually not good at developing ones with a lot of artwork. Text based games aren't groundbreakers any more and graphic artists don't often want to work for free, from what I've seen. Yes, they could be like lots of us open source give it away programmers, but it is everyone's right to ask for compensation for their work.
So, the upshot of this, as I see it, is that if you want linux to become a gaming platform, you need commercial entities that are pushing it. Like any new technology and market, it will be small and unpopular for a while. Once it gains critical mass, things won't be so tight. Until then, we need companies like Loki that combine money with an overall good faith effort to develop the market and technology.
While I don't really give a damn about videogames, I know that the more games you can play on linux, the more people will use linux, and all users of linux benefit, at least indirectly, from an increased user base.
And as far as things like Wine go, yes, they're neat, and are a useful interim solution, but Wine will always be slower than running the software natively in Windows by the very nature of how it works and what it is. You don't tend to run servers and other intensive processes in emulation, why should you run games, which will often chew up all the resources they can to run as well as possible?
In a one fan solution, is it better to have the fan sucking air into a case or sucking air out?
... I'm not entirely sure, but I think that it's close to a toss up. However, if I was going to pick one or the other, I'd have to go with the one pushing air in. That gives you 2 slight advantages.
Hmm
One, it means that there is a high velocity cool air stream blowing over something (though not necessarily what you'd want it to). Two, it means that the pressure inside the case will be slightly higher than the outside pressure, which will make most of the small holes expell air instead of sucking it in (as they would if the 1 fan blew air outwards). If you put an air filter on the fan blowing air inwards, then the upshot will be that not much dust ends up inside your case.
Another thing to consider when placing fans in a not-so-small case is convection. Hot air rises. So put intake fans near the bottom of the case and exhaust fans near the top. That way convection currents will aid them, not fight them.
PS, are these fans bad with high loads because they use brushless engines, giving poor torque?
Actually, I think it has more to do with the blade design. DC motors give highest torque when in a stall condition, brushless are no exception to this (incidentally, this is part of why deisel locomotives actually use the engines to run generators which then drive electric motors on each wheel). The motor will not likely reach stall, however.
Try cupping your hand on each side of one of these fans so that no air can flow. The motor is slowed a good bit, but the blades still spin just fine. The blade design is optimized for moving the most air possible, not for overcoming friction. Blowers are designed to make a high velocity stream that can overcome more friction than fans.
The problem with your argument about cubic feet and flow rate is in the basics of fluid flows. Given a presure on a fluid in a duct/pipe/whatever, the flow rate goes up with the fourth power of the diameter! This is why, as you correctly pointed out, fans don't scale down well, and thus a bigger fan is much better.
However, when you get small cases, you get small spaces for air to move through, and thus reduced flowrates regardless of fan size. The CFM rating on a fan assumes no significant load on the fan. The types of fans used in pc cooling cannot handle large resistance to flow; their cfm will drop like a rock.
Blowers (the things with a rotating circular mouse cage thing) do a lot better, but are noisier and don't move air nearly as fast in the first place.
A problem is NP-Complete if:
1. It is in NP.
2. Any other problem in NP can be reduced (read: "converted") to it in polynomial time.
Last I heard, not all NP problems could be reduced to NP-complete. The definition for NP-complete that I've always heard is that NP-complete is a subset of NP and that all NP-complete problems can be reduced to each other (I suppose in poly time is implcit here). There are some (though not many I think) problems that are in NP but not NP-complete.
Do you have any fear that the mere fact that you chose Slashdot for your first interview might hurt your chances of getting the job? After all, Slashdot is a renegade group of hackers bent on destroying Microsoft, and they aren't likely to appoint someone who they think will just drive Microsoft into the ground.
As at least one other person has pointed out, it's not condoning the bad stuff, it's deliberately ignoring EVERYTHING. MIT does this so that they have some claim to common carrier status for their internet service. Many other schools (including mine) do the same thing for the same reason. If they once start policing any of the illegal activity on their networks, they risk becoming liable for ALL of it. Given the nature of college students, any intelligent person will avoid any liability for ANYTHING they do, be it computerized or not!
Most reasonable countries and reasonable laws are aware of the contract killer/spammer/whatever. What makes you think these laws will be any exception? I would expect that a well worded anti-spam law would choose its phrasing such that it didn't matter how many levels of indirection there were; if you are anywhere in the chain of "spam him" instructions, you're guilty.
Remember, The Man(tm) may be an asshole, he may be an ignoramus, but he is very rarely a moron. Morons aren't very threatening and if they are, they are easily controlled and manipulated into doing something less threatening.
I know this sounds cruel, but it is how nature works.
If people are starving, the solution probably is NOT to import food. That is a temporary, unstable problem, and it will only make things worse in the long run (more food => more people => bigger famine when the imports stop).
Trying to introduce agriculture also probably isn't such a great idea. Most of the areas that suffer from mass famine right now are not capable of supporting agriculture on a level that would aleviate famine.
The solution, cruel as it sounds, is for there to be fewer people.
People dying of hunger is the NATURAL result of there being more people than food. We don't mourn the natural cycles in population of other creatures on this planet due to cycles in population of their food (this is a classic first semester differential equations thing). We should not overly mourn our own population cycles.
To paraphrase Ghandi, If the entire population of India was brought up to the base poverty level of England, it would strip the planet bare in a few years.
The Z80 is indeed still ubiquitous. The average car has at least a dozen of them from what I've heard. I wouldn't be surprised if your VCR (and other stereo components, at least the ones that have big fancy displays) had one. Many vending machines run on them, from what I've heard. The things litterally cost only pennies, so it's not like you'd save much money on the hardware going with simpler logic, and writing the control software is probably easier (and thus cheaper) than doing something with more deidcated / specialized hardware.
Linux has more or less zero control over data/instruction caches in the cpu. That's all done in hardware, maybe cpu microcode.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that dcache/icache refers to dentry and inode caches, which are internal kernel structures representing files & directories, iirc.
Random bugfix really does deserve a cranial whallop, though.
I have to concur. The Sparrow and Children of God were two of the most moving books of any genre I have ever read.
And in the genre of the rare female sci-fi writer, I am horrified that nobody has mentioned Ursula LeGuin in any of the highly moderated comments. She has written many excellent novels. IMHO, one of the marks of a great fiction writer is one whose stories carry a ring of truth to them, even though they are fiction. LeGuin's stories fullfil this marvelously for me.
For those of you new to her writing, my personal recommendations for books to get you started are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Telling, and Rocannon's World. IIRC, she has won several Hugo & Nebula awards.
One of the funniest things in an airport was some ignorant woman with one of the small cellphones, who kept using it like a walkie talkie. She'd hold it up to hear ear to listen, and then hold it in front of her face to talk, and back again. I had to try hard not to laugh out loud, since she looked like she could have thrown me to my destination airport :)
I think the real problem with this would be the amount of traffic needed to negotiate the dynamic routing paths, especially considering the possible range. Also, TCP can only handle 30 hops. That would make this rather diffcult to implement well without lots of fixed access points.
The only way to make the dynamic routing work well that I can think of would be to not really publish routes, but rather have a way to discover other routing nodes in your vicinity, and incorporate gps, so you know roughly where your destination is and each routing node routes to the closest adjacent node to the destination. That would certainly be inefficient, tho.
The postal service has not been anywhere near self sufficient in years, perhaps even decades. I believe it's current funding is well into the billions of dollars.
Also, the postal service has a government mandated monopoly on basic letter services. It is illegal to send non-urgent mail through any other carrier than the post office. I believe the law defines urgent as something requiring a response in less than some number of days (don't remember the number).
How about AAA? Hasn't curtailed any of my freedoms lately. Pulled me out of a few nasty spots too!
Actually, yes there is. NT's driver model cannot handle hotplug devices very well. Hence why just about any change to a driver requires a reboot.
Any data carrying signal must include a range of wavelengths
Fiber optics with current technology transmit all the data on a single optical wavelength. The technology to do multiple wavelengths has been in development for a while, but we haven't hit serious barriers with a single wavelength, so this technology hasn't been commercialized.
And the rate at which a light is pulsed doesn't affect its propogation rate. That would violate all sorts of laws of physics.
The real reason why you must do the electrical conversion and back is that several sources combine to cause slight variations in the time bits of light take to get from one end of the fiber to the next. Chaos and imperfections in the glass effectively blur the time dimension of the signal at the output end, so you must clean the signal periodically.
This has nothing to do with the fact that different wavelengths of light travel at different speeds through matter. That causes chromatic aberation in lenses, which is one of the reasons why big telescopes use only mirrors. But since there is on a single color of light going through the fiber, there cannot be any chromatic aberration.
-Matt
While monoculture may be a problem, one of the bigger problems is that the bovine populations in Europe were, until very recently (European Union), almost totaly isolated from each other. Now that trade barriers have been killed, there is much more trade of bovine stuff between the countries and so these isolated populations are now in relatively close contact. Each population has evolved its own set of diseases (at least local variants) and immunities. The net result is like what happened to the natives all over the world when Europeans brought smallpox through. Epidemic. Massive Death.
-Matt
How much do you think AOL could've sued for?
How much they could've sued for?!
Try how much do you think they paid the movie producers for product placement and other forms of indirect advertising! I'll bet it's well into the tens of millions.
-Matt