Irony, defined: The institution responsible for changing copyright law so individuals face millions in fines and years behind jail now has to argue against it to save its own ass.
IQ is highly correlated with future income. IQ is also highly correlated with social status.
Fail. The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. [1] Job performance and experience are the most direct indicator of future income. IQ has never been "highly" correlated with future income.
As far as social status... there's not a single study I can find supporting your claim.
[1] Hunter, J. E. and Hunter, R. F. (1984). Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 72-98.
Nearly the entirety of biological evidence is against it being an artifact of culture.
The evidence is not kind to your assertion. Women are getting taller every year -- and models are typically taller than the demographic they're targeting, at least in this country. Throughout history, the ideal of female beauty has changed -- at some points, the preference was for fat women, at other times, thin women. In victorian ages, it was cherubs (women with very rounded faces), whereas these days we prefer women with high cheekbones and a more angular face. In the 80s, androgyny was advocated.
The reason there's 6 billion people on the planet instead of a few hundred million is because of technology.
And here I was thinking it was because people had sex and the current global environment provides the resources necessary for survival. Namely, our understanding of agriculture -- and the technology to support those six billion people is several thousand years old. Most people would argue you don't have to be smart to figure out how to dig a hole and throw some seeds in it -- what you do need is enough time to experiment, and some ability to record the results of those experiments (language). You can be very, very, stupid but as long as you can do those two things you'll eventually get to quantum physics. Eventually.
The reason we can talk so much to each other is because of technology.
Language is not dependent on technology. I can strip you naked and leave you on an island with nothing but nature around you, and you'll still be able to talk. And if I put you there with twenty other people, the odds of your survival go way up -- because you can talk to them. Technology has nothing to do with this.
Intelligence developed technology [...]
I'm going to hate myself for this, but -- citation needed. You're assuming intelligence is a prerequisite for technological advancement. Science (and thus technology) is based on a few central ideas -- first, that our observations of physical phenomenon are based on natural laws. These phenomena can be explained through a process of experimentation and peer review. Discoveries are often accidental. Therefore, while I concede that scientific principles can be applied by even those of low intelligence, or non-human intelligence. Scientific advancement is also increasingly animated -- and some discoveries have been purely the result of algorithms sifting through data and making correlations based on that, rather than based on the intelligence of its designers.
- therefore it has an enormous survival advantage on the macroscale.
I don't remember Darwin talking much about the "macroscale". I do recall him talking a lot about reproductive success. Very intelligent people don't have any greater chances of acquiring material wealth, social status, or other factors that contribute to reproductive success. There's been research done that suggests that a scientist's output and contributions to the field go down markedly upon getting married. As well, the stereotype of the single geek is a bit too close for comfort. What this means is that high intelligence is not a desirable trait, and is likely instead a byproduct of evolution rather than a result of it. Or put another way -- geniuses are either accidental, or we just don't need many of them to adapt to the environment (hence their relative scarcity). Either proposition seems equally valid.
"Maleness" is a brain that develops and is modified by testosterone, resulting in increased risk taking behavior and improved mapping functions and possible a whole host of subtler changes.
Sexism, defined. I'll stick to science, thank you.
due to technology, physical strength matters an enormous amount less. Hence women are now being valued more, because nearly all jobs don't need as much physical strength.
We wouldn't exist as a species without them. Try to remember that, Rambo, before you talk about how important it is for us to hunt the wumpus. Language skills, not brute force, is what has allowed this species to reach the levels it has -- and it would have happened even if we'd been slathering rat beasts with room temperature IQs. Evolution does not care for either male ego or smart people -- in fact, based on anecdotal evidence, the universe is in fact actively hostile towards intelligence.
"Equal protection", statistics, discrimination suits - none of this would be possible without technology.
Then you lack imagination. We dreamed about traveling amongst the stars long before we even knew what they were. Striving for equality has been with us from the beginning.
One possibility is that men really are smarter, just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
Fundamentally the question cannot be answered as long as we cling to preconceived notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. "Man" is a social construct -- and from a scientific perspective there is no clear way to deliniate(sp?) between male and female. You can claim genetics determines that, and I'll show you XX men and XY women. You claim genitalia, I'll reply with birth defects. Any such distinction is arbitrary, and claims to the contrary are unscientific. The either/or proposition of gender and sex are social constructs. I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
Our entire civilization exists because of bright men...
No, it doesn't. Civilization exists because of a pair of genetic mutations that greatly increased the folds (surface area) of the brain and a refinement of our tongues, which allowed us to develop language. Technology exists because we have the ability to communicate knowledge of our environment more efficiently, and remember that knowledge for longer periods, than any other animal. We couldn't have evolved if we couldn't speak to each other, or put another way: Logic and reason presuppose, at their origin, emotion. Lab rats do smarter things than people in many situations -- and if monkeys could speak in words (instead of merely understand them), we'd probably be quite humbled by how much less of a difference there really is.
But I can make this a whole lot simpler with a Douglas Adams quote: We've always thought we were smarter than dolphins because we built cities and live in them, whereas the dolphins think they're smarter for the same reason. You think civilization exist because of bright men -- I'd argue it's more accurate to say that men engage in risk-taking behavior more often, and statistically that's going to eventually lead to a beneficial discovery (which society then commits to the collective memory). Of course, this behavior more often leads to horrible failure -- and that's okay. Because from an evolutionary standpoint, men are disposable: they fight and die in wars, experiments gone wrong, and more -- as long as the women survive, society rebuilds and we raise another generation of risk-taking men. Women don't take risks as often as men do, because that behavior risks the future of the human race, ie. the children. Intelligence has nothing to do with any potential benefits from how men and women think: It's how they act that determines the outcome.
Ironically, civilized trappings such as feminism and political correctness are only possible at all due to technology.
Feminism, if we define it as advocating equal social/legal protection and rights for women, has been around since before you had the technology to write such sexist scribes on public forums. Historically, societies which have greater equality between various groups (men, women, gays, blacks, slaves, whatever) has occurred during periods of economic and material prosperity. As resources diminish, competition increases and society favors characteristics that give individuals a greater portion of those limited resources. During periods of scarcity, civilization dissolves into "thog smash head with rock, take food." Women can't compete with men on physical strength. Intelligence has nothing to do with that difference.
Anyways, as far as I know, men have done around 95-99% of the inventing. Correct me if I'm wrong.
History also says Columbus discovered America, nevermind that there were millions of native americans here first. History is written by the dominant society. Just last week I was at the Mall of America and there is a statue there honoring 9/11 -- and it claimed that it was "the single largest loss of life on US soil." That's a lie -- I'm s
Kind of begs the question "who is farming and for what?"
Please proceed immediately to the next thread, as the effects of prolonged exposure to this question has not been investigated. *fzzt* As an optional test protocol, we are pleased to present an amusing fact. The personal data is now more valuable than the organs and combined incomes of everyone in your hometown.
Hey, 1 in 5 people use this application. Remember that once the application has more than a million users, it can access not only your personal information, but everyone's personal information you can access. So, in short, the creators of Farmville have access to most, if not all, of the Facebook database. Moo, moo.
Who knew leaving a bank of computers on 24/7 costs money?
Answer: The school administrators, who turned down a previous IT request to turn the machines off when not in use and impliment a power management policy some years prior to this incident.
Intel an American company, with the American economy in the shape it's in, I am offended at the codename Bangalore.
First, I agree with you completely. That said, if the processor core is anything like the city it's named for...a 48 core processor on a mesh topology is a good digital analogy to Bangalore -- it is the 3rd most populous urban area in India. It'll also smell horrible, the electrons will be subject to depraved working conditions, and they'll be paid crap for their work, etc. Despite it being a so-called "economic powerhouse", only about 60k of its inhabitants have more than US $1 million net worth. It has over 5.8 million people living there. It makes the wage gap in this country look postively equalitarian.
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
I worked for a corporation supporting over 78,000 workstations. I had full admin rights to each one of those systems. I could have popped SETI@Home on them and it would have ran for years without anyone being the wiser, assuming I made a few trivial changes so it didn't show up in task manager.
Governments... Large corporations... same difference, really.
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
Why does the world need a non-free web server that only runs on Windows when there's already plenty of free (as in speech) ones out there (http://www.apache.org/, http://www.lighttpd.net/) that run everywhere?,
For the same reason there are more than five models of vehicle on the roadways: Different needs.
Or why not use DC for the entire data center and put the battery at the Data Center level?
12VDC, each unit needs 300W at least... That's 25 amps per unit. Think wire gauge. That's the reason, long and short. That, and you can't run 12VDC very far before power loss becomes a significant consideration.
Tesla figured this out over a hundred years ago -- AC powers and transformers = more efficient.
The problem with mesh computing is that it doesn't save in energy costs. With a centralized UPS and power supply, improving efficiency requires that you upgrade one unit. This way, you have to upgrade a few hundred units. It's similar to why moving to electric cars is advocated despite their limited range and low performance: Because it's easier to upgrade a dozen power plants than a few hundred thousand cars, to take advantage of the latest technology.
I'd have to say that neither is truly "innovative" because that would imply something new was present in either of them, rather than a remix of existing technologies and/or incremental improvements on them (such as minaturization). The only really innovative thing I've seen out of Apple in awhile has been the touch wheel on the iPods; Which was quite a departure from existing human interface designs at the time. The word "innovative" has been quite overused in this field.
If you're getting bullied in real life, you have to try to run away and get help immediately before your attackers catch up with you and continue the beating.
You haven't been bullied, have you? You don't run -- it only encourages them. You turn into any attack -- 95% of the time, that's the right answer. Bullies, muggers, rapists, etc., all have one thing in common: They go for the low hanging fruit.
Online, you can simply get off the computer and tell the proper authorities (be that the police or your parents or whoever) at your leisure. There is not the same need for immediacy.
Or, you know, you could ignore them. Or be a responsible parent to your child, instead of wasting taxpayer dollars chasing down every bad word someone else's kid says about yours.
Also, the whole idea of grooming children (or more often FBI agents posing as children) is that the pedophile gets the child to believe they're safe, and so they would have no motivation to push the little dolphin button. The kids that go off to meet pedophiles do so because they don't perceive that they're in any danger. If they don't perceive the danger, why would they alert the police to anything?
Grooming takes time. It doesn't just happen one evening while your child is propped up on the bed and you're having dinner, and the next day they're on a bus. A lack of parental supervision is the problem here -- if we were actually spending time parenting instead of working two jobs and leaving the child rearing to the schools, televisions, and computers, this wouldn't be possible.
This government solution isn't: That friendly dolphin isn't there for the children, it's there for the parents. So they can feel less guilty about not watching their kid. It's the same reason we have padded foam and rubber all over playgrounds, and the swing sets have been removed, along with all the other interesting things to do. Meanwhile, I used guns, went hunting, rode motorcycles, ATVs, and played hide and seek in a five acre field. Bullies didn't give me much trouble growing up -- rural girls scare the ever-living crap out of city boys.
Take a hint, parents: Raise your kids to be self-reliant and strong, and you'll never have to worry about their safety. But keep them as your precious snowflakes, and you'll raise a bunch of fragile weaklings that will spend their lives suckling the tit of the government and crumpling at every hardship. I don't say this to be mean -- I say this because the other thing a rural upbringing gave me was a lack of tact.;)
How long then until a worm emerges that floods the govt with hundreds of thousands of fradulent calls, making the signal to noise ratio too burdensome to navigate?
What would be the motivator for such a malicious act? There's no money to be gained, and if they were caught, they'd have the book thrown at them. Frankly, if someone tried this I wouldn't be surprised if the criminal community "policed itself" and put the poor bastard out of his misery out of fear of unwanted attention/legislation.
from wikipedia.. "Low ratings prompted UPN to cancel Star Trek: Enterprise on February 2, 2005, but the network allowed the series to complete its fourth season. The final episode aired on May 13, 2005."
Okay, I stand corrected. Mr. President, please ban Enterprise and begin bombing in 15 minutes.
...designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
No offense, Mr. President, but you want to know what really gets us fired up about those things? Getting paid for it. There are a select few of us that are willing to work for peanuts making the world a better place, spending hours working intractable problems, and sacrificing our social and sex lives all for the sake of The Greater Good. The rest of us -- we want to be paid for our work. The work isn't glamorous -- it's demanding, thankless, and for most requires an expensive education that they aren't reimbursed for. This field in particular (information technology) was gutted about seven years ago under the last administration in the name of short term profits. There is no R&D budget left for innovation, and not much has happened that's revolutionary in this industry since the bubble burst.
If you want to showcase our science and technology, start by making this country the best place to be for it once again -- rather than watching as Europe turns on the LHC while ours sits half-finished in Texas. Send some money to the Department of Energy to fund some physics over here. Give some grant money out so we can deploy a successor to the internet that doesn't suck, controlled by private interests who only want to sell us viagra, cheap thrills, pay per view, and piss-poor last mile connections. Put us back in space, which was once a source of national pride and now languishes as an embarassment. And cancel Enterprise -- goddamn that show sucks!
ever heard of punitive damage? If you only ever have to pay exactly for what you did, and no putitive damage, when you g et caught, there would be no point NOT to do it.
First, I shouldn't even dignify your post with a response given the poor spelling and general lack of knowledge of the subject matter, but I'm bored. Second, here's how it looks in the US (I'm even more of a non-expert on non-US laws);
Actual: $6--30. (from TFA) Copyright holder is also entitled to any profits derived from the violation (in general). In the case of someone using XP privately for themselves and deriving no profit beyond that, the profits would also likely be zero. Statutory: Only available if the copyright is registered with the copyright office. $200 if it can be proved it was accidental at the discretion of the court. $750--30,000 if it cannot be proved, but there is reasonable doubt at the discretion of the court. Up to $150,000 per work if it can be proved to be willful. Source: 17 USC 504. Punitive: Not generally available. [1] It may be available if statutory damages are unavailable, or if the plaintiff elects to seek actual damages (plus profits derived). This is very rarely done in practice, and generally the punitive damages will equal the actual damages plus profits derived from the violation.
In the vast majority of cases, statutory damages far exceed actual or potential punitive damages.
Slashdot Mirror
Irony, defined: The institution responsible for changing copyright law so individuals face millions in fines and years behind jail now has to argue against it to save its own ass.
IQ is highly correlated with future income. IQ is also highly correlated with social status.
Fail. The validity of IQ as a predictor of job performance is above zero for all work studied to date, but varies with the type of job and across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6. [1] Job performance and experience are the most direct indicator of future income. IQ has never been "highly" correlated with future income.
As far as social status... there's not a single study I can find supporting your claim.
[1] Hunter, J. E. and Hunter, R. F. (1984). Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 72-98.
The reason we can communicate with each other NOW, and you aren't stuck in the kitchen raising babies in my village, is because of technology.
Now you're just being a sexist pig. You don't even care about the science.
Nearly the entirety of biological evidence is against it being an artifact of culture.
The evidence is not kind to your assertion. Women are getting taller every year -- and models are typically taller than the demographic they're targeting, at least in this country. Throughout history, the ideal of female beauty has changed -- at some points, the preference was for fat women, at other times, thin women. In victorian ages, it was cherubs (women with very rounded faces), whereas these days we prefer women with high cheekbones and a more angular face. In the 80s, androgyny was advocated.
/automated, not animated. That's what I get for going two days without sleep...
The reason there's 6 billion people on the planet instead of a few hundred million is because of technology.
And here I was thinking it was because people had sex and the current global environment provides the resources necessary for survival. Namely, our understanding of agriculture -- and the technology to support those six billion people is several thousand years old. Most people would argue you don't have to be smart to figure out how to dig a hole and throw some seeds in it -- what you do need is enough time to experiment, and some ability to record the results of those experiments (language). You can be very, very, stupid but as long as you can do those two things you'll eventually get to quantum physics. Eventually.
The reason we can talk so much to each other is because of technology.
Language is not dependent on technology. I can strip you naked and leave you on an island with nothing but nature around you, and you'll still be able to talk. And if I put you there with twenty other people, the odds of your survival go way up -- because you can talk to them. Technology has nothing to do with this.
Intelligence developed technology [...]
I'm going to hate myself for this, but -- citation needed. You're assuming intelligence is a prerequisite for technological advancement. Science (and thus technology) is based on a few central ideas -- first, that our observations of physical phenomenon are based on natural laws. These phenomena can be explained through a process of experimentation and peer review. Discoveries are often accidental. Therefore, while I concede that scientific principles can be applied by even those of low intelligence, or non-human intelligence. Scientific advancement is also increasingly animated -- and some discoveries have been purely the result of algorithms sifting through data and making correlations based on that, rather than based on the intelligence of its designers.
- therefore it has an enormous survival advantage on the macroscale.
I don't remember Darwin talking much about the "macroscale". I do recall him talking a lot about reproductive success. Very intelligent people don't have any greater chances of acquiring material wealth, social status, or other factors that contribute to reproductive success. There's been research done that suggests that a scientist's output and contributions to the field go down markedly upon getting married. As well, the stereotype of the single geek is a bit too close for comfort. What this means is that high intelligence is not a desirable trait, and is likely instead a byproduct of evolution rather than a result of it. Or put another way -- geniuses are either accidental, or we just don't need many of them to adapt to the environment (hence their relative scarcity). Either proposition seems equally valid.
"Maleness" is a brain that develops and is modified by testosterone, resulting in increased risk taking behavior and improved mapping functions and possible a whole host of subtler changes.
Sexism, defined. I'll stick to science, thank you.
due to technology, physical strength matters an enormous amount less. Hence women are now being valued more, because nearly all jobs don't need as much physical strength.
We wouldn't exist as a species without them. Try to remember that, Rambo, before you talk about how important it is for us to hunt the wumpus. Language skills, not brute force, is what has allowed this species to reach the levels it has -- and it would have happened even if we'd been slathering rat beasts with room temperature IQs. Evolution does not care for either male ego or smart people -- in fact, based on anecdotal evidence, the universe is in fact actively hostile towards intelligence.
"Equal protection", statistics, discrimination suits - none of this would be possible without technology.
Then you lack imagination. We dreamed about traveling amongst the stars long before we even knew what they were. Striving for equality has been with us from the beginning.
One possibility is that men really are smarter, just that IQ tests don't measure the most important aspects of intelligence.
Fundamentally the question cannot be answered as long as we cling to preconceived notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. "Man" is a social construct -- and from a scientific perspective there is no clear way to deliniate(sp?) between male and female. You can claim genetics determines that, and I'll show you XX men and XY women. You claim genitalia, I'll reply with birth defects. Any such distinction is arbitrary, and claims to the contrary are unscientific. The either/or proposition of gender and sex are social constructs. I'd also like to remind you that there are no studies proving that intelligence has any survival advantage whatsoever.
Our entire civilization exists because of bright men...
No, it doesn't. Civilization exists because of a pair of genetic mutations that greatly increased the folds (surface area) of the brain and a refinement of our tongues, which allowed us to develop language. Technology exists because we have the ability to communicate knowledge of our environment more efficiently, and remember that knowledge for longer periods, than any other animal. We couldn't have evolved if we couldn't speak to each other, or put another way: Logic and reason presuppose, at their origin, emotion. Lab rats do smarter things than people in many situations -- and if monkeys could speak in words (instead of merely understand them), we'd probably be quite humbled by how much less of a difference there really is.
But I can make this a whole lot simpler with a Douglas Adams quote: We've always thought we were smarter than dolphins because we built cities and live in them, whereas the dolphins think they're smarter for the same reason. You think civilization exist because of bright men -- I'd argue it's more accurate to say that men engage in risk-taking behavior more often, and statistically that's going to eventually lead to a beneficial discovery (which society then commits to the collective memory). Of course, this behavior more often leads to horrible failure -- and that's okay. Because from an evolutionary standpoint, men are disposable: they fight and die in wars, experiments gone wrong, and more -- as long as the women survive, society rebuilds and we raise another generation of risk-taking men. Women don't take risks as often as men do, because that behavior risks the future of the human race, ie. the children. Intelligence has nothing to do with any potential benefits from how men and women think: It's how they act that determines the outcome.
Ironically, civilized trappings such as feminism and political correctness are only possible at all due to technology.
Feminism, if we define it as advocating equal social/legal protection and rights for women, has been around since before you had the technology to write such sexist scribes on public forums. Historically, societies which have greater equality between various groups (men, women, gays, blacks, slaves, whatever) has occurred during periods of economic and material prosperity. As resources diminish, competition increases and society favors characteristics that give individuals a greater portion of those limited resources. During periods of scarcity, civilization dissolves into "thog smash head with rock, take food." Women can't compete with men on physical strength. Intelligence has nothing to do with that difference.
Anyways, as far as I know, men have done around 95-99% of the inventing. Correct me if I'm wrong.
History also says Columbus discovered America, nevermind that there were millions of native americans here first. History is written by the dominant society. Just last week I was at the Mall of America and there is a statue there honoring 9/11 -- and it claimed that it was "the single largest loss of life on US soil." That's a lie -- I'm s
Kind of begs the question "who is farming and for what?"
Please proceed immediately to the next thread, as the effects of prolonged exposure to this question has not been investigated. *fzzt* As an optional test protocol, we are pleased to present an amusing fact. The personal data is now more valuable than the organs and combined incomes of everyone in your hometown.
Hey, 1 in 5 people use this application. Remember that once the application has more than a million users, it can access not only your personal information, but everyone's personal information you can access. So, in short, the creators of Farmville have access to most, if not all, of the Facebook database. Moo, moo.
Who knew leaving a bank of computers on 24/7 costs money?
Answer: The school administrators, who turned down a previous IT request to turn the machines off when not in use and impliment a power management policy some years prior to this incident.
Intel an American company, with the American economy in the shape it's in, I am offended at the codename Bangalore.
First, I agree with you completely. That said, if the processor core is anything like the city it's named for...a 48 core processor on a mesh topology is a good digital analogy to Bangalore -- it is the 3rd most populous urban area in India. It'll also smell horrible, the electrons will be subject to depraved working conditions, and they'll be paid crap for their work, etc. Despite it being a so-called "economic powerhouse", only about 60k of its inhabitants have more than US $1 million net worth. It has over 5.8 million people living there. It makes the wage gap in this country look postively equalitarian.
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
I worked for a corporation supporting over 78,000 workstations. I had full admin rights to each one of those systems. I could have popped SETI@Home on them and it would have ran for years without anyone being the wiser, assuming I made a few trivial changes so it didn't show up in task manager.
Governments... Large corporations... same difference, really.
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
Why does the world need a non-free web server that only runs on Windows when there's already plenty of free (as in speech) ones out there (http://www.apache.org/, http://www.lighttpd.net/) that run everywhere?,
For the same reason there are more than five models of vehicle on the roadways: Different needs.
Or why not use DC for the entire data center and put the battery at the Data Center level?
12VDC, each unit needs 300W at least... That's 25 amps per unit. Think wire gauge. That's the reason, long and short. That, and you can't run 12VDC very far before power loss becomes a significant consideration.
Tesla figured this out over a hundred years ago -- AC powers and transformers = more efficient.
The problem with mesh computing is that it doesn't save in energy costs. With a centralized UPS and power supply, improving efficiency requires that you upgrade one unit. This way, you have to upgrade a few hundred units. It's similar to why moving to electric cars is advocated despite their limited range and low performance: Because it's easier to upgrade a dozen power plants than a few hundred thousand cars, to take advantage of the latest technology.
I'd have to say that neither is truly "innovative" because that would imply something new was present in either of them, rather than a remix of existing technologies and/or incremental improvements on them (such as minaturization). The only really innovative thing I've seen out of Apple in awhile has been the touch wheel on the iPods; Which was quite a departure from existing human interface designs at the time. The word "innovative" has been quite overused in this field.
If you're getting bullied in real life, you have to try to run away and get help immediately before your attackers catch up with you and continue the beating.
You haven't been bullied, have you? You don't run -- it only encourages them. You turn into any attack -- 95% of the time, that's the right answer. Bullies, muggers, rapists, etc., all have one thing in common: They go for the low hanging fruit.
Online, you can simply get off the computer and tell the proper authorities (be that the police or your parents or whoever) at your leisure. There is not the same need for immediacy.
Or, you know, you could ignore them. Or be a responsible parent to your child, instead of wasting taxpayer dollars chasing down every bad word someone else's kid says about yours.
Also, the whole idea of grooming children (or more often FBI agents posing as children) is that the pedophile gets the child to believe they're safe, and so they would have no motivation to push the little dolphin button. The kids that go off to meet pedophiles do so because they don't perceive that they're in any danger. If they don't perceive the danger, why would they alert the police to anything?
Grooming takes time. It doesn't just happen one evening while your child is propped up on the bed and you're having dinner, and the next day they're on a bus. A lack of parental supervision is the problem here -- if we were actually spending time parenting instead of working two jobs and leaving the child rearing to the schools, televisions, and computers, this wouldn't be possible.
This government solution isn't: That friendly dolphin isn't there for the children, it's there for the parents. So they can feel less guilty about not watching their kid. It's the same reason we have padded foam and rubber all over playgrounds, and the swing sets have been removed, along with all the other interesting things to do. Meanwhile, I used guns, went hunting, rode motorcycles, ATVs, and played hide and seek in a five acre field. Bullies didn't give me much trouble growing up -- rural girls scare the ever-living crap out of city boys.
Take a hint, parents: Raise your kids to be self-reliant and strong, and you'll never have to worry about their safety. But keep them as your precious snowflakes, and you'll raise a bunch of fragile weaklings that will spend their lives suckling the tit of the government and crumpling at every hardship. I don't say this to be mean -- I say this because the other thing a rural upbringing gave me was a lack of tact. ;)
How long then until a worm emerges that floods the govt with hundreds of thousands of fradulent calls, making the signal to noise ratio too burdensome to navigate?
What would be the motivator for such a malicious act? There's no money to be gained, and if they were caught, they'd have the book thrown at them. Frankly, if someone tried this I wouldn't be surprised if the criminal community "policed itself" and put the poor bastard out of his misery out of fear of unwanted attention/legislation.
from wikipedia.. "Low ratings prompted UPN to cancel Star Trek: Enterprise on February 2, 2005, but the network allowed the series to complete its fourth season. The final episode aired on May 13, 2005."
Okay, I stand corrected. Mr. President, please ban Enterprise and begin bombing in 15 minutes.
...designed to get American students fired up about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
No offense, Mr. President, but you want to know what really gets us fired up about those things? Getting paid for it. There are a select few of us that are willing to work for peanuts making the world a better place, spending hours working intractable problems, and sacrificing our social and sex lives all for the sake of The Greater Good. The rest of us -- we want to be paid for our work. The work isn't glamorous -- it's demanding, thankless, and for most requires an expensive education that they aren't reimbursed for. This field in particular (information technology) was gutted about seven years ago under the last administration in the name of short term profits. There is no R&D budget left for innovation, and not much has happened that's revolutionary in this industry since the bubble burst.
If you want to showcase our science and technology, start by making this country the best place to be for it once again -- rather than watching as Europe turns on the LHC while ours sits half-finished in Texas. Send some money to the Department of Energy to fund some physics over here. Give some grant money out so we can deploy a successor to the internet that doesn't suck, controlled by private interests who only want to sell us viagra, cheap thrills, pay per view, and piss-poor last mile connections. Put us back in space, which was once a source of national pride and now languishes as an embarassment. And cancel Enterprise -- goddamn that show sucks!
How quickly can they make the switch? The latency of the individual components dictates the design.
ever heard of punitive damage? If you only ever have to pay exactly for what you did, and no putitive damage, when you g et caught, there would be no point NOT to do it.
First, I shouldn't even dignify your post with a response given the poor spelling and general lack of knowledge of the subject matter, but I'm bored. Second, here's how it looks in the US (I'm even more of a non-expert on non-US laws);
Actual:
$6--30. (from TFA) Copyright holder is also entitled to any profits derived from the violation (in general). In the case of someone using XP privately for themselves and deriving no profit beyond that, the profits would also likely be zero.
Statutory:
Only available if the copyright is registered with the copyright office.
$200 if it can be proved it was accidental at the discretion of the court.
$750--30,000 if it cannot be proved, but there is reasonable doubt at the discretion of the court.
Up to $150,000 per work if it can be proved to be willful. Source: 17 USC 504.
Punitive:
Not generally available. [1] It may be available if statutory damages are unavailable, or if the plaintiff elects to seek actual damages (plus profits derived). This is very rarely done in practice, and generally the punitive damages will equal the actual damages plus profits derived from the violation.
In the vast majority of cases, statutory damages far exceed actual or potential punitive damages.
[1] Leutwyler v. Royal Hashemite Court of Jordan, 184 F. Supp. 2d 303, 308
[2] http://library.findlaw.com/2005/Feb/10/172826.html#_edn14
P.S. IANAL.
The refund price for the decline of the EULA is correct in it being US$6. This price unfortunately is not negotiable...
So when I download XP off TPB or a similar site, they're going to sue me for $6 in damages? Yeah. Right.
Real freedoms, as opposed to whatever bullshit subjective measurement
Real freedom, sir, either exists for everyone, or it exists for no one. And the price of it is eternal vigilance, not "we're good enough."