Given the all the frantic rerouting going on, as well as the similar problems faced earlier this year, we should assume that it is, in fact, a central point of failure, no matter what an abstract overview map tells us.
Geosychronous orbit has too much time latency, and LEO takes more satellites to cover the same area. It'd be cheeper to just lay more cable, but corporations tend to push for raw efficiency rather than redundancy. It's going to take governments using their buying power to encourage redundant routes to get us back to where DARPA was in the '80s.
Model T didn't have a distributor (Jay Leno mentioned this offhand in the video on Garage 419). I believe you can convert them to run a distributor, and there is a distributor-like timing system, but otherwise it's just magnetos.
The gas back then often got high octane ratings by using a lead additive. Increased environmental regulations for leaded gas are one reason why engine efficiency dropped so badly in the '70s (most because lead doesn't work with catalytic converters rather than regulating lead directly).
Blending in some kind of alchol may get us 120 octane pump gas once again. Another problem solved by booze!
Hydrogen is the most abundant element, and Oxygen isn't far behind, relatively speaking. The two combine easily to form H2O. So it shouldn't be so surprising that we find water everywhere we look, assuming that the physics that works here is the same everywhere else in the universe (and we'd have to throw out most of astrophysics if that weren't true).
1) do we have technology that can convert electrical power into sufficient thrust to escape earth gravity and work in space
Most electric-based propultion methods don't have the thrust to make it off Earth, but are great once you're in a vacuum. See VASIMR and Ion Engines. Laser propulsion could work, but would need the laser system to be Earth-based, assuming you even had a laser powerful enough to get even a 1 kg object into orbit.
Why? SimCity was just a game looking for an additional disaster scenario. They're forms of non-ionizing radiation. In the case of the microwaves, they're too spread out to warm up the air by more than a few degrees. They're meant to be captured by rectennas spread over farm fields and still allow crops to be grown underneath. I haven't studied the laser proposals as in-depth, but it would be a very thin beam.
If nothing else, the technical challenges of transferring that energy from space down through a thick atmosphere to the surface of the Earth should warrant a discussion of just moving us all closer to the source in the first place.
This problem is the most straightforward one. There are two holes in the spectrum normally blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, one in the microwave range and the other in light (infared, I think). Both are easy to transmit and convert back into electricity.
The problem that isn't so straightforward is getting launch costs cheap enough to make it competitive with other solutions. Which ends up being exactly the same problem that colonization needs to solve, so there's no reason why research into one won't help the other.
NYC is a lost cause as far as astronomy is concerned, but I have hope that smaller cities and towns will see this and adopt it. LEDs are inheirently directional, whereas most fixtures tend to waste a lot of their light going out and up. So LEDs should be a win for astronomy.
One thing about HPS is that it spreads light everywhere, whereas LEDs are more directed, which you want in a streetlight facing down. Omnidirectionalness can be fixed with good fixture design, but most cities use crummy fixtures.
"Learn to adapt" is the last contingency (well, the last contingency is extinction, but we'll assume that's unacceptable).
I disagree. Many of the problems of climate change are only a problem because humans will have problems adapting to the changes. The Earth itself has changed the climate on its own many times in the past, sometimes quite suddenly (due to metors, large volcanic activity, changes in solar cycles, etc.). No matter if the current changes are human-made or not, the next set of changes may not be.
Fortunately, changes to reduce greenhouse gases can be done hand-in-hand with changes to make our infrastructure more adaptive. For instance, hydroponic vertical farming in cities would reduce the transportation needed to get food into people's homes, while also being less dependent on the overall environment. Getting into some form of electric car would allow that electricity to come from any sufficiently large source, rather than just fossil fuels.
Granted, we can't plan for every climate event, but we could certainly make our infrastructure less dependent on the environment.
I'm wondering how they're counting that, though. Many of the spam botnets out there originate in Russia or other countries with governments that just don't care, though the actual computer sending it is often going to be in the US. If it's counted just by backtracking the IP address of the original sender, it'll show up as being from the US, even though it's really from Russia.
I wouldn't be surprised if CAN-SPAM did in fact kill off the major parts of the US-born spam problem, but the problem just moved elsewhere.
A good password manager is potentially better than trying to remember passwords. Excepting Rain Man-style savants (who often have severe cognitive difficulties in other ways), a computer can remember more unique passwords than any humans. Could you memorize a unique, strong, truly random password of at least 8 chars for every site you've ever visited?
There are indeed implementation problems that make this less secure than it could be, but even a naive implementation that stores the passwords in plaintext is better than trying to remember a few passwords and using them across multiple sites.
Isn't the original just a hypercard stack? It certainly could be written that way. I'm sure it needed some emulation doohicky for the Windows port, but nothing that can't be done.
If it is a hypercard stack, I doubt there is any leftover code. But the game is basically a sequence of hyperlinked image maps with some quicktime vids thrown in. You could implement the whole thing in HTML and minimal JavaScript.
The areas where diamonds have direct, practical use have been on artificial diamonds for a while (specifically, diamond cutting blades). It's only the jeweler's diamonds that are still natural.
There are also some potential practical uses of diamonds that have no current use because large quantities are too expensive. Such as building materials, thermal conductors, and semiconductors.
Until recently, most artificial diamonds had too many impurities to look good on a ring, even to an untrained eye (you'd have to be blind to not notice that your stone is distinctly yellow). Even now, making pure artificial diamonds is about the same price as digging them out of the ground. Still, the techniques are only going to get better, and I'll be dancing the streets when DeBeers goes bankrupt.
10x more? Not anymore. I pay less than double the normal price on my business-class DSL line. I could never afford 10x more, but at this rate, I'm happy to pay the extra so I don't have to deal with any of this ISP traffic control nonsense.
Using up the extra power gets us programmers who can worry about solving the actual problem, rather than hand optimizing their assembler to execute in less than 50 clock cycles. We may not be technically accomplishing more computer work per clock cycle, but we're definately accomplishing more programmer work per wallclock hour.
What you get with that remapping is that you can write programs as if you're the only one using the RAM. In other words, you can start accessing memory address f00000000 and never have to worry about another program using the same (physical) address.
Many in this thread have mentioned the Amiga as having multitasking without virtual memory (which makes my earlier statement techinically wrong), but this case demonstrates the very problem with that technique. You have to be very careful to never step on the memory that another program is using. You can go through all sorts of contortions to try to get around this, but the ultimate solution is to just implement virtual memory and be done with it.
TSR programs on DOS had much the same problems as the above. Most BSoDs of the Win95 through ME days were due to a bad VM implementation that often had programs stepping on each other's memory. The relatively low ocurrance of BSoDs on modern Windows is largely due to Microsoft finally learning to do VM right (more specifically, getting NT into a home OS instead of just servers and workstations).
You've been raked over the coals already for calling NAT/uPnP anything other than an ugly hack. But there's another problem here, which is how fast routers can route.
When an IPv4 router wants to send a packet along, it looks up in a table for the routing portion of the IP (the/24 portion or whatever the netmask is). It then sends the packet out on the interface specified in the table, or the default interface if it doesn't find it. The problem is that as the IPv4 space fills up, the size of these tables gets very large. Even if you have enough memory to hold them, searching that memory takes a long time.
IPv6 is a hierarchical address space, so the routers are laid out in a tree-shape rather than the ad-hoc setup of IPv4. The routers therefore only need to look at a small chunk of the address to know how to send the packet on. Then the next router takes the next chunk of the address, and so on.
Additionally, the max packet size of IPv4 is 65k. IPv6 can use an optional jumbo payload feature to go up to 4G. You need the link layer to support more than 1500 bytes per frame (which is the traditional limit of ethernet and a few other link protocols), but in theory you could transfer almost an entire DVD in one packet.
To add to the other replies, what you're suggesting is basically what TSR programs on DOS did. Basically, the OS would mark the sections of memory used by the TSR as unusable, and any other programs were expected to work around those areas.
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of the problems with this method. We should all be glad that those days are far behind us.
It never did change. "Virtual Memory" always meant a trick the kernel and CPU do to make programs think they are accessing a different memory address than they actually are. This trick is necessary in all multitasking operating systems.
Once you've made the jump to mapping real memory addresses to fake ones, it's easy to map the fake addresses to a swap file on the hard drive instead of actual RAM. The confusion of the terms started when naive programmers at the UI level called that swap file "virtual memory".
Slashdot Mirror
"Is a false statement" is a false statement. Now go prove it.
Given the all the frantic rerouting going on, as well as the similar problems faced earlier this year, we should assume that it is, in fact, a central point of failure, no matter what an abstract overview map tells us.
Geosychronous orbit has too much time latency, and LEO takes more satellites to cover the same area. It'd be cheeper to just lay more cable, but corporations tend to push for raw efficiency rather than redundancy. It's going to take governments using their buying power to encourage redundant routes to get us back to where DARPA was in the '80s.
Model T didn't have a distributor (Jay Leno mentioned this offhand in the video on Garage 419). I believe you can convert them to run a distributor, and there is a distributor-like timing system, but otherwise it's just magnetos.
The gas back then often got high octane ratings by using a lead additive. Increased environmental regulations for leaded gas are one reason why engine efficiency dropped so badly in the '70s (most because lead doesn't work with catalytic converters rather than regulating lead directly).
Blending in some kind of alchol may get us 120 octane pump gas once again. Another problem solved by booze!
Hydrogen is the most abundant element, and Oxygen isn't far behind, relatively speaking. The two combine easily to form H2O. So it shouldn't be so surprising that we find water everywhere we look, assuming that the physics that works here is the same everywhere else in the universe (and we'd have to throw out most of astrophysics if that weren't true).
1) do we have technology that can convert electrical power into sufficient thrust to escape earth gravity and work in space
Most electric-based propultion methods don't have the thrust to make it off Earth, but are great once you're in a vacuum. See VASIMR and Ion Engines. Laser propulsion could work, but would need the laser system to be Earth-based, assuming you even had a laser powerful enough to get even a 1 kg object into orbit.
Why? SimCity was just a game looking for an additional disaster scenario. They're forms of non-ionizing radiation. In the case of the microwaves, they're too spread out to warm up the air by more than a few degrees. They're meant to be captured by rectennas spread over farm fields and still allow crops to be grown underneath. I haven't studied the laser proposals as in-depth, but it would be a very thin beam.
If nothing else, the technical challenges of transferring that energy from space down through a thick atmosphere to the surface of the Earth should warrant a discussion of just moving us all closer to the source in the first place.
This problem is the most straightforward one. There are two holes in the spectrum normally blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, one in the microwave range and the other in light (infared, I think). Both are easy to transmit and convert back into electricity.
The problem that isn't so straightforward is getting launch costs cheap enough to make it competitive with other solutions. Which ends up being exactly the same problem that colonization needs to solve, so there's no reason why research into one won't help the other.
NYC is a lost cause as far as astronomy is concerned, but I have hope that smaller cities and towns will see this and adopt it. LEDs are inheirently directional, whereas most fixtures tend to waste a lot of their light going out and up. So LEDs should be a win for astronomy.
Some of the newer LEDs can go above 100 lumens/watt.
One thing about HPS is that it spreads light everywhere, whereas LEDs are more directed, which you want in a streetlight facing down. Omnidirectionalness can be fixed with good fixture design, but most cities use crummy fixtures.
"Learn to adapt" is the last contingency (well, the last contingency is extinction, but we'll assume that's unacceptable).
I disagree. Many of the problems of climate change are only a problem because humans will have problems adapting to the changes. The Earth itself has changed the climate on its own many times in the past, sometimes quite suddenly (due to metors, large volcanic activity, changes in solar cycles, etc.). No matter if the current changes are human-made or not, the next set of changes may not be.
Fortunately, changes to reduce greenhouse gases can be done hand-in-hand with changes to make our infrastructure more adaptive. For instance, hydroponic vertical farming in cities would reduce the transportation needed to get food into people's homes, while also being less dependent on the overall environment. Getting into some form of electric car would allow that electricity to come from any sufficiently large source, rather than just fossil fuels.
Granted, we can't plan for every climate event, but we could certainly make our infrastructure less dependent on the environment.
I'm wondering how they're counting that, though. Many of the spam botnets out there originate in Russia or other countries with governments that just don't care, though the actual computer sending it is often going to be in the US. If it's counted just by backtracking the IP address of the original sender, it'll show up as being from the US, even though it's really from Russia.
I wouldn't be surprised if CAN-SPAM did in fact kill off the major parts of the US-born spam problem, but the problem just moved elsewhere.
A good password manager is potentially better than trying to remember passwords. Excepting Rain Man-style savants (who often have severe cognitive difficulties in other ways), a computer can remember more unique passwords than any humans. Could you memorize a unique, strong, truly random password of at least 8 chars for every site you've ever visited?
There are indeed implementation problems that make this less secure than it could be, but even a naive implementation that stores the passwords in plaintext is better than trying to remember a few passwords and using them across multiple sites.
Isn't the original just a hypercard stack? It certainly could be written that way. I'm sure it needed some emulation doohicky for the Windows port, but nothing that can't be done.
If it is a hypercard stack, I doubt there is any leftover code. But the game is basically a sequence of hyperlinked image maps with some quicktime vids thrown in. You could implement the whole thing in HTML and minimal JavaScript.
The areas where diamonds have direct, practical use have been on artificial diamonds for a while (specifically, diamond cutting blades). It's only the jeweler's diamonds that are still natural.
There are also some potential practical uses of diamonds that have no current use because large quantities are too expensive. Such as building materials, thermal conductors, and semiconductors.
Until recently, most artificial diamonds had too many impurities to look good on a ring, even to an untrained eye (you'd have to be blind to not notice that your stone is distinctly yellow). Even now, making pure artificial diamonds is about the same price as digging them out of the ground. Still, the techniques are only going to get better, and I'll be dancing the streets when DeBeers goes bankrupt.
I'd presume he's talking about the US embargo of oil sales to the Empire of Japan after they invaded French Indochina, which prompted the attack.
Somehow, I think not selling oil to an imperialist power noted for raping villiges is one of the least bad things the US has ever done.
10x more? Not anymore. I pay less than double the normal price on my business-class DSL line. I could never afford 10x more, but at this rate, I'm happy to pay the extra so I don't have to deal with any of this ISP traffic control nonsense.
That's Stand Alone Complex, though. The earlier movies and the magna are all different universes that can and do contridict each other.
Using up the extra power gets us programmers who can worry about solving the actual problem, rather than hand optimizing their assembler to execute in less than 50 clock cycles. We may not be technically accomplishing more computer work per clock cycle, but we're definately accomplishing more programmer work per wallclock hour.
What you get with that remapping is that you can write programs as if you're the only one using the RAM. In other words, you can start accessing memory address f00000000 and never have to worry about another program using the same (physical) address.
Many in this thread have mentioned the Amiga as having multitasking without virtual memory (which makes my earlier statement techinically wrong), but this case demonstrates the very problem with that technique. You have to be very careful to never step on the memory that another program is using. You can go through all sorts of contortions to try to get around this, but the ultimate solution is to just implement virtual memory and be done with it.
TSR programs on DOS had much the same problems as the above. Most BSoDs of the Win95 through ME days were due to a bad VM implementation that often had programs stepping on each other's memory. The relatively low ocurrance of BSoDs on modern Windows is largely due to Microsoft finally learning to do VM right (more specifically, getting NT into a home OS instead of just servers and workstations).
You've been raked over the coals already for calling NAT/uPnP anything other than an ugly hack. But there's another problem here, which is how fast routers can route.
When an IPv4 router wants to send a packet along, it looks up in a table for the routing portion of the IP (the /24 portion or whatever the netmask is). It then sends the packet out on the interface specified in the table, or the default interface if it doesn't find it. The problem is that as the IPv4 space fills up, the size of these tables gets very large. Even if you have enough memory to hold them, searching that memory takes a long time.
IPv6 is a hierarchical address space, so the routers are laid out in a tree-shape rather than the ad-hoc setup of IPv4. The routers therefore only need to look at a small chunk of the address to know how to send the packet on. Then the next router takes the next chunk of the address, and so on.
Additionally, the max packet size of IPv4 is 65k. IPv6 can use an optional jumbo payload feature to go up to 4G. You need the link layer to support more than 1500 bytes per frame (which is the traditional limit of ethernet and a few other link protocols), but in theory you could transfer almost an entire DVD in one packet.
To add to the other replies, what you're suggesting is basically what TSR programs on DOS did. Basically, the OS would mark the sections of memory used by the TSR as unusable, and any other programs were expected to work around those areas.
Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown of the problems with this method. We should all be glad that those days are far behind us.
It never did change. "Virtual Memory" always meant a trick the kernel and CPU do to make programs think they are accessing a different memory address than they actually are. This trick is necessary in all multitasking operating systems.
Once you've made the jump to mapping real memory addresses to fake ones, it's easy to map the fake addresses to a swap file on the hard drive instead of actual RAM. The confusion of the terms started when naive programmers at the UI level called that swap file "virtual memory".
A textbook example of why "Anonymous" is follwed by "Coward".