Really? Did you do hard physical labor from sunup until sundown today? Will you do the same tomorrow, and every following day until you collapse from overwork and die shortly thereafter?
Because that's what life was like for most people before industrialization.
If you're like most Slashdotters, you spend the majority of your day sitting comfortably in front of a computer. That may feel like "busy" to you, but believe me, it's not. Your mind may be active, but your body is 99% idle.
If efficiency just means there's more time for people to do more work, there's something seriously wrong with the world.
It means there is a surplus of productivity. That surplus might be given to the workers in the form of higher pay, or shorter hours, or better benefits, or lower prices, or some combination thereof.... or it might be given to the owners of the company in the form of greater profits. If there's a problem, it's because too often the latter happens.
If you guys think IP6 will be adopted, just wait till they find huge money in artificial scarcity of IP4 blocks. There will be no where to run and escape it! Unless you pay that premium...
This will work until the first ISP realizes there is now a market for IPv6 accounts that cost less than NAT, and do more... then you can run and escape to that ISP.
you will have to upgrade soon because when we run out of v4 addresses, Windows XP won't work.
... or, you could type "netsh interface ipv6 install" at the command prompt, and presto, Windows XP will work again. Save yourself the $199 (or whatever it is) price of a Windows 7 license.
Embed solar panels in the road surface and we can have potentially unlimited range.
I think that's a great idea, but we'll also need a way to keep them clean. Getting driven on will dirty them up pretty fast, and a dirty solar panel is a solar panel that's not getting very much sunlight.
The average consumer is concerned about getting stranded because their vehicle runs out of fuel.
Another possible option: call a tow truck, have the tow-truck use its engine to recharge your battery to the point where you can make it to the nearest recharge station. Not really all that different from what a lot of people would do when their gas-powered car runs out of gas.
"Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States "
It's all speculation, of course. But ask yourself, who has both the capability AND the motivation to carry out such an attack? The same countries who have been threatening an aerial strike (but haven't gone through with it because a physical attack would be too destabilizing) certainly come to mind as likely suspects.
trusting a product made by your enemy to run your country's infrastructure is just dumb.
Probably, but if your goal is to have a nuclear arsenal within, say, 5 years, and it would take 10 years to design your own industrial control solutions from scratch, then you may just have to buy the available turnkey solution and take the risk. The alternative would be to push back the "release" another 5 years, and perhaps that wasn't considered acceptable.
What would be the dumb part in this scenario would be allowing people to take USB thumb drives into the "secure" nuclear facility.
Iran has stated that they want to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," [...] and would probably use nukes as an offensive weapon
For all their many faults, the Iranian government is no more of a suicide pact than the USSR government was in the 1980s. Iran's government is as aware of how MAD works as anyone.
As for what motivates Iran to acquire nuclear weapons: consider what happened to their next-door neighbor, who didn't get nuclear weapons in time. Compare that to the odds of a similar invasion happening to North Korea, who does have nukes. So, one obvious reason why Iran would want nuclear weapons is to deter a US invasion.
Of course. But on the other hand, if you are trying to be a world leader and convince other nations to "do the right thing", it helps not to be seen as a cynical hypocrite who says one thing and does another. So yeah, you can play the realpolitik games, just don't be very surprised when other countries follow suit.
Well, I'm afraid you just didn't 'get' memory management yet. Once you do, it's actually pretty simple.
I 'get it', I just think it's not a very good system. Using malloc()/free() in C is "pretty simple" as well: simply be sure to free() everything you malloc() when you are done with it. That doesn't make it easy to use.
AFAICT Obj-C isn't much different from C-with-a-reference-counting convention. For example, in the "Basics" section, Apple documents the following methods that you need to understand and call at the appropriate times:
alloc
copy
retain
release
autorelease
Now, none of these have semantics that is particularly complicated... the problem is that you have to know about them at all. You have to remember when to call retain, when to call release, etc. Not really much of a difference from C, where you have to remember when to call malloc(), when to call free(), when to increment/decrement a refcount member variable, etc. Certainly more of a hassle than C++ (where shared_ptr's constructor and destructor automatically does it all for you) or Java (where garbage collection does it all for you).
It's telling that the Practical Memory Management page has a list of "common mistakes" that will result in memory leaks or undefined behavior -- the very mistakes that an automated memory management system is supposed to prevent. In well-designed system, these mistakes wouldn't be "common", because they wouldn't be easy to make. (Ideally, they wouldn't even be possible).
Every time I ask people why they dislike Obj-C, they can't get any further than the brackets
At least on the iPhone OS, what bothers me is the lack of garbage collection, combined with the completely non-automated, error-prone nature of their reference-counting mechanism. I'm used to C++, which doesn't (usually) have garbage collection either, but at least there I can declare a shared_ptr for my dynamically allocated object, and be done with worrying about memory management from then on -- things will (more or less) "just work". In Obj-C I have to constantly try and remember which objects I 'own', when it's mandatory to [retain] or [release] and when it's forbidden to do so, and if I ever get anything wrong, I'll end up with a silent memory leak and/or code crashing when it tries to access freed memory. It's really not very much better than using straight malloc()/free() in C. I feel like I'm spending too much time tracking details that the language should handle automatically.
The human body has a max output of about 200 watts. About 1/4 HP. sustained flying is probably a pipe dream.
Let's look at the theoretical limit (best case scenario): someone builds a flying machine out of unobtanium, and so the machine itself weighs zero kilograms. In this case the pilot needs only to support his own weight. Would human-powered flight be possible in this scenario?
(I don't have the necessary physics or physiology knowledge to even put out a guess -- but if not, I suppose you can always hop in a glider and take advantage of updrafts)
The basic problem with a railgun is that it give only a fraction of the velocity required - and it does so only in one plane.
Maybe I'm missing something, but can't you point the railgun in any direction you want? Granted it's probably cheaper to run the track along the ground, but you could at least in principle aim it straight up, or diagonally, or any other direction...
Incidentally, I suspect the appeal of the railgun is similar to the appeal of a Space Elevator... if you can supply the fuel/energy from the ground, rather than having to pay to lift a few thousand gallons of rocket fuel mass into the air, that's a big win.
No I just don't see why a browser should be so demanding that you have to tap the GPU to get any speed out of it. It's web browser for crying out loud.
Who said anything about "have to"? Clearly you don't have to, since millions of people use IE without any GPU present at all, and it performs well for them.
On the other hand, if there is a GPU available, and using it can improve the user experience, why not go ahead and use it?
What I'm reading is "I prefer my $299 video card to operate as a 600-GigaFLOP space heater whenever I'm browsing the Internet (aka, most of the time)".
Is letting vast quantities of perfectly usable compute cycles go to waste really something to be proud of?
Detonation or thermite. Pretty easy solution if you must be encumbered by an electronic device
Of course, to do that you have to carry explosives around with you (or hide them somewhere). And if the police find those, now they think they have evidence that you're a terrorist. Probably not an improvement in your legal position.
As to risk, everything has risk. But there are plenty of roofers who last an entire career without falling off a roof.
That is a misleading analogy... a roof is an unintelligent object whose behavior is (relatively) simple and predictable. A criminal isn't going up against simple, unpredictable objects, he's going up against human beings, many of whom are quite intelligent, and all of whom can behave unpredictably.
Furthermore, when a roofer does fall off of a roof (or suffer some other kind of injury) there's a whole social safety net waiting to help him recover and return to work. Emergency rooms, doctors, worker's comp, insurance, etc. A criminal, on the other hand, won't get any help returning to his "work" -- just the opposite, there's an entire system set up to make sure he doesn't return to work. So while a fall off of a roof might put a roofer out of work for 6 months, a getting caught will put a criminal out of work for years (if not decades).
Lastly, the lack of societal support effects even the criminals who don't get caught. If a roofer gets stiffed on a deal, he can go to the police and file a complaint, or go to the Better Business Bureau and complain there, or sue the other party in court. If a criminal gets stiffed, he has none of those options -- doing any of those things would be just as likely to put him in jail as get him any redress. So he can either (a) shoot the other person, or (b) suck it up and take a loss. Shooting the other person doesn't get him his money back, and it's one more crime that he runs the risk of getting caught for. Sucking up the loss doesn't do his bottom line any good either. And of course anyone who knows about his criminal behavior can try to blackmail him (or otherwise influence him) at any time, simply by threatening to give evidence to the police. Not a particularly profitable position in most ways.
It is as far as fuel is concerned. However there's lots more than that that oil is used for, so it'll still be extracted even when it costs more energy to extract than it gives.
I take your point... but it will have to be some other energy source providing the means to extract that oil.
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, we are so much busier today.
Really? Did you do hard physical labor from sunup until sundown today? Will you do the same tomorrow, and every following day until you collapse from overwork and die shortly thereafter?
Because that's what life was like for most people before industrialization.
If you're like most Slashdotters, you spend the majority of your day sitting comfortably in front of a computer. That may feel like "busy" to you, but believe me, it's not. Your mind may be active, but your body is 99% idle.
If efficiency just means there's more time for people to do more work, there's something seriously wrong with the world.
It means there is a surplus of productivity. That surplus might be given to the workers in the form of higher pay, or shorter hours, or better benefits, or lower prices, or some combination thereof.... or it might be given to the owners of the company in the form of greater profits. If there's a problem, it's because too often the latter happens.
If you guys think IP6 will be adopted, just wait till they find huge money in artificial scarcity of IP4 blocks. There will be no where to run and escape it! Unless you pay that premium...
This will work until the first ISP realizes there is now a market for IPv6 accounts that cost less than NAT, and do more... then you can run and escape to that ISP.
you will have to upgrade soon because when we run out of v4 addresses, Windows XP won't work.
Where's my flying car?
Erm, they're not ready for prime time yet. However, we have developed a flying Segway, if that's of interest....
Embed solar panels in the road surface and we can have potentially unlimited range.
I think that's a great idea, but we'll also need a way to keep them clean. Getting driven on will dirty them up pretty fast, and a dirty solar panel is a solar panel that's not getting very much sunlight.
The average consumer is concerned about getting stranded because their vehicle runs out of fuel.
Another possible option: call a tow truck, have the tow-truck use its engine to recharge your battery to the point where you can make it to the nearest recharge station. Not really all that different from what a lot of people would do when their gas-powered car runs out of gas.
"Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States "
It's all speculation, of course. But ask yourself, who has both the capability AND the motivation to carry out such an attack? The same countries who have been threatening an aerial strike (but haven't gone through with it because a physical attack would be too destabilizing) certainly come to mind as likely suspects.
trusting a product made by your enemy to run your country's infrastructure is just dumb.
Probably, but if your goal is to have a nuclear arsenal within, say, 5 years, and it would take 10 years to design your own industrial control solutions from scratch, then you may just have to buy the available turnkey solution and take the risk. The alternative would be to push back the "release" another 5 years, and perhaps that wasn't considered acceptable.
What would be the dumb part in this scenario would be allowing people to take USB thumb drives into the "secure" nuclear facility.
Iran has stated that they want to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," [...] and would probably use nukes as an offensive weapon
For all their many faults, the Iranian government is no more of a suicide pact than the USSR government was in the 1980s. Iran's government is as aware of how MAD works as anyone.
As for what motivates Iran to acquire nuclear weapons: consider what happened to their next-door neighbor, who didn't get nuclear weapons in time. Compare that to the odds of a similar invasion happening to North Korea, who does have nukes. So, one obvious reason why Iran would want nuclear weapons is to deter a US invasion.
Unfair? Yes. Do I care, not really.
Of course. But on the other hand, if you are trying to be a world leader and convince other nations to "do the right thing", it helps not to be seen as a cynical hypocrite who says one thing and does another. So yeah, you can play the realpolitik games, just don't be very surprised when other countries follow suit.
Well, I'm afraid you just didn't 'get' memory management yet. Once you do, it's actually pretty simple.
I 'get it', I just think it's not a very good system. Using malloc()/free() in C is "pretty simple" as well: simply be sure to free() everything you malloc() when you are done with it. That doesn't make it easy to use.
AFAICT Obj-C isn't much different from C-with-a-reference-counting convention. For example, in the "Basics" section, Apple documents the following methods that you need to understand and call at the appropriate times:
Now, none of these have semantics that is particularly complicated... the problem is that you have to know about them at all. You have to remember when to call retain, when to call release, etc. Not really much of a difference from C, where you have to remember when to call malloc(), when to call free(), when to increment/decrement a refcount member variable, etc. Certainly more of a hassle than C++ (where shared_ptr's constructor and destructor automatically does it all for you) or Java (where garbage collection does it all for you).
It's telling that the Practical Memory Management page has a list of "common mistakes" that will result in memory leaks or undefined behavior -- the very mistakes that an automated memory management system is supposed to prevent. In well-designed system, these mistakes wouldn't be "common", because they wouldn't be easy to make. (Ideally, they wouldn't even be possible).
Every time I ask people why they dislike Obj-C, they can't get any further than the brackets
At least on the iPhone OS, what bothers me is the lack of garbage collection, combined with the completely non-automated, error-prone nature of their reference-counting mechanism. I'm used to C++, which doesn't (usually) have garbage collection either, but at least there I can declare a shared_ptr for my dynamically allocated object, and be done with worrying about memory management from then on -- things will (more or less) "just work". In Obj-C I have to constantly try and remember which objects I 'own', when it's mandatory to [retain] or [release] and when it's forbidden to do so, and if I ever get anything wrong, I'll end up with a silent memory leak and/or code crashing when it tries to access freed memory. It's really not very much better than using straight malloc()/free() in C. I feel like I'm spending too much time tracking details that the language should handle automatically.
I'm surprised the allusions to prison rape persist. It still happens, though not as common as it once was
I'm not familiar with how common prison rape once was, but it's definitely still a problem.
The human body has a max output of about 200 watts. About 1/4 HP. sustained flying is probably a pipe dream.
Let's look at the theoretical limit (best case scenario): someone builds a flying machine out of unobtanium, and so the machine itself weighs zero kilograms. In this case the pilot needs only to support his own weight. Would human-powered flight be possible in this scenario?
(I don't have the necessary physics or physiology knowledge to even put out a guess -- but if not, I suppose you can always hop in a glider and take advantage of updrafts)
Dude...you need to get out more.
Don't bother... I've been there. Way overrated IMO.
If your jpgs look like everybody elses jpgs both visually and under close analytical scrutiny they aren't going to bother you.
I've developed a fascinating algorithm for encoding hidden data by slightly modulating breast sizes, but this comment is too small to contain it.
The basic problem with a railgun is that it give only a fraction of the velocity required - and it does so only in one plane.
Maybe I'm missing something, but can't you point the railgun in any direction you want? Granted it's probably cheaper to run the track along the ground, but you could at least in principle aim it straight up, or diagonally, or any other direction...
Incidentally, I suspect the appeal of the railgun is similar to the appeal of a Space Elevator... if you can supply the fuel/energy from the ground, rather than having to pay to lift a few thousand gallons of rocket fuel mass into the air, that's a big win.
No I just don't see why a browser should be so demanding that you have to tap the GPU to get any speed out of it. It's web browser for crying out loud.
Who said anything about "have to"? Clearly you don't have to, since millions of people use IE without any GPU present at all, and it performs well for them.
On the other hand, if there is a GPU available, and using it can improve the user experience, why not go ahead and use it?
What I'm reading is "I prefer my $299 video card to operate as a 600-GigaFLOP space heater whenever I'm browsing the Internet (aka, most of the time)".
Is letting vast quantities of perfectly usable compute cycles go to waste really something to be proud of?
In my opinion learning to not hit your own neighborhood where you'll be recognized and followed on foot to our house
AHA! The cat's out of the bag now, SydShamino! Slashdot citizens, arrest that man!
If he doesn't, then he deserves to get caught.
He deserves to get caught in any case, because he's a f*cking criminal.
Detonation or thermite. Pretty easy solution if you must be encumbered by an electronic device
Of course, to do that you have to carry explosives around with you (or hide them somewhere). And if the police find those, now they think they have evidence that you're a terrorist. Probably not an improvement in your legal position.
As to risk, everything has risk. But there are plenty of roofers who last an entire career without falling off a roof.
That is a misleading analogy... a roof is an unintelligent object whose behavior is (relatively) simple and predictable. A criminal isn't going up against simple, unpredictable objects, he's going up against human beings, many of whom are quite intelligent, and all of whom can behave unpredictably.
Furthermore, when a roofer does fall off of a roof (or suffer some other kind of injury) there's a whole social safety net waiting to help him recover and return to work. Emergency rooms, doctors, worker's comp, insurance, etc. A criminal, on the other hand, won't get any help returning to his "work" -- just the opposite, there's an entire system set up to make sure he doesn't return to work. So while a fall off of a roof might put a roofer out of work for 6 months, a getting caught will put a criminal out of work for years (if not decades).
Lastly, the lack of societal support effects even the criminals who don't get caught. If a roofer gets stiffed on a deal, he can go to the police and file a complaint, or go to the Better Business Bureau and complain there, or sue the other party in court. If a criminal gets stiffed, he has none of those options -- doing any of those things would be just as likely to put him in jail as get him any redress. So he can either (a) shoot the other person, or (b) suck it up and take a loss. Shooting the other person doesn't get him his money back, and it's one more crime that he runs the risk of getting caught for. Sucking up the loss doesn't do his bottom line any good either. And of course anyone who knows about his criminal behavior can try to blackmail him (or otherwise influence him) at any time, simply by threatening to give evidence to the police. Not a particularly profitable position in most ways.
It is as far as fuel is concerned. However there's lots more than that that oil is used for, so it'll still be extracted even when it costs more energy to extract than it gives.
I take your point... but it will have to be some other energy source providing the means to extract that oil.
Peak oil is sensationalist bullsh*t. When petroleum based products become more scarce
Wow, that gave me whiplash: "peak oil is bullshit, and here's how the economy will react when it occurs"