It may just have, if this disaster does what it could economically and environmentally do to the southern US and any other part of the world affected by this..
I think this disaster may have done to offshore oil drilling what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did for nuclear power in the US... raised the level of NIMBYism to the point where future offshore oil-drilling proposals will require too much sorting through red tape to ever be profitable.
I don't see how allowing a higher error rate will enable them to put more transistors on a chip.
What it does is increase the chances of actually being able to use the chip once it's made. Right now, many chips have to be discarded because they contain manufacturing flaws that (in current designs) makes them unusable. If they can come up with a design that allows flawed chips to be useful anyway, they no longer have to discard all the chips that didn't come out perfectly.
Well, they aren't rock-solid today either, so you can not trust their output even today. It's just not very likely that there will be a mistake.
For common definitions of "rock-solid" and "not very likely", the above statements cancel each other out. (Keep in mind that different markets have different requirements for reliability... 1 hardware error every year is probably acceptable for casual computing use, but not for nuclear reactor control)
Anything that's left will be spent on menus that fade in and out and buttons that look like quivering drops of water -- perhaps next year, they'll have animated fish living inside them.
If animated fish menus are what the consumers want, then why not sell them animated menus? Or, if consumers prefer spending their CPU cycles on getting actual work done instead, they can always buy software with a less fancy GUI. It's not like there aren't options available to suit every taste.
So what you are saying here is that if we can make an explosive small enough we can create laser guided flies that will seek out the spot and land and detonate.
Wouldn't they be more likely to fly towards the laser's source? Probably not what you want....
But there's nothing compelling about Apple's computers, other than the software they run.
Well, the cases look nice, but yes, the software is the main thing. MacOS/X is the first mainstream (read: commercially well-supported) consumer OS that doesn't suck donkey balls.
The only thing $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_A) makes are designs. All of the manufacturing is outsourced. $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_B) also 'makes' the $(PRODUCT_A), in the same way that $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_A) 'makes' the $(PRODUCT_B); by sending the designs to a company in China to mass produce them.
There, I generalized that for you. Now you can re-use your post in lots of places!
Serious question: Windows had fanboys? I always figured Windows was for people who didn't care (I mean that in the nicest possible way).
Strangely enough, yes. They were people who had grown up knowing only MS-DOS, and therefore thought that Windows 95 was alien future technology. They'd heard of Macs but never used one, and of course they had no idea what an Amiga was.
I work with a company that would dissolve themselves and the CEO would commit seppeku before we consider OSX.
Er, why? I've used Linux for development, and I've used MacOS/X for development, and there really isn't that much difference between the two. (Granted, we're using Qt for our program's underlying API; is it Cocoa in particular that you dislike?)
I think the farming metaphor would be "eating the seed corn". (I'm not sure if it's quite the same metaphor, but it at least has the advantage of not being horrifying to think about)
And what if it's true? What if the system is broken and there's nothing a single person can do about it? What then?
Well, then you're fucked. However, if there is something that can be done, but the people who could have done it are all too depressed and despondent to actually find that thing and do it, then they've fucked themselves, and turned a non-hopeless situation into a hopeless one through their own inaction. So defeatism is not a useful approach to take, because you're not omniscient and therefore there might always be an as-yet-undiscovered solution to be found if you keep looking. If you keep trying to improve things, failure is a possibility; if you give up, it's a certainty.
I am talking about punishment that severe in both, economic sense and personal punishment in the sense of prison time.
Punishment alone won't solve the problem. It might if every company had perfect knowledge of all of the risks and was an economically rational actor, that's simply not the case in the real world. What inevitably happens without regulation is this:
Some company makes a mess, and is punished severely
Other companies take note and self-regulate for a while
A few years pass, memories of the disaster start to get hazy
Some company notices that by cutting just a few corners, they can get a competitive edge on the other companies, with no apparent downside
All the other competing companies are now forced to cut the same corners, or get undercut on price and go out of business
Repeat the previous two steps until some company cuts one corner too many, and things go pear-shaped. Then goto the top and start the whole process over again
When there are risks to the public, regulation is necessary to keep companies from taking those risks.
I wish someone would successfully implement Communism. Its an appealing concept that never worked because any communist revolution was always used as a vehicle to institute a tyrannical regime.
Heh, kind of like saying that levitation is an appealing concept that never worked because gravity always causes unsupported objects to fall to the ground.
Rather than war, couldn't we just set the military-industrial complex to the task of breaking windows and then fixing them?
Breaking things and then fixing them sounds like a pretty reasonable description of war, actually. (in particular, the war breaks things, and then the defense companies get taxpayer money to fix them (or produce more of them))
No one will ever be held responsible for this. Ever. Not now, not ever. Ever ever ever.
What exactly do you mean when you say "be held responsible"? Are you hoping for public executions? BP CEO's heak on a pike, maybe?
BP will pay whatever it ends up costing them to "fix" the spill,
In other words, BP will be held responsible, in that they will pay for the cleanup.
Obama is a completely worthless shill to the right of Richard Nixon and will do nothing.
Obama's an amazing guy -- simultaneously to the left of Chairman Mao and to the right of Richard Nixon! He's everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time! Maybe he's mastered that quantum teleportation technique from the other article.
Nothing ever changes, rich people never suffer, and again no one will ever be punished for it. There is literally no hope, and that's not even a joke. There seriously isn't.
You sound like someone trying to defend their own apathy. After all, if there's no hope, then you are cleared of all responsibility for ever doing anything. Nice gig if you can avoid suicide.
Beside the heat issue, they did not even consider the internet connection itself.
Oddly enough, they did consider that. Here's a quote from the article that you failed to read: " The first cafe is set to go live in Zambia soon. While the tiny town it will be sited in is 70 miles from the nearest major centre, it is home to a malarial research institute that has a satellite dish link with John Hopkins in the US, so the cafe will piggyback on that connection."
Seriously, though - why are these people so intent on providing Internet access to countries and people that need many more basic things in life first
What does it matter to you? It's their charity, their money, and therefore their decision about what they want to do. If you think people need something else more, start your own damn charity.
The Prius, in my opinion, is one of the ugliest cars in all of creation.
I think it looks pretty cool. But that's all a matter of personal taste anyway, so there's little point in arguing about it. If you don't like the way a model looks, don't buy one.
Why is it that any sort of hybrid or electric car has to be hideous?
Of course it doesn't have to be.... if you want a boring look, that's available too.
(I fear the day Suburu makes an electric car, the level of smug will be unprecedented)
I think the constant sniping about the alleged 'smugness' of hybrid vehicle owners says more about the critics than it does about the hybrid owners themselves. Insecure, much?
Hopefully this alliance between Tesla and Toyota will give us sexy electric cars that don't cost a fortune.
Aptera isn't a car. It is more like a motorcycle with a bubble around it. At least a Tesla is still a car
I believe that was the previous poster's point -- that Aptera is a 'new way of thinking', or as you would put it, 'not a car'.
Personally, I think even Aptera doesn't go far enough -- if you really want to solve car-related problems, even the "greenest" car isn't really all that green. Instead, work on making car ownership unnecessary in the first place.
It's all about centralizing control. "We have the means to improve lives for all people. We have assumed control, and will (eventually, maybe) act in your interest."
Hahaha, as if you have some kind of "control" now. Dug any oil wells in your back yard lately? At least with an electric car you have the theoretical possibility of producing your own electricity to recharge it from your own solar panels / wind turbine / etc.
It comes down to if you cannot see the source don't trust it.
... and even if you can see the source, you still can't trust it. Unless you are an expert in the source's programming language, AND you are willing to spend several dozen hours doing a line-by-line review of all of the source code, most exploits are still going to walk right by you. A "mistake" that opens up a security hole can be very subtle; indeed that's why so many honest developers end up releasing security holes by mistake.
And that's not even counting the second issue: how do you verify that the source code you are reading actually corresponds with the executable your computer is going to run? If you download both source and executable, it could be that the source is clean, but the executable contains a back door. Even if you compile the source code yourself, it could be that the code exploits a bug (or backdoor) in your compiler to implement behavior different from what the source code indicates.
What the longer wings make me wonder is "Where are you going to park it?" Apron space at airports is already critically limited. How on earth do they expect to dock something with absurdly long wings?
Perhaps the wings could fold smaller when necessary? (just as long as they don't fold smaller during flight, of course)
Once again, another anti-nuke wacko proves he has no fucking idea what he is talking about, prefering to throw around "scary" words instead of actually researching shit. I swear to god, it's like knowledge is actually taboo to you people.
It sounds like you're so enraged that you are unwilling to acknowledge that there could be any valid concerns about the hazards of nuclear power. That's all well and good if your goal is just to rant on Slashdot, but if you actually want to promote nuclear power, you ought to wipe the spittle off of your chin and try a little respectful discussion instead of flinging insults. "You people" are the people who will vote for or against nuclear power, and calling them names isn't going to help them see your side of things.
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It may just have, if this disaster does what it could economically and environmentally do to the southern US and any other part of the world affected by this..
I think this disaster may have done to offshore oil drilling what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did for nuclear power in the US... raised the level of NIMBYism to the point where future offshore oil-drilling proposals will require too much sorting through red tape to ever be profitable.
I don't see how allowing a higher error rate will enable them to put more transistors on a chip.
What it does is increase the chances of actually being able to use the chip once it's made. Right now, many chips have to be discarded because they contain manufacturing flaws that (in current designs) makes them unusable. If they can come up with a design that allows flawed chips to be useful anyway, they no longer have to discard all the chips that didn't come out perfectly.
Well, they aren't rock-solid today either, so you can not trust their output even today. It's just not very likely that there will be a mistake.
For common definitions of "rock-solid" and "not very likely", the above statements cancel each other out. (Keep in mind that different markets have different requirements for reliability... 1 hardware error every year is probably acceptable for casual computing use, but not for nuclear reactor control)
Anything that's left will be spent on menus that fade in and out and buttons that look like quivering drops of water -- perhaps next year, they'll have animated fish living inside them.
If animated fish menus are what the consumers want, then why not sell them animated menus? Or, if consumers prefer spending their CPU cycles on getting actual work done instead, they can always buy software with a less fancy GUI. It's not like there aren't options available to suit every taste.
You could either send every byte twice (TI 99/4A cassette format, I'm looking at you!)
Seems to me you'd have to send every byte three times, otherwise if two bytes don't match, how do you know one is correct and which one is corrupted?
(on the other hand, this would help explain why TI 99/4A cassette loads were so bloody slow...)
So what you are saying here is that if we can make an explosive small enough we can create laser guided flies that will seek out the spot and land and detonate.
Wouldn't they be more likely to fly towards the laser's source? Probably not what you want....
But there's nothing compelling about Apple's computers, other than the software they run.
Well, the cases look nice, but yes, the software is the main thing. MacOS/X is the first mainstream (read: commercially well-supported) consumer OS that doesn't suck donkey balls.
The only thing $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_A) makes are designs. All of the manufacturing is outsourced. $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_B) also 'makes' the $(PRODUCT_A), in the same way that $(AMERICAN_COMPANY_A) 'makes' the $(PRODUCT_B); by sending the designs to a company in China to mass produce them.
There, I generalized that for you. Now you can re-use your post in lots of places!
Serious question: Windows had fanboys? I always figured Windows was for people who didn't care (I mean that in the nicest possible way).
Strangely enough, yes. They were people who had grown up knowing only MS-DOS, and therefore thought that Windows 95 was alien future technology. They'd heard of Macs but never used one, and of course they had no idea what an Amiga was.
I work with a company that would dissolve themselves and the CEO would commit seppeku before we consider OSX.
Er, why? I've used Linux for development, and I've used MacOS/X for development, and there really isn't that much difference between the two. (Granted, we're using Qt for our program's underlying API; is it Cocoa in particular that you dislike?)
Perhaps eatings its own offspring might suffice?
I think the farming metaphor would be "eating the seed corn". (I'm not sure if it's quite the same metaphor, but it at least has the advantage of not being horrifying to think about)
And what if it's true? What if the system is broken and there's nothing a single person can do about it? What then?
Well, then you're fucked. However, if there is something that can be done, but the people who could have done it are all too depressed and despondent to actually find that thing and do it, then they've fucked themselves, and turned a non-hopeless situation into a hopeless one through their own inaction. So defeatism is not a useful approach to take, because you're not omniscient and therefore there might always be an as-yet-undiscovered solution to be found if you keep looking. If you keep trying to improve things, failure is a possibility; if you give up, it's a certainty.
I am talking about punishment that severe in both, economic sense and personal punishment in the sense of prison time.
Punishment alone won't solve the problem. It might if every company had perfect knowledge of all of the risks and was an economically rational actor, that's simply not the case in the real world. What inevitably happens without regulation is this:
When there are risks to the public, regulation is necessary to keep companies from taking those risks.
I wish someone would successfully implement Communism. Its an appealing concept that never worked because any communist revolution was always used as a vehicle to institute a tyrannical regime.
Heh, kind of like saying that levitation is an appealing concept that never worked because gravity always causes unsupported objects to fall to the ground.
Rather than war, couldn't we just set the military-industrial complex to the task of breaking windows and then fixing them?
Breaking things and then fixing them sounds like a pretty reasonable description of war, actually. (in particular, the war breaks things, and then the defense companies get taxpayer money to fix them (or produce more of them))
No one will ever be held responsible for this. Ever. Not now, not ever. Ever ever ever.
What exactly do you mean when you say "be held responsible"? Are you hoping for public executions? BP CEO's heak on a pike, maybe?
BP will pay whatever it ends up costing them to "fix" the spill,
In other words, BP will be held responsible, in that they will pay for the cleanup.
Obama is a completely worthless shill to the right of Richard Nixon and will do nothing.
Obama's an amazing guy -- simultaneously to the left of Chairman Mao and to the right of Richard Nixon! He's everywhere and nowhere, all at the same time! Maybe he's mastered that quantum teleportation technique from the other article.
Nothing ever changes, rich people never suffer, and again no one will ever be punished for it. There is literally no hope, and that's not even a joke. There seriously isn't.
You sound like someone trying to defend their own apathy. After all, if there's no hope, then you are cleared of all responsibility for ever doing anything. Nice gig if you can avoid suicide.
Beside the heat issue, they did not even consider the internet connection itself.
Oddly enough, they did consider that. Here's a quote from the article that you failed to read: " The first cafe is set to go live in Zambia soon. While the tiny town it will be sited in is 70 miles from the nearest major centre, it is home to a malarial research institute that has a satellite dish link with John Hopkins in the US, so the cafe will piggyback on that connection."
Seriously, though - why are these people so intent on providing Internet access to countries and people that need many more basic things in life first
What does it matter to you? It's their charity, their money, and therefore their decision about what they want to do. If you think people need something else more, start your own damn charity.
The Prius, in my opinion, is one of the ugliest cars in all of creation.
I think it looks pretty cool. But that's all a matter of personal taste anyway, so there's little point in arguing about it. If you don't like the way a model looks, don't buy one.
Why is it that any sort of hybrid or electric car has to be hideous?
Of course it doesn't have to be.... if you want a boring look, that's available too.
(I fear the day Suburu makes an electric car, the level of smug will be unprecedented)
I think the constant sniping about the alleged 'smugness' of hybrid vehicle owners says more about the critics than it does about the hybrid owners themselves. Insecure, much?
Hopefully this alliance between Tesla and Toyota will give us sexy electric cars that don't cost a fortune.
Amen to that!
Aptera isn't a car. It is more like a motorcycle with a bubble around it. At least a Tesla is still a car
I believe that was the previous poster's point -- that Aptera is a 'new way of thinking', or as you would put it, 'not a car'.
Personally, I think even Aptera doesn't go far enough -- if you really want to solve car-related problems, even the "greenest" car isn't really all that green. Instead, work on making car ownership unnecessary in the first place.
It's all about centralizing control. "We have the means to improve lives for all people. We have assumed control, and will (eventually, maybe) act in your interest."
Hahaha, as if you have some kind of "control" now. Dug any oil wells in your back yard lately? At least with an electric car you have the theoretical possibility of producing your own electricity to recharge it from your own solar panels / wind turbine / etc.
It comes down to if you cannot see the source don't trust it.
And that's not even counting the second issue: how do you verify that the source code you are reading actually corresponds with the executable your computer is going to run? If you download both source and executable, it could be that the source is clean, but the executable contains a back door. Even if you compile the source code yourself, it could be that the code exploits a bug (or backdoor) in your compiler to implement behavior different from what the source code indicates.
What the longer wings make me wonder is "Where are you going to park it?" Apron space at airports is already critically limited. How on earth do they expect to dock something with absurdly long wings?
Perhaps the wings could fold smaller when necessary? (just as long as they don't fold smaller during flight, of course)
Am I the only one who doesn't want people having remote access to my car?
Yes, you are. The rest of us think it would be pretty neat to have remote access to your car. ;^)
Once again, another anti-nuke wacko proves he has no fucking idea what he is talking about, prefering to throw around "scary" words instead of actually researching shit. I swear to god, it's like knowledge is actually taboo to you people.
It sounds like you're so enraged that you are unwilling to acknowledge that there could be any valid concerns about the hazards of nuclear power. That's all well and good if your goal is just to rant on Slashdot, but if you actually want to promote nuclear power, you ought to wipe the spittle off of your chin and try a little respectful discussion instead of flinging insults. "You people" are the people who will vote for or against nuclear power, and calling them names isn't going to help them see your side of things.