There are two basic constraints (besides costs). One is the strength of the materials. The printer used by the University of South Hampton uses nylon as it's structural material. That's pretty good, but not excellent. The other is the size of piece that the printer can print. IIRC the University of South Hampton printer can only handle things up to a meter long.
Note that these aren't intrinsic limits. There exist printers that can print titanium. I don't really know the strength of the material printed, but I suspect it's rather good. But these aren't nano-manipulators, much less assemblers. They have most of the traditional limitations, with some new ones, and a couple removed. Think of spraying concrete on a really small scale, using different colors of concrete. Well, some printers can print electrically conductive traces as well as insulators, so that's not a terribly accurate image. And different printers use slightly different approaches. Some use UV light to condense plastic out of a bath of polymer. Others spray particles like an ink-jet printer, and then use lasers to fix the stuff in place, like a traditional laser printer. And they can handle different kinds of "particles". There's one that actually *does* spray concrete, and can handle fairly large shapes. Etc.
Don't expect this approach to yield a human rated plane in the next 5 years. Probably not in the next decade. But it can do lots of other things.
So what you do is concentrate on making the printers cheaper and better, and then sell lots of printers, so people can print up what they want on an "as needed" basis. This saves warehousing, inventory, etc.
For something large, printing it on site saves shipping...though of course you do need to ship the printer, and it needs to traverse the site.
I expect that eventually, if the technology is successful, there will be a variety of different printers for special purposes, and a few general models for home use. But you need some way to recycle the things you aren't using anymore back into raw feedstock. (Tricky, but maybe no trickier than the original printer.)
The printer that they (University of South Hampton) used basically prints nylon, and also a bit of metal. I doubt that means it can print stainless steel.
OTOH, nylon might well be good enough for the propeller on a plane that small.
Your basic argument is correct, but you have a lot more faith in the honesty and accuracy of the GDP than I do.
The GDP is largely a work of fiction. Of the things is measures, only some have a positive influence on the general welfare, and many of the things it doesn't measure are quite significant for the general welfare. Do you really feel that generating paperwork for the government is something positive? That's but one of the questionable items that go into the GDP. One could raise the GDP by requiring twice an many forms to be filled. (Note that this would also provide jobs, and decrease unemployment. Other numbers that don't directly affect the economy...though they certainly have indirect effects, in many directions.)
What the GDP should measure is gross domestic production. It shouldn't cover what things sold for at auctions. This creates a very difficult problem. It means that you need to assign a value to something independent of it's market value. This is probably impossible. So it's not a coincidence that the GDP is a work of fiction, it's because it's trying to measure something that can't be measured. But it doesn't need to be quite as bad as it is. It's that bad because it's been adjusted over the decades by politicians to make themselves look good.
Pounds of cotton have a real value. Tons of refined iron have a real value. But how do you assign a value to a shirt or a computer chip, outside of what people will pay for it? What about an advertisement? Should it even have a positive value? Some advertisements attempt to inform people that some particular thing is available at some particular location for some particular cost. That has a positive value. Others attempt to convince people to buy something they don't want. That has a negative value. So how to you figure advertisements in the GDP? And even if you were to restrict yourself to cotton and iron, these don't have a large intrinsic value. They acquire a large value in a context where people want to use them to accomplish some purpose. So how do you rate their relative value?
Much of economics is like this. You can have complex models of how things interact, but when you try to summarize them, you come up with essentially meaningless numbers. Is unemployment bad? Then lets give everyone a job carrying bricks from one side of the city to the other. Now there's no unemployment (well, among those able to carry bricks), but is this really a gain? If you don't like that example, give every unemployed person a job as a highwayman. Is this an improvement? Jobs are not important in and of themselves, but only because of what they do, and their value can be either positive or negative. So just measuring unemployment is essentially meaningless. (Provided that the unemployed have some way to support themselves. If they don't, then they're likely to find a job with a negative social value. But that reduces unemployment!)
Well, the original CDs, the ones that were made by burning holes in the sheet of metal with a laser and sealing the layers of foil between layers of glass, were claimed to be good for well over a century. But I don't know of anything that even claims to be good forever. (Well, there's this MEM that was still in the laboratory that would probably be good for an indefinite period if you stored it in a vacuum at constant temperature. But you can bet that if it ever goes into commercial production the production model will have shaved several corners.)
So if your criterion is "forever", then there is no long term storage. Books certainly don't qualify. Not even if you print them on papyrus or clay tablets.
I suspect that the FSF holds the copyright, so they CAN'T violate the GPL in distributing it. The GPL only applies if you aren't the copyright holder to the code. But it would make secondary distribution illegal. (Say, by Debian or by Red Hat.)
What do you call long term? I've had CDs (burned, not pressed) fail after sitting on the shelf for a decade. DVDs are reputed to be less stable, and Blu-Ray to be even less so.
For medium term storage I consider HDs to be optimal. DVDs are probably OK for 5 years. Can't even speculate on the lifetime of a burned BluRay...but I'd guess 2.5 years. (Guess is the word. Denser storage is usually more fragile is my only reasoning.) *IF* you have a thermostatically controlled vault, and *IF* you have either the cash or the equipment, then tape is probably a good choice for storage of over 5 years. Just remember to read each tape at around 5 years, and be prepared for occasional failures. (I.e., multiple copies.) OTOH, this is with older tapes. I really don't know what to expect of tapes denser than 6250 BPI.
For me the most convenient storage form (recently) has been hard disk. And it's probably better than BluRay disks. Cheaper, easier, faster. Just remember: Multiple copies, and check things occasionally. I'm really looking forwards to USB3, as currently off-line hard disk usage is enough of a pain that I don't back up frequently enough. (Yeah, I'm an individual, not a company, But this is a problem that affects companies too, they just trade things off differently.)
There's a very big difference between a bug and a problem with the design. Problems with the design are why I despise KDE4. It is not now, and never has been, bugs. They've been fixing the bugs. The design problems they have refused to acknowledge.
Well, and in that case it's a fact that what I call a design flaw, other people like. So, in this case, what we are calling a design flaw, Google may well like. It's not a bug. If they change it, all well and good, but don't expect it to go away during the beta process without a concerted push by external sources, because it's not a bug.
I suppose that I shouldn't comment without reading the original article, but I'm not *that* interested.
This is another poor Slashdot summary. A Megawatt is nearly meaningless without a duration. Are they talking about watt/hours, watt/months, watt/years, or watt/decades? Solar cells don't last forever, so the duration is necessary to get any meaning out of it. I really doubt that they're talking about Megawatts/picosecond.
Presumably the original article discussed this. That, however, is just a guess because Jobs/Megawatt is a really stupid metric, so maybe they really didn't mean Jobs/(Megawatt/hour) or some such. Both those who attack it and those who defend it have been missing how nearly meaning-free the unit is. You know that they are proposing some kind of proportional relationship between jobs and electricity, but that's about as clear as it gets. And taking the unit "watts" literally yields nonsense. For that matter, so does taking the unit "jobs". With some jobs one is better off on public assistance, bad as that is. I really doubt that there's a sensible equivalence between a truck driver and a corporate executive, but both jobs are required by solar power companies.
Stupid! No, I don't want to read the article. The summary makes it look far too stupid to waste time on. In fact, I can't believe that the original article is as bad as the summary, and I *still* don't want to read it.
If you think that you know how to make yourself untraceable (rather than just difficult to trace), then you're wrong. And saying that they can't prove it depends on what's considered proof. If they can get an expert to testify that their approach is correct, the fact that it wasn't doesn't keep them from imprisoning you.
N.B.: I didn't say that they would catch the correct person. They might, or they might not. But they can catch somebody and argue that it's the correct person. And the odds may be fairly reasonable that they *did* catch the correct person, even if it wouldn't really qualify as "clear and convincing evidence" to people that understood what was being said.
If you've read this far, you'll note that I somewhat overstated the case in the first paragraph. But that's because it's a much larger risk than most "hackers" assume. And because the police are often more interested in a good arrest record than in justice, and DAs are almost always more interested in a good conviction record than in justice. (Plea bargaining should be outlawed, and considered a felony in an of itself.)
PayPal has a long standing tradition of abusing customers. Only once did I even start to open an account with them, but half-way through I decided that this was a very stupid thing to do, and aborted the transaction. I've never regretted that. In fact occasionally I'll read another news story and say to myself "I escaped by the skin of my teeth." (That's probably an incorrect conclusion. Probably most people don't have any trouble with them. But I really hate to count on being lucky.)
Given the current electoral system, I don't think outrage would suffice. Not even enough that there was rioting in the streets of all major cities. Third parties just let you feel that you're letting them know that you're upset. (Hint: They don't care.)
But there are good reasons why the bodyguards of all major political figures have been increasingly strengthened. Once upon a time the president was willing to shake hands with the populace. Today that would probably be considered suicidal. And correctly, because the percentage of discontented people had increased dramatically.
N.B.: It isn't all the politicians fault. People aren't designed to understand complex systems, and the world is a very complex system. But they barely try for real public support anymore. Propaganda, yes, but that's a *very* different thing than caring. And people sense that, even if they can't articulate it.
FWIW, I believe that my Representative attempts to promote the goals of the community that is nominally represented. But note that a Representative represents a far smaller number of people than most other elected officials. Even then, many of the Representatives are more interested in running for Governor or Senator than in supporting their local district. And for that funding sources are much more important than popular support. Funding can create support. (But can't deal with caring.) Even our mayor, who is quite a local figure, is less caring that she was as a councilmember. You can't care for people if you don't know them (at least superficially). And people are limited in the number of people they can care about. It varies, depending partially upon how intensely you care about your core group, and partially upon your personality, but the upper limit is probably between 100 and 250.
N.B.: This does allow for "hierarchies of caring" to exist. But they can't make effective use of mass media. Because each member can probably only "care about" 50 "subordinates". (If they don't have a personal life outside of work, they probably can't care about anyone.) Note that this is a far greater fan out than administration can handle. But to "care for" someone in this sense means to hear their problems, understand them, and attempt to provide help if appropriate. And to pass up to you "superior" what kinds of problems you are dealing with.
You'll notice that this bears a resemblance to the organization that some "city bosses" used to have, with "ward heelers" being analogous to the lowest level of the "hierarchy of caring". It's not an exact match, of course. Even then the real purpose of the organization was to concentrate power. But it involved more actual caring than does today's government. (I'm not claiming it was a good system. But then I certainly wouldn't call the current system good, either.)
I really doubt that this is a "bet the company" case for Google. They *might* have to stop selling Android, if they lose, and it could be a bit expensive. (I think the upper limit is well over $100 million. Got to figure court costs, lawyers fees, etc. But I doubt that it's over $300 million. And the worst case is very unlikely.)
Go read the publicly available part of the terms then. Or have a lawyer read it for you.
They didn't promise ANY indemnity against anyone who made money off of their work, or shared the source code, unless that source code was included in Novell's Suse. Presumably that now will apply to Attachmate's Suse...but since the promise is essentially worthless (e.g., you aren't indemnified if you submit the work to Suse, and they decide not to use it, or if you don't submit it to them, but put it on sourceforge, etc.) it really doesn't matter who you would need to get to approve your work.
Then there are the parts of the agreement that aren't public. Since the publicly visible parts are so appalling (I'm supposed to be grateful for THAT!!??) I find it hard to imagine what the rest is like. Probably services that Suse must perform for them in return for the agreement. (Which does, let's admit it, pay Suse, or it's owning company, a bit of cash.)
Since I saw an analysis of the agreement, I've refused to have anything to do with Suse.
It's not that there's "no risk of disaster". It's that any disaster will be quite localized, and the worst case is minimal.
It also sounds relatively cheap to build, so even if you needed to rebuild it every 3 years that probably wouldn't be a problem. (But I think you could design it so that over-capacity winds would just open it up and blow through it. So even that shouldn't be necessary.)
Still, that's a pretty tall structure. There might be interesting problems.
I must have misunderstood the Dalvik compiler. I thought it could understand Java source code as well as class files. That does mean it would be more work for them. If they don't already have a Java compiler, then a Java to Python + Python-machine-code cross-compiler would be a lot more work.
OTOH, it would need to be a specially hacked version of the Python language. The main reason that Google went with Dalvik rather than jvm, as I understand it, was for performance. Python would need special features that aren't in the standard language to allow for that. Statically typed variables is probably the main feature, and routines in which ALL variables are required to be statically typed. Python's dynamic variables are a bit expensive. I think there's something like one extra indirect reference per reference. And there's also a bit of RAM overhead. And a couple of other computation penalties. Think of each variable reference being a function call and you'd probably be pretty close to the overhead.
Still, Cython and Pyrex are already more than half-way there. It's not an impossible target if someone with some resources wanted to go for it. If those are your starting point, you're assuming C rather than Java as your base layer. Quite traditional, actually. (Too bad Parrot isn't making better progress. That's a design with some real possibilities...though I say this based upon only a brief scrutiny of the VM opcodes. And there's also LLVM, but I don't know the tradeoffs that it makes.)
But it doesn't use Java. That's the point. If it used java, then it could use any of various freely available java engines. It uses, however, Dalvik which isn't covered by the same license. As it is, however, there wasn't a pre-existing deal with Sun that need be argued away.
Personally, at this point I think they should build a Python engine, and switch over to Python. It should be possible to create a tool that would do 90+% of the code conversion automatically...at least if you don't care how ugly it looks. After all, they did write a compiler.
Actually, what they should do is to write a Python VM for an extended Python that's extended to allow inline assembly language code (in the assembly language of the VM), and an automatic translator from Java to a combination of Python and the assembly code of the VM. Since they've already got the design to translate Java to Dalvik this should be reasonably easy. So then the tool is for converting one kind of source code into another kind of source code. And the compiler never comes close to Java. Also, at that point they immediately become available to another large pool of programmers, without additional work on their part. They can then retire Dalvik. Advantages here include the large number of libraries that Python has already available to replace the ones that Java has. Not quite the same, but probably available without a fight.
Clearly what I'm talking about here wouldn't be the standard Python dialect. And as it's already deviant, it can be allowed to deviate further to accommodate needed changes to improve performance. This should, however, be kept to a minimum. Changes to improve performance are a reasonable approach. And possibly compiler switches to enable the non-standard features. (OTOH, nearly anything performance enhancing could be done with the "inline assembler". So this shouldn't be stretched too far. Probably only to the point to static typing to allow optimization. Pyrex and Cython show one way this could be done. What I'm basically talking about here is an enhanced Pyrex, extended to the entire compiler, rather than intended for only a link between Python and C.)
The part that's obviously difficult is the automated translation step. Perhaps Google could use some of their search technology to search out patterns of code that do the same thin in the two different languages? Sort of a very specialized bablefish.
There are *LOTS* of reasons to give up on the US market, and software patents are near the top of the list. There are also a few reasons not to give up on it. So far the major players have decided that it's still worth the risk and the expense to maintain a US presence. If things continue to get worse, expect that to start changing.
P.S.: Java wouldn't be the reason, software patents would.
P.P.S: The eternal copyright would be another good reason, if the other countries weren't doing the same thing. Sometimes the stupidity isn't localized.
KDE4 is currently much better than it was, but it's not yet as good as Gnome2, much less as good as KDE3.x. I'm not, however, saying that it isn't better than Gnome3 will be. Early appearances are that it's better.
Whether I'll switch back the KDE4, or switch to LXDE when Gnome2 is withdrawn is not something I've decided upon. Maybe there'll be a successful revival of KDE3. (I know it's being worked on. The last time I looked, the repositories weren't working.)
FWIW, I find the usages GiB, KiB, etc. to be ugly and unreasonable. As *I* almost always deal in powers of 2, I always mean 2^30 bytes when I write either GB or gigabyte. And I consider that the original change was made from gross commercial motives, to allow the manufacturers of certain products to claim that their storage devices held more than they actually did.
I *do* understand why the metric system would prefer powers of 10, but when the were inspired (by some cause) to step into computer metrics, they went beyond all propriety, They should have come up with a different prefix. (I also understand that in the case of Kilo this would have been an onerous demand, but then 1024 and 1000 are pretty close, so there wouldn't be much problem in either case. The Giga prefix, however, was not widely used outside of the computer field. Yes, astronomers used it occasionally, but not with any great precision. The error bars were generally large enough to encompass either meaning.)
If it had been some organization that had chosen the prefix Giga for 2^30, then I could see that they had a point. It was, however, instead common usage. And it still is for many people, so their introduction of a differing meaning merely promoted confusion. Rather like MS claiming trademark on the term windows for graphic display windows, when pre-existed their use of the term. And I suspect a similar commercial motive.
If it were required that jury nullification be explained to prospective jurors, then I would have a lot less trouble with the laws. As it is, instead, prohibited... well, then the laws have to be nearly perfect before I'll think then defensible.
N.B.: Even with jury nullification, there will still be many miscarriages of justice. Perfection does not exist in this world. And even then the system would be shamelessly tilted in favor of the rich and the powerful.
Sorry, it's not that simple. You have, indeed, identified one thread, but it's an extremely parallel process, and focusing on only one thread gives you a very distorted picture. Other factors are control of the media...which shapes public images. Concentrated wealth, which gives the ability to act in a focused way over a "long" period of time. (More than one election cycle.) Tremendous egotism. Etc.
And please note that Hollywood is not the only place these factors appear. You can see them active in many places. Also, I left out organized crime. Not because it's absent, but because by it's nature I can't tell how significant it is.
And there are counter trends, and cross-currents. It's a tremendously complex parallel process. But none of the major trends seem to be supportive of individual liberty.
The problem is, the laws are systematically unjust. So you can't presume that just because someone broke the law they acted incorrectly. (Recklessly, perhaps. But many reckless actions are quite defensible, and many are also legal. Not always the same ones.)
You are right. I won't let the perpetrators of an action decide whether it was moral or ethical. But I won't let the legislators decide that either. *I* decide whether I consider an action to be moral or ethical.
It would be nice if we could depend on the laws to be just, and the legal system to promote justice. They don't. The legal system no longer even claims to promote justice. They promote following the laws, or at least the bureaucratic procedures. (Having followed the laws isn't sufficient. You can be convicted in a blatantly obvious miscarriage of justice, but until the proper procedures have been followed, being obviously innocent will not save you from being punished. Not even for a capital offense.)
The basic problem is that those who make the laws are beholden to a small minority of the population for the majority of their support. These are the people who control their access to the means to communicate with the voters, and the controllers of who will be offered as a candidate for selection by the parties. Another problem is that you need to be crazy in one way or another to be willing to devote enough effort to get elected. (Note that these are independent problems, which are both active.) There are others, but the end result is that the people who get elected are all control freaks, and they are beholden to a small, largely wealthy, segment of the population. This is reflected in the laws that they pass.
I'm not about to let those characters define what *I* consider just.
His claim is that they are just as bad, not that his evidence is as creditable. It could easily be based on a much smaller sample, (say three) and still have a "evil app" rate as bad or worse than the android. The error bars would just be a lot bigger.
That's a lousy answer. It's a good answer for neither a person nor a company.
Off-site storage is mandatory if you care about data retention, because accidents happen. Fire, flood, tornado, etc. If you really care, then off-site storage at multiple locations. (This is why the joke about backing things up by putting them on an ftp server.)
I don't have a good answer, but yours is terrible. Active media are more subject to damage than stored media. Many kinds are subject to electrical power surges. You can generally recover from that, but it's quite expensive.
I can see arguments in favor of tape, of hard disk, even of DVDs (though only for small data sets). I can't see ANY in favor of keeping everything on-line. Even the cloud is preferable (and the cloud, itself, is a terrible answer unless it's your own custom cloud, but then you need to back-up the cloud).
OTOH, your argument about media not staying constant over a decade is valid. It doesn't however, justify your proposal. It merely points up weaknesses in other approaches. And they ALL have multiple weaknesses. (I.e., I don't know of a "solution". Merely of approaches that reduce the risk to an amount proportional to the amount of effort and cash that you are willing to spend. But EVERY serious approach relies on off-line storage.)
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There are two basic constraints (besides costs). One is the strength of the materials. The printer used by the University of South Hampton uses nylon as it's structural material. That's pretty good, but not excellent. The other is the size of piece that the printer can print. IIRC the University of South Hampton printer can only handle things up to a meter long.
Note that these aren't intrinsic limits. There exist printers that can print titanium. I don't really know the strength of the material printed, but I suspect it's rather good. But these aren't nano-manipulators, much less assemblers. They have most of the traditional limitations, with some new ones, and a couple removed. Think of spraying concrete on a really small scale, using different colors of concrete. Well, some printers can print electrically conductive traces as well as insulators, so that's not a terribly accurate image. And different printers use slightly different approaches. Some use UV light to condense plastic out of a bath of polymer. Others spray particles like an ink-jet printer, and then use lasers to fix the stuff in place, like a traditional laser printer. And they can handle different kinds of "particles". There's one that actually *does* spray concrete, and can handle fairly large shapes. Etc.
Don't expect this approach to yield a human rated plane in the next 5 years. Probably not in the next decade. But it can do lots of other things.
So what you do is concentrate on making the printers cheaper and better, and then sell lots of printers, so people can print up what they want on an "as needed" basis. This saves warehousing, inventory, etc.
For something large, printing it on site saves shipping...though of course you do need to ship the printer, and it needs to traverse the site.
I expect that eventually, if the technology is successful, there will be a variety of different printers for special purposes, and a few general models for home use. But you need some way to recycle the things you aren't using anymore back into raw feedstock. (Tricky, but maybe no trickier than the original printer.)
The printer that they (University of South Hampton) used basically prints nylon, and also a bit of metal. I doubt that means it can print stainless steel.
OTOH, nylon might well be good enough for the propeller on a plane that small.
Your basic argument is correct, but you have a lot more faith in the honesty and accuracy of the GDP than I do.
The GDP is largely a work of fiction. Of the things is measures, only some have a positive influence on the general welfare, and many of the things it doesn't measure are quite significant for the general welfare. Do you really feel that generating paperwork for the government is something positive? That's but one of the questionable items that go into the GDP. One could raise the GDP by requiring twice an many forms to be filled. (Note that this would also provide jobs, and decrease unemployment. Other numbers that don't directly affect the economy...though they certainly have indirect effects, in many directions.)
What the GDP should measure is gross domestic production. It shouldn't cover what things sold for at auctions. This creates a very difficult problem. It means that you need to assign a value to something independent of it's market value. This is probably impossible. So it's not a coincidence that the GDP is a work of fiction, it's because it's trying to measure something that can't be measured. But it doesn't need to be quite as bad as it is. It's that bad because it's been adjusted over the decades by politicians to make themselves look good.
Pounds of cotton have a real value. Tons of refined iron have a real value. But how do you assign a value to a shirt or a computer chip, outside of what people will pay for it? What about an advertisement? Should it even have a positive value? Some advertisements attempt to inform people that some particular thing is available at some particular location for some particular cost. That has a positive value. Others attempt to convince people to buy something they don't want. That has a negative value. So how to you figure advertisements in the GDP? And even if you were to restrict yourself to cotton and iron, these don't have a large intrinsic value. They acquire a large value in a context where people want to use them to accomplish some purpose. So how do you rate their relative value?
Much of economics is like this. You can have complex models of how things interact, but when you try to summarize them, you come up with essentially meaningless numbers. Is unemployment bad? Then lets give everyone a job carrying bricks from one side of the city to the other. Now there's no unemployment (well, among those able to carry bricks), but is this really a gain? If you don't like that example, give every unemployed person a job as a highwayman. Is this an improvement? Jobs are not important in and of themselves, but only because of what they do, and their value can be either positive or negative. So just measuring unemployment is essentially meaningless. (Provided that the unemployed have some way to support themselves. If they don't, then they're likely to find a job with a negative social value. But that reduces unemployment!)
Well, the original CDs, the ones that were made by burning holes in the sheet of metal with a laser and sealing the layers of foil between layers of glass, were claimed to be good for well over a century. But I don't know of anything that even claims to be good forever. (Well, there's this MEM that was still in the laboratory that would probably be good for an indefinite period if you stored it in a vacuum at constant temperature. But you can bet that if it ever goes into commercial production the production model will have shaved several corners.)
So if your criterion is "forever", then there is no long term storage. Books certainly don't qualify. Not even if you print them on papyrus or clay tablets.
I suspect that the FSF holds the copyright, so they CAN'T violate the GPL in distributing it. The GPL only applies if you aren't the copyright holder to the code. But it would make secondary distribution illegal. (Say, by Debian or by Red Hat.)
What do you call long term? I've had CDs (burned, not pressed) fail after sitting on the shelf for a decade. DVDs are reputed to be less stable, and Blu-Ray to be even less so.
For medium term storage I consider HDs to be optimal. DVDs are probably OK for 5 years. Can't even speculate on the lifetime of a burned BluRay...but I'd guess 2.5 years. (Guess is the word. Denser storage is usually more fragile is my only reasoning.) *IF* you have a thermostatically controlled vault, and *IF* you have either the cash or the equipment, then tape is probably a good choice for storage of over 5 years. Just remember to read each tape at around 5 years, and be prepared for occasional failures. (I.e., multiple copies.) OTOH, this is with older tapes. I really don't know what to expect of tapes denser than 6250 BPI.
For me the most convenient storage form (recently) has been hard disk. And it's probably better than BluRay disks. Cheaper, easier, faster. Just remember: Multiple copies, and check things occasionally. I'm really looking forwards to USB3, as currently off-line hard disk usage is enough of a pain that I don't back up frequently enough. (Yeah, I'm an individual, not a company, But this is a problem that affects companies too, they just trade things off differently.)
There's a very big difference between a bug and a problem with the design. Problems with the design are why I despise KDE4. It is not now, and never has been, bugs. They've been fixing the bugs. The design problems they have refused to acknowledge.
Well, and in that case it's a fact that what I call a design flaw, other people like. So, in this case, what we are calling a design flaw, Google may well like. It's not a bug. If they change it, all well and good, but don't expect it to go away during the beta process without a concerted push by external sources, because it's not a bug.
I suppose that I shouldn't comment without reading the original article, but I'm not *that* interested.
This is another poor Slashdot summary. A Megawatt is nearly meaningless without a duration. Are they talking about watt/hours, watt/months, watt/years, or watt/decades? Solar cells don't last forever, so the duration is necessary to get any meaning out of it. I really doubt that they're talking about Megawatts/picosecond.
Presumably the original article discussed this. That, however, is just a guess because Jobs/Megawatt is a really stupid metric, so maybe they really didn't mean Jobs/(Megawatt/hour) or some such. Both those who attack it and those who defend it have been missing how nearly meaning-free the unit is. You know that they are proposing some kind of proportional relationship between jobs and electricity, but that's about as clear as it gets. And taking the unit "watts" literally yields nonsense. For that matter, so does taking the unit "jobs". With some jobs one is better off on public assistance, bad as that is. I really doubt that there's a sensible equivalence between a truck driver and a corporate executive, but both jobs are required by solar power companies.
Stupid! No, I don't want to read the article. The summary makes it look far too stupid to waste time on. In fact, I can't believe that the original article is as bad as the summary, and I *still* don't want to read it.
If you think that you know how to make yourself untraceable (rather than just difficult to trace), then you're wrong. And saying that they can't prove it depends on what's considered proof. If they can get an expert to testify that their approach is correct, the fact that it wasn't doesn't keep them from imprisoning you.
N.B.: I didn't say that they would catch the correct person. They might, or they might not. But they can catch somebody and argue that it's the correct person. And the odds may be fairly reasonable that they *did* catch the correct person, even if it wouldn't really qualify as "clear and convincing evidence" to people that understood what was being said.
If you've read this far, you'll note that I somewhat overstated the case in the first paragraph. But that's because it's a much larger risk than most "hackers" assume. And because the police are often more interested in a good arrest record than in justice, and DAs are almost always more interested in a good conviction record than in justice. (Plea bargaining should be outlawed, and considered a felony in an of itself.)
PayPal has a long standing tradition of abusing customers. Only once did I even start to open an account with them, but half-way through I decided that this was a very stupid thing to do, and aborted the transaction. I've never regretted that. In fact occasionally I'll read another news story and say to myself "I escaped by the skin of my teeth." (That's probably an incorrect conclusion. Probably most people don't have any trouble with them. But I really hate to count on being lucky.)
Given the current electoral system, I don't think outrage would suffice. Not even enough that there was rioting in the streets of all major cities. Third parties just let you feel that you're letting them know that you're upset. (Hint: They don't care.)
But there are good reasons why the bodyguards of all major political figures have been increasingly strengthened. Once upon a time the president was willing to shake hands with the populace. Today that would probably be considered suicidal. And correctly, because the percentage of discontented people had increased dramatically.
N.B.: It isn't all the politicians fault. People aren't designed to understand complex systems, and the world is a very complex system. But they barely try for real public support anymore. Propaganda, yes, but that's a *very* different thing than caring. And people sense that, even if they can't articulate it.
FWIW, I believe that my Representative attempts to promote the goals of the community that is nominally represented. But note that a Representative represents a far smaller number of people than most other elected officials. Even then, many of the Representatives are more interested in running for Governor or Senator than in supporting their local district. And for that funding sources are much more important than popular support. Funding can create support. (But can't deal with caring.) Even our mayor, who is quite a local figure, is less caring that she was as a councilmember. You can't care for people if you don't know them (at least superficially). And people are limited in the number of people they can care about. It varies, depending partially upon how intensely you care about your core group, and partially upon your personality, but the upper limit is probably between 100 and 250.
N.B.: This does allow for "hierarchies of caring" to exist. But they can't make effective use of mass media. Because each member can probably only "care about" 50 "subordinates". (If they don't have a personal life outside of work, they probably can't care about anyone.) Note that this is a far greater fan out than administration can handle. But to "care for" someone in this sense means to hear their problems, understand them, and attempt to provide help if appropriate. And to pass up to you "superior" what kinds of problems you are dealing with.
You'll notice that this bears a resemblance to the organization that some "city bosses" used to have, with "ward heelers" being analogous to the lowest level of the "hierarchy of caring". It's not an exact match, of course. Even then the real purpose of the organization was to concentrate power. But it involved more actual caring than does today's government. (I'm not claiming it was a good system. But then I certainly wouldn't call the current system good, either.)
I really doubt that this is a "bet the company" case for Google. They *might* have to stop selling Android, if they lose, and it could be a bit expensive. (I think the upper limit is well over $100 million. Got to figure court costs, lawyers fees, etc. But I doubt that it's over $300 million. And the worst case is very unlikely.)
Go read the publicly available part of the terms then. Or have a lawyer read it for you.
They didn't promise ANY indemnity against anyone who made money off of their work, or shared the source code, unless that source code was included in Novell's Suse. Presumably that now will apply to Attachmate's Suse...but since the promise is essentially worthless (e.g., you aren't indemnified if you submit the work to Suse, and they decide not to use it, or if you don't submit it to them, but put it on sourceforge, etc.) it really doesn't matter who you would need to get to approve your work.
Then there are the parts of the agreement that aren't public. Since the publicly visible parts are so appalling (I'm supposed to be grateful for THAT!!??) I find it hard to imagine what the rest is like. Probably services that Suse must perform for them in return for the agreement. (Which does, let's admit it, pay Suse, or it's owning company, a bit of cash.)
Since I saw an analysis of the agreement, I've refused to have anything to do with Suse.
It's not that there's "no risk of disaster". It's that any disaster will be quite localized, and the worst case is minimal.
It also sounds relatively cheap to build, so even if you needed to rebuild it every 3 years that probably wouldn't be a problem. (But I think you could design it so that over-capacity winds would just open it up and blow through it. So even that shouldn't be necessary.)
Still, that's a pretty tall structure. There might be interesting problems.
I must have misunderstood the Dalvik compiler. I thought it could understand Java source code as well as class files. That does mean it would be more work for them. If they don't already have a Java compiler, then a Java to Python + Python-machine-code cross-compiler would be a lot more work.
OTOH, it would need to be a specially hacked version of the Python language. The main reason that Google went with Dalvik rather than jvm, as I understand it, was for performance. Python would need special features that aren't in the standard language to allow for that. Statically typed variables is probably the main feature, and routines in which ALL variables are required to be statically typed. Python's dynamic variables are a bit expensive. I think there's something like one extra indirect reference per reference. And there's also a bit of RAM overhead. And a couple of other computation penalties. Think of each variable reference being a function call and you'd probably be pretty close to the overhead.
Still, Cython and Pyrex are already more than half-way there. It's not an impossible target if someone with some resources wanted to go for it. If those are your starting point, you're assuming C rather than Java as your base layer. Quite traditional, actually. (Too bad Parrot isn't making better progress. That's a design with some real possibilities...though I say this based upon only a brief scrutiny of the VM opcodes. And there's also LLVM, but I don't know the tradeoffs that it makes.)
But it doesn't use Java. That's the point. If it used java, then it could use any of various freely available java engines. It uses, however, Dalvik which isn't covered by the same license. As it is, however, there wasn't a pre-existing deal with Sun that need be argued away.
Personally, at this point I think they should build a Python engine, and switch over to Python. It should be possible to create a tool that would do 90+% of the code conversion automatically...at least if you don't care how ugly it looks. After all, they did write a compiler.
Actually, what they should do is to write a Python VM for an extended Python that's extended to allow inline assembly language code (in the assembly language of the VM), and an automatic translator from Java to a combination of Python and the assembly code of the VM. Since they've already got the design to translate Java to Dalvik this should be reasonably easy. So then the tool is for converting one kind of source code into another kind of source code. And the compiler never comes close to Java. Also, at that point they immediately become available to another large pool of programmers, without additional work on their part. They can then retire Dalvik. Advantages here include the large number of libraries that Python has already available to replace the ones that Java has. Not quite the same, but probably available without a fight.
Clearly what I'm talking about here wouldn't be the standard Python dialect. And as it's already deviant, it can be allowed to deviate further to accommodate needed changes to improve performance. This should, however, be kept to a minimum. Changes to improve performance are a reasonable approach. And possibly compiler switches to enable the non-standard features. (OTOH, nearly anything performance enhancing could be done with the "inline assembler". So this shouldn't be stretched too far. Probably only to the point to static typing to allow optimization. Pyrex and Cython show one way this could be done. What I'm basically talking about here is an enhanced Pyrex, extended to the entire compiler, rather than intended for only a link between Python and C.)
The part that's obviously difficult is the automated translation step. Perhaps Google could use some of their search technology to search out patterns of code that do the same thin in the two different languages? Sort of a very specialized bablefish.
There are *LOTS* of reasons to give up on the US market, and software patents are near the top of the list. There are also a few reasons not to give up on it. So far the major players have decided that it's still worth the risk and the expense to maintain a US presence. If things continue to get worse, expect that to start changing.
P.S.: Java wouldn't be the reason, software patents would.
P.P.S: The eternal copyright would be another good reason, if the other countries weren't doing the same thing. Sometimes the stupidity isn't localized.
KDE4 is currently much better than it was, but it's not yet as good as Gnome2, much less as good as KDE3.x. I'm not, however, saying that it isn't better than Gnome3 will be. Early appearances are that it's better.
Whether I'll switch back the KDE4, or switch to LXDE when Gnome2 is withdrawn is not something I've decided upon. Maybe there'll be a successful revival of KDE3. (I know it's being worked on. The last time I looked, the repositories weren't working.)
I *officially* changed in 1999.
FWIW, I find the usages GiB, KiB, etc. to be ugly and unreasonable. As *I* almost always deal in powers of 2, I always mean 2^30 bytes when I write either GB or gigabyte. And I consider that the original change was made from gross commercial motives, to allow the manufacturers of certain products to claim that their storage devices held more than they actually did.
I *do* understand why the metric system would prefer powers of 10, but when the were inspired (by some cause) to step into computer metrics, they went beyond all propriety, They should have come up with a different prefix. (I also understand that in the case of Kilo this would have been an onerous demand, but then 1024 and 1000 are pretty close, so there wouldn't be much problem in either case. The Giga prefix, however, was not widely used outside of the computer field. Yes, astronomers used it occasionally, but not with any great precision. The error bars were generally large enough to encompass either meaning.)
If it had been some organization that had chosen the prefix Giga for 2^30, then I could see that they had a point. It was, however, instead common usage. And it still is for many people, so their introduction of a differing meaning merely promoted confusion. Rather like MS claiming trademark on the term windows for graphic display windows, when pre-existed their use of the term. And I suspect a similar commercial motive.
If it were required that jury nullification be explained to prospective jurors, then I would have a lot less trouble with the laws. As it is, instead, prohibited... well, then the laws have to be nearly perfect before I'll think then defensible.
N.B.: Even with jury nullification, there will still be many miscarriages of justice. Perfection does not exist in this world. And even then the system would be shamelessly tilted in favor of the rich and the powerful.
Sorry, it's not that simple. You have, indeed, identified one thread, but it's an extremely parallel process, and focusing on only one thread gives you a very distorted picture. Other factors are control of the media...which shapes public images. Concentrated wealth, which gives the ability to act in a focused way over a "long" period of time. (More than one election cycle.) Tremendous egotism. Etc.
And please note that Hollywood is not the only place these factors appear. You can see them active in many places. Also, I left out organized crime. Not because it's absent, but because by it's nature I can't tell how significant it is.
And there are counter trends, and cross-currents. It's a tremendously complex parallel process. But none of the major trends seem to be supportive of individual liberty.
The problem is, the laws are systematically unjust. So you can't presume that just because someone broke the law they acted incorrectly. (Recklessly, perhaps. But many reckless actions are quite defensible, and many are also legal. Not always the same ones.)
You are right. I won't let the perpetrators of an action decide whether it was moral or ethical. But I won't let the legislators decide that either. *I* decide whether I consider an action to be moral or ethical.
It would be nice if we could depend on the laws to be just, and the legal system to promote justice. They don't. The legal system no longer even claims to promote justice. They promote following the laws, or at least the bureaucratic procedures. (Having followed the laws isn't sufficient. You can be convicted in a blatantly obvious miscarriage of justice, but until the proper procedures have been followed, being obviously innocent will not save you from being punished. Not even for a capital offense.)
The basic problem is that those who make the laws are beholden to a small minority of the population for the majority of their support. These are the people who control their access to the means to communicate with the voters, and the controllers of who will be offered as a candidate for selection by the parties. Another problem is that you need to be crazy in one way or another to be willing to devote enough effort to get elected. (Note that these are independent problems, which are both active.) There are others, but the end result is that the people who get elected are all control freaks, and they are beholden to a small, largely wealthy, segment of the population. This is reflected in the laws that they pass.
I'm not about to let those characters define what *I* consider just.
Sorry, but you are way overstating the case.
His claim is that they are just as bad, not that his evidence is as creditable. It could easily be based on a much smaller sample, (say three) and still have a "evil app" rate as bad or worse than the android. The error bars would just be a lot bigger.
That's a lousy answer. It's a good answer for neither a person nor a company.
Off-site storage is mandatory if you care about data retention, because accidents happen. Fire, flood, tornado, etc. If you really care, then off-site storage at multiple locations. (This is why the joke about backing things up by putting them on an ftp server.)
I don't have a good answer, but yours is terrible. Active media are more subject to damage than stored media. Many kinds are subject to electrical power surges. You can generally recover from that, but it's quite expensive.
I can see arguments in favor of tape, of hard disk, even of DVDs (though only for small data sets). I can't see ANY in favor of keeping everything on-line. Even the cloud is preferable (and the cloud, itself, is a terrible answer unless it's your own custom cloud, but then you need to back-up the cloud).
OTOH, your argument about media not staying constant over a decade is valid. It doesn't however, justify your proposal. It merely points up weaknesses in other approaches. And they ALL have multiple weaknesses. (I.e., I don't know of a "solution". Merely of approaches that reduce the risk to an amount proportional to the amount of effort and cash that you are willing to spend. But EVERY serious approach relies on off-line storage.)