This is why when someone brings a law suit against someone else and looses, they should not only compensate that person/company, but should do so 100X the costs it took to defend themselves. Then the RIAA would have to reconsider next time it was to use terrorism and its bought Senators to push researchers around
I bet the corporations would love that. Nobody would ever bring suit against them again. It would be way too risky.
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
This is a LOOOOOONG way off, if it ever happens. Natural language isn't good enough to precisely express many problems. (That's why mathematicians and scientists have their own languages!) There are way too many ambiguities.
And even if it does come about, the skills programmers use (primarily thinking logically about a problem) will still be necessary for more advanced uses of computers. Programmers of some sort will always be in demand.
The cost comes in complications to make an easy to use web site that has all those things. The more stuff that is on the page, the less likely vistors will find what they're looking for. It also forces more clicks to get where you want to.
I can easily see having CDs, DVDs, etc. They're, in my mine, very similar to books. However, having patio furniture? Cars? Those are a waste of space on the main page and make the web site more difficult to use.
I think that Congress probably has that power. There's nothing in the consitution that prohibits it, is there? It's "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct". That phrase gives Congress a lot of power. If Congress saw fit to equip all census workers with guns, they could. The urine samples could (theoretically) be justified by saying that they just needed to make sure no one was counted twice...
Note: I don't think that Congress should do these things. Hopefully, Congressmen who voted for such extreme measures would be quickly voted out of office. It's just that the consitution, as I read it, doesn't prohibit it.
From our perspective outside a black hole, matter never quite passes through a black hole's event horizon. That is because time slows down near the event horizon and it takes an infinite amount of our time for the matter to pass through the event horizon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be true only for a static black hole? Since the black hole is gaining matter (or at the very least there is more matter near the event horizon which should be good enough), the black hole's event horizon should be growing, thus "swallowing" the mass that would otherwise appear to be stuck.
Time and distance are measured in the same units (1 s = 300,000 km). Things like electric charge are just counted (after all, the smallest unit of charge is just 1/3). Energy becomes just inverse distance. The strength of the electric field is the just fine structure constant, etc, etc, etc.
Then, all we need to do is define ONE unit. The Plank Second sounds good to me.
Many, many conversions just go away!
P.S. I could be wrong on some of the details, but the concept is valid.
Re: All of these breakthroughs in chip design.
on
IBMs CMOS 9S
·
· Score: 1
e= mc squared? nahh its about 2.718281828459045235602874713527
Almost, but not quite. Yank down and left and then after it gets there move the mouse up and right just a bit. The little border MS puts in causes the button to be slower to use. The OS X dock also has this little problem. I hope they fix it before the final release...
In my comment, I never said how keyboard control should be handled. It is a totally separate issue from where the menu is located. I believe that all functions should be available through the keyboard, but that shouldn't be considered the primary way access them. They should be shortcuts for advanced users.
In the case of your friends, they may indeed have the motor control required. However, the typical person doesn't and that's who is (and should be) targeted by this user-interface decision. Also, are you sure that they timed themselves under typical use? Or did they prepare themselves for the timing test? It could easily make a big difference in the results.
Many user interface studies have shown that it is significantly faster to have the menu on the top than on the top of Windows. Why? The menu height is infinite so there is much less need for fine motor control - you just jam the mouse to the top of the screen. The reason people don't think it is faster is that when accessing a menu on the top of a Window, users are using that fine motor control and lose track of the time it is taking. In other words, you may perceive it to be faster, but if you use a stop watch, it is actually slower. The orignal Macintosh user-interface designers studied this very carefully when they made the decision to put it on top.
I'm not sure you're paying attention to this anymore, but this NY Times article explains with better statistics why there was a problem in the counting of the votes and why, in all likelihood, Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush.
Did she actually say this? Honestly, I don't recall.
Yes, she did.
In any event, why was VC able to count its votes continuously, but not PBC? I don't recall hearing anything about VC dragging its tail waiting for a court ruling. PBC and MD have now had almost three weeks to count their votes, including machine and hand recounts. That seems like plenty of time to me.
Each county has a different board which independently makes decisions. The PBC board was perhaps more cautious. Also, I think VC is a smaller county and it took them less time to get the first couple of steps done. (This, incidentally, brings up a different topic: the election deadlines make it practically impossible for a large county to recount votes in time. The county board has to decide contested ballots, so this makes the time it takes proportional to the number of contested ballots, which presumably scales with county size. Also, they are required to be present at the recounts, meaning that when they're in court, no counting can be done.)
In any event, we have now had three vote counts (not even including all military absentee votes!) and Bush still won. What more does Gore want? He has stated he would abide by the recounts. The fact that two counties couldn't get them done by the deadline set by the Democrat-appointed supreme court of Florida is scandalous, but not because Bush won.
Officially, we've only had three recounts in Broward county and maybe a couple of other ones. The absentee votes were only counted once (or twice for a few counties...). Palm Beach's recounts weren't accepted in the final tally. Miami's partial recount didn't either. Nassau, amazingly, decided to take the first count instead of the second (which favored Gore by a net 52 votes). The Florida Supreme Court set the deadline to allow time for contesting the results, which is now happening. Under Florida law, Judges have wide discretion for handling contested elections. I think that before all is said and done, the manual count in Miami will happen. Also, Palm Beach County's results (net 215 votes for Gore) will also be counted. Bush has said he won't contest any counties.
First off, Bush didn't ask for recounts because there was no reason for him to do so. Lots of people here seem to be missing this simple point. Why would someone who won an election ask for a recount? It would be ludicrous.
Given how close the election is and the likelihood that a recount in the Democratic counties would (will?) change the result, don't you think it would have been prudent for Bush to ask for a recount the counties in which he had an advantage? Instead, he decided to ridicule and attempt to discredit the whole concept of manual recounts. Given that he signed a bill in Texas requiring a manual recount in such situations, I find his attitude reprehensible.
As for the manual recounts and failures of counties to finish them, recall that PBC started it's recount the day before Harris' original Nov. 14 deadline. They wasted four or five days! Both PBC and Miam-Dade halted and restarted their recounts at least once, for no apparent reason, though there was some talk of "needing to get permission from the court." I've never understood this point, because it seems to me that the count should be able to go ahead, though certification would require a court ruling. If someone can clarify, I would appreciate it.
It took a day or two to do the original count. Then, the county, by law, was required to do a machine recount taking another couple of days. At that point, PBC indicated they wanted to do a manual recount, but Harris said it was illegal!?!?! The Attorney General said it was ok. They decided that they needed a judge to tell them what they could do. This took another day or so. By then, time was up and Harris said that the votes must be in. I'm not sure about the story with Miami-Dade, but I think it was similar. Also, there were at this time lawsuits by Gore trying to force them to recount, which may have also been a factor in changing opinions on recounts.
I believe that at this point he doesn't stand much of a chance of succeeding... Surprisingly, weeks of recounts being done in Democrat counties that voted OVERWEALMINGLY for him, using hand recount rules made and remade on the fly by DEMOCRATS didn't change the results.
There was simply not enough time for recounts. Only one of those heavily Democratic counties (Broward) had enough time to finish.
If Dade and Palm Beach counties both had enough time to finish their manual recounts, then it in all likelihood would have changed the results. Miami was through with only about 1/4 of their counting and picked up about 150 votes (assuming this trend continued, this would mean about 600 votes). Palm Beach was almost done (2 hours left!) and Ms. Harris declined to give them the time to complete their tally in a blatantly partisan move. Furthermore, she rejected the partial recount, which netted Gore 180 votes with about 1000 votes to count. The Florida Supreme Court allowed her to accept the results Monday at 9 am if her office wasn't open at 5 pm on Sunday.
Both candidates had every opportunity - including during the Fl. Supreme Court explicitly asking the Bush lawyers - to request manual recounts in any county thought to be improperly counted. The reason Bush didn't was he didn't believe the recounts would favor him. Why? By happenstance, the counties that vote Republican have optical voting systems, which have significantly fewer undercounted votes. A recount wouldn't change the results much. The punch-card systems in heavily Democratic counties have a much higher percentage of undercounted votes. This means when manual recounts are made, the undercounted votes will (or at least should) result in votes being resolved. These votes are likely to be split in approximately same proportion as the rest of the vote in that county (unless there's some other consistent bias), resulting in a substantial gain for Gore. This is what we've seen, but due to limited time and substantial obstruction by Republicans, especially Ms. Harris, all the votes weren't counted.
The Republican arguments that these votes should not be counted fly in the face of reason as well as law. The job of elections officials should be to make sure that every vote gets counted. The provisions in Florida State law that allow manual recounts anticipate this. It is clear that manual recounts cannot possibly be made in the seven-day period after the election, which an earlier law allows. The Florida Supreme court explicitly recognized this conflict and said that the newer law has precedence (this is typically the standard in legal cases).
The bottom line: in all likelihood, a fair count of the votes would favor Gore. The Bush campaign has tried it's hardest to avoid recounts for exactly this reason.
At any rate, it's clear that there was a significant problem with the ballots in Palm Beach County that may change the election. The fact that the Bush campaign is try to thwart a hand recount is ridiculous given that Bush signed a Texas law stating that a hand recount is the preferable method to recount!
In 1996, 16,000 Palm Beach County ballots were discarded. In 2000, of the 19,000 ballots, only a small percentage were discarded due to multiple presidential votes.
According to
this salon.com article, the number of discarded ballots this year was 29,000 compared to about 15,000 in 1996. The 19,000 number is votes that were discarded due to overvoting. The difference? This year there were much more double-punched ballots than 1996. Something like 4.4% of the vote was invalidated, which is way higher than in other counties.
I think it is tough to argue that there weren't significant problems with the ballot in Palm Beach county this year. The tough question is what to do about it. (I vote for a hand recount and be done with it. If Bush thinks it's unfair that only 4 counties get hand recounts because it's not uniformly applied throughout the state, let him ask for hand recounts in the other counties.)
I think you misinterpreted what I meant by "rendering". I don't mean generating an image out of nothingness (e.g. Toy Story). In this context, most current video processing programs (Apple's Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, etc) need to "render" in order to create video effects, such as transitions (combining two source images in some way, such as a fade). The programs don't seem able to do these in real-time (though there is some third-party hardware to allow for some real-time rendering of some effects). The number I tossed out (5GHz) is what I assume will be required for simple real-time effects for DV resolution (720x480, 30 FPS) output without extra hardware. I'm making the assumption, of course, that the software is near-optimial (I'd bet it is probably within a factor of two of that, but I really have no idea).
As for rendering it low-quality, that's just a work-around for the current computer limitations. When editing, one really wants to view the output as it's going to be in the final. Degrading the quality may result it different decisions on the edits (what "looks good" may change). The other problem is that these programs cache the rendered images, which can effectively double the storage required (which is not insignificant!)
The bottom line is that real-time, high quality editing would make a difference and for this to happen, CPUs need to get significantly faster. Note, however, that video is (or should be) highly parallelizable. Right now neither Final Cut Pro nor Adobe Premier uses my second processor, but they really would benefit tremendously.
Games! (Oops, sorry). The other thing people need CPU power for is video. Video requires far more CPU power than is now available cheaply. And Consumers want it, too (ask anyone with a kid...) Rendering on current processors takes just too damn long (I don't care if you have your 500MHz G4 or 1.3MHz Pentium) at DV resoultion. There's still a lot of waiting... We really need something more like 5GHz to have anything reasonably responsive for "normal" editing (i.e. without crazy transitions, etc). And of course, then people will want to start adding fancy video effects...
I agree that for word processing/office type tasks, no one really needs more than about 200Mhz. More than that is a waste.
A long time ago (in internet time), in MacUser or MacWorld (I forget which) Andy Ihnatko came up with a game: Web That Smut. It goes as follow. Choose any starting page and follow the links until you find smut. The shortest path wins. (Well, actually, you start with a page and two of you face off and say "I can Web That Smut in x links" like the game Name That Tune - but we're playing the distrubuted version here.) Here, let's play Web That DeCSS - find the path that leads to DeCSS code starting from www.mpaa.org.
Some notes: you're not allowed to type in anything! That is, you can't find a search engine and type in DeCSS. In my solution below, I need to go through the NY Times. Since I've registered with them, I don't have to type in anything, but if you haven't registered, it won't work. Maybe someone can find a solution that doesn't require registration?
Slashdot Mirror
This is why when someone brings a law suit against someone else and looses, they should not only compensate that person/company, but should do so 100X the costs it took to defend themselves. Then the RIAA would have to reconsider next time it was to use terrorism and its bought Senators to push researchers around
I bet the corporations would love that. Nobody would ever bring suit against them again. It would be way too risky.
No, it's the other way around. The original algorithm made the paper clip come up less often.
The Economist's article is here
The end result id natural language programming. You literally tell the computer what you want it to do, and its amazing compiler will produce perfect code.
This is a LOOOOOONG way off, if it ever happens. Natural language isn't good enough to precisely express many problems. (That's why mathematicians and scientists have their own languages!) There are way too many ambiguities.
And even if it does come about, the skills programmers use (primarily thinking logically about a problem) will still be necessary for more advanced uses of computers. Programmers of some sort will always be in demand.
The cost comes in complications to make an easy to use web site that has all those things. The more stuff that is on the page, the less likely vistors will find what they're looking for. It also forces more clicks to get where you want to.
I can easily see having CDs, DVDs, etc. They're, in my mine, very similar to books. However, having patio furniture? Cars? Those are a waste of space on the main page and make the web site more difficult to use.
So how long does this "inifite computing" machine take to complete an infinite loop?
I think that Congress probably has that power. There's nothing in the consitution that prohibits it, is there? It's "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct". That phrase gives Congress a lot of power. If Congress saw fit to equip all census workers with guns, they could. The urine samples could (theoretically) be justified by saying that they just needed to make sure no one was counted twice...
Note: I don't think that Congress should do these things. Hopefully, Congressmen who voted for such extreme measures would be quickly voted out of office. It's just that the consitution, as I read it, doesn't prohibit it.
From our perspective outside a black hole, matter never quite passes through a black hole's event horizon. That is because time slows down near the event horizon and it takes an infinite amount of our time for the matter to pass through the event horizon.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be true only for a static black hole? Since the black hole is gaining matter (or at the very least there is more matter near the event horizon which should be good enough), the black hole's event horizon should be growing, thus "swallowing" the mass that would otherwise appear to be stuck.
Those damn aliens. They already polluted it before we got there!
We should all use physicist units!
Plank's Constant (h-bar) = 1
Speed of Light (c) = 1
Time and distance are measured in the same units (1 s = 300,000 km). Things like electric charge are just counted (after all, the smallest unit of charge is just 1/3). Energy becomes just inverse distance. The strength of the electric field is the just fine structure constant, etc, etc, etc.
Then, all we need to do is define ONE unit. The Plank Second sounds good to me.
Many, many conversions just go away!
P.S. I could be wrong on some of the details, but the concept is valid.
e= mc squared? nahh its about 2.718281828459045235602874713527
Nah, it is E=mc^2. It's case-sensitive, you know.
Yes, and the latency isn't exactly good. I calculate about a 15 minute round-trip time for the signal.
Almost, but not quite. Yank down and left and then after it gets there move the mouse up and right just a bit. The little border MS puts in causes the button to be slower to use. The OS X dock also has this little problem. I hope they fix it before the final release...
In my comment, I never said how keyboard control should be handled. It is a totally separate issue from where the menu is located. I believe that all functions should be available through the keyboard, but that shouldn't be considered the primary way access them. They should be shortcuts for advanced users.
In the case of your friends, they may indeed have the motor control required. However, the typical person doesn't and that's who is (and should be) targeted by this user-interface decision. Also, are you sure that they timed themselves under typical use? Or did they prepare themselves for the timing test? It could easily make a big difference in the results.
Many user interface studies have shown that it is significantly faster to have the menu on the top than on the top of Windows. Why? The menu height is infinite so there is much less need for fine motor control - you just jam the mouse to the top of the screen. The reason people don't think it is faster is that when accessing a menu on the top of a Window, users are using that fine motor control and lose track of the time it is taking. In other words, you may perceive it to be faster, but if you use a stop watch, it is actually slower. The orignal Macintosh user-interface designers studied this very carefully when they made the decision to put it on top.
See this article on AskTog (go to question #5)
I'm not sure you're paying attention to this anymore, but this NY Times article explains with better statistics why there was a problem in the counting of the votes and why, in all likelihood, Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush.
Did she actually say this? Honestly, I don't recall.
Yes, she did.
In any event, why was VC able to count its votes continuously, but not PBC? I don't recall hearing anything about VC dragging its tail waiting for a court ruling. PBC and MD have now had almost three weeks to count their votes, including machine and hand recounts. That seems like plenty of time to me.
Each county has a different board which independently makes decisions. The PBC board was perhaps more cautious. Also, I think VC is a smaller county and it took them less time to get the first couple of steps done. (This, incidentally, brings up a different topic: the election deadlines make it practically impossible for a large county to recount votes in time. The county board has to decide contested ballots, so this makes the time it takes proportional to the number of contested ballots, which presumably scales with county size. Also, they are required to be present at the recounts, meaning that when they're in court, no counting can be done.)
In any event, we have now had three vote counts (not even including all military absentee votes!) and Bush still won. What more does Gore want? He has stated he would abide by the recounts. The fact that two counties couldn't get them done by the deadline set by the Democrat-appointed supreme court of Florida is scandalous, but not because Bush won.
Officially, we've only had three recounts in Broward county and maybe a couple of other ones. The absentee votes were only counted once (or twice for a few counties...). Palm Beach's recounts weren't accepted in the final tally. Miami's partial recount didn't either. Nassau, amazingly, decided to take the first count instead of the second (which favored Gore by a net 52 votes). The Florida Supreme Court set the deadline to allow time for contesting the results, which is now happening. Under Florida law, Judges have wide discretion for handling contested elections. I think that before all is said and done, the manual count in Miami will happen. Also, Palm Beach County's results (net 215 votes for Gore) will also be counted. Bush has said he won't contest any counties.
First off, Bush didn't ask for recounts because there was no reason for him to do so. Lots of people here seem to be missing this simple point. Why would someone who won an election ask for a recount? It would be ludicrous.
Given how close the election is and the likelihood that a recount in the Democratic counties would (will?) change the result, don't you think it would have been prudent for Bush to ask for a recount the counties in which he had an advantage? Instead, he decided to ridicule and attempt to discredit the whole concept of manual recounts. Given that he signed a bill in Texas requiring a manual recount in such situations, I find his attitude reprehensible.
As for the manual recounts and failures of counties to finish them, recall that PBC started it's recount the day before Harris' original Nov. 14 deadline. They wasted four or five days! Both PBC and Miam-Dade halted and restarted their recounts at least once, for no apparent reason, though there was some talk of "needing to get permission from the court." I've never understood this point, because it seems to me that the count should be able to go ahead, though certification would require a court ruling. If someone can clarify, I would appreciate it.
It took a day or two to do the original count. Then, the county, by law, was required to do a machine recount taking another couple of days. At that point, PBC indicated they wanted to do a manual recount, but Harris said it was illegal!?!?! The Attorney General said it was ok. They decided that they needed a judge to tell them what they could do. This took another day or so. By then, time was up and Harris said that the votes must be in. I'm not sure about the story with Miami-Dade, but I think it was similar. Also, there were at this time lawsuits by Gore trying to force them to recount, which may have also been a factor in changing opinions on recounts.
I believe that at this point he doesn't stand much of a chance of succeeding... Surprisingly, weeks of recounts being done in Democrat counties that voted OVERWEALMINGLY for him, using hand recount rules made and remade on the fly by DEMOCRATS didn't change the results.
There was simply not enough time for recounts. Only one of those heavily Democratic counties (Broward) had enough time to finish.
If Dade and Palm Beach counties both had enough time to finish their manual recounts, then it in all likelihood would have changed the results. Miami was through with only about 1/4 of their counting and picked up about 150 votes (assuming this trend continued, this would mean about 600 votes). Palm Beach was almost done (2 hours left!) and Ms. Harris declined to give them the time to complete their tally in a blatantly partisan move. Furthermore, she rejected the partial recount, which netted Gore 180 votes with about 1000 votes to count. The Florida Supreme Court allowed her to accept the results Monday at 9 am if her office wasn't open at 5 pm on Sunday.
Both candidates had every opportunity - including during the Fl. Supreme Court explicitly asking the Bush lawyers - to request manual recounts in any county thought to be improperly counted. The reason Bush didn't was he didn't believe the recounts would favor him. Why? By happenstance, the counties that vote Republican have optical voting systems, which have significantly fewer undercounted votes. A recount wouldn't change the results much. The punch-card systems in heavily Democratic counties have a much higher percentage of undercounted votes. This means when manual recounts are made, the undercounted votes will (or at least should) result in votes being resolved. These votes are likely to be split in approximately same proportion as the rest of the vote in that county (unless there's some other consistent bias), resulting in a substantial gain for Gore. This is what we've seen, but due to limited time and substantial obstruction by Republicans, especially Ms. Harris, all the votes weren't counted.
The Republican arguments that these votes should not be counted fly in the face of reason as well as law. The job of elections officials should be to make sure that every vote gets counted. The provisions in Florida State law that allow manual recounts anticipate this. It is clear that manual recounts cannot possibly be made in the seven-day period after the election, which an earlier law allows. The Florida Supreme court explicitly recognized this conflict and said that the newer law has precedence (this is typically the standard in legal cases).
The bottom line: in all likelihood, a fair count of the votes would favor Gore. The Bush campaign has tried it's hardest to avoid recounts for exactly this reason.
I'm (mostly) repeating a post that I've already made, since the same mistake was made in this post.
According to this salon.co m article, the number of discarded ballots this year was 29,000 compared to about 15,000 in 1996. The 19,000 number is for votes that were discarded due only to overvoting. The difference? This year there were much more double-punched ballots than 1996. Something like 4.1% of the presidential vote was overvotes, compared to about .82% for Senate. Also, the 3400 votes for Buchanan were way out of line from what they were in other counties (no, that's not proof that there's a problem, there may be a concentration of Buchanan voters in Palm Beach County, but which explanation do you believe?)
At any rate, it's clear that there was a significant problem with the ballots in Palm Beach County that may change the election. The fact that the Bush campaign is try to thwart a hand recount is ridiculous given that Bush signed a Texas law stating that a hand recount is the preferable method to recount!
In 1996, 16,000 Palm Beach County ballots were discarded. In 2000, of the 19,000 ballots, only a small percentage were discarded due to multiple presidential votes.
According to this salon.com article, the number of discarded ballots this year was 29,000 compared to about 15,000 in 1996. The 19,000 number is votes that were discarded due to overvoting. The difference? This year there were much more double-punched ballots than 1996. Something like 4.4% of the vote was invalidated, which is way higher than in other counties.
I think it is tough to argue that there weren't significant problems with the ballot in Palm Beach county this year. The tough question is what to do about it. (I vote for a hand recount and be done with it. If Bush thinks it's unfair that only 4 counties get hand recounts because it's not uniformly applied throughout the state, let him ask for hand recounts in the other counties.)
I think you misinterpreted what I meant by "rendering". I don't mean generating an image out of nothingness (e.g. Toy Story). In this context, most current video processing programs (Apple's Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, etc) need to "render" in order to create video effects, such as transitions (combining two source images in some way, such as a fade). The programs don't seem able to do these in real-time (though there is some third-party hardware to allow for some real-time rendering of some effects). The number I tossed out (5GHz) is what I assume will be required for simple real-time effects for DV resolution (720x480, 30 FPS) output without extra hardware. I'm making the assumption, of course, that the software is near-optimial (I'd bet it is probably within a factor of two of that, but I really have no idea).
As for rendering it low-quality, that's just a work-around for the current computer limitations. When editing, one really wants to view the output as it's going to be in the final. Degrading the quality may result it different decisions on the edits (what "looks good" may change). The other problem is that these programs cache the rendered images, which can effectively double the storage required (which is not insignificant!)
The bottom line is that real-time, high quality editing would make a difference and for this to happen, CPUs need to get significantly faster. Note, however, that video is (or should be) highly parallelizable. Right now neither Final Cut Pro nor Adobe Premier uses my second processor, but they really would benefit tremendously.
Games! (Oops, sorry). The other thing people need CPU power for is video. Video requires far more CPU power than is now available cheaply. And Consumers want it, too (ask anyone with a kid...) Rendering on current processors takes just too damn long (I don't care if you have your 500MHz G4 or 1.3MHz Pentium) at DV resoultion. There's still a lot of waiting... We really need something more like 5GHz to have anything reasonably responsive for "normal" editing (i.e. without crazy transitions, etc). And of course, then people will want to start adding fancy video effects...
I agree that for word processing/office type tasks, no one really needs more than about 200Mhz. More than that is a waste.
A long time ago (in internet time), in MacUser or MacWorld (I forget which) Andy Ihnatko came up with a game: Web That Smut. It goes as follow. Choose any starting page and follow the links until you find smut. The shortest path wins. (Well, actually, you start with a page and two of you face off and say "I can Web That Smut in x links" like the game Name That Tune - but we're playing the distrubuted version here.) Here, let's play Web That DeCSS - find the path that leads to DeCSS code starting from www.mpaa.org.
A C.html
t ml
m es/cyberlaw/
i nkscyberlaw.html
0 808_ny_post_trial_brief.html
Some notes: you're not allowed to type in anything! That is, you can't find a search engine and type in DeCSS. In my solution below, I need to go through the NY Times. Since I've registered with them, I don't have to type in anything, but if you haven't registered, it won't work. Maybe someone can find a solution that doesn't require registration?
http://www.mpaa.org/
http://www.mpaa.org/home.htm
http://www.mpaa.org/tv/
http://www.tvguidelines.org/default.htm
http://www.tvguidelines.org/resource.htm
http://www.nea.org/
http://www.nea.org/news/press/
http://www.edweek.org/clips/
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/17/nyregion/17TE
http://www.nytimes.com/pages-technology/index.h
http://www.nytimes.com/pages-technology/cyberti
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/reference/l
http://www.eff.org/
http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/MPAA_DVD_cases/2000
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/dvd/
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/DeCSS/
http://www.zpok.demon.co.uk/decss/
Governor,
Please describe issues where you will vote against your largest campaign donors
This questions should instead read:
Candidate,
Please describe issues where you will vote against your largest campaign donors.
After all, they all get contributions. By the way, I think it's a very good question.
No, that would be using Nintendo to fight Sony.