Except electric cars, even if 100% powered by electricity from gasoline plants, would still be a massive improvement. Internal combustion engines have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 30%, but large stationary plants can afford to be much more efficient. Collecting the energy from a gasoline plant, piping it through wires to a person's home, putting it into a battery, taking it out of the battery, and operating an electric motor adds up (or, rather, multiplies down) to a total efficiency of... 48%. That's right, 60% more bang for your buck, even if nothing else changes.
Copyright is an artificial government grant of monopoly over reproduction and public performance of a work. A foreign import isn't reproduced under that monopoly grant and is thus illegal to import or sell in the US.
Wait, what? Copyright is a monopoly over reproduction and public performance, so it makes it illegal to import goods legally created in another country but sold for lower prices? I fail to see the logical reasoning here.
I'm pretty sure the first sale doctrine forbids using legal tricks (like slapping a license agreement onto a book) to prevent resale of a copyrighted work. Not much of a stretch to extend that to technological protections.
There's no problem with rampant civil liberties abuse at all unless your activities don't reach beyond working, sleeping and mundane discussions with your family every day.
I say decentralize the web. Make it so that websites are stored "on the cloud", with dozens, or even hundreds, of redundant copies broken into small chunks on random people's computers. Make publishing these sites easy, so anyone can do it, removing the need for centralized holding sites like Youtube, blogspot.com, etc. Reduce ISPs to being a purely city-to-city pipe, with intra-city connections being done through the individual computers themselves.
Freenet is already doing a lot of this, if we can just make it more mainstream...
The Google empire seems to cover quite a lot of what Facebook offers. You can have your personal website on Google, link to those of your friends, you can see on Gmail if any of your contacts are online and start up an IM conversation with them, etc.
Making DRM breaking illegal only if you're breaking copyright is like making it illegal to use a gun if you're committing murder with it. The offense here is breaking copyright, which is already illegal, breaking DRM is just the means to the end.
It's not just people refusing to have their private parts scanned as a matter of principle. It's also people who decide it's simply too much of a headache, with the airport security and the customs forms only being subconsciously incorporated into their thoughts. When I'm flying, I'm always, in the back of my mind, afraid. Not of terrorists, who kill less air travellers than bad weather, but of the security. I'm afraid of being detained for hours because I lost some critical document or made a mistake in filling out some bureaucratic form. If it weren't for that, I'd be flying at least 50% more often.
And we now have security. The locked and reinforced doors to the cabin. That's what would have completely prevented 9/11, and with that the only thing we realistically need is explosive/bioweapon sniffing.
Except that every additional gigabyte is useful - you can store almost 3 45-minute TV episodes on that. By packing more pixels, however, there are rapid diminishing returns as you start to overcome the resolution of the eye itself.
Nevertheless, I think the quality of story selection has been diminishing a good bit here. Is it a revenue shortfall?
While quantity has gone up massively these past few years. I think it's the opposite - a symptom of Slashdot's growing membership. As more people come to post, you need to post more stories to contain the discussions, spending less time on each one.
Have you ever tried to survive a 10 hour car ride as a kid? Unless you have entertainment (and no, talking to your parents doesn't count for more than 15 minutes), you will get extremely bored before you're even halfway through.
PHPECTS - sorry, that should be "aspects" - of spelling on the internet are growing weirder. Readers recently explained the numerous web appearances of the non-word at the start of this paragraph by speculating that website managers carelessly run a "find-and-replace word" macro to expunge all references to the Microsoft web-page-generating language ASP, and replace it with the independently-produced language PHP (27 February)....
These search-and-destroy word-replacing missions - which we shall call netplications - are not limited to the acronyms favoured by IT geeks. Some years ago, following the takeover of the Midlands Examining Group (MEG) by the Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations board (OCR), physics students were suddenly required to learn all about "ocrawatts" and "ocrabytes" (14 January 2006). We haven't yet come across any netplications using real words. Perhaps our mind is now too discomanised to think of any to try.
There isn't much more that can be done with operating systems. Once the kernel works reasonably well, and the interface works reasonably well, there's no way left to improve (see: new versions of Windows improving the UI mainly with flashy graphics, GNOME and KDE starting to do the same). All the development going on right now is in applications and on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Except electric cars, even if 100% powered by electricity from gasoline plants, would still be a massive improvement. Internal combustion engines have a maximum theoretical efficiency of 30%, but large stationary plants can afford to be much more efficient. Collecting the energy from a gasoline plant, piping it through wires to a person's home, putting it into a battery, taking it out of the battery, and operating an electric motor adds up (or, rather, multiplies down) to a total efficiency of... 48%. That's right, 60% more bang for your buck, even if nothing else changes.
Copyright is an artificial government grant of monopoly over reproduction and public performance of a work. A foreign import isn't reproduced under that monopoly grant and is thus illegal to import or sell in the US.
Wait, what? Copyright is a monopoly over reproduction and public performance, so it makes it illegal to import goods legally created in another country but sold for lower prices? I fail to see the logical reasoning here.
I'm pretty sure the first sale doctrine forbids using legal tricks (like slapping a license agreement onto a book) to prevent resale of a copyrighted work. Not much of a stretch to extend that to technological protections.
There's no problem with rampant civil liberties abuse at all unless your activities don't reach beyond working, sleeping and mundane discussions with your family every day.
The word "free" has more than one meaning:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
So the disk will be made up of DRM programs protecting... each other?
I say decentralize the web. Make it so that websites are stored "on the cloud", with dozens, or even hundreds, of redundant copies broken into small chunks on random people's computers. Make publishing these sites easy, so anyone can do it, removing the need for centralized holding sites like Youtube, blogspot.com, etc. Reduce ISPs to being a purely city-to-city pipe, with intra-city connections being done through the individual computers themselves.
Freenet is already doing a lot of this, if we can just make it more mainstream...
The Google empire seems to cover quite a lot of what Facebook offers. You can have your personal website on Google, link to those of your friends, you can see on Gmail if any of your contacts are online and start up an IM conversation with them, etc.
Making DRM breaking illegal only if you're breaking copyright is like making it illegal to use a gun if you're committing murder with it. The offense here is breaking copyright, which is already illegal, breaking DRM is just the means to the end.
Won against whom? I would imagine the (more unsavory elements of the) government like having an excuse to impose more control and extend their power.
It's not just people refusing to have their private parts scanned as a matter of principle. It's also people who decide it's simply too much of a headache, with the airport security and the customs forms only being subconsciously incorporated into their thoughts. When I'm flying, I'm always, in the back of my mind, afraid. Not of terrorists, who kill less air travellers than bad weather, but of the security. I'm afraid of being detained for hours because I lost some critical document or made a mistake in filling out some bureaucratic form. If it weren't for that, I'd be flying at least 50% more often.
And we now have security. The locked and reinforced doors to the cabin. That's what would have completely prevented 9/11, and with that the only thing we realistically need is explosive/bioweapon sniffing.
Except that every additional gigabyte is useful - you can store almost 3 45-minute TV episodes on that. By packing more pixels, however, there are rapid diminishing returns as you start to overcome the resolution of the eye itself.
Nevertheless, I think the quality of story selection has been diminishing a good bit here. Is it a revenue shortfall?
While quantity has gone up massively these past few years. I think it's the opposite - a symptom of Slashdot's growing membership. As more people come to post, you need to post more stories to contain the discussions, spending less time on each one.
There's a difference between identifying yourself and showing ID.
And in what way are books superior to electronic entertainment in terms of parent-child interaction? Different tech, same problem.
Have you ever tried to survive a 10 hour car ride as a kid? Unless you have entertainment (and no, talking to your parents doesn't count for more than 15 minutes), you will get extremely bored before you're even halfway through.
Videos here
PHPECTS - sorry, that should be "aspects" - of spelling on the internet are growing weirder. Readers recently explained the numerous web appearances of the non-word at the start of this paragraph by speculating that website managers carelessly run a "find-and-replace word" macro to expunge all references to the Microsoft web-page-generating language ASP, and replace it with the independently-produced language PHP (27 February). ...
These search-and-destroy word-replacing missions - which we shall call netplications - are not limited to the acronyms favoured by IT geeks. Some years ago, following the takeover of the Midlands Examining Group (MEG) by the Oxford Cambridge and RSA Examinations board (OCR), physics students were suddenly required to learn all about "ocrawatts" and "ocrabytes" (14 January 2006). We haven't yet come across any netplications using real words. Perhaps our mind is now too discomanised to think of any to try.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627542.800-stewing-magazine-wrappers-in-gravy.html
Servant 1: Ok, let's fire up the machine. Bring us the list of world news so it can make an informed decision.
Servant 2: Here you go. (passes paper to Servant 1)
(Servant 1 feeds paper into machine)
Servant 1: Ok, here goes. Let's see how it responds to the scandal in the UN.
(shredder noise heard)
(d20 heard bouncing around inside)
Servant 2: Look, the answers are coming out.
Servant 1: (grabs output) Ok, let's see.
Servant 2: Continue oppressing citizens. Send missiles into Pacific Ocean, near Japan. Put resources into creating a Linux distribution.
Servant 1: Wait, what was that second one?
Servant 2: Machine said it, let's go deliver the orders to the people.
There isn't much more that can be done with operating systems. Once the kernel works reasonably well, and the interface works reasonably well, there's no way left to improve (see: new versions of Windows improving the UI mainly with flashy graphics, GNOME and KDE starting to do the same). All the development going on right now is in applications and on the internet.
GNU is Not Unix General Public License
I fail to see the redundancy here.
Do you really not understand the difference between downloading something for personal enjoyment and commercial distribution?
Also, I really would like some proof that the downloading crowd and the GPL enforcement crowd are made up of the same people.
Ok, so the software has some dependencies. Isn't the Linux package management system designed to take care of all that with one command?
Machines powerful enough to run the world would have to have some human-like processes.
Remember that humans are also a machine, and there is absolutely nothing special about a human that a sufficiently powerful robot can't replicate.