If you're saying what I think you're saying, that was actually exactly my point. Legislation is cheap. Enforcement is expensive.
When the budget doesn't permit any other tool but a hammer, the problem had damn well better be a nail because you can be sure the government will hit it.
So we're looking at a law that requries P2P software to inform about what P2P means and demand explicit consent from the user (which everyone will doubtlessly click away as readily as we dismiss EULAs, i.e. as soon as we've found the right button).
To me it looks like a cheap and easy way of making it look like you're solving a problem. Doesn't say anything about the severity of that problem or the efficiency of the solution, but you can't get everything I suppose.
The school gives students computers with remote webcam activation. REMOTE WEBCAM ACTIVATION. I mean, how sick is that? How could anyone accept that kind of thing in the first place?
I don't care what's it supposed to be used for. I don't care what they tell me they'll use it for. I don't care that the laptop technically belongs to the school. A webcam that is not controlled by me - and me only - does not belong in my computer. Period.
I use good old pen and paper. It's versatile, it's cheap, it's lightweight and it never suffers from hangups, startup times etc.
Instead of thinking "how could I use a digital device to take notes?" you should ask yourself "why do I want my notes to be digital?". Myself, I rarely feel that need as I mostly take notes to study from (less important) and stay awake at lectures (more important). Neither of these reasons require notes in the form of computer files.
On the other hand, you could easily think of several other uses for digital notes. You can share them with friends. You can upload them to somewhere, letting the whole class benefit from them. You can copy them easily. You can store and arrange them easily. You can send them to people on the other side of the Earth, should you want to. But do you want to? That's the question you should answer before making the switch.
The more alternatives for manned space flight, the less dependent we become on the space agency of one single nation. An agency that battles not only technical difficulties but also perpetual budget problems.
I hope for more international cooperation in the future. Sending up your own astronauts gets your country a fair bit of prestige. Sending up astronauts from other nations also gets you friends.
Many, MANY people are irritated because they think their computers run to slow (and they're probably right). This can be verified by looking at the headlines of the tabloids whenever nothing of interest has happened in the world: Make your PC FASTER in 10 MINUTES! The articles usually contain tips such as "close the Vista sidebar", "remove spyware programs", "update your drivers" and "defragment the drive". I suppose sometimes it even works, if you're not computer-savvy enough to do those things already.
Thing is, those articles show there's a demand. Making software that supposedly makes the computer faster is very smart business indeed. See it as the modern equivalent of snake oil salesmen and astrologers. Very few people are likely to complain - if you don't know enough about computers to recognize adware, you definitely won't install benchmarking software to test your computer's performance. A computer to them is as opaque and unintelligible as the human body must have been to the people of old who bought medicines that didn't work. Sadly, there's STILL a market for such medicines, astrology is still alive and kicking, and the computer speedup salesmen will probably be around for a long time.
As long as people are ignorant, they're going to be ripped off.
I'm not sure about that. I think in the future, the OS might have to deal with a lot more computing errors and fault tolerance. It could be better to accept a few broken transistors and use some sort of redundance algorithm if you get vastly greater computing power in the deal.
I completely agree though, that the 10 year prospect is very optimistic. The semiconductor industry evolves at a rapid pace, but this isn't evolution, it's revolution. It will take time before the first usable chip is made with this technology, and it will take even longer before those circuits can compete with silicon-based circuits.
When you have an entire team of scientists having prolonged discussions about the best solution to such a simple problem as getting a small vehicle out of a sand trap, you know your methods are pretty limited.
If we had people on Mars, problems like these would be trivial to solve. The human body is a tremendously versatile instrument and you don't fully appreciate it until you try to do things with robots - especially if those robots are located several light minutes away. Sending humans to Mars would simplify exploration by leaps and bounds. All that has been discovered so far in 35 years of probe landings could probably be done in a few days with astronauts present.
Some problems are hard to anticipate when implementing a new solution - this wasn't one of them. If you live in a snowy climate and want your traffic lights to work even during snow, you MUST take precautions.
It doesn't sound like a terribly difficult problem either. You could use heating, some kind of automatic wiper, spraying with ethylene glycol, or just wiping them off manually every now and then.
Do you think you could help me with that? I'm a professional athlete and my good reputation has recently been tainted due to some unfortunate rumors about my private life...
Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
So as long as you can find willing suicide candidates, you see no problem in having a 1/129 failure rate? In addition to being pretty cynical, that kind of thinking is negative for several other reasons:
1) It means the most promising students might choose other professions because of the risks involved.
2) Every tragic accident in space will mean the entire mission, the shuttle and the equipment, the lives of the astronauts, and the training of them, will be lost. Add to that additional costs of investigation, lawsuits, insurance issues and so on. By avoiding even one such accident, the budget of NASA could afford spending that money on other things, such as safety improvements.
3) Every loss of human lives is not only tragic but also undermines the credibility of NASA and the space program. With every failure, media and politicians start asking questions: why are we doing this? Why is it so expensive? Is it acceptable to spend billions of the tax-payers' dollars on a business this risky? One accident too many and they might decide to put manned space exploration on hold for the foreseeable future.
4) If we are to increase human presence in space, we NEED to get a better track record. Let's compare with the history of aviation - that industry knew right from the beginning that safety was its main concern, so it developed routines and standards that were international, useful and improved safety to a level that beat most other forms of transportation. If flying had anywhere near the accident risk of space flight, then flying would be marginalized and reserved for adventurers and daredevils.
Am I unfair to compare aviation to space flight? Of course I am, and that's my point. Safety is essential to any mature industry. If we want to take space flight to the point where regular flying is today, working out useful and trustworthy safety procedures is not even an option - it's absolutely necessary.
Yep, that pretty much sucks. I'm not defending the methods used by some of these scientists, I'm defending the necessity of taking legislative measures to stop pollution. And that's not just carbon dioxide, I mean any kind of pollution.
"Hello there! I noticed that the hole you're drilling in our boat is likely to sink us. I wouldn't dream of stopping you, but why don't you think about slowing down a bit? It could benefit you too."
Of course, their over-engineering of human risk-related matters leaves something to be desired. Anyone exploring uncharted territories has to accept the risks involved, including the possibility of a one way trip. Is that really such a bad thing though? There are plenty of risk-takers who thrive on this, and plenty of them would love to make history as part of the first colonization team on the moon (for example).
When looking for scientists to do observations in Antarctica, they don't hire people who like adventure, because there is very little of that. Instead they choose people who are very patient and content with reading books, watching movies etc for very long periods of time. Adventurous people go mad from the boredom.
I suspect it would be the same with Mars. It's awesome, but it's still essentially a desert, and chances are there won't be much to do except working. There's also the issue of safety. Safety is not only a moral precautuion (people can die) but also essential to the mission's success. I wouldn't want a self-proclaimed risk-taker on a manned mission.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you just need a lot of breakthroughs because there are lots of problems to break through?
And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.
If you're saying what I think you're saying, that was actually exactly my point. Legislation is cheap. Enforcement is expensive.
When the budget doesn't permit any other tool but a hammer, the problem had damn well better be a nail because you can be sure the government will hit it.
So we're looking at a law that requries P2P software to inform about what P2P means and demand explicit consent from the user (which everyone will doubtlessly click away as readily as we dismiss EULAs, i.e. as soon as we've found the right button).
To me it looks like a cheap and easy way of making it look like you're solving a problem. Doesn't say anything about the severity of that problem or the efficiency of the solution, but you can't get everything I suppose.
The Internet needs a firewall to protect itself from Chuck Norris.
The school gives students computers with remote webcam activation. REMOTE WEBCAM ACTIVATION. I mean, how sick is that? How could anyone accept that kind of thing in the first place?
I don't care what's it supposed to be used for. I don't care what they tell me they'll use it for. I don't care that the laptop technically belongs to the school. A webcam that is not controlled by me - and me only - does not belong in my computer. Period.
My car is more than 10 years old, you insensitive clod!
Dr. Jekyll? Is that you?
I use good old pen and paper. It's versatile, it's cheap, it's lightweight and it never suffers from hangups, startup times etc.
Instead of thinking "how could I use a digital device to take notes?" you should ask yourself "why do I want my notes to be digital?". Myself, I rarely feel that need as I mostly take notes to study from (less important) and stay awake at lectures (more important). Neither of these reasons require notes in the form of computer files.
On the other hand, you could easily think of several other uses for digital notes. You can share them with friends. You can upload them to somewhere, letting the whole class benefit from them. You can copy them easily. You can store and arrange them easily. You can send them to people on the other side of the Earth, should you want to. But do you want to? That's the question you should answer before making the switch.
And the shark STILL looks fake!
The more alternatives for manned space flight, the less dependent we become on the space agency of one single nation. An agency that battles not only technical difficulties but also perpetual budget problems.
I hope for more international cooperation in the future. Sending up your own astronauts gets your country a fair bit of prestige. Sending up astronauts from other nations also gets you friends.
Slashdot should have a -1 "spoiler" moderation.
Too bad IBM don't make hard disk drives anymore...
Why hasn't anyone come up with this before? Or if they have, where are the others?
Many, MANY people are irritated because they think their computers run to slow (and they're probably right). This can be verified by looking at the headlines of the tabloids whenever nothing of interest has happened in the world: Make your PC FASTER in 10 MINUTES! The articles usually contain tips such as "close the Vista sidebar", "remove spyware programs", "update your drivers" and "defragment the drive". I suppose sometimes it even works, if you're not computer-savvy enough to do those things already.
Thing is, those articles show there's a demand. Making software that supposedly makes the computer faster is very smart business indeed. See it as the modern equivalent of snake oil salesmen and astrologers. Very few people are likely to complain - if you don't know enough about computers to recognize adware, you definitely won't install benchmarking software to test your computer's performance. A computer to them is as opaque and unintelligible as the human body must have been to the people of old who bought medicines that didn't work. Sadly, there's STILL a market for such medicines, astrology is still alive and kicking, and the computer speedup salesmen will probably be around for a long time.
As long as people are ignorant, they're going to be ripped off.
I'm not sure about that. I think in the future, the OS might have to deal with a lot more computing errors and fault tolerance. It could be better to accept a few broken transistors and use some sort of redundance algorithm if you get vastly greater computing power in the deal.
I completely agree though, that the 10 year prospect is very optimistic. The semiconductor industry evolves at a rapid pace, but this isn't evolution, it's revolution. It will take time before the first usable chip is made with this technology, and it will take even longer before those circuits can compete with silicon-based circuits.
When you have an entire team of scientists having prolonged discussions about the best solution to such a simple problem as getting a small vehicle out of a sand trap, you know your methods are pretty limited.
If we had people on Mars, problems like these would be trivial to solve. The human body is a tremendously versatile instrument and you don't fully appreciate it until you try to do things with robots - especially if those robots are located several light minutes away. Sending humans to Mars would simplify exploration by leaps and bounds. All that has been discovered so far in 35 years of probe landings could probably be done in a few days with astronauts present.
Some problems are hard to anticipate when implementing a new solution - this wasn't one of them. If you live in a snowy climate and want your traffic lights to work even during snow, you MUST take precautions.
It doesn't sound like a terribly difficult problem either. You could use heating, some kind of automatic wiper, spraying with ethylene glycol, or just wiping them off manually every now and then.
Do you think you could help me with that? I'm a professional athlete and my good reputation has recently been tainted due to some unfortunate rumors about my private life...
If you have, make sure you delete your cookies before you search for "midget gay porn".
Which is exactly how they are supposed to work.
Astronauts know the risks and willingly take them.
So as long as you can find willing suicide candidates, you see no problem in having a 1/129 failure rate? In addition to being pretty cynical, that kind of thinking is negative for several other reasons:
1) It means the most promising students might choose other professions because of the risks involved.
2) Every tragic accident in space will mean the entire mission, the shuttle and the equipment, the lives of the astronauts, and the training of them, will be lost. Add to that additional costs of investigation, lawsuits, insurance issues and so on. By avoiding even one such accident, the budget of NASA could afford spending that money on other things, such as safety improvements.
3) Every loss of human lives is not only tragic but also undermines the credibility of NASA and the space program. With every failure, media and politicians start asking questions: why are we doing this? Why is it so expensive? Is it acceptable to spend billions of the tax-payers' dollars on a business this risky? One accident too many and they might decide to put manned space exploration on hold for the foreseeable future.
4) If we are to increase human presence in space, we NEED to get a better track record. Let's compare with the history of aviation - that industry knew right from the beginning that safety was its main concern, so it developed routines and standards that were international, useful and improved safety to a level that beat most other forms of transportation. If flying had anywhere near the accident risk of space flight, then flying would be marginalized and reserved for adventurers and daredevils.
Am I unfair to compare aviation to space flight? Of course I am, and that's my point. Safety is essential to any mature industry. If we want to take space flight to the point where regular flying is today, working out useful and trustworthy safety procedures is not even an option - it's absolutely necessary.
Yep, that pretty much sucks. I'm not defending the methods used by some of these scientists, I'm defending the necessity of taking legislative measures to stop pollution. And that's not just carbon dioxide, I mean any kind of pollution.
"Hello there! I noticed that the hole you're drilling in our boat is likely to sink us. I wouldn't dream of stopping you, but why don't you think about slowing down a bit? It could benefit you too."
Of course, their over-engineering of human risk-related matters leaves something to be desired. Anyone exploring uncharted territories has to accept the risks involved, including the possibility of a one way trip. Is that really such a bad thing though? There are plenty of risk-takers who thrive on this, and plenty of them would love to make history as part of the first colonization team on the moon (for example).
When looking for scientists to do observations in Antarctica, they don't hire people who like adventure, because there is very little of that. Instead they choose people who are very patient and content with reading books, watching movies etc for very long periods of time. Adventurous people go mad from the boredom.
I suspect it would be the same with Mars. It's awesome, but it's still essentially a desert, and chances are there won't be much to do except working. There's also the issue of safety. Safety is not only a moral precautuion (people can die) but also essential to the mission's success. I wouldn't want a self-proclaimed risk-taker on a manned mission.