You talk as if this is something MS might try, when we all know that they've been doing it routinely all along. But this kind of tactic doesn't seem to be working with netbooks. Companies seem to have no trouble making and selling simple Linux netbooks.
The sad thing is that this is not entirely a win for Linux. Yes, it means increased market share. But it only succeeds because there's a basic set of Internet tools that everybody uses and that can be implemented on any widely-used OS. That being the case, vendors might as well use an OS that doesn't come with license fees.
But that means nobody will be able to make a living writing applications for these netbooks — they already have all the software their users need. Most desktop applications will continue to be coded against Microsoft's convoluted, inconsistent, and buggy APIs and platforms.
Dyson is a physicist, not a climatologist. Neither are half the names given on the page you link — which is a blog by an oil state Senator! At best you have a list of maybe a dozen scientists, half of whom are not experts in climate. And all of them characterize themselves as dissidents from the mainstream of scientific thought on global warming.
Your whole argument is just parroting blogosphere BS. That's dumb enough when it's a random shoot-from-the lip blog. But this is a blog by a politician with a vested interest in denying climate change and a history of demonizing anybody who disagrees with him, and routinely makes arguments that not even his fellow "skeptics" care for. That's way beyond dumb.
That's an extreme assumption. But "wild"? No more than, say, destroying a major business center with a couple of hijacked airplanes.
The terrorism experts pretty much agree that there will be a major incident sometime in the next 10 years. Obviously they can't predict exactly when, where, or how. But building a lot of "peaceful" nuclear plants makes it that much easier to steal fissionable material, which increases the probability that something like this will occur. Not to a certainy, of course, maybe not even to a "probable." But it's sure as hell not "wild" either.
You are absolutely the first person I have ever heard make this claim. Can you cite somebody who's actually working on this, or has the Evil Conspiracy driven them all underground?
There are very few respected scientists who think it's true
That's simple, pure bullshit. Not even the leading climate deniers claim that. They do claim that the mainstream climate scientists rely too much on theoretical models, that they don't pay enough attention to negative evidence, that there's not enough data, etc., etc. But the fact remains that the deniers are in the minority.
OK, that's three posts in a row that are totally disconnected from logic or fact. I'm afraid I find your bop bag approach to argument a bit of a bore. You'll excuse me if I ignore you.
"Waste" disposal is only a problem because we refuse to reprocess it like any sane and sensible country would.
Huh? You mean somebody (and I mean somebody in the real world) has found a use for the byproduct of nuclear fission? Last I heard, just finding a place to store it was a major problem. And by "storing it" I mean keeping it secure for centuries.
You lost me with item 1. I'm not going to claim that scientific opinion is unanimous on this issue, but if you're dismissing all the respected scientists who do believe in it as a "star echochamber", none of your opinions have any credibility at all.
And yet the word "model" appears nowhere in TFA. It refers instead to "quantitative evaluation". You can certainly disagree with the way evaluation was carried out. But you're not doing that. You're claiming that there are "wild assumptions", something I see no evidence of.
Advocates of a given technology tend to be pretty blind to its downsides. This is particularly true for advocates of nuclear power (waste disposal, weapons proliferation, high costs, high NIMBY factor) and biofuels (environmental degradation; diversion of cropland from food production). All this study does is point out these blind spots. The way you dismiss the study out of hand is all too typical of the river-in-Egypt approach to environmental debate.
One caveat with respect to biofuels: most of the objection to it don't apply to plans to extract it from oil-rich algae. But this emerging technology doesn't seem to get much press, probably because it doesn't have the entrenched businesses lobbying for it that nukes and fuel crops do.
Nonsesne. Ever used Delphi? Turbo Pascal? Any Java IDE or debugger? The Perl debugger? All of these allow you to trace program state without reference to assembly level code.
Why? Pocket devices just aren't very good as eBook readers. If you read with any speed at all, you have to turn the page every 3 seconds. It gets old.
Right now, I often read eBooks on my Motion Computing tablet, where the screen is a little bigger than that of most hardbound book pages. And when the price comes down to something reasonable, I'll probably get a Kindle or Sony. These have a screen the size of a paperback book page, which is probably the minimum practical size for a reader.
Go crawl back under your rock. These folks hold jobs with the same requirements and the same pay as native U.S. citizens. In fact, many of these immigrants are now U.S. citizens, though of recent vintage. They didn't get their jobs by working cheap — these are highly-skilled engineers, not chicken-pluckers.
If you think India is ripping us off by paying for the education of our professionals, then you need to learn a little basic math.
No, Stross got it exactly wrong. Assuming that this recent analysis is correct, an earth space elevator is impractical even without the debris and gravity well issues.
Stross is sometimes fun to read, but he has too many howlers to rate as a serious prognosticator. Most SF "predictions" turn out wrong to some extent anyway (the future is always weirder than you can imagine) but Stross's pet theories tend to be especially weak on logic and subject to almost immediate invalidation.
Also, he never met a weird idea he didn't like, and he puts all of them in his stories. I have to read his stuff with a browser window open so I can google for all his silly references.
Fine. Now persuade the FCC to let you have the bandwidth to do it in the field. Note that the existing users of that bandwidth will oppose you. Loudly.
Hey, if you assume the right kind of scientific breakthrough (or the existence of magic) you can do anything. But before you can build that gigabit cell phone, you're either going to have to find a flaw in the math behind information theory, on else make a fundamental change in the laws of physics. Neither is impossible. but there's no hint that is on the horizon.
Also a lot of "art house" movies. And a lot of titles that aren't well-known, but are still worth watching. That's especially true since they started rotating old Starz titles.
When will have the latest blockbusters? Probably never. The same economics that makes Hollywood spend a lot of money on this kind of crap makes them want to tightly control distribution. You may think that's wrong, but a lot of us don't care. There's more good stuff online then I'll live long enough to see (including the 200 movies in my Netflix watch-now queue), and I just don't care if I never get to watch crappy blockbusters online.
That's a little more difficult. Wired capacity you can increase just by pulling more wires. The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
Dude, somebody else already made that comeback, and I already answered it. Short answer: we have metro areas that are almost as dense as anything in Korea. Density is not the issue.
I cited my 5 Mbit failure as an example of how feeble U.S. Internet access is. I was arguing with a guy who claimed that 100 Mbit was widely available. Getting 10 Mbit would be nice, but even if it were widely available, it still would leave the U.S. lagging.
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But this isn't a cell phone or a PDA. This is a device that is specifically for people who don't need to install anything.
You talk as if this is something MS might try, when we all know that they've been doing it routinely all along. But this kind of tactic doesn't seem to be working with netbooks. Companies seem to have no trouble making and selling simple Linux netbooks.
The sad thing is that this is not entirely a win for Linux. Yes, it means increased market share. But it only succeeds because there's a basic set of Internet tools that everybody uses and that can be implemented on any widely-used OS. That being the case, vendors might as well use an OS that doesn't come with license fees.
But that means nobody will be able to make a living writing applications for these netbooks — they already have all the software their users need. Most desktop applications will continue to be coded against Microsoft's convoluted, inconsistent, and buggy APIs and platforms.
Dyson is a physicist, not a climatologist. Neither are half the names given on the page you link — which is a blog by an oil state Senator! At best you have a list of maybe a dozen scientists, half of whom are not experts in climate. And all of them characterize themselves as dissidents from the mainstream of scientific thought on global warming.
Your whole argument is just parroting blogosphere BS. That's dumb enough when it's a random shoot-from-the lip blog. But this is a blog by a politician with a vested interest in denying climate change and a history of demonizing anybody who disagrees with him, and routinely makes arguments that not even his fellow "skeptics" care for. That's way beyond dumb.
The capitalization was sarcasm. You hadn't made any case beyond vague, unsupported assertions. And you still haven't.
That's an extreme assumption. But "wild"? No more than, say, destroying a major business center with a couple of hijacked airplanes.
The terrorism experts pretty much agree that there will be a major incident sometime in the next 10 years. Obviously they can't predict exactly when, where, or how. But building a lot of "peaceful" nuclear plants makes it that much easier to steal fissionable material, which increases the probability that something like this will occur. Not to a certainy, of course, maybe not even to a "probable." But it's sure as hell not "wild" either.
That's four in a row. Are you trying for some kind of record? I don't think Guiness tracks this kind of thing.
You are absolutely the first person I have ever heard make this claim. Can you cite somebody who's actually working on this, or has the Evil Conspiracy driven them all underground?
There are very few respected scientists who think it's true
That's simple, pure bullshit. Not even the leading climate deniers claim that. They do claim that the mainstream climate scientists rely too much on theoretical models, that they don't pay enough attention to negative evidence, that there's not enough data, etc., etc. But the fact remains that the deniers are in the minority.
OK, that's three posts in a row that are totally disconnected from logic or fact. I'm afraid I find your bop bag approach to argument a bit of a bore. You'll excuse me if I ignore you.
"Waste" disposal is only a problem because we refuse to reprocess it like any sane and sensible country would.
Huh? You mean somebody (and I mean somebody in the real world) has found a use for the byproduct of nuclear fission? Last I heard, just finding a place to store it was a major problem. And by "storing it" I mean keeping it secure for centuries.
You lost me with item 1. I'm not going to claim that scientific opinion is unanimous on this issue, but if you're dismissing all the respected scientists who do believe in it as a "star echochamber", none of your opinions have any credibility at all.
And yet the word "model" appears nowhere in TFA. It refers instead to "quantitative evaluation". You can certainly disagree with the way evaluation was carried out. But you're not doing that. You're claiming that there are "wild assumptions", something I see no evidence of.
Advocates of a given technology tend to be pretty blind to its downsides. This is particularly true for advocates of nuclear power (waste disposal, weapons proliferation, high costs, high NIMBY factor) and biofuels (environmental degradation; diversion of cropland from food production). All this study does is point out these blind spots. The way you dismiss the study out of hand is all too typical of the river-in-Egypt approach to environmental debate.
One caveat with respect to biofuels: most of the objection to it don't apply to plans to extract it from oil-rich algae. But this emerging technology doesn't seem to get much press, probably because it doesn't have the entrenched businesses lobbying for it that nukes and fuel crops do.
Invade our lives? I seem to have missed that plank in his platform.
Nonsesne. Ever used Delphi? Turbo Pascal? Any Java IDE or debugger? The Perl debugger? All of these allow you to trace program state without reference to assembly level code.
You can do the same thing with a high-level language and a debugger. 4
If you own a DS, you NEED to own a R4.
Why? Pocket devices just aren't very good as eBook readers. If you read with any speed at all, you have to turn the page every 3 seconds. It gets old.
Right now, I often read eBooks on my Motion Computing tablet, where the screen is a little bigger than that of most hardbound book pages. And when the price comes down to something reasonable, I'll probably get a Kindle or Sony. These have a screen the size of a paperback book page, which is probably the minimum practical size for a reader.
I'll save my DS for playing Advance Wars.
Go crawl back under your rock. These folks hold jobs with the same requirements and the same pay as native U.S. citizens. In fact, many of these immigrants are now U.S. citizens, though of recent vintage. They didn't get their jobs by working cheap — these are highly-skilled engineers, not chicken-pluckers.
If you think India is ripping us off by paying for the education of our professionals, then you need to learn a little basic math.
No, Stross got it exactly wrong. Assuming that this recent analysis is correct, an earth space elevator is impractical even without the debris and gravity well issues.
Stross is sometimes fun to read, but he has too many howlers to rate as a serious prognosticator. Most SF "predictions" turn out wrong to some extent anyway (the future is always weirder than you can imagine) but Stross's pet theories tend to be especially weak on logic and subject to almost immediate invalidation.
Also, he never met a weird idea he didn't like, and he puts all of them in his stories. I have to read his stuff with a browser window open so I can google for all his silly references.
Fine. Now persuade the FCC to let you have the bandwidth to do it in the field. Note that the existing users of that bandwidth will oppose you. Loudly.
Bored now. Go snipe-troll somebody else.
Hey, if you assume the right kind of scientific breakthrough (or the existence of magic) you can do anything. But before you can build that gigabit cell phone, you're either going to have to find a flaw in the math behind information theory, on else make a fundamental change in the laws of physics. Neither is impossible. but there's no hint that is on the horizon.
Also a lot of "art house" movies. And a lot of titles that aren't well-known, but are still worth watching. That's especially true since they started rotating old Starz titles.
When will have the latest blockbusters? Probably never. The same economics that makes Hollywood spend a lot of money on this kind of crap makes them want to tightly control distribution. You may think that's wrong, but a lot of us don't care. There's more good stuff online then I'll live long enough to see (including the 200 movies in my Netflix watch-now queue), and I just don't care if I never get to watch crappy blockbusters online.
So why isn't fibre widely available in apartment buildings in big cities in this country?
That's a little more difficult. Wired capacity you can increase just by pulling more wires. The carrying capacity of the airwaves is fixed by God, and a lot of it is already being used.
Dude, somebody else already made that comeback, and I already answered it. Short answer: we have metro areas that are almost as dense as anything in Korea. Density is not the issue.
I cited my 5 Mbit failure as an example of how feeble U.S. Internet access is. I was arguing with a guy who claimed that 100 Mbit was widely available. Getting 10 Mbit would be nice, but even if it were widely available, it still would leave the U.S. lagging.