All the eject buttons should have triggered electronic signals only, like the buttons on your microwave oven. When you press "eject", the button should signal the OS that an ejection was requested. The OS should flush its write buffers or whatever, then it should send an "eject" signal back to the device. Only then should the floppy/tape/CD be ejected.
Apple's eject button on the keyboard does almost the right thing, but a good designer would have placed the button on or near the device, not on the keyboard.
Cartels always have to be maintained by force. . . . . DeBeers just happens to supply its own muscle. . . . . I can't stand to see so many people attribute the evils of mercantilist markets to insufficient government control.
How exactly will your perfectly free market, unfettered by government regulation of any kind, prevent the formation of cartels? Competition certainly will not do it, not when a company like DeBeers can use a death squad on its competitors. If competition will not keep the market honest, and the government is not there to do it, what is left? Answer: not much. Your vaunted free market, if it ever became as totally unrestrained as you seem to want it to be, will last about as long as a snowball in hell.
he got everybody into one room, then barred the doors and...:)
Just like Cesare Borgia (16th century), who invited four of his rebellious condottieri (mercenary) captains to a reconciliation feast at Sengallia. The ensuing massacre is still remembered with a shudder.
I do strongly believe the invasion of Iraq was motivated by decency.
Believe what you like. That does not make your beliefs the truth.
It was indecent for a cynical world, led by Old Europe and the UN, that allowed Saddam to brutalize Kurdistan and reign for 12 additional years after the first gulf war.
Was it not the sainted President Reagan who gave Saddam the chemical weapons with which he gassed the Kurds? Was it not Donald Rumsfeld, no less, who went to Baghdad at the time to shake Saddam's hand? Please tell me about the decency of Reagan and Rumsfeld.
All you can do is make hyperbolic assertions with no relevance to real events.
(Boggle) No relevance to reality? Has Bush's WMD excuse for invading Iraq proven to be totally empty, or not? Did the U.S. revive Saddam's dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, or not? Did Iyad Alawi make a loudly praised speech to Congress, or not? Is the same Alawi now leading death squads in Iraq, or not? Did Americans torture their prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, or not?
"Decency" is not in Bush's vocabulary. (See his heist of the University of Houston's trust fund.) It is certainly in "Chemical" Rumsfeld's vocabulary, but he sneers at it.
The US is not alone as a society that is in denial about its past transgressions. Indeed, it is not the worst offender considering historal interpretations that prevail in Japan, China, Russia, France...
What can be worse than the American genocide of another race?
I think the majority of Americans are proud of the role they play in Iraq, crushing tyranny and establishing democracy.
"Establishing democracy?" No so. The truth is that the U.S. tried very hard to create another dictatorship: Iyad Alawi was to be the next ruler of Iraq, the next Saddam, wielding Saddam's hated secret police (the newly revived Mukhabarat). Like Saddam, Alawi was a former client -- i.e. puppet -- of the CIA; and like Saddam, Alawi was a psychotic murderer.
The U.S. installed Alawi as Interim Prime Minister, and even tried to confer a halo of legitimacy on him by inviting him to give a speech to
Congress. Don't you remember it? Alawi was loudly cheered in the Capitol and widely praised in the U.S. media. They loved this murderer. Clearly, the intent was to establish another brutal and hated dictatorship.
You cannot tell me that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been motivated by any shred of decency.
The war against Saddam has been a great success.
Only in the sense of Tacitus, the Roman historian: "They make a desert and call it peace." (See Fallujah.)
The Alawi enthronement failed at birth, mostly because the Shiites absolutely abhorred the guy (and I do not blame them at all). The recent hastily rigged elections were a gloss on the American capitulation to reality: that the Shiites now dominate Iraq. The situation is now extremely perilous, because the Shiites also run neighboring Iran: this is why the U.S. is now beating the war drums against the mullahs. It is also why the Pentagon has purchased 1,500,000,000 bullets this year.
An unprovoked invasion of a country, killing who knows how many tens of thousands of people, only to replace that country's dictator with another murderous dictator: this is something for Americans to be proud of? Another looming war, because Bush has totally messed up the first one: this is success?
Would it really have been better for Europe to bypass North and South America, leaving them in the perpetual grip of brutal Stone Age cultures?
Not all of pre-Columbus America was equally primitive.
For example, the Iroquois Confederation had been enjoying a working democracy for 500 years when the Europeans "discovered" them. In fact, large parts of the Constitution of the United States were consciously based on the Iroquois model, because that had been proven to work.
See The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. It's all there: the voting, the rule of law, and the separation of the government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
I bet you didn't know that. The U.S. today is desperately and deliberately amnesiac on many topics, probably out of embarrassment and guilt. (And I include Iraq in this.) The greatest genius in American history was not Jefferson, Franklin, or anyone else you have probably heard of, but Dekanawidah of the Iroquois, who invented the laws of the Iroquois Confederacy so long ago (around 1100 AD).
Actually you don't need to worry about the inverse square law if you are going that fast. Red shift will make the gamma's harmless.
Just a nitpick.... I think the redshifting would be irrelevant. If you were going fast enough to redshift the gammas behind you into harmlessness, you would be fried by the blueshifted radiation in front.
Unless you carried enough shielding. But if you had that much shielding, the gamma ray burster would be irrelevant to you anyway (unless you were right next to it!).
We could counter the depletion by making some ozone ourselves. To do this on a planetary scale would require immense amounts of energy, but we will probably have plenty of fusion power by 2100 AD (or sooner). So if no nearby gamma ray bursters occur for at least a century (very very likely), we will be OK.
BitKeeper provided a free, powerful system that helped Linux, and the Linux community, tremondously. No one debates that
BitMover received an immense marketing boost from Linus' adoption of BitKeeper. The company founded by Larry McVoy would probably not be viable today without Linus' implied endorsement of their product. So please don't pretend that BitMover was doing Linus a favor -- the reality was very much the other way around.
When BitMover was just getting started, nobody knew what BitKeeper was, and nobody had any idea whether it was a reliable program. Because an archive of source code is the repository of the corporate jewels, reliability is crucial. Cautious sysadmins want a revision control system to have a long track record for dependability, and they would not have touched a newbie program like BitKeeper with a ten foot pole. So BitMover's survival in a crowded market was very uncertain from the start.
Linus' adoption of BitKeeper lent it enormous credibility, and is probably the most important reason why Larry McVoy's company continues to exist today. Linus benefited somewhat from BitKeeper, but BitKeeper benefited vastly more from Linus.
After all this time, we've become what we claimed to hate most.
"He who hunts monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. For if you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
I think you're missing something though. Assuming what you say is true (I'm not going to bother checking your #s..), the fact is that we would be constantly adding to that stockpile. So while something may be ok in 400 years, there's another spent rod somewhere that arrived only 100 years ago.
Fission is only a stopgap until we have better sources of energy, such as fusion; it is unlikely that Yucca Mountain will be accumulating spent fuel for more than a century or two. So if the original poster is right, 200 or 300 years after the repository stops growing it will be less radioactive than the ore from which the fuel was mined.
Traditional Dead Trees can't do this
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Wouldn't it be nice if a movie review showed actual clips from the movie?
Wouldn't it be nice if a textbook could have animations showing exactly why the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus works? (Demonstrate that the slope of the graph of the integral is the derivative that you're integrating.)
A car servicing manual would be much more illuminating if it had animated cartoons showing exactly how the engine worked.
None of this is possible for dead paper books.
Re:I know this is an oft repeated point but
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Upbeat on E-books
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As for reading in the bath with a PDA - I do it all the time.
Be careful. Some batteries explode when they get wet.
Despite the TV shows you watch, lawyers are not out save the world or adopt all the orphans they run across while doing community service for their coke problems
No, but the liability lawyers do put the fear of God (or at least of treble damage awards) into dishonest or exploitative corporations, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's Haliburton (asbestos).
Of course, these corporations loathe the idea of being seriously punished for their malfeasance, which is why there is currently such a loud campaign in favor of capping corporate liability.
5 years of care is no small thing though, regardless of how much it costs
But what quality of "medical care" would the $500 buy over 5 years, even in India? Just enough to have somebody come around regularly to check that you're still alive, and to call the undertaker if necessary?
Depositing 1 mole of stuff atom by atom at a speed of 1 billion atoms per second takes about 20 million years.
There is no law that says we will always be so slow. Here is an existence proof that a faster mechanism is eminently possible: you. You did not take 20 million years to grow from a single cell.
Fifteen years -- or however old you are -- is still pretty slow of course. But I have no doubt that we will find ways to speed things up. By using the polymerase chain reaction, we can replicate DNA at exponential rates; this is proven technology. More speculatively, perhaps we could use DNA (and its accompanying horde of proteins) to build the ribosomes to build the nano tools used for building the devices we need.
Although there has never been a war started in the name of buddhism...
This may be true for most of Bhuddism, but not for all.
In particular, the last few hundred years of the history of Tibet can be understood as a period of nearly continous warfare between temples for supreme power. As Tibet was a theocracy (a religious dictatorship), the temples were the most powerful institutions in the country. And all that power has had its usual corrupting influence, even on Bhuddism.
The Dalai Lama's school, the Gelupka (Yellow Hats), is the dominant faction today, but that may change. The competition between the temples is pretty vicious still; assassinations are common.
Ever wondered that such a gadget would require too much energy too be economical?
If you need more energy, you can tell the fabricator to build more solar cells. You would need the power grid only at the beginning, in order to build the first few of these cells.
As another poster noted, the fabricator can make solar cells.
2. 'Atoms' to feed the machine
Solar cells use silicon.... and practically any rock you can pick up is mostly silicon dioxide. For things other than solar cells, diamondoid materials will be great for structural material; we can literally get the necessary carbon from the air (it's what trees do, after all).
3. Patterns to instruct the machine
As the other poster noted: the internet and open source. In a world free of want, everyone will have plenty of leisure. We will be designing new things out of sheer boredom if nothing else, and we will be publishing their blueprints over the Internet the way we swap recipes today.
Although free markets are great from the point of view of moving quickly to a local optimum in resource utilization, their coverage and consistency are spotty.
I agree. And you get full marks for understanding that the optimum reached by capitalism is usually local, not global.
For those who are wondering what the difference is, here's an example. If you're on top of Pike's Peak, you are standing on a local optimum in terms of elevation above sea level. You are on an optimum because you would be going downhill as soon as you moved away from the peak, no matter which direction you took. However, the optimum is local, not global, because Pike's Peak is not the highest mountain in the world, not even close. If your metric is elevation above sea level, the global optimum is far away, on the top of Mt. Everest.
A capitalistic corporation tends to be short-sighted: it tends to take whichever course is immediately most advantageous. In terms of the hill-climbing analogy, the corporation is always walking upwards in whichever direction seems steepest at the moment. Thus it tends to end up at a local optimum: on top of Pike's Peak, or if it is shortsighted enough, on top of the nearest dunghill. And there it will be stuck. This is why the parent poster says that capitalism tends to find the local optimum, not the global one.
[The difference between war and terrorism is] all about intent.
No so. There is no difference in intent, only in the slant of terminology. Regardless of whether an attack is called "war" or "terrorism", the intent of the attacker is the same: to coerce a group of people by lethal force. As an inevitable consequence, many innocents die or suffer horribly for the rest of their lives, regardless of the rhetoric.
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Apple's eject button on the keyboard does almost the right thing, but a good designer would have placed the button on or near the device, not on the keyboard.
How exactly will your perfectly free market, unfettered by government regulation of any kind, prevent the formation of cartels? Competition certainly will not do it, not when a company like DeBeers can use a death squad on its competitors. If competition will not keep the market honest, and the government is not there to do it, what is left? Answer: not much. Your vaunted free market, if it ever became as totally unrestrained as you seem to want it to be, will last about as long as a snowball in hell.
Oops, forgot to log in. The above article was mine.
Just like Cesare Borgia (16th century), who invited four of his rebellious condottieri (mercenary) captains to a reconciliation feast at Sengallia. The ensuing massacre is still remembered with a shudder.
Believe what you like. That does not make your beliefs the truth.
It was indecent for a cynical world, led by Old Europe and the UN, that allowed Saddam to brutalize Kurdistan and reign for 12 additional years after the first gulf war.
Was it not the sainted President Reagan who gave Saddam the chemical weapons with which he gassed the Kurds? Was it not Donald Rumsfeld, no less, who went to Baghdad at the time to shake Saddam's hand? Please tell me about the decency of Reagan and Rumsfeld.
All you can do is make hyperbolic assertions with no relevance to real events.
(Boggle) No relevance to reality? Has Bush's WMD excuse for invading Iraq proven to be totally empty, or not? Did the U.S. revive Saddam's dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, or not? Did Iyad Alawi make a loudly praised speech to Congress, or not? Is the same Alawi now leading death squads in Iraq, or not? Did Americans torture their prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, or not?
"Decency" is not in Bush's vocabulary. (See his heist of the University of Houston's trust fund.) It is certainly in "Chemical" Rumsfeld's vocabulary, but he sneers at it.
Oops. The above message was mine.
What can be worse than the American genocide of another race?
I think the majority of Americans are proud of the role they play in Iraq, crushing tyranny and establishing democracy.
"Establishing democracy?" No so. The truth is that the U.S. tried very hard to create another dictatorship: Iyad Alawi was to be the next ruler of Iraq, the next Saddam, wielding Saddam's hated secret police (the newly revived Mukhabarat). Like Saddam, Alawi was a former client -- i.e. puppet -- of the CIA; and like Saddam, Alawi was a psychotic murderer.
The U.S. installed Alawi as Interim Prime Minister, and even tried to confer a halo of legitimacy on him by inviting him to give a speech to Congress. Don't you remember it? Alawi was loudly cheered in the Capitol and widely praised in the U.S. media. They loved this murderer. Clearly, the intent was to establish another brutal and hated dictatorship.
You cannot tell me that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been motivated by any shred of decency.
The war against Saddam has been a great success.
Only in the sense of Tacitus, the Roman historian: "They make a desert and call it peace." (See Fallujah.)
The Alawi enthronement failed at birth, mostly because the Shiites absolutely abhorred the guy (and I do not blame them at all). The recent hastily rigged elections were a gloss on the American capitulation to reality: that the Shiites now dominate Iraq. The situation is now extremely perilous, because the Shiites also run neighboring Iran: this is why the U.S. is now beating the war drums against the mullahs. It is also why the Pentagon has purchased 1,500,000,000 bullets this year.
An unprovoked invasion of a country, killing who knows how many tens of thousands of people, only to replace that country's dictator with another murderous dictator: this is something for Americans to be proud of? Another looming war, because Bush has totally messed up the first one: this is success?
Not all of pre-Columbus America was equally primitive.
For example, the Iroquois Confederation had been enjoying a working democracy for 500 years when the Europeans "discovered" them. In fact, large parts of the Constitution of the United States were consciously based on the Iroquois model, because that had been proven to work.
See The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. It's all there: the voting, the rule of law, and the separation of the government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
I bet you didn't know that. The U.S. today is desperately and deliberately amnesiac on many topics, probably out of embarrassment and guilt. (And I include Iraq in this.) The greatest genius in American history was not Jefferson, Franklin, or anyone else you have probably heard of, but Dekanawidah of the Iroquois, who invented the laws of the Iroquois Confederacy so long ago (around 1100 AD).
Just a nitpick.... I think the redshifting would be irrelevant. If you were going fast enough to redshift the gammas behind you into harmlessness, you would be fried by the blueshifted radiation in front.
Unless you carried enough shielding. But if you had that much shielding, the gamma ray burster would be irrelevant to you anyway (unless you were right next to it!).
We could counter the depletion by making some ozone ourselves. To do this on a planetary scale would require immense amounts of energy, but we will probably have plenty of fusion power by 2100 AD (or sooner). So if no nearby gamma ray bursters occur for at least a century (very very likely), we will be OK.
BitMover received an immense marketing boost from Linus' adoption of BitKeeper. The company founded by Larry McVoy would probably not be viable today without Linus' implied endorsement of their product. So please don't pretend that BitMover was doing Linus a favor -- the reality was very much the other way around.
When BitMover was just getting started, nobody knew what BitKeeper was, and nobody had any idea whether it was a reliable program. Because an archive of source code is the repository of the corporate jewels, reliability is crucial. Cautious sysadmins want a revision control system to have a long track record for dependability, and they would not have touched a newbie program like BitKeeper with a ten foot pole. So BitMover's survival in a crowded market was very uncertain from the start.
Linus' adoption of BitKeeper lent it enormous credibility, and is probably the most important reason why Larry McVoy's company continues to exist today. Linus benefited somewhat from BitKeeper, but BitKeeper benefited vastly more from Linus.
"He who hunts monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. For if you stare long into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Fission is only a stopgap until we have better sources of energy, such as fusion; it is unlikely that Yucca Mountain will be accumulating spent fuel for more than a century or two. So if the original poster is right, 200 or 300 years after the repository stops growing it will be less radioactive than the ore from which the fuel was mined.
Wouldn't it be nice if a textbook could have animations showing exactly why the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus works? (Demonstrate that the slope of the graph of the integral is the derivative that you're integrating.)
A car servicing manual would be much more illuminating if it had animated cartoons showing exactly how the engine worked.
None of this is possible for dead paper books.
Be careful. Some batteries explode when they get wet.
If old Hebrew did have a word for "rib" then there was a good chance the word was coined on the battlefield.
No, but the liability lawyers do put the fear of God (or at least of treble damage awards) into dishonest or exploitative corporations, such as Vice President Dick Cheney's Haliburton (asbestos).
Of course, these corporations loathe the idea of being seriously punished for their malfeasance, which is why there is currently such a loud campaign in favor of capping corporate liability.
But what quality of "medical care" would the $500 buy over 5 years, even in India? Just enough to have somebody come around regularly to check that you're still alive, and to call the undertaker if necessary?
Um, your irony detector needs fixing.
There is no law that says we will always be so slow. Here is an existence proof that a faster mechanism is eminently possible: you. You did not take 20 million years to grow from a single cell.
Fifteen years -- or however old you are -- is still pretty slow of course. But I have no doubt that we will find ways to speed things up. By using the polymerase chain reaction, we can replicate DNA at exponential rates; this is proven technology. More speculatively, perhaps we could use DNA (and its accompanying horde of proteins) to build the ribosomes to build the nano tools used for building the devices we need.
This may be true for most of Bhuddism, but not for all.
In particular, the last few hundred years of the history of Tibet can be understood as a period of nearly continous warfare between temples for supreme power. As Tibet was a theocracy (a religious dictatorship), the temples were the most powerful institutions in the country. And all that power has had its usual corrupting influence, even on Bhuddism.
The Dalai Lama's school, the Gelupka (Yellow Hats), is the dominant faction today, but that may change. The competition between the temples is pretty vicious still; assassinations are common.
If you need more energy, you can tell the fabricator to build more solar cells. You would need the power grid only at the beginning, in order to build the first few of these cells.
As another poster noted, the fabricator can make solar cells.
2. 'Atoms' to feed the machine
Solar cells use silicon.... and practically any rock you can pick up is mostly silicon dioxide. For things other than solar cells, diamondoid materials will be great for structural material; we can literally get the necessary carbon from the air (it's what trees do, after all).
3. Patterns to instruct the machine
As the other poster noted: the internet and open source. In a world free of want, everyone will have plenty of leisure. We will be designing new things out of sheer boredom if nothing else, and we will be publishing their blueprints over the Internet the way we swap recipes today.
I agree. And you get full marks for understanding that the optimum reached by capitalism is usually local, not global.
For those who are wondering what the difference is, here's an example. If you're on top of Pike's Peak, you are standing on a local optimum in terms of elevation above sea level. You are on an optimum because you would be going downhill as soon as you moved away from the peak, no matter which direction you took. However, the optimum is local, not global, because Pike's Peak is not the highest mountain in the world, not even close. If your metric is elevation above sea level, the global optimum is far away, on the top of Mt. Everest.
A capitalistic corporation tends to be short-sighted: it tends to take whichever course is immediately most advantageous. In terms of the hill-climbing analogy, the corporation is always walking upwards in whichever direction seems steepest at the moment. Thus it tends to end up at a local optimum: on top of Pike's Peak, or if it is shortsighted enough, on top of the nearest dunghill. And there it will be stuck. This is why the parent poster says that capitalism tends to find the local optimum, not the global one.
No so. There is no difference in intent, only in the slant of terminology. Regardless of whether an attack is called "war" or "terrorism", the intent of the attacker is the same: to coerce a group of people by lethal force. As an inevitable consequence, many innocents die or suffer horribly for the rest of their lives, regardless of the rhetoric.