Not sure why skype was bought in the first place
on
EBay Mulling Skype Sale
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· Score: 4, Informative
There's no obvious connection between an internet phone service and an auction house. As such, there's no obvious way for the phone service to assist the auction side of things by any means other than being profitable. There's no obvious assistance through technological improvements, customer base, or provided service. Skilled developers in one field couldn't even transfer their skills to the other easily - codec/real-time developers aren't usually web/e-commerce developers. Internet phone systems are still very primitive compared to regular phone systems making a significant profit unlikely at best for the time being.
British Telecom is doing a lot with the Internet, has a lot of telecommunications experience and has the infrastructure. The BBC has experience with codec development, real-time delivery of multimedia to large numbers of people, and the problem of digital audio over unreliable networks. Timesys, in the US, has enormous experience with real-time systems and the problems of real-time computer-based applications, although I'm not sure if they have much experience with real-time networking. They might. Cisco, now they have Scientific Atlanta, have not only vast computer networking experience but experience with all kinds of high-performance network systems. Again, since cable television systems must be able to decode the signal fast enough, Cisco must have people skilled in high-performance codec development.
Any of these companies would seem to be better partners than eBay. None of them will likely buy it, but I could see Skype faring better with any of them. They have skills and experience eBay would not have had that relate to what Skype is doing.
This does raise an interesting question, though. If ISPs are highly concerned about the bandwidth requirements to deliver the BBC's iPlayer content (given that that can be delivered best-effort, whereas Skype's cannot) to the point where they think the BBC should pay extra for that bandwidth, and given that ISPs are keen to ditch neutralty and charge providers extra just to get best-effort, it follows Skype will be in for some hefty ISP bills in the future. Is it possible that such extra costs would make Internet telephony on any commercial scale completely impractical?
(To get the customer base to be profitable, Skype would need users worldwide, but they'd be paying every ISP that served at least one customer of theirs plus the backbone providers for both the extra bandwith and the high-end quality of service needed, as well as their own ISP bills. Assuming bandwith charges are equal to QoS charges, that means they pay twice what any other Internet service pays for the same effective level of service. That means they'd need twice as many users as a profitable e-commerce business, assuming service is a major cost. Tha means ramping up to that level would also be very expensive.)
Thanks for the link, it's much appreciated. Again, this is truly interesting stuff that would be hard to find if you don't know what to look for, rarely (if ever) gets referenced by media coverage, and is far better pointed out by a post such as yours (and covered by the website you linked to, which is nicely presented, making a distinct change from many accademic sites) than by trying to hunt through a textbook (most of which have a worse layout than the accademic websites I detest). This is good information.
The only way to learn an observation-based science is to observe and ask questions, with the full recognition that an observation may not be accurate. It is difficult - and somewhat illegal - for individuals to carry out experimental science capable of generating measurable earthquakes large enough to be observed over any significant distance. Book knowledge in the hands of a non-expert is largely useless as it is impossible for a non-expert to know enough to evaluate the book.
I think it was Kansas that tried mandating fraudulant claims be included in science textbooks for scools, or it may have been a school district in Pennsylvania. There were a bunch that tried forcing Intelligent Design within the accepted textbooks themselves. Regardless of where it was, the fact remains that this demonstrates non-experts CANNOT trust any source that cannot be questioned. Books can't talk, people can. Ergo, it is to people - preferably those who are experts - that non-experts must go. There are plenty of experts (and people who know experts) on Slashdot. Ergo, observations of interest to non-experts posted on Slashdot may get feedback from experts, enlightening the non-expert and anyone else who might have been interested by the non-expert's observation.
It's quite simple. So simple, in fact, that it has been the cornerstone of the better educational systems for thousands of years. Well, other than posting to Slashdot, as it's not that old. Yet.
I believe you completely, but the phrase above is the key part. I wouldn't be looking if I knew where to find it, and as there isn't uniform coverage (not everywhere gets earthquakes) it's impossible to know if there's coverage unless you do know where to find it. This isn't intended as a criticism of your comments, which are genuinely helpful, but it is intended as a criticism of the US Geological Survey, the various seismic network websites I have accessed (web navigation hell) and the media for complicating the finding of such data.
The webicorder you gave was most interesting. There was either a much smaller shock further away at the same time, or the two shocks travelled at different speeds. The gap between the smaller initial peak and the much larger second peak appears to increase with distance. Some of the stations are overlapping - I assume distance down is proportional to distance away, which would be a reasonable way to plot but it would be easier to read if they stretched the Y scale a little more, as it's hard for me to see if that really is the first peak I'm seeing or simply a product of the graphing.
I think conventional wisdom is that in Microsoft's case, it is a chair of smiting. It's not simply a Microsoft problem, however. It has a lot to do with software patents, price gouging and dodgy attitudes towards reverse engineering throughout the industry. Yes, it costs money to develop high-end codecs, and it is entirely reasonable for corporations to try to make a profit from their work, but that argument only goes so far and current practices go way beyond reasonable.
In the Pacific Northwest, there are webicorders - online seismographs for the volcanos and other potentially unstable regions. The major earthquake that caused the devastating 26 Dec (Boxing Day) tsunami a few years back showed up extremely clearly on these. The shockwaves were not just large enough to register, but large enough to show up as a massive feature. If those graphs are still online, they would make for good material in a basic course on geology.
What I don't know is whether there is anything comparable in the areas affected by these central US tremors. A description of experiences is useful, but plenty of reports will have those. Those are easy to come by. Much rarer is actual raw data, actual hard information on the nature of the quake. A quantitative experience, rather than a qualitative one. There will be much more to the story than what could be felt or described through experience, and that "more" bit is the bit that seperates understanding from simply witnessing. The latter facilitates understanding but is not a substitute for it.
You're totally correct there. However, you should remember that departments get funded by how often their papers get cited, so there is an incentive to make all papers fully buzzword-compliant rather than scientifically correct. In this particular case, it could be argued that the buzzword is appropriate because the effect being utilized is normally only seen at the microscopic level, not the macroscopic as here. However, precisely since the Zeno Effect is normally only seen at the microscopic level, the addition of the term "quantum" is superfluous and therefore likely used more to draw attention to the article than to say anything useful.
Specifically on the topic of mystifying science, science classes generally don't help much in this regard. They work from older models to newer ones, which in itself isn't necessarily bad (as it teaches how to understand things from first principles and how the ideas developed historically) but because older models introduced fudge factors or were based on incorrect assumptions, those who do not progress far enough in science classes are left with erronious beliefs and superstitions. Even those who do progress to a high level are at risk, because once something is learned, it is very hard to unlearn it.
The selection of models - and textbooks - is also important. Most textbooks are historically inaccurate (negating the value of the teaching the history of science and assisting in the mystifying and religifying of modern discoveries of historical fact) and many contain errors in the science (such as confusing the terminology, getting the right results for the wrong reasons, and so forth). The teaching of calculus is particularly bad - I've known a lot of bright people left totally confused by it due to the fact that the way it is usually taught misses a lot of mental steps in the process and fails to define terminology. That's a pity. Calculus is so simple that Archimedes could not only derive it from first principles but also discover the first principles as well in only a handful of notes. Combinatorial logic is generally taught as an advanced subject, but the foundations were discovered by cutting up triangles, making it a subject that could be taught at elementary school the same way Venn diagrams and basic set logic are. (It may be, by now, but I've a suspicion the reverse is true, that less science appears at an early age.)
Finally, the complexity and difficulty of problems is also exaggerated. Stonehenge's 250 tonne massive Sarson stones are local, it's the bluestone granite that was imported and those are much smaller. The Great Pyramid was built after a long history of developing the technology and the difficult parts were probably poured as a form of concrete. (This makes the proposed German concrete Pyramid - a giant cemetary for tens of thousands, which is intended to be three times taller than the Great Pyramid - a direct successor in terms of materials used as well as intended purpose.) The weather isn't horrendously complex, it's merely an unstable chaotic system. The illusion of complexity comes from the fact that it can never be measured accurately enough to model perfectly. Quantum mechanics is not stuffed full of paradoxes, it's merely stuffed full of probabilities. Particle/wave duality, the existence of fields, and other convenient tricks are merely taught to avoid having to explain the mechanics behind the science. In a way, it's worse than caveman logic, because they had the excuse of not having the information available about the underlying principles. Today, no such excuse exists.
You're right, but I'm guessing the original poster's idea is that if the author of the statistics doesn't say how they are calculating the numbers, we don't know what the numbers actually say or how we should adjust them to adjust for non-BitTorrent traffic, legitimate traffic and undetected traffic. Probably the adjustments are going to be small, but there's no obvious way to prove that or even to set upper and lower bounds.
Let's say that you stipulate that if the user/host component of the URI can be resolved into a public key, the page must be signed, then you eliminate the case of the signature being removed by a browser that makes that initial check (and therefore presumably makes the later ones) but do not impact browsers that do not make that check. The premise here is that there is some sort of trusted third party that cannot be trivially screened and that can tell the browser what to expect from the server. This would not be true of the key exchange idea - the browser can't independently verify if a signature is supposed to be there, so can't detect tampering that blocks verification.
Don't see why it wouldn't work. You pull the site's public key from a public key server and validate against it. Or if caching is prohibited, use a key exchange algorithm to swap two random numbers - on the server, the server's number signs the page and the user's number countersigns it. It doesn't matter that it's weak, since you can use the HTTP headers to exchange new key pairs every page if you like and it's only intended to stop injection attacks.
It makes building on the moon pointless, since 10' of soil is more than adequate for growing the plants in space and the technical difficulties are so great that the difference between space and the moon isn't significant in comparison to getting the project done at all. Mind you, regardless of where it was built, the technical challenges and costs are so great that I don't even see this getting onto the drawing board of any serious space agency for another 150 years - possibly longer, given the funding problems of the American and Russian space agencies and the threatened collapse of scientific research in Britain. (You need money and you need researchers. The less you have of either, the longer it will take to bridge the gap.)
...they already have both sets of images, and they're not short on disk space, why not simply have a toggle in Google Earth that allows you to select between "best resolution" and "most recent image"? A version numbering system would be even better, as it would allow you to use Google Earth to track changes in a place, but I suspect that even Google would have problems with the storage requirements for that.
One of the underlying principles of things like common law is that everyone deserves reasonableness. Justice cannot be guaranteed, but a reasonable effort to provide it can. Likewise, support for the blind or any other group cannot be guaranteed, but if you move the target threshold to what a reasonable blind person could expect, it becomes easier. This isn't perfect (what is?) as reasonableness is much harder to pin down. What is reasonable to one person may not be to another. I've been told that some speech synthesizers, like Jaws, have a tendency to crash if any other program attempts to play sounds. I, personally, would not consider that reasonable, but if that is the case, enough people must think it is for the company to still sell the software.
Website design is probably the biggest problem. I sincerely doubt anyone with any impairment whatsoever would be able to navigate OpenLibrary's website very well, which is ironic at best. In the same way that web browsers and servers can already support the identification of the user's language, it should be possible to support the identification of common requirements. However, as almost nobody uses the language identifier, I can't see anyone using a requirements identifier even if it did exist.
The next-biggest problem, however, is in the hands of the open-source community. There really isn't much serious competition to the companies selling thousand dollar screen readers. Festival doesn't exactly enjoy the same level of development as, say, Firefox. For that matter, as far as I know Firefox can't even make use of Festival and the only "screen reader" I ever found for Linux required the user to cut and paste the text into a window. There may well be plugins and packages I'm not aware of that can handle all that. I hope I've missed something. I'm rather concerned that I might not have.
Excellent rebuttal there. (Hey, I like it when people come up with counter-examples. It's when it gets personal that it bothers me.) Old English is especially good as an example, as I'm at least half-way familiar with its characteristics.
I'd forgotten the name. The link has an extra slash at the end, though. Try: this link instead. There were one or two replies skeptical of my claim, which is very understandable given the apparent absurdity of it, so I'm extremely glad you found the reference. It's greatly appreciated.
Adaptation implies a flawed transfer, as a perfect transfer cannot yield the ability to adapt, only the ability to perpetuate. It may be a different permutation of traits, but the traits must already exist. The most adaptable, therefore, are those with the greatest number of flaws in the transfer of traits, as that will yield the greatest number of candidates with greater fitness for a new environment than the previous generation. Well, up to an extent. If the process exceeds an error rate proportional to the rate of change of the environment, you'd decrease the odds of holding onto traits that actually are useful/optimal. However, as the rate of change of the environment also changes, the ideal error rate changes, therefore what constitutes ideal adaptability must also change. This means that a species that is near-perfect in its ability to adapt at one point in time may be completely unsuitable at another point in time. It follows that the ability to adapt is a trait that itself must be held subject to the ability to adapt.
I'd therefore rewrite the last piece to say something like "those with an ability to adapt most closely aligned with the pressure to adapt at that time, including those pressures exerted by changes within the pressure to adapt". Well, except that it's longer, less succinct, and less obvious in meaning to those not already familiar with the idea of evolution.
It's not really a tautology. It's recursive and reversible (and therefore provable by induction from first principles) but the statement isn't necessarily true simply because of itself, mostly because "adapt" does not have a constant definition.
I thought the current limit on Infiniband was 12 channels in any given direction with 5 Gb/s per channel (and even then that only applies if you're using PCI 2.x with the upgraded bus speeds), giving you a peak of 60 Gb/s. Regardless, 60 Gb/s is still well over the 10 Gb/s of Ethernet. More to the point, latencies on Infiniband are around 2.5-8 us, whereas they can be 100 times as much over Ethernet. Kernel bypass is another factor. It exists for Ethernet, but it's rare, whereas it's standard for Infiniband. Remember, Linux has something like a 20 ms context switch time and that's low, so you really want to keep switching to and from the kernel to a minimum.
SCI is definitely an interesting technology - I've seen several presentations from Dolphinics - and it would seem to be ideal for something like a storage system. Not sure what the current limitations are.
There are certainly other networking technologies out there, and some of those may also compete in this market. Part of the problem, I think, is that there is a lot of scattered information out there and very little independent, organized collection and dissemination of it. You wouldn't need a consortium to promote 10 Gb Ethernet if it was already clear to people what 10 Gb Ethernet actually offered on a practical, day-to-day basis. Not ping-pong tests, not dodgy benchmarks, not marketspeak but actual practical information and some form of real-world guide on how to map user requirements onto what each network technology would realistically deliver.
The first is answered by the article and 2-6 were largely answered by Biosphere 2, so those don't seem to apply. The problem is not one-off transports, but repeat trasports. That just leaves cosmic radiation and constant temperature. These are not trivial problems. Cosmic radiation might not be too bad - the seeds that the Apollo astronauts took to the moon and brought back remained viable, and many living organisms have survived shuttle and space station missions for prolonged periods of time. You'd want something fairly hardy against radiation, due to the time factors involved, but it's possible that fairly minimal shielding would be sufficient. The temperature more complex, as a prohibition on repeat transports eliminates the carrying of fuel for generators to power temperature regulation systems. You'd want some way of capturing the heat from the "daytime" and then releasing it on an as-needed basis over a sufficient area that temperatures remain within acceptable limits. Since water is needed in the system anyway, using solar water heating (with solar-powered pumps) would seem to be an easy way to carry heat around. Spray the water into the air of the dome as a fine mist and you've a heat release mechanism (and artificial rainfall).
Would this be enough to grow plants on the moon? The only way to find out would be to do the experiment, but as Biosphee 2 demonstrated, miscalculations are expensive and easy to make. (Biosphere 2 would have needed to be two to three times the size it was to have functioned as intended, due to uninvited insects getting in.) On Earth, the miscalculation was so expensive that nobody has tried repeating the experiment with recalculated dimensions. For the moon, where the cost of transport and construction would be tens of thousands that on Earth due to the high fuel costs and short mission times, you not only get just one shot at it, but you also have to make sure that one shot produces enormous value for money. Unless you know of a tree that produces pure platinum fruit, I don't see that being possible - at least, for now. Future launch systems might become cheap enough to make this possible, but I don't think we're remotely close to the point we could even test the theory, let alone make it worth the testing.
To take your points in turn, I don't know if Neanderthals could produce phonemes we cannot - but I would be willing to bet they could. They also produced much higher-pitched sounds, which likely means their hearing covered a larger range. (The low frequencies used by humans to hunt and track would most likely have been used by Neanderthals.) Your second point, covering doing things differently, was illustrated in my example of the whistle language in humans but your example of cats combining vocalizations with body language and other visual cues is excellent. It's not clear how much information content there is in, say, bottlenose dolphin vocalizations, but it's clearly sufficient for them to carry out highly sophisticated group activities such as strand feeding, corral feeding and shark-baiting.
(As for accents, you can identify the region a cat or dog is from by the vocalizations. There is consistant regional variation. I'm not certain if it's true of all mammals, but it is true for quite a number. And I would not advise calling a cat simple, at least not to its face. Most cats are fully aware that they are the true masters of Earth and that humans are mere slaves to their whims. Most cat owners become aware of this after the first week of training from their cat.)
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British Telecom is doing a lot with the Internet, has a lot of telecommunications experience and has the infrastructure. The BBC has experience with codec development, real-time delivery of multimedia to large numbers of people, and the problem of digital audio over unreliable networks. Timesys, in the US, has enormous experience with real-time systems and the problems of real-time computer-based applications, although I'm not sure if they have much experience with real-time networking. They might. Cisco, now they have Scientific Atlanta, have not only vast computer networking experience but experience with all kinds of high-performance network systems. Again, since cable television systems must be able to decode the signal fast enough, Cisco must have people skilled in high-performance codec development.
Any of these companies would seem to be better partners than eBay. None of them will likely buy it, but I could see Skype faring better with any of them. They have skills and experience eBay would not have had that relate to what Skype is doing.
This does raise an interesting question, though. If ISPs are highly concerned about the bandwidth requirements to deliver the BBC's iPlayer content (given that that can be delivered best-effort, whereas Skype's cannot) to the point where they think the BBC should pay extra for that bandwidth, and given that ISPs are keen to ditch neutralty and charge providers extra just to get best-effort, it follows Skype will be in for some hefty ISP bills in the future. Is it possible that such extra costs would make Internet telephony on any commercial scale completely impractical?
(To get the customer base to be profitable, Skype would need users worldwide, but they'd be paying every ISP that served at least one customer of theirs plus the backbone providers for both the extra bandwith and the high-end quality of service needed, as well as their own ISP bills. Assuming bandwith charges are equal to QoS charges, that means they pay twice what any other Internet service pays for the same effective level of service. That means they'd need twice as many users as a profitable e-commerce business, assuming service is a major cost. Tha means ramping up to that level would also be very expensive.)
Thanks for the link, it's much appreciated. Again, this is truly interesting stuff that would be hard to find if you don't know what to look for, rarely (if ever) gets referenced by media coverage, and is far better pointed out by a post such as yours (and covered by the website you linked to, which is nicely presented, making a distinct change from many accademic sites) than by trying to hunt through a textbook (most of which have a worse layout than the accademic websites I detest). This is good information.
I think it was Kansas that tried mandating fraudulant claims be included in science textbooks for scools, or it may have been a school district in Pennsylvania. There were a bunch that tried forcing Intelligent Design within the accepted textbooks themselves. Regardless of where it was, the fact remains that this demonstrates non-experts CANNOT trust any source that cannot be questioned. Books can't talk, people can. Ergo, it is to people - preferably those who are experts - that non-experts must go. There are plenty of experts (and people who know experts) on Slashdot. Ergo, observations of interest to non-experts posted on Slashdot may get feedback from experts, enlightening the non-expert and anyone else who might have been interested by the non-expert's observation.
It's quite simple. So simple, in fact, that it has been the cornerstone of the better educational systems for thousands of years. Well, other than posting to Slashdot, as it's not that old. Yet.
I believe you completely, but the phrase above is the key part. I wouldn't be looking if I knew where to find it, and as there isn't uniform coverage (not everywhere gets earthquakes) it's impossible to know if there's coverage unless you do know where to find it. This isn't intended as a criticism of your comments, which are genuinely helpful, but it is intended as a criticism of the US Geological Survey, the various seismic network websites I have accessed (web navigation hell) and the media for complicating the finding of such data.
The webicorder you gave was most interesting. There was either a much smaller shock further away at the same time, or the two shocks travelled at different speeds. The gap between the smaller initial peak and the much larger second peak appears to increase with distance. Some of the stations are overlapping - I assume distance down is proportional to distance away, which would be a reasonable way to plot but it would be easier to read if they stretched the Y scale a little more, as it's hard for me to see if that really is the first peak I'm seeing or simply a product of the graphing.
I think conventional wisdom is that in Microsoft's case, it is a chair of smiting. It's not simply a Microsoft problem, however. It has a lot to do with software patents, price gouging and dodgy attitudes towards reverse engineering throughout the industry. Yes, it costs money to develop high-end codecs, and it is entirely reasonable for corporations to try to make a profit from their work, but that argument only goes so far and current practices go way beyond reasonable.
What I don't know is whether there is anything comparable in the areas affected by these central US tremors. A description of experiences is useful, but plenty of reports will have those. Those are easy to come by. Much rarer is actual raw data, actual hard information on the nature of the quake. A quantitative experience, rather than a qualitative one. There will be much more to the story than what could be felt or described through experience, and that "more" bit is the bit that seperates understanding from simply witnessing. The latter facilitates understanding but is not a substitute for it.
Specifically on the topic of mystifying science, science classes generally don't help much in this regard. They work from older models to newer ones, which in itself isn't necessarily bad (as it teaches how to understand things from first principles and how the ideas developed historically) but because older models introduced fudge factors or were based on incorrect assumptions, those who do not progress far enough in science classes are left with erronious beliefs and superstitions. Even those who do progress to a high level are at risk, because once something is learned, it is very hard to unlearn it.
The selection of models - and textbooks - is also important. Most textbooks are historically inaccurate (negating the value of the teaching the history of science and assisting in the mystifying and religifying of modern discoveries of historical fact) and many contain errors in the science (such as confusing the terminology, getting the right results for the wrong reasons, and so forth). The teaching of calculus is particularly bad - I've known a lot of bright people left totally confused by it due to the fact that the way it is usually taught misses a lot of mental steps in the process and fails to define terminology. That's a pity. Calculus is so simple that Archimedes could not only derive it from first principles but also discover the first principles as well in only a handful of notes. Combinatorial logic is generally taught as an advanced subject, but the foundations were discovered by cutting up triangles, making it a subject that could be taught at elementary school the same way Venn diagrams and basic set logic are. (It may be, by now, but I've a suspicion the reverse is true, that less science appears at an early age.)
Finally, the complexity and difficulty of problems is also exaggerated. Stonehenge's 250 tonne massive Sarson stones are local, it's the bluestone granite that was imported and those are much smaller. The Great Pyramid was built after a long history of developing the technology and the difficult parts were probably poured as a form of concrete. (This makes the proposed German concrete Pyramid - a giant cemetary for tens of thousands, which is intended to be three times taller than the Great Pyramid - a direct successor in terms of materials used as well as intended purpose.) The weather isn't horrendously complex, it's merely an unstable chaotic system. The illusion of complexity comes from the fact that it can never be measured accurately enough to model perfectly. Quantum mechanics is not stuffed full of paradoxes, it's merely stuffed full of probabilities. Particle/wave duality, the existence of fields, and other convenient tricks are merely taught to avoid having to explain the mechanics behind the science. In a way, it's worse than caveman logic, because they had the excuse of not having the information available about the underlying principles. Today, no such excuse exists.
A swallow has already patented the technology, along with quantum lifting gear for coconuts.
If the question and the answer cancel out, they might take the universe with it.
You're right, but I'm guessing the original poster's idea is that if the author of the statistics doesn't say how they are calculating the numbers, we don't know what the numbers actually say or how we should adjust them to adjust for non-BitTorrent traffic, legitimate traffic and undetected traffic. Probably the adjustments are going to be small, but there's no obvious way to prove that or even to set upper and lower bounds.
Let's say that you stipulate that if the user/host component of the URI can be resolved into a public key, the page must be signed, then you eliminate the case of the signature being removed by a browser that makes that initial check (and therefore presumably makes the later ones) but do not impact browsers that do not make that check. The premise here is that there is some sort of trusted third party that cannot be trivially screened and that can tell the browser what to expect from the server. This would not be true of the key exchange idea - the browser can't independently verify if a signature is supposed to be there, so can't detect tampering that blocks verification.
Don't see why it wouldn't work. You pull the site's public key from a public key server and validate against it. Or if caching is prohibited, use a key exchange algorithm to swap two random numbers - on the server, the server's number signs the page and the user's number countersigns it. It doesn't matter that it's weak, since you can use the HTTP headers to exchange new key pairs every page if you like and it's only intended to stop injection attacks.
Netcraft is dead. Paypal confirms it. And E-bay swapped it for some military hardware.
You only need the merest whisper of an ion propulsion system story and Slashdot users will go atom with puns.
It makes building on the moon pointless, since 10' of soil is more than adequate for growing the plants in space and the technical difficulties are so great that the difference between space and the moon isn't significant in comparison to getting the project done at all. Mind you, regardless of where it was built, the technical challenges and costs are so great that I don't even see this getting onto the drawing board of any serious space agency for another 150 years - possibly longer, given the funding problems of the American and Russian space agencies and the threatened collapse of scientific research in Britain. (You need money and you need researchers. The less you have of either, the longer it will take to bridge the gap.)
...they already have both sets of images, and they're not short on disk space, why not simply have a toggle in Google Earth that allows you to select between "best resolution" and "most recent image"? A version numbering system would be even better, as it would allow you to use Google Earth to track changes in a place, but I suspect that even Google would have problems with the storage requirements for that.
Website design is probably the biggest problem. I sincerely doubt anyone with any impairment whatsoever would be able to navigate OpenLibrary's website very well, which is ironic at best. In the same way that web browsers and servers can already support the identification of the user's language, it should be possible to support the identification of common requirements. However, as almost nobody uses the language identifier, I can't see anyone using a requirements identifier even if it did exist.
The next-biggest problem, however, is in the hands of the open-source community. There really isn't much serious competition to the companies selling thousand dollar screen readers. Festival doesn't exactly enjoy the same level of development as, say, Firefox. For that matter, as far as I know Firefox can't even make use of Festival and the only "screen reader" I ever found for Linux required the user to cut and paste the text into a window. There may well be plugins and packages I'm not aware of that can handle all that. I hope I've missed something. I'm rather concerned that I might not have.
Excellent rebuttal there. (Hey, I like it when people come up with counter-examples. It's when it gets personal that it bothers me.) Old English is especially good as an example, as I'm at least half-way familiar with its characteristics.
I'd forgotten the name. The link has an extra slash at the end, though. Try: this link instead. There were one or two replies skeptical of my claim, which is very understandable given the apparent absurdity of it, so I'm extremely glad you found the reference. It's greatly appreciated.
I'd therefore rewrite the last piece to say something like "those with an ability to adapt most closely aligned with the pressure to adapt at that time, including those pressures exerted by changes within the pressure to adapt". Well, except that it's longer, less succinct, and less obvious in meaning to those not already familiar with the idea of evolution.
It's not really a tautology. It's recursive and reversible (and therefore provable by induction from first principles) but the statement isn't necessarily true simply because of itself, mostly because "adapt" does not have a constant definition.
But... but... by being on the Internet, his works are now a species that has become permanent!
SCI is definitely an interesting technology - I've seen several presentations from Dolphinics - and it would seem to be ideal for something like a storage system. Not sure what the current limitations are.
There are certainly other networking technologies out there, and some of those may also compete in this market. Part of the problem, I think, is that there is a lot of scattered information out there and very little independent, organized collection and dissemination of it. You wouldn't need a consortium to promote 10 Gb Ethernet if it was already clear to people what 10 Gb Ethernet actually offered on a practical, day-to-day basis. Not ping-pong tests, not dodgy benchmarks, not marketspeak but actual practical information and some form of real-world guide on how to map user requirements onto what each network technology would realistically deliver.
Would this be enough to grow plants on the moon? The only way to find out would be to do the experiment, but as Biosphee 2 demonstrated, miscalculations are expensive and easy to make. (Biosphere 2 would have needed to be two to three times the size it was to have functioned as intended, due to uninvited insects getting in.) On Earth, the miscalculation was so expensive that nobody has tried repeating the experiment with recalculated dimensions. For the moon, where the cost of transport and construction would be tens of thousands that on Earth due to the high fuel costs and short mission times, you not only get just one shot at it, but you also have to make sure that one shot produces enormous value for money. Unless you know of a tree that produces pure platinum fruit, I don't see that being possible - at least, for now. Future launch systems might become cheap enough to make this possible, but I don't think we're remotely close to the point we could even test the theory, let alone make it worth the testing.
(As for accents, you can identify the region a cat or dog is from by the vocalizations. There is consistant regional variation. I'm not certain if it's true of all mammals, but it is true for quite a number. And I would not advise calling a cat simple, at least not to its face. Most cats are fully aware that they are the true masters of Earth and that humans are mere slaves to their whims. Most cat owners become aware of this after the first week of training from their cat.)