Yes, I concur that America is a hyper-litiguous society, suing everyone and everything in sight for no apparent reason. It is one of the most despised aspects of America, as far as other nations are concerned. Any notion of reasonableness has been abandoned, in favour of who can lynch who in the courts.
No, I do not agree that that is justification for any kind of avoidance. Systems do not change by avoiding the abuses and failures within them. Systems change by confronting the flaws head-on and continuing to do so until the system has no alternative but to change. Individuals may lose - will lose - but since individuals will ultimately lose anyway as things stand (you're open to frivolous lawsuits, the same way medical practitioners are, and face higher costs and lower returns for exactly the same reasons). America exists on a bubbling stew of paranoia, delusion and get-rich-quick schemes. But, then, to be fair so do many other nations. However, bowing to the paranoia and delusions will not save you from them. Rather, you are feeding them by doing so.
Am I suggesting the extremely high-risk tactic of pilots throwing themselves at the wolves until the wolves are so sickened by the carnage they cease to be wolves? Yes. It's the only way. There is no other, at least none that history has ever shown. And, yes, historically this technique has been used quite successfully in many cases where you had those who were afraid to have a voice.
Well, laptops produce high-tech skills. High-tech skills produce external investment. External investment produce the resources needed to dig third-world countries out of the hole they are in. It's a good long-term solution, but there's a huge gap between the immediate-term of food/medicines and the decade+-term of training an advanced workforce.
One of the problems with a number of these countries is deforestation has altered the reflective index of the ground and, in turn, altered the local climate. Another problem is that there has been some level of dependence on natural reservoirs and natural water sources. All fine and good, except when environmental shifts have depleted the natural reservoirs and instability has impacted availability of natural water sources.
The cost would be high, but it should be possible to produce artificial reservoirs with (a) some degree of protection against evaporation, (b) some degree of artificial change in reflective index, and (c) some method of pumping heat. It need not be a perfect setup, it need only be good enough to capture torrential rains and release them slowly to farmers, and also encourage even a fractional increase in rainfall in the region.
That last one seems ambitious, but horticulturalists and engineers are experts at building microclimates and a microclimate is all this is about. A small microclimate that has a fractionally higher humidity and a way to exploit it.
As opposed to some other sort of fact? Never knew there were any. Fascinating. I take (a) the lack of protective circuits on any battery I've seen, and (b) the accounts from manufacturers I don't use are giving accounts that match what I expect if their batteries match what I've seen.
The problem with highly generalized lists is that they don't really reflect the fact that society is not a cohesive whole but a collection of groups of which one is overwhelmingly dominant. The only group reflected, then, is that dominant one. The other groups are too small to ever be seen in overall statistics.
The problem with any network stats-derived list is that you can't count unique individuals. Multiple users may share an IP address. A given user may have multiple IP addresses. What's worse is that if you count page hits, rather than visitors, you end up counting the same people multiple times. Or are they people? Maybe some/all are scripts. It's not like there's a shortage of scripts for pulling YouTube content, and I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA lawyers have bots which search for keywords that may be of interest. They usually do.
Besides which, I'd far prefer one decent copy of Bill Baggs' videos to be up there, and maybe some of the rarer broadcast sci-fi, such as The Changes or Doomwatch, where efforts to make them available legally are either derisory or non-existent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of the same music video in many cases. People should be able to enjoy music, sure, but what possible benefit is there to having so many identical versions? Greater diversity of content would benefit more people and increase the value of the service as a whole.
(I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA would prefer no copies at all, but that's not going to happen and it wouldn't be good for it to happen. That being said, YouTube needs to be more than about those two - their egos or their products.)
If batteries had these kinds of circuits, I seriously doubt the problems that we've seen would have occurred frequently enough to force a mass recall, and the "memory" problem would never have become burned into public awareness. Besides which, I've never known electronics manufacturers (or anyone else) to add in safety if they didn't have to.
Some technologies can be made safe (within reason) by use of governing technologies and fail-safe designs. In the case of Lithiun Ion batteries, I believe excessive power drain and excessive voltages for recharging were listed as problems. A Zenner diode stops those. Operation outside of thermal ranges? Thermistors would seem to be the simplest solution. Draining the battery below a minimum level is also nasty for lithium ion batteries, if I recall. Provided there is something that signals (or, better, stops signaling) when the battery drops below that limit, a transistor would cut the circuit and prevent damage.
Is that perfect? No. It's quite respectable, though, and still cheap enough to be practical for the battery, the recharger/adapter, etc. Added to which, the probabilities are not cumulative - only the permutation of all things failing in compatible ways would produce an unsafe result. As a result, you can get as safe as you can reasonably afford.
Then quality control should include tests to ensure the casing can absorb shock, and that the interface between the usable pins and the battery prevents electrical errors. This is not to negate your point - quite the opposite. When a technology is unsound, it should either be prohibited until it is made sound, OR encapsulated to the point where it cannot be used outside of the design limits.
...I'd say they should give it to someone and that might well be you. The code probably has no significant IP value, there may well be code that could be usefully recycled in Firefox or other Open Source browsers, and it might be the perfect project for someone to gnaw on in their spare time. Abandonware is a pollutant in the IT environment - AOL should "go green" and hand the source to someone who is interested.
...that this is in response to all the horror stories of the last year of batteries catching fire and/or exploding. Neither of which would be unique to lithium batteries, and is more a product of lousy quality control than rogue individuals. If Firestone/Bridgestone could end up having to explain themselves to Congress, and face hefty consequences, then why not do the same to battery makers who produce lithium bombs? You don't see bans on Jeeps or SUVs with Bridgestone tires on roll-on/roll-off/roll-over ferries, but far more vehicles were impacted (and far more severely) by the tire issue than computers have been by the battery issue.
There have been numerous comments on the inept handling of existing regulations by the TSA, including on here and including many by people currently or formerly employed by the TSA itself. Journalists and Government watchdog officials are forever getting banned items that are infinitely more dangerous than a battery past screeners. Mind you, other countries aren't any better. The French managed to lose a whole load of plastic explosives during a test run at a busy airport.
For planetary research, you want radio telescopes specifically tuned to frequencies of larger molecules (water, sulpher dioxide, something like that). This should be where the planets are brightest and where all other objects are dimmest. My understanding of the Webber telescope is that it won't be looking in that sort of range. It's also very small for what you really want.
No, the joke didn't fly over my head. It was obviously meant in jest. However, my reply is correct - to get an accurate 1 pixel image, you need a square kilometer array. To get something 2x2 pixels in size (about the size of a small o), you'd need an array a mile across. And for all of that, all you'd see is an image that looked almost exactly like an o - fairly uniform in the middle with a well-defined boundary. Thus, the true joke is that the joke is also true.
That would require an array of telescopes roughly a mile in diameter. Certainly very possible, though as the square kilometer array has demonstrated, very hard to organize and fund.
For that matter, the Constition only binds the Government. Corporations are free to do what they will to whom they like. Indeed, the only way this relates to the Constitution at all is the First Amendment right to make any claim they damn well please, even if it is blatant FUD or trollbait, so long as they don't accuse specific people (which would be slander or libel, depending on the method).
The problem there is that celluloid is not chemically inert. Unless you plan on storing it at absolute zero, degredation over time is inevitable. The real problem with optical formats (such as CDs and DVDs) is that they are also not inert. Because you have different layers of different materials, you are also going to have problems with differing rates of expansion. Core memory won't degrade for hundreds of years, but unless there's a plan to hollow out one mountain for each movie made, there won't be space enough to store several terabytes of data in core.
Ok, what does that leave us? Historically, long-lasting data has been placed in stone. Texts lasting thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of years can be preserved in such a format. Now, clearly you're not going to get far if you etch each bit plane of each colour plane of each frame of the movie into rock on the macroscale, but we can borrow ideas. Lithography is at the point where you can etch at the 25-33 nanometer level. Etching bit planes at that scale would be hellishly expensive but would be practical in terms of scale. You want a solid whose structure is so completely locked that there is no possibility of distortion ruining the data, and which is so inert that you have much greater freedom over the environmental conditions needed. Are there any good candidates?
Crystals would seem a logical place to start. The structure is prety much locked, which means your etchings are unlikely to degrade over the lifetime requirements of archival media and stand an excellent chance of surviving intact over the lifetime requirements of a typical civilization. Semiconductors, such as silicon and gallium arsonide, are also excellent candidates - they're not reactive within themselves and the experience with etching at these sorts of levels on such media would be a definite plus.
The downside of this approach is the expense. You have to make the lithographic mask at a wafer-scale (the pattern is not repeating), and each mask is good for only one wafer. Yes, the lifetime is now a hundred times greater than with conventional media, but the cost has increased a thousand, maybe ten thousand, times. In terms of cost per unit time, lithography is definitely a Really Bad Idea. The total cost of preserving for the same amount of time would be far less by using less durable media. It's also far more evenly distributed, making it far more practical for companies to adopt.
The upside is that the media is vastly more likely to survive neglect, abuse, war, natural disasters, bad management, and all the other catastrophies which have resulted in so many historically significant recordings being lost forever. Using a lithographic storage format, you don't need efforts such as "Missing: Presumed Wiped" and you won't need the very expensive technique of digitally cleaning, repairing, restoring and re-mastering old recordings. (Digital recordings generally don't need the cleaning part, unless there was a lot of noise on the original recording, but that would be true no matter what medium was used to store the digital data.)
The question then becomes one of return on investment. Are the sorts of catastrophies that lithography can deal with common enough that the additional cost is more than covered by the additional return from having a greater range of recordings survive? If yes, then lithography is the sensible approach. If no, then except in matters that absolutely should be preserved even at great cost, standard media should be used.
I would have to say that no, the cost of using lithography as a storage format is far in excess of the benefits, for most things. There might be a very few things that should be preserved this way, but not much.
Re:I'd like something else.
on
Ruby 1.9.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I will. I, for one, would be more aware of the brilliant features in Haskell programs (and Haskell in general) if information on it was a little better circulated. (A few of the records on Freshmeat had gathered so many cobwebs and so much dust that they looked like something from a 60s horror movie.) The same is true of Erlang, and many other "obscure" languages - obscure because it's below the radar of many who would be interested.
Now, I would not call myself remotely qualified to write an article (or a book) on Haskell, Erlang, Pi-Occam, or any of the other fascinating languages out there, but I'm bothered by the rarity (and sometimes total lack) of any such text from people who are qualified. At this point, I'm tempted to write such disgracefully bad books on these subjects that the experts are compelled to write stuff worth reading out of sheer disgust. Or maybe the mere threat of me writing will be sufficient.
I've seen SSDs used to cache access to a traditional hard drive, and have even seen traditional hard drives used to cache access to optical mass storage. So long as your disk usage is "typical" (lots of access to a limited range of programs and libraries, infrequent access to the full range), it makes sense to layer the access in this way. You don't then have to care about limited space on the SSDs, you don't have to worry about MTBF because it's very unlikely all layers will fail at the same time (cacheing means that you've spare copies of everything that you frequently use), and you're much less subject to the limitations of any of the devices.
As for the bus, I would have to agree that most Flash-based or other popular SSD solutions are far slower than they need to be. (Bear in mind that PCI Express 2.0 can deliver 5 gigabits per second per lane, across 32 lanes. Yes, not many home PCs have PCI Express 2.0, but even conventional PCI technology is capable of delivering more than adequate bandwidth. To make the SSD faster, it could also be cached using conventional RAM. Ideally, it wouldn't be a write-through cache, but a battery-backed standard cache that flushes as-needed or on external power failure, so as to minimize writes.
As with most technologies, if there aren't good solutions it is not the fault of the technology, it is the lack of imagination by those implementing it.
Re:I'd like something else.
on
Ruby 1.9.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Erlang is good, and is an example of a language that is very usable in some of the niches that are under-developed. There are a few projects written in Erlang, and I would expect that to increase over time as Erlang technology improves and as more people become aware of it. It would probably help if there was more reference to it on Slashdot, LWN and Freshmeat.
Re:I'd like something else.
on
Ruby 1.9.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My BSc was over 16 years ago, my MPhil was over 11 years ago. Much of my professional career has involved client/server systems, distributed computing, grid computing, embedded computing and high-performance computing. My open source contributions include a MIPS port of an open source MPI package, work on clustering and multicast-based CORBA technology. My protocol standards contributions include work on using scalable reliable multicast alongside RDMA to do efficient one-to-all and all-to-all operations (ie: not sequentially, as is implemented in most open source MPI implementations). My hardware experience has included programming meshes of T800 Transputers, UltraSPARC clusters, Broadcom BCM1250 clusters and high-end multi-core x86 processors. Amateur projects have included using distributed computing to perform signal processing and data analysis from ground-penetrating RADAR and magnetometers being used by an archaeological group.
If you want the evidence, the data, the background, I've no objections to stating it. Well, with the exception of commercial projects still covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if the company betrayed not only me but also the other software engineers there, resulting in engineers being deprived of rightful wages, forced out or removed under false pretenses. I have ethics, even if they do not. The bulk of my experience is NOT covered by any NDA, but is a little on the lengthy side. People get paid good money for writing books with less content. If you actually want to know, I have no objections, but it's not something anyone would be willing to read on Slashdot as a reply or even as a main article.
Faster is good, but faster is not enough. Parallelization, these days, involves multi-LAN, multi-node, multi-CPU, multi-core systems where each core may or may not also be a vector processor. Modern libraries for handling such code tends to be usually too primitive to effectively handle anything but simple cases of even very narrowly-focussed software. If you want to parallelize across a combination of types, forget it. There are ways to do it - such as CORBA - but they're too slow and/or too complex. There are also languages modified to handle the complexities of parallelization, such as Unified Parallel C, Parlog or Occam, but they're usually much too complex to use in practice.
Is parallelization the only niche that isn't supported well? No. There are other areas languages generally do badly in. There are very few languages which handle internationalization efficiently. There are very few languages which handle graphical interfaces efficiently or logically. Languages are typically either good at handling very complicated data structures OR handling structures that are defined just-in-time, typically not both.
My interest in Ruby would be greatly increased if I saw it do something that very few other languages could do, preferably no language that was in mainstream use.
International copyright is secured by international treaties and enforced by international trades organizations and potentially by international courts. However, copyright under international law is defined very specifically. Certain things cannot be copyright under international law, which is why Elvis soap can be sold in England without license from Graceland.
First off, I am firmly convinced that "accepted morality" will always be on the edge (or just over) of what is legal, so it is inevitable that if, oh, N% of the population would break the law at one point in time, N% will break the law at some other point in time, no matter how the law changes between those times.
By that logic, the law, then, should be slightly stricter than necessary and applied leniently. People will remain on the edge of what's legal, but lenient interpretation would then place the vast majority of those within the limits of what is acceptable. Liberalizing the law and making it more strictly enforced has made for a more predictable society, but it has also placed far too many people in prison and has created an atmosphere of despair.
There also needs to be a better understanding within Government and corporations alike as to whether they want short-term or long-term profits. They can't have both. If long-term gains are what really matter, then there are three question marks. Firstly, does piracy really have a long-term impact on sales?
(Not day-by-day sales, but overall. Will the number of copies sold over the lifetime of the product really be different, or will it merely change the sales figures from a high initial value that rapidly shrinks to being something that is much more uniform? If, over ten or twenty years, the total sales are absolutely identical then the companies have lost not a single sale. All they have lost is the interest they would have earned.)
Secondly, is the problem in the piracy itself or in the original investment?
(Profit is the return on investment. The more you invest, the better the product. The better the product, the more it will sell. However, the return will increase non-linearly. There is an optimum level. However, that ignores memory/associations. If you factor in what the customers expect, then the optimum will shift. If customers have had good experiences in the past, the next product is likely to get greater interest. Conversely, bad experiences will reduce interest. It is generally assumed that it is ten times easier to lose interest than to increase it, and that doing nothing is as bad as producing crap.)
Thirdly, is there a way to change the taxation system to curtail short-term profits but refund over the long-term?
(If the profits are no different whether the profits are immediate or distributed more evenly, especially if there are tax credits for investment and tax penalties for balance sheet rigging, then the RIAA and MPAA might, just might, back off. Their mode of operation would cost them too much.)
You are correct there. Many societies that were isolated from Europe never developed the ability to process alcohol, so react violently to it. Indeed, their reactions probably say much about why early Europeans regarded alcohol with such fear and mysticism. The ability to process milk as an adult is unique to those who evolved in norther Europe, or are descended from them, so any modern processed food containing lactose may make such people violently ill.
(It's not all one-way, either. The Inuit have a diet which would be lethal to anyone from the Mediterranian over any sizable length of time, for example.)
The loss of native languages (120 languages become extinct daily, according to some reports) is another factor in the death of such cultures. If you lose the ability to unify and identify, then there is nothing to keep the group together.
That does depend a little on how one defines "race". There are twelve known mtDNA "families" that exist in modern times. It could reasonably be argued that these twelve families are sufficiently ancient and sufficiently divergent as to constitute a "race" of sorts. Mind you, they don't correspond at all well with popular notions of race, but if "race" has any meaning at all, it will be found in genetics and not in popular culture or stereotypes.
There is, of course, a major problem with using the twelve "daughters of Eve" as they are sometimes referred to, in that there is no meaningful correspondence between them and the Y chromosome lines that have been identified - geographically or chronologically, either instantaneously or in terms of population migrations. This is why you get the high variance within the popularly-identified "races". People mix, have always mixed, and will always mix.
Are there exceptions to this? Well, sort of. There have been populations that were (and sometimes still are) in isolation from all other humans, and have been for tens of thousands of years. Many have become extinct, when traders and missionaries brought diseases to such populations. Some have survived, such as the Australian aborigines. In some cases, these people have very marginally different bone structure than the dominant types in Europe and Asia. In other cases (such as with native North Americans), ten thousand years has not been sufficient time. In no case has it been sufficient for there to be any fundamental difference. Most perceived differences owe far more to culture than to biology. Nature vs. Nurture battles are most often won by Nurture.
What about intelligence studies? Exactly. What about them. We don't even have a working definition of intelligence other than a self-referential one from Turing. IQ tests between Europe and the US are so fundamentally different that anyone who does well at one will almost certainly fail at the other, and that is with cultures far closer together than either is with, oh, the Maoris or the Bedouin. Such studies are flawed in the fundamental assumption that equal intelligence means identical culture. That assumption cannot be avoided when the only reference to intelligence a person has is themselves and is tolerable within very narrow parameters, but is completely invalid outside of those.
(One of the other problems with defining intelligence is that every attempt has led to conclusions regarding either human or non-human intelligence that enough humans were not willing to accept for one reason or another. Most of the definitions probably were incorrect, imprecise or just plain wrong in some way. However, if agreement is impossible, then so is a definition, and therefore so is any attempt to meaningfully distinguish.)
What about nations, languages, visible differences and so on? Too many of each of these. The daughters of Eve permit an absolute maximum of 12 groupings. However, that is an absolute maximum. To be sufficiently "pure" as to be meaningful as a race, you must be able to show that all members of that race trace back to exactly the same mtDNA group and exactly the same Y chromosome group. If there's a difference, then you cannot determine what fraction of the DNA comes from what source, as there's currently no real mapping of the rest of the DNA (ie: most of it) to a given population.
Except amongst royal families and certain cults, I seriously doubt you'd get enough markers to match on just those mapped regions of DNA even with first or second cousins. Relatives on one side of the family should match to one of the sets, yes, but both sides are almost guaranteed not to match with both. This means that 10,000 years ago, one set of your ancestors were living in isolation from the other set, amongst wholly different people who might very well be considered different races.
In fact, the odds are extremely high that when you get to third or fourth cousins, people you identify with as being "your sort", and historic figures you c
The Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights project lets you hook up games like Pong to hotel lighting systems. With the better resolution and greater refresh rate offered by christmas lights, it should be possible to get Doom or Quake to play quite nicely over the side of a mountain or something.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I do not agree that that is justification for any kind of avoidance. Systems do not change by avoiding the abuses and failures within them. Systems change by confronting the flaws head-on and continuing to do so until the system has no alternative but to change. Individuals may lose - will lose - but since individuals will ultimately lose anyway as things stand (you're open to frivolous lawsuits, the same way medical practitioners are, and face higher costs and lower returns for exactly the same reasons). America exists on a bubbling stew of paranoia, delusion and get-rich-quick schemes. But, then, to be fair so do many other nations. However, bowing to the paranoia and delusions will not save you from them. Rather, you are feeding them by doing so.
Am I suggesting the extremely high-risk tactic of pilots throwing themselves at the wolves until the wolves are so sickened by the carnage they cease to be wolves? Yes. It's the only way. There is no other, at least none that history has ever shown. And, yes, historically this technique has been used quite successfully in many cases where you had those who were afraid to have a voice.
One of the problems with a number of these countries is deforestation has altered the reflective index of the ground and, in turn, altered the local climate. Another problem is that there has been some level of dependence on natural reservoirs and natural water sources. All fine and good, except when environmental shifts have depleted the natural reservoirs and instability has impacted availability of natural water sources.
The cost would be high, but it should be possible to produce artificial reservoirs with (a) some degree of protection against evaporation, (b) some degree of artificial change in reflective index, and (c) some method of pumping heat. It need not be a perfect setup, it need only be good enough to capture torrential rains and release them slowly to farmers, and also encourage even a fractional increase in rainfall in the region.
That last one seems ambitious, but horticulturalists and engineers are experts at building microclimates and a microclimate is all this is about. A small microclimate that has a fractionally higher humidity and a way to exploit it.
As opposed to some other sort of fact? Never knew there were any. Fascinating. I take (a) the lack of protective circuits on any battery I've seen, and (b) the accounts from manufacturers I don't use are giving accounts that match what I expect if their batteries match what I've seen.
The problem with any network stats-derived list is that you can't count unique individuals. Multiple users may share an IP address. A given user may have multiple IP addresses. What's worse is that if you count page hits, rather than visitors, you end up counting the same people multiple times. Or are they people? Maybe some/all are scripts. It's not like there's a shortage of scripts for pulling YouTube content, and I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA lawyers have bots which search for keywords that may be of interest. They usually do.
Besides which, I'd far prefer one decent copy of Bill Baggs' videos to be up there, and maybe some of the rarer broadcast sci-fi, such as The Changes or Doomwatch, where efforts to make them available legally are either derisory or non-existent. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of copies of the same music video in many cases. People should be able to enjoy music, sure, but what possible benefit is there to having so many identical versions? Greater diversity of content would benefit more people and increase the value of the service as a whole.
(I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA would prefer no copies at all, but that's not going to happen and it wouldn't be good for it to happen. That being said, YouTube needs to be more than about those two - their egos or their products.)
If batteries had these kinds of circuits, I seriously doubt the problems that we've seen would have occurred frequently enough to force a mass recall, and the "memory" problem would never have become burned into public awareness. Besides which, I've never known electronics manufacturers (or anyone else) to add in safety if they didn't have to.
Is that perfect? No. It's quite respectable, though, and still cheap enough to be practical for the battery, the recharger/adapter, etc. Added to which, the probabilities are not cumulative - only the permutation of all things failing in compatible ways would produce an unsafe result. As a result, you can get as safe as you can reasonably afford.
Then quality control should include tests to ensure the casing can absorb shock, and that the interface between the usable pins and the battery prevents electrical errors. This is not to negate your point - quite the opposite. When a technology is unsound, it should either be prohibited until it is made sound, OR encapsulated to the point where it cannot be used outside of the design limits.
...I'd say they should give it to someone and that might well be you. The code probably has no significant IP value, there may well be code that could be usefully recycled in Firefox or other Open Source browsers, and it might be the perfect project for someone to gnaw on in their spare time. Abandonware is a pollutant in the IT environment - AOL should "go green" and hand the source to someone who is interested.
There have been numerous comments on the inept handling of existing regulations by the TSA, including on here and including many by people currently or formerly employed by the TSA itself. Journalists and Government watchdog officials are forever getting banned items that are infinitely more dangerous than a battery past screeners. Mind you, other countries aren't any better. The French managed to lose a whole load of plastic explosives during a test run at a busy airport.
For planetary research, you want radio telescopes specifically tuned to frequencies of larger molecules (water, sulpher dioxide, something like that). This should be where the planets are brightest and where all other objects are dimmest. My understanding of the Webber telescope is that it won't be looking in that sort of range. It's also very small for what you really want.
No, the joke didn't fly over my head. It was obviously meant in jest. However, my reply is correct - to get an accurate 1 pixel image, you need a square kilometer array. To get something 2x2 pixels in size (about the size of a small o), you'd need an array a mile across. And for all of that, all you'd see is an image that looked almost exactly like an o - fairly uniform in the middle with a well-defined boundary. Thus, the true joke is that the joke is also true.
That would require an array of telescopes roughly a mile in diameter. Certainly very possible, though as the square kilometer array has demonstrated, very hard to organize and fund.
For that matter, the Constition only binds the Government. Corporations are free to do what they will to whom they like. Indeed, the only way this relates to the Constitution at all is the First Amendment right to make any claim they damn well please, even if it is blatant FUD or trollbait, so long as they don't accuse specific people (which would be slander or libel, depending on the method).
Ok, what does that leave us? Historically, long-lasting data has been placed in stone. Texts lasting thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of years can be preserved in such a format. Now, clearly you're not going to get far if you etch each bit plane of each colour plane of each frame of the movie into rock on the macroscale, but we can borrow ideas. Lithography is at the point where you can etch at the 25-33 nanometer level. Etching bit planes at that scale would be hellishly expensive but would be practical in terms of scale. You want a solid whose structure is so completely locked that there is no possibility of distortion ruining the data, and which is so inert that you have much greater freedom over the environmental conditions needed. Are there any good candidates?
Crystals would seem a logical place to start. The structure is prety much locked, which means your etchings are unlikely to degrade over the lifetime requirements of archival media and stand an excellent chance of surviving intact over the lifetime requirements of a typical civilization. Semiconductors, such as silicon and gallium arsonide, are also excellent candidates - they're not reactive within themselves and the experience with etching at these sorts of levels on such media would be a definite plus.
The downside of this approach is the expense. You have to make the lithographic mask at a wafer-scale (the pattern is not repeating), and each mask is good for only one wafer. Yes, the lifetime is now a hundred times greater than with conventional media, but the cost has increased a thousand, maybe ten thousand, times. In terms of cost per unit time, lithography is definitely a Really Bad Idea. The total cost of preserving for the same amount of time would be far less by using less durable media. It's also far more evenly distributed, making it far more practical for companies to adopt.
The upside is that the media is vastly more likely to survive neglect, abuse, war, natural disasters, bad management, and all the other catastrophies which have resulted in so many historically significant recordings being lost forever. Using a lithographic storage format, you don't need efforts such as "Missing: Presumed Wiped" and you won't need the very expensive technique of digitally cleaning, repairing, restoring and re-mastering old recordings. (Digital recordings generally don't need the cleaning part, unless there was a lot of noise on the original recording, but that would be true no matter what medium was used to store the digital data.)
The question then becomes one of return on investment. Are the sorts of catastrophies that lithography can deal with common enough that the additional cost is more than covered by the additional return from having a greater range of recordings survive? If yes, then lithography is the sensible approach. If no, then except in matters that absolutely should be preserved even at great cost, standard media should be used.
I would have to say that no, the cost of using lithography as a storage format is far in excess of the benefits, for most things. There might be a very few things that should be preserved this way, but not much.
Now, I would not call myself remotely qualified to write an article (or a book) on Haskell, Erlang, Pi-Occam, or any of the other fascinating languages out there, but I'm bothered by the rarity (and sometimes total lack) of any such text from people who are qualified. At this point, I'm tempted to write such disgracefully bad books on these subjects that the experts are compelled to write stuff worth reading out of sheer disgust. Or maybe the mere threat of me writing will be sufficient.
As for the bus, I would have to agree that most Flash-based or other popular SSD solutions are far slower than they need to be. (Bear in mind that PCI Express 2.0 can deliver 5 gigabits per second per lane, across 32 lanes. Yes, not many home PCs have PCI Express 2.0, but even conventional PCI technology is capable of delivering more than adequate bandwidth. To make the SSD faster, it could also be cached using conventional RAM. Ideally, it wouldn't be a write-through cache, but a battery-backed standard cache that flushes as-needed or on external power failure, so as to minimize writes.
As with most technologies, if there aren't good solutions it is not the fault of the technology, it is the lack of imagination by those implementing it.
Erlang is good, and is an example of a language that is very usable in some of the niches that are under-developed. There are a few projects written in Erlang, and I would expect that to increase over time as Erlang technology improves and as more people become aware of it. It would probably help if there was more reference to it on Slashdot, LWN and Freshmeat.
If you want the evidence, the data, the background, I've no objections to stating it. Well, with the exception of commercial projects still covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if the company betrayed not only me but also the other software engineers there, resulting in engineers being deprived of rightful wages, forced out or removed under false pretenses. I have ethics, even if they do not. The bulk of my experience is NOT covered by any NDA, but is a little on the lengthy side. People get paid good money for writing books with less content. If you actually want to know, I have no objections, but it's not something anyone would be willing to read on Slashdot as a reply or even as a main article.
Is parallelization the only niche that isn't supported well? No. There are other areas languages generally do badly in. There are very few languages which handle internationalization efficiently. There are very few languages which handle graphical interfaces efficiently or logically. Languages are typically either good at handling very complicated data structures OR handling structures that are defined just-in-time, typically not both.
My interest in Ruby would be greatly increased if I saw it do something that very few other languages could do, preferably no language that was in mainstream use.
International copyright is secured by international treaties and enforced by international trades organizations and potentially by international courts. However, copyright under international law is defined very specifically. Certain things cannot be copyright under international law, which is why Elvis soap can be sold in England without license from Graceland.
By that logic, the law, then, should be slightly stricter than necessary and applied leniently. People will remain on the edge of what's legal, but lenient interpretation would then place the vast majority of those within the limits of what is acceptable. Liberalizing the law and making it more strictly enforced has made for a more predictable society, but it has also placed far too many people in prison and has created an atmosphere of despair.
There also needs to be a better understanding within Government and corporations alike as to whether they want short-term or long-term profits. They can't have both. If long-term gains are what really matter, then there are three question marks. Firstly, does piracy really have a long-term impact on sales?
(Not day-by-day sales, but overall. Will the number of copies sold over the lifetime of the product really be different, or will it merely change the sales figures from a high initial value that rapidly shrinks to being something that is much more uniform? If, over ten or twenty years, the total sales are absolutely identical then the companies have lost not a single sale. All they have lost is the interest they would have earned.)
Secondly, is the problem in the piracy itself or in the original investment?
(Profit is the return on investment. The more you invest, the better the product. The better the product, the more it will sell. However, the return will increase non-linearly. There is an optimum level. However, that ignores memory/associations. If you factor in what the customers expect, then the optimum will shift. If customers have had good experiences in the past, the next product is likely to get greater interest. Conversely, bad experiences will reduce interest. It is generally assumed that it is ten times easier to lose interest than to increase it, and that doing nothing is as bad as producing crap.)
Thirdly, is there a way to change the taxation system to curtail short-term profits but refund over the long-term?
(If the profits are no different whether the profits are immediate or distributed more evenly, especially if there are tax credits for investment and tax penalties for balance sheet rigging, then the RIAA and MPAA might, just might, back off. Their mode of operation would cost them too much.)
(It's not all one-way, either. The Inuit have a diet which would be lethal to anyone from the Mediterranian over any sizable length of time, for example.)
The loss of native languages (120 languages become extinct daily, according to some reports) is another factor in the death of such cultures. If you lose the ability to unify and identify, then there is nothing to keep the group together.
There is, of course, a major problem with using the twelve "daughters of Eve" as they are sometimes referred to, in that there is no meaningful correspondence between them and the Y chromosome lines that have been identified - geographically or chronologically, either instantaneously or in terms of population migrations. This is why you get the high variance within the popularly-identified "races". People mix, have always mixed, and will always mix.
Are there exceptions to this? Well, sort of. There have been populations that were (and sometimes still are) in isolation from all other humans, and have been for tens of thousands of years. Many have become extinct, when traders and missionaries brought diseases to such populations. Some have survived, such as the Australian aborigines. In some cases, these people have very marginally different bone structure than the dominant types in Europe and Asia. In other cases (such as with native North Americans), ten thousand years has not been sufficient time. In no case has it been sufficient for there to be any fundamental difference. Most perceived differences owe far more to culture than to biology. Nature vs. Nurture battles are most often won by Nurture.
What about intelligence studies? Exactly. What about them. We don't even have a working definition of intelligence other than a self-referential one from Turing. IQ tests between Europe and the US are so fundamentally different that anyone who does well at one will almost certainly fail at the other, and that is with cultures far closer together than either is with, oh, the Maoris or the Bedouin. Such studies are flawed in the fundamental assumption that equal intelligence means identical culture. That assumption cannot be avoided when the only reference to intelligence a person has is themselves and is tolerable within very narrow parameters, but is completely invalid outside of those.
(One of the other problems with defining intelligence is that every attempt has led to conclusions regarding either human or non-human intelligence that enough humans were not willing to accept for one reason or another. Most of the definitions probably were incorrect, imprecise or just plain wrong in some way. However, if agreement is impossible, then so is a definition, and therefore so is any attempt to meaningfully distinguish.)
What about nations, languages, visible differences and so on? Too many of each of these. The daughters of Eve permit an absolute maximum of 12 groupings. However, that is an absolute maximum. To be sufficiently "pure" as to be meaningful as a race, you must be able to show that all members of that race trace back to exactly the same mtDNA group and exactly the same Y chromosome group. If there's a difference, then you cannot determine what fraction of the DNA comes from what source, as there's currently no real mapping of the rest of the DNA (ie: most of it) to a given population.
Except amongst royal families and certain cults, I seriously doubt you'd get enough markers to match on just those mapped regions of DNA even with first or second cousins. Relatives on one side of the family should match to one of the sets, yes, but both sides are almost guaranteed not to match with both. This means that 10,000 years ago, one set of your ancestors were living in isolation from the other set, amongst wholly different people who might very well be considered different races.
In fact, the odds are extremely high that when you get to third or fourth cousins, people you identify with as being "your sort", and historic figures you c
The Chaos Computer Club's Blinkenlights project lets you hook up games like Pong to hotel lighting systems. With the better resolution and greater refresh rate offered by christmas lights, it should be possible to get Doom or Quake to play quite nicely over the side of a mountain or something.
If enough houses got together, they could make a great set of fake runway lights for aircraft.