Exactly. The Excite part was the dot.com snakeoil business. The @Home part should do just fine, there is plenty of money to be made in broadband internet access. I have a few friends who envy my ATTBI access. They would pay hard cash for it, but it's simply not offered (yet) where they live (no, they don't live out in the boonies). Same deal with DSL, too far from the local office, voice conditioning coils in the line, we're working on a solution, yada yada yada...
Unless my understanding of IP is completely off, it seems to me that dynamic IP will allow them to serve more customers with the same pool of IP addresses (unless everybody is connected 24/7/365). Wheter this is a case of an evil company trying to make more money, or a company trying to keep costs down for their customers, I don't know. That's a different issue.
Furthermore, a changing IP address should give you a little bit of protection against hackers, right? I know it's no substitute for firewalls and all that, and yeah, Linux is Much Better Than Windows (TM), but it should make life a little harder for black hat hackers. Right?
Makes me admire Arthur C. Clarke even more than I already did. Read "2010" to get a description of how Europa could sustain life. Seems like Clarke was right all along. Sometimes I wonder if the man has some secret source of inside information...
Not sure if this is offtopic, I think it's mostly on-topic, but anyway.
Some years ago I was reading an interview with the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" fame), and he was describing how he was amazed by a relative of his, who was an interpreter, and who described her thought processes when translating. Turned out that what she described was completely alien to him, since he was strictly monolingual.
I was completely shocked. Here's how Sacks' relative described it. If you speak more than one language, you don't simply think in "words". There's ideas, images, sounds, smells, and other harder to describe concepts. The process of translating is not a look-up process ("this word means that word", etc.). You need to absorb what is written or said in one language, translate that into ideas, concepts, emotions and what not, and then express those ideas in another language. You also have to place what you hear and say in the proper context. Often this has to be done 'on-the-fly', so the fact that multiple brain regions are involved doesn't surprise me.
What shocked me was that Sacks (and apparently a lot of monolingual people) didn't experience this at all! I was under the assumption that everybody's brain worked like this. So, apparently there is a lot of truth to the theory that language is a defining factor in structuring the human brain. According to the research, there is a significant difference between one and two languages, let alone the difference between zero and one language.
Well, I guess it depends on what your definition of bilingual is.
My first language is Dutch, and I have been living in the USA for almost 6 years now. I don't consider myself to be 'truly' bilingual, since I only started learning English at age 8 or so.
Anyway, my experience is that people who speak two (or three, or more) languages well, generally do not mix them up. It's the people who are struggling with the 2nd language that are the ones that fall back on the 1st language when they get angry, emotional, or drunk.
Switching languages mid-sentence, sure, I've done that, but only when I wanted to. It usually happens when I speak Dutch to another Dutch person, and a non-Dutch speaking person joins the conversation. Out of courtesy, I then switch to a language that everyone understands.
Again, it depends on the definition of "bilingual". The article is less than clear about that.
I'm sure they'll find a way. It's just that the language seems overly broad ("any interactive digital device"). Might be a good thing, it would increase the changes of being declared unconstitutional. My example was deliberately silly, of course.
No one really respected computers before 1995. Only office workers used them and NO one used them for entertainment.
Huh? I had a C64 way before '95, and I can assure I did not do anything useful with it, I only played games. But maybe that's not what you mean by entertainment...
Last August, Hollings circulated a proposal called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) that prohibits creating, selling or distributing "any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."
Hmm. A new car contains about 80 microprocessors, on average. They certainly qualify as "digital device". Most of them are maybe not interactive, but things like radio/CD player, GPS navigation system, on-board computer and probably anything that interfaces with the controls and/or dials could be argued to be "interactive". Even an ABS system could be called "interactive", with a little imagination (after all, what is the definition of "interaction")? So, does this mean that the car makers have a lot of work to do?
So yes, Americans aren't the only shitheads regarding this.
(This should be redundant) Of course not, it's all about money. It's cheaper to send it off somewhere than to dismantle and recycle in an environmentally responsible way. However, this is a typical case of short-term thinking. In the long run it's going to be more costly than attacking the problem now.
Ironically, I can remember that in the '70s and '80s (before the fall of the Berlin wall) Western European countries were shipping chemical waste to Eastern Germany. Cheaper than processing it in a responsible way. The East Germans then just dumped the stuff in the countryside. Of course, now that Germany is united, they have to clean it up after all...
Nothing to be proud of here. The USA may be #1 in foreign aid in an absolute sense, but if you calculate it as a percentage of the GNP, it's not all that much. Look up the numbers if you don't believe me.
You are right that "b", "c", and "d" will likely have a far more devastating effect than "a". However, "a" is the only thing we can influence to a reasonable extent (don't believe those silly movies that claim you can evaporate an asteroid with a laser mounted on an F-16).
Your argument about CO2 also has some merit. In fact, if it wasn't for CO2 and the greenhouse effect, average temperature on earth would be at least 6 degrees Celsius (~11 F) lower. You could probably ski in Arizona in July. Furthermore, contrary to some belief, CO2 is not "toxic".
However, two facts are rarely disputed: 1. CO2 traps infrared radiation. 2. Since the start of the Industrial Age, humankind has been dumping significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Some scientists believe that we could be causing a "runaway" greenhouse effect: more CO2 in the air causes rise of temperature, causes more CO2 in the air, etc. There are theories that something like that might have happened on Venus, which has an average temperature of 867 F, and an atmospheric pressure of about 90 times that on earth. Other scientists believe that CO2 emissions cause a negative feedback effect: more CO2 would mean more trees, thus more absorption of CO2, hence a stabilizing effect.
I think this issue is far from settled. The optimists might well be right. However, should the pessimists be right, then we have a real serious problem. A runaway greenhouse effect would probably wipe out almost all life on earth, so it's in the same category as your other examples. Stakes could be tremendously high here. We might as well be a little careful and look into ways of limiting CO2 emissions. Saving energy is quite an effective way, it costs nothing (on the contrary...), is effective immediately, and it buys us time to explore alternative sources of energy.
Of course, whatever the estimates of fossil fuel reserves are, eventually we will run out of it, so the CO2 emission problem will go away given enough time. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
Ah, but, the poster's point is that nobody who had actually walked on a planet would be alive when the colony arrived. In your North American colonist analogy, imagine that the journey across the Atlantic would take dozens of generations. Would anyone still know how to be a farmer, for example?
See also: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. Warships traveling at relativistic speeds, that encounter superior technology once they do battle, since tens of years have passed for the target, and only weeks for the warship.
What happens to people sent on a 300 year journey when fifty years later, on Earth, a new tech is invented that cuts the journey time in half and we send a new improved ship to the same place?
Two things:
1. The human species could be extinguished in the fifty years you mention. Not likely, but the whole reasoning behind this idea is to save the species in case of a catastrophe on Earth.
2. Who says they know where they are going? The likelihood of identifying an Earth-like planet near another star is not very big. Might as well sail off and see where you end up. Furthermore, it would be rather silly to send a second ship to the same place. Better identify another one for the second ship (double the chances of survival of the species).
The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia
Yes, obviously. The thinking behind a bigger sail is that the extra thrust will more than compensate for the extra weight. If that wasn't the case, you would actually have to trim the sail. No sail=maximum thrust! It's like putting a bigger engine in a car. The thinking is that the extra weight will be more than compensated for by the extra horsepower.
Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe
Correct. The fact that the deep space probes use a radioactive decay electricity source rather than solar panels illustrates this. The sun ain't so bright anymore when you've passed Saturn.
However: the article mentions a giant laser to propel the ship. Laser beams diverge a little bit, but it could work better than solar particles. This idea is described in one of the "Mote" books by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (can't remember which one any more).
As for the technical feasibility of enormous solar sails propelling people to stars that is 99.99% bunk....
There are some problems there indeed. Not the least of which is: how do you stop when you get where you are going? The article mentions a giant laser to propel the ship. Is there a giant laser ready at our destination? Or are we conveniently going to orbit a star to slow down? How about course alterations? It would be a bit frustrating to pass by a suitable planet when you can't get there.
No, you have it wrong, sorry. You can easily see this by imagining 2 ships traveling to Alpha Centauri, but at slightly different speeds. One ship goes at 0.99c, the other at 0.999c. Einsteins equation for time dilation ( t = t0/sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)) ) gives quite different results: a time dilution ratio of about 7.1 for 0.99c, and about 22.4 for.999c. So, have 42 years passed on earth, or 135 years?
The first generation will of course be volunteers, so that should work well. But the second generation will have plenty of fuel for their teenage rebellion. "Who gave you the right to lock me up for life in a tin can without cable??". Once the old timers are out of the picture, there is no telling what the ship people will do. I doubt they'll feel bound by the original crews intentions.
Nothing new. How about the people who emigrated to America? Their children did not know any country but America. Even nowadays, children of immigrants have normally no desire to move back to the country their parents came from. Sure, they're interested, and will go there on vacation, but hardly any of them emigrate back. And that's not just true for the USA, it goes for any country.
Minor mistake in your subject line: "How innocent people are treated." Or doesn't "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" apply any more, and has the USA joined the proud club of banana republics? Hey, guess what, they even dropped charges against the guy....
Just to avoid confusion caused by my sarcasm, I agree completely with your post.
Please. SDRAM is the standard. DDR is entrenching into that market. Rambus? It's like the Mac - some people wonder, 'What's that?' while the techs laugh at people who have it.
Maybe. But, often it's the non-techs that make technical decisions, at least in a business environment. I'm sure companies like Dell are selling plenty of systems with RAMBUS in it.
Having a technologically superior product does not mean you'll succeed commercially. Having an inferior product does not mean you'll fail. Unfortunately.
That's all nice and well, but I am a bit bothered by the fact that there is controversy about the info on THG. I used to trust the articles, now I'll have to apply my own judgement (oh dear...:-).
They say this because of the huge expense needed to provide 512MB or more of ultra fast memory. But what if they added yet another level of "cache"?
Intel's McKinley chip reportedly has 3MB of Level 3 on-chip cache. Not exactly what you are proposing, but the same basic principle.
Slightly off-topic: there's an interesting column in Embedded Systems magazine where the author expresses concern about cosmic rays flipping bits in this cache. Apparently Intel acknowledges that this may be a problem (they have studied it). Intel claims a 'normal' user should experience this problem once every 1000 years. However, as the author points out, what if every airplane is equipped with a McKinley chip? Apparently there are 7000 planes in the air at any given moment (on average), so would that mean 7 plane crashes a year due to this problem?
To get on topic again: your idea is interesting, but maybe we should try to avoid running monstrous applications that need ridiculous amounts of RAM.
Having said that, I did run into a memory problem when I had to edit a 270MB text file the other day. For some reason, the 512 MB of memory in my machine wasn't enough. Emacs wouldn't load the darn file ("buffer size exceeded"), and Wordpad hung. I tried Notepad (I know, I'm nuts...), and it actually worked! The machine started thrashing like crazy, it took several minutes to scroll, but eventually I managed to do the minor edits. Yes, Linux probably would have done it without a problem, but that was just not an option, so save me your flames. And I hate vi, so don't bother...
Slashdot Mirror
What killed @Home Network? Excite@Home did.
Exactly. The Excite part was the dot.com snakeoil business. The @Home part should do just fine, there is plenty of money to be made in broadband internet access. I have a few friends who envy my ATTBI access. They would pay hard cash for it, but it's simply not offered (yet) where they live (no, they don't live out in the boonies). Same deal with DSL, too far from the local office, voice conditioning coils in the line, we're working on a solution, yada yada yada...
Besides the points already made:
Unless my understanding of IP is completely off, it seems to me that dynamic IP will allow them to serve more customers with the same pool of IP addresses (unless everybody is connected 24/7/365). Wheter this is a case of an evil company trying to make more money, or a company trying to keep costs down for their customers, I don't know. That's a different issue.
Furthermore, a changing IP address should give you a little bit of protection against hackers, right? I know it's no substitute for firewalls and all that, and yeah, Linux is Much Better Than Windows (TM), but it should make life a little harder for black hat hackers. Right?
Makes me admire Arthur C. Clarke even more than I already did. Read "2010" to get a description of how Europa could sustain life. Seems like Clarke was right all along. Sometimes I wonder if the man has some secret source of inside information...
Not sure if this is offtopic, I think it's mostly on-topic, but anyway.
Some years ago I was reading an interview with the well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks (of "Awakenings" fame), and he was describing how he was amazed by a relative of his, who was an interpreter, and who described her thought processes when translating. Turned out that what she described was completely alien to him, since he was strictly monolingual.
I was completely shocked.
Here's how Sacks' relative described it. If you speak more than one language, you don't simply think in "words". There's ideas, images, sounds, smells, and other harder to describe concepts. The process of translating is not a look-up process ("this word means that word", etc.). You need to absorb what is written or said in one language, translate that into ideas, concepts, emotions and what not, and then express those ideas in another language. You also have to place what you hear and say in the proper context. Often this has to be done 'on-the-fly', so the fact that multiple brain regions are involved doesn't surprise me.
What shocked me was that Sacks (and apparently a lot of monolingual people) didn't experience this at all! I was under the assumption that everybody's brain worked like this. So, apparently there is a lot of truth to the theory that language is a defining factor in structuring the human brain. According to the research, there is a significant difference between one and two languages, let alone the difference between zero and one language.
Well, I guess it depends on what your definition of bilingual is.
My first language is Dutch, and I have been living in the USA for almost 6 years now. I don't consider myself to be 'truly' bilingual, since I only started learning English at age 8 or so.
Anyway, my experience is that people who speak two (or three, or more) languages well, generally do not mix them up. It's the people who are struggling with the 2nd language that are the ones that fall back on the 1st language when they get angry, emotional, or drunk.
Switching languages mid-sentence, sure, I've done that, but only when I wanted to. It usually happens when I speak Dutch to another Dutch person, and a non-Dutch speaking person joins the conversation. Out of courtesy, I then switch to a language that everyone understands.
Again, it depends on the definition of "bilingual". The article is less than clear about that.
"chances", not "changes". Darn Preview Button...
I'm sure they'll find a way. It's just that the language seems overly broad ("any interactive digital device"). Might be a good thing, it would increase the changes of being declared unconstitutional. My example was deliberately silly, of course.
No one really respected computers before 1995. Only office workers used them and NO one used them for entertainment.
Huh? I had a C64 way before '95, and I can assure I did not do anything useful with it, I only played games. But maybe that's not what you mean by entertainment...
Last August, Hollings circulated a proposal called the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA) that prohibits creating, selling or distributing "any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies."
Hmm. A new car contains about 80 microprocessors, on average. They certainly qualify as "digital device". Most of them are maybe not interactive, but things like radio/CD player, GPS navigation system, on-board computer and probably anything that interfaces with the controls and/or dials could be argued to be "interactive". Even an ABS system could be called "interactive", with a little imagination (after all, what is the definition of "interaction")?
So, does this mean that the car makers have a lot of work to do?
So yes, Americans aren't the only shitheads regarding this.
(This should be redundant) Of course not, it's all about money. It's cheaper to send it off somewhere than to dismantle and recycle in an environmentally responsible way. However, this is a typical case of short-term thinking. In the long run it's going to be more costly than attacking the problem now.
Ironically, I can remember that in the '70s and '80s (before the fall of the Berlin wall) Western European countries were shipping chemical waste to Eastern Germany. Cheaper than processing it in a responsible way. The East Germans then just dumped the stuff in the countryside. Of course, now that Germany is united, they have to clean it up after all...
That would be very flattering for the slashdot community. However, I think CNN has other things on their minds.
With the amount of aid we send everywhere?
Nothing to be proud of here. The USA may be #1 in foreign aid in an absolute sense, but if you calculate it as a percentage of the GNP, it's not all that much. Look up the numbers if you don't believe me.
I didn't know Ross Perot posts on slashdot...
You are right that "b", "c", and "d" will likely have a far more devastating effect than "a". However, "a" is the only thing we can influence to a reasonable extent (don't believe those silly movies that claim you can evaporate an asteroid with a laser mounted on an F-16).
Your argument about CO2 also has some merit. In fact, if it wasn't for CO2 and the greenhouse effect, average temperature on earth would be at least 6 degrees Celsius (~11 F) lower. You could probably ski in Arizona in July. Furthermore, contrary to some belief, CO2 is not "toxic".
However, two facts are rarely disputed:
1. CO2 traps infrared radiation.
2. Since the start of the Industrial Age, humankind has been dumping significant amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Some scientists believe that we could be causing a "runaway" greenhouse effect: more CO2 in the air causes rise of temperature, causes more CO2 in the air, etc. There are theories that something like that might have happened on Venus, which has an average temperature of 867 F, and an atmospheric pressure of about 90 times that on earth.
Other scientists believe that CO2 emissions cause a negative feedback effect: more CO2 would mean more trees, thus more absorption of CO2, hence a stabilizing effect.
I think this issue is far from settled. The optimists might well be right. However, should the pessimists be right, then we have a real serious problem. A runaway greenhouse effect would probably wipe out almost all life on earth, so it's in the same category as your other examples. Stakes could be tremendously high here. We might as well be a little careful and look into ways of limiting CO2 emissions. Saving energy is quite an effective way, it costs nothing (on the contrary...), is effective immediately, and it buys us time to explore alternative sources of energy.
Of course, whatever the estimates of fossil fuel reserves are, eventually we will run out of it, so the CO2 emission problem will go away given enough time. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
Ah, but, the poster's point is that nobody who had actually walked on a planet would be alive when the colony arrived. In your North American colonist analogy, imagine that the journey across the Atlantic would take dozens of generations. Would anyone still know how to be a farmer, for example?
See also: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman. Warships traveling at relativistic speeds, that encounter superior technology once they do battle, since tens of years have passed for the target, and only weeks for the warship.
What happens to people sent on a 300 year journey when fifty years later, on Earth, a new tech is invented that cuts the journey time in half and we send a new improved ship to the same place?
Two things:
1. The human species could be extinguished in the fifty years you mention. Not likely, but the whole reasoning behind this idea is to save the species in case of a catastrophe on Earth.
2. Who says they know where they are going? The likelihood of identifying an Earth-like planet near another star is not very big. Might as well sail off and see where you end up. Furthermore, it would be rather silly to send a second ship to the same place. Better identify another one for the second ship (double the chances of survival of the species).
The bigger my sail is the more it weighs thus the more sail area I need to collect energy to overcome intertia
Yes, obviously. The thinking behind a bigger sail is that the extra thrust will more than compensate for the extra weight. If that wasn't the case, you would actually have to trim the sail. No sail=maximum thrust! It's like putting a bigger engine in a car. The thinking is that the extra weight will be more than compensated for by the extra horsepower.
Acceleration caused from taking energy from solar wind particles is also not linear or infinite like you retardedly believe
Correct. The fact that the deep space probes use a radioactive decay electricity source rather than solar panels illustrates this. The sun ain't so bright anymore when you've passed Saturn.
However: the article mentions a giant laser to propel the ship. Laser beams diverge a little bit, but it could work better than solar particles. This idea is described in one of the "Mote" books by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (can't remember which one any more).
As for the technical feasibility of enormous solar sails propelling people to stars that is 99.99% bunk....
There are some problems there indeed. Not the least of which is: how do you stop when you get where you are going? The article mentions a giant laser to propel the ship. Is there a giant laser ready at our destination? Or are we conveniently going to orbit a star to slow down? How about course alterations? It would be a bit frustrating to pass by a suitable planet when you can't get there.
No, you have it wrong, sorry. You can easily see this by imagining 2 ships traveling to Alpha Centauri, but at slightly different speeds. One ship goes at 0.99c, the other at 0.999c. Einsteins equation for time dilation ( t = t0/sqrt(1-(v^2/c^2)) ) gives quite different results: a time dilution ratio of about 7.1 for 0.99c, and about 22.4 for .999c. So, have 42 years passed on earth, or 135 years?
The first generation will of course be volunteers, so that should work well. But the second generation will have plenty of fuel for their teenage rebellion. "Who gave you the right to lock me up for life in a tin can without cable??". Once the old timers are out of the picture, there is no telling what the ship people will do. I doubt they'll feel bound by the original crews intentions.
Nothing new. How about the people who emigrated to America? Their children did not know any country but America. Even nowadays, children of immigrants have normally no desire to move back to the country their parents came from. Sure, they're interested, and will go there on vacation, but hardly any of them emigrate back. And that's not just true for the USA, it goes for any country.
Minor mistake in your subject line: "How innocent people are treated." Or doesn't "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" apply any more, and has the USA joined the proud club of banana republics? Hey, guess what, they even dropped charges against the guy....
Just to avoid confusion caused by my sarcasm, I agree completely with your post.
Please. SDRAM is the standard. DDR is entrenching into that market. Rambus? It's like the Mac - some people wonder, 'What's that?' while the techs laugh at people who have it.
Maybe. But, often it's the non-techs that make technical decisions, at least in a business environment. I'm sure companies like Dell are selling plenty of systems with RAMBUS in it.
Having a technologically superior product does not mean you'll succeed commercially. Having an inferior product does not mean you'll fail. Unfortunately.
That's all nice and well, but I am a bit bothered by the fact that there is controversy about the info on THG. I used to trust the articles, now I'll have to apply my own judgement (oh dear...:-).
They say this because of the huge expense needed to provide 512MB or more of ultra fast memory. But what if they added yet another level of "cache"?
Intel's McKinley chip reportedly has 3MB of Level 3 on-chip cache. Not exactly what you are proposing, but the same basic principle.
Slightly off-topic: there's an interesting column in Embedded Systems magazine where the author expresses concern about cosmic rays flipping bits in this cache. Apparently Intel acknowledges that this may be a problem (they have studied it). Intel claims a 'normal' user should experience this problem once every 1000 years. However, as the author points out, what if every airplane is equipped with a McKinley chip? Apparently there are 7000 planes in the air at any given moment (on average), so would that mean 7 plane crashes a year due to this problem?
To get on topic again: your idea is interesting, but maybe we should try to avoid running monstrous applications that need ridiculous amounts of RAM.
Having said that, I did run into a memory problem when I had to edit a 270MB text file the other day. For some reason, the 512 MB of memory in my machine wasn't enough. Emacs wouldn't load the darn file ("buffer size exceeded"), and Wordpad hung. I tried Notepad (I know, I'm nuts...), and it actually worked! The machine started thrashing like crazy, it took several minutes to scroll, but eventually I managed to do the minor edits. Yes, Linux probably would have done it without a problem, but that was just not an option, so save me your flames. And I hate vi, so don't bother...