We've had this capability for a while. And I don't even mean "I've seen it in other games"... I really mean that we could have been doing this for a while.
The problem is that even as consoles improve by a factor of 10, game designers/programmers/whoever decides the features try to improve the graphics by a factor of 11. Witness the PS3 games that have framerate troubles... forget console fanboyism, forget everything like that, that is nothing more and nothing less than bad judgment by the game developer and biting off more than they could chew.
Forget about the extra power to display corpses... despite our gaming rigs having more power than I would ever have dreamed of in my childhood, we still have games that can't keep up 30fps. I'd rather see more attention payed to that than corpse retention.
Yes. Expect the same people complaining about rows of houses that are too similar to whip right around to complaining about rows of houses that are too radically different at dizzying speeds.
(Because the real underlying complaint is "Not everybody has the same tastes as me, and the same high prioritization of 'taste' as me".... that will always find a way to manifest in some complaint.)
You wouldn't be forced to use that color scheme. If the displays don't look at least as good as current LCD they're not going to sell.
It's just that if you're "in the know" and understand what's going on, you could choose a light-on-black display to save power. And with the improved contrast ratio, that might not be so bad.
I'm wondering how small they'll eventually be able to get these. I wonder if they'll ever get to the point where they can fit one of these in a laptop. SEDs should only consume power proportional to the brightness of the display, so I could see light lettering on a dark background coming back; display less stuff, use less power.
Add an SED to a laptop with solid-state storage (which, by the time this is feasible, will be at least where laptop hard drives are today), and the continuing work on processors that can shut themselves down nicely, and we may get some truly efficient laptops out of the deal, that only use power when actually doing something. Imagine instead of "suspending", just setting a "blank the screen" screensaver, and ending up with about the same power usage as a suspended laptop of today, only your torrent is still going...
For better or for worse, shipping the user a browser that defaults to trusting nobody isn't going to happen anytime soon.
If you did ship a normal end-user a browser that trusted nobody, it would be equivalent to shipping one that trusted everybody, as they'd learn to "just click 'yes'", so while it's theoretically superior, it isn't practically. You can try this; you're free to remove all that automated trust.
Although you could make a case that no automated trust is better than inaccurate automated trust.
I guess the take-away lesson here is that when you add "uneducated and uneducatable users" into the mix, security gets really, really, really, really hard. (Note that I'm not claiming all users are uneducatable, but the number is non-zero and I'd personally guess around 15%, which is significant.) Unfortunately, "something" must be done, and by golly, "something" will be done.
You need to be a bit more careful. DST incontrovertibly "saves" energy, vs. non-DST. It's statistical. You can look it up. The energy savings are in fact quite significant.
What I find stupid, and what you may want to glom onto as the reason to find DST stupid, is that the root problem is the idea that we should get up at 7am, regardless of 7am's relationship to the sun itself. I also find it stupid that everybody has to get off of work at the exact same minute. If we were more flexible (for real, not just lip service to "flex time"), the need for DST would just melt away as people naturally migrated towards more realistic schedules.
To the best of my knowledge (and I'd be fine with being proven wrong), there is no good way to blame the government for our need to be told by our clocks that we should get up at different times. Except for the government setting worktimes for its own employees (which it has the right to do, more or less), our societal obsession with all working the same schedule, dictated to us unnaturally by our clocks, is the root problem and has just naturally evolved.
Presumably there are some benefits too or we'd have migrated away from this by now, although it is conceivable that there are off-setting benefits to this setup that outweigh the staggering societal energy costs, and lost man-hours spent in needlessly-bad traffic jams. (There'll always be traffic jams, but they wouldn't be as bad if we staggered our times better. Well, we'd probably just compensate by building fewer roads, but for a few years it'd be nice...) Or it's simply a holdover from factory days that we still haven't flushed out of our collective systems. (Kinda like our school system, although that's a whole new flamewar.)
As connection speeds rapidly increase, this will become more of a non-issue.
I agree, except with the word "rapidly". Having made the jump to "megabit", I haven't noticed my connection speed going up a heck of a lot since then; certainly nothing like my MIPs jumps.
If you are satisfied with that 8x8 image, then there's no reason you can't compress a 128x128 image down to 8x8 as well, and in fact, it will look better because there was more information there to start with, which makes the interpolation more accurate.
If you boil your claim down, you're basically claiming that we can reduce the resolution without throwing out information, which is, along with being "not true", also nonsense.
Determining the exact cutoff would depend on your definitions of various terms, but certainly, shrinking a 128x128 original to 8x8 vs. shrinking a 64x64 original to 8x8 will have no effective difference; depending on your algorithm it may actually come out exactly the same. It is true you need "good pixels", and DVDs upsample so well because they have "good pixels" (vs. the pirated, shrunken MPEG4 movies that have just barely-good-enough pixels at their native resolutions and suck horribly when upsampled), but both an HD-DVD movie shrunk to postage-stamp video and a DVD movie shrunk to postage-stamp video are going to look the same: postage stamp video.
Downsampling == losing information; in fact, that's basically the definition of downsampling if you're careful enough with your terminology. It doesn't matter if you're shrinking a 25GB source to 600MB or a 5GB source to 600MB; you can still only "squeeze" 600MB of information into that 600MB. You gotta pay the piper.
Well, personally, I'm pretty happy with straight DVDs upsampled to 1650x1050 (my laptop screen), so I don't really disagree. But there definitely is a quality difference; the one HD video I've ever watched (not "HD-DVD" per se, just a high-resolution video file) was definitely an improvement over up-sampled DVDs. It's just... I don't really care that much.
(The interlacing is annoying, especially in cartoons like Futurama. Going to "p" from "i" would be enough to make me happy.)
Movie bloat isn't as stupid as you think. As I'm sure many HDTV pirates are aware, it's quite possible to fit a 720p movie onto a DVD by using decent compression. So why do we need these new, highly inconvenient disc formats? Is going from 720 to 1080 really worth going from $50 players to $500?
Fine, I'll spell out why movie "bloat" is a stupid thing to worry about. Well, actually, since I don't want to type it I'll give it to you in algorithm form:
1. Think of a reason program bloat is bad. 2. Realize it doesn't apply to movies. 3. Repeat until you run out of reasons.
Pirates are in for a shock if they think the next generation of movies are going to compress that much better; one of the reasons for the new formats is that they are going to start out by using the same codecs the pirates have been using. No more shrinking a movie by 75% with minimal quality loss (although I can still tell the difference); you're going to have to make harder choices about quality vs. resolution. (Actually, I expect the pirates who are distributing the movies already realize this; I hope they're steeling themselves for the bitching to come when the next generation doesn't work that way...)
Oh, and finally, there's a world of difference between "squeezing" a high-def movie onto a DVD, with visible quality degradation, and fitting one onto one of the new high-capacity disks, which at a decent quality still doesn't leave much room left over on the disk. Squeezing a DVD onto a CD is a cute parlor trick, and certainly works far, far better than it has any right to, but if you can't see the quality degradation you either lack the equipment or lack the discrimination. (I don't consider the latter to be a problem; in fact I tend to encourage people not to try to attain that sort of discrimination since it pretty much only leads to pain. Nevertheless, the differences are there.) And like I said, it's not going to be as big a win this time around; nothing will stop you from trying to squeeze a full HD moving onto a DVD5 or DVD9, because the codecs will pretty much let you use any bitrate you want, but it's not going to be without cost this time, and I expect most such movies will end up with their resolutions cut down in practice.
Some people, as I post this, have sort of strongly hinted at this, but nobody else has directly asked this yet.
What are you already using to patch your 7000+ servers? By the time you reach 7000+, this should have been a problem long solved. Hell, I'd expect it to be solved by the 100+ point.
What's so special about this DST patch that your current process can't handle it?
Because if the answer is "we have no process", you've long since lost, and good odds your systems are already seething piles of unpatched, compromised machines.
If you do have a process but it's inadequate, and Slashdot might actually be able to help you, you'll need to be a little more clear on exactly what the problem is, if it isn't "we have no process".
(What is it with people lobbing questions onto Ask Slashdot and almost, but not quite, never following up? Is the lead on Ask Slashdot so long that people die before it gets posted, or just give up? Obviously I ask this before I can tell whether "thesandbender" is one of the rare exceptions... as of this writing, no, unless (s)he's been modded into oblivion.)
I am a statistician, and reading through the comments hear, am saddened that many readers claim that "statistical significance" could not have been achieved in this study because of a sample size of 30 women.
I blame schooling for this. Not counting my actual statistics classes, whenever I was asked to criticize a paper I always got credit for complaining that the sample size was too small, even when I knew I was completely full of shit and even when the various measurements of significance were sitting right there in the paper.
All you've got is the lone statistics course fighting even the other professors at a University, who apparently apply the statistical significance tests by rote, but don't really "believe" in them (or understand them to any degree). It's not hard to guess which will "win".
However, money is a representation of wealth in terms of labor, rights, and goods. For those most part, that is a zero-sum game,
Nope.
The reason is, you missed a step. Wealth is also represented in the configuration of materials, and to a somewhat lesser degree, labor and rights. The laptop that I am typing this on cost me ~$1200, but the actual cost of the fundamental atoms of its makeup are a few dollars at best. But this laptop also represents wealth beyond the wildest dreams of a 10th century monarch, as it doesn't matter how much of their wealth they would attempt to spend, they could not have this laptop. Let alone the internet it is hooked to, and all the ambient wealth the internet represents.
Barring victory by the terrorists or some other major disaster, wealth can be continued to expect to rise for a very long time even without the influx of new sources of energy, labor, or raw materials, as we continue to build ever more sophisticated expressions of wealth with the stuff we already do have.
Actually, socialism and communism are not built upon that assumption at all.
I recognize that the claimed theory behind those things is not based on zero-sum economics, but it is still a significant underlying theme, especially in the things that people actually believe, not just theoretically. Especially if you're still a communist at this late date (not "you" personally, "you" in general) at this late date. The true theoretical backings of communism have been utterly destroyed in practice, so what people actually believe is probably coming from something else. ("Something else" that is, as it happens, equally destroyed by history, but with much more emotional appeal.)
My suspicion is we have about the right level of capitalism.
Me too.
I just thought, perhaps, someone urging others to understand how economies work might like to expand their own understanding a little.
Don't assume that I'm pouring either my full understanding of economics or a complete economics textbook into a Slashdot comment, as neither would fit in one. (I doubt I've got a perfect understanding of economics, what with nobody else having one either, but a full discussion of my various approximations, rules of thumb, and misconceptions wouldn't fit into a Slashdot comment box even were I inclined to type it, and certainly any economics textbook that fit in here wouldn't be worth the cash you drop on it.) I was just attacking the zero-sum fallacy.
The combination of "buying the minimum RAM on the side of the box" and "loading the machine with all the software to make it do something" like virus scanning, lab security/rebuilding software, and almost as an incidental afterthought, applications that chew through RAM like there is no tomorrow (like Office apps), is untenable. You can buy a cheap machine with minimal RAM, but that cheap machine with minimal hardware will have minimal capabilities. You can't really expect to buy the cheapest possible machine and then put it into a rather harsh environment (labs like that are really about as demanding and harsh as it gets) and expect it to do well.
Sure, Windows may suck, but your real problem I'd bet quite a bit that based on your CPU spec, and based on how those machines were sold at that time, those poor machines had 256MB at most, and there's good odds it was 128MB, and they really needed 512MB minimum. (Actually, at 10 minutes to get to login, 128MB is probably a good guess.)
(Vista's long delay has actually moved us to a world where even basic machines have 512MB, which is pretty good for the XP generation, but I'm sure as Vista comes rolling in it'll cease to be enough, and it'll be a bit yet before the basic machine ships with 1GB, assuming even that is enough.)
The idea that the economy is a zero-sum affair is so abundantly contradicted by readily available evidence that I find it almost amusing that it holds such sway over people.
No, a job created elsewhere instead of here does not automatically mean that it "costs" us a job here. Jobs aren't a resource that is mined from the Earth, jobs are created by the economy. If that overseas person does well enough, it may "create" two jobs here.
It's not even right to speak of jobs being "created"; a more appropriate verb might be funded. There's a "job" that involves you being my personal punchmonkey, but there's no way we're going to come to mutually beneficial agreement about that "job", so it isn't funded.
But the flip side holds; the net impact could be more than one job "destroyed". It's not zero-sum.
The whole thing is very complicated, because even if off-shoring a developer creates/funds five jobs over here, it may be the case that none of them are development work. Or one off-shored developer may well create three more development jobs, but not in Silicon Valley. (No, you don't get to say all three of those jobs are cleaning up after the off-shore guy; if off-shoring is a net negative value, the economy will eventually cut off the off-shoring, even if that means driving a particularly stubborn company that refuses to see it as a negative value bankrupt.)
But one thing it's not is "zero-sum".
(Even if you don't "like" capitalism, it's vital to come to understand what capital is and why capital produces more capital. Communism, and to a lesser extent socialism, can be seen as starting with the assumption the economy is a zero-sum game, and they end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on that front as in their zeal to make sure capital/wealth is evenly distributed, they destroy the mechanisms of capital/wealth creation. Actually, they end up with a negative-sum game. I'm not defending any particular instantiation of capitalism at this time, I'm just saying you damn well need to understand why it does what it does if you want to understand how economies work.)
Well, duh. People who cash out at the first opportunity don't try again, so of course they don't replicate their success. You have to play again to win again!
Quoting the guy who invented relativity to defend your ignorance of it takes some balls.
Given that physics has thoroughly destroyed the idea of "simultaneous", I'd say it's incumbent on you to produce a workable, unambiguous definition of "simultaneous" if you want to act like a prick about it. I think you'll find that it's very easy, until you actually learn about relativity and think about it.
Ah, thank you for the name. It's difficult to find the name of something based on its description. I tried before posting but just got a lot of stuff about how to use foreign keys.
Recursive queries would totally, completely solve the "hierarchy" part of the problem, and halfway decent database design would handle the rest.
My theory is that nobody realizes that recursive queries would solve their problems, so nobody asks for them, so nobody ever discovers them, so nobody ever realizes that recursive queries would solve their problem. I don't know of an open source DB that has this, and I'd certainly never seen this in my many years of working with SQL. I wish we did have it, it would solve so many of my problems.
Now, if we could just deal with the problem of having a key that could relate to any one of several tables in some reasonable way... that's the other problem I keep hitting over and over again.
You can't send any information "along" a quantum entanglement. How do you propose to send a timing signal along a channel that can carry no information? How do you propose to define "instantaneous" when you can't even provide a timing signal that matches your definition?
OK, in the context we're talking about, there's no such thing as "instantaneous". Unless you're some kind of living galaxy that has response times measured in trillions of years.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that that describes nobody reading this.
What else are we looking at and taking images of that is actually nothing like it is in real time.
Uh, how about, everything? Absolutely, positively, everything?
Even on Planet Earth light speed delays can be noticible (it is the bulk of a ping time that goes any significant distance, a highly impressive achievement), but once you leave Earth, everything has a significant light speed delay. The moon is just over a light-second away and the sun roughly eight and a half light minutes. (The exact distance varies over the course of the year.)
Slashdot Mirror
We've had this capability for a while. And I don't even mean "I've seen it in other games"... I really mean that we could have been doing this for a while.
The problem is that even as consoles improve by a factor of 10, game designers/programmers/whoever decides the features try to improve the graphics by a factor of 11. Witness the PS3 games that have framerate troubles... forget console fanboyism, forget everything like that, that is nothing more and nothing less than bad judgment by the game developer and biting off more than they could chew.
Forget about the extra power to display corpses... despite our gaming rigs having more power than I would ever have dreamed of in my childhood, we still have games that can't keep up 30fps. I'd rather see more attention payed to that than corpse retention.
Yes. Expect the same people complaining about rows of houses that are too similar to whip right around to complaining about rows of houses that are too radically different at dizzying speeds.
(Because the real underlying complaint is "Not everybody has the same tastes as me, and the same high prioritization of 'taste' as me".... that will always find a way to manifest in some complaint.)
You wouldn't be forced to use that color scheme. If the displays don't look at least as good as current LCD they're not going to sell.
It's just that if you're "in the know" and understand what's going on, you could choose a light-on-black display to save power. And with the improved contrast ratio, that might not be so bad.
I'm wondering how small they'll eventually be able to get these. I wonder if they'll ever get to the point where they can fit one of these in a laptop. SEDs should only consume power proportional to the brightness of the display, so I could see light lettering on a dark background coming back; display less stuff, use less power.
Add an SED to a laptop with solid-state storage (which, by the time this is feasible, will be at least where laptop hard drives are today), and the continuing work on processors that can shut themselves down nicely, and we may get some truly efficient laptops out of the deal, that only use power when actually doing something. Imagine instead of "suspending", just setting a "blank the screen" screensaver, and ending up with about the same power usage as a suspended laptop of today, only your torrent is still going...
A man can dream.
For better or for worse, shipping the user a browser that defaults to trusting nobody isn't going to happen anytime soon.
If you did ship a normal end-user a browser that trusted nobody, it would be equivalent to shipping one that trusted everybody, as they'd learn to "just click 'yes'", so while it's theoretically superior, it isn't practically. You can try this; you're free to remove all that automated trust.
Although you could make a case that no automated trust is better than inaccurate automated trust.
I guess the take-away lesson here is that when you add "uneducated and uneducatable users" into the mix, security gets really, really, really, really hard. (Note that I'm not claiming all users are uneducatable, but the number is non-zero and I'd personally guess around 15%, which is significant.) Unfortunately, "something" must be done, and by golly, "something" will be done.
You need to be a bit more careful. DST incontrovertibly "saves" energy, vs. non-DST. It's statistical. You can look it up. The energy savings are in fact quite significant.
What I find stupid, and what you may want to glom onto as the reason to find DST stupid, is that the root problem is the idea that we should get up at 7am, regardless of 7am's relationship to the sun itself. I also find it stupid that everybody has to get off of work at the exact same minute. If we were more flexible (for real, not just lip service to "flex time"), the need for DST would just melt away as people naturally migrated towards more realistic schedules.
To the best of my knowledge (and I'd be fine with being proven wrong), there is no good way to blame the government for our need to be told by our clocks that we should get up at different times. Except for the government setting worktimes for its own employees (which it has the right to do, more or less), our societal obsession with all working the same schedule, dictated to us unnaturally by our clocks, is the root problem and has just naturally evolved.
Presumably there are some benefits too or we'd have migrated away from this by now, although it is conceivable that there are off-setting benefits to this setup that outweigh the staggering societal energy costs, and lost man-hours spent in needlessly-bad traffic jams. (There'll always be traffic jams, but they wouldn't be as bad if we staggered our times better. Well, we'd probably just compensate by building fewer roads, but for a few years it'd be nice...) Or it's simply a holdover from factory days that we still haven't flushed out of our collective systems. (Kinda like our school system, although that's a whole new flamewar.)
If you boil your claim down, you're basically claiming that we can reduce the resolution without throwing out information, which is, along with being "not true", also nonsense.
Determining the exact cutoff would depend on your definitions of various terms, but certainly, shrinking a 128x128 original to 8x8 vs. shrinking a 64x64 original to 8x8 will have no effective difference; depending on your algorithm it may actually come out exactly the same. It is true you need "good pixels", and DVDs upsample so well because they have "good pixels" (vs. the pirated, shrunken MPEG4 movies that have just barely-good-enough pixels at their native resolutions and suck horribly when upsampled), but both an HD-DVD movie shrunk to postage-stamp video and a DVD movie shrunk to postage-stamp video are going to look the same: postage stamp video.
Downsampling == losing information; in fact, that's basically the definition of downsampling if you're careful enough with your terminology. It doesn't matter if you're shrinking a 25GB source to 600MB or a 5GB source to 600MB; you can still only "squeeze" 600MB of information into that 600MB. You gotta pay the piper.
Well, personally, I'm pretty happy with straight DVDs upsampled to 1650x1050 (my laptop screen), so I don't really disagree. But there definitely is a quality difference; the one HD video I've ever watched (not "HD-DVD" per se, just a high-resolution video file) was definitely an improvement over up-sampled DVDs. It's just... I don't really care that much.
(The interlacing is annoying, especially in cartoons like Futurama. Going to "p" from "i" would be enough to make me happy.)
Oh, and finally, there's a world of difference between "squeezing" a high-def movie onto a DVD, with visible quality degradation, and fitting one onto one of the new high-capacity disks, which at a decent quality still doesn't leave much room left over on the disk. Squeezing a DVD onto a CD is a cute parlor trick, and certainly works far, far better than it has any right to, but if you can't see the quality degradation you either lack the equipment or lack the discrimination. (I don't consider the latter to be a problem; in fact I tend to encourage people not to try to attain that sort of discrimination since it pretty much only leads to pain. Nevertheless, the differences are there.) And like I said, it's not going to be as big a win this time around; nothing will stop you from trying to squeeze a full HD moving onto a DVD5 or DVD9, because the codecs will pretty much let you use any bitrate you want, but it's not going to be without cost this time, and I expect most such movies will end up with their resolutions cut down in practice.
Some people, as I post this, have sort of strongly hinted at this, but nobody else has directly asked this yet.
What are you already using to patch your 7000+ servers? By the time you reach 7000+, this should have been a problem long solved. Hell, I'd expect it to be solved by the 100+ point.
What's so special about this DST patch that your current process can't handle it?
Because if the answer is "we have no process", you've long since lost, and good odds your systems are already seething piles of unpatched, compromised machines.
If you do have a process but it's inadequate, and Slashdot might actually be able to help you, you'll need to be a little more clear on exactly what the problem is, if it isn't "we have no process".
(What is it with people lobbing questions onto Ask Slashdot and almost, but not quite, never following up? Is the lead on Ask Slashdot so long that people die before it gets posted, or just give up? Obviously I ask this before I can tell whether "thesandbender" is one of the rare exceptions... as of this writing, no, unless (s)he's been modded into oblivion.)
Excuse me, did you just complain about movie bloat?
If this is some sort of troll, you need to make it less plausible. This is Slashdot.
If this is serious, you need to be slapped around a bit.
Either way, I got a belly laugh out of it, so thanks.
Eh, it'll get leaked sooner or later.
(On a slightly less "+1, Funny" note, that'd put their ethics to a real test...)
All you've got is the lone statistics course fighting even the other professors at a University, who apparently apply the statistical significance tests by rote, but don't really "believe" in them (or understand them to any degree). It's not hard to guess which will "win".
The reason is, you missed a step. Wealth is also represented in the configuration of materials, and to a somewhat lesser degree, labor and rights. The laptop that I am typing this on cost me ~$1200, but the actual cost of the fundamental atoms of its makeup are a few dollars at best. But this laptop also represents wealth beyond the wildest dreams of a 10th century monarch, as it doesn't matter how much of their wealth they would attempt to spend, they could not have this laptop. Let alone the internet it is hooked to, and all the ambient wealth the internet represents.
Barring victory by the terrorists or some other major disaster, wealth can be continued to expect to rise for a very long time even without the influx of new sources of energy, labor, or raw materials, as we continue to build ever more sophisticated expressions of wealth with the stuff we already do have.
I recognize that the claimed theory behind those things is not based on zero-sum economics, but it is still a significant underlying theme, especially in the things that people actually believe, not just theoretically. Especially if you're still a communist at this late date (not "you" personally, "you" in general) at this late date. The true theoretical backings of communism have been utterly destroyed in practice, so what people actually believe is probably coming from something else. ("Something else" that is, as it happens, equally destroyed by history, but with much more emotional appeal.)
Me too.
Don't assume that I'm pouring either my full understanding of economics or a complete economics textbook into a Slashdot comment, as neither would fit in one. (I doubt I've got a perfect understanding of economics, what with nobody else having one either, but a full discussion of my various approximations, rules of thumb, and misconceptions wouldn't fit into a Slashdot comment box even were I inclined to type it, and certainly any economics textbook that fit in here wouldn't be worth the cash you drop on it.) I was just attacking the zero-sum fallacy.
Wealth is not a conserved quantity, and the economy is not a closed system. Two fundamental requirements for thermodynamics to work.
The combination of "buying the minimum RAM on the side of the box" and "loading the machine with all the software to make it do something" like virus scanning, lab security/rebuilding software, and almost as an incidental afterthought, applications that chew through RAM like there is no tomorrow (like Office apps), is untenable. You can buy a cheap machine with minimal RAM, but that cheap machine with minimal hardware will have minimal capabilities. You can't really expect to buy the cheapest possible machine and then put it into a rather harsh environment (labs like that are really about as demanding and harsh as it gets) and expect it to do well.
Sure, Windows may suck, but your real problem I'd bet quite a bit that based on your CPU spec, and based on how those machines were sold at that time, those poor machines had 256MB at most, and there's good odds it was 128MB, and they really needed 512MB minimum. (Actually, at 10 minutes to get to login, 128MB is probably a good guess.)
(Vista's long delay has actually moved us to a world where even basic machines have 512MB, which is pretty good for the XP generation, but I'm sure as Vista comes rolling in it'll cease to be enough, and it'll be a bit yet before the basic machine ships with 1GB, assuming even that is enough.)
The idea that the economy is a zero-sum affair is so abundantly contradicted by readily available evidence that I find it almost amusing that it holds such sway over people.
No, a job created elsewhere instead of here does not automatically mean that it "costs" us a job here. Jobs aren't a resource that is mined from the Earth, jobs are created by the economy. If that overseas person does well enough, it may "create" two jobs here.
It's not even right to speak of jobs being "created"; a more appropriate verb might be funded. There's a "job" that involves you being my personal punchmonkey, but there's no way we're going to come to mutually beneficial agreement about that "job", so it isn't funded.
But the flip side holds; the net impact could be more than one job "destroyed". It's not zero-sum.
The whole thing is very complicated, because even if off-shoring a developer creates/funds five jobs over here, it may be the case that none of them are development work. Or one off-shored developer may well create three more development jobs, but not in Silicon Valley. (No, you don't get to say all three of those jobs are cleaning up after the off-shore guy; if off-shoring is a net negative value, the economy will eventually cut off the off-shoring, even if that means driving a particularly stubborn company that refuses to see it as a negative value bankrupt.)
But one thing it's not is "zero-sum".
(Even if you don't "like" capitalism, it's vital to come to understand what capital is and why capital produces more capital. Communism, and to a lesser extent socialism, can be seen as starting with the assumption the economy is a zero-sum game, and they end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy on that front as in their zeal to make sure capital/wealth is evenly distributed, they destroy the mechanisms of capital/wealth creation. Actually, they end up with a negative-sum game. I'm not defending any particular instantiation of capitalism at this time, I'm just saying you damn well need to understand why it does what it does if you want to understand how economies work.)
Well, duh. People who cash out at the first opportunity don't try again, so of course they don't replicate their success. You have to play again to win again!
Quoting the guy who invented relativity to defend your ignorance of it takes some balls.
Given that physics has thoroughly destroyed the idea of "simultaneous", I'd say it's incumbent on you to produce a workable, unambiguous definition of "simultaneous" if you want to act like a prick about it. I think you'll find that it's very easy, until you actually learn about relativity and think about it.
Go learn about relativity.
Recursive queries would totally, completely solve the "hierarchy" part of the problem, and halfway decent database design would handle the rest.
My theory is that nobody realizes that recursive queries would solve their problems, so nobody asks for them, so nobody ever discovers them, so nobody ever realizes that recursive queries would solve their problem. I don't know of an open source DB that has this, and I'd certainly never seen this in my many years of working with SQL. I wish we did have it, it would solve so many of my problems.
Now, if we could just deal with the problem of having a key that could relate to any one of several tables in some reasonable way... that's the other problem I keep hitting over and over again.
How about [random physics word]?
You can't send any information "along" a quantum entanglement. How do you propose to send a timing signal along a channel that can carry no information? How do you propose to define "instantaneous" when you can't even provide a timing signal that matches your definition?
*thbbtttpt*
OK, in the context we're talking about, there's no such thing as "instantaneous". Unless you're some kind of living galaxy that has response times measured in trillions of years.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that that describes nobody reading this.
Again I say *thbbtttpt*. (That's a raspberry.)
Even on Planet Earth light speed delays can be noticible (it is the bulk of a ping time that goes any significant distance, a highly impressive achievement), but once you leave Earth, everything has a significant light speed delay. The moon is just over a light-second away and the sun roughly eight and a half light minutes. (The exact distance varies over the course of the year.)