Daher fordern wir, das nichtkommerzielle Kopieren, ZugÃnglichmachen, Speichern und Nutzen von Werken nicht nur zu legalisieren, sondern explizit zu fÃrdern, um die allgemeine Verfügbarkeit von Information, Wissen und Kultur zu verbessern, denn dies stellt eine essentielle Grundvoraussetzung für die soziale, technische und wirtschaftliche Weiterentwicklung unserer Gesellschaft dar.
Or in English (unofficial translation):
Therefore we demand that non-commercial copying, sharing, storing and use of works not only be legalized, but explicitly promoted to improve the overall availability of information, knowledge and culture, because this is a crucial prerequisite for the social, technical and economic development of our society.
I think there's a few copyright holders who would choke on that one. Also they want to built open, anonymous wifi networks and absolve the ISPs of all liability = free file sharing in practice. They have a very broad political program compared to the Swedish party, but they are no less radical when it comes to copyright. I do hope hey pass the 5% barrier in the national election in 2013, then it could get real fun (they had 2% in 2009 - more than 3x what the Swedish PP managed in their national election...)
When has the US ever cared about European political systems? Here in Europe parties come and go, merge and split all the time while the US has ignored it for well over 100 years. If I was a bookmaker I'd give lower odds on a muslim ladyboy becoming President than a third party getting any power. The whole system is rigged that way and both parties love it because they can never "lose", the voters will pass the ball between them but they always return in a few years.
Adding to what you said, while most classified material has a date at which point it is reviewed for declassification, there are some classifications, such as what the US uses for nuclear secrets that have no date built in to declassify on.
From what I gather some documents are automatically declassified, the rest are regularly reviewed to see if they should be kept classified or not. I don't think anything is permanently classified and will never be reviewed again.
You're not quite getting what empathy is. You're not expressing empathy unless this photographer was himself thinking "I'm a self-serving prick who is now seeking...." Empathy is imagining what someone else is feeling, sympathy is remembering having felt what someone else is feeling.
I don't think that's quite right, you can feel sympathy for someone else's situation without having been in it yourself. But you're right, it's not empathy if I see someone else acting like a prick unless that person himself realizes he's acting like a prick. It's more like I've tried empathy and I've tried seeing it from your side, but I've made a moral judgement that you're wrong and I'm right. Then I suppose you could argue the basis of that judgement....
That's the potential damage the whole swarm did. But it's like saying that you should not only pay your own speeding fine, you should pay the ones of the drivers behind you and indeed you contribute to a culture of speeding so you should pay part of the fine for everyone. How much did each peer contribute? Well one download equals one upload and each peer is only interested in downloading once, so the average is one upload. Even if we presume that each download is a lost sale and that the retail price is pure profit - both very generous assumptions - the direct damage is $1. The fact that millions of people do it and that millions * $1 is actually a serious bit of money doesn't justify dropping that on one person. I'm sure you can see the absurdity if they caught everyone in the swarm, it's be billions that is absurdly beyond their total profits.
Of course there's a few other factors here. One is that they're not happy to recover just actual damages, it's like being caught and just having to deliver the item back. But there's been a long standing history to award triple damages, no more. That is why the previous judge found $2250, triple the statutory minimum rather than $750. It's actually proof statutory damages are supposed to be a replacement for actual damages, not punitative damages. But then again there already is a clause for the "innocent infringer" which brings the statutory damages down to $200, intent should already be covered in a $750 minimum.
However it's typical that the penalties tend to get disproportional when the amount is very small - steal a $1 stick of gum and your fine will be much higher than the value, it won't increase to 10x if you steal for $10. Now copyright infringement is not theft but I think the analogy is sane, if you had to take someone to court and at most you could get was $5 then it wouldn't make sense, you could die the death of a thousand stings but each sting would be too small to pursue. Of course if you're caught with a bag of ten $1 items from ten different manufacturers you won't be charged with ten counts of theft, but on P2P networks you are charged with ten counts of copyright infringement.
I guess arguing about what it "should be" doesn't really make sense. Big business controls Congress and Congress controls the law. And the lawyers have the juries convinced these people are some kind of economic terrorists of something, destroying the economy. Whatever, let the US ruin the lives of more people - it already does that with drug convictions as far as I've gathered, it'll only sink yourself eventually. Or as the economy goes now, sooner rather than later...
There's some good points here, but the current productivity apps are almost all written for x86. It'll take a huge effort from Microsoft to convince all of them to make an ARM version for applications that 99% would like to use at a "real" desktop with monitor and keyboard. And it'll take even longer before the people who've already bought and paid for their software to buy those versions. I think you'll still have an ARM tablet and a x86 cpu for running desktop software for a looong time to come.
I think most people would be happy with those living a bit separate worlds because the touch interface is so completely different than the keyboard + mouse interface. Of course some of those will exist in both worlds, but I don't see myself using a touch interface on a laptop/desktop nor a PC interface on a tablet - the latter is what Microsoft tried years ago and it was a total disaster. That there's an Office for tables and an Office for desktops that read the same files, share icons and such yes but not the UI as such. I think most people would be happy enough with a good synch, I'm not sure that what Microsoft is trying to do here will add value.
Then again, this is one of those areas where I really feel that I - and pretty much everyone here on slashdot - is not very representative of the market. I'm not sure what the "average user" wants or needs. I don't have a tablet and I got no particular interest in getting me one, I have a smart phone which is handy because it's pocket size but honestly prefer my nettop which is about the same size over the tablets. The sales figures aren't lying though, someone's buying them....
Been there, tried that for 3.5 years after seeing Vista was the future of Windows. Win7 brought me back, if Metro is something I abhor then I got no problem making 7 the new XP and keeping it for many years to come. Besides, you typically get one generation of "classic" mode so I'd say at worst it becomes hopeless when Win8 support ends around 2020 or so. And there's Mac, but I figure they're heading down the same path Microsoft is, in fact a bit further up the road. Mostly I'm anxious to see what happens to Qt and KDE, because if Gnome 3 and Unity is any sign of what's to come then I'd rather become a grumpy old fart talking about how everything was better before.
Bittorrent doesn't stream. My connection is fast enough to stream Netflix, but not fast enough that I can decide what I want to watch, torrent it, and then watch it.
Actually uTorrent 3 does stream, assuming of course you have a fast enough swarm. I tried it and it works, not that the waiting has been a big issue for me as I've usually had a backlog to watch.
Empathy and sympathy does tend to get mixed up a bit. I can understand that it's embarrassing and humiliating to be exposed as a fraud, that is empathy. But I don't have any sympathy for him, because he dug that hole for himself. After all those lies he has very little credibility when he claims to regret it, that's not me starting out as a cynic but a direct result of his actions. Besides there's nothing inherent to empathy that means I should believe in the good of all people, only that I am able to put myself in their shoes. And putting myself in his shoes I see a self-serving prick who is now seeking sympathy from the gullible. Perhaps in time he will be able to prove that he truly wants to make amends, but it'll take more than getting caught with the hand in the cookie jar and saying "I'm sorry" to do it. At least with me.
To get from where we were 30 years ago to where we are now took thousands and thousands of innovations, damn near all of them patented. So yes, undeniably patents encourage innovation.
Where exactly is this "undeniable" causality? Wouldn't anybody be interested in selling me a better phone without patents? How many innovations were blocked by patents? If I invent something I probably would take out a patent, because the system makes those very valuable both to defend with, cross-license and sell. But it is much like paying protection money to the Mafia, it doesn't mean a corrupt system is good only that you make the best of it.
There's no causality between "Most businesses pay protection money" and "Businesses that pay protection money do better than those who don't" that lead to "A system of protection money encourages commerce". To make it perfectly clear: "Most businesses [patents innovations]" and "Businesses that [patent innovations] do better than those who don't" doesn't lead to "A system of [patenting innovations] encourages commerce"
I've noticed that too. That and the tendency of comments to veer off into discussions unrelated to the article, only to degenerate into exchanges of insults./. was reported in a story a week ago as being among the dying websites. It's easy to see why.
Maybe because you've provided two of the most clueless comments on this article, taking it very much off track with a zany conspiracy theory? You're not exactly pulling the average up, you know. But I guess that counts like an insult.
The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer. Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.
It's very rarely you need a programming language to do just one thing, maybe they go into specialty or research projects but anything commonly used has to be a swiss army knife. Most of the time you want to ask "Can I add another tool to this knife?" not design an entirely new dedicated knife for that purpose. There's a place to mix products for a "best of breed" solution, but languages are not it. Your narrow choice of language is likely to fail as the project expands and it really needs other sets of functionality.
If you want to see a prime example of that, look at VBA projects that have run out of hand. Quite probably it wasn't such a bad choice for the original task, just tack on this little bit to Excel and it works. Then it grows and grows and all those limitations get very limiting and you're forced to rewrite everything. That's what happens with other narrow languages too, if you go beyond that scope it's very good at things falls apart. Not to mention all the indirect effects like the available employee pool and the complex skills required to take over.
That is why there's a very significant drop-off in languages. I'm not saying you should try making a square peg fit a round hole, but very often the languages you, the team and the company knows and is familiar with beats trying to get everyone up to speed on a new language. But that goes for everything, should you work within the system to improve it or outside the system to overthrow it. I guess it all depends on how broken the old system is but people have a tendency to idealize the system on the drawing board.
even if his mum did it, it wouldnt be to waste on extremely overpriced mass manufactured SHIT that the companies are putting into market to suck people off of their money.
You seem to have a serious "everything has been done before... and better" bug up your ass given your posting history, which is fine. If you don't like anything made in the last decade don't buy it and don't pirate it. But you'd do well to lose the "I don't like it and that means it's SHIT and you don't like SHIT do you?" attitude, it's just as obnoxious when it's artsy types saying all mainstream music and film sucks, gourmet chefs bashing fast food even though people obviously like the taste or grumpy old gamers who thinks everything with better than VGA graphics must suck.
Probably because she has no baseline to compare against, I mean it's not like a constant weak allergic reaction is directly harmful but more like your body is stressed all the time. You just do what's possible and stay away from things you're strongly allergic to, you have to eat something and you have to balance it against other issues like getting all your vitamins and other dietary needs.
The thing is that even if we could do the whole calculation using reversible computing, then what? If we start over on a new and completely different calculation we can't use any of the previous intermediaries and if we clear them - either before or during the next calculation - then we've just spent as much energy as doing it the non-reversible way. Reusing past calculations or lookup tables that are really cached results is something we do in many algorithms today, so each calculation is likely to be necessary and then I don't see how reversible computing is going to do anything but fill the computer with useless intermediaries. We just delay the energy use until we somehow dispose of or reset them.
10 years? Naw I give it five max. Once APUs can play games at 1080p with all the eye candy almost no one will buy a separate GPU. They day that they can driver two 1080p displays at that level it will be all over.
1. Heat. If you have a hot CPU and a hot GPU, having both together is not such a good idea. 2. Upgrades. No more swapping graphics cards without swapping CPU (and if you're unlucky then mobo, memory etc. too) 3. If you look at the benchmarks for your favorite game, a discrete nVidia may be a better choice.
Don't get me wrong, for laptops, nettops and SoC chips this makes perfect sense but for a powerful desktop a discrete graphics card makes just as much sense. I don't think the discrete GPU is going away any time soon.
AFAIK those gels are essentially calorie bombs because top athletes can burn close to 10000 kcal a day. Nice if you already have all your dietary needs covered and just need more energy, but pointless for astronauts - and everybody else, really. For average people it's about as healthy as supersize meals.
while space food was precooked such that refrigeration is not required and is ready to eat or could be prepared simply by adding water or by heating.
We use some variation on this when we go mountain hiking, it's basically a dried meal just add boiling water. Carry a light alcohol burner and you can get a good hot meal for almost no weight. There's also full ration kits that include energy bars and lots of other portable foods, like 3800 kcal in 1 kg weight. There's not really much new to be gained there, except you probably get food better suited for space and less suited for earth. And oh yeah, it's all relative - it's an okay meal but it's not how you'd do it at home, this process naturally has its limitations.
How many times per second do you want to buy and sell that SUV?
Well, that would be more a one-off thing. But I want it done fast, like if the news take a week to spread around I want it done in days. If it takes a day I want it done in hours. If it takes an hour I want it done in minutes. And theoretically, if there was such a market for cars and the news take 70 ms I'd like it sold in 60 ms.
P.S. What's the point in a metamoderation system when everybody's using overrated as their "-1, I disagree" mod?
If I learn that the government is going to pass a huge extra car tax on SUVs, is it then wrong of me to try selling my SUV right away before people become aware of it and the market price adjusts itself? That's the essence here, when there's reason to sell I want to be first out the door. When there's reason to buy I want to be first in the door. There's not really many other ways it could happen whenever the company posts a press release or earning figures or anything else that will affect the stock price.
The only other alternative would be if the market operated on some kind of pulse, but it'd be a long legal battle to tell people they can't sell what they own exactly when they want. Not to mention all sorts of funny jurisdiction issues as they move to electronic stock exchanges in non-cooperating countries and such. Until then, being fastest matters.
Also, if tax breaks dont do anything, any thoughts / commentary on the Regan years? I would be sincerely to hear your explanation for what happened after Reagan implemented his tax cuts.
The difference lies in the confidence of the market, back then they still wanted to invest. Right now it's like giving a ship that's battened down the hatches new sails, they'll stuff them away and when you ask why they're not setting sail they'll look at you like you're crazy and point out the gloomy outlook. So they'll keep the savings and consolidate, they might buy out some others to be ready to leap when the market recovers but they won't expand now. Of course this is all a bit of a Catch 22 since the market won't recover until someone invests, but right now it's not working and it's killing the public sector and building a huge budget deficit which is something Europe is collapsing under right now. In other words most of the warning sirens and red lights are going off in the heads of the investors. Right now investors are taking in the full cost and maybe then some to repay government spending and then it turns out the looming debt pretty much negates the positive effects of the spending. The whole system has become a bit disrobed to show the government only redistributes wealth, it doesn't create it. Tax breaks one place has to be compensated some other place and they can't push any more debt on the next generation.
I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.
Well there's two things: 1) Some things just aren't observable from earth, certain parts of the spectrum don't reach us. 2) Atmospheric distortion, like you see the air shimmer in the desert on a very warm day.
The first one is still real. The second one we now have huge computers that compensate for it, it's by no means easy yet still easier than blasting massive yet incredibly precise and fragile telescopes into space. And we still place our observatories high in the mountains to avoid as much as possible. Or the tl;dr version: We have use for both.
And all that would be at most 3x54Mbit = 162 Mbit if you're streaming three BluRays. Currently I'm on a 60/60 Mbit/s connection (as in real, I've had 6+ MB/s actual transfer speeds) and honestly it's just ridiculously fast. I'd certainly take higher if they were reasonably priced for bragging rights (they offer up to 800 Mbit/s now, but for absurd prices) but it's not really many places I'd need it. Sure, that 20GB download from steam could be a little faster but really... it's fast. By the time I've watched one episode, the whole season has finished downloading. With uTorrent's play during download instant satisfaction is already here. In short, I need some new applications that require that sort of bandwidth.
Actually he measured the rendering just fine. But what nVidia told him is that they're doing some timing magic before they display it in SLI setups, which is currently not possible to measure with FRAPS or any of the other standard FPS tools. So right now you would need to get a high-speed camera to snap pictures of the screen to know what the user sees. But regardless of that they can't get rid of all the stuttering that easily, the slowest frame still takes much longer to render than the average. Also this means the latency is actually at times higher than the 1/FPS rate should suggest. Very interesting stuff, even though these numbers are suspect. Another good reason to just get a single card solution, which are getting awfully fast anyway.
This actually reminds me of the intro to a book I read on investments. Basically, everyone is given one dollar and a coin, then you flip the coin and if you get heads you double up if you get tails you lose. Twenty throws later one in a million is a millionaire and they will think their coin-flipping technique is absolutely fantastic, maybe write books about it and things like that.Do like me and you'll be a millionaire, even though that's obviously complete nonsense.
It was a way of expressing that even the completely clueless can win on pure chance, but that it'd make no sense trying to "learn" from them. OTOH if there were many millionaires, coming from the same area or following the same technique then it would make sense to look at those and see what they are doing because it's not just chance, something they do actually improve their odds. Because there's a lot of people there around people like Gates and Jobs that just rode the rocket.
Slashdot Mirror
They say a lot of things, but under Politics -> Copyright you find statements like:
Daher fordern wir, das nichtkommerzielle Kopieren, ZugÃnglichmachen, Speichern und Nutzen von Werken nicht nur zu legalisieren, sondern explizit zu fÃrdern, um die allgemeine Verfügbarkeit von Information, Wissen und Kultur zu verbessern, denn dies stellt eine essentielle Grundvoraussetzung für die soziale, technische und wirtschaftliche Weiterentwicklung unserer Gesellschaft dar.
Or in English (unofficial translation):
Therefore we demand that non-commercial copying, sharing, storing and use of works not only be legalized, but explicitly promoted to improve the overall availability of information, knowledge and culture, because this is a crucial prerequisite for the social, technical and economic development of our society.
I think there's a few copyright holders who would choke on that one. Also they want to built open, anonymous wifi networks and absolve the ISPs of all liability = free file sharing in practice. They have a very broad political program compared to the Swedish party, but they are no less radical when it comes to copyright. I do hope hey pass the 5% barrier in the national election in 2013, then it could get real fun (they had 2% in 2009 - more than 3x what the Swedish PP managed in their national election...)
When has the US ever cared about European political systems? Here in Europe parties come and go, merge and split all the time while the US has ignored it for well over 100 years. If I was a bookmaker I'd give lower odds on a muslim ladyboy becoming President than a third party getting any power. The whole system is rigged that way and both parties love it because they can never "lose", the voters will pass the ball between them but they always return in a few years.
Adding to what you said, while most classified material has a date at which point it is reviewed for declassification, there are some classifications, such as what the US uses for nuclear secrets that have no date built in to declassify on.
From what I gather some documents are automatically declassified, the rest are regularly reviewed to see if they should be kept classified or not. I don't think anything is permanently classified and will never be reviewed again.
You're not quite getting what empathy is. You're not expressing empathy unless this photographer was himself thinking "I'm a self-serving prick who is now seeking...." Empathy is imagining what someone else is feeling, sympathy is remembering having felt what someone else is feeling.
I don't think that's quite right, you can feel sympathy for someone else's situation without having been in it yourself. But you're right, it's not empathy if I see someone else acting like a prick unless that person himself realizes he's acting like a prick. It's more like I've tried empathy and I've tried seeing it from your side, but I've made a moral judgement that you're wrong and I'm right. Then I suppose you could argue the basis of that judgement....
That's the potential damage the whole swarm did. But it's like saying that you should not only pay your own speeding fine, you should pay the ones of the drivers behind you and indeed you contribute to a culture of speeding so you should pay part of the fine for everyone. How much did each peer contribute? Well one download equals one upload and each peer is only interested in downloading once, so the average is one upload. Even if we presume that each download is a lost sale and that the retail price is pure profit - both very generous assumptions - the direct damage is $1. The fact that millions of people do it and that millions * $1 is actually a serious bit of money doesn't justify dropping that on one person. I'm sure you can see the absurdity if they caught everyone in the swarm, it's be billions that is absurdly beyond their total profits.
Of course there's a few other factors here. One is that they're not happy to recover just actual damages, it's like being caught and just having to deliver the item back. But there's been a long standing history to award triple damages, no more. That is why the previous judge found $2250, triple the statutory minimum rather than $750. It's actually proof statutory damages are supposed to be a replacement for actual damages, not punitative damages. But then again there already is a clause for the "innocent infringer" which brings the statutory damages down to $200, intent should already be covered in a $750 minimum.
However it's typical that the penalties tend to get disproportional when the amount is very small - steal a $1 stick of gum and your fine will be much higher than the value, it won't increase to 10x if you steal for $10. Now copyright infringement is not theft but I think the analogy is sane, if you had to take someone to court and at most you could get was $5 then it wouldn't make sense, you could die the death of a thousand stings but each sting would be too small to pursue. Of course if you're caught with a bag of ten $1 items from ten different manufacturers you won't be charged with ten counts of theft, but on P2P networks you are charged with ten counts of copyright infringement.
I guess arguing about what it "should be" doesn't really make sense. Big business controls Congress and Congress controls the law. And the lawyers have the juries convinced these people are some kind of economic terrorists of something, destroying the economy. Whatever, let the US ruin the lives of more people - it already does that with drug convictions as far as I've gathered, it'll only sink yourself eventually. Or as the economy goes now, sooner rather than later...
There's some good points here, but the current productivity apps are almost all written for x86. It'll take a huge effort from Microsoft to convince all of them to make an ARM version for applications that 99% would like to use at a "real" desktop with monitor and keyboard. And it'll take even longer before the people who've already bought and paid for their software to buy those versions. I think you'll still have an ARM tablet and a x86 cpu for running desktop software for a looong time to come.
I think most people would be happy with those living a bit separate worlds because the touch interface is so completely different than the keyboard + mouse interface. Of course some of those will exist in both worlds, but I don't see myself using a touch interface on a laptop/desktop nor a PC interface on a tablet - the latter is what Microsoft tried years ago and it was a total disaster. That there's an Office for tables and an Office for desktops that read the same files, share icons and such yes but not the UI as such. I think most people would be happy enough with a good synch, I'm not sure that what Microsoft is trying to do here will add value.
Then again, this is one of those areas where I really feel that I - and pretty much everyone here on slashdot - is not very representative of the market. I'm not sure what the "average user" wants or needs. I don't have a tablet and I got no particular interest in getting me one, I have a smart phone which is handy because it's pocket size but honestly prefer my nettop which is about the same size over the tablets. The sales figures aren't lying though, someone's buying them....
Been there, tried that for 3.5 years after seeing Vista was the future of Windows. Win7 brought me back, if Metro is something I abhor then I got no problem making 7 the new XP and keeping it for many years to come. Besides, you typically get one generation of "classic" mode so I'd say at worst it becomes hopeless when Win8 support ends around 2020 or so. And there's Mac, but I figure they're heading down the same path Microsoft is, in fact a bit further up the road. Mostly I'm anxious to see what happens to Qt and KDE, because if Gnome 3 and Unity is any sign of what's to come then I'd rather become a grumpy old fart talking about how everything was better before.
Bittorrent doesn't stream. My connection is fast enough to stream Netflix, but not fast enough that I can decide what I want to watch, torrent it, and then watch it.
Actually uTorrent 3 does stream, assuming of course you have a fast enough swarm. I tried it and it works, not that the waiting has been a big issue for me as I've usually had a backlog to watch.
Empathy and sympathy does tend to get mixed up a bit. I can understand that it's embarrassing and humiliating to be exposed as a fraud, that is empathy. But I don't have any sympathy for him, because he dug that hole for himself. After all those lies he has very little credibility when he claims to regret it, that's not me starting out as a cynic but a direct result of his actions. Besides there's nothing inherent to empathy that means I should believe in the good of all people, only that I am able to put myself in their shoes. And putting myself in his shoes I see a self-serving prick who is now seeking sympathy from the gullible. Perhaps in time he will be able to prove that he truly wants to make amends, but it'll take more than getting caught with the hand in the cookie jar and saying "I'm sorry" to do it. At least with me.
To get from where we were 30 years ago to where we are now took thousands and thousands of innovations, damn near all of them patented. So yes, undeniably patents encourage innovation.
Where exactly is this "undeniable" causality? Wouldn't anybody be interested in selling me a better phone without patents? How many innovations were blocked by patents? If I invent something I probably would take out a patent, because the system makes those very valuable both to defend with, cross-license and sell. But it is much like paying protection money to the Mafia, it doesn't mean a corrupt system is good only that you make the best of it.
There's no causality between "Most businesses pay protection money" and "Businesses that pay protection money do better than those who don't" that lead to "A system of protection money encourages commerce". To make it perfectly clear: "Most businesses [patents innovations]" and "Businesses that [patent innovations] do better than those who don't" doesn't lead to "A system of [patenting innovations] encourages commerce"
I've noticed that too. That and the tendency of comments to veer off into discussions unrelated to the article, only to degenerate into exchanges of insults. /. was reported in a story a week ago as being among the dying websites. It's easy to see why.
Maybe because you've provided two of the most clueless comments on this article, taking it very much off track with a zany conspiracy theory? You're not exactly pulling the average up, you know. But I guess that counts like an insult.
The problem with the toolbox analogy is that your screwdriver never has to interact with your hammer. Software code on the other hand is notoriously bad at working with code from other languages, sure there's language bindings and and various ways of making them somewhat talk to each other but the cost of mixing languages is huge. It's more like building bits and pieces of the system to work on optical signals and the rest on electrical signals, not like pounding one nail and screwing one screw into a board.
It's very rarely you need a programming language to do just one thing, maybe they go into specialty or research projects but anything commonly used has to be a swiss army knife. Most of the time you want to ask "Can I add another tool to this knife?" not design an entirely new dedicated knife for that purpose. There's a place to mix products for a "best of breed" solution, but languages are not it. Your narrow choice of language is likely to fail as the project expands and it really needs other sets of functionality.
If you want to see a prime example of that, look at VBA projects that have run out of hand. Quite probably it wasn't such a bad choice for the original task, just tack on this little bit to Excel and it works. Then it grows and grows and all those limitations get very limiting and you're forced to rewrite everything. That's what happens with other narrow languages too, if you go beyond that scope it's very good at things falls apart. Not to mention all the indirect effects like the available employee pool and the complex skills required to take over.
That is why there's a very significant drop-off in languages. I'm not saying you should try making a square peg fit a round hole, but very often the languages you, the team and the company knows and is familiar with beats trying to get everyone up to speed on a new language. But that goes for everything, should you work within the system to improve it or outside the system to overthrow it. I guess it all depends on how broken the old system is but people have a tendency to idealize the system on the drawing board.
even if his mum did it, it wouldnt be to waste on extremely overpriced mass manufactured SHIT that the companies are putting into market to suck people off of their money.
You seem to have a serious "everything has been done before... and better" bug up your ass given your posting history, which is fine. If you don't like anything made in the last decade don't buy it and don't pirate it. But you'd do well to lose the "I don't like it and that means it's SHIT and you don't like SHIT do you?" attitude, it's just as obnoxious when it's artsy types saying all mainstream music and film sucks, gourmet chefs bashing fast food even though people obviously like the taste or grumpy old gamers who thinks everything with better than VGA graphics must suck.
Probably because she has no baseline to compare against, I mean it's not like a constant weak allergic reaction is directly harmful but more like your body is stressed all the time. You just do what's possible and stay away from things you're strongly allergic to, you have to eat something and you have to balance it against other issues like getting all your vitamins and other dietary needs.
The thing is that even if we could do the whole calculation using reversible computing, then what? If we start over on a new and completely different calculation we can't use any of the previous intermediaries and if we clear them - either before or during the next calculation - then we've just spent as much energy as doing it the non-reversible way. Reusing past calculations or lookup tables that are really cached results is something we do in many algorithms today, so each calculation is likely to be necessary and then I don't see how reversible computing is going to do anything but fill the computer with useless intermediaries. We just delay the energy use until we somehow dispose of or reset them.
10 years? Naw I give it five max. Once APUs can play games at 1080p with all the eye candy almost no one will buy a separate GPU. They day that they can driver two 1080p displays at that level it will be all over.
1. Heat. If you have a hot CPU and a hot GPU, having both together is not such a good idea.
2. Upgrades. No more swapping graphics cards without swapping CPU (and if you're unlucky then mobo, memory etc. too)
3. If you look at the benchmarks for your favorite game, a discrete nVidia may be a better choice.
Don't get me wrong, for laptops, nettops and SoC chips this makes perfect sense but for a powerful desktop a discrete graphics card makes just as much sense. I don't think the discrete GPU is going away any time soon.
AFAIK those gels are essentially calorie bombs because top athletes can burn close to 10000 kcal a day. Nice if you already have all your dietary needs covered and just need more energy, but pointless for astronauts - and everybody else, really. For average people it's about as healthy as supersize meals.
while space food was precooked such that refrigeration is not required and is ready to eat or could be prepared simply by adding water or by heating.
We use some variation on this when we go mountain hiking, it's basically a dried meal just add boiling water. Carry a light alcohol burner and you can get a good hot meal for almost no weight. There's also full ration kits that include energy bars and lots of other portable foods, like 3800 kcal in 1 kg weight. There's not really much new to be gained there, except you probably get food better suited for space and less suited for earth. And oh yeah, it's all relative - it's an okay meal but it's not how you'd do it at home, this process naturally has its limitations.
How many times per second do you want to buy and sell that SUV?
Well, that would be more a one-off thing. But I want it done fast, like if the news take a week to spread around I want it done in days. If it takes a day I want it done in hours. If it takes an hour I want it done in minutes. And theoretically, if there was such a market for cars and the news take 70 ms I'd like it sold in 60 ms.
P.S. What's the point in a metamoderation system when everybody's using overrated as their "-1, I disagree" mod?
If I learn that the government is going to pass a huge extra car tax on SUVs, is it then wrong of me to try selling my SUV right away before people become aware of it and the market price adjusts itself? That's the essence here, when there's reason to sell I want to be first out the door. When there's reason to buy I want to be first in the door. There's not really many other ways it could happen whenever the company posts a press release or earning figures or anything else that will affect the stock price.
The only other alternative would be if the market operated on some kind of pulse, but it'd be a long legal battle to tell people they can't sell what they own exactly when they want. Not to mention all sorts of funny jurisdiction issues as they move to electronic stock exchanges in non-cooperating countries and such. Until then, being fastest matters.
Also, if tax breaks dont do anything, any thoughts / commentary on the Regan years? I would be sincerely to hear your explanation for what happened after Reagan implemented his tax cuts.
The difference lies in the confidence of the market, back then they still wanted to invest. Right now it's like giving a ship that's battened down the hatches new sails, they'll stuff them away and when you ask why they're not setting sail they'll look at you like you're crazy and point out the gloomy outlook. So they'll keep the savings and consolidate, they might buy out some others to be ready to leap when the market recovers but they won't expand now. Of course this is all a bit of a Catch 22 since the market won't recover until someone invests, but right now it's not working and it's killing the public sector and building a huge budget deficit which is something Europe is collapsing under right now. In other words most of the warning sirens and red lights are going off in the heads of the investors. Right now investors are taking in the full cost and maybe then some to repay government spending and then it turns out the looming debt pretty much negates the positive effects of the spending. The whole system has become a bit disrobed to show the government only redistributes wealth, it doesn't create it. Tax breaks one place has to be compensated some other place and they can't push any more debt on the next generation.
I got the impression from Frank Drake's book that astronomy was 'best done' by satellite radio telescope.
Well there's two things:
1) Some things just aren't observable from earth, certain parts of the spectrum don't reach us.
2) Atmospheric distortion, like you see the air shimmer in the desert on a very warm day.
The first one is still real. The second one we now have huge computers that compensate for it, it's by no means easy yet still easier than blasting massive yet incredibly precise and fragile telescopes into space. And we still place our observatories high in the mountains to avoid as much as possible. Or the tl;dr version: We have use for both.
And all that would be at most 3x54Mbit = 162 Mbit if you're streaming three BluRays. Currently I'm on a 60/60 Mbit/s connection (as in real, I've had 6+ MB/s actual transfer speeds) and honestly it's just ridiculously fast. I'd certainly take higher if they were reasonably priced for bragging rights (they offer up to 800 Mbit/s now, but for absurd prices) but it's not really many places I'd need it. Sure, that 20GB download from steam could be a little faster but really... it's fast. By the time I've watched one episode, the whole season has finished downloading. With uTorrent's play during download instant satisfaction is already here. In short, I need some new applications that require that sort of bandwidth.
Actually he measured the rendering just fine. But what nVidia told him is that they're doing some timing magic before they display it in SLI setups, which is currently not possible to measure with FRAPS or any of the other standard FPS tools. So right now you would need to get a high-speed camera to snap pictures of the screen to know what the user sees. But regardless of that they can't get rid of all the stuttering that easily, the slowest frame still takes much longer to render than the average. Also this means the latency is actually at times higher than the 1/FPS rate should suggest. Very interesting stuff, even though these numbers are suspect. Another good reason to just get a single card solution, which are getting awfully fast anyway.
This actually reminds me of the intro to a book I read on investments. Basically, everyone is given one dollar and a coin, then you flip the coin and if you get heads you double up if you get tails you lose. Twenty throws later one in a million is a millionaire and they will think their coin-flipping technique is absolutely fantastic, maybe write books about it and things like that .Do like me and you'll be a millionaire, even though that's obviously complete nonsense.
It was a way of expressing that even the completely clueless can win on pure chance, but that it'd make no sense trying to "learn" from them. OTOH if there were many millionaires, coming from the same area or following the same technique then it would make sense to look at those and see what they are doing because it's not just chance, something they do actually improve their odds. Because there's a lot of people there around people like Gates and Jobs that just rode the rocket.