From the voting articles: The startling result is, with the exception of optical, older technologies were significantly more accurate than newer technologies.
Not every problem is best solved with a new technology solution. New technology creates the potential for new and unforeseen problems. Sometimes it's better to stick with something that is known to work especially when fundamental rights are involved.
Mach 7.1 is stupid fast. To put this in perspective you need an appropriate analogy. If an ant, which normally moves at less the.5 mph were to travel that fast, it would be travelling at 5000 mph. Hope that clarifies things.
Human beings are capable of incredible self dillusion. Some human beings can convince themselves of just about anything inspite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I think this is where a lot of scientists and the intellectually inclined run into trouble. They believe that more evidence will help them win their arguments but fail to recognize that the other side is not playing by the same rules--that is, logic versus faith.
It's like the story of the watermelon by Mircea Eliade. I don't want to write the whole story but I'll just give the Cliff notes version. There is a farming community where they don't know what watermelons are. The farmers believe they are monsters. When a stranger comes to town, he says it's just a watermelon, eat's a watermelon and is promptly killed by the scared farmers. Then another stranger comes to town, but he teaches the farmers a secret ritual with the watermelons where they partake of the monsters' flesh to gain power over it. Eventually the ritual dies after many generations and the monsters become just watermelons.
You can't go up to a flat-earther, creationist, or conspiracy theorist and say "It's a watermelon!" A more primitive metaphor would be that they essentially want to live in the forest with magic animals and spirits. That is, there can be no compromise for them between belief and science. Belief is paramount and faith requires the rejection of science. The louder you shout "It's a watermelon!" the more they'll cling to their belief. For creationists, the test of faith is the belief the bible is the one true word of God. From their point of view, science threatens that belief.
Logically there is no conflict between religion and science because they occupy different realms. Science will admit that there are things about which it can never know anything. The event horizon (the edge of the unknowable) is where science ends and religion begins. The method when dealing with those who do not want to know the truth is to assuage their fears and to try to teach them in a non-threatening way. It should not be to try to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
The SETI@home system records a 2.5-MHz-wide band centered at the 1,420 MHz hydrogen line. Because this line would be of interest to astronomers of any species who were studying the galaxy, this frequency is one of the most likely locations for deliberate extraterrestrial transmissions.
The SETI project makes an assumption that because Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe it follows that a transmission from another species would necessarily be at that frequency. The other species would choose to transmit on the frequency that is most likely to be listened to. Although this assumption may make sense to us, it does not necessarily follow that it will make sense to another sentient life form on another planet. It is essentially attempting to predict the behavior of a species about which we know nothing other than they are sentient and have developed technology.
We must consider the possibility that another species would choose to broadcast on another frequency. The reasons for choosing another frequency may be cosmologically or mathematically significant. That is, since we do not have a complete theory of the everything (unified theory), we may not yet recognize that there would be a better frequency for broadcasting. One that would be the most obvious choice to a species that had already developed a unified theory. Therefore SETI may be looking at the wrong frequency.
Another siginificant issue is the power required to send the transmission any significant distance in Galactic terms. I won't get into that (because I can't remember the stats of the top of my head) but suffice it to say, that it would require many more times the power generated on earth every day.
Don't take offense but I'm really getting tired this type of article. It is time for you to take a break from writing about corporatism. We all know the deal, okay. How many different ways can you say the same thing? How many different things can you find to support your central argument?
I'm personally challenging you to go one entire month without an article like this. I believe that if you stop constantly writing about it, you may be inspired to do something about it.
You know more about this topic than probably anyone on the planet but all you do is write about it. The question is: will you take the challenge and try to come up with a solution?
I've got 4 Linux manuals and 1 BSD manual that I've printed and stuck in binders. I would also like to get PerlBook in printed format. But at ~1500 pages, I won't print it myself.
BTW, I used to work in publishing. Be forwarned. It sucks as an industry.
I'm not voting until at least Service Pack 3, which would be right around 2006. Everyone knows it takes MS 3 revisions to get a stable product.
If every there was a need for an Open Source project, this is it.
Starting termination mechanisms before the employee is actually informed is just COLD though.
The problem is that you never know how an employee is going to react.
I had a consulting job where I had to go in and undo damage that a fired network manager had done. It wasn't blantant damage so there was no real legal recourse. He just targeted the people he thought were responsible and screwed up their accounts, files and PCs. I also had to do a complete security audit to close up any backdoors he left.
At a full time job I had, I made sure I was out of the office the day they layed off one particular person. A lot of people thought he might go postal. He didn't go postal but it was not a good situation to have other employees planning escape routes.
The truth is there is no real pleasant way to terminate someone. However, it should at least be handled professional manner.
If you really think there are greener pastures elsewhere, then leave. No one is stopping you. Don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. My only advice is that you keep your U.S. citizenship just in case.
The U.S. is a lot like Linux. You can do pretty much anything. That's both good and bad. It's really a question of what you do with it. If you are lazy, you are probably better off with limited options like a MS product. It may not work all that well and have limited functionality but you won't have to think too much about it. If you are motivated, then you can handle the extra work that having more potential brings.
Seems like the researchers spent a lot of time developing a solution when one was already available. The
Party Pig is a small pressurized keg that uses an expanding pouch to force the beer out. The researchers should have just bought one of these kegs and spent the rest of their funding experimenting with filling and emptying the keg.
Even though there may be planets around other stars with the potential to develop life or even simple forms or life, it does not naturally follow that there will be intelligent life on other planets anywhere near us.
For most of earth's history, life was in the form of single-celled organisms. It wasn't until recently (in geological time) that multi-celled life came into existence. Further, humans only developed after a comet slammed into the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Technology is another element that must also be developed in order to communicate beyond one's planet of origin. The probability of all these developments occuring with significant frequency is low. Therefore, the likelihood of finding intelligent life on other planets is very low.
Is there intelligent life somewhere in the Universe? Most likely given the estimated size of the Universe of 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each (10^22 stars).
Is there intelligent life somewhere in the Galaxy? That's a tough one. It is possible but it is not probable that we will find it. Even if intelligent life developed somewhere else in the galaxy, it may not have developed at the same time we did. We've only had the technology to communicate to other planets for 50 years. Further, there is also the issue of huge power requirements to communicate across long distances in space which is yet another obstacle to finding intelligent life.
You must stay on top of the latest languages, software and hardware or, as I have witnessed, you will get stuck working in a room with no windows and poor ventilation with a bunch of H1-Bs programming and servicing out-of-date systems. As my career progressed, I have learned a progression of different systems and languages. This is basically the rough order: Netware, AIX, NT, C++, Linux, Perl, BSD, Java, Solaris. I don't like or dislike particular systems irregardless of the manufacturer, I will work with whatever pays the bills. Do not limit yourself to only working with particular systems and languages otherwise you will reduce you value and put yourself in the low-end labor pool with the H1-Bs.
I was interested in knowing how you were handling the issue of throughput on the backplane, which in the case of a distributed supercomputer is a network conection. Obviously, a distributed supercomputer will give you more bang for the buck in terms of raw processing power than a single supercomputer. But how much of an impact does this use of network connections have on the overall performance?
The overall performance will depend on the type of applications you are running. To that end I also wondering if are you planning on running any standard benchmarks and making the results public? I would be particularly interested in seeing the results from the TPC-C benchmark (http://www.tpc.org). I'm not sure if it will be even possible to run this benchmark on your system since I don't know how it is configured but it would be nice to see how your system compares in terms of enterprise computing solutions.
This quote, although far removed from the subject of corporations, may shed some light on the concept of the individual and the process of becoming an individual.
INDIVIDUATION. The concept of individuation plays a large role in our psychology. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.
Individuation is a natural necessity inasmuch as its prevention by a leveling down to collective standards is injurious to the vital activity of the individual. Since individuality is a prior psychological and physiological datum, it also expresses itself in psychological ways. Any serious check to individuality, therefore, is an artificial stunting. It is obvious a social group consisting of stunted individuals cannot be a healthy and viable institution; only a society that can preserve its internal cohesion and collective values, while at the same time granting the individual the greatest possible freedom, has any prospect of enduring vitality. As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation. --C.G. Jung, Collected Works, Volume 6, 757-758.
Putting aside the rhetoric about "trafficking in stolen goods" and the other legal issues, this issue boils down to control. You perceive it as controlling your music but it is the behavior of your fans that you want to change. Where are you going to draw the line between controlling your music and controlling you fans? Whether or not you ever personally planned to sue individuals, the fact remains that the actions of the RIAA acting on your behalf sent a clear message to your fans that there is a threat of future lawsuits. With Napster there is a company to sue but what happens when the RIAA turns its guns on Gnutella? Who are they going to sue on your behalf if there is no company to sue? Your fans. Who are they going to monitor to find copyright violators? Your fans. I think you must carefully consider the future reprecussions of your actions. You've opened a Pandora's box of problems and I don't think you've realized it yet. In a year, you'll wonder how you did what you thought was right and ended up creating a leviathan that monitors the behavior of your fans.
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Not every problem is best solved with a new technology solution. New technology creates the potential for new and unforeseen problems. Sometimes it's better to stick with something that is known to work especially when fundamental rights are involved.
Mach 7.1 is stupid fast. To put this in perspective you need an appropriate analogy. If an ant, which normally moves at less the .5 mph were to travel that fast, it would be travelling at 5000 mph. Hope that clarifies things.
"Zee whole point of April Fool's is ruined if your joke is so obvious that it doesn't fool anyone. Vhy don't come up with a believable joke!!!"
It's like the story of the watermelon by Mircea Eliade. I don't want to write the whole story but I'll just give the Cliff notes version. There is a farming community where they don't know what watermelons are. The farmers believe they are monsters. When a stranger comes to town, he says it's just a watermelon, eat's a watermelon and is promptly killed by the scared farmers. Then another stranger comes to town, but he teaches the farmers a secret ritual with the watermelons where they partake of the monsters' flesh to gain power over it. Eventually the ritual dies after many generations and the monsters become just watermelons.
You can't go up to a flat-earther, creationist, or conspiracy theorist and say "It's a watermelon!" A more primitive metaphor would be that they essentially want to live in the forest with magic animals and spirits. That is, there can be no compromise for them between belief and science. Belief is paramount and faith requires the rejection of science. The louder you shout "It's a watermelon!" the more they'll cling to their belief. For creationists, the test of faith is the belief the bible is the one true word of God. From their point of view, science threatens that belief.
Logically there is no conflict between religion and science because they occupy different realms. Science will admit that there are things about which it can never know anything. The event horizon (the edge of the unknowable) is where science ends and religion begins. The method when dealing with those who do not want to know the truth is to assuage their fears and to try to teach them in a non-threatening way. It should not be to try to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
The SETI project makes an assumption that because Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe it follows that a transmission from another species would necessarily be at that frequency. The other species would choose to transmit on the frequency that is most likely to be listened to. Although this assumption may make sense to us, it does not necessarily follow that it will make sense to another sentient life form on another planet. It is essentially attempting to predict the behavior of a species about which we know nothing other than they are sentient and have developed technology.
We must consider the possibility that another species would choose to broadcast on another frequency. The reasons for choosing another frequency may be cosmologically or mathematically significant. That is, since we do not have a complete theory of the everything (unified theory), we may not yet recognize that there would be a better frequency for broadcasting. One that would be the most obvious choice to a species that had already developed a unified theory. Therefore SETI may be looking at the wrong frequency.
Another siginificant issue is the power required to send the transmission any significant distance in Galactic terms. I won't get into that (because I can't remember the stats of the top of my head) but suffice it to say, that it would require many more times the power generated on earth every day.
I'm personally challenging you to go one entire month without an article like this. I believe that if you stop constantly writing about it, you may be inspired to do something about it. You know more about this topic than probably anyone on the planet but all you do is write about it. The question is: will you take the challenge and try to come up with a solution?
BTW, I used to work in publishing. Be forwarned. It sucks as an industry.
I'm not voting until at least Service Pack 3, which would be right around 2006. Everyone knows it takes MS 3 revisions to get a stable product. If every there was a need for an Open Source project, this is it.
The problem is that you never know how an employee is going to react.
I had a consulting job where I had to go in and undo damage that a fired network manager had done. It wasn't blantant damage so there was no real legal recourse. He just targeted the people he thought were responsible and screwed up their accounts, files and PCs. I also had to do a complete security audit to close up any backdoors he left.
At a full time job I had, I made sure I was out of the office the day they layed off one particular person. A lot of people thought he might go postal. He didn't go postal but it was not a good situation to have other employees planning escape routes.
The truth is there is no real pleasant way to terminate someone. However, it should at least be handled professional manner.
The U.S. is a lot like Linux. You can do pretty much anything. That's both good and bad. It's really a question of what you do with it. If you are lazy, you are probably better off with limited options like a MS product. It may not work all that well and have limited functionality but you won't have to think too much about it. If you are motivated, then you can handle the extra work that having more potential brings.
Seems like the researchers spent a lot of time developing a solution when one was already available. The Party Pig is a small pressurized keg that uses an expanding pouch to force the beer out. The researchers should have just bought one of these kegs and spent the rest of their funding experimenting with filling and emptying the keg.
For most of earth's history, life was in the form of single-celled organisms. It wasn't until recently (in geological time) that multi-celled life came into existence. Further, humans only developed after a comet slammed into the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Technology is another element that must also be developed in order to communicate beyond one's planet of origin. The probability of all these developments occuring with significant frequency is low. Therefore, the likelihood of finding intelligent life on other planets is very low.
Is there intelligent life somewhere in the Universe? Most likely given the estimated size of the Universe of 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars each (10^22 stars).
Is there intelligent life somewhere in the Galaxy? That's a tough one. It is possible but it is not probable that we will find it. Even if intelligent life developed somewhere else in the galaxy, it may not have developed at the same time we did. We've only had the technology to communicate to other planets for 50 years. Further, there is also the issue of huge power requirements to communicate across long distances in space which is yet another obstacle to finding intelligent life.
Method and apparatus using geographical position and universal time determination means to provide authenticated, secure, on-line communication between remote gaming locations
Authentication of a message source
You must stay on top of the latest languages, software and hardware or, as I have witnessed, you will get stuck working in a room with no windows and poor ventilation with a bunch of H1-Bs programming and servicing out-of-date systems. As my career progressed, I have learned a progression of different systems and languages. This is basically the rough order: Netware, AIX, NT, C++, Linux, Perl, BSD, Java, Solaris. I don't like or dislike particular systems irregardless of the manufacturer, I will work with whatever pays the bills. Do not limit yourself to only working with particular systems and languages otherwise you will reduce you value and put yourself in the low-end labor pool with the H1-Bs.
The overall performance will depend on the type of applications you are running. To that end I also wondering if are you planning on running any standard benchmarks and making the results public? I would be particularly interested in seeing the results from the TPC-C benchmark (http://www.tpc.org). I'm not sure if it will be even possible to run this benchmark on your system since I don't know how it is configured but it would be nice to see how your system compares in terms of enterprise computing solutions.
This quote, although far removed from the subject of corporations, may shed some light on the concept of the individual and the process of becoming an individual.
Putting aside the rhetoric about "trafficking in stolen goods" and the other legal issues, this issue boils down to control. You perceive it as controlling your music but it is the behavior of your fans that you want to change. Where are you going to draw the line between controlling your music and controlling you fans?
Whether or not you ever personally planned to sue individuals, the fact remains that the actions of the RIAA acting on your behalf sent a clear message to your fans that there is a threat of future lawsuits. With Napster there is a company to sue but what happens when the RIAA turns its guns on Gnutella? Who are they going to sue on your behalf if there is no company to sue? Your fans. Who are they going to monitor to find copyright violators? Your fans.
I think you must carefully consider the future reprecussions of your actions. You've opened a Pandora's box of problems and I don't think you've realized it yet. In a year, you'll wonder how you did what you thought was right and ended up creating a leviathan that monitors the behavior of your fans.