The high school mathetmatics teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), came up with the idea for liquid oxygen fueld rockets more than 70 YEARS AGO!!! Almost everything in our space program is based on liquid fueld rockets! If we had invented and implemented a better space travel technology, perhaps we would have colonized the solar system by now.
I've been following the whole "free energy" movement for a while off and on just for kicks. Yes, there are lots of kooks and scammers involved. I hear about the next great technology every few months that nobody is able to replicate. The whole thing often appears like a big waste of time.
However, fundamental physics has gotten really boring lately. Practical space travel and energy production haven't gone anywhere since the development of liquid fueled rockets and nuclear energy, the basic physics of which were all done before the 1940s. String theory seems so far to be pretty much a dead end and not much more than a bunch of mathematical tricks. Particle accelerators and fusion reactors so far are curious multi-billion dollar projects that have yet to yield results that can be put to use in practical engineering contexts.
Given the failure of "Big Science" to move physics forward as of late, I'm all for the little guys. The little guys unfortunately are comprised of both kooks and geniuses but they should all have their theories and experiments at least considered. I also think every once and a while people with budgets should try and replicate and/or test the most promising devices.
I am so glad that somebody actually made an affordable practical computer for the developing world disguised as a cellphone. After all the simputers and half baked Linux web pads and other doomed "developing economy" platforms we might actually have a winner here. Of course there are a lot of middle and upper class people of all nations including India who will also benefit in that they are not gadget freaks and want a decent cheap cell phone.
Actually, the most secure vault ever, at least one where someone with non-trivial firepower has tried to break into was the one at the Afghanistan Central Bank. It contained 20,000 pieces of ancient gold coins and relics and the countries gold reserves. The Taliban tried to break into it, even shooting it with rockets from an attack helicopter but they couldn't break in. They wanted to dynamite it but decided against it as they figured out that would have collapsed the whole building on top of the vault. I think that's pretty secure. Maybe they should rent co-lo space?
Here's what I expect to be the top 5 trolls for this thread
- It's so bloated! My pentium 200mhz runs so much faster with just blackbox, shells, lynx and vi.
- It looks so much like Windows XP! Why can't it have pie menus and non-rectangular windows so it looks different!
- This company is going to be the next Microsoft. They've already partnered with Microsoft's evil twin, Walmart.
- This computer comes bundled with Walmart machines, Walmart is evil and must have employed chinese slave labor to write their operating system.
- Everyone should give up on Linux on the desktop and switch to MacOS because Macs are like better and stuff, and I like my Ipod and Steve Jobs is god.
Sounds like you downloaded subversion and spent 5 minutes with it. Based on your review, I recommend you go spend the $500 per user for visual source safe. It will require reading no documentation and your firewall administrator will respect the fact that you're trying to use a Microsoft(tm) product and not some suspect open source program and bend over backwards to do whatever needs to be done to get it to work because it's the standard.
Better yet would someone make the "Enterprise" subversion package with an option to use internet explorer proxy settings and bloated soap calls instead of webdav and sell it to this guy for $500 a seat? Thanks. Oh yeah, and please reimplement it in managed C code running on top of.net? Thanks.
I think now that the world is getting a little smaller, thanks to ye' old Internet, people are starting to realize something about other cultures. That is that people who speak multiple languages well, especially YOUR language, are usually more likely to be well educated and mannered and like YOUR culture.
What people don't realize is that people who don't care about YOUR culture and don't speak YOUR language are usually less likely to be appreciative and understanding of YOUR culture and you personally. People who only speak one language from any country are usually likely to look down on people who don't speak their language. People who only speak one language are usually a bit less culturally sensitive to other cultures and native language speakers. When one learns to speak multiple languages it can be easier to realize that someone who is not a native english speaker who doesn't have perfect english grammar is not of below average intelligence.
This is why people always come back from vacation talking about how wonderful a specific country was and how all people from that culture are so wonderful. It's because they only talked to people who learned their language, and therefore were more likely to have a positive feelings toward their culture.
So you're worried that this might lead to a technology that could devastate the earth? I guess you've never heard about Nuclear Weapons, some of which are in the hands of some not so wonderful people, such as Kim Jong Il of North Korea. Sorry bud, you're trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left, about 60 years to late I might add. On the other hand, if this were an easy way to make large amounts of U-238 and Plutonium then I might be worried.
The industrial revolution started because of forest depletion in England which meant that they had to switch to coal. In order to get to the coal they invented the steam engine to pump water out of mines and lift people into and out of them. The invention of the steam engine had the wonderful side effect of bringing forth the industrial revolution from which we all benefited.
If you want to read about the reasons for societal development and collapse by a academic whose works on civilization have stood the test of time and explain the Roman, Mayan, Mezoamerican and Egyptian collapses all with the same theory I suggest you read Tainter's collapse of complex societies. The west has saved itself from collapse for longer than any other civilization out there because we have had the wonderful luck to constantly innovate ourselves out of the corners we get into. There were many times throughout the Renaissance and the industrial revolution that European society could have collapsed but we always managed to pull ourselves out of it via technolgy.
I started using Linux on the Desktop in about 97 with Redhat 5.2. It sucked, badly. I basically used three applications. Xemacs, Netscape, the Shell and some now forgotten window manager. I used it for Real Work (TM) to build production Linux systems using mod_perl, which was also a screwy system, but that's another story.
For years I waited anxiously as KDE and Gnome faught their Open Source/Free war. I watched as I envangelized other developers to use Linux and dealt with their machines becoming totally foobared with the audio or video card not working right and having them not use any applications except shells and xload. I watched as Linux fortune's waxed and wained. I kept hoping for a good desktop and a sane system. I did every little update I could, waiting for the fix that would fix everything. I was disapointed over and over again by Ximian and early versions of KDE. RPM was maddening hell. Things were looking good for Linux at that time though. Windows was still unstable and Linux felt a lot more powerful at that time. Linux world in 1999 was a crazy party. Then the low point over the last 10 years for Linux came, Microsoft released Windows 2000. Finally they had a stable reasonable Internet ready operating system that didn't crash. I started hearing a lot of Linux desktop users giving Win2k it's due and switching back. I struggled on. Over the next five years there were bright spots such as Java getting released and stable on Linux and Firefox and Openoffice developing. I used redhat 9 for a long time. Stuck in a barely usable combination of Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse and terminal windows. Things were slow though. The system sucked. I even switched back to Win2k at home because I was sick of not being able to play Multimedia.
This year things have gotten a lot better. I discovered Ubuntu which has a no thinking required install system in apt-get. I have Firefox, Database Clients, JDK1.5, Eclipse (I rarely touch xemacs), KDE 3.4,which has finally worked out most of the bugs, Gaim, good hardware support, Linux 2.6, much improved performance. I EVEN HAVE GOOD FONTS, a huge accomplishment! When I go back to Windows XP at home there's really nothing that I get too excited about. Video is still an issue and cut and paste of course, but I don't do any non text authoring, except with open office which works fine, that's about it. Linux really needs to get something like COM/OLE nailed down and it will solve almost all of its problems. Mono and KParts seem to be attempts at this. So I went from 3 buggy barely usable desktop applications on Linux (Xemacs,netscape,terms) to at least 15 or more usable desktop applications. That's certainly progress.
(Warning: disgruntled unix user rant follows)
BTW, three things I'm sick of in Linux:
1. The C Language Security Holes, Constant Reinvention of the wheel due to lack of portability and good component model.
2. Anti-XML Sentiment Delimited Files Are Terrible.
3. Bloat Complaints Are the only people left using Linux embedded systems developers??
4. Perl/Awk/Sed I used it for years, totally ugly, unparsable, etc.
5. RPM More time wasted than any thing else I've ever used in all of Linux.
Actually when it comes to intellectual property lawsuits I think some of the most disturbingly stupid are convicts who sue prosecuters and judges for using their names in legal proceedings because the inmate claims copyright infringment of the intellectual property rights to THEIR NAME.
In China and India parents rely on their successful children to support them in their old age. In this country children are looked at as a luxury, and a source of liability, worry, and trouble, not as an investment. If parents were counting on their children to provide for them in their old age, I am sure you would see a lot more pressure coming from the parents to make sure their children were academically successful.
For 90% of the target market, the only thing that matters is if it can display dhtml, flash , javascript, and multimedia as well as IE 6 Running on Windows 98 or better. Another 8% will use it if it can do these things as well as Firefox. Otherwise the target market will go down to the local internet cafe and just use ie6 on windows.
The only platform people are somewhat willing to compromise on is their mobile phone. They can't carry around their windows pc in their pocket so they'll settle for less. For the rest it will be not worth it.
It's kind of like the office suite market. The only question that matters is does the thing read and write word flawlessly every time. If it works 99% of the time it better be free or else nobody will use it.
Art is any purposeful composition of elements that stimulate the senses and as a byproduct of said stimulation, makes one feel an emotion. This of course comes with the caveat that confusion is NOT an emotion. Really, art has nothing to do with how it is composed but what its effect is. Given that reading the code in algorithm books makes me experience feelings of admiration for the cleverness of algorithm designers, I guess code is art.
Confluence
Has a Link to this location. It appears to be in the middle of north Chad. The Cia world factbook doesn't show a big lake there, though it does show other lakes in Chad. Multimap says there is water in that location though. Maybe this is some kind of gigantic bog?
What is this
Big Blue Spot in the middle of Africa doing their? I don't think it's a lake. Is it some gigantic cobalt or other blue mineral deposit? Weird... Can some geologist explain this to me?
People think they can run an e-commerce shop and not do any technology or even integration. They can run the whole thing via ebay. The problem is is that there's a lot of margin getting eaten up by fees to service providers and the services aren't flexible. That, and anything that is really really easy to run is going to be subject to a lot of competition very soon and declining margins, like ebay drop shipping.
If you're on the internet you're a technology company. The same way that if you're a retail store you're to some extent in the storefront design, logistics, human resources and interior design business. At least in retail you can get into a franchise where someone has figured all this stuff out for you. With technology though there isn't a really good reason to franchise because there isn't the limited trade area issue.
One of the ideas that deep ecologists put forward is the "Gaia Hypothesis" which says that the whole earth is an organism. I decided to use this as the basis for my argument which is: don't all living things have to sooner or later reproduce? How does the earth reproduce? How does all the DNA of its lifeforms get spread to other planets? The reproductive system of the earth is us! The evolution of the human species was not a gigantic horrible accident as some deep ecologists seem to imply but the natural inevitable course of development of life on earth. So when planets get a nice stable atmosphere and start to grow life they will eventually develop intelligent life that will reproduce the planet. Our rockets going out to other planets are like seeds leaving a dandelion to land somewhere else and grow there.
We like our planet, the life and the things on it and we have an unstoppable desire to explore that has been with us since the first humans showed up. Intelligent life leaving a planet to go space exploring and terraforming is just the natural cycle that planets, like other organisms go through.
Mars is like the dirt that a seed lands in. The dirt may have the same chemicals as the dandelion and a few bacteria but it is mostly dead. The dandelion seed lands there and starts growing, taking chemicals from the environment, etc.
Well, Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company claims that the first transistor (made 50 years ago at Bell Labs), which led to the development of computers as we know them today, may have been reverse-engineered from alien technology. He also claims to possess the means to build a "transcapacitor." According to UFO Magazine (which ought to know), the transcapacitor stores "vast amounts of data while consuming very little energy." His company plans to "manufacture a 90GB hard drive from the transcapacitor by late 1999 or 2000." Their speculation is that "clusters of transcapacitors may have served as a neural network in the alien computer from Roswell.
It seems the Slashdot crowd has been wailing forever about how big corporations control our government. Now finally China has come along and can use its economic muscle to tell big corporations what to do.
It can even tell Big Corporations to censor American content or to lobby and donate to American politicians who are pro-China. If the Big Corporations fail to do so, China can easily place roadblocks in their way to help their more co-operative competitors.
If you would stay if the money was better, tell him you got a better offer and will need a 30% raise or a profit sharing plan in order to consider staying. He will give you the raise. Most companies have pretty fat margins if they've been around that long and you deserve a cut if you're vital to the company.
Among my favorite advice of his is to completely give up on the standard C library. Really, everybody should have done it a while ago. It's one of those things like the unix pipe model that was a good start, but now that it has hung around for 25 years, it needs an upgrade. How about everybody stop using the standard C library and switch to something like the Apache Portable Runtime?
Write bug-free code.
I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits.
If there are no negative health effects, then what's the big deal? I can't understand why making ourselves better in these kinds of ways is in any way bad. . This anti-human-improvement sentiment that goes around whenever anything like this is announced reminds me of Vonnegut's Story about 2081 where everyone is finally equal.
IMHO, I see it as a deeper cultural trend that originally started with Frankenstein. With every technological improvement, especially if it is augmenting human capability people are expecting some sort of Daedalus ironic ending. It's in a lot of sci-fi movies. Think Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, Terminator, The Matrix.
Slashdot Mirror
The high school mathetmatics teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), came up with the idea for liquid oxygen fueld rockets more than 70 YEARS AGO!!! Almost everything in our space program is based on liquid fueld rockets! If we had invented and implemented a better space travel technology, perhaps we would have colonized the solar system by now.
I've been following the whole "free energy" movement for a while off and on just for kicks. Yes, there are lots of kooks and scammers involved. I hear about the next great technology every few months that nobody is able to replicate. The whole thing often appears like a big waste of time.
However, fundamental physics has gotten really boring lately. Practical space travel and energy production haven't gone anywhere since the development of liquid fueled rockets and nuclear energy, the basic physics of which were all done before the 1940s. String theory seems so far to be pretty much a dead end and not much more than a bunch of mathematical tricks. Particle accelerators and fusion reactors so far are curious multi-billion dollar projects that have yet to yield results that can be put to use in practical engineering contexts.
Given the failure of "Big Science" to move physics forward as of late, I'm all for the little guys. The little guys unfortunately are comprised of both kooks and geniuses but they should all have their theories and experiments at least considered. I also think every once and a while people with budgets should try and replicate and/or test the most promising devices.
I am so glad that somebody actually made an affordable practical computer for the developing world disguised as a cellphone. After all the simputers and half baked Linux web pads and other doomed "developing economy" platforms we might actually have a winner here. Of course there are a lot of middle and upper class people of all nations including India who will also benefit in that they are not gadget freaks and want a decent cheap cell phone.
Actually, the most secure vault ever, at least one where someone with non-trivial firepower has tried to break into was the one at the Afghanistan Central Bank. It contained 20,000 pieces of ancient gold coins and relics and the countries gold reserves. The Taliban tried to break into it, even shooting it with rockets from an attack helicopter but they couldn't break in. They wanted to dynamite it but decided against it as they figured out that would have collapsed the whole building on top of the vault. I think that's pretty secure. Maybe they should rent co-lo space?
Story over here
Here's what I expect to be the top 5 trolls for this thread
- It's so bloated! My pentium 200mhz runs so much faster with just blackbox, shells, lynx and vi.
- It looks so much like Windows XP! Why can't it have pie menus and non-rectangular windows so it looks different!
- This company is going to be the next Microsoft. They've already partnered with Microsoft's evil twin, Walmart.
- This computer comes bundled with Walmart machines, Walmart is evil and must have employed chinese slave labor to write their operating system.
- Everyone should give up on Linux on the desktop and switch to MacOS because Macs are like better and stuff, and I like my Ipod and Steve Jobs is god.
Sounds like you downloaded subversion and spent 5 minutes with it. Based on your review, I recommend you go spend the $500 per user for visual source safe. It will require reading no documentation and your firewall administrator will respect the fact that you're trying to use a Microsoft(tm) product and not some suspect open source program and bend over backwards to do whatever needs to be done to get it to work because it's the standard.
.net? Thanks.
Better yet would someone make the "Enterprise" subversion package with an option to use internet explorer proxy settings and bloated soap calls instead of webdav and sell it to this guy for $500 a seat? Thanks. Oh yeah, and please reimplement it in managed C code running on top of
I think now that the world is getting a little smaller, thanks to ye' old Internet, people are starting to realize something about other cultures. That is that people who speak multiple languages well, especially YOUR language, are usually more likely to be well educated and mannered and like YOUR culture.
What people don't realize is that people who don't care about YOUR culture and don't speak YOUR language are usually less likely to be appreciative and understanding of YOUR culture and you personally. People who only speak one language from any country are usually likely to look down on people who don't speak their language. People who only speak one language are usually a bit less culturally sensitive to other cultures and native language speakers. When one learns to speak multiple languages it can be easier to realize that someone who is not a native english speaker who doesn't have perfect english grammar is not of below average intelligence.
This is why people always come back from vacation talking about how wonderful a specific country was and how all people from that culture are so wonderful. It's because they only talked to people who learned their language, and therefore were more likely to have a positive feelings toward their culture.
So you're worried that this might lead to a technology that could devastate the earth? I guess you've never heard about Nuclear Weapons, some of which are in the hands of some not so wonderful people, such as Kim Jong Il of North Korea. Sorry bud, you're trying to close the barn door after the horse has already left, about 60 years to late I might add. On the other hand, if this were an easy way to make large amounts of U-238 and Plutonium then I might be worried.
You are so wrong it's not even funny.
The industrial revolution started because of forest depletion in England which meant that they had to switch to coal. In order to get to the coal they invented the steam engine to pump water out of mines and lift people into and out of them. The invention of the steam engine had the wonderful side effect of bringing forth the industrial revolution from which we all benefited.
If you want to read about the reasons for societal development and collapse by a academic whose works on civilization have stood the test of time and explain the Roman, Mayan, Mezoamerican and Egyptian collapses all with the same theory I suggest you read Tainter's collapse of complex societies. The west has saved itself from collapse for longer than any other civilization out there because we have had the wonderful luck to constantly innovate ourselves out of the corners we get into. There were many times throughout the Renaissance and the industrial revolution that European society could have collapsed but we always managed to pull ourselves out of it via technolgy.
I started using Linux on the Desktop in about 97 with Redhat 5.2. It sucked, badly. I basically used three applications. Xemacs, Netscape, the Shell and some now forgotten window manager. I used it for Real Work (TM) to build production Linux systems using mod_perl, which was also a screwy system, but that's another story.
,which has finally worked out most of the bugs, Gaim, good hardware support, Linux 2.6, much improved performance. I EVEN HAVE GOOD FONTS, a huge accomplishment! When I go back to Windows XP at home there's really nothing that I get too excited about. Video is still an issue and cut and paste of course, but I don't do any non text authoring, except with open office which works fine, that's about it. Linux really needs to get something like COM/OLE nailed down and it will solve almost all of its problems. Mono and KParts seem to be attempts at this. So I went from 3 buggy barely usable desktop applications on Linux (Xemacs,netscape,terms) to at least 15 or more usable desktop applications. That's certainly progress.
For years I waited anxiously as KDE and Gnome faught their Open Source/Free war. I watched as I envangelized other developers to use Linux and dealt with their machines becoming totally foobared with the audio or video card not working right and having them not use any applications except shells and xload. I watched as Linux fortune's waxed and wained. I kept hoping for a good desktop and a sane system. I did every little update I could, waiting for the fix that would fix everything. I was disapointed over and over again by Ximian and early versions of KDE. RPM was maddening hell. Things were looking good for Linux at that time though. Windows was still unstable and Linux felt a lot more powerful at that time. Linux world in 1999 was a crazy party. Then the low point over the last 10 years for Linux came, Microsoft released Windows 2000. Finally they had a stable reasonable Internet ready operating system that didn't crash. I started hearing a lot of Linux desktop users giving Win2k it's due and switching back. I struggled on. Over the next five years there were bright spots such as Java getting released and stable on Linux and Firefox and Openoffice developing. I used redhat 9 for a long time. Stuck in a barely usable combination of Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse and terminal windows. Things were slow though. The system sucked. I even switched back to Win2k at home because I was sick of not being able to play Multimedia.
This year things have gotten a lot better. I discovered Ubuntu which has a no thinking required install system in apt-get. I have Firefox, Database Clients, JDK1.5, Eclipse (I rarely touch xemacs), KDE 3.4
(Warning: disgruntled unix user rant follows)
BTW, three things I'm sick of in Linux:
1. The C Language
Security Holes,
Constant Reinvention of the wheel due to lack
of portability and good component model.
2. Anti-XML Sentiment
Delimited Files Are Terrible.
3. Bloat Complaints
Are the only people left using Linux embedded systems developers??
4. Perl/Awk/Sed
I used it for years, totally ugly, unparsable, etc.
5. RPM
More time wasted than any thing else I've ever used in all of Linux.
Actually when it comes to intellectual property lawsuits I think some of the most disturbingly stupid are convicts who sue prosecuters and judges for using their names in legal proceedings because the inmate claims copyright infringment of the intellectual property rights to THEIR NAME.
2 004113118.html
http://news.findlaw.com/court_tv/s/20040317/17mar
In China and India parents rely on their successful children to support them in their old age. In this country children are looked at as a luxury, and a source of liability, worry, and trouble, not as an investment. If parents were counting on their children to provide for them in their old age, I am sure you would see a lot more pressure coming from the parents to make sure their children were academically successful.
For 90% of the target market, the only thing that matters is if it can display dhtml, flash , javascript, and multimedia as well as IE 6 Running on Windows 98 or better. Another 8% will use it if it can do these things as well as Firefox. Otherwise the target market will go down to the local internet cafe and just use ie6 on windows.
The only platform people are somewhat willing to compromise on is their mobile phone. They can't carry around their windows pc in their pocket so they'll settle for less. For the rest it will be not worth it.
It's kind of like the office suite market. The only question that matters is does the thing read and write word flawlessly every time. If it works 99% of the time it better be free or else nobody will use it.
Art is any purposeful composition of elements that stimulate the senses and as a byproduct of said stimulation, makes one feel an emotion. This of course comes with the caveat that confusion is NOT an emotion. Really, art has nothing to do with how it is composed but what its effect is. Given that reading the code in algorithm books makes me experience feelings of admiration for the cleverness of algorithm designers, I guess code is art.
Confluence Has a Link to this location. It appears to be in the middle of north Chad. The Cia world factbook doesn't show a big lake there, though it does show other lakes in Chad. Multimap says there is water in that location though. Maybe this is some kind of gigantic bog?
What is this Big Blue Spot in the middle of Africa doing their? I don't think it's a lake. Is it some gigantic cobalt or other blue mineral deposit? Weird... Can some geologist explain this to me?
People think they can run an e-commerce shop and not do any technology or even integration. They can run the whole thing via ebay. The problem is is that there's a lot of margin getting eaten up by fees to service providers and the services aren't flexible. That, and anything that is really really easy to run is going to be subject to a lot of competition very soon and declining margins, like ebay drop shipping.
If you're on the internet you're a technology company. The same way that if you're a retail store you're to some extent in the storefront design, logistics, human resources and interior design business. At least in retail you can get into a franchise where someone has figured all this stuff out for you. With technology though there isn't a really good reason to franchise because there isn't the limited trade area issue.
One of the ideas that deep ecologists put forward is the "Gaia Hypothesis" which says that the whole earth is an organism. I decided to use this as the basis for my argument which is: don't all living things have to sooner or later reproduce? How does the earth reproduce? How does all the DNA of its lifeforms get spread to other planets? The reproductive system of the earth is us! The evolution of the human species was not a gigantic horrible accident as some deep ecologists seem to imply but the natural inevitable course of development of life on earth. So when planets get a nice stable atmosphere and start to grow life they will eventually develop intelligent life that will reproduce the planet. Our rockets going out to other planets are like seeds leaving a dandelion to land somewhere else and grow there.
We like our planet, the life and the things on it and we have an unstoppable desire to explore that has been with us since the first humans showed up. Intelligent life leaving a planet to go space exploring and terraforming is just the natural cycle that planets, like other organisms go through.
Mars is like the dirt that a seed lands in. The dirt may have the same chemicals as the dandelion and a few bacteria but it is mostly dead. The dandelion seed lands there and starts growing, taking chemicals from the environment, etc.
550 : Recipient address rejected: cleric casts repel undead at spam zombie;
Remember when a 90 gigabyte drive was considered so advanced that it could only have been created by extra-terrestrials?
http://www.dbpd.com/vault/9807ddw.htm
Well, Jack Shulman of the American Computer Company claims that the first transistor (made 50 years ago at Bell Labs), which led to the development of computers as we know them today, may have been reverse-engineered from alien technology. He also claims to possess the means to build a "transcapacitor." According to UFO Magazine (which ought to know), the transcapacitor stores "vast amounts of data while consuming very little energy." His company plans to "manufacture a 90GB hard drive from the transcapacitor by late 1999 or 2000." Their speculation is that "clusters of transcapacitors may have served as a neural network in the alien computer from Roswell.
It seems the Slashdot crowd has been wailing forever about how big corporations control our government. Now finally China has come along and can use its economic muscle to tell big corporations what to do.
It can even tell Big Corporations to censor American content or to lobby and donate to American politicians who are pro-China. If the Big Corporations fail to do so, China can easily place roadblocks in their way to help their more co-operative competitors.
But can you run your Diesel partially on Nuclear, Solar, Wind or Hydro power by being able to plug it into the wall overnight?
5 1&tid=232&tid=126
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/02/19582
If you would stay if the money was better, tell him you got a better offer and will need a 30% raise or a profit sharing plan in order to consider staying. He will give you the raise. Most companies have pretty fat margins if they've been around that long and you deserve a cut if you're vital to the company.
DJ Bernstein Will Tell You Why
Among my favorite advice of his is to completely give up on the standard C library. Really, everybody should have done it a while ago. It's one of those things like the unix pipe model that was a good start, but now that it has hung around for 25 years, it needs an upgrade. How about everybody stop using the standard C library and switch to something like the Apache Portable Runtime?
Write bug-free code. I've mostly given up on the standard C library. Many of its facilities, particularly stdio, seem designed to encourage bugs. A big chunk of qmail is stolen from a basic C library that I've been developing for several years for a variety of applications. The stralloc concept and getln() make it very easy to avoid buffer overruns, memory leaks, and artificial line length limits.
If there are no negative health effects, then what's the big deal? I can't understand why making ourselves better in these kinds of ways is in any way bad. . This anti-human-improvement sentiment that goes around whenever anything like this is announced reminds me of Vonnegut's Story about 2081 where everyone is finally equal.
IMHO, I see it as a deeper cultural trend that originally started with Frankenstein. With every technological improvement, especially if it is augmenting human capability people are expecting some sort of Daedalus ironic ending. It's in a lot of sci-fi movies. Think Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, Terminator, The Matrix.