There are two reasons for gratis content, neither of which have anything to do with the difference in willingness to pay between different content consumers (as Cliff's spurious arguement asserts):
Most online content is worthless and the consumers know it. Stuff like/. may be mildly entertaining, but the SN ratio is nearly 0. Most other online content providers are in the same basket.
This is a classic example of the cartel quandry: a cartel is only stable so long as absolute control can be exerted over the members of the cartel. As soon as one member of the cartel breaks ranks (in order to increase their income by decreasing prices but increasing quantity) the cartel pricing structure collapses. With most cartels, there is a small matter of minimum investment necesary to enter the market, which restricts the number of possible players and eases the quandry somewhat. With online content, however, the barriers to entry are almost zero (especially with a fluff site like/.) hence there is no opportunity to install a cartel pricing structure.
Since information, in general, is a fluid comodity, all profit from information properties is based on some form of cartel or monopoly. For copyrightable information, these monopolies are support by legislation and judicial action, but this only works if the information itself is, somehow, unique and valuable.
Most online content is either non-unique or of very little value (or both./. falls into this last category). You simply can't charge money for something that the market doesn't value or can get elsewhere for free.
So, the point is that the vast online readership will probably never pay for most online content. The only way to squeeze any revenue out of online content is to either produce something entirely unique and unreproducable (difficult and costly to do, both because of production costs, and becuase you will probably need to defend ownership and control of the content in court) or you will need to establish a reputation which ensures a consistant readership, and trade access to that readership to third parties (advertisers).
Most system admins managing a large farm probably do it
remotely via ssh or telnet. Sure you can run xwindows remotely, but thats a huge overhead and waste of
time...I have yet to find anything that needed GUI for my job, except maybe to make disk partitioning
easier.
And most sys admins are probably not using pine or pico. Most sys admins I know, in fact, are adicted to one of the two brain damaged editors most commonly associated with unix, and have given me nothing but grief (well, at least a few snide remarks) for my reliance on pico.
My remark about the transition to GUI tools wasn't in reference to sys admins, but to casual desktop users. These are the same user who were the original audience for both pine and pico, and who, these days, are far more likely to be using a GUI than to ever be resorting to anything on a command line, if they can possibly avoid it, much less remotely logging in to hosts on a server farm (large or small).
<disclaimer>I don't mean any great disprespect to either vi or emacs by calling them brain damaged. They are, in fact, highly capable tools with many usefull features. I just don't happen to like them very much (though, if forced, I prefer vi) mostly because I recall, very well, what it was like trying to learn either of them as a unix newbie. Pico, with the nice little command menu at the bottom of the screen, is a much better editor for new or occasional users than either vi or emacs.<disclaimer>
<disclaimer>I use pico, I even like pico. One of the first things I do when installing a new system is put pico on it, so I'll have a comfortable editing environment when there is no working X session. Pico is the perfect tool for someone who doesn't touch a text mode editor but once in a full moon and can't be bothered with memorizing a bunch of cryptic key sequences just to edit a couple configuration files.</disclaimer>
Chirs Allegretta claims that the reason noone (before him) bothered to clone pico was that the pine/pico license was just free enough to supress development of completely free clone. In fact, the main reason that noone cloned pico was that noone thought the program was good enough to bother with. There were plenty of small, simple, modeless, non-GUI editors for Linux. If you didn't like the pico license, you could just switch to jed or joe. You could even choose to switch to an editor with a real feature set while you were at it.
Noone cloned pico because noone took pico seriously as a text editor. If you were going to go to the trouble of writing your own text editor, it was sure as heck worth it to give it a better user interface and better features. The only folks who actually used pico were either a) folk using pine, or b) newbies (like me) who didn't want to bother with the other brain damaged tools (i.e. vi or emacs). Even then, most folk would graduate to a more capable editor once they were comfortable in the unix environment (especially if they were running X11, in which case they'd get a good graphical editor, like Nedit).
Chris's article is little more than shameless self-promotion, with a smattering of GPL-boosting thrown in for good measure. The first time I saw Chris's pet editor on freshmeat, I thought it was a joke. I just couldn't believe that anyone would waste their effort on a pico clone. I could resist following the link, however, which revealed the true motivation for nano: GPL fundamentalism.
Chris has a good point to make about the non-free (and non-open-source) nature of the pico license, but pico and pine just aren't good enough tools to have made the license silliness matter. If UW had raised a stink about the license at some point, folk would simple have stopped using pico and pine and moved to one of the other fine tools. Now, with the almost complete transition to GUI-based tools, pico and pine are even more irrelevant than before.
Here is the policy that I try to follow in my programs:
Default Values: Provide reasonable default values, hard coded into the program, in case the program is run without any configuration.
Config Files: Search for a configuration file in a number of reasonable locations and override any default values with values from the configuration file.
Envronment Variables: Override default values or values from the config file with anything found in the environment.
Command Line Parameters: Override everything else with anything specified explicitly on the command line.
As an added bonus, I try to provide a command line flag that will cause the program to dump the current configuration to a file, along with as much documentation (your configuration file format should allow for comments so it can be documented in situ) as is needed to understand and edit the file.
Only in extreme circumstances should the program come to a point where it cannot proceed because of missing configuration information. If it does come to such a point, it certainly shouldn't core dump. Rather, it should display an informative error message, indicating which configuration parameters are missing and giving some advice on how to either obtain a basic configuration file or set the required paramter.
This is exactly the same sort of ineffectual whining that the Mac community has been using for two decades, and the Linux community has no excuse for repeating it. In the Mac community this tactic was pretty much unavoidable, since the entire platform is (or, at least, was) a traditional closed-source system, with all the restraint of free-inquiry such system's entail. As well, the userbase was, largely, non-technical and couldn't be relied upon to develop the kind of software that was being produced by the commercial software vendors.
None of this is true for the Linux community!
Rather than spending our time and effort whining to one or another closed-minded, short-sighted, software vendor "that there are also preferences for other operating systems," we should be working to either make the products from those vendors irrelevant (as this product already seems to be, for the most part) or to duplicate the functionality in an open or free product.
In the few cases where some piece of software can't be duplicated, and where you really like or need the product, go out and plunk down some cash: you'll have slightly more influence with most companies as a paying client than as joe-random-whiner who is just has an axe to grind, and, by increasing the income stream for the Linux version, you'll make it more likely that the company will see the Linux market as profitable.
Rememeber, we don't need their products, they need our business. If they don't want to let us play ball in their little yard, we can go play in the public park, without them. By the time these bozo's wake up and realize which way the wind is blowing, it will be too late.
Anyway, i'll chime in here and say that FORTRAN is both A) not the first language, obviously, and B) is still in use.... FORTRAN isn't dead--but probably should be.
FORTRAN was, pretty much, the first high level language for computer programming. Before FORTRAN you pretty much had the choice of autocode (a primitive assembler used by IBM) or raw machine code (compared to which, autocode was considered a vast improvement). Some people claim that LISP predates FORTRAN by a few years, but I don't think it was actually used to write any programs on computers, only as a mathematicians' notational tool.
As for whether or not FORTRAN should be dead: if your only experience with FORTRAN is pre-FORTRAN77 code, written before there was a proper, wide-spread, understanding of even simple structured program design, then you might be excused for your prejudices. Modern FORTRAN however (FORTRAN90 and beyond) is quite a pleasant language, offering all the amenities familiar to users of any of the younger, sleeker, languages in common use today. The only thing I haven't (yet) seen added to FORTRAN are object extensions (of course, I haven't been paying very close attention lately).
I'm not saying that their product doesn't work (though I seriously doubt that they can get an improvement in speed from anything other than their hand-picked benchmarks) but that they are probably just trying to spin an established (but under-reported) technology in order to attract venture capital.
There is no rennaissance in computing that will be ushered in by this product. We have already seen it's like with DEC's FX32 (intel to Alpha) and Apple's synthetic68k (M68k to PowerPC) as well as a number of predecessors (wasn't there something like this on one or another set of IBM mainframes) and current open source and commercial products (Plex86, VMware, Bochs, SoftPC, VirtualPC, VirtualPlaystation, etc.), all of which use some amount of dynamic binary translation, and none have set the world on fire. They are mildly usefull for some purposes, but the cost of actual hardware is low enough to kill their usefullness in most applications.
I wish these guys luck, but I doubt anyone will be too enthusiastic about this product. They might have stood a chance if they'd pitched this thing a year or two earlier (when there was lots of dumb money looking to be spent) but they are probably toast today.
I am certain that the pain in my right arm is no hoax or mass delusion, but it doesn't seem to be nearly as debilitating as I have heard other people claim their injuries to be. It also doesn't seem to be due to typing, so much as to use of a mouse or other pointing device in the wrong position.
In the three years that I have been suffering from this pain (usually just a slight twinge in my wrist and the palm of my hand, but occasionally reaching up to my elbow or even to my shoulder) I have not had to undergo surgery, wear a brace, or even take any kind of pain killer or anti-inflamatory drug. What I have done is obtain a host of assistive ergonomic devices (wrist support pads for keyabord and mouse, and assorted 'ergonomic' keyboards and trackballs) and pay extra attention to the position of my arms and body while I'm working at the computer.
I've spent several hundred dollars on these accomodations (all of it my own money) and I've been able to reduce the pain from the arm numbing agony I was experiencing in 1999 to slight twinges in the hand and wrist. There may be folks for whom CT, and other RSI's, are real debilitating disorders, but not for me.
That said, I wouldn't be suprised to find lots of folk exagerating the seriousness of their problems in order to get some concession out of employers in tight labor markets. Similarly, I wouldn't be suprised to find that, with the loosening of the labor market, there has also been a reduction in CT/RSI claims: the sqeaky wheel quiets down when there's less grease to be had, if it knows what's good for it.
I once had a friend who worked for little company in Herndon VA, now defunct (the company was InterCon, and made some nice networking products for the Mac). My friend's business card gave his title simply as 'Paladin'.
The obsession with phonetic spelling is an unhealthy and rediculous pathology: to understand why, have a look at Justin B. Rye's Spelling Reform page (subtitled And the Real Reason It's Impossible).
Of course, even if you could get China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea to agree on a unified character encoding similar to the ISO-Roman character set (where identical or analogous characters in the different alphabets shared the same character code) you would still need more than 50,000 encodings just for the unified asian character set.
I can see good reasons why language using similar alphabets should have overlapping encodings, but this is probably better solved by providing translation tables between related alphabets than by forcing multiple alphabets to share a single encoding. While I may be able to write the french coup de grâce in the english alphabet as coup de grace something has clearly been lost. Other europen languages are even worse, even those that nominally use the roman alphabet! Then there are questions of alphabetization between differnt languages and the questions of whether or not accented letters correspond to each other or to the unaccented letter.
Call me a purist, but I think it is actaully much easier if we just had distinct representations for each language and had to perform some kind of mapping to display one language in another language's alphabet.
<TROLL MODE="apple zealot">
this would only be cool if Apple did it using tranlucent plastics! </TROLL>
<TROLL MODE="linux zealot">
this would only be cool if the pointing device
had three buttons! </TROLL>
<TROLL MODE="windows luser" LEVEL="clueless">
these are going to rock so hard they'll wipe those Apple losers and those Linux geeks right off the planet! Dude! </TROLL>
Seriously, Compaq has been making some good looking hardware for some time now (the old 3050 series desktops with the integrated LCD and cordless mouse were works of art, though a bit pricey for the day) but, as an Apple zealot, I can't get too enthused about PC hardware, even when it looks this cool. As a Linux geek, however, I'll have to give one of these babies serious consideration as my next Linux box. It'd be nice to get some of the desk space back, and get a portable machine in the bargain as well.
Mea Culpa: I was largely guessing on the specs for the DELL inspiron (DELL's site sucks for extracting information from the sales-babble, and I spec'd the systems in the reverse order from which they are listed, so I was getting fatigured by the time I came to the DELL site) and I didn't think to check the weight or battery life of the different systems (simply an oversight: I do consider weight and battery life an important factor in a laptop).
As for the fellow who pointed out that I missed the most important differentiating factor between the 'PC' laptops and the iBook: I was assuming that the 'PC' laptops were to be purged of the Taint of Redmond and innoculated with something a little more palatable (Linux or a BSD variant).
In fact, I'm half considering an iBook as a Linux system. I've been running LinuxPPC on an old PowerComputing system at home and it's very nice. The only drawback with the iBook is that, if I'm going to run X on the beastie, I want three mouse buttons (so far, this requirement, along with the desire for built-in ethernet, has vetoed all contenders, Apple or otherwise).
Side note: I've been running Mac OS X on the afore mentioned PowerComputing box (upgraded PowerWave w/ 300MHz G3, 128MB RAM, etc. I used the instructions at Ryan Rempel's page to install OS X on a 'oldWorld' system) and it is damned slow. Unless Apple can optimize whatever parts of OS X that make it seem to drag so badly, I'd say that LinuxPPC has a secure position as an alternate OS for Apple PPC boxen. Running LinuxPPC, the PowerWave was easily the equal of my AMD K6-500 box, even before the G3 upgrade (it was originally a PPC604 132MHz). Under Mac OS X, even the simplest things seem to take forever.
Another Disclaimer: Yes, I know my system is unsupported, and I know that the memory sub-system sucks, and I know that things would probably be faster with a bit more memory (fer cryin' out loud! I've already got friggin' 128MB on that thing, that should be enough for anybody!). Still, LinuxPPC was quick and spry where Mac OS X is slow and plodding. Anyone that was concerned that OS X would be the death of LinuxPPC should rest easy.
GatewaySolo 5300$1624
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
ethernet (optional PC-card)
TV-out no fireware/IEEE 1394
IBMA22e$1699
1024x768
64 MB RAM
15 GB HD
CD-ROM
built-in ethernet
unspecified external display port no firewire/IEEE 1394
Toshiba2800$1469
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ethernet
TV-out no firewire/IEEE 1394
(I have omitted some features either becuase we all know how the contents turns out -- i.e. the CPU on the iBook is much slower than the competition -- or becuase the specs were substantially the same -- everyone has USB ports and modems, so why mention it?)
The Apple offering seems to stand up to the competition pretty well, with the notable exception being the DELL Inspiron 8000 which just kicks butt up and down (1400x1050 LCD! profanity, blasphemy, and disrespect! that is some nice hardware! I wonder how well it does with Linux). Most of the stuff I saw that was significantly cheaper than the Apple system didn't come with built-in ethernet and had only SVGA resolution on the LCD, which are two features near and dear to me.
While you can't get a new Apple laptop for the $900 that some models from some manufacturers are going for at the moment, you are certainly not getting ripped off. I'd say that the old saw about overpriced-underpowered Apple hardware is clearly more myth than reality.
Disclaimer: I'm an old Apple hand (my first real computer -- the kind that didn't store its data on cassette tapes -- was a Lisa 2 running MacWorks back in 1984) who has drifted far into the Linux camp of late (though I do own some Apple stock). I went into this comparisson intending to show that Apple was a clearly better value for the price than PC laptops with similar features, but the truth has bested me.
P.S. what I wouldn't give to have support for the TABLE tag on Slashdot.
Anyone notice that there is no encoding software* here, despite what the article summary says? While it might be nice to have a good, open source, streaming media player, what we really need is a fast and efficient (in terms of compressed file size) video encoder, preferably producing MPEG-1 streams. Without a good, real time, encoder, we can't produce our own video streams for our own purposes (I'd like to turn my Linux box into a digital VCR, personally).
* For those who are easily confused by precise language: an encoder turns raw input data (video data, in this case) into some specific usable format (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, etc.) possibly applying some kind of compression. What the folks at sureplayer have produced is a decoder, which takes the encoded data stream and turns it back into something like the raw data stream.
As many folks have said, the real failure of banner ads isn't in the medium, it's in the message itself.
I click on lots of banner ads, when the ad looks interesting and I have a reasonable basis to believe that the ad won't take me to some popup happy fraud-site. Most banner ads, however, don't satisfy my criteria: If the advertisment itself is obviously trying to defraud the viewer (e.g. the "Your Internet Connection is not Optimized" ads that masquerade as an MS Windows dialog (I only use MacOS and Linux, so the stupidity of this approach is extra obvious)) what can you expect of the site that comissioned it?
As I said, I click on banner ads all the time, on Slashdot, on MacCentral and MacInTouch, on Salon and a number of other reputable pages. I have learned that I can trust the ads I see on these pages to take me to vendors I can trust who are hawking wares that I might be interested in. Any time I see a banner ad masquerading as a dialog box or an interactive game or poll, I simply steer clear of it (and, possibly, of the entire site, depending on my irritation level).
It's not banner ads that aren't working: it's the folks who think them up, and the folks who comission them.
The entire point of the power supply in most computers is to convert AC to DC: the components in the computer take DC power directly. If you already have the DC power, you could almost (modulo deriving the right voltage levels and some power conditioning) hook up all the components directly.
The item (or items) you are looking for is called a DC-DC power converter, possibly combined with a moderately sized capacitor to smooth out any sags or dips (you'll also need something to filter out surges, maybe a zener diode or some such). For most of the computer all you are worried about is producing 5 V and 12 V feeds, which shouldn't be a big deal, but for some components (CRTs and the flourescent backlight on most LCDs) you will need to produce some very high voltages (in the kV range, at least). For high voltages you will need to go back to a real power supply and an intermediate AC stage (aka, a switching power supply, which is what you already have in all such applications). Then the question is, do you replace the one that you already have in your CRT or LCD monitor, which is expecting 50-60 Hz, 110V (or 220 V, or whatever the local flavor is) AC power, or do you roll your own that can take whatever DC voltage you happen to have handy?
Ultimately, it is probably much simpler just to convert your local DC source into a nice 60 Hz, 110 V AC signal and continue using all your equipment in an unmodified manner. The conversion, both in your DC-AC converter and in the computers' power supplies, is pretty efficient these days, so don't worry too much about lost power there.
inheritance: if you're not using this then why bother with C++ at all?
class polymorphism: this goes hand in hand with using inheritance.
exceptions: even though they aren't supported by many of the low level libraries, they make the code much easier to read.
templates: even though the standard isn't entirely reliable on all compilers and they are a bit mystifying to newbies, they fit very well with the OO philosophy.
The bad parts:
overloading: using the familiar language operators to do double (and often tripple) duty is just plain confusing in real code. It looks really cool in language demos, but doesn't work for real world projects. When you include both function overloading and default parameter values, you get an unmanagable mess.
stream I/O: for the same reason that operator overloading is a crock, so is stream I/O. I quote "I saw cout shifted "Hello World" times to the left and stopped right there."
references: most of your programmer's time will be spent reading the code rather than the class definitions (and this is as it should be) so anything that makes it more difficult to tell what is happening in the code is bad and to be avoided. References are just such a beast, especially when used in parameter lists. (As a return value they are almost acceptable)
Patient: "Doctor, when I write multi-threaded programs in C++ they dump core all over the place and I don't understand why!"
Doctor: "Don't do that."
I know it sounds glib, but it really is the heart of the matter. Writing proper multi-threaded programs is difficult and takes a fair amount of skill. If you or your programming staff don't have the skill to do it, you are better off sticking to something less challenging. This isn't meant as a put down, either: there are plenty of simple solutions to problems that, at first blush, may look like they require threads (or dynamic memory allocation, or any of a number of other complex and error prone tactics). You could replace your multiple threads with a polling loop and a switch statement, or spawn completely separate processes and communicate through pipes (you might be supprised how much performance you can get out of either solution compared to the threaded code).
If you feel that you really must use the cool threaded code (or a complex, dynamically allocted data structure, or whatever) then you may need to dedicate a week or two to a carefull re-examination of the code and the accompanying re-implementation to eliminate race-conditions/memory-leaks/mutual exclusion errors/etc. While there are a lot of cool debugging tools out there, that can help you find some kinds of errors, there is really no substitute for a deep and thorough understanding of your code. You can either spend the time understanding the mess you have, or try replacing it with something less complex but easier to maintain. (but, maybe, harder to extend/scale/etc.)
Here are some of my favorite high-tech problems with low-tech solutions:
Multi-threading: multiple processes or polling loop with switch statement.
Search Trees or other tree structures: hash tables.
Linked lists or other linked structures: dynamically allocated arrays (double when size>=length, halve when size<length-n, like Java vectors)
Complex decision logic: state machines.
Admittedly, sometimes you really do need to go with the more complex solution, but it is best to avoid it whenever possible. Besides, you can always put the complex stuff in the next version.
Re:Why thought experiments are bull
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 2
The Tipler problem isn't purely an exercise in observed phenomena: the two fusion reaction paths result from first principles rather than a catalog of observed conditions. As for the accusation that Tipler is knocking down a staw man: that may be true, but the staw man was constructed by Pons and Fleischmann, not Tipler or his editors. It was Pons and Fleischmann who insisted on the presence of Deuteron fusion and who also insisted that the correct method of verifying their experiment was to find the products thereof.
I am not, and I don't think anyone else is, suggesting that something interesting wasn't happening in Pons' and Fleischmann's aparatus. Maybe it deserves to be investigated, but not under the fraudulent auspices of 'cold fusion' or any other miraculous new source of free energy. Anyone suggesting that such research is called for is either an outright crank or has some kind of ulterior motive that should clearly be distrusted.
Pons and Fleischmann made outrageous and unsupported claims about their scientific investigations. The scientific community responded in the proper manner by trying to verify those claims. After many attempts it became clear that the claims could not be verified, that the experiment was not repeatable. The proper response to unverifiable claims and unrepeatable experiments is to toss them on the rubish heap of history and move on, which is exactly what has been done. Tipler's probelm set is just an amusing footnote to the affair, but instructive never the less.
Reading this book reminds me somewhat of the media circus known as the Columbine incident. Almost every "fact" and "explanation" that the media bombarded us with turned out to be pure crap afterwards. People everywhere formed theories and reached conclusions based on the initial reports, and were slow to change their minds even after the more accurate facts slowly surfaced.
Unfortunately for your argument, most of the really bad jornalism and fossilized public opinion was pro-P&F. They had a very seductive argument (which you are, largely, now repeating) and an awfully attractive carrot if you bought their claims.
If you read "Excess Heat", or even just some of it, you will realize that there are more facts and theories to consider than what was thoroughly covered by the likes of Discover, USA Today, and Newsweek.
Relying on the likes of USA Today and Newsweek (and even Discover) for your news about hard science is like relying on Slashdot for news of international politics: you may hear of some things, but don't expect accuracy or precision.
If you realize anything from this book, it should be that all of your armchair chemistry and physics knowledge hasn't prepared you for the world of surface chemistry, catalysis, or electrochemistry.... You can rattle off a dozen reasons why it can't work, but can't think of one reason why it might.
For the record, at the time that Pons' and Fleischmann's first claims were reported in the press, I did some back of the envelope calculations on the probable reduction of the electrostatic force between deuterium nucleii 'disolved' in the surface of a platinum crystal. My calculations showed that, within an order of magnitude, their claims for room temperature fusion were believable.
I was 'guardedly optimistic' about cold fusion at the time, but I had failed to take into account the necessary by-products of a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction (neutron radiation) and the effect it would have had on nearby people (lethal dosage in a few hours). Had I considered the radiation problem, it would have been obvious that Pons' and Fleischmann were either liars or concealing one or more dead bodies. (and probably suffering from massive radiation burns themselves)
In retrospect, it is hard to understand why more scientists didn't bring up the problem of neutron radiation at the time that Pons Fleischmann made their initial claims. All the fuss about calorimetry and vacuuming helium out of the cieling tiles seems just silly if you don't see lethal doses of neutron radiation from an unshielded fusion reaction.
Why Cold Fusion is Bull
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 5
Even a second year undergraduate physics student can see that Pons' and Flieschmann's claims for cold fusion where severly overstated, if not simply fraudulent. Their obsession with inaccurate and difficult measurements suggests that they were, indeed, attempting a cover-up, but the cover-up was for the obvious fallacies in their own experiments.
The suggestion to persue either more accurate calorimetry (an error prone process even under the best conditions) or the search for 'nuclear ash' (better known as helium) are straw men to distract researchers from the easier to measure (and patently missing) by-products of a fusion reaction: neutrons! (and the dead lab workers caused by the neutron flux near the aparatus)
The following homework problem, taken from Physics for Scientists and Engineers, volume 2 third edition, by Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, chapter 40 Nuclei, page 1336:
47. In 1989, researchers claimed to have achieved fusion in an electromechanical cell at room temperature. They claimed a power output of 4 W from deuterium fusion reactions in the palladium electrode of their apparatus.
If the two most likely reactions are
[fusion of two deuterium resulting in a Helium-3 nucleus, a neutron, and 3.27 MeV]
and
[fusion of two deuterium resulting in a Helium-3 nucleus, a hydrogen neucleus, and 4.03 MeV]
with 50 percent of the reactions going down each branch, how many neutrons per second would we expect to be emitted in the generation of 4 W of power?
If one-tenth of these neutrons were absorbed by the body of an 80.0-kg worker near the device, and if each absorbed neutron carries an average energy of 0.5 MeV with an RBE of 4, to what radiation dose rate in rems per hour would this correspond?
How long would it take for a person to receive a total dose of 500 rems? (This is the dose that is usually lethal to half of those receiving it.)
The answers are:
3.42 trillion neutrons per second emitted by the generation of 4 W of power.
493 rems per hour absorbed by an 80.0 kg worker standing near the aparatus.
1.01 hours for the worker to receive a lethal dose.
Without the most obvious by-product, neutrons, of the most likely nuclear reaction, the one suggested by Pons and Flieschmann themselves, as measured by an easily obtainable metric, dead or dying lab workers (or graduate students), the searches for any of the more esoteric by-products is a pointless waste of time.
As with any other newly formed nation, the aliens would need to establish some form of diplomatic recognition with one or mother nations on earth. There are well established protocols for doing this already, which have been used numerous times over last century, at least. Once the aliens had been recognized as a group by one or more nations, the alien 'nation' would be able to issue passports to it's citizens, establish diplomatic missions to earthly nations and do all sorts of other stuff that your run-of-the-mill earthly nations do. Aliens visiting a nation would have the same sorts of rights (or lack thereof) that any non-resident human would have.
Before you get all hot and bothered about rights for artificial intelligences, maybe you should consider the difficulties of recognizing naturally occurring non-human intelligence within current legal systems. I don't think it very likely that whales, dolphins or chimpanzees are going to be recognized as legal 'people' no matter what kinds of intelligence they can be shown to posess. When the intelligent entity happens to be entirely constructed by intentional human endeavor, however, I suspect that recognition as anything other than an owned and ownable object is out of the question.
I just want to be able to rearrange the window control buttons (close, minimize, maximize, and the tiny icon) in the title bar. I can do this in X Windows with most window managers. I can even do this on the Mac, with the right extensions. If the skinning feature of Win Xp will allow me to move the close button to the left side of the title bar, I will be happy to suffer through almost anything else. (DISCLAIMER: I don't willingly suffer the Windows blight, but my job essentially requires it)
Exactly true. When I first heard this puzzle I was told that the solution had to do with the order of mathematical operations and precedence, but I have also had the solution explained to me in terms of standard accounting practice. (something about not counting both debits and credits in the same group, but I'm no accountant so I don't remember the details) The real trick is in the telling. This didn't become clear to me, however, till I had to write the problem down, and I found that you had to carefully avoid any mention of the price after the refund (or the price claimed by the bellhop, to obscure his petty theft).
The simplest way I have found to explain the error is to say that you should only count actual dollars that people in the problem are holding: $3 (in the travelers' hands) + $2 (in the bellhop's pocket) + $25 (in the manager's till) = $30 (originally paid for the room).
Still, most people, when they first hear the puzzle, are quite flummoxed and have a very hard time explaining exactly what the error is.
Slashdot Mirror
- Most online content is worthless and the consumers know it. Stuff like
/. may be mildly entertaining, but the SN ratio is nearly 0. Most other online content providers are in the same basket.
- This is a classic example of the cartel quandry: a cartel is only stable so long as absolute control can be exerted over the members of the cartel. As soon as one member of the cartel breaks ranks (in order to increase their income by decreasing prices but increasing quantity) the cartel pricing structure collapses. With most cartels, there is a small matter of minimum investment necesary to enter the market, which restricts the number of possible players and eases the quandry somewhat. With online content, however, the barriers to entry are almost zero (especially with a fluff site like
/.) hence there is no opportunity to install a cartel pricing structure.
Since information, in general, is a fluid comodity, all profit from information properties is based on some form of cartel or monopoly. For copyrightable information, these monopolies are support by legislation and judicial action, but this only works if the information itself is, somehow, unique and valuable.Most online content is either non-unique or of very little value (or both. /. falls into this last category). You simply can't charge money for something that the market doesn't value or can get elsewhere for free.
So, the point is that the vast online readership will probably never pay for most online content. The only way to squeeze any revenue out of online content is to either produce something entirely unique and unreproducable (difficult and costly to do, both because of production costs, and becuase you will probably need to defend ownership and control of the content in court) or you will need to establish a reputation which ensures a consistant readership, and trade access to that readership to third parties (advertisers).
um...no.
And most sys admins are probably not using pine or pico. Most sys admins I know, in fact, are adicted to one of the two brain damaged editors most commonly associated with unix, and have given me nothing but grief (well, at least a few snide remarks) for my reliance on pico.
My remark about the transition to GUI tools wasn't in reference to sys admins, but to casual desktop users. These are the same user who were the original audience for both pine and pico, and who, these days, are far more likely to be using a GUI than to ever be resorting to anything on a command line, if they can possibly avoid it, much less remotely logging in to hosts on a server farm (large or small).
<disclaimer> I don't mean any great disprespect to either vi or emacs by calling them brain damaged. They are, in fact, highly capable tools with many usefull features. I just don't happen to like them very much (though, if forced, I prefer vi) mostly because I recall, very well, what it was like trying to learn either of them as a unix newbie. Pico, with the nice little command menu at the bottom of the screen, is a much better editor for new or occasional users than either vi or emacs. <disclaimer>
What ever happened to reading comprehension?
Chirs Allegretta claims that the reason noone (before him) bothered to clone pico was that the pine/pico license was just free enough to supress development of completely free clone. In fact, the main reason that noone cloned pico was that noone thought the program was good enough to bother with. There were plenty of small, simple, modeless, non-GUI editors for Linux. If you didn't like the pico license, you could just switch to jed or joe. You could even choose to switch to an editor with a real feature set while you were at it.
Noone cloned pico because noone took pico seriously as a text editor. If you were going to go to the trouble of writing your own text editor, it was sure as heck worth it to give it a better user interface and better features. The only folks who actually used pico were either a) folk using pine, or b) newbies (like me) who didn't want to bother with the other brain damaged tools (i.e. vi or emacs). Even then, most folk would graduate to a more capable editor once they were comfortable in the unix environment (especially if they were running X11, in which case they'd get a good graphical editor, like Nedit).
Chris's article is little more than shameless self-promotion, with a smattering of GPL-boosting thrown in for good measure. The first time I saw Chris's pet editor on freshmeat, I thought it was a joke. I just couldn't believe that anyone would waste their effort on a pico clone. I could resist following the link, however, which revealed the true motivation for nano: GPL fundamentalism.
Chris has a good point to make about the non-free (and non-open-source) nature of the pico license, but pico and pine just aren't good enough tools to have made the license silliness matter. If UW had raised a stink about the license at some point, folk would simple have stopped using pico and pine and moved to one of the other fine tools. Now, with the almost complete transition to GUI-based tools, pico and pine are even more irrelevant than before.
Here is the policy that I try to follow in my programs:
- Default Values: Provide reasonable default values, hard coded into the program, in case the program is run without any configuration.
- Config Files: Search for a configuration file in a number of reasonable locations and override any default values with values from the configuration file.
- Envronment Variables: Override default values or values from the config file with anything found in the environment.
- Command Line Parameters: Override everything else with anything specified explicitly on the command line.
As an added bonus, I try to provide a command line flag that will cause the program to dump the current configuration to a file, along with as much documentation (your configuration file format should allow for comments so it can be documented in situ) as is needed to understand and edit the file.Only in extreme circumstances should the program come to a point where it cannot proceed because of missing configuration information. If it does come to such a point, it certainly shouldn't core dump. Rather, it should display an informative error message, indicating which configuration parameters are missing and giving some advice on how to either obtain a basic configuration file or set the required paramter.
None of this is true for the Linux community!
Rather than spending our time and effort whining to one or another closed-minded, short-sighted, software vendor "that there are also preferences for other operating systems," we should be working to either make the products from those vendors irrelevant (as this product already seems to be, for the most part) or to duplicate the functionality in an open or free product.
In the few cases where some piece of software can't be duplicated, and where you really like or need the product, go out and plunk down some cash: you'll have slightly more influence with most companies as a paying client than as joe-random-whiner who is just has an axe to grind, and, by increasing the income stream for the Linux version, you'll make it more likely that the company will see the Linux market as profitable.
Rememeber, we don't need their products, they need our business. If they don't want to let us play ball in their little yard, we can go play in the public park, without them. By the time these bozo's wake up and realize which way the wind is blowing, it will be too late.
There is no rennaissance in computing that will be ushered in by this product. We have already seen it's like with DEC's FX32 (intel to Alpha) and Apple's synthetic68k (M68k to PowerPC) as well as a number of predecessors (wasn't there something like this on one or another set of IBM mainframes) and current open source and commercial products (Plex86, VMware, Bochs, SoftPC, VirtualPC, VirtualPlaystation, etc.), all of which use some amount of dynamic binary translation, and none have set the world on fire. They are mildly usefull for some purposes, but the cost of actual hardware is low enough to kill their usefullness in most applications.
I wish these guys luck, but I doubt anyone will be too enthusiastic about this product. They might have stood a chance if they'd pitched this thing a year or two earlier (when there was lots of dumb money looking to be spent) but they are probably toast today.
In the three years that I have been suffering from this pain (usually just a slight twinge in my wrist and the palm of my hand, but occasionally reaching up to my elbow or even to my shoulder) I have not had to undergo surgery, wear a brace, or even take any kind of pain killer or anti-inflamatory drug. What I have done is obtain a host of assistive ergonomic devices (wrist support pads for keyabord and mouse, and assorted 'ergonomic' keyboards and trackballs) and pay extra attention to the position of my arms and body while I'm working at the computer.
I've spent several hundred dollars on these accomodations (all of it my own money) and I've been able to reduce the pain from the arm numbing agony I was experiencing in 1999 to slight twinges in the hand and wrist. There may be folks for whom CT, and other RSI's, are real debilitating disorders, but not for me.
That said, I wouldn't be suprised to find lots of folk exagerating the seriousness of their problems in order to get some concession out of employers in tight labor markets. Similarly, I wouldn't be suprised to find that, with the loosening of the labor market, there has also been a reduction in CT/RSI claims: the sqeaky wheel quiets down when there's less grease to be had, if it knows what's good for it.
I once had a friend who worked for little company in Herndon VA, now defunct (the company was InterCon, and made some nice networking products for the Mac). My friend's business card gave his title simply as 'Paladin'.
The obsession with phonetic spelling is an unhealthy and rediculous pathology: to understand why, have a look at Justin B. Rye's Spelling Reform page (subtitled And the Real Reason It's Impossible).
Of course, even if you could get China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea to agree on a unified character encoding similar to the ISO-Roman character set (where identical or analogous characters in the different alphabets shared the same character code) you would still need more than 50,000 encodings just for the unified asian character set.
I can see good reasons why language using similar alphabets should have overlapping encodings, but this is probably better solved by providing translation tables between related alphabets than by forcing multiple alphabets to share a single encoding. While I may be able to write the french coup de grâce in the english alphabet as coup de grace something has clearly been lost. Other europen languages are even worse, even those that nominally use the roman alphabet! Then there are questions of alphabetization between differnt languages and the questions of whether or not accented letters correspond to each other or to the unaccented letter.
Call me a purist, but I think it is actaully much easier if we just had distinct representations for each language and had to perform some kind of mapping to display one language in another language's alphabet.
<TROLL MODE="apple zealot">
this would only be cool if Apple did it using tranlucent plastics!
</TROLL>
<TROLL MODE="linux zealot">
this would only be cool if the pointing device had three buttons!
</TROLL>
<TROLL MODE="windows luser" LEVEL="clueless">
these are going to rock so hard they'll wipe those Apple losers and those Linux geeks right off the planet! Dude!
</TROLL>
Seriously, Compaq has been making some good looking hardware for some time now (the old 3050 series desktops with the integrated LCD and cordless mouse were works of art, though a bit pricey for the day) but, as an Apple zealot, I can't get too enthused about PC hardware, even when it looks this cool. As a Linux geek, however, I'll have to give one of these babies serious consideration as my next Linux box. It'd be nice to get some of the desk space back, and get a portable machine in the bargain as well.
Mea Culpa: I was largely guessing on the specs for the DELL inspiron (DELL's site sucks for extracting information from the sales-babble, and I spec'd the systems in the reverse order from which they are listed, so I was getting fatigured by the time I came to the DELL site) and I didn't think to check the weight or battery life of the different systems (simply an oversight: I do consider weight and battery life an important factor in a laptop).
As for the fellow who pointed out that I missed the most important differentiating factor between the 'PC' laptops and the iBook: I was assuming that the 'PC' laptops were to be purged of the Taint of Redmond and innoculated with something a little more palatable (Linux or a BSD variant).
In fact, I'm half considering an iBook as a Linux system. I've been running LinuxPPC on an old PowerComputing system at home and it's very nice. The only drawback with the iBook is that, if I'm going to run X on the beastie, I want three mouse buttons (so far, this requirement, along with the desire for built-in ethernet, has vetoed all contenders, Apple or otherwise).
Side note: I've been running Mac OS X on the afore mentioned PowerComputing box (upgraded PowerWave w/ 300MHz G3, 128MB RAM, etc. I used the instructions at Ryan Rempel's page to install OS X on a 'oldWorld' system) and it is damned slow. Unless Apple can optimize whatever parts of OS X that make it seem to drag so badly, I'd say that LinuxPPC has a secure position as an alternate OS for Apple PPC boxen. Running LinuxPPC, the PowerWave was easily the equal of my AMD K6-500 box, even before the G3 upgrade (it was originally a PPC604 132MHz). Under Mac OS X, even the simplest things seem to take forever.
Another Disclaimer: Yes, I know my system is unsupported, and I know that the memory sub-system sucks, and I know that things would probably be faster with a bit more memory (fer cryin' out loud! I've already got friggin' 128MB on that thing, that should be enough for anybody!). Still, LinuxPPC was quick and spry where Mac OS X is slow and plodding. Anyone that was concerned that OS X would be the death of LinuxPPC should rest easy.
A quick romp across the net for similarly configured and priced machines yields the following results:
1024x768 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ehternet
RGB-video out
firewire
1400x1050 LCD
64 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ethernet
IEEE 1394
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
ethernet (optional PC-card)
TV-out
no fireware/IEEE 1394
1024x768
64 MB RAM
15 GB HD
CD-ROM
built-in ethernet
unspecified external display port
no firewire/IEEE 1394
800x600 LCD
128 MB RAM
10 GB HD
DVD-ROM
built-in ethernet
TV-out
no firewire/IEEE 1394
(I have omitted some features either becuase we all know how the contents turns out -- i.e. the CPU on the iBook is much slower than the competition -- or becuase the specs were substantially the same -- everyone has USB ports and modems, so why mention it?)
The Apple offering seems to stand up to the competition pretty well, with the notable exception being the DELL Inspiron 8000 which just kicks butt up and down (1400x1050 LCD! profanity, blasphemy, and disrespect! that is some nice hardware! I wonder how well it does with Linux). Most of the stuff I saw that was significantly cheaper than the Apple system didn't come with built-in ethernet and had only SVGA resolution on the LCD, which are two features near and dear to me.
While you can't get a new Apple laptop for the $900 that some models from some manufacturers are going for at the moment, you are certainly not getting ripped off. I'd say that the old saw about overpriced-underpowered Apple hardware is clearly more myth than reality.
Disclaimer: I'm an old Apple hand (my first real computer -- the kind that didn't store its data on cassette tapes -- was a Lisa 2 running MacWorks back in 1984) who has drifted far into the Linux camp of late (though I do own some Apple stock). I went into this comparisson intending to show that Apple was a clearly better value for the price than PC laptops with similar features, but the truth has bested me.
P.S. what I wouldn't give to have support for the TABLE tag on Slashdot.
Anyone notice that there is no encoding software* here, despite what the article summary says? While it might be nice to have a good, open source, streaming media player, what we really need is a fast and efficient (in terms of compressed file size) video encoder, preferably producing MPEG-1 streams. Without a good, real time, encoder, we can't produce our own video streams for our own purposes (I'd like to turn my Linux box into a digital VCR, personally).
* For those who are easily confused by precise language: an encoder turns raw input data (video data, in this case) into some specific usable format (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, etc.) possibly applying some kind of compression. What the folks at sureplayer have produced is a decoder, which takes the encoded data stream and turns it back into something like the raw data stream.
As many folks have said, the real failure of banner ads isn't in the medium, it's in the message itself.
I click on lots of banner ads, when the ad looks interesting and I have a reasonable basis to believe that the ad won't take me to some popup happy fraud-site. Most banner ads, however, don't satisfy my criteria: If the advertisment itself is obviously trying to defraud the viewer (e.g. the "Your Internet Connection is not Optimized" ads that masquerade as an MS Windows dialog (I only use MacOS and Linux, so the stupidity of this approach is extra obvious)) what can you expect of the site that comissioned it?
As I said, I click on banner ads all the time, on Slashdot, on MacCentral and MacInTouch, on Salon and a number of other reputable pages. I have learned that I can trust the ads I see on these pages to take me to vendors I can trust who are hawking wares that I might be interested in. Any time I see a banner ad masquerading as a dialog box or an interactive game or poll, I simply steer clear of it (and, possibly, of the entire site, depending on my irritation level).
It's not banner ads that aren't working: it's the folks who think them up, and the folks who comission them.
The entire point of the power supply in most computers is to convert AC to DC: the components in the computer take DC power directly. If you already have the DC power, you could almost (modulo deriving the right voltage levels and some power conditioning) hook up all the components directly.
The item (or items) you are looking for is called a DC-DC power converter, possibly combined with a moderately sized capacitor to smooth out any sags or dips (you'll also need something to filter out surges, maybe a zener diode or some such). For most of the computer all you are worried about is producing 5 V and 12 V feeds, which shouldn't be a big deal, but for some components (CRTs and the flourescent backlight on most LCDs) you will need to produce some very high voltages (in the kV range, at least). For high voltages you will need to go back to a real power supply and an intermediate AC stage (aka, a switching power supply, which is what you already have in all such applications). Then the question is, do you replace the one that you already have in your CRT or LCD monitor, which is expecting 50-60 Hz, 110V (or 220 V, or whatever the local flavor is) AC power, or do you roll your own that can take whatever DC voltage you happen to have handy?
Ultimately, it is probably much simpler just to convert your local DC source into a nice 60 Hz, 110 V AC signal and continue using all your equipment in an unmodified manner. The conversion, both in your DC-AC converter and in the computers' power supplies, is pretty efficient these days, so don't worry too much about lost power there.
The good parts:
The bad parts:
Patient: "Doctor, when I write multi-threaded programs in C++ they dump core all over the place and I don't understand why!"
Doctor: "Don't do that."
I know it sounds glib, but it really is the heart of the matter. Writing proper multi-threaded programs is difficult and takes a fair amount of skill. If you or your programming staff don't have the skill to do it, you are better off sticking to something less challenging. This isn't meant as a put down, either: there are plenty of simple solutions to problems that, at first blush, may look like they require threads (or dynamic memory allocation, or any of a number of other complex and error prone tactics). You could replace your multiple threads with a polling loop and a switch statement, or spawn completely separate processes and communicate through pipes (you might be supprised how much performance you can get out of either solution compared to the threaded code).
If you feel that you really must use the cool threaded code (or a complex, dynamically allocted data structure, or whatever) then you may need to dedicate a week or two to a carefull re-examination of the code and the accompanying re-implementation to eliminate race-conditions/memory-leaks/mutual exclusion errors/etc. While there are a lot of cool debugging tools out there, that can help you find some kinds of errors, there is really no substitute for a deep and thorough understanding of your code. You can either spend the time understanding the mess you have, or try replacing it with something less complex but easier to maintain. (but, maybe, harder to extend/scale/etc.)
Here are some of my favorite high-tech problems with low-tech solutions:
- Multi-threading: multiple processes or polling loop with switch statement.
- Search Trees or other tree structures: hash tables.
- Linked lists or other linked structures: dynamically allocated arrays (double when size>=length, halve when size<length-n, like Java vectors)
- Complex decision logic: state machines.
Admittedly, sometimes you really do need to go with the more complex solution, but it is best to avoid it whenever possible. Besides, you can always put the complex stuff in the next version.The Tipler problem isn't purely an exercise in observed phenomena: the two fusion reaction paths result from first principles rather than a catalog of observed conditions. As for the accusation that Tipler is knocking down a staw man: that may be true, but the staw man was constructed by Pons and Fleischmann, not Tipler or his editors. It was Pons and Fleischmann who insisted on the presence of Deuteron fusion and who also insisted that the correct method of verifying their experiment was to find the products thereof.
I am not, and I don't think anyone else is, suggesting that something interesting wasn't happening in Pons' and Fleischmann's aparatus. Maybe it deserves to be investigated, but not under the fraudulent auspices of 'cold fusion' or any other miraculous new source of free energy. Anyone suggesting that such research is called for is either an outright crank or has some kind of ulterior motive that should clearly be distrusted.
Pons and Fleischmann made outrageous and unsupported claims about their scientific investigations. The scientific community responded in the proper manner by trying to verify those claims. After many attempts it became clear that the claims could not be verified, that the experiment was not repeatable. The proper response to unverifiable claims and unrepeatable experiments is to toss them on the rubish heap of history and move on, which is exactly what has been done. Tipler's probelm set is just an amusing footnote to the affair, but instructive never the less.
Caractacus Potts wrote:
Unfortunately for your argument, most of the really bad jornalism and fossilized public opinion was pro-P&F. They had a very seductive argument (which you are, largely, now repeating) and an awfully attractive carrot if you bought their claims.
Relying on the likes of USA Today and Newsweek (and even Discover) for your news about hard science is like relying on Slashdot for news of international politics: you may hear of some things, but don't expect accuracy or precision.
For the record, at the time that Pons' and Fleischmann's first claims were reported in the press, I did some back of the envelope calculations on the probable reduction of the electrostatic force between deuterium nucleii 'disolved' in the surface of a platinum crystal. My calculations showed that, within an order of magnitude, their claims for room temperature fusion were believable.
I was 'guardedly optimistic' about cold fusion at the time, but I had failed to take into account the necessary by-products of a deuterium-deuterium fusion reaction (neutron radiation) and the effect it would have had on nearby people (lethal dosage in a few hours). Had I considered the radiation problem, it would have been obvious that Pons' and Fleischmann were either liars or concealing one or more dead bodies. (and probably suffering from massive radiation burns themselves)
In retrospect, it is hard to understand why more scientists didn't bring up the problem of neutron radiation at the time that Pons Fleischmann made their initial claims. All the fuss about calorimetry and vacuuming helium out of the cieling tiles seems just silly if you don't see lethal doses of neutron radiation from an unshielded fusion reaction.
Even a second year undergraduate physics student can see that Pons' and Flieschmann's claims for cold fusion where severly overstated, if not simply fraudulent. Their obsession with inaccurate and difficult measurements suggests that they were, indeed, attempting a cover-up, but the cover-up was for the obvious fallacies in their own experiments.
The suggestion to persue either more accurate calorimetry (an error prone process even under the best conditions) or the search for 'nuclear ash' (better known as helium) are straw men to distract researchers from the easier to measure (and patently missing) by-products of a fusion reaction: neutrons! (and the dead lab workers caused by the neutron flux near the aparatus)
The following homework problem, taken from Physics for Scientists and Engineers, volume 2 third edition, by Paul A. Tipler, Worth Publishers, chapter 40 Nuclei, page 1336:
and with 50 percent of the reactions going down each branch, how many neutrons per second would we expect to be emitted in the generation of 4 W of power?If one-tenth of these neutrons were absorbed by the body of an 80.0-kg worker near the device, and if each absorbed neutron carries an average energy of 0.5 MeV with an RBE of 4, to what radiation dose rate in rems per hour would this correspond?
How long would it take for a person to receive a total dose of 500 rems? (This is the dose that is usually lethal to half of those receiving it.)
The answers are:
Without the most obvious by-product, neutrons, of the most likely nuclear reaction, the one suggested by Pons and Flieschmann themselves, as measured by an easily obtainable metric, dead or dying lab workers (or graduate students), the searches for any of the more esoteric by-products is a pointless waste of time.
As with any other newly formed nation, the aliens would need to establish some form of diplomatic recognition with one or mother nations on earth. There are well established protocols for doing this already, which have been used numerous times over last century, at least. Once the aliens had been recognized as a group by one or more nations, the alien 'nation' would be able to issue passports to it's citizens, establish diplomatic missions to earthly nations and do all sorts of other stuff that your run-of-the-mill earthly nations do. Aliens visiting a nation would have the same sorts of rights (or lack thereof) that any non-resident human would have.
Before you get all hot and bothered about rights for artificial intelligences, maybe you should consider the difficulties of recognizing naturally occurring non-human intelligence within current legal systems. I don't think it very likely that whales, dolphins or chimpanzees are going to be recognized as legal 'people' no matter what kinds of intelligence they can be shown to posess. When the intelligent entity happens to be entirely constructed by intentional human endeavor, however, I suspect that recognition as anything other than an owned and ownable object is out of the question.
I just want to be able to rearrange the window control buttons (close, minimize, maximize, and the tiny icon) in the title bar. I can do this in X Windows with most window managers. I can even do this on the Mac, with the right extensions. If the skinning feature of Win Xp will allow me to move the close button to the left side of the title bar, I will be happy to suffer through almost anything else. (DISCLAIMER: I don't willingly suffer the Windows blight, but my job essentially requires it)
Exactly true. When I first heard this puzzle I was told that the solution had to do with the order of mathematical operations and precedence, but I have also had the solution explained to me in terms of standard accounting practice. (something about not counting both debits and credits in the same group, but I'm no accountant so I don't remember the details) The real trick is in the telling. This didn't become clear to me, however, till I had to write the problem down, and I found that you had to carefully avoid any mention of the price after the refund (or the price claimed by the bellhop, to obscure his petty theft).
The simplest way I have found to explain the error is to say that you should only count actual dollars that people in the problem are holding: $3 (in the travelers' hands) + $2 (in the bellhop's pocket) + $25 (in the manager's till) = $30 (originally paid for the room).
Still, most people, when they first hear the puzzle, are quite flummoxed and have a very hard time explaining exactly what the error is.