Military threats promote innovation
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While war and weaponry are generally considered to be Bad Things(tm), there could still be an upside to all this. The fact exists that the military is traditionally the single biggest innovator in new technologies and ideas. During the cold war, our government spent trillions of dollars funding research in all fields of science and as a result, we gained a lot of useful technology that has civilian as well as military usefulness.
Without the soviets to compete against, NASA's budget has been shrinking to pathetic levels, leaving little funding for research and exploration these days. Perhaps the threat of military satellites orbiting the Earth, and the need to defend against them could be just the thing the government needs to start funneling some more much deserved money into NASA again. Think of all the benefits that would result from the US getting into another space race with China.
Who would pay $600 for what essentially is an off-the-shelf PC with a custom shaped case. I can build the same thing with off the shelf components for under $400. I've also found that the S/N ratio on most consumer quality PC sound cards leaves something to be desired. Most low-end sound cards have a S/N ration of around 90 dB, which is completely unacceptable for even the weekend audiophile. I think I'll stick with my PC for gaming and web browsing and use REAL stereo components for my music listening needs.
America is the land of the free in the sense that one is given the right to speak out against perceived injustice and voice their unpopular opinion in a public forum without danger of repercussions. This is a privilege that quite a few of us take for granted.
In many countries around the world, you would have been put to death for the anti-government sentiment in your above post.
The Russians would not send up their cargo module because they were too destitute to finance it's construction and launch. USia has already contributed millions of dollars towards portions of the ISS for which Russia claimed responsibility. They should not have committed to the ISS in the first place if they are unable to foot the bill for their share. A third-world country such as Russia or China has no business exploring space until they can successfully their internal problems. It makes no sense that the government should launch a $15 million Soyuz rocket while it's citizens spend a month's salary on a single loaf of bread.
Almost every signifigant medical advance in human history have been tested on humans while in the experimental stage. There's only so much you can do with rabbits and monkeys, eventually human testing is necessary. If everyone went by your logic, we'd still be living in the dark ages in terms of medicine, and doctors would be prescribing leaches to cure "the vapors".
Human testing is risky, but is absolutely necessary for the advancement of medical science.
There is NO threat of smallpox being released into the public. By 1979, the WHO completely wiped-out smallpox in the wild. The only living strains of smallpox in existance are located a highly secured CDC laboratory, and in a lab in Russia. There is almost NO chance of this illness being re-released into the wild. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to capitalize on the fear and paranoia of the public.
A "basic right", as you put it, is something that is manditory for survival.
Basic Rights are: Food Water and shelter
Unmetered Internet access is nothing more than a luxury. I know it may seem hard for *you* to live without such "necessities" as Jon Katz and Napster, but in the grand scheme of things, these are nothing more than another way to pass the time.
While it would be nice to have a nice fat fibre pipe going to my flat, in no way is my government under obligation to provide me with such. This rings especially true when there are so many around the world who are forced to do without their real basic rights of food, water, and shelter.
Before you write your representative demanding your God-given right to free 'net access. Think about those less fortunate, who would trade a lifetime of Internet usage for a single bowl of rice.
Just thinking about all the time, money, and CPU power that went into this disgusts me. While a prime number with 3,500,000 digits might have a nice cool factor, it is completely useless for any practical purposes.
Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.
Globalization is the natural progression of the age in which we are living. We have the ability to communicate with anyone on earth in a matter of seconds, and modern jetliners and bullet trains allow for face-to-face contact in a matter of hours. This is the first time in human history that it has been possible for corporations to maintain well organized presences on multiple continents. Globalization is nothing more than the natural expansion of existing commerce.
Furthermore, it takes an enormous amount of time and resources for a corporation to become globalized. All businesses start out as a small mom-and-pop shop, and either expand or fail. Today's globalized corporations are merely the most sucessful of the previous generation's small town shops, and you don't become a huge multinational conglomerate by screwing over your customers. Companies like Wal-Mart, Montsano, and Coca Cola got where they are today by offering superior products and services than their competitors. Years of hard work got them where they are today, not some government Trilateral Commission conspiracy. It's free-market economy at it's finest, nothing more.
Va Linu^h^h^h^hSystems needs desperately to do SOMETHING to get back into the black. Their recently released financial statement is quite disturbing. It's quite possibly the worst I've ever seen.
Their total revenue for the quarter was $15,981,000, while their Net Loss was $290,118,000. They lost 20 times what they made. That is simply pathetic. If they're going to come out of this, they've got to do a MAJOR turnaround, and as much as I'd like VA to succeed, I don't think selling SourceForge is going to make them 275 million a quarter. I feel bad for those who bought LNUX in the $300 range.
I think that as soon as providers start offering flat rate wireless, the service will really take off. I used to work for a wireless phone company, and numerous consumer surveys have shown that flat rate pay plans with the same billing each month is what most consumers want. We're already doing this with landline phones and Internet access, and I feel that flat-rate cell plans are the next natural step in this direction.
The infrastructure to do this has been in place for several years now, and It's just up to cellular service providers to adopt a flat pricing plan and go from there. In fact, there are already several providers my locality who are offering unlimited usage for around $50/month.
The US has taken a lot of flak from critics about being slow to adopt cellular technologies, and I think this is a definite step in the right direction. We may not have Bluetooth or 3G yet, but nobody really needs those bells and whistles anyway. I want a cheap cell phone that will work just like my regular landline phone, and hopefully that's what flat rate pricing will allow. In some third world countries like Britain and Japan, their regular phones don't even have unlimited usage. You make a local call in a less industrialized nation like Britain, and you're going to be paying by the minute.
Does anyone have a link to the changelog? I'm interested to see if they've fixed any of the bugs present in 2.4.11a and previous.
I'd also be interested to know if they've fixed the Integer floating poing RAND bug that can occur on some older MMX Athlons. I've got a friend who has one of the affected processors, and he's been dying to upgrade, but can't because his tarball segfaults on compile.
Also, what's the status of that TCP/IP stack optimization that Theo De Raadt has been working on? Has this been incorporated into the new kernel? I'm getting sick of compiling my winipcfg.dll file every time I install a new kernel. Hopefully the new winmodem streaming support will take care of this problem. It shouldn't have taken as long as it already has, considering DeRaadt switched from C to VisualBasic for his new code. Any info would be helpful...
I'm glad to see that Alpha processors are (temporarily, at least) going to continue to be an option. Alpha's are far from mainstream, but it's always good to see some competition in the market dominated by Intel.
With that said, I feel that Intel makes a superior processor and Alpha's are already a bit outdated. Almost all modern apps require x-86 extensions such as MMX, SSE, and 3dNow, which Alphas do not support. I'd rather be running a hardware platform which supports these innovations and allows software to overcome x86 limitations. Alpha's are 64 bit processors, and they are quite fast, but they do not offer the specialised hardware instructions that x86 supports. Alpha's are like 1960's muscle cars. They're fast, but only because of the brute force under the hood. X86 machines are sleek and smoothe like a Porche because they use brilliant engineering and specialised extensions like SSE. I'll take the Porche over the outdated horsepower any day.
Furthermore, Alphas are limited in the software platforms on which they support. Only certain flavors of Unix will run on an Alpha, while Almost all Unices, Windows, DOS, BSD, OS/2 etc. are supported by x86 based processors.
The ARM CPU architecture is patented and ARM has sucessfully defended their architecture against IP theft in the past.
It shouldn't matter how their competitors were able to copy their RISC processors, the important fact here is that the device has been granted a US patent. I'm sure people are going to say that reverse engineering makes it perfectly legal, but that is simply not the case. Reverse engineering protects OpenCores.org from being accused of corporate espionage, by proving that they legally obtained the information necessary to copy the core, but their posting of patented information to their website is what is being argued against. Reverse engineering is nothing more than a legitimate way for engineers to steal the intellectual property of competitors and gain an unfair business advantage. ARM has invested millions of dollars and countless hours into developing their processor core, and they are completely justified in defending what is rightfully theirs against so-called "reverse engineering" patent theft.
Let's look at it this way, there are hundereds of very simple devices that have received US patents. Ever seen that microwavave bacon cooker advertised on Infomercials? I'm pretty sure that without too much effort, I could figure out how that was made without looking at any of it's inventors design specs. Do I legally have a right to sell my own "reverse engineered" version of someone elses invention? I should think not!
I don't see these things taking off for most uses because the PCI bus is limited to a measly 133 MB/S. Even newer 64 bit PCI slots found in some servers have insignifigant bandwidth to keep the data flowing fast enough to make full use of these things. I can see where they may come in handy for heavy number crunching applications such as SETI, but for web serving and DB applications, the throughput between the card and the host system is simply unacceptable.
Also, I would imagine that the RF interference generated by having several of these in one box would be quite signifigant. PCI slots are only an inch or so apart on most motherboards, and without any sort of RF shielding between multiple cards, I can't imagine they'd function properly. It's a good idea on paper, but in reality, I'd think a few 1U rackmount servers would do the job much better. And for $499 a piece, you could get a decent single processor rackmount server for around the same price.
John, I've heard a lot of debating lately on Slashdot and other discussion sites regarding the US governments recent initiative to include a government accessible "back door" into all new crypto tools.
Supporters of this program claim that such a program will allow day-to-day communications among law-abiding citizens to remain private, whilst still allowing the FBI and CIA to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists(with a warrant, of course).
The liberal media opposition to this initiative is claiming that by installing government accessible backdoors into encryption tools, we are giving up our right to privacy in favor of increased public safety. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to ignore the fact that nowhere in our Constitution or Bill of Rights, are we guaranteed anonimity or absolute privacy. It seems to me that if we cannot trust our policing agencies to be responsible with the power they have been given, the problem is not with the cryptography, but the government itself, and this problem needs to be addressed as such.
My question to you is: What is Cryptome's, and your personal, stance on government accessible backdoors installed in cryptography. Would the benefit to law enforcement, and the increased homeland security outweigh the possible implications to the loss of privacy. Do you think open-sourcing popular cryptographic tools would help alleviate people's fears about the integrity of their data security?
From the article: "By leveraging the mini CD format, Imation was able to keep the player's size down for those who want to use it as their main portable player. The cost is smaller disk capacity - 185 MB versus the 600+ MB a standard CD can hold - but that still holds plenty of tunes when your on the go. "
Sounds just like a minidisc player to me. What is the advantage of this over 10-year-old minidisc technology?
All reports I've read say that Jar-Jar is going to be included. Your going to hate the movie unless they take that fool out. Base your movies on cartoonish animated lizards and no one will watch. Are you listening, Lucas? Slapstick comedy does not Belong in an epic movie like Star Wars. To make the movie a success among adults, don't cater to kids. US moviegoers learned their lesson last time, and won't buy your crap again.
No. The point is that the story's submitter explicitly stated that non-Windows OS's were out of the question, and yet, for some reason unbeknownst to this poster, your blind allegiance to a piece of software of all things, caused you chime in with "d00d! Use Linux!", which is not only completely useless advice, but the precise opposite of what the submitter asked.
Get a grip on reality, you dunce. Linux is not the answer to all the world's problems. It has it's advantages, but Linux will not end war, famine, and injustice. It's also not too great for programming Windows apps.
Let me get this straight here: The guy is developing Windows applications, and specifically said that he is not permitted to install other OS's, and your suggestion is for him to run Linux. You rode the short bus to school, didn't you?
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Without the soviets to compete against, NASA's budget has been shrinking to pathetic levels, leaving little funding for research and exploration these days. Perhaps the threat of military satellites orbiting the Earth, and the need to defend against them could be just the thing the government needs to start funneling some more much deserved money into NASA again. Think of all the benefits that would result from the US getting into another space race with China.
Who would pay $600 for what essentially is an off-the-shelf PC with a custom shaped case. I can build the same thing with off the shelf components for under $400. I've also found that the S/N ratio on most consumer quality PC sound cards leaves something to be desired. Most low-end sound cards have a S/N ration of around 90 dB, which is completely unacceptable for even the weekend audiophile. I think I'll stick with my PC for gaming and web browsing and use REAL stereo components for my music listening needs.
Yeah, but they make up Celene's largest fanbase.
Let me guess: You're wearing a hat made out of tinfoil right now, aren't you?
In many countries around the world, you would have been put to death for the anti-government sentiment in your above post.
Or you could just search Google.
The Russians would not send up their cargo module because they were too destitute to finance it's construction and launch. USia has already contributed millions of dollars towards portions of the ISS for which Russia claimed responsibility. They should not have committed to the ISS in the first place if they are unable to foot the bill for their share. A third-world country such as Russia or China has no business exploring space until they can successfully their internal problems. It makes no sense that the government should launch a $15 million Soyuz rocket while it's citizens spend a month's salary on a single loaf of bread.
Human testing is risky, but is absolutely necessary for the advancement of medical science.
He was probably using a DNA computer to come up with those figures.
There is NO threat of smallpox being released into the public. By 1979, the WHO completely wiped-out smallpox in the wild. The only living strains of smallpox in existance are located a highly secured CDC laboratory, and in a lab in Russia. There is almost NO chance of this illness being re-released into the wild. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to capitalize on the fear and paranoia of the public.
Basic Rights are:
Food
Water
and shelter
Unmetered Internet access is nothing more than a luxury. I know it may seem hard for *you* to live without such "necessities" as Jon Katz and Napster, but in the grand scheme of things, these are nothing more than another way to pass the time.
While it would be nice to have a nice fat fibre pipe going to my flat, in no way is my government under obligation to provide me with such. This rings especially true when there are so many around the world who are forced to do without their real basic rights of food, water, and shelter.
Before you write your representative demanding your God-given right to free 'net access. Think about those less fortunate, who would trade a lifetime of Internet usage for a single bowl of rice.
Right now, there are literally millions of people who are suffering on this earth, and the vast majority of those problems can be solved by science. We should be focusing our resources on curing disease, engineering more productive grains and vegatables, and discovering cleaner power sources rather than pissing away millions of years of CPU time trying to see who can come up with the biggest prime number.
Furthermore, it takes an enormous amount of time and resources for a corporation to become globalized. All businesses start out as a small mom-and-pop shop, and either expand or fail. Today's globalized corporations are merely the most sucessful of the previous generation's small town shops, and you don't become a huge multinational conglomerate by screwing over your customers. Companies like Wal-Mart, Montsano, and Coca Cola got where they are today by offering superior products and services than their competitors. Years of hard work got them where they are today, not some government Trilateral Commission conspiracy. It's free-market economy at it's finest, nothing more.
Their total revenue for the quarter was $15,981,000, while their Net Loss was $290,118,000. They lost 20 times what they made. That is simply pathetic. If they're going to come out of this, they've got to do a MAJOR turnaround, and as much as I'd like VA to succeed, I don't think selling SourceForge is going to make them 275 million a quarter. I feel bad for those who bought LNUX in the $300 range.
The infrastructure to do this has been in place for several years now, and It's just up to cellular service providers to adopt a flat pricing plan and go from there. In fact, there are already several providers my locality who are offering unlimited usage for around $50/month.
The US has taken a lot of flak from critics about being slow to adopt cellular technologies, and I think this is a definite step in the right direction. We may not have Bluetooth or 3G yet, but nobody really needs those bells and whistles anyway. I want a cheap cell phone that will work just like my regular landline phone, and hopefully that's what flat rate pricing will allow. In some third world countries like Britain and Japan, their regular phones don't even have unlimited usage. You make a local call in a less industrialized nation like Britain, and you're going to be paying by the minute.
I'd also be interested to know if they've fixed the Integer floating poing RAND bug that can occur on some older MMX Athlons. I've got a friend who has one of the affected processors, and he's been dying to upgrade, but can't because his tarball segfaults on compile.
Also, what's the status of that TCP/IP stack optimization that Theo De Raadt has been working on? Has this been incorporated into the new kernel? I'm getting sick of compiling my winipcfg.dll file every time I install a new kernel. Hopefully the new winmodem streaming support will take care of this problem. It shouldn't have taken as long as it already has, considering DeRaadt switched from C to VisualBasic for his new code. Any info would be helpful...
With that said, I feel that Intel makes a superior processor and Alpha's are already a bit outdated. Almost all modern apps require x-86 extensions such as MMX, SSE, and 3dNow, which Alphas do not support. I'd rather be running a hardware platform which supports these innovations and allows software to overcome x86 limitations. Alpha's are 64 bit processors, and they are quite fast, but they do not offer the specialised hardware instructions that x86 supports. Alpha's are like 1960's muscle cars. They're fast, but only because of the brute force under the hood. X86 machines are sleek and smoothe like a Porche because they use brilliant engineering and specialised extensions like SSE. I'll take the Porche over the outdated horsepower any day.
Furthermore, Alphas are limited in the software platforms on which they support. Only certain flavors of Unix will run on an Alpha, while Almost all Unices, Windows, DOS, BSD, OS/2 etc. are supported by x86 based processors.
It shouldn't matter how their competitors were able to copy their RISC processors, the important fact here is that the device has been granted a US patent. I'm sure people are going to say that reverse engineering makes it perfectly legal, but that is simply not the case. Reverse engineering protects OpenCores.org from being accused of corporate espionage, by proving that they legally obtained the information necessary to copy the core, but their posting of patented information to their website is what is being argued against. Reverse engineering is nothing more than a legitimate way for engineers to steal the intellectual property of competitors and gain an unfair business advantage. ARM has invested millions of dollars and countless hours into developing their processor core, and they are completely justified in defending what is rightfully theirs against so-called "reverse engineering" patent theft.
Let's look at it this way, there are hundereds of very simple devices that have received US patents. Ever seen that microwavave bacon cooker advertised on Infomercials? I'm pretty sure that without too much effort, I could figure out how that was made without looking at any of it's inventors design specs. Do I legally have a right to sell my own "reverse engineered" version of someone elses invention? I should think not!
Also, I would imagine that the RF interference generated by having several of these in one box would be quite signifigant. PCI slots are only an inch or so apart on most motherboards, and without any sort of RF shielding between multiple cards, I can't imagine they'd function properly. It's a good idea on paper, but in reality, I'd think a few 1U rackmount servers would do the job much better. And for $499 a piece, you could get a decent single processor rackmount server for around the same price.
Supporters of this program claim that such a program will allow day-to-day communications among law-abiding citizens to remain private, whilst still allowing the FBI and CIA to monitor the communications of suspected terrorists(with a warrant, of course).
The liberal media opposition to this initiative is claiming that by installing government accessible backdoors into encryption tools, we are giving up our right to privacy in favor of increased public safety. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to ignore the fact that nowhere in our Constitution or Bill of Rights, are we guaranteed anonimity or absolute privacy. It seems to me that if we cannot trust our policing agencies to be responsible with the power they have been given, the problem is not with the cryptography, but the government itself, and this problem needs to be addressed as such.
My question to you is: What is Cryptome's, and your personal, stance on government accessible backdoors installed in cryptography. Would the benefit to law enforcement, and the increased homeland security outweigh the possible implications to the loss of privacy. Do you think open-sourcing popular cryptographic tools would help alleviate people's fears about the integrity of their data security?
Sounds just like a minidisc player to me. What is the advantage of this over 10-year-old minidisc technology?
And their's is only $250.
All reports I've read say that Jar-Jar is going to be included.
Your going to hate the movie unless they take that fool out.
Base your movies on cartoonish animated lizards and no one will watch.
Are you listening, Lucas? Slapstick comedy does not
Belong in an epic movie like Star Wars.
To make the movie a success among adults, don't cater to kids.
US moviegoers learned their lesson last time, and won't buy your crap again.
Get a grip on reality, you dunce. Linux is not the answer to all the world's problems. It has it's advantages, but Linux will not end war, famine, and injustice. It's also not too great for programming Windows apps.
Let me get this straight here: The guy is developing Windows applications, and specifically said that he is not permitted to install other OS's, and your suggestion is for him to run Linux. You rode the short bus to school, didn't you?