This is interesting, since you seem to feel quite superior to the rest of us that think it's a very relevant piece of work.
It was an anti-communist rag written with characters shallow and plot weak even by science fiction standards. If you think I'm being superior just because I think that book is no better than its contemporary critics held it to be, well, then you may want to rethink your position.
Surveillance and control are intimately linked.
They are, but not in the way that you think.
The manager of an amusement park must survey his park in order to control it. The Red Cross at an American Prison can survey all they want, but they don't have any control at all over the prison that the warden doesn't give them.
1984 would work if you removed the double-screen and just used technology that was contemporary to Orwell's day. In fact, it did work for the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. But if you turned Big Brother into a democratically-appointed survellience system that could only watch and didn't have the Thought Police, well, then Orwell's story becomes about as spooky as Minority Report. Less, even.
If at any moment it is possible that you are being observed by someone - anyone - aren't you less inclPined to exercise your freedoms?
Nope. I presume that someone, either man or God, is observing me every minute of every day. I exercise my freedoms as I see fit, with the full expectation that someone will observe and, eventually, I will be called to account for my actions. (This is one of the surprisngly modern parts of Christianity, btw -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)
If you are less inclined to exercise your freedoms when you are being observed, well, then you probably are confusing "excerise your freedoms" with "break the rules of good behavior". Please go back to kindergarten, I think you missed a few lessons on how to operate in civilzied society.
Its Big Brother, but its a distributed Big brother.
*sigh*
Big Brother was not a tryanny of observation, it was a tyranny of control.
Go back and read that (god-awful) book again. Note the (thorughly depressing and rather insipid) plotline. Pay special attention to the description of how Big Brother operates.
If you're going to a bank, you're not using the little plastic card the OP was talking about. You're using a different, more complicated card that can get certain persons in a lot of fiscal problems.
When using one of those cards -- well, if all you get is the $1.00 ATM fee, count yourself lucky.
It's good, sound personal fiscal policy, the kind of lesson that I want my children to learn!
Better the card than a check, and better a check than cash.
Why? Better fraud control. And if you really did teach them a sound personal fiscal policy, they'll have a plastic card that they can pay off for less actual cost than the postage of that stamp or the fee for that ATM. (Now, if only Visa would let you transfer to an individual...)
Graphical User Interfaces are intuitive because you can remember the location of things.
1: No, they're not. GUIs are intuitive because the human brain was hard-wired to operate in a universe where there are blocks and shapes and stuff. DOS 5 had a GUI of sorts, that was every bit as intuitive as Windows or Mac could ever be.
2: Folders and files, which move, aren't the sort of things they were talking about. Windows has at least three ways to make a command or folder always in the same location -- which is something most folk don't want, so it's not used very often.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
one based soley on cost, btw.
Figure out how much it costs to clean up the pollution from said coal. Bill the coal plant for that. Watch as other, less polluting alternatives becomes more popular.
Nothing else matters in a capitalist economy but cost. We keep Wal-Mart from enslaving its employees by having a very high price tag for slavery. We keep GM from leaving cars on the road that are death traps by having a high cost on such activity. You want to clean up the environment? Make pollution cost.
Remember that we're in the "good-story Science fiction" level of ideas, here. (Or, the "the Gods are hiding from us" level.) Not something to waste any significant ammount of time on, but an intriguing diversion when one has some recreational time.
Plus, it seems unlikely that such signals would have escaped detection, as they would probably interfere with MRI scans of the brain.
I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming to have a telepathic moment while undergoing an MRI. Something about a big, loud magnet sort of ruins the concentration or "peace" typically said to be required.
Telepathy, if it exists via an EM signal, would certainly show up on an MRI and in an accurate enough blood sugar measurement. But since most claims of telepathy are either in moments of great stress and low action (child trapped in sinking car types) or virtually no stress or action at all (sleeping and trance types), it's plausible that such a spike does occur, but not in a moment that is easily detected. (Notice how no one has managed to have telepathy-on-demand, suggesting that, if it does exist, it is done via subconcious reflex.)
The most likely, and hardest-to-proove, mode of telepathy would be a "life-threatening emergency" alarm. To test it, we would have to subject multiple human beings to some greatly stressful event (one that would include not only a substantial ammount of fear but also likely a signficiant ammount of pain), and monitor all of the nearby and well-known human beings who might be potential receptors, preferrably withholding from them any knowledge of the time, place, situation, or identity of the person so tested. (A hunter-gatherer evolution would be directed at the closest known "may help" type, including by necessity other humans who may not be blood or social kin.)
Of couse, the other three plausible scienerios involve either some entity or group of entities keeping knowledge of telepathy from being common knowledge (maybe they all chat and hide from the rest of us), a Bhuddist like "those who talk about telepathy aren't telepathic" situation, or a simple unconcious an unspecific interaction. Only the last of which can actually be tested for objectively.
(Let's ignore the "gov't already knows about it and keeps 'em secret" argument as self-defeating.)
Two, quantum entanglement has been proven, via the No Cloning Theorem, to be incapable of transmitting information.
That's a mighty loaded word you're tossing around there. Two hundred years ago, it was proven that a heaver-than-air craft capable of supporting a human weight could not fly. Maybe the No Cloning Theorem is correct, maybe it isn't -- we won't know until we have a lot more experience with actual quantum-mechanics-based technology than we do.
(And, in a like vein, we won't "know" that we know exactly how the human brain works until we can create an artifical one or we have the technology that should let us create an artificial one and we don't get it to work.)
Let's face it, the only reason why time is unidirectional is because of the second law of thermodynamics, and that one is unidirectional because of information theory.
Call this a "you're an idiot" post.
Time is unidirectional. Enthropy is unidirectional. Because these are the only two things that work like that, we have our system of theories structured to put them together.
If our theories are wrong, then that means that our theories are wrong--not that the universe somehow operates differently than we've always observed. There are plausible alterations to understood theory that allow for reversable time, and reduction in enthropy -- all of which require the universe to be more complex than current theory holds it to be, which is one of the reasons why the alterations are only "plausible fictions".
Let me spell this out for you -- I am *not* saying that our theories are actually wrong. I am saying that, if they are wrong, then the wrongness extends only to our knowledge, not the universe--which will putter long quite well without us knowing why it works the way it does.
I think for the large part, the world of psychics is snake oil, predators preying on the gullible.
Don't forget the gullible dancing for money. Not everyone who operates on a false premise are predators; some are just ignorant.
But, if you're familiar with the double-slit "interference" experiment, you may get an uneasy sense there is much for us to learn about interaction of particles, forces, energies, etc. It's not for me to determine ESP is real but I've experienced unexplainable phenomena at least to my level to understand.
Or not so uneasy. "ESP" -- which is a pretty broad term, when you get down to it -- in cases like you describe is just similarities in taste. Two people who like the same things picking the same mass-producted widget to give to someone, with no communcation, isn't really ESP. Two people picking the same set of things, and correctly deciding who will get the one and who will get the other, would be closer.
And: temperature is not something you see in a thermometer, it's the mean speed of the molecules vibration. It HAS a meaning.
Actually, depending on your thermometer, what you see is either the expansion of mercury against a ruler, the location of a needle on a dial, or a digital read-out. Saying that a thermometer measures the "mean speed of molecules' vibration" is putting the cart before the horse -- YES, it has a meaning, but that meaning requires that the tech, the thermometer, and our understanding of thermodynamics all to be correct.
If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it...
Who said anything of the kind?
It's concievable that humans have some form of radiation or radio-frequency that we use to communicate, or we could have neurochemicals that become quantum-entangled with those in other brains. And it certainly would use energy -- maybe not hundreds of kilocalories, but something.
If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, time would not be unidirectional.
Maybe on the first part of that statement, not so much on the second. (And note, only the second part of your argument applies. Since it's really just an inversion of the second law, and all...)
Just because the second law of thermodynamics is wrong doesn't mean that time would become non-unidirectional. You're talking about something being fundamentally wrong with one of our basic understandings of how the universe works. Which means that we would have to find out some other reason why time is unidirectional; time wouldn't suddenly stop working because we were wrong about why it works the way that it does.
Sure it does. You just need to realize that what they really mean is "a second is that unit of time that we can measure by counting 9,192,631,770 occilations of a Caesium-133 atom", with the emphasis on the WE.
Let's take another absurdly re-defined measurement, the meter (you know, the basis of the entire metric system). It was originally defined, by the French Academy of Sciences, as one ten-millionths the distance from the north pole to the equator, in a line around the curve of the earth. The fact that the earth really is slightly different than 40,000 meters in north-south circumfrance doesn't change this definition, becasue the inferred component in the "1/10,000,000th" definition is "as measured by the French Academy of Sciences circa 1791."
Another example, which is a personal favorite, is to parse exactly what the "fact" is when you see a temperature. The real fact is "what the operator stated the thermometer to read." Which means that if the temperature doesn't seem right, it can be because the operator was mistaken, the thermometer didn't work, there's something off-kilter with the thing being measured, or our basic understanding of thermodynamics is flawed. Since (1) and (2) are easy to control for (insert additional tech, with seperate thermometer), most of the time we just worry about (3) -- since we can only talk about (4) if we also rule out (3).
(I really don't get why folk get all hung up on "definitions" of our units of measurement. An inch is an inch is an inch, if it's "the line on a ruler", "the length between the hashes on a particlar bar in the Smithsonian", "0.0254 meters", or "the distance light travels through a vaccum in 1/11,802,852,677.16... seconds".)
That means it is accurate to 0.000000025ths of a second in 10 years... A more partical time-frame, which can be tested fairly easily.
How, exactly?
Only test that I can think of would be to build two of these, plus a control of some sort, and leave them right next to each other for ten years. Only the control will be less accurate than the device you're measuring...
You're right! By god, where's the mold? Where's the rot? I can't believe i just ate meat and bread without life-sustaining rot!
Yes, there are a lot of things in the food we eat that are new. However, at least in America, everything sold as food has to go through a more rigid inspection system than ever happened in ancient times.
So in order to make consumers think about performance again, and not just the number of cores, we will name our processors with a "virtual core number" that reflect real-world performance better. Thank You!
FWIW, Vista is going to rate your PC for you--so you finally have a (relatively) nonbiased way to compare actual performance with one number you can read off a box.
No, Microsoft will not make any of the concessions, because to do so would destroy their monopoly. Their monopoly depends on their control over the protocols and file formats they use.
No, not really. Microsoft's monopoly is due to their huge installed base -- because so many are used to using MS's products, not because so many have files in MS's formats.
Don't believe me? Consider this--right now, EVERY monopolistic item that MS has can be read "well enough" by their competitors. And yet, despite the price difference of hundreds of dollars per seat, we don't see a mass migration away from MS to their competition.
I do expect MS to pay at least part of the fine--and I expect that, even if they adopted ODF for everything as thoroughly as they've adopted TCP/IP, they'd still be a monopoly becuase they simply pay more attention to the "luser" than the other guy.
Why not? That 'trusted computing' in vista is like a cursed boots of slowness -35
Except that Vista doesn't include Trusted Computing. It has some DRM features, but not a heck of a lot more that you can get with Windows XP and the latest MS Media software. Oh, and if you don't use any DRM files, absolutely nothing DRM related runs.
not to mention the cheezy 3-d desktop that lets you scroll 'side to side' to see stacked windows easier,
Oh, yes, MS is certainly the first OS manufacturer to realize that everyone and their grandmother has a 3D accelerator in their PC, and start using it do to something in the OS. I mean, it's not like Apple ever did anything like that.
all while doubling the power drain on a laptop.
My laptop ran Vista for about two weeks, and since the heat increase I noticed continues now that I'm off Vista and back to XP, I'm pretty sure that's summer and not the unoptimized beta code that is Vista. I even ran in on battery for more than a few days, and while I lost a few minutes of battery in the time it took "sleep mode" to become "hibernate", battery life certainly wasn't halved.
when you've got a fat bloated pig like vista, even suse 10 could easily be a vista killer.
Y'know, folk said the same thing about XP when it came out. And now virtually every major Linux distribution has just as much crap on by default.
Microsoft was persecuted by the EU, which apparently doesn't trust people to choose to associate with businesses on their own, and the fines were wrong.
No, the fines were the EU saying "look, if you want to play in our field you have to obey our laws."
MS is a monopoly -- I think they have a bigger control over the consumer computer market than Standard Oil had in its day. In the USA, that means that they can't leverage their monopoly to enter other market. (Such as, for example, they can't force Windows users to buy Office, or keep them from using a Palm OS PDA, or have a Windows PC crap all over the network in a way that they don't let Apple and IBM/Linux know about).
In the EU, well, the standards are a bit higher. It's much more of a socalist economy than the United States, and that means that there are, as other folk have noted, more rules in favor of consumers against businesses. MS always has the option of just backing out of the EU entirely; I'm sure they'll still survive, somehow, with the loss of 400 million potential customers--and, heck, once Europe becomes dominated by Apple, MS can come back in as a non-monopoly player.
Don't expect MS to pay all of that fine, btw. They'll probably make the concessions that the EU demands, and have a significant part of it lifted or voided. (What DOES the EU want, anyway?)
While Vista does have steeper requirements, and by default runs a bunch of GUI effects that aren't really necessary--I don't see it as a disaster at all.
I just removed Beta 2 from this very laptop, and my reasons for doing so had nothing whatsoever to do with the OS (My laptop's DVD reading software decided not to work, and ATI's beta vista driver didn't support OpenGL). For the entire time I had it on, there was exactly one crash -- and it was caused by the aforementioned laptop software, not Vista. For the past few weeks, every time I've seen someone's computer problem, I've remembered part of Vista that would make that problem easier to fix.
Say what you will for the cathedral, but the book coming down the pipe isn't one that's going to fall apart at the seams.
The big adjustment is going to be when petroleum runs scarce.
No, not really. There are about three answers to Peak Oil -- ethaonol, synthetic crude, and hydrogen -- and each of them will become cheaper and cheaper, in comparison to oil, as oil rises.
By the time gas reaches $5 USD, probably sooner, we'll have at least one significant alternative, in the USA, ready to export to China and India.
In this case I wouldn't call it word choice, but grammatic, and I'm the first to accept that my handle one the English tense system is far from perfect. Can you elaborate?
Of course. (Word choice and grammar are essentially the same things.) "Made" is the past-tense of "make." "I never make mistakes", and "I have never made mistakes" are all subtly shades of the exact same meaning.
For common English vernacular, a claim to prefection (such as "I don't make mistakes") tends to come off as rather arrogant. Even Shakesphere had his off moments. A simple passive correction is usually better, such as "didn't you mean 'its'?" or the sarcastic, such as "what about its cool?"
The "I had to learn this as an adult; why can't you keep up with something you learned in grade school?" is a good line, too.
Slashdot Mirror
This is interesting, since you seem to feel quite superior to the rest of us that think it's a very relevant piece of work.
It was an anti-communist rag written with characters shallow and plot weak even by science fiction standards. If you think I'm being superior just because I think that book is no better than its contemporary critics held it to be, well, then you may want to rethink your position.
Surveillance and control are intimately linked.
They are, but not in the way that you think.
The manager of an amusement park must survey his park in order to control it. The Red Cross at an American Prison can survey all they want, but they don't have any control at all over the prison that the warden doesn't give them.
1984 would work if you removed the double-screen and just used technology that was contemporary to Orwell's day. In fact, it did work for the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. But if you turned Big Brother into a democratically-appointed survellience system that could only watch and didn't have the Thought Police, well, then Orwell's story becomes about as spooky as Minority Report. Less, even.
If at any moment it is possible that you are being observed by someone - anyone - aren't you less inclPined to exercise your freedoms?
Nope. I presume that someone, either man or God, is observing me every minute of every day. I exercise my freedoms as I see fit, with the full expectation that someone will observe and, eventually, I will be called to account for my actions. (This is one of the surprisngly modern parts of Christianity, btw -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)
If you are less inclined to exercise your freedoms when you are being observed, well, then you probably are confusing "excerise your freedoms" with "break the rules of good behavior". Please go back to kindergarten, I think you missed a few lessons on how to operate in civilzied society.
(There, now I'm being superior.)
Its Big Brother, but its a distributed Big brother.
*sigh*
Big Brother was not a tryanny of observation, it was a tyranny of control.
Go back and read that (god-awful) book again. Note the (thorughly depressing and rather insipid) plotline. Pay special attention to the description of how Big Brother operates.
If you're going to a bank, you're not using the little plastic card the OP was talking about. You're using a different, more complicated card that can get certain persons in a lot of fiscal problems.
When using one of those cards -- well, if all you get is the $1.00 ATM fee, count yourself lucky.
It's good, sound personal fiscal policy, the kind of lesson that I want my children to learn!
Better the card than a check, and better a check than cash.
Why? Better fraud control. And if you really did teach them a sound personal fiscal policy, they'll have a plastic card that they can pay off for less actual cost than the postage of that stamp or the fee for that ATM. (Now, if only Visa would let you transfer to an individual...)
Graphical User Interfaces are intuitive because you can remember the location of things.
1: No, they're not. GUIs are intuitive because the human brain was hard-wired to operate in a universe where there are blocks and shapes and stuff. DOS 5 had a GUI of sorts, that was every bit as intuitive as Windows or Mac could ever be.
2: Folders and files, which move, aren't the sort of things they were talking about. Windows has at least three ways to make a command or folder always in the same location -- which is something most folk don't want, so it's not used very often.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
one based soley on cost, btw.
Figure out how much it costs to clean up the pollution from said coal. Bill the coal plant for that. Watch as other, less polluting alternatives becomes more popular.
Nothing else matters in a capitalist economy but cost. We keep Wal-Mart from enslaving its employees by having a very high price tag for slavery. We keep GM from leaving cars on the road that are death traps by having a high cost on such activity. You want to clean up the environment? Make pollution cost.
Nope, not paranormal. Not ESP.
ESP requires something that cannot be explained by mere knowledge. Hence, the "P."
Remember that we're in the "good-story Science fiction" level of ideas, here. (Or, the "the Gods are hiding from us" level.) Not something to waste any significant ammount of time on, but an intriguing diversion when one has some recreational time.
Plus, it seems unlikely that such signals would have escaped detection, as they would probably interfere with MRI scans of the brain.
I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming to have a telepathic moment while undergoing an MRI. Something about a big, loud magnet sort of ruins the concentration or "peace" typically said to be required.
Telepathy, if it exists via an EM signal, would certainly show up on an MRI and in an accurate enough blood sugar measurement. But since most claims of telepathy are either in moments of great stress and low action (child trapped in sinking car types) or virtually no stress or action at all (sleeping and trance types), it's plausible that such a spike does occur, but not in a moment that is easily detected. (Notice how no one has managed to have telepathy-on-demand, suggesting that, if it does exist, it is done via subconcious reflex.)
The most likely, and hardest-to-proove, mode of telepathy would be a "life-threatening emergency" alarm. To test it, we would have to subject multiple human beings to some greatly stressful event (one that would include not only a substantial ammount of fear but also likely a signficiant ammount of pain), and monitor all of the nearby and well-known human beings who might be potential receptors, preferrably withholding from them any knowledge of the time, place, situation, or identity of the person so tested. (A hunter-gatherer evolution would be directed at the closest known "may help" type, including by necessity other humans who may not be blood or social kin.)
Of couse, the other three plausible scienerios involve either some entity or group of entities keeping knowledge of telepathy from being common knowledge (maybe they all chat and hide from the rest of us), a Bhuddist like "those who talk about telepathy aren't telepathic" situation, or a simple unconcious an unspecific interaction. Only the last of which can actually be tested for objectively.
(Let's ignore the "gov't already knows about it and keeps 'em secret" argument as self-defeating.)
Two, quantum entanglement has been proven, via the No Cloning Theorem, to be incapable of transmitting information.
That's a mighty loaded word you're tossing around there. Two hundred years ago, it was proven that a heaver-than-air craft capable of supporting a human weight could not fly. Maybe the No Cloning Theorem is correct, maybe it isn't -- we won't know until we have a lot more experience with actual quantum-mechanics-based technology than we do.
(And, in a like vein, we won't "know" that we know exactly how the human brain works until we can create an artifical one or we have the technology that should let us create an artificial one and we don't get it to work.)
Let's face it, the only reason why time is unidirectional is because of the second law of thermodynamics, and that one is unidirectional because of information theory.
Call this a "you're an idiot" post.
Time is unidirectional. Enthropy is unidirectional. Because these are the only two things that work like that, we have our system of theories structured to put them together.
If our theories are wrong, then that means that our theories are wrong--not that the universe somehow operates differently than we've always observed. There are plausible alterations to understood theory that allow for reversable time, and reduction in enthropy -- all of which require the universe to be more complex than current theory holds it to be, which is one of the reasons why the alterations are only "plausible fictions".
Let me spell this out for you -- I am *not* saying that our theories are actually wrong. I am saying that, if they are wrong, then the wrongness extends only to our knowledge, not the universe--which will putter long quite well without us knowing why it works the way it does.
I think for the large part, the world of psychics is snake oil, predators preying on the gullible.
Don't forget the gullible dancing for money. Not everyone who operates on a false premise are predators; some are just ignorant.
But, if you're familiar with the double-slit "interference" experiment, you may get an uneasy sense there is much for us to learn about interaction of particles, forces, energies, etc. It's not for me to determine ESP is real but I've experienced unexplainable phenomena at least to my level to understand.
Or not so uneasy. "ESP" -- which is a pretty broad term, when you get down to it -- in cases like you describe is just similarities in taste. Two people who like the same things picking the same mass-producted widget to give to someone, with no communcation, isn't really ESP. Two people picking the same set of things, and correctly deciding who will get the one and who will get the other, would be closer.
And: temperature is not something you see in a thermometer, it's the mean speed of the molecules vibration. It HAS a meaning.
Actually, depending on your thermometer, what you see is either the expansion of mercury against a ruler, the location of a needle on a dial, or a digital read-out. Saying that a thermometer measures the "mean speed of molecules' vibration" is putting the cart before the horse -- YES, it has a meaning, but that meaning requires that the tech, the thermometer, and our understanding of thermodynamics all to be correct.
If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it...
Who said anything of the kind?
It's concievable that humans have some form of radiation or radio-frequency that we use to communicate, or we could have neurochemicals that become quantum-entangled with those in other brains. And it certainly would use energy -- maybe not hundreds of kilocalories, but something.
If you could store or send information without passing through a physical medium and without spending energy doing it, the second law of thermodynamics would be violated, time would not be unidirectional.
Maybe on the first part of that statement, not so much on the second. (And note, only the second part of your argument applies. Since it's really just an inversion of the second law, and all...)
Just because the second law of thermodynamics is wrong doesn't mean that time would become non-unidirectional. You're talking about something being fundamentally wrong with one of our basic understandings of how the universe works. Which means that we would have to find out some other reason why time is unidirectional; time wouldn't suddenly stop working because we were wrong about why it works the way that it does.
Sure it does. You just need to realize that what they really mean is "a second is that unit of time that we can measure by counting 9,192,631,770 occilations of a Caesium-133 atom", with the emphasis on the WE.
Let's take another absurdly re-defined measurement, the meter (you know, the basis of the entire metric system). It was originally defined, by the French Academy of Sciences, as one ten-millionths the distance from the north pole to the equator, in a line around the curve of the earth. The fact that the earth really is slightly different than 40,000 meters in north-south circumfrance doesn't change this definition, becasue the inferred component in the "1/10,000,000th" definition is "as measured by the French Academy of Sciences circa 1791."
Another example, which is a personal favorite, is to parse exactly what the "fact" is when you see a temperature. The real fact is "what the operator stated the thermometer to read." Which means that if the temperature doesn't seem right, it can be because the operator was mistaken, the thermometer didn't work, there's something off-kilter with the thing being measured, or our basic understanding of thermodynamics is flawed. Since (1) and (2) are easy to control for (insert additional tech, with seperate thermometer), most of the time we just worry about (3) -- since we can only talk about (4) if we also rule out (3).
(I really don't get why folk get all hung up on "definitions" of our units of measurement. An inch is an inch is an inch, if it's "the line on a ruler", "the length between the hashes on a particlar bar in the Smithsonian", "0.0254 meters", or "the distance light travels through a vaccum in 1/11,802,852,677.16... seconds".)
That means it is accurate to 0.000000025ths of a second in 10 years... A more partical time-frame, which can be tested fairly easily.
How, exactly?
Only test that I can think of would be to build two of these, plus a control of some sort, and leave them right next to each other for ten years. Only the control will be less accurate than the device you're measuring...
It's estimated that NASA costs the average American tax-payer over $100 a year.
NASA has a $30 billion budget?
The food is not the same, read the ingredients
You're right! By god, where's the mold? Where's the rot? I can't believe i just ate meat and bread without life-sustaining rot!
Yes, there are a lot of things in the food we eat that are new. However, at least in America, everything sold as food has to go through a more rigid inspection system than ever happened in ancient times.
How is the retracted update different from the functionality which I have seen in-place since I bought the machine a year ago?
Log on as a user. "encrypt" a file.
Log on as an administrator. Go try and read that file.
With MS's new toy, that wouldn't happen.
So in order to make consumers think about performance again, and not just the number of cores, we will name our processors with a "virtual core number" that reflect real-world performance better. Thank You!
FWIW, Vista is going to rate your PC for you--so you finally have a (relatively) nonbiased way to compare actual performance with one number you can read off a box.
No, Microsoft will not make any of the concessions, because to do so would destroy their monopoly. Their monopoly depends on their control over the protocols and file formats they use.
No, not really. Microsoft's monopoly is due to their huge installed base -- because so many are used to using MS's products, not because so many have files in MS's formats.
Don't believe me? Consider this--right now, EVERY monopolistic item that MS has can be read "well enough" by their competitors. And yet, despite the price difference of hundreds of dollars per seat, we don't see a mass migration away from MS to their competition.
I do expect MS to pay at least part of the fine--and I expect that, even if they adopted ODF for everything as thoroughly as they've adopted TCP/IP, they'd still be a monopoly becuase they simply pay more attention to the "luser" than the other guy.
Sheesh.
Why not? That 'trusted computing' in vista is like a cursed boots of slowness -35
Except that Vista doesn't include Trusted Computing. It has some DRM features, but not a heck of a lot more that you can get with Windows XP and the latest MS Media software. Oh, and if you don't use any DRM files, absolutely nothing DRM related runs.
not to mention the cheezy 3-d desktop that lets you scroll 'side to side' to see stacked windows easier,
Oh, yes, MS is certainly the first OS manufacturer to realize that everyone and their grandmother has a 3D accelerator in their PC, and start using it do to something in the OS. I mean, it's not like Apple ever did anything like that.
all while doubling the power drain on a laptop.
My laptop ran Vista for about two weeks, and since the heat increase I noticed continues now that I'm off Vista and back to XP, I'm pretty sure that's summer and not the unoptimized beta code that is Vista. I even ran in on battery for more than a few days, and while I lost a few minutes of battery in the time it took "sleep mode" to become "hibernate", battery life certainly wasn't halved.
when you've got a fat bloated pig like vista, even suse 10 could easily be a vista killer.
Y'know, folk said the same thing about XP when it came out. And now virtually every major Linux distribution has just as much crap on by default.
Microsoft was persecuted by the EU, which apparently doesn't trust people to choose to associate with businesses on their own, and the fines were wrong.
No, the fines were the EU saying "look, if you want to play in our field you have to obey our laws."
MS is a monopoly -- I think they have a bigger control over the consumer computer market than Standard Oil had in its day. In the USA, that means that they can't leverage their monopoly to enter other market. (Such as, for example, they can't force Windows users to buy Office, or keep them from using a Palm OS PDA, or have a Windows PC crap all over the network in a way that they don't let Apple and IBM/Linux know about).
In the EU, well, the standards are a bit higher. It's much more of a socalist economy than the United States, and that means that there are, as other folk have noted, more rules in favor of consumers against businesses. MS always has the option of just backing out of the EU entirely; I'm sure they'll still survive, somehow, with the loss of 400 million potential customers--and, heck, once Europe becomes dominated by Apple, MS can come back in as a non-monopoly player.
Don't expect MS to pay all of that fine, btw. They'll probably make the concessions that the EU demands, and have a significant part of it lifted or voided. (What DOES the EU want, anyway?)
Why not tell a customer about one little number? ;)
Because you can't pardon them for anything they might do illegally in helping you. The President can.
Odd...
While Vista does have steeper requirements, and by default runs a bunch of GUI effects that aren't really necessary--I don't see it as a disaster at all.
I just removed Beta 2 from this very laptop, and my reasons for doing so had nothing whatsoever to do with the OS (My laptop's DVD reading software decided not to work, and ATI's beta vista driver didn't support OpenGL). For the entire time I had it on, there was exactly one crash -- and it was caused by the aforementioned laptop software, not Vista. For the past few weeks, every time I've seen someone's computer problem, I've remembered part of Vista that would make that problem easier to fix.
Say what you will for the cathedral, but the book coming down the pipe isn't one that's going to fall apart at the seams.
The big adjustment is going to be when petroleum runs scarce.
No, not really. There are about three answers to Peak Oil -- ethaonol, synthetic crude, and hydrogen -- and each of them will become cheaper and cheaper, in comparison to oil, as oil rises.
By the time gas reaches $5 USD, probably sooner, we'll have at least one significant alternative, in the USA, ready to export to China and India.
In this case I wouldn't call it word choice, but grammatic, and I'm the first to accept that my handle one the English tense system is far from perfect. Can you elaborate?
Of course. (Word choice and grammar are essentially the same things.) "Made" is the past-tense of "make." "I never make mistakes", and "I have never made mistakes" are all subtly shades of the exact same meaning.
For common English vernacular, a claim to prefection (such as "I don't make mistakes") tends to come off as rather arrogant. Even Shakesphere had his off moments. A simple passive correction is usually better, such as "didn't you mean 'its'?" or the sarcastic, such as "what about its cool?"
The "I had to learn this as an adult; why can't you keep up with something you learned in grade school?" is a good line, too.