If you haven't tried one of the recent Freenet builds (0.7 alpha builds), you should. It certainly won't match other file sharing programs, but it's far, far better than it used to be (not to mention more secure). It works, though slowly, for large files.
Also, for large files (over 32kB), Freenet is multi-homed -- all the pieces end up in different places. For popular files, many different nodes will cache copies locally, so it will speed up -- basically automated demand-dependent load balancing.
Dictionaries describe common usage. When discussing a legal matter, it is correct to use the appropriate legal terms. In a legal sense, piracy is robbery and other crimes on the high seas. If you checked a law dictionary, you'd find a very different entry for piracy.
In any technical discussion, it is important to use proper terminology; this is as true in legal matters as others.
Seriously, if your tinfoil hat is on that tight, I have some "security" software to sell you. P2P isn't anonymous, not the way it's normally implemented. If you actually want anonymous P2P, you need to go to something like Freenet.
Where did you get the idea that the constitution is so fantastic?
Several reasons. Firstly, I agree with many of the ideas in the Constitution. I won't go into details.
Secondly, I agree with the methodology -- that there should be an overarching "meta-law" that covers what sorts of things can and cannot be legislated, and that furthermore it should be significantly more difficult to change this meta-law than to change regular laws, though not impossible (the amendment procedure).
And last but certainly not least, every Congressman and President took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Failing in that oath is an important indicator of that person's true priorities; many times, when people complain about lawmakers ignoring the Constitution, the real complaint is less about the Constitution and more about how that person is failing to carry out the job they swore to do. If we cannot trust these people to uphold the law they swore to place above all others, why exactly are we trusting them to make any laws at all?
We already transmit power hundreds of kilometers. The problem would be insulating the high voltage DC cables, not to mention running a reactor underwater. Corrosion issues are the biggest problem after expense, really.
Probably the kind that learned coding as a tool to use to pursue other ends, and learned the languages he needed to to get his job done. I'm inclined to think that's a good sign -- he's demonstrated a willingness to learn about the things he needs to learn about to get his job done. I think that bodes well for his career as a congressman, and a potential willingness to learn about more modern technologies as relevant to his job.
I'm not saying use diplomacy with the terrorists directly. I'm saying you need to use care in how you respond to them, so as not to create more terrorists. For every terrorist, there are many more who aren't yet terrorists, but sympathize. As you give them better reasons (from their perspective, be they rational reasons or otherwise), more of them become terrorists; give them less cause, and fewer do so. The diplomatic effort goes into the response, whether it involves sitting down at a negotiating table or not.
The fundamental problem with the "kill all the terrorists" is the assumption that the terrorists are a clearly delineated group of fixed size, when in fact many people sympathize with them and will join them if sufficiently provoked -- unilateral actions create new terrorists. The goal is not simply to get rid of all the current terrorists; it is to reduce their numbers, including taking into account what your actions will do for their recruitment ability.
You make the naive assumption that the two groups are completely independent. Unilateral action causes more people to join the extremists; working on treating other people well and addressing their legitimate concerns results in fewer people joining. People become extremists when they see a need for it, not by chance.
You can't "kill all the terrorists" without creating more. Foreign policy and diplomacy are a bit more complicated than you seem to think.
Try again. Avogadro's number is 6.022 E 23. A drug like penicillin has a molecular weight of 334. Other drugs will be heavier or lighter, but generally within a factor of 10. 8oz of water is 236g. That combines to give about 400 billion (4 E 11) molecules of penicillin at 1 part per trillion (1 E -12).
Molecules are small. Even mildly complex organic ones like drugs. Check your intro chem text before spouting off about such things.
Re:Get a neighbor to help test your connection?
on
Verizon, Fiber Or Die?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Iperf is excellent for this, especially if you want to test details like packet size, port number, UDP vs TCP...
Unless Baryon number isn't conserved, and AIUI it appears to be a conserved quantity, you can't get rid of Baryons. You can destroy them by combining them with their antiparticle (which counts as -1 baryon number), because you have the same number before and after. So you can't dispose of matter by converting it into energy, any more than you can create it without ending up with waste antimatter. If you had some antimatter on hand, you could combine it with your waste matter, though.
Remember, antimatter generation generates antimatter-matter *pairs*. Annihilation destroys *pairs*. It appears that all such reactions are similar.
That said, there do appear to be plenty of sources of energy, at least for the forseeable future... It's the harnessing that's the trouble.
And that extra matter comes from where, again? Like I said, you need some sort of matter supply. That need not be a hard problem, but you do need it. My guess is bulk transmutation doesn't care whether it starts with random crap from waste or random crap from matter-antimatter production.
what is the information retrieval rate of a space probe (robotic explorer, etc.) vs.a human being?
Currently, the *information* retrieval rate, potentially distinct from the *data* retrieval rate, is much, much higher for a person. The reason is that our ability to learn on Mars is limited by our tools, and robotic tools are far less capable than human-operated ones. This becomes especially true when you account for the fact that you can give a person instructions like "gather data on x, y, z, and anything else 'interesting'."
For example, the MER robots accomplish in a day what a trained geologist could accomplish in a few minutes. They simply don't have the capabilities. Some of that is because they were a small mission, but long before you scaled them up to compete with a human it would be cheaper to just send the person.
Furthermore, a lot of the work a person would do would be gathering data that would be sent back -- probably some of it immediately, and a lot stored on physical media in the spacecraft, with the option for the people back on Earth to ask for more data to be sent. Remember that sending data from Mars to here is a lot slower, thanks to lower signal power, than sending data on Earth.
The question of whether to send people should be based not on how much information they could get, but what the quality of that information is. People are, at least for the easily forseeable future, far more capable than robotic explorers.
See, the thing is, there *is* editing going on. Sometimes they change things in the submission; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes they add sensationalist comments or headlines that didn't come from either the article or submitter. What people complain about isn't the lack of editing -- there certainly is editing, not to mention editorializing, going on -- it's the poor quality of the editing.
And why would we expect it? Well, for some reason, they expect us to pay them money in the form of subscriptions. At that point they've passed being "some random blog"; it seems only fair to expect a modicum of professionalism in the editing.
The inefficiency, AIUI, is in the electrical -> optical energy conversion, not anything in the purely optical domain. If you need 100mW of optical power, it takes a lot more electrical power to get it. I don't know exact numbers off hand, or even how much power is typical (I'm not a networking guy, but I've looked at diode lasers for other purposes before).
I assumed there wasn't any discrete circuitry beyond perhaps the optical component and a temperature controller if there is one. It's the ASIC I was talking about using power, though I confess I have no idea what a modern power budget would be for it.
High-speed networking takes a non-trivial amount of power to drive the signals, be they electrical or optical. Especially for optical devices, the efficiency in getting that power onto the transmission medium is low. At high enough speeds, there are also a lot of high speed transistors switching in the control logic that use power for the same reasons as your CPU. So, they've improved the power consumption in these and other areas.
LOX/LH2 rockets are normally run fuel-rich (most rockets are, actually, it's just more pronounced with LH2). 2H2 + O2 corresponds to a mass ratio of 8 parts O2 to 1 part H2; in actual practice the mass ratio used is somewhere between 4:1 and 6:1, depending on the engine.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the chemistry going on is more equilibrium chemistry than normal combustion chemistry -- the H2, O2, H2O, OH, etc are all in equilibrium. Adding excess H2 burns more of the O2, and that gets more energy out of the reactants per unit mass (having similar numbers of moles of unburned reactants uses less weight if they're moles of H2 instead of O2). Secondly, H2 is better behaved than almost anything else when it comes to using the nozzle to turn heat into kinetic energy -- you'll get a larger fraction of the chemical energy out as exhaust velocity. If the H2 were inert, that wouldn't be enough to make it worth adding, but it's not inert as explained above. And thirdly, adding excess H2 drops the combustion temperature while simultaneously increasing the cooling ability (LH2 is a marvelous coolant; LOX isn't), making it easier to run the regeneratively cooled engine.
Are the relevant documents on Freenet yet? If so, what's the link?
If not, is there a convenient mirror package somewhere? I'd be happy to post it, but I'd rather not deal with converting the hyperlinks and removing the Wikileaks formatting from the html -- I'd rather have just the documents themselves. Wikileaks doesn't seem to have such available, or if they do I haven't found it.
Not being an international law expert, here's my take on it. You don't need everyone to sign on, in fact it works fine in isolation as long as the region is big enough people care (eg, the US, but probably not Antigua).
Suppose the US (and no one else) implements this. Then, as an author, I have my 3 year grace period to get the work registered, and then I start paying taxes on the value of the work *in the US*. If I don't pay the taxes, it becomes public domain in the US, but I still have my normal protection outside the US. So derivative works would then exist in the US free from copyright issues, but they'd have to be properly licensed elsewhere.
Of course, as soon as several countries implement this independently, you get a huge mess for authors who have to assess value for each country. The solution is easy, I think: just have them all agree to respect the copyright state of the work in the country of authorship, for works created in countries with similar rules. Defining "similar" to include a minimum tax rate and a maximum free term would prevent small countries from acting as copyright tax havens.
They discuss that, and agree with you. The reason is that in the eyes of the public, the two are regularly conflated, especially by religious hacks trying to dispute evolution. So, they discuss the relationship and lack thereof (they're not completely unrelated, actually), and also discuss why they're talking about both.
The short answer is that they were trying to summarize the current state of scientific knowledge as relates to a particular political and religious debate, and both evolution and the origin of life are part of that debate.
If energy is not scarce, we'll be able to leave. We'll have things like Dyson Spheres. It wouldn't surprise me if the Earth was turned into a nature preserve, simply because we didn't have a better use for it.
"If energy is not scarce" is a starting point that rapidly leads to the inability to make decent predictions. I'd say that it's difficult to make better than wild guesses, in fact. But finishing the sentence with "the X will be hard" seems particularly shortsighted and unimaginative.
Well, you'd still need source mass, thanks to conservation of Baryon number. You can't actually just convert energy into regular matter without having equal quantities of antimatter left over (at least according to our current best understanding).
You could, however, rearrange the source mass, which would presumably be cheap. But presumably it would also take a lot of energy, so your point still stands.
Of course, you can always replicate solar power plants... Economics in a post-scarcity world are tough to reason about, but my guess is that energy will always be scarce to varying degrees.
(IANAP, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I've screwed this up.)
To a degree, it wouldn't matter much. Most of what is present in the SSE sets (Streaming SIMD [Single Instruction Multiple Data] Extensions) is for handling lots of data. Most of the complex, time consuming work in things like web browsers is branch-heavy integer code doing unique operations on each piece of data. SSE are very helpful for graphics work, audio work, or any other application that does the same operation on lots of data (for example, as part of taking a DFT or DCT. They don't really help with string parsing.
That said, they do offer more registers, and better ways of copying data around in memory, and compilers are easily clever enough to apply those to help with traditionally 'integer' code. But the performance difference I would expect would be much less that in media handling applications. (Of course, things like the jpeg renderer in FF certainly count as media handling.)
Then again, I haven't actually run comparative benchmarks... That's just my understanding of what sorts of things those extensions help with.
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't tried one of the recent Freenet builds (0.7 alpha builds), you should. It certainly won't match other file sharing programs, but it's far, far better than it used to be (not to mention more secure). It works, though slowly, for large files.
Also, for large files (over 32kB), Freenet is multi-homed -- all the pieces end up in different places. For popular files, many different nodes will cache copies locally, so it will speed up -- basically automated demand-dependent load balancing.
Dictionaries describe common usage. When discussing a legal matter, it is correct to use the appropriate legal terms. In a legal sense, piracy is robbery and other crimes on the high seas. If you checked a law dictionary, you'd find a very different entry for piracy.
In any technical discussion, it is important to use proper terminology; this is as true in legal matters as others.
Your computer is broadcasting an IP address!
Seriously, if your tinfoil hat is on that tight, I have some "security" software to sell you. P2P isn't anonymous, not the way it's normally implemented. If you actually want anonymous P2P, you need to go to something like Freenet.
Where did you get the idea that the constitution is so fantastic?
Several reasons. Firstly, I agree with many of the ideas in the Constitution. I won't go into details.
Secondly, I agree with the methodology -- that there should be an overarching "meta-law" that covers what sorts of things can and cannot be legislated, and that furthermore it should be significantly more difficult to change this meta-law than to change regular laws, though not impossible (the amendment procedure).
And last but certainly not least, every Congressman and President took an oath to uphold the Constitution. Failing in that oath is an important indicator of that person's true priorities; many times, when people complain about lawmakers ignoring the Constitution, the real complaint is less about the Constitution and more about how that person is failing to carry out the job they swore to do. If we cannot trust these people to uphold the law they swore to place above all others, why exactly are we trusting them to make any laws at all?
We already transmit power hundreds of kilometers. The problem would be insulating the high voltage DC cables, not to mention running a reactor underwater. Corrosion issues are the biggest problem after expense, really.
Probably the kind that learned coding as a tool to use to pursue other ends, and learned the languages he needed to to get his job done. I'm inclined to think that's a good sign -- he's demonstrated a willingness to learn about the things he needs to learn about to get his job done. I think that bodes well for his career as a congressman, and a potential willingness to learn about more modern technologies as relevant to his job.
I'm not saying use diplomacy with the terrorists directly. I'm saying you need to use care in how you respond to them, so as not to create more terrorists. For every terrorist, there are many more who aren't yet terrorists, but sympathize. As you give them better reasons (from their perspective, be they rational reasons or otherwise), more of them become terrorists; give them less cause, and fewer do so. The diplomatic effort goes into the response, whether it involves sitting down at a negotiating table or not.
The fundamental problem with the "kill all the terrorists" is the assumption that the terrorists are a clearly delineated group of fixed size, when in fact many people sympathize with them and will join them if sufficiently provoked -- unilateral actions create new terrorists. The goal is not simply to get rid of all the current terrorists; it is to reduce their numbers, including taking into account what your actions will do for their recruitment ability.
You make the naive assumption that the two groups are completely independent. Unilateral action causes more people to join the extremists; working on treating other people well and addressing their legitimate concerns results in fewer people joining. People become extremists when they see a need for it, not by chance.
You can't "kill all the terrorists" without creating more. Foreign policy and diplomacy are a bit more complicated than you seem to think.
Try again. Avogadro's number is 6.022 E 23. A drug like penicillin has a molecular weight of 334. Other drugs will be heavier or lighter, but generally within a factor of 10. 8oz of water is 236g. That combines to give about 400 billion (4 E 11) molecules of penicillin at 1 part per trillion (1 E -12).
Molecules are small. Even mildly complex organic ones like drugs. Check your intro chem text before spouting off about such things.
Iperf is excellent for this, especially if you want to test details like packet size, port number, UDP vs TCP...
Unless Baryon number isn't conserved, and AIUI it appears to be a conserved quantity, you can't get rid of Baryons. You can destroy them by combining them with their antiparticle (which counts as -1 baryon number), because you have the same number before and after. So you can't dispose of matter by converting it into energy, any more than you can create it without ending up with waste antimatter. If you had some antimatter on hand, you could combine it with your waste matter, though.
Remember, antimatter generation generates antimatter-matter *pairs*. Annihilation destroys *pairs*. It appears that all such reactions are similar.
That said, there do appear to be plenty of sources of energy, at least for the forseeable future... It's the harnessing that's the trouble.
And that extra matter comes from where, again? Like I said, you need some sort of matter supply. That need not be a hard problem, but you do need it. My guess is bulk transmutation doesn't care whether it starts with random crap from waste or random crap from matter-antimatter production.
what is the information retrieval rate of a space probe (robotic explorer, etc.) vs.a human being?
Currently, the *information* retrieval rate, potentially distinct from the *data* retrieval rate, is much, much higher for a person. The reason is that our ability to learn on Mars is limited by our tools, and robotic tools are far less capable than human-operated ones. This becomes especially true when you account for the fact that you can give a person instructions like "gather data on x, y, z, and anything else 'interesting'."
For example, the MER robots accomplish in a day what a trained geologist could accomplish in a few minutes. They simply don't have the capabilities. Some of that is because they were a small mission, but long before you scaled them up to compete with a human it would be cheaper to just send the person.
Furthermore, a lot of the work a person would do would be gathering data that would be sent back -- probably some of it immediately, and a lot stored on physical media in the spacecraft, with the option for the people back on Earth to ask for more data to be sent. Remember that sending data from Mars to here is a lot slower, thanks to lower signal power, than sending data on Earth.
The question of whether to send people should be based not on how much information they could get, but what the quality of that information is. People are, at least for the easily forseeable future, far more capable than robotic explorers.
Bioptentials is not a word. There are plenty of words they could have used, there was no need to make one up.
See, the thing is, there *is* editing going on. Sometimes they change things in the submission; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes they add sensationalist comments or headlines that didn't come from either the article or submitter. What people complain about isn't the lack of editing -- there certainly is editing, not to mention editorializing, going on -- it's the poor quality of the editing.
And why would we expect it? Well, for some reason, they expect us to pay them money in the form of subscriptions. At that point they've passed being "some random blog"; it seems only fair to expect a modicum of professionalism in the editing.
The inefficiency, AIUI, is in the electrical -> optical energy conversion, not anything in the purely optical domain. If you need 100mW of optical power, it takes a lot more electrical power to get it. I don't know exact numbers off hand, or even how much power is typical (I'm not a networking guy, but I've looked at diode lasers for other purposes before).
I assumed there wasn't any discrete circuitry beyond perhaps the optical component and a temperature controller if there is one. It's the ASIC I was talking about using power, though I confess I have no idea what a modern power budget would be for it.
High-speed networking takes a non-trivial amount of power to drive the signals, be they electrical or optical. Especially for optical devices, the efficiency in getting that power onto the transmission medium is low. At high enough speeds, there are also a lot of high speed transistors switching in the control logic that use power for the same reasons as your CPU. So, they've improved the power consumption in these and other areas.
LOX/LH2 rockets are normally run fuel-rich (most rockets are, actually, it's just more pronounced with LH2). 2H2 + O2 corresponds to a mass ratio of 8 parts O2 to 1 part H2; in actual practice the mass ratio used is somewhere between 4:1 and 6:1, depending on the engine.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the chemistry going on is more equilibrium chemistry than normal combustion chemistry -- the H2, O2, H2O, OH, etc are all in equilibrium. Adding excess H2 burns more of the O2, and that gets more energy out of the reactants per unit mass (having similar numbers of moles of unburned reactants uses less weight if they're moles of H2 instead of O2). Secondly, H2 is better behaved than almost anything else when it comes to using the nozzle to turn heat into kinetic energy -- you'll get a larger fraction of the chemical energy out as exhaust velocity. If the H2 were inert, that wouldn't be enough to make it worth adding, but it's not inert as explained above. And thirdly, adding excess H2 drops the combustion temperature while simultaneously increasing the cooling ability (LH2 is a marvelous coolant; LOX isn't), making it easier to run the regeneratively cooled engine.
Are the relevant documents on Freenet yet? If so, what's the link?
If not, is there a convenient mirror package somewhere? I'd be happy to post it, but I'd rather not deal with converting the hyperlinks and removing the Wikileaks formatting from the html -- I'd rather have just the documents themselves. Wikileaks doesn't seem to have such available, or if they do I haven't found it.
Not being an international law expert, here's my take on it. You don't need everyone to sign on, in fact it works fine in isolation as long as the region is big enough people care (eg, the US, but probably not Antigua).
Suppose the US (and no one else) implements this. Then, as an author, I have my 3 year grace period to get the work registered, and then I start paying taxes on the value of the work *in the US*. If I don't pay the taxes, it becomes public domain in the US, but I still have my normal protection outside the US. So derivative works would then exist in the US free from copyright issues, but they'd have to be properly licensed elsewhere.
Of course, as soon as several countries implement this independently, you get a huge mess for authors who have to assess value for each country. The solution is easy, I think: just have them all agree to respect the copyright state of the work in the country of authorship, for works created in countries with similar rules. Defining "similar" to include a minimum tax rate and a maximum free term would prevent small countries from acting as copyright tax havens.
(Yeah, yeah, I know... no one RTFAs on /..)
They discuss that, and agree with you. The reason is that in the eyes of the public, the two are regularly conflated, especially by religious hacks trying to dispute evolution. So, they discuss the relationship and lack thereof (they're not completely unrelated, actually), and also discuss why they're talking about both.
The short answer is that they were trying to summarize the current state of scientific knowledge as relates to a particular political and religious debate, and both evolution and the origin of life are part of that debate.
If energy is not scarce, we'll be able to leave. We'll have things like Dyson Spheres. It wouldn't surprise me if the Earth was turned into a nature preserve, simply because we didn't have a better use for it.
"If energy is not scarce" is a starting point that rapidly leads to the inability to make decent predictions. I'd say that it's difficult to make better than wild guesses, in fact. But finishing the sentence with "the X will be hard" seems particularly shortsighted and unimaginative.
Well, you'd still need source mass, thanks to conservation of Baryon number. You can't actually just convert energy into regular matter without having equal quantities of antimatter left over (at least according to our current best understanding).
You could, however, rearrange the source mass, which would presumably be cheap. But presumably it would also take a lot of energy, so your point still stands.
Of course, you can always replicate solar power plants... Economics in a post-scarcity world are tough to reason about, but my guess is that energy will always be scarce to varying degrees.
(IANAP, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I've screwed this up.)
Impressive. Are there other compiler / configuration changes, or is that purely a result of SSE?
To a degree, it wouldn't matter much. Most of what is present in the SSE sets (Streaming SIMD [Single Instruction Multiple Data] Extensions) is for handling lots of data. Most of the complex, time consuming work in things like web browsers is branch-heavy integer code doing unique operations on each piece of data. SSE are very helpful for graphics work, audio work, or any other application that does the same operation on lots of data (for example, as part of taking a DFT or DCT. They don't really help with string parsing.
That said, they do offer more registers, and better ways of copying data around in memory, and compilers are easily clever enough to apply those to help with traditionally 'integer' code. But the performance difference I would expect would be much less that in media handling applications. (Of course, things like the jpeg renderer in FF certainly count as media handling.)
Then again, I haven't actually run comparative benchmarks... That's just my understanding of what sorts of things those extensions help with.