This was exemplified in an article I read either here or in BusinessWeek about why DVD players literally can't drop below about $20 because they cost ~$10 to build and ship and $10 to license the DVD technology.
This is exactly why there are so many non-technical requirements for a college degree. If you were expected to just be able to code or build stuff then a degree from a two year tech school would do it, but for a Bachelor's degree you have to get all kinds of English, History, Literature, and non-technical electives.
Many of my friends are English grad students. When I need code help I ask someone in my department, but I bounce all my project ideas off of them. It was several years ago that they requested a public webpage where they could all go in and collaborativly edit a single document. I was too young in my coding years to produce one but it turned out to be a great idea. They're now called wikis.
My music is in my hard drive. For safety I attached a cable leading to an external hard drive where I keep copies. For even more safety I attached a second cable leading to a DSL router. And if that doesn't work, well, what else are friends good for?
I may be a damned optimist, but I fully expect to be able to find someone who has whatever I lose should the worst happen to my local copies.
Solar collectors seem to effectively concentrate lethal amounts of heat without anyone being concerned for the birds. People said the same about the birds when they put windmills all over the Netherlands. The birds just flew around them. And 20 bucks says they can tell when they're approaching a large warm column of air through which a microwave beam is passing.
Since when do planes and satellites move anywhere but in predicted ways? Why would the beam hit any area of land but what it's supposed to? We're not going to have a guy on the moon aiming this thing by hand. Pick a desert and stick a collector in it. If everyone played "what if..." game we'd never have nuclear power.
Not that I disagree, but I would think that any efforts to harness the moon's supply of He3 for fusion would have the reactor situated on the moon sending the produced energy back to the earth in some energy beam (such as microwave). The capability to send energy like that would also give a manner in which to propel vehicles away from the Earth and moon. I'm nowhere near physicist enough to tell what the efficiency of this would be, but you're likely right about it's infeasability.
So cynical. If *some people* had universal replicators everyone else would force them out of their hands or die trying. Either way you lose all classes.
Suppose, worst case scenario, that someone had general purpose machinery and used it to dominate everyone else. Only three things could come out of that:
1) Revolution. Oppressed peoples rising up (and in this case they truly are oppressed since the person keeping the universal replicator doesn't have much right to keep it since it, by definition, is worth more than the effort and energy put into making it (John Galt would seem to disagree, but his only stipulation for getting free power was that you abide by the same moral standard as he did)) and overthrowing whoever is holding this power from them. 2) Complete suppression. Everyone would have to be held back to the point where they no longer were able rise up, probably through selective breeding, thus effectively robbing them of their humanity. The only humans left would be those in charge. (god being the supreme fascist) 3) Give it up. Either out of fear of revolution or distaste of suppression.
If it's option 2 and the power dynamic is maintained you're going to end up with the Dilbertian division where part of the human race becomes simian again and the other part advances. It's a bit fascist, but like it or not it would lead to a utopia. (if you're thinking dystopia you're in the same group of people as Hermione (Harry Potter reference) trying to save house elves from their oppression whether they like it or not. go join PETA or something.)
30,000 years from now when humanity has turned this planet or something like it into one big computer and information storage system containing all the feelings, thoughts, and ideas of our decendants... I'm sure the only values left will be the values attributed to individuals or systems of individuals and their personalities.
That's probably a little farfetched to accept right off, so I'll divulge a simpler scenario. Once we have general purpose machinery and robotics capable of replication and production without human effort or interaction... market values will find obsolescence. Throughout invention we've been creating things that make living as a human require less and less effort. I think it's safe to assume that we will one day create a world that surpasses the need for further human effort.
From then on all effort will be toward artificial needs that would be classifiable more as luxury. There will no longer be a world where any question of "how much" will have any bearing on the comfort of a person's life unless that person wishes to enter into some sort of market system dealing in goods and services that can only be classified as extraneous to human need.
I'm talking about perfect, easy, stale, endless, pointless utopia. It's a good thing we've got apocalyptic religions to tell us the world won't last that long.
I think it's more a matter of not being profitable as we see it now. For instance, I've heard that the moon has an inordinate amound of He3 which is pretty uncommon here on Earth but is very useful in making a fusion reactor. At the moment fusion power isn't quite profitable, so He3 isn't really needed.
I doubt gold and diamonds would get anyone in space. Sure, it'd be nice to replace all the copper wires on the planet with gold, but I think it's simply not a profitable enough venture to go anywhere in space simply for gold. And really, what good are diamonds when we're making our own?
It's the elemental things that would drive us out into the solar system and we simply aren't advanced enough to make use of the things it has to provide. Titanium oxide is incredibly abundant here, and yet pure titanium comes a premium price.
The people who say "they should privatize space!" are probably not farsighted enough to realize the veracity of that comment so it makes them sound silly. But in truth, space has a wonderful abundance of things that we're still too primitive to have profitable uses for.
One hopes though that by the time we do reach space we'll have advanced beyond the need for profitability. Ayn Rand is my hero, but I can't see how capitalism would survive once we're able to saturate all markets with free goods. That's just my vision of the future, perhaps we'll delay ourselves enough to never get there.
I don't see anyone else freaking out about the specific kind of pressure they were using on this guy.
The Director called me and first asked me to remove any link to the university from my website, and also to "hide" the fact that I was teaching there. Then he told me about the pressures and threats he and the Program received (to be subjected to software licenses inspection, copyright violations inspections, or anything that may damage them). Obviously I had to resign to save his job (and everybody else's at the Masters Program). So I did.
That fact should be trumped up a little bit more. That sounds like the typical kind of harassment they'd say is common with corrupt governments. We've got the BSA doing it here Stateside. These things need to change.
I wonder if much of the fervor with which people cling to life support has been enhanced by Darwin. Before him, an early death was just the local god's way of doing things. After him, they learned how to thwart Darwin by using life support saying "Haha! Darwin has no power over me." No one could contradict his theory with science, so maybe they're making it obsolete.
I was in an Alltel store recently getting a new phone when a woman walked in and asked if Alltel had any phones that would work in Iraq. The store people said no, so she asked where the nearest Suncom dealer was.
"Windows Loghorn will present you less BSOD. Joi Ito reports that Windows Longorn will get additional ROSD (red screen of death) for 'really bad errors.' So you will get less BSOD but some new RSOD. You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry."
Am I the only one bothered by the weird acronymming going on in the post? That's just weird.
whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine.
You obviously don't get the same kind of deer we do in South Carolina. Imagine rats with really long legs. Throw into that the two people in my county killed by impalement just for walking across the wrong field at the wrong time.
(U) Mr. Carpani was driving faster than any other vehicle observed by the Soldiers that evening. He failed to stop for the spotlight since he was not expecting a roadblock. Additionally, he was dealing with multiple distractions including talking on the phone while driving, the conversation in the back seat, trying to listen for threats, driving on a wet road, focusing on tasks to be accomplished, the need to get to the airport, and the excited and tense atmosphere in the car. (Annexes 104C, 105C, 125C, 140C). Any one of these would have affected his reaction time.
I know one thing, in windows XP, my laptop hard drive spins up every 10 minutes because XP likes to do tons of shit even when i'm not using it. All it does is write 1 or 2K onto the disk, and for that it spins the damn drive up... every time.
What part of 64-bit addressing did you not understand? Or was it the virtual memory part, cause I know that sometimes gets people?
Of course it's only writing a few kB to disk, that's the page size that your virtual memory manager uses. What it means is that your real memory is full and something had to be written out to virtual memory on the harddrive before it was overwritten in real memory. This sounds like you'd be storing your virtual memory in flash instead of on a plate, which is pretty useful, but that use is severely diminished when you no longer have limits on how much RAM your computer can handle which will effectively remove the nead for virtual memory on disk that's getting constantly written to.
The silly thing about the article is that they're touting this new Samsung drive while at the same time touting Longhorn's capability (as a 64-bit OS) to make the Samsung feature extraneous.
They talk in the article about Longhorn using 64-bit memory addressing so you'll be getting gobs of main memory. When your page table is 10GB like they mention in the article then there would be little to no reason for another paging system inside the harddrive. As much as I like modularity this is just silly.
It's definitely a gimmick, and a nearly useless one when everyone's upgraded to their 64-bit systems. Do you want your memory cached on something connected to the FSB or do you want it done out on a device? I don't even understand why they're trying to get into this game.
It's like making a pencil that never wears down but putting the same old erasers on it.
Make some mulch. Shredding them would work too. After shredding them just spread them across your garden and spray it down with a sprinkler, or turn them in your compost pile. This is also a great way to dispose of cardboard boxes after a big move.
A good worm farm can take care of a NYT subscription pretty easily.
;-) But that's necessary, of course, since only Windows prevents raw TCP/IP connections which we all know are hazardous. I'm sure those people with their unsafe operating systems have to have a really high limit so they'll be able to add more systems together and withstand the impending DOS attacks.
Going with Windows is just *so* much cheaper. The OS even prevents you from buying too many machines!
Slashdot Mirror
This was exemplified in an article I read either here or in BusinessWeek about why DVD players literally can't drop below about $20 because they cost ~$10 to build and ship and $10 to license the DVD technology.
This is exactly why there are so many non-technical requirements for a college degree. If you were expected to just be able to code or build stuff then a degree from a two year tech school would do it, but for a Bachelor's degree you have to get all kinds of English, History, Literature, and non-technical electives.
Many of my friends are English grad students. When I need code help I ask someone in my department, but I bounce all my project ideas off of them. It was several years ago that they requested a public webpage where they could all go in and collaborativly edit a single document. I was too young in my coding years to produce one but it turned out to be a great idea. They're now called wikis.
It's pretty well named though.
It's like calling a pack of Marlboro 60s a "Marlboro Starter Pack"
It was a joke.
My music is in my hard drive. For safety I attached a cable leading to an external hard drive where I keep copies. For even more safety I attached a second cable leading to a DSL router. And if that doesn't work, well, what else are friends good for?
I may be a damned optimist, but I fully expect to be able to find someone who has whatever I lose should the worst happen to my local copies.
A good point if you bought it 40 years or more ago.
How confident are you that the music you are collecting today will still be playable in forty years?
A better question: How confident am I that I'll actually *want* the music I'm collecting today to be playable in forty years?
They'll probably wise up to the inherent vulnerabilities involved with a typical installation and instead run a Eunuchs-based system.
...coupled with the history of searches for "Lolitas" in Levie's Web browser.
Note to self: No pursuing of Nabokov books until *after* my psychotic ex-girlfriend has stopped looking for ways to get me in trouble.
It sounds a little over the top, but she just recently tried to stab me with a screwdriver.
Solar collectors seem to effectively concentrate lethal amounts of heat without anyone being concerned for the birds. People said the same about the birds when they put windmills all over the Netherlands. The birds just flew around them. And 20 bucks says they can tell when they're approaching a large warm column of air through which a microwave beam is passing.
Since when do planes and satellites move anywhere but in predicted ways? Why would the beam hit any area of land but what it's supposed to? We're not going to have a guy on the moon aiming this thing by hand. Pick a desert and stick a collector in it. If everyone played "what if..." game we'd never have nuclear power.
Not that I disagree, but I would think that any efforts to harness the moon's supply of He3 for fusion would have the reactor situated on the moon sending the produced energy back to the earth in some energy beam (such as microwave). The capability to send energy like that would also give a manner in which to propel vehicles away from the Earth and moon. I'm nowhere near physicist enough to tell what the efficiency of this would be, but you're likely right about it's infeasability.
So cynical. If *some people* had universal replicators everyone else would force them out of their hands or die trying. Either way you lose all classes.
Suppose, worst case scenario, that someone had general purpose machinery and used it to dominate everyone else. Only three things could come out of that:
1) Revolution. Oppressed peoples rising up (and in this case they truly are oppressed since the person keeping the universal replicator doesn't have much right to keep it since it, by definition, is worth more than the effort and energy put into making it (John Galt would seem to disagree, but his only stipulation for getting free power was that you abide by the same moral standard as he did)) and overthrowing whoever is holding this power from them.
2) Complete suppression. Everyone would have to be held back to the point where they no longer were able rise up, probably through selective breeding, thus effectively robbing them of their humanity. The only humans left would be those in charge. (god being the supreme fascist)
3) Give it up. Either out of fear of revolution or distaste of suppression.
If it's option 2 and the power dynamic is maintained you're going to end up with the Dilbertian division where part of the human race becomes simian again and the other part advances. It's a bit fascist, but like it or not it would lead to a utopia. (if you're thinking dystopia you're in the same group of people as Hermione (Harry Potter reference) trying to save house elves from their oppression whether they like it or not. go join PETA or something.)
30,000 years from now when humanity has turned this planet or something like it into one big computer and information storage system containing all the feelings, thoughts, and ideas of our decendants... I'm sure the only values left will be the values attributed to individuals or systems of individuals and their personalities.
That's probably a little farfetched to accept right off, so I'll divulge a simpler scenario. Once we have general purpose machinery and robotics capable of replication and production without human effort or interaction... market values will find obsolescence. Throughout invention we've been creating things that make living as a human require less and less effort. I think it's safe to assume that we will one day create a world that surpasses the need for further human effort.
From then on all effort will be toward artificial needs that would be classifiable more as luxury. There will no longer be a world where any question of "how much" will have any bearing on the comfort of a person's life unless that person wishes to enter into some sort of market system dealing in goods and services that can only be classified as extraneous to human need.
I'm talking about perfect, easy, stale, endless, pointless utopia. It's a good thing we've got apocalyptic religions to tell us the world won't last that long.
I think it's more a matter of not being profitable as we see it now. For instance, I've heard that the moon has an inordinate amound of He3 which is pretty uncommon here on Earth but is very useful in making a fusion reactor. At the moment fusion power isn't quite profitable, so He3 isn't really needed.
I doubt gold and diamonds would get anyone in space. Sure, it'd be nice to replace all the copper wires on the planet with gold, but I think it's simply not a profitable enough venture to go anywhere in space simply for gold. And really, what good are diamonds when we're making our own?
It's the elemental things that would drive us out into the solar system and we simply aren't advanced enough to make use of the things it has to provide. Titanium oxide is incredibly abundant here, and yet pure titanium comes a premium price.
The people who say "they should privatize space!" are probably not farsighted enough to realize the veracity of that comment so it makes them sound silly. But in truth, space has a wonderful abundance of things that we're still too primitive to have profitable uses for.
One hopes though that by the time we do reach space we'll have advanced beyond the need for profitability. Ayn Rand is my hero, but I can't see how capitalism would survive once we're able to saturate all markets with free goods. That's just my vision of the future, perhaps we'll delay ourselves enough to never get there.
I don't see anyone else freaking out about the specific kind of pressure they were using on this guy.
The Director called me and first asked me to remove any link to the university from my website, and also to "hide" the fact that I was teaching there. Then he told me about the pressures and threats he and the Program received (to be subjected to software licenses inspection, copyright violations inspections, or anything that may damage them). Obviously I had to resign to save his job (and everybody else's at the Masters Program). So I did.
That fact should be trumped up a little bit more. That sounds like the typical kind of harassment they'd say is common with corrupt governments. We've got the BSA doing it here Stateside. These things need to change.
I wonder if much of the fervor with which people cling to life support has been enhanced by Darwin. Before him, an early death was just the local god's way of doing things. After him, they learned how to thwart Darwin by using life support saying "Haha! Darwin has no power over me." No one could contradict his theory with science, so maybe they're making it obsolete.
I was in an Alltel store recently getting a new phone when a woman walked in and asked if Alltel had any phones that would work in Iraq. The store people said no, so she asked where the nearest Suncom dealer was.
Welcome to South Carolina.
"Windows Loghorn will present you less BSOD. Joi Ito reports that Windows Longorn will get additional ROSD (red screen of death) for 'really bad errors.' So you will get less BSOD but some new RSOD. You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry."
Am I the only one bothered by the weird acronymming going on in the post? That's just weird.
whereas tracking and killing innocent animals on foot is just fine.
You obviously don't get the same kind of deer we do in South Carolina. Imagine rats with really long legs. Throw into that the two people in my county killed by impalement just for walking across the wrong field at the wrong time.
I'm still kind of dumbfounded at the audacity of Mr. Wallace...
That was shameless.
It's bigger than that.
(U) Mr. Carpani was driving faster than any other vehicle observed by the Soldiers that evening. He failed to stop for the spotlight since he was not expecting a roadblock. Additionally, he was dealing with multiple distractions including talking on the phone while driving, the conversation in the back seat, trying to listen for threats, driving on a wet road, focusing on tasks to be accomplished, the need to get to the airport, and the excited and tense atmosphere in the car. (Annexes 104C, 105C, 125C, 140C). Any one of these would have affected his reaction time.
Funny that they mention cell phone first.
I know one thing, in windows XP, my laptop hard drive spins up every 10 minutes because XP likes to do tons of shit even when i'm not using it. All it does is write 1 or 2K onto the disk, and for that it spins the damn drive up... every time.
What part of 64-bit addressing did you not understand? Or was it the virtual memory part, cause I know that sometimes gets people?
Of course it's only writing a few kB to disk, that's the page size that your virtual memory manager uses. What it means is that your real memory is full and something had to be written out to virtual memory on the harddrive before it was overwritten in real memory. This sounds like you'd be storing your virtual memory in flash instead of on a plate, which is pretty useful, but that use is severely diminished when you no longer have limits on how much RAM your computer can handle which will effectively remove the nead for virtual memory on disk that's getting constantly written to.
The silly thing about the article is that they're touting this new Samsung drive while at the same time touting Longhorn's capability (as a 64-bit OS) to make the Samsung feature extraneous.
They talk in the article about Longhorn using 64-bit memory addressing so you'll be getting gobs of main memory. When your page table is 10GB like they mention in the article then there would be little to no reason for another paging system inside the harddrive. As much as I like modularity this is just silly.
It's definitely a gimmick, and a nearly useless one when everyone's upgraded to their 64-bit systems. Do you want your memory cached on something connected to the FSB or do you want it done out on a device? I don't even understand why they're trying to get into this game.
It's like making a pencil that never wears down but putting the same old erasers on it.
Make some mulch. Shredding them would work too. After shredding them just spread them across your garden and spray it down with a sprinkler, or turn them in your compost pile. This is also a great way to dispose of cardboard boxes after a big move.
A good worm farm can take care of a NYT subscription pretty easily.
But I remember him too, and I didn't know him.
What gives?
It's pretty high.
;-)
But that's necessary, of course, since only Windows prevents raw TCP/IP connections which we all know are hazardous. I'm sure those people with their unsafe operating systems have to have a really high limit so they'll be able to add more systems together and withstand the impending DOS attacks.
Going with Windows is just *so* much cheaper. The OS even prevents you from buying too many machines!