Well, yeah, but I don't want to have to hit a key combo just to search. If I begin hitting letter keys when I'm browsing a page I'm probably searching for something. Why else would I hit letter keys? So why not start searching right away? (I suppose the feature could be confusing for new users, so it's probably something that should be disabled by default, as it is in Firefox. It's the first thing I enable on a fresh FF install.)
As I said there is an extension that adds the functionality to Chrome so it's bearable, but I would prefer if it was built-in.
Something about Firefox is ridiculously slow since FF4. It takes several seconds to start, webpages load slowly, scrolling is choppy. Maybe something is wrong with one of my add-ons, but I don't want to turn them off and then turn each on one by one to find out if that's the case. Nah, it was easier to just switch to Chrome. It's fast as hell and has almost all the features I need as someone who does not do any web development.
My only major gripe is that Chrome lacks the feature where it does an in-page search as soon as you begin typing. There is an extension that does it, sort of, but it's not quite as polished as in Firefox. The Chrome team has come out and said that they will not make it a built-in feature, which is sad. Once you get used to browsing text-intensive web pages by in-page search you'll never go back. It saves your eyes and your mouse hand a lot of work. Especially your eyes. I hardly read stuff anymore, I just type what I'm looking for. But I digress...
If Firefox fixes the speed problem they will get me back, whatever that means. It's not like I'm paying for anything.
Sounds reasonable, except there is no way in hell WoW will run forever, at least not officially. I bet that almost everyone who is playing WoW would be in the market for a better MMO and unlike other kinds of software you only have time to play one MMO at a time. It's only a matter of time. If you want to play the better MMO you have to quit WoW. For all we know Blizzard could have a better MMO than WoW in internal beta right now. They should have if they have invested their money wisely.
Once subscription numbers for WoW drop under a certain level the best way to continue is probably to make both the server and the client freeware and let the community take over.
Will future archaeologists interpret this as a sign that there was a cult based around timekeeping in Texas in the 2000's?
Probably not, but it is an interesting thought that it may be the case that many if not all of the most durable and long-standing monuments of ancient times essentially tell us nothing that's representative about the ancient cultures that built them. Take Stonehenge for example. Imagine if Stonehenge was built by a small group of people with too much money or resources on their hands who thought that it would be awesome to build a really, really big stone circle.
I imagine that their in-house fab churns out some very interesting niche designs; but it would be a real surprise if it has any terribly impressive capabilities in general-purpose compute applications. Staying on the bleeding edge of fabrication requires serious money, while just quietly gobbling up commodity stuff from Intel or Nvidia or whoever won't raise any eyebrows.
They probably have some cool specialized crypto-crunchers based on cryptoanalysis that hasn't officially been done yet, and I suspect that they are the chaps to talk to when you need a chip that absolutely hasn't been backdoored in china; but I suspect that their process density and clockspeed capabilities are middling at best.
That's what they want you to think.
It's obviously a new world order government conspiracy to mine all the remaining Bitcoins.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. I don't want religion to try to explain science (I mean, I suppose I would be okay with it if God wanted to explain everything). I want religion to explain things that aren't explained by science and the non-religious parts of philosophy. If religion can sort of uniquely explain anything then I will be satisfied and I will probably join it, but I don't think it does.
Religion addresses ethics, but it fails to arrive at answers. The failure goes back to the age-old question about whether or not God has the power to decide what's good and what's bad. If the answer is no, God is not really God. If the answer is yes, God is asking you to basically follow his whims.
Why would you follow the whims of God? I mean I think we need rewards and punishments in place if we're going to follow orders. I think that's why religion needs heaven and hell (and similar ideas like rebirth and nirvana and whatnot) to make sense of ethics. You can decide to not follow God, but that's going to suck for you. A believer in a savior God could paraphrase "science - it works, bitches" with "savior God - it works, bitches... You'll have to wait until you die, but it really works. Promise."
The problem with that is that if the mind is the brain, then God would have to make a copy of the information in the brain to transfer it to your new avatar in heaven or hell. Then we would expect there to be a physical copying event of the mind-state right before a person dies. But we don't see that. It could be we're not smart enough to see it. Could be that the mind isn't really the brain, except it looks like it is.
I tend to think that religion has evolved in a Darwinian process that selects for beliefs that maintain social cohesion and strengthen societies.
I'm not telling anyone to quit religion. There is evidence that religion can be a good way to keep in touch with your community and your extended family. There are lots of nice traditions, some of which I follow myself, just because I like to. I think that telling someone to quit religion cold turkey and replace it with science is a bit like telling someone to quit Facebook and replace it with Wikipedia.
You're right that science and religion can coexist so long as religion agrees to move out of they way when it comes into conflict with science and science has evidence and religion doesn't. That does make your God a bit of a God of the gap, but maybe that is not a problem. Things like "how can we make nature do our bidding?" are by their nature answered by science. Any God worth his salt should be able to answer them, but there's no reason why he should give us the answers on a silver platter.
The reason why I'm not religious is not so much due to the success of science in answering questions about nature as due to the failure of religion to answer questions about ethics and aesthetics and yes - the failure to explain the beginning of the universe/multiverse/cosmos (if it had a beginning). The God hypothesis does not seem to explain anything.
Simple. They claim that mutations are always harmful to the organism and it's descendants.
When biologists show them examples of beneficial mutations happening in nature and in the lab, the creationists change their claim to that mutations are statistically speaking almost always harmful and that therefore the sum over time of mutation upon mutation will always be harmful to a population (and by doing so they prove that they don't understand the process of iterated natural selection).
When biologists show them many examples of how species have adapted to changing environmental conditions the creationists agree that populations can mutate and develop in beneficial ways, but claim that the changes are always small and that over really long periods of time the change always gravitates around the God-given species equilibrium. The creationists call this "microevolution".
When biologists show them examples of massive evolutionary change such as the chain of fossils of the transition from a land-living animal to whales, the creationists begin to write sophistry about "irreducible complexity" and information "theory" and claim that there's a science called "intelligent design".
When biologists show them that irreducible complexity is not observed in nature and point out that complexity is observed to arise spontaneously in thermodynamic processes such as for example the formation of snowflakes, the creationists will surely come up with some other dumb crap. This is the stage we're at right now, so I don't know what it'll be, although a stupid idea known as "specified complexity" seems likely to become popular. These guys are completely immune to knowledge, so rest assure that there will be something new.
WoW gold is just game content. If people use them to buy real life stuff then that's interesting, but it's probably not going to be widespread enough to cause trouble. Linden dollars and Bitcoin are marketed as currencies. Bitcoin also has a fixed amount of money which means that the value of a Bitcoin will undergo cycles of rapid deflation and inflation. This means that Bitcoin comes with a Ponzi-ish scheme built in.
I don't know if it is illegal in most jurisdictions, but it seems unethical to me, unless I'm wrong about the deflation-inflation cycles. It seems that I'm a sucker for mining my 0.21 BTC and my only way out is to find a greater sucker, who in turn has to find a greater sucker, until the deflation stops and the value crashes and the last sucker loses his "investment" and potentially has to eat noodles the next few months, or sell his car, or his house depending on how bad the bubble gets. To be honest I kind of hope it burst before my 0.21 BTC becomes "valuable" enough to buy anything.
Why would I want to stabilize the economy? Call me a cynical asshole*, but I mined my 0.21 Bitcoin in the hopes that there would be an outrageous bubble and that I might be able to sell them or buy something for them somewhere close to the peak.
*I do realize that Bitcoin is fucked up and most likely illegal (at least on theory - nobody has been charged yet) in my country and I am prepared to hand over my 0.21 to the local authorities at their request.
Realistically speaking, how are you going to get your employees to never use the built-in save function in their apps?
My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the "save" button will essentially work as a button that uploads a document to the cloud. Each separate app would need its own built-in encryption and decryption if it's going to be practical from a user perspective.
Everything you just described could be done over wifi VoIP without the expensive monthly 3G bill.
Why not just tape a prepaid cellphone to the door with your number in the speed dial and a note that says "hold 1 to call someone to the door"? Wow... did I just invent something?! Now I just need a 13... no, make that an 11 yr old kid to peddle it....
That's actually a pretty good idea and probably pretty close to what they've done. I bet they've used a cheap 3G board and designed a second board with a microcontroller, if the 3G unit board doesn't have an MCU. Connect the two and attach a pushbutton.
Your VoIP solution might be more expensive to make and would probably take longer to reach the market and may be more expensive to use. It's not cheaper to call VoIP --> mobile than it is to call mobile --> mobile, especially not if you use a prepaid SIM card on the same provider that you're using for your main phone.
The hassle of filling up the prepaid account every now and then will be a problem...
Clearly, the kid is a businessman, because by the time the customer realizes how annoying it is that the doorbell needs regular maintenance it will be too late to return it to the store.
I would get both, assuming OpenSkype is lightweight and sits quietly in the background except when my one friend on OpenSkype calls me.
Most people wouldn't bother. As for you... what about when OpenSkype forks and becomes LibreSkype and OpenSkype and SINS (which of course would stand for SINS Is Not Skype)? What if those drifted apart and lost interoperability?
For lots of people, myself included, Skype may already be one of two apps used for similar purposes; Skype and a softphone, Skype and an IM client, or perhaps all three. There's a point at which adding new elements to support new networks becomes insupportable; and the smallest networks will be the ones that are eliminated in the drive to consolidate clients. I've already made choices about what IM and softphone clients to use based on how many different networks they support, and if one client supports most networks, but not all, I don't keep another client around for those last couple, I just live without them.
The exception? Oh, yeah... Skype.
Sure, if we run our future prediction simulation this is likely to happen. After a while people would go back to using Skype, mobile, mail, Facebook and twitter, all of which does or (I'm sure) will do voice and video in the future. But even so I would use OpenSkype as long as it's useful to me. Installing and removing software is easy. No harm done if it fails. Not for me anyway. I don't know what the developers of OpenSkype and LibreSkype will think when their user numbers dwindle to less than before the fork...
As I wrote in another post: I think the free software community is very late to the table on voice and video (Asterisk is amazing, but that's like saying Linux is good for gaming because lots of gaming servers use Linux). I'm afraid that realistically speaking, anything the community does will be too little too late to counter the inevitable onslaught of gratis non-free voice and video everywhere on the web.
Yes, but if voice and video becomes standardized and easy to set up on the web every site with a community aspect, not just the big ones, will have a widget that you can use to talk to other members of the same community.
A lot of work is being done on standardizing microphone, webcam and P2P support in browsers and it looks inevitable that there will eventually be lots of ways to speak to people directly on the web. Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, Gmail and so on will have it built-in. Even Slashdot will probably have it eventually, although that is a vile and horrible idea...
Where was I?
Yes, right. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when we will have ubiquitous P2P voice and video on the web. Non-web solutions would probably be useful in some scenarios too, but the free software community is late to the table.
The article says "The officials emphasize, however, that not every attack would lead to retaliation. Such a cyber attack would have to be so serious it would threaten American lives, commerce, infrastructure or worse, and there would have to be indisputable evidence leading to the nation state involved, NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said."
What that means in English is something like: If an hostile organization brought down the electric grid, or caused a meltdown in a nuclear plant, or caused airliners to crash, or did something equivalent, then that means that war is an option.
Occam's razor is king in engineering too. If something doesn't work, check things in order of how complicated the failure mode would have to be, or how many unknowns would have to align for the failure mode to happen. Adjust for how long it would take to check for each error. (Looking for the car keys under the street lamp is a good start if there's a chance they landed there.)
Maybe, maybe not. What does that have to do with the GPGPU as a technology?
GPGPU:s are already used in supercomputers and they could perhaps be used in server farms to speed up internet services. It is likely that the next generation of tablets will have GPGPU:s, just because they can. It is not infeasible to imagine a smartphone with a GPGPU. What's the point of having a massively parallel processor in your pocket? I have no clue, but people usually find something to do with cool tech.
Oh and game consoles goes without saying, doesn't it? Unless the console becomes an internet service in which case the servers would have GPGPU:s.
From what I can tell, the successful entrepreneurs aren't the ones who can come up with good ideas. Lots of people can do that The skill is filtering them. It's hard to determine what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. You need to estimate the cost, estimate the return and the likelihood of getting that return and figure out if it's worth it.
Sure. Filtering is probably one of the most important parts of the creative process. If your idea hasn't been filtered it's not a good idea.
I suspect that another important thing is attention to detail. For every great idea there seems to be hundreds of subtle ways to mess up and fail even though the idea is fundamentally sound.
Yeah, but if you own enough money to hire thousands of people your time is probably best spent looking for other people with good ideas. That will be more productive than pursuing any idea you can come up with yourself.
No, humans have to be terrified for it to be terrorism. For example, an IRA bomb in a rubbish bin is terrorism, even if they phone in a bomb scare and get everyone evacuated before it explodes.
George Carlin, is that you?
First of all there is no agreed upon definition of terrorism. We are going to have to invent our own. IMHO terrorism is mean to be a word reserved for people who pose a serious and realistic violent threat to human life. I think that an organization armed with bombs (or the balls to make bomb threats) plays in a whole different league than an organization with herbicide spray cans. If you refer to both as terrorist groups you have not only vilified a relatively harmless group of people, but also devalued the word terrorism.
You could easily have 10 million riders per year. Multiply that with an average ticket price of $100. That's a billion dollars per year. Now, that may not be enough to pay for construction of the track and 5% interest on the construction cost, but it would be enough to pay for trains and maintenance and operations, which opens up the possibility for a market driven scheme...
Let the government build the tracks with tax money (or rather with government loans payed back over time). Once the tracks are in place the government would auction time slots to private train operators. The state government would not be allowed to subsidize operations of these companies, but local governments/cities would be allowed to do so to some extent if they want more frequent service to their city. The track, track operation and track maintenance would be owned and run as a state government owned business, which could be sold to private buyers later if it becomes profitable. You should be able to pay more and more of the maintenance with user fees as the ridership grows over time.
This way you get your rail line, and you get competitive rail operators who will compete for your ticket money in order to increase their profits.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, but I don't want to have to hit a key combo just to search. If I begin hitting letter keys when I'm browsing a page I'm probably searching for something. Why else would I hit letter keys? So why not start searching right away? (I suppose the feature could be confusing for new users, so it's probably something that should be disabled by default, as it is in Firefox. It's the first thing I enable on a fresh FF install.)
As I said there is an extension that adds the functionality to Chrome so it's bearable, but I would prefer if it was built-in.
Something about Firefox is ridiculously slow since FF4. It takes several seconds to start, webpages load slowly, scrolling is choppy. Maybe something is wrong with one of my add-ons, but I don't want to turn them off and then turn each on one by one to find out if that's the case. Nah, it was easier to just switch to Chrome. It's fast as hell and has almost all the features I need as someone who does not do any web development.
My only major gripe is that Chrome lacks the feature where it does an in-page search as soon as you begin typing. There is an extension that does it, sort of, but it's not quite as polished as in Firefox. The Chrome team has come out and said that they will not make it a built-in feature, which is sad. Once you get used to browsing text-intensive web pages by in-page search you'll never go back. It saves your eyes and your mouse hand a lot of work. Especially your eyes. I hardly read stuff anymore, I just type what I'm looking for. But I digress...
If Firefox fixes the speed problem they will get me back, whatever that means. It's not like I'm paying for anything.
Sounds reasonable, except there is no way in hell WoW will run forever, at least not officially. I bet that almost everyone who is playing WoW would be in the market for a better MMO and unlike other kinds of software you only have time to play one MMO at a time. It's only a matter of time. If you want to play the better MMO you have to quit WoW. For all we know Blizzard could have a better MMO than WoW in internal beta right now. They should have if they have invested their money wisely.
Once subscription numbers for WoW drop under a certain level the best way to continue is probably to make both the server and the client freeware and let the community take over.
Will future archaeologists interpret this as a sign that there was a cult based around timekeeping in Texas in the 2000's?
Probably not, but it is an interesting thought that it may be the case that many if not all of the most durable and long-standing monuments of ancient times essentially tell us nothing that's representative about the ancient cultures that built them. Take Stonehenge for example. Imagine if Stonehenge was built by a small group of people with too much money or resources on their hands who thought that it would be awesome to build a really, really big stone circle.
I imagine that their in-house fab churns out some very interesting niche designs; but it would be a real surprise if it has any terribly impressive capabilities in general-purpose compute applications. Staying on the bleeding edge of fabrication requires serious money, while just quietly gobbling up commodity stuff from Intel or Nvidia or whoever won't raise any eyebrows.
They probably have some cool specialized crypto-crunchers based on cryptoanalysis that hasn't officially been done yet, and I suspect that they are the chaps to talk to when you need a chip that absolutely hasn't been backdoored in china; but I suspect that their process density and clockspeed capabilities are middling at best.
That's what they want you to think.
It's obviously a new world order government conspiracy to mine all the remaining Bitcoins.
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. I don't want religion to try to explain science (I mean, I suppose I would be okay with it if God wanted to explain everything). I want religion to explain things that aren't explained by science and the non-religious parts of philosophy. If religion can sort of uniquely explain anything then I will be satisfied and I will probably join it, but I don't think it does.
Religion addresses ethics, but it fails to arrive at answers. The failure goes back to the age-old question about whether or not God has the power to decide what's good and what's bad. If the answer is no, God is not really God. If the answer is yes, God is asking you to basically follow his whims.
Why would you follow the whims of God? I mean I think we need rewards and punishments in place if we're going to follow orders. I think that's why religion needs heaven and hell (and similar ideas like rebirth and nirvana and whatnot) to make sense of ethics. You can decide to not follow God, but that's going to suck for you. A believer in a savior God could paraphrase "science - it works, bitches" with "savior God - it works, bitches... You'll have to wait until you die, but it really works. Promise."
The problem with that is that if the mind is the brain, then God would have to make a copy of the information in the brain to transfer it to your new avatar in heaven or hell. Then we would expect there to be a physical copying event of the mind-state right before a person dies. But we don't see that. It could be we're not smart enough to see it. Could be that the mind isn't really the brain, except it looks like it is.
I tend to think that religion has evolved in a Darwinian process that selects for beliefs that maintain social cohesion and strengthen societies.
I'm not telling anyone to quit religion. There is evidence that religion can be a good way to keep in touch with your community and your extended family. There are lots of nice traditions, some of which I follow myself, just because I like to. I think that telling someone to quit religion cold turkey and replace it with science is a bit like telling someone to quit Facebook and replace it with Wikipedia.
You're right that science and religion can coexist so long as religion agrees to move out of they way when it comes into conflict with science and science has evidence and religion doesn't. That does make your God a bit of a God of the gap, but maybe that is not a problem. Things like "how can we make nature do our bidding?" are by their nature answered by science. Any God worth his salt should be able to answer them, but there's no reason why he should give us the answers on a silver platter.
The reason why I'm not religious is not so much due to the success of science in answering questions about nature as due to the failure of religion to answer questions about ethics and aesthetics and yes - the failure to explain the beginning of the universe/multiverse/cosmos (if it had a beginning). The God hypothesis does not seem to explain anything.
Simple. They claim that mutations are always harmful to the organism and it's descendants.
When biologists show them examples of beneficial mutations happening in nature and in the lab, the creationists change their claim to that mutations are statistically speaking almost always harmful and that therefore the sum over time of mutation upon mutation will always be harmful to a population (and by doing so they prove that they don't understand the process of iterated natural selection).
When biologists show them many examples of how species have adapted to changing environmental conditions the creationists agree that populations can mutate and develop in beneficial ways, but claim that the changes are always small and that over really long periods of time the change always gravitates around the God-given species equilibrium. The creationists call this "microevolution".
When biologists show them examples of massive evolutionary change such as the chain of fossils of the transition from a land-living animal to whales, the creationists begin to write sophistry about "irreducible complexity" and information "theory" and claim that there's a science called "intelligent design".
When biologists show them that irreducible complexity is not observed in nature and point out that complexity is observed to arise spontaneously in thermodynamic processes such as for example the formation of snowflakes, the creationists will surely come up with some other dumb crap. This is the stage we're at right now, so I don't know what it'll be, although a stupid idea known as "specified complexity" seems likely to become popular. These guys are completely immune to knowledge, so rest assure that there will be something new.
I plan on us having a completely rational and apolitical debate on the science of the causes of solar cooling.
That's precisely the kind of extremist authoritarian centrism that Hitler and the Nazis were mongering!
How many early adopters were there, or in other words: how many people were involved in mining the first one million Bitcoins?
WoW gold is just game content. If people use them to buy real life stuff then that's interesting, but it's probably not going to be widespread enough to cause trouble. Linden dollars and Bitcoin are marketed as currencies. Bitcoin also has a fixed amount of money which means that the value of a Bitcoin will undergo cycles of rapid deflation and inflation. This means that Bitcoin comes with a Ponzi-ish scheme built in.
I don't know if it is illegal in most jurisdictions, but it seems unethical to me, unless I'm wrong about the deflation-inflation cycles. It seems that I'm a sucker for mining my 0.21 BTC and my only way out is to find a greater sucker, who in turn has to find a greater sucker, until the deflation stops and the value crashes and the last sucker loses his "investment" and potentially has to eat noodles the next few months, or sell his car, or his house depending on how bad the bubble gets. To be honest I kind of hope it burst before my 0.21 BTC becomes "valuable" enough to buy anything.
Why would I want to stabilize the economy? Call me a cynical asshole*, but I mined my 0.21 Bitcoin in the hopes that there would be an outrageous bubble and that I might be able to sell them or buy something for them somewhere close to the peak.
*I do realize that Bitcoin is fucked up and most likely illegal (at least on theory - nobody has been charged yet) in my country and I am prepared to hand over my 0.21 to the local authorities at their request.
Realistically speaking, how are you going to get your employees to never use the built-in save function in their apps?
My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is that the "save" button will essentially work as a button that uploads a document to the cloud. Each separate app would need its own built-in encryption and decryption if it's going to be practical from a user perspective.
Everything you just described could be done over wifi VoIP without the expensive monthly 3G bill.
Why not just tape a prepaid cellphone to the door with your number in the speed dial and a note that says "hold 1 to call someone to the door"? Wow... did I just invent something?! Now I just need a 13... no, make that an 11 yr old kid to peddle it....
That's actually a pretty good idea and probably pretty close to what they've done. I bet they've used a cheap 3G board and designed a second board with a microcontroller, if the 3G unit board doesn't have an MCU. Connect the two and attach a pushbutton.
Your VoIP solution might be more expensive to make and would probably take longer to reach the market and may be more expensive to use. It's not cheaper to call VoIP --> mobile than it is to call mobile --> mobile, especially not if you use a prepaid SIM card on the same provider that you're using for your main phone.
The hassle of filling up the prepaid account every now and then will be a problem...
Clearly, the kid is a businessman, because by the time the customer realizes how annoying it is that the doorbell needs regular maintenance it will be too late to return it to the store.
I would get both, assuming OpenSkype is lightweight and sits quietly in the background except when my one friend on OpenSkype calls me.
Most people wouldn't bother. As for you... what about when OpenSkype forks and becomes LibreSkype and OpenSkype and SINS (which of course would stand for SINS Is Not Skype)? What if those drifted apart and lost interoperability?
For lots of people, myself included, Skype may already be one of two apps used for similar purposes; Skype and a softphone, Skype and an IM client, or perhaps all three. There's a point at which adding new elements to support new networks becomes insupportable; and the smallest networks will be the ones that are eliminated in the drive to consolidate clients. I've already made choices about what IM and softphone clients to use based on how many different networks they support, and if one client supports most networks, but not all, I don't keep another client around for those last couple, I just live without them.
The exception? Oh, yeah... Skype.
Sure, if we run our future prediction simulation this is likely to happen. After a while people would go back to using Skype, mobile, mail, Facebook and twitter, all of which does or (I'm sure) will do voice and video in the future. But even so I would use OpenSkype as long as it's useful to me. Installing and removing software is easy. No harm done if it fails. Not for me anyway. I don't know what the developers of OpenSkype and LibreSkype will think when their user numbers dwindle to less than before the fork...
As I wrote in another post: I think the free software community is very late to the table on voice and video (Asterisk is amazing, but that's like saying Linux is good for gaming because lots of gaming servers use Linux). I'm afraid that realistically speaking, anything the community does will be too little too late to counter the inevitable onslaught of gratis non-free voice and video everywhere on the web.
I would get both, assuming OpenSkype is lightweight and sits quietly in the background except when my one friend on OpenSkype calls me.
Yes, but if voice and video becomes standardized and easy to set up on the web every site with a community aspect, not just the big ones, will have a widget that you can use to talk to other members of the same community.
The need for standalone VoIP apps would shrink.
A lot of work is being done on standardizing microphone, webcam and P2P support in browsers and it looks inevitable that there will eventually be lots of ways to speak to people directly on the web. Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, Gmail and so on will have it built-in. Even Slashdot will probably have it eventually, although that is a vile and horrible idea...
Where was I?
Yes, right. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when we will have ubiquitous P2P voice and video on the web. Non-web solutions would probably be useful in some scenarios too, but the free software community is late to the table.
The article says "The officials emphasize, however, that not every attack would lead to retaliation. Such a cyber attack would have to be so serious it would threaten American lives, commerce, infrastructure or worse, and there would have to be indisputable evidence leading to the nation state involved, NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said."
What that means in English is something like: If an hostile organization brought down the electric grid, or caused a meltdown in a nuclear plant, or caused airliners to crash, or did something equivalent, then that means that war is an option.
That makes sense IMHO.
You'd think so with your sig.
Occam's razor is king in engineering too. If something doesn't work, check things in order of how complicated the failure mode would have to be, or how many unknowns would have to align for the failure mode to happen. Adjust for how long it would take to check for each error. (Looking for the car keys under the street lamp is a good start if there's a chance they landed there.)
Maybe, maybe not. What does that have to do with the GPGPU as a technology?
GPGPU:s are already used in supercomputers and they could perhaps be used in server farms to speed up internet services. It is likely that the next generation of tablets will have GPGPU:s, just because they can. It is not infeasible to imagine a smartphone with a GPGPU. What's the point of having a massively parallel processor in your pocket? I have no clue, but people usually find something to do with cool tech.
Oh and game consoles goes without saying, doesn't it? Unless the console becomes an internet service in which case the servers would have GPGPU:s.
From what I can tell, the successful entrepreneurs aren't the ones who can come up with good ideas. Lots of people can do that The skill is filtering them. It's hard to determine what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. You need to estimate the cost, estimate the return and the likelihood of getting that return and figure out if it's worth it.
Sure. Filtering is probably one of the most important parts of the creative process. If your idea hasn't been filtered it's not a good idea.
I suspect that another important thing is attention to detail. For every great idea there seems to be hundreds of subtle ways to mess up and fail even though the idea is fundamentally sound.
Yeah, but if you own enough money to hire thousands of people your time is probably best spent looking for other people with good ideas. That will be more productive than pursuing any idea you can come up with yourself.
No, humans have to be terrified for it to be terrorism. For example, an IRA bomb in a rubbish bin is terrorism, even if they phone in a bomb scare and get everyone evacuated before it explodes.
George Carlin, is that you?
First of all there is no agreed upon definition of terrorism. We are going to have to invent our own. IMHO terrorism is mean to be a word reserved for people who pose a serious and realistic violent threat to human life. I think that an organization armed with bombs (or the balls to make bomb threats) plays in a whole different league than an organization with herbicide spray cans. If you refer to both as terrorist groups you have not only vilified a relatively harmless group of people, but also devalued the word terrorism.
You could easily have 10 million riders per year. Multiply that with an average ticket price of $100. That's a billion dollars per year. Now, that may not be enough to pay for construction of the track and 5% interest on the construction cost, but it would be enough to pay for trains and maintenance and operations, which opens up the possibility for a market driven scheme...
Let the government build the tracks with tax money (or rather with government loans payed back over time). Once the tracks are in place the government would auction time slots to private train operators. The state government would not be allowed to subsidize operations of these companies, but local governments/cities would be allowed to do so to some extent if they want more frequent service to their city. The track, track operation and track maintenance would be owned and run as a state government owned business, which could be sold to private buyers later if it becomes profitable. You should be able to pay more and more of the maintenance with user fees as the ridership grows over time.
This way you get your rail line, and you get competitive rail operators who will compete for your ticket money in order to increase their profits.