As long as none of the widespread and numerous strains of AIDS becomes airborn. If you don't believe this is a real possibility, you don't know enough AIDS researchers.
Cancer strikes smokers, radiation victims, and otherwise randomly. No one with knowledge of the field feels that cancer is likely to become airborn.
Ah, but breaking the speed laws is statistical murder, not a crime with no victims. It's just that you're not _particularly_ likely to kill anyone. But someone doing _exactly_ what you are will.
However, there are important distances being ignored here: Radio vs DVD:
Audio cues while driving are not as important as visual cues. There have been cases where people have not heard sirens, and have caused problems as a result, but the frequency with which you must respond to audio cues is sufficiently low to make driving with a radio relatively safe.
Visual cues are fairly important. If you are driving in bumper to bumper traffic watching a dvd, and don't notice the brakelights, you have trouble. If you are driving in bumper to bumper traffic listening to the radio, and don't hear the brakes squealing in front of you, hopefully you notice the brake lights.
Radio vs handheld cell phone: With radio, you take one hand off the wheel, and press buttons. This can lead to accidents, and occasionally does. Statistically though, the odds that you'll reach out to change channels at a critical moment are reasonably low.
With a cell phone, you may have your hand off the wheel for the entire commute. In urban areas, that can often be in the 30 minute to 1-hour range. In addition, unlike with a radio, most people won't feel free to jerk their hand back to the wheel in an emergency, for multiple reasons: a) you'll drop your phone (you won't drop your radio). b) you're holding your phone in a grip (you don't hold your radio the same way). c) you're more involved with your phone (in the midst of conversation).
Even more serious is the likelyhood that you won't put your hand back on the wheel during moments you need to make steering adjustments in non emergencies. This can lead to an increased statistical risk that you'll be the cause of an accident.
I'll allow people to have hands-free phones in their cars with no complaints, but just like with motorcycle helmets, as a public policy, it just makes more sense to legally force people to not have dvd players distracting the driver, and not have phones or other electronics occupying the driver's hands.
"One transistor == one neuron. Its a fairly common assumption that is most likely valid."
It is not a common assumption among scientists researching neurons, nor is it likely valid.
Comparing neurons to transistors requires a consideration of clock speed. 1 transistor at 1 Mhz cannot match the calculating capability of 1 neuron at brain speed.
Based on my experience doing simulations at the city of hope, my personal estimate might be that 100k to 1 million non-specialized transistors at 100 mhz (ie in a modern CPU) could match one neuron. If you specialize for brain-like computations, you can do much better, but most transistor development isn't focused on this goal today.
However, I've seen the six hour version. It was the long version + extended intro and some extra footage. It was not actually six hours long, it just took six hours with the commercials. There are, however, 3 version in existence, it was clearly longer, and contained extra scenes not in the long version. To my best estimate, it was about 3 hours, possibly 3 hours 20 of movie time, an hour worth of discussion with someone from the movie crew, and the rest in commercials.
To be fair... I'm fairly sure the development team just signs once, and then the signatures are duplicated... that's the way autographed editions always work. (Sorry to burst anyone's bubble who thinks signatures that they didn't actually witness came from the actual person).
I mean... barring alien involvement with FPS... did the physical impossibilities bother anyone. At least when the conspiracies are involved, I can believe that there is technology that we don't understand causing effects beyond our comprehension.
But this episode seemed to be trying to sell itself as 'it could really happen!'. They took it far too seriously to make it as funny as it could have been, but not seriously enough for me to find it a palatable platform for discussing the issues raised.
I think the acting from all sides was sub par, particularly from andersen and duchovny. Could they have been any flatter?
Overall, IMO that was the worst xfiles episode i've seen, and i've seen all but three or four.
" Remember Murkowski's bill? Now that we've got the Colorado law, we'll see tons of spam with "ADV:" in the subject line, and the language "Since we used ADV: this isn't spam, nyaah nyaah nyaah". This law legitimizes spam, rather than prohibiting it. "
The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support. Have any of your real email contacts ever sent you a message containing the string ADV:? (Seriously... do a search on your saved email).
Re:And the answer... (and rest of the questions...
on
The Simpsons Turn 10
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately, there is an episode where lisa, if memory serves, is going to point out which state sprinfield is in on a map. Bart Walks in and blocks the _eastern_ half of the US, also blocking lisa's pointing. Unless Lisa is wrong, we must believe that Springfield is east of the Mississippi. Which would be in conflict with KBBL, except that while many things are screwy in springfield (possibly including KBBL) Lisa is generally infallible when it comes to stuff like schoolwork and geography.
If you are hired to be a responsible grape smasher, and note that a nearby grape provider is including large amounts of feces with his grape shipments, you have a _responsibility_ to reject all of his grapes to prevent this contamination if possible. This is what the UDP is in your grape smashing analogy. The UDP rejects all grapes from a known feces-grapes provider. Sure, some of the boxes of grapes might not contain feces, but most of them do, so why take chances. When the feces per box ratio rises too high, you just don't want those grapes anymore.
" Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads? "
Of course you can. It's pretty easy to do. A number of people already do it using internet junk buster, which in essence mirrors slashdot locally without the ads.
Could you then redistribute it to the world? Easily. There's no way short of physical force they can stop you. (calling in lawyers counts as threat of physical force, since after the lawyers come the cops). If you find a way to accomplish this anonymously, slashdot can't do anything.
" IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property. "
Of course, if you had a replicator, you could make a coke clone, exactly like coke, and market it as something else entirely. When chemical analyzers get sufficiently good, this might actually happen. Imagine if you will that walmart soda tasted _exactly_ like coke, instead of like the crappy generic soda it is. Would you pay the extra 500% premium for generic coke? (last time i checked walmart soda was 10c vs coke at 50c).
Intellectual property is going to become very very difficult to protect for the kind of financial gain the property owners currently expect. Realistically, they need to find better ways of generating income (live performance) if they want to survive. They are certainly welcome to try, it's just going to be hard, and they'd be better off focusing their attention on other opportunities.
" Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different? "
Since intel code names are based on geographic features, i'd assume kass-kades, as that's how you pronounce the matching river if you're from the area.
To be fair, Rambus has been underperforming compared to expectations. Rambus even at full speed has shown only small gains over pc100 memory on most applications, and looks like a tossup against PC133 memory, and looks to lose once PC266 memory is commonplace. To claim it is the best technology is a stretch, when it is ambiguous at best. Visit Tom's Hardware and look at the benchmarks.
And again, MacOS is also not in any way clearly superior. It has significant flaws, and had sufficient flaws to make it ambiguously better even back before win95. (multitasking, memory protection, licensing issues, power user & developer support).
Not that I'd claim superior technology always wins, but those are two terrible examples.
Firewire is more interesting. It will be interesting to see whether firewire or USB 2 winds up as a dominant standard, since firewire is clearly superior except for licensing issues. (And licensing issues can be a killer... no one wants to commit to a technology that can be swept out from under them).
" This wouldn't be SMP, even the motherboard wouldn't really know there were multiple cores on one processor. "
This is essentially how most of the current processors already work. A Pentium II processor is capable of executing _multiple_ instructions on the same clock. The motherboard/OS don't even know there's effectively more than one processing unit present.
What you really want is a nice threaded OS and applications, coupled with known multiple CPUs so that applications can be executed in parallel on the thread level, rather than on the instruction level (or looking at it from the programming perspective, it is much more fruitful to parallelize your app deliberately, rather than let the hardware try to do the best it can for you.)
" Q32: How long of a cable can I use to connect my device? A32: In practice, the USB specification limits the length of a cable between full speed devices to 5 meters (a little under 16 feet 5 inches). For a low speed device the limit is 3 meters (9 feet 10 inches). "
I personally have my printer (full speed) hooked up over a fifteen foot cable, so that works.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as none of the widespread and numerous strains of AIDS becomes airborn. If you don't believe this is a real possibility, you don't know enough AIDS researchers.
Cancer strikes smokers, radiation victims, and otherwise randomly. No one with knowledge of the field feels that cancer is likely to become airborn.
Ah, but breaking the speed laws is statistical murder, not a crime with no victims. It's just that you're not _particularly_ likely to kill anyone. But someone doing _exactly_ what you are will.
However, there are important distances being ignored here:
Radio vs DVD:
Audio cues while driving are not as important as visual cues. There have been cases where people have not heard sirens, and have caused problems as a result, but the frequency with which you must respond to audio cues is sufficiently low to make driving with a radio relatively safe.
Visual cues are fairly important. If you are driving in bumper to bumper traffic watching a dvd, and don't notice the brakelights, you have trouble. If you are driving in bumper to bumper traffic listening to the radio, and don't hear the brakes squealing in front of you, hopefully you notice the brake lights.
Radio vs handheld cell phone:
With radio, you take one hand off the wheel, and press buttons. This can lead to accidents, and occasionally does. Statistically though, the odds that you'll reach out to change channels at a critical moment are reasonably low.
With a cell phone, you may have your hand off the wheel for the entire commute. In urban areas, that can often be in the 30 minute to 1-hour range. In addition, unlike with a radio, most people won't feel free to jerk their hand back to the wheel in an emergency, for multiple reasons:
a) you'll drop your phone (you won't drop your radio).
b) you're holding your phone in a grip (you don't hold your radio the same way).
c) you're more involved with your phone (in the midst of conversation).
Even more serious is the likelyhood that you won't put your hand back on the wheel during moments you need to make steering adjustments in non emergencies. This can lead to an increased statistical risk that you'll be the cause of an accident.
I'll allow people to have hands-free phones in their cars with no complaints, but just like with motorcycle helmets, as a public policy, it just makes more sense to legally force people to not have dvd players distracting the driver, and not have phones or other electronics occupying the driver's hands.
"One transistor == one neuron. Its a fairly common assumption that is most likely valid."
It is not a common assumption among scientists researching neurons, nor is it likely valid.
Comparing neurons to transistors requires a consideration of clock speed. 1 transistor at 1 Mhz cannot match the calculating capability of 1 neuron at brain speed.
Based on my experience doing simulations at the city of hope, my personal estimate might be that 100k to 1 million non-specialized transistors at 100 mhz (ie in a modern CPU) could match one neuron. If you specialize for brain-like computations, you can do much better, but most transistor development isn't focused on this goal today.
However, I've seen the six hour version. It was the long version + extended intro and some extra footage. It was not actually six hours long, it just took six hours with the commercials. There are, however, 3 version in existence, it was clearly longer, and contained extra scenes not in the long version. To my best estimate, it was about 3 hours, possibly 3 hours 20 of movie time, an hour worth of discussion with someone from the movie crew, and the rest in commercials.
To be fair ... I'm fairly sure the development team just signs once, and then the signatures are duplicated ... that's the way autographed editions always work. (Sorry to burst anyone's bubble who thinks signatures that they didn't actually witness came from the actual person).
"
I also long fo rthe day when dying in an RPG was a really horrible thing...
"
At least you have d2 to look forward to (with the hardcore permanent death option).
I mean ... barring alien involvement with FPS ... did the physical impossibilities bother anyone. At least when the conspiracies are involved, I can believe that there is technology that we don't understand causing effects beyond our comprehension.
But this episode seemed to be trying to sell itself as 'it could really happen!'. They took it far too seriously to make it as funny as it could have been, but not seriously enough for me to find it a palatable platform for discussing the issues raised.
I think the acting from all sides was sub par, particularly from andersen and duchovny. Could they have been any flatter?
Overall, IMO that was the worst xfiles episode i've seen, and i've seen all but three or four.
"
... do a search on your saved email).
Remember Murkowski's bill? Now that we've got the Colorado law, we'll see tons of spam with "ADV:" in the subject line, and the language "Since we used
ADV: this isn't spam, nyaah nyaah nyaah". This law legitimizes spam, rather than prohibiting it.
"
The whole point of this is that if all the spam starts containing ADV: that makes for a very easy text filter, which most email programs support. Have any of your real email contacts ever sent you a message containing the string ADV:? (Seriously
Unfortunately, there is an episode where lisa, if memory serves, is going to point out which state sprinfield is in on a map. Bart Walks in and blocks the _eastern_ half of the US, also blocking lisa's pointing. Unless Lisa is wrong, we must believe that Springfield is east of the Mississippi. Which would be in conflict with KBBL, except that while many things are screwy in springfield (possibly including KBBL) Lisa is generally infallible when it comes to stuff like schoolwork and geography.
If you are hired to be a responsible grape smasher, and note that a nearby grape provider is including large amounts of feces with his grape shipments, you have a _responsibility_ to reject all of his grapes to prevent this contamination if possible. This is what the UDP is in your grape smashing analogy. The UDP rejects all grapes from a known feces-grapes provider. Sure, some of the boxes of grapes might not contain feces, but most of them do, so why take chances. When the feces per box ratio rises too high, you just don't want those grapes anymore.
"
Does this mean that I can mirror Slashdot, but without those pesky ads?
"
Of course you can. It's pretty easy to do. A number of people already do it using internet junk buster, which in essence mirrors slashdot locally without the ads.
Could you then redistribute it to the world? Easily. There's no way short of physical force they can stop you. (calling in lawyers counts as threat of physical force, since after the lawyers come the cops). If you find a way to accomplish this anonymously, slashdot can't do anything.
"
IP isn't forfeited in theory or in actuality just because someone has a copy of it. I can hold a Coke can in my hand, but I could be sued if I made my own Coke
can. I can copy a DVD and distribute it to my friends, but I could be sued (or put in jail) for theft of intellectual property.
"
Of course, if you had a replicator, you could make a coke clone, exactly like coke, and market it as something else entirely. When chemical analyzers get sufficiently good, this might actually happen. Imagine if you will that walmart soda tasted _exactly_ like coke, instead of like the crappy generic soda it is. Would you pay the extra 500% premium for generic coke? (last time i checked walmart soda was 10c vs coke at 50c).
Intellectual property is going to become very very difficult to protect for the kind of financial gain the property owners currently expect. Realistically, they need to find better ways of generating income (live performance) if they want to survive. They are certainly welcome to try, it's just going to be hard, and they'd be better off focusing their attention on other opportunities.
"
Slightly off-topic, the new PIII Xeon are codenamed "Cascades." Is this pronounced kass-kades or kass-kad-ees or something entirely different?
"
Since intel code names are based on geographic features, i'd assume kass-kades, as that's how you pronounce the matching river if you're from the area.
To be fair, Rambus has been underperforming compared to expectations. Rambus even at full speed has shown only small gains over pc100 memory on most applications, and looks like a tossup against PC133 memory, and looks to lose once PC266 memory is commonplace. To claim it is the best technology is a stretch, when it is ambiguous at best. Visit Tom's Hardware and look at the benchmarks.
... no one wants to commit to a technology that can be swept out from under them).
And again, MacOS is also not in any way clearly superior. It has significant flaws, and had sufficient flaws to make it ambiguously better even back before win95. (multitasking, memory protection, licensing issues, power user & developer support).
Not that I'd claim superior technology always wins, but those are two terrible examples.
Firewire is more interesting. It will be interesting to see whether firewire or USB 2 winds up as a dominant standard, since firewire is clearly superior except for licensing issues. (And licensing issues can be a killer
"
This wouldn't be SMP, even the motherboard wouldn't really know there were multiple cores on one processor.
"
This is essentially how most of the current
processors already work. A Pentium II processor
is capable of executing _multiple_ instructions
on the same clock. The motherboard/OS don't
even know there's effectively more than one
processing unit present.
What you really want is a nice threaded OS and
applications, coupled with known multiple CPUs
so that applications can be executed in parallel
on the thread level, rather than on the
instruction level (or looking at it from the
programming perspective, it is much more fruitful
to parallelize your app deliberately, rather
than let the hardware try to do the best it can
for you.)
In the detailed rules, there's a section
restricting things like EMP and shining
lasers into the eyes of your (human) opponents.
http://www.usb.org/faq/ans5.html#q32
"
Q32: How long of a cable can I use to connect my device?
A32: In practice, the USB specification limits the length of a cable between full speed
devices to 5 meters (a little under 16 feet 5 inches). For a low speed device the limit is 3
meters (9 feet 10 inches).
"
I personally have my printer (full speed)
hooked up over a fifteen foot cable, so that
works.