There actually is a fairly good argument for landing people on Mars: latency. Best case, you are going to get ~5 minutes of lag with all commands to robots, and you can't trust the robots to run themselves completely. Bandwidth is also a problem, but that could be dealt with on the technical side. Latency cannot. Putting a human on Mars would mean you could do 100x the exploration in the same amount of time. That could be worthwhile. That problem doesn't exist for the Moon, as it is only a few light-seconds away. Humans are a bit faster even there, but not nearly as much so as they would be for Mars.
If so, then I apologize for thinking we as customers are always being cheated. If on the other hand, selling them at 50% off still returns some profit, something must change. It's that capitalism?
Umm, what? There are so many things wrong with your comment it's hard to know where to start. First of all, being ebooks the cost to O'Reilly per copy is near zero, so obviously they aren't selling at a "loss" at any time. Their normal prices are likely set by 2 factors: a high enough price that they can pay the author and still make a tidy profit, and a low enough price that people will still buy. By lowering prices, they increase the number of copies but lower net profit per unit, which means they might end up making little to no profit over their regular prices (or even less, or more likely a lot more).
However, in no case and no matter what price they set, they are never cheating the customer. The customer pays what he thinks the book is worth. If the price is too high, he has the option of simply not buying. Not like there aren't a million other things he could spend his money on for entertainment or knowledge. That's how capitalism works.
If you're wondering why they don't set the price low permanently, the answer is simple. Some people will pay full price to get the book when or nearly when it comes out. Some will not, and will wait for sales or lowered prices, or simply not buy it if the price doesn't get lowered. Steam is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. They sell tons of games at full price to people who want it now, and discount them 50-75% later on. The customers know this, and some will wait, while some will not. Either way, all parties involved end up getting what they want.
Prices for electronic "goods" are a lot more complex than "always as low as will still make you some profit on the individual unit".
Can't? No. Don't want to? Yes. Honestly, there isn't much point to it, and never was. Landing a man on the moon was mostly a dick-waving contest in the first place. Yeah sure it's cool, but it has very little scientific purpose beyond proving it can be done... which was already known anyways.
You expect me to believe that Megaupload couldn't not-link those other 1,999 people to those files? Really? Maybe they had to keep the files, but they certainly didn't have to allow a bunch of other people to create links to and download it.
There is a slight disconnect of what is meant by calling something "infinite". Technically, it means "without boundary", which in this context simply means I can walk in one direction and never reach an end. You don't need to generate the whole thing or store it in memory all at once (that would be absolutely impossible), you just need to be able to generate as much as would ever be needed. That is still a technical challenge. I'm guessing that if you really expanded far enough, your computer would run out of memory. Either that or he destroys segments of the world that aren't in use. There is literally no other option. As others have pointed out, the world can and probably will repeat over some segment, that isn't actually a problem or a qualification for infinite at all.
You can never generate something that is actually infinite, it will always have some boundary. You can, however, extend that boundary as far as your physical limitations (computer memory, in this case), will allow. In that sense, it is infinite (indefinite in size is a better word and is what he actually means).
Yep, in fact if the environment is truly infinite, some portion of it (for an arbitrarily large, but non-infinite "some") will end up repeating, it's unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make the portion so small over a given segment of the space that no human will ever notice the repetition.
....and almost none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the procedural generation, which is actually pretty boring as far as it goes. Games have been doing complex procedural generated terrain since.... well, I don't even know (Rogue, at least), with complex variations much more sophisticated than Minecraft. Minecraft is insanely popular, but as far as good procedural generation goes, it's really not at all spectacular. I mean, hell, Dwarf Fortress (while non-infinite, it could be made so, if it was practical to do so as far as gameplay goes) procedurally generates weather pattern effects on terrain and political/economic shifts in population over an indefinite (user-set) period of time.
Trap shooting is done using shotguns for a reason, and at a few hundred feet, the rockets can cover miles. I mean, sure, there are other ways to shoot down the rockets, but "guys with guns" probably isn't a terribly practical one (I'm not even sure I'd want to blow up a rocket at short range, some of them can carry ~100lb warheads, so you'd end up loosing a lot of the shooters, maybe even if they actually hit the missile). One system I've seen mentioned is the US's Phalanx system, which is designed for exactly this, shooting down incoming munitions, but that has a relatively limited range and probably even more importantly results in thousands of rounds of ammunition being spread everywhere (they weren't designed to be used in cities, after all), some of which is likely to hit people/buildings.
A sniper shooting a rocket out of the air? I think you've been watching too many movies. It's considered a good shot for a sniper to hit a relatively stationary human-sized target at 1-2km away. While it's hard to find a good figure, the rockets Hamas et al are using look to be traveling at 200m/s, which means they will cover the effective firing range in 5-6 seconds, which is nowhere near enough time to get a bead and fire. With a few hundred snipers and a known launch point, they could maybe hit 1 out of every 100 by sheer luck, if that (although I grant you even a near hit might knock the rocket off course or destroy it, it's still going to be incredibly ineffective).
I'm not a licensed electrician, but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly.
Not really, as they say "current kills", not voltage. Static electric discharges frequently have a higher voltage than that. Lethality depends on a number of different factors. Of course, 7,000 volts of continuous DC current would most certainly be enough to kill most people, but electric fences usually use short pulses rather than continuous flow (at least, animal fences I've worked with, and been shocked by, do).
Start making the recyclers who pay cash for copper keep records and start prosecuting them for receiving stolen goods.
So you would punish the innocent with more paperwork and regulations along with the guilty? That doesn't sound very appealing to me. Besides, it's not like thieves wouldn't lie anyways, which would give the recyclers who take stolen goods plausible deniability.
Hey dumb dumb the arrest had nothing to do with Religion. Such bigotry on this site.
It did, actually, although somewhat tangentially. The leader she was indirectly speaking out against was a leader of a fundamentalist religious movement with a long history of violence that is trying to expel foreigners and non-Hindu ideologies (they call themselves "Shiva's Army", if that tells you anything about their stance).
Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs to employ them. In turn, there aren't enough employers because there aren't enough people buying stuff, because people don't have enough money. So yeah, money is still the limiting factor.
And guess what it takes to recycle steel and copper? Time and resources (i.e. money).
Right, the judge can't force the women to hand over access. He can say "hand over access or have your case thrown out for insufficient evidence", though.
As for "conflicts with her belief system" she can just fuck right off with that. You don't get to be excused from policies, laws, regulations, etc. just because they "offend your belief system".
Actually, you do in a lot of cases (conscientious objectors are one example, some religions are actually exempt from taxation in another). You ever heard of the first amendment? Let me remind you of the first sentence: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" The amendment is not just about free speech, you know.
For that matter, it probably isn't even illegal in China (do they have a copyright agreement with the US? Seems unlikely), which looks to be the only place they make phones with it pre-loaded, so unless the FOSS people want to block people outside China from downloading it (which I, personally, would find deeply ironic), I don't think they even have any legal grounding whatsoever.
DNS-and-BIND specified the mechanisms, which I assume means the internal workings. It might not even be illegal in the US to do that anyways (IANAL, I don't know, but seems like unless it is patented you can copy it), mind you, it just illustrates that some Chinese consider that "research".
No. It doesnt matter what they intend. They still have to make their modifications public regardless.
Not if they write a new kernel and don't use any source from the previous one. Of course, they would still have to release source for the kernels they have already distributed.
I believe this, and I really am not entirely opposed to hardware patents, it's just that when a device needs to license literally thousands of patents in order to provide basic, often completely obvious (slide-to-unlock, for example), functionality, something is seriously broken.
But he specifically brought up smartphones as an example of where the system was working well. Maybe the system does work well in other areas, but if the head of the office is trying to use smartphones as an example of patents inspiring "innovation", he is... an idiot, quite frankly (or a liar, either way, not trustworthy).
Combine that with lots of other crap coming out of the office (like labeling any business that uses trademarks as an "IP-business" to defend IP laws, even if you're just working construction), and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's outright corruption, but it's incompetence, at least.
But why? It's not like you are going to be encoding video or rending a Pixar movie on the thing. You want video playback, document editing, some gaming, and web surfing, anything beyond that is pretty much redundant and a waste of battery life.
Second, they only compare the performance to simular system configurations rather then a regular Intel CPU based netbook.
Uhh, an Atom is a regular Intel CPU based netbook. Atom was designed specifically for netbooks, in fact. I'm not sure how much more "regular Intel CPU based netbook" you want, because you can't get more regular Intel netbook than that, unless you expect them to compare it to "Ultrabooks" 2-3x the price (which aren't netbooks). Agreed, the site is terrible.
Even at 10 km/s, stratosphere to detonation is still over 5 seconds, and you don't need to wait till then to launch the missile. The SM-3 (used in the Aegis ABM system) doesn't even start identifying the target until after the third-stage booster fires, for that exact reason. You see there is an incoming missile, you fire the interceptor in the general direction, then you make an assessment about which target to hit, which thanks to the very very expensive Aegis system is not terribly difficult at that stage, since you've had 5-10 seconds to assess which target is a threat.
All this is theorycrafting, though, the simple fact is the system works. You absolutely can hit an incoming ICBM, and I know, because people have done it before, with some consistency.
On the other hand, strategic weapons, like nuclear-armed reentry vehicles (which are hypersonic and can actively manoeuvre), are virtually unstoppable.
Not quite. Very difficult, yes, but not nearly unstoppable. We know, because it's been and being done. Also, most (all?) intercontinental missiles are, well, ballistic, they don't do a lot of maneuvering since that would mean it isn't, you know, "ballistic". The only kind of missile that can afford to maneuver a lot (or at all) beyond the initial stage are the relatively short ranged kind, which are definitely still a threat, but much less of one, since they can't carry nearly as large of a payload as a ballistic missile (or the range to hit most targets). Speed is not actually all that relevant, it's just a number to the computer. It reduces reaction time, but since a computer would fire the missile anyways, that isn't much of an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
There actually is a fairly good argument for landing people on Mars: latency. Best case, you are going to get ~5 minutes of lag with all commands to robots, and you can't trust the robots to run themselves completely. Bandwidth is also a problem, but that could be dealt with on the technical side. Latency cannot. Putting a human on Mars would mean you could do 100x the exploration in the same amount of time. That could be worthwhile. That problem doesn't exist for the Moon, as it is only a few light-seconds away. Humans are a bit faster even there, but not nearly as much so as they would be for Mars.
If so, then I apologize for thinking we as customers are always being cheated. If on the other hand, selling them at 50% off still returns some profit, something must change. It's that capitalism?
Umm, what? There are so many things wrong with your comment it's hard to know where to start. First of all, being ebooks the cost to O'Reilly per copy is near zero, so obviously they aren't selling at a "loss" at any time. Their normal prices are likely set by 2 factors: a high enough price that they can pay the author and still make a tidy profit, and a low enough price that people will still buy. By lowering prices, they increase the number of copies but lower net profit per unit, which means they might end up making little to no profit over their regular prices (or even less, or more likely a lot more).
However, in no case and no matter what price they set, they are never cheating the customer. The customer pays what he thinks the book is worth. If the price is too high, he has the option of simply not buying. Not like there aren't a million other things he could spend his money on for entertainment or knowledge. That's how capitalism works.
If you're wondering why they don't set the price low permanently, the answer is simple. Some people will pay full price to get the book when or nearly when it comes out. Some will not, and will wait for sales or lowered prices, or simply not buy it if the price doesn't get lowered. Steam is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon. They sell tons of games at full price to people who want it now, and discount them 50-75% later on. The customers know this, and some will wait, while some will not. Either way, all parties involved end up getting what they want.
Prices for electronic "goods" are a lot more complex than "always as low as will still make you some profit on the individual unit".
We certainly can't.
Can't? No. Don't want to? Yes. Honestly, there isn't much point to it, and never was. Landing a man on the moon was mostly a dick-waving contest in the first place. Yeah sure it's cool, but it has very little scientific purpose beyond proving it can be done... which was already known anyways.
You expect me to believe that Megaupload couldn't not-link those other 1,999 people to those files? Really? Maybe they had to keep the files, but they certainly didn't have to allow a bunch of other people to create links to and download it.
There is a slight disconnect of what is meant by calling something "infinite". Technically, it means "without boundary", which in this context simply means I can walk in one direction and never reach an end. You don't need to generate the whole thing or store it in memory all at once (that would be absolutely impossible), you just need to be able to generate as much as would ever be needed. That is still a technical challenge. I'm guessing that if you really expanded far enough, your computer would run out of memory. Either that or he destroys segments of the world that aren't in use. There is literally no other option. As others have pointed out, the world can and probably will repeat over some segment, that isn't actually a problem or a qualification for infinite at all.
You can never generate something that is actually infinite, it will always have some boundary. You can, however, extend that boundary as far as your physical limitations (computer memory, in this case), will allow. In that sense, it is infinite (indefinite in size is a better word and is what he actually means).
Yep, in fact if the environment is truly infinite, some portion of it (for an arbitrarily large, but non-infinite "some") will end up repeating, it's unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make the portion so small over a given segment of the space that no human will ever notice the repetition.
....and almost none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the procedural generation, which is actually pretty boring as far as it goes. Games have been doing complex procedural generated terrain since.... well, I don't even know (Rogue, at least), with complex variations much more sophisticated than Minecraft. Minecraft is insanely popular, but as far as good procedural generation goes, it's really not at all spectacular. I mean, hell, Dwarf Fortress (while non-infinite, it could be made so, if it was practical to do so as far as gameplay goes) procedurally generates weather pattern effects on terrain and political/economic shifts in population over an indefinite (user-set) period of time.
Man, I can't wait until video games get the technology to not just be viewable static 3d models.
I'll be impressed when they actually get 3D models, and not just a 2D representation of a 3D model (even stereoscopic displays aren't actually 3D).
Trap shooting is done using shotguns for a reason, and at a few hundred feet, the rockets can cover miles. I mean, sure, there are other ways to shoot down the rockets, but "guys with guns" probably isn't a terribly practical one (I'm not even sure I'd want to blow up a rocket at short range, some of them can carry ~100lb warheads, so you'd end up loosing a lot of the shooters, maybe even if they actually hit the missile). One system I've seen mentioned is the US's Phalanx system, which is designed for exactly this, shooting down incoming munitions, but that has a relatively limited range and probably even more importantly results in thousands of rounds of ammunition being spread everywhere (they weren't designed to be used in cities, after all), some of which is likely to hit people/buildings.
A sniper shooting a rocket out of the air? I think you've been watching too many movies. It's considered a good shot for a sniper to hit a relatively stationary human-sized target at 1-2km away. While it's hard to find a good figure, the rockets Hamas et al are using look to be traveling at 200m/s, which means they will cover the effective firing range in 5-6 seconds, which is nowhere near enough time to get a bead and fire. With a few hundred snipers and a known launch point, they could maybe hit 1 out of every 100 by sheer luck, if that (although I grant you even a near hit might knock the rocket off course or destroy it, it's still going to be incredibly ineffective).
I'm not a licensed electrician, but 7,000 volts sounds kinda' deadly.
Not really, as they say "current kills", not voltage. Static electric discharges frequently have a higher voltage than that. Lethality depends on a number of different factors. Of course, 7,000 volts of continuous DC current would most certainly be enough to kill most people, but electric fences usually use short pulses rather than continuous flow (at least, animal fences I've worked with, and been shocked by, do).
Start making the recyclers who pay cash for copper keep records and start prosecuting them for receiving stolen goods.
So you would punish the innocent with more paperwork and regulations along with the guilty? That doesn't sound very appealing to me. Besides, it's not like thieves wouldn't lie anyways, which would give the recyclers who take stolen goods plausible deniability.
Hey dumb dumb the arrest had nothing to do with Religion. Such bigotry on this site.
It did, actually, although somewhat tangentially. The leader she was indirectly speaking out against was a leader of a fundamentalist religious movement with a long history of violence that is trying to expel foreigners and non-Hindu ideologies (they call themselves "Shiva's Army", if that tells you anything about their stance).
Those workers aren't employed because there aren't enough businesses with unfilled jobs to employ them. In turn, there aren't enough employers because there aren't enough people buying stuff, because people don't have enough money. So yeah, money is still the limiting factor.
And guess what it takes to recycle steel and copper? Time and resources (i.e. money).
Right, the judge can't force the women to hand over access. He can say "hand over access or have your case thrown out for insufficient evidence", though.
As for "conflicts with her belief system" she can just fuck right off with that. You don't get to be excused from policies, laws, regulations, etc. just because they "offend your belief system".
Actually, you do in a lot of cases (conscientious objectors are one example, some religions are actually exempt from taxation in another). You ever heard of the first amendment? Let me remind you of the first sentence: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" The amendment is not just about free speech, you know.
For that matter, it probably isn't even illegal in China (do they have a copyright agreement with the US? Seems unlikely), which looks to be the only place they make phones with it pre-loaded, so unless the FOSS people want to block people outside China from downloading it (which I, personally, would find deeply ironic), I don't think they even have any legal grounding whatsoever.
DNS-and-BIND specified the mechanisms, which I assume means the internal workings. It might not even be illegal in the US to do that anyways (IANAL, I don't know, but seems like unless it is patented you can copy it), mind you, it just illustrates that some Chinese consider that "research".
No. It doesnt matter what they intend. They still have to make their modifications public regardless.
Not if they write a new kernel and don't use any source from the previous one. Of course, they would still have to release source for the kernels they have already distributed.
I believe this, and I really am not entirely opposed to hardware patents, it's just that when a device needs to license literally thousands of patents in order to provide basic, often completely obvious (slide-to-unlock, for example), functionality, something is seriously broken.
But he specifically brought up smartphones as an example of where the system was working well. Maybe the system does work well in other areas, but if the head of the office is trying to use smartphones as an example of patents inspiring "innovation", he is... an idiot, quite frankly (or a liar, either way, not trustworthy).
Combine that with lots of other crap coming out of the office (like labeling any business that uses trademarks as an "IP-business" to defend IP laws, even if you're just working construction), and it doesn't paint a very pretty picture. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say it's outright corruption, but it's incompetence, at least.
But why? It's not like you are going to be encoding video or rending a Pixar movie on the thing. You want video playback, document editing, some gaming, and web surfing, anything beyond that is pretty much redundant and a waste of battery life.
Second, they only compare the performance to simular system configurations rather then a regular Intel CPU based netbook.
Uhh, an Atom is a regular Intel CPU based netbook. Atom was designed specifically for netbooks, in fact. I'm not sure how much more "regular Intel CPU based netbook" you want, because you can't get more regular Intel netbook than that, unless you expect them to compare it to "Ultrabooks" 2-3x the price (which aren't netbooks). Agreed, the site is terrible.
Even at 10 km/s, stratosphere to detonation is still over 5 seconds, and you don't need to wait till then to launch the missile. The SM-3 (used in the Aegis ABM system) doesn't even start identifying the target until after the third-stage booster fires, for that exact reason. You see there is an incoming missile, you fire the interceptor in the general direction, then you make an assessment about which target to hit, which thanks to the very very expensive Aegis system is not terribly difficult at that stage, since you've had 5-10 seconds to assess which target is a threat.
All this is theorycrafting, though, the simple fact is the system works. You absolutely can hit an incoming ICBM, and I know, because people have done it before, with some consistency.
On the other hand, strategic weapons, like nuclear-armed reentry vehicles (which are hypersonic and can actively manoeuvre), are virtually unstoppable.
Not quite. Very difficult, yes, but not nearly unstoppable. We know, because it's been and being done. Also, most (all?) intercontinental missiles are, well, ballistic, they don't do a lot of maneuvering since that would mean it isn't, you know, "ballistic". The only kind of missile that can afford to maneuver a lot (or at all) beyond the initial stage are the relatively short ranged kind, which are definitely still a threat, but much less of one, since they can't carry nearly as large of a payload as a ballistic missile (or the range to hit most targets). Speed is not actually all that relevant, it's just a number to the computer. It reduces reaction time, but since a computer would fire the missile anyways, that isn't much of an issue.