At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal.
Take this as anecdotal, but quite a while ago here in Massachusetts they set a aside a portion of the state cigarette tax to fund a series of anti-smoking PSAs.
If I recall, some were pretty graphic; i.e., pictures of smoke damaged lungs. Some were interviews with survivors of lung cancer and various cigarette related disorders. All were uniformly depressing.
I heard they had a significant negative impact on cigarette sales. That's only hearsay, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Then they stopped.
The nicest explanation I can think of is that enough people complained about being bombarded by a series of really depressing PSAs.
My cynical half suspects they stopped showing them because they negatively affected the state cigarette tax collection.
No, the 6502 was designed by Motorola and manufactured by MOS Tech.
Almost, but not quite. The 6501 was designed by a team at Motorola but Motorola management was uninterested so the entire design team resigned en masse, shopped the design around and finally MOS Technology produced it.
The 6501 was pin-compatible with the Motorola 6800, Motorola sued immediately so the not-pin-compatible, but otherwise identical, 6502 was designed and produced.
But hey, once at least the court of public opinion stopped a politician from being, well, a lying scumbag asshole politician
I'm not disagreeing completely, but I just want to point out that the stated reason why he opposed the legislation was because of "the electoral implications".
Not for ethical reasons, not because it was the right thing to do, not because it was best for the citizens of Canada, but for "electoral implications".
So I guess that still makes him "a lying scumbag asshole politician". But, hey, whatever works.
If you have to get one now, the Viewsonic G-Tablet for $400 is as generic an Android tablet as I've seen; Tegra 2 processor, 10.1" 1024 X 600 screen, 512MB RAM, 16GB flash, mini SD card slot, mini and full-size USB ports, B/G/N WiFi, Bluetooth, an honest 8-10 hours of battery life, etc., etc.
If you read the reviews, there seem to be two categories. People who are disappointed with the out-of-the-box Tap-n-Tap interface and return it, and those who spend an hour or two updating the software and are happy with it.
Viewsonic does seem committed to improving the G-Tablet and is reportedly pushing out frequent software updates.
My impression from reading the reviews is that the hardware is decent but the software needs a little work, probably because it's just been released. If you can put some effort into tweaking it you can end up with a decent tablet, or you can wait 6 months and hopefully let Viewsonic iron out the wrinkles.
I read the same anecdote and I have no argument with safety over convenience in reactor design.
But it's too bad if an unintended side effect is to make smaller nuclear surface vessels, like the aforementioned USS Virginia, cheaper to scrap than to refuel.
USS NAUTILUS, the first nuke powered naval vessel and Rickover's dream, pulled into port in February 1957 to be refueled. The refueling was complete by Mid-April 1957.
Thanks for that. Of course almost any amount of refueling effort and expense is worth it for submarines and aircraft carriers.
I was just musing that perhaps the reason RicktheBrick's USS Virginia and other nuclear powered surface vessels (excepting aircraft carriers) were decommissioned because of the effort and expense to refuel a welded reactor vessel.
How would they do that anyway? Cut open the reactor, refuel and weld it shut again? Or just replace the entire reactor? Either way perhaps it was just not economical for smaller surface vessels.
It is strange since when I retired from the Navy, every ship that I had been a member had already been mothballed even those ships that were built after I had first joined.
I read somewhere that Admiral Rickover insisted on welding all the reactor containment vessels shut, for safety reasons.
I always wondered how difficult that make it to refuel the reactors.
I've always wondered why the Segway wasn't adapted for wheelchair-bound people.
Just a quibble, but it is tiring to stand in one place for long periods of time. I imagine even more so for someone whose leg muscles have atrophied.
And if you're going through the effort to strap them into some sort of frame to take the weight off their legs, why not just give them a chair to sit in in the first place.
that getting these alleged minerals out of Afghanistan is going to be a problem for western countries. Afghanistan is bordered by Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and various other 'stans to the north.
Oddly enough, the country that might mostly benefit from this discovery is China and perhaps India. You know China must be interested.
If I want to read an array of floats (say a bunch of 3D points), it's easier to read them in as a bunch of 4 byte binary chunks than to parse a text string.
Big or little endian? X86, ARM or IBM or other processor? IEEE 128, 64, 32 or 16 bit format? Gotta know exactly what format those binary data points are in or you're screwed. Plaintext... not so much.
We don't store images in plaintext because binary is too hard to work with.
But you can easily convert binary to plaintext using base64 or similar conversion.
gzip is legacy. If you want optimal generic lossless compression, lzma is best in class as far as I know.
Don't care. My point is that compression algorithms are well known and plaintext is easy to compress.
My point is that plaintext is simple, easy to use, and program, operating system and processor agnostic. Just the sort of thing you want to use when you have to transfer data from one computer running a random combination of program, operating system and processor to another computer running a different random combination of program, operating system and processor.
> In other words, plaintext is a feature not a bug.
They are not directly human readable (the only advantage of plaintext), but you can convert to/from a human readable form whenever this is required.
I would submit that the tools to slice and dice plaintext are easier to write and debug than binary tools. And since I assume in this context "plaintext" really means "XML", there are tested, debugged, standardized libraries for importing, exporting and manipulating XML for all languages and all platforms that I'm familar with.
And you can convert to/from binary format whenever this is required.
We should not be using an uncompressed plaintext format for transmitting information over the internet. Not everyone has a high speed connection.
Yet they are so full of plaintext and the technology to process it is all based around slicing and dicing this data up to turn it back into usable binary data that it's amazing we've come this far on such a rickety technology.
The advantage of transferring data as plaintext is that you can slice and dice it to your heart's content. Instead of transferring it in some binary format that may be proprietary or non-extensible or out-dated in a few years.
Every generation seems to have its own style of tinkering.
Broadly speaking, fifty years ago it was ham radio, thirty years ago it was microcomputers like the Apple, Commodore and Atari, today I think it's microcontrollers like the PIC, AVR or especially the Arduino. (Yeah, I know, there's a lot of hobbies and tinkering I glossed over like chemistry, cars, etc, etc. I sure someone will make a list of everything I missed.)
But my point is, today most tinkering seems to be centered around using microcontrollers in various applications. I think the Arduino has accelerated the trend because of its ease of use. In addition, RF modules like the XBee have made it almost ridiculously easy to create distributed networks of microcomputers for whatever application you can think of.
Because of the proliferation of powerful microcontrollers and RF modules, my predication is that 30 years from now people look back at this as the time hobbiest robotics really took off. (Yeah, I know, people have been doing hobbiest robots for years, I just think that the combination of cheap, powerful computers, microcontrollers, motor controllers, RF modules and GPS modules will accelerate the trend.)
Unfortunately, no one has thought of a way to make money off of it yet. Other than insanely rich tourists.
...RIGHT NOW at least. If "insanely rich tourists" are willing to pay to drive down the price of the technology so that I can afford it in 20 years (and all the other benefits that cheap access to space can offer), I'm all for that.
Hell of a lot better use of their money than the government taxing them and giving it to Al Gore in exchange for carbon credits.
It may be too late for us cynical and jaded adults but perhaps we can try an experiment with our children. Teach them to be responsible citizens. Start with restoring an actual functioning public domain. Then teach copyright obligations in civics classes to primary school students.
Considering the abysmal state of education in the United States, teaching history would be a good start. Including American history (in America obviously), of which the Constitution and Copyright is a part.
I read this... uh two weeks ago? All the same things we said back then still apply (you'll lose ~99% of your power over the 20,000 mile beaming distance), et cetera, et cetera. Highly inefficient.
I'm not sure where you're getting your figures, but this experiment suggests you're wrong.
34 kilowatts over 1.5 kilometers at 82% efficiency.
O'Reilly has published a number of Open Books--books with various forms of "open" copyright--over the years. The reasons for "opening" copyright, as well as the specific license agreements under which they are opened, are as varied as our authors.
Perhaps a book was outdated enough to be put out of print, yet some people still needed the information it covered. Or the author or subject of a book felt strongly that it should be published under a particular open copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
At this point about the only thing that we could do that we haven't tried is to make tobacco illegal.
Take this as anecdotal, but quite a while ago here in Massachusetts they set a aside a portion of the state cigarette tax to fund a series of anti-smoking PSAs.
If I recall, some were pretty graphic; i.e., pictures of smoke damaged lungs. Some were interviews with survivors of lung cancer and various cigarette related disorders. All were uniformly depressing.
I heard they had a significant negative impact on cigarette sales. That's only hearsay, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Then they stopped.
The nicest explanation I can think of is that enough people complained about being bombarded by a series of really depressing PSAs.
My cynical half suspects they stopped showing them because they negatively affected the state cigarette tax collection.
No, the 6502 was designed by Motorola and manufactured by MOS Tech.
Almost, but not quite. The 6501 was designed by a team at Motorola but Motorola management was uninterested so the entire design team resigned en masse, shopped the design around and finally MOS Technology produced it.
The 6501 was pin-compatible with the Motorola 6800, Motorola sued immediately so the not-pin-compatible, but otherwise identical, 6502 was designed and produced.
And the rest is history.
I'm not disagreeing completely, but I just want to point out that the stated reason why he opposed the legislation was because of "the electoral implications".
Not for ethical reasons, not because it was the right thing to do, not because it was best for the citizens of Canada, but for "electoral implications".
So I guess that still makes him "a lying scumbag asshole politician". But, hey, whatever works.
If you have to get one now, the Viewsonic G-Tablet for $400 is as generic an Android tablet as I've seen; Tegra 2 processor, 10.1" 1024 X 600 screen, 512MB RAM, 16GB flash, mini SD card slot, mini and full-size USB ports, B/G/N WiFi, Bluetooth, an honest 8-10 hours of battery life, etc., etc.
If you read the reviews, there seem to be two categories. People who are disappointed with the out-of-the-box Tap-n-Tap interface and return it, and those who spend an hour or two updating the software and are happy with it.
Viewsonic does seem committed to improving the G-Tablet and is reportedly pushing out frequent software updates.
And it's available from Amazon and Sears.
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy
The Viewsonic G Tablet is out and available now at, for example, Sears for $400.
Decent specs; 10" screen, 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, 512MB RAM, 16GB flash, Android 2.2.
My impression from reading the reviews is that the hardware is decent but the software needs a little work, probably because it's just been released. If you can put some effort into tweaking it you can end up with a decent tablet, or you can wait 6 months and hopefully let Viewsonic iron out the wrinkles.
Close our markets to all of China's exports.
You don't have to close our markets, just impose a 10% to 20% across the board import tariff on all manufactured goods.
Actually, we should take away their MFN (most favored nation) trading status. They never deserved it in the first place.
I read the same anecdote and I have no argument with safety over convenience in reactor design.
But it's too bad if an unintended side effect is to make smaller nuclear surface vessels, like the aforementioned USS Virginia, cheaper to scrap than to refuel.
Thanks for that. Of course almost any amount of refueling effort and expense is worth it for submarines and aircraft carriers.
I was just musing that perhaps the reason RicktheBrick's USS Virginia and other nuclear powered surface vessels (excepting aircraft carriers) were decommissioned because of the effort and expense to refuel a welded reactor vessel.
How would they do that anyway? Cut open the reactor, refuel and weld it shut again? Or just replace the entire reactor? Either way perhaps it was just not economical for smaller surface vessels.
I read somewhere that Admiral Rickover insisted on welding all the reactor containment vessels shut, for safety reasons.
I always wondered how difficult that make it to refuel the reactors.
I've always wondered why the Segway wasn't adapted for wheelchair-bound people.
Just a quibble, but it is tiring to stand in one place for long periods of time. I imagine even more so for someone whose leg muscles have atrophied.
And if you're going through the effort to strap them into some sort of frame to take the weight off their legs, why not just give them a chair to sit in in the first place.
that getting these alleged minerals out of Afghanistan is going to be a problem for western countries. Afghanistan is bordered by Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and various other 'stans to the north.
Oddly enough, the country that might mostly benefit from this discovery is China and perhaps India. You know China must be interested.
Einstein didn't have a lab. His lab was his brain, and his "thought experiments" were obviously productive.
But nobody knew if he was right until they verified his theories experimentally.
Better yet, try this; "Data on the Largest Manufacturing Countries in 2008".
It's only up through 2008, but it's the latest I could find on short notice.
Big or little endian? X86, ARM or IBM or other processor? IEEE 128, 64, 32 or 16 bit format? Gotta know exactly what format those binary data points are in or you're screwed. Plaintext... not so much.
But you can easily convert binary to plaintext using base64 or similar conversion.
Don't care. My point is that compression algorithms are well known and plaintext is easy to compress.
My point is that plaintext is simple, easy to use, and program, operating system and processor agnostic. Just the sort of thing you want to use when you have to transfer data from one computer running a random combination of program, operating system and processor to another computer running a different random combination of program, operating system and processor.
I would submit that the tools to slice and dice plaintext are easier to write and debug than binary tools. And since I assume in this context "plaintext" really means "XML", there are tested, debugged, standardized libraries for importing, exporting and manipulating XML for all languages and all platforms that I'm familar with.
And you can convert to/from binary format whenever this is required.
One word, gzip.
The advantage of transferring data as plaintext is that you can slice and dice it to your heart's content. Instead of transferring it in some binary format that may be proprietary or non-extensible or out-dated in a few years.
In other words, plaintext is a feature not a bug.
Every generation seems to have its own style of tinkering.
Broadly speaking, fifty years ago it was ham radio, thirty years ago it was microcomputers like the Apple, Commodore and Atari, today I think it's microcontrollers like the PIC, AVR or especially the Arduino. (Yeah, I know, there's a lot of hobbies and tinkering I glossed over like chemistry, cars, etc, etc. I sure someone will make a list of everything I missed.)
But my point is, today most tinkering seems to be centered around using microcontrollers in various applications. I think the Arduino has accelerated the trend because of its ease of use. In addition, RF modules like the XBee have made it almost ridiculously easy to create distributed networks of microcomputers for whatever application you can think of.
Because of the proliferation of powerful microcontrollers and RF modules, my predication is that 30 years from now people look back at this as the time hobbiest robotics really took off. (Yeah, I know, people have been doing hobbiest robots for years, I just think that the combination of cheap, powerful computers, microcontrollers, motor controllers, RF modules and GPS modules will accelerate the trend.)
Unfortunately, no one has thought of a way to make money off of it yet. Other than insanely rich tourists.
...RIGHT NOW at least. If "insanely rich tourists" are willing to pay to drive down the price of the technology so that I can afford it in 20 years (and all the other benefits that cheap access to space can offer), I'm all for that.
Hell of a lot better use of their money than the government taxing them and giving it to Al Gore in exchange for carbon credits.
Considering the abysmal state of education in the United States, teaching history would be a good start. Including American history (in America obviously), of which the Constitution and Copyright is a part.
I'm not sure where you're getting your figures, but this experiment suggests you're wrong.
34 kilowatts over 1.5 kilometers at 82% efficiency.
A recent Lifehacker article suggested the $200 Acer Aspire Revo. Pros: 160GB HD, HMDI output, Gigabit ethernet, reportably plays 1080p, runs XBMC. Cons: single-core, 1GB RAM, no built-in expandability, WiFi or IR.
For $320, the Revo's big brother also has dual-core, 2GB RAM and built-in WiFi.
Because GPUs have no memory management unit, so they can't run any modern multitasking operating system worth beans; Windows, Linux, Mac OS, whatever.
And why should they? That's not what they're designed for.
Virtually all the ROI of the moon landings was from the technology developed for the program, not from going to the moon itself.
I suppose the lesson is to develop the technology to go to Mars, but not actually go
Or go back to the moon; closer, cheaper, quicker.
I understand O'Reilly publishes a number of books under "various forms of 'open' copyright".