I know this story is probably going to get a lot of people riled up. However, it is still my understanding that the NSA goes to great pains to avoid intercepting any communication that comes from a U.S. citizen. They are strictly prohibited from doing so.
If you are a U.S. citizen, your main privacy concerns should be with the FBI and the DoJ with their powers granted by the Patriot Act.
The main problem was that many folks got fed up with the very closed nature of XFree86 development. Many decisions about the project were made by fiat in non-public mailing lists. These core group of developers were often unwilling to explore new features or allow new developers. The barrier to entry for obtaining CVS access to the source was high. Thus, many developers who were not part of the core group got annoyed and decided to stop submitting patches to XFree86. Thus, all these derivatives were born that promise a more community-oriented development process.
The license change was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
No, actually you're wrong about this as far as the democratic primaries are concerned. Candidates would not park themselves in one big state if the primaries were all on the same day. This is because the contests in each state are not winner-take-all. This differs from the general election. Candidates get assigned a fraction of the delegates in each state according to their share of the vote. Thus, if a candidate wins a state with 60% of the vote, he still only gets 60% of the delegates to the national convention (well, truthfully it's much more complicated than that, but it's a good approximation). Thus, the boundaries between states really don't matter. Since the number of delegates is based on the population of each precinct, you can effectively treat every precinct in the country as a separate race. Thus, there is no advantage to campaigning primarily in the large states except for these reasons:
Campaigning in areas of dense population let you gain visibility to more people at once.
The illusion that one candidate has "won" a state, even though the win itself may be meaningless, may give the appearance of being a frontrunner. Of course, this reason is no longer relevant if all primaries were on the same day.
An interesting tidbit was that when Howard Dean dropped out of the race, he still had more delegates than John Edwards at the time. It's just because Dean had no first place finishes that the press basically discounted him -- and assumed the voters would do the same.
There is one aspect of this debate often overlooked: the quality of the tuner box. With digital cable, you'll often find that the tuner they rent you is a piece of crap. The built-in program guide is very sluggish to respond to commands and is usually riddled with little thumbnail ads.
With DirecTV, I had a Hughes tuner box that was great. The program guide was very responsive. I could scroll through it quickly with no time lag between my remote presses. Also, it would put a small zoomed out view of the current channel in the corner, so I could still watch TV while looking through the guide. That's a very useful feature.
Overall, I felt that the cable TV companies are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of you while keeping their own costs rock bottom. DirecTV on the other hand cares about the user experience of their service.
Also, as far as the dish loosing signal during weather -- I've never had a problem. On the other hand, I installed the dish myself. I imagine the "professional installers" often don't point the dish very accurately.
Interestingly, the answer to your first question was hinted at in the linked article, written in 1984:
Apple's brochures and TV ads proclaim, ``Of the 235 million people in America, only a fraction can use a computer.'' Macintosh, they say, is ``the computer for the rest of us.''
One flaw in this strategy, several observers said, is that Apple may not be able to capture the high-volume sales to large corporations more interested in number-crunching than flair.
The film is live action -- so who cares if the characters look ugly in the concept art. Whether or not the characters are truly ugly will depend on the actors hired to play them and the skills of the makeup artists.
In a lot of US metropolitan areas, there exists so-called "street-level" doppler radar which can show what the weather is doing down to street-level accuracy. I see a lot of TV stations advertise this capability, but honestly, it's pretty useless on TV because it's very unlikely they are going to show me my street during a broadcast. Are there any websites out there that give access to the data from these street-level doppler systems? I'm thinking something like Yahoo maps except with the current weather overlayed on top of all my searches.
I guess the usual metaphor "free as in speech, not beer" hasn't been widely circulated enough. Maybe that should be printed in the source headers along with the GPL.
Not exactly true as far as I understand. The firmware on your current DVD player does not know how to decode higher resolution video streams even if the disk contained them. The DVD-video spec only contains a very small number of specific resolutions that need to be decoded, since the players want to be as simple to implement as possible. Furthermore, the composite outputs on any current player can't be driven higher than 480p, at least not on any player I know of. In order to get higher resolution content, you need to amend the DVD-video spec in addition to increasing the capacity.
If I had to guess the speed of molecular electronics I would say that it would run approximately 100 times faster (clock speed) than current state of the art chips. You can judge for yourself givin this information:
The devices in a molecular electronic computer are about 1000 times smaller linearly than current devices (1,000,000 times smaller in area). As an example, an AND gate would fit in a space 3nm x 4nm. That is EXTREMELY small. Any increase in speed would be due to such miniaturation, and would roughly match historic correlations between speed and feature size. An implication of this density is that terrabit memory would fit on 1 square centimeter. I am not extremely well versed in other developing technologies, but you can make your own comparisons given that data.
The basic idea is that molecular electronics is no different than what we have now. It's just 1,000,000 times smaller. This has the benefit that everything we already know about higher level logic, computer architecture, etc. still applies. Things like quantum computing promise amazing power, but we have no idea how to make such a computer useful to your average Joe. Molecular electronics let's us do what we do now, just a whole lot better.
In terms of availability, my guess is that you could buy a computer with certain molecular components in 10 years. In 15-20 years, maybe you'll be able to buy a fully molecular computer (CPU and RAM). This puts us on target to continue Moore's law.
I've just summarized a few issues here. If you want the full discussion, download that pdf I mentioned in my last post.
We actually know a lot more about this technology already than you might think. The basis of this technology is that these individual molecules are electrically conductive. They are designed to work just as traditional semiconductor devices do, except that they aren't semiconductors, they are molecules. We have to do some slightly different trickery to get the current-voltage behavior that we want, but the same principles of electrical engineering still apply.
If you are curious about the "bigger picture" of molecular electronics, this paper should answer your questions:
I am actually somewhat an expert in this subject as I have been doing research on molecular electronics for about two years ago. I have been to most of the conferences so far on the subject. (All this reseach is being funded by DARPA) Anyway, the significance of this research is that it involves passing electrical current through molecules, not just a two-state system created by structural conformations. Although I do not have the specific details on this recent experiment, I know that the past work of Reed has involved synthesizing a molecular structure and then testing its electrical properties (I-V, C, etc.) by using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip to apply varying voltages across the molecule and then measuring the results.
My guess is that they have fabricated a molecule with a high capacitance that can store charge in a similar fashion as conventional DRAM. However, such a molecule cannot be used in a memory array until a switch (molecular-sized transistor) can be fabricated. That should come soon. However, the above is only speculation on my part.
If you want some good introductory information on molecular electronics in general including both memory, switches, and higher level logic architecures (AND, OR, XOR, etc.) in molecules, download this paper:
The research in that paper was performed at the MITRE Corporation, which is also in the process of developing molecular electronic architectures. I contributed a large portion of the computational data to the above paper.
Computer code has been in use for several decades now. Over that time period, unspoken rules have evolved that determine how we exchange code, and what form of communication that falls under. For too long, commercial programmers have dominated the scene -- not open-source or educational uses of code (only in these genres would code count as speech). I guess my point is that it is impossible for everyone to consider code free speech. Many of us agree (including myself) that code should be considered free speech -- that's what the GPL is for. However, the precedent was set long ago that code will only be considered free speech if its author wants it to be. The bottom line is that the author determines this by choosing a license. However, this means that the government should not be able to restrict encryption code. They are not the author, and they have no right to in effect force the author to put a more restrictive license on that code if the author chooses to think of their own code as free speech.
Has anyone played the new King's Quest? I love kq 1-6, but 7 really disappointed me. My favorite is 5, but I'm wondering if the new 3d concept in King's Quest 8 can satisfy those of us who loved the old-style king's quest. Please reply if you've played it and you have an opinion either way.
I was under the impression that the FAA mandated, or at least highly recommended the use of Ada in all mission critical applications because of its rock-solid ability to not crash or do nasty things. Is this true? Or has the aircraft industry given way to C/C++?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this story is probably going to get a lot of people riled up. However, it is still my understanding that the NSA goes to great pains to avoid intercepting any communication that comes from a U.S. citizen. They are strictly prohibited from doing so.
If you are a U.S. citizen, your main privacy concerns should be with the FBI and the DoJ with their powers granted by the Patriot Act.
It was about more than the license change.
The main problem was that many folks got fed up with the very closed nature of XFree86 development. Many decisions about the project were made by fiat in non-public mailing lists. These core group of developers were often unwilling to explore new features or allow new developers. The barrier to entry for obtaining CVS access to the source was high. Thus, many developers who were not part of the core group got annoyed and decided to stop submitting patches to XFree86. Thus, all these derivatives were born that promise a more community-oriented development process.
The license change was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
An interesting tidbit was that when Howard Dean dropped out of the race, he still had more delegates than John Edwards at the time. It's just because Dean had no first place finishes that the press basically discounted him -- and assumed the voters would do the same.
There is one aspect of this debate often overlooked: the quality of the tuner box. With digital cable, you'll often find that the tuner they rent you is a piece of crap. The built-in program guide is very sluggish to respond to commands and is usually riddled with little thumbnail ads.
With DirecTV, I had a Hughes tuner box that was great. The program guide was very responsive. I could scroll through it quickly with no time lag between my remote presses. Also, it would put a small zoomed out view of the current channel in the corner, so I could still watch TV while looking through the guide. That's a very useful feature.
Overall, I felt that the cable TV companies are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of you while keeping their own costs rock bottom. DirecTV on the other hand cares about the user experience of their service.
Also, as far as the dish loosing signal during weather -- I've never had a problem. On the other hand, I installed the dish myself. I imagine the "professional installers" often don't point the dish very accurately.
The film is live action -- so who cares if the characters look ugly in the concept art. Whether or not the characters are truly ugly will depend on the actors hired to play them and the skills of the makeup artists.
In a lot of US metropolitan areas, there exists so-called "street-level" doppler radar which can show what the weather is doing down to street-level accuracy. I see a lot of TV stations advertise this capability, but honestly, it's pretty useless on TV because it's very unlikely they are going to show me my street during a broadcast. Are there any websites out there that give access to the data from these street-level doppler systems? I'm thinking something like Yahoo maps except with the current weather overlayed on top of all my searches.
Relax, the poster was just trying to be funny, taking a jab at the die-hard followers of the Dvorak keyboard like yourself.
I guess the usual metaphor "free as in speech, not beer" hasn't been widely circulated enough. Maybe that should be printed in the source headers along with the GPL.
Not exactly true as far as I understand. The firmware on your current DVD player does not know how to decode higher resolution video streams even if the disk contained them. The DVD-video spec only contains a very small number of specific resolutions that need to be decoded, since the players want to be as simple to implement as possible. Furthermore, the composite outputs on any current player can't be driven higher than 480p, at least not on any player I know of. In order to get higher resolution content, you need to amend the DVD-video spec in addition to increasing the capacity.
it's spelled "Caltech", not "Cal Tech".
Actually, I much prefer to use http://www.howshitworks.com/
If I had to guess the speed of molecular electronics I would say that it would run approximately 100 times faster (clock speed) than current state of the art chips. You can judge for yourself givin this information:
The devices in a molecular electronic computer are about 1000 times smaller linearly than current devices (1,000,000 times smaller in area). As an example, an AND gate would fit in a space 3nm x 4nm. That is EXTREMELY small. Any increase in speed would be due to such miniaturation, and would roughly match historic correlations between speed and feature size. An implication of this density is that terrabit memory would fit on 1 square centimeter. I am not extremely well versed in other developing technologies, but you can make your own comparisons given that data.
The basic idea is that molecular electronics is no different than what we have now. It's just 1,000,000 times smaller. This has the benefit that everything we already know about higher level logic, computer architecture, etc. still applies. Things like quantum computing promise amazing power, but we have no idea how to make such a computer useful to your average Joe. Molecular electronics let's us do what we do now, just a whole lot better.
In terms of availability, my guess is that you could buy a computer with certain molecular components in 10 years. In 15-20 years, maybe you'll be able to buy a fully molecular computer (CPU and RAM). This puts us on target to continue Moore's law.
I've just summarized a few issues here. If you want the full discussion, download that pdf I mentioned in my last post.
We actually know a lot more about this technology already than you might think. The basis of this technology is that these individual molecules are electrically conductive. They are designed to work just as traditional semiconductor devices do, except that they aren't semiconductors, they are molecules. We have to do some slightly different trickery to get the current-voltage behavior that we want, but the same principles of electrical engineering still apply.
If you are curious about the "bigger picture" of molecular electronics, this paper should answer your questions:
"Architecture 's for Molecular Electronic Computers" by James Ellenbogen and J. Chistopher Love
I actually contributed a large portion of the computational results to the above paper. See my post in the next thread for some more information.
I am actually somewhat an expert in this subject as I have been doing research on molecular electronics for about two years ago. I have been to most of the conferences so far on the subject. (All this reseach is being funded by DARPA) Anyway, the significance of this research is that it involves passing electrical current through molecules, not just a two-state system created by structural conformations. Although I do not have the specific details on this recent experiment, I know that the past work of Reed has involved synthesizing a molecular structure and then testing its electrical properties (I-V, C, etc.) by using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip to apply varying voltages across the molecule and then measuring the results.
My guess is that they have fabricated a molecule with a high capacitance that can store charge in a similar fashion as conventional DRAM. However, such a molecule cannot be used in a memory array until a switch (molecular-sized transistor) can be fabricated. That should come soon. However, the above is only speculation on my part.
If you want some good introductory information on molecular electronics in general including both memory, switches, and higher level logic architecures (AND, OR, XOR, etc.) in molecules, download this paper:
"Architecture s for Molecular Electronic Computers" by James Ellenbogen and J. Christopher Love
The research in that paper was performed at the MITRE Corporation, which is also in the process of developing molecular electronic architectures. I contributed a large portion of the computational data to the above paper.
Computer code has been in use for several decades now. Over that time period, unspoken rules have evolved that determine how we exchange code, and what form of communication that falls under. For too long, commercial programmers have dominated the scene -- not open-source or educational uses of code (only in these genres would code count as speech). I guess my point is that it is impossible for everyone to consider code free speech. Many of us agree (including myself) that code should be considered free speech -- that's what the GPL is for. However, the precedent was set long ago that code will only be considered free speech if its author wants it to be. The bottom line is that the author determines this by choosing a license. However, this means that the government should not be able to restrict encryption code. They are not the author, and they have no right to in effect force the author to put a more restrictive license on that code if the author chooses to think of their own code as free speech.
Has anyone played the new King's Quest? I love kq 1-6, but 7 really disappointed me. My favorite is 5, but I'm wondering if the new 3d concept in King's Quest 8 can satisfy those of us who loved the old-style king's quest. Please reply if you've played it and you have an opinion either way.
I was under the impression that the FAA mandated, or at least highly recommended the use of Ada in all mission critical applications because of its rock-solid ability to not crash or do nasty things. Is this true? Or has the aircraft industry given way to C/C++?