Canada is the second-largest country in the world only when water that is part of the country is considered as well.
It's true, Canada is not as large (in land area) as many people think. Individual Canadians, on the other hand, are enormous. Many in the U.S. don't realize that the average Canadian is over 2.4 metres (eight feet) tall and can easily weigh over 120 kg (260 lbs).
I have no idea if Moore's Law will really start to "fail" in a particular time scale (one of these times it's gotta be true, right?), but a related issue I find interesting is that CPU speeds don't seem to be being touted to computer buyers so heavily anymore. Walk into a big electronics store and look at their desktop offerings: where they used to prominently feature how many GHz they had inside (and people vaguely felt that more of these mysterious GHz was better), now the CPUs are given code names and numbers that don't reflect CPU speed: Check out this nifty X2, or the Turion 64, or...
The new hook for consumers is the number of "cores", and once again most people have probably picked up the vague sense that having more of them inside means the computer is better. I've been told by people who might be in a position to know that it's not that they can't keep cranking up CPU speeds, but that the cost/benefit (profit-wise) stops making sense at some point because of the huge cost of implementing a new fab at a finer length scale, and we're pretty much at that point. So it makes sense that cores are the new GHz, and Moore's Law will have less and less direct impact on the end computer buyer from now on.
Maybe there's a Core Law to be formulated about how often the average number of processors per computer can be expected to double?
In the end, Apple's move doesn't change our opinion that the best way to acquire digital music remains buying the CD . . .
I always burn the iTMS tracks to a CD, then rip them back off into MP3 (or whatever): Presto, no DRM. And with CDs costing about 20 cents, with about 10 songs per CD, I figure my songs cost me $1.01 instead of $.99, which is fine with me. So if you don't want to have to leave your house to buy a CD, there's always the burn/rip option, even for DRM-ed iTMS songs.
For example, if you make $1 million selling cocaine, even though the activity is illegal, you're still liable for the taxes on the income, and can still be criminally charged for tax evasion in addition to narcotics distribution.
Just say no to drugs: they make your taxes really complicated!
I hope it retains the feature that you can flick it on and it's ready to go in under a second. I miss those days. If I recall correctly, everything was just in ROM, including the ability to execute BASIC, right? With advances in flash RAM, maybe we'll get back there one day (except for the BASIC) . . .
Of course, if you use the output of the exercise to RUN the air conditioning system..... Heat pumps are far over-unity for the heat they move vs the energy they are fed.
Excellent point! I don't have anything to add, I just wanted to say that.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way...
Yeah, you're right, but at the same time, I don't really see the harm in trying to do something with the energy that people dump into, say, a flywheel when riding a stationary bike. Currently it just spins around to produce resistance, so why not have it turn a little generator? Bring your rechargable batteries with you to the gym, plug them in, and walk out with them recharged! I agree that it certainly shouldn't give people the impression that they are Doing Something to Save the Environment.
Of course, the 100% efficient mode of energy recovery is using the heat dissipated by all that exercise, but that happens automatically (if it happens at all): with a room full of sweating exercisers, you should have to heat the place less in the winter and thus use less energy. Unfortunately, the gym highlighted in the article is in Hong Kong, so it's almost certainly air conditioned year-round rather than heated, so all that heat dissipation is the last thing you want. Still, no harm charging some batteries (or something), since that's still recovering a bit more of the energy that would otherwise go into fighting the air conditioning system, and thus it's an improvement over the existing situation -- just a very, very slight one.
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects. This board could then also solicit articles by experts and find other wikis that host specialized information to link to the common Wikipedia.
Hey, maybe they could start printing the articles out, binding them into book form (probably more than one book, come to think of it, maybe a whole set of numbered volumes), and publishing them!
This is not scientific thinking, and it shouldn't be granted any credence. You need to get some evidence to support your views. Your cautionary assertion is on par with the following: never write the letters "CKGJSHDFKLNJNSDFH" on a piece of paper -we don't know what would happen since it has never been done, and it might end life on earth (you can't rule it out completely). Both claims are just about equally substantiated.
Fair enough, and a very good point. Still, if the Earth does get swallowed, even once, I just hope it lasts long enough for us to get an extremely abject apology from physicists.
They've checked their calculations more than once, right? With several brands of calculator?
Can I get an "Amen" for the parent post? Sing it, brother (sister)!
I know the earlier posts about everything being OK now because the Democrats won are intended to be funny, and they are, but in all seriousness, you guys should really keep hammering away against electronic voiting. It's just a bad idea, for all the reasons outlined so neatly, above. It doesn't matter who benefits, it matters that the system is vulnerable.
I've always liked Comedy Central, and them taking this stance really hits home that they want to keep in touch with their target demographic. If other Corps. started doing this, and releasing the strangle-hold on clips on Youtube, I might consider watching more of their programming as well.
I notice that CBS is all over YouTube: they post clips, trailers, and so on, for their shows, under the member name CBS (age: 78).
Of course, this doesn't tell us what they do when other people post things from their shows. Does anyone know?
But doesn't even the most open, verified system still suffer from having the "Vote for Bob" patch installed at the last minute by an official-looking guy with glasses and a clipboard? I know, this shouldn't be allowed, but it seems to happen all the flippin' time! People just don't yet understand what's required to keep a computer secure, but it's pretty easy to understand "Don't let anyone steal or tamper with these little pieces of paper!" Security has to deal with what actually happens in the real world, not in theory, and out here in the real world, computers are a mystery to most election officials in a way that pieces of paper are not. This mysteriousness can lead to bad decisions about what kind of access is allowed.
OK, the Australian system is voter-verifiable, but if you're going to need to have all the voters bring back their receipts afterwards, why not just count the paper to begin with?
If I were an American, I'd be very frightened about voting using an electronic machine, given all the horror stories I've been reading. And as a Canadian, I'm quite happy with our paper ballot system, and I'll resist any attempt to replace it!
I think the demand simply isn't there, I wouldn't blame the technology.
What I can never figure out is the geometry of how the computer-as-TV is supposed to work. Are you going to have a desk in your living room, so you can sit at it when you want to work with the computer as a computer? Or does this thing sit, isolated, like a TV, and it just happens to also be a computer? Or are you supposed to use cordless everything, and sit across the room to type and mouse? And if so, are you supposed to have *really* good eyesight, so you can surf from across the room? So far, my use of a computer is different enough from my use of a TV that they really don't seem to be at all interchangeable -- in terms of normal interaction distance, if nothing else. None of this is fundamentally unchangeable, of course, but I'd be curious to hear whether others are using computers successfully as anything other than one-person TVs that sit on a computer desk and are watched solo.
What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient for Amazon to establish this program as being "theirs" and make it obvious that anyone else who does it later is an imitator.
Nice idea in theory, but I think the trouble would be that such protections always seem to grow longer and more powerful over time. Just look at copyright, now closing in on a full century's worth of automatic, iron-clad protection for everything you scribble down, anywhere.
For starters, for a large portion of the human history (in fact, for _the_ largest portion), the average life expectancy was in the 30 to 40 years range. Yes, literally. The life expectancy in ancient Egypt for example was in the low 30's. In the European middle ages and renaissance it wasn't much better, since they had very high mortality. In fact, all medieval cities had such high mortality (because of being filthy disease-ridden places) that they needed a constant influx of peasants moving in just to maintain their size. So, again, the average person would have a really really shitty life expectancy.
Getting more and more off-topic, here, but . . . This thing about 30-40 years is a misunderstanding based on the meaning of "life expectancy". It's literally the mean, or expected value, so it counts the age of every person, adds them up, and divides by the number. It thus counts a whole lot of people whose age at death is zero, one, or two years: in other words, high infant mortality pulls down the life expectancy very quickly. If you ask, instead, what's the conditional expected age at death, given that you live to be at least five (or something), the numbers shoot way up. Plenty of people in the olden days would have survived into their fifties, sixties, or seventies. The high end of the distribution has spread upwards, too, but the mean being so low does not mean that most people dropped dead in the their mid-thirties. A lot of the gain in life expectancy has come from reducing infant mortality.
Sorry, a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
But in any case, you're right, the incubation time to create a functional adult humans was probably a lot shorter, back then.
I took a class, many years ago, from Prof. DeLaurier, and I'll always remember how he described that earlier ornithopter: "We named it Mr. Bill," he said, "after a Saturday Night Live character of perpetual ill-fortune."
... [On] one side I have a complete stranger who claims that he has been in one of my systems, found a few bugs, and have a few suggestions, one the other side is that the only way to be sure of system integrity is to asume that the system is completely penetra[t]ed...
Yeah, it's like what von Clausewitz said about war: "You plan for what the enemy can do, not what he will do."
When somebody can corrupt your whole system, the only secure way to proceed is to assume they already have.
[Aside from personal experience, I tend to be even more cynical because working in various places and talking about walking to work I have met _three_ secretaries who each had their father killed at a stop sign or stop light pedestrian walk.]
I initially read that as "I have met three secretaries who each had killed their father at a stop sign," and thought, "Man, those are some long odds."
Slashdot Mirror
"I have threatened my boss with a cat ..."
Is your boss a rat? That could be your problem, right there.
Canada is the second-largest country in the world only when water that is part of the country is considered as well.
It's true, Canada is not as large (in land area) as many people think. Individual Canadians, on the other hand, are enormous. Many in the U.S. don't realize that the average Canadian is over 2.4 metres (eight feet) tall and can easily weigh over 120 kg (260 lbs).
I have no idea if Moore's Law will really start to "fail" in a particular time scale (one of these times it's gotta be true, right?), but a related issue I find interesting is that CPU speeds don't seem to be being touted to computer buyers so heavily anymore. Walk into a big electronics store and look at their desktop offerings: where they used to prominently feature how many GHz they had inside (and people vaguely felt that more of these mysterious GHz was better), now the CPUs are given code names and numbers that don't reflect CPU speed: Check out this nifty X2, or the Turion 64, or ...
The new hook for consumers is the number of "cores", and once again most people have probably picked up the vague sense that having more of them inside means the computer is better. I've been told by people who might be in a position to know that it's not that they can't keep cranking up CPU speeds, but that the cost/benefit (profit-wise) stops making sense at some point because of the huge cost of implementing a new fab at a finer length scale, and we're pretty much at that point. So it makes sense that cores are the new GHz, and Moore's Law will have less and less direct impact on the end computer buyer from now on.
Maybe there's a Core Law to be formulated about how often the average number of processors per computer can be expected to double?
Did anyone else read this and think, "Bill who?" No, I, uh, didn't think so . . .
In the end, Apple's move doesn't change our opinion that the best way to acquire digital music remains buying the CD . . .
I always burn the iTMS tracks to a CD, then rip them back off into MP3 (or whatever): Presto, no DRM. And with CDs costing about 20 cents, with about 10 songs per CD, I figure my songs cost me $1.01 instead of $.99, which is fine with me. So if you don't want to have to leave your house to buy a CD, there's always the burn/rip option, even for DRM-ed iTMS songs.
For example, if you make $1 million selling cocaine, even though the activity is illegal, you're still liable for the taxes on the income, and can still be criminally charged for tax evasion in addition to narcotics distribution.
Just say no to drugs: they make your taxes really complicated!
I would, if only it were possible to buy from them without installing bloody iTunes on my computer!
Buying from the iTunes Music Store without using iTunes? Yeah, I'm sure they'll be getting right on that . . .
I hope it retains the feature that you can flick it on and it's ready to go in under a second. I miss those days. If I recall correctly, everything was just in ROM, including the ability to execute BASIC, right? With advances in flash RAM, maybe we'll get back there one day (except for the BASIC) . . .
Of course, if you use the output of the exercise to RUN the air conditioning system..... Heat pumps are far over-unity for the heat they move vs the energy they are fed.
Excellent point! I don't have anything to add, I just wanted to say that.
The article doesn't hide this either, but there is really very little real energy to be won in this way ...
Yeah, you're right, but at the same time, I don't really see the harm in trying to do something with the energy that people dump into, say, a flywheel when riding a stationary bike. Currently it just spins around to produce resistance, so why not have it turn a little generator? Bring your rechargable batteries with you to the gym, plug them in, and walk out with them recharged! I agree that it certainly shouldn't give people the impression that they are Doing Something to Save the Environment.
Of course, the 100% efficient mode of energy recovery is using the heat dissipated by all that exercise, but that happens automatically (if it happens at all): with a room full of sweating exercisers, you should have to heat the place less in the winter and thus use less energy. Unfortunately, the gym highlighted in the article is in Hong Kong, so it's almost certainly air conditioned year-round rather than heated, so all that heat dissipation is the last thing you want. Still, no harm charging some batteries (or something), since that's still recovering a bit more of the energy that would otherwise go into fighting the air conditioning system, and thus it's an improvement over the existing situation -- just a very, very slight one.
Now that Wikipedia has reached a critical mass, the time has come to establish a trusted editorial board that can vet articles to established experts in the field of subjects. This board could then also solicit articles by experts and find other wikis that host specialized information to link to the common Wikipedia.
Hey, maybe they could start printing the articles out, binding them into book form (probably more than one book, come to think of it, maybe a whole set of numbered volumes), and publishing them!
This is not scientific thinking, and it shouldn't be granted any credence. You need to get some evidence to support your views. Your cautionary assertion is on par with the following: never write the letters "CKGJSHDFKLNJNSDFH" on a piece of paper -we don't know what would happen since it has never been done, and it might end life on earth (you can't rule it out completely). Both claims are just about equally substantiated.
Fair enough, and a very good point. Still, if the Earth does get swallowed, even once, I just hope it lasts long enough for us to get an extremely abject apology from physicists.
They've checked their calculations more than once, right? With several brands of calculator?
The only way to win . . . is not to watch.
Can I get an "Amen" for the parent post? Sing it, brother (sister)!
I know the earlier posts about everything being OK now because the Democrats won are intended to be funny, and they are, but in all seriousness, you guys should really keep hammering away against electronic voiting. It's just a bad idea, for all the reasons outlined so neatly, above. It doesn't matter who benefits, it matters that the system is vulnerable.
I've always liked Comedy Central, and them taking this stance really hits home that they want to keep in touch with their target demographic. If other Corps. started doing this, and releasing the strangle-hold on clips on Youtube, I might consider watching more of their programming as well.
I notice that CBS is all over YouTube: they post clips, trailers, and so on, for their shows, under the member name CBS (age: 78).
Of course, this doesn't tell us what they do when other people post things from their shows. Does anyone know?
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html It's open source, it's verifiable, it's secure.
But doesn't even the most open, verified system still suffer from having the "Vote for Bob" patch installed at the last minute by an official-looking guy with glasses and a clipboard? I know, this shouldn't be allowed, but it seems to happen all the flippin' time! People just don't yet understand what's required to keep a computer secure, but it's pretty easy to understand "Don't let anyone steal or tamper with these little pieces of paper!" Security has to deal with what actually happens in the real world, not in theory, and out here in the real world, computers are a mystery to most election officials in a way that pieces of paper are not. This mysteriousness can lead to bad decisions about what kind of access is allowed.
OK, the Australian system is voter-verifiable, but if you're going to need to have all the voters bring back their receipts afterwards, why not just count the paper to begin with?
If I were an American, I'd be very frightened about voting using an electronic machine, given all the horror stories I've been reading. And as a Canadian, I'm quite happy with our paper ballot system, and I'll resist any attempt to replace it!
Clearly a made-up name for a town. Just east of West BumF*ck, isn't it?
I think the demand simply isn't there, I wouldn't blame the technology.
What I can never figure out is the geometry of how the computer-as-TV is supposed to work. Are you going to have a desk in your living room, so you can sit at it when you want to work with the computer as a computer? Or does this thing sit, isolated, like a TV, and it just happens to also be a computer? Or are you supposed to use cordless everything, and sit across the room to type and mouse? And if so, are you supposed to have *really* good eyesight, so you can surf from across the room? So far, my use of a computer is different enough from my use of a TV that they really don't seem to be at all interchangeable -- in terms of normal interaction distance, if nothing else. None of this is fundamentally unchangeable, of course, but I'd be curious to hear whether others are using computers successfully as anything other than one-person TVs that sit on a computer desk and are watched solo.
What we need is something like a short-term copyright/patent where a "minor innovation" is protected for a short period of time so that its creators can get some benefit from being the first to do it. 6-12 months would be sufficient for Amazon to establish this program as being "theirs" and make it obvious that anyone else who does it later is an imitator.
Nice idea in theory, but I think the trouble would be that such protections always seem to grow longer and more powerful over time. Just look at copyright, now closing in on a full century's worth of automatic, iron-clad protection for everything you scribble down, anywhere.
Huh. Live and learn -- thanks for taking the time to reply!
For starters, for a large portion of the human history (in fact, for _the_ largest portion), the average life expectancy was in the 30 to 40 years range. Yes, literally. The life expectancy in ancient Egypt for example was in the low 30's. In the European middle ages and renaissance it wasn't much better, since they had very high mortality. In fact, all medieval cities had such high mortality (because of being filthy disease-ridden places) that they needed a constant influx of peasants moving in just to maintain their size. So, again, the average person would have a really really shitty life expectancy.
Getting more and more off-topic, here, but . . . This thing about 30-40 years is a misunderstanding based on the meaning of "life expectancy". It's literally the mean, or expected value, so it counts the age of every person, adds them up, and divides by the number. It thus counts a whole lot of people whose age at death is zero, one, or two years: in other words, high infant mortality pulls down the life expectancy very quickly. If you ask, instead, what's the conditional expected age at death, given that you live to be at least five (or something), the numbers shoot way up. Plenty of people in the olden days would have survived into their fifties, sixties, or seventies. The high end of the distribution has spread upwards, too, but the mean being so low does not mean that most people dropped dead in the their mid-thirties. A lot of the gain in life expectancy has come from reducing infant mortality.
Sorry, a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
But in any case, you're right, the incubation time to create a functional adult humans was probably a lot shorter, back then.
I took a class, many years ago, from Prof. DeLaurier, and I'll always remember how he described that earlier ornithopter: "We named it Mr. Bill," he said, "after a Saturday Night Live character of perpetual ill-fortune."
... [On] one side I have a complete stranger who claims that he has been in one of my systems, found a few bugs, and have a few suggestions, one the other side is that the only way to be sure of system integrity is to asume that the system is completely penetra[t]ed...
Yeah, it's like what von Clausewitz said about war: "You plan for what the enemy can do, not what he will do."
When somebody can corrupt your whole system, the only secure way to proceed is to assume they already have.
[Aside from personal experience, I tend to be even more cynical because working in various places and talking about walking to work I have met _three_ secretaries who each had their father killed at a stop sign or stop light pedestrian walk.]
I initially read that as "I have met three secretaries who each had killed their father at a stop sign," and thought, "Man, those are some long odds."
Alpha was the 22nd to reach tropical storm strength this year, and the season doesn't end until November 30.
Aren't there, like, 25 or 26 letters, something like that? And no, I will not RTFA (read the fucking alphabet) - it's early on a Sunday morning.