Yeah, that 400Mhz Rambus outpreforms DDR chipsets by quite a bit as far as bandwidth. The reason everyone isn't jumping to Rambus isn't the price, its because it doesn't matter. It's memory latency thats far more important in most applications. Memory isn't generally accessed sequentially.
Quite simply: We, more than any nation that is likely to attack us, are vulnerable to information warfare. You can cause very serious disruption by attacking the right computers. We know countries like China are working in this area. It allows a smaller country to make much more effective attacks against us without the loss of resources that would generally be involved. Normally Iran couldn't touch us, but if they break in and start dropping out bits of the power grid or dropping sattelites out of the sky(remember the copy of the OS that walked off NASA's servers 4 months ago?) thats going to have a serious impact on our country.
Therefore, the NSA, with their mandate to protect national security has an extremely vested interest in making sure that all of our online reasources are using a secure operating system. They're taking something thats already relatively secure and making it better. And the additional bonus of doing it open source is that we get to look at it so we can actually trust it.
No, actually it doesn't. They only have to provide the source to anyone they distribute it too. So if it the government were to keep it in house there would be no need to distribute the source.
Sheesh. Yeah, the Oil companies like a dependance on oil - but they know this is coming. You'll note that many of them have been restyling themselves as "energy" companies as opposed to oil companies.
As for the US Government, I imagine there are few things they'd enjoy more than telling OPEC where they can stick it. OPEC is one of the few world powers that can cause the US really serious problems. And as an added bonus, we would no longer have a vested interest in the Middle East. We wouldn't have to care which tin pot dictator or religious leader had decided to declare a jihad against his neighbor, anymore than we bother with unrest in Africa now. How many of you are familar with whats going on in the Republic of the Congo vs the Israel/Palestinian mess? And we'd quit dumping money into the area for all of the above to buy and develop weapons. All in all, a reduced dependance on oil is a serious boon for the US government.
"If aliens are just crashing in the desert, the they're under the airforces jurisdiction. But when they start taking jobs from Americans...well thats then they're under the jurisdiction of the INS". Or something like that. I haven't seen the movie in a long time.
If science were restricted to the "practical" and "important" it would never have gotten anywhere. Look at all those mathematicians over the years who were working on brining mathematics to its current level. 90% of that had no practical application at the time. Yet all of our modern technology is based on such Mathematics.
As for the common man getting his reward from the "scientific elite" what do you call the computer you used to post that peice of crap? Your TV? Modern Medicine? Automobiles? GPS? Cell Phones? If it weren't for those "scientific elites" the majority of our population would be subsistence farmers plowing their feilds with horses and iron plows. Oh yea, we'd all be doing this in Europe, cause we wouldn't have a clue the Americas were here.
Yes, they might evolve to be somewhat like us in their handling of the environment - or the might not. I mean, if you really think about it a great deal of earths evironment has been created by various forms of life - lots of oxygen in the atmosphere, the balance of carbon dioxide creating the "right" amount of greenhouse effect, which influences the amount of unfrozen surface water.. Theres no reason they have to be chemically like us. Just because DNA is the way that we store our information about our structure is no reason that anyone else has to, or that they have to use Amino Acids as their basic building blocks. Both are extremely arbitrary "standards". The reason they're consistent throughout earth based life is not because they're nessecarily any better than any other method of doing things but because we all came from a common ancestory. Theres no reason that another form of life might not have an entirely different method of storing its structural blue print, or that it might not store the information for the construction of its component molecules in terms of individual atoms or an entirely different set of building blocks. Also, there is the possibility of life based substances other than carbon - a silicon based life form, some kind of silicon/carbon hybrid, other atoms in the same period(not as likely, since as they get heavier there are more problems and the bonds aren't as strong), maybe constructed in some way that we wouldn't even think of.
Water might not even be nessecary - granted, it makes a wonderful solvent, but there are other solvents out there, particularly at lower temperatures. Who knows? Anyway, the assumption that life is nessecarily anything like us either chemically or physically is a fairly bad one to make until we have other examples of life that didn't evolve on earth.
The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the
originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against.
Oh, you mean kinda like what Microsoft did to Netscape with explorer?
No, this rebuttal is not unnessecary. You're making the mistake of assuming that the slashdot community is representative of the world at large. Nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of our population(I'm guessing that this would include our congressmen) are still pretty intimidated by these computer thingies, have no clue about linux, free software, open source, etc.
Not everyone else hates Microsoft. Most people don't know how much their software sucks - it's all they've ever used. To them, Microsoft is all these things that they claim to be. Around here "My name is from Microsoft" brings derision and malevolence. To the rest of the world, that commands a lot of respect. They assume these people know what they're talking about. They have lots of money - they must. If we don't issue public rebuttals, they're going to be believed not because their opinions have any merit but because they're the only ones talking.
Looks a lot like how they sell Windows, doesn't it?
Try again. The reason most universities have begun doing this is because of federal law - they have to, at least for repeated violations. This is what we were told at the beginning of the year by various residence hall staff anyway.
Well, as has been pointed out in response to previous stories, these guys also missed their orbital insertion the first time around - something that I don't think NASA has ever done before. Thier probes might have crash and explode, but they crash and explode on target.
My thoughts exactly. I have a feeling that battery life might suck however - even a normal laptop battery is bigger than my visor handheld, and I'd expect more than a couple hours battery life from such a device before I'd really be willing to invest that much.
So what? Should we go back to the plains of Africa? Our brains will evolve and adapt. Alas, Alzheimers doesn't kick in until you've already reproduced anyway. ADD has some evolutionary potential though. Really, our society is waaaay to safe. If everybody survives to reproduce, we're only going to stagnate from an evolutionary point of view.
Any such solution would be effectively limited to line of sight. While this would work wonderfully in (eastern) North Dakota, most places have things like hills, trees and buildings that would get in the way. A satellite system would theoretically be able to reach everywhere, but would be at the mercy of the weather. In other words, optical communication without fiber is extremely limited.
Come on, planets, moons, comets small countries - they're all targets. Basically, everything outside the US borders is fair game. If you complain we're just gonna launch the next one at you. Particularly you Canadians. We know what you're up to with your space-sky-diving. Don't think we don't.
Actually, I would say that this law is quite a bit closer to socialism than it is to capitalism. The government is deciding that the artists aren't getting what they deserve and are using tax money to support the industry, instead of letting them get by on their own merits. The government is in fact protecting them from the realities of the market place by subsidizing their work.
I really can't seen how communism or socialism would change this situation one bit - you seem to have this same odd idea that a lot of socialist thinkers do - that under a socialist system powerful people and powerful groups will quit looking out for their own interest and the expense of the people. It's not true. The government works for the powerful more than the average joe under any system - this is pretty much the definition of "powerful". Socialism just makes that government more powerful. At least under capitalism we have business and government interests seperated and working against each other some of the time.
However, the countries that we're really worried about aren't really capable of doing major amounts of weapons research. Iran, Iraq, etc are basically operating off of technology developed by other countries. Russia has far to many nukes for the proposed system to even make a dent in a full out nuclear attack - Russia has thousands of nuckes. The proposed defense would be able to take out at most 7 planes x 30 shots = 210 missles. China would be the only country that has the industrial capacity to really get involved in an arms race and with them we have the same deterrent we di with Russia - neither country is actually stupid enought to use nuclear weapons.
This sounds like an excellent idea. Perhaps you could have a "training period" where you rank every post to initially set your preferences according to the rest of the community. The resources consumed just for the moderation system might be a little prohibitive though.
Even a high speed trail would take forever to get from major population centers in the US to major population centers in Europe and Asia. Even someplace like Beijing or Tokyo, you'd probably end up going halfway around the world. The straight is a long way from anywhere that any (sane) person really wants to live. Also, I can't speak for the Canadian rail system, but the US rail system is a literally falling apart. There are lines that are so bad the freights need to slow down to 10-15mph so they don't derail, which really doesn't make it worth connecting over here.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that 400Mhz Rambus outpreforms DDR chipsets by quite a bit as far as bandwidth. The reason everyone isn't jumping to Rambus isn't the price, its because it doesn't matter. It's memory latency thats far more important in most applications. Memory isn't generally accessed sequentially.
Quite simply: We, more than any nation that is likely to attack us, are vulnerable to information warfare. You can cause very serious disruption by attacking the right computers. We know countries like China are working in this area. It allows a smaller country to make much more effective attacks against us without the loss of resources that would generally be involved. Normally Iran couldn't touch us, but if they break in and start dropping out bits of the power grid or dropping sattelites out of the sky(remember the copy of the OS that walked off NASA's servers 4 months ago?) thats going to have a serious impact on our country. Therefore, the NSA, with their mandate to protect national security has an extremely vested interest in making sure that all of our online reasources are using a secure operating system. They're taking something thats already relatively secure and making it better. And the additional bonus of doing it open source is that we get to look at it so we can actually trust it.
No, actually it doesn't. They only have to provide the source to anyone they distribute it too. So if it the government were to keep it in house there would be no need to distribute the source.
Sheesh. Yeah, the Oil companies like a dependance on oil - but they know this is coming. You'll note that many of them have been restyling themselves as "energy" companies as opposed to oil companies. As for the US Government, I imagine there are few things they'd enjoy more than telling OPEC where they can stick it. OPEC is one of the few world powers that can cause the US really serious problems. And as an added bonus, we would no longer have a vested interest in the Middle East. We wouldn't have to care which tin pot dictator or religious leader had decided to declare a jihad against his neighbor, anymore than we bother with unrest in Africa now. How many of you are familar with whats going on in the Republic of the Congo vs the Israel/Palestinian mess? And we'd quit dumping money into the area for all of the above to buy and develop weapons. All in all, a reduced dependance on oil is a serious boon for the US government.
"If aliens are just crashing in the desert, the they're under the airforces jurisdiction. But when they start taking jobs from Americans...well thats then they're under the jurisdiction of the INS". Or something like that. I haven't seen the movie in a long time.
And then theres the ASCII version of goatse.cx.......
The Daily show is truely awesome television. Absolutely hilarious, and probably at least as accurate as FOXnews...
If science were restricted to the "practical" and "important" it would never have gotten anywhere. Look at all those mathematicians over the years who were working on brining mathematics to its current level. 90% of that had no practical application at the time. Yet all of our modern technology is based on such Mathematics. As for the common man getting his reward from the "scientific elite" what do you call the computer you used to post that peice of crap? Your TV? Modern Medicine? Automobiles? GPS? Cell Phones? If it weren't for those "scientific elites" the majority of our population would be subsistence farmers plowing their feilds with horses and iron plows. Oh yea, we'd all be doing this in Europe, cause we wouldn't have a clue the Americas were here.
Yes, they might evolve to be somewhat like us in their handling of the environment - or the might not. I mean, if you really think about it a great deal of earths evironment has been created by various forms of life - lots of oxygen in the atmosphere, the balance of carbon dioxide creating the "right" amount of greenhouse effect, which influences the amount of unfrozen surface water.. Theres no reason they have to be chemically like us. Just because DNA is the way that we store our information about our structure is no reason that anyone else has to, or that they have to use Amino Acids as their basic building blocks. Both are extremely arbitrary "standards". The reason they're consistent throughout earth based life is not because they're nessecarily any better than any other method of doing things but because we all came from a common ancestory. Theres no reason that another form of life might not have an entirely different method of storing its structural blue print, or that it might not store the information for the construction of its component molecules in terms of individual atoms or an entirely different set of building blocks. Also, there is the possibility of life based substances other than carbon - a silicon based life form, some kind of silicon/carbon hybrid, other atoms in the same period(not as likely, since as they get heavier there are more problems and the bonds aren't as strong), maybe constructed in some way that we wouldn't even think of. Water might not even be nessecary - granted, it makes a wonderful solvent, but there are other solvents out there, particularly at lower temperatures. Who knows? Anyway, the assumption that life is nessecarily anything like us either chemically or physically is a fairly bad one to make until we have other examples of life that didn't evolve on earth.
The big one is cloning. Every time a really good new program idea comes out and someone tries to sell it, a thousand hackers jump on it and clone it, guaranteeing that the originator won't make a dime. Sometimes, the clone is even inferior, but at $0 it's impossible to compete against. Oh, you mean kinda like what Microsoft did to Netscape with explorer?
No, this rebuttal is not unnessecary. You're making the mistake of assuming that the slashdot community is representative of the world at large. Nothing could be further from the truth. The majority of our population(I'm guessing that this would include our congressmen) are still pretty intimidated by these computer thingies, have no clue about linux, free software, open source, etc. Not everyone else hates Microsoft. Most people don't know how much their software sucks - it's all they've ever used. To them, Microsoft is all these things that they claim to be. Around here "My name is from Microsoft" brings derision and malevolence. To the rest of the world, that commands a lot of respect. They assume these people know what they're talking about. They have lots of money - they must. If we don't issue public rebuttals, they're going to be believed not because their opinions have any merit but because they're the only ones talking. Looks a lot like how they sell Windows, doesn't it?
Try again. The reason most universities have begun doing this is because of federal law - they have to, at least for repeated violations. This is what we were told at the beginning of the year by various residence hall staff anyway.
Well, as has been pointed out in response to previous stories, these guys also missed their orbital insertion the first time around - something that I don't think NASA has ever done before. Thier probes might have crash and explode, but they crash and explode on target.
My thoughts exactly. I have a feeling that battery life might suck however - even a normal laptop battery is bigger than my visor handheld, and I'd expect more than a couple hours battery life from such a device before I'd really be willing to invest that much.
So what? Should we go back to the plains of Africa? Our brains will evolve and adapt. Alas, Alzheimers doesn't kick in until you've already reproduced anyway. ADD has some evolutionary potential though. Really, our society is waaaay to safe. If everybody survives to reproduce, we're only going to stagnate from an evolutionary point of view.
The Blaine the Mono you're talking to is already 800 miles away, under the city communicated by encrypted microburst radio.
Any such solution would be effectively limited to line of sight. While this would work wonderfully in (eastern) North Dakota, most places have things like hills, trees and buildings that would get in the way. A satellite system would theoretically be able to reach everywhere, but would be at the mercy of the weather. In other words, optical communication without fiber is extremely limited.
Come on, planets, moons, comets small countries - they're all targets. Basically, everything outside the US borders is fair game. If you complain we're just gonna launch the next one at you. Particularly you Canadians. We know what you're up to with your space-sky-diving. Don't think we don't.
Actually, I would say that this law is quite a bit closer to socialism than it is to capitalism. The government is deciding that the artists aren't getting what they deserve and are using tax money to support the industry, instead of letting them get by on their own merits. The government is in fact protecting them from the realities of the market place by subsidizing their work. I really can't seen how communism or socialism would change this situation one bit - you seem to have this same odd idea that a lot of socialist thinkers do - that under a socialist system powerful people and powerful groups will quit looking out for their own interest and the expense of the people. It's not true. The government works for the powerful more than the average joe under any system - this is pretty much the definition of "powerful". Socialism just makes that government more powerful. At least under capitalism we have business and government interests seperated and working against each other some of the time.
Nor North Dakota. (There really isn't anything of value here.) We're the first line of defense.
However, the countries that we're really worried about aren't really capable of doing major amounts of weapons research. Iran, Iraq, etc are basically operating off of technology developed by other countries. Russia has far to many nukes for the proposed system to even make a dent in a full out nuclear attack - Russia has thousands of nuckes. The proposed defense would be able to take out at most 7 planes x 30 shots = 210 missles. China would be the only country that has the industrial capacity to really get involved in an arms race and with them we have the same deterrent we di with Russia - neither country is actually stupid enought to use nuclear weapons.
This sounds like an excellent idea. Perhaps you could have a "training period" where you rank every post to initially set your preferences according to the rest of the community. The resources consumed just for the moderation system might be a little prohibitive though.
Even a high speed trail would take forever to get from major population centers in the US to major population centers in Europe and Asia. Even someplace like Beijing or Tokyo, you'd probably end up going halfway around the world. The straight is a long way from anywhere that any (sane) person really wants to live. Also, I can't speak for the Canadian rail system, but the US rail system is a literally falling apart. There are lines that are so bad the freights need to slow down to 10-15mph so they don't derail, which really doesn't make it worth connecting over here.