Considering: - Standard Gravity is 9.80665 meters per second per second acceleration - The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second Disregarding: - How much energy would be required to do so
Accelerating at a constant 1G, it would take 354.063277 days to reach lightspeed.
So, not very long and not high Gs.
If you were able to reach a significant fraction of light speed--say twenty nines' worth--you could traverse the entire universe in a human lifespan, due to the time dilation effects. Disregard that stopping to observe anything would require vast amounts of energy and then, possibly very high Gs. But getting up to speed really shouldn't be a problem for a sufficiently advanced civilization.
What about ctrl+v/c/x isn't natural for you? I use the first knuckle of my pinky finger of my left hand to hit the ctrl key, then the index finger to hit x/c/v. It feels pretty natural to me.
The strange dreams people have would seem more random than associative, although they may indeed be associative on some level. Although the single best example I can think of is simple creativity. One's ability to create new things, come up with new ideas, look at things from a different perspective, those seem like random-ish processes.
I hold issue with your terminology and request a clarification. Are you asserting that fertility declines in those with a high standard of living, or that birth rates decline in those with a high standard of living? I could agree with the latter but I would argue against the former.
Some factors that would make the birth rate decline make sense: - Higher standard of living means you aren't working a farm to sustain your family so you don't need more child labor to help out - Higher standard of living means better health care which means more of your progeny survive to adulthood and you don't need to replace them on a regular basis. - Higher standard of living also means better health care for you which means you're in no hurry to start making babies for fear of dying before you get a chance. - Higher standard of living provides you more time to pursue your career and hobbies both due to the aforementioned health care, as well as not having to work 16 hours a day to earn a living wage. This means however that there is less time to dedicate to a family. A quick google search confirms that we're waiting longer to procreate, at least in Canada, on average.
I can't think of anything that would make fertility decline, however.
I didn't see any discussion about this in the comments I read, but I think an interesting idea to consider is that space may well not be homogeneous. I mean, the distribution of matter within space is not homogeneous, so why do we assume that space itself is homogeneous? I don't think we have the instruments or theories to cover this sort of situation, but I think it's an idea worth considering.
A similar issue is that everything is moving away from everything else, which would seem to indicate to me that the fabric of space is itself expanding. Kind of like when you draw something (matter) on a balloon (space) and then inflate the balloon. However, some balloons aren't manufactured well (not that I'm saying the universe was "manufactured") and they will inflate unevenly. Some inflate as ovals, some as long tubes, others in wacky shapes. What's to say that space isn't doing this sort of uneven expansion too?
We need some way to quantify distance irrespective of space, because if space itself is expanding, then the ruler you use to measure it (which obviously exists in space) is also expanding. I lack proper terminology to say what I'm about to say, so I need you to bear with me. We need the ability to take a snapshot of a given region of space, and determine the density of arbitrary volumes of space within that region. I know, I just said we need to determine the density of emptiness, and that's where I've minced terms. If the expansion rate of each arbitrary region of space isn't homogeneous with respect to the other regions, then some regions should be "less dense" than others. They should, literally, contain more or less space than another arbitrary region.
So if space isn't homogeneous, then when matter passes from a low density to high density region of space, is the matter recompressed? The analogy here is you have a balloon representing a low density region of space, you draw a little stick figure on it, then while the ink is still wet, you press it on another balloon of equal inflation and then deflate it to symbolize the transition from low to high density space. The stick figure will shrink and become more dense. Another possibility though is that the matter isn't necessarily "anchored" to a given region of space, so the object could pass from the less-dense space into the more-dense space without distortion. The analogy here is that the second balloon is already deflated when you imprint the stick figure upon it.
I think that something like this could account for the velocity discrepancies. I'm no physicist though, that's just my two cents.
That really is an excellent book, and I often forget things like labels being signs of bad design.
Realistically, this thing is a weapon. You don't want it to light up slowly in the event that it needs to be used as a weapon; you want to blind an attacker/invader instantly without question or hesitance. Detectors for cornea reflection would probably be infeasible without significantly increasing the cost and bulkiness of the unit. I don't know about a thermostat, because flashlight bulbs in general get hot, it's actually getting hot that causes them to produce light.
I think the best idea is to make the beam more widely dispersed by default. Kind of like how you can twist a maglite to focus the beam, the twisting action could adjust beam focus as well as turn the light on/off. The light would always turn off when it is at its most dispersed and when turned on it would again be at maximum dispersion.
They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs to toss out ASAP.
People like the child/wife/friend/visitor who picks up this neat little flashlight and, while remarking "I hate these maglite knock-offs" proceeds to permanently blind themselves?
As another commenter pointed out, you can't use the design and form-factor of a harmless device when packaging an extremely dangerous device, because you will confuse and possibly harm people unintentionally. Would you package rat poison to look like candy bars or perhaps like a nice slice of deliciously moist cake? Warning labels protect people. They may not serve to protect the buyer of a given device, because they generally tend to know what they're buying and what it's used/not used for; but it can serve to protect somebody unfamiliar with the device, somebody who may happen upon it by random chance. If I owned one of these lights, I would have a sticker on it that said "DO NOT POINT AT FACE. EVER. SRSLY."
Those multiple.RAR files most likely originated on Usenet, where corruption-resistance is very important (indeed, the.RAR files are often accompanied by.PAR parity files as well).
The.torrent was probably just created from a usenet download, omitting the.PAR files (which are unnecessary when using Bittorrent).
Movies and television allow us to live vicariously through the characters of those mediums. Since we're living vicariously, at a sub-conscious level it's possible that we're living out these scenarios and they cause us to run a threat analysis simulation on them while asleep. Haven't you ever watched a movie and said "I would have..." or "He should've..." and such? This bus accident you refer to, did you see any video footage of perhaps the aftermath or an interview with somebody who was involved or related to someone involved? That could also figure into the threat simulation. Also, can you honestly tell me that you have never fantasized about having Neo's abilities, even if only for a fleeting moment (like when you say "I would have...")?
Our "weirder" dreams could be a threat resolution simulation derived from a combination of all forms of living: direct experience, vicarious living through television, and imagined fears (zombies, etc).
I really, really like the theory that dreams are a threat analysis and resolution simulation, because that makes so. much. sense. And it's cool, too.
You missed the point. If a CD itself is being recorded to compensate for being compressed as an MP3, of course there wouldn't be a perceptible difference!
If a raw, live performance in a studio is imperceptibly different from a recording of that performance, that's another matter all together, and it doesn't seem to be something that is being tested in the sorts of comparison studies you mention.
So you store them on glass masters of HD-DVD data discs. So what if it takes ten discs to back it up and it's extremely expensive to create those discs in glass; then you've got a copy of everything that lasts forever.
I'm just stunned that we don't have archival-type data storage media that, even if it costs $20,000 to master each disc, isn't used more frequently or by more people.
The track itself is completely passive and unpowered, removing the need for additional power infrastructure. The train itself contains permanent magnets (or powered superconducting electromagnets) and the rail system is made up of shorted coils of wire or layers of copper/aluminum sheet metal. As the train passes over the track, an EM field is induced in the track with the same polarity as the magnets in the train, causing the two to repel one another. It's a delightfully simple concept/design that I wish received more R&D money. I first heard of it almost ten years ago and I'm surprised it isn't being more widely used today.
I think (and I could be mistaken) that the only thing holding back this technology is that if the train isn't coupled to the track in any way, how do you propel the train without using noisy forms of propulsion like rockets or jet engines? I suppose you could ignite a rocket or jet engine for short bursts in rural areas to produce tremendous speeds and then coast until the next "burst zone" (or whatever you'd call it). But then what do you do in urban areas? Maybe have a mile or two of "acceleration tunnel" to build up initial speed? In an ideal world (hell, if we're spending $100m on every mile of track...) we could totally enclose the train in a tube, depressurize it, and send the thing cross-country at supersonic speeds.
Interesting to note that from Terabyte onwards aren't in the default word dictionary for Firefox v2.0.0.9.
Anyhow, what would be in a futuristic one-terabyte OS? Well, name something your operating system does now and imagine how it could be better. Instead of a calendar, an entire multimedia almanac. Instead of a system clock, a functional world (or possibly even off-world/world-neutral) clock. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality for every major planetary language in a variety of voices, intonations, accents, ages, etc. Building upon the usual game of 20 questions which has already been packaged as a toy that can guess what you're thinking a significant amount of the time, add a Q&A service that can answer all kinds of questions "Does it rain more each year in Chicago or Los Angeles?" "What industries is the government currently subsidizing? What about in Canada? China?" and so on. You'd probably have an entire copy of wikipedia (or something comparable) on your local machine. Keep in mind that at the time when we have an operating system 1 terabyte in size, we'll probably also have much faster internet connections, larger higher-resolution monitors, and so on. You could get incremental updates to the monstrous database that backs the AI engine that answers these sorts of questions (and the almanac mentioned before).
Consider also that some of the best monitors out there have a maximum resolution of 2560x1900 (Dell/Apple 30" flat panels). That's today. What about when this future date comes? What will visual imaging (ie, photographic) technology bring us? What if every picture on wikipedia were of high enough quality to count the freckles on someone's face or the hairs on an animal's body? That surely would add to the size of the database. The multimedia almanac I mention could have incredibly high-resolution photographs and videos. As it stands today, multimedia are the end-user's biggest storage hogs. This also assumes we're still using two-dimensional displays by that time and not 3-d volumetric displays, which would increase the storage demands of multimedia significantly.
Also, what is an operating system? Here's the (sizable, for a Slashdot comment) introduction from the Wikipedia article on the "Operating system" topic: "An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the system. At the foundation of all system software, an operating system performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking and managing file systems. Most operating systems come with an application that provides a user interface for managing the operating system, such as a command line interpreter or graphical user interface. The operating system forms a platform for other system software and for application software."
Let's start here: "Software that manages the sharing of resources and provides programmers with an interface to access those resources." Who is a programmer today? Somebody sitting in an office, manipulating arcane bits and bytes into something everyone can use. What if, in the future, the operating system provided this functionality to the end-user in a way they could utilize? To draw a parallel: did the computer on ST:TNG have more than an operating system? You ask it to do something, and it does it, no applications necessary. Being able to do anything you wanted with any piece of information was something that specific computer was
The upcoming spacewalk is not without risks, including the remote possibility of electrocution since it is impossible to stop the solar panel from generating electricity during the repair attempt.
So they can't just turn the panels away from the sun...why? Or unfurl some sort of mylar shield? What kind of amateurs designed a system that can't be turned off for maintenance?
Bittorrent is a valid distribution method for a variety of high-volume distributables. A significant number of Linux distributions for example, are distributed via bittorrent. World of Warcraft also uses Bittorrent to ease the load on their patch servers. Individual/independent films are frequently released and distributed with Bittorrent, saving indie producers from having to partner with a distributor or high-bandwidth hosting facility in order to get their movie seen. There are enough "legitimate" uses of P2P protocols that a judge or jury could be legitimately swayed if it were just a matter of the legitimacy of P2P.
Consider for a moment that Comcast is indiscriminately interrupting these file transfers. They aren't trying to prevent piracy, they're trying to prevent all communication of a certain type to/from certain locations at certain times of day.
What Comcast is doing is akin to the traffic lights that some states put at freeway onramps, to limit congestion on major highways during certain times of day. During high-demand hours (like when people are getting home from work) Comcast wants to ensure a fruitful and productive user experience (reading the news, checking email, etc), and this is most easily accomplished when the network in a high-density area (like an apartment complex or group of complexes) is not saturated with P2P traffic. Comcast has good intentions, but their methods are extremely suspect. I'm not clear on whether or not they are using a simple traffic light paradigm, treating all traffic the same and controlling all high-bandwidth consumption transfers in the same fashion, or if they're discriminating by port number or some other means.
Given the trouble I've seen mentioned regarding Google, I'm inclined to believe that they're trying to limit all high-bandwidth consumption transfers. Not only is this not about piracy, it's not just about bittorrent or other P2P networks. They could accomplish similar goals (normalizing bandwidth usage and ensuring a consistently positive user experience) by using simple traffic shaping, but then their "6 megabit" advertised speed wouldn't really be accurate. It'd be a "6 megabit off-peak" speed, and that doesn't really bring in subscribers. They DO seem to be going about things in a fairly nefarious and sneaky manner, but is "TCP/IP standards compliance" part of their user contract? Do they guarantee to abide by the standards laid out in RFC 793? "Internet connection" is a fairly ambiguous term; what does having an internet connection guarantee? An IP address and one hop of upstream connectivity? More?
It's questionable whether or not Comcast is doing anything they aren't legally allowed to do.
To someone who is mired in electronics on a daily basis, a circuit board doesn't "look like a bomb" but it actually looks like homework, or a radio, or a motherboard, or something else. For this student and other students like her, when they look at a circuit board, "bomb" is the furthest thing from their mind.
A better analogy would be a butcher who goes to the airport directly from work with blood still on his clothing and thinks nothing of it because being covered in animal blood all day is completely normal for him.
So really, let's consider some common sense here: not all perspectives are equal. What is obvious to you is not obvious to the next person, because the origin of their perspective is drastically different. In the most blatant logical example: If you have three people standing in different places looking at the same large cylindrical object, one looking directly perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, one looking directly along the longitudinal axis, and one between those two positions; they will each respectively see a rectangle, a circle, and a cylinder. What is completely obvious to one is inaccessible to the others, making the "commonality" of "common sense" rather questionable.
What is unfortunate about this story is the reminder that the majority (also known as "the dumb") are seeing bombs and terrorists everywhere that there are none.
"We have major issues these days with schools being fucked up"
You need to read that statement--the one you wrote--and think critically for a moment. Could it be that kids are flunking not because they aren't trying and not because they aren't smart, but because [public] schools are, well, fucked up? Do you really think it's a good idea to punish the kids for having bad teachers and unions that ensure that a bad teacher will remain employed indefinitely? I'm sure it's convenient to point to the children and say "spoiled little miscreants!" but really, you need to look at the big picture and consider that there may be another cause for this situation that won't be helped by keeping the kids from playing games.
Here's what I favor: not selling games (or, to be more draconian, any sort of leisure/enjoyment material such as movies, sporting event tickets, etc) to public school teachers unless their classes have an independently-verified 80% or better pass rate. Maybe then they'd take school (and work, as they're one and the same) seriously.
What if both electrons are each respectively being held in machines that constantly measures their spin at a set interval (say a billion times per second) and these two machines are synchronized such that you can guarantee that one machine will make the measurement a small fraction of a nanosecond before the other? That is, what if you know (predictively) whether or not the primary particle has been measured, because it will be continually measured at a certain frequency? Would that violate causality?
According to the study discussed in that article: * More than a third of kids under 6 have a TV in their bedroom. * About one in four have a VCR or DVD [player] where they sleep.
If a third of kids under 6 have a TV in their bedroom, it isn't inconceivable that more than half of the chilren under 12 have a TV in their bedroom. It also isn't inconceivable to believe that they're watching HBO. My "Most of them" remark was somewhat snarky but the truth of the situation probably isn't far from my assertion.
A one square meter polycarbonate or acrylic fresnel lens costs significantly less than a one square meter space-grade solar cell. We're talking orders of magnitude, here. I mean, you can get a 1 m2 fresnel lens for less than $50 ($39 for 0.8m2 here). I don't have a good figure for the cost of space-grade 20+ percent efficient solar cells, but I think we can assume that if your average 1KW system costs about $7K to $10K for 10-percent-ish efficient cells, then we'd probably be looking at a $50,000 or more cost for the high-efficiency ones covering the same amount of area.
So to answer your question, it matters because solar is too expensive right now for anyone but an aficionado or treehugger to afford. With improvements like this, the overall cost of the system comes down enough that the average person can consider it and do a cost-benefit analysis of the solar power system compared to their electric bill over the short term. "It pays for itself in three years" versus "It pays for itself in thirty years" is pretty powerful stuff.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Alcohol doesn't cause auto accidents, bad judgment causes auto accidents. And relatedly, making a file available for download doesn't result in piracy, actually downloading the file results in piracy.
It could be argued, by your flawed logic, that honor bar systems that rely upon your own honesty and integrity to pay the fair rate for the foodstuffs you take, those systems are facilitating theft by making available things to be stolen. Hell, supermarkets would be classified as accessories to every shoplifting crime, because they've made things available to be stolen. If I leave my car door unlocked and somebody opens my car and rummages through my things, stealing a handgun and committing a crime with it, I'm an accessory to that crime because I made the gun available to them?
"Enabling" doesn't mean a god damned thing. The real issue here is intent. Did somebody intend to cut into the RIAA's profit stream? Even more at issue is the notion that somebody who downloaded a song would buy it instead. Maybe, for a given person, the only way a song/album/movie will be acquired is by download, which defeats entirely the notion of a "lost sale" for a given song/album/movie. Maybe for those people, buying isn't an option or a preference. So if the "enabler" didn't intend to cut into the RIAA's profit stream, and all of the downloaders had absolutely no intention of buying the music, then what is the ultimate loss here? With this (fairly reasonable) reasoning in mind, it would be ludicrous to believe that $750 per shared song is an adequate amount of compensation for the RIAA, as they have not actually lost anything, nor did they stand to gain anything if the act of downloading had been prevented.
The RIAA needs to grow up and move on with their existence. Sometimes as we grow up we have to accept that things just change and we just have to deal with it. RIAA: Deal with it, change your business model, adapt to new technology. The fat cat days of charging $20 for something that costs you $0.50 to make and giving a couple percent of that $20 to the artist is over. You're going to be making less money, but if you want to stay in business at all, you need to evolve.
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Considering:
- Standard Gravity is 9.80665 meters per second per second acceleration
- The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second
Disregarding:
- How much energy would be required to do so
Accelerating at a constant 1G, it would take 354.063277 days to reach lightspeed.
So, not very long and not high Gs.
If you were able to reach a significant fraction of light speed--say twenty nines' worth--you could traverse the entire universe in a human lifespan, due to the time dilation effects. Disregard that stopping to observe anything would require vast amounts of energy and then, possibly very high Gs. But getting up to speed really shouldn't be a problem for a sufficiently advanced civilization.
What about ctrl+v/c/x isn't natural for you? I use the first knuckle of my pinky finger of my left hand to hit the ctrl key, then the index finger to hit x/c/v. It feels pretty natural to me.
The strange dreams people have would seem more random than associative, although they may indeed be associative on some level. Although the single best example I can think of is simple creativity. One's ability to create new things, come up with new ideas, look at things from a different perspective, those seem like random-ish processes.
An analog asymmetric multiprocessing system complete with random-access memory and a variable-speed bus. Truly, quite weird.
I hold issue with your terminology and request a clarification. Are you asserting that fertility declines in those with a high standard of living, or that birth rates decline in those with a high standard of living? I could agree with the latter but I would argue against the former.
Some factors that would make the birth rate decline make sense:
- Higher standard of living means you aren't working a farm to sustain your family so you don't need more child labor to help out
- Higher standard of living means better health care which means more of your progeny survive to adulthood and you don't need to replace them on a regular basis.
- Higher standard of living also means better health care for you which means you're in no hurry to start making babies for fear of dying before you get a chance.
- Higher standard of living provides you more time to pursue your career and hobbies both due to the aforementioned health care, as well as not having to work 16 hours a day to earn a living wage. This means however that there is less time to dedicate to a family. A quick google search confirms that we're waiting longer to procreate, at least in Canada, on average.
I can't think of anything that would make fertility decline, however.
I didn't see any discussion about this in the comments I read, but I think an interesting idea to consider is that space may well not be homogeneous. I mean, the distribution of matter within space is not homogeneous, so why do we assume that space itself is homogeneous? I don't think we have the instruments or theories to cover this sort of situation, but I think it's an idea worth considering.
A similar issue is that everything is moving away from everything else, which would seem to indicate to me that the fabric of space is itself expanding. Kind of like when you draw something (matter) on a balloon (space) and then inflate the balloon. However, some balloons aren't manufactured well (not that I'm saying the universe was "manufactured") and they will inflate unevenly. Some inflate as ovals, some as long tubes, others in wacky shapes. What's to say that space isn't doing this sort of uneven expansion too?
We need some way to quantify distance irrespective of space, because if space itself is expanding, then the ruler you use to measure it (which obviously exists in space) is also expanding. I lack proper terminology to say what I'm about to say, so I need you to bear with me. We need the ability to take a snapshot of a given region of space, and determine the density of arbitrary volumes of space within that region. I know, I just said we need to determine the density of emptiness, and that's where I've minced terms. If the expansion rate of each arbitrary region of space isn't homogeneous with respect to the other regions, then some regions should be "less dense" than others. They should, literally, contain more or less space than another arbitrary region.
So if space isn't homogeneous, then when matter passes from a low density to high density region of space, is the matter recompressed? The analogy here is you have a balloon representing a low density region of space, you draw a little stick figure on it, then while the ink is still wet, you press it on another balloon of equal inflation and then deflate it to symbolize the transition from low to high density space. The stick figure will shrink and become more dense. Another possibility though is that the matter isn't necessarily "anchored" to a given region of space, so the object could pass from the less-dense space into the more-dense space without distortion. The analogy here is that the second balloon is already deflated when you imprint the stick figure upon it.
I think that something like this could account for the velocity discrepancies. I'm no physicist though, that's just my two cents.
That really is an excellent book, and I often forget things like labels being signs of bad design.
Realistically, this thing is a weapon. You don't want it to light up slowly in the event that it needs to be used as a weapon; you want to blind an attacker/invader instantly without question or hesitance. Detectors for cornea reflection would probably be infeasible without significantly increasing the cost and bulkiness of the unit. I don't know about a thermostat, because flashlight bulbs in general get hot, it's actually getting hot that causes them to produce light.
I think the best idea is to make the beam more widely dispersed by default. Kind of like how you can twist a maglite to focus the beam, the twisting action could adjust beam focus as well as turn the light on/off. The light would always turn off when it is at its most dispersed and when turned on it would again be at maximum dispersion.
They keep people in the gene pool who Darwin-the-Lifeguard needs to toss out ASAP.
People like the child/wife/friend/visitor who picks up this neat little flashlight and, while remarking "I hate these maglite knock-offs" proceeds to permanently blind themselves?
As another commenter pointed out, you can't use the design and form-factor of a harmless device when packaging an extremely dangerous device, because you will confuse and possibly harm people unintentionally. Would you package rat poison to look like candy bars or perhaps like a nice slice of deliciously moist cake? Warning labels protect people. They may not serve to protect the buyer of a given device, because they generally tend to know what they're buying and what it's used/not used for; but it can serve to protect somebody unfamiliar with the device, somebody who may happen upon it by random chance. If I owned one of these lights, I would have a sticker on it that said "DO NOT POINT AT FACE. EVER. SRSLY."
Those multiple .RAR files most likely originated on Usenet, where corruption-resistance is very important (indeed, the .RAR files are often accompanied by .PAR parity files as well).
.torrent was probably just created from a usenet download, omitting the .PAR files (which are unnecessary when using Bittorrent).
The
Movies and television allow us to live vicariously through the characters of those mediums. Since we're living vicariously, at a sub-conscious level it's possible that we're living out these scenarios and they cause us to run a threat analysis simulation on them while asleep. Haven't you ever watched a movie and said "I would have..." or "He should've..." and such? This bus accident you refer to, did you see any video footage of perhaps the aftermath or an interview with somebody who was involved or related to someone involved? That could also figure into the threat simulation. Also, can you honestly tell me that you have never fantasized about having Neo's abilities, even if only for a fleeting moment (like when you say "I would have...")?
Our "weirder" dreams could be a threat resolution simulation derived from a combination of all forms of living: direct experience, vicarious living through television, and imagined fears (zombies, etc).
I really, really like the theory that dreams are a threat analysis and resolution simulation, because that makes so. much. sense. And it's cool, too.
You missed the point. If a CD itself is being recorded to compensate for being compressed as an MP3, of course there wouldn't be a perceptible difference!
If a raw, live performance in a studio is imperceptibly different from a recording of that performance, that's another matter all together, and it doesn't seem to be something that is being tested in the sorts of comparison studies you mention.
So you store them on glass masters of HD-DVD data discs. So what if it takes ten discs to back it up and it's extremely expensive to create those discs in glass; then you've got a copy of everything that lasts forever.
I'm just stunned that we don't have archival-type data storage media that, even if it costs $20,000 to master each disc, isn't used more frequently or by more people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductrack
The track itself is completely passive and unpowered, removing the need for additional power infrastructure. The train itself contains permanent magnets (or powered superconducting electromagnets) and the rail system is made up of shorted coils of wire or layers of copper/aluminum sheet metal. As the train passes over the track, an EM field is induced in the track with the same polarity as the magnets in the train, causing the two to repel one another. It's a delightfully simple concept/design that I wish received more R&D money. I first heard of it almost ten years ago and I'm surprised it isn't being more widely used today.
I think (and I could be mistaken) that the only thing holding back this technology is that if the train isn't coupled to the track in any way, how do you propel the train without using noisy forms of propulsion like rockets or jet engines? I suppose you could ignite a rocket or jet engine for short bursts in rural areas to produce tremendous speeds and then coast until the next "burst zone" (or whatever you'd call it). But then what do you do in urban areas? Maybe have a mile or two of "acceleration tunnel" to build up initial speed? In an ideal world (hell, if we're spending $100m on every mile of track...) we could totally enclose the train in a tube, depressurize it, and send the thing cross-country at supersonic speeds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte
Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte, Petabyte, Exabyte, Zettabyte, Yottabyte.
Interesting to note that from Terabyte onwards aren't in the default word dictionary for Firefox v2.0.0.9.
Anyhow, what would be in a futuristic one-terabyte OS? Well, name something your operating system does now and imagine how it could be better. Instead of a calendar, an entire multimedia almanac. Instead of a system clock, a functional world (or possibly even off-world/world-neutral) clock. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text functionality for every major planetary language in a variety of voices, intonations, accents, ages, etc. Building upon the usual game of 20 questions which has already been packaged as a toy that can guess what you're thinking a significant amount of the time, add a Q&A service that can answer all kinds of questions "Does it rain more each year in Chicago or Los Angeles?" "What industries is the government currently subsidizing? What about in Canada? China?" and so on. You'd probably have an entire copy of wikipedia (or something comparable) on your local machine. Keep in mind that at the time when we have an operating system 1 terabyte in size, we'll probably also have much faster internet connections, larger higher-resolution monitors, and so on. You could get incremental updates to the monstrous database that backs the AI engine that answers these sorts of questions (and the almanac mentioned before).
Consider also that some of the best monitors out there have a maximum resolution of 2560x1900 (Dell/Apple 30" flat panels). That's today. What about when this future date comes? What will visual imaging (ie, photographic) technology bring us? What if every picture on wikipedia were of high enough quality to count the freckles on someone's face or the hairs on an animal's body? That surely would add to the size of the database. The multimedia almanac I mention could have incredibly high-resolution photographs and videos. As it stands today, multimedia are the end-user's biggest storage hogs. This also assumes we're still using two-dimensional displays by that time and not 3-d volumetric displays, which would increase the storage demands of multimedia significantly.
Also, what is an operating system? Here's the (sizable, for a Slashdot comment) introduction from the Wikipedia article on the "Operating system" topic: "An operating system (OS) is the software that manages the sharing of the resources of a computer and provides programmers with an interface used to access those resources. An operating system processes system data and user input, and responds by allocating and managing tasks and internal system resources as a service to users and programs of the system. At the foundation of all system software, an operating system performs basic tasks such as controlling and allocating memory, prioritizing system requests, controlling input and output devices, facilitating networking and managing file systems. Most operating systems come with an application that provides a user interface for managing the operating system, such as a command line interpreter or graphical user interface. The operating system forms a platform for other system software and for application software."
Let's start here: "Software that manages the sharing of resources and provides programmers with an interface to access those resources." Who is a programmer today? Somebody sitting in an office, manipulating arcane bits and bytes into something everyone can use. What if, in the future, the operating system provided this functionality to the end-user in a way they could utilize? To draw a parallel: did the computer on ST:TNG have more than an operating system? You ask it to do something, and it does it, no applications necessary. Being able to do anything you wanted with any piece of information was something that specific computer was
Do those mined numbers include Europe and Asia?
Bittorrent is a valid distribution method for a variety of high-volume distributables. A significant number of Linux distributions for example, are distributed via bittorrent. World of Warcraft also uses Bittorrent to ease the load on their patch servers. Individual/independent films are frequently released and distributed with Bittorrent, saving indie producers from having to partner with a distributor or high-bandwidth hosting facility in order to get their movie seen. There are enough "legitimate" uses of P2P protocols that a judge or jury could be legitimately swayed if it were just a matter of the legitimacy of P2P.
Consider for a moment that Comcast is indiscriminately interrupting these file transfers. They aren't trying to prevent piracy, they're trying to prevent all communication of a certain type to/from certain locations at certain times of day.
What Comcast is doing is akin to the traffic lights that some states put at freeway onramps, to limit congestion on major highways during certain times of day. During high-demand hours (like when people are getting home from work) Comcast wants to ensure a fruitful and productive user experience (reading the news, checking email, etc), and this is most easily accomplished when the network in a high-density area (like an apartment complex or group of complexes) is not saturated with P2P traffic. Comcast has good intentions, but their methods are extremely suspect. I'm not clear on whether or not they are using a simple traffic light paradigm, treating all traffic the same and controlling all high-bandwidth consumption transfers in the same fashion, or if they're discriminating by port number or some other means.
Given the trouble I've seen mentioned regarding Google, I'm inclined to believe that they're trying to limit all high-bandwidth consumption transfers. Not only is this not about piracy, it's not just about bittorrent or other P2P networks. They could accomplish similar goals (normalizing bandwidth usage and ensuring a consistently positive user experience) by using simple traffic shaping, but then their "6 megabit" advertised speed wouldn't really be accurate. It'd be a "6 megabit off-peak" speed, and that doesn't really bring in subscribers. They DO seem to be going about things in a fairly nefarious and sneaky manner, but is "TCP/IP standards compliance" part of their user contract? Do they guarantee to abide by the standards laid out in RFC 793? "Internet connection" is a fairly ambiguous term; what does having an internet connection guarantee? An IP address and one hop of upstream connectivity? More?
It's questionable whether or not Comcast is doing anything they aren't legally allowed to do.
To someone who is mired in electronics on a daily basis, a circuit board doesn't "look like a bomb" but it actually looks like homework, or a radio, or a motherboard, or something else. For this student and other students like her, when they look at a circuit board, "bomb" is the furthest thing from their mind.
A better analogy would be a butcher who goes to the airport directly from work with blood still on his clothing and thinks nothing of it because being covered in animal blood all day is completely normal for him.
So really, let's consider some common sense here: not all perspectives are equal. What is obvious to you is not obvious to the next person, because the origin of their perspective is drastically different. In the most blatant logical example: If you have three people standing in different places looking at the same large cylindrical object, one looking directly perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, one looking directly along the longitudinal axis, and one between those two positions; they will each respectively see a rectangle, a circle, and a cylinder. What is completely obvious to one is inaccessible to the others, making the "commonality" of "common sense" rather questionable.
What is unfortunate about this story is the reminder that the majority (also known as "the dumb") are seeing bombs and terrorists everywhere that there are none.
"We have major issues these days with schools being fucked up"
You need to read that statement--the one you wrote--and think critically for a moment. Could it be that kids are flunking not because they aren't trying and not because they aren't smart, but because [public] schools are, well, fucked up? Do you really think it's a good idea to punish the kids for having bad teachers and unions that ensure that a bad teacher will remain employed indefinitely? I'm sure it's convenient to point to the children and say "spoiled little miscreants!" but really, you need to look at the big picture and consider that there may be another cause for this situation that won't be helped by keeping the kids from playing games.
Here's what I favor: not selling games (or, to be more draconian, any sort of leisure/enjoyment material such as movies, sporting event tickets, etc) to public school teachers unless their classes have an independently-verified 80% or better pass rate. Maybe then they'd take school (and work, as they're one and the same) seriously.
What if both electrons are each respectively being held in machines that constantly measures their spin at a set interval (say a billion times per second) and these two machines are synchronized such that you can guarantee that one machine will make the measurement a small fraction of a nanosecond before the other? That is, what if you know (predictively) whether or not the primary particle has been measured, because it will be continually measured at a certain frequency? Would that violate causality?
http://www.cnn.com/2003/HEALTH/parenting/10/28/tv. kids/index.html
According to the study discussed in that article:
* More than a third of kids under 6 have a TV in their bedroom.
* About one in four have a VCR or DVD [player] where they sleep.
If a third of kids under 6 have a TV in their bedroom, it isn't inconceivable that more than half of the chilren under 12 have a TV in their bedroom. It also isn't inconceivable to believe that they're watching HBO. My "Most of them" remark was somewhat snarky but the truth of the situation probably isn't far from my assertion.
Most of them.
A one square meter polycarbonate or acrylic fresnel lens costs significantly less than a one square meter space-grade solar cell. We're talking orders of magnitude, here. I mean, you can get a 1 m2 fresnel lens for less than $50 ($39 for 0.8m2 here). I don't have a good figure for the cost of space-grade 20+ percent efficient solar cells, but I think we can assume that if your average 1KW system costs about $7K to $10K for 10-percent-ish efficient cells, then we'd probably be looking at a $50,000 or more cost for the high-efficiency ones covering the same amount of area.
So to answer your question, it matters because solar is too expensive right now for anyone but an aficionado or treehugger to afford. With improvements like this, the overall cost of the system comes down enough that the average person can consider it and do a cost-benefit analysis of the solar power system compared to their electric bill over the short term. "It pays for itself in three years" versus "It pays for itself in thirty years" is pretty powerful stuff.
...So?
Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Alcohol doesn't cause auto accidents, bad judgment causes auto accidents.
And relatedly, making a file available for download doesn't result in piracy, actually downloading the file results in piracy.
It could be argued, by your flawed logic, that honor bar systems that rely upon your own honesty and integrity to pay the fair rate for the foodstuffs you take, those systems are facilitating theft by making available things to be stolen. Hell, supermarkets would be classified as accessories to every shoplifting crime, because they've made things available to be stolen. If I leave my car door unlocked and somebody opens my car and rummages through my things, stealing a handgun and committing a crime with it, I'm an accessory to that crime because I made the gun available to them?
"Enabling" doesn't mean a god damned thing. The real issue here is intent. Did somebody intend to cut into the RIAA's profit stream? Even more at issue is the notion that somebody who downloaded a song would buy it instead. Maybe, for a given person, the only way a song/album/movie will be acquired is by download, which defeats entirely the notion of a "lost sale" for a given song/album/movie. Maybe for those people, buying isn't an option or a preference. So if the "enabler" didn't intend to cut into the RIAA's profit stream, and all of the downloaders had absolutely no intention of buying the music, then what is the ultimate loss here? With this (fairly reasonable) reasoning in mind, it would be ludicrous to believe that $750 per shared song is an adequate amount of compensation for the RIAA, as they have not actually lost anything, nor did they stand to gain anything if the act of downloading had been prevented.
The RIAA needs to grow up and move on with their existence. Sometimes as we grow up we have to accept that things just change and we just have to deal with it. RIAA: Deal with it, change your business model, adapt to new technology. The fat cat days of charging $20 for something that costs you $0.50 to make and giving a couple percent of that $20 to the artist is over. You're going to be making less money, but if you want to stay in business at all, you need to evolve.