Asimov came closest I think, with his "Multivac" - but even he thought it was much farther off.
I think I see your problem. You're taking your hints from science fiction authors rather than the science itself. Obviously he also predicted the nature of AI, though it hasn't come close.
Predicting the internet isn't a big stretch by comparison. The difference in the amount of knowledge needed to do it is like the difference between drinking a coke and drinking all the water in the ocean. We only begin to concieve of how we can concieve of it.
We may find a way to travel to other planets. We may figure out how to make watermelons without rinds. We might even figure out how to clone humans perfectly. Making something artificial that is as robust as a living being is much harder than these things.
Back on the subject of fragility, the "brains" of the robots we can create are much more fragile than we are. We just give them weatherproof, inflexibile coatings before we turn them off and send them into space. Also keep in mind that these robots are made to do less. This inflexibilty means that less can break. This is true in the biological world as well. To do a more apt comparison would mean comparing much simpler organisms survival to the computers we send into space.
Or try a more complex approach. Instead of sending a single, very flexible and complex human, send a flexible and complex supercomputer. I can guarantee that the radiation will fry the computer a lot faster than it would a human because losing a few too many of it's processors (which is inevitable as a result of the process of making it into space and because of the resulting radiation) would kill it.
The only thing our robots are more "robust" at than life is being off so that they consume no resources. This, and the fact that humans are not expendable is the only reason we send robots into space instead of humans. In fact, a computer consumes a lot more energy to do what it does than a human does to accomplish what it does (a human accomplishes a good deal more, but to limit it to an area that you already know about, a brain uses a lot less energy than a CPU does).
A lot of "futurologists" pointed out exactly what you're saying about this time period twenty years ago.
They thought that by now (read: the beginning of the 21st century) we'd have intelligent machines that surpass the intelligence of humans and which help (or perhaps hinder) our thinking processes.
Let me give you a clue. Our "fragile" forms are a lot less fragile than our computers or our machines. Sometimes we armor plate them to survive a teeny bit longer than we would if naked in a harsh environment (such as outer space), but they're still only functioning in the month range.
We can do more tasks in our lifetimes, and we can recover from injuries far better. As much as we have sought to change this, it is the way that it is.
Also, the necessary cognitive ability that we would consider thought which leads to problem solving of arbitrary problems is not even close, even in theory, to achieving the level that humans have achieved.
What it boils down to is this: when will we realize that biological systems are so many levels more advanced than anything we have ever created? I think the answer lies here: if people will learn more about our attempts at creating life in the form of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotech, and perhaps more, then we will know that all of our children are going to be the ones we made the old fashion way for centuries, if not millenia to come. If not, though, then as a biological species we are doomed to repeat the ignorance and superstition about technology of the victorian age.
Let our Frankenstienian fears die, for they live only in fiction.
I'll still be using the desktop machines I've got - doing incremental upgrades, of course - but it'll basically be the same boxen.
By then your laptop will be gone. Even if you don't step on it, drop it, run over it with a car, or get it stolen, it'll die from overheat or one of the internal components will break and be irreparable because everything's integrated (with the possible exception of the harddrive).
And then you'll have to buy another one.
Laptops may eventually replace desktops in per-unit usage simply because the laptop owners have to keep buying new ones, while the desktop owners don't. Kind of like how industrial laser printer sales are far fewer than inkjet printer sales.
I hope they don't. They give most of the power to whoever runs the micropayment system. There are already too many middle men on media, and I don't want another lobbying force in there.
Further, you can't be sure that you'll get what you pay for when you buy information without having seen it (click here to get this comic - except that this one is with a guest artist who doesn't know how to draw and is too stupid to make good jokes).
You want a good alternative? Try the subscription model. It works beautifully, and even if you can't get what you pay for the first time, over a course of ALL the articles you can look at, you can know. Plus, it's easier to provide samples of some of the content you'll see, so that the artists won't inadvertently defraud anyone (which is very likely to happen if they do micropayments - through the use of articles that turn out to be duds).
Finally, you have to consider the value to the customer. I don't want to put a $.25 charge on my credit card. I don't want 50.$.25 on my card - I don't want to risk credit problems, overcharging, fraud, or any of the other problems that dealing with e-money inherently create, and making a ton of small purchases exacerbate.
I'd much prefer a huge one-time payment so that I didn't have to worry as much about it.
I would say that we should boycott any place that believes that micropayments are a good idea, but I don't think I have to.
This is just what I've been looking for! (start playing the sad story music, if you have any - Michael Jackson stuff will work real well here) You see, I've had sort of an identity crisis - not really sure who I am. The post office can finally change that. They can authenticate me, and authenticate who I am. No more wandering willy-nilly.
(at this point please begin playing some patriotic music to get the full effect of the message) With the post office as my guide, I will rise to the brink of a better tomorrow and boldly go forth to face my dreams because I am authenticated!
Thankyou, US post office. The world is in your debt.
They don't have to be "massively obfuscated" to be difficult for blind people to use.
Do you think that there are OCRs in modern webbrowsers for the blind? Besides, OCRs today are made to work with a much higher DPI than is present in those little images usually, and encoding things in jpeg, as these images do, screws up OCRs even worse.
Also, it's to hard for the browser to figure out where there might be some text it could read, and where there is just plain picture.
It's a lot easier for the distributor to just put up a randomly generated audio file to go with that randomly generated picture than it is for the blind to have to do such a convoluted and ineffective workaround.
This is an area that Linux advocates should be able to get behind. After all, we, the minority, have been trying for years to get hardware manufacturers to support us.
KIILLLL!!!! Rid the world of the filthy disgusting spammonger! Use his vile machines to broadcast a message to the world that spam shall not go unpunished! The land shall be purified!*
*This rant curtesy of having just watched Boondock Saints and Dune.
Yeah that works. I have my own country, so when I buy from bn, I make a street named "bn street" and have them send mail there, or "amazon way," etc. If I get junk mail at bobscomputers ave, then bobscomputers.biz is likely the culprit.
Actually, I'm lying a lot.
As enlightened as your idea may be, warpath, it is illegal for most users to run their own mailservers with their ISP setup. Also, as noted above, it doesn't really apply to people who give out your physical address when they shouldn't.
Perhaps to REALLY screw them up, we should invoke some kind of e-mail trading system, so that demographics identification is no longer effective and they leave us alone.
It is ridiculous. Especially since recompiling the kernel takes much less than three days. You needed some better documentation to tell you this.
I am thoroughly convinced that it is not an unpleasant install experience that's the problem, its that the install isn't robust. Your clicky-clicky idea currently will not lead to such robustness for quite some time, as our hardware is still to finicky for our software to get everything right. DOCUMENTATION, though, can lead to this. If we can document the majority of the process in nice friendly install guides, and the very, very minor problems in help forums, I think we can get even the most obtuse users able to use the software if they're willing to read.
Further, RPM dependency problems are a result of using binary packages, not of the RPM format alone. Specifically compiled.debs will also require very specific library needs. The only way around that is to compile stuff yourself.
The point of struggling with an OS for days to get it to the point where it is as usable as another OS is so that you can change it's capabilities to suit your needs quickly later - something that is more possible with Debian than with Redhat or Mandrake, but still more true of BSD and Gentoo.
No, sounds like something else...
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 3, Funny
A workaholic with a joyless job, no friends who's life falls apart because of an inexplicable bug? Sounds like the Metamorphosis, Kafka's classic.
The only twist on this one is that the bug takes over the guy's program instead of the guy himself.
surely the job should go to the person who can do it best?
Perhaps it should, but that's not the issue. Its going to Indian programmers because they're cheaper, not better. And its happening because India has a HUGE population and not very many ways of making money. The programmers are desparate, and willing to work for less than the US standard rates.
In the global scheme of things, this will mean giving American wealth to other nations at its expense. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing, though. There are lots more Indians who live in abject poverty than Americans, and more money to that country might help alleviate that.
You apparently don't know any other implications of combustion of hydrogen.
Do you think it would be better if we increased the amount of water on the planet? Sure, it may not be as bad as increasing the amount of CO2, but a big increase in either could be bad for us all.
The key to the hydrogen turning into heat and water is that with more energy that water can be turned BACK into oxygen and hydrogen.
Well, methane doesn't burn as completely as pure hydrogen, meaning it doesn't have as much energy per litre.
Also, you don't know that about the price. You can't possibly know the price of this process versus the price of methane extraction from biowaste.
I've personally heard something of the methane experiments and every one that I've heard about hasn't been able to produce enough methane from the waste to justify extracting the methane - it was always a very energy-costly operation that produced too little to be useful.
Do you have a link that says why methane is a better idea than hydrogen? Or any links for reversable methane reactions (this is one of the big deals for hydrogen? Burning hydrogen is an almost completely reversable reaction, so you can use it as a rechargable fuel source).
I'm willing to be convinced to the contrary, but from what I've heard about it, burning hydrocarbons doesn't seem to be as long-term or effective of a solution as burning hydrogen does.
There is, perhaps a one-to-one mapping in Sword (at the beginning of the book), but this certainly diverges as you get further into the books. IT diverges A LOT.
1) Read the copywrite page again. The images and characters are owned by warner brothers (which in turn are a subsidiary of Time-Warner, but saying that Time-Warner owns it is still imprecise), but the books are publishing rights are owned by the publishing company.
2) Where would we be without the Shannara books? Tolkien didn't publish enough for the voracious readers and we wanted more in the same genre that was invented by those books!
The same can be said for the original sword & sorcery books created by the Conan the Barbarian series (which actually generously allowed many authors to write books on it), and the spy novels that started with the James Bond books (yes, they were books first).
Do you think that this is any different? People want more than seven books! Sure, those seven will be revered and treasured, but we want MORE books about ordinary kids doing magic.
Killing off the "copies" will obviously be doing the world a great disservice.
Well...mostly. I'm sure that there are some porn-related Harry Potter knock-offs that don't exactly scream good literature.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite printing by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) is now well understood - and such generators are probably going to be used to break the ice at parties by printing embarassing messages on the hostess's dress, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy. Many respectable physicists said that they aren't going to stand for this - partly because it is a debasement of science, but mostly because they don't get invited to those sort of parties. Another thing they won't stand is the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite distance printer needed to print mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they will probably announced that such a machine is virtually impossible.
Then you've apparently never worked as an audio technician. At 16 gauge you can sometimes get 500 feet out of twisted pair, and much more if you amplify the source first, which is a very good idea. Note that normal speaker cables are 18 gauge, though I don't have a great deal of experience with them. Theoretically (based upon knowing the ohms/meter ratio for the two), you'll get slightly more than two thirds the performance out of 18 gauge.
You can get small box-sized preamps that will fit on your desk and do the job nicely for under $100 so that there's nothing to worry about. Even if you don't, though, it's good to keep in mind that output from a PC isn't exactly unpowered. It's rated at.25 watt, which is a lot higher than most unpowered signals.
For all you people who missed it (especially the moderator who marked it as "insightful" rather than "funny"), that was irony.
Calling the dictatorships in the middle east "international terrorists" is an attempt at thought control.
So is calling our actions there "liberation."
Thinking about it, you can easily see that the issue is not so cut and dried as "good guys" versus "axis of evil."
Recognize, analyze and decide for yourself, and such things will have no power over you. Otherwise, you may be violently for or against the things that you would do better to think about logically, as I believe that many of both the strong pacifists and strong agressors in this past war have been before even seeing the facts.
Except that NOBODY wants telemarketers. There are some people that want Windows.
Obviously that doesn't matter any more than it doesn't matter that nobody wants spammers. They still do their thing because if they can just find ONE sucker in a million that will buy from them, they've hit the jackpot.
You might be a troll, but you serve much better as a devil's advocate. I don't think you're looking at this quite right.
The "failure" of open source is that everybody wants it their own way, perhaps, but you should look more seriously at what that means. They want any piece of software they want to work with whatever hardware they've got as well as possible. There really isn't anything wrong with that. Shouldn't this be the case? This has been a HUGE problem in the past.
There was no way to make any piece of software work well without hurting some other piece. You want easy installation? Then you won't be able to optimize. You want to optimize? Then configuration will not be easy.
The problem is not choice, it's flexibility. Autoconfig did a lot to ensure that flexibility, and this "fork" is another step in that direction. I put fork in quotation marks because it is quite likely that a lot of the material in the fork will go back to the original. At least, I really, really hope so. Otherwise, there are certainly going to be people switching back and forth between the two distros. Gentoo is designed with flexibility in mind, and it is becoming more flexible as time goes on, so this is quite feasible. Haven't you heard how much Gentoo steals from other distros?
Here's a better question than yours.
How much farther along would your distro be if all open source software was easily accessable to it? How much farther would it be if someone could create packages for your distro that come from a different distro, processor, or even kernel?
That seemed to be ZWelch's concerns when I talked to him on #gentoo-embedded last.
One final note: in case you're thinking that something like this is just another development thing, note that Zachary Welch was the lead embedded group developer. This is going to be a distro with advanced cross-compilation capabilities, an area which is rather undeveloped (anywhere in the open source world) at the moment.
But you won't want to use the internet everywhere.
on
Will Cellular Swamp WiFi?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This is the key to the issue.
Do you want to use the internet while driving? Not so much. Maybe only to get directions; the amount that cell phones provide on their basic (read: not very profitable) services.
Other than that, you want to use it in places you work, your home, and places you think/eat (such as restaurants). Considering the cost, it is not unlikely for restaraunts would put in 802.11b if they thought it would earn them customers, as it well might. As far as work and home, the same is true - it's often a cheap feature to add to an environment, and it's getting cheaper a lot faster than the other method.
It seems to me that "surfing" in it's usual sense is reserved for wi/fi alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Asimov came closest I think, with his "Multivac" - but even he thought it was much farther off.
I think I see your problem. You're taking your hints from science fiction authors rather than the science itself. Obviously he also predicted the nature of AI, though it hasn't come close.
Predicting the internet isn't a big stretch by comparison. The difference in the amount of knowledge needed to do it is like the difference between drinking a coke and drinking all the water in the ocean. We only begin to concieve of how we can concieve of it.
We may find a way to travel to other planets. We may figure out how to make watermelons without rinds. We might even figure out how to clone humans perfectly.
Making something artificial that is as robust as a living being is much harder than these things.
Back on the subject of fragility, the "brains" of the robots we can create are much more fragile than we are. We just give them weatherproof, inflexibile coatings before we turn them off and send them into space. Also keep in mind that these robots are made to do less. This inflexibilty means that less can break. This is true in the biological world as well. To do a more apt comparison would mean comparing much simpler organisms survival to the computers we send into space.
Or try a more complex approach. Instead of sending a single, very flexible and complex human, send a flexible and complex supercomputer. I can guarantee that the radiation will fry the computer a lot faster than it would a human because losing a few too many of it's processors (which is inevitable as a result of the process of making it into space and because of the resulting radiation) would kill it.
The only thing our robots are more "robust" at than life is being off so that they consume no resources. This, and the fact that humans are not expendable is the only reason we send robots into space instead of humans. In fact, a computer consumes a lot more energy to do what it does than a human does to accomplish what it does (a human accomplishes a good deal more, but to limit it to an area that you already know about, a brain uses a lot less energy than a CPU does).
A lot of "futurologists" pointed out exactly what you're saying about this time period twenty years ago.
They thought that by now (read: the beginning of the 21st century) we'd have intelligent machines that surpass the intelligence of humans and which help (or perhaps hinder) our thinking processes.
Let me give you a clue. Our "fragile" forms are a lot less fragile than our computers or our machines. Sometimes we armor plate them to survive a teeny bit longer than we would if naked in a harsh environment (such as outer space), but they're still only functioning in the month range.
We can do more tasks in our lifetimes, and we can recover from injuries far better. As much as we have sought to change this, it is the way that it is.
Also, the necessary cognitive ability that we would consider thought which leads to problem solving of arbitrary problems is not even close, even in theory, to achieving the level that humans have achieved.
What it boils down to is this: when will we realize that biological systems are so many levels more advanced than anything we have ever created? I think the answer lies here: if people will learn more about our attempts at creating life in the form of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotech, and perhaps more, then we will know that all of our children are going to be the ones we made the old fashion way for centuries, if not millenia to come. If not, though, then as a biological species we are doomed to repeat the ignorance and superstition about technology of the victorian age.
Let our Frankenstienian fears die, for they live only in fiction.
No! Everyone loves Genuine People Personalities!
Remember, a robot is your plastic pal who's fun to be with!
I certainly don't want to see Yopy fail.
I do. I'm sick of this "we're going to be coming out with it. Just wait and see" thing that gmate does.
The first Yopy had it's release date pushed back two years. I'm not sure that this is not it. How are they even making money?
I would like to have their resources and ideas put into another company that can actually deliver products.
Just wait 5 years.
I'll still be using the desktop machines I've got - doing incremental upgrades, of course - but it'll basically be the same boxen.
By then your laptop will be gone. Even if you don't step on it, drop it, run over it with a car, or get it stolen, it'll die from overheat or one of the internal components will break and be irreparable because everything's integrated (with the possible exception of the harddrive).
And then you'll have to buy another one.
Laptops may eventually replace desktops in per-unit usage simply because the laptop owners have to keep buying new ones, while the desktop owners don't. Kind of like how industrial laser printer sales are far fewer than inkjet printer sales.
He was going to only work there for 15 years, but then Office Space came out...
His boss didn't want him getting any ideas about testing the soundness of the building.
There is also a standing memo warning passersby not to touch his stapler.
I hope they don't. They give most of the power to whoever runs the micropayment system. There are already too many middle men on media, and I don't want another lobbying force in there.
.$.25 on my card - I don't want to risk credit problems, overcharging, fraud, or any of the other problems that dealing with e-money inherently create, and making a ton of small purchases exacerbate.
Further, you can't be sure that you'll get what you pay for when you buy information without having seen it (click here to get this comic - except that this one is with a guest artist who doesn't know how to draw and is too stupid to make good jokes).
You want a good alternative? Try the subscription model. It works beautifully, and even if you can't get what you pay for the first time, over a course of ALL the articles you can look at, you can know. Plus, it's easier to provide samples of some of the content you'll see, so that the artists won't inadvertently defraud anyone (which is very likely to happen if they do micropayments - through the use of articles that turn out to be duds).
Finally, you have to consider the value to the customer. I don't want to put a $.25 charge on my credit card. I don't want 50
I'd much prefer a huge one-time payment so that I didn't have to worry as much about it.
I would say that we should boycott any place that believes that micropayments are a good idea, but I don't think I have to.
That business model is as unsound as a vaccuum.
This is just what I've been looking for!
(start playing the sad story music, if you have any - Michael Jackson stuff will work real well here)
You see, I've had sort of an identity crisis - not really sure who I am. The post office can finally change that. They can authenticate me, and authenticate who I am. No more wandering willy-nilly.
(at this point please begin playing some patriotic music to get the full effect of the message)
With the post office as my guide, I will rise to the brink of a better tomorrow and boldly go forth to face my dreams because I am authenticated!
Thankyou, US post office. The world is in your debt.
They don't have to be "massively obfuscated" to be difficult for blind people to use.
Do you think that there are OCRs in modern webbrowsers for the blind? Besides, OCRs today are made to work with a much higher DPI than is present in those little images usually, and encoding things in jpeg, as these images do, screws up OCRs even worse.
Also, it's to hard for the browser to figure out where there might be some text it could read, and where there is just plain picture.
It's a lot easier for the distributor to just put up a randomly generated audio file to go with that randomly generated picture than it is for the blind to have to do such a convoluted and ineffective workaround.
This is an area that Linux advocates should be able to get behind. After all, we, the minority, have been trying for years to get hardware manufacturers to support us.
kill.
KILL!!
KIILLLL!!!!
Rid the world of the filthy disgusting spammonger! Use his vile machines to broadcast a message to the world that spam shall not go unpunished! The land shall be purified!*
*This rant curtesy of having just watched Boondock Saints and Dune.
Yeah that works. I have my own country, so when I buy from bn, I make a street named "bn street" and have them send mail there, or "amazon way," etc. If I get junk mail at bobscomputers ave, then bobscomputers.biz is likely the culprit.
Actually, I'm lying a lot.
As enlightened as your idea may be, warpath, it is illegal for most users to run their own mailservers with their ISP setup. Also, as noted above, it doesn't really apply to people who give out your physical address when they shouldn't.
We are not completely without alternatives, though.
Perhaps to REALLY screw them up, we should invoke some kind of e-mail trading system, so that demographics identification is no longer effective and they leave us alone.
It is ridiculous. Especially since recompiling the kernel takes much less than three days. You needed some better documentation to tell you this.
.debs will also require very specific library needs. The only way around that is to compile stuff yourself.
I am thoroughly convinced that it is not an unpleasant install experience that's the problem, its that the install isn't robust. Your clicky-clicky idea currently will not lead to such robustness for quite some time, as our hardware is still to finicky for our software to get everything right. DOCUMENTATION, though, can lead to this. If we can document the majority of the process in nice friendly install guides, and the very, very minor problems in help forums, I think we can get even the most obtuse users able to use the software if they're willing to read.
Further, RPM dependency problems are a result of using binary packages, not of the RPM format alone. Specifically compiled
The point of struggling with an OS for days to get it to the point where it is as usable as another OS is so that you can change it's capabilities to suit your needs quickly later - something that is more possible with Debian than with Redhat or Mandrake, but still more true of BSD and Gentoo.
A workaholic with a joyless job, no friends who's life falls apart because of an inexplicable bug? Sounds like the Metamorphosis, Kafka's classic.
The only twist on this one is that the bug takes over the guy's program instead of the guy himself.
surely the job should go to the person who can do it best?
Perhaps it should, but that's not the issue. Its going to Indian programmers because they're cheaper, not better. And its happening because India has a HUGE population and not very many ways of making money. The programmers are desparate, and willing to work for less than the US standard rates.
In the global scheme of things, this will mean giving American wealth to other nations at its expense. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing, though. There are lots more Indians who live in abject poverty than Americans, and more money to that country might help alleviate that.
Who better than a Windows technical writer to critique Linux through an installfest experience?
I mean how do system designers, consumer experts, and big and small businessmen compare someone who uses their computer as a glorified typewriter?
Certianly you would prefer personal experience from someone like that if you have to get personal experience.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to be going. I'm off to the homeless shelter to visit my real-estate agent.
No I didn't. See paragraph #4 from my post.
You apparently don't know any other implications of combustion of hydrogen.
Do you think it would be better if we increased the amount of water on the planet? Sure, it may not be as bad as increasing the amount of CO2, but a big increase in either could be bad for us all.
The key to the hydrogen turning into heat and water is that with more energy that water can be turned BACK into oxygen and hydrogen.
Well, methane doesn't burn as completely as pure hydrogen, meaning it doesn't have as much energy per litre.
Also, you don't know that about the price. You can't possibly know the price of this process versus the price of methane extraction from biowaste.
I've personally heard something of the methane experiments and every one that I've heard about hasn't been able to produce enough methane from the waste to justify extracting the methane - it was always a very energy-costly operation that produced too little to be useful.
Do you have a link that says why methane is a better idea than hydrogen? Or any links for reversable methane reactions (this is one of the big deals for hydrogen? Burning hydrogen is an almost completely reversable reaction, so you can use it as a rechargable fuel source).
I'm willing to be convinced to the contrary, but from what I've heard about it, burning hydrocarbons doesn't seem to be as long-term or effective of a solution as burning hydrogen does.
There is, perhaps a one-to-one mapping in Sword (at the beginning of the book), but this certainly diverges as you get further into the books. IT diverges A LOT.
1) Read the copywrite page again.
The images and characters are owned by warner brothers (which in turn are a subsidiary of Time-Warner, but saying that Time-Warner owns it is still imprecise), but the books are publishing rights are owned by the publishing company.
2) Where would we be without the Shannara books? Tolkien didn't publish enough for the voracious readers and we wanted more in the same genre that was invented by those books!
The same can be said for the original sword & sorcery books created by the Conan the Barbarian series (which actually generously allowed many authors to write books on it), and the spy novels that started with the James Bond books (yes, they were books first).
Do you think that this is any different? People want more than seven books! Sure, those seven will be revered and treasured, but we want MORE books about ordinary kids doing magic.
Killing off the "copies" will obviously be doing the world a great disservice.
Well...mostly. I'm sure that there are some porn-related Harry Potter knock-offs that don't exactly scream good literature.
The principle of generating small amounts of finite printing by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) is now well understood - and such generators are probably going to be used to break the ice at parties by printing embarassing messages on the hostess's dress, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they aren't going to stand for this - partly because it is a debasement of science, but mostly because they don't get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they won't stand is the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite distance printer needed to print mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they will probably announced that such a machine is virtually impossible.
Then you've apparently never worked as an audio technician. At 16 gauge you can sometimes get 500 feet out of twisted pair, and much more if you amplify the source first, which is a very good idea. Note that normal speaker cables are 18 gauge, though I don't have a great deal of experience with them. Theoretically (based upon knowing the ohms/meter ratio for the two), you'll get slightly more than two thirds the performance out of 18 gauge.
.25 watt, which is a lot higher than most unpowered signals.
You can get small box-sized preamps that will fit on your desk and do the job nicely for under $100 so that there's nothing to worry about. Even if you don't, though, it's good to keep in mind that output from a PC isn't exactly unpowered. It's rated at
For all you people who missed it (especially the moderator who marked it as "insightful" rather than "funny"), that was irony.
Calling the dictatorships in the middle east "international terrorists" is an attempt at thought control.
So is calling our actions there "liberation."
Thinking about it, you can easily see that the issue is not so cut and dried as "good guys" versus "axis of evil."
Recognize, analyze and decide for yourself, and such things will have no power over you. Otherwise, you may be violently for or against the things that you would do better to think about logically, as I believe that many of both the strong pacifists and strong agressors in this past war have been before even seeing the facts.
Except that NOBODY wants telemarketers. There are some people that want Windows.
Obviously that doesn't matter any more than it doesn't matter that nobody wants spammers. They still do their thing because if they can just find ONE sucker in a million that will buy from them, they've hit the jackpot.
You might be a troll, but you serve much better as a devil's advocate.
I don't think you're looking at this quite right.
The "failure" of open source is that everybody wants it their own way, perhaps, but you should look more seriously at what that means. They want any piece of software they want to work with whatever hardware they've got as well as possible. There really isn't anything wrong with that. Shouldn't this be the case?
This has been a HUGE problem in the past.
There was no way to make any piece of software work well without hurting some other piece. You want easy installation? Then you won't be able to optimize. You want to optimize? Then configuration will not be easy.
The problem is not choice, it's flexibility. Autoconfig did a lot to ensure that flexibility, and this "fork" is another step in that direction. I put fork in quotation marks because it is quite likely that a lot of the material in the fork will go back to the original. At least, I really, really hope so. Otherwise, there are certainly going to be people switching back and forth between the two distros. Gentoo is designed with flexibility in mind, and it is becoming more flexible as time goes on, so this is quite feasible. Haven't you heard how much Gentoo steals from other distros?
Here's a better question than yours.
How much farther along would your distro be if all open source software was easily accessable to it? How much farther would it be if someone could create packages for your distro that come from a different distro, processor, or even kernel?
That seemed to be ZWelch's concerns when I talked to him on #gentoo-embedded last.
One final note: in case you're thinking that something like this is just another development thing, note that Zachary Welch was the lead embedded group developer. This is going to be a distro with advanced cross-compilation capabilities, an area which is rather undeveloped (anywhere in the open source world) at the moment.
This is the key to the issue.
Do you want to use the internet while driving? Not so much. Maybe only to get directions; the amount that cell phones provide on their basic (read: not very profitable) services.
Other than that, you want to use it in places you work, your home, and places you think/eat (such as restaurants). Considering the cost, it is not unlikely for restaraunts would put in 802.11b if they thought it would earn them customers, as it well might. As far as work and home, the same is true - it's often a cheap feature to add to an environment, and it's getting cheaper a lot faster than the other method.
It seems to me that "surfing" in it's usual sense is reserved for wi/fi alone.