"Data Matrix from Siemens(look here for more information) is a 2-D matrix code designed to pack a lot of information in a very small space. A Data Matrix symbol can store between one and 500 characters. The symbol is also scalable between a 1-mil square to a 14-inch square. That means that a Data Matrix symbol has a maximum theoretical density of 500 million characters to the inch! The practical density will, of course, be limited by the resolution of the printing and reading technology used."
Cut that back by 2 orders of magnatude to 5 million characters per square inch, add Reed-Soloman or other error correcting to cut it back to 4Mb / square inch, which is close to 400 Mb/page. And that is assuming 2 orders of magnitude less than the format is capable of. I think you can squeeze out 1 Gb / page (front and back)
So, yes, I think this can be done. Between this and compression techniques on the original, yes - a few thousand sheets of paper. Fairly cheap and effective.
Is everyone a moron around here? The only solution I have ever seen for long term digital storage is by far the cheapest, and easiest - though not the most compact. What about 2D barcodes? Just PRINT the damn info onto paper (the 2D barcode stuff has pretty good data density) and stick it in a cabinet or two. Jeez, it shouldn't take a damn rocket scientist. That will be good for 100+ years, is easy to read back into VOLATILE storage again, can be duplicated infinitely and relatively cheaply, and requires no maintenance. What is wrong with you people??
I've had the same theory for a while myself. Sort of a Relativity Theory - time is relative to ones experience. To go beyond what you've said, I think it also explains quite a bit more human behavior. In short, the human brain can conceive of time only up to 2 times what it has experienced. For example, young teens can't conceive of being forty, much less older, and can barely conceive of being over 20, which explains part of the 'I'll live forever' outlook. At forty, you can conceive of being 70 or 80, thus the 'midlife crisis' where you really perceive your mortality for the first time. And so on.
Also just a pet theory of mine, but seems useful.
Yes - you are correct. Ingesting radioactive particles is much worse. Alpha particle emitters can't harm you - can't even penetrate your skin - unless you inhale or ingest them. Then they can do a lot of damage internally. Same goes for other radioactive particles - much more harmful inside you than out.
Sorry, can't resist shooting this down. While I haven't heard of someone writing an app to do what Expose on the Mac OS does, EVERY single one of the other tasks you mention was done, as slick as you can ask for, back in 1985 on the 32-bit Amiga OS - including photo and video production that was not surpassed on the PC for another 15 years. All with the stock 7Mhz processors (though, to be correct, the video production stuff was typically done on a 40Mhz processor).
If you limit your discussion to PCs, your points above are correct. But PCs and Macs were not the only game in town back then. Heck, my old Amiga booted the OS off a dang floppy faster than my PC does today off it's harddrive. And the OS was 1/2 Mb on that floppy. Today its 1/2 Gb on a PC, minimum - is it 1000 times better? Not from where I'm sitting.
The Amiga was also, to continue, a lot simpler to develop for - there was typically one or two ways to do something. On a PC - there's sometimes 20, all of which work differently. Which one is harder to maintain?
Not sure that's workable. Originally there were no 'running mates' for Vice President - the VP was the runner up in the election to the President. It was quickly determined that, while a nice idea, it REALLY didn't work well in the real world. Dems hiring Reps and vice versa may fall into that same trap.
What you need to understand is that the US Government is 1) Made up of people who seek out power. 2) Made up of, to a large part, lawyers.
Those who seek out power want to USE that power. Lawyers are trained for years in ways to weasle, confound, or reverse statements, judgements, and statutes. The US Government trying to weasle around parts of the Constitution? I would be surprised not to see it. Not that they should get away with it, but it is definitely expected.
The judge in the case should make three statements: 1) Lawyers and clients sometimes confer by email. 2) There is no way to know if any particular email is between a lawyer and a client. 3) All communications between lawyer and client are priveleged and NO ONE is allowed to look at them, for any reason.
Therefor, NO, you cannot read any email without a warrent.
Prices are going up for solar panels? That's great news!! Seriously, it is - even discounting the fact that the panels today are likey better than the ones from 2003. Demand is driving up the prices, which makes making solar panels a better investment, which increases production, which eventually drive down the prices while improving the quality and utility of what is produced. Competition at its finest. That, my friend, is a GOOD thing.
Actually, I think 4:15 is wrong. I'd apply a 20% margin to account for varying traffic delays, which in this case is 15 minutes. Thus it should be started at 4:30, not 4:15
Re:Attention! It's all about the ATTENTION!
on
Project Arcade
·
· Score: 1
Oh yeah - I remember those days too. Especially the very delicate task of getting the high score on Defender. See, it rolled over at 1,000,000 and went back to zero, so the high score was 999,975 (25 points being the least you could get). BUT the fun part was the bug that kicked in at 990,000 - between there and 1,000,000 every time you got points you got and extra life. Which was cool except you got points for being shot. The only way to get the high score was to carefully run out of ships AND blow up your last one on exactly the right score when coming out of hyperspace (the only way you could die without scoring points).
Those were the days! hehe.
I'd rather see a manned mision as well, but many of the limits of the current Mars rovers can be overcome. The current ones are autonomous and self-reliant. Do they need to be? Why not send a rover 'base' a large chunk of the payload for the Mars mission that sits in one place as a fuel depot, high powered transmitter, place for more sophistocated (read heavier) instruments, etc.?
The rovers could refuel at the base, go out and explore, and come back. With a liquid fuel and a real engine rather than what can be powered from a few measly solar cells, you could do a lot more and travel a lot further (and faster). Even bring back samples for more detailed analysis at the base.
With a manned mission you'd be moving a lot of mass to Mars. What could you do with the same mass and robots? Bears thinking about.
Or if you prefer the movies, take the Terminator series of movies. All efforts to change the 'future' only caused it to come about, though possibly with minor details changed along the way. That is certainly my favorite way to treat time travel - paradoxes thus simply do not happen.
Their case with IBM has clarified how Free Software can defend itself against copyright claims, and it has also proven that GPL is a valid, trial tested, copyright license. This may seem minor, but no license is considered worth the paper it's written on until it is contested in court... same goes for contracts, waviers, etc. Without precedent, there is no way of knowing how the language will be interpreted. I really have no idea why people keep saying this - it simply is not true. Copywrite law allows you to do X with GPL software, the GPL allows you to do X + Y (where Y is modify and distribute). Any company that tries to do Y NEEDS that GPL license to be valid. If the GPL may not be valid, then that company can't do Y - at all. Most software licenses try to restrict what you can do - so if they are not valid, you win (you can do more than it says you can). The GPL license lets you do MORE - so if it's not valid, you lose (you can't do the MORE). I don't know why that distinction escapes people - it turns everything on its head. It simply cannot be contested - anyone doing so is shooting themselves in the foot. It would simply be idiotic, 'cause even if you win, you LOSE.
I guess the cynical answer is the best - instant gratification. We in the US have gotten used to the Elections being decided - and tallied - before we even get home from the voting place. In fact, early results are collected and suppressed as the early results were available so early they were affecting the Elections as a whole. If we used paper ballots and tallied them by hand it would take days if not weeks. And what fun is that? We need the huge swings, the states turning colors as we watch - the DRAMA of it all. Nothing less will do for the good ole US of A. We can't go to bed not KNOWING!!!
Baen books has this one their website, The Mote in Gods Eye, the sequel, and a bunch of pre-quels as well (9 in all) as a package deal. Quite a good read (although the earlier books jump around a bit) altogether.
Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of Baen and have purchased quite a few books from them. The 'innovation' of theirs I like the best is making the first chapter or few chapters of a book available to read before buying it. I like long stories and series and that is invaluable to 'pull a reader in' and make a purchase. They are bundling series together now, which is also something I like.
They REALLY get it, and I'm glad I found them. If you like SciFi or Fantasy (they are more geared towards SciFi, but have both in good supply) you should check them out too.
Bzzzt! Wrong, thanks for playing. The GPL itself says, in plain english, that you did not have a chance to see the GPL beforehand, you did not sign anything, you do NOT have to 'accept' the GPL - the software is free to do with as you please. The only reason you need to accept the GPL is IF you are re-distributing it or distributing modified versions of the software - that is all the GPL covers. That's it. NO ONE just using GPL software has to accept the GPL at all.
Sorry I missed this thread over the weekend, but I must say at first glance your post infuriated me (the word *clearly* especially). I've gotten over it and now I'm just curious - by what standards are you posing that the person in question is *clearly* making derivative works? Blacksun.com was already taken down, but what I saw when I checked out cafepress.com site was a T-shirt with the perfectly good, average vocabulary, word 'serenity' on it - in another LANGUAGE even. No tie in to Firefly, no characters, no trademarks, nothing from the series or movie at all. This seems tatamount to MicroSoft suing Anderson for selling 'Windows'. I hope you check follow ups to your posts as I would love to hear your response. If this is so, it seems to me (a layperson) that something is SERIOUSLY wrong in the copyright/trademark system.
Looking forward to hearing back - thanks in advance.
I see some of the same thing as you are talking about here in the US. There is this overwhelming preasure to DO SOMETHING about any problem that arises, whether or not the solution makes sense, and whether or not that something is solvable. Take traffic accidents for instance. They are responsible, unwittingly, for the proliferation of stop signs, traffic signals, etc. No one looks at it as "well, an accident happened here. Stuff happens - big deal". No, it is looked at as a PROBLEM - there must be something WRONG or the accident could not have happened. Doesn't make much sense to me, but any place there is an accident, a new sign or signal sprouts like a mushroom. It's a wonder anyone gets anywhere anymore.
Same thing with terrorists. Its a PROBLEM, therefore has a SOLUTION, and by god we are going to fix it. So, this is what we get - because the only way to fix it is to prevent it altogether, and the only way to do that, because people are involved, is shit like this bill.
No, I don't see that at all. GCC is GPL, but the code you compile with it is NOT GPL (unless you want it to be). If they GPL Java compilers and runtime it would not force anything using it to be GPL. Now, if the Java libraries are GPL (which I can see them being in their code form - i.e. you can't modify the library code except under GPL) that might be a problem, but I can see them being set up so the code of the libraries is GPL, but their use as libraries is LGPL.
That would satisfy Sun I think - the main deterrent to open sourcing Java has been MicroSoft getting their grubby hands on it again. With GPL, that can't happen (in theory at least).
Remember, a GPL word processor does NOT make your letters GPL. A GPL Java environment would NOT make your Java programs GPL.
Commercial use can continue, without modifying Java itself - which is exactly what we have today.
I don't see a problem.
There are options out there - there are organizations for independent contractors, small business owners, etc. that can provide group rates for healthcare. Doesn't make health coverage cheap - not much in the way of volume discounts - but it is available, if about 50% more expensive than a large company plan (from what I have seen anyway).
Re:For the rocket scientists out there....
on
Pluto Probe Delayed
·
· Score: 1
IANARS, but I don't think it takes one to see why they didn't try an orbit. I asked myself the same questions at first, then remembered how small Pluto is. Not much chance of slowing down to go into orbit - you need 25K mi/hr for escape velocity for Earth (IIRC) and the Jupiter slingshot will bump that to 37K+ to make the trip shorter. No way to bleed off that much speed - you'd need a Saturn V or more out there to do that. Or they could have bled the speed off at Jupiter and crawled out there to Pluto for decades. I know I wouldn't want to wait that long.
I'd like to know why they didn't include an impactor though. Those are always fun, but probably not as useful as the instruments they'd have to leave behind.
Stopped cars really wouldn't be a problem. Car arrives at a floor on the 'up' shaft, moves horizontally to between the two shafts, opens doors. People get on and off. Only when the doors are closed does the car move horizontally again to either the 'up or 'down' shaft to get where it is needed next. No other car is interfered with unless it needed to get to THAT floor and the station on that floor was occupied by an open elevator car with Mr. Talksalot.
So not so big a problem at all - most likely not noticable unless a car was stalled on a popular floor for a long time. And you can easily design a dual station on each floor without taking up too much extra room - problem effectively solved.
Slashdot Mirror
"Data Matrix from Siemens(look here for more information) is a 2-D matrix code designed to pack a lot of information in a very small space. A Data Matrix symbol can store between one and 500 characters. The symbol is also scalable between a 1-mil square to a 14-inch square. That means that a Data Matrix symbol has a maximum theoretical density of 500 million characters to the inch! The practical density will, of course, be limited by the resolution of the printing and reading technology used."
Cut that back by 2 orders of magnatude to 5 million characters per square inch, add Reed-Soloman or other error correcting to cut it back to 4Mb / square inch, which is close to 400 Mb/page. And that is assuming 2 orders of magnitude less than the format is capable of. I think you can squeeze out 1 Gb / page (front and back)
So, yes, I think this can be done. Between this and compression techniques on the original, yes - a few thousand sheets of paper. Fairly cheap and effective.
Is everyone a moron around here? The only solution I have ever seen for long term digital storage is by far the cheapest, and easiest - though not the most compact. What about 2D barcodes? Just PRINT the damn info onto paper (the 2D barcode stuff has pretty good data density) and stick it in a cabinet or two. Jeez, it shouldn't take a damn rocket scientist. That will be good for 100+ years, is easy to read back into VOLATILE storage again, can be duplicated infinitely and relatively cheaply, and requires no maintenance. What is wrong with you people??
I've had the same theory for a while myself. Sort of a Relativity Theory - time is relative to ones experience. To go beyond what you've said, I think it also explains quite a bit more human behavior. In short, the human brain can conceive of time only up to 2 times what it has experienced. For example, young teens can't conceive of being forty, much less older, and can barely conceive of being over 20, which explains part of the 'I'll live forever' outlook. At forty, you can conceive of being 70 or 80, thus the 'midlife crisis' where you really perceive your mortality for the first time. And so on.
Also just a pet theory of mine, but seems useful.
Yes - you are correct. Ingesting radioactive particles is much worse. Alpha particle emitters can't harm you - can't even penetrate your skin - unless you inhale or ingest them. Then they can do a lot of damage internally. Same goes for other radioactive particles - much more harmful inside you than out.
Sorry, can't resist shooting this down. While I haven't heard of someone writing an app to do what Expose on the Mac OS does, EVERY single one of the other tasks you mention was done, as slick as you can ask for, back in 1985 on the 32-bit Amiga OS - including photo and video production that was not surpassed on the PC for another 15 years. All with the stock 7Mhz processors (though, to be correct, the video production stuff was typically done on a 40Mhz processor).
If you limit your discussion to PCs, your points above are correct. But PCs and Macs were not the only game in town back then. Heck, my old Amiga booted the OS off a dang floppy faster than my PC does today off it's harddrive. And the OS was 1/2 Mb on that floppy. Today its 1/2 Gb on a PC, minimum - is it 1000 times better? Not from where I'm sitting.
The Amiga was also, to continue, a lot simpler to develop for - there was typically one or two ways to do something. On a PC - there's sometimes 20, all of which work differently. Which one is harder to maintain?
Not sure that's workable. Originally there were no 'running mates' for Vice President - the VP was the runner up in the election to the President. It was quickly determined that, while a nice idea, it REALLY didn't work well in the real world. Dems hiring Reps and vice versa may fall into that same trap.
What you need to understand is that the US Government is
1) Made up of people who seek out power.
2) Made up of, to a large part, lawyers.
Those who seek out power want to USE that power. Lawyers are trained for years in ways to weasle, confound, or reverse statements, judgements, and statutes. The US Government trying to weasle around parts of the Constitution? I would be surprised not to see it. Not that they should get away with it, but it is definitely expected.
The judge in the case should make three statements: 1) Lawyers and clients sometimes confer by email. 2) There is no way to know if any particular email is between a lawyer and a client. 3) All communications between lawyer and client are priveleged and NO ONE is allowed to look at them, for any reason.
Therefor, NO, you cannot read any email without a warrent.
Isn't that simple?
Prices are going up for solar panels? That's great news!! Seriously, it is - even discounting the fact that the panels today are likey better than the ones from 2003. Demand is driving up the prices, which makes making solar panels a better investment, which increases production, which eventually drive down the prices while improving the quality and utility of what is produced. Competition at its finest. That, my friend, is a GOOD thing.
Actually, I think 4:15 is wrong. I'd apply a 20% margin to account for varying traffic delays, which in this case is 15 minutes. Thus it should be started at 4:30, not 4:15
Oh yeah - I remember those days too. Especially the very delicate task of getting the high score on Defender. See, it rolled over at 1,000,000 and went back to zero, so the high score was 999,975 (25 points being the least you could get). BUT the fun part was the bug that kicked in at 990,000 - between there and 1,000,000 every time you got points you got and extra life. Which was cool except you got points for being shot. The only way to get the high score was to carefully run out of ships AND blow up your last one on exactly the right score when coming out of hyperspace (the only way you could die without scoring points).
Those were the days! hehe.
I'd rather see a manned mision as well, but many of the limits of the current Mars rovers can be overcome. The current ones are autonomous and self-reliant. Do they need to be? Why not send a rover 'base' a large chunk of the payload for the Mars mission that sits in one place as a fuel depot, high powered transmitter, place for more sophistocated (read heavier) instruments, etc.?
The rovers could refuel at the base, go out and explore, and come back. With a liquid fuel and a real engine rather than what can be powered from a few measly solar cells, you could do a lot more and travel a lot further (and faster). Even bring back samples for more detailed analysis at the base.
With a manned mission you'd be moving a lot of mass to Mars. What could you do with the same mass and robots? Bears thinking about.
Or if you prefer the movies, take the Terminator series of movies. All efforts to change the 'future' only caused it to come about, though possibly with minor details changed along the way. That is certainly my favorite way to treat time travel - paradoxes thus simply do not happen.
Reel it in?
I guess the cynical answer is the best - instant gratification. We in the US have gotten used to the Elections being decided - and tallied - before we even get home from the voting place. In fact, early results are collected and suppressed as the early results were available so early they were affecting the Elections as a whole. If we used paper ballots and tallied them by hand it would take days if not weeks. And what fun is that? We need the huge swings, the states turning colors as we watch - the DRAMA of it all. Nothing less will do for the good ole US of A. We can't go to bed not KNOWING!!!
Baen books has this one their website, The Mote in Gods Eye, the sequel, and a bunch of pre-quels as well (9 in all) as a package deal. Quite a good read (although the earlier books jump around a bit) altogether.
And, to top it all off - every book I've seen on the site will let you read the first couple of chapters. Try before you buy. May they never change.
Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of Baen and have purchased quite a few books from them. The 'innovation' of theirs I like the best is making the first chapter or few chapters of a book available to read before buying it. I like long stories and series and that is invaluable to 'pull a reader in' and make a purchase. They are bundling series together now, which is also something I like.
They REALLY get it, and I'm glad I found them. If you like SciFi or Fantasy (they are more geared towards SciFi, but have both in good supply) you should check them out too.
Bzzzt! Wrong, thanks for playing. The GPL itself says, in plain english, that you did not have a chance to see the GPL beforehand, you did not sign anything, you do NOT have to 'accept' the GPL - the software is free to do with as you please. The only reason you need to accept the GPL is IF you are re-distributing it or distributing modified versions of the software - that is all the GPL covers. That's it. NO ONE just using GPL software has to accept the GPL at all.
Sorry I missed this thread over the weekend, but I must say at first glance your post infuriated me (the word *clearly* especially). I've gotten over it and now I'm just curious - by what standards are you posing that the person in question is *clearly* making derivative works? Blacksun.com was already taken down, but what I saw when I checked out cafepress.com site was a T-shirt with the perfectly good, average vocabulary, word 'serenity' on it - in another LANGUAGE even. No tie in to Firefly, no characters, no trademarks, nothing from the series or movie at all. This seems tatamount to MicroSoft suing Anderson for selling 'Windows'. I hope you check follow ups to your posts as I would love to hear your response. If this is so, it seems to me (a layperson) that something is SERIOUSLY wrong in the copyright/trademark system.
Looking forward to hearing back - thanks in advance.
I see some of the same thing as you are talking about here in the US. There is this overwhelming preasure to DO SOMETHING about any problem that arises, whether or not the solution makes sense, and whether or not that something is solvable. Take traffic accidents for instance. They are responsible, unwittingly, for the proliferation of stop signs, traffic signals, etc. No one looks at it as "well, an accident happened here. Stuff happens - big deal". No, it is looked at as a PROBLEM - there must be something WRONG or the accident could not have happened. Doesn't make much sense to me, but any place there is an accident, a new sign or signal sprouts like a mushroom. It's a wonder anyone gets anywhere anymore.
Same thing with terrorists. Its a PROBLEM, therefore has a SOLUTION, and by god we are going to fix it. So, this is what we get - because the only way to fix it is to prevent it altogether, and the only way to do that, because people are involved, is shit like this bill.
Somebody stop the planet - I need to get off.
No, I don't see that at all. GCC is GPL, but the code you compile with it is NOT GPL (unless you want it to be). If they GPL Java compilers and runtime it would not force anything using it to be GPL. Now, if the Java libraries are GPL (which I can see them being in their code form - i.e. you can't modify the library code except under GPL) that might be a problem, but I can see them being set up so the code of the libraries is GPL, but their use as libraries is LGPL.
That would satisfy Sun I think - the main deterrent to open sourcing Java has been MicroSoft getting their grubby hands on it again. With GPL, that can't happen (in theory at least).
Remember, a GPL word processor does NOT make your letters GPL. A GPL Java environment would NOT make your Java programs GPL.
Commercial use can continue, without modifying Java itself - which is exactly what we have today.
I don't see a problem.
There are options out there - there are organizations for independent contractors, small business owners, etc. that can provide group rates for healthcare. Doesn't make health coverage cheap - not much in the way of volume discounts - but it is available, if about 50% more expensive than a large company plan (from what I have seen anyway).
IANARS, but I don't think it takes one to see why they didn't try an orbit. I asked myself the same questions at first, then remembered how small Pluto is. Not much chance of slowing down to go into orbit - you need 25K mi/hr for escape velocity for Earth (IIRC) and the Jupiter slingshot will bump that to 37K+ to make the trip shorter. No way to bleed off that much speed - you'd need a Saturn V or more out there to do that. Or they could have bled the speed off at Jupiter and crawled out there to Pluto for decades. I know I wouldn't want to wait that long.
I'd like to know why they didn't include an impactor though. Those are always fun, but probably not as useful as the instruments they'd have to leave behind.
Stopped cars really wouldn't be a problem. Car arrives at a floor on the 'up' shaft, moves horizontally to between the two shafts, opens doors. People get on and off. Only when the doors are closed does the car move horizontally again to either the 'up or 'down' shaft to get where it is needed next. No other car is interfered with unless it needed to get to THAT floor and the station on that floor was occupied by an open elevator car with Mr. Talksalot.
So not so big a problem at all - most likely not noticable unless a car was stalled on a popular floor for a long time. And you can easily design a dual station on each floor without taking up too much extra room - problem effectively solved.