Why does my blood pressure rise when I go to MySpace? Is it the inane musings of the attention whores, the crappy music, or the terrible, terrible web pages?
Well I guess the bottom line is that if I ever want a primo aneuysm I know where to go.
Either I'm missing something or this article is complete fluff. Is what they're talking about REALLY innovative? Can some antenna geeks/EM specialists help me out here?
Let me see if I can translate the article from "Let's obfuscate what we're really doing using terms we're making up on the fly so we can get grant money" to "truth".
Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.
To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances".
If you have a power source that alternates, it will propagate through space. Let's call a conductor that is designed for this purpose an "antenna". An omnidirectional antenna will send it out in all directions, but it's possible to build antennas that concentrate the energy in a single direction. That's why they use huge parabolic dishes to talk to satellites orbiting around other planets - They concentrate the signal and send it in one direction, with little radiation leaking out to the sides. Sorry, scientists, someone beat you to the punch on "non-radiative" antennas.
"If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another," said Professor Soljacic.
Antennas can not only send, but receive. In fact, any metal object exposed to an electromagnetic field will induce that field and turn it back into power. That's why fluorescent tubes light up in your hand without a power source when you are standing near an active Tesla coil - There is literally enough power going through it (and your body) to energize it. But let's not talk about inductance, let's talk about "resonance" and "energy tails".
Pft. "Resonance". It's called tuning, fool. EM waves are like any other kind of wave. There is a measurable length from crest to crest. If you've heard antenna terminology talking about full wave, half wave, and quarter wave antennas, this is what they are talking about. Antennas are optimized for certain frequencies by their size. You can cut the antenna size down by 1/2 or 1/4 its optimal length and still get pretty good power transfer. It IS possible to receive a signal from a transmitter regardless of antenna size, but if you are interested in distance, tuning should be done to optimize power transfer. This is the part that really blows me away - These fools are talking about this field having a period of 6.4MHz. If you divide the speed of light (300,000,000 m/sec) by the frequency (6,400,000Hz), you will see that the optimal length for the sending/receiving antenna is 46.8 meters!. Even it was a 1/2 or 1/4 wave, that's still pretty huge.
One other thing - You might already have an inductive charger in your home. Most cordless toothbrushes and electric razors charge in this way now - Without direct electrical contact. These guys are trying to build an antenna that can transfer enough power to do it from a distance. Sounds nice, but I'm not going to attach a 46 meter coiled antenna to my cell phone.
And here I thought it was the US that had the crown for poorly thought out knee-jerk laws that don't do anything but make feel politicians feel as if they're getting something done, while serving as a detriment to the general populace.
The first obvious issue is enforcement. Is the Brazillan "SS" going to start tracking everyone on the Internet who posts under a pseudonym? Are they going to troll the net for all anonymous content, and play "guess-the-Brazillian"? Were they planning on asking virus writers and crackers really really nicely if they could please not proxy chain and use their real names when writing their malware?
If by some miracle enforcement of this law were remotely possible, and if someone wanted really obfuscate their source apart from proxy chaining, how hard would it be to jack into an AP and ride on top of somebody else's connection? Does the owner of the AP now become liable for allowing "unapproved" users to connect?
Then there is the three year data retention requirement. I just don't get these things. Storing a log of every connection, from every node, from every protocol, from every port, for hundreds of thousands of users? And store them all for three years? You'd need a whole datacenter dedicated just to that task alone. Do these moron politicians even bother consulting computer professionals before they write laws that make ISP's build their own mini Echelons at their expense? Oh, wait....
Anyway, if Brazil wants to kill their burgeoning IT sector, putting anonymous users away for 4 years is certainly one way to go about it.
Aha, so THAT'S why everyone is so afraid of their own shadow that they'd rather live in a police state than face the astronomical odds of being blow'd up by a terrorist.
Just read this before visiting Slashdot. I feel a LOT safter knowing that armed police in full riot gear are patting down those violent schoolkids, don't you? Terrorists are lurking everywhere!
Well, this is where my ignorance of the inner workings of CPU-based virtualization comes in. I thought that perhaps VM mode on the processors might abstract a common hardware set a la VMWare. ie. Let's say you're running on an Intel 975 chipset and now all of a sudden it switches gears and turns into a BX chipset on the fly. That's what I'm talking about. But the more I read, the more I gather this does not happen, and identical hardware is "emulated" in VM mode on the CPU.
With that said, you'd think there'd be an easy way for the OS to tell it was operating in VM mode. Couldn't one send an instruction to the virtual processor such that it says "yes, you are operating in VM mode". Of course the hypervisor of the system would have to be ignored in case it tried to spoof the answer to such a query, but that would be up to the CPU to stop that from happening....And, again...I know practically zero about how these new virtualization features are supposed to work.
Think about VMWare -- Windows doesn't royally freak out when it is running as a VM under VMWare.
But it would if you changed it from a host OS to a guest OS without rebooting it. Or even if you did reboot it for that matter. That's what I was wondering about.
IMHO, the dowry is a completely different horse. Apart from the concept of the dowry, in Western culture we are made to believe the larger the rock, the more the man loves the woman. The dowry, on the other hand, is just about money. The idea behind it is to get the woman married off as soon as possible, because single women are seen as an affront to the "honor" of a family in certain, I'll say - primitive - cultures. The dowry as you described in Britain seems more like an optional formality. In India, the Middle East, and certain parts of Asia the bride can be killed if the dowry is withheld or perceived not to be big enough. And as you might know, female infanticide is common in such cultures because families would rather receive a dowry than give one. As a result, there's an artificial imbalance between the male and female populations in said cultures leading to a host of new problems.
So, while I would say that while the idea of an expensive token of love is a pet peeve of mine, I see the dowry as being responsible for some pretty serious social problems.
Modern virtualization allows for a machine on top of a machine. So I could, in theory, place a controlling bit of kit above your Operating System where it can't see it, can't modify it, and can't realize that it's being toyed with by a rootkit overlord.
There isn't a great deal of information about how it actually works, but from I've been able to read from the author's blog, apparently when Blue Pill starts up it's able assert itself as a hypervisor and force the OS into running as a VM - dynamically, without a reboot. In other words, Blue Pill becomes the "host OS" and your OS becomes the "guest" in realtime. The hypervisor then has complete access to all system resources where presumably it can pick passwords out of memory, intercept disk writes, and a host of other nasty things. As you postulated, the OS would be none the wiser. I find it hard to believe since all the VM software I have seen abstracts the hardware, and I would think that Windows would royally freak out if it were forced to run as a VM in realtime - but then again I don't know much about the new hardware-based VM features in CPUs. Apparently it's possible since Blue Pill was demoed at a Black Hat conference...
There isn't going to be a trial. The prosecutors probably offered him a deal, and he plead guilty. He probably would have been looking at a hell of a lot more time if it went to a jury trial. I certainly wouldn't trust my future to the mouth breathers they get on the jury. After all, all the smart people are dodging the duty because they have jobs that pay more than $5 a day.
But the fact remains that people do judge, and the reactions I noted are *very* commonplace.
Yes they do, and they are. My question was: Why is it important to you what they think?
If your wife were sick and required expensive treatment, would you consider it "the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with" ? How about a pet?
Strawman argument. I won't even address this.
One other thing... your quote from the article is supposed to illustrate what, exactly? That celebs make good spokespeople?
Oh, yes they make excellent spokespeople. I generally don't like to clutter my posts with tons of quotes from linked articles, but if you would please continue to read past the point I quoted, you would see that DeBeers went on a calculated, long term campaign to use the media to equate diamonds with love. The best way to do that was through celebrities. The underlying point, however, is that DeBeers successfully changed America's perception of diamonds. The whole diamond ring engagement thing? A meme DeBeers was single-handedly responsible for. Your belief that you made a wise investment and your obvious concern over what people think of your marriage is rooted in this.
Anyway, don't get me wrong - It's good to get one's wife nice things every now and then. It shows her you're thinking of her. But the best part is you don't have to spend a boatload of money - especially not on a company as checkered as DeBeers.
third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.
Why is it important to you that anyone judge your relationship based on the size of a trinket? It's the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with on a diamond (or anything else, for that matter) Sad to say, anyone who thinks so is a victim of the DeBeers marketing machine. The very article you cited from The Atlantic is a perfect illustration of this. One of the more pertinent parts of the article:
Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public's picture of the way a man courts -- and wins -- a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love.
I RTFA'ed. I hope the aliens don't see the broadcast. They'll probably send a planetbuster back. I mean, let's say I'm an alien and I get this signal beamed over to me. I have no cipher to decode it, unlike that pretty gold disc that was picked up in interstellar space last week, so I put my scientists on the case and they spend many, many moons decoding the signal. But now they're talking in a language I can't understand. Now I have to study cues in the video for years to try to figure out what they're saying. Finally, I get it. Then I hear: "We have seen your crop cicles. Stop by and say hello." You fucking bet I'd push the button.
The only redeeming value about this broadcast is that there's an off chance of a human sexuality demonstration. Pr0n made for aliens is something I don't have in my archives yet.
Few enough people think my comments in online forums are interesting. Why would anyone care about my life? And suppose I were not to share it, then I would I keep it for myself for what purpose? Unplugging from current reality and engaging in nostalgia? And aren't some things just better off forgotten? I know there are probably a lot of dumb things I said/did in the past that I'd rather forget and hope everyone else does too. The Internet already does a fantastic job of bringing my stupid comments made years ago back into the present. I can only imagine was a lifestream would look like. Ugh.
I can just see it now. I'm back in time leaning in for my first kiss, and then I say "hang on baby, I need to strap on my headcam so I can remember this". Of course all that would be captured are several nose bumps and her comment that I'm using too much tongue. Like I said, stuff I'd rather forget...
Anyone ever seen Strange Days? Where the dude's got a while collection of disks of captured memories of his girlfriend that broke up with him? Yeah, there's a paradise...playing back immersive footage of some ex so often you can't let go and move on.
And lastly, to me, the whole idea of storing your life on a drive just smacks of Myspace style attention whoring gone stratospheric. And you think drunken party pics are bad...
I mention it because these are engineered microoganisms. It's true that I'm a layman, and I know pretty much nothing about biology. I was just asking questions of people better equipped to understand the issues than myself. I was just wondering out loud if there could possibly be some unintended consequences though the widespread deployment of breeded viruses.
It doesn't have to mutate to infect animal/plant cells to cause damage. There are many beneficial bacteria that lives in our bodies. What happens if the bacteriophages mutated to start killing off those? All sorts of intestinal problems can be caused by the destruction of the beneficial bacteria that live there. If that happened, how would you then kill the bacteriophage? Your immune system wouldn't respond to it because it's not attacking any of your cells. I'd sure like to hear what a microbiologist has to say about this scenario.
Don't get me wrong - in the age of antibiotic resistant bacteria, I think that bacteriophages are the next step to combat them. But putting them in the general food supply? For me, the jury's out on that one.
The PS3 is going to cost 5 to 6 bills, probably on the upper end. And this Yankee Group says it's going to DOMINATE? Are they joking? Even the Japanese think that thing is too expensive Here in America, with as many people that complain about gas prices cutting into their budget, are they going to be rushing to put a $600 toy that doesn't even come with any games under the tree for Christmas? Please. Even successful 30-somethings will probably give pause at the sight of the price tag.
IMHO, the Wii is going to sit at the top. Yeah it's a dumb name, but with its price point and back-to-basics approach to gaming as opposed to PC shovelware is what will set it apart from the crowd. There is one gambit, though - Microsoft's general release of the SDK for the Xbox 360. I think that people will do some pretty awesome stuff with that, and I'm certainly interested in seeing how that will pan out. One thing's for sure, either way it goes I doubt the PS3 will have a significant share of the market.
I don't think it's that we are a bunch of old curmudgeons who hate Myspace because it's one of those newfangled thingies, or because we don't understand it. I don't think that it even has to do with average age of its denizens. For me, one thing it has to do with is the TYPE of people it attracts, rather than their age. And what geek on Slashdot would subject themselves to the browser-crashing HTML and attention whoring that is Myspace unless they want to see the boobs of a co-worker or high school classmate?
But seriously - The other dimension of it is that to be an effective Myspace participant you have to put a ton of information about yourself - Pics, where you went to school, your job, your thoughts, and -best of all-, everyone you have contact with. I don't think it's a secret to anyone here that Slashdotters are acutely averse to letting a lot of detailed info about themselves out, let alone posting it voluntarily. This is especially true since we know that the NSA is trolling MySpace to build a map of the social networks of anyone they spider. Which is probably everyone^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N only terrorists.
Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request.
That sounds like a hell of a lot of overhead. With so much stuff going on, what do the performance benchmarks of this fs look like? Doesn't it pretty much guarantee fragmentation? I mean, if you have a lot of redundant data there is no way it can be contiguous with all of the files that it belongs to. As you mentioned, the point is likely moot because I'd like to believe most users try to avoid having a lot of redundant data on their drives.
IMHO, given what you had said, I don't think Venti is at all appropriate for Joe Average everyday user. It's probably more efficient to compress and decompress files in realtime. However, I'm sure there are applications (storing of large amounts of test data perhaps?) that Venti could really be useful.
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Why does my blood pressure rise when I go to MySpace? Is it the inane musings of the attention whores, the crappy music, or the terrible, terrible web pages?
Well I guess the bottom line is that if I ever want a primo aneuysm I know where to go.
Boy will NASA ever be disappointed when they arrive at the moon all ready to start building and find a Chinese moonbase already there.
Egypt? A secular state? Are you kidding me? Then what are they doing with a "religious authority" that has the power to censor speech, conduct raids, confiscate materials, and make arrests? And which, I might add, was given this power by the government?
How secular would you consider the US to be if GW gave Pat Robertson the exclusive power to seize/ban/destroy everything "non-Christian"?
Why doesn't this guy stop what the hell he's doing and wait for the signal from the future so he can see whether or not his hard work will pay off?
Either I'm missing something or this article is complete fluff. Is what they're talking about REALLY innovative? Can some antenna geeks/EM specialists help me out here?
Let me see if I can translate the article from "Let's obfuscate what we're really doing using terms we're making up on the fly so we can get grant money" to "truth".
Typically, systems that use electromagnetic radiation, such as radio antennas, are not suitable for the efficient transfer of energy because they scatter energy in all directions, wasting large amounts of it into free space.
To overcome this problem, the team investigated a special class of "non-radiative" objects with so-called "long-lived resonances".
If you have a power source that alternates, it will propagate through space. Let's call a conductor that is designed for this purpose an "antenna". An omnidirectional antenna will send it out in all directions, but it's possible to build antennas that concentrate the energy in a single direction. That's why they use huge parabolic dishes to talk to satellites orbiting around other planets - They concentrate the signal and send it in one direction, with little radiation leaking out to the sides. Sorry, scientists, someone beat you to the punch on "non-radiative" antennas.
"If you bring another resonant object with the same frequency close enough to these tails then it turns out that the energy can tunnel from one object to another," said Professor Soljacic.
Antennas can not only send, but receive. In fact, any metal object exposed to an electromagnetic field will induce that field and turn it back into power. That's why fluorescent tubes light up in your hand without a power source when you are standing near an active Tesla coil - There is literally enough power going through it (and your body) to energize it. But let's not talk about inductance, let's talk about "resonance" and "energy tails".
Pft. "Resonance". It's called tuning, fool. EM waves are like any other kind of wave. There is a measurable length from crest to crest. If you've heard antenna terminology talking about full wave, half wave, and quarter wave antennas, this is what they are talking about. Antennas are optimized for certain frequencies by their size. You can cut the antenna size down by 1/2 or 1/4 its optimal length and still get pretty good power transfer. It IS possible to receive a signal from a transmitter regardless of antenna size, but if you are interested in distance, tuning should be done to optimize power transfer. This is the part that really blows me away - These fools are talking about this field having a period of 6.4MHz. If you divide the speed of light (300,000,000 m/sec) by the frequency (6,400,000Hz), you will see that the optimal length for the sending/receiving antenna is 46.8 meters!. Even it was a 1/2 or 1/4 wave, that's still pretty huge.
One other thing - You might already have an inductive charger in your home. Most cordless toothbrushes and electric razors charge in this way now - Without direct electrical contact. These guys are trying to build an antenna that can transfer enough power to do it from a distance. Sounds nice, but I'm not going to attach a 46 meter coiled antenna to my cell phone.
That we consider money more important than who rules us?
And here I thought it was the US that had the crown for poorly thought out knee-jerk laws that don't do anything but make feel politicians feel as if they're getting something done, while serving as a detriment to the general populace.
The first obvious issue is enforcement. Is the Brazillan "SS" going to start tracking everyone on the Internet who posts under a pseudonym? Are they going to troll the net for all anonymous content, and play "guess-the-Brazillian"? Were they planning on asking virus writers and crackers really really nicely if they could please not proxy chain and use their real names when writing their malware?
If by some miracle enforcement of this law were remotely possible, and if someone wanted really obfuscate their source apart from proxy chaining, how hard would it be to jack into an AP and ride on top of somebody else's connection? Does the owner of the AP now become liable for allowing "unapproved" users to connect?
Then there is the three year data retention requirement. I just don't get these things. Storing a log of every connection, from every node, from every protocol, from every port, for hundreds of thousands of users? And store them all for three years? You'd need a whole datacenter dedicated just to that task alone. Do these moron politicians even bother consulting computer professionals before they write laws that make ISP's build their own mini Echelons at their expense? Oh, wait....
Anyway, if Brazil wants to kill their burgeoning IT sector, putting anonymous users away for 4 years is certainly one way to go about it.
Aha, so THAT'S why everyone is so afraid of their own shadow that they'd rather live in a police state than face the astronomical odds of being blow'd up by a terrorist.
Just read this before visiting Slashdot. I feel a LOT safter knowing that armed police in full riot gear are patting down those violent schoolkids, don't you? Terrorists are lurking everywhere!
Well, this is where my ignorance of the inner workings of CPU-based virtualization comes in. I thought that perhaps VM mode on the processors might abstract a common hardware set a la VMWare. ie. Let's say you're running on an Intel 975 chipset and now all of a sudden it switches gears and turns into a BX chipset on the fly. That's what I'm talking about. But the more I read, the more I gather this does not happen, and identical hardware is "emulated" in VM mode on the CPU.
With that said, you'd think there'd be an easy way for the OS to tell it was operating in VM mode. Couldn't one send an instruction to the virtual processor such that it says "yes, you are operating in VM mode". Of course the hypervisor of the system would have to be ignored in case it tried to spoof the answer to such a query, but that would be up to the CPU to stop that from happening....And, again...I know practically zero about how these new virtualization features are supposed to work.
Think about VMWare -- Windows doesn't royally freak out when it is running as a VM under VMWare.
But it would if you changed it from a host OS to a guest OS without rebooting it. Or even if you did reboot it for that matter. That's what I was wondering about.
IMHO, the dowry is a completely different horse. Apart from the concept of the dowry, in Western culture we are made to believe the larger the rock, the more the man loves the woman. The dowry, on the other hand, is just about money. The idea behind it is to get the woman married off as soon as possible, because single women are seen as an affront to the "honor" of a family in certain, I'll say - primitive - cultures. The dowry as you described in Britain seems more like an optional formality. In India, the Middle East, and certain parts of Asia the bride can be killed if the dowry is withheld or perceived not to be big enough. And as you might know, female infanticide is common in such cultures because families would rather receive a dowry than give one. As a result, there's an artificial imbalance between the male and female populations in said cultures leading to a host of new problems.
So, while I would say that while the idea of an expensive token of love is a pet peeve of mine, I see the dowry as being responsible for some pretty serious social problems.
Modern virtualization allows for a machine on top of a machine. So I could, in theory, place a controlling bit of kit above your Operating System where it can't see it, can't modify it, and can't realize that it's being toyed with by a rootkit overlord.
There isn't a great deal of information about how it actually works, but from I've been able to read from the author's blog, apparently when Blue Pill starts up it's able assert itself as a hypervisor and force the OS into running as a VM - dynamically, without a reboot. In other words, Blue Pill becomes the "host OS" and your OS becomes the "guest" in realtime. The hypervisor then has complete access to all system resources where presumably it can pick passwords out of memory, intercept disk writes, and a host of other nasty things. As you postulated, the OS would be none the wiser. I find it hard to believe since all the VM software I have seen abstracts the hardware, and I would think that Windows would royally freak out if it were forced to run as a VM in realtime - but then again I don't know much about the new hardware-based VM features in CPUs. Apparently it's possible since Blue Pill was demoed at a Black Hat conference...
There isn't going to be a trial. The prosecutors probably offered him a deal, and he plead guilty. He probably would have been looking at a hell of a lot more time if it went to a jury trial. I certainly wouldn't trust my future to the mouth breathers they get on the jury. After all, all the smart people are dodging the duty because they have jobs that pay more than $5 a day.
But the fact remains that people do judge, and the reactions I noted are *very* commonplace.
Yes they do, and they are. My question was: Why is it important to you what they think?
If your wife were sick and required expensive treatment, would you consider it "the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with" ? How about a pet?
Strawman argument. I won't even address this.
One other thing... your quote from the article is supposed to illustrate what, exactly? That celebs make good spokespeople?
Oh, yes they make excellent spokespeople. I generally don't like to clutter my posts with tons of quotes from linked articles, but if you would please continue to read past the point I quoted, you would see that DeBeers went on a calculated, long term campaign to use the media to equate diamonds with love. The best way to do that was through celebrities. The underlying point, however, is that DeBeers successfully changed America's perception of diamonds. The whole diamond ring engagement thing? A meme DeBeers was single-handedly responsible for. Your belief that you made a wise investment and your obvious concern over what people think of your marriage is rooted in this.
Anyway, don't get me wrong - It's good to get one's wife nice things every now and then. It shows her you're thinking of her. But the best part is you don't have to spend a boatload of money - especially not on a company as checkered as DeBeers.
third, I never understood what all the fuss was about diamonds, until I bought my fiancee (now wife) one. I'm a pretty miserly guy in general but I have to say splashing out for a 1ct SI1 with excellent cut and symmetry was an amazingly good decision (for me) in retrospect. she gets complements on it every day (years later), and, sad to say EVERYONE JUDGES OUR RELATIONSHIP BASED ON THE FRICKING ROCK. I can't tell you how many times she's heard "oh he must really love you" -- gak -- sad but true.
Why is it important to you that anyone judge your relationship based on the size of a trinket? It's the height of materialism to believe that the love you feel for someone is proportional to the amount of money you're willing to part with on a diamond (or anything else, for that matter) Sad to say, anyone who thinks so is a victim of the DeBeers marketing machine. The very article you cited from The Atlantic is a perfect illustration of this. One of the more pertinent parts of the article:
Since the Ayer plan to romanticize diamonds required subtly altering the public's picture of the way a man courts -- and wins -- a woman, the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures. Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their symbols of indestructible love.
Apparently Reiser not only deletes files, but wives, too.
I RTFA'ed. I hope the aliens don't see the broadcast. They'll probably send a planetbuster back. I mean, let's say I'm an alien and I get this signal beamed over to me. I have no cipher to decode it, unlike that pretty gold disc that was picked up in interstellar space last week, so I put my scientists on the case and they spend many, many moons decoding the signal. But now they're talking in a language I can't understand. Now I have to study cues in the video for years to try to figure out what they're saying. Finally, I get it. Then I hear: "We have seen your crop cicles. Stop by and say hello." You fucking bet I'd push the button.
The only redeeming value about this broadcast is that there's an off chance of a human sexuality demonstration. Pr0n made for aliens is something I don't have in my archives yet.
Few enough people think my comments in online forums are interesting. Why would anyone care about my life? And suppose I were not to share it, then I would I keep it for myself for what purpose? Unplugging from current reality and engaging in nostalgia? And aren't some things just better off forgotten? I know there are probably a lot of dumb things I said/did in the past that I'd rather forget and hope everyone else does too. The Internet already does a fantastic job of bringing my stupid comments made years ago back into the present. I can only imagine was a lifestream would look like. Ugh.
I can just see it now. I'm back in time leaning in for my first kiss, and then I say "hang on baby, I need to strap on my headcam so I can remember this". Of course all that would be captured are several nose bumps and her comment that I'm using too much tongue. Like I said, stuff I'd rather forget...
Anyone ever seen Strange Days? Where the dude's got a while collection of disks of captured memories of his girlfriend that broke up with him? Yeah, there's a paradise...playing back immersive footage of some ex so often you can't let go and move on.
And lastly, to me, the whole idea of storing your life on a drive just smacks of Myspace style attention whoring gone stratospheric. And you think drunken party pics are bad...
At $20 million a flight, I doubt she'll have the opportunity to get acclimated to that sort of thing.
I mention it because these are engineered microoganisms. It's true that I'm a layman, and I know pretty much nothing about biology. I was just asking questions of people better equipped to understand the issues than myself. I was just wondering out loud if there could possibly be some unintended consequences though the widespread deployment of breeded viruses.
It doesn't have to mutate to infect animal/plant cells to cause damage. There are many beneficial bacteria that lives in our bodies. What happens if the bacteriophages mutated to start killing off those? All sorts of intestinal problems can be caused by the destruction of the beneficial bacteria that live there. If that happened, how would you then kill the bacteriophage? Your immune system wouldn't respond to it because it's not attacking any of your cells. I'd sure like to hear what a microbiologist has to say about this scenario.
Don't get me wrong - in the age of antibiotic resistant bacteria, I think that bacteriophages are the next step to combat them. But putting them in the general food supply? For me, the jury's out on that one.
The PS3 is going to cost 5 to 6 bills, probably on the upper end. And this Yankee Group says it's going to DOMINATE? Are they joking? Even the Japanese think that thing is too expensive Here in America, with as many people that complain about gas prices cutting into their budget, are they going to be rushing to put a $600 toy that doesn't even come with any games under the tree for Christmas? Please. Even successful 30-somethings will probably give pause at the sight of the price tag.
IMHO, the Wii is going to sit at the top. Yeah it's a dumb name, but with its price point and back-to-basics approach to gaming as opposed to PC shovelware is what will set it apart from the crowd. There is one gambit, though - Microsoft's general release of the SDK for the Xbox 360. I think that people will do some pretty awesome stuff with that, and I'm certainly interested in seeing how that will pan out. One thing's for sure, either way it goes I doubt the PS3 will have a significant share of the market.
I don't think it's that we are a bunch of old curmudgeons who hate Myspace because it's one of those newfangled thingies, or because we don't understand it. I don't think that it even has to do with average age of its denizens. For me, one thing it has to do with is the TYPE of people it attracts, rather than their age. And what geek on Slashdot would subject themselves to the browser-crashing HTML and attention whoring that is Myspace unless they want to see the boobs of a co-worker or high school classmate?
But seriously - The other dimension of it is that to be an effective Myspace participant you have to put a ton of information about yourself - Pics, where you went to school, your job, your thoughts, and -best of all-, everyone you have contact with. I don't think it's a secret to anyone here that Slashdotters are acutely averse to letting a lot of detailed info about themselves out, let alone posting it voluntarily. This is especially true since we know that the NSA is trolling MySpace to build a map of the social networks of anyone they spider. Which is probably everyone^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N^N only terrorists.
Venti does data compression by removal of redundant data by (basically) writing a block, and then checksumming the block and using that sum to refer to the block in the future, so that if the software tries to write an identical block, it simply ignores the request.
That sounds like a hell of a lot of overhead. With so much stuff going on, what do the performance benchmarks of this fs look like? Doesn't it pretty much guarantee fragmentation? I mean, if you have a lot of redundant data there is no way it can be contiguous with all of the files that it belongs to. As you mentioned, the point is likely moot because I'd like to believe most users try to avoid having a lot of redundant data on their drives.
IMHO, given what you had said, I don't think Venti is at all appropriate for Joe Average everyday user. It's probably more efficient to compress and decompress files in realtime. However, I'm sure there are applications (storing of large amounts of test data perhaps?) that Venti could really be useful.
..."We have no evidence. We never did. Because IBM deleted it all. Yeah, that's the ticket."
How has this case been allowed to go on for so long?