Minecraft has some fairly hefty upstream requirements. Slow uploading servers will see world-updates on the client happen in worse-than-slideshow speeds.
Hell, when I tried it on my VPS with 100Mbit (contended, obviously, but I've never managed to really max it out with game servers or large downloads before), it sometimes took minutes to draw the whole visible world on first load (and until then, block updates are slow and behind reality so you're not mining what you think you are and can die quite easily if something pops up or you mine into lava).
It's also much worse when you're exploring new land, as the block downloads cause much more traffic if they aren't cached from the server yet.
Basically, you could do it from a home connection but I wouldn't like to try. A personal server on a VPS can sometimes struggle on its own, on the default settings.
"... you don't download gigabytes of movies or whatever to your VPS only to then have to trickle-feed them back to your home PC anyway"
VPS, by the way we're using the term here, would be external. That's nothing to do with having a movie server in your house (would you use an external VPS to be your home "movie server"? No. Because, for a start, your connection speed would be killed downloading 5TB for every movie you watch - at best you'd download it externally and then trickle-stream it to your home movie server, the exact scenario I posited as a waste of time when you could just download it to your home movie server direct.).
You use a VPS for when you need services hosted externally. You use a home server for when you need services hosted internally. It's as simple as that. A home movie server, that's an internal thing. Sure, it might download a movie from the Internet once in a while, but it's not going to be directly streaming them off the net over your DSL connection, espcially if they are 5Tb each, as you claim! And if it was, why would you need a VPS?
We have a blog post about how much electricity it costs to run a server at home and comparing-apples-to-oranges (nothing considered - or mostly just neatly glossed over - in terms of maintenance, uptime, hardware expense, noise, upstream connectivity, etc.). And for a games server (so the most vital of all possible servers).
This is yet-another mark against the name of "news for nerds". A two-second calculation that any of us could make (and probably have a hundred times) with a $5 watt meter and an electricity bill, posing as an "article" for "nerds".
I run a VPS. You know why? Because I can get it to do everything I do on my Linux servers at home, but it's sitting in a datacentre with ridiculous amounts of bandwidth available to it (I think I get 5Tb of traffic before anyone even asks questions, and upload/download at stupid speeds all day long) and is managed by someone else - starting at £10 a month, I've gone up to £30 a month for more RAM, more data allowance, and proper backups.
I run dedicated servers for work - same reasons. Of course we could do it in-house, that's not the point. The point is that you only pay for an external server if you need external connectivity or management, and that's a question that doesn't have a "opinion" answer, so much as a binary yes/no answer about whether you should do it or not. You don't run email servers from your home ADSL and you don't download gigabytes of movies or whatever to your VPS only to then have to trickle-feed them back to your home PC anyway.
And for most things you need, the cheapest of cheap VPS's with a decent host will be able to do everything you want. If you want to do specialist gaming servers, look at gaming server hosts. They are stupidly cheap. If you want to do high-bandwidth video streaming, look at proper dedicated servers with proper connectivity. If you want to let your kids play Minecraft together on a secure "internal" server, slap a VM on an old desktop in your spare room and have done with it.
It's not a question. You either need an external managed host and the benefits of that, or you don't. Now if you were talking about a business with SLA-guaranteed leased lines and lots of bandwidth to spare, asking the same question (in-house vs external), it's closer to an opinion piece where getting some stats can help and even then there's no "right answer" that will cover everyone so much as a summing up of individual circumstances. But you're not.
If you want a VPS to run your website, email, spam filtering, act as an external VPN, secure your SVN repositories, proxy downloads for you, and a million and one other jobs? Buy it, find out. If you're at the point of running servers, £10 a month is low enough to test it out (and the place I'm with offer a £1 trial month) and see if it helps you.
But this "article"? You recovered yourself a few months ago after the crap videos and junk you foisted on us until your returned to normal - this is just another step down on the graph, as far as I'm concerned, and it's getting close to crossing the x-axis again.
Is the sender IP whitelisted? Allow. Is the sender IP not presenting a valid reverse DNS name? Block. Is the sender IP listed on SpamHaus? Block. Does the sender IP not match the domain SPF record (even soft-fail is a fail)? Block. Is the sender IP not retrying after being told to try again in five minutes (greylisting)? Block.
And then you can do things to do with the actual message itself, like DKIM signing, spam-detection, etc.
Instantly cut out 99.9% of your spam, and at the same time anyone who fails those tests isn't running a mail server worthy of the name in this day and age. If your ISP even ALLOWS you to send email from an address without a valid reverse-DNS, for example, I'd question what the hell they are doing with their systems or why they expect customers to be able to email at all without being blacklisted by someone.
Anyone who can't pass those tests isn't going to be able to send email to anyone else anyway. It won't just be your company, but almost everyone they communicate with (Google, etc. pretty much do the same run of tests on your name, if not more strict!). And if they aren't bothering to keep their SPF records up to date, I'm surprised that they get mail sent at all.
But don't, under any circumstances, accept the mail for later delivery. Reject it there and then. Don't faff about wasting resources, providing "proof" that the email was received to the sender, or storing things up that you then aren't sure you should deliver.
In the small businesses I've set up with email, this literally cuts 99.9% of all spam, and the number of false positives is effectively zero (and usually, as you say, due to idiots not setting / updating their email / domain properly). And when one of those botnets gets hold of your domain and tries to spam you with hundreds of connections a second, you can work through them easily without having to worry about them ending up in mailboxes.
This is the default setup for things like Postfix on most Linux distros, for example. I fail to believe that those defaults are changed by everyone who sets up a mailserver, or that setups that DON'T confirm to those tests actually send much email to anyone without having problems.
And, if you really, really, really are a small business that has problems that you can't get around by just using your ISP's recommended method, sticking Google Apps on a domain, or renting a £10/month VPS that does it all for you - WITH THOSE DEFAULTS, and more - is literally chicken-feed for communicating with customers and suppliers.
If they are idiots, that's their problem. If you want to accept and deliver email that's quite obviously spoofed because you're afraid of catching up their emails by mistake, that's your problem. Only one of those types of problems can be fixed.
If it comes to it, and you hear complaints from those companies, just whitelist their domains if their business is that important to you. But if they can't even be bothered to work out why, I would guess, at least 10-50% of their email just bounces or never gets to the other end, there's nothing you can do about that.
Is anyone really shocked? And it's not Microsoft's responsibility to ensure that a third-party company can do business selling its goods on second-hand, or renting them.
Anyone who's ever used a DVD or video game lately will know that the physical rental business is dying, and the physical used video games business has been dead for years. Hell, the PC section of my local games store basically disappeared overnight once online activation became the norm and by then I hadn't bought anything in it for years because my Steam account WAS my games. We're literally talking about things as far back as Red Alert 2, for goodness sake.
I do think it's sad but that's the way things have gone already. That said, I *love* my Steam account just for the convenience, and haven't bought a physical video game in... damn... I can't even remember. It may have been a Windows 98 title.
I still have a stack of my old PC video games on a shelf - I can't remember the last time I had to use a disk from them because the convenience of just downloading them from Steam / GOG.com or whatever was worth paying a few pounds for them all over again. Yes, I literally own things like Theme Hospital, Syndicate and the entire Quake series several times over.
The beginning of the end was Half-Life, for me, and especially when the new Steam service gave all previous Half-Life CD Key owners a copy on Steam. Since then I haven't needed to buy a physical game at all. And I haven't really owned a console - except possibly the Wii, about five years after it came out, but that was just for casual gaming at parties, etc. - since then.
It's not like it's a car, where you need to get spare parts and the car company's computer system won't allow you to use them (but even that's been the case for years now). They are producing games, and you can't resell those games. They aren't REQUIRED to allow you to do that, and never have been. The used game market piggybacks and doesn't save them money (in fact the opposite) as it's an entirely separate market. Now that they are large enough to control distribution entirely and the technology is there to provide games only digitally, why should they be supporting a third-party doing business off their goods? Consumer freedom? The consumers haven't seemed to have minded so far.
I'm all for control-of-the-device when it comes to things I purchase, so I haven't purchased many consoles in the last 15 years anyway, but this has been on the radar - and even existing in other industries - for DECADES. Why is it news to some people? And why, in the same breath, are people mentioning the rumoured "SteamBox" as a good thing? It's EXACTLY the same! And, to be honest, from Steam's / Microsoft's point of view, it can only be good business - controlling the entire distribution channel for your device is just good business sense.
If you're shocked by this, maybe you should have been paying attention 20 years ago when everyone else was noticing the trend and producing "open" systems and software licensing.
Because under EU Data Protection Law, such information passing would actually be illegal from the start anyway without obtaining my explicit consent.
Sometimes the Data Protection Act really screws up my job. But it does it because it makes me comply with things that *stop* others lives being screwed up.
Equifax have no need for that information, anonymised or not. Thus they should have no access to it.
I work in schools. I often have to generate the systems to make usernames, passwords or email addresses and the like. Sometimes several dozens of times over in a variety of formats and allowable restraints (I do HATE software / services that can't just let me enter whatever the hell I like, how long I like, and with spaces if I like, and handle it like any other string - passwords, I accept, but anywhere else is just another way to waste my time going back and forth).
Every single clever system you think will avoid conflicts, won't. Every single automated system you think will make "easy to remember / guess" usernames, won't. Invariably, you will end up with having to make manual exceptions, which will also nicely screw up any fancy scripts you make to work on the basis of a naming system.
In schools, especially primaries, there is pressure to make short, simple usernames. First name only? Won't be long before you hit two "John"s. First name plus initial? Now you'll get John Smith and John Sergeant. I guarantee you.
Anything more complex and you have the inevitable result that one of the results will be unfortunate or even obscene. First four of surname, plus first two of first name? I GUARANTEE you that you will end up with a swear-word, or having to tell a user that their username is "different" to everyone else because otherwise it would end up with a swear-word (I have at least two members of staff at the moment who are literally a letter away from being very offensive, and I once had a child from a muslim family whose username came out to something like 'porcine', which I didn't think they'd like at all). And eventually you'll still find yourself making a smitjo2 or whatever.
Okay, so full-name on everything? Now you'll get someone like with a surname like "St Matthew-Daniels" who has the most horrendous email ever to type in correctly (and thus has to take the step of having an enforced rename to "Mr Daniels" or similar on everything from the classroom door to their email in order to make things sensible - imagine being a 7-year-old asked to go find Mr St Matthew-Daniels and not knowing who the hell that is because they all call him Mr Daniels).
No matter what system you choose, you'll get someone else with the same name. It's inevitable. If not now, then when one of the women gets married and takes her husband's name, or when X's older brother with the same surname and similar first name joins, or whatever. Just by random chance you'll get a collision that will mess up any fancy system. I have at least 20 Patel's in the school I work in at the moment, a handful of Smith's, and I used to get an awful lot of similar-spelled Vietnamese or Chinese names too.
So keep it simple. Use firstname.surname@company.tld and have done with it (if your company is tiny, you can get away with firstname@ for a while, but the rule above will apply just the same in the end).
It's easy to generate in Excel from a database for CSV import/export, it's easy to manage, you'll lessen the chance of collision as much as reasonably possible without getting stupid (e.g. middle name), and you'll have to deal with exceptions anyway - so just put out the lists in a simple format like that and then do whatever corrections you need to make later.
But to be honest, in some cases source from places like Microsoft (and even things like OpenOffice) has been given to people who then just go "Urgh, why would I want to use that?!". The first thing LibreOffice did when they got their hands on the OO code was to rip things out and start again, start removing Java dependencies, removing lots of obsolete junk, and replacing the really crap code.
The source alone is not sufficient to do this.
Imagine, if you will, Microsoft "contributing" to Samba - let's say they contribute a fully-compatible AD implementation, to take an example of something that's desired and highly-sought after and certainly in MS's power to deliver. Their changes are bound by the GPL, too.
But that doesn't mean that if they slapped in ten metric tons of crap into Samba that it would be accepted and pushed as-is, nor that it wouldn't create a "Microsoft-free" Samba to clean up the code while the "Microsoft-tainted" Samba provides functionality.
Or what if they've dropped in a load of code that makes Samba work better, but only compiles on/for Windows systems, or isn't 64-bit safe, or isn't thread-safe. Sure it's "progress", but is that useful to the project as a whole? Maybe you can sit down and clean it up and make it work as intended, or maybe the effort of doing so is worse than just writing it all again from scratch.
A code-drop is, in and of itself, only the very, very first part of the process of actually integrating code into a project. It's the "easy" bit, especially if you don't give a crap about code quality.
But the biggest danger, is that MS takes Git, adds proprietary extensions and then just code-dumps their changes and abandons them. Then you have a million people who wonder why your git server isn't compatible with their git client from Microsoft, why you don't "just get it working" (even if it does horrendous things like lets users delete git histories or needs to run as root or whatever), and your left to manage the mess for eternity even though you have nothing to do with MS themselves.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
We're at the first part. Same as we were for many, many, many ideas that Microsoft took (AD is the perfect example - a bastardised version of Kerberos, LDAP, that isn't compatible with anything else, which is why Samba 4.0 has to bundle it's OWN Kerberos, LDAP etc. servers that operate in the "Microsoft way").
But if the subcontractors did what was asked (just that what was asked wasn't precisely what was required), then they've done their job. Changes after the initial sign-off, even though your product matches the specs originally given? That's going to cost you big time.
And every time you change one, you affect all the other contractors and their changes affect you and so on. Hence costs spiral, and you end up with something that may not even be fit for purpose. But, hey, at least you can blame the contractors for not delivering a working final product, even though they did exactly what was asked.
Just ask the UK NHS IT contractors how that all works.
I would guess that if you stole, say, $6 worth of products from a store and got caught, they would charge you something similar, so yes it appears reasonable (unlike the "more than the earth is worth" fines that have been bandied about in other countries).
- Cost of the product (though whether you experienced "permanent deprivation" of that cost is dubious, I'd award it you anyway so that people who pirate $1000 pieces of software are $1000 times as fined as someone who pirated a $1 piece of software). - Plus administrative fees. - Plus legal costs once a denial has taken place in front of a tribunal and you're still found guilty. - Plus a punitive damage for actually doing the naughty thing in the first place.
Seems to be the first SENSIBLE ruling in terms of copyright on the Internet in years, in fact.
And you've just given me one more reason to think that my policy of "turn it off" (since it was first put into a consumer OS) was correct.
"All we want to do is tell the fucking router that we'd like an open port. Why should that be so difficult?"
Because it's MY DAMN COMPUTER and network, that's why. And you have no need to open my ports. You can talk outwards, no problem at all, to any destination that will accept a connection. And most home routers will NOT accept a connection (you have to think of people who DON'T have UPnP enabled or compatible hardware too, or have software firewalls in the way as well, etc.). Why do I need to let traffic through other than what your servers have sanitised and handled for me?
The number of actual applications for UPnP is vanishingly small, and all solved by just running an intermediary server to handle connections which requires next-to-nothing in terms of resources (literally, a £10/month VPS would be overkill just for that, and most people that would need it have something like a website anyway that could run off the same machine).
And the simple examples of Skype/Steam show that there's NO NEED TO, whether joining gameservers or providing streaming video from both ends simultaneously, unless I'm deliberately setting up a network service that NEEDS to be accessible to the world. And if I can't figure out a port-forward interface on a router for that, maybe I shouldn't be doing it.
Opening a port really is old-hat, and not something that's worked reliably on any random machine/network for decades (You'll notice that things like TeamViewer etc. just run a local client and talk out to a accessible server, faffing with port-forwards just isn't worth the hassle). And there's no need to do it. And UPnP is a just way for it to happen automatically (whether it works or not is another matter) without any user say-so in it. If that isn't enough to scare you off having used it for the past decade, maybe you need to run a network or two and see what it means in real terms of impact upon what you need to do.
If your application NEEDS to open ports, run an intermediary server which is publicly accessible, secured, and only exposes that port necessary. If you haven't got the resources / brains to do that, I don't want you opening ports into my networks and personal computers anyway.
Seconded. This is the one of the best things about Opera - I don't get bogged down in junk or risk my computer on junky adverts loading because they "need" Flash.
I just click the play button that takes place of the Flash / Java / whatever plugin image if and when I want to view it and it loads and plays JUST THAT ONE.
Why would anybody use anything else? Hell, I can kill my modern laptop just scrolling too much down a popular image site (which just auto-loads more images as you go) and get to the point where the browser CRAWLS along by doing nothing more than looking at some images. God knows what it would be like for someone with a browser that loads every Flash video, plugin, etc. along the way.
Nah, sleep is closer to being a reboot or "fsync()" call. Your working memory (RAM) is doing things all day and if you're interrupted or disturbed, you can lose it. Sleep just syncs your data to more long-term storage if it's necessary, and discards all those temporary files you no longer need.
As you get older, committing things to memory takes longer as you have more things there to remember? I'm just guessing.
And to be honest, all the "old people" I know, get less sleep in their retirement than they ever have in their entire life (and thus tend to take early-morning walks, be up with the crows, listening to the radio late at night, etc.).
Women often rate pain they experienced during childbirth much lower after only a few hours.
The hormones that surge through the body after birth gives rise to a deliberate "memory wash" to make things seem as though they were less painful than they actually were at the time.
An evolutionary trick to ensure childbirth continues even though it is THE most stressful thing a human body will ever experience naturally.
I'm reading a book about memory at the moment, and this is one of the thing specifically mentioned. The book was written in the 90's and discusses research going back to the 70's, so this is hardly "news" (though that fact that it might be better proven or more specific now could be, but that's not what TFS says).
I have an interest in memory mainly because I suffer quite badly from a very peculiar memory defect (I won't pretend that it's been diagnosed by - or even mentioned to - a medical professional, but it's definitely there).
I have an atrocious memory. Everyone says so. I forget things all the time, forget birthdays, forget facts I was told years ago about whatever gossip was being talked about at the time, etc.
Funny, though, that I can remember pi to 32 decimal places without struggling, and only learned it because I was writing a program to calculate it by a series of diminishing fractions back when I was about 10, and have never needed to know it in any detail (certainly not to 32 places!) since. I can remember my 4th birthday. I can recite conversations that I've had months ago. I can remember all sorts of weird stuff and the EXACT same people who berate me for having a terrible memory often say "How the hell do you remember that? I didn't even remember the thing taking place and I was there!"
My problem is not memory. It's automatic memory acquisition and recall. Just being exposed to a fact won't make me remember it unless I find it interesting or I force myself to remember it (I know the number plate of a car my ex-father-in-law hired nearly 10 years ago for a family trip because we were booking into a hotel and I had to run outside, commit it to memory, and then recite it a minute later - it's STILL there). Without doing this deliberately I won't commit it to memory, and I can't be relied upon to recall it unless prompted.
And similarly, just knowing that at 3:00pm I have an urgent appointment won't make my brain trigger the recall. Even if I look at a clock. Even if I deliberately look at my schedule. Even if I then check mentally that I have nothing on that day so I can sign up for something else. It still just does not pop into my brain. But if at any point you ask me "What time was that appointment with X you had?" I would be able to tell you the time months in the future, and what we were supposed to discuss, in extraordinary detail.
My memory is PERFECT. It does exactly what I ask it to. But when it's not being used, it goes to sleep. It misses facts that it might be useful for me to remember unless I wake it up. And it will not "remind" me of anything, ever - it will always only do it after the event.
I function in society quite normally, but it's a real struggle and people don't see this, because of the ambiguity of my brain. I might not remember to come to your birthday party that I've been planning for months. But I will remember that crucial fact that you asked me to remember so long as YOU prompt me to give it to you at the required time.
I have tried every single possible system known to man of making myself be "reminded" of things in time. None of them work. Have my phone calendar beep? I'll forget to put the appointment in, I'll forget that I put my phone to silent, I'll cancel the beep when it does happen and then forget to check what it was, I'll read the calendar and know where I'm supposed to be in 5 minutes and then in 10 minutes find myself still sitting there having been distracted by something. You name it, the system won't work for me.
For a while I had systems such as "everything on the bottom step has to go upstairs next time I go there", because I was so sick and tired of having to keep going up and downstairs and getting there and an hour later realising I was supposed to be doing X (the thing I came downstairs for).
I still forgot to put things on the pile, or that the pile was supposed to be there (especially if I'd emptied it recently, the pile would be "forgotten" about until the next ti
I do love that the signs say "Secret Nuclear Bunker" on that particular one. I used to laugh every time I drove past on my way to work.
Why not just "Nuclear Bunker", or "Former Nuclear Bunker", as it's still only a tourist-attraction signpost anyway. Secret Nuclear Bunker just makes you laugh.
Unless that's the point - now we discussed it at least twice and people will think "Oh, I'll go and find that"...
1.2% efficient isn't bad for the first go at getting this effect with semiconductors though.
Hell, I bet early solar panels weren't even that efficient, and they are all over the world now.
You would need to get to about 50% efficiency to make them useful, though, but with no-moving parts and all the other advantages, probably even less than that would make them have practical application.
Well, put some of that semiconductor underneath the base plate, aim a 800W laser at it contained inside the device - depending on the speed the material loses heat at, it might be possible to make a "microwave freezer" that freezes (or at least cools) things in seconds.
Probably pie-in-the-sky because of some physical limit (i.e. it might take hours to cool no matter how much power you aim at it), but the "microwave freezer" has been an April Fool "hoax" on at least one BBC science programme (Tomorrow's World) that I fell for when I was younger and would have LOVED to have a device that did that.
If I can heat a meal to burning temperature in minutes, why can't I do the opposite too - reliably, cleanly, reproducibly, without consuming some resource that I would have to keep buying (except electricity, of course).
The applications of a clean "quick-freeze" device run from not just your freezer and fridge, but down to drinks makers, coolboxes, industrial cooling systems, even processor coolers and air-conditioning. I'm actually quite amazed that in this day and age our most common way of cooling things is still the evaporation/condensation cycle of some gas, or blowing air around it. It just seems too primitive in a "quantum" world.
Why can't you do that with an airliner? Maybe a car, but a car that's still running in 25 years is quite an achievement anyway.
On an airliner? Just basic operational procedure would mean that updates for fixes are common (physical or software) to fix ANY potential problem after YEARS of testing on identical systems deployed in test labs.
There's almost certainly a copy of a Boeing's internals at Boeing where they've done exactly this (e.g. test Y2K rollover to make sure it doesn't affect flightplan or autopilot) and they didn't risk a plane to do so.
25 years means none of your current desktops will still be running (it would be like running a ZX Spectrum as a business machine would be seen today). There might be embedded devices, but how many will go 25 years without a SINGLE test or upgrade or fix or replacement? Very, very, very few.
There isn't a network switch in the world deployed today that will still be around in 25 years untouched. It would literally be like finding out a ZX Spectrum was running vital parts of your business by being tucked away in a cupboard and forgotten about for 25 years and NOT ONE PERSON KNOWING.
"Imagine a mortgage amortization program projecting payments out into the future for a 30-year mortgage."
Well, that's a not-unreasonable example that almost certainly exists already, and seeing as we're only 25 years away - seems like the banks didn't really have any problems with that - at least, none they've advertised.
So the real question is: How big a problem is it really? Application software can trundle off and do what it likes and ignore the clocks it knows are wrong, and 64-bit time systems like are available today are carrying on quite happily.
Y2K was like this - doomsaying about how your mortgage would fail and your wages would stop. Sure, it could - theoretically - have caused problems. But only if your software managers in charge of those things were complete idiots in the first place (and using an app that was written in the 60's, unchanged, isn't an excuse and STILL makes you an idiot).
Y2.038K is definitely MORE of a problem. Definitely. But it's obviously not something that those with software that looks that far ahead are worried about at the moment. And in 25 years, in any of my current computers are still operational I will be incredibly impressed. If any of my computers NEXT YEAR aren't running 64-bit OS (whether or not they have 64-bit clocks) I will be slightly put out! So 25 years to move to 64-bit clocks? No problem.
It's not possible for humans to build something larger than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something stronger than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something that moves faster than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something to get to another planet.
It's not possible for humans to build something smarter than them.
I'm sure they've all been said in the past, in some way. Admittedly, probably millions of years ago in some cases but that's the way evolution works.
But, personally, I feel that brute-force on a simple model is entirely the wrong way to go about it, and that's what all modern "AI" seems to do. "Let's simplify a neuron, right now let's make a billion of them and join them together at the speed of light. Oh. Nothing happened". It doesn't make a brain.
I feel like we're cavemen who've seen a computer, were told it was made from sand and think that if they just make a realistic enough sandcastle that looks like a computer, they'll be able to play Doom on it.
The brain is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It has survived trial-by-fire countless billions of times. It is created by the process of being the only thing that was left over after billions and billions and billions of things affecting it, and has thus had its strength and abilities refined and honed over countless tests. Even the way the proteins from our DNA are arranged determine the initial brain structure and how it grows and are the product of evolution - none of us start with a "blank slate" or else things like reflexes wouldn't exist and we'd all have to learn "how to breathe" from scratch within minutes of being born or else we would die (which means virtually none of us would live).
In comparison, if we don't get results from an "AI" algorithm with a few months of computing time (no matter how many machines we throw behind it), we give up. Think how long it takes you to teach a child to speak, and they ARE equipped with the most intelligent brain that we know of.
We just cannot simulate things on the same scales - even the simplest brain has billions of neurons each with thousands or tens of thousands of connections that grow and die and are replaced over time. It's like having every person on the planet with a simple circuit in their hands, which has 10,000 off-board connectors on it, and they only have limited rules as to who they can connect to and not (so as to not put their intelligence into the system).
It's a scale we can't replicate on supercomputers or even huge worldwide networks of people - it's literally still in the pie-in-the-sky territory of experiment, like trying to get the world population to jump up at the same time.
And that's for quite a simple brain. Now we carry out that experiment for a year, constantly, doing nothing else and we might have the intelligence of, say, a small mammal or (extremely unlikely) 1-year-old baby. If we started out with a PERFECT set of rules, exposure of inputs/outputs to the environment, etc. (which, as I've pointed out, probably is the most important part of our brain - the data we start with, inherent in its very structure and creation by our DNA etc.).
It doesn't matter how fast you get, or what you do, the scale is still out by orders of magnitude to "simulate" even an insect brain which has undergone hundreds of millions of years of evolution to "kickstart" it with the right data and connections.
And yet we think we can stray from pure logic into a seriously simplified "neural network", run it for a few months on a supercomputer and do anything more impressive than an insect could do if we really understood its brain (even the smallest of insects is doing vision - in some sense - pattern-recognition, path-finding, flock/hive characteristics, reproduction, chemical sensing, and putting it all together to stay alive - if we knew how to tap into the brain to get the data we needed, an insect would probably put any "AI" example you've ever
If the threat of the police coming to look at what you've done is enough to make you sign something, you were doing something you knew was wrong in any case.
At worst it's probably only a civil matter anyway, and the police would have said to file some criminal charges or stop wasting their time. But even if they did file charges or arrest you, it would have then come up in court that you were being "forced" to sign the paper or face the consequences - which in most jurisdictions would even be classed as blackmail ("Sign over your house to me, or I'll tell the cops that you hit your wife last night" - it's no different - and though there is a secondary crime involved, the court is much more likely to look on the charges against you with some suspicion. Hell, chances are the only evidence against you would be "contaminated" by such a charge from your accuser and would never be admissible in any court, ever again)
There's a difference between being offered something advantageous and being told that you'll have something disadvantageous happen to you if you don't. One's "bribery", one's "blackmail".
The simpler rule? Never sign anything. Honestly. Just don't. If you want to read all the legalese and all the implications and know all the case surrounding the court's accepted interpretation of such contracts etc. then you might stand half a chance. But otherwise, you don't. That's why you hire lawyers, to do that stuff for you. In my country you don't buy a house without a lawyer involved, even if you could do it yourself - because you have no way of knowing what you're actually signing up to.
Never sign anything. Certainly never sign anything under pressure. And the more pressure you're under, the less you sign. Even the law recognises that agreeing to a contract is something that a party should do on their own time and at their own pace, there's just too much to weigh up.
Certainly, never sign anything that looks out of the everyday and "legal" without a lawyer. An NDA comes under those definitions where, say, a parcel acceptance at your front door might not.
And teach this to your kids because, come 18, or 16, or whatever the local age is, they are able to sign LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACTS. They could literally sign a contract that they'd give all their life's earnings to a charity and it would be binding (without going to court to prove it was unfair in the first place, which is a point you NEVER want to reach, even if you think you'll win).
If you can sign a marriage register, or a mortgage application, and it is a legal contract, you can sign your life away by signing the wrong thing (e.g. army sign-up form, etc.) and although a court may EVENTUALLY agree with you and get you out of it, you do not want to have to take it that far, just from a sheer time-and-expense angle.
"only 20" = not a kid. Fully grown, legal, contract-obliged, come-of-age adult in just about every civilisation and jurisdiction known to man. By at least 2 years, I should think, in most places.
I lack empathy for idiots, who sign things under (alleged) duress, and then break them anyway. If you were going to break it, don't sign it. If you're threatened with the POLICE, of all things, let them come - phone them your damn self. Because either you did something wrong (and know it), or someone else did by threatening you with the police.
If he'd signed a mortgage, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed a marriage register, it would be legally binding. If he signed a statement that he beat his wife, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed a hire agreement on his car, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed an alimony agreement to feed his kids, it would be legally binding.
At absolute worst, he should have just called in his parents at that stage if he's that much of a child. But he is NOT a child. In my country, he's been able to have his own family and house for four years, sign legal contracts for that time, etc. etc. etc. In some countries, only for two.
And the second you're old enough to sign legally-binding contracts, you're judged - in law - to know whether or not you should be signing them, and competent enough of understanding to abide by them.
20. He's bloody 20. Not 15. 20. He is NOT a child, even if he's still a student.
So the USSR is on the trade-embargoes list too? (Er... no... it's not).
The US itself put nuclear weapons in the EU in case of the USSR attacking, and although they are an "ally" to the EU, I don't see any of the former Russian states initiating embargoes with the EU countries or the US, now or in the past?
And where embargoes exist, or have existed since the Cold War, they are usually aimed purely at the thing you want to embargo (i.e. nuclear weapons, like the UK embargoed India). A blanket trade embargo is someone throwing their toys out of the pram, not a sensible real-world solution, and is usually only temporary until a government settles into power.
And the US-Cuba embargo was started in 1960. Most of the legislators who decided on the embargo aren't even around any more. My entire life was lived in that time, with nearly two decades to spare. Wars were fought and won.
The US is a playground bully that embargoes countries that don't play by its terms. It has little or no real-world relevance to their security, or anything else.
Cuba are about as much a threat to the US as Argentina is to UK. And, hell, technically we went to war with Argentina for an invasion of UK-owned islands in the intervening decades, fought it, declared peace and several decades later are being cautious about a potential re-occurrence. But we still don't even trade-embargo them.
And, technically, the embargo has NEVER been about that. It was about human rights, trade debts, and the nationalisation of US citizens' property in the country. The Missile Crisis came years later, and was resolved within days.
Let's punish countries for things they did up to 60+ years ago with their own allies that actually hurt no-one, and punish them even when the problem goes away. Because there'd be an AWFUL lot of countries up shit creek if we did that.
And, the thing is, nobody has ANY idea whose has missiles and where they could be aimed at nowadays. Nobody. Hell, that was the whole "WMD" farce in a nutshell - a false positive. And most modern weapons could take out anyone, anywhere, without warning. By the standards applied, the US should either a) invade Cuba or b) trade-embargo every country in the world. The threat was always the USSR, never Cuba itself.
Notice that no other countries embargo Cuba. Not even the US allies. That says a lot. And no country in the world has had an embargo in place for as long.
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Minecraft has some fairly hefty upstream requirements. Slow uploading servers will see world-updates on the client happen in worse-than-slideshow speeds.
Hell, when I tried it on my VPS with 100Mbit (contended, obviously, but I've never managed to really max it out with game servers or large downloads before), it sometimes took minutes to draw the whole visible world on first load (and until then, block updates are slow and behind reality so you're not mining what you think you are and can die quite easily if something pops up or you mine into lava).
It's also much worse when you're exploring new land, as the block downloads cause much more traffic if they aren't cached from the server yet.
Basically, you could do it from a home connection but I wouldn't like to try. A personal server on a VPS can sometimes struggle on its own, on the default settings.
Er, read what I actually wrote?
"... you don't download gigabytes of movies or whatever to your VPS only to then have to trickle-feed them back to your home PC anyway"
VPS, by the way we're using the term here, would be external. That's nothing to do with having a movie server in your house (would you use an external VPS to be your home "movie server"? No. Because, for a start, your connection speed would be killed downloading 5TB for every movie you watch - at best you'd download it externally and then trickle-stream it to your home movie server, the exact scenario I posited as a waste of time when you could just download it to your home movie server direct.).
You use a VPS for when you need services hosted externally. You use a home server for when you need services hosted internally. It's as simple as that. A home movie server, that's an internal thing. Sure, it might download a movie from the Internet once in a while, but it's not going to be directly streaming them off the net over your DSL connection, espcially if they are 5Tb each, as you claim! And if it was, why would you need a VPS?
We have a blog post about how much electricity it costs to run a server at home and comparing-apples-to-oranges (nothing considered - or mostly just neatly glossed over - in terms of maintenance, uptime, hardware expense, noise, upstream connectivity, etc.). And for a games server (so the most vital of all possible servers).
This is yet-another mark against the name of "news for nerds". A two-second calculation that any of us could make (and probably have a hundred times) with a $5 watt meter and an electricity bill, posing as an "article" for "nerds".
I run a VPS. You know why? Because I can get it to do everything I do on my Linux servers at home, but it's sitting in a datacentre with ridiculous amounts of bandwidth available to it (I think I get 5Tb of traffic before anyone even asks questions, and upload/download at stupid speeds all day long) and is managed by someone else - starting at £10 a month, I've gone up to £30 a month for more RAM, more data allowance, and proper backups.
I run dedicated servers for work - same reasons. Of course we could do it in-house, that's not the point. The point is that you only pay for an external server if you need external connectivity or management, and that's a question that doesn't have a "opinion" answer, so much as a binary yes/no answer about whether you should do it or not. You don't run email servers from your home ADSL and you don't download gigabytes of movies or whatever to your VPS only to then have to trickle-feed them back to your home PC anyway.
And for most things you need, the cheapest of cheap VPS's with a decent host will be able to do everything you want. If you want to do specialist gaming servers, look at gaming server hosts. They are stupidly cheap. If you want to do high-bandwidth video streaming, look at proper dedicated servers with proper connectivity. If you want to let your kids play Minecraft together on a secure "internal" server, slap a VM on an old desktop in your spare room and have done with it.
It's not a question. You either need an external managed host and the benefits of that, or you don't. Now if you were talking about a business with SLA-guaranteed leased lines and lots of bandwidth to spare, asking the same question (in-house vs external), it's closer to an opinion piece where getting some stats can help and even then there's no "right answer" that will cover everyone so much as a summing up of individual circumstances. But you're not.
If you want a VPS to run your website, email, spam filtering, act as an external VPN, secure your SVN repositories, proxy downloads for you, and a million and one other jobs? Buy it, find out. If you're at the point of running servers, £10 a month is low enough to test it out (and the place I'm with offer a £1 trial month) and see if it helps you.
But this "article"? You recovered yourself a few months ago after the crap videos and junk you foisted on us until your returned to normal - this is just another step down on the graph, as far as I'm concerned, and it's getting close to crossing the x-axis again.
Is the sender IP whitelisted? Allow.
Is the sender IP not presenting a valid reverse DNS name? Block.
Is the sender IP listed on SpamHaus? Block.
Does the sender IP not match the domain SPF record (even soft-fail is a fail)? Block.
Is the sender IP not retrying after being told to try again in five minutes (greylisting)? Block.
And then you can do things to do with the actual message itself, like DKIM signing, spam-detection, etc.
Instantly cut out 99.9% of your spam, and at the same time anyone who fails those tests isn't running a mail server worthy of the name in this day and age. If your ISP even ALLOWS you to send email from an address without a valid reverse-DNS, for example, I'd question what the hell they are doing with their systems or why they expect customers to be able to email at all without being blacklisted by someone.
Anyone who can't pass those tests isn't going to be able to send email to anyone else anyway. It won't just be your company, but almost everyone they communicate with (Google, etc. pretty much do the same run of tests on your name, if not more strict!). And if they aren't bothering to keep their SPF records up to date, I'm surprised that they get mail sent at all.
But don't, under any circumstances, accept the mail for later delivery. Reject it there and then. Don't faff about wasting resources, providing "proof" that the email was received to the sender, or storing things up that you then aren't sure you should deliver.
In the small businesses I've set up with email, this literally cuts 99.9% of all spam, and the number of false positives is effectively zero (and usually, as you say, due to idiots not setting / updating their email / domain properly). And when one of those botnets gets hold of your domain and tries to spam you with hundreds of connections a second, you can work through them easily without having to worry about them ending up in mailboxes.
This is the default setup for things like Postfix on most Linux distros, for example. I fail to believe that those defaults are changed by everyone who sets up a mailserver, or that setups that DON'T confirm to those tests actually send much email to anyone without having problems.
And, if you really, really, really are a small business that has problems that you can't get around by just using your ISP's recommended method, sticking Google Apps on a domain, or renting a £10/month VPS that does it all for you - WITH THOSE DEFAULTS, and more - is literally chicken-feed for communicating with customers and suppliers.
If they are idiots, that's their problem. If you want to accept and deliver email that's quite obviously spoofed because you're afraid of catching up their emails by mistake, that's your problem. Only one of those types of problems can be fixed.
If it comes to it, and you hear complaints from those companies, just whitelist their domains if their business is that important to you. But if they can't even be bothered to work out why, I would guess, at least 10-50% of their email just bounces or never gets to the other end, there's nothing you can do about that.
Is anyone really shocked? And it's not Microsoft's responsibility to ensure that a third-party company can do business selling its goods on second-hand, or renting them.
Anyone who's ever used a DVD or video game lately will know that the physical rental business is dying, and the physical used video games business has been dead for years. Hell, the PC section of my local games store basically disappeared overnight once online activation became the norm and by then I hadn't bought anything in it for years because my Steam account WAS my games. We're literally talking about things as far back as Red Alert 2, for goodness sake.
I do think it's sad but that's the way things have gone already. That said, I *love* my Steam account just for the convenience, and haven't bought a physical video game in... damn... I can't even remember. It may have been a Windows 98 title.
I still have a stack of my old PC video games on a shelf - I can't remember the last time I had to use a disk from them because the convenience of just downloading them from Steam / GOG.com or whatever was worth paying a few pounds for them all over again. Yes, I literally own things like Theme Hospital, Syndicate and the entire Quake series several times over.
The beginning of the end was Half-Life, for me, and especially when the new Steam service gave all previous Half-Life CD Key owners a copy on Steam. Since then I haven't needed to buy a physical game at all. And I haven't really owned a console - except possibly the Wii, about five years after it came out, but that was just for casual gaming at parties, etc. - since then.
It's not like it's a car, where you need to get spare parts and the car company's computer system won't allow you to use them (but even that's been the case for years now). They are producing games, and you can't resell those games. They aren't REQUIRED to allow you to do that, and never have been. The used game market piggybacks and doesn't save them money (in fact the opposite) as it's an entirely separate market. Now that they are large enough to control distribution entirely and the technology is there to provide games only digitally, why should they be supporting a third-party doing business off their goods? Consumer freedom? The consumers haven't seemed to have minded so far.
I'm all for control-of-the-device when it comes to things I purchase, so I haven't purchased many consoles in the last 15 years anyway, but this has been on the radar - and even existing in other industries - for DECADES. Why is it news to some people? And why, in the same breath, are people mentioning the rumoured "SteamBox" as a good thing? It's EXACTLY the same! And, to be honest, from Steam's / Microsoft's point of view, it can only be good business - controlling the entire distribution channel for your device is just good business sense.
If you're shocked by this, maybe you should have been paying attention 20 years ago when everyone else was noticing the trend and producing "open" systems and software licensing.
Because under EU Data Protection Law, such information passing would actually be illegal from the start anyway without obtaining my explicit consent.
Sometimes the Data Protection Act really screws up my job. But it does it because it makes me comply with things that *stop* others lives being screwed up.
Equifax have no need for that information, anonymised or not. Thus they should have no access to it.
I work in schools. I often have to generate the systems to make usernames, passwords or email addresses and the like. Sometimes several dozens of times over in a variety of formats and allowable restraints (I do HATE software / services that can't just let me enter whatever the hell I like, how long I like, and with spaces if I like, and handle it like any other string - passwords, I accept, but anywhere else is just another way to waste my time going back and forth).
Every single clever system you think will avoid conflicts, won't. Every single automated system you think will make "easy to remember / guess" usernames, won't. Invariably, you will end up with having to make manual exceptions, which will also nicely screw up any fancy scripts you make to work on the basis of a naming system.
In schools, especially primaries, there is pressure to make short, simple usernames. First name only? Won't be long before you hit two "John"s. First name plus initial? Now you'll get John Smith and John Sergeant. I guarantee you.
Anything more complex and you have the inevitable result that one of the results will be unfortunate or even obscene. First four of surname, plus first two of first name? I GUARANTEE you that you will end up with a swear-word, or having to tell a user that their username is "different" to everyone else because otherwise it would end up with a swear-word (I have at least two members of staff at the moment who are literally a letter away from being very offensive, and I once had a child from a muslim family whose username came out to something like 'porcine', which I didn't think they'd like at all). And eventually you'll still find yourself making a smitjo2 or whatever.
Okay, so full-name on everything? Now you'll get someone like with a surname like "St Matthew-Daniels" who has the most horrendous email ever to type in correctly (and thus has to take the step of having an enforced rename to "Mr Daniels" or similar on everything from the classroom door to their email in order to make things sensible - imagine being a 7-year-old asked to go find Mr St Matthew-Daniels and not knowing who the hell that is because they all call him Mr Daniels).
No matter what system you choose, you'll get someone else with the same name. It's inevitable. If not now, then when one of the women gets married and takes her husband's name, or when X's older brother with the same surname and similar first name joins, or whatever. Just by random chance you'll get a collision that will mess up any fancy system. I have at least 20 Patel's in the school I work in at the moment, a handful of Smith's, and I used to get an awful lot of similar-spelled Vietnamese or Chinese names too.
So keep it simple. Use firstname.surname@company.tld and have done with it (if your company is tiny, you can get away with firstname@ for a while, but the rule above will apply just the same in the end).
It's easy to generate in Excel from a database for CSV import/export, it's easy to manage, you'll lessen the chance of collision as much as reasonably possible without getting stupid (e.g. middle name), and you'll have to deal with exceptions anyway - so just put out the lists in a simple format like that and then do whatever corrections you need to make later.
The GPL stops it happening WITHOUT SOURCE.
But to be honest, in some cases source from places like Microsoft (and even things like OpenOffice) has been given to people who then just go "Urgh, why would I want to use that?!". The first thing LibreOffice did when they got their hands on the OO code was to rip things out and start again, start removing Java dependencies, removing lots of obsolete junk, and replacing the really crap code.
The source alone is not sufficient to do this.
Imagine, if you will, Microsoft "contributing" to Samba - let's say they contribute a fully-compatible AD implementation, to take an example of something that's desired and highly-sought after and certainly in MS's power to deliver. Their changes are bound by the GPL, too.
But that doesn't mean that if they slapped in ten metric tons of crap into Samba that it would be accepted and pushed as-is, nor that it wouldn't create a "Microsoft-free" Samba to clean up the code while the "Microsoft-tainted" Samba provides functionality.
Or what if they've dropped in a load of code that makes Samba work better, but only compiles on/for Windows systems, or isn't 64-bit safe, or isn't thread-safe. Sure it's "progress", but is that useful to the project as a whole? Maybe you can sit down and clean it up and make it work as intended, or maybe the effort of doing so is worse than just writing it all again from scratch.
A code-drop is, in and of itself, only the very, very first part of the process of actually integrating code into a project. It's the "easy" bit, especially if you don't give a crap about code quality.
But the biggest danger, is that MS takes Git, adds proprietary extensions and then just code-dumps their changes and abandons them. Then you have a million people who wonder why your git server isn't compatible with their git client from Microsoft, why you don't "just get it working" (even if it does horrendous things like lets users delete git histories or needs to run as root or whatever), and your left to manage the mess for eternity even though you have nothing to do with MS themselves.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
We're at the first part. Same as we were for many, many, many ideas that Microsoft took (AD is the perfect example - a bastardised version of Kerberos, LDAP, that isn't compatible with anything else, which is why Samba 4.0 has to bundle it's OWN Kerberos, LDAP etc. servers that operate in the "Microsoft way").
Boeing, maybe.
But if the subcontractors did what was asked (just that what was asked wasn't precisely what was required), then they've done their job. Changes after the initial sign-off, even though your product matches the specs originally given? That's going to cost you big time.
And every time you change one, you affect all the other contractors and their changes affect you and so on. Hence costs spiral, and you end up with something that may not even be fit for purpose. But, hey, at least you can blame the contractors for not delivering a working final product, even though they did exactly what was asked.
Just ask the UK NHS IT contractors how that all works.
I would guess that if you stole, say, $6 worth of products from a store and got caught, they would charge you something similar, so yes it appears reasonable (unlike the "more than the earth is worth" fines that have been bandied about in other countries).
- Cost of the product (though whether you experienced "permanent deprivation" of that cost is dubious, I'd award it you anyway so that people who pirate $1000 pieces of software are $1000 times as fined as someone who pirated a $1 piece of software).
- Plus administrative fees.
- Plus legal costs once a denial has taken place in front of a tribunal and you're still found guilty.
- Plus a punitive damage for actually doing the naughty thing in the first place.
Seems to be the first SENSIBLE ruling in terms of copyright on the Internet in years, in fact.
And you've just given me one more reason to think that my policy of "turn it off" (since it was first put into a consumer OS) was correct.
"All we want to do is tell the fucking router that we'd like an open port. Why should that be so difficult?"
Because it's MY DAMN COMPUTER and network, that's why. And you have no need to open my ports. You can talk outwards, no problem at all, to any destination that will accept a connection. And most home routers will NOT accept a connection (you have to think of people who DON'T have UPnP enabled or compatible hardware too, or have software firewalls in the way as well, etc.). Why do I need to let traffic through other than what your servers have sanitised and handled for me?
The number of actual applications for UPnP is vanishingly small, and all solved by just running an intermediary server to handle connections which requires next-to-nothing in terms of resources (literally, a £10/month VPS would be overkill just for that, and most people that would need it have something like a website anyway that could run off the same machine).
And the simple examples of Skype/Steam show that there's NO NEED TO, whether joining gameservers or providing streaming video from both ends simultaneously, unless I'm deliberately setting up a network service that NEEDS to be accessible to the world. And if I can't figure out a port-forward interface on a router for that, maybe I shouldn't be doing it.
Opening a port really is old-hat, and not something that's worked reliably on any random machine/network for decades (You'll notice that things like TeamViewer etc. just run a local client and talk out to a accessible server, faffing with port-forwards just isn't worth the hassle). And there's no need to do it. And UPnP is a just way for it to happen automatically (whether it works or not is another matter) without any user say-so in it. If that isn't enough to scare you off having used it for the past decade, maybe you need to run a network or two and see what it means in real terms of impact upon what you need to do.
If your application NEEDS to open ports, run an intermediary server which is publicly accessible, secured, and only exposes that port necessary. If you haven't got the resources / brains to do that, I don't want you opening ports into my networks and personal computers anyway.
Seconded. This is the one of the best things about Opera - I don't get bogged down in junk or risk my computer on junky adverts loading because they "need" Flash.
I just click the play button that takes place of the Flash / Java / whatever plugin image if and when I want to view it and it loads and plays JUST THAT ONE.
Why would anybody use anything else? Hell, I can kill my modern laptop just scrolling too much down a popular image site (which just auto-loads more images as you go) and get to the point where the browser CRAWLS along by doing nothing more than looking at some images. God knows what it would be like for someone with a browser that loads every Flash video, plugin, etc. along the way.
Nah, sleep is closer to being a reboot or "fsync()" call. Your working memory (RAM) is doing things all day and if you're interrupted or disturbed, you can lose it. Sleep just syncs your data to more long-term storage if it's necessary, and discards all those temporary files you no longer need.
As you get older, committing things to memory takes longer as you have more things there to remember? I'm just guessing.
And to be honest, all the "old people" I know, get less sleep in their retirement than they ever have in their entire life (and thus tend to take early-morning walks, be up with the crows, listening to the radio late at night, etc.).
Women often rate pain they experienced during childbirth much lower after only a few hours.
The hormones that surge through the body after birth gives rise to a deliberate "memory wash" to make things seem as though they were less painful than they actually were at the time.
An evolutionary trick to ensure childbirth continues even though it is THE most stressful thing a human body will ever experience naturally.
I'm reading a book about memory at the moment, and this is one of the thing specifically mentioned. The book was written in the 90's and discusses research going back to the 70's, so this is hardly "news" (though that fact that it might be better proven or more specific now could be, but that's not what TFS says).
I have an interest in memory mainly because I suffer quite badly from a very peculiar memory defect (I won't pretend that it's been diagnosed by - or even mentioned to - a medical professional, but it's definitely there).
I have an atrocious memory. Everyone says so. I forget things all the time, forget birthdays, forget facts I was told years ago about whatever gossip was being talked about at the time, etc.
Funny, though, that I can remember pi to 32 decimal places without struggling, and only learned it because I was writing a program to calculate it by a series of diminishing fractions back when I was about 10, and have never needed to know it in any detail (certainly not to 32 places!) since. I can remember my 4th birthday. I can recite conversations that I've had months ago. I can remember all sorts of weird stuff and the EXACT same people who berate me for having a terrible memory often say "How the hell do you remember that? I didn't even remember the thing taking place and I was there!"
My problem is not memory. It's automatic memory acquisition and recall. Just being exposed to a fact won't make me remember it unless I find it interesting or I force myself to remember it (I know the number plate of a car my ex-father-in-law hired nearly 10 years ago for a family trip because we were booking into a hotel and I had to run outside, commit it to memory, and then recite it a minute later - it's STILL there). Without doing this deliberately I won't commit it to memory, and I can't be relied upon to recall it unless prompted.
And similarly, just knowing that at 3:00pm I have an urgent appointment won't make my brain trigger the recall. Even if I look at a clock. Even if I deliberately look at my schedule. Even if I then check mentally that I have nothing on that day so I can sign up for something else. It still just does not pop into my brain. But if at any point you ask me "What time was that appointment with X you had?" I would be able to tell you the time months in the future, and what we were supposed to discuss, in extraordinary detail.
My memory is PERFECT. It does exactly what I ask it to. But when it's not being used, it goes to sleep. It misses facts that it might be useful for me to remember unless I wake it up. And it will not "remind" me of anything, ever - it will always only do it after the event.
I function in society quite normally, but it's a real struggle and people don't see this, because of the ambiguity of my brain. I might not remember to come to your birthday party that I've been planning for months. But I will remember that crucial fact that you asked me to remember so long as YOU prompt me to give it to you at the required time.
I have tried every single possible system known to man of making myself be "reminded" of things in time. None of them work. Have my phone calendar beep? I'll forget to put the appointment in, I'll forget that I put my phone to silent, I'll cancel the beep when it does happen and then forget to check what it was, I'll read the calendar and know where I'm supposed to be in 5 minutes and then in 10 minutes find myself still sitting there having been distracted by something. You name it, the system won't work for me.
For a while I had systems such as "everything on the bottom step has to go upstairs next time I go there", because I was so sick and tired of having to keep going up and downstairs and getting there and an hour later realising I was supposed to be doing X (the thing I came downstairs for).
I still forgot to put things on the pile, or that the pile was supposed to be there (especially if I'd emptied it recently, the pile would be "forgotten" about until the next ti
I do love that the signs say "Secret Nuclear Bunker" on that particular one. I used to laugh every time I drove past on my way to work.
Why not just "Nuclear Bunker", or "Former Nuclear Bunker", as it's still only a tourist-attraction signpost anyway. Secret Nuclear Bunker just makes you laugh.
Unless that's the point - now we discussed it at least twice and people will think "Oh, I'll go and find that"...
1.2% efficient isn't bad for the first go at getting this effect with semiconductors though.
Hell, I bet early solar panels weren't even that efficient, and they are all over the world now.
You would need to get to about 50% efficiency to make them useful, though, but with no-moving parts and all the other advantages, probably even less than that would make them have practical application.
Well, put some of that semiconductor underneath the base plate, aim a 800W laser at it contained inside the device - depending on the speed the material loses heat at, it might be possible to make a "microwave freezer" that freezes (or at least cools) things in seconds.
Probably pie-in-the-sky because of some physical limit (i.e. it might take hours to cool no matter how much power you aim at it), but the "microwave freezer" has been an April Fool "hoax" on at least one BBC science programme (Tomorrow's World) that I fell for when I was younger and would have LOVED to have a device that did that.
If I can heat a meal to burning temperature in minutes, why can't I do the opposite too - reliably, cleanly, reproducibly, without consuming some resource that I would have to keep buying (except electricity, of course).
The applications of a clean "quick-freeze" device run from not just your freezer and fridge, but down to drinks makers, coolboxes, industrial cooling systems, even processor coolers and air-conditioning. I'm actually quite amazed that in this day and age our most common way of cooling things is still the evaporation/condensation cycle of some gas, or blowing air around it. It just seems too primitive in a "quantum" world.
Why can't you do that with an airliner? Maybe a car, but a car that's still running in 25 years is quite an achievement anyway.
On an airliner? Just basic operational procedure would mean that updates for fixes are common (physical or software) to fix ANY potential problem after YEARS of testing on identical systems deployed in test labs.
There's almost certainly a copy of a Boeing's internals at Boeing where they've done exactly this (e.g. test Y2K rollover to make sure it doesn't affect flightplan or autopilot) and they didn't risk a plane to do so.
25 years means none of your current desktops will still be running (it would be like running a ZX Spectrum as a business machine would be seen today). There might be embedded devices, but how many will go 25 years without a SINGLE test or upgrade or fix or replacement? Very, very, very few.
There isn't a network switch in the world deployed today that will still be around in 25 years untouched. It would literally be like finding out a ZX Spectrum was running vital parts of your business by being tucked away in a cupboard and forgotten about for 25 years and NOT ONE PERSON KNOWING.
"Imagine a mortgage amortization program projecting payments out into the future for a 30-year mortgage."
Well, that's a not-unreasonable example that almost certainly exists already, and seeing as we're only 25 years away - seems like the banks didn't really have any problems with that - at least, none they've advertised.
So the real question is: How big a problem is it really? Application software can trundle off and do what it likes and ignore the clocks it knows are wrong, and 64-bit time systems like are available today are carrying on quite happily.
Y2K was like this - doomsaying about how your mortgage would fail and your wages would stop. Sure, it could - theoretically - have caused problems. But only if your software managers in charge of those things were complete idiots in the first place (and using an app that was written in the 60's, unchanged, isn't an excuse and STILL makes you an idiot).
Y2.038K is definitely MORE of a problem. Definitely. But it's obviously not something that those with software that looks that far ahead are worried about at the moment. And in 25 years, in any of my current computers are still operational I will be incredibly impressed. If any of my computers NEXT YEAR aren't running 64-bit OS (whether or not they have 64-bit clocks) I will be slightly put out! So 25 years to move to 64-bit clocks? No problem.
It's not possible for humans to build something larger than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something stronger than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something that moves faster than them.
It's not possible for humans to build something to get to another planet.
It's not possible for humans to build something smarter than them.
I'm sure they've all been said in the past, in some way. Admittedly, probably millions of years ago in some cases but that's the way evolution works.
But, personally, I feel that brute-force on a simple model is entirely the wrong way to go about it, and that's what all modern "AI" seems to do. "Let's simplify a neuron, right now let's make a billion of them and join them together at the speed of light. Oh. Nothing happened". It doesn't make a brain.
I feel like we're cavemen who've seen a computer, were told it was made from sand and think that if they just make a realistic enough sandcastle that looks like a computer, they'll be able to play Doom on it.
The brain is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It has survived trial-by-fire countless billions of times. It is created by the process of being the only thing that was left over after billions and billions and billions of things affecting it, and has thus had its strength and abilities refined and honed over countless tests. Even the way the proteins from our DNA are arranged determine the initial brain structure and how it grows and are the product of evolution - none of us start with a "blank slate" or else things like reflexes wouldn't exist and we'd all have to learn "how to breathe" from scratch within minutes of being born or else we would die (which means virtually none of us would live).
In comparison, if we don't get results from an "AI" algorithm with a few months of computing time (no matter how many machines we throw behind it), we give up. Think how long it takes you to teach a child to speak, and they ARE equipped with the most intelligent brain that we know of.
We just cannot simulate things on the same scales - even the simplest brain has billions of neurons each with thousands or tens of thousands of connections that grow and die and are replaced over time. It's like having every person on the planet with a simple circuit in their hands, which has 10,000 off-board connectors on it, and they only have limited rules as to who they can connect to and not (so as to not put their intelligence into the system).
It's a scale we can't replicate on supercomputers or even huge worldwide networks of people - it's literally still in the pie-in-the-sky territory of experiment, like trying to get the world population to jump up at the same time.
And that's for quite a simple brain. Now we carry out that experiment for a year, constantly, doing nothing else and we might have the intelligence of, say, a small mammal or (extremely unlikely) 1-year-old baby. If we started out with a PERFECT set of rules, exposure of inputs/outputs to the environment, etc. (which, as I've pointed out, probably is the most important part of our brain - the data we start with, inherent in its very structure and creation by our DNA etc.).
It doesn't matter how fast you get, or what you do, the scale is still out by orders of magnitude to "simulate" even an insect brain which has undergone hundreds of millions of years of evolution to "kickstart" it with the right data and connections.
And yet we think we can stray from pure logic into a seriously simplified "neural network", run it for a few months on a supercomputer and do anything more impressive than an insect could do if we really understood its brain (even the smallest of insects is doing vision - in some sense - pattern-recognition, path-finding, flock/hive characteristics, reproduction, chemical sensing, and putting it all together to stay alive - if we knew how to tap into the brain to get the data we needed, an insect would probably put any "AI" example you've ever
If the threat of the police coming to look at what you've done is enough to make you sign something, you were doing something you knew was wrong in any case.
At worst it's probably only a civil matter anyway, and the police would have said to file some criminal charges or stop wasting their time. But even if they did file charges or arrest you, it would have then come up in court that you were being "forced" to sign the paper or face the consequences - which in most jurisdictions would even be classed as blackmail ("Sign over your house to me, or I'll tell the cops that you hit your wife last night" - it's no different - and though there is a secondary crime involved, the court is much more likely to look on the charges against you with some suspicion. Hell, chances are the only evidence against you would be "contaminated" by such a charge from your accuser and would never be admissible in any court, ever again)
There's a difference between being offered something advantageous and being told that you'll have something disadvantageous happen to you if you don't. One's "bribery", one's "blackmail".
The simpler rule? Never sign anything. Honestly. Just don't. If you want to read all the legalese and all the implications and know all the case surrounding the court's accepted interpretation of such contracts etc. then you might stand half a chance. But otherwise, you don't. That's why you hire lawyers, to do that stuff for you. In my country you don't buy a house without a lawyer involved, even if you could do it yourself - because you have no way of knowing what you're actually signing up to.
Never sign anything. Certainly never sign anything under pressure. And the more pressure you're under, the less you sign. Even the law recognises that agreeing to a contract is something that a party should do on their own time and at their own pace, there's just too much to weigh up.
Certainly, never sign anything that looks out of the everyday and "legal" without a lawyer. An NDA comes under those definitions where, say, a parcel acceptance at your front door might not.
And teach this to your kids because, come 18, or 16, or whatever the local age is, they are able to sign LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACTS. They could literally sign a contract that they'd give all their life's earnings to a charity and it would be binding (without going to court to prove it was unfair in the first place, which is a point you NEVER want to reach, even if you think you'll win).
If you can sign a marriage register, or a mortgage application, and it is a legal contract, you can sign your life away by signing the wrong thing (e.g. army sign-up form, etc.) and although a court may EVENTUALLY agree with you and get you out of it, you do not want to have to take it that far, just from a sheer time-and-expense angle.
"only 20" = not a kid. Fully grown, legal, contract-obliged, come-of-age adult in just about every civilisation and jurisdiction known to man. By at least 2 years, I should think, in most places.
I lack empathy for idiots, who sign things under (alleged) duress, and then break them anyway. If you were going to break it, don't sign it. If you're threatened with the POLICE, of all things, let them come - phone them your damn self. Because either you did something wrong (and know it), or someone else did by threatening you with the police.
If he'd signed a mortgage, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed a marriage register, it would be legally binding. If he signed a statement that he beat his wife, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed a hire agreement on his car, it would be legally binding. If he'd signed an alimony agreement to feed his kids, it would be legally binding.
At absolute worst, he should have just called in his parents at that stage if he's that much of a child. But he is NOT a child. In my country, he's been able to have his own family and house for four years, sign legal contracts for that time, etc. etc. etc. In some countries, only for two.
And the second you're old enough to sign legally-binding contracts, you're judged - in law - to know whether or not you should be signing them, and competent enough of understanding to abide by them.
20. He's bloody 20. Not 15. 20. He is NOT a child, even if he's still a student.
He just acts like one.
So the USSR is on the trade-embargoes list too? (Er... no... it's not).
The US itself put nuclear weapons in the EU in case of the USSR attacking, and although they are an "ally" to the EU, I don't see any of the former Russian states initiating embargoes with the EU countries or the US, now or in the past?
And where embargoes exist, or have existed since the Cold War, they are usually aimed purely at the thing you want to embargo (i.e. nuclear weapons, like the UK embargoed India). A blanket trade embargo is someone throwing their toys out of the pram, not a sensible real-world solution, and is usually only temporary until a government settles into power.
And the US-Cuba embargo was started in 1960. Most of the legislators who decided on the embargo aren't even around any more. My entire life was lived in that time, with nearly two decades to spare. Wars were fought and won.
The US is a playground bully that embargoes countries that don't play by its terms. It has little or no real-world relevance to their security, or anything else.
Cuba are about as much a threat to the US as Argentina is to UK. And, hell, technically we went to war with Argentina for an invasion of UK-owned islands in the intervening decades, fought it, declared peace and several decades later are being cautious about a potential re-occurrence. But we still don't even trade-embargo them.
And, technically, the embargo has NEVER been about that. It was about human rights, trade debts, and the nationalisation of US citizens' property in the country. The Missile Crisis came years later, and was resolved within days.
Let's punish countries for things they did up to 60+ years ago with their own allies that actually hurt no-one, and punish them even when the problem goes away. Because there'd be an AWFUL lot of countries up shit creek if we did that.
And, the thing is, nobody has ANY idea whose has missiles and where they could be aimed at nowadays. Nobody. Hell, that was the whole "WMD" farce in a nutshell - a false positive. And most modern weapons could take out anyone, anywhere, without warning. By the standards applied, the US should either a) invade Cuba or b) trade-embargo every country in the world. The threat was always the USSR, never Cuba itself.
Notice that no other countries embargo Cuba. Not even the US allies. That says a lot. And no country in the world has had an embargo in place for as long.