processors and sub systems have gotten a lot faster since then.
i know, cheap ethernet interfaces are slower than the fastest cards out there, but your experience, from many years back when a 800 mhz cpu was fast, are a bit dated. a 100 MB file shouldn't take long enough to download from a file server even with a cheap nic unless there is a performance issue with the file server in question. 100 megabytes shouldn't take more than a few seconds to transfer across a lan.
in theory a 100 mbit lan should take 8 seconds to transfer a 100 megabyte file. in theory a 1000 mbit lan should only take.8 seconds. obviously file IO limitations do apply. if your hard drive can only do 80 mbit, and only on the start of the drive it's going to take longer.
well, fiber optics are pretty awesome, the advances in the field of fiber optics is frankly amazing. the drive for increasing network bandwidth are deeper, though. the telephone industry was rapidly expanding thanks to dial up modems, and there was this big huge copper shortage they were looking at, so they starting investing heavily into research on how they could 'fix' the problem for once and for all, and the solution was to dig up and recycle the POTS lines built on analog telephone networks and recycle them, and replace them with high speed fiber optic data networks. based on cheap, glass fiber technology. although eventually they figured out ways to use more flexible materials.
the same technology advances that led to the compact disc lead to fiber optic technology, and once fiber optics got started, they figured out how to double the capacity of lines over and over again and again. this is how 'unlimited' long distance became affordable, and how the internet avoided complete collapse.
but it costs money to lay fiber optics, and there needs to be a revenue stream to cover those costs. downloading content for free, using peer to peer technologies doesn't provide a revenue stream to roll out huge data networks. so there is a problem with the way technology has advanced, and why it advanced in the first place.
bandwidth sucking applications like steam help cover the costs of the networks because they have to pay for their upload, but some warez torrents of the same games put heavy load on the network, without a revenue stream other than 'consumer broadband subscribers' and consumers are the first to balk at high prices.
you do realize, that 18v battery is a series of 3 volt batteries right?
lithium ion batteries don't come above 3.2 volts. they simply can't get them past that voltage, so 4-cell li-ion batteries can go to 12 volts, and a 6 cell battery gives you 18 volts.
in theory a smart battery controller can charge one cell at a time from a trickle solar charger. it just depends, does the battery controller have the logic to trickle charge or not.
"The problem is that almost NOBODY is doing this."
i admit, I'm kinda lazy and i've only converted one relatives computer to linux, and i didn't bother to show them how to add software.
but ubuntu is growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time. there are people out there exposing 'the populace' to linux. although, personally i like kubuntu a lot better. mainly because the system i'm typing on now had a under supported GPU, yeah they're motherboard graphix, but it works fine for all my old games (and i have a lot of old games for windows) but i like linux for internet usage, when i'm not playing games.
speaking of games, the one person i switched to linux, likes the sudoku game that comes on linux. mark shuttleworth has a plan for linux, and i like what he's been doing so far. as long as the government doesn't mandate trusted computing, linux is looking more and more like the 'microsoft' killer.
better yet, let's just send them a swab of our genetic markers.
when billions of people have been tested, we'll realize just how likely the basic forms of testing are of having actual duplicates, instead of just trusting prosecutors, who love the 'smoking gun' of DNA matches.
"What do we need to get this project off the ground?"
first, you need to weed out the pansies who say 'killing people, for trying to make a living sending commercial e-mail, that's horrible'
secondly, you need a large budget and specialized training in invading hostile territory and killing possibly armed men in ambushes and guerrilla tactics. remember not all spam originates from the united states.
since you'll never get both of the above, you're left with technical and legal counter measures... which ultimately just doesn't work.
how many times have you gotten a call from a telemarketer? during dinner? there are (or were) laws against machine dialing apparatus here in the USA, but then some wiener designed a computer modem, and the downfall was quick, it was now quick and easy to use stock parts to auto dial and even give people pre-recorded messages over telephone.
spam ultimately is suffering the problem that much to the technology involved has substantial other uses besides spamming, so spammers get free reign. captchas did make a difference in the arms race. for a while. but now captchas are obsolete. they don't work they can't be fixed, and you're never going to get a really good test for determining a human from a bot..
simple distorted words aren't good enough, what you need to do, is switch to something humans are insanely good at that machines can't even be coded for. puns and homonyms. so basically what you wind up with is say a paragraph of text, with a single sentence response from the end user.
but even this will wind up getting cracked, unless you come up with a way of distorting the paragraphs slightly without changing the response from users, so they can't just match the paragraph to the answer... but this is a lot of work, to get a sophisticated captcha system based on a database of giving one paragraph of text and expecting a one line response that is obvious to a human but not to bot and reuse them but always with something different done to the paragraph. and even with such a hard test, the free porn sites give free access to a porn site for answering 5 captchas, teenagers have a lot of hormones and loads of free time...
i know microsoft and yahoo and google don't like the fact that spam originates from their networks, because spammers broke their captchas... but the problem isn't going away. there is no way to make it better. compuserve tried to curtail spam by having 'electronic postage' on sending e-mail, compuserve eventually went under. but electronic postage is realistically the only way spam will ever be controllable without killing all the spammers, because if it costs $0.15 cents per e-mail recipient they're going to suddenly get very good at figuring out who responds to spam. just like bulk mail comes to people based on information companies can find out about them.
and there are countless people who would be angry at paying to e-mail people. so it's not going to happen.
you sound like you'd be happier with xubuntu and vi in a terminal.
i've never had firefox 2 or 3 crash, then again i'm running noscript so silverlight the primary cause of firefox 3 crashes is blocked entirely.
as for open office, i've never had that crash ever, but it is bloated. but there is a nice program called nano which is a pico clone. you don't even need a windowed environment, to use it. getting it to work on windows involves a bit of bloat, but nobody said you had to run windows, now did they?
perhaps you should just get damn small linux and be happy. there are a lot of useful programs in damn small linux, and the whole thing takes less than 50 megabytes. it's pretty snappy, too.
or if you're feeling adventurous there is always building linux from scratch. since you compiled and built it, everything in there can meet your needs of small and efficient... and maybe even find second life for some horribly obsolete system that can't access more than a few megabytes of hard disk space. compact flash to ide adaptors are a good fit for restoring old machines, due to the small volume size of CF cards.
the main point is, there are highly efficient and streamlined applications. most people want 'feature rich applications' notepad might be great for some people, but for some the ability to load more than 2 MB of text is important. there are always trade offs between features and performance, the trick is getting the 'killer' must have features and avoiding bloated features users don't want.
in some ways browser 'add-ons' are a way of copping out for mozilla, on the one hand add-ons have tons of features users request, on the other hand they keep the main engine more streamlined by making users add and install add-ons. so people who just want a browser can just use firefox, and people who want something that can slice, dice, and make julian fries, well they can just search for the right add-on.. metaphorically speaking.
well, the best solution is to keep watching as much light from around the universe for as long as possible, until enough data is collected that we know every single possible bit of data about what's happening in as much of the universe as we can observe.
computers and advanced optics are making incredible views of the universe that once would have required a giant floating space telescope. only here on earth, as this technology matures we'll have so much more observational data available which will make it a lit easier to decide what is happening with light.
sadly, it's not quite that easy, trademarks are easily denied. however a the IOC is given a lot more room for trademarking that normal people and corporations don't have. also, it cost money to trademark 'everything' it's not quite like copyright where you can copyright 5000 pages for the same price as copyrighting 1 page, at least as far as i know it isn't cheaper to trademark a whole lot of phrases all at once,
they have to make money after all, if they gave a big discount for mass trademarking then where would the revenue come from? apparently to go global with a trademark, that is a separate filing as well..
"Is my trademark registration valid outside the United States? No. However, if you are a qualified owner of a trademark application pending before the USPTO, or of a registration issued by the USPTO, you may seek registration in any of the countries that have joined the Madrid Protocol by filing a single application, called an "international application," with the he International Bureau of the World Property Intellectual Organization, through the USPTO."
and sometimes, the motherboard bios itself loads buggy tables when it 'detects' linux rather than using the same tables it uses for windows. causing all manner of stability problems and issues. some companies just don't care if their motherboard runs linux, they might even be taking money to make linux look bad from microsoft.
see here's the thing cloud computing has really only taken off with end users. webmail, facebook, myspace... the list goes on and on... companies like security, they like keeping things simple, and they certainly don't trust confidential data they can be sued over for leaking with anyone who isn't in house.
and here's the thing, for the longest time point of sale credit transactions all went over POTS lines to computers deep inside some sort of credit card transaction centers... but now, they've moved to sending them over 'always on' internet connections and since then, hackers have been getting into more and more computer systems and grabbing more and more credit card numbers...
everyone from gas stations to grocery stores are getting their systems hacked and valuable credit card data is getting stolen. all of which could easily be prevented with a a nice hardened firewall and only allowing the actual ports that the system uses.
home users can get the same level of security with smoothwall linux which is free as in beer, companies can buy their commercial firewall product, it's not a bad price for what you get. sadly, i've read 'online' guides on how to 'configure' hardened firewalls that is clearly put there by hackers because the instruction include opening every single type of connection both ways! that would be like relying on windows firewall, which does the same.
cloud computing in nothing more than managed colocation services. or sophisticated hosting services..
coming up with another name for it, is silly, it is marketing, yeah they're using the hosting to allow some people to put their own data up on the internet, but most of the 'cloud' computing services are just managed colo services, with an interface to manage your servers and database etc.
i mean, there is nothing wrong with say using colocation services to let people put up their own content, but giving it a new fancy name, and trying to market it as something separate is fundamentally silly.
"Someone who is much better at poker than the people he's playing with will come out ahead in the long term, assuming that nobody's cheating."
but these were high stakes tables, with professional poker players and people who are good at playing poker, perhaps good enough to get interrogated in vegas for winning too much, while they search em for a computer or other cheating aids..
if you're not good at poker, you shouldn't be playing at a high stakes table.. especially when the same sites have penny ante tables and some even have 'free' games with no wagers, just to attract more poker players.
and i read the article on this about a week ago, when Kentucky took over numerous gambling site domain names by court order... i said it was foolish to gable on line, and the reason KY took away the domains was the sites were crooked and cheated players.. and someone linked to an article about how players were cheating gambling sites, only this new article exposed that the 'cheaters' were actually 'employees' fleecing their high stakes players.
anyways, it's very hard to stop cheating in online gambling, because it's not legal to run gambling sites in the USA, so people host them offshore, then advertise to people in the states etc.
"Also, it was a "generally well known fact" when cars were invented that going above 50 mph would cause the driver's lungs to collapse from wind pressure,"
I call bullshit. there's something called a hurricane that cause wind speeds above 100 miles per hour ever single year. the highest recorded wind speed in a hurricane is 194 miles per hour.
oh and BTW, the windshield is necessary to allow a human driver to continue breathing at today's highway speeds. it's very hard to properly exhale at 50-60 mph.
well in the experiment in question 50% of the matter 'disappeared' or in other words was converted to energy. a standard fission reactor is converting ounces of matter into energy.
in other words, we're talking about an explosion about 350,000 times larger than hiroshima. i think that's enough energy to crack the earth in half. on the plus side, they were working with rubidium-85, not super fluid liquid helium, oh yeah, and they got the temperature all the way down to 3 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. the abstract does say that liquid helium doesn't have a chance in hell of becoming attractive, as well.
also, in order for half of it to 'disappear' all of the liquid helium would have to become attractive, so i doubt that even if the condition became favorable that enough helium would become attractive to make any big bang... we got a 2 month extension in case the scientist at cert are wrong about helium, and enough of it could become active for enough of it to to convert to energy to create a big enough of an explosion.
i've been a fan of ATI for a long time, there was a time where i tried out nvidia, but i picked the wrong company, and it tainted my feelings about nvidia's approach to letting other people make the cards while they make the chips. since then i've been using ati in everything except systems where price was more of a factor. but given the news against nvidia, i probably won't be building any nvidia systems ever again.
then again i haven't had many people have me build them systems lately, and it's not just the economy, it's because they'd rather get systems fast and cheap at the computer center than wait for me to hand select quality parts and build them a system that never has serious issues.
i had the same problem with fast food work, they always want to know why you weren't promoted to management.
ultimately though in my case, i don't handle people or stress very well, and wouldn't have done a great job in the type of jobs i didn't get hired to.
then again i have a mental illness, and in retrospect a lot of problems in my life all stem back to early signs of mental illness that doctors ignored, or that i managed to seem normal enough they doctors didn't think it was a serious mental illness. ironically at many of the places i applied for work at, their in house psychological profiles most likely indicated i had some mental problems, and they never even bothered to disclose to me any findings..
but going without medication it was just a matter of time before i had a serious hospitalization spanning some 4 months.. and then another 6 months in group homes. at that point the doctors acknowledged i had a problem. sadly i am in no shape to earn a living for myself even with medication, but because i had some doctors who thought i should be working i got denied twice for benefits. the types of jobs i can hold down for a year or two before being fired don't pay enough to even cover basic living expenses... not to mention getting fired every 2 years isn't a good way to be employed. and i would get fired every 2 years then spend 2-3 months looking for work, it's just sad that the doctors etc couldn't even ask me about how my work history had gone in the past before thinking i should be working. the most income i have ever made in a year was 6,000 my average is around $3,000 and lately i haven't been able to handle earning $2,000 a year, it's gotten worse with time, and i really can't handle a job.
right now since the disability thing is in appeal i haven't even tried to work, not just because i know i can't handle it, but because you can't work if you want to get on disability, no matter how pathetic the work might be.
webcams are different from fixed focal length cameras.
most fixed focal length cameras are set to infinity. that means if you take a close range picture it's all blurry, beyond the ability of fast recognition. if the camera has higher resolution, the less the blur affects the recognition by software.
most webcams are set to a focal length of a few feet, or come with auto focus, or manual focus..
so a webcam can be lower res and have better image recognition, oh yeah and a laptop has a lot more processing power than a phone. that makes a huge speed difference.
also with higher resolution you can take the picture farther away, and still have enough pixels, it is true there are scanner apps for the iphone, but most likely they have compromised between speed and ability to read blurred photos.
given the track record of the government during dubba's presidency, giving a private corporation $280 million to do nothing would be minor. after all they've spent Trillions of dollars on iraq, and are floating a 700 billion golden parachute for mortgage backed securities. without addressing the fundamental problem that lead to the failure of Mortgage backed securities and without helping people keep the homes they borrowed against...
i mean, he's such a generous guy giving his circle of friends trillions of dollars....
you're missing the point. even if google and her telco partners screw it up, you can still make a google g1 appstore app and a website and everytime people scan an item with the g1 they give a location and price, and in return they get a list of locations and prices near them.
even if google screws it up, anyone willing to becoem an android developer can fix it. except for 1 thing. the cost of using all the bandwidth this is going to take...
well, you don't have to send the photo, so what you send is a 10 digit number (actually 12 digits, 10 weren't enough) then a price (probably less than 10 digits, i don't think yachts come with barcodes) then a location, less than 2 120 character lines. to make it simple for users just have a postal code and a small name field. it would be nice if on starting the name of a place a 'suggestion' list showed up like with the google toolbar... so people can just click it and not need to remember everything...
so the amount of bandwidth is trivial, a few k to send, and a few k in the receive. maybe more if the product is available from hundreds of locations, perhaps you only send the first 4 and a 'more' button and have 'by price' 'by location' search optimizations...
a little bit of coding work, it's not rocket science the hard part is getting local people to put the data in to get people to start using it... if you're starting off with 1 city, you can go around to supermarkets and do it yourself while beta testing the app..
" That's fair play under the rules of capitalism."
'Is it? This is not free competition in an open market with a free flow of information. This is specifically targetting and trying to undo deals for the acquisition of a competitor's products using backroom machinations, bribes, and threats. Anti-trust legislation exists for a reason: to avoid cartels and monopolies and allow an open market to function and thereby protect the consumer. Some rules that are enforced are required. Unfortunately, monopolist corporate power in the US is such that rules have hardly been enforced.'
while you have some nice ideas in there, there are two big things you're missing. #1 capitalism
"Capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are owned by private persons, and operated for profit[1] and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are predominantly determined through the operation of a free market or in a regulated market."
doesn't say anything about fairness, other than 'regulated market' which infers government intervention because there is no inherent fairness in capitalism, so the government must provide the fairness.
#2 Anti-trust regulations, particularly in the USA.
anti-trust laws have only as many teeth, as the government gives them. the laws are specifically weak and vague, only congress can order the break up of a monopoly... and congress has done this exactly twice. #1 railroads this was way back when the government had balls, and men were men, and dirty business wasn't kosher in Washington DC. they totally screwed up the entire railroad system, by totally castrating anyone who wanted to get rich off railroads. it's their fault that 'every american' needs a fucking car, but i digress. secondly they broke up ma bell. this was done when congress had some teeth, but had already been castrated and were mainly worried that the break-up didn't screw over the telecom industry the way the railroad break up did. they did this one right, but sadly by the time it came up to microsoft's turn at the plate, congress was now ball-less and toothless so they gave people a $25 dollar coupon on the purchase of microsoft products, and gave microsoft yet another committee this one made up of college professors and what not.
so you can see, anti-trust law in the USA is a weak as the government is corrupt. maybe this is a good thing, considering how they dropped the ball on railroads. i can guarantee you if railroad tycoons had not had their empires made into amtrack cars would be less popular than they are now. trains have huge performance and economy of scale benefits, and commercial trucking might have been playing second fiddle to a second or third generation railroad monopoly.
"i'm simply saying that the trait you're describing is a universal _human_ trait,"
you've never met a 30 year old with the intelligence of a 2 year old have you?
my aunt and uncle both worked with the developmentally disabled and i can tell you right now, greed is a LEARNED behavior. people without the capacity to learn don't even understand that other people can lie and cheat them, or even how to take care of their personal needs. this is why they wind up institutionalized.
i can 100% guarantee you greed is not hard wired into the brain. learned traits can be suppressed, at least by healthy people.
in order for something to be a universal trait it must be hard wired into the brain or the DNA of EVERY human being. greed, a vice, is not universal. your argument that 'everyone is greedy' is a justification for your own person misbehavior. it's like some sick justification for rape like 'everyone wants to have sex.' or maybe more like 'justifying' the removal of mountain tops to burn coal because 'everyone wants cheap electricity.'
you're justifying greed. plain and simple, justification is just one way of circumventing having a sensible superego. you're bypassing part of your own brains internal functions designed to make society work. it just makes me wonder what the hell you do with your time that you're filling your superego full of trash like "everyone would steal from their child's educational future if they knew they could make $100 cash off the deal"
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processors and sub systems have gotten a lot faster since then.
i know, cheap ethernet interfaces are slower than the fastest cards out there, but your experience, from many years back when a 800 mhz cpu was fast, are a bit dated. a 100 MB file shouldn't take long enough to download from a file server even with a cheap nic unless there is a performance issue with the file server in question. 100 megabytes shouldn't take more than a few seconds to transfer across a lan.
in theory a 100 mbit lan should take 8 seconds to transfer a 100 megabyte file. in theory a 1000 mbit lan should only take .8 seconds. obviously file IO limitations do apply. if your hard drive can only do 80 mbit, and only on the start of the drive it's going to take longer.
"Let's party like it's 2038!"
There, fixed that for you!
well, fiber optics are pretty awesome, the advances in the field of fiber optics is frankly amazing. the drive for increasing network bandwidth are deeper, though. the telephone industry was rapidly expanding thanks to dial up modems, and there was this big huge copper shortage they were looking at, so they starting investing heavily into research on how they could 'fix' the problem for once and for all, and the solution was to dig up and recycle the POTS lines built on analog telephone networks and recycle them, and replace them with high speed fiber optic data networks. based on cheap, glass fiber technology. although eventually they figured out ways to use more flexible materials.
the same technology advances that led to the compact disc lead to fiber optic technology, and once fiber optics got started, they figured out how to double the capacity of lines over and over again and again. this is how 'unlimited' long distance became affordable, and how the internet avoided complete collapse.
but it costs money to lay fiber optics, and there needs to be a revenue stream to cover those costs. downloading content for free, using peer to peer technologies doesn't provide a revenue stream to roll out huge data networks. so there is a problem with the way technology has advanced, and why it advanced in the first place.
bandwidth sucking applications like steam help cover the costs of the networks because they have to pay for their upload, but some warez torrents of the same games put heavy load on the network, without a revenue stream other than 'consumer broadband subscribers' and consumers are the first to balk at high prices.
you do realize, that 18v battery is a series of 3 volt batteries right?
lithium ion batteries don't come above 3.2 volts. they simply can't get them past that voltage, so 4-cell li-ion batteries can go to 12 volts, and a 6 cell battery gives you 18 volts.
in theory a smart battery controller can charge one cell at a time from a trickle solar charger. it just depends, does the battery controller have the logic to trickle charge or not.
"The problem is that almost NOBODY is doing this."
i admit, I'm kinda lazy and i've only converted one relatives computer to linux, and i didn't bother to show them how to add software.
but ubuntu is growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time. there are people out there exposing 'the populace' to linux. although, personally i like kubuntu a lot better. mainly because the system i'm typing on now had a under supported GPU, yeah they're motherboard graphix, but it works fine for all my old games (and i have a lot of old games for windows) but i like linux for internet usage, when i'm not playing games.
speaking of games, the one person i switched to linux, likes the sudoku game that comes on linux. mark shuttleworth has a plan for linux, and i like what he's been doing so far. as long as the government doesn't mandate trusted computing, linux is looking more and more like the 'microsoft' killer.
better yet, let's just send them a swab of our genetic markers.
when billions of people have been tested, we'll realize just how likely the basic forms of testing are of having actual duplicates, instead of just trusting prosecutors, who love the 'smoking gun' of DNA matches.
"What do we need to get this project off the ground?"
first, you need to weed out the pansies who say 'killing people, for trying to make a living sending commercial e-mail, that's horrible'
secondly, you need a large budget and specialized training in invading hostile territory and killing possibly armed men in ambushes and guerrilla tactics. remember not all spam originates from the united states.
since you'll never get both of the above, you're left with technical and legal counter measures... which ultimately just doesn't work.
how many times have you gotten a call from a telemarketer? during dinner? there are (or were) laws against machine dialing apparatus here in the USA, but then some wiener designed a computer modem, and the downfall was quick, it was now quick and easy to use stock parts to auto dial and even give people pre-recorded messages over telephone.
spam ultimately is suffering the problem that much to the technology involved has substantial other uses besides spamming, so spammers get free reign. captchas did make a difference in the arms race. for a while. but now captchas are obsolete. they don't work they can't be fixed, and you're never going to get a really good test for determining a human from a bot..
simple distorted words aren't good enough, what you need to do, is switch to something humans are insanely good at that machines can't even be coded for. puns and homonyms. so basically what you wind up with is say a paragraph of text, with a single sentence response from the end user.
but even this will wind up getting cracked, unless you come up with a way of distorting the paragraphs slightly without changing the response from users, so they can't just match the paragraph to the answer... but this is a lot of work, to get a sophisticated captcha system based on a database of giving one paragraph of text and expecting a one line response that is obvious to a human but not to bot and reuse them but always with something different done to the paragraph. and even with such a hard test, the free porn sites give free access to a porn site for answering 5 captchas, teenagers have a lot of hormones and loads of free time...
i know microsoft and yahoo and google don't like the fact that spam originates from their networks, because spammers broke their captchas... but the problem isn't going away. there is no way to make it better. compuserve tried to curtail spam by having 'electronic postage' on sending e-mail, compuserve eventually went under. but electronic postage is realistically the only way spam will ever be controllable without killing all the spammers, because if it costs $0.15 cents per e-mail recipient they're going to suddenly get very good at figuring out who responds to spam. just like bulk mail comes to people based on information companies can find out about them.
and there are countless people who would be angry at paying to e-mail people. so it's not going to happen.
you sound like you'd be happier with xubuntu and vi in a terminal.
i've never had firefox 2 or 3 crash, then again i'm running noscript so silverlight the primary cause of firefox 3 crashes is blocked entirely.
as for open office, i've never had that crash ever, but it is bloated. but there is a nice program called nano which is a pico clone. you don't even need a windowed environment, to use it. getting it to work on windows involves a bit of bloat, but nobody said you had to run windows, now did they?
perhaps you should just get damn small linux and be happy. there are a lot of useful programs in damn small linux, and the whole thing takes less than 50 megabytes. it's pretty snappy, too.
or if you're feeling adventurous there is always building linux from scratch. since you compiled and built it, everything in there can meet your needs of small and efficient... and maybe even find second life for some horribly obsolete system that can't access more than a few megabytes of hard disk space. compact flash to ide adaptors are a good fit for restoring old machines, due to the small volume size of CF cards.
the main point is, there are highly efficient and streamlined applications. most people want 'feature rich applications' notepad might be great for some people, but for some the ability to load more than 2 MB of text is important. there are always trade offs between features and performance, the trick is getting the 'killer' must have features and avoiding bloated features users don't want.
in some ways browser 'add-ons' are a way of copping out for mozilla, on the one hand add-ons have tons of features users request, on the other hand they keep the main engine more streamlined by making users add and install add-ons. so people who just want a browser can just use firefox, and people who want something that can slice, dice, and make julian fries, well they can just search for the right add-on.. metaphorically speaking.
well, the best solution is to keep watching as much light from around the universe for as long as possible, until enough data is collected that we know every single possible bit of data about what's happening in as much of the universe as we can observe.
computers and advanced optics are making incredible views of the universe that once would have required a giant floating space telescope. only here on earth, as this technology matures we'll have so much more observational data available which will make it a lit easier to decide what is happening with light.
sadly, it's not quite that easy, trademarks are easily denied. however a the IOC is given a lot more room for trademarking that normal people and corporations don't have. also, it cost money to trademark 'everything' it's not quite like copyright where you can copyright 5000 pages for the same price as copyrighting 1 page, at least as far as i know it isn't cheaper to trademark a whole lot of phrases all at once,
they have to make money after all, if they gave a big discount for mass trademarking then where would the revenue come from? apparently to go global with a trademark, that is a separate filing as well..
"Is my trademark registration valid outside the United States?
No. However, if you are a qualified owner of a trademark application pending before the USPTO, or of a registration issued by the USPTO, you may seek registration in any of the countries that have joined the Madrid Protocol by filing a single application, called an "international application," with the he International Bureau of the World Property Intellectual Organization, through the USPTO."
and sometimes, the motherboard bios itself loads buggy tables when it 'detects' linux rather than using the same tables it uses for windows. causing all manner of stability problems and issues. some companies just don't care if their motherboard runs linux, they might even be taking money to make linux look bad from microsoft.
see here's the thing cloud computing has really only taken off with end users. webmail, facebook, myspace... the list goes on and on... companies like security, they like keeping things simple, and they certainly don't trust confidential data they can be sued over for leaking with anyone who isn't in house.
and here's the thing, for the longest time point of sale credit transactions all went over POTS lines to computers deep inside some sort of credit card transaction centers... but now, they've moved to sending them over 'always on' internet connections and since then, hackers have been getting into more and more computer systems and grabbing more and more credit card numbers...
everyone from gas stations to grocery stores are getting their systems hacked and valuable credit card data is getting stolen. all of which could easily be prevented with a a nice hardened firewall and only allowing the actual ports that the system uses.
home users can get the same level of security with smoothwall linux which is free as in beer, companies can buy their commercial firewall product, it's not a bad price for what you get. sadly, i've read 'online' guides on how to 'configure' hardened firewalls that is clearly put there by hackers because the instruction include opening every single type of connection both ways! that would be like relying on windows firewall, which does the same.
cloud computing in nothing more than managed colocation services. or sophisticated hosting services..
coming up with another name for it, is silly, it is marketing, yeah they're using the hosting to allow some people to put their own data up on the internet, but most of the 'cloud' computing services are just managed colo services, with an interface to manage your servers and database etc.
i mean, there is nothing wrong with say using colocation services to let people put up their own content, but giving it a new fancy name, and trying to market it as something separate is fundamentally silly.
"Someone who is much better at poker than the people he's playing with will come out ahead in the long term, assuming that nobody's cheating."
but these were high stakes tables, with professional poker players and people who are good at playing poker, perhaps good enough to get interrogated in vegas for winning too much, while they search em for a computer or other cheating aids..
if you're not good at poker, you shouldn't be playing at a high stakes table.. especially when the same sites have penny ante tables and some even have 'free' games with no wagers, just to attract more poker players.
and i read the article on this about a week ago, when Kentucky took over numerous gambling site domain names by court order... i said it was foolish to gable on line, and the reason KY took away the domains was the sites were crooked and cheated players.. and someone linked to an article about how players were cheating gambling sites, only this new article exposed that the 'cheaters' were actually 'employees' fleecing their high stakes players.
anyways, it's very hard to stop cheating in online gambling, because it's not legal to run gambling sites in the USA, so people host them offshore, then advertise to people in the states etc.
the cheapest solution is a $10 usb 2.0 controller. http://www1.pricewatch.com/public/info2.aspx?i=44&z=2988&ro=2&aid=32983822&u=http%3A%2F%2F3btech.net%2Fadaufopousb2.html
since the motherboards usb is buggy, this $10 fix will solve the problem.
"Also, it was a "generally well known fact" when cars were invented that going above 50 mph would cause the driver's lungs to collapse from wind pressure,"
I call bullshit. there's something called a hurricane that cause wind speeds above 100 miles per hour ever single year. the highest recorded wind speed in a hurricane is 194 miles per hour.
oh and BTW, the windshield is necessary to allow a human driver to continue breathing at today's highway speeds. it's very hard to properly exhale at 50-60 mph.
well in the experiment in question 50% of the matter 'disappeared' or in other words was converted to energy. a standard fission reactor is converting ounces of matter into energy.
in other words, we're talking about an explosion about 350,000 times larger than hiroshima. i think that's enough energy to crack the earth in half. on the plus side, they were working with rubidium-85, not super fluid liquid helium, oh yeah, and they got the temperature all the way down to 3 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. the abstract does say that liquid helium doesn't have a chance in hell of becoming attractive, as well.
also, in order for half of it to 'disappear' all of the liquid helium would have to become attractive, so i doubt that even if the condition became favorable that enough helium would become attractive to make any big bang... we got a 2 month extension in case the scientist at cert are wrong about helium, and enough of it could become active for enough of it to to convert to energy to create a big enough of an explosion.
i've been a fan of ATI for a long time, there was a time where i tried out nvidia, but i picked the wrong company, and it tainted my feelings about nvidia's approach to letting other people make the cards while they make the chips. since then i've been using ati in everything except systems where price was more of a factor. but given the news against nvidia, i probably won't be building any nvidia systems ever again.
then again i haven't had many people have me build them systems lately, and it's not just the economy, it's because they'd rather get systems fast and cheap at the computer center than wait for me to hand select quality parts and build them a system that never has serious issues.
i had the same problem with fast food work, they always want to know why you weren't promoted to management.
ultimately though in my case, i don't handle people or stress very well, and wouldn't have done a great job in the type of jobs i didn't get hired to.
then again i have a mental illness, and in retrospect a lot of problems in my life all stem back to early signs of mental illness that doctors ignored, or that i managed to seem normal enough they doctors didn't think it was a serious mental illness. ironically at many of the places i applied for work at, their in house psychological profiles most likely indicated i had some mental problems, and they never even bothered to disclose to me any findings..
but going without medication it was just a matter of time before i had a serious hospitalization spanning some 4 months.. and then another 6 months in group homes. at that point the doctors acknowledged i had a problem. sadly i am in no shape to earn a living for myself even with medication, but because i had some doctors who thought i should be working i got denied twice for benefits. the types of jobs i can hold down for a year or two before being fired don't pay enough to even cover basic living expenses... not to mention getting fired every 2 years isn't a good way to be employed. and i would get fired every 2 years then spend 2-3 months looking for work, it's just sad that the doctors etc couldn't even ask me about how my work history had gone in the past before thinking i should be working. the most income i have ever made in a year was 6,000 my average is around $3,000 and lately i haven't been able to handle earning $2,000 a year, it's gotten worse with time, and i really can't handle a job.
right now since the disability thing is in appeal i haven't even tried to work, not just because i know i can't handle it, but because you can't work if you want to get on disability, no matter how pathetic the work might be.
well, politics makes strange bedfellows. do you honestly think that nasa with all it's expensive space missions can avoid political intrigue?
webcams are different from fixed focal length cameras.
most fixed focal length cameras are set to infinity. that means if you take a close range picture it's all blurry, beyond the ability of fast recognition. if the camera has higher resolution, the less the blur affects the recognition by software.
most webcams are set to a focal length of a few feet, or come with auto focus, or manual focus..
so a webcam can be lower res and have better image recognition, oh yeah and a laptop has a lot more processing power than a phone. that makes a huge speed difference.
also with higher resolution you can take the picture farther away, and still have enough pixels, it is true there are scanner apps for the iphone, but most likely they have compromised between speed and ability to read blurred photos.
given the track record of the government during dubba's presidency, giving a private corporation $280 million to do nothing would be minor. after all they've spent Trillions of dollars on iraq, and are floating a 700 billion golden parachute for mortgage backed securities. without addressing the fundamental problem that lead to the failure of Mortgage backed securities and without helping people keep the homes they borrowed against...
i mean, he's such a generous guy giving his circle of friends trillions of dollars....
you're missing the point. even if google and her telco partners screw it up, you can still make a google g1 appstore app and a website and everytime people scan an item with the g1 they give a location and price, and in return they get a list of locations and prices near them.
even if google screws it up, anyone willing to becoem an android developer can fix it. except for 1 thing. the cost of using all the bandwidth this is going to take...
well, you don't have to send the photo, so what you send is a 10 digit number (actually 12 digits, 10 weren't enough) then a price (probably less than 10 digits, i don't think yachts come with barcodes) then a location, less than 2 120 character lines. to make it simple for users just have a postal code and a small name field. it would be nice if on starting the name of a place a 'suggestion' list showed up like with the google toolbar... so people can just click it and not need to remember everything...
so the amount of bandwidth is trivial, a few k to send, and a few k in the receive. maybe more if the product is available from hundreds of locations, perhaps you only send the first 4 and a 'more' button and have 'by price' 'by location' search optimizations...
a little bit of coding work, it's not rocket science the hard part is getting local people to put the data in to get people to start using it... if you're starting off with 1 city, you can go around to supermarkets and do it yourself while beta testing the app..
" That's fair play under the rules of capitalism."
'Is it? This is not free competition in an open market with a free flow of information. This is specifically targetting and trying to undo deals for the acquisition of a competitor's products using backroom machinations, bribes, and threats. Anti-trust legislation exists for a reason: to avoid cartels and monopolies and allow an open market to function and thereby protect the consumer. Some rules that are enforced are required. Unfortunately, monopolist corporate power in the US is such that rules have hardly been enforced.'
while you have some nice ideas in there, there are two big things you're missing. #1 capitalism
"Capitalism is the economic system in which the means of production are owned by private persons, and operated for profit[1] and where investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are predominantly determined through the operation of a free market or in a regulated market."
doesn't say anything about fairness, other than 'regulated market' which infers government intervention because there is no inherent fairness in capitalism, so the government must provide the fairness.
#2 Anti-trust regulations, particularly in the USA.
anti-trust laws have only as many teeth, as the government gives them. the laws are specifically weak and vague, only congress can order the break up of a monopoly... and congress has done this exactly twice. #1 railroads this was way back when the government had balls, and men were men, and dirty business wasn't kosher in Washington DC. they totally screwed up the entire railroad system, by totally castrating anyone who wanted to get rich off railroads. it's their fault that 'every american' needs a fucking car, but i digress. secondly they broke up ma bell. this was done when congress had some teeth, but had already been castrated and were mainly worried that the break-up didn't screw over the telecom industry the way the railroad break up did. they did this one right, but sadly by the time it came up to microsoft's turn at the plate, congress was now ball-less and toothless so they gave people a $25 dollar coupon on the purchase of microsoft products, and gave microsoft yet another committee this one made up of college professors and what not.
so you can see, anti-trust law in the USA is a weak as the government is corrupt. maybe this is a good thing, considering how they dropped the ball on railroads. i can guarantee you if railroad tycoons had not had their empires made into amtrack cars would be less popular than they are now. trains have huge performance and economy of scale benefits, and commercial trucking might have been playing second fiddle to a second or third generation railroad monopoly.
"i'm simply saying that the trait you're describing is a universal _human_ trait,"
you've never met a 30 year old with the intelligence of a 2 year old have you?
my aunt and uncle both worked with the developmentally disabled and i can tell you right now, greed is a LEARNED behavior. people without the capacity to learn don't even understand that other people can lie and cheat them, or even how to take care of their personal needs. this is why they wind up institutionalized.
i can 100% guarantee you greed is not hard wired into the brain. learned traits can be suppressed, at least by healthy people.
in order for something to be a universal trait it must be hard wired into the brain or the DNA of EVERY human being. greed, a vice, is not universal. your argument that 'everyone is greedy' is a justification for your own person misbehavior. it's like some sick justification for rape like 'everyone wants to have sex.' or maybe more like 'justifying' the removal of mountain tops to burn coal because 'everyone wants cheap electricity.'
you're justifying greed. plain and simple, justification is just one way of circumventing having a sensible superego. you're bypassing part of your own brains internal functions designed to make society work. it just makes me wonder what the hell you do with your time that you're filling your superego full of trash like "everyone would steal from their child's educational future if they knew they could make $100 cash off the deal"