Solar power is supposed to help us rely less on oil. However, these new solar cells are made from plastic, which doesn't help our dependency on oil.
That's OK. We use the rest of the oil in the
ground to make plastic solar panels. It will
generate orders of magnitude more energy per
barrel of oil than burning it.
When it's worn out, much of it can be recycled.
Even with recycling, after a long time, all of the oil will be depleted.
At this point, we can start converting coal into
hydrocarbons to make plastic. We'll have 1 or
2 orders of magnitude more plastic available.
I would guess that be enough plastic to get us through the next
20000 years or so. After that, we might need to
think of some other way to get energy.
I wonder what they did with the applications
that used to run on that mainframe. I predict
we'll find out next week's story on Slashdot: "Company
Moves Business Applications from Monolithic
Mainframe to Dozens of x86 PCs"
While the well known problems with the current process of granting patents do hurt the rights of legitimate owners
Somehow I get the impression that you think
that there are no problems in this universe
other than ensuring each owner is properly enjoying
his rights.
Sure, they benefit in the case that renting a wheel from you is cheaper than re-inventing it for themselves.
The problem with software patents is that reinventing
a software "wheel" is often cheaper than renting it.
Such a patent produces a net loss in overall economic efficiency.
The especially annoying part is that
people often unknowingly reinvent somene else's
"wheel", only to be harassed later.
Hopefully this will get America's NASA more funding to be competitive.
Face it, the only reason for a country to do manned
space flight is to prove to the world that it has
the expertise to deploy a credible ICBM force. The US and
Soviet union did this decades ago. We both
proved our points and now both
manned space programs drift aimlessly with no purpose.
Now it's China's
turn to fly some astronauts so we will ph34r
their 1337 missile skillz. I expect that they will
use the US antimissile project as an excuse to
seriously increase their ICBM force above the
current token levels, so this manned space program
fits in nicely.
That doesn't mean that we need
to blow even more money sending our people
on months-long trips round and round
the globe. We should use all of NASA's current
budget to send much more frequent and capable
unmanned missions to other planets.
50% of the projects are still even in "design" stage and out of the 50% left 90% are abandoned in one way or another and only the resulting 10% have some sort of activity
Commercial software projects are the same: only
a small fraction of them make it to final release
without being canceled or redefined. The general
public just doesn't see these. You can rest
assured, however, that the revision control systems
in your average software company are littered
with countless defunct projects.
For some reason, management doesn't
say: Why develop new products? We
can just restart work on all of our old canceled
projects and bring them to market. Maybe the
reasons we canceled them magically went away...
You can arrest hundreds or thousands, but you cannot arrest tens of thousands and millions of people for performing a harmless action. It will bring your state to a grinding halt.
Actually, if you look at history, this is not always
true. For example, Stalin handled the problem
by streamlining the punishment process: He simply
eliminated all of the steps between "Arrest" and
"Execution". In this way, he was able to efficiently
do away with millions of ordinary citizens for their "crimes".
I recommend only getting packages
of 'extra-firm' tofu. Cut them into cubes or strips
and fry them in some peanut oil over medium-high heat until
golden-brown (this takes a while). Add to your
favorite recipie.
It comes out better in flavor and texture than the mystery chicken
that a lot of restaurants put in oriental dishes.
We'll just have to tell Congress that "any device that can legitimately hit a baseball can be misused for illegal murder. How do you think MLB would react if the state legislatures tried to outlaw the game of baseball?"
I don't think it's too much to ask Major League Baseball to switch
over to the less dangerous foam toy bats.
Surely the gameplay can be adjusted to accomodate
the new equipment. Its a small price to pay
for everyone's safety (including the children)!
what determines whether it is a good thing or not is a matter of economics
Not everything in this world can be explained by
economics. Economic analysis only works where
things can be converted in to a particular 1-dimensional
measure (money or its equivalent). Every human activity has some degree of
"impedance mismatch" when trying to convert
it into simplistic economic models. Economic analysis works
well for things such as pork belly futures, but not
so well for things like religion.
Most economists
probably assume that software is like a commodity.
RMS probably assumes that software is like a
religion. I suspect that it has aspects of both.
Thus, RMS is qualified to comment about his
software area, and economists are qualified
to comment about theirs. Neither viewpoint covers the
whole picture by itself.
that launch at an average cost of $500,000 per mission,
I think you forgot a few zeros. It's more like $500,000,000 per mission.
It's really sad; for that kind of money you can send
a small probe to any planet in the solar system
and learn something totally new.
Instead, they blow half a gigabuck every time they
need to fix a toilet on the ISS.
So since you have no fortran programers, and probably can't find a good one, what happens when your pay-roll program breaks, not have payroll for 4 months until you can get another written?
Well, I guess I'd tell the programmers that I
do have that they won't get their next
paycheck until they learn FORTRAN and fix
the program. It's a pretty straightforward language.
With this extra bit of motivation,
I'd bet it would be fixed by the next pay period:-).
The studies show people with internet access at work waste 2 hours per day on it.
So the internet lowers productivity by 25% just by connecting to it. Anyone with any brains at all would pull the plug.
Maybe you don't remember time wasting activities
in the pre-internet era. Things like: wandering
the plant on epic donut quests, endless banter with
your office mates, reading thick publications like Byte and PC-Week cover-to-cover,
writing video game emulators, calling all of the
car stereo stores in the Yellow Pages looking
for the best deal on an in-dash cassette player,
and countless others.
I'm guessing that Internet usage has cut into the
above activities more than into real work. In my
case, I think the amount of off-topic time I spend
at work has remained roughly constant over the
last 15 years. (And it's been more than balanced
by work I've done while at home).
Why would you ever want to run windows notepad or calculator?
I actually prefer calc.exe (scientific mode) to KCalc or xcalc, mainly
because I've used it for a dozen years or more
and I know how it works and all of the keyboard shortcuts. Why should
I deprive myself of this adequate piece of software? I've got more important things to learn than another calculator program.
Sad part is that pioneers of modern shareware, such as Jasc (whose Paint Shop Pro was one of the major shareware contributors long, long time ago) now release time limited demoes because thats the only way to sell their own programs.
The strange thing about my copy of PaintShop Pro 4
was that the time limit didn't work. It would fire
up even after it said "you have -437 days left
on your free trial period". I finally felt bad enough
about this to go to their website with my $49
to buy a copy. Problem was, they hiked the price
to $99 for the next version. Threshold exceeded.
That prompted my to learn the GIMP. My initial
reaction to its GUI was revulsion, but I wiped the
puke off of my keyboard and kept learning it. Now I am
actually getting used to it.
It's more powerful, zero cost and guilt-free.
I think that over time there will be less room for
old-style shareware writers to operate squeezed between
established commercial vendors and ever-improving
free software.
no image processing program in the world could put together bits from a picture of a CD surface.
Why not? All you have to do is identify the edges
of the pits and record the distance between them.
Apply the CD decoding standard to the results
and out comes the data.
I was in PC hardware design when OS/2
betas were first circulating
(IIRC, it was originally called DOS 5 or
something similar). This was the first time that PC memory
> 640K got a real workout (random
access outside of a 64K peephole). Back then,
extended memory often was kludged on with
things like piggy-back expansion boards.
Of course,
many machines in the field promptly croaked when
the new OS stressed their extended memory
for the first time. Our work ground to a
halt for weeks as we tracked down flaky RAM-related
problems.
Chasing those types of ghosts was never any
fun: Hook a logic analyzer to the memory bus,
let it run overnight, find out that the impedance
of the logic analyzer probes suppressed the bug, start again
from square 1.
I'm guessing that memory interface designers
today use better engineering practices than
we did back then.
Being so thin, it can be easily shredded, so there's no further need to keep your financial documents [andersen.com] on paper.
I don't think that's such a good idea. Anybody with special equipment could probably read whatever's left of the tracks on the shards of CD. One shard could hold many kilobytes of contiguous data; even entire documents.
Shredding a CD is kind of like printing all of your documents onto a single mile-long roll of paper, then slicing the paper into 1-foot long pieces. You could get a lot of info off of any one chunk.
When I got done, I wrote a letter, and soon discovered that TeX was not included! What the hell?
It's probably because 99% of the people are like me. When I run out of disk space, the first thing i do is:
rpm -qa | grep etex | xargs rpm -e
Presto! 50 megs freed up. Mandrake probably figures most people don't want to learn how to use rpm, much less learn the TeX language. This saves them the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
That's OK. We use the rest of the oil in the ground to make plastic solar panels. It will generate orders of magnitude more energy per barrel of oil than burning it.
When it's worn out, much of it can be recycled. Even with recycling, after a long time, all of the oil will be depleted. At this point, we can start converting coal into hydrocarbons to make plastic. We'll have 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more plastic available.
I would guess that be enough plastic to get us through the next 20000 years or so. After that, we might need to think of some other way to get energy.
Grace Hopper didn't need no steenkin kernel. Real geek women used toggle switches and patchcords. None of this OS handholding.
I wonder what they did with the applications that used to run on that mainframe. I predict we'll find out next week's story on Slashdot: "Company Moves Business Applications from Monolithic Mainframe to Dozens of x86 PCs"
Otherwise known as the encryption key? That's hardly a one-time-pad.
Somehow I get the impression that you think that there are no problems in this universe other than ensuring each owner is properly enjoying his rights.
The problem with software patents is that reinventing a software "wheel" is often cheaper than renting it. Such a patent produces a net loss in overall economic efficiency.
The especially annoying part is that people often unknowingly reinvent somene else's "wheel", only to be harassed later.
So what is this "PGP sig"? Is it a witty quip, or is it just some spam message you can't remove unless you upgrade from the free version?
I'd rather use a product that lets me write my own sig.
Face it, the only reason for a country to do manned space flight is to prove to the world that it has the expertise to deploy a credible ICBM force. The US and Soviet union did this decades ago. We both proved our points and now both manned space programs drift aimlessly with no purpose.
Now it's China's turn to fly some astronauts so we will ph34r their 1337 missile skillz. I expect that they will use the US antimissile project as an excuse to seriously increase their ICBM force above the current token levels, so this manned space program fits in nicely.
That doesn't mean that we need to blow even more money sending our people on months-long trips round and round the globe. We should use all of NASA's current budget to send much more frequent and capable unmanned missions to other planets.
Cheap publicity. You would have never heard of this company if they weren't involved with their free software projects.
Public awareness is very hard to create or buy, and it's a huge advantage in the marketplace.
Commercial software projects are the same: only a small fraction of them make it to final release without being canceled or redefined. The general public just doesn't see these. You can rest assured, however, that the revision control systems in your average software company are littered with countless defunct projects.
For some reason, management doesn't say: Why develop new products? We can just restart work on all of our old canceled projects and bring them to market. Maybe the reasons we canceled them magically went away...
Actually, if you look at history, this is not always true. For example, Stalin handled the problem by streamlining the punishment process: He simply eliminated all of the steps between "Arrest" and "Execution". In this way, he was able to efficiently do away with millions of ordinary citizens for their "crimes".
It comes out better in flavor and texture than the mystery chicken that a lot of restaurants put in oriental dishes.
I don't think it's too much to ask Major League Baseball to switch over to the less dangerous foam toy bats. Surely the gameplay can be adjusted to accomodate the new equipment. Its a small price to pay for everyone's safety (including the children)!
From: Judge133838201@courtcentral.cc
+++ L@@K +++ YOU HAVE BEEN SERVED _,.'``'-.,_,.-'``'-.,_,.->> THIS IMPORANT SUBPOENA!!!!!
Just delete it. Turn off your preview pane, too.
Not everything in this world can be explained by economics. Economic analysis only works where things can be converted in to a particular 1-dimensional measure (money or its equivalent). Every human activity has some degree of "impedance mismatch" when trying to convert it into simplistic economic models. Economic analysis works well for things such as pork belly futures, but not so well for things like religion.
Most economists probably assume that software is like a commodity. RMS probably assumes that software is like a religion. I suspect that it has aspects of both.
Thus, RMS is qualified to comment about his software area, and economists are qualified to comment about theirs. Neither viewpoint covers the whole picture by itself.
I think you forgot a few zeros. It's more like $500,000,000 per mission. It's really sad; for that kind of money you can send a small probe to any planet in the solar system and learn something totally new. Instead, they blow half a gigabuck every time they need to fix a toilet on the ISS.
Well, I guess I'd tell the programmers that I do have that they won't get their next paycheck until they learn FORTRAN and fix the program. It's a pretty straightforward language. With this extra bit of motivation, I'd bet it would be fixed by the next pay period :-).
So the internet lowers productivity by 25% just by connecting to it. Anyone with any brains at all would pull the plug.
Maybe you don't remember time wasting activities in the pre-internet era. Things like: wandering the plant on epic donut quests, endless banter with your office mates, reading thick publications like Byte and PC-Week cover-to-cover, writing video game emulators, calling all of the car stereo stores in the Yellow Pages looking for the best deal on an in-dash cassette player, and countless others.
I'm guessing that Internet usage has cut into the above activities more than into real work. In my case, I think the amount of off-topic time I spend at work has remained roughly constant over the last 15 years. (And it's been more than balanced by work I've done while at home).
I actually prefer calc.exe (scientific mode) to KCalc or xcalc, mainly because I've used it for a dozen years or more and I know how it works and all of the keyboard shortcuts. Why should I deprive myself of this adequate piece of software? I've got more important things to learn than another calculator program.
The strange thing about my copy of PaintShop Pro 4 was that the time limit didn't work. It would fire up even after it said "you have -437 days left on your free trial period". I finally felt bad enough about this to go to their website with my $49 to buy a copy. Problem was, they hiked the price to $99 for the next version. Threshold exceeded.
That prompted my to learn the GIMP. My initial reaction to its GUI was revulsion, but I wiped the puke off of my keyboard and kept learning it. Now I am actually getting used to it. It's more powerful, zero cost and guilt-free.
I think that over time there will be less room for old-style shareware writers to operate squeezed between established commercial vendors and ever-improving free software.
Why not? All you have to do is identify the edges of the pits and record the distance between them. Apply the CD decoding standard to the results and out comes the data.
Of course, many machines in the field promptly croaked when the new OS stressed their extended memory for the first time. Our work ground to a halt for weeks as we tracked down flaky RAM-related problems.
Chasing those types of ghosts was never any fun: Hook a logic analyzer to the memory bus, let it run overnight, find out that the impedance of the logic analyzer probes suppressed the bug, start again from square 1.
I'm guessing that memory interface designers today use better engineering practices than we did back then.
Possibly: a microscope, a digital camera, and a relatively simple image processing program.
I don't think that's such a good idea. Anybody with special equipment could probably read whatever's left of the tracks on the shards of CD. One shard could hold many kilobytes of contiguous data; even entire documents.
Shredding a CD is kind of like printing all of your documents onto a single mile-long roll of paper, then slicing the paper into 1-foot long pieces. You could get a lot of info off of any one chunk.
It's probably because 99% of the people are like me. When I run out of disk space, the first thing i do is:
rpm -qa | grep etex | xargs rpm -e
Presto! 50 megs freed up. Mandrake probably figures most people don't want to learn how to use rpm, much less learn the TeX language. This saves them the trouble.