Let one person do the application hosting and get your committee to VNC to that host. Then everybody can do everything, including applications that don't have shared edit features built in.
of course (IMHO) their only hope is to follow in the footsteps of most every other widely adopted specification and make freely available all the protocols and templates for sample implementations.
Cases in point: IBM PC, just about every programming language, PDF,... to many to list.
For the widely adopted protocols that are not open, well they soon get hacked and become defacto open anyway (think RIAA, MPAA backed technologies).
The same concept has been in play for entire existence of Ethernet, which has proven very reliable. The only significant difference here is that instead of time based - single channel- collisions where you back off for a random amount of time, you back off and frequency hop.
I see your point. The example I gave insufficiently demonstrated my intent. What I am trying to get around is the concept of voting where it may be an untimely yes/no proposition and any person can vote without standing behind their opinion. In essence, requiring someone to construct a logically conditioned rationale would eliminate those who are incoherent or irrational from participating (generally speaking people like that should not be setting policy) and provide a means for a direct democracy that isn't run by mob rule (mobs are not rational).
So how about requiring that the rationale contain certain relevant data points and that those data points be quantifiable. Further make all rationale publically viewable, since setting public policy should not be a back room issue. Ala:
Opinions on federal taxation of gasoline must address the amount of taxation, the price, usage and origin of crude oil.
My Opinion: I support an alternative energy research via a gasoline tax rate of 33% if crude oil production will cause species extinction and {if the rate of domestic usage is increasing or if the price of crude is greater than $75 dollars a barrel or if more than 1/2 of all crude oil consumed is of foreign origin }.
Now, if at any point any of these conditions fails then I no longer support 33% taxation. There is no need for me to monitor conditions and vote my position at the next policy hearing. A time consuming task at best and at worst a bad vote since conditions can change soon after my vote.
The how is not problematic, as long as the premise testing is performed based on an openly accessible and well defined standard. Much like passing compiler tests in coding, the language is well defined and a standard compiler can parse it. Additionally the supporting statements should require real world test items, at first guess any proper noun would work.
Essentially something along the lines of: I support action (A), if and only if {person (B) and {place (C) or thing (D)}}
if (B) is invalidated the opinion is no longer valid and would need to updated by its owner or it gets ignored.
The effort to craft a functional rationale would (I believe) eliminate a bunch of voting scenarios where snap decisions are made and then no recourse is available until things get entirely out of hand (impeachment) or they have run there course and people vote in some knee-jerk antithetical person/bill.
The problem, as I see it, is that voting is a red herring. What I mean is that the whole concept of voting is an artificial limitation put in place at a time when it was impossible to obtain and interpret the intentions of the people directly. Specifically, the limitations of voting allow for fraud (bought votes, ballot stuffing, etc) and also don't allow for the voter to change their mind in a timely fashion.
Somewhere above, representation was posed as a solution to group think and propaganda. Again the solution lies not in removing people (read representative system) who would follow group think but in ensuring that their intent actually has a viable rationale behind it.
I have given this some thought and propose that a system that performs state-full polling of registered opinions/rationales when a decision is to be made should work (looking for constructive criticism on this). Make it so that any person can update their opinion/rationale at any time. Also, require that the rationale be based on a logically testable premise. If the test fails, the opinion gets ignored in the high level decision process.
The upshot being that if your incapable of supporting your opinion with a verifiable rationale then you are not deserving of the right to control the destiny of the people/country.
Further, if you want to change the policies in play, then you need to push a specific opinion/rationale held by the people. Once enough opinions get registered any decision based on previous opinions would get reversed through a mechanism that incorporates hysteresis into the stateful polling of said opinions.
those who can code in binary and those who cant code.
OK, kidding aside.
There are those who write code so that a person can do something on a computer. In which case the users are comparatively slow and the high level languages give you a distinct advantage in development.
Then there are those who write code to make the computer do something, in which case the low level languages give you the ability to more effectively optimize how the computer interacts with itself, this is where languages like C, C++ really come into their own.
In the early days of computing it was all about the later, now its much more about the former, but the later will never go away. So the decrease is reasonable and IMHO does not represent a failing of the language, just a shift in the way computers are being used. I will be very surprised if the high level languages ever get widespread acceptance in the areas that require computational efficiency, ala computational physics, protein folding, etc.
Sorry, I overstated this, according to intel http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20080401comp.htm the cellular functionality is integrable, not integrated. Excerpt "Intel Centrino Atom processor technology also enables manufacturers to integrate a range of wireless connectivity options, including Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular data"
and this would make the perfect device for my sensibilities.
First make a dockable bluetooth headset so that it will recharge and be available when I want it, not sitting on my desk where I forgot it.
Second, add a cell phone with a sim chip slot so I can transfer my cell service onto the laptop.
I think that this is where they are heading, especially seeing as the Intel atom cpu they are scheduled to switch to has cell network capability built in.
Lots of people are asking about the problems of energy storage. The way forward is really very simple.
There are two fundamental assumptions, one is long term - any non-renewable energy source will eventually run out. The other is immediate - nobody wants to rebuild the massive infrastructure that already exists.
In terms of our expected spcies life cycle on this planet, solar is an obvious candidate. But what do we do when the sun is obscured (by the earth/clouds/smog etc.)? The answer lies in the other energy infrastructure that we already have, OIL! Make oil while the sun shines. We don't have to retool an enormous energy delivery infrastructure, we don't have to develop radical new concepts in energy use. We capitalize on the already existing infrastructure and we tap into the long term energy resource that is solar.
If new technologies come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete and negate the necessity of oil pipe lines and electric transmission lines then, cool. But, until then we use the investment we have already made in the energy infrastructure by delivering sustainable solar energy in the form of an already functional an usefull energy commodity.
Perhaps because there are already running plants with a well understood technology. Perhaps because, once built you have free, automated fuel delivery. Perhaps because you don't have to replace the entire infrastructure. Not to mention that NREL (a group I would classify *Really Smart People*) is predicting costs of about $0.054 / KWH by 2020 ref. http://www.nrel.gov/solar/parabolic_trough.html
And, just maybe, because the cost of the Iraq war is not just measured in dollars but in human lives, beyond what the monetary assessments can place a value on.
Of course that is probably not PC enough so maybe somethings like The InterTube or IP Freely or, just The Special Internet Group Network Architecture Layer (The SIGNAL)
OK OK, those are pretty bad, but I applaud your goals and wish you well in your en devour.
Is anyone aware of a shielded power line (coax, twisted pair or other) that would work also as a RF(or higher) transmission line? In the US almost without exception house wiring is either 10, 12 or 16 gauge parallel solid coper cable. Ideally it would seem that a single power/wave-guide line would allow for pretty much unlimited adaptability in refitting, oh say your toaster oven to a recipe management terminal, or whatever.
I hope your comment was an attempt at humor. Personally I find your observation somewhat trite. It seems patently obvious to me that a politician would happily utter the truth if served their own purpose and that there are ample examples to verify this with which I could use to refute your observation.
The benefit is that ray tracing can generate better scenes by evaluating the physics of lighting in a more accurate way. The simple parallelism aspect comes into play when you have 32 GPU's that can render individual frames at rates higher than one per second each giving you more realistic animation and better lighting physics, not to mention the ability of the intra scene parallelism. As a reference the wikipedia article here has supporting corroboration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_hardware
Or maybe just obvious to anyone in the industry. Since clock speeds are bounded and not getting any faster and you can only lower voltages so much before signals get lost in the noise, the only way forward is in parallelism and ray tracing is wondrously parallelifyable (is that a real word?).
I finally decided to watch one of her speeches the other night and discovered that she has an amazingly obvious tell. If you pay attention to her head motion you sill see that every time she make an affirmative statement she nods her head (as if to agree with herself). Contrary, every time she make a negative statement she shakes her head from side to side. There is also a diagonal gesture to accompany the ambiguous statements as well. She does this for every fact that she speaks, however if you watch her head during her declaratory statements, she does the same thing, but these are the promises she is supposed to be making and she will actually show which ones she really believes in. For instance at one point she made a statement to the effect that
.. this will provide health care for all Americans while simultaneously shaking her head as if to say no, not really, not all - only some.
When I watched her speech and payed attention to her body language, almost all the "good" parts (IMNSHO) are qualified as negative or ambiguous and all the self serving political promises are affirmative. If anyone else cares to post some specific examples that lay out what her real intentions are I would gladly like to see them.
The need to boot up a machine is not really necessary, just make a universal virtualization host that you can load your 'thumb drive OS' on and skip the wait for hardware boot up. Alternatively, have a virtual machine for any major OS that you might run on top of (Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD/etc) and then your private OS runs inside the virtual host. Almost perfect portability and the ability to run a completely customized environment pretty much anywhere.
Don't know if this redundant or not, anyway - my take on the future of user computing lies in the ability of open source software to be downloaded on demand. Windows Update and apt-get in combination with the trend in virtualization are strong pointers in the future of computing. Users will access data that has an associated list of application handlers, these handlers will be cached locally for rapid loading, after they haven't been used for a while they will expire out of the cache until the next time they are needed and be downloaded again. All this will happen with only minimal input by the user to specify the preferred handler. For fee subscriptions to cutting edge development software will allow companies to make a profit until the open source community decides they like the application and re-implement the features and functionality, this of course does not preclude the ability of open source to lead the way as well.
OK, maybe/not really. I was just looking at google maps one time an it sure looks like the remnants of a crater to me, judge for yourself. The visible arc of the eastern most portion of the crater is the coastline to the east and a bit north of Polar Bear Provincial Park. Why else would you have such a large semicircle coast just cut out of an otherwise irregular coastline? http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=56.583692,-79.672852&spn=10.630137,27.597656&z=6&om=1
Not entirely nonsense, when all the market providers collude -intentionally or otherwise- to offer the same lack of transparency (as is the current standard of practice for business) the buyers have no choice but to accept the products as offered or forgo the product in its entirety. I would contend that this is not really a viable choice at all, since the buyer is completely unaware that they may be supporting a heinous business practice and thus has no real motivation to walk away from the transaction.
With regard to your second point, you may well be right. However, I tend to believe that if the people are truly aware of supporting an 'evil' provider they would predominantly choose a more benign resource for their product. In fact the single largest force in the market is the collective consumer and the knowledge of supporting an evil business practice would encourage benign market competitors. In my opinion your point presumes that the evil provider is powerful enough to prevent any benign resource competitor, something that I find fairly dubious. Further, I counter that in some sense the correcting hand of big government is nothing more than formal cooperation of the masses to disband a globally undesirable provider, the same corrective force can be brought to bear in a transparent free market through a knowledgeable consumer collective, so I am not sure what the distinction you are trying make would be here.
The issue I was trying to make clear is that many people tend to bring forth the free market argument as some kind of all encompassing panacea. I would only be inclined to support that point of view if the consumer can be completely circumspect in the choice of where we spend our money (Note: not even remotely feasible in the current economic structure). Also, if you really think that I am making some kind of straw man argument, it would be nice if you would be more specific so that I can either determine if my argument is false or expand my reasoning behind any insufficiently substantiated claims.
This reply is not so much directed at you as the doctrine of free market. Many people bring forth the argument that the free market can solve all the problems the plague the economic interactions of humanity. However, one thing that most people don't pay attention to is that caveat emptor (buyer beware) is only possible when the buyer is fully aware of the product or service they are purchasing. Since big corporations tend to keep as much of their business behind closed doors as possible, and indeed often blatantly falsify their goods, then the buyer can not make a truly informed decision and thus the hand of big government must be put to use to ensure that the populace is not taken unfair advantage of. I am all for getting rid of big government, but only so long as any provider must be completely transparent with respect to their actions in providing me with services or goods.
Slashdot Mirror
For really simple interactivity, I would suggest something along the lines of
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vnc-reflector/
Let one person do the application hosting and get your committee to VNC to that host. Then everybody can do everything, including applications that don't have shared edit features built in.
of course (IMHO) their only hope is to follow in the footsteps of most every other widely adopted specification and make freely available all the protocols and templates for sample implementations.
Cases in point: IBM PC, just about every programming language, PDF, ... to many to list.
For the widely adopted protocols that are not open, well they soon get hacked and become defacto open anyway (think RIAA, MPAA backed technologies).
Note: Did'nt RTFA
... and who is going to watch the watchers?
Or rather, in this case who is going to vet the group responsible for determining if something is true?
The same concept has been in play for entire existence of Ethernet, which has proven very reliable. The only significant difference here is that instead of time based - single channel- collisions where you back off for a random amount of time, you back off and frequency hop.
I see your point. The example I gave insufficiently demonstrated my intent. What I am trying to get around is the concept of voting where it may be an untimely yes/no proposition and any person can vote without standing behind their opinion. In essence, requiring someone to construct a logically conditioned rationale would eliminate those who are incoherent or irrational from participating (generally speaking people like that should not be setting policy) and provide a means for a direct democracy that isn't run by mob rule (mobs are not rational).
So how about requiring that the rationale contain certain relevant data points and that those data points be quantifiable. Further make all rationale publically viewable, since setting public policy should not be a back room issue. Ala:
Opinions on federal taxation of gasoline must address the amount of taxation, the price, usage and origin of crude oil.
My Opinion: I support an alternative energy research via a gasoline tax rate of 33% if crude oil production will cause species extinction and {if the rate of domestic usage is increasing or if the price of crude is greater than $75 dollars a barrel or if more than 1/2 of all crude oil consumed is of foreign origin }.
Now, if at any point any of these conditions fails then I no longer support 33% taxation. There is no need for me to monitor conditions and vote my position at the next policy hearing. A time consuming task at best and at worst a bad vote since conditions can change soon after my vote.
The how is not problematic, as long as the premise testing is performed based on an openly accessible and well defined standard. Much like passing compiler tests in coding, the language is well defined and a standard compiler can parse it. Additionally the supporting statements should require real world test items, at first guess any proper noun would work.
Essentially something along the lines of:
I support action (A), if and only if {person (B) and {place (C) or thing (D)}}
if (B) is invalidated the opinion is no longer valid and would need to updated by its owner or it gets ignored.
The effort to craft a functional rationale would (I believe) eliminate a bunch of voting scenarios where snap decisions are made and then no recourse is available until things get entirely out of hand (impeachment) or they have run there course and people vote in some knee-jerk antithetical person/bill.
The problem, as I see it, is that voting is a red herring. What I mean is that the whole concept of voting is an artificial limitation put in place at a time when it was impossible to obtain and interpret the intentions of the people directly. Specifically, the limitations of voting allow for fraud (bought votes, ballot stuffing, etc) and also don't allow for the voter to change their mind in a timely fashion.
Somewhere above, representation was posed as a solution to group think and propaganda. Again the solution lies not in removing people (read representative system) who would follow group think but in ensuring that their intent actually has a viable rationale behind it.
I have given this some thought and propose that a system that performs state-full polling of registered opinions/rationales when a decision is to be made should work (looking for constructive criticism on this). Make it so that any person can update their opinion/rationale at any time. Also, require that the rationale be based on a logically testable premise. If the test fails, the opinion gets ignored in the high level decision process.
The upshot being that if your incapable of supporting your opinion with a verifiable rationale then you are not deserving of the right to control the destiny of the people/country.
Further, if you want to change the policies in play, then you need to push a specific opinion/rationale held by the people. Once enough opinions get registered any decision based on previous opinions would get reversed through a mechanism that incorporates hysteresis into the stateful polling of said opinions.
undoing errant interesting mod on eff'n rickroll
those who can code in binary and those who cant code.
OK, kidding aside.
There are those who write code so that a person can do something on a computer. In which case the users are comparatively slow and the high level languages give you a distinct advantage in development.
Then there are those who write code to make the computer do something, in which case the low level languages give you the ability to more effectively optimize how the computer interacts with itself, this is where languages like C, C++ really come into their own.
In the early days of computing it was all about the later, now its much more about the former, but the later will never go away. So the decrease is reasonable and IMHO does not represent a failing of the language, just a shift in the way computers are being used. I will be very surprised if the high level languages ever get widespread acceptance in the areas that require computational efficiency, ala computational physics, protein folding, etc.
Sorry, I overstated this, according to intel http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20080401comp.htm the cellular functionality is integrable, not integrated.
Excerpt "Intel Centrino Atom processor technology also enables manufacturers to integrate a range of wireless connectivity options, including Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular data"
and this would make the perfect device for my sensibilities.
First make a dockable bluetooth headset so that it will recharge and be available when I want it, not sitting on my desk where I forgot it.
Second, add a cell phone with a sim chip slot so I can transfer my cell service onto the laptop.
I think that this is where they are heading, especially seeing as the Intel atom cpu they are scheduled to switch to has cell network capability built in.
Lots of people are asking about the problems of energy storage. The way forward is really very simple.
There are two fundamental assumptions, one is long term - any non-renewable energy source will eventually run out. The other is immediate - nobody wants to rebuild the massive infrastructure that already exists.
In terms of our expected spcies life cycle on this planet, solar is an obvious candidate. But what do we do when the sun is obscured (by the earth/clouds/smog etc.)? The answer lies in the other energy infrastructure that we already have, OIL! Make oil while the sun shines. We don't have to retool an enormous energy delivery infrastructure, we don't have to develop radical new concepts in energy use. We capitalize on the already existing infrastructure and we tap into the long term energy resource that is solar.
If new technologies come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete and negate the necessity of oil pipe lines and electric transmission lines then, cool. But, until then we use the investment we have already made in the energy infrastructure by delivering sustainable solar energy in the form of an already functional an usefull energy commodity.
Except that the ring is not passively stable and to compound that difficulty there is no known material that could handle the stress involved.
Perhaps because there are already running plants with a well understood technology. Perhaps because, once built you have free, automated fuel delivery. Perhaps because you don't have to replace the entire infrastructure. Not to mention that NREL (a group I would classify *Really Smart People*) is predicting costs of about $0.054 / KWH by 2020
ref. http://www.nrel.gov/solar/parabolic_trough.html
And, just maybe, because the cost of the Iraq war is not just measured in dollars but in human lives, beyond what the monetary assessments can place a value on.
Of course that is probably not PC enough so maybe somethings like
The InterTube
or
IP Freely
or, just
The Special Internet Group Network Architecture Layer (The SIGNAL)
OK OK, those are pretty bad, but I applaud your goals and wish you well in your en devour.
Is anyone aware of a shielded power line (coax, twisted pair or other) that would work also as a RF(or higher) transmission line? In the US almost without exception house wiring is either 10, 12 or 16 gauge parallel solid coper cable. Ideally it would seem that a single power/wave-guide line would allow for pretty much unlimited adaptability in refitting, oh say your toaster oven to a recipe management terminal, or whatever.
I hope your comment was an attempt at humor. Personally I find your observation somewhat trite. It seems patently obvious to me that a politician would happily utter the truth if served their own purpose and that there are ample examples to verify this with which I could use to refute your observation.
The benefit is that ray tracing can generate better scenes by evaluating the physics of lighting in a more accurate way. The simple parallelism aspect comes into play when you have 32 GPU's that can render individual frames at rates higher than one per second each giving you more realistic animation and better lighting physics, not to mention the ability of the intra scene parallelism. As a reference the wikipedia article here has supporting corroboration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_hardware
Or maybe just obvious to anyone in the industry. Since clock speeds are bounded and not getting any faster and you can only lower voltages so much before signals get lost in the noise, the only way forward is in parallelism and ray tracing is wondrously parallelifyable (is that a real word?).
I finally decided to watch one of her speeches the other night and discovered that she has an amazingly obvious tell. If you pay attention to her head motion you sill see that every time she make an affirmative statement she nods her head (as if to agree with herself). Contrary, every time she make a negative statement she shakes her head from side to side. There is also a diagonal gesture to accompany the ambiguous statements as well. She does this for every fact that she speaks, however if you watch her head during her declaratory statements, she does the same thing, but these are the promises she is supposed to be making and she will actually show which ones she really believes in. For instance at one point she made a statement to the effect that
.. this will provide health care for all Americans while simultaneously shaking her head as if to say no, not really, not all - only some.When I watched her speech and payed attention to her body language, almost all the "good" parts (IMNSHO) are qualified as negative or ambiguous and all the self serving political promises are affirmative. If anyone else cares to post some specific examples that lay out what her real intentions are I would gladly like to see them.
The need to boot up a machine is not really necessary, just make a universal virtualization host that you can load your 'thumb drive OS' on and skip the wait for hardware boot up. Alternatively, have a virtual machine for any major OS that you might run on top of (Mac/Windows/Linux/BSD/etc) and then your private OS runs inside the virtual host. Almost perfect portability and the ability to run a completely customized environment pretty much anywhere.
Don't know if this redundant or not, anyway - my take on the future of user computing lies in the ability of open source software to be downloaded on demand. Windows Update and apt-get in combination with the trend in virtualization are strong pointers in the future of computing. Users will access data that has an associated list of application handlers, these handlers will be cached locally for rapid loading, after they haven't been used for a while they will expire out of the cache until the next time they are needed and be downloaded again. All this will happen with only minimal input by the user to specify the preferred handler. For fee subscriptions to cutting edge development software will allow companies to make a profit until the open source community decides they like the application and re-implement the features and functionality, this of course does not preclude the ability of open source to lead the way as well.
;-)
Of course, I could be wrong
OK, maybe/not really.
I was just looking at google maps one time an it sure looks like the remnants of a crater to me, judge for yourself.
The visible arc of the eastern most portion of the crater is the coastline to the east and a bit north of Polar Bear Provincial Park.
Why else would you have such a large semicircle coast just cut out of an otherwise irregular coastline?
http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=56.583692,-79.672852&spn=10.630137,27.597656&z=6&om=1
Not entirely nonsense, when all the market providers collude -intentionally or otherwise- to offer the same lack of transparency (as is the current standard of practice for business) the buyers have no choice but to accept the products as offered or forgo the product in its entirety. I would contend that this is not really a viable choice at all, since the buyer is completely unaware that they may be supporting a heinous business practice and thus has no real motivation to walk away from the transaction.
With regard to your second point, you may well be right. However, I tend to believe that if the people are truly aware of supporting an 'evil' provider they would predominantly choose a more benign resource for their product. In fact the single largest force in the market is the collective consumer and the knowledge of supporting an evil business practice would encourage benign market competitors. In my opinion your point presumes that the evil provider is powerful enough to prevent any benign resource competitor, something that I find fairly dubious. Further, I counter that in some sense the correcting hand of big government is nothing more than formal cooperation of the masses to disband a globally undesirable provider, the same corrective force can be brought to bear in a transparent free market through a knowledgeable consumer collective, so I am not sure what the distinction you are trying make would be here.
The issue I was trying to make clear is that many people tend to bring forth the free market argument as some kind of all encompassing panacea. I would only be inclined to support that point of view if the consumer can be completely circumspect in the choice of where we spend our money (Note: not even remotely feasible in the current economic structure). Also, if you really think that I am making some kind of straw man argument, it would be nice if you would be more specific so that I can either determine if my argument is false or expand my reasoning behind any insufficiently substantiated claims.
This reply is not so much directed at you as the doctrine of free market. Many people bring forth the argument that the free market can solve all the problems the plague the economic interactions of humanity. However, one thing that most people don't pay attention to is that caveat emptor (buyer beware) is only possible when the buyer is fully aware of the product or service they are purchasing. Since big corporations tend to keep as much of their business behind closed doors as possible, and indeed often blatantly falsify their goods, then the buyer can not make a truly informed decision and thus the hand of big government must be put to use to ensure that the populace is not taken unfair advantage of. I am all for getting rid of big government, but only so long as any provider must be completely transparent with respect to their actions in providing me with services or goods.