You are required to carry ID on you at all times (ostensibly for identification of your body if you die or something) even though you supposedly cannot be arrested for failing to provide ID - but they can haul you in if you don't have ID if you're even a passenger in a car.
Um, no. And if that actually happened to you, I suggest you go and speak to the ACLU. You only have to have a driver's license on you if you are driving, and even in most states it's technically legal to not have it on you, but you run the risk of being taken down to the station until you can produce it.
There is no requirement to have an ID when you're a passenger in a car, or just walking down the street. (Furthermore, I'm not sure what you're on about body identification; I've never heard that excuse.)
The growing use of IDs in order to travel on public transportation (long-haul buses, trains, etc.) is very distressing to me, and is a legitimate problem that should be fought tooth and nail.
The situation is bad, but it's not as bad as you're making it out to be, and that's important for people to know. People taking a defeatist attitude about things like this is part of the problem.
Interesting. I actually emailed Lenovo Sales a while back, and they swore up and down to me that they didn't ship anything to anyone (wholesale or otherwise) that wasn't preinstalled with Windows. Guess that's what I get for trusting a sales drone.
I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some other programmer: figure out a way to shoehorn an existing open-source editor, or a new one, in place of the one that's been removed. Sounds like a good thesis project for a comp-sci student somewhere.
I don't fault the guy for wanting to make money, I really don't. (I work on closed-source software to pay the bills, and we don't even give it away free-as-in-beer.) But he's not going to win any friends by holding the code effectively hostage; since he's not known as being an OSS developer, he's going to have to take the first step if he wants to receive funding from people who are ideologically motivated in that direction. A good first step would be opening up whatever code is his to release in whatever form it's currently in, just to prove that he's not playing Pit and the Pendulum with the Delete key on the whole project.
The post is really just an attempt to get some money. The fact that he would continue to develop it if he were paid probably goes without saying. However, he's also saying he would "consider" opening the code if he were paid enough, suggesting that if no donors come forward, he would simple delete the code and completely kill the product. This suggests to me that he's not really interested in open sourcing anything, but that he'll write that he will (if paid) in order to increase his chances of getting press on open source-centric sites like Slashdot.
What's more, it sort of confirms that the developer doesn't particularly care about the survival of the product, it's purely a cash cow that's threatening to run dry. That in itself doesn't really encourage me to fund it; I'd rather give my funding to someone who wants the product to succeed, and needs the money in order to deal with practical concerns (keeping in food, electricity, equipment) that would otherwise interrupt their ultimate goal, which is producing something. There's a strong fundamental difference between the ultimate goal being production of a product, and the ultimate goal being an income stream.
I remember the article you're talking about; it was here on Slashdot a while back. It was widely assumed to be a hoax, at least in the advertised implementation. He was talking about TB per page, and replacing Blu-Ray discs with paper, etc.
But in theory there's no reason why you can't do a 2D bar code at high resolution across a page. You wouldn't want to use regular toner though, since it sticks to the pages; you'd want to use real ink that sinks in. Preferably pigment inks instead of dyes, too.
The problem you get into is even if you can make the paper last a few thousand years, how long are the readers going to last? If you have to use a scanner to retrieve the information from the pages, then you run the risk of your information being irretrievably lost if the scanners all break down (say if civilization temporarily loses the ability to produce them). This requires that you keep around a lot of "bootstrapping" information on how to build the decoders, etc. in a natural-language format.
That is more than a joke CPUs are a very efficient heat source. Using a pile of CPUs to heat a pool might work out better than existing devices.
You are aware, I hope, that all resistance-coil devices, which is what a CPU basically acts like, are 100% thermally efficient?
A Pentium 4 is no more efficient at producing heat than a toaster of equivalent wattage. They're both turning electric power into heat.
To get more efficient heating, you'd need to move to devices which actually use electricity to move heat from place to place rather than create it from electricity -- aka "heat pumps." They can appear to be more than 100% efficient, if you count the heat they pull in from the outside environment as free.
I have a pool that's plumbed entirely with various types of PVC; both the standard rigid SCH40 and the flexible stuff (which I prefer, as it reduces the number of hard bends you need). The only thing I've noticed is some bleaching of the plastic where it is in contact with the water. You can easily see this in most lined pools by looking at the water line; it'll be lighter blue where it's constantly exposed to chlorinated water than above it.
I suppose over time chlorinated water might break down plastics, but I doubt it's very fast. Remember that city water is chlorinated, too (although at a far less concentration) and PVC is used for household water lines that are expected to last for decades.
I tend to wonder more about metal components, where the chlorine might act as an oxidizer and speed up the decomposition of the metal. The water blocks would be my biggest personal concern, since they're not tested for city water much less pool water, and they're right in the computers' cases.
Before I'd be willing to set up some system like this, I would want some kind of flow cutoff, that would stop the entire pool from draining into my house if something sprung a leak. I have this horrible image of coming home after a vacation, only to find out that the contents of the pool have migrated to the basement via the computer room.
I think a lot of computers have internal ports that were put in there as part of the original board design, but were never taken advantage of during configuration or subsequent system design.
In an old Mac of mine (G4 "Sawtooth"), there is an internal Firewire port right on the motherboard, even though there are virtually no (to my knowledge anyway) internal Firewire devices available. The most useful thing you can do with it is run it out to a dummy card-slot panel and give yourself an extra external port. (I suppose you could also run another HD by using a IDE to FW converter card, if you could find a small enough one.)
It's there, I suspect, because when they were designing that mobo, it wasn't clear that Firewire would be used primarily for DV and external peripherals, and wouldn't become the internal-peripheral interconnect of choice. For all the designers knew, Firewire could have become like SATA is today, with hard drives being built for it natively. In that case, having one inside the case could be useful as hell (particularly since that machine has space for 4 or 6 internal 3.5" HDs and 2 removable-media drives). They had no way of knowing that it would end up being the electronics version of an appendix.
I suspect if you were to look around closely at the first generations of a lot of technologies, you'd find a lot of things like this; design decisions made for possibilities that just didn't pan out, but were left there anyway.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get it pre-installed with Linux? And would you recommend wherever you bought it from?
I'm still hoping that Lenovo will see the light and sell ThinkPads (or whatever they're calling them these days) without Windows; I never could get a bare one from IBM, and there was always just something galling about buying software that I don't want to use.
I find the idea of a multinational corporation and a government getting into it fascinating. Not fascinating in a good way, but fascinating in a 'well, I never thought I'd see that happen' sort of way.
At least in my experience, many people in government have something of a god complex. The idea that there are people more powerful than them just doesn't compute. And to a certain extent, they're quite justified. At least in the last few hundred years of history, there haven't been a lot of organizations that could rival governments in terms of power and longevity; some religious organizations were up there (and still are), and some quasi-governmental corporations (e.g. VOC, HEIC), but generally speaking I think it's safe to say that most politicians regard government as inherently superior to industry and the historical counterexamples to this are seen as exceptions rather than rules.
Setting aside whether this should be the case, I think we are rapidly approaching or have already reached a point where many industrial/corporate organizations are playing on the same field as many states, whether those states want to admit it or not.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of speculation to wonder if a day might come when a group of business interests might get together and plot the downfall of a government because it was threatening their income.
Please direct me to the Unified World Zoning Laws, please.
Oh, wait; you mean there aren't any? Well, it's sort of hard to compare a local zoning ordnance to a global ".xxx" TLD, then. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there is a problem with creating adult domains under CC TLDs. If country FU wants to create ".adult.fu", then they should go right ahead. And if region BR of country FU wants to create ".adult.br.fu", they should go right ahead as well. They are also free to mandate that all porn sites within their jurisdiction use those domains. Heck, they're free to block all traffic not originating from their own TLD, if that's what their residents want (I'd argue that they're insane, and shooting themselves in the foot, but hey, it's their country/region/whatever). If residents of those areas decide to go to some other area's TLD, perhaps an area that doesn't restrict it to 'adult' zones, well that's just like driving from Provo to Reno. Not everyone wants to live the same way; when you're on somebody else's turf (or nobody's turf at all, in the case of non-country-specific TLDs), you'd best shut up and deal, and go back to your own area if you don't like it.
Adult sites and content are a local and regional issue, because that's where you're going to have a shot at getting some consensus as to what content belongs where. That's the level on which ".kids" and ".xxx" domains should be created, not at the root level.
You can't really give a hard quantity for "amateur radio" since there are many ways of transmitting packets. Over VHF, which is the most popular region for packet (although TCP/IP is not all that common), you're typically in the 9600 to 14400 baud range. (And 9600 baud is considered "fast" packet.) The frequencies can handle more data, but most people don't have the equipment to do more than that, so the de facto standards are rather slow.
On microwave or some of the higher UHF bands, if you were only interested in doing a point-to-point link and were going to use specialized equipment, you could obviously push a lot of data. For long distances, down on HF, and with low signal-to-noise, you're going to be talking about fairly slow teletype-like speeds. (3600 baud is considered really good.)
But as the other respondent mentioned, the bigger hurdles to such a system aren't technical but legal and regulatory; at least in the U.S., using Amateur Radio for any sort of business or commercial purpose is prohibited, as is any form of encryption (there are some narrow exceptions but in general, encryption is strictly verboten). Plus, there are rules about letting people transmit information using your radio and passing third-party traffic internationally (only some countries have agreements with the U.S. allowing hams to do this).
Right now, the current state-of-the-art with respect to Amateur Radio wide-area data networking (of things actually in use by any significant number of users) are probably WinLink2000/Airmail2000. They're all designed for email-via-radio (particularly HF radio) rather than web browsing or other real-time activities. Unfortunately, they rely very heavily on closed-source, single-OS software, and (at least as implemented by many stations) proprietary, patent-encumbered communications protocols, which I think are anathema to the very idea of amateur radio. (Case in point: WinLink2000 prefers PACTOR2 as its HF OTA protocol, which is not only a proprietary and patented algorithm, but it requires the purchase of a very expensive hardware modem, available only from a single source. And the software is closed-source and Windows-only. Sound like a good idea to you? Yeah, me neither. And the WL2k people wonder why there's little interest...) Anyway, enough of a rant there. The point is that the state-of-the-art with regards to amateur radio is pretty well behind what most internet users would probably be impressed with.
There unfortunately seems to be little interest among mainstream hams (at least that I've met) to pursue or develop modern radio-data communications. There are definitely people out there who are doing some great stuff, but down at my local club, which I think is fairly representative, a large percentage of the guys see radios and computers as two separate things better off left separate. Radio is something they've been doing for decades; computers are black boxes. (Even using computers for logging purposes is viewed as "pretty high tech.") I'm not saying they're fools by any means, a few of them are absolute geniuses when it comes to radio and analog signals -- we're talking greybeards who could MacGuyver themselves an HF transceiver out of your junk box. So while I have the utmost respect for them, very little of that knowledge is getting passed on, or combined with modern technology. Hence the biggest developments in radio communication are not being done by hams, but by companies who develop products for other related markets (marine communication, in the case of PACTOR) and amateurs get stuck with what trickles down, instead of the other way around as it was in the past.
The only way this is going to change is if more young people, or people with a wider variety of interests and knowledge, become hams and learn from the 'old wizards' before they're gone (and at my club, you're a real spring chicken if you weren't around during World War II), and amateur radio and its associated spectrum and opportunities for communication gone with it. Starting mid-Feb,
Unless YouTube has a branch in Brazil (though I've never heard about such thing).
I am pretty sure that Google has a branch office in Brazil, since Google runs Orkut and Brazil is Orkut's major market and the source of 50+% of its userbase.
If the Brazilian government wanted to go after Google, I'm sure they have some assets in-country that they could go after. Probably not the real war chests of the company, which I assume is all in the States, but a few million bucks worth of stuff seized would probably annoy the shareholders quite a bit.
Frankly it surprises me that so many internet companies persist in maintaining branch offices in so many countries. Every time you set up a location and incorporate in a new jurisdiction, you increase your legal exposure and make whatever assets you assign to that shell (at the very least) vulnerable to that country's laws. It would seem that as the international climate grows more and more litigious, that the hazards of setting up local subsidiaries would outweigh the risks more often. I certainly would want to minimize the number of subsidiaries, if I were running a multinational, I'd think.
You might want to film your wedding night with your wife; It's your (plural) right. But that doesn't give the right to others to publish that film.
It does if you do it in a public place, where there's no assumption of privacy...it's one thing if someone sneaks a hidden camera into your honeymoon suite, another thing entirely if you start getting it on right on the beach, and expect everyone else to just avert their eyes and lenses. This seems like a pretty darn sensible rule to me. If you're in a private place, then shame on anyone for spying; if you're in public, well then, you must have wanted people to watch.
The people in the (frankly not-too-erotic) video looked to be on a public beach; unless there's something about the video's circumstances that I'm missing, if they were in the U.S. I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on.
I fail to see why the terrorist rendition flights have any link to copyright infringement cases. If you can provide any evidence of the U.S. using such tactics against copyright infringers, I'd be interested.
The "slippery slope" is a very weak argument. It's only logically applicable in situations where doing action A makes actions B, C, and D more likely. If you can't prove that doing A makes B more likely to occur in some direct way, then it's a fallacy.
Although I'm generally the first to tell you that the average American is probably fat, lazy, and ignorant, they are not as completely devoid of thought as seems sometimes to be assumed in some circles. The average red-state American, on the whole, seems not to have a problem with the government torturing terrorist suspects, or any sort of radical Islamists for that matter. However, despite what you might think of that stance, it doesn't say anything about their opinions of the government torturing somebody for downloading MP3s -- which is probably a subject far more near and dear to said American's heart, because while they'll probably never read a Koran, they probably have downloaded (or their son/daughter/nephew has downloaded) their share of MP3s. The two activities (and more importantly, the would-be perpetrators of each activity) are seen as being quite different in kind, and I can pretty much guarantee that there's little stomach for the CIA hauling off downloaders in the middle of the night.
You might as well say that people who support the death penalty are going to green-light public hangings of jaywalkers. It's a ridiculous exaggeration, and frankly it's intellectually dishonest and prevents rational and meaningful discussion of the actual situation, by replacing fact with hyperbole.
My understanding is that the current-generation "CISC" chips have a preprocessor (on the die) that turns some of the more complex instructions into several less complex ones, which are what the processor's logic pipelines work on. Thus while the compiler might still produce CISC microcode, it's really being cross-compiled one further time before it's actually executed. So you can sort of argue it either way. The processor as a unit does execute more instructions than RISC chips; but in a way they're not executing them natively.
The main reason I've heard why CISC+preprocessor designs won out over pure RISC is because the die area required for the CISC-to-RISC pre-processor shrunk steadily as new manufacturing processes were developed. The logic required to translate CISC to RISC is basically fixed, and as you go to smaller and smaller processes, it represents a smaller and smaller portion of the total processor die area. Thus, every year the advantage of RISC over CISC shrinks. It's sort of an unintended consequence of Moore's law: the ability to pack more transistors onto a die has also made radical changes to the architecture's less attractive, since it makes preprocessor logic "cheaper" in terms of die space.
The x86 instruction set has become the lingua franca of processors, even though most of them immediately break those x86 instructions down into RISC-ish sub-instructions for actual processing. Whether you can still call this hybrid architecture CISC or RISC is mostly semantics; it's a little of both.
The ease, the vastness, the updating, the decentralized wikipedia (at least in its editors), the accuracy...
I was with you right up until that point. Wikipedia is great, but its accuracy is a little questionable. I'd say that in general, Wikipedia is a good idea of what a reasonably well-educated adult probably thinks is true. But despite attempts to enforce citing sources, there's quite a bit of misinformation on topics; generally not outright lies per se, but stuff that seems OK on first glance, but is either a mis-simplification of a topic or a pure misunderstanding.
I'm not sure this is even really a criticism of Wikipedia. It's quite useful as it is, and I don't think that an "expert system" as others have proposed would be superior. It just means one has to keep in mind when reading WP that it is, in general, written and edited by non-experts, and thus shouldn't be taken too far. But for that matter, neither should any general-reference Encyclopedia.
In general, I'm a fan of Wikipedia, and I think that the fluidity of the information that it provides might actually help the next generation of researchers, who are growing up with it in their lives. Once you realize how easy it is for anyone to change an article in Wikipedia, it really drills in the importance of going directly to primary sources. By allowing students to access primary source information more quickly, it lets them do better research, faster. This is all assuming, of course, that teachers are good about punishing students who try to use WP as a primary source itself. (Unless the topic at hand is public perception or meta-critique of social issues, where WP might be appropriate as an actual source.) Where past generations might have accepted what was written in an encyclopedia as basically true and inviolate, people growing up with Wikipedia will probably be more quick to realize the controversiality of many issues that a dead-tree reference can render into (false) black and white. When you read an article in Britannica, you can't look at the Discussion page and see what kind of editorial fistfight went into its creation; with Wikipedia, you can.
I think the market is right around the corner: high-definition TV.
The PVR market has been crippled in recent years because of market confusion, and compatibility problems (will my TiVO work with my cable box, etc.), plus competition for consumers' money by HDTVs themselves.
Once people get done buying their HDTV and paying off their credit cards, they're going to start looking at PVRs. I think that's a market that's probably going to explode in the next 5-10 years, even more than it has already. I also think you're going to see PVR functionality being built into the 'standard' cableco boxes, rather than as an upgrade. (Not that it will be free, they'll just charge everyone for it.)
High-def TV takes up a lot of space. That means if you want to have significant PVR functionality, you need to have a lot of local storage. 37.5TB, or 300Tb (aka 300,000,000Mb, if we use the 'marketing department' definitions) would be about 4,340 hours (180 days) of 19.2Mb/s HDTV. While that seems impossibly huge, I could imagine a future PVR using it as local cache: constantly downloading and storing programming based on your preferences. Add in a big HD movie library (say the contents of your local Blockbuster) and you can give the customer the impression of many simultaneous channels, even if they only have a relatively narrow pipe. (Narrow being 1 HD channel at a time, or a 20Mb pipe -- fat by today's standards, granted.)
Content always expands out to fill the available capacity. I remember when I first heard about the development of DVDs, back in the early 1990s. They seemed pretty ridiculously big then, too. Now I have stuff that I can't back up to DVDs, because it would be impractical to split it among so many discs as would be required. (Apple's Aperture doesn't even try to have a backup-to-DVD option, it's designed strictly to work with removable hard discs as backup 'Vaults.')
There was a time when people thought 20MB removable media was more than a single person would ever need, though we might look back and laugh. There's going to be a time in the future when 40TB looks the same way.
I agree with you, except for the GP's comment about wireless. Linux and wireless just don't work together, unless you're lucky enough to have one of the few well-supported chipsets (thankfully some of the ones used in laptops are OK, e.g. Centrino). But if you go down to Best Buy and pick up a random Wifi card and expect it to work, welcome to the house of pain. If you're lucky, they'll be a driver for it (like the acx100/111 series), but you'll need to find and download the right firmware...there's no "plug and play." Plug-n-pray, possibly -- because you're praying that the vendor hasn't changed the chipset on you, from whenever the card model was last reported as working with your distro, praying the firmware you downloaded works, pouring over dmesg's output trying to figure out what hotplug is up to, praying you wrote the config files right because the GUI tools are about as helpful as a screen door on a submarine...it makes me somewhat ill just thinking about it.
Personally, I've given up on wifi on my Linux machines. I'd rather just get a few thousand feet of Ethernet cable and a cordless drill and start boring holes, because at least that's a tractable problem. (Although it's been pointed out elsewhere that future Ethernet drivers may have the same issues as current wifi cards, because they're all ditching EEPROMs and Flash for driver-loaded, non-distributable firmware.)
Now granted, wireless on Windows isn't necessarily any picnic. The vendor-supplied drivers are often complete pieces of shit and buggy as hell. I spent three hours trying to get WPA-PSK working on a flatmate's WinXP system once, because of the crap D-Link calls drivers. I wouldn't want to expose a novice computer user to that. But I was able to get it working, and I'm not really an experienced Windows user (use one at work but don't own one and don't plan to); everything about Windows makes my brain ache. As much as I would really like to say that Windows is vastly inferior to Linux in every possible way, it's just not true, at least where wireless is concerned.
There is only one platform which makes wireless easy enough to use that I would trust a novice user to set it up, and that's the Apple's. There's a lot Apple does wrong, but you can't criticize how they handle wifi on the Mac. If you want wireless, you go to your Apple Store and buy the card. It costs a lot of money, but it's guaranteed to work, no dicking around.
The one where ambient humidity serves as an insulator and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge, which is a tremendous risk in a room with that many highly charged moving parts.
I realize this is nitpicking (and the rest of your post was right on) but I think you meant to say "where ambient humidity serves as a conductor and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge..."
Higher humidity makes the air a poorer dielectric, meaning that static charges dissipate before they can build up to significant voltages. With dry air, the air is a better insulator, hence higher-voltage static charges. (This is why the kids' trick where you scuff your feet on the carpet, particularly while wearing rubber-footed one-piece jammies, and then shock the beejesus out of someone, only works in the winter.) Naturally, anything that produces sparks -- particularly my favorite, Van de Graaf generators -- work far better in dry air than wet.
I think we need to do some sort of "Trading Places"-esque scheme, where all the Microsoft board members go to sleep one night as usual, but wake up the next morning working in Bangalore at an outsourced call center for OEM tech support.
At the same time we'll let the tech support drones have their way with the Microsoft campus, which I suspect will involve setting it on fire.
If software patents harm Microsoft then why does MS patent software?
Mutually Assured Destruction.
If you want to go into the software business, you need to have some patents yourself, just in case somebody else decides to go after you. If Microsoft didn't have a patent portfolio, IBM would roll over them like a big blue Panzer division. It's basically impossible to develop non-trivial application software without violating somebody's patents, somewhere; hence every major software company has its own patent arsenal, in case somebody else starts saber-rattling.
Slashdot Mirror
You are required to carry ID on you at all times (ostensibly for identification of your body if you die or something) even though you supposedly cannot be arrested for failing to provide ID - but they can haul you in if you don't have ID if you're even a passenger in a car.
Um, no. And if that actually happened to you, I suggest you go and speak to the ACLU. You only have to have a driver's license on you if you are driving, and even in most states it's technically legal to not have it on you, but you run the risk of being taken down to the station until you can produce it.
There is no requirement to have an ID when you're a passenger in a car, or just walking down the street. (Furthermore, I'm not sure what you're on about body identification; I've never heard that excuse.)
The growing use of IDs in order to travel on public transportation (long-haul buses, trains, etc.) is very distressing to me, and is a legitimate problem that should be fought tooth and nail.
The situation is bad, but it's not as bad as you're making it out to be, and that's important for people to know. People taking a defeatist attitude about things like this is part of the problem.
Interesting. I actually emailed Lenovo Sales a while back, and they swore up and down to me that they didn't ship anything to anyone (wholesale or otherwise) that wasn't preinstalled with Windows. Guess that's what I get for trusting a sales drone.
I guess he could just toss the code out to the wolves after striping out the editor but it would honestly just die at that time.
Not sure why he wouldn't do this at least to begin with; I think it would quiet a lot of the skeptics (myself included) who aren't particularly swayed by the thought that he would "consider" making it open source given appropriate funding. Stripping out the editor but opening the rest might actually be a good way to spur development because it gives a tractable problem to some other programmer: figure out a way to shoehorn an existing open-source editor, or a new one, in place of the one that's been removed. Sounds like a good thesis project for a comp-sci student somewhere.
I don't fault the guy for wanting to make money, I really don't. (I work on closed-source software to pay the bills, and we don't even give it away free-as-in-beer.) But he's not going to win any friends by holding the code effectively hostage; since he's not known as being an OSS developer, he's going to have to take the first step if he wants to receive funding from people who are ideologically motivated in that direction. A good first step would be opening up whatever code is his to release in whatever form it's currently in, just to prove that he's not playing Pit and the Pendulum with the Delete key on the whole project.
I remember the article you're talking about; it was here on Slashdot a while back. It was widely assumed to be a hoax, at least in the advertised implementation. He was talking about TB per page, and replacing Blu-Ray discs with paper, etc.
But in theory there's no reason why you can't do a 2D bar code at high resolution across a page. You wouldn't want to use regular toner though, since it sticks to the pages; you'd want to use real ink that sinks in. Preferably pigment inks instead of dyes, too.
The problem you get into is even if you can make the paper last a few thousand years, how long are the readers going to last? If you have to use a scanner to retrieve the information from the pages, then you run the risk of your information being irretrievably lost if the scanners all break down (say if civilization temporarily loses the ability to produce them). This requires that you keep around a lot of "bootstrapping" information on how to build the decoders, etc. in a natural-language format.
John Brown was a terrorist; he just predated the use of the term. Had it existed, it certainly would have been applied.
One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
That is more than a joke CPUs are a very efficient heat source. Using a pile of CPUs to heat a pool might work out better than existing devices.
You are aware, I hope, that all resistance-coil devices, which is what a CPU basically acts like, are 100% thermally efficient?
A Pentium 4 is no more efficient at producing heat than a toaster of equivalent wattage. They're both turning electric power into heat.
To get more efficient heating, you'd need to move to devices which actually use electricity to move heat from place to place rather than create it from electricity -- aka "heat pumps." They can appear to be more than 100% efficient, if you count the heat they pull in from the outside environment as free.
I have a pool that's plumbed entirely with various types of PVC; both the standard rigid SCH40 and the flexible stuff (which I prefer, as it reduces the number of hard bends you need). The only thing I've noticed is some bleaching of the plastic where it is in contact with the water. You can easily see this in most lined pools by looking at the water line; it'll be lighter blue where it's constantly exposed to chlorinated water than above it.
I suppose over time chlorinated water might break down plastics, but I doubt it's very fast. Remember that city water is chlorinated, too (although at a far less concentration) and PVC is used for household water lines that are expected to last for decades.
I tend to wonder more about metal components, where the chlorine might act as an oxidizer and speed up the decomposition of the metal. The water blocks would be my biggest personal concern, since they're not tested for city water much less pool water, and they're right in the computers' cases.
Before I'd be willing to set up some system like this, I would want some kind of flow cutoff, that would stop the entire pool from draining into my house if something sprung a leak. I have this horrible image of coming home after a vacation, only to find out that the contents of the pool have migrated to the basement via the computer room.
I think a lot of computers have internal ports that were put in there as part of the original board design, but were never taken advantage of during configuration or subsequent system design.
In an old Mac of mine (G4 "Sawtooth"), there is an internal Firewire port right on the motherboard, even though there are virtually no (to my knowledge anyway) internal Firewire devices available. The most useful thing you can do with it is run it out to a dummy card-slot panel and give yourself an extra external port. (I suppose you could also run another HD by using a IDE to FW converter card, if you could find a small enough one.)
It's there, I suspect, because when they were designing that mobo, it wasn't clear that Firewire would be used primarily for DV and external peripherals, and wouldn't become the internal-peripheral interconnect of choice. For all the designers knew, Firewire could have become like SATA is today, with hard drives being built for it natively. In that case, having one inside the case could be useful as hell (particularly since that machine has space for 4 or 6 internal 3.5" HDs and 2 removable-media drives). They had no way of knowing that it would end up being the electronics version of an appendix.
I suspect if you were to look around closely at the first generations of a lot of technologies, you'd find a lot of things like this; design decisions made for possibilities that just didn't pan out, but were left there anyway.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get it pre-installed with Linux? And would you recommend wherever you bought it from?
I'm still hoping that Lenovo will see the light and sell ThinkPads (or whatever they're calling them these days) without Windows; I never could get a bare one from IBM, and there was always just something galling about buying software that I don't want to use.
I find the idea of a multinational corporation and a government getting into it fascinating. Not fascinating in a good way, but fascinating in a 'well, I never thought I'd see that happen' sort of way.
At least in my experience, many people in government have something of a god complex. The idea that there are people more powerful than them just doesn't compute. And to a certain extent, they're quite justified. At least in the last few hundred years of history, there haven't been a lot of organizations that could rival governments in terms of power and longevity; some religious organizations were up there (and still are), and some quasi-governmental corporations (e.g. VOC, HEIC), but generally speaking I think it's safe to say that most politicians regard government as inherently superior to industry and the historical counterexamples to this are seen as exceptions rather than rules.
Setting aside whether this should be the case, I think we are rapidly approaching or have already reached a point where many industrial/corporate organizations are playing on the same field as many states, whether those states want to admit it or not.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of speculation to wonder if a day might come when a group of business interests might get together and plot the downfall of a government because it was threatening their income.
In real life we create zoning laws...
Please direct me to the Unified World Zoning Laws, please.
Oh, wait; you mean there aren't any? Well, it's sort of hard to compare a local zoning ordnance to a global ".xxx" TLD, then. I don't think anyone is suggesting that there is a problem with creating adult domains under CC TLDs. If country FU wants to create ".adult.fu", then they should go right ahead. And if region BR of country FU wants to create ".adult.br.fu", they should go right ahead as well. They are also free to mandate that all porn sites within their jurisdiction use those domains. Heck, they're free to block all traffic not originating from their own TLD, if that's what their residents want (I'd argue that they're insane, and shooting themselves in the foot, but hey, it's their country/region/whatever). If residents of those areas decide to go to some other area's TLD, perhaps an area that doesn't restrict it to 'adult' zones, well that's just like driving from Provo to Reno. Not everyone wants to live the same way; when you're on somebody else's turf (or nobody's turf at all, in the case of non-country-specific TLDs), you'd best shut up and deal, and go back to your own area if you don't like it.
Adult sites and content are a local and regional issue, because that's where you're going to have a shot at getting some consensus as to what content belongs where. That's the level on which ".kids" and ".xxx" domains should be created, not at the root level.
it just takes a bunch of cash from existing companies and gives it to the new registrar.
I see you're catching on.
You can't really give a hard quantity for "amateur radio" since there are many ways of transmitting packets. Over VHF, which is the most popular region for packet (although TCP/IP is not all that common), you're typically in the 9600 to 14400 baud range. (And 9600 baud is considered "fast" packet.) The frequencies can handle more data, but most people don't have the equipment to do more than that, so the de facto standards are rather slow.
On microwave or some of the higher UHF bands, if you were only interested in doing a point-to-point link and were going to use specialized equipment, you could obviously push a lot of data. For long distances, down on HF, and with low signal-to-noise, you're going to be talking about fairly slow teletype-like speeds. (3600 baud is considered really good.)
But as the other respondent mentioned, the bigger hurdles to such a system aren't technical but legal and regulatory; at least in the U.S., using Amateur Radio for any sort of business or commercial purpose is prohibited, as is any form of encryption (there are some narrow exceptions but in general, encryption is strictly verboten). Plus, there are rules about letting people transmit information using your radio and passing third-party traffic internationally (only some countries have agreements with the U.S. allowing hams to do this).
Right now, the current state-of-the-art with respect to Amateur Radio wide-area data networking (of things actually in use by any significant number of users) are probably WinLink2000/Airmail2000. They're all designed for email-via-radio (particularly HF radio) rather than web browsing or other real-time activities. Unfortunately, they rely very heavily on closed-source, single-OS software, and (at least as implemented by many stations) proprietary, patent-encumbered communications protocols, which I think are anathema to the very idea of amateur radio. (Case in point: WinLink2000 prefers PACTOR2 as its HF OTA protocol, which is not only a proprietary and patented algorithm, but it requires the purchase of a very expensive hardware modem, available only from a single source. And the software is closed-source and Windows-only. Sound like a good idea to you? Yeah, me neither. And the WL2k people wonder why there's little interest...) Anyway, enough of a rant there. The point is that the state-of-the-art with regards to amateur radio is pretty well behind what most internet users would probably be impressed with.
There unfortunately seems to be little interest among mainstream hams (at least that I've met) to pursue or develop modern radio-data communications. There are definitely people out there who are doing some great stuff, but down at my local club, which I think is fairly representative, a large percentage of the guys see radios and computers as two separate things better off left separate. Radio is something they've been doing for decades; computers are black boxes. (Even using computers for logging purposes is viewed as "pretty high tech.") I'm not saying they're fools by any means, a few of them are absolute geniuses when it comes to radio and analog signals -- we're talking greybeards who could MacGuyver themselves an HF transceiver out of your junk box. So while I have the utmost respect for them, very little of that knowledge is getting passed on, or combined with modern technology. Hence the biggest developments in radio communication are not being done by hams, but by companies who develop products for other related markets (marine communication, in the case of PACTOR) and amateurs get stuck with what trickles down, instead of the other way around as it was in the past.
The only way this is going to change is if more young people, or people with a wider variety of interests and knowledge, become hams and learn from the 'old wizards' before they're gone (and at my club, you're a real spring chicken if you weren't around during World War II), and amateur radio and its associated spectrum and opportunities for communication gone with it. Starting mid-Feb,
Unless YouTube has a branch in Brazil (though I've never heard about such thing).
I am pretty sure that Google has a branch office in Brazil, since Google runs Orkut and Brazil is Orkut's major market and the source of 50+% of its userbase.
If the Brazilian government wanted to go after Google, I'm sure they have some assets in-country that they could go after. Probably not the real war chests of the company, which I assume is all in the States, but a few million bucks worth of stuff seized would probably annoy the shareholders quite a bit.
Frankly it surprises me that so many internet companies persist in maintaining branch offices in so many countries. Every time you set up a location and incorporate in a new jurisdiction, you increase your legal exposure and make whatever assets you assign to that shell (at the very least) vulnerable to that country's laws. It would seem that as the international climate grows more and more litigious, that the hazards of setting up local subsidiaries would outweigh the risks more often. I certainly would want to minimize the number of subsidiaries, if I were running a multinational, I'd think.
You might want to film your wedding night with your wife; It's your (plural) right. But that doesn't give the right to others to publish that film.
It does if you do it in a public place, where there's no assumption of privacy...it's one thing if someone sneaks a hidden camera into your honeymoon suite, another thing entirely if you start getting it on right on the beach, and expect everyone else to just avert their eyes and lenses. This seems like a pretty darn sensible rule to me. If you're in a private place, then shame on anyone for spying; if you're in public, well then, you must have wanted people to watch.
The people in the (frankly not-too-erotic) video looked to be on a public beach; unless there's something about the video's circumstances that I'm missing, if they were in the U.S. I doubt they'd have a leg to stand on.
I fail to see why the terrorist rendition flights have any link to copyright infringement cases. If you can provide any evidence of the U.S. using such tactics against copyright infringers, I'd be interested.
The "slippery slope" is a very weak argument. It's only logically applicable in situations where doing action A makes actions B, C, and D more likely. If you can't prove that doing A makes B more likely to occur in some direct way, then it's a fallacy.
Although I'm generally the first to tell you that the average American is probably fat, lazy, and ignorant, they are not as completely devoid of thought as seems sometimes to be assumed in some circles. The average red-state American, on the whole, seems not to have a problem with the government torturing terrorist suspects, or any sort of radical Islamists for that matter. However, despite what you might think of that stance, it doesn't say anything about their opinions of the government torturing somebody for downloading MP3s -- which is probably a subject far more near and dear to said American's heart, because while they'll probably never read a Koran, they probably have downloaded (or their son/daughter/nephew has downloaded) their share of MP3s. The two activities (and more importantly, the would-be perpetrators of each activity) are seen as being quite different in kind, and I can pretty much guarantee that there's little stomach for the CIA hauling off downloaders in the middle of the night.
You might as well say that people who support the death penalty are going to green-light public hangings of jaywalkers. It's a ridiculous exaggeration, and frankly it's intellectually dishonest and prevents rational and meaningful discussion of the actual situation, by replacing fact with hyperbole.
Or were you just trolling for mod points?
My understanding is that the current-generation "CISC" chips have a preprocessor (on the die) that turns some of the more complex instructions into several less complex ones, which are what the processor's logic pipelines work on. Thus while the compiler might still produce CISC microcode, it's really being cross-compiled one further time before it's actually executed. So you can sort of argue it either way. The processor as a unit does execute more instructions than RISC chips; but in a way they're not executing them natively.
The main reason I've heard why CISC+preprocessor designs won out over pure RISC is because the die area required for the CISC-to-RISC pre-processor shrunk steadily as new manufacturing processes were developed. The logic required to translate CISC to RISC is basically fixed, and as you go to smaller and smaller processes, it represents a smaller and smaller portion of the total processor die area. Thus, every year the advantage of RISC over CISC shrinks. It's sort of an unintended consequence of Moore's law: the ability to pack more transistors onto a die has also made radical changes to the architecture's less attractive, since it makes preprocessor logic "cheaper" in terms of die space.
The x86 instruction set has become the lingua franca of processors, even though most of them immediately break those x86 instructions down into RISC-ish sub-instructions for actual processing. Whether you can still call this hybrid architecture CISC or RISC is mostly semantics; it's a little of both.
The ease, the vastness, the updating, the decentralized wikipedia (at least in its editors), the accuracy ...
I was with you right up until that point. Wikipedia is great, but its accuracy is a little questionable. I'd say that in general, Wikipedia is a good idea of what a reasonably well-educated adult probably thinks is true. But despite attempts to enforce citing sources, there's quite a bit of misinformation on topics; generally not outright lies per se, but stuff that seems OK on first glance, but is either a mis-simplification of a topic or a pure misunderstanding.
I'm not sure this is even really a criticism of Wikipedia. It's quite useful as it is, and I don't think that an "expert system" as others have proposed would be superior. It just means one has to keep in mind when reading WP that it is, in general, written and edited by non-experts, and thus shouldn't be taken too far. But for that matter, neither should any general-reference Encyclopedia.
In general, I'm a fan of Wikipedia, and I think that the fluidity of the information that it provides might actually help the next generation of researchers, who are growing up with it in their lives. Once you realize how easy it is for anyone to change an article in Wikipedia, it really drills in the importance of going directly to primary sources. By allowing students to access primary source information more quickly, it lets them do better research, faster. This is all assuming, of course, that teachers are good about punishing students who try to use WP as a primary source itself. (Unless the topic at hand is public perception or meta-critique of social issues, where WP might be appropriate as an actual source.) Where past generations might have accepted what was written in an encyclopedia as basically true and inviolate, people growing up with Wikipedia will probably be more quick to realize the controversiality of many issues that a dead-tree reference can render into (false) black and white. When you read an article in Britannica, you can't look at the Discussion page and see what kind of editorial fistfight went into its creation; with Wikipedia, you can.
I think the market is right around the corner: high-definition TV.
The PVR market has been crippled in recent years because of market confusion, and compatibility problems (will my TiVO work with my cable box, etc.), plus competition for consumers' money by HDTVs themselves.
Once people get done buying their HDTV and paying off their credit cards, they're going to start looking at PVRs. I think that's a market that's probably going to explode in the next 5-10 years, even more than it has already. I also think you're going to see PVR functionality being built into the 'standard' cableco boxes, rather than as an upgrade. (Not that it will be free, they'll just charge everyone for it.)
High-def TV takes up a lot of space. That means if you want to have significant PVR functionality, you need to have a lot of local storage. 37.5TB, or 300Tb (aka 300,000,000Mb, if we use the 'marketing department' definitions) would be about 4,340 hours (180 days) of 19.2Mb/s HDTV. While that seems impossibly huge, I could imagine a future PVR using it as local cache: constantly downloading and storing programming based on your preferences. Add in a big HD movie library (say the contents of your local Blockbuster) and you can give the customer the impression of many simultaneous channels, even if they only have a relatively narrow pipe. (Narrow being 1 HD channel at a time, or a 20Mb pipe -- fat by today's standards, granted.)
Content always expands out to fill the available capacity. I remember when I first heard about the development of DVDs, back in the early 1990s. They seemed pretty ridiculously big then, too. Now I have stuff that I can't back up to DVDs, because it would be impractical to split it among so many discs as would be required. (Apple's Aperture doesn't even try to have a backup-to-DVD option, it's designed strictly to work with removable hard discs as backup 'Vaults.')
There was a time when people thought 20MB removable media was more than a single person would ever need, though we might look back and laugh. There's going to be a time in the future when 40TB looks the same way.
I agree with you, except for the GP's comment about wireless. Linux and wireless just don't work together, unless you're lucky enough to have one of the few well-supported chipsets (thankfully some of the ones used in laptops are OK, e.g. Centrino). But if you go down to Best Buy and pick up a random Wifi card and expect it to work, welcome to the house of pain. If you're lucky, they'll be a driver for it (like the acx100/111 series), but you'll need to find and download the right firmware...there's no "plug and play." Plug-n-pray, possibly -- because you're praying that the vendor hasn't changed the chipset on you, from whenever the card model was last reported as working with your distro, praying the firmware you downloaded works, pouring over dmesg's output trying to figure out what hotplug is up to, praying you wrote the config files right because the GUI tools are about as helpful as a screen door on a submarine...it makes me somewhat ill just thinking about it.
Personally, I've given up on wifi on my Linux machines. I'd rather just get a few thousand feet of Ethernet cable and a cordless drill and start boring holes, because at least that's a tractable problem. (Although it's been pointed out elsewhere that future Ethernet drivers may have the same issues as current wifi cards, because they're all ditching EEPROMs and Flash for driver-loaded, non-distributable firmware.)
Now granted, wireless on Windows isn't necessarily any picnic. The vendor-supplied drivers are often complete pieces of shit and buggy as hell. I spent three hours trying to get WPA-PSK working on a flatmate's WinXP system once, because of the crap D-Link calls drivers. I wouldn't want to expose a novice computer user to that. But I was able to get it working, and I'm not really an experienced Windows user (use one at work but don't own one and don't plan to); everything about Windows makes my brain ache. As much as I would really like to say that Windows is vastly inferior to Linux in every possible way, it's just not true, at least where wireless is concerned.
There is only one platform which makes wireless easy enough to use that I would trust a novice user to set it up, and that's the Apple's. There's a lot Apple does wrong, but you can't criticize how they handle wifi on the Mac. If you want wireless, you go to your Apple Store and buy the card. It costs a lot of money, but it's guaranteed to work, no dicking around.
The one where ambient humidity serves as an insulator and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge, which is a tremendous risk in a room with that many highly charged moving parts.
I realize this is nitpicking (and the rest of your post was right on) but I think you meant to say "where ambient humidity serves as a conductor and thereby prevents the aggregation of static charge..."
Higher humidity makes the air a poorer dielectric, meaning that static charges dissipate before they can build up to significant voltages. With dry air, the air is a better insulator, hence higher-voltage static charges. (This is why the kids' trick where you scuff your feet on the carpet, particularly while wearing rubber-footed one-piece jammies, and then shock the beejesus out of someone, only works in the winter.) Naturally, anything that produces sparks -- particularly my favorite, Van de Graaf generators -- work far better in dry air than wet.
I think we need to do some sort of "Trading Places"-esque scheme, where all the Microsoft board members go to sleep one night as usual, but wake up the next morning working in Bangalore at an outsourced call center for OEM tech support.
At the same time we'll let the tech support drones have their way with the Microsoft campus, which I suspect will involve setting it on fire.
I don't know why anyone would complain, the spec is only 6,000 pages long.
And the best part is, these are the pages it uses... (I mean, why else do those specs cost so much?)
If software patents harm Microsoft then why does MS patent software?
Mutually Assured Destruction.
If you want to go into the software business, you need to have some patents yourself, just in case somebody else decides to go after you. If Microsoft didn't have a patent portfolio, IBM would roll over them like a big blue Panzer division. It's basically impossible to develop non-trivial application software without violating somebody's patents, somewhere; hence every major software company has its own patent arsenal, in case somebody else starts saber-rattling.