"The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul" is (IMHO) funnier than some of the later material in the H2G2 trilogy (of-five). I literally cried when "The Salmon of Time" ended so abruptly.
Is anyone looking at film versions of the two and a half Dirk Gently novels?
It's bad enough that we have to dial phones and enter text messages with such a crappy interface. Going from two thumbs to one means that the devices are marginally cheaper - but it means that ALL of the work now happens with one thumb instead of two. It seems pretty likely that this will double the load on the thumb - making all sorts of repetitive strain problems more prevelant.
We should be looking at technologies that allow you to use MORE fingers - not LESS.
Humans are just the tool that our genes use to make more genes.
From that perspective, my personal death is NOT as important as the continuation of my children.
Most parents know this at the instinctual level.
The argument that says I'm going to die - what to I care about the rest of humanity - is clearly bogus for most humans. All life on earth strives harder to pass on genetic information than to survive as an individual. That's why we age - and why we fall apart much more rapidly after child-rearing age is past.
But ozone (which is only a high energy oxygen molecule) is continually replenished from regular oxygen - the only reason that we have ozone destruction problems is because we have stuff like CFC's up there that continually destroy ozone faster than it is being re-formed.
A sudden destruction of about half of the ozone wouldn't be immediately fatal to creatures on the other hemisphere. It would basically be a race between the ozone on the protected side of the planet gradually dispersing to the zapped hemisphere - and thereby halving the density over the remaining population - versus the formation of fresh ozone.
Dunno how you'd go about figuring out the consequences and time-span of that process - but people manage to live in polar regions where there are gigantic ozone holes. They don't all drop dead overnight.
So if it's just 10 seconds, surely it could only cook the side of the planet facing the event? Surely we aren't talking about an event so energetic that the radiation would pass all the way through the earth's core in enough strength to screw up both hemispheres at once?
We must be talking something that trashes the ozone layer - or the environment in some other way. It's not enough for the energy to simply kill all the critters on one half of the planet...that's a recoverable event in itself.
It must be that it depletes something important and CONSEQUENTLY all the fish die.
Since gamma rays are travelling at the speed of light - we can't possibly get any warning of them without figuring out some kind of faster-than-light transportation or message transmission.
I suppose we could make a REALLY good predictive model of when astronomical objects are likely to do this - and predict the arrival of a gamma ray burst in time to do something about it. But what could we possibly do?
It takes a good few inches of lead (or a good few feet of concrete, dirt, whatever) to significantly attenuate gamma rays - and if the ones were are talking about were powerful enough to get through the full depth of the earth's oceans and still kill things when they got there - then you'd need to wrap the earth in a few feet of lead - or hide down some amazingly deep mine-shafts.
Since gamma rays are electrically neutral, you can't deflect them away with magnets or anything like that.
We'd have to get out of the way - but this radiation will be expanding out equally in all directions from the source. Unless we had thousands of years of warning, we'd have to high-tail it outta here at close to the speed of light in order to get far enough away for the inverse-square law to have an effect. If we're 100 light years from the source (say) and a mile of salt water doesn't attenuate the energy enough - then we'd need to be *way* more than 200 light years away if we could carry a quarter of a mile of water as a shield, 400 light years away if we had a sixteenth of a mile of water....for any reasonable amount of shielding, we need thousands of years notice of the problem happening.
In all likelyhood, we'd just sit back and let our great, great, great grandchildren deal with the problem.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
OK - I've been hanging out on the www.dslinux.org site for a few weeks. This announcement is *WAY* premature. There isn't even a coherent team put together to START the port yet.
What there is right now is a bunch of individual developers who have each individually solved various parts of the puzzle. However, we are quite far from having all of the parts put together in the form of a runnable kernel - and there is ABSOLUTELY NO ORGANISED DSLINUX TEAM YET!
In order to try to pull things together, I am in the process of organising an election to nominate a team leader - and then to collect together the expertise of the disparate developers, set up a SourceForge account (there already is one - but there has been nothing committed to it since December.
I don't know the individual who posted this to/. - but it doesn't represent the current state of affairs one little bit.
If you need to confirm what I'm saying, visit the forums at www.dslinux.org - or check the emptyness of dslinux.sf.net
If your music is any good, you can sell at prices that are a tenth what online and main-street music sellers charge. And even with rampant piracy, if the fans buy direct from you, you're bound to do better than if some thieving back-stabbing record company is taking 99% of the store price.
The only function those guys have is marketting.
So - the question for you is: How do you get known without a full-scale commercial marketting engine behind you?
I'd suggest doing cheap/free live concerts - giving away demo disks - providing freely and legally downloadable demo tracks. Make sure your web site address is visible on everything that's published about you....heck name your band "Double-You, Double-You, Double-You, My Band Dot Com" so that nobody can even mention you without giving the URL!
Try to get yourself known by any means possible - get creative.
If people will actually come to your web site, you can make money selling MP3's for a dollar for an entire album - let alone a dollar a track. Having become enough interested in your music to actually go to the trouble of visiting your website - who wouldn't spend a dollar to get an entire album if you make it easy enough? How about $10 for every piece of music you've ever recorded?
100% of 10,000 $1 online sales every bit as good as 1% of 100,000 $10 CD's.
Actually, BETTER because you'll be in touch with your fans and be able to make your own artistic decisions without big brother telling you what to do.
It doesn't take much skill with a browser to find the real online scrabble sites. You don't need to look through two million pages to find infringing sites.
If you *just* type 'Scrabble' into Google, the eighth hit from the top (www.thepixelpit.co.uk/scrabble.htm) is another obviously infringing site that (presumably) didn't get a C&D.
It's impossible that this guy could have accumulated 100,000 users without having been noticed by Hasbro *long* ago.
I think Hasbro are perfectly within their rights to shut down this site. The guy who runs it wasn't thinking straight when he decided to clone another companies product, use their trademark, copy their copyrighted board design, etc. That was just dumb.
HOWEVER, the fact that Hasbro left it so long without doing anything about it is pretty dubious.
There is no reason why a company who actually cares about protecting their copyrights, trademarks and patents shouldn't have one of their employees type each of their trademarked names into Google once a week and send cease & desist notices out promptly as soon as infringing sites appear.
What sucks here is that the site has been running for so long - so many people have invested time and effort into it (and others come to love it) - presumably on the basis of "Hasbro clearly approve of this or they'd have shut it down already".
There can be no morally sound reason not to protect your IP immediately. The reasons NOT to do so are purely sneaky business tactics like letting some guy build up a huge following for a web site - then taking it away and using it to advertise.
However, the law allows this kind of thing - so we get this kind of deliberately delayed reaction appearing all over the IP world. The law should not allow it - but then IP law is so unbelievably screwed up, this is one of the lesser evils.
My son and I invent our own. The inventing process is at least 50% of the fun - and just occasionally, we come up with a really good one. For something totally off-the-wall, try 'Kniggits':
(The URL is poorly chosen - it's not actually a paper and pencil game).
Gotta agree with the earlier post about the old Avalon Hill games - there were hundreds of them and 95% of them were really good. You should be able to find a zillion of them on eBay.
For something fairly simple, we've had a lot of fun with 'HeroScape' (from Milton Bradley) - but complexifying the game no end by adding our own rules. Also 'Pirates of the Spanish Main' from Wizkids (buy at least 10 packs to maximise the fun).
No list would be complete without mentioning Dungeons and Dragons - which is as much fun as the people you play it with - and is quite compatible with large quantities of alcohol.
Is it enough to take a kids edutainment package and change the themes to be more suitable?
That might not be all that difficult to do...especially with OpenSource packages such as the Tux4Kids stuff. You could probably find the kinds of 2D sprites they use all over the Internet and with a little tweaking in GIMP, change 'TuxTyping' to 'Naked Babes from Hell Typing'.
In nature, one teeny tiny grass plant somewhere gets the mutation. It takes thousands of generations of the animals that feed on it for that mutation to spread far enough to be important. That gives the animals plenty of time to evolve to keep up with the change.
When humanity introduces a genetically engineered plant, it emerges as hundreds of thousands of acres of the stuff - all planted within one growing season, fed with the best nutrition, watered with mathematical perfection and sprayed to keep bugs from destroying it. The potential for an advantageous gene to cross over into the wild all in a couple of generations is HUGE. None of the other species of plants and animals stand a chance of adapting in the event of such a sudden change - so they die.
This isn't a theoretical problem - it's already happening. Do a web search for 'Starlink corn' if you disbelieve that this can be a problem.
Hunger is a very natural thing. It's what keeps populations in check in ecosystems that can't support them.
Quite understandably, and for good humanitarian reasons, we try to 'cure' hunger. That results in more people surviving - which results in even more hunger in subsequent generations.
Like any other species, humand breed until they hit the limits of their environment.
What is needed is birth control of one kind or another (education, condoms, drugs, laws) to keep the population below what the environment can support.
So you produce that grass that stops growing after 2" - it gets used everywhere - it's genes get out so it competes with and mixes with the general gene-pool for grasses around the world. Maybe because it needs less nutrients (since it's only renewing itself instead of actively growing) - so it out-performs all other grasses.
Grass around the world stops growing - ruminants have nothing to eat - so they strip the leaves off every bush and tree - then they die. Six months later, we all die of starvation.
Yeah - they may inadvertently make $5M from spammers - but I bet the cost of spam to them is a LOT more than that. It follows that this is not an intentional part of their business model - but merely the residue of spammers that they've been unable to eliminate.
Most manufacturers deliberately have their speedometers read high by several miles per hour (my MINI Cooper reads about 3mph high at low speeds - going up to 5mph high at 80 to 100mph).
They do this for liability reasons. If for some reason the gauge is off by a little bit and you get a speeding ticket (or worse, you get into a wreck) - then they don't want you to sue them claiming that the speedometer was reading too low. By making them read a little high - then even if they get mis-calibrated (eg due to tyre wear, higher-then-recommended tyre pressures, etc) they still won't be reading *LOW*.
So - if your LCD speedometer is off by a bit, you won't really be that much worse off than with the stock speedo.
As someone previously suggested, you might want to look at the OBD-II specification. All cars sold in the USA in the last 10 or so years have a port located down under the steering wheel somewhere which delivers a wealth of interesting information in a more or less standard format. You can certainly read RPM for your tachometer - along with the rotational speed of each wheel independently and a bunch of other fun stuff. You could probably interpret the error code readouts it gives you to light up warning lights in a meaningful way.
In most places, you can sell a car with an unknown milage on it. What you can't do is misrepresent the milage. If (for example) your odometer has 'rolled over', the mileage it reads is now incorrect. But that doesn't mean you can't sell the car.
Of course it's going to be a lot harder to sell a car with unknown milage - but that's a different matter. Selling a car which has been severely 'hacked' is likely to be tricky anyway.
I don't think we want drivers looking at the cellphone's screen instead of looking at the road...but maybe the person calling the guy in the car ought to see the same view of the road that a passenger sitting next to him would see. That would help with the "Shut up! Something important just happened 100' ahead of me." phenomenon.
The cellphone companies are pushing up the bandwidth availability for photos, movies, etc - and who are pushing up the audio quality for MP3 player capabilities, games, etc.
If it could be proved conclusively that processing low bandwidth audio is the problem here - then they could point out that a cell-to-cell phone call with high bandwidth throughout was actually safer for car drivers than landline-to-cell calls - they could push yet more people to use cellphones at home instead of landlines.
I can buy a pretty decent computer with a modern CPU and lots of RAM for under $500 - maybe as little as $300.
So unless I need my results very soon after posing the problem, I'm better off spending $500 bucks on a PC and running my problem for 20 days than I am buying 500 CPU-hours from Sun and getting the answer back very quickly.
But Sun must have to schedule their system - and you have to go through the grief of sending your program to them, getting it to work on their grid, paying for it, etc, etc. So you know it's not going to be available on-demand, *instantly* - so you might have to wait several hours before they can schedule your task. This facility is only going to be useful for things that would take an eternity to run on a single PC.
Even if I need the results quickly, unless this is a one-time problem, I'd be better off buying a pile of cheap PC's than using Sun's facility. If I need to run a 100 CPU/hour problem often, I can justify buying a $10,000 20 PC cluster for just 100 runs.
Bun if Sun's niche is big problems whose results are needed quickly *AND* which are not run frequently - then there is still a problem because you just know it's going to be quite a bit of grief to get your code ported over to Solaris (or whatever they are running) - to get your data onto their disk drives - to get the results back. If you only run this program once - then that overhead will kill you - and you'd *still* be better off buying your own systems.
FWIW: IBM offer a very similar service - with very similar problems over pricing.
I've certainly tried using a cellphone in the car and it's really aparrent to me that I'm not driving as well as I should. So my cellphone stays off in the car. I'm a big time supporter of banning hands-on cellphone use by the drivers of moving vehicles.
But these studies that show that hands-free devices are also unacceptably dangerous make me worry about having another person in the car with me? If I have an 'active conversation' with a passenger as I drive, am I at the same risk as with a hands-free cellphone?
I've never used a hands-free cellphone - but I certainly don't *feel* like my driving is suffering when I talk with a passenger as I drive.
So if that's an accurate observation - and a hands-free phone conversation is somehow worse than chatting with a passenger - then what makes the difference?
Is it that a passenger notices when driving conditions require more of my attention and stops talking? Is it something to do with the quality of the audio from the phone? What?
Seems like a study of *THAT* distinction would provide interesting data on the nature of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul" is (IMHO) funnier than some of the later material in the H2G2 trilogy (of-five). I literally cried when "The Salmon of Time" ended so abruptly.
Is anyone looking at film versions of the two and a half Dirk Gently novels?
It's bad enough that we have to dial phones and enter text messages with such a crappy interface. Going from two thumbs to one means that the devices are marginally cheaper - but it means that ALL of the work now happens with one thumb instead of two. It seems pretty likely that this will double the load on the thumb - making all sorts of repetitive strain problems more prevelant.
We should be looking at technologies that allow you to use MORE fingers - not LESS.
Humans are just the tool that our genes use to make more genes.
From that perspective, my personal death is NOT as important as the continuation of my children.
Most parents know this at the instinctual level.
The argument that says I'm going to die - what to I care about the rest of humanity - is clearly bogus for most humans. All life on earth strives harder to pass on genetic information than to survive as an individual. That's why we age - and why we fall apart much more rapidly after child-rearing age is past.
But ozone (which is only a high energy oxygen molecule) is continually replenished from regular oxygen - the only reason that we have ozone destruction problems is because we have stuff like CFC's up there that continually destroy ozone faster than it is being re-formed.
A sudden destruction of about half of the ozone wouldn't be immediately fatal to creatures on the other hemisphere. It would basically be a race between the ozone on the protected side of the planet gradually dispersing to the zapped hemisphere - and thereby halving the density over the remaining population - versus the formation of fresh ozone.
Dunno how you'd go about figuring out the consequences and time-span of that process - but people manage to live in polar regions where there are gigantic ozone holes. They don't all drop dead overnight.
So if it's just 10 seconds, surely it could only cook the side of the planet facing the event? Surely we aren't talking about an event so energetic that the radiation would pass all the way through the earth's core in enough strength to screw up both hemispheres at once?
We must be talking something that trashes the ozone layer - or the environment in some other way. It's not enough for the energy to simply kill all the critters on one half of the planet...that's a recoverable event in itself.
It must be that it depletes something important and CONSEQUENTLY all the fish die.
Since gamma rays are travelling at the speed of light - we can't possibly get any warning of them without figuring out some kind of faster-than-light transportation or message transmission.
I suppose we could make a REALLY good predictive model of when astronomical objects are likely to do this - and predict the arrival of a gamma ray burst in time to do something about it. But what could we possibly do?
It takes a good few inches of lead (or a good few feet of concrete, dirt, whatever) to significantly attenuate gamma rays - and if the ones were are talking about were powerful enough to get through the full depth of the earth's oceans and still kill things when they got there - then you'd need to wrap the earth in a few feet of lead - or hide down some amazingly deep mine-shafts.
Since gamma rays are electrically neutral, you can't deflect them away with magnets or anything like that.
We'd have to get out of the way - but this radiation will be expanding out equally in all directions from the source. Unless we had thousands of years of warning, we'd have to high-tail it outta here at close to the speed of light in order to get far enough away for the inverse-square law to have an effect. If we're 100 light years from the source (say) and a mile of salt water doesn't attenuate the energy enough - then we'd need to be *way* more than 200 light years away if we could carry a quarter of a mile of water as a shield, 400 light years away if we had a sixteenth of a mile of water....for any reasonable amount of shielding, we need thousands of years notice of the problem happening.
In all likelyhood, we'd just sit back and let our great, great, great grandchildren deal with the problem.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
OK - I've been hanging out on the www.dslinux.org site for a few weeks. This announcement is *WAY* premature. There isn't even a coherent team put together to START the port yet.
/. - but it doesn't represent the current state of affairs one little bit.
What there is right now is a bunch of individual developers who have each individually solved various parts of the puzzle. However, we are quite far from having all of the parts put together in the form of a runnable kernel - and there is ABSOLUTELY NO ORGANISED DSLINUX TEAM YET!
In order to try to pull things together, I am in the process of organising an election to nominate a team leader - and then to collect together the expertise of the disparate developers, set up a SourceForge account (there already is one - but there has been nothing committed to it since December.
I don't know the individual who posted this to
If you need to confirm what I'm saying, visit the forums at www.dslinux.org - or check the emptyness of dslinux.sf.net
Please mod me up so this message gets out.
If your music is any good, you can sell at prices that are a tenth what online and main-street music sellers charge. And even with rampant piracy, if the fans buy direct from you, you're bound to do better than if some thieving back-stabbing record company is taking 99% of the store price.
The only function those guys have is marketting.
So - the question for you is: How do you get known without a full-scale commercial marketting engine behind you?
I'd suggest doing cheap/free live concerts - giving away demo disks - providing freely and legally downloadable demo tracks. Make sure your web site address is visible on everything that's published about you....heck name your band "Double-You, Double-You, Double-You, My Band Dot Com" so that nobody can even mention you without giving the URL!
Try to get yourself known by any means possible - get creative.
If people will actually come to your web site, you can make money selling MP3's for a dollar for an entire album - let alone a dollar a track. Having become enough interested in your music to actually go to the trouble of visiting your website - who wouldn't spend a dollar to get an entire album if you make it easy enough? How about $10 for every piece of music you've ever recorded?
100% of 10,000 $1 online sales every bit as good as 1% of 100,000 $10 CD's.
Actually, BETTER because you'll be in touch with your fans and be able to make your own artistic decisions without big brother telling you what to do.
Does anyone know what the legal stipulation is for someone to lose a trademark like that?
It's clearly happened in the past (Jello being the canonical example).
It doesn't take much skill with a browser to find the real online scrabble sites. You don't need to look through two million pages to find infringing sites.
If you *just* type 'Scrabble' into Google, the eighth hit from the top (www.thepixelpit.co.uk/scrabble.htm) is another obviously infringing site that (presumably) didn't get a C&D.
It's impossible that this guy could have accumulated 100,000 users without having been noticed by Hasbro *long* ago.
I think Hasbro are perfectly within their rights to shut down this site. The guy who runs it wasn't thinking straight when he decided to clone another companies product, use their trademark, copy their copyrighted board design, etc. That was just dumb.
HOWEVER, the fact that Hasbro left it so long without doing anything about it is pretty dubious.
There is no reason why a company who actually cares about protecting their copyrights, trademarks and patents shouldn't have one of their employees type each of their trademarked names into Google once a week and send cease & desist notices out promptly as soon as infringing sites appear.
What sucks here is that the site has been running for so long - so many people have invested time and effort into it (and others come to love it) - presumably on the basis of "Hasbro clearly approve of this or they'd have shut it down already".
There can be no morally sound reason not to protect your IP immediately. The reasons NOT to do so are purely sneaky business tactics like letting some guy build up a huge following for a web site - then taking it away and using it to advertise.
However, the law allows this kind of thing - so we get this kind of deliberately delayed reaction appearing all over the IP world. The law should not allow it - but then IP law is so unbelievably screwed up, this is one of the lesser evils.
My son and I invent our own. The inventing process is at least 50% of the fun - and just occasionally, we come up with a really good one. For something totally off-the-wall, try 'Kniggits':
n ig gits
http://www.sjbaker.org/paper_and_pencil_games/k
(The URL is poorly chosen - it's not actually a paper and pencil game).
Gotta agree with the earlier post about the old Avalon Hill games - there were hundreds of them and 95% of them were really good. You should be able to find a zillion of them on eBay.
For something fairly simple, we've had a lot of fun with 'HeroScape' (from Milton Bradley) - but complexifying the game no end by adding our own rules. Also 'Pirates of the Spanish Main' from Wizkids (buy at least 10 packs to maximise the fun).
No list would be complete without mentioning Dungeons and Dragons - which is as much fun as the people you play it with - and is quite compatible with large quantities of alcohol.
Is it enough to take a kids edutainment package and change the themes to be more suitable?
That might not be all that difficult to do...especially with OpenSource packages such as the Tux4Kids stuff. You could probably find the kinds of 2D sprites they use all over the Internet and with a little tweaking in GIMP, change 'TuxTyping' to 'Naked Babes from Hell Typing'.
That's an exceedingly naive view.
In nature, one teeny tiny grass plant somewhere gets the mutation. It takes thousands of generations of the animals that feed on it for that mutation to spread far enough to be important. That gives the animals plenty of time to evolve to keep up with the change.
When humanity introduces a genetically engineered plant, it emerges as hundreds of thousands of acres of the stuff - all planted within one growing season, fed with the best nutrition, watered with mathematical perfection and sprayed to keep
bugs from destroying it. The potential for an advantageous gene to cross over into the wild all in a couple of generations is HUGE. None of the other species of plants and animals stand a chance of adapting in the event of such a sudden change - so they die.
This isn't a theoretical problem - it's already happening. Do a web search for 'Starlink corn' if you disbelieve that this can be a problem.
Hunger is a very natural thing. It's what keeps populations in check in ecosystems that can't support them.
Quite understandably, and for good humanitarian reasons, we try to 'cure' hunger. That results in more people surviving - which results in even more hunger in subsequent generations.
Like any other species, humand breed until they hit the limits of their environment.
What is needed is birth control of one kind or another (education, condoms, drugs, laws) to keep the population below what the environment can support.
So you produce that grass that stops growing after 2" - it gets used everywhere - it's genes get out so it competes with and mixes with the general gene-pool for grasses around the world. Maybe because it needs less nutrients (since it's only renewing itself instead of actively growing) - so it out-performs all other grasses.
Grass around the world stops growing - ruminants have nothing to eat - so they strip the leaves off every bush and tree - then they die. Six months later, we all die of starvation.
Good idea!
I'm British you insensitive clod. We spell words *properly* tyre, tyre, tyre, tyre!
Those roadside gadgets also read high - for the same reason that speedometers do.
I used a GPS to measure speed. It reads exactly right. But BMW don't make a secret over their deliberate high-reading speedometers.
Yeah - they may inadvertently make $5M from spammers - but I bet the cost of spam to them is a LOT more than that. It follows that this is not an intentional part of their business model - but merely the residue of spammers that they've been unable to eliminate.
Most manufacturers deliberately have their speedometers read high by several miles per hour (my MINI Cooper reads about 3mph high at low speeds - going up to 5mph high at 80 to 100mph).
They do this for liability reasons. If for some reason the gauge is off by a little bit and you get a speeding ticket (or worse, you get into a wreck) - then they don't want you to sue them claiming that the speedometer was reading too low. By making them read a little high - then even if they get mis-calibrated (eg due to tyre wear, higher-then-recommended tyre pressures, etc) they still won't be reading *LOW*.
So - if your LCD speedometer is off by a bit, you won't really be that much
worse off than with the stock speedo.
As someone previously suggested, you might want to look at the OBD-II specification. All cars sold in the USA in the last 10 or so years have a port located down under the steering wheel somewhere which delivers a wealth of interesting information in a more or less standard format. You can certainly read RPM for your tachometer - along with the rotational speed of each wheel independently and a bunch of other fun stuff. You could probably interpret the error code readouts it gives you to light up warning lights in a meaningful way.
In most places, you can sell a car with an unknown milage on it. What you can't do is misrepresent the milage. If (for example) your odometer has 'rolled over', the mileage it reads is now incorrect. But that doesn't mean you can't sell the car.
Of course it's going to be a lot harder to sell a car with unknown milage - but that's a different matter. Selling a car which has been severely 'hacked' is likely to be tricky anyway.
I don't think we want drivers looking at the cellphone's screen instead of looking at the road...but maybe the person calling the guy in the car ought to see the same view of the road that a passenger sitting next to him would see. That would help with the "Shut up! Something important just happened 100' ahead of me." phenomenon.
That's an important finding.
The cellphone companies are pushing up the bandwidth availability for photos, movies, etc - and who are pushing up the audio quality for MP3 player capabilities, games, etc.
If it could be proved conclusively that processing low bandwidth audio is the problem here - then they could point out that a cell-to-cell phone call with high bandwidth throughout was actually safer for car drivers than landline-to-cell calls - they could push yet more people to use cellphones at home instead of landlines.
I can buy a pretty decent computer with a modern CPU and lots of RAM for under $500 - maybe as little as $300.
So unless I need my results very soon after posing the problem, I'm better off spending $500 bucks on a PC and running my problem for 20 days than I am buying 500 CPU-hours from Sun and getting the answer back very quickly.
But Sun must have to schedule their system - and you have to go through the grief of sending your program to them, getting it to work on their grid, paying for it, etc, etc. So you know it's not going to be available on-demand, *instantly* - so you might have to wait several hours before they can schedule your task. This facility is only going to be useful for things that would take an eternity to run on a single PC.
Even if I need the results quickly, unless this is a one-time problem, I'd be better off buying a pile of cheap PC's than using Sun's facility. If I need to run a 100 CPU/hour problem often, I can justify buying a $10,000 20 PC cluster for just 100 runs.
Bun if Sun's niche is big problems whose results are needed quickly *AND* which are not run frequently - then there is still a problem because you just know it's going to be quite a bit of grief to get your code ported over to Solaris (or whatever they are running) - to get your data onto their disk drives - to get the results back. If you only run this program once - then that overhead will kill you - and you'd *still* be better off buying your own systems.
FWIW: IBM offer a very similar service - with very similar problems over pricing.
I've certainly tried using a cellphone in the car and it's really aparrent to me that I'm not driving as well as I should. So my cellphone stays off in the car. I'm a big time supporter of banning hands-on cellphone use by the drivers of moving vehicles.
But these studies that show that hands-free devices are also unacceptably dangerous make me worry about having another person in the car with me? If I have an 'active conversation' with a passenger as I drive, am I at the same risk as with a hands-free cellphone?
I've never used a hands-free cellphone - but I certainly don't *feel* like my driving is suffering when I talk with a passenger as I drive.
So if that's an accurate observation - and a hands-free phone conversation is somehow worse than chatting with a passenger - then what makes the difference?
Is it that a passenger notices when driving conditions require more of my attention and stops talking? Is it something to do with the quality of the audio from the phone? What?
Seems like a study of *THAT* distinction would provide interesting data on the nature of the problem.