Re:No boom, you will just scorch the paint
on
Port-A-Nuke
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· Score: 1
I wonder if one acquired a suitable transport aircraft (surplus Herc?) and pushed one of these out the back from 30,000 ft over a populated area, if that would crack it open?
OK engineers, what kind of kinetic energy does that potential energy translate into?
Maybe it doesn't have to be opened to provide a fairly devastating weapon...
Sure, the launch structures, maybe. But the hangars that the Space Shuttles are housed in are only rated for a Category 3 hurricane. They might also survive a Category 4 or 5 Frances, but then again, they might not.
The launch structures are designed to survive 125 mph winds, and are the sturdiest structures at the cape. With winds currently at 145 mph, there's the distinct possibility that nothing may be left but twisted rubble.
Anybody want to put a price tag on replacing the investment in equipment and facilities that has accumulated over the past 40 years?
I think the loss will make the current expensive adventures in Iraq look like a trip to the gaming arcade.
NASA will be out of the manned space exploration business.
Perhaps any one of these will not pan out. AI progress has moved fairly slowly of late. On the other hand, neurobiology has been booming along, and there seems little doubt that it will eventually be possible to simulate brain function. I can understand why writers are finding it difficult to extrapolate far into the future; it is simply hard to imagine that all of these will stall out.
Eh -- isn't that the POINT of science fiction? Imagining the hard-to-imagine scenarios? If it was ovbious before the fact, would it be called science fiction?
Vinge managed to dodge the bullet a bit by postulating essentially a chaotic collapse that delayed the Singularity a few years in order to fit his plot purposes, and purposefully wrote around the problem of describing the nature of the Singularity. Such a collapse is not all that hard to imagine, as humankind is composed of individuals who are largely resistant to change, and change is what's happenin'.
My own personal view is that humanity is moving along a rapidly-narrowing path between transcendence and self-extinction, at an accelerating pace. Tough to make a call on the outcome, which gets to the dilemma sci-fi writers have: those who choose to write about a future where humanity has transcended, face the problem of a dog imagining life as a human.
Nevertheless, sci-fi writers have chosen their field of endeavor, and I don't want to hear them complaining about the difficulty of the task before them.
The one thing that most folks (who have pondered these questions a bit) agree on is that IF any of the routes to achieving the Singularity happen, it will be an event not unlike the freezing of liquid water cooled below the freezing point -- it will spread very rapidly, in an asymptotic fashion.
... on Alan Sherpard's thoughts at lift-off of our first manned suborbital flight that here he was, sitting on a huge container of explosive materials, built by the lowest-bidding contractor. Yep these people truly have "The Right Stuff", and the ones who have died have paid the dues for all of us.
... and that what other nation on this planet would allow the news f the disaster and subsequent investigation to be covered so openly? Sure, "stuff" happens -- but if it's not given a thorough airing, how do we expect "stuff" to ever get fixed? I am both thrilled by the images and amazed by the political boldness when our government* allows real-time webcasting of events on the space station and space walks. At least with this revelation that we have a faulty process for applying the foam insulation, there's some reason to expect it will be fixed.
*rotten and corrupt it certainly is, but (I think) it's still better than the rest -- we'll see in November if we can change course or remain headed for the pit.
... and while it would very likely require a different standard to operate in the advertised manner, it sure seems to me that they pretty clearly state that this will be manufactured in 2005.
And I also see nothing to indicate that it will be a conventional semiconductor product -- so far as I can tell, it might be MRAM. It might even be a quantum dot product, and actually have a shot at hitting 2TB in the not-too-distant future (but that's pretty far out there, if they had managed to overcome all the hurdles to package and access a large array of quantum dots, it would surely merit a splashier PR).
Assuming that it IS just a new media format using today's semconductor technologies, then the only thing new is the transfer rate, as the energy density required to drive (many) trillions of transistors would likely eliminate the need for any secondary illumination -- just run the glow through some plastic light pipes to provide keyboard illumination or display backlighting!
Terabyte postage stamps just ain't gonna happen with today's semiconductor technologies.
Also, with existing technologies, I suspect that a sustained data transfer rate will fall far short of 120MBps -- although I could be wrong, that's effectively gigabit ethernet (theoretical maximum) transfer rate territory, and that works.
... "Why are schools no longer teaching typing?"...
It is likely due to the widely held perception that the educational system is a giant feeder system for the needs of the corporations at the top of the world's food chain.
The progression goes like this:
primary school
secondary school
undergraduate school
graduate school
post-graduate school
employment
with "shortcuts" to employment at the various levels of post-secondary school attainment. The primary purpose of education in today's world is not to produce a better PERSON, but rather to produce a more competent EMPLOYEE.
Somehow, I'll bet this wasn't what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he championed the concept of universal public education.
Anyhow, if that is the question, then we are clearly sending textual input (as a career) either overseas or to automation. The side effect of improving keyboarding so as to help students in a world awash in keyboards is as out of touch as promoting critial thought and analysis, which also have no place in the corporate world.
Ergo, no need to teach keyboarding in the schools.
Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?"
Well yes... unless you belong to one of those school districts where they've bundled an iBook with each student (and while in the minority, there are still a considerable number of them). In those places, students probably come away with a much better Microsoft experience, because they're not running Office under Windows.
But realistically, given the distribution of people who know ANYTHING about computing or technology in the ranks of the decision makers, it's to be expected that they will purchase the absolute-rock-bottom lowest cost crap possible, and force the staff to suffer with it until it crumbles into dust.
Which begs the question, why hasn't Linux made a bigger (or any) impact in the public schools? They could extend the life of mouldering old boxes and do so for virtually no cost! I think there's a case to be made for public-spirited geeks to put together a polished presentation to a school board (after winning the hearts and minds of the local school PC admins so they can provide support to the budgetary folks in the decision-making process) or school district showing how easily this can be done and how much they will save.
It will be a tough sell, because for a lot of these "civil servants" the easiest way to increase their own standing (and salaries) is to crank up the budgets. This is the role of the talented salespeople at IBM, Dell, HPQ and Apple. They have a synergistic relationship with the school district management -- a you-scratch-my-back-I'll line-your-pockets kind of a deal.
So what DOES happen to the unemployed folks that were canned during an outsourcing project that ultimately failed? After the dust settles, are they back at their old jobs, making a good living at another company, or working as Wal-Mart greeters?
So with the lower efficiency of this plant-based photovoltaic conversion, you'd have to have some REALLY BIG plants to get significant amounts of power.... and what would they do with this capability?
Why, use it to drive out competing plants, of course. Or maybe cross-fertilize with Venus flytraps and stun/fry small animals as food in order to spread into areas with poor soil. Maybe a good niche would be as a desert plant, lurking around watering holes.
Yes, I know the Slaver sunflowers used mirrors, not electrically-charged lasers or biological Tesla coils, but you can't expect mere fiction to be as creative as reality!
... the public is already severely polarized with *VERY* few undecided's.
How many Bush supporters will be willing to spend a movie ticket to go see something they believe is a pack of lies that lambasts their hero?
The real problem in America is that no opinions are ever changed anymore -- the divisions just get wider and deeper.
But when the movie is released on DVD before the election, I'll bet there will be a new tradition of Halloween gift-giving started this year -- I know I'm making a list of Bush-lovers I'm sending a copy to...
... considering that the military maintains (and has for some time now) a database of DNA data for military personnel -- for purposes of postmortem identification.
That's a pretty large database, and while I'm sure there's some sort of policy controls imposed upon it, policies change.
So it's well past time for some actual legal debate and federal legislation governing access to stored DNA data, preferably as part of a larger privacy initiative.
... there was a country which valued progress and efficiency above all else. They organized their social structure to permit as much or more freedom to produce and innovate as anyone on the planet.
Wave after wave of new technologies were born there, exploited to the fullness of their possibilities, and then displaced by Something Better.
They were the envy of the world.
Inevitably, other countries took the lesson to heart and tried to become more competitive -- some with slaves, some with forced standardization, some with automation. The little world's productivity increased by leaps and bounds.
But eventually, inexorably, the world's needs were met by smaller and smaller numbers of individual producers, due to the ever-increasing advances in productivity and efficiency. In many industries, actual human labor was completely eliminated.
And the little world's socio-economic system, which depended upon the exchange of human labor for the essentials of life, became very unstable.
As the pool of available jobs shrank, countries began to compete for jobs instead of competing to produce more with less, because they had come to equate jobs with riches. This was in stark contrast to the wide availability of riches and the scarcity of jobs to produce those riches.
Under the system that allowed people to procure riches by exchanging their labor, the shrinkage of the jobs pool meant that people lacked money to maintain their socio-economic class, and large numbers drifted into poverty. The social structure was reshaped as everyone in the family acquired menial low-paying jobs in order to try and hang on to their positions in the scheme of things.
This happened because the changes did not take place smoothly and gradually, but rather with increasing rapidity and severity. People became selfish and mean, in the midst of plenty.
Eventually tensions became high enough that the disgruntled people sought war as a means of venting their frustrations at things being different than they once were.
And indeed, things were different. Countries that once had a thriving middle class were turned into banana republics as the wealth aggregated among the upper classes and the redistribution of wealth slowed and then stopped.
And in the end, when nobody really needed to work anymore, poor amidst a cornucopia of production, the disgruntled factions made war against each other with WMD and everybody died.
By burying the USPO with bazillions of laughable patents, they can accomplish one of two things:
Either draw attention to how ludicrous the whole system is, with the intention of dismantling it or reshaping it to serve their needs, or
Manage to generate so many bogus patents that one or more key areas goes unchallenged and they gain valuable bargaining chips to use with IBM and to lock out the Open Source movement, which is not nearly so prolific at the generation of bogus patents, and hence has little to trade.
In any case, their effort serves the collective and expands their sphere of control.
... despite the dubious foundation for this flood of patents, there are really only three possible outcomes:
1) the patent goes unchallenged, thus Microsoft wins by achieving a license to rape and pillage. (unlikely)
2) the patent is challenged, and Microsoft wins, thus strengthening their license to rape and pillage. (unlikely)
3) the patent is challenged and Microsoft loses the challenge, but still wins by weakening the opposition due to the opposition having to spend a larger fraction of their working capital than Microsoft in this non-productive activity. In areas of the marketplace where there is not a large healthy corporation to oppose them, they drive the competition out via the competitors' inability to afford the Microsoft tax of continuous legal action.
The ability of monopolies to buy into the poker game and use their near-limitless wealth to drive the competition out of the game by raising the stakes beyond their opponents' ability to call is one reason why monopolies used to have strict controls placed on them or be broken up. They are beyond the reach of the checks and balances of the free marketplace.
Ah, but how many Canadians do they pack into a "standard" cube?
In my manic corner of corporate Amerika, it's 4 bods per cube, each one with 2 beepers and 2 cellphones in addition to the "desk phone", so you're trying to concentrate amidst a cacophony of beeping madness and cubemates shouting into one of their phones to overcome the general din.
Here's a hypothetical situation -- you keep all your finances (check register, bank balances, etc) in Quicken/M$FT Money/et al, as well as policy numbers, loan payment schedules, yada yada yada. Your home directory is encrypted (via something like Mac OS X's FileVault) when stored, and decrypted only upon a successful login.
You're in a car wreck and are comatose for 6 months.
During that time, your car is repo'ed, your home is put up for sale due to lack of property tax payments (I think there are probably things to protect one from the mortgagor, but not from your friendly local gummint) -- you get the idea.
It's a good idea to have someone you trust (Fox Mulder notwithstanding) know how to get in and manage things in your absence.
If you're fortunate enough to have TWO people you trust (or almost trust), you might devise some sort of digital equivalent (this IS Slashdot, right?) of the old "2 halves of a dollar bill" key used in the movies. It would seem like a variant of the RSA scheme would work nicely. Maybe a large number that is the product of two (or as many trusted folk as you have) large primes could be the key to your digital castle...
Otherwise, recovering from a coma could be one of the most unpleasant surprises you'll ever have.
What I want to know, is why isn't anyone pushing to steer these NEO rocks into one of the Lagrange points [http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la grange.html] and construct a REAL space habitat instead of sending a man to Mars or establishing a "permanent" lunar base? It would be pretty cheap to do so, as the technology to build robots to do the grunt work is pretty much within our grasp now. Having sufficient bulk would make for a decent radiation shield, and even a micro-gravity environment is preferable to the zero-G of the ISS, as dust+debris are more readily managed.
There are at least 3 known small (a few kilometers in diameter) rocks that are close enough to send out a robot "tug" with a large amount of propellant, some good-sized solar arrays (or a nuclear battery) to power an ion drive. All the tug needs to do is match orbits with the asteroid, position itself, make contact and gently push it in the right direction. It would take a long time to put the asteroid into one of the L4/L5 points, but as tugs expire, new ones can be sent (or send additional tugs to speed up the process) at a very minimal cost, with a very simple trade-off of time vs money.
I would expect that by the time we get multiple asteroids in close proximity to each other in one of the stable Lagrange points, we would be able to send much more capable robotic workers to either tie the asteroids together with titanium I-beams, or better yet, tether them together with carbon fiber cables and put some spin on the assemblage to keep them under tension. Initially, we could construct living spaces inside the rocks, but as capabilities increase, and more material is placed into the mix, it would be possible to create a poor man's RingWorld with considerable acreage. It's a great place to harvest solar power, base elaborate interplanetary communications facilities and astronomical observatories.
The costs of maintaining an effort like this are very small, and it has the benefit of collecting wandering rocks that might one day drop in on us and put them to good use. Far better than programs to blow them up with nukes, and Bruce Willis won't be around to save us forever.
I guess the RIAA is already contemplating...
on
Mobile Wifi Backpack
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· Score: 1
... legislation to require persons wearing portable base stations to also wear 220lb "DMR belts", to discourage the footloose masses from broadcasting their iTunes libraries wherever they go, via their own portable subnet LANs.
... and you'll see a pretty good correlation to the observed rankings.
It isn't until you get down to lawyers that the professions begin to become mired in procedural straightjackets, where what the practitioner does is dictated by a set of obsolete/seemingly unrelated set of process rules or changes in direction while the work is ongoing.
How many plumbers (hairdressers, chefs, florists, care assistants) have the "blissful" experience of having the customer (or worse yet, some third party -- say insurance companies or HMOs in the case of MDs) butt in to change direction or tell them to hurry up or I'm not gonna pay you? Just look at how bureaucratic teaching has become, with the book used, material covered (and in what order according to a fixed timetable), and pretty much every aspect of the job dictated by someone other than the teacher.
This is a function of the direction our society has taken -- away from individual craftsmen/women whose reputation is their bond, and into some Orwellian corporate nightmare where people are turned into interchangeable machines, leaving no room for the exceptional practitioner.
All too sad that this should be the case when we have the perfect media for maintaining public customer satisfaction metrics -- the web.
... stopping the relentless rise in heath care expenses. It could save the domestic airline industry -- I can envision package deals wherein US airlines tie in with Indian medical facilities to deliver patients to the doctors.
And I can all-too-easily see the US insurance companies and employers (of what few employees don't get "off-shored") pushing medical care outside the US.
If only we could manage to "off-shore" our corporate management and lower the ratio between CEO and employee compensation --
During bad times, which nation do you think will be more able to overcome adversity? The nation with a vision, not afraid to spend resources or even risk lives on new, unproven endeavours? Or the nation that insists on first fixing the problems of today?
Gee, I thought that the biggest problem we face today is that we have no vision..."
... those profits were cut short by the arrival of the clone business and competition.
In recent years (my recollection, check me on this to be sure) IBM's PC business has been struggling to break even.
It's a logical move for them to look at ways to make their PC business more competitive, and with their Linux business (and associated consulting and hardware sales) growing well, it make great synergistic sense to leverage that success by both reducing internal expense and promoting a successful business line.
The time at which they would actually drop Windows from their products lies far in the future (if ever), but having IBM using it internally means it won't be long before they sell their desktop PCs and Thinkpads with a choice of OS -- and that's a GREAT thing.
And (sadly), IBM's moving to Linux for desktop hardware in no way points to an abandonment of the x86 architecture for the PPC. That move depends upon how well their x86 desktop Linux effort succeeds, and whether IBM can make licensed x86's cheaper than PPCs.
So for the foreseeable future, if you want a desktop G5 running a *nix variant, I think you're looking at Mac OS X.
Slashdot Mirror
OK engineers, what kind of kinetic energy does that potential energy translate into?
Maybe it doesn't have to be opened to provide a fairly devastating weapon...
The launch structures are designed to survive 125 mph winds, and are the sturdiest structures at the cape. With winds currently at 145 mph, there's the distinct possibility that nothing may be left but twisted rubble.
Anybody want to put a price tag on replacing the investment in equipment and facilities that has accumulated over the past 40 years?
I think the loss will make the current expensive adventures in Iraq look like a trip to the gaming arcade.
NASA will be out of the manned space exploration business.
Imagining the hard-to-imagine scenarios?
If it was ovbious before the fact, would it be called science fiction?
Vinge managed to dodge the bullet a bit by postulating essentially a chaotic collapse that delayed the Singularity a few years in order to fit his plot purposes, and purposefully wrote around the problem of describing the nature of the Singularity. Such a collapse is not all that hard to imagine, as humankind is composed of individuals who are largely resistant to change, and change is what's happenin'.
My own personal view is that humanity is moving along a rapidly-narrowing path between transcendence and self-extinction, at an accelerating pace. Tough to make a call on the outcome, which gets to the dilemma sci-fi writers have: those who choose to write about a future where humanity has transcended, face the problem of a dog imagining life as a human.
Nevertheless, sci-fi writers have chosen their field of endeavor, and I don't want to hear them complaining about the difficulty of the task before them.
The one thing that most folks (who have pondered these questions a bit) agree on is that IF any of the routes to achieving the Singularity happen, it will be an event not unlike the freezing of liquid water cooled below the freezing point -- it will spread very rapidly, in an asymptotic fashion.
*rotten and corrupt it certainly is, but (I think) it's still better than the rest -- we'll see in November if we can change course or remain headed for the pit.
... and while it would very likely require a different standard to operate in the advertised manner, it sure seems to me that they pretty clearly state that this will be manufactured in 2005.
And I also see nothing to indicate that it will be a conventional semiconductor product -- so far as I can tell, it might be MRAM. It might even be a quantum dot product, and actually have a shot at hitting 2TB in the not-too-distant future (but that's pretty far out there, if they had managed to overcome all the hurdles to package and access a large array of quantum dots, it would surely merit a splashier PR).
Assuming that it IS just a new media format using today's semconductor technologies, then the only thing new is the transfer rate, as the energy density required to drive (many) trillions of transistors would likely eliminate the need for any secondary illumination -- just run the glow through some plastic light pipes to provide keyboard illumination or display backlighting!
Terabyte postage stamps just ain't gonna happen with today's semiconductor technologies.
Also, with existing technologies, I suspect that a sustained data transfer rate will fall far short of 120MBps -- although I could be wrong, that's effectively gigabit ethernet (theoretical maximum) transfer rate territory, and that works.
It is likely due to the widely held perception that the educational system is a giant feeder system for the needs of the corporations at the top of the world's food chain.
The progression goes like this:
primary school
secondary school
undergraduate school
graduate school
post-graduate school
employment
with "shortcuts" to employment at the various levels of post-secondary school attainment. The primary purpose of education in today's world is not to produce a better PERSON, but rather to produce a more competent EMPLOYEE.
Somehow, I'll bet this wasn't what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he championed the concept of universal public education.
Anyhow, if that is the question, then we are clearly sending textual input (as a career) either overseas or to automation. The side effect of improving keyboarding so as to help students in a world awash in keyboards is as out of touch as promoting critial thought and analysis, which also have no place in the corporate world.
Ergo, no need to teach keyboarding in the schools.
Is everyone else completely locked into Microsoft like we are?"
Well yes... unless you belong to one of those school districts where they've bundled an iBook with each student (and while in the minority, there are still a considerable number of them). In those places, students probably come away with a much better Microsoft experience, because they're not running Office under Windows.
But realistically, given the distribution of people who know ANYTHING about computing or technology in the ranks of the decision makers, it's to be expected that they will purchase the absolute-rock-bottom lowest cost crap possible, and force the staff to suffer with it until it crumbles into dust.
Which begs the question, why hasn't Linux made a bigger (or any) impact in the public schools? They could extend the life of mouldering old boxes and do so for virtually no cost! I think there's a case to be made for public-spirited geeks to put together a polished presentation to a school board (after winning the hearts and minds of the local school PC admins so they can provide support to the budgetary folks in the decision-making process) or school district showing how easily this can be done and how much they will save.
It will be a tough sell, because for a lot of these "civil servants" the easiest way to increase their own standing (and salaries) is to crank up the budgets. This is the role of the talented salespeople at IBM, Dell, HPQ and Apple. They have a synergistic relationship with the school district management -- a you-scratch-my-back-I'll line-your-pockets kind of a deal.
So what DOES happen to the unemployed folks that were canned during an outsourcing project that ultimately failed? After the dust settles, are they back at their old jobs, making a good living at another company, or working as Wal-Mart greeters?
So with the lower efficiency of this plant-based photovoltaic conversion, you'd have to have some REALLY BIG plants to get significant amounts of power.... and what would they do with this capability?
Why, use it to drive out competing plants, of course. Or maybe cross-fertilize with Venus flytraps and stun/fry small animals as food in order to spread into areas with poor soil. Maybe a good niche would be as a desert plant, lurking around watering holes.
Yes, I know the Slaver sunflowers used mirrors, not electrically-charged lasers or biological Tesla coils, but you can't expect mere fiction to be as creative as reality!
... the public is already severely polarized with *VERY* few undecided's.
How many Bush supporters will be willing to spend a movie ticket to go see something they believe is a pack of lies that lambasts their hero?
The real problem in America is that no opinions are ever changed anymore -- the divisions just get wider and deeper.
But when the movie is released on DVD before the election, I'll bet there will be a new tradition of Halloween gift-giving started this year -- I know I'm making a list of Bush-lovers I'm sending a copy to...
If you can't beat 'em, be sure to piss 'em off !!
... if Paul Allen doesn't claim one of the 2 potential passenger seats for the X-Prize qualifier, I'll never understand why not.
After all, he's already paid for it.
... considering that the military maintains (and has for some time now) a database of DNA data for military personnel -- for purposes of postmortem identification.
That's a pretty large database, and while I'm sure there's some sort of policy controls imposed upon it, policies change.
So it's well past time for some actual legal debate and federal legislation governing access to stored DNA data, preferably as part of a larger privacy initiative.
... there was a country which valued progress and efficiency above all else. They organized their social structure to permit as much or more freedom to produce and innovate as anyone on the planet.
Wave after wave of new technologies were born there, exploited to the fullness of their possibilities, and then displaced by Something Better.
They were the envy of the world.
Inevitably, other countries took the lesson to heart and tried to become more competitive -- some with slaves, some with forced standardization, some with automation. The little world's productivity increased by leaps and bounds.
But eventually, inexorably, the world's needs were met by smaller and smaller numbers of individual producers, due to the ever-increasing advances in productivity and efficiency. In many industries, actual human labor was completely eliminated.
And the little world's socio-economic system, which depended upon the exchange of human labor for the essentials of life, became very unstable.
As the pool of available jobs shrank, countries began to compete for jobs instead of competing to produce more with less, because they had come to equate jobs with riches. This was in stark contrast to the wide availability of riches and the scarcity of jobs to produce those riches.
Under the system that allowed people to procure riches by exchanging their labor, the shrinkage of the jobs pool meant that people lacked money to maintain their socio-economic class, and large numbers drifted into poverty. The social structure was reshaped as everyone in the family acquired menial low-paying jobs in order to try and hang on to their positions in the scheme of things.
This happened because the changes did not take place smoothly and gradually, but rather with increasing rapidity and severity. People became selfish and mean, in the midst of plenty.
Eventually tensions became high enough that the disgruntled people sought war as a means of venting their frustrations at things being different than they once were.
And indeed, things were different. Countries that once had a thriving middle class were turned into banana republics as the wealth aggregated among the upper classes and the redistribution of wealth slowed and then stopped.
And in the end, when nobody really needed to work anymore, poor amidst a cornucopia of production, the disgruntled factions made war against each other with WMD and everybody died.
And no one lived happily ever after...
... Microsoft's "win-win" strategy --
By burying the USPO with bazillions of laughable patents, they can accomplish one of two things:
Either draw attention to how ludicrous the whole system is, with the intention of dismantling it or reshaping it to serve their needs, or
Manage to generate so many bogus patents that one or more key areas goes unchallenged and they gain valuable bargaining chips to use with IBM and to lock out the Open Source movement, which is not nearly so prolific at the generation of bogus patents, and hence has little to trade.
In any case, their effort serves the collective and expands their sphere of control.
Resistance is Futile...
... despite the dubious foundation for this flood of patents, there are really only three possible outcomes:
1) the patent goes unchallenged, thus Microsoft wins by achieving a license to rape and pillage. (unlikely)
2) the patent is challenged, and Microsoft wins, thus strengthening their license to rape and pillage. (unlikely)
3) the patent is challenged and Microsoft loses the challenge, but still wins by weakening the opposition due to the opposition having to spend a larger fraction of their working capital than Microsoft in this non-productive activity. In areas of the marketplace where there is not a large healthy corporation to oppose them, they drive the competition out via the competitors' inability to afford the Microsoft tax of continuous legal action.
The ability of monopolies to buy into the poker game and use their near-limitless wealth to drive the competition out of the game by raising the stakes beyond their opponents' ability to call is one reason why monopolies used to have strict controls placed on them or be broken up. They are beyond the reach of the checks and balances of the free marketplace.
Ah, but how many Canadians do they pack into a "standard" cube?
In my manic corner of corporate Amerika, it's 4 bods per cube, each one with 2 beepers and 2 cellphones in addition to the "desk phone", so you're trying to concentrate amidst a cacophony of beeping madness and cubemates shouting into one of their phones to overcome the general din.
But we're productive, by God.
... for this to be relevant.
Here's a hypothetical situation -- you keep all your finances (check register, bank balances, etc) in Quicken/M$FT Money/et al, as well as policy numbers, loan payment schedules, yada yada yada.
Your home directory is encrypted (via something like Mac OS X's FileVault) when stored, and decrypted only upon a successful login.
You're in a car wreck and are comatose for 6 months.
During that time, your car is repo'ed, your home is put up for sale due to lack of property tax payments (I think there are probably things to protect one from the mortgagor, but not from your friendly local gummint) -- you get the idea.
It's a good idea to have someone you trust (Fox Mulder notwithstanding) know how to get in and manage things in your absence.
If you're fortunate enough to have TWO people you trust (or almost trust), you might devise some sort of digital equivalent (this IS Slashdot, right?) of the old "2 halves of a dollar bill" key used in the movies. It would seem like a variant of the RSA scheme would work nicely. Maybe a large number that is the product of two (or as many trusted folk as you have) large primes could be the key to your digital castle...
Otherwise, recovering from a coma could be one of the most unpleasant surprises you'll ever have.
And I thought he was just using base 2 when referring to an "order of magnitude"...
Seemed reasonable at the time, given the digital/binary logic context...
What I want to know, is why isn't anyone pushing to steer these NEO rocks into one of the Lagrange points [http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la grange.html] and construct a REAL space habitat instead of sending a man to Mars or establishing a "permanent" lunar base? It would be pretty cheap to do so, as the technology to build robots to do the grunt work is pretty much within our grasp now. Having sufficient bulk would make for a decent radiation shield, and even a micro-gravity environment is preferable to the zero-G of the ISS, as dust+debris are more readily managed.
There are at least 3 known small (a few kilometers in diameter) rocks that are close enough to send out a robot "tug" with a large amount of propellant, some good-sized solar arrays (or a nuclear battery) to power an ion drive. All the tug needs to do is match orbits with the asteroid, position itself, make contact and gently push it in the right direction. It would take a long time to put the asteroid into one of the L4/L5 points, but as tugs expire, new ones can be sent (or send additional tugs to speed up the process) at a very minimal cost, with a very simple trade-off of time vs money.
I would expect that by the time we get multiple asteroids in close proximity to each other in one of the stable Lagrange points, we would be able to send much more capable robotic workers to either tie the asteroids together with titanium I-beams, or better yet, tether them together with carbon fiber cables and put some spin on the assemblage to keep them under tension. Initially, we could construct living spaces inside the rocks, but as capabilities increase, and more material is placed into the mix, it would be possible to create a poor man's RingWorld with considerable acreage. It's a great place to harvest solar power, base elaborate interplanetary communications facilities and astronomical observatories.
The costs of maintaining an effort like this are very small, and it has the benefit of collecting wandering rocks that might one day drop in on us and put them to good use. Far better than programs to blow them up with nukes, and Bruce Willis won't be around to save us forever.
... legislation to require persons wearing portable base stations to also wear 220lb "DMR belts", to discourage the footloose masses from broadcasting their iTunes libraries wherever they go, via their own portable subnet LANs.
I think it's called the Harrison Bergeron bill.
... and you'll see a pretty good correlation to the observed rankings.
It isn't until you get down to lawyers that the professions begin to become mired in procedural straightjackets, where what the practitioner does is dictated by a set of obsolete/seemingly unrelated set of process rules or changes in direction while the work is ongoing.
How many plumbers (hairdressers, chefs, florists, care assistants) have the "blissful" experience of having the customer (or worse yet, some third party -- say insurance companies or HMOs in the case of MDs) butt in to change direction or tell them to hurry up or I'm not gonna pay you? Just look at how bureaucratic teaching has become, with the book used, material covered (and in what order according to a fixed timetable), and pretty much every aspect of the job dictated by someone other than the teacher.
This is a function of the direction our society has taken -- away from individual craftsmen/women whose reputation is their bond, and into some Orwellian corporate nightmare where people are turned into interchangeable machines, leaving no room for the exceptional practitioner.
All too sad that this should be the case when we have the perfect media for maintaining public customer satisfaction metrics -- the web.
Seems like it would be a lot easier to move it into a stable orbit that to destroy it.
It would be a great way to build an interplanetary ISP without all the expense of hauling materials up from the gravity well.
Also, it would make a swell military base to be used against those sneaky aliens.
... stopping the relentless rise in heath care expenses. It could save the domestic airline industry -- I can envision package deals wherein US airlines tie in with Indian medical facilities to deliver patients to the doctors.
...
And I can all-too-easily see the US insurance companies and employers (of what few employees don't get "off-shored") pushing medical care outside the US.
If only we could manage to "off-shore" our corporate management and lower the ratio between CEO and employee compensation --
Now there's a bubble that's ripe to pop
Gee, I thought that the biggest problem we face today is that we have no vision..."
... those profits were cut short by the arrival of the clone business and competition.
In recent years (my recollection, check me on this to be sure) IBM's PC business has been struggling to break even.
It's a logical move for them to look at ways to make their PC business more competitive, and with their Linux business (and associated consulting and hardware sales) growing well, it make great synergistic sense to leverage that success by both reducing internal expense and promoting a successful business line.
The time at which they would actually drop Windows from their products lies far in the future (if ever), but having IBM using it internally means it won't be long before they sell their desktop PCs and Thinkpads with a choice of OS -- and that's a GREAT thing.
And (sadly), IBM's moving to Linux for desktop hardware in no way points to an abandonment of the x86 architecture for the PPC. That move depends upon how well their x86 desktop Linux effort succeeds, and whether IBM can make licensed x86's cheaper than PPCs.
So for the foreseeable future, if you want a desktop G5 running a *nix variant, I think you're looking at Mac OS X.