Actually, I believe that an effective shareholder proposal initiative could be launched that would reign in the excesses in executive compensation -- just pick a number to represent a maximum multiplier between the lowest paid employees in the company and the highest paid employees.
We don't have to return to the levels of the 1950's -- something like a multiple of 100 times the lowest paid employee becoming a cap on executive compensation would be reasonable.
And one would have to include contractual labor agreements as well as straight salaried compensation, so no one could hide behind that old "I have a CONTRACT!" chestnut.
An approach like this, while legislatively possible (but not likely so long as elected officials are suckling the wallets of corporate America), is a lot more feasible as shareholder proposals. Even pension funds and mutual funds could see the value in reaping savings in employee compensation between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars annually. And certainly no corporate official is going to the poorhouse while making 100 times the amount of the lowest paid employee in the corporate.
Unless those employees are making a few hundred bucks a year in some 3rd world sweatshop...
... (in the Services menu) to summarize the referenced article:
The program gathers text from online news services on specific subjects, learns the characteristic patterns of sentences in these groupings and then uses those patterns to create new sentences that give equivalent information in different words.
The researchers, Regina Barzilay, an assistant professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Lillian Lee, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, said that while the program would not yield paraphrases as zany as those in the Monty Python sketch, it is fairly adept at rewording the flat cadences of news service prose. Give it a sentence like "The surprise bombing injured 20 people, 5 of them seriously," Barzilay said, and it can match it to equivalent patterns in its databank and then produce a handful of paraphrases. For instance, it might come up with "Twenty people were wounded in the explosion, among them five in serious condition."
The OS X feature appears to operate not so much by restating in different words, but by identifying redundancies and eliminating them. It works very well.
It appears to me that it's editors that are in jeopardy, not reporters.
or bulletproof clothing? Seems like a fabric made of this stuff could make a mighty fine lightweight aircraft skin, or a parachute that folds up into a money belt, or....???
Gee -- I'm running OS X 10.2.8 on a 1996-vintage 7500 (albeit with a G3 cpu card and Firewire+USB combo card) just fine, and am contemplating a move to 10.3 as soon as the open source XPostFacto support for 10.3 gets just a little more mature (i.e., past alpha code).
It is evident that he HAS spent a substantial amount of time over the years improving his skills, to the end that he has better (certainly broader, likely deeper) IT skills than 99% of Slashdot readers.
And his reward for this? He's too expensive. The "improve your skills" meme is not successful when facing offshore competition at 10% of the wage rate.
The skills he has to improve in order to stay employed are those that cannot be shipped offshore, like becoming a plumber or an electrician. Of course, this means he is required to throw away a career he has invested over 30 years in, along with all that vaunted training and experience.
I would like to think there is a case for a domestic IT industry, but until the dismal sciences recognize the benefits of a diverse local economy over a specialized global economy, all the arguments are going to be slanted towards cutting business expense by gutting the middle classes.
One of the major reasons Linux is so successful outside the US is that foreign governments recognize that it would be nice to have an IT industry of their own, one that does not send all the profits overseas. They're not switching to Linux to be better positioned to export IT jobs to India or China.
After a lengthy highway chase, unable to evade helicopters or outrun radio, he pulls over, and as the cops rush forward to apprehend him, he pulls out his checkbook and says
1) RIAA
2) SBA
3) Al Qaeda (no published number, just start calling every phone in Pakistan)
4) The Office of Homeland Defense
5) Democratic National Committee
5) Republican National Committee
Sadly, once the Evil has grown beyond a certain critical mass, mere mass protests have no effect.
Well, for sure they need to dump the www.applemusic.com domain, which in any event does NOT take one to the AppleMusic web site, but rather becomes http://www.apple.com/itunes/ and takes one to the iTunes site, including the iTunes Music Store.
The parent organization (Apple Computer) is not at all prominently named, and one is only aware of the Apple Computer association by virtue of the fact that the iTunes Music site lives within the Apple Computer domain.
In fact, the iTunes Music Store tab gets equal billing with a tab for Audible.com, which is an entirely different company completely unaffiliated with Apple Computer (even though that particular web page was clearly made by the same people who made the rest of the Apple pages). It would be a simple thing to spin off iTunes into a separate subsidiary (much like Claris was for a while), but I'm not sure that would buy them anything in the context of this suit.
Maybe the easiest solution is for Apple Computer to rename themselves as Macintosh Computing, or iLife Inc, or just plain Mac. I suspect a simple change of name would be insufficient to get out of the prior agreements, they would have to do something like create a new company (let's call it Mac Incorporated) which would then buy out the assets of Apple Computer, which would promptly exit both the computer and music businesses, and specialize in selling color schemes. This would seem to satisfy the terms of the prior agreements with Apple Corps.
Any lawyers out there to poke holes in this (pretty ridiculous) scheme?
So maybe the idea is to sell the iTunes Music store to Apple Records?
I seriously doubt that they will be able to enforce the "no playing music through an Apple computer" portion of their agreement, as Macs have been playing music through external speakers for a long, long time -- whether in violation of the earlier agreement or not, I think (but IANAL) that some attempt must be made to defend the trademark to preserve it.
So exactly what is the underlying motive here, if not publicity? Does a record label that has sold 30 million albums need the money? Of course, the gross on 30 million albums at $20 a pop is *only* 600 million, while Apple has (last time I checked) over 3 billion in cash, and grossed over a billion-and-a-half last quarter, with gross profits of over 400 million. So maybe the recording label *is* trying to cut themselves a slice of Apple's pie.
In any event, Apple Computer has the financial resources to mount a very serious defense, where in prior years I doubt that they would have been able to stand up to a major record label. Earlier this year Apple was the leading candidate in the rumor mills to buy Vivendi's music business.
Looking up Apple Records in the Wikipedia, it says they had a period following 1984 where they "lost money for several years". I don't think it's beyond the realm of reason to think that they might be willing to cash out, even if their re-release of past hits album has sold 30 million copies over 147 weeks. I don't think the Beatles are going to be cutting any new tracks, so the owners might well be looking ahead and trying to maximize their cash flow -- remember, the artists would still collect some negotiated royalties on the music sold, even if they no longer owned the recording company.
And it would seem that it would be pretty tough for Apple Records to prove that they lost any sales due to brand confusion with anything from Apple Computer.
I b'lieve I'll stick with the PR ploy concept, until someone can show me why Apple Records didn't sue Apple Computer promptly following either the iPod release (now in its 3rd generation!) or the iTunes Music Store, or for that matter, iTunes itself!
... to gain free media coverage, then Apple Computer will purchase Apple Corps, closing the door on the past suit settlements, and allowing the iTMS to exclusively market the Beatles' works, after hyping demand.
Both parties benefit. The artists still get their royalties, and Apple gets the revenue that would have gone to the distribution company.
Sales shoot up from the publicity, and for Apple to be able to exclusively distribute the Beatles' tracks would put them in a whole different league from the competition in internet music sales.
-- and Science has been declining as a career choice for quite some time now. It only logical that as the pool of science-trained people shrinks, the pool of "hard" science fiction writers must inevitably follow.
People prefer to eschew the details and go for the "big Picture". Take Slashdot, for instance. A supposed haven of computer geeks and science-oriented people, but how many are actually are capable of writing assembler code? Or any language? How many remember enough calculus to solve high-school calculus problems? My guess is that the answer to both questions is well under half.
To be a "geek" in today's world is to be able to set the clock on your VCR and make it through a Linux installation. Wire-wrapping is not in the skillset of the modern geek (at least not in the mainstream of geek-dom). And I'm not berating Slashdotters, they ARE geeks compared to the Clueless Teeming Masses.
But the cold hard fact is that if you find math and science intimidating, you're going to appreciate fiction like Star Wars or Tolkien much more than something that requires a certain level of understanding of fundamental principles to appreciate the plot constraints. And there are fewer and fewer writers who have the background to write sci-fi (reflected by the fact that there are fewer and fewer of all of us in the technically well-versed boat).
Maybe the next generation of sci-fi will come from one of the nations to which much of the technical employment is moving, but I suspect that cutural differences will make such fiction unappealing to Western cultures.
I suspect that versions of Virtual PC that ran on 604 based Macs will run fine on a G5...
Except for the fact that those versions of VPC were pre-OSX, and it's dubious that they will run under Classic.
I'm awaiting the inevitable benchmarks that compare various emulated Windows performance under G5 Bochs to VPC 6.x on a decently fast G4.
I'd rather run Bochs for free (or at worse, very cheaply) that pay significantly more to Microsoft for crippled future releases of VPC to ensure that performance sucks (even after the architectural differences are taken into account).
If Microsoft wanted to, they could easily buy back a lot of the performance lost due to manipulating addresses and integers by producing versions of DirectX and other drivers that talk directly to the underlying hardware. Look at how poorly existing VPC manages the video -- emulating an older graphics chip not present in any Mac.
Even if Bochs only ran in full screen mode (to avoid sharing the display with OS X), the performance gains from native instead of emulated video are likely to be quite significant -- maybe not enough to totally overcome the performance hit due to the loss of the pseudo-little endian mode, but I'll bet the G5 can make up the difference.
As I interpret the sentiment, the author is saying that the internet will "evolve" to be more resistant to the bad effects of virii.
That "evolution" may not be in a direction that we would regard as desirable.
For instance, introducing per packet fees/taxes would be a highly effective way to deal with both virii and spam, as it would impose both a disincentive for mass-mailers (affecting both spammers and clueless users whose systems become "owned"), and much improved traceability (anonymous mailers can't be billed, so they don't get serviced).
The open, "public" interent would quickly give way to an all-commercial/goverment (exempt from fees, of course) internet that was largely free of spam and virii.
One of the nicer aspects of trying to preserve the weak along with the strong is that it expands diversity and possibility. Give me a world with antibiotics and medical infrastructure any day over trying to make it on the merits of my own immune system.
I prefer the notion of exterminating virii (and spam) as opposed to surviving them. We just have to be sure that the cure is not worse than the disease.
any remaining members of the once-thriving American textile/garment industry... or... machinists or factory workers.
Seen any American-made TVs lately?
People who think things will return to "normal" as the economy picks back up are just fooling themselves. There will be some IT jobs left in this country, but it's going to be a smaller and smaller pool as the jobs flow out through the hole in the bottom of the wage structure called Globalism.
I'm not suggesting that Globalism is evil, but those who ignore its effects are just whistling in the dark.
This IS the end of the American IT industry as a major employer of Americans.
... Microsoft, for attempting such a blatant display of stoopid patent-seeking for technology that was being developed before Microsoft even existed (remember Qube back in 1977?) -- surely that must invalidate a large section of this "patent"),
... or the the patent examiner who granted this farce under the influence of either bribery or criminal stoopidity.
Gates, thy name is Greed.
Maybe AOL-Time-Warner could sue Microsoft for attempted claim-jumping/patent-infringement?
I just wish there were such a thing as frivolous patents applications, which could be prosecuted similar to frivolous lawsuits.
... for this kind of image horsepower. If you want to look 10 years out, then you may as well hypothesize a helmet that will allow the then-contemporary GPU to send sensory inputs directly into the brain.
After all, images are merely optical sensory input data. If the bandwidth of the device doubles every year, you should be somewhere in the neighborhood of being able to produce a data stream comparable to a human's normal sensorium.
I'm looking for someone who knows more about this than I do (which shouldn't be difficult), to take this notion and flesh it out with some informed speculation...
If you have this wonderfully fast and compact memory, the simplest way to exploit it is to access it in a linear manner with a whompin' huge address space.
Who needs VM? -- Actually, we'll still need mechanisms to isolate processes from each other, so virtual addressing will still have a place. But not as a means to accomodate logical address spaces larger than physical address spaces.
I want a fuel-cell powered, IBM 970 Powerbook with buckytube memory and an OLED display. Never mind the power switch, I'll just refuel it every other month or so.
Care to guess how many younger workers can meet this spec?
What fraction of coders under 30 have a MS in Computer Science?
What fraction of them have an ACTIVE Secret Clearance? -- hint: the idea is to maintain as few Secret Clearances as possible, so as to minimize exposure to secret stuff.
How many young coders know assembly, and PPC assembly at that?
Cryptography EXPERIENCE, and less than 6 years total experience?
My guess is that there's only a handful of recent MIT/CalTech graduates who have co-oped or interned with the NSA/CIA (they probably have an admiral or general in the family to vouch for them) who stand a chance of meeting this spec.
It would appear to me that this particular specification (like so many others) is designed to keep everyone OUT, so they can promote someone they've already identified, on the grounds that "we ran ads, but couldn't find anybody qualified".
Yup -- and the headlines also read that overall, layoffs are up 71% in April -- if all the water is draining out of the jobs pond, the employment level is lowered for everyone.
So plan on having a tough time finding a job, and don't blame the trouble on the diploma.
... and that would be the "CEO Bubble", so that I can hire former champaign-and-brie CEO's to fly in and mow my lawn.
If I don't like the rates or his parole officer won't allow travel over a state line, I can always hire one of those cut-rate offshore CEOs for pennies on the dollar...
actually, if you click on over to the Prairie Home Companion web site while the real-time broadcast is happening, you'll find that yes, you can watch a radio program over the internet.
It's a real treat if you can't conveniently travel to wherever the show is occuring and purchase tickets, or if you'd simply like to see what the stage show is like.
You have a choice of seeing a visual image presented from either a single camera view, or get better coverage from a 3-camera view, if you've got the bandwidth.
Since it is a web site of the local affiliate and not NPR, I see no reason to think that the imagery (whatever it is, I see no player requirement specified) will disappear.
Yeah, you're correct, I'm more than a little bitter about my perception of the onslaught of stupidity in MY COUNTRY. Sorry if it offended you.
But let's look at this just a bit further and see if there isn't something to it.
One point -- please don't confuse the United States with Canada and Mexico. Canada seems to do quite well when compared to us on a per capita basis, and Mexico is still growing out of being a third-world nation, and makes for a not really meaningful comparison to the US.
Your #1 gripe should read:
#1:Insults an entire country.
Maybe an insult, maybe an observation. Probably an insult in my case, certainly an expression of the strongest disappointment, could well be an observation for others.
#2: One would normally supply examples refuting the statement, rather than just listing it and stating that it's wrong. Let me begin by offering up the opinion that while the military end of the war in Iraq was prosecuted brilliantly, the political end of it has been a miserable failure -- witness the predictable looting and collapse of social structure when the previous totalitarian iron grip was removed. Who loots hospitals, for God's sake? And why didn't we have a plan beyond winning the war? Is there any political action being taken to correct the economic malaise in this country? Shouldn't we be attending to this? Is anyone concerned about the Patriot Act doing what Al Qaeda could not, destroying the freedoms that have allowed the United States to become the strongest nation on Earth? These aren't the cries of the masses, the masses are happy as clams that we're able to kick a minor despot's butt and bomb third-world countries back into the stone age. Was there any value in severely damaging a web of diplomatic relationships it has taken a half-century to put together? As to the questions about America's ability to comprehend science, how well does this most powerful (and one of the most prosperous) nation on the planet score in such things as literacy, mathematical reasoning, etc? Why are high-tech jobs fleeing overseas (no, I haven't lost mine -- yet)? What about the long-term trend of declining SAT scores? I think that there's PLENTY of empirical evidence that would indicate that the USofA, as a nation, is running a few bricks short of a load. I welcome your counter-examples of political/scientific brilliance on our part.
#3: How can you doubt this? Just look at the correlation between advertising dollars and where consumers spend their money.
Finally, if you look at where most tetraethyl lead and lead-based paint has been consumed over the past hundred years, maybe there is something to this. It's said that one of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was their extensive plumbing system, using lead pipes. Maybe, just maybe, we are seeing some impact from our role as the world's largest consumer of virtually everything.
Personally, I'd like to be able to blame it on some external influence like lead exposure, as opposed to thinking that maybe our culture promoted stupidity as a virtue. BTW, where are the forms of entertainment (TV, cable, movies) that show a thinking protagonist solving complex problems? All I see is "reality" TV.
I believe that the thing that has allowed America to become the Greatest Nation on Earth is our society's freedom to, and penchant for, critically examining what's wrong in America and fixing it. If you are one of those "America - Love It or Leave It (exactly as it is)" people, then I guess I belong on your list of foes. So be it.
These kinds of fears have been around for a while. When the first hydrogen bomb was exploded at the Bikini Atol, there was some concern that the level of deuterium in sea water was sufficient to sustain a fusion reaction in the oceans.
Calculations showed otherwise, and things proceeded as expected. (Note: this may be apocrypal, as I can find no google reference to it and can't remember where I came across it -- but it makes the point as well as anything)
Just imagine if the theories or calculations had been inadequate to predict the results. Then look across the expanse of scientific history, and see how much of scientific knowledge has sprung from unexpected or unforeseen results.
All the author is saying is that the price of poker has gone up, and as we continue to push back the frontiers of ignorance, it's pretty much inevitable that we're going to step in something really ugly sooner or later. And with the capabilities humanity is poking at with sticks, the consequences of a major oops/surprise in a number of fields (high-energy physics, genetic tinkering/biowar, nanotech) are generally at least planet-wide in scope.
For the concerns involving alterations in the fabric of space-time or nature of reality, even off-world laboratories may offer insufficient protection.
Risk assessment is a very poorly understood discipline, easily corrupted by those who want to attain the goal and can't conceive of making a mistake. Look at how easily the NASA bureaucrats rationalize away the risks of the shuttle -- check out Feynman's appendix to the Challenger failure analysis report for some insight, and marvel at how his back-of-the-envelope calculation of 1:100 catastrophic failure rate still holds true today, and NASA management is still oblivious to the point he was trying to make.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I believe that an effective shareholder proposal initiative could be launched that would reign in the excesses in executive compensation -- just pick a number to represent a maximum multiplier between the lowest paid employees in the company and the highest paid employees.
We don't have to return to the levels of the 1950's -- something like a multiple of 100 times the lowest paid employee becoming a cap on executive compensation would be reasonable.
And one would have to include contractual labor agreements as well as straight salaried compensation, so no one could hide behind that old "I have a CONTRACT!" chestnut.
An approach like this, while legislatively possible (but not likely so long as elected officials are suckling the wallets of corporate America), is a lot more feasible as shareholder proposals. Even pension funds and mutual funds could see the value in reaping savings in employee compensation between hundreds of millions and billions of dollars annually. And certainly no corporate official is going to the poorhouse while making 100 times the amount of the lowest paid employee in the corporate.
Unless those employees are making a few hundred bucks a year in some 3rd world sweatshop...
The OS X feature appears to operate not so much by restating in different words, but by identifying redundancies and eliminating them. It works very well.
It appears to me that it's editors that are in jeopardy, not reporters.
... I'm sure there will be a commensurate increase in other professions to balance this.
Politicians and lawyers look to be good choices.
... but what about molecular monofilament fibers?
or bulletproof clothing? Seems like a fabric made of this stuff could make a mighty fine lightweight aircraft skin, or a parachute that folds up into a money belt, or....???
Gee -- I'm running OS X 10.2.8 on a 1996-vintage 7500 (albeit with a G3 cpu card and Firewire+USB combo card) just fine, and am contemplating a move to 10.3 as soon as the open source XPostFacto support for 10.3 gets just a little more mature (i.e., past alpha code).
How about "googgles"?
It is evident that he HAS spent a substantial amount of time over the years improving his skills, to the end that he has better (certainly broader, likely deeper) IT skills than 99% of Slashdot readers.
And his reward for this? He's too expensive. The "improve your skills" meme is not successful when facing offshore competition at 10% of the wage rate.
The skills he has to improve in order to stay employed are those that cannot be shipped offshore, like becoming a plumber or an electrician. Of course, this means he is required to throw away a career he has invested over 30 years in, along with all that vaunted training and experience.
I would like to think there is a case for a domestic IT industry, but until the dismal sciences recognize the benefits of a diverse local economy over a specialized global economy, all the arguments are going to be slanted towards cutting business expense by gutting the middle classes.
One of the major reasons Linux is so successful outside the US is that foreign governments recognize that it would be nice to have an IT industry of their own, one that does not send all the profits overseas. They're not switching to Linux to be better positioned to export IT jobs to India or China.
... Bill Gates is pulled over for speeding.
After a lengthy highway chase, unable to evade helicopters or outrun radio, he pulls over, and as the cops rush forward to apprehend him, he pulls out his checkbook and says
"Who shall I make the check out to?"
... can this be applied to?
1) RIAA
2) SBA
3) Al Qaeda (no published number, just start calling every phone in Pakistan)
4) The Office of Homeland Defense
5) Democratic National Committee
5) Republican National Committee
Sadly, once the Evil has grown beyond a certain critical mass, mere mass protests have no effect.
The parent organization (Apple Computer) is not at all prominently named, and one is only aware of the Apple Computer association by virtue of the fact that the iTunes Music site lives within the Apple Computer domain.
In fact, the iTunes Music Store tab gets equal billing with a tab for Audible.com, which is an entirely different company completely unaffiliated with Apple Computer (even though that particular web page was clearly made by the same people who made the rest of the Apple pages).
It would be a simple thing to spin off iTunes into a separate subsidiary (much like Claris was for a while), but I'm not sure that would buy them anything in the context of this suit.
Maybe the easiest solution is for Apple Computer to rename themselves as Macintosh Computing, or iLife Inc, or just plain Mac. I suspect a simple change of name would be insufficient to get out of the prior agreements, they would have to do something like create a new company (let's call it Mac Incorporated) which would then buy out the assets of Apple Computer, which would promptly exit both the computer and music businesses, and specialize in selling color schemes. This would seem to satisfy the terms of the prior agreements with Apple Corps.
Any lawyers out there to poke holes in this (pretty ridiculous) scheme?
So maybe the idea is to sell the iTunes Music store to Apple Records?
I seriously doubt that they will be able to enforce the "no playing music through an Apple computer" portion of their agreement, as Macs have been playing music through external speakers for a long, long time -- whether in violation of the earlier agreement or not, I think (but IANAL) that some attempt must be made to defend the trademark to preserve it.
So exactly what is the underlying motive here, if not publicity? Does a record label that has sold 30 million albums need the money? Of course, the gross on 30 million albums at $20 a pop is *only* 600 million, while Apple has (last time I checked) over 3 billion in cash, and grossed over a billion-and-a-half last quarter, with gross profits of over 400 million. So maybe the recording label *is* trying to cut themselves a slice of Apple's pie.
In any event, Apple Computer has the financial resources to mount a very serious defense, where in prior years I doubt that they would have been able to stand up to a major record label. Earlier this year Apple was the leading candidate in the rumor mills to buy Vivendi's music business.
Looking up Apple Records in the Wikipedia, it says they had a period following 1984 where they "lost money for several years". I don't think it's beyond the realm of reason to think that they might be willing to cash out, even if their re-release of past hits album has sold 30 million copies over 147 weeks. I don't think the Beatles are going to be cutting any new tracks, so the owners might well be looking ahead and trying to maximize their cash flow -- remember, the artists would still collect some negotiated royalties on the music sold, even if they no longer owned the recording company.
And it would seem that it would be pretty tough for Apple Records to prove that they lost any sales due to brand confusion with anything from Apple Computer.
I b'lieve I'll stick with the PR ploy concept, until someone can show me why Apple Records didn't sue Apple Computer promptly following either the iPod release (now in its 3rd generation!) or the iTunes Music Store, or for that matter, iTunes itself!
... to gain free media coverage, then Apple Computer will purchase Apple Corps, closing the door on the past suit settlements, and allowing the iTMS to exclusively market the Beatles' works, after hyping demand.
Both parties benefit. The artists still get their royalties, and Apple gets the revenue that would have gone to the distribution company.
Sales shoot up from the publicity, and for Apple to be able to exclusively distribute the Beatles' tracks would put them in a whole different league from the competition in internet music sales.
-- and Science has been declining as a career choice for quite some time now. It only logical that as the pool of science-trained people shrinks, the pool of "hard" science fiction writers must inevitably follow.
People prefer to eschew the details and go for the "big Picture". Take Slashdot, for instance. A supposed haven of computer geeks and science-oriented people, but how many are actually are capable of writing assembler code? Or any language? How many remember enough calculus to solve high-school calculus problems? My guess is that the answer to both questions is well under half.
To be a "geek" in today's world is to be able to set the clock on your VCR and make it through a Linux installation. Wire-wrapping is not in the skillset of the modern geek (at least not in the mainstream of geek-dom). And I'm not berating Slashdotters, they ARE geeks compared to the Clueless Teeming Masses.
But the cold hard fact is that if you find math and science intimidating, you're going to appreciate fiction like Star Wars or Tolkien much more than something that requires a certain level of understanding of fundamental principles to appreciate the plot constraints. And there are fewer and fewer writers who have the background to write sci-fi (reflected by the fact that there are fewer and fewer of all of us in the technically well-versed boat).
Maybe the next generation of sci-fi will come from one of the nations to which much of the technical employment is moving, but I suspect that cutural differences will make such fiction unappealing to Western cultures.
Except for the fact that those versions of VPC were pre-OSX, and it's dubious that they will run under Classic.
I'm awaiting the inevitable benchmarks that compare various emulated Windows performance under G5 Bochs to VPC 6.x on a decently fast G4.
I'd rather run Bochs for free (or at worse, very cheaply) that pay significantly more to Microsoft for crippled future releases of VPC to ensure that performance sucks (even after the architectural differences are taken into account).
If Microsoft wanted to, they could easily buy back a lot of the performance lost due to manipulating addresses and integers by producing versions of DirectX and other drivers that talk directly to the underlying hardware. Look at how poorly existing VPC manages the video -- emulating an older graphics chip not present in any Mac.
Even if Bochs only ran in full screen mode (to avoid sharing the display with OS X), the performance gains from native instead of emulated video are likely to be quite significant -- maybe not enough to totally overcome the performance hit due to the loss of the pseudo-little endian mode, but I'll bet the G5 can make up the difference.
As I interpret the sentiment, the author is saying that the internet will "evolve" to be more resistant to the bad effects of virii.
That "evolution" may not be in a direction that we would regard as desirable.
For instance, introducing per packet fees/taxes would be a highly effective way to deal with both virii and spam, as it would impose both a disincentive for mass-mailers (affecting both spammers and clueless users whose systems become "owned"), and much improved traceability (anonymous mailers can't be billed, so they don't get serviced).
The open, "public" interent would quickly give way to an all-commercial/goverment (exempt from fees, of course) internet that was largely free of spam and virii.
One of the nicer aspects of trying to preserve the weak along with the strong is that it expands diversity and possibility. Give me a world with antibiotics and medical infrastructure any day over trying to make it on the merits of my own immune system.
I prefer the notion of exterminating virii (and spam) as opposed to surviving them. We just have to be sure that the cure is not worse than the disease.
any remaining members of the once-thriving American textile/garment industry ... or ... machinists or factory workers.
Seen any American-made TVs lately?
People who think things will return to "normal" as the economy picks back up are just fooling themselves. There will be some IT jobs left in this country, but it's going to be a smaller and smaller pool as the jobs flow out through the hole in the bottom of the wage structure called Globalism.
I'm not suggesting that Globalism is evil, but those who ignore its effects are just whistling in the dark.
This IS the end of the American IT industry as a major employer of Americans.
Gates, thy name is Greed.
Maybe AOL-Time-Warner could sue Microsoft for attempted claim-jumping/patent-infringement?
I just wish there were such a thing as frivolous patents applications, which could be prosecuted similar to frivolous lawsuits.
... for this kind of image horsepower. If you want to look 10 years out, then you may as well hypothesize a helmet that will allow the then-contemporary GPU to send sensory inputs directly into the brain.
After all, images are merely optical sensory input data. If the bandwidth of the device doubles every year, you should be somewhere in the neighborhood of being able to produce a data stream comparable to a human's normal sensorium.
I'm looking for someone who knows more about this than I do (which shouldn't be difficult), to take this notion and flesh it out with some informed speculation...
I'm waiting...
... for 64-bit addressing.
If you have this wonderfully fast and compact memory, the simplest way to exploit it is to access it in a linear manner with a whompin' huge address space.
Who needs VM? -- Actually, we'll still need mechanisms to isolate processes from each other, so virtual addressing will still have a place. But not as a means to accomodate logical address spaces larger than physical address spaces.
I want a fuel-cell powered, IBM 970 Powerbook with buckytube memory and an OLED display. Never mind the power switch, I'll just refuel it every other month or so.
Care to guess how many younger workers can meet this spec?
What fraction of coders under 30 have a MS in Computer Science?
What fraction of them have an ACTIVE Secret Clearance? -- hint: the idea is to maintain as few Secret Clearances as possible, so as to minimize exposure to secret stuff.
How many young coders know assembly, and PPC assembly at that?
Cryptography EXPERIENCE, and less than 6 years total experience?
My guess is that there's only a handful of recent MIT/CalTech graduates who have co-oped or interned with the NSA/CIA (they probably have an admiral or general in the family to vouch for them) who stand a chance of meeting this spec.
It would appear to me that this particular specification (like so many others) is designed to keep everyone OUT, so they can promote someone they've already identified, on the grounds that "we ran ads, but couldn't find anybody qualified".
So plan on having a tough time finding a job, and don't blame the trouble on the diploma.
Times are Tough All Over.
If I don't like the rates or his parole officer won't allow travel over a state line, I can always hire one of those cut-rate offshore CEOs for pennies on the dollar...
actually, if you click on over to the Prairie Home Companion web site while the real-time broadcast is happening, you'll find that yes, you can watch a radio program over the internet.
It's a real treat if you can't conveniently travel to wherever the show is occuring and purchase tickets, or if you'd simply like to see what the stage show is like.
You have a choice of seeing a visual image presented from either a single camera view, or get better coverage from a 3-camera view, if you've got the bandwidth.
Since it is a web site of the local affiliate and not NPR, I see no reason to think that the imagery (whatever it is, I see no player requirement specified) will disappear.
But let's look at this just a bit further and see if there isn't something to it.
One point -- please don't confuse the United States with Canada and Mexico. Canada seems to do quite well when compared to us on a per capita basis, and Mexico is still growing out of being a third-world nation, and makes for a not really meaningful comparison to the US.
Your #1 gripe should read:
#1:Insults an entire country. Maybe an insult, maybe an observation. Probably an insult in my case, certainly an expression of the strongest disappointment, could well be an observation for others.
#2: One would normally supply examples refuting the statement, rather than just listing it and stating that it's wrong. Let me begin by offering up the opinion that while the military end of the war in Iraq was prosecuted brilliantly, the political end of it has been a miserable failure -- witness the predictable looting and collapse of social structure when the previous totalitarian iron grip was removed. Who loots hospitals, for God's sake? And why didn't we have a plan beyond winning the war? Is there any political action being taken to correct the economic malaise in this country? Shouldn't we be attending to this? Is anyone concerned about the Patriot Act doing what Al Qaeda could not, destroying the freedoms that have allowed the United States to become the strongest nation on Earth? These aren't the cries of the masses, the masses are happy as clams that we're able to kick a minor despot's butt and bomb third-world countries back into the stone age. Was there any value in severely damaging a web of diplomatic relationships it has taken a half-century to put together? As to the questions about America's ability to comprehend science, how well does this most powerful (and one of the most prosperous) nation on the planet score in such things as literacy, mathematical reasoning, etc? Why are high-tech jobs fleeing overseas (no, I haven't lost mine -- yet)? What about the long-term trend of declining SAT scores?
I think that there's PLENTY of empirical evidence that would indicate that the USofA, as a nation, is running a few bricks short of a load. I welcome your counter-examples of political/scientific brilliance on our part.
#3: How can you doubt this? Just look at the correlation between advertising dollars and where consumers spend their money.
Finally, if you look at where most tetraethyl lead and lead-based paint has been consumed over the past hundred years, maybe there is something to this. It's said that one of the reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was their extensive plumbing system, using lead pipes. Maybe, just maybe, we are seeing some impact from our role as the world's largest consumer of virtually everything.
Personally, I'd like to be able to blame it on some external influence like lead exposure, as opposed to thinking that maybe our culture promoted stupidity as a virtue. BTW, where are the forms of entertainment (TV, cable, movies) that show a thinking protagonist solving complex problems? All I see is "reality" TV.
I believe that the thing that has allowed America to become the Greatest Nation on Earth is our society's freedom to, and penchant for, critically examining what's wrong in America and fixing it. If you are one of those "America - Love It or Leave It (exactly as it is)" people, then I guess I belong on your list of foes. So be it.
Calculations showed otherwise, and things proceeded as expected. (Note: this may be apocrypal, as I can find no google reference to it and can't remember where I came across it -- but it makes the point as well as anything)
Just imagine if the theories or calculations had been inadequate to predict the results. Then look across the expanse of scientific history, and see how much of scientific knowledge has sprung from unexpected or unforeseen results.
All the author is saying is that the price of poker has gone up, and as we continue to push back the frontiers of ignorance, it's pretty much inevitable that we're going to step in something really ugly sooner or later. And with the capabilities humanity is poking at with sticks, the consequences of a major oops/surprise in a number of fields (high-energy physics, genetic tinkering/biowar, nanotech) are generally at least planet-wide in scope.
For the concerns involving alterations in the fabric of space-time or nature of reality, even off-world laboratories may offer insufficient protection.
Risk assessment is a very poorly understood discipline, easily corrupted by those who want to attain the goal and can't conceive of making a mistake. Look at how easily the NASA bureaucrats rationalize away the risks of the shuttle -- check out Feynman's appendix to the Challenger failure analysis report for some insight, and marvel at how his back-of-the-envelope calculation of 1:100 catastrophic failure rate still holds true today, and NASA management is still oblivious to the point he was trying to make.