I think what I'm most excited for with this release is seeing if Oracle follows through on their promise to put out the source for the up-to-the-date work on ZFS. While ZFS at v28 has proven to be both a lot of fun and very useful for many of us, the updates since (first available for general use with Solaris 11 Express last year I believe) add a few really nice features, including crypto and work on block pointer rewrite. While the illumos project could certainly fork it if required, it would be really great if everyone could stay in sync more. After the acquisition, rather then do nightly releases there was a decision to opt for only releasing code with major versions, which while disappointing at least offered hope going forward. I don't see that Oracle has anything to lose here by staying open with that component, filesystems benefit a lot from widespread use and lots of testing, but, well, it is Oracle.
No it doesn't; you could sell what amounts to a bunch of patches, using previously installed components of the system that did not change.
I addressed this in passing, but perhaps it's worth some additional expansion. I wrote:
Additionally, "upgrades" should be (again, from a user perspective) simply full versions, identical, except cheaper and for existing users.
What you seem to be arguing for is additional DRM, ie., a technical protection measure in order to enforce the wishes of the developer. However, compared to a purely social and legal framework, where customers and people in general are simply expected to be adults and do the right thing, there are significant downsides.
There is additional cost to develop and deploy technical protection methods on the developer side, towards no real overall economic gain.
On the user side, these measures can present honest customers with significant additional hassle and no gain while failing to do anything to the dishonest. This is the case in general, but particularly the case with an operating system. Under the current state of things, Mac OS X has no serial, no ownership checks, and no checks for previous versions. It only has some weak checks to see if it's on a Mac, and otherwise depends on license requirements. The net result is that one never even has to think about it when it comes to upgrading a machine, imaging new machines, etc. It's fine to change hardware, nuke the old hard drive, run it off a direct connect or networked image, just copy right over from one hard drive to another, or anything else possible. In any case, there will never be any trip up.
Under your scenario, things become much more complicated to no value. To upgrade, you first need to go and dig up your old install media and install that? What if it's been a few versions, you have to start a couple back, then install one upgrade, then the next upgrade? Is it even allowed under this scenario to simply ditto over from an old drive to a new one? This doesn't seem like a net gain.
Finally, if there is no rule of law and society involved, but merely technical protection, I see no way around the economic incentive to ever more heavily restrict stuff. Deep hardware level DRM practically becomes a requirement under this scenario, one where you're not just up against random individuals who aren't really any commercial loss, but against serious businesses. This seems bad every way around, from the perspective of consumer choice and of competition. A massive multinational like Apple could afford to reengineer everything, but a small dev?
I think it's better to have a system where the general standards just exist as a matter of law and society.
To my mind, software upgrades are an economically efficient and pro-user offering. They are good for both the production and use side of the equation, allowing users to pay directly for the additional cost of development since their last version rather then all the original work and value that went into the product. They allow developers to reward their own supporters and more efficiently allocate resources. Additionally, "upgrades" should be (again, from a user perspective) simply full versions, identical, except cheaper and for existing users. This is how all commercial software I use works as well.
However, the entire concept of upgrades depends completely on legal licensing: that I can have a clause that says "you may not use this unless you previously owned a full version". I already see a number of posts, both here on Slashdot and on other forums (such as the comments with the Ars Technica article on this story), that are enraged at the result, and that argue that Psystar was "adding value" by "lowering hardware costs". The underlying argument is that, if a piece of software is sold, that should be that. However, how do those of you who argue for that square it with upgrading? Do you simply agree with the App Store take, where upgrades don't exist at all? Or do you have some other way of squaring things away?
As things have existed, Mac OS X offerings have all been upgrades and have been priced accordingly. There seems to be a reasonable consideration on both sides here: buyers pay less money, but in exchange have the restriction of needing to have a Mac as Apple has chosen to build their development around an integrated model. Do some of you think that such integrated models should be illegal, regardless of what benefits they offer? Should Apple be required by law to sell a "full" version of Mac OS X, and would you actually be willing to pay what that might cost (ie., if they said "full version, $400")? I'm genuinely curious about people's thoughts around this.
It seems to have become trendy again to hate Apple no matter what, but this is getting ridiculous. Why is it that Apple is expected to be the only platform vendor that has to maintain their own version of the JVM for free? Jobs is quite correct in saying that Java under OS X has long lagged behind the latest official Sun release. I wish it was more common for Apple to leave more components to third parties now that they've got more market share. Another example would be graphics drivers, which lag tremendously in both performance and features. I don't understand why on Earth any Java dev would want to be stuck indefinitely with Apple's outdated implementation that by definition would never be a major priority rather then get a version from the main organization behind it. For that matter I blame Sun's longstanding ambivalence toasted FOSS. If we had a fully open GPL edition of the JVM that was best of class like we should have gotten years ago, this never would have been an issue in the first place. It's yet another tech Sun's BS has screwed us on, with their insistance to out ZFS under the CDDL rather then Apache/BSD/LGPL being another major example. Anyone still have that old sun strategy wheel, from before 'acquisition' became their final exit?
Or the converse, I suppose (hardware solutions can add another layer to this). This looks like some very interesting work, and may have more applicability in general beyond this one scenario. I'm certainly looking forward to following their implementation as it comes along. But with that said, if this attack was a serious concern for a given entity there seem to be some obvious potential hardware solutions. The attack essentially depends on being able to shutdown the computer but keep the memory cold enough that the randomization time is slowed down tremendously, giving enough time to perform a dump of the contents onto another system for further analysis. Therefore, it can be prevented by, for example, having electric heater units surrounding the memory connected to a dedicated capacitor bank and temperature sensor, as well as a sensor to detect if someone tries for force open the machine (intrusion alarm). Then the system can perform a scram shutdown (or if it is just shutdown normally), and the heaters can assure that the memory is kept hot for a couple of seconds afterwards even in the face of attempted cooling. It only needs to manage it very briefly and then all the contents are scrambled. Other similar methods (maybe a really micro EMP inside a shield memory space) would be possible to, but basically they just need to deny an attacker for a very short amount of time or ensure entropy in the RAM and then the attack is useless.
Ultimately a dedicated hardware secure key store would be better and easier to integrate across all systems, and this more software solution of course has the massive advantage of being able to run for free on existing hardware. But the above could at least be retrofitted on nearly anything, and while it is more esoteric, then again so is the attack since it requires physical access.
Contrary the the statement there, I don't the even pretty wild interpretations of an EULA would apply at all. If they wished to pursue that angle Apple would need to go after individual users. From Apple's POV, I believe the only true point of contention would be if Open Tech uses any of their trademarks in its advertising or general web. They can't just plaster Apple OS X images all over the place for example.
No, the real potential source of suits isn't even necessarily from Apple. Rather, Open Tech will have to be very careful in their wording when it comes to promotion. From what I've seen an early draft of their PR used phrases like "Mac Compatible." What exactly does that mean, legally? What happens when a software update breaks the OS? If a customer sees "Mac Compatible" and nothing else, and then buys based on that, I could see grounds for a false advertising suit.
Of course, that can be avoided quite neatly I think with some very careful wording, and by making the limitations and lack of support from Apple very explicit. "Capable of running OS X", with a big fat bold "Not supported by Apple, future updates may not be compatible" warning might work just fine. This just seems like the area where, if these guys are amateur or don't think about it much, they could get tripped up.
There is no "separate partition or physical volume" option available to you on a Mac
A separate partition is what we super techie people refer to formatting a disc using the "Partition" option, hence, a separate partition! I know, your mind was just blown. A "separate physical volume" would be, for example, these new cutting edge things called "hard drives." If you have either of those, you can duplicate your OS install, then reboot off your copy. Then you can update on that copy and if something breaks just reboot back to your original untouched volume and nuke the copy.
I apologize for being so sarcastic here, but how can someone on Slashdot of all places lack such fundamental knowledge about computers? Multiple logical volumes have been around for ages, back to the dawn of the idea of volumes themselves practically. Come on, sir!
I must respectfully disagree with you jcr. I think RIAA is worse, because the tobacco companies aren't trying to force me to deal with tobacco. They have had no material effect on the march of anti-secondhand smoke laws, and there have never been requirements to smoke tobacco. I personally feel that people should be free to engage in risky behavior, so long as they are at no point lied to about it, coerced in any way, and so long as it does not risk anyone else. Tobacco failed on the truthfulness point back before the major lawsuits, but at this point I don't feel anyone who does even a cursory check, or even who has paid remote attention to society, can genuinely not have any notion of the dangers of smoking.
Meanwhile, RIAA et al are successfully destroying basic parts of our nation's laws, undermining society in general and the tech and media industries in particular. They really do have a claim on being one of the most purely destructive corporate forces ever.
Web based applications, especially on at a LAN level (for instance, on a corporate or educational intranet), have had a lot of promise for quite a while. Current standards for Javascript, XML, and CSS, when used properly and to their fullest extent, can certainly make for very rich feeling applications on a thin-client like infrastructure. Google is simply one of the first really large and widespread applications of this. I should note that web applications will not be replacing general applications anytime in the foreseeable future; bandwidth is not the only issue either. For serious, professional applications like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and the like, interface is very important as well. This includes having an interface that meshes well with other applications and the OS. Obviously, heavy duty games are a more tech limited category - links will likely always be much faster at the local machine level, and games take advantage of that bandwidth and power. However, many other applications, including a large percentage of the most commonly used apps (like wordprocessors, email, etc), lend themselves well to translation to web applications. With this comes: Ease of maintenance.
Having an application centrally deployed means bug fixes and new features can be rolled out instantly, transparently, and uniformly. This can also ease development of other features, because developers can count on every user having access to the same version. In addition, rollbacks may be made if necessary in a central way.
Architecture independence
Thanks to open source software development, all major operating systems support webservers of one kind or another, and additionally there exist at least as an option very functional and uniform browsers. This means that servers and clients can be swapped as an organization's needs dictate, rather then becoming locked into any single architecture.
Scaling/Economy benefits
Additional clients added to the network have instant access to all available web apps, without the need to perform any installations or updates. Software can be deployed very widely and cheaply.
*Control
While the other factors have been positive, it is debatable whether this is a benefit or not; however, it is certain to be something developers consider. Having a functional, centralized software repository opens the possibility for time renting of access, and then shutting people off when the money stops flowing. Depending on implementation, and of course the user, this may be boon or bane: a very cheap way to temporarily access software you need, and never have to pay for it again, or a way developers extract endless money. Personally, I always have wondered if Microsoft has purposely delayed adding features to IE for as long as possible in particular light of the second item, architecture independence. Microsoft Office is one of the cornerstones of their business, and enabling rich web languages would also allow a shift to be made away from requiring Windows. (This stance is also, incidentally, why so many of us who do professional web development are very frustrated with MS. I personally have to spend dozens of wasted hours for each big site coding up special versions for IE, in addition to standards compliant ones, and even then my possible feature set is much reduced. Cumulatively over the world, this must result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of wasted work-hours per year.)
Web apps have a lot of promise. Issues like GUI integration remain, but I am excited that the scene is at last gaining steam after stalling for the last 4 years or so.
Evolution acts on population gene pools when some factor favors the survival of specific genes. However, modern humans depend on genetics to a far smaller extent then any other species; rather, we depend on our intelligence. We don't evolve thicker fur or blubber to live in colder environments, we alter our environment (shelter) or create artificial means to warm ourselves. Synthetic transportation replaces wings or faster legs. We use medicine to cure ourselves of disease and accidents. It therefore seems both likely and acceptable that in the future, humans will choose to alter themselves at a physical, internal level. This seems to be a logical progression from our current external prosthetics, like cars. I suspect this will take the form of one or more of the following:
Genetic engineering: Gene therapy is currently a very promising field of study, and research on vectors is finally yielding some extremely promising results, both for viral (see some of the fourth generation or higher lentiviral systems) and non-viral (liposomes etc). As gene therapy becomes common, the same techniques can be applied to not just fix genes, but add or alter existing ones to give desirable attributes (better vision, etc).
Brain-computer interfaces: Once again, most current research takes place with the aim to provide superior prosthetics to people who have suffered from accidents. This is my personal area of interest. In principle, all the input and output going into the brain should be able to be intercepted and controlled. By doing that, a person could be transplanted into any artificial body desired. I feel that at the current pace of development, this will be a relatively (there is always risk with surgery) safe and well understood procedure within 20-30 years, assuming research isn't outlawed or anything like that.
Medical nanotechnology: Very speculative, I don't think anyone knows for sure whether is can actually be done or not. I'm listing it because it would be a different way to augment the human body from the previous two.
All of these technologies may work together, of course. It may be that human genetic engineering would help a person be more compatible with synthetic augmentations, for example. I also believe these are all good things. The core of what makes us us is our minds, and it seems tragic that so many people are restricted by the box their brain must travel in. I hope to be able to help make it so that losing limbs and getting paralyzed are simply no longer problems that need to be worried about beyond some inconvenience. I think that transferring to artificial bodies, or at least advanced gene therapy, will be important for future efforts to colonize space. It appears that in many ways, the primary threat is luddites shutting the research down. Fortunately, so far most of this has passed under their radar, so I am hopeful that will continue to be the case until actual products are ready to go. At that point, it will be too late to stop it. It is an exciting time to be alive though, and I encourage everyone to go and do some research on the subject, especially if you have access to a college or corporate net that has subscriptions to primary research engines, like ScienceDirect or JStor. Also, everyone can look at becoming a member of the AAAS, which will get you online access to Science.
Gene Delivery Systems. A free quick intro (from a lecture/course) on some of the different vector systems being studied for gene therapy, and desirable characteristics.
Those of you with access to journals can go read a very interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(6):1022-1035. "Optimizing a Linear Algorithm for Real-Time Robotic Control using Chronic Cortical Ensemble Recordings in Monkeys," by Wessberg and Nicolelis.
This comes up every time one of these discussions starts. It is the same thing for music, the same for movies, the same for games, and basically the same for every kind of IP! Where is the alternative? I actually did go google search, I went to Nintendo's site, to Square's, etc. I can't find any place where they will even sell me these games, *let alone* as simple ROMs. Often, the games aren't for sale period (as in the case of old SNES games). I want to give them my money!
This old saying is very, very true: A lot of stuff is only free if your time is worthless. I am now an adult, I have a job and a credit card, I am happy and willing to trade my money in exchange for not having to waste my time searching for low quality or buggy crap on the net. Guess what, if it takes me two hours to find those ROMs, or those MP3s, well that is $50-80 in wasted time. So if companies charge less then that, it is not only more convenient, it is in fact cheaper for me to just pay them. Duh. And yet there is nothing, so I guess I just don't have any sympathy. I don't think it can be equated with any type of theft or moral ill to copy something when there is no economic price to it, and it doesn't deprive anyone of anything. It would be like finding some never printed book buried in an abandoned building somewhere, the author dead, and being sued for putting the text online.
Most of these suggestions are common sense to anyone who has a couple of serious software projects under their belt, which isn't to say that they aren't worthwhile to look through. However, one in particular made me think of an old question of mine, having to do with the way unix works vs the modern GUI. On page 6, the pdf discusses the "Collaborate Law". It says:
"Forget enterprise systems that do everything possible within your field. They're too large, clumsy and require too much development time. Instead, create small discrete software that can collaborate seamlessly with the technology that the end users are currently using."
This, in a nutshell, seems to be the core philosophy behind much of the original Unix. Most Unix apps (and in particular, all the 'commands' which are small applications) have the concept of standard in (stdin), standard out (stdout), and standard error (stderr). Because most commands can operate to accept stdin, do its purpose, and then send to stdout, it is both possible, intuitive, and very practical to chain together many small commands to accomplish a single task very easily. I suspect there is some terminology for this process, but as I don't know what it is I generally think of it as being a "stream centered" approach. You have many discrete components operating on a stream of information. However, I know of no similar functionality in most modern GUIs, which are all basically application-centered approaches (though Windows tends to present itself as being document-centered). Each application is a single thing that you open up, and has its own self contained operations, usage, etc. I would like to see this more object-oriented stream approach exist in more GUIs today, because it is really a very useful paradigm for many tasks. It allows developers to concentrate on doing a single task extremely well, and then allows users to chain that task in as many ways as they can imagine, which is always more then what the original developer could think of. In Mac OS X 10.4, the Automator feature sounds like it might very well be close to what I have in mind, though a lot will depend on how easily and powerfully developers can make new 'Actions' (Apple's terminology for single task apps/commands). However, these days I really think that is an old concept that is time tested and very useful and just waiting for the right re-implementation to become critical for a new generation.
I have just been grappling with this very issue. What kind of solution can find depends on a couple of factors:
-What RAID level you want (5 usually requires better hardware) -Whether you want hardware RAID (I strongly recommend this) or soft RAID -How much redundancy you need (Battery backup cache? Redundant controllers? Hardware environmental controls?)
If you are looking for good pci cards, I would strongly suggest a card from 3ware, and a card from a place such a Seagate. Getting a super-duper cheap card when terabytes of data are on the line is just fundamentally stupid. You can save some bucks now, but be ready with your next Ask Slashdot: "How do I recover data from my dead RAID?" Seagate now has a nice 5 year warranty, which match well with good quality and reasonably cheap drives. Look at some of the SATA drives like the Barracuda. However, any decent quality drive maker can work. If you have even more money, you can look at some of the things offered by places like StorCase. A larger initial investment can become cheaper as you scale up the cheap harddrive count, and it can be a good thing in the long run. Obviously, the more time you are willing to invest doing things yourself, the cheaper you can get to some extent vs premade items. However, no support as well.
Do read up on some of the fundamentals of RAID: Everything you need to know (and lots you don't) is probably at least mentioned in the PC Guide on RAID. Look through that. Things like hot swap and hot spares are important to understand. Finally, you should remember to check compatability. Unfortunately, I for instance have not been able to find much of anything in the way of controller cards that is compatable with OS X (except the obvious, the XServe RAID). So I have something set up on a BSD box in my server closet that I then link to, more like a storage appliance. Happily, the 3ware cards and many others are now compatable with a wide variety of *nix and BSD flavors along Windows, but do check to make sure.
Last but not least, remember this!: RAID is *not* a backup solution, but an highly redundant onsite storage system. Have another form of backups, even if it is just a RAID 1 off site, or DVD-Rs, or something. If a disaster happens (thieves, fire, nuclear destruction, John Ashcroft) on site storage won't save you.
think this certainly looks like a very interesting technology, and in many ways is a logical extension of some of the techniques that have been around for years. Fellow users of products like VirtualPC (I use it with Windows 2000 and Debian) know that there are features like "Save State" that allow you to close down the VPC and then restart it later with the same programs running, setup, etc. The restore is also faster then restarting the OS (Windows or otherwise) from scratch. It is of course possible to copy the hard drive image and VPC program to another computer and still restore again, though this is time consuming. So I think it is clever to extend this to work more transparently over a network.
If a person is just browsing mail, or wants to check sites, do word processing, etc., this seems like a great thing. However, I do not see two important issues addressed in the article. First of all, the technology is claimed to be non-proprietary, which is great. But how easy is it to move between major architectures? I have happily switched to FreeBSD on my x86 machines and Mac OSX for my main work. I assume that this tech will require all used machines to be similar architectures, making it less useful for those of us on the fringe. If I have compiled a lot of my apps to specifically use features of x86-64 (ie, Athlon FX53 etc) how will the system respond?
The second problem is more basic, the symptom being: I don't have a laptop. The reason? I can still get vastly more power on the desktop, and I need that power. I use my machine for molecular force modeling (Cerius2), BLAST, as well as a significant amount of graphics work with Photoshop. And of course, there are games. I have around 480GB in disk space, and that is hardly on the high end anymore. Computer makers off many different lines of machines (and of course there is a thriving DIY market) precisely because different users have such different needs and desires. It's not just the software that is customized, but the hardware as well. This system *would* work very well if all the machines in hotels or wherever were pretty high-end, with gigabytes of disk space, at least a gig of ram, high end graphics cards, etc. Then differences would be purely in how we all customized our work environments, apps, etc. Unfortunately, the reality (where the boxes are generally almost the cheapest a business can buy) is so far from this scenario as to be laughable. I think that this is a great idea, but with limited application, because in the real world the various needs of people (and not even a small minority) diverge to greatly for this to be wide-scale for the foreseeable future.
The goal of suppressing and/or absorbing the sonic boom has been around for a long time now, and I have seen a number of different attempts at doing it, most without particularly good levels of success. But at least for a commercial aircraft, another very important consideration is fuel costs. People who follow the aviation industry should remember the recent airliner choice of the new Boeing 7E7 over their Sonic Cruiser concept, because the 7E7 is much more efficient, which therefore translates to lower fuel costs.
Most supersonic aircraft require afterburners in order to go faster then sound, and afterburners are incredibly voracious consumers of fuel. I think that one of the other very important innovations is the "Supercruise" ability, seen on aircraft like the F-22 Raptor. This allows the aircraft to maintain supersonic speed for extended periods of time in a low power setting, and this in turn is just as vital for cheap, commercially viable flights. I hope that advances in sonic boom suppression will also work well with the necessary designs for supercruising, and that we may all be able to take advantage of such flights within the next 2-3 decades. If both aren't taken into account, and designers come up with plans that make for an either-or choice, it could mean supersonic planes will still be relegated to the relatively wealthy.
I might also point out (to myself) that Apple's stance of not including documentation with its products might be enhancing their reputation of "easy-to-use out of the box." Without an imposing manual through which to read, people might assume more readily that they can simply jump into a program and be able to figure it out.
As someone who has worked on a number of programs, I can tell you that not having documentation as a certainty can change how the programmer thinks about things as well. If you don't know if your end users will have any manual, and in fact you have been told that they will most likely be starting the application up raw, it makes for a change in thinking about design elements. Does this button here make sense? Are the labels as self-explanatory as possible? Are there sufficient little help messages when needed? In many other cases, these are things that can pushed aside a bit ("Oh well, they can always look at it in the manual. It makes sense to me.") So Apple's stance may actually help make for a self fulfilling prophecy: no documentation taken for granted helps lead to software that doesn't need it as much.
The ideal of free trade, the idea that competition helps to spur innovation, increase efficiency, and generate jobs, clearly has significant truth. As Americans, we already have an example that should be obvious: the states themselves. Between each state there exists free trade, something that wasn't the case under the Articles of the Confederation. It was specifically changed so that there would be a single source of currency, no tariffs, etc. In many ways, it is just like free trade between countries, and it has obviously been tremendously successful. With some exceptions, the United States is certain very strong economically and technologically, and the states all do well.
However, this example also illustrates a very important caveat to this whole situation: the competition can only be productive if there is an equal baseline established. As a country, we have decided that certain qualities are important to us, such as a clean environment, worker's rights, education, health care, etc. These are national policies, enshrined in institutions from the EPA to the FDA, and thus every state is subject to the same requirements. And it is here that the comparison with international Free Trade breaks down. If companies in India are not subject to the same requirements, if they are not required to care about the environment etc., then it is not really free trade. American companies can't ever hope to compete, burdened by costs they can't control. Instead, we merely subsidize a temporary exploitation of a less developed country. Once India and other countries develop to a similar level, they will likely begin to care about more of the same things, and at that point competition can begin to truly flourish without a need for restrictions. But in the mean time, I don't see how true Free Trade can exist without unfairly undermining important values we hold.
Or at least I should say, science is not the main point. It frustrates me to see that every time an article of this sort pops up, it always seems that someone makes this (arguably quite valid) point: Why bother with manned space travel for science/exploration missions, when autonomous machines can do it more cheaply and for less risk? Counter arguments to this can be made along the lines of humans being more adaptable, flexible, etc, but ultimately the argument has a lot of merit. Except that it is arguing against something that shouldn't really be the main factor in the debate. We need manned missions, because we need actual manned colinization of space, for a great number of reasons. It seems like a good idea to not have all of our eggs in one basket, so to speak, and I am sure that eventually very big, important science will come out of being able to construct things in the asteroid belt.
But in the mean time, humanity really needs a frontier. Our systems have a tendency to slowly but surely become slower and more mired as time passes, in part because power tends to be gravitational; it gets concentrated in the hands of smaller groups of people, who in turn often become more cautious and inflexible with regards to things that would rock the boat. Bureaucracy gets bigger, not smaller, and it becomes harder to try radically new ways of doing things. The best way for change to take place is often for it to be experimented with somewhere else, and then filter back; this is what happened in the past with America. These people, coming to a new place without any entrenched baggage, got to try to start a system from scratch, and when it was successful, other countries could observe and then emulate and improve on it as it filtered back. But there is no frontier to experiment with anymore. The whole world (the oceans don't count, they are too hard/expensive to colonize for now) has people living in it. I think it is important for our development as a species to move on to new places, where new laws can be tried (including new ways of thinking about stuff like IP and citizen participation), and so that no single entity will ever be able to easily control everyone.
For many people, I believe that the excitement, opportunity, etc. are worth the risk and sacrifice that it will take. The Hubble has been one of our most successful and productive projects, and one that wouldn't have been possible without astronauts; the space station, in contrast, has in fact been sort of a waste from the point of view of both science and exploration. But neither should be the sole reason to keep or get rid of the shuttle, or the concept of manned space flight. A certain amount of capital is needed to prime things, so to speak, before enough momentum can develop for space exploration to become self-sustaining without government aid. This large up front cost has been and will be difficult for many to swallow, especially in our notoriously money hungry Congress. But as a country, and a species, we need this, and it will pay back many times over. I apologize for my long windedness, but I am hopeful that eventually some politicians will try to get votes from people with some large vision and dream instead of simply the usual issues.
I am very excited by this news. I swear by my 48gx, which has the most useful calculatlor I have ever used. RPN input is very fast, the stack is very useful, and it was really ahead of its time with features. However, it can be a bit pokey at times, making certain features less useful. However, it is also very good on the computer. In mid-2000, HP actually made the laudable move of releasing the HP48 ROM images to the public, so various emulators that work exactly like the real thing can be found for various platforms. For OS X, I would suggest using x48, which is even featured on Apple's website! You can find the original page here. Worth checking out. Also, HP48gx enthusiasts should check out metakernal, which, while it requires you to have an add-on memory card, can make the 48gx a lot more usable. It rewrites a lot of the core functions in assembly, making them far faster, as well as adding new features. It is also free now (minus the cost of the required card, obviously).
Seriously, it is ultimately a matter of very basic physics. In space especially, it is pretty easy to predict the trajectory of a known object for a great distance into the future. With the velocities and distances involved, a tiny nudge to any object months in advance would mean a trajectory change of hundreds of thousands to millions of miles. A thermonuclear charge at a few months away and no worries, even for a *big* rock. Now if the thing is just days away, that is a totally different story, but we could still possibly do stuff to minimize the damage. For instance, it might be possible to get it to break into chunks, or to shift it to land in the ocean as opposed to on land. This stuff isn't mysterious, its just large scale. I'm not saying the media would be of any use (it is doubtful that we could load up the previously mentioned thermonuke with editors, despite the added punch[ooh]) but all would certainly not be hopeless.
Though Square is best know for Final Fantasy, and I will admit a certain special fondness for FF6 in particular as it was the first realy RPG I ever played through and what got me hooked on the genre (for better or worse), they have made a lot of other terrific games as well. In particular, I am thinking of Chrono Trigger, which was one of the last games they came out with on the SNES and also one of the best. That one actually got a sequel, or perhaps a side story at any rate, called Chrono Cross for the Playstation. These games were both interesting, and especially Chrono Trigger at the time, because they did away with the whole 'Random Encounters on World Map' thing that virtually every other RPG I can think of up until that time had. This made it a lot more fun to just explore around, as there wasn't any annoyance or penalty for doing so.
I personally have mixed feelings about the latest, FFX. It certainly has fantastic graphics, and I have really found myself getting into it at times. I have had a bunch of fun in many pieces, which I guess is the ultimate test for any game. But, I personally find some of the voices somewhat gag inducing or just jarring to the experience at points. I know people complain about too much angst or whatever, but personally I kind of like having my main character be a bit of a bad-ass, someone who at least at first isn't super interested in running out and saving the world, who has emotional conflicts and doesn't have an easy time dealing with it. In FF7, for instance, I liked Cloud's opening attitude, though I may be one of the few if FFX fans are to be believed. And I really _liked_ the first opening city, which is where the game starts right off (not really a spoiler to talk about it, but stop reading if you don't want some suspense taken out of your first 5 minutes of the game). It is really cool looking and well designed, and, well, if I lived in a place like that and it, and all my friends, was blown up, I would be really f@&^!ng pissed. Instead, we get a quick "oh well, it's all good." *Shrug*. Harder to get into the a character (ie, to role-play, to feel and empathize with) who sounds just like a California surfer stereotype, and I certainly found myself rolling my eyes or thinking 'stop being such a whiny loser and get fighting already,' during some of the drawn out dialog. Given these things are on DVDs, would it kill them to include the original japanese sound track as well?
Another interesting BCI link
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· Score: 2, Informative
Very useful right away, let alone in the future
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· Score: 3, Informative
There are already a lot of implantable devices for which power is a big concern. From simple things like pacemakers and sensors to more complex and experimental devices like artificial hearts, everything needs juice. One of the big problems, for instance, with some early devices is that in order to add more juice you had two bad options:
1. Have some sort of actual device sticking out of the body. This is bad, because it breaches the skin, our natural defensive screen, and such things tend to become very easily infected.
2. Surgery to replace cells. Again, any surgery at all is going to be both expensive and risk prone.
More recently, a third option has become available: having fully implanted power system that can be recharged wirelessly, via em radiation of some kind (you can google for it). This is a big gain, because it allows devices that are more power hungry while still maintaining the benefits of not breaching the skin and not needing frequent operations. But it still requires people to remember and have access to the appropriate charging device consistantly. If for any reason some one forgets or can't recharge, the device may shut down, sometimes with fatal results. So having a way to remove one more step for powering these things should really help improve the quality of life for a lot of people today.
Of course, personally I find this to be a very exciting development for future things as well. When we get to the point of having more optional implants, for things like boosting hearing or vision, a way to power them will be necessary, and if the power requirements are low, then this system would be perfect. Ultimately, widespread adoption of anything, from an OS to a vehicle, is all about making it as easy and intuitive for end users as possible. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on for advanced things like brain-computer interfaces, and people who are interested should look around, as the state of the art has advanced a great deal in the past 5 years. Here are a few links for the curious, and much more can be found with google, of course:
Overall, he didn't do that bad a job. In some ways Dean is actually an interesting mix of left and right. He is a former doctor, which partly explains a lot of his very strong positions with regards to health care. He certainly has come across as one of the strongest left standing democrats in many ads and articles, but he has an A grade from the NRA as he was not at all anti-gun ownership in Vermont. He is also reasonably fiscally conservative. Our state didn't go too overboard with spending, and we actually still have over 10 million dollars in our "rainy day fund," for what it's worth. My biggest quibble with his term was actually in regards to education, but a lot of that was the fault of the legislature and the courts (which ruled our old method was unconstitutional). Of the candidates, we could do a lot worse (come to think of it, we have been doing a lot worse) then Dean. Having met him, and lived with him as head of the state, I think he has some good ideas. I was actually kind of pro-war, but Bush has screwed us so badly on the domestic front in virtually every field, from economics to scientific research (VERY important to me) to basic civil rights, that I would vote for virtually anyone over him. I would recommend people look at his stands.
Slashdot Mirror
I think what I'm most excited for with this release is seeing if Oracle follows through on their promise to put out the source for the up-to-the-date work on ZFS. While ZFS at v28 has proven to be both a lot of fun and very useful for many of us, the updates since (first available for general use with Solaris 11 Express last year I believe) add a few really nice features, including crypto and work on block pointer rewrite. While the illumos project could certainly fork it if required, it would be really great if everyone could stay in sync more. After the acquisition, rather then do nightly releases there was a decision to opt for only releasing code with major versions, which while disappointing at least offered hope going forward. I don't see that Oracle has anything to lose here by staying open with that component, filesystems benefit a lot from widespread use and lots of testing, but, well, it is Oracle.
No it doesn't; you could sell what amounts to a bunch of patches, using previously installed components of the system that did not change.
I addressed this in passing, but perhaps it's worth some additional expansion. I wrote:
Additionally, "upgrades" should be (again, from a user perspective) simply full versions, identical, except cheaper and for existing users.
What you seem to be arguing for is additional DRM, ie., a technical protection measure in order to enforce the wishes of the developer. However, compared to a purely social and legal framework, where customers and people in general are simply expected to be adults and do the right thing, there are significant downsides.
Under your scenario, things become much more complicated to no value. To upgrade, you first need to go and dig up your old install media and install that? What if it's been a few versions, you have to start a couple back, then install one upgrade, then the next upgrade? Is it even allowed under this scenario to simply ditto over from an old drive to a new one? This doesn't seem like a net gain.
I think it's better to have a system where the general standards just exist as a matter of law and society.
To my mind, software upgrades are an economically efficient and pro-user offering. They are good for both the production and use side of the equation, allowing users to pay directly for the additional cost of development since their last version rather then all the original work and value that went into the product. They allow developers to reward their own supporters and more efficiently allocate resources. Additionally, "upgrades" should be (again, from a user perspective) simply full versions, identical, except cheaper and for existing users. This is how all commercial software I use works as well.
However, the entire concept of upgrades depends completely on legal licensing: that I can have a clause that says "you may not use this unless you previously owned a full version". I already see a number of posts, both here on Slashdot and on other forums (such as the comments with the Ars Technica article on this story), that are enraged at the result, and that argue that Psystar was "adding value" by "lowering hardware costs". The underlying argument is that, if a piece of software is sold, that should be that. However, how do those of you who argue for that square it with upgrading? Do you simply agree with the App Store take, where upgrades don't exist at all? Or do you have some other way of squaring things away?
As things have existed, Mac OS X offerings have all been upgrades and have been priced accordingly. There seems to be a reasonable consideration on both sides here: buyers pay less money, but in exchange have the restriction of needing to have a Mac as Apple has chosen to build their development around an integrated model. Do some of you think that such integrated models should be illegal, regardless of what benefits they offer? Should Apple be required by law to sell a "full" version of Mac OS X, and would you actually be willing to pay what that might cost (ie., if they said "full version, $400")? I'm genuinely curious about people's thoughts around this.
Haven't posted in a long time either, but I too want to toss in my small token of thanks for an amazing job and long run.
It seems to have become trendy again to hate Apple no matter what, but this is getting ridiculous. Why is it that Apple is expected to be the only platform vendor that has to maintain their own version of the JVM for free? Jobs is quite correct in saying that Java under OS X has long lagged behind the latest official Sun release. I wish it was more common for Apple to leave more components to third parties now that they've got more market share. Another example would be graphics drivers, which lag tremendously in both performance and features. I don't understand why on Earth any Java dev would want to be stuck indefinitely with Apple's outdated implementation that by definition would never be a major priority rather then get a version from the main organization behind it. For that matter I blame Sun's longstanding ambivalence toasted FOSS. If we had a fully open GPL edition of the JVM that was best of class like we should have gotten years ago, this never would have been an issue in the first place. It's yet another tech Sun's BS has screwed us on, with their insistance to out ZFS under the CDDL rather then Apache/BSD/LGPL being another major example. Anyone still have that old sun strategy wheel, from before 'acquisition' became their final exit?
Or the converse, I suppose (hardware solutions can add another layer to this). This looks like some very interesting work, and may have more applicability in general beyond this one scenario. I'm certainly looking forward to following their implementation as it comes along. But with that said, if this attack was a serious concern for a given entity there seem to be some obvious potential hardware solutions. The attack essentially depends on being able to shutdown the computer but keep the memory cold enough that the randomization time is slowed down tremendously, giving enough time to perform a dump of the contents onto another system for further analysis. Therefore, it can be prevented by, for example, having electric heater units surrounding the memory connected to a dedicated capacitor bank and temperature sensor, as well as a sensor to detect if someone tries for force open the machine (intrusion alarm). Then the system can perform a scram shutdown (or if it is just shutdown normally), and the heaters can assure that the memory is kept hot for a couple of seconds afterwards even in the face of attempted cooling. It only needs to manage it very briefly and then all the contents are scrambled. Other similar methods (maybe a really micro EMP inside a shield memory space) would be possible to, but basically they just need to deny an attacker for a very short amount of time or ensure entropy in the RAM and then the attack is useless.
Ultimately a dedicated hardware secure key store would be better and easier to integrate across all systems, and this more software solution of course has the massive advantage of being able to run for free on existing hardware. But the above could at least be retrofitted on nearly anything, and while it is more esoteric, then again so is the attack since it requires physical access.
Contrary the the statement there, I don't the even pretty wild interpretations of an EULA would apply at all. If they wished to pursue that angle Apple would need to go after individual users. From Apple's POV, I believe the only true point of contention would be if Open Tech uses any of their trademarks in its advertising or general web. They can't just plaster Apple OS X images all over the place for example.
No, the real potential source of suits isn't even necessarily from Apple. Rather, Open Tech will have to be very careful in their wording when it comes to promotion. From what I've seen an early draft of their PR used phrases like "Mac Compatible." What exactly does that mean, legally? What happens when a software update breaks the OS? If a customer sees "Mac Compatible" and nothing else, and then buys based on that, I could see grounds for a false advertising suit.
Of course, that can be avoided quite neatly I think with some very careful wording, and by making the limitations and lack of support from Apple very explicit. "Capable of running OS X", with a big fat bold "Not supported by Apple, future updates may not be compatible" warning might work just fine. This just seems like the area where, if these guys are amateur or don't think about it much, they could get tripped up.
A separate partition is what we super techie people refer to formatting a disc using the "Partition" option, hence, a separate partition! I know, your mind was just blown. A "separate physical volume" would be, for example, these new cutting edge things called "hard drives." If you have either of those, you can duplicate your OS install, then reboot off your copy. Then you can update on that copy and if something breaks just reboot back to your original untouched volume and nuke the copy.
I apologize for being so sarcastic here, but how can someone on Slashdot of all places lack such fundamental knowledge about computers? Multiple logical volumes have been around for ages, back to the dawn of the idea of volumes themselves practically. Come on, sir!
I must respectfully disagree with you jcr. I think RIAA is worse, because the tobacco companies aren't trying to force me to deal with tobacco. They have had no material effect on the march of anti-secondhand smoke laws, and there have never been requirements to smoke tobacco. I personally feel that people should be free to engage in risky behavior, so long as they are at no point lied to about it, coerced in any way, and so long as it does not risk anyone else. Tobacco failed on the truthfulness point back before the major lawsuits, but at this point I don't feel anyone who does even a cursory check, or even who has paid remote attention to society, can genuinely not have any notion of the dangers of smoking.
Meanwhile, RIAA et al are successfully destroying basic parts of our nation's laws, undermining society in general and the tech and media industries in particular. They really do have a claim on being one of the most purely destructive corporate forces ever.
Ease of maintenance. Having an application centrally deployed means bug fixes and new features can be rolled out instantly, transparently, and uniformly. This can also ease development of other features, because developers can count on every user having access to the same version. In addition, rollbacks may be made if necessary in a central way. Architecture independence Thanks to open source software development, all major operating systems support webservers of one kind or another, and additionally there exist at least as an option very functional and uniform browsers. This means that servers and clients can be swapped as an organization's needs dictate, rather then becoming locked into any single architecture. Scaling/Economy benefits Additional clients added to the network have instant access to all available web apps, without the need to perform any installations or updates. Software can be deployed very widely and cheaply. *Control While the other factors have been positive, it is debatable whether this is a benefit or not; however, it is certain to be something developers consider. Having a functional, centralized software repository opens the possibility for time renting of access, and then shutting people off when the money stops flowing. Depending on implementation, and of course the user, this may be boon or bane: a very cheap way to temporarily access software you need, and never have to pay for it again, or a way developers extract endless money.
Personally, I always have wondered if Microsoft has purposely delayed adding features to IE for as long as possible in particular light of the second item, architecture independence. Microsoft Office is one of the cornerstones of their business, and enabling rich web languages would also allow a shift to be made away from requiring Windows. (This stance is also, incidentally, why so many of us who do professional web development are very frustrated with MS. I personally have to spend dozens of wasted hours for each big site coding up special versions for IE, in addition to standards compliant ones, and even then my possible feature set is much reduced. Cumulatively over the world, this must result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of wasted work-hours per year.)
Web apps have a lot of promise. Issues like GUI integration remain, but I am excited that the scene is at last gaining steam after stalling for the last 4 years or so.
All of these technologies may work together, of course. It may be that human genetic engineering would help a person be more compatible with synthetic augmentations, for example. I also believe these are all good things. The core of what makes us us is our minds, and it seems tragic that so many people are restricted by the box their brain must travel in. I hope to be able to help make it so that losing limbs and getting paralyzed are simply no longer problems that need to be worried about beyond some inconvenience. I think that transferring to artificial bodies, or at least advanced gene therapy, will be important for future efforts to colonize space. It appears that in many ways, the primary threat is luddites shutting the research down. Fortunately, so far most of this has passed under their radar, so I am hopeful that will continue to be the case until actual products are ready to go. At that point, it will be too late to stop it. It is an exciting time to be alive though, and I encourage everyone to go and do some research on the subject, especially if you have access to a college or corporate net that has subscriptions to primary research engines, like ScienceDirect or JStor. Also, everyone can look at becoming a member of the AAAS, which will get you online access to Science.
Some links:
University of California Neuroelectric Research Group. Some interesting information, with PDFs available, on BCI.
Gene Delivery Systems. A free quick intro (from a lecture/course) on some of the different vector systems being studied for gene therapy, and desirable characteristics.
Those of you with access to journals can go read a very interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(6):1022-1035. "Optimizing a Linear Algorithm for Real-Time Robotic Control using Chronic Cortical Ensemble Recordings in Monkeys," by Wessberg and Nicolelis.
This old saying is very, very true: A lot of stuff is only free if your time is worthless. I am now an adult, I have a job and a credit card, I am happy and willing to trade my money in exchange for not having to waste my time searching for low quality or buggy crap on the net. Guess what, if it takes me two hours to find those ROMs, or those MP3s, well that is $50-80 in wasted time. So if companies charge less then that, it is not only more convenient, it is in fact cheaper for me to just pay them. Duh. And yet there is nothing, so I guess I just don't have any sympathy. I don't think it can be equated with any type of theft or moral ill to copy something when there is no economic price to it, and it doesn't deprive anyone of anything. It would be like finding some never printed book buried in an abandoned building somewhere, the author dead, and being sued for putting the text online.
"Forget enterprise systems that do everything possible within your field. They're too large, clumsy and require too much development time. Instead, create small discrete software that can collaborate seamlessly with the technology that the end users are currently using."
This, in a nutshell, seems to be the core philosophy behind much of the original Unix. Most Unix apps (and in particular, all the 'commands' which are small applications) have the concept of standard in (stdin), standard out (stdout), and standard error (stderr). Because most commands can operate to accept stdin, do its purpose, and then send to stdout, it is both possible, intuitive, and very practical to chain together many small commands to accomplish a single task very easily. I suspect there is some terminology for this process, but as I don't know what it is I generally think of it as being a "stream centered" approach. You have many discrete components operating on a stream of information. However, I know of no similar functionality in most modern GUIs, which are all basically application-centered approaches (though Windows tends to present itself as being document-centered). Each application is a single thing that you open up, and has its own self contained operations, usage, etc. I would like to see this more object-oriented stream approach exist in more GUIs today, because it is really a very useful paradigm for many tasks. It allows developers to concentrate on doing a single task extremely well, and then allows users to chain that task in as many ways as they can imagine, which is always more then what the original developer could think of. In Mac OS X 10.4, the Automator feature sounds like it might very well be close to what I have in mind, though a lot will depend on how easily and powerfully developers can make new 'Actions' (Apple's terminology for single task apps/commands). However, these days I really think that is an old concept that is time tested and very useful and just waiting for the right re-implementation to become critical for a new generation.-What RAID level you want (5 usually requires better hardware)
-Whether you want hardware RAID (I strongly recommend this) or soft RAID
-How much redundancy you need (Battery backup cache? Redundant controllers? Hardware environmental controls?)
If you are looking for good pci cards, I would strongly suggest a card from 3ware, and a card from a place such a Seagate. Getting a super-duper cheap card when terabytes of data are on the line is just fundamentally stupid. You can save some bucks now, but be ready with your next Ask Slashdot: "How do I recover data from my dead RAID?" Seagate now has a nice 5 year warranty, which match well with good quality and reasonably cheap drives. Look at some of the SATA drives like the Barracuda. However, any decent quality drive maker can work. If you have even more money, you can look at some of the things offered by places like StorCase. A larger initial investment can become cheaper as you scale up the cheap harddrive count, and it can be a good thing in the long run. Obviously, the more time you are willing to invest doing things yourself, the cheaper you can get to some extent vs premade items. However, no support as well.
Do read up on some of the fundamentals of RAID: Everything you need to know (and lots you don't) is probably at least mentioned in the PC Guide on RAID. Look through that. Things like hot swap and hot spares are important to understand. Finally, you should remember to check compatability. Unfortunately, I for instance have not been able to find much of anything in the way of controller cards that is compatable with OS X (except the obvious, the XServe RAID). So I have something set up on a BSD box in my server closet that I then link to, more like a storage appliance. Happily, the 3ware cards and many others are now compatable with a wide variety of *nix and BSD flavors along Windows, but do check to make sure.
Last but not least, remember this!: RAID is *not* a backup solution, but an highly redundant onsite storage system. Have another form of backups, even if it is just a RAID 1 off site, or DVD-Rs, or something. If a disaster happens (thieves, fire, nuclear destruction, John Ashcroft) on site storage won't save you.
think this certainly looks like a very interesting technology, and in many ways is a logical extension of some of the techniques that have been around for years. Fellow users of products like VirtualPC (I use it with Windows 2000 and Debian) know that there are features like "Save State" that allow you to close down the VPC and then restart it later with the same programs running, setup, etc. The restore is also faster then restarting the OS (Windows or otherwise) from scratch. It is of course possible to copy the hard drive image and VPC program to another computer and still restore again, though this is time consuming. So I think it is clever to extend this to work more transparently over a network.
If a person is just browsing mail, or wants to check sites, do word processing, etc., this seems like a great thing. However, I do not see two important issues addressed in the article. First of all, the technology is claimed to be non-proprietary, which is great. But how easy is it to move between major architectures? I have happily switched to FreeBSD on my x86 machines and Mac OSX for my main work. I assume that this tech will require all used machines to be similar architectures, making it less useful for those of us on the fringe. If I have compiled a lot of my apps to specifically use features of x86-64 (ie, Athlon FX53 etc) how will the system respond?
The second problem is more basic, the symptom being: I don't have a laptop. The reason? I can still get vastly more power on the desktop, and I need that power. I use my machine for molecular force modeling (Cerius2), BLAST, as well as a significant amount of graphics work with Photoshop. And of course, there are games. I have around 480GB in disk space, and that is hardly on the high end anymore. Computer makers off many different lines of machines (and of course there is a thriving DIY market) precisely because different users have such different needs and desires. It's not just the software that is customized, but the hardware as well. This system *would* work very well if all the machines in hotels or wherever were pretty high-end, with gigabytes of disk space, at least a gig of ram, high end graphics cards, etc. Then differences would be purely in how we all customized our work environments, apps, etc. Unfortunately, the reality (where the boxes are generally almost the cheapest a business can buy) is so far from this scenario as to be laughable. I think that this is a great idea, but with limited application, because in the real world the various needs of people (and not even a small minority) diverge to greatly for this to be wide-scale for the foreseeable future.
Most supersonic aircraft require afterburners in order to go faster then sound, and afterburners are incredibly voracious consumers of fuel. I think that one of the other very important innovations is the "Supercruise" ability, seen on aircraft like the F-22 Raptor. This allows the aircraft to maintain supersonic speed for extended periods of time in a low power setting, and this in turn is just as vital for cheap, commercially viable flights. I hope that advances in sonic boom suppression will also work well with the necessary designs for supercruising, and that we may all be able to take advantage of such flights within the next 2-3 decades. If both aren't taken into account, and designers come up with plans that make for an either-or choice, it could mean supersonic planes will still be relegated to the relatively wealthy.
As someone who has worked on a number of programs, I can tell you that not having documentation as a certainty can change how the programmer thinks about things as well. If you don't know if your end users will have any manual, and in fact you have been told that they will most likely be starting the application up raw, it makes for a change in thinking about design elements. Does this button here make sense? Are the labels as self-explanatory as possible? Are there sufficient little help messages when needed? In many other cases, these are things that can pushed aside a bit ("Oh well, they can always look at it in the manual. It makes sense to me.") So Apple's stance may actually help make for a self fulfilling prophecy: no documentation taken for granted helps lead to software that doesn't need it as much.
However, this example also illustrates a very important caveat to this whole situation: the competition can only be productive if there is an equal baseline established. As a country, we have decided that certain qualities are important to us, such as a clean environment, worker's rights, education, health care, etc. These are national policies, enshrined in institutions from the EPA to the FDA, and thus every state is subject to the same requirements. And it is here that the comparison with international Free Trade breaks down. If companies in India are not subject to the same requirements, if they are not required to care about the environment etc., then it is not really free trade. American companies can't ever hope to compete, burdened by costs they can't control. Instead, we merely subsidize a temporary exploitation of a less developed country. Once India and other countries develop to a similar level, they will likely begin to care about more of the same things, and at that point competition can begin to truly flourish without a need for restrictions. But in the mean time, I don't see how true Free Trade can exist without unfairly undermining important values we hold.
But in the mean time, humanity really needs a frontier. Our systems have a tendency to slowly but surely become slower and more mired as time passes, in part because power tends to be gravitational; it gets concentrated in the hands of smaller groups of people, who in turn often become more cautious and inflexible with regards to things that would rock the boat. Bureaucracy gets bigger, not smaller, and it becomes harder to try radically new ways of doing things. The best way for change to take place is often for it to be experimented with somewhere else, and then filter back; this is what happened in the past with America. These people, coming to a new place without any entrenched baggage, got to try to start a system from scratch, and when it was successful, other countries could observe and then emulate and improve on it as it filtered back. But there is no frontier to experiment with anymore. The whole world (the oceans don't count, they are too hard/expensive to colonize for now) has people living in it. I think it is important for our development as a species to move on to new places, where new laws can be tried (including new ways of thinking about stuff like IP and citizen participation), and so that no single entity will ever be able to easily control everyone.
For many people, I believe that the excitement, opportunity, etc. are worth the risk and sacrifice that it will take. The Hubble has been one of our most successful and productive projects, and one that wouldn't have been possible without astronauts; the space station, in contrast, has in fact been sort of a waste from the point of view of both science and exploration. But neither should be the sole reason to keep or get rid of the shuttle, or the concept of manned space flight. A certain amount of capital is needed to prime things, so to speak, before enough momentum can develop for space exploration to become self-sustaining without government aid. This large up front cost has been and will be difficult for many to swallow, especially in our notoriously money hungry Congress. But as a country, and a species, we need this, and it will pay back many times over. I apologize for my long windedness, but I am hopeful that eventually some politicians will try to get votes from people with some large vision and dream instead of simply the usual issues.
I am very excited by this news. I swear by my 48gx, which has the most useful calculatlor I have ever used. RPN input is very fast, the stack is very useful, and it was really ahead of its time with features. However, it can be a bit pokey at times, making certain features less useful. However, it is also very good on the computer. In mid-2000, HP actually made the laudable move of releasing the HP48 ROM images to the public, so various emulators that work exactly like the real thing can be found for various platforms. For OS X, I would suggest using x48, which is even featured on Apple's website! You can find the original page here. Worth checking out. Also, HP48gx enthusiasts should check out metakernal, which, while it requires you to have an add-on memory card, can make the 48gx a lot more usable. It rewrites a lot of the core functions in assembly, making them far faster, as well as adding new features. It is also free now (minus the cost of the required card, obviously).
Seriously, it is ultimately a matter of very basic physics. In space especially, it is pretty easy to predict the trajectory of a known object for a great distance into the future. With the velocities and distances involved, a tiny nudge to any object months in advance would mean a trajectory change of hundreds of thousands to millions of miles. A thermonuclear charge at a few months away and no worries, even for a *big* rock. Now if the thing is just days away, that is a totally different story, but we could still possibly do stuff to minimize the damage. For instance, it might be possible to get it to break into chunks, or to shift it to land in the ocean as opposed to on land. This stuff isn't mysterious, its just large scale. I'm not saying the media would be of any use (it is doubtful that we could load up the previously mentioned thermonuke with editors, despite the added punch[ooh]) but all would certainly not be hopeless.
I personally have mixed feelings about the latest, FFX. It certainly has fantastic graphics, and I have really found myself getting into it at times. I have had a bunch of fun in many pieces, which I guess is the ultimate test for any game. But, I personally find some of the voices somewhat gag inducing or just jarring to the experience at points. I know people complain about too much angst or whatever, but personally I kind of like having my main character be a bit of a bad-ass, someone who at least at first isn't super interested in running out and saving the world, who has emotional conflicts and doesn't have an easy time dealing with it. In FF7, for instance, I liked Cloud's opening attitude, though I may be one of the few if FFX fans are to be believed. And I really _liked_ the first opening city, which is where the game starts right off (not really a spoiler to talk about it, but stop reading if you don't want some suspense taken out of your first 5 minutes of the game). It is really cool looking and well designed, and, well, if I lived in a place like that and it, and all my friends, was blown up, I would be really f@&^!ng pissed. Instead, we get a quick "oh well, it's all good." *Shrug*. Harder to get into the a character (ie, to role-play, to feel and empathize with) who sounds just like a California surfer stereotype, and I certainly found myself rolling my eyes or thinking 'stop being such a whiny loser and get fighting already,' during some of the drawn out dialog. Given these things are on DVDs, would it kill them to include the original japanese sound track as well?
This one has some more actual research, as well as a lot more links and citations.
1. Have some sort of actual device sticking out of the body. This is bad, because it breaches the skin, our natural defensive screen, and such things tend to become very easily infected.
2. Surgery to replace cells. Again, any surgery at all is going to be both expensive and risk prone.
More recently, a third option has become available: having fully implanted power system that can be recharged wirelessly, via em radiation of some kind (you can google for it). This is a big gain, because it allows devices that are more power hungry while still maintaining the benefits of not breaching the skin and not needing frequent operations. But it still requires people to remember and have access to the appropriate charging device consistantly. If for any reason some one forgets or can't recharge, the device may shut down, sometimes with fatal results. So having a way to remove one more step for powering these things should really help improve the quality of life for a lot of people today.
Of course, personally I find this to be a very exciting development for future things as well. When we get to the point of having more optional implants, for things like boosting hearing or vision, a way to power them will be necessary, and if the power requirements are low, then this system would be perfect. Ultimately, widespread adoption of anything, from an OS to a vehicle, is all about making it as easy and intuitive for end users as possible. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on for advanced things like brain-computer interfaces, and people who are interested should look around, as the state of the art has advanced a great deal in the past 5 years. Here are a few links for the curious, and much more can be found with google, of course:
Graz University of Technology
Standford/DVA Neural Interface Project
Beyond the Big Barrier(lighter, intro type stuff)
News Group:
sci.med.psychobiology
Overall, he didn't do that bad a job. In some ways Dean is actually an interesting mix of left and right. He is a former doctor, which partly explains a lot of his very strong positions with regards to health care. He certainly has come across as one of the strongest left standing democrats in many ads and articles, but he has an A grade from the NRA as he was not at all anti-gun ownership in Vermont. He is also reasonably fiscally conservative. Our state didn't go too overboard with spending, and we actually still have over 10 million dollars in our "rainy day fund," for what it's worth. My biggest quibble with his term was actually in regards to education, but a lot of that was the fault of the legislature and the courts (which ruled our old method was unconstitutional). Of the candidates, we could do a lot worse (come to think of it, we have been doing a lot worse) then Dean. Having met him, and lived with him as head of the state, I think he has some good ideas. I was actually kind of pro-war, but Bush has screwed us so badly on the domestic front in virtually every field, from economics to scientific research (VERY important to me) to basic civil rights, that I would vote for virtually anyone over him. I would recommend people look at his stands.