Going from 6 to 7 was how many years ago? For the time of the transition and given the relative infancy of personal computing, System 7 was released in 1991 I bought my first computer, an Atari 400 around 1980. I played my first computer games at least a couple of years before that on a DEC PDP-11 in my friend's home. So I would say that calling 1991 the "infancy of personal computing" is pretty ridiculous. Computing, whether personal or not, hasn't really changed all that much since 1991. What are you like 12 years old or something?
The most beautiful part of a democracy is, except in some cases, you get the governance you deserve. Bullshit. Who is this "you"? Democracy is a joke. Look around you. Most people are stupid and selfish and cruel and very easily led. The majority of any group is nearly always wrong. Maybe the human race does not 'deserve' to survive. Is that where you would like to see this "democracy", this majority rule, take us?
A government is like a machine with one purpose: to control. Everything. And it won't stop, ever, until it has won. It can only be stopped by being destroyed utterly through armed revolt. Through war and violence and blood in the streets. But as the government grows in power this becomes increasingly difficult. In the case of the United States it would now be all but impossible. The war machine has grown powerful beyond all imagining. Even a good sized militia would have no chance against that kind of adversary.
So we are on our way. There are no turns on this road. "Terrorism" will continue to grow as the term grows to include anything not expressly permitted. But what is happening cannot be blamed on any one person. It is a sort of tragedy of the commons, this thing we call 'government'. We create a machine that will always eventually take control and destroy us, destroy everything for its own selfish needs. A vast machine controlled by countless thousands of people who individually have not the slightest chance to determine its course. We never seem to learn from our mistakes. Each time we believe that this time it will be different.
because there's no "friction" on the black hole. And you know this how exactly? I guess you might be talking about a micro black hole, maybe orders of magnitude smaller than an electron. In that case I would have to agree that the earth would seem to be mostly empty space, like a whole galaxy to a human sized spaceship. But if it is anything much larger than that I would imagine that there would at least be some frictional forces as it plummeted through the dense metallic core of the earth like a lead brick through air. If its mass were great enough I would imagine that our planet would have virtually no effect on it. No more than fog or a cloud of smoke would have on a bullet. If its mass (and therefore its momentum) were small enough to be 'captured' by the earth's gravitational field, then I think it would follow a pendulum like path, surface to surface through the center, where it would finally come to rest after being slowed by friction. I suspect that only a very slow moving black hole would be stopped by the earth in a 'collision'.
from the creation of a "Department of Homeland Security" (my God, what an Orwellian phrase) to the defense of torture, extraordinary renditions, no-fly lists, etc. I'm an anarcho-libertarian and would like to see most politicians dead. I kid you not. So I don't have a horse in this race. I think the whole democrat-republican dual party system is a sick joke. But even I have to admit that Bush Jr., Mr. Monkeyman, has done an unusual amount of damage to our "way of life", more than Osama Bin Laden could ever dream of doing. It is just sad. I won't mind seeing the republicans take a breather in the next election. Well as long as we don't end up with Hilary, who I find extremely annoying and repulsive. And could we please get a president who doesn't look and act like a monkey and who has at least the slightest hint of charisma? Most of our presidents have all the personality of a dried turd. Why can't we just inherit the ex-prime ministers of England? Most of them have 10 times the charisma of our last 4 presidents put together.
Re:Glad it's not Sony or Microsoft or some other c
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NYC Lawyers Subpoena Code
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*sigh*. information wants to be free is just a more pithy (and to some confusing) way of saying secrets are hard to keep or information is hard to control. Information tends to escape, to find a way out, and once it does you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, ever. It does not mean that there are no secrets that are worth keeping or at least trying to keep. There may also be something in there about the futility of even trying to control or hoard information. Something about it being a waste of time and so forth.
All I can say is for your sake I sincerely hope that you do not live in the US or in any country with an extradition treaty with the US. You have just incriminated yourself. Utterly. I can honestly say that I have never, ever, under any circumstances, been to any child porn site. Nor have I ever searched for one on google and have absolutely no awareness that any such sites exist. None. I cannot claim that such things exist any more than I can claim that thousands of clones of Woody Allen live happily on Gliese 581 D. Even if you have 'found' such sites how could you possibly know that it is not just an FBI honeypot with blank files (which are just honeypot links themselves)? There is no way that you could possibly know what you claim to unless you have actually looked at the pictures or videos on said site which is very illegal and can result in not only many years in federal prison, but also your name on a publicly available national/international list of sex offenders, at which point you may as well kill yourself or move to antarctica and live off of penguins. Or both. Your life in human society will be over. Have you seen The Crucible? Or read other accounts of the Salem Witch Trials?
I highly suggest that whatever your views, if you currently reside in the US, you seriously consider what I am saying. Do you think that FBI agents cannot read slashdot? Or that no one they know might point out this article to them, and by extension, posts like yours? It might have been different if you were posting anonymously from an internet cafe preferably while wearing a ski mask and dark sunglasses and gloves. Do you think that anyone here or anyone else on planet earth will even think about helping you? They would be labeled pedophiles themselves if they make the slightest move to do any such thing. Even a lawyer will only defend you grudgingly and only if they have absolutely no choice. And even so, such lawyers will be treading on very thin ice. They could very well end up ruining their own lives by 'defending' you. And no one will care about what happens to you after you have been accused. Maybe not even your mother or father. Your enemies will consist of the vast majority of the human race, most of whom would like to see you not only killed, but brutally tortured and your body hacked up and burned. And your 'guilt' or 'innocence' will not matter to them. You would be just another lamb for them to slaughter, to sacrifice on their alter, in the name of all the children on the planet. So would you care to modify your original statement, sir?
In addition to all that wouldn't a potential customer have to be an absolute moron, as in perhaps genuinely mentally retarded, to use some traceable form of payment (and only hand delivered cash while wearing gloves, ski mask, dark glasses etc is not) as well as your IP address (unless you are downloading to an internet cafe) with such a site? Whether the pictures are 'real' (which in many cases is not possible to determine anyway) or not? I find it hard to believe that such sites could exist at all. And what ISP would host them? And even more to the point who in their right mind would be stupid enough to actually start and to run such a site? Unless they are in fact FBI honey pots. Then the ISPs would welcome them with open arms and they would have nothing to fear from any laws. To me it seems much more likely that any such sites are exactly that.
Of course that is yet another reason why you have to be a moron to even think about clicking on such links as the one in this story. I highly doubt this guy has ever abused a child. But it is completely irrelevant. His life is over. This guy should really make it into the Darwin Awards. Even if you were looking for child porn what could you even hope to find on the internet? A commercial web site? LMAO. Now freenet or usenet (posted from an internet cafe while disguised for instance) is maybe another matter. But even so, I d
Although you have some good points, there seems to be something you are missing. Have you ever actually downloaded one of those re-compressed hi-def movies? I have. The file was 9 GB. As far as I can tell it was the original resolution. So it has been *hugely* re-compressed. I was expecting it to be a huge mess. But you know what? It wasn't. Yes, there were numerous compression artifacts, but I was too distracted by the fact that the overall image quality and detail and dynamic range were about 1.78 gazillion times better than standard def DVD. It was one of the first hi-def movies I have watched on my computer and I was not at all disappointed. Would the original Blu-Ray or HD-DVD that it was derived from have better image quality? I have no doubt. You can't just throw away 60% or 70% of the information in an image and expect to retain the same quality. Is the difference noticeable? Almost certainly. But that doesn't change the fact that even at a reduced quality the re-compressed hi-def material is vastly superior in terms of the subjective viewing experience compared to the only other drive space friendly alternative, regular DVD. In fact I feel like throwing all of my DVDs in the trash. To me the difference seems that huge.
Generally speaking I do see myself as a videophile, as someone who cares very much about a small difference in image quality. But until hard drives become vastly larger I simply will not have enough space to store hi-def movies at the original quality. So, as much as it disturbs me, I am going to have to compromise. The re-compressed hi-def files are still an order of magnitude improvement over DVD. To me, the difference between regular DVD and hi-def is a much larger jump than between laser disc and DVD. I suppose it might more approximate the jump between VHS and laser disc. So as a videophile without infinite hard drive space (and without much money or an HDTV) I am quite happy with our new format and with the people responsible for cracking BD+.
Although I don't really claim to understand how it is possible to re-compress so much without completely degrading the quality to an unwatchable level, I am wondering if studios have really outdone themselves. Maybe they just have so much more space and the newer compression algorithms are so good that they are able to encode their film transfers at a bitrate that is nearly without artifacts, a format truly made for videophiles. Of course the irony is that they are doing this to try to tempt us all (not just videophiles) away from the fully cracked and easily copyable DVD format into their spider web of uber advanced DRM that is BD+ (and AACS). Call it what you will but it *is* much more advanced than DeCSS. Especially Blu-Ray.
But it probably takes a lot of extra storage space to get rid of that last 20% of compression artifacts (or whatever). So a non-perfectionist can still have relatively breathtaking video quality at a much smaller size if he is willing to make some visible but acceptable compromises. I am guessing that each video has its own sweet spot in this regard, a point where video quality starts to degrade sharply. That's the point that the re-encoder has to find.
All it means is that it is very hard to keep a secret Exactly. Well put. Why is this so hard for people to grasp? It truly is not rocket science. And anyone who cannot understand this truly needs to have their geek card permanently revoked. Those who speak English as a second language to be exempted of course.
How many water companies does your neighbourhood need? As many as it takes to have a competitive market and consumer friendly pricing and service. There is no reason to put up some kind of barrier to entry. If no one wants to step up to the plate because it is too expensive to build the infrastructure (or whatever the justification for the classification of 'natural' monopoly), then the monopoly can be regulated to protect consumers from the evil greedy corporations. There is, however, absolutely no justification for actually stopping anyone from trying to compete.
IIRC, there was a time when cable companies and electric utilities were considered 'natural' monopolies. But where I live there is Comcast, Verizon, and RCN to choose from. There are also multiple electric companies and local telephone companies (Verizon, RCN).So what happened? They were natural monopolies before but now they aren't? And where I live water is provided directly by the town. So I guess the answer is 'none'.
if you took two dogs and strapped them together, facing each other, with their forelimbs in the air and only their rear limbs on the ground... and made them telepathic... they might move a bit like that! The first time I saw this Boston Robotics thing (the earlier version), I had no context for the video clip, nothing to tell me it was a robot. So it reeaally creeped me out big time. And the loud engine actually made it even more scary. I thought maybe it was some sick, brutal, military experiment in commanding a real, but mutilated animal, a hybrid dog-machine, like those experiments being done with rats. Has anyone else here seen No Telling? I suspect that if I hadn't seen that movie I might not have been so creeped out.
That gasoline engine really reduces its practicality though for anything other than a pack mule. They need to work on adding an RTG to it along with some of those newly developed high efficiency solar cells. So it will be nearly silent and not need recharging for like 80 years. Also they definitely need a head with video camera eyes with green lasers and/or high intensity IR lights behind them as well, a hydraulic jaw controlling a mouth filled with hundreds of hollow, hardened, stainless steel shark teeth filled and coated with a potent neurotoxin like maybe palytoxin or tetrodotoxin. A minigun hidden in its mouth is obviously mandatory. It should also be able to cough VX nerve gas from a small compressed cylinder in it's throat and spit concentrated nitric acid. And of course it would need microphone ears and a tail to aid in balance when running and some fur and leather/kevlar skin to help protect its electronics from the elements and the occasional bullet. If they could make it pass for a real dog they could even fill its belly with explosives to self destruct near enemy troops or if captured. And of course they should really add some wings and make it into an ornithopter as well. And how about a really cool howl like the one in American Werewolf in London or some even more creeptastic sound. Great for shock and awe. Also great for crowd control of anti-war protesters etc.
Of course a nonmilitary version with the RTG and solar cells could be sent to explore mars.
While this new architecture sounds amazing, and I am planning to upgrade in about a year when this is released, is anyone else a bit worried about the overclocking potential of Nehalem? Intel sells their high end $1000 + 'Extreme' CPUs with an unlocked multiplier and, other than a higher bin, that is really its only selling point. I remember the days before Intel started locking down the multipliers. Lots of people thought it might spell the end of overclocking. But of course it turned out that FSB overclocking, although RAM and chipset limited, was a perfectly viable alternative and so overclockers were freed from Intel's pricing structure. But this seems like an opportunity for Intel to add value to their more profitable high binned parts by closing the FSB loophole and leaving no way for overclockers to do their thing. Could it be that by next year only the rich will be able to afford a bleeding edge CPU?
without AMD we wouldn't be seeing these releases. Actually this seems a bit disingenuous to me. Intel released Penryn way before they had to. Intel (the hare) was so far ahead of AMD (the tortoise) with the 65nm Core 2 that they could have sat back and relaxed for a while, saving R&D costs while waiting for AMD to catch up at least a little. I mean look at Nvidia for a perfect counterexample. Most people believe that they already have a next gen GPU ready but that they are sitting on it until they have someone to compete with besides themselves. To a lot of people that seems to make sense. Especially if you *only* care about making as much money as possible and don't care about being a technology leader. The only problem I have with that logic is that you will be losing sales from upgraders as well as allowing your competition to get closer to you so that you cannot price as high. But obviously Nvidia seems to feel that the savings in R&D costs and not competing with their own products is enough to justify it. Of course there is always the possibility that Nvidia is just not ready with their new tech yet, but not many people seem to believe that.
Instead of waiting for some real competition, Intel released Penryn more or less right on schedule when the only competition they had was their own 65nm processors. Of course the quad cores are only just being released now, but they are still releasing them way before AMD has anything to really compete with them. People make all kinds of cynical statements about business methods without even considering corporate culture. Has it ever occurred to anyone that Intel simply may not believe in only releasing new tech when they absolutely have no choice due to competition?
I'm not saying competition is not a good thing, but I don't think AMD is presenting much competition to Intel at the moment. AMD is in big trouble and Intel is well aware of that fact. I just don't think that it is competition that is driving Intel forward. Competition may affect their pricing, but I think Intel would keep right on with their two year tick tock cycles and process shrinks even if AMD folded tomorrow.
So what you are saying is: "What, me worry"? After all, in 100 years such repressive regimes will extinguish themselves? Frankly, I take a less historical approach. At the rate things are going, we are all slipping right down that slippery slope into a true police state. And yes, it is exactly like boiling a frog. Except there is no real chance for most of us to jump out of the pot. At least in the days of Nazi Germany there was somewhere to go, somewhere to escape to.
Actually I am wondering if exactly the opposite is going to be true. Maybe massively multithreaded assembly language programming is going to be our future. After all, so far there is no high level language that solves the problems of massive parallelism. This blind faith that development time is orders of magnitude more precious than runtime has maybe proven to be wrong. Only overclockers are getting much single core speed increase from the recent full process step from 65nm to 45nm. CPU speed increases have been greatly slowing down and, failing a fundamental breakthrough in technology, may soon stop completely. So how do you make current programs run faster when the number of instructions per second no longer increases every year?
We need to start teaching assembly language at our universities again. We need to make it an important part of our curriculum. We need to start encouraging people to actually think about efficiency again. We need to stop ending every discussion about optimization with the mere mention of the sin of 'premature optimization', with 'premature' often translating into 'never'. Instead of trying to continue to improve our native code compilers we are dumping them for JIT byte code 'compilers'.
Maybe, at least for a while, we are going to have to stop thinking about a computer as just a black box. Maybe we are going to have to understand all the little hamsters running around on the inside. And we may also find a lot of the programming paradigms that we hold so dear come tumbling down. The companies that choose to ignore the possibilities of massive SMP and stick with their precious 'maintainable' code with all of its beautiful logic and readability and extensibility might find themselves passed by. Maybe it is time once again to think more like the machines running our code. Could assembly and ultra low level languages (even lower level than C) actually be the way forward? When you can get a speedup of 10x or 20x from parallelism, it is nontrivial and worth the extra effort in writing and maintaining the code. But it would be a very bitter pill for modern programmers to swallow.
OTOH, maybe the way forward will be haskell/ocaml/erlang. Either way, it would be a fundamental change in the direction we are currently headed in the (mainstream) programming world. I don't think the answer will be Java.
I don't mean to state the obvious, but the vast majority of today's SSDs are not much faster than the hard drives they replace, especially when you consider both reading and writing. Especially when you compare the SSD transfer rates to dual or quad RAID 0. Take a look at some of the actual benchmarks. You also have to take into account that flash memory has a much more limited number of writes than standards hard drives which don't really have any such limit. Now of course it is possible that some future tech will eliminate these issues, but we haven't seen it yet. The closest we have come to genuinely eliminating the hard drive speed issue is with the Gigabyte i-drive, which itself has many unresolved issues (like reliable battery back up) and does not really solve the problem in its current form.
The problem with 'majority rules' democracies is that intelligent, logically thinking, people are always a tiny minority of any population. Americans have a reputation for being dummies, but I suspect intelligent people would be a minority in any population. Of course, the US is not really a 'democracy'. It is a republic. Now maybe if you had to pass some kind of IQ test to vote or to run for office...
It also doesn't help matters that the more intelligent a person is the more likely they are to realize that voting is a waste of their time since the odds of it actually changing the outcome of a national election is less than winning millions of dollars in a state lottery. And all the choices end up being pretty much the same anyway. And the two party system guarantees that that will never change. Any candidate whose views differ at all from either of the two dominant parties has no chance whatsoever to win. Election promises mean nothing anyway. So the whole system is basically useless in every way.
The founders of the US government were philosophers and intellectuals. They hoped that the system they came up with (based on Locke and others) would be an effective system for limiting the tyranny of government power. They had the best of intentions, but it was just an experiment. One that had never really been tried before. And good intentions are not enough. I'm not sure there is a way of stopping the growth of government power. It is like trying to stop gravity. The only solution I can think of would be to make most human beings much more intelligent. Maybe through some kind of brain implant? Something like that.
It's hard enough for a geek to land one of the hotties. Are we supposed to disqualify them just because they are stupid? If you want intellectual conversation talk to your friends. If you don't have any intellectual or intelligent friends then go find some. I can't believe anyone could even ask this question. My dog can't do calculus, but she still makes a great companion. If you are that picky maybe you don't deserve to get any action. Actually girls who believe in astrology/spirits/ghosts etc tend to be highly suggestible. They are great because you can persuade them to actually stay with you if you like them. You can persuade them to do pretty much anything. In the end that matters a lot more than swapping syllogisms with another brain in a jar.
You need to change BT so it doesn't penalise dowloading before it'll be useful as a distribution mechanism. No. It doesn't penalize downloading it penalizes leeching. It was actually the first major p2p system with any teeth to its anti-leech measures. The more you contribute the more you get back. The less you contribute the less you get back. It is fair. Ever wonder why those private tracker sites with enforced ratios are so much faster than the other sites?
1. A lot of (probably most) users are on asymmetric connections - I'm on 8mb down, 832k up. So your 1:1 ratio forcing now limited me to 832k down maximum. I'll use an FTP server at 8mb thanks. So? Go ahead and use the FTP server. The bittorrent swarm is in fact better off without you. You take away from the swarm without giving anything back and everyone else in the swarm who is sticking around for 10 times as long as their download took in order to reach a 1:1 ratio are paying the price for it. If you leech you are a free rider and your loss actually greatly benefits the rest of the swarm. P2P is not magic. Every byte that you download is from someone else's upload. I have an asymmetric connection as well. Most people have that. But that rarely stops me from giving back what I take from the swarm. I just don't delete the torrent until I have a 1:1 ratio, even if it takes weeks or months.
Nearly all users are on NAT, which means that they *can't* seed without farting around with port forwarding. I think it is an exaggeration to say 'nearly all' users are behind a NAT. I am behind a NAT too, and I find that, especially with bittorent, when the NAT is not in the mood to forward its ports I am not going to be downloading anything at more than a snail's pace either. So that is not an excuse for leeching. In any case, any geek would know how to forward ports. So, unless the NAT is not under our control, that is not an excuse for any of us here anyway.
Mind you, with decent free health care, they have something fundamentally good that Americans don't, and the way things are going, never will have. I am getting tired of battling all of this misinformation about Cuba every time there is a story about it here. Look, just go there and see for yourself. I guarantee that you will find it very enlightening. I lived there for more than a year. I have experienced this supposedly miraculous health care phenomenon for myself. I have to admit that, before I arrived there, I too assumed that what I had heard about Cuban health care was true. That it would be at least marginally better than other third world countries. How many times do I have to break this to all of you? IT IS NOT TRUE. IT IS A MYTH. There. Was that loud enough? Apparently it is something that people really want to believe. Well, I can't stop you. Believe what you want. But if you ever need the services of a doctor or hospital on that island you will realize how wrong you are. I'm not sure if you are an American yourself, but we *do* have free health care in this country. You just have to have a low enough income to qualify for it. My friend does and he gets all of his care for free. To compare the level of health care in the US or really any first world country to Cuba is worse than laughable. It is so far beyond ludicrous that it leaves me speechless. Have you ever traveled to a country with very primitive health care and needed the care of a doctor? Well, unless you have been to Central Africa, it is very likely that Cuban health care is far more primitive than what you experienced there.
Is it that inconceivable that a country can have excellent healthcare but at the same time severely limit its people's political freedoms? Not in the least bit inconceivable. It just happens to not be the truth in this case. Go travel to Cuba and visit some clinics there and the major hospitals (I have been to all of them). Then you will see how 'advanced' their health care is. And very quickly. The Cubans I have met there laugh at this idea that foreigners have of Cuba as being some kind of model for health care. It may not be any worse than lots of other 3rd world countries (although I can vouch for Mexico, Colombia, and Thailand as being approximately 1 zillion times better), but it sure as hell isn't any better. I think you would really have to go to Africa to compete with Cuba's level of health care. I have been to a lot of 3rd world countries and can't think of any that are worse than Cuba. Maybe Laos has about the same level overall, although prescription drugs seem to be more widely available than in Cuba. Sometimes it is the Cuban doctor's outdated ideas and lack of knowledge about newer theories and techniques that scare me the most. I have met doctors there who seem to believe that a cold can be caused by too many rainy days or getting wet, for instance. And they are simply ignorant of things that are easy for me to find out about with one medline search. Almost no one has an internet connection there. Not even doctors. For reference all they have are old medical textbooks, if they are lucky. Cuba is just too cut off from the rest of the world.
They have first rate low tech preventative and pre/post natal health care.
Well, I agree with the 'low tech' part. As for the rest, getting the nurses there to stop reusing hypodermic needles would be a good start. I was waiting at a clinic in Havana with my (Cuban) ex-girlfriend for a blood test and was amazed at the Cubans waiting their turn to get an injection from the same needle. At least they washed it in a tray of water between shots. Yeah, Cuba is the high tech health care capital of the world. I demanded that they do *not* use a shared needle for my girlfriend and they were willing to comply for the rich foreigner. It just costs a bit extra and most Cubans don't have the extra money to pay for the new needle. Also, I hope you aren't expecting a large selection of drugs or say, bandaids (only available at the biggest hospitals in Havana) or antibiotic ointment (haha, that's a good one). Also, outside of Havana there are rolling blackouts on a regular basis. Just hope you aren't getting some medical procedure when that happens. They do have basic antibiotics at least, but not much else. Vitamins are often prescribed by doctors there for all kinds of ailments. And even the largest hospitals seem to lack those machines that go "bing".
Would you really trade your life away for a place in a history book?
Short answer: Yes. Many of us would trade our lives for that place in the history books. Actually for a lot less than that. To walk on a planet that no human being has ever been before. To boldly go... yada yada. That actually means something to some of us. Just not to you obviously. So don't volunteer. But don't complain about others with the courage and vision who are willing to sacrifice themselves. Nothing that you will ever do in your life could ever equal being the first human to walk on another planet.
Actually several slashdotters have already volunteered. And let this make one more. I would be willing to train for such a mission. Do the best I could. And then die. Do you have any idea how many human beings on this planet kill themselves each year, and for no purpose whatsoever? NASA would get thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of applicants for a one way suicide mission if they asked for volunteers. They could still give the suicidal volunteer the proper training, and select only physically fit candidates who are judged emotionally/mentally 'stable' despite being willing to die for a great cause. This isn't really so different from getting teenagers with their whole life ahead of them to sign up for fighting in a war where they will have to kill and maybe die. The only difference here is that death may be 100% certain within a certain time frame due to limitations of our current life support tech. I do agree with some others however that this is pure fantasy land. It's a moot point. The American public does not have the stomach for it. The only chance might be for a pedophile. The hatred for pedophiles is universal. Or if you really want to get nearly unanimous support choose a child rapist and pedophile. But one who is physically fit and highly intelligent and deeply believes in the mission.
Wow. Mod this guy up more. One of the best written summaries I have read on the situation. I got your back on the $10/month dialup. That's what I paid. In the mid to late 90s that was a market price. $10 - $15 for unlimited connections at 56k was completely mainstream pricing. Now I pay $60 for the lowest tier of cable modem internet service and I'm not complaining about it, but saying that we're paying the same is a huge lie. Yeah, I know some of you live an an area where you have some kind of budget DSL lite for like $25 or $30 but most of those plans seem to require that you're already paying at least another $20 a month for a land line. If you want to use a cell instead you are back up to like $50 or $60 again.
I believe that, rather than actually spending money to speed up their services and maybe raise the pricing on true higher tier service, they instead have a meeting with the marketing department and have them paper launch 'higher tier' service by pulling numbers out from where the sun don't shine. Under no circumstances are these telecoms or cable companies going to even think about genuinely upgrading their service. Ever. Once we accept that we can move on. Their solution is to simply disconnect or cap their higher bandwidth users and label them 'hogs'. Beautiful! End of problem! And if you look at things from their perspective it is easy to see why. Their unstated target market is web surfers. People who could easily get by with 56k without a problem but have a bit too much money in their pocket and like all the fancy advertising. If you want to actually use their advertised bandwidth they don't want you as a customer because you are hurting their bottom line more than you are helping it.
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A government is like a machine with one purpose: to control. Everything. And it won't stop, ever, until it has won. It can only be stopped by being destroyed utterly through armed revolt. Through war and violence and blood in the streets. But as the government grows in power this becomes increasingly difficult. In the case of the United States it would now be all but impossible. The war machine has grown powerful beyond all imagining. Even a good sized militia would have no chance against that kind of adversary.
So we are on our way. There are no turns on this road. "Terrorism" will continue to grow as the term grows to include anything not expressly permitted. But what is happening cannot be blamed on any one person. It is a sort of tragedy of the commons, this thing we call 'government'. We create a machine that will always eventually take control and destroy us, destroy everything for its own selfish needs. A vast machine controlled by countless thousands of people who individually have not the slightest chance to determine its course. We never seem to learn from our mistakes. Each time we believe that this time it will be different.
*sigh*. information wants to be free is just a more pithy (and to some confusing) way of saying secrets are hard to keep or information is hard to control. Information tends to escape, to find a way out, and once it does you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, ever. It does not mean that there are no secrets that are worth keeping or at least trying to keep. There may also be something in there about the futility of even trying to control or hoard information. Something about it being a waste of time and so forth.
There obviously are child porn websites.
All I can say is for your sake I sincerely hope that you do not live in the US or in any country with an extradition treaty with the US. You have just incriminated yourself. Utterly. I can honestly say that I have never, ever, under any circumstances, been to any child porn site. Nor have I ever searched for one on google and have absolutely no awareness that any such sites exist. None. I cannot claim that such things exist any more than I can claim that thousands of clones of Woody Allen live happily on Gliese 581 D. Even if you have 'found' such sites how could you possibly know that it is not just an FBI honeypot with blank files (which are just honeypot links themselves)? There is no way that you could possibly know what you claim to unless you have actually looked at the pictures or videos on said site which is very illegal and can result in not only many years in federal prison, but also your name on a publicly available national/international list of sex offenders, at which point you may as well kill yourself or move to antarctica and live off of penguins. Or both. Your life in human society will be over. Have you seen The Crucible? Or read other accounts of the Salem Witch Trials?
I highly suggest that whatever your views, if you currently reside in the US, you seriously consider what I am saying. Do you think that FBI agents cannot read slashdot? Or that no one they know might point out this article to them, and by extension, posts like yours? It might have been different if you were posting anonymously from an internet cafe preferably while wearing a ski mask and dark sunglasses and gloves. Do you think that anyone here or anyone else on planet earth will even think about helping you? They would be labeled pedophiles themselves if they make the slightest move to do any such thing. Even a lawyer will only defend you grudgingly and only if they have absolutely no choice. And even so, such lawyers will be treading on very thin ice. They could very well end up ruining their own lives by 'defending' you. And no one will care about what happens to you after you have been accused. Maybe not even your mother or father. Your enemies will consist of the vast majority of the human race, most of whom would like to see you not only killed, but brutally tortured and your body hacked up and burned. And your 'guilt' or 'innocence' will not matter to them. You would be just another lamb for them to slaughter, to sacrifice on their alter, in the name of all the children on the planet. So would you care to modify your original statement, sir?
In addition to all that wouldn't a potential customer have to be an absolute moron, as in perhaps genuinely mentally retarded, to use some traceable form of payment (and only hand delivered cash while wearing gloves, ski mask, dark glasses etc is not) as well as your IP address (unless you are downloading to an internet cafe) with such a site? Whether the pictures are 'real' (which in many cases is not possible to determine anyway) or not? I find it hard to believe that such sites could exist at all. And what ISP would host them? And even more to the point who in their right mind would be stupid enough to actually start and to run such a site? Unless they are in fact FBI honey pots. Then the ISPs would welcome them with open arms and they would have nothing to fear from any laws. To me it seems much more likely that any such sites are exactly that.
Of course that is yet another reason why you have to be a moron to even think about clicking on such links as the one in this story. I highly doubt this guy has ever abused a child. But it is completely irrelevant. His life is over. This guy should really make it into the Darwin Awards. Even if you were looking for child porn what could you even hope to find on the internet? A commercial web site? LMAO. Now freenet or usenet (posted from an internet cafe while disguised for instance) is maybe another matter. But even so, I d
Although you have some good points, there seems to be something you are missing. Have you ever actually downloaded one of those re-compressed hi-def movies? I have. The file was 9 GB. As far as I can tell it was the original resolution. So it has been *hugely* re-compressed. I was expecting it to be a huge mess. But you know what? It wasn't. Yes, there were numerous compression artifacts, but I was too distracted by the fact that the overall image quality and detail and dynamic range were about 1.78 gazillion times better than standard def DVD. It was one of the first hi-def movies I have watched on my computer and I was not at all disappointed. Would the original Blu-Ray or HD-DVD that it was derived from have better image quality? I have no doubt. You can't just throw away 60% or 70% of the information in an image and expect to retain the same quality. Is the difference noticeable? Almost certainly. But that doesn't change the fact that even at a reduced quality the re-compressed hi-def material is vastly superior in terms of the subjective viewing experience compared to the only other drive space friendly alternative, regular DVD. In fact I feel like throwing all of my DVDs in the trash. To me the difference seems that huge.
Generally speaking I do see myself as a videophile, as someone who cares very much about a small difference in image quality. But until hard drives become vastly larger I simply will not have enough space to store hi-def movies at the original quality. So, as much as it disturbs me, I am going to have to compromise. The re-compressed hi-def files are still an order of magnitude improvement over DVD. To me, the difference between regular DVD and hi-def is a much larger jump than between laser disc and DVD. I suppose it might more approximate the jump between VHS and laser disc. So as a videophile without infinite hard drive space (and without much money or an HDTV) I am quite happy with our new format and with the people responsible for cracking BD+.
Although I don't really claim to understand how it is possible to re-compress so much without completely degrading the quality to an unwatchable level, I am wondering if studios have really outdone themselves. Maybe they just have so much more space and the newer compression algorithms are so good that they are able to encode their film transfers at a bitrate that is nearly without artifacts, a format truly made for videophiles. Of course the irony is that they are doing this to try to tempt us all (not just videophiles) away from the fully cracked and easily copyable DVD format into their spider web of uber advanced DRM that is BD+ (and AACS). Call it what you will but it *is* much more advanced than DeCSS. Especially Blu-Ray.
But it probably takes a lot of extra storage space to get rid of that last 20% of compression artifacts (or whatever). So a non-perfectionist can still have relatively breathtaking video quality at a much smaller size if he is willing to make some visible but acceptable compromises. I am guessing that each video has its own sweet spot in this regard, a point where video quality starts to degrade sharply. That's the point that the re-encoder has to find.
IIRC, there was a time when cable companies and electric utilities were considered 'natural' monopolies. But where I live there is Comcast, Verizon, and RCN to choose from. There are also multiple electric companies and local telephone companies (Verizon, RCN).So what happened? They were natural monopolies before but now they aren't? And where I live water is provided directly by the town. So I guess the answer is 'none'.
That gasoline engine really reduces its practicality though for anything other than a pack mule. They need to work on adding an RTG to it along with some of those newly developed high efficiency solar cells. So it will be nearly silent and not need recharging for like 80 years. Also they definitely need a head with video camera eyes with green lasers and/or high intensity IR lights behind them as well, a hydraulic jaw controlling a mouth filled with hundreds of hollow, hardened, stainless steel shark teeth filled and coated with a potent neurotoxin like maybe palytoxin or tetrodotoxin. A minigun hidden in its mouth is obviously mandatory. It should also be able to cough VX nerve gas from a small compressed cylinder in it's throat and spit concentrated nitric acid. And of course it would need microphone ears and a tail to aid in balance when running and some fur and leather/kevlar skin to help protect its electronics from the elements and the occasional bullet. If they could make it pass for a real dog they could even fill its belly with explosives to self destruct near enemy troops or if captured. And of course they should really add some wings and make it into an ornithopter as well. And how about a really cool howl like the one in American Werewolf in London or some even more creeptastic sound. Great for shock and awe. Also great for crowd control of anti-war protesters etc.
Of course a nonmilitary version with the RTG and solar cells could be sent to explore mars.
While this new architecture sounds amazing, and I am planning to upgrade in about a year when this is released, is anyone else a bit worried about the overclocking potential of Nehalem? Intel sells their high end $1000 + 'Extreme' CPUs with an unlocked multiplier and, other than a higher bin, that is really its only selling point. I remember the days before Intel started locking down the multipliers. Lots of people thought it might spell the end of overclocking. But of course it turned out that FSB overclocking, although RAM and chipset limited, was a perfectly viable alternative and so overclockers were freed from Intel's pricing structure. But this seems like an opportunity for Intel to add value to their more profitable high binned parts by closing the FSB loophole and leaving no way for overclockers to do their thing. Could it be that by next year only the rich will be able to afford a bleeding edge CPU?
Instead of waiting for some real competition, Intel released Penryn more or less right on schedule when the only competition they had was their own 65nm processors. Of course the quad cores are only just being released now, but they are still releasing them way before AMD has anything to really compete with them. People make all kinds of cynical statements about business methods without even considering corporate culture. Has it ever occurred to anyone that Intel simply may not believe in only releasing new tech when they absolutely have no choice due to competition?
I'm not saying competition is not a good thing, but I don't think AMD is presenting much competition to Intel at the moment. AMD is in big trouble and Intel is well aware of that fact. I just don't think that it is competition that is driving Intel forward. Competition may affect their pricing, but I think Intel would keep right on with their two year tick tock cycles and process shrinks even if AMD folded tomorrow.
So what you are saying is: "What, me worry"? After all, in 100 years such repressive regimes will extinguish themselves? Frankly, I take a less historical approach. At the rate things are going, we are all slipping right down that slippery slope into a true police state. And yes, it is exactly like boiling a frog. Except there is no real chance for most of us to jump out of the pot. At least in the days of Nazi Germany there was somewhere to go, somewhere to escape to.
Actually I am wondering if exactly the opposite is going to be true. Maybe massively multithreaded assembly language programming is going to be our future. After all, so far there is no high level language that solves the problems of massive parallelism. This blind faith that development time is orders of magnitude more precious than runtime has maybe proven to be wrong. Only overclockers are getting much single core speed increase from the recent full process step from 65nm to 45nm. CPU speed increases have been greatly slowing down and, failing a fundamental breakthrough in technology, may soon stop completely. So how do you make current programs run faster when the number of instructions per second no longer increases every year?
We need to start teaching assembly language at our universities again. We need to make it an important part of our curriculum. We need to start encouraging people to actually think about efficiency again. We need to stop ending every discussion about optimization with the mere mention of the sin of 'premature optimization', with 'premature' often translating into 'never'. Instead of trying to continue to improve our native code compilers we are dumping them for JIT byte code 'compilers'.
Maybe, at least for a while, we are going to have to stop thinking about a computer as just a black box. Maybe we are going to have to understand all the little hamsters running around on the inside. And we may also find a lot of the programming paradigms that we hold so dear come tumbling down. The companies that choose to ignore the possibilities of massive SMP and stick with their precious 'maintainable' code with all of its beautiful logic and readability and extensibility might find themselves passed by. Maybe it is time once again to think more like the machines running our code. Could assembly and ultra low level languages (even lower level than C) actually be the way forward? When you can get a speedup of 10x or 20x from parallelism, it is nontrivial and worth the extra effort in writing and maintaining the code. But it would be a very bitter pill for modern programmers to swallow.
OTOH, maybe the way forward will be haskell/ocaml/erlang. Either way, it would be a fundamental change in the direction we are currently headed in the (mainstream) programming world. I don't think the answer will be Java.
I don't mean to state the obvious, but the vast majority of today's SSDs are not much faster than the hard drives they replace, especially when you consider both reading and writing. Especially when you compare the SSD transfer rates to dual or quad RAID 0. Take a look at some of the actual benchmarks. You also have to take into account that flash memory has a much more limited number of writes than standards hard drives which don't really have any such limit. Now of course it is possible that some future tech will eliminate these issues, but we haven't seen it yet. The closest we have come to genuinely eliminating the hard drive speed issue is with the Gigabyte i-drive, which itself has many unresolved issues (like reliable battery back up) and does not really solve the problem in its current form.
The problem with 'majority rules' democracies is that intelligent, logically thinking, people are always a tiny minority of any population. Americans have a reputation for being dummies, but I suspect intelligent people would be a minority in any population. Of course, the US is not really a 'democracy'. It is a republic. Now maybe if you had to pass some kind of IQ test to vote or to run for office...
It also doesn't help matters that the more intelligent a person is the more likely they are to realize that voting is a waste of their time since the odds of it actually changing the outcome of a national election is less than winning millions of dollars in a state lottery. And all the choices end up being pretty much the same anyway. And the two party system guarantees that that will never change. Any candidate whose views differ at all from either of the two dominant parties has no chance whatsoever to win. Election promises mean nothing anyway. So the whole system is basically useless in every way.
The founders of the US government were philosophers and intellectuals. They hoped that the system they came up with (based on Locke and others) would be an effective system for limiting the tyranny of government power. They had the best of intentions, but it was just an experiment. One that had never really been tried before. And good intentions are not enough. I'm not sure there is a way of stopping the growth of government power. It is like trying to stop gravity. The only solution I can think of would be to make most human beings much more intelligent. Maybe through some kind of brain implant? Something like that.
It's hard enough for a geek to land one of the hotties. Are we supposed to disqualify them just because they are stupid? If you want intellectual conversation talk to your friends. If you don't have any intellectual or intelligent friends then go find some. I can't believe anyone could even ask this question. My dog can't do calculus, but she still makes a great companion. If you are that picky maybe you don't deserve to get any action. Actually girls who believe in astrology/spirits/ghosts etc tend to be highly suggestible. They are great because you can persuade them to actually stay with you if you like them. You can persuade them to do pretty much anything. In the end that matters a lot more than swapping syllogisms with another brain in a jar.
They have first rate low tech preventative and pre/post natal health care.
Well, I agree with the 'low tech' part. As for the rest, getting the nurses there to stop reusing hypodermic needles would be a good start. I was waiting at a clinic in Havana with my (Cuban) ex-girlfriend for a blood test and was amazed at the Cubans waiting their turn to get an injection from the same needle. At least they washed it in a tray of water between shots. Yeah, Cuba is the high tech health care capital of the world. I demanded that they do *not* use a shared needle for my girlfriend and they were willing to comply for the rich foreigner. It just costs a bit extra and most Cubans don't have the extra money to pay for the new needle. Also, I hope you aren't expecting a large selection of drugs or say, bandaids (only available at the biggest hospitals in Havana) or antibiotic ointment (haha, that's a good one). Also, outside of Havana there are rolling blackouts on a regular basis. Just hope you aren't getting some medical procedure when that happens. They do have basic antibiotics at least, but not much else. Vitamins are often prescribed by doctors there for all kinds of ailments. And even the largest hospitals seem to lack those machines that go "bing".
Would you really trade your life away for a place in a history book?
Short answer: Yes. Many of us would trade our lives for that place in the history books. Actually for a lot less than that. To walk on a planet that no human being has ever been before. To boldly go... yada yada. That actually means something to some of us. Just not to you obviously. So don't volunteer. But don't complain about others with the courage and vision who are willing to sacrifice themselves. Nothing that you will ever do in your life could ever equal being the first human to walk on another planet.
Actually several slashdotters have already volunteered. And let this make one more. I would be willing to train for such a mission. Do the best I could. And then die. Do you have any idea how many human beings on this planet kill themselves each year, and for no purpose whatsoever? NASA would get thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of applicants for a one way suicide mission if they asked for volunteers. They could still give the suicidal volunteer the proper training, and select only physically fit candidates who are judged emotionally/mentally 'stable' despite being willing to die for a great cause. This isn't really so different from getting teenagers with their whole life ahead of them to sign up for fighting in a war where they will have to kill and maybe die. The only difference here is that death may be 100% certain within a certain time frame due to limitations of our current life support tech. I do agree with some others however that this is pure fantasy land. It's a moot point. The American public does not have the stomach for it. The only chance might be for a pedophile. The hatred for pedophiles is universal. Or if you really want to get nearly unanimous support choose a child rapist and pedophile. But one who is physically fit and highly intelligent and deeply believes in the mission.
Wow. Mod this guy up more. One of the best written summaries I have read on the situation. I got your back on the $10/month dialup. That's what I paid. In the mid to late 90s that was a market price. $10 - $15 for unlimited connections at 56k was completely mainstream pricing. Now I pay $60 for the lowest tier of cable modem internet service and I'm not complaining about it, but saying that we're paying the same is a huge lie. Yeah, I know some of you live an an area where you have some kind of budget DSL lite for like $25 or $30 but most of those plans seem to require that you're already paying at least another $20 a month for a land line. If you want to use a cell instead you are back up to like $50 or $60 again.
I believe that, rather than actually spending money to speed up their services and maybe raise the pricing on true higher tier service, they instead have a meeting with the marketing department and have them paper launch 'higher tier' service by pulling numbers out from where the sun don't shine. Under no circumstances are these telecoms or cable companies going to even think about genuinely upgrading their service. Ever. Once we accept that we can move on. Their solution is to simply disconnect or cap their higher bandwidth users and label them 'hogs'. Beautiful! End of problem! And if you look at things from their perspective it is easy to see why. Their unstated target market is web surfers. People who could easily get by with 56k without a problem but have a bit too much money in their pocket and like all the fancy advertising. If you want to actually use their advertised bandwidth they don't want you as a customer because you are hurting their bottom line more than you are helping it.