Also, have you considered the full implications of that stance? Could the US, for example, censor Busboy Productions, Inc. on the grounds it has no first ammendment rights? Could they sieze Twitter's computer servers without a warrant on the grounds it has no fourth ammendment rights? Can they tap your wokplace phone without a warrant because your employer has no expectation of privacy?
The Lockean concept of natural rights upon which the constitution is based would clearly not apply to a corporation as such. A corporation is just a group of individuals. However the constitution was supposed to be about forbidding all actions of the government except what was expressly permitted by the founders' document. The founders were terribly afraid that their fledgling government--a republic if you can keep it--would become the same sort of tyranny that so many British colonists had recently fought and died to escape.
So you are looking at this all wrong. The question you should be asking is what right does the government have to seize servers, censor speech and tap phones. The answer is none, unless it is explicitly allowed under very specific circumstances by the constitution. Usually that involves probable cause to believe that some kind of crime has been committed etc.
Still, you might ask if the corporation does not have the same natural rights as individual human beings because corporations are not people then how do you justify protecting them from any sort of crime whether perpetrated by the government or by individuals? The answer has to derive from the natural rights of the individuals that make up the group. The made up entity that the individuals created (the group) may not have Lockean natural rights per se, but by damaging the group (as in your server seizure example) you are also damaging all or many of the individuals within the group.
Of course your censorship and phone tap examples do directly violate the natural rights of individuals in the group. In that sense they are not great examples for your point. It is only your property seizure example that requires the above elaboration because it is not clear exactly which humans own those computers or their contents. I think it can still be argued that they are owned quite directly by the shareholders, by all the members of the group individually. If the server is worth, say, $3000 and the company consists of 1000 people then you have just robbed $3 from each human, a clear violation of their right to have property.
Yes. I can see that it is certainly of great benefit to new businesses and to investors. But the poster you responded to was asking about the benefits to society. Those are not so easy to trace. Not every startup is a net benefit to society. Especially if it fails and the creditors take the fall. It could be argued that on the contrary this sort of free insurance policy is paid for by everyone else who has to pay higher interest rates on their loans or even higher taxes and inflation of the money supply due to banks failing which are considered "too big to fail" by the government. I happen to think that limited liability corporations and their absurd personhood are a net loss on any society that permits/encourages them. A company without such limited liability and without any "rights" as a person is of much greater value to society.
Therefore, corporate taxes should be abolished too, right? After all corporation is people and those people already pay their taxes.
That is a very logical argument. I completely agree. Just as soon as they lose all of their personhood status. Corporate taxes are the price they pay to the government for allowing them this absurd fiction that they are some kind of person. Apparently they consider it a good enough deal. Actually I would support ending corporate income taxes in any case. And personal income taxes as well. But that's another matter.
Good point. Excellent post. But I question whether this original 1608 form of corporation truly required the concept of personhood in order to exist. Perhaps a government that believes the trade off you speak of is one that is beneficial to society could simply grant limited liability against potential creditors directly to investors and leave it at that without invoking the whole corporation-as-person concept. The government could even just grant the individual investors a certain level of immunity from creditors sort of like what the concept of personal bankruptcy does for individuals. Some may argue that the whole business is really unfair to creditors who just want to get paid for their product/service, but that is another point entirely
Nice try but "free speech" is about limiting what the government can do. It is not about what individuals are allowed to do. That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is not. The founders were worried about limiting government power. Technically the first amendment is not really even necessary. The whole point of the constitution was to discuss what the government was not allowed to do. Not what citizens were allowed to do. Even if corporations-as-individuals were abolished tomorrow, you would still have the self-same group of people working together toward a common goal of selling a product/service for a profit. And those individual employees would still have the right to not have the government interfere with their communications. The founders were concerned that any enumeration of specific rights (like the right to say or write whatever the fuck you want) would be taken to imply that those were the only rights that individuals possessed. In other words that the government would be free to do whatever was not expressly forbidden to it, but that the citizens of the Republic would be forbidden to do anything that was not expressly allowed by said government. Precisely the opposite of what the founders intended. Unfortunately the latter is exactly where we have ended up. Hence the necessity to enumerate all of our rights in "amendments" etc.
Explain to me from, say, an anarcho-libertarian perspective how a corporation-as-individual would even be possible? A corporation-as-individual type of institution relies on the government to enforce its unreal status. Back in the real world a corporation would just be a group of individuals cooperating toward whatever the goal of the corporation is: making widgets for instance. Without a government you couldn't have corporations as they currently exist. Just as you couldn't have copyrights or patents. At least not in their current form.
Even from a limited/bare-bones government Libertarian perspective there is nothing inherent to a sociopathic, many-as-one style corporation that is even remotely necessary to a free market economy. And in fact true laissez-faire capitalism would seem to require that corporations not be given special treatment over other groups of individuals. It requires active government intervention to do so.
If corporations were individuals they would be sociopaths as this 2003 Canadian documentary endeavors to show. In D&D they would be considered either lawful evil or chaotic evil (depending on the corporation). They are narrowly selfish and greedy to such an extent that as an individual they would almost certainly be criminals. Profit trumps every other concern without exception. So corporations are an evil institution, but are they a necessary evil? The price we pay for economic prosperity. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean we have to give them any more power than necessary to get what we (as a society) want from them (inexpensive, innovative, useful products).
I consider myself a Libertarian, but I would argue that even in a free society corporations-as-individuals should be prohibited. It simply does not make sense to grant them the same rights as an individual not only because they clearly are a group of individuals, but because corporations need to have limitations on their power and on their predictably ruthlessly selfish/evil behavior. Corporations are the only institutions that can even remotely compete with governments in terms of power and abuse of power and they should be treated warily because of this.
As a preteen in the late 70s I played a game that I remember as SPACWR on a friend's DEC PDP-11. My friend and I played for hours and thought it was great fun. It was really an ASCII Star Trek game originally written by Mike Mayfield in 1971 in BASIC and then translated into DEC BASIC by David Ahl who gave it the confusing name so similar to the game discussed here.
The exact mechanism through which unpowered 22-25nm MLC NAND storage loses track of its data is interesting, but somewhat beside the point. The point is that there is an inherent limit to the technology in terms of data retention and we have now basically arrived there at 25nm.
You seem to be arguing that the loss of the drive itself through the destructive write mechanism is more significant. In many cases this is likely to be true, but many end users may not realize that leaving their drive unpowered for 8 months will result in data loss/corruption. These process shrinks are starting to blur the line between volatile and non-volatile storage.
As for the cost issue I think that cost reductions are a good thing in theory. When there is competition available in the market to drive down prices. Unfortunately, we haven't had such competition in the CPU market for a while. Which is why I used it as an example of how cost reductions don't necessarily result in lower prices at the consumer level. Of course there is competition in the SSD market. So the comparison is a bit unfair. Yet, I remain skeptical. Just because a company could lower their price to increase sales (and start a price war) doesn't mean they always will. As long as none of the competition attempts to get too ambitious with market share prices can stagnate for quite a while. Back when AMD was still competitive (in terms of performance) with Intel in the processor market they attempted to beat Intel on price for a while. Then they just stopped. They decided that the loss of profit margin wasn't worth the additional market share. Both companies happily maintained similar price/performance ratios for quite a while that way.
Yes. Thanks for the link. A lot could change between now and Q2, but that is nice to see. I suspect they would reserve the right to change to different memory at any time. I will keep my fingers crossed that I will be able to purchase a 32nm SF-2000 series drive that maxes out the sata3 interface in both sequential reads and writes. Still, unless consumers become more aware that smaller process size is a bad thing for NAND SSDs I think all of the manufacturers will eventually be peddling NAND at 25nm and beyond. Their financial motivation is just too strong.
Sandforce has already announced its new sata3 controller. On paper it looks like it will have much faster sequential writes than Intel, but it sounds like it will also have a shorter lifetime and shorter data retention times due to the use of 25nm NAND. Intel is wisely sticking with 34nm. It may be more expensive to manufacture, but is superior tech. I can only hope that OCZ changes their mind and decides to at least offer a more expensive 34nm version. OCZ won't be shipping their Vertex 3 drives until Q2 so Intel will have a big head start in the market.
The NAND industry seems to be doing its best to encourage ignorance on the disadvantages of smaller process sizes from the consumer POV and the ignorance seems to be widespread. Getting the facts on this issue can be a bit difficult. Here is a good thread on the topic. http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2142742
The following post sums it up better than I could. Note his point about data retention times as well. That is a point that is often ignored when the focus is solely on write cycles.
As flash cells are shrunk, they become less good. This is a fundamental feature of the technology. The overall volume of the cell becomes smaller, so less electrons can be stored in the cell (so the signal picked up by the electronics is weaker and less clear, so you get a higher error rate) and the insulating barriers around the cell must be made thinner, in order to save space - allowing the electrons to leak out of the cell more easily (reducing power off data retention time). The thinner insulation also wears out more quickly (reducing life cycles)
It's difficult to define a 'fundamantal' limit for flash, because it may be possible to work around poor performance, and as yet unknown new manufacturing techniques and semiconductor materials may be developed. However, it has been suggested in the scientific literature that 18-22 nm, is the realistic limit. Beyond that, the performance/reliability/lifespan of the flash would be too poor, no matter how much wear levelling, and how sophisticated the ECC codes were.
Enterprise grade SSD flash, will need higher specifications than flash for toy cameras. Enterprise applications are unlikely to tolerate 18 nm flash with 100 write cycles and one lost sector per 100 GB of data stored. However, this probably would be acceptable for toys or throwaway devices.
NAND Flash memory quality is also beginning to drop. Chips manufactured using 90nm-generation technology in 2004-05, for example, were assured for about 100,000 rewrites and data retention of about a decade. As multi-level architecture and smaller geometry are introduced, quality is showing a sharp decline. The 30nm 2-bit/cell chips expected to enter volume production in 2009-10 may well end up with a rewrite assurance of no more than 3,000 cycles, and a data retention time of about a year. The first 3-bit/cell chips are hitting the market now, with only a few hundred rewrites.
Flash memory works by trapping electrons. Over time these electrons leak away, until the charge is too small for the data to be read any more. With smaller feature sizes (34 nm instead of 45 or 65 nm) this leakage is more significant and fewer electrons can be stored per bit, thus the time during which the stored value can be maintained is decreased.
Name some countries outside of Africa where cell phone use is not ubiquitous. I'll start. Cuba. North Korea maybe? Probably Myanmar (Burma). Surely there must be more. Maybe some of the 'Stans?
I must admit that I ( in the beginning of Wikileaks ) was chearing for Wikileaks. The idea of a place for whistleblowers to blow the whistle on companies doing bad things ( like BP etc. ) was nice.
So whistle blowers against private corporations = good, but against governments = bad? You don't really sound like the kind of guy to support whistle blowers of any kind. Especially when there are "security issues".
My cousin and his colleagues noted that he had a sleazy approach to women. This was before the accusations.
What does that even mean? Your cousin met him at a party and right there and then decided that he was probably a rapist? What was he doing at the party that made him seem guilty of having a "sleazy approach to women"?
In addition to the issue with death penalty crimes, Sweden also can't turn him over to the US without the UK's approval anyway, under European Union laws (Various extradition rules under the European Arrest Warrant [europa.eu] acts).
Once he is in Sweden, what does the UK have to do with anything? He's not a citizen of the UK. Are you saying that the first EU country to extradite him somehow has veto power over any further extraditions by other EU countries?
I think seeds are mostly from people with a sense of fairness. It's not really pure altruism. I upload at least as much as I download because the whole system is not sustainable otherwise (essentially a selfish motive). I don't believe in taking from the swarm more than I am giving back. It's true that quite a few people don't care, which is probably one reason why all torrents eventually die. But there are enough people with a sense of fairness to make the system mostly work. It's really about trading. The swarm gives me a copy of the movie/game/CD and I feel compelled to give back at least as much data as I was given. I guess it's an honor system of sorts. I think many or even most people wouldn't steal stuff even if they thought they wouldn't be caught.
It's that same sense of fairness that powers bittorrent and also motivates some people to buy content instead of downloading it. I do both. I download everything first to try it. If I like it then I buy the usually higher quality paid version. Games/software are the exception because the paid version is actually lower quality than the downloaded one due to draconian DRM. I only purchase DRM-free software, which basically doesn't exist anymore.
If a generation Z kid tries to communicate with me in their language I simply won't understand them. I do understand that their language serves a purpose in terms of manual data compression. As another poster pointed out you could just have the phone translate it into English after it has been transmitted. Yet it does isolate them from the rest of the world who doesn't speak their language. I highly doubt it helps their English skills in any way because what they are practicing is not English.
I doubt that text messaging in txt language is in itself enough to make a good speller into a bad speller, but you are not going to find that out in a 10 week study. I think the argument is that children are getting too much of the wrong kind of language practice. They are getting a huge amount of practice in a language which does not exist outside of their group. It may be true that the txters who are poor spellers may have been poor spellers even without mommy's cell phone, and it's not like they would have had any writing practice outside of school anyway. But the txt spelling is constantly being reinforced. It would be very surprising indeed if this had no repercussions whatsoever outside of cell phone use.
I personally believe that spelling is not the problem. Nowadays nearly everything written is written on a computer and computers have spell checkers. It's like being able to do mathematics in your head versus needing a calculator. Technology has made English spelling into a skill that is borderline archaic. And the fact that English is so absurdly non-phonetic also cannot be ignored. Maybe the language should gradually be changed to be spelled more like Spanish for instance. That would be moving in the direction of logic and progress. Txt language moves in exactly the opposite direction toward greater complexity in spelling. It is even more difficult to learn. Aside from the unnecessarily complicated spelling, the English language is one of the easiest in the world to learn. I have little doubt that that is the most important reason that it has replaced French as the international language, even though French is a much more beautiful language.
I think the biggest problem with all the txting is that the 140 character limit in nearly all of their communication may encourage a short attention span when it comes to reading, listening, and maybe all forms of communication. Yes, it encourages brevity/conciseness as well, but at the expense of genuine literacy. It is simply not possible to communicate complex and subtle concepts in less than 140 characters. If you zone out any time a "wall of text" exceeds a few sentences you are going to have a lot of trouble understanding complex and subtle ideas. And if you limit your outgoing communications to no more than a few sentences at a time you are going to severely limit the complexity and subtlety of ideas that you can express. Eventually this laziness, lack of patience, and expectation that all information be received in easily digestible little pieces can become habitual and you won't realize that anything is wrong with the way you are processing information.
Inserting DRM into a game is stealing. Downloading a game from TPB is merely copyright infringement. A form of trespassing on imaginary property and a form of protest against restrictive DRM.
So when you socialize more your amygdala gets bigger. That part of your brain is responsible for social activities. So hot girls have big amygdalas and nerdy guys have small amygdalas. At least there is one part of the brain of outgoing, social people that isn't underdeveloped. If they did anything other than chat with their friends, get drunk, and have sex they might avoid having an underdeveloped cerebral cortex. A choice between having a more developed cerebral cortex and a more developed amygdala ain't no choice at all.
Now under Swedish law if he slept with them and they withdrew consent it is considered rape. So if they said stop not without the condom while he was screwing them then it is rape under swedish law.
The swedish prosecutors can't seem to decide what it is exactly that he is accused of. At the moment he seems to be accused of having sex with a torn condom and having sex with a sleeping woman. I haven't (recently) seen any claims that either woman withdrew her consent at any point. But the claims against him keep shifting. We'll have to wait for the trial to receive official word of exactly what it is he is accused of doing. If either women did tell him to stop (for whatever reason) and he went ahead anyway or if he really did have sex with a sleeping women (although it is hard for me to imagine her not waking up) then I would agree that he is guilty of what is commonly referred to as rape, and not just in Sweden. Otherwise the charges against him seem absurd. The sex with a sleeping woman claim seems particularly bizarre to me. If she didn't wake up, then how did she know that he even had sex with her? I suppose those sorts of details would be revealed at a trial.
Although there is no link to the original Swedish document, and I can't read Swedish anyway, the article indicates that Assange is being accused of 2 counts of rape. Both instances seem ridiculous for different reasons. I have had condoms tear and not realize it until I pulled out. So that alone is not a consent issue. In the other instance, how the hell is it possible to have sex with someone while they are asleep, with or without a condom. Would they not wake up before you even had the chance to stick it in? The key issue in both cases is whether or not Assange was in fact told to stop. Either he was or he wasn't. If he was told to stop, and continued anyway then it was rape by US definitions. If he was not told to stop and the women just got pissed off later for various reasons it was not rape by most normal definitions of the term. If Assange was not told to stop then I think CIA involvement becomes quite plausible. The accusers should be thoroughly investigated for secret money transfers etc. If they are Swedish citizens working for the CIA could they be liable for espionage charges under Swedish law? Wouldn't that make them traitors to the Swedish government?
Sure is different when you see the guy in the Wired article fled to Mexico shortly after.
Why? Maybe my sarcasm detector is in need of service, but it only indicates that the "defendants" realized they were in deep shit and risked 30 years or more in prison for owing money to the telephone companies and lying on a credit application. I don't think that warrants 30 years in prison. It was a sort of debtor prison situation. FBI is the new KGB. The real followup would be knowing if all those people were actually convicted and sentenced to 30 years each in federal prison. The lesson: always pay your bills to telcos on time and never lie on a credit application. If you do both you could end up spending the rest of your life-not-worth-living in prison with murderers and gangbangers. Note that some of the charges were for "copyright infringement". Are we talking mp3s here?
When I used to have Comcap I would use up my 250 gig per month up+down bandwidth cap in 4-5 days with a 10 mbit connection. Nowadays that equals around 10 hidef movies, or 10 modern games assuming a 1:1 ratio. and very often 1:1 isn't even possible on p2p. So that would mean only 7-9 movies or games. Then the rest of the month I wouldn't be able to download anything and had to be careful browsing too many web sites. And obviously no netflix streaming. I now have 35/35 mbit Fios. I don't have to worry about caps. I can max out my connection 24/7 for as long as I want without worrying about getting booted from the ISP. I'm sure that there are months where I use 1 TB or more combined up+down bandwidth. And there are months where I have almost nothing to download and probably use up no more than 50 GB combined bandwidth. The idea that all ISPs have caps is a myth. One that Comcap would like very much to spread far and wide. Comcap is one of the few ISPs where a faster connection is actually a bad thing. A faster connection just means you can use up your monthly bandwidth in only 1-2 days instead of 4-5. I for one would not pay extra for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, have you considered the full implications of that stance? Could the US, for example, censor Busboy Productions, Inc. on the grounds it has no first ammendment rights? Could they sieze Twitter's computer servers without a warrant on the grounds it has no fourth ammendment rights? Can they tap your wokplace phone without a warrant because your employer has no expectation of privacy?
The Lockean concept of natural rights upon which the constitution is based would clearly not apply to a corporation as such. A corporation is just a group of individuals. However the constitution was supposed to be about forbidding all actions of the government except what was expressly permitted by the founders' document. The founders were terribly afraid that their fledgling government--a republic if you can keep it--would become the same sort of tyranny that so many British colonists had recently fought and died to escape.
So you are looking at this all wrong. The question you should be asking is what right does the government have to seize servers, censor speech and tap phones. The answer is none, unless it is explicitly allowed under very specific circumstances by the constitution. Usually that involves probable cause to believe that some kind of crime has been committed etc.
Still, you might ask if the corporation does not have the same natural rights as individual human beings because corporations are not people then how do you justify protecting them from any sort of crime whether perpetrated by the government or by individuals? The answer has to derive from the natural rights of the individuals that make up the group. The made up entity that the individuals created (the group) may not have Lockean natural rights per se, but by damaging the group (as in your server seizure example) you are also damaging all or many of the individuals within the group.
Of course your censorship and phone tap examples do directly violate the natural rights of individuals in the group. In that sense they are not great examples for your point. It is only your property seizure example that requires the above elaboration because it is not clear exactly which humans own those computers or their contents. I think it can still be argued that they are owned quite directly by the shareholders, by all the members of the group individually. If the server is worth, say, $3000 and the company consists of 1000 people then you have just robbed $3 from each human, a clear violation of their right to have property.
Yes. I can see that it is certainly of great benefit to new businesses and to investors. But the poster you responded to was asking about the benefits to society. Those are not so easy to trace. Not every startup is a net benefit to society. Especially if it fails and the creditors take the fall. It could be argued that on the contrary this sort of free insurance policy is paid for by everyone else who has to pay higher interest rates on their loans or even higher taxes and inflation of the money supply due to banks failing which are considered "too big to fail" by the government. I happen to think that limited liability corporations and their absurd personhood are a net loss on any society that permits/encourages them. A company without such limited liability and without any "rights" as a person is of much greater value to society.
Therefore, corporate taxes should be abolished too, right? After all corporation is people and those people already pay their taxes.
That is a very logical argument. I completely agree. Just as soon as they lose all of their personhood status. Corporate taxes are the price they pay to the government for allowing them this absurd fiction that they are some kind of person. Apparently they consider it a good enough deal. Actually I would support ending corporate income taxes in any case. And personal income taxes as well. But that's another matter.
Good point. Excellent post. But I question whether this original 1608 form of corporation truly required the concept of personhood in order to exist. Perhaps a government that believes the trade off you speak of is one that is beneficial to society could simply grant limited liability against potential creditors directly to investors and leave it at that without invoking the whole corporation-as-person concept. The government could even just grant the individual investors a certain level of immunity from creditors sort of like what the concept of personal bankruptcy does for individuals. Some may argue that the whole business is really unfair to creditors who just want to get paid for their product/service, but that is another point entirely
Nice try but "free speech" is about limiting what the government can do. It is not about what individuals are allowed to do. That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it is not. The founders were worried about limiting government power. Technically the first amendment is not really even necessary. The whole point of the constitution was to discuss what the government was not allowed to do. Not what citizens were allowed to do. Even if corporations-as-individuals were abolished tomorrow, you would still have the self-same group of people working together toward a common goal of selling a product/service for a profit. And those individual employees would still have the right to not have the government interfere with their communications. The founders were concerned that any enumeration of specific rights (like the right to say or write whatever the fuck you want) would be taken to imply that those were the only rights that individuals possessed. In other words that the government would be free to do whatever was not expressly forbidden to it, but that the citizens of the Republic would be forbidden to do anything that was not expressly allowed by said government. Precisely the opposite of what the founders intended. Unfortunately the latter is exactly where we have ended up. Hence the necessity to enumerate all of our rights in "amendments" etc.
Explain to me from, say, an anarcho-libertarian perspective how a corporation-as-individual would even be possible? A corporation-as-individual type of institution relies on the government to enforce its unreal status. Back in the real world a corporation would just be a group of individuals cooperating toward whatever the goal of the corporation is: making widgets for instance. Without a government you couldn't have corporations as they currently exist. Just as you couldn't have copyrights or patents. At least not in their current form.
Even from a limited/bare-bones government Libertarian perspective there is nothing inherent to a sociopathic, many-as-one style corporation that is even remotely necessary to a free market economy. And in fact true laissez-faire capitalism would seem to require that corporations not be given special treatment over other groups of individuals. It requires active government intervention to do so.
If corporations were individuals they would be sociopaths as this 2003 Canadian documentary endeavors to show. In D&D they would be considered either lawful evil or chaotic evil (depending on the corporation). They are narrowly selfish and greedy to such an extent that as an individual they would almost certainly be criminals. Profit trumps every other concern without exception. So corporations are an evil institution, but are they a necessary evil? The price we pay for economic prosperity. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean we have to give them any more power than necessary to get what we (as a society) want from them (inexpensive, innovative, useful products).
I consider myself a Libertarian, but I would argue that even in a free society corporations-as-individuals should be prohibited. It simply does not make sense to grant them the same rights as an individual not only because they clearly are a group of individuals, but because corporations need to have limitations on their power and on their predictably ruthlessly selfish/evil behavior. Corporations are the only institutions that can even remotely compete with governments in terms of power and abuse of power and they should be treated warily because of this.
As a preteen in the late 70s I played a game that I remember as SPACWR on a friend's DEC PDP-11. My friend and I played for hours and thought it was great fun. It was really an ASCII Star Trek game originally written by Mike Mayfield in 1971 in BASIC and then translated into DEC BASIC by David Ahl who gave it the confusing name so similar to the game discussed here.
Here's another link for the curious.
http://www.dunnington.u-net.com/public/startrek/
The exact mechanism through which unpowered 22-25nm MLC NAND storage loses track of its data is interesting, but somewhat beside the point. The point is that there is an inherent limit to the technology in terms of data retention and we have now basically arrived there at 25nm.
You seem to be arguing that the loss of the drive itself through the destructive write mechanism is more significant. In many cases this is likely to be true, but many end users may not realize that leaving their drive unpowered for 8 months will result in data loss/corruption. These process shrinks are starting to blur the line between volatile and non-volatile storage.
As for the cost issue I think that cost reductions are a good thing in theory. When there is competition available in the market to drive down prices. Unfortunately, we haven't had such competition in the CPU market for a while. Which is why I used it as an example of how cost reductions don't necessarily result in lower prices at the consumer level. Of course there is competition in the SSD market. So the comparison is a bit unfair. Yet, I remain skeptical. Just because a company could lower their price to increase sales (and start a price war) doesn't mean they always will. As long as none of the competition attempts to get too ambitious with market share prices can stagnate for quite a while. Back when AMD was still competitive (in terms of performance) with Intel in the processor market they attempted to beat Intel on price for a while. Then they just stopped. They decided that the loss of profit margin wasn't worth the additional market share. Both companies happily maintained similar price/performance ratios for quite a while that way.
Is a 32nm version good enough for you?
Yes. Thanks for the link. A lot could change between now and Q2, but that is nice to see. I suspect they would reserve the right to change to different memory at any time. I will keep my fingers crossed that I will be able to purchase a 32nm SF-2000 series drive that maxes out the sata3 interface in both sequential reads and writes. Still, unless consumers become more aware that smaller process size is a bad thing for NAND SSDs I think all of the manufacturers will eventually be peddling NAND at 25nm and beyond. Their financial motivation is just too strong.
Sandforce has already announced its new sata3 controller. On paper it looks like it will have much faster sequential writes than Intel, but it sounds like it will also have a shorter lifetime and shorter data retention times due to the use of 25nm NAND. Intel is wisely sticking with 34nm. It may be more expensive to manufacture, but is superior tech. I can only hope that OCZ changes their mind and decides to at least offer a more expensive 34nm version. OCZ won't be shipping their Vertex 3 drives until Q2 so Intel will have a big head start in the market.
The NAND industry seems to be doing its best to encourage ignorance on the disadvantages of smaller process sizes from the consumer POV and the ignorance seems to be widespread. Getting the facts on this issue can be a bit difficult. Here is a good thread on the topic.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2142742
The following post sums it up better than I could. Note his point about data retention times as well. That is a point that is often ignored when the focus is solely on write cycles.
As flash cells are shrunk, they become less good. This is a fundamental feature of the technology. The overall volume of the cell becomes smaller, so less electrons can be stored in the cell (so the signal picked up by the electronics is weaker and less clear, so you get a higher error rate) and the insulating barriers around the cell must be made thinner, in order to save space - allowing the electrons to leak out of the cell more easily (reducing power off data retention time). The thinner insulation also wears out more quickly (reducing life cycles)
It's difficult to define a 'fundamantal' limit for flash, because it may be possible to work around poor performance, and as yet unknown new manufacturing techniques and semiconductor materials may be developed. However, it has been suggested in the scientific literature that 18-22 nm, is the realistic limit. Beyond that, the performance/reliability/lifespan of the flash would be too poor, no matter how much wear levelling, and how sophisticated the ECC codes were.
Enterprise grade SSD flash, will need higher specifications than flash for toy cameras. Enterprise applications are unlikely to tolerate 18 nm flash with 100 write cycles and one lost sector per 100 GB of data stored. However, this probably would be acceptable for toys or throwaway devices.
Some more coverage of the topic:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20090528/170920/
NAND Flash memory quality is also beginning to drop. Chips manufactured using 90nm-generation technology in 2004-05, for example, were assured for about 100,000 rewrites and data retention of about a decade. As multi-level architecture and smaller geometry are introduced, quality is showing a sharp decline. The 30nm 2-bit/cell chips expected to enter volume production in 2009-10 may well end up with a rewrite assurance of no more than 3,000 cycles, and a data retention time of about a year. The first 3-bit/cell chips are hitting the market now, with only a few hundred rewrites.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1502663
Flash memory works by trapping electrons. Over time these electrons leak away, until the charge is too small for the data to be read any more. With smaller feature sizes (34 nm instead of 45 or 65 nm) this leakage is more significant and fewer electrons can be stored per bit, thus the time during which the stored value can be maintained is decreased.
http://www.corsair.com/blog/force25nm/
Name some countries outside of Africa where cell phone use is not ubiquitous. I'll start. Cuba. North Korea maybe? Probably Myanmar (Burma). Surely there must be more. Maybe some of the 'Stans?
I must admit that I ( in the beginning of Wikileaks ) was chearing for Wikileaks. The idea of a place for whistleblowers to blow the whistle on companies doing bad things ( like BP etc. ) was nice.
So whistle blowers against private corporations = good, but against governments = bad? You don't really sound like the kind of guy to support whistle blowers of any kind. Especially when there are "security issues".
My cousin and his colleagues noted that he had a sleazy approach to women. This was before the accusations.
What does that even mean? Your cousin met him at a party and right there and then decided that he was probably a rapist? What was he doing at the party that made him seem guilty of having a "sleazy approach to women"?
The UK can also still deny Swedish extradition to the US.
How?
[citation needed]
In addition to the issue with death penalty crimes, Sweden also can't turn him over to the US without the UK's approval anyway, under European Union laws (Various extradition rules under the European Arrest Warrant [europa.eu] acts).
Once he is in Sweden, what does the UK have to do with anything? He's not a citizen of the UK. Are you saying that the first EU country to extradite him somehow has veto power over any further extraditions by other EU countries?
I think seeds are mostly from people with a sense of fairness. It's not really pure altruism. I upload at least as much as I download because the whole system is not sustainable otherwise (essentially a selfish motive). I don't believe in taking from the swarm more than I am giving back. It's true that quite a few people don't care, which is probably one reason why all torrents eventually die. But there are enough people with a sense of fairness to make the system mostly work. It's really about trading. The swarm gives me a copy of the movie/game/CD and I feel compelled to give back at least as much data as I was given. I guess it's an honor system of sorts. I think many or even most people wouldn't steal stuff even if they thought they wouldn't be caught.
It's that same sense of fairness that powers bittorrent and also motivates some people to buy content instead of downloading it. I do both. I download everything first to try it. If I like it then I buy the usually higher quality paid version. Games/software are the exception because the paid version is actually lower quality than the downloaded one due to draconian DRM. I only purchase DRM-free software, which basically doesn't exist anymore.
If a generation Z kid tries to communicate with me in their language I simply won't understand them. I do understand that their language serves a purpose in terms of manual data compression. As another poster pointed out you could just have the phone translate it into English after it has been transmitted. Yet it does isolate them from the rest of the world who doesn't speak their language. I highly doubt it helps their English skills in any way because what they are practicing is not English.
I doubt that text messaging in txt language is in itself enough to make a good speller into a bad speller, but you are not going to find that out in a 10 week study. I think the argument is that children are getting too much of the wrong kind of language practice. They are getting a huge amount of practice in a language which does not exist outside of their group. It may be true that the txters who are poor spellers may have been poor spellers even without mommy's cell phone, and it's not like they would have had any writing practice outside of school anyway. But the txt spelling is constantly being reinforced. It would be very surprising indeed if this had no repercussions whatsoever outside of cell phone use.
I personally believe that spelling is not the problem. Nowadays nearly everything written is written on a computer and computers have spell checkers. It's like being able to do mathematics in your head versus needing a calculator. Technology has made English spelling into a skill that is borderline archaic. And the fact that English is so absurdly non-phonetic also cannot be ignored. Maybe the language should gradually be changed to be spelled more like Spanish for instance. That would be moving in the direction of logic and progress. Txt language moves in exactly the opposite direction toward greater complexity in spelling. It is even more difficult to learn. Aside from the unnecessarily complicated spelling, the English language is one of the easiest in the world to learn. I have little doubt that that is the most important reason that it has replaced French as the international language, even though French is a much more beautiful language.
I think the biggest problem with all the txting is that the 140 character limit in nearly all of their communication may encourage a short attention span when it comes to reading, listening, and maybe all forms of communication. Yes, it encourages brevity/conciseness as well, but at the expense of genuine literacy. It is simply not possible to communicate complex and subtle concepts in less than 140 characters. If you zone out any time a "wall of text" exceeds a few sentences you are going to have a lot of trouble understanding complex and subtle ideas. And if you limit your outgoing communications to no more than a few sentences at a time you are going to severely limit the complexity and subtlety of ideas that you can express. Eventually this laziness, lack of patience, and expectation that all information be received in easily digestible little pieces can become habitual and you won't realize that anything is wrong with the way you are processing information.
Inserting DRM into a game is stealing. Downloading a game from TPB is merely copyright infringement. A form of trespassing on imaginary property and a form of protest against restrictive DRM.
So when you socialize more your amygdala gets bigger. That part of your brain is responsible for social activities. So hot girls have big amygdalas and nerdy guys have small amygdalas. At least there is one part of the brain of outgoing, social people that isn't underdeveloped. If they did anything other than chat with their friends, get drunk, and have sex they might avoid having an underdeveloped cerebral cortex. A choice between having a more developed cerebral cortex and a more developed amygdala ain't no choice at all.
Now under Swedish law if he slept with them and they withdrew consent it is considered rape. So if they said stop not without the condom while he was screwing them then it is rape under swedish law.
The swedish prosecutors can't seem to decide what it is exactly that he is accused of. At the moment he seems to be accused of having sex with a torn condom and having sex with a sleeping woman. I haven't (recently) seen any claims that either woman withdrew her consent at any point. But the claims against him keep shifting. We'll have to wait for the trial to receive official word of exactly what it is he is accused of doing. If either women did tell him to stop (for whatever reason) and he went ahead anyway or if he really did have sex with a sleeping women (although it is hard for me to imagine her not waking up) then I would agree that he is guilty of what is commonly referred to as rape, and not just in Sweden. Otherwise the charges against him seem absurd. The sex with a sleeping woman claim seems particularly bizarre to me. If she didn't wake up, then how did she know that he even had sex with her? I suppose those sorts of details would be revealed at a trial.
Although there is no link to the original Swedish document, and I can't read Swedish anyway, the article indicates that Assange is being accused of 2 counts of rape. Both instances seem ridiculous for different reasons. I have had condoms tear and not realize it until I pulled out. So that alone is not a consent issue. In the other instance, how the hell is it possible to have sex with someone while they are asleep, with or without a condom. Would they not wake up before you even had the chance to stick it in? The key issue in both cases is whether or not Assange was in fact told to stop. Either he was or he wasn't. If he was told to stop, and continued anyway then it was rape by US definitions. If he was not told to stop and the women just got pissed off later for various reasons it was not rape by most normal definitions of the term. If Assange was not told to stop then I think CIA involvement becomes quite plausible. The accusers should be thoroughly investigated for secret money transfers etc. If they are Swedish citizens working for the CIA could they be liable for espionage charges under Swedish law? Wouldn't that make them traitors to the Swedish government?
Sure is different when you see the guy in the Wired article fled to Mexico shortly after.
Why? Maybe my sarcasm detector is in need of service, but it only indicates that the "defendants" realized they were in deep shit and risked 30 years or more in prison for owing money to the telephone companies and lying on a credit application. I don't think that warrants 30 years in prison. It was a sort of debtor prison situation. FBI is the new KGB. The real followup would be knowing if all those people were actually convicted and sentenced to 30 years each in federal prison. The lesson: always pay your bills to telcos on time and never lie on a credit application. If you do both you could end up spending the rest of your life-not-worth-living in prison with murderers and gangbangers. Note that some of the charges were for "copyright infringement". Are we talking mp3s here?
In other news, AMD is now hiring thousands of hackers with 3G cellular experience. For what purpose, nobody knows.
When I used to have Comcap I would use up my 250 gig per month up+down bandwidth cap in 4-5 days with a 10 mbit connection. Nowadays that equals around 10 hidef movies, or 10 modern games assuming a 1:1 ratio. and very often 1:1 isn't even possible on p2p. So that would mean only 7-9 movies or games. Then the rest of the month I wouldn't be able to download anything and had to be careful browsing too many web sites. And obviously no netflix streaming. I now have 35/35 mbit Fios. I don't have to worry about caps. I can max out my connection 24/7 for as long as I want without worrying about getting booted from the ISP. I'm sure that there are months where I use 1 TB or more combined up+down bandwidth. And there are months where I have almost nothing to download and probably use up no more than 50 GB combined bandwidth. The idea that all ISPs have caps is a myth. One that Comcap would like very much to spread far and wide. Comcap is one of the few ISPs where a faster connection is actually a bad thing. A faster connection just means you can use up your monthly bandwidth in only 1-2 days instead of 4-5. I for one would not pay extra for that.