Didn't spend enough time address each issue and I can't find my notes on the subject. I will try ot address them from memory.
1.)N. America lacking a crop - Don't remember enough about this to adress it
2.) Mexico - Peru - Yes, it is indeed extremely difficult to travel between the two but no more difficult than say between Rome and Peking/Shanghai; silk road (as an single example). Where there is a will there is a way.
3.)Africa no suitable crops - The Nile river and delta managed to supply the Roman empire with most of it's grain for centuries, and the lower nile supplied the Axum kingdom quite well, and the Niger river supplied a number of kingdoms on the gold coast with a dependable crop (wheat).
4.)Mayans/Aztecs in central america. Indeed, I should've clarified this.
Actually, recent evidence suggest that the basque fisherman might have gotten to the great banks around 900-1000 A.D b/c they where following the cod migrations.
BTW, Cod, which drew the fisherman to the great banks, was once so plentiful you could 'walk across the N.atlantic on their backs.' Now, cod fishing is banned b/c of massive overfishing.
ahh I see Jared Diamonds book has even influenced slashdot readers. Time to have a look at this 'book'.
1.) his central premise of ecological conditions determining human devolopment falls apart B/c
a.) China - more advanced than the west until about 1800 yet in the tropics, supposedly impossible to develop an advanced ciz. in warm climates
b.) N.America - nearly identical climate with Europe but never developed a truly advanced civilization
c.) S. America - close climate paralells with Africa but developed highly advanced culutures and civilizations: Mayan, Inca, Aztec
2.) Disease
a.) Argues that disease destroyed african civilizations but glosses over such European calamities as
Black Plague, Typhoid,Malaria and many others
b.) Seems to base his research more on current world situations than historical
3.) The whole basis of continents with North-South Axis and East-West axis is absurd and makes me mad just thinking about. In particular, Asia can be either a North-South or East-West depending upon where you measure.
These are just to many, I tried to go over the most important and glaring mistakes he made. In all honesty, for a truly global perspective check out Andre Gundar Frank's ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (too lazy to link it).
Actually that book is full of fallacies, bad scholarships, and outright lies.
TO name just a few:
1.) his central premise of ecological conditions determinging human devolopment falls apart B/c
a.) China - more advanced than the west until about 1800 yet in the tropics, supposedly impossible to develop an inadvanced ciz. in warm climates
b.) N.America - nearly identical climate with Europe but never developed a truly advanced civilization
c.) S. America - close climate paralells with Africa but developed highly advanced culutures and civilizations: Mayan, Inca, Aztec
2.) Disease
a.) Argues that disease destroyed african civilizations but glosses over such European calamities as
Black Plague, Typhoid,Malaria and many others
b.) Seems to base his research more on current world situations than historical
3.) The whole basis of continents with North-South Axis and East-West axis is absurd and makes me mad just thinking about. In particular, Asia can be either a North-South or East-West depending upon where you measure.
These are just to many, I tried to go over the most important and glaring mistakes he made. In all honesty, for a truly global perspective check out Andre Gundar Frank's ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (too lazy to link it).
Road runner wasn't mentioned as one of the people looking into this - it was COX, AT&T, and ComCast.
If I was a cynical person I would say that Time Warner was advertising it like that and planned on charging people per computer once it was firmly established in the marketplace.
Not really a big deal when you consider that there is *no* way for them to know this is occuring... unless someone tells them of course. None. Zip. Zilch. ZeRo.
I do remember reading somewhere that the cable companies where trying to introduce a new form of adressing that would allow them to 'see' everything behind a NAT (the premise to prevent this type of type and to charge you per computer).
There is quite a bit of research out there that suggests that most people find 3d navigation imposssibly hard to understand/use. Here are some relevant links:
Not to mention how to you display such things to a reader who is blind or has any other type of disability... the list goes on. Beautiful idea, but not very good in practice.
Hmmm. Ok let's do some (quick) math here. Assume that roughly 1 million copyrighted works are (succesfully) downloaded every day - not too high of a figure I believe. OK now let's apply these fines to them:
1 million x 25,000 = $25,000,000,000 Wow! 25 billion dollars a day in fines! 25tril x 365 = 9,125,000,000,000. 9.125 trillion dollars a year in fines. Or, the govt's budget for the next 9 years. I understand now - quick way to kill that pesky 'ol national debt.
And more fun! Assume 60 million people have 100 downloaded copyright works liable for prosecution. 2.5$ million per person. I, personally, have 2,326 'copyrighted' works: 58 million in fines.
Perfect, these fines some perfectly reasonable and just - not extortion no sir.
Re:And how are they supposed to measure this?
on
More on MPEG4
·
· Score: 2
True, they do charge you the gas tax, but look at it this way at least you are getting something worthwile out of it. Most of the road building/devolepment/maintence is paid for by the gas tax (at least in nebraska); the rest is other taxes/federal funds.
With the mpeg-4 scheme all you are paying for is some rich CEO to get richer.
Indeed props to intel for standing up to the RIAA and MPAA. Of course Intel could buy them both and still have enough money to purchase Rhode Island, but I digrees.
But, give credit to microsoft also. Steve ballmer is mentioned as a signee of the letter sent to the Recording/Movie industy. Give credit to all EIGHT companies who signed the letter. They all realized that this would be the death of the PC as we know it and are trying to stop it - course I wonder why they haven't bought a few senators yet..
microsoft showers us with donations of hardware for the labs, and software and books for the students. as well as contests, events, and has been incredibly helpful for our branch of the ACM. as for documentation, free copies of MSDN and all the microsoft press books you could ever want go a long way
Rule of Acquistion #98: Every man has his price.
=)
Re:Now we know where to land
on
Lots of Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As a general plug I would suggest to anyone interested in the possibilites of terraforming mars to read Kim Stanley Robinson's 3-part Mars series. All 3 won the Hugo (or was it nebula?). Great books.
I hate the arrogance of these interface 'experts'. GUI isn't everything people. Everyone knows that you can get things done ten times faster in a GUI yet home many people still stick with a plain old Bash shell?
Ridiculous. I want everything on my computer to be customizable to fit MY needs. Not what somebody tells me are my needs. My computer (MINE DAMMMIT!) shouldn't be a glorified VCR.. which of course the expertly designed easy-to-use interface that about 1/2 the population can't figure out how to set the clock on, much less do anything useful with.
Sigh. I am getting tired of effects/operations that I can't seem to change or get rid of. Case in point: Mac OSX's inumerable annoying features, wee purdy, it slides Joe Bob! Enough already. This is the trend of things to come, my fellow slashdotters. GUI 'experts' will design the 'perfect' GUI that of course A.)Is hard to use C.)Has so many animations that 30% of the people using it have epileptic attacks C.)Is totally uncustomizable: I can hear it now, But.1pt font is so much more EFFICENT! You can fit 1x10^27 characters on your screen!
I'm sure a non-customizable interface will probably allow most people to get work done faster. THe point of most people who bitch about OS X(Use it and hate it... god I hate animations) isn't whether or not it is more efficient or not. the POINT is that THEY want to control how their OS behaves, not Steve.
If efficiency was king we sure as sh** wouldn't be using linux now would we? To type in any standard linux commnad takes, on average, about 2-3 times as long then a simpler GUI interface. But, we LIKE to. *I AM GEEK HEAR ME TYPE*. I want to be able to do just about anything to my OS b/c that's how *I* want to do it. Not Steve, or Bill, or some 'efficiency expert'. If i want to convert my OS to only accept Hex commands thats my right!
I understand your point, too much customization can be a bad thing for the average user, but not allowing users hardly any control over there GUI is not the solution either. And, god I hate to say this, microsoft actually did the right thing when they allowed WinXP to be changed to 'classic' windows format ( -1, flamebait). Happy medium people.. happy medium.
was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea
Seems obvious to me - the guy is for better relations with china as well as furthering education! Damm where do I vote? Such an innovative speaker!
On a serious note, I hope this guy gets his head put on a pike and placed on display as a warning to the next ten generations that some things come as too high a price.
Not everday you get to use a B5 quote now is it? =)
Actually, when I took my Comp Sci 101 class awhile back the professor brought up a situation in which a computer program has harmed people. It's been awhile so I only remember the general gist of the stories.
Consider: Company designed X program to run X piece of medical equipment. Program fails. Patient dies. Who is responisble (the company was sued out of existence it turns out)
Consider: Company designed mainframe system X. System fails b/c of date-bug (like 2K bug but it failed on 1987 for some reason). Hospital computers crash. Nobody dies but it was a distinct possibility.
It isn't that hard to extrapolate situations where computer programs can/do cause actual physical harm to people (would YOU want win95 running the air traffic control system? Didn't think so).
Holding software makers unaccountable for their errors is ridiculous. No industry in America is allowed to do this. You can say software is impossible to be completely fail-safe. Ok, so are cars, VCRS, DVD players, airplanes, etc but manufactures are still held liable. Simple fact is the software industry has been able to produce bug ridden, crappy software under the title of 'good enough' for far too long. Accoutability is desperately needed.
FPS is almost wholly the end computer's problem. Now, the exception to this is when lag problems start to crop up. Depending on the speed of your computer you will notice a FPS drop anywhere from 200ms-400ms.
110ms isn't nothing major, agreed. But the point was that it increased by 100ms after 20 clients where logged on. (100% increase)
FPS is totally dependent (At on counter-strike) upon the client. But I can give you this statistic.
Ping times, normal load, across a 100base-t network for the server was about 12ms. When more than 17 people joined they would start spiking to a max of 110ms.
Great Idea, but I imagine the technical aspect would kill the game. Rendering and controlling htat much data will destroy even the fatest server (unless somebody smarter than I figures out a way to do things better).
Consider a counterstrike server (used to run one). OK, so we went through a university connection (DS-3) used a pentium II-400, 512mb ram, and linux. 20 ppl max. When you got 20 people on there the server would be running at nearly 99% utilization. I cannot imagine any server that would be able to handle interacting the thousands of elements needed to do what you say.
Even if you had acess to dual P4-2.0 GHZ machine consider if hte bandwith could support the game you describe. Figure a rought estimate of 50-100 people per machine @ around 5.0k/sec and you quickly max out your connection.
But, I might be wrong on all of the above. It is late at nite =)
Just a quick suggestion, try Opera. Very small, very fast browser that is available on alot of platforms with lots of features including the ability to shut off all of the pop-up ads. Quite useful.
Students made,drafted, and passed the code of conduct when it comes to computer use.
Students do have the final say. And as I explained better in a previous post no filtering software is used, you can look at whatever the hell you want as long (sex ed, condoms, beasty porn,whatever) as it is FOR A CLASS!! Academic use only, not private whack-off time.
Yes I believe in free speech but no I don't believe in giving computers away for people to sit on them and whack off all day long. Half the people I catch are not even students at the university - just old men trying to get off. Do i want to extend free speech to them? YES! But not in a damm library for computers that are for academic use only. Simple.
Information on condoms, or anything related to sex-education is OK, even doing research for a class on porn is fine (note from instructor is required). What isn't OK is defined here:
Personal use of any University information system to access, download, print, store, forward, transmit or distribute obscene material.
Note the words Personal and the word obscene (as defined by the Supreme Court), too lazy to look up the link.
There are absolutely no filtering programs in effect on any of the computers on campus. This is left entirely in the judgement of the consultants maning the labs, i.e. me. Basically I see some beasty porn, some C**shots, etc and I kick them out of the library. Sounds harsh from a ACLU member doesn't it? Well you catch people masturbating to porn (never women I might add *Sigh) when you are working and then see just how happy you are to see it.
Policy isn't bad and is really quite reasonable. Just don't look at porn to get off and you don't violate the policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't spend enough time address each issue and I can't find my notes on the subject. I will try ot address them from memory. 1.)N. America lacking a crop - Don't remember enough about this to adress it 2.) Mexico - Peru - Yes, it is indeed extremely difficult to travel between the two but no more difficult than say between Rome and Peking/Shanghai; silk road (as an single example). Where there is a will there is a way. 3.)Africa no suitable crops - The Nile river and delta managed to supply the Roman empire with most of it's grain for centuries, and the lower nile supplied the Axum kingdom quite well, and the Niger river supplied a number of kingdoms on the gold coast with a dependable crop (wheat). 4.)Mayans/Aztecs in central america. Indeed, I should've clarified this.
1.) 2000 years ago is far too long - try more like 600-700
2.) Actually many chinese cities where larger than 100,000 and some exceeded 3 million - around 0 A.d.
3.) Many italian cities exceeded 500,000 around the time columbus discovered america
Actually, recent evidence suggest that the basque fisherman might have gotten to the great banks around 900-1000 A.D b/c they where following the cod migrations.
BTW, Cod, which drew the fisherman to the great banks, was once so plentiful you could 'walk across the N.atlantic on their backs.' Now, cod fishing is banned b/c of massive overfishing.
ahh I see Jared Diamonds book has even influenced slashdot readers. Time to have a look at this 'book'.
1.) his central premise of ecological conditions determining human devolopment falls apart B/c
a.) China - more advanced than the west until about 1800 yet in the tropics, supposedly impossible to develop an advanced ciz. in warm climates
b.) N.America - nearly identical climate with Europe but never developed a truly advanced civilization
c.) S. America - close climate paralells with Africa but developed highly advanced culutures and civilizations: Mayan, Inca, Aztec
2.) Disease
a.) Argues that disease destroyed african civilizations but glosses over such European calamities as
Black Plague, Typhoid,Malaria and many others
b.) Seems to base his research more on current world situations than historical
3.) The whole basis of continents with North-South Axis and East-West axis is absurd and makes me mad just thinking about. In particular, Asia can be either a North-South or East-West depending upon where you measure.
These are just to many, I tried to go over the most important and glaring mistakes he made. In all honesty, for a truly global perspective check out Andre Gundar Frank's ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (too lazy to link it).
Actually that book is full of fallacies, bad scholarships, and outright lies. TO name just a few: 1.) his central premise of ecological conditions determinging human devolopment falls apart B/c a.) China - more advanced than the west until about 1800 yet in the tropics, supposedly impossible to develop an inadvanced ciz. in warm climates b.) N.America - nearly identical climate with Europe but never developed a truly advanced civilization c.) S. America - close climate paralells with Africa but developed highly advanced culutures and civilizations: Mayan, Inca, Aztec 2.) Disease a.) Argues that disease destroyed african civilizations but glosses over such European calamities as Black Plague, Typhoid,Malaria and many others b.) Seems to base his research more on current world situations than historical 3.) The whole basis of continents with North-South Axis and East-West axis is absurd and makes me mad just thinking about. In particular, Asia can be either a North-South or East-West depending upon where you measure. These are just to many, I tried to go over the most important and glaring mistakes he made. In all honesty, for a truly global perspective check out Andre Gundar Frank's ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (too lazy to link it).
Road runner wasn't mentioned as one of the people looking into this - it was COX, AT&T, and ComCast.
If I was a cynical person I would say that Time Warner was advertising it like that and planned on charging people per computer once it was firmly established in the marketplace.
Not really a big deal when you consider that there is *no* way for them to know this is occuring... unless someone tells them of course. None. Zip. Zilch. ZeRo.
I do remember reading somewhere that the cable companies where trying to introduce a new form of adressing that would allow them to 'see' everything behind a NAT (the premise to prevent this type of type and to charge you per computer).
There is quite a bit of research out there that suggests that most people find 3d navigation imposssibly hard to understand/use. Here are some relevant links:
Summary of book on Web Usability
Why 3-D navigation is bad (People aren't frogs)
Not to mention how to you display such things to a reader who is blind or has any other type of disability... the list goes on. Beautiful idea, but not very good in practice.
Hmmm. Ok let's do some (quick) math here. Assume that roughly 1 million copyrighted works are (succesfully) downloaded every day - not too high of a figure I believe. OK now let's apply these fines to them:
1 million x 25,000 = $25,000,000,000
Wow! 25 billion dollars a day in fines! 25tril x 365 = 9,125,000,000,000. 9.125 trillion dollars a year in fines. Or, the govt's budget for the next 9 years. I understand now - quick way to kill that pesky 'ol national debt.
And more fun! Assume 60 million people have 100 downloaded copyright works liable for prosecution. 2.5$ million per person. I, personally, have 2,326 'copyrighted' works: 58 million in fines.
Perfect, these fines some perfectly reasonable and just - not extortion no sir.
True, they do charge you the gas tax, but look at it this way at least you are getting something worthwile out of it. Most of the road building/devolepment/maintence is paid for by the gas tax (at least in nebraska); the rest is other taxes/federal funds.
With the mpeg-4 scheme all you are paying for is some rich CEO to get richer.
Indeed props to intel for standing up to the RIAA and MPAA. Of course Intel could buy them both and still have enough money to purchase Rhode Island, but I digrees. But, give credit to microsoft also. Steve ballmer is mentioned as a signee of the letter sent to the Recording/Movie industy. Give credit to all EIGHT companies who signed the letter. They all realized that this would be the death of the PC as we know it and are trying to stop it - course I wonder why they haven't bought a few senators yet..
microsoft showers us with donations of hardware for the labs, and software and books for the students. as well as contests, events, and has been incredibly helpful for our branch of the ACM. as for documentation, free copies of MSDN and all the microsoft press books you could ever want go a long way
Rule of Acquistion #98: Every man has his price.
=)
As a general plug I would suggest to anyone interested in the possibilites of terraforming mars to read Kim Stanley Robinson's 3-part Mars series. All 3 won the Hugo (or was it nebula?). Great books.
I hate the arrogance of these interface 'experts'. GUI isn't everything people. Everyone knows that you can get things done ten times faster in a GUI yet home many people still stick with a plain old Bash shell?
Ridiculous. I want everything on my computer to be customizable to fit MY needs. Not what somebody tells me are my needs. My computer (MINE DAMMMIT!) shouldn't be a glorified VCR.. which of course the expertly designed easy-to-use interface that about 1/2 the population can't figure out how to set the clock on, much less do anything useful with.
Sigh. I am getting tired of effects/operations that I can't seem to change or get rid of. Case in point: Mac OSX's inumerable annoying features, wee purdy, it slides Joe Bob! Enough already. This is the trend of things to come, my fellow slashdotters. GUI 'experts' will design the 'perfect' GUI that of course A.)Is hard to use
C.)Has so many animations that 30% of the people using it have epileptic attacks C.)Is totally uncustomizable: I can hear it now, But
Oops.They are close... Kindof. My bad.
I'm sure a non-customizable interface will probably allow most people to get work done faster. THe point of most people who bitch about OS X(Use it and hate it... god I hate animations) isn't whether or not it is more efficient or not. the POINT is that THEY want to control how their OS behaves, not Steve .
If efficiency was king we sure as sh** wouldn't be using linux now would we? To type in any standard linux commnad takes, on average, about 2-3 times as long then a simpler GUI interface. But, we LIKE to. *I AM GEEK HEAR ME TYPE*. I want to be able to do just about anything to my OS b/c that's how *I* want to do it. Not Steve, or Bill, or some 'efficiency expert'. If i want to convert my OS to only accept Hex commands thats my right!
I understand your point, too much customization can be a bad thing for the average user, but not allowing users hardly any control over there GUI is not the solution either. And, god I hate to say this, microsoft actually did the right thing when they allowed WinXP to be changed to 'classic' windows format ( -1, flamebait). Happy medium people.. happy medium.
was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea
Seems obvious to me - the guy is for better relations with china as well as furthering education! Damm where do I vote? Such an innovative speaker!
On a serious note, I hope this guy gets his head put on a pike and placed on display as a warning to the next ten generations that some things come as too high a price.
Not everday you get to use a B5 quote now is it? =)
I work at a university lab and we use Citrix. Extremely expensive, yes, but it is quite good... if you want ot pay for it.
Actually, when I took my Comp Sci 101 class awhile back the professor brought up a situation in which a computer program has harmed people. It's been awhile so I only remember the general gist of the stories.
Consider: Company designed X program to run X piece of medical equipment. Program fails. Patient dies. Who is responisble (the company was sued out of existence it turns out)
Consider: Company designed mainframe system X. System fails b/c of date-bug (like 2K bug but it failed on 1987 for some reason). Hospital computers crash. Nobody dies but it was a distinct possibility.
It isn't that hard to extrapolate situations where computer programs can/do cause actual physical harm to people (would YOU want win95 running the air traffic control system? Didn't think so).
Holding software makers unaccountable for their errors is ridiculous. No industry in America is allowed to do this. You can say software is impossible to be completely fail-safe. Ok, so are cars, VCRS, DVD players, airplanes, etc but manufactures are still held liable. Simple fact is the software industry has been able to produce bug ridden, crappy software under the title of 'good enough' for far too long. Accoutability is desperately needed.
FPS is almost wholly the end computer's problem. Now, the exception to this is when lag problems start to crop up. Depending on the speed of your computer you will notice a FPS drop anywhere from 200ms-400ms. 110ms isn't nothing major, agreed. But the point was that it increased by 100ms after 20 clients where logged on. (100% increase)
FPS is totally dependent (At on counter-strike) upon the client. But I can give you this statistic. Ping times, normal load, across a 100base-t network for the server was about 12ms. When more than 17 people joined they would start spiking to a max of 110ms.
Great Idea, but I imagine the technical aspect would kill the game. Rendering and controlling htat much data will destroy even the fatest server (unless somebody smarter than I figures out a way to do things better).
Consider a counterstrike server (used to run one). OK, so we went through a university connection (DS-3) used a pentium II-400, 512mb ram, and linux. 20 ppl max. When you got 20 people on there the server would be running at nearly 99% utilization. I cannot imagine any server that would be able to handle interacting the thousands of elements needed to do what you say.
Even if you had acess to dual P4-2.0 GHZ machine consider if hte bandwith could support the game you describe. Figure a rought estimate of 50-100 people per machine @ around 5.0k/sec and you quickly max out your connection.
But, I might be wrong on all of the above. It is late at nite =)
Just a quick suggestion, try Opera. Very small, very fast browser that is available on alot of platforms with lots of features including the ability to shut off all of the pop-up ads. Quite useful.
Students made,drafted, and passed the code of conduct when it comes to computer use.
Students do have the final say. And as I explained better in a previous post no filtering software is used, you can look at whatever the hell you want as long (sex ed, condoms, beasty porn,whatever) as it is FOR A CLASS!! Academic use only, not private whack-off time.
Yes I believe in free speech but no I don't believe in giving computers away for people to sit on them and whack off all day long. Half the people I catch are not even students at the university - just old men trying to get off. Do i want to extend free speech to them? YES! But not in a damm library for computers that are for academic use only. Simple.
Maybe I should've explained the policy better.
Information on condoms, or anything related to sex-education is OK, even doing research for a class on porn is fine (note from instructor is required). What isn't OK is defined here:
Personal use of any University information system to access, download, print, store, forward, transmit or distribute obscene material.
Note the words Personal and the word obscene (as defined by the Supreme Court), too lazy to look up the link.
There are absolutely no filtering programs in effect on any of the computers on campus. This is left entirely in the judgement of the consultants maning the labs, i.e. me. Basically I see some beasty porn, some C**shots, etc and I kick them out of the library. Sounds harsh from a ACLU member doesn't it? Well you catch people masturbating to porn (never women I might add *Sigh) when you are working and then see just how happy you are to see it.
Policy isn't bad and is really quite reasonable. Just don't look at porn to get off and you don't violate the policy.