I seem to remember this sucking on the Atari 800 as well...but later I found a Pac Man "playalike" that was much better.
Re:Generally, looks to be the right idea; watch ou
on
Virtual Volunteering
·
· Score: 2
If the entire world was as developed as the West, I am sure they would find the energy needed. It would be a great boon to society to have starving Ethiopian farmers become well-fed Ph.D. engineers working on hydrogen, fusion, and solar energy!
CO2 is an issue. It is an economic "externality" that can only be effectively dealt with through regulation.
But the decision is whether you develop technology for economically reasonable CO2 reduction now and regulate later, or whether you regulate now (potentially disrupting global economies) in hope of developing technology later, if you can afford it.
The US government decided to look for technology first before adopting the Kyoto Protocol, which would provide a questionable envrionmental benefit even if it could be enforced.
Either way, the good news is that CO2 reducing technologies are under development (mainly in high-GDP countries). We already have nuclear fission which we may need global climate change to give us the guts to use. LED lighting, fuel cells, advanced solar, and hydrogen fuel are currently under development.
One other thought: The US produces the most CO2 per capita, but the least CO2 per dollar of GDP in the world. Thinking that way, it is the most efficient user of energy...
Education alone doesn't work though. There has been a lot of pressure from the IMF/WB and foreign aid donors to establish schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, there is a lot more schooling in Africa than there was 50 years ago, and a ton of Unviersities.
But...in many countries in Africa, there is no functioning free market economy to hire the newly educated. So often children drop out of school to work in the fields and make some money, or stay in school and come to the US and Europe once they have a college degree.
It is no suprise that 50 years of the West trying to get economic growth going in Africa has failed. The West has always missed the basics, free markets that are appropriately regulated, with strong currencies (that are really strong and not artifically propped up by exchange laws that encourage black-market currency trading) are what allows economic growth to occur.
In the meantime, we've been trying to get Africa to industrialize and educate. Industrial machinery has no inputs or way to sell outputs in the government-commanded economies. Oops. Education also failed for the reasons I mentioned above. Ooops. So then we just started to give them loans (bribes) to fix their economies. Didn't work because the people in charge kept the loans (bribes), didn't change, and now have Bono shilling for them to get debt forgiveness to get more loans (bribes).
If US geeks were more economically literate, that might help!
Unless you are planning a nonprofit that has as it mission the overthrow of dictatorships, and the establishment of freedom in these nations.
Sign me up! The "Licoln Brigade" of the new millenium, bringing democracy and free markets to the world's poor!
Re:Generally, looks to be the right idea; watch ou
on
Virtual Volunteering
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The concept that the world cannot support a population living with "Western" standards is not only wrong, it is pseudo-racist.
As societies become more technologically and economically developed, resources are used more efficiently. Moreover, advanced economies can afford to search more far, wide, and smart with regard to resources. In the US, most commodities are cheaper now (in inflation adjusted terms) than 30 years ago. Richer countries also have decreased birth rates.
Moreover, "externalities" such as air pollution are easier to deal with in a rich economy because the extra money is there to add the exhaust controls and regulations neeeded. If you are going to starve, you don't care about micro-particles breathed in because of your in-home coal fire.
The big mistake is that economies are not zero-sum games. Everyone can get rich together, infact the world is far, far richer now than it was than at the turn of the century. Look at places like South Korea that went from a dirt-poor agricultural country to having better broadband than the US. Even very underdeveloped countries are better off, though lagging Western standards.
Every free market exchange raises the wealth of both parties, or else the parties would not agree to participate. Moreover, rises in market prices of resources (if they happen) either cause more effort to go into finding them, or cause more effort to go into alternatives.
This doesn't mean there won't be some specific environmental problems...global CO2 is probably a problem, but would be easier to deal with in a rich world than a poor one. But don't worry about non-externality commodities such as iron, tin, copper, and oil, the market will take care of them just fine.
The best thing about running your own business is that you quickly learn that business is job one, not programming. Revenues, cash flow, customers, etc. make a business. Technology is just a tool to encourage customers to give you money, but not the only tool, and often secondary to marketing and management.
Accidental gun deaths in US per year: 1000 As percentage of all accidental deaths 1%
Accidental gun deaths have been falling in the US over time. Many accidental deaths are due to hunting, and I also suspect that many "accidental" gun deaths of adults are really hushed-up suicides for insurance reasons.
Gun suicides per year: ~15,000 Gun homicides per year: ~15,000
Guns owned by Americans: 200 million Gun owners in US: 65 million Gun hunters in US: 14 million
Most gun deaths are due to people using their own weapons with the clear intent to kill.
Of course, New Jersey won't even let you pump your own gas, so I suppose a "safe gun" law is unsuprising.
Besides, "safe gun" laws work hand-in-hand with "Saturday Night Special" laws to raise gun prices to keep cheap guns out of the hands of poor people (read: racial code word), which the voters fear.
While the satellite providers aren't hurting, they aren't doing very well either. Higher modulation techniques and better coding mean more bps per hertz (I'm working on a 16QAM project right now, but we do have big dishes, >4m). Also a bunch of satellite dotcoms have gone away.
The possibly good news for users is that Ka band birds will be launching in the next few years. They can steer tighter baems for more "cellular-like" coverage from Geosync orbit.
On Wednesday, I was the last person in line to board a turboprop from Pittsburgh to Lexington, and they searched me. It certainly seemed like they may have delayed the departure based on my search (for a minute or so).
It appears to me now that to avoid being searched, watch who is currently being searched. They don't seem to pull out every X person, rather when they are done with one search, they pull the next person out of line.
Of course, you might look a little suspicious telling the two people behind you to go ahead just to avoid a search...
The BattleTech (or whatever) simulator was pretty awesome, but it took up a lot of real-estate per player. It was also very complex, which must have appealed to some people, but probably not most.
For my part, I preferred the VR FPS game down the hall...it was like Photon for people too lazy to run around...
How the heck can you keep up with all this dang Java stuff? "You can use Bluelegs to support CowBerries for n-tiered enterprise apps under COW2BITEME from a UML converter."
In the time it has taken me to read up on Application Servers, JSP, J2EE, beans, UML, struts, etc., I could have written about 20 PHP applications...or 20.NET ones!
If Java is so cool, why is Yahoo moving to PHP?
All this structure to build what? Web apps move content from user to DB and back to user, occasionally doing some math in-between.
Then there is stability. 200 blades and a layer 4 switch, I say! Call me when more than 50 blow up.
I know this sounds like a troll, but what is the deal? Haven't there been enough books written?
My opinion, slightly opposing, is that Visual Basic has been a revolutionary tool in helping a wide range of people write simple GUIfied programs (about 90% of real-world business tasks) exceedingly quickly. Combined with COM and ActiveX, novice programmers can get rapid access to a lot of power.
Moreover, VB and VC++ have really popularlized the concept of the GUIfied IDE.
VC#'s continues this with its "build a Web service/Web service client in a minute" concept based on WSDL. And ASP.NET's Web forms are taking the power of the "Visual" line to the Web as well.
After growing up on Emacs and vi, the modern IDE is really a marvel!
The Miller-Urey experiment does show that random energy into a specific set of simple chemicals can yield amino acids.
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
Other researchers have suggested that inoganic forms of proto-life (crystal growth) may have had a role in the catalysis of organic chemicals to actually get to something leading to RNA/DNA.
I'm not saying that there is anything particularly magic about the formation of life, just that Miller-Urey is a very small part of a very big question.
Neurons in adults: 2x10E9 to 5x10E9 Synapses in adults: 10E14, a few thousand per neuron Neuron firings per second: max 2 Khz
The biggest challenge in comparing brain to supercomputer is the massive connectivity of brain, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron.
The total processing speed of ASCII Purple sounds about right for number of neurons in brain times the maximum number of pulses per second per neuron.
Given there are 10E14 synapses, each one with at least a byte of synpatic weight associated with it, it would need memory of at least around a petabyte of memory, although synpase memory change speeds are probably not faster than tape, and I know of plenty of installations with a petabyte on tape.
But here is the kicker: Will those 100 teraflops be flops that can use thousands of inputs? Probably not. So I'd argue that to truly be as powerful as the human brain, you would need 100 petaflops of 1-2 input flops, with at least a petabyte tape system.
thanks to some fools in congress, cable companies have no local competition in many areas that cannot recieve DSL (like mine).
In the USA anyway, cable monopolies are generally granted by LOCAL governments. I don't see how one could blame the grant of a local cable monopoly on Congress.
phone needs to be told when to hand off, what to hand off too, and so on. Often the particular combination that will work for a user traveling on a certain road is unique to that road, and even the direction of travel. Each combination needs to be figured out, and then manually entered by an engineer.)
Why isn't there an expert system of some kind to do this? It seems to me that there should be software solutions to most of these problems, including early diagnosis of cells with high dropped-calls and automatic solutions for software problems.
It also lets the White House decide who gets hired and fired, bypassing employment standards regulations (who's gonna be suprised when it's 99% white?).
I dunno, maybe Secretary of State Colin Powell? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice?Secretary of Education Rod Paige? Or maybe you should ask White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales?
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to remember this sucking on the Atari 800 as well...but later I found a Pac Man "playalike" that was much better.
If the entire world was as developed as the West, I am sure they would find the energy needed. It would be a great boon to society to have starving Ethiopian farmers become well-fed Ph.D. engineers working on hydrogen, fusion, and solar energy!
CO2 is an issue. It is an economic "externality" that can only be effectively dealt with through regulation.
But the decision is whether you develop technology for economically reasonable CO2 reduction now and regulate later, or whether you regulate now (potentially disrupting global economies) in hope of developing technology later, if you can afford it.
The US government decided to look for technology first before adopting the Kyoto Protocol, which would provide a questionable envrionmental benefit even if it could be enforced.
Either way, the good news is that CO2 reducing technologies are under development (mainly in high-GDP countries). We already have nuclear fission which we may need global climate change to give us the guts to use. LED lighting, fuel cells, advanced solar, and hydrogen fuel are currently under development.
One other thought: The US produces the most CO2 per capita, but the least CO2 per dollar of GDP in the world. Thinking that way, it is the most efficient user of energy...
Education alone doesn't work though. There has been a lot of pressure from the IMF/WB and foreign aid donors to establish schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, there is a lot more schooling in Africa than there was 50 years ago, and a ton of Unviersities.
But...in many countries in Africa, there is no functioning free market economy to hire the newly educated. So often children drop out of school to work in the fields and make some money, or stay in school and come to the US and Europe once they have a college degree.
It is no suprise that 50 years of the West trying to get economic growth going in Africa has failed. The West has always missed the basics, free markets that are appropriately regulated, with strong currencies (that are really strong and not artifically propped up by exchange laws that encourage black-market currency trading) are what allows economic growth to occur.
In the meantime, we've been trying to get Africa to industrialize and educate. Industrial machinery has no inputs or way to sell outputs in the government-commanded economies. Oops. Education also failed for the reasons I mentioned above. Ooops. So then we just started to give them loans (bribes) to fix their economies. Didn't work because the people in charge kept the loans (bribes), didn't change, and now have Bono shilling for them to get debt forgiveness to get more loans (bribes).
If US geeks were more economically literate, that might help!
Unless you are planning a nonprofit that has as it mission the overthrow of dictatorships, and the establishment of freedom in these nations.
Sign me up! The "Licoln Brigade" of the new millenium, bringing democracy and free markets to the world's poor!
The concept that the world cannot support a population living with "Western" standards is not only wrong, it is pseudo-racist.
As societies become more technologically and economically developed, resources are used more efficiently. Moreover, advanced economies can afford to search more far, wide, and smart with regard to resources. In the US, most commodities are cheaper now (in inflation adjusted terms) than 30 years ago. Richer countries also have decreased birth rates.
Moreover, "externalities" such as air pollution are easier to deal with in a rich economy because the extra money is there to add the exhaust controls and regulations neeeded. If you are going to starve, you don't care about micro-particles breathed in because of your in-home coal fire.
The big mistake is that economies are not zero-sum games. Everyone can get rich together, infact the world is far, far richer now than it was than at the turn of the century. Look at places like South Korea that went from a dirt-poor agricultural country to having better broadband than the US. Even very underdeveloped countries are better off, though lagging Western standards.
Every free market exchange raises the wealth of both parties, or else the parties would not agree to participate. Moreover, rises in market prices of resources (if they happen) either cause more effort to go into finding them, or cause more effort to go into alternatives.
This doesn't mean there won't be some specific environmental problems...global CO2 is probably a problem, but would be easier to deal with in a rich world than a poor one. But don't worry about non-externality commodities such as iron, tin, copper, and oil, the market will take care of them just fine.
The best thing about running your own business is that you quickly learn that business is job one, not programming. Revenues, cash flow, customers, etc. make a business. Technology is just a tool to encourage customers to give you money, but not the only tool, and often secondary to marketing and management.
Accidental gun deaths in US per year: 1000
As percentage of all accidental deaths 1%
Accidental gun deaths have been falling in the US over time. Many accidental deaths are due to hunting, and I also suspect that many "accidental" gun deaths of adults are really hushed-up suicides for insurance reasons.
Gun suicides per year: ~15,000
Gun homicides per year: ~15,000
Guns owned by Americans: 200 million
Gun owners in US: 65 million
Gun hunters in US: 14 million
Most gun deaths are due to people using their own weapons with the clear intent to kill.
Of course, New Jersey won't even let you pump your own gas, so I suppose a "safe gun" law is unsuprising.
Besides, "safe gun" laws work hand-in-hand with "Saturday Night Special" laws to raise gun prices to keep cheap guns out of the hands of poor people (read: racial code word), which the voters fear.
Microsoft GE (Gun Edition)
"Who do you want to shoot today?"
"It wasn't me officer, it was a Code Red virus my gun got from Outlook!"
"Blue screen of DEATH!"
FWIW, I have a system that talks hostnames hitting my web site.
While the satellite providers aren't hurting, they aren't doing very well either. Higher modulation techniques and better coding mean more bps per hertz (I'm working on a 16QAM project right now, but we do have big dishes, >4m). Also a bunch of satellite dotcoms have gone away.
The possibly good news for users is that Ka band birds will be launching in the next few years. They can steer tighter baems for more "cellular-like" coverage from Geosync orbit.
Hey folks, move to DC, the defense industrial complex is hiring!
A friend of mine had to drive around radioactive sources for a university in the Washington, DC area.
He said he did get pulled over once by an unmarked white truck and asked a lot of questions, but he had all the right papers.
This week I took four flights without once having them ask me to turn on my computer.
OK, it was a Fujitsu Stylistic 1200 tablet. Maybe they only search machines with keyboards...
BTW, Bluegrass Airport in Lexington, KY, is completely covered with free 802.11 wireless Internet access. Sweet!
On Wednesday, I was the last person in line to board a turboprop from Pittsburgh to Lexington, and they searched me. It certainly seemed like they may have delayed the departure based on my search (for a minute or so).
It appears to me now that to avoid being searched, watch who is currently being searched. They don't seem to pull out every X person, rather when they are done with one search, they pull the next person out of line.
Of course, you might look a little suspicious telling the two people behind you to go ahead just to avoid a search...
The BattleTech (or whatever) simulator was pretty awesome, but it took up a lot of real-estate per player. It was also very complex, which must have appealed to some people, but probably not most.
For my part, I preferred the VR FPS game down the hall...it was like Photon for people too lazy to run around...
OK, I'm NOT a software engineer. That said...
.NET ones!
How the heck can you keep up with all this dang Java stuff? "You can use Bluelegs to support CowBerries for n-tiered enterprise apps under COW2BITEME from a UML converter."
In the time it has taken me to read up on Application Servers, JSP, J2EE, beans, UML, struts, etc., I could have written about 20 PHP applications...or 20
If Java is so cool, why is Yahoo moving to PHP?
All this structure to build what? Web apps move content from user to DB and back to user, occasionally doing some math in-between.
Then there is stability. 200 blades and a layer 4 switch, I say! Call me when more than 50 blow up.
I know this sounds like a troll, but what is the deal? Haven't there been enough books written?
Q: Under CDA, do government provided wireless access points have to run censorware filters?
My opinion, slightly opposing, is that Visual Basic has been a revolutionary tool in helping a wide range of people write simple GUIfied programs (about 90% of real-world business tasks) exceedingly quickly. Combined with COM and ActiveX, novice programmers can get rapid access to a lot of power.
Moreover, VB and VC++ have really popularlized the concept of the GUIfied IDE.
VC#'s continues this with its "build a Web service/Web service client in a minute" concept based on WSDL. And ASP.NET's Web forms are taking the power of the "Visual" line to the Web as well.
After growing up on Emacs and vi, the modern IDE is really a marvel!
The Miller-Urey experiment does show that random energy into a specific set of simple chemicals can yield amino acids.
However, it did not produce all amino acids required for life as we know it. Moreover, there is no known chemical pathway to go from a bunch of amino acids to DNA/RNA. Plus there is also significant debate about whether the initial atmosphere they began with existed on Earth at the time of the origins of life.
Other researchers have suggested that inoganic forms of proto-life (crystal growth) may have had a role in the catalysis of organic chemicals to actually get to something leading to RNA/DNA.
I'm not saying that there is anything particularly magic about the formation of life, just that Miller-Urey is a very small part of a very big question.
10-20's 2-way sat solution means you can be in the middle of nowhere and still get your location tracked.
Often there is no cellphone coverage in rural areas, and sometimes it is even sketchy in some parts of cities...
Neurons in adults: 2x10E9 to 5x10E9
Synapses in adults: 10E14, a few thousand per neuron
Neuron firings per second: max 2 Khz
The biggest challenge in comparing brain to supercomputer is the massive connectivity of brain, with 2000-5000 synapses per neuron.
The total processing speed of ASCII Purple sounds about right for number of neurons in brain times the maximum number of pulses per second per neuron.
Given there are 10E14 synapses, each one with at least a byte of synpatic weight associated with it, it would need memory of at least around a petabyte of memory, although synpase memory change speeds are probably not faster than tape, and I know of plenty of installations with a petabyte on tape.
But here is the kicker: Will those 100 teraflops be flops that can use thousands of inputs? Probably not. So I'd argue that to truly be as powerful as the human brain, you would need 100 petaflops of 1-2 input flops, with at least a petabyte tape system.
I wonder where the real "congestion" is going on.
The good news is that this problem is mostly one of first-mover networks getting bogged down in their own technology (and perhaps debt).
We know the long-distance fiber backbones are very, very underutilized.
Now 10 Gig E can take you 20 miles over fiber, so the distribution part of cable service should become much less congested soon.
With 3GHz processors available, cheap PC-based routers should start to eat into specialty devices.
Hmm...I wonder if anyone has made a Beowulf router?
thanks to some fools in congress, cable companies have no local competition in many areas that cannot recieve DSL (like mine).
In the USA anyway, cable monopolies are generally granted by LOCAL governments. I don't see how one could blame the grant of a local cable monopoly on Congress.
phone needs to be told when to hand off, what to hand off too, and so on. Often the particular combination that will work for a user traveling on a certain road is unique to that road, and even the direction of travel. Each combination needs to be figured out, and then manually entered by an engineer.)
Why isn't there an expert system of some kind to do this? It seems to me that there should be software solutions to most of these problems, including early diagnosis of cells with high dropped-calls and automatic solutions for software problems.
It also lets the White House decide who gets hired and fired, bypassing employment standards regulations (who's gonna be suprised when it's 99% white?).
I dunno, maybe Secretary of State Colin Powell? National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice?Secretary of Education Rod Paige? Or maybe you should ask White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales?