Check out QNX if you can use a realtime UNIX instead of a realtime Linux.
The latest version is free, and the kernel is small.
I have not used the new free version, so I cannot say how it compares to QNX4, but QNX4 is fast, reliable (we have multi-node systems which have been running in the field for 3 years, constantly pumping audio (running radio stations) without a single hitch, even through multiple software upgrades (yes, we were able to upgrade the software while the network was controlling multiple on air stations) ), and is a hard realtime OS.
I don't know specs on the actual timing details, but I know that it gives guarantees and keeps them (which is mainly what makes it hard realtime - soft realtime would be, "we need to empty this buffer at least once every 50ms," while hard realtime would be, "we have a 2ms window every 50ms during which time we must read and reset this flag").
Anyway, there are lots of good things to be said for QNX, but you can find out all about it from their site, the QNX users group, etc..
So now you can hit Google to find out all about QNX.
First of all, I understand that the first ammendment does not extend to any speech whatsoever (such as commanding someone to commit a crime).
On your first point, the court decided that the code was speech, but it was also a device, so it is not really accurate to say "DeCSS was about code, not speech." It was more about the distinction between code and speech. Still, DeCSS probably wasn't the best example for that reason.
But what about Felten being threatened with the DMCA to cancel his presentation on security holes in audio copy protection schemes? Or what about a pseudocode version of the DeCSS code?
One of the arguments I heard in the DeCSS case was that the code was a device, and not merely speech. Can pseudocode be considered a device? How about a paragraph in plain English describing a piece of pseudocode for which an analagous piece of code could then be written in a real computer language?
My point is that whether or not the DMCA actually attempts to prohibit what should be consitutionally protected free speech (which, from what I have heard, it certainly seems to), it certainly seems to be being used by corporations to do just that.
Felten isn't a great example because he backed down instead of ignoring the RIAA and facing the music of the court, and later sued because he felt he had been stifled by illegitimate legal action, or somesuch, but the real question is, had he fought it, would the courts have sided with the RIAA or with Felten?
Isn't this what the whole DeCSS issue is about? The prevention of free speech on the basis that it disseminates information which could be used for circumventation?
He goes on about fair use quite a bit, but fails to mention the free speech and words vs. deeds aspect involved with discussing circumventation menthods.
He quotes from the decision:
The normal method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it... The government may not prohibit speech because it increases the chance an unlawful act will be committed at some indefinite future time.
It seems like this applies just as much to discussing methods for circumventing copy protection on DVDs as it does to fair use issues. The government cannot prohibit you from talking about how to copy DVDs just because it may increase your chances of actually doing something illegal with copies of DVDs.
On another note, the idea that you cannot talk about security flaws in copy protection schemes has another very negative side effect. If I wanted to copy protect my content, by paying some company to use their patented technology, I want to be able to make an educated decision about whether their copy protection methods will be effective. If I am unable to find descriptions of potential problems with these methods, how will I decide if they are secure enough to be worth the money I will pay to licence them?
Certainly the established pirates will have ways of distributing this information to each other, so they will have easier access to the circumventation methods than me, a potential customer of the technology they are trying to circumvent.
Seems pretty silly to me. If I am going to buy something, I want to be able to find out if it actually works before I spend the cash. I certainly want to be able to find out that it absolutely will not work, if that is the case.
One of the possible uses mentioned is take-out menus from restaurant chains.
I'm sorry, but the paper ones that litter the sidewalk daily are bad enough without having disposable electronics in them.
Now we can wash more lead and mercury into the bay! Remember, just because you can throw it away, doesn't mean you have to. I've been using the same disposable razor for 15 years now:).
Seriously, though, I think the focus should be about extending the use life of the things we produce, not decreasing it. Until recently, I had a 100MHz system which had only just started to be unsuitable for what I do (I'm a software engineer, so I edit text more often than I watch movies). When I got my new system, I found someone who could realistically use my old system (for email, web surfing, and 1 or 2 track pro-audio recording (it has Digigram audio hardware) ).
The next time you have an urge to run out and buy some cool toy, ask yourself two questions: 1.) do I really want this, and 2.) who can realistically use my old one?
Perhaps it's high time for the various governments we have floating around (they must be there for something) to take the IP for universally adopted standards by eminent domain.
On the other hand, we have all seen how competent our governments have been when confronted with technological issues and campaign contributions...
When he is complaining about Campbell, he comes at it from the perspective that we have all come to the exact same conclusions about Campbell on our own, therefore he doesn't have to support his opinion.
No matter what I knew or did not know about Campbell (I actually know very little), this would only convince me that the author wanted me to hate Campbell. You don't even get a good picture from the article exactly why he hates Campbell so much, just that he really, really does.
Funny how there was John Brunner 20-30 years earlier...
Elaborating reply to self
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
Another way of stating what I think you are telling me is that:
Given a universe consisting of nothing but two twins, one twin slightly more massive than the other, the more the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the older the more massive twin will be relative to the less massive twin. And the less the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the closer their ages will be.
Is this a correct interpretation of what you are saying?
A little more info, please
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
Are you saying that the "travelling" twin ends up younger than the twin who "stays behind" because the travelling twin has accelerated and decelerated relative to more mass (whereas the stationary twin has only accelerated and decelerated relative to the mass of the other twin)?
BTW, this is good discussion. For some reason, people often seem to have trouble debating on forums without flaming each other. This has been a really thought-provoking thread for me (and I may have even learned something). It shows the value of exposing one's ignorance. If I had been hesitant to post my original comment because I was afraid of being publicly wrong, I would not have had this opportunity to reconsider my interpretations. If I had started flaming you in response to your initial debate, then my ego would have insisted that I "win" the debate, which, of course, would be totally counter-productive.
This is a little too brief for me to get what your point is, but it seems like you are confusing "feeling the acceleration" with "feeling the acceleration in an identical way". If the universe consisted only of the twins, and one twin was 5 Kgs. more massive than the other, and they pushed off from each other, are you saying that the less massive twin is the only one who will feel any effect of acceleration? Obviously, as the mass difference increases, the larger mass will perceive less effect, but that does not mean that it would feel different to the larger mass to accelerate itself, than to have everything else in the universe accelerate in the other direction.
On the first point (#2), there exist all of the same political problems with distributing the GM rice seed for the farmers to grow. Also, in order to farm a piece of land, you need some stability in the area. You can't just pack up your farm and move it everytime the soldiers come through. In addition to this, the companies doing the research have no economic interest in freely distributing their product to third world countries.
On the second point (#6), the same thing applies to non-GM food. The issue is overproduction. When humans turned to agriculture from a nomadic life, they enabled population explosion (and started the degradation of resources) by allowing themselves to get nutrition out of the soil faster than they put it back in. Now the rain barrel is almost empty, and getting filled more and more slowly, as we draw from it faster and faster.
On the third point, it started out already in the wrong hands, as evidenced by the fact that they will only release their data under unspecified licencing arrangements. The evil multinational companies created it, so they don't need to hijack it.
Feeling the acceleration
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
You "feel the acceleration" only relative to the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe "feels the acceleration" relative to you.
Remember that anytime you think you can pinpoint "not moving" through space in an absolute sense, you are doing something wrong. It is impossible to tell if you are moving or if the rest of the universe is moving around you. If the rest of the universe started moving relative to you and then stopped, you would still feel the effects of the acceleration exaclty as if you were the one accelerating, only in the opposite direction.
Again, the issue is that you can only accelerate or decelerate relative to something else.
The mass issue is different (although I must say, It is good food for thought). There is no paradox inherent in the two twins being different ages; the paradox arises when you see that in order for the twin who "travelled" to end up younger than the other twin, the twin who stayed behind (having "travelled" relative to the twin in the "stationary" spaceship) must also be younger than the twin in the spaceship.
One mass is larger relative to the other, therefore one mass has more effect than the other, the twins can age at different rates, and there is no paradox because one twin is younger than the other, they are not both younger than each other.
Look at it the other way around. One twin gets into his ship. Everything else in the universe moves past it at near light speed for a year. Then, everything but the ship decellerates and then accellerates in the other direction until the part of the rest of the universe where the twin is has reached the ship with the other twin. Now the "stationary" twin should be younger, according to your assesment, because he is the one who underwent the accelleration changes.
Twins being a different age from each other is not the paradox. The paradox is that each twin would have to be simultaneously older and younger than the other twin, depending on your perspective.
If you keep relativity intact, then the twins must be the same age when they meet up (relative to each other), because the effect of moving one particle is the same as the effect of moving everything but that particle in the opposite direction.
Twins at light speed "example" breaks relativity
on
Time Travel
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· Score: 2
The classic relativity "example" of taking a pair of twins and sending one on a near-light-speed journey and then detecting an age difference between them upon return (the one who "travelled" being much younger) is based on a misinterpretation of relativity.
One of the basic results of relativity is that you can never say that you are moving except in terms of something else. Therefore you can never say that one object is moving faster than another in an absolute sense.
If the twins were able to detect (and agree) that one twin (the twin that stayed behind) was older than the other, this would violate relativity because they could say in an absolute sense, "I was moving, and you were not."
In reality, there would be no external validation that one had "travelled" and one had "stayed behind". You could look at either one as the traveler (or a combination of both) and the universe all still works out the same.
Consider this: there is nothing in the universe but the two twins. One twin moves at near the speed of light away from the other twin for one year. Then the second twin moves at the same near-light speed toward the first twin for one year. There can be no way to distinguish this from the situation where the first twin moves away from the second twin, and then moves back toward him.
The conceptual mistake here is that when considering the relativity of time, people forget that distance and mass are also relative. Therefore when the "travelling" twin experiences time at a slower rate, he also experiences distances to be greater; he would measure a clock outside of his ship to be running fast, but he would measure mile-markers outside of his ship to be closer together than a mile. Thus, while, relative to the outside world, less time would be going by, he would also be traveling a shorter distance relative to the outside world.
Observing his own local environment, he would not notice a change, since an inch in the cockpit would still be an inch.
This is how you resolve the paradox of headlights on a ship traveling at near light speed. Relative to the ship, the light travels away from the headlights at the speed of light. Relative to the outside world, the light travels at - you guessed it - the speed of light. The reason it is not a paradox is: Relative to the ship, the light travels approximately one foot in one nanosecond. Relative to the rest of the universe, the same event is perceived as the light traveling less than one foot, but the perceived time it takes is less than one nanosecond.
Same thing with the relativistic "paradox" of spinning in a circle. If you take the perspective that you are still, and the rest of the universe is spinning around you, you might think that this means that Alpha Centauri must be traveling (relative to you) at faster than the speed of light. But distance, time and mass being relative, as Alpha Centauri approaches the speed of light relative to you spinning, it gets smaller and closer (due to the relativity of distance), and clocks on Alpha Centauri appear to run fast to you (which are both the same - distance shrinking and time speeding up - if distance shrinks than it takes "less time" for a cesium molecule to complete one vibration, making clocks appear fast).
Anyway, the idea is that relativity only works when you apply it to all of the variables. If you assume that masses and distances are absolute, then you will come up with all sorts of paradoxes when considering the relativity of time.
And the bottom line is, relativity says that you cannot pinpoint your absolute location in the universe. Your mass decreases when you "slow down" but when you weigh yourself, you do it relative to weights which are also "slowed down," so you can't perceive the change in your own mass, so you can't say, "I weigh as little as possible, therefore I am not moving with absolute reference to the universe."
It is advertised to protect the pristine cleanliness of your perfect digital signal.
Anyway, interference problems in your analog cables are much more likely to come from cables which are carrying some real power. S/PDIF doesn't transfer any power for devices, just signal (which, on the wire, would be a low power analog signal putting out no more interference than an RCA cable carrying a line level). So if you needed shielding to prevent your digital signal from interfering on your analog cable, you would need just as much shielding to prevent your analog signal from interfering with other analog cables.
They are trying to make themselves look like humanitarians by working on rice and claiming that their research will help the starving people of the world; that the abillity to tailor rice to produce more will provide the surplus of food that is missing in the equation of world hunger.
There are all sorts of things wrong with this.
1. The human race produces more food than is required to feed the entire population of the world. This has been true for at least a decade, I believe.
2. The reasons that surplus food does not make it to the hungry of the world are almost always political (and often exacerbated by the physical difficulties of distribution). It is not that there is not enough food, it is that it is difficult to give it away without it being stolen by the local powers. In many cases, the donors of the food (I'm looking at you, U.S. gov't) know in advance that the people who are receiving it will sell it to buy weapons; donated food is often used to covertly fund arms deals.
3. Often, the original causes of hunger are political deals which trade the agricultural land of native citizens (without compensation or consent) to U.S. agricultural corporations, who remove the native population from 'their' new farmland and often destroy it in the process of farming it irresponsibly.
4. Eating a sufficient quantity of food does not mean that you are getting the necessary nutrition to survive. You cannot establish good health in an impoverished area just by providing enough rice.
5. History hath shown that when companies genetically engineer foods, they do it, not for the purposes of increasing the nutritional value, or flavor, or anything else of real interest to the ultimate consumer. They engineer things like square tomatoes to save on shipping costs. They engineer herbicide immunities, not so that farmers can grow more food by growing fewer weeds, but so that they can sell their patented herbicide. The ultimate effect of this is to damage our agricultural resources for the profit of a few large corporations.
6. Even if we could 'safely' increase yield with genetically engineered rice, the likelihood is that this would just lead to faster consumption of our agricultural land (since we farm it irresponsibly) and exacerbate our water crisis (meanwhile, Monsanto is trying to buy up all of the world's water supply they can).
7. Given the cavalier attitude of corporations releasing under-tested genetic modifications into the wild, I would not give them good odds of getting the benefits of genetic modifications to outweigh the harms. I would never release a piece of software with the cavalier attitude that these companies release biological command sets. They have proven that they have under-tested by making "scientific" claims about the engineered foods that have turned out too be patently untrue (won't pose human allergy risks, won't contaminate non-GM crops, etc.). It seems that software developers are able to be carefull enough to deliver mission critical applications that actually work as advertised; these genetic systems are the ultimate in mission critical (the mission being the survival of an ecosystem which supports us) and it seems that they are using much less caution in dealing with them than you would if you were writing a piece of software to control someone's life-support equipment.
Anyway, the point is, when you read an article that says that some large corporation's forray into the land of profit is somehow going to bring widespread benefit to humanity, you can bet it is a load of crap. Any action which brings widespread benefit to humanity tends to be counter to their abillity to control their profits.
As an example, if a giant fast food franchise chain were going to automate all of their drive-up windows, you might see an article with a headline like, "Automated drive-ups free workers from meaningless, horrible drudgery." What do you think happens to the workers? Does the company, in its bid to benefit humankind, keep paying them so that they can go and create something usefull for the rest of the world? No, the workers get laid off and go on unemployment or welfare, the company makes more money, and the landlord has a hard time getting the rent. This example looks like a benefit to everyone at first, but when you look closer, it is the corporation making money at everybody else's expense.
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This test alone cost $7m. They presumably need to build another $80m model to proceed with the other tests, which are probably not penny candy either.
Besides, the video of it crashing is spectacular. That alone makes it newsworthy.
What's wrong with
The latest version is free, and the kernel is small.
I have not used the new free version, so I cannot say how it compares to QNX4, but QNX4 is fast, reliable (we have multi-node systems which have been running in the field for 3 years, constantly pumping audio (running radio stations) without a single hitch, even through multiple software upgrades (yes, we were able to upgrade the software while the network was controlling multiple on air stations) ), and is a hard realtime OS.
I don't know specs on the actual timing details, but I know that it gives guarantees and keeps them (which is mainly what makes it hard realtime - soft realtime would be, "we need to empty this buffer at least once every 50ms," while hard realtime would be, "we have a 2ms window every 50ms during which time we must read and reset this flag").
Anyway, there are lots of good things to be said for QNX, but you can find out all about it from their site, the QNX users group, etc..
So now you can hit Google to find out all about QNX.
Well, I wasn't planning on trying it myself anytime soon, but if I do, I'll be sure to follow your advice and avoid looking in the toilet. :)
On your first point, the court decided that the code was speech, but it was also a device, so it is not really accurate to say "DeCSS was about code, not speech." It was more about the distinction between code and speech. Still, DeCSS probably wasn't the best example for that reason.
But what about Felten being threatened with the DMCA to cancel his presentation on security holes in audio copy protection schemes? Or what about a pseudocode version of the DeCSS code?
One of the arguments I heard in the DeCSS case was that the code was a device, and not merely speech. Can pseudocode be considered a device? How about a paragraph in plain English describing a piece of pseudocode for which an analagous piece of code could then be written in a real computer language?
My point is that whether or not the DMCA actually attempts to prohibit what should be consitutionally protected free speech (which, from what I have heard, it certainly seems to), it certainly seems to be being used by corporations to do just that.
Felten isn't a great example because he backed down instead of ignoring the RIAA and facing the music of the court, and later sued because he felt he had been stifled by illegitimate legal action, or somesuch, but the real question is, had he fought it, would the courts have sided with the RIAA or with Felten?
Isn't this what the whole DeCSS issue is about? The prevention of free speech on the basis that it disseminates information which could be used for circumventation?
He quotes from the decision:
The normal method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it ... The government may not prohibit speech because it increases the chance an unlawful act will be committed at some indefinite future time.
It seems like this applies just as much to discussing methods for circumventing copy protection on DVDs as it does to fair use issues. The government cannot prohibit you from talking about how to copy DVDs just because it may increase your chances of actually doing something illegal with copies of DVDs.
On another note, the idea that you cannot talk about security flaws in copy protection schemes has another very negative side effect. If I wanted to copy protect my content, by paying some company to use their patented technology, I want to be able to make an educated decision about whether their copy protection methods will be effective. If I am unable to find descriptions of potential problems with these methods, how will I decide if they are secure enough to be worth the money I will pay to licence them?
Certainly the established pirates will have ways of distributing this information to each other, so they will have easier access to the circumventation methods than me, a potential customer of the technology they are trying to circumvent.
Seems pretty silly to me. If I am going to buy something, I want to be able to find out if it actually works before I spend the cash. I certainly want to be able to find out that it absolutely will not work, if that is the case.
I'm sorry, but the paper ones that litter the sidewalk daily are bad enough without having disposable electronics in them.
Now we can wash more lead and mercury into the bay! Remember, just because you can throw it away, doesn't mean you have to. I've been using the same disposable razor for 15 years now :).
Seriously, though, I think the focus should be about extending the use life of the things we produce, not decreasing it. Until recently, I had a 100MHz system which had only just started to be unsuitable for what I do (I'm a software engineer, so I edit text more often than I watch movies). When I got my new system, I found someone who could realistically use my old system (for email, web surfing, and 1 or 2 track pro-audio recording (it has Digigram audio hardware) ).
The next time you have an urge to run out and buy some cool toy, ask yourself two questions: 1.) do I really want this, and 2.) who can realistically use my old one?
On the other hand, we have all seen how competent our governments have been when confronted with technological issues and campaign contributions...
By not informing the public of the holes until they have released a (faulty?) patch, they are demnonstrating incredibly quick turnaround time.
Of course, in the meantime, all of the IIS systems are vulnerable (able to be vulnered).
It's called speed.
No matter what I knew or did not know about Campbell (I actually know very little), this would only convince me that the author wanted me to hate Campbell. You don't even get a good picture from the article exactly why he hates Campbell so much, just that he really, really does.
Funny how there was John Brunner 20-30 years earlier...
Given a universe consisting of nothing but two twins, one twin slightly more massive than the other, the more the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the older the more massive twin will be relative to the less massive twin. And the less the twins accelerate/decelerate relative to each other, the closer their ages will be.
Is this a correct interpretation of what you are saying?
BTW, this is good discussion. For some reason, people often seem to have trouble debating on forums without flaming each other. This has been a really thought-provoking thread for me (and I may have even learned something). It shows the value of exposing one's ignorance. If I had been hesitant to post my original comment because I was afraid of being publicly wrong, I would not have had this opportunity to reconsider my interpretations. If I had started flaming you in response to your initial debate, then my ego would have insisted that I "win" the debate, which, of course, would be totally counter-productive.
This is a little too brief for me to get what your point is, but it seems like you are confusing "feeling the acceleration" with "feeling the acceleration in an identical way". If the universe consisted only of the twins, and one twin was 5 Kgs. more massive than the other, and they pushed off from each other, are you saying that the less massive twin is the only one who will feel any effect of acceleration? Obviously, as the mass difference increases, the larger mass will perceive less effect, but that does not mean that it would feel different to the larger mass to accelerate itself, than to have everything else in the universe accelerate in the other direction.
On the second point (#6), the same thing applies to non-GM food. The issue is overproduction. When humans turned to agriculture from a nomadic life, they enabled population explosion (and started the degradation of resources) by allowing themselves to get nutrition out of the soil faster than they put it back in. Now the rain barrel is almost empty, and getting filled more and more slowly, as we draw from it faster and faster.
On the third point, it started out already in the wrong hands, as evidenced by the fact that they will only release their data under unspecified licencing arrangements. The evil multinational companies created it, so they don't need to hijack it.
Remember that anytime you think you can pinpoint "not moving" through space in an absolute sense, you are doing something wrong. It is impossible to tell if you are moving or if the rest of the universe is moving around you. If the rest of the universe started moving relative to you and then stopped, you would still feel the effects of the acceleration exaclty as if you were the one accelerating, only in the opposite direction.
Again, the issue is that you can only accelerate or decelerate relative to something else.
The mass issue is different (although I must say, It is good food for thought). There is no paradox inherent in the two twins being different ages; the paradox arises when you see that in order for the twin who "travelled" to end up younger than the other twin, the twin who stayed behind (having "travelled" relative to the twin in the "stationary" spaceship) must also be younger than the twin in the spaceship.
One mass is larger relative to the other, therefore one mass has more effect than the other, the twins can age at different rates, and there is no paradox because one twin is younger than the other, they are not both younger than each other.
Twins being a different age from each other is not the paradox. The paradox is that each twin would have to be simultaneously older and younger than the other twin, depending on your perspective.
If you keep relativity intact, then the twins must be the same age when they meet up (relative to each other), because the effect of moving one particle is the same as the effect of moving everything but that particle in the opposite direction.
One of the basic results of relativity is that you can never say that you are moving except in terms of something else. Therefore you can never say that one object is moving faster than another in an absolute sense.
If the twins were able to detect (and agree) that one twin (the twin that stayed behind) was older than the other, this would violate relativity because they could say in an absolute sense, "I was moving, and you were not."
In reality, there would be no external validation that one had "travelled" and one had "stayed behind". You could look at either one as the traveler (or a combination of both) and the universe all still works out the same.
Consider this: there is nothing in the universe but the two twins. One twin moves at near the speed of light away from the other twin for one year. Then the second twin moves at the same near-light speed toward the first twin for one year. There can be no way to distinguish this from the situation where the first twin moves away from the second twin, and then moves back toward him.
The conceptual mistake here is that when considering the relativity of time, people forget that distance and mass are also relative. Therefore when the "travelling" twin experiences time at a slower rate, he also experiences distances to be greater; he would measure a clock outside of his ship to be running fast, but he would measure mile-markers outside of his ship to be closer together than a mile. Thus, while, relative to the outside world, less time would be going by, he would also be traveling a shorter distance relative to the outside world.
Observing his own local environment, he would not notice a change, since an inch in the cockpit would still be an inch.
This is how you resolve the paradox of headlights on a ship traveling at near light speed. Relative to the ship, the light travels away from the headlights at the speed of light. Relative to the outside world, the light travels at - you guessed it - the speed of light. The reason it is not a paradox is: Relative to the ship, the light travels approximately one foot in one nanosecond. Relative to the rest of the universe, the same event is perceived as the light traveling less than one foot, but the perceived time it takes is less than one nanosecond.
Same thing with the relativistic "paradox" of spinning in a circle. If you take the perspective that you are still, and the rest of the universe is spinning around you, you might think that this means that Alpha Centauri must be traveling (relative to you) at faster than the speed of light. But distance, time and mass being relative, as Alpha Centauri approaches the speed of light relative to you spinning, it gets smaller and closer (due to the relativity of distance), and clocks on Alpha Centauri appear to run fast to you (which are both the same - distance shrinking and time speeding up - if distance shrinks than it takes "less time" for a cesium molecule to complete one vibration, making clocks appear fast).
Anyway, the idea is that relativity only works when you apply it to all of the variables. If you assume that masses and distances are absolute, then you will come up with all sorts of paradoxes when considering the relativity of time.
And the bottom line is, relativity says that you cannot pinpoint your absolute location in the universe. Your mass decreases when you "slow down" but when you weigh yourself, you do it relative to weights which are also "slowed down," so you can't perceive the change in your own mass, so you can't say, "I weigh as little as possible, therefore I am not moving with absolute reference to the universe."
Anyway, interference problems in your analog cables are much more likely to come from cables which are carrying some real power. S/PDIF doesn't transfer any power for devices, just signal (which, on the wire, would be a low power analog signal putting out no more interference than an RCA cable carrying a line level). So if you needed shielding to prevent your digital signal from interfering on your analog cable, you would need just as much shielding to prevent your analog signal from interfering with other analog cables.
Maybe they're aphids...
There are all sorts of things wrong with this.
1. The human race produces more food than is required to feed the entire population of the world. This has been true for at least a decade, I believe.
2. The reasons that surplus food does not make it to the hungry of the world are almost always political (and often exacerbated by the physical difficulties of distribution). It is not that there is not enough food, it is that it is difficult to give it away without it being stolen by the local powers. In many cases, the donors of the food (I'm looking at you, U.S. gov't) know in advance that the people who are receiving it will sell it to buy weapons; donated food is often used to covertly fund arms deals.
3. Often, the original causes of hunger are political deals which trade the agricultural land of native citizens (without compensation or consent) to U.S. agricultural corporations, who remove the native population from 'their' new farmland and often destroy it in the process of farming it irresponsibly.
4. Eating a sufficient quantity of food does not mean that you are getting the necessary nutrition to survive. You cannot establish good health in an impoverished area just by providing enough rice.
5. History hath shown that when companies genetically engineer foods, they do it, not for the purposes of increasing the nutritional value, or flavor, or anything else of real interest to the ultimate consumer. They engineer things like square tomatoes to save on shipping costs. They engineer herbicide immunities, not so that farmers can grow more food by growing fewer weeds, but so that they can sell their patented herbicide. The ultimate effect of this is to damage our agricultural resources for the profit of a few large corporations.
6. Even if we could 'safely' increase yield with genetically engineered rice, the likelihood is that this would just lead to faster consumption of our agricultural land (since we farm it irresponsibly) and exacerbate our water crisis (meanwhile, Monsanto is trying to buy up all of the world's water supply they can).
7. Given the cavalier attitude of corporations releasing under-tested genetic modifications into the wild, I would not give them good odds of getting the benefits of genetic modifications to outweigh the harms. I would never release a piece of software with the cavalier attitude that these companies release biological command sets. They have proven that they have under-tested by making "scientific" claims about the engineered foods that have turned out too be patently untrue (won't pose human allergy risks, won't contaminate non-GM crops, etc.). It seems that software developers are able to be carefull enough to deliver mission critical applications that actually work as advertised; these genetic systems are the ultimate in mission critical (the mission being the survival of an ecosystem which supports us) and it seems that they are using much less caution in dealing with them than you would if you were writing a piece of software to control someone's life-support equipment.
Anyway, the point is, when you read an article that says that some large corporation's forray into the land of profit is somehow going to bring widespread benefit to humanity, you can bet it is a load of crap. Any action which brings widespread benefit to humanity tends to be counter to their abillity to control their profits.
As an example, if a giant fast food franchise chain were going to automate all of their drive-up windows, you might see an article with a headline like, "Automated drive-ups free workers from meaningless, horrible drudgery." What do you think happens to the workers? Does the company, in its bid to benefit humankind, keep paying them so that they can go and create something usefull for the rest of the world? No, the workers get laid off and go on unemployment or welfare, the company makes more money, and the landlord has a hard time getting the rent. This example looks like a benefit to everyone at first, but when you look closer, it is the corporation making money at everybody else's expense.
I think that they posted only the second half of the article. Presumably an editorial accident. It's definately part of the CNet article, though.
If only you could mod down an article (like this one)...