Under pressure from the UK government, car manufacturers have now made their cars sold in this country much harder to steal, and as a result car crime is falling. Perhaps they should do the same to software manufacturers.
I come to this argument with a Keynsian bias: government regulation should only be applied where there is a market failure. In this case the failure is imperfect information: just like at the beginning of the 20th century for virtually any product, the motto for software is "caveat emptor." The government responded to the health dangers of products such as milk laced with formaldehyde by creating labeling standards and outlawing certain chemicals, etc.
Software should be treated in a similar way, IMO. I believe that software that controls systems where human lives are at risk should be regulated by the government to some degree, just as food and drugs are now regulated.
The truth with software market is that the imperfect information is only temporary: serious security defects are quickly discovered and fixed. It is obvious that this is much less expensive to the economy as a whole than government standards for software development or turning software into a vitual feast for liability lawyers. Businesses should now be aware that new software is vulnerable in general, and that means if everyone acts rationally only businesses with little to lose from security defects would use new software products that have not yet been vetted in the wild. This means damage from security defects are minimized, and government impact on software development as an economic activity is also minimized, creating a "good enough" solution.
I agree that it is a possible solution, but it is not the only solution. Caching popular searches, having each node keep a cache of a random selection of adjacent nodes, and any number of other creative strategies to avoid the dumb graph crawling (granted, loop detection and timeouts do work) of gnutella may make it as useful as napster was in terms of breadth of material available.
So is there a tendency for the anti- or real matter of the pair to fall in the hole? If it is balanced then Hawking radiation doesn't affect the size of the hole, but if antimatter does tend to fall into the hole and the real matter tends to escape, then the antimatter particle would vaporize some matter in the black hole and the tendency for the Hawking radiation would be to evaporate the black hole, no?
This sounds like it is something different from the debate on whether the universe is open, closed, or balanced. IIRC, that debate has to do with whether parallel lines tend to converge, diverge, or remain the same "distance" apart over the distance of the galaxy. There is a good argument that the universe is exactly balanced, because if it is closed or open the equations lead quickly to massive expansion or sudden collapse. Or am I wrong?:)
I've been trying to wrap my mind around the basic ideas of quantum physics with the help of one of those popularizing books, but they have not talked about black hole evaporation. Is this like alpha radiation, where the probability curve of the location of a couple of protons is such that there is a reasonable chance that it will find itself outside of the range of the strong nuclear force? (but in the case of the black hole the force would be gravity and the location would be the event horizon or at least the point where the electrical force pushing on an ion would be stronger than gravity.)
I am not going to venture an opinion on the relative intelligence of audiophiles and windows users, but I have to say that being a sucker doesn't make you smart. What I mean is, the amount you pay for an item is not necessarily a measure of its quality, and paying $70,000 dollars for a piece of sound reproduction equipment doesn't scream "Smart Shopper!" to me. You could hire the strings section of your local philharmonic to come play on the weekends for you for a year for that much, and I'm pretty sure you get good fidelity with a live performance.
As the cost of hardware decreases, the cost of software becomes the dominant aspect of a computing device, obviously. What is not so obvious is the fact that if more than 50% of a product's part costs comes from a non-comodity part produced by a possibly hostile company (MS), no manufacturer in its right mind would invest heavily in the production of that product, since they can get squeezed. This means three possible outcomes for the PC industry:
1. Full-power, expensive operating systems become a niche market and more consumer-oriented targeted platforms on the level of TiVo or Palm become the norm. Microsoft and Apple have a big advantage in this scenario due to their code bases, and you would see a market of 3-5 manufacturers of appliances including MS and Apple.
2. General purpose operating systems based on free software become the norm for home use, opening the field to many competitors with an eventual shakeout to who knows who. Advantage: PC makers.
3. Microsoft lowers its OEM pricing for the Windows environment and provides it through a Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing scheme with multiple distribution companies who resell it to home PC manufacturers. Ironically, this is one of the proposed Justice settlement schemes before Bush gave the farm away. Some or most of the current PC manufacturers survive in this scenario and microsoft becomes like a utility: profitable and boring.
the cost of expert software programmers has tended to go up because you're paying for a salary rather than a physical component
OTOH, the number of units sold has dramatically increased, and since RnD is mostly a fixed cost and the incremental cost is a CD and an oversized box, Windows has been getting more and more profitable over the past 12 years. I expect Microsoft will be forced to do one of two things as hardware gets cheaper: either lower prices for the general-purpose windows platform, or move home users to a more targeted consumer platform that will be so focused on household tasks (web, IM, games, letters, multimedia, etc) you would have a hard time describing it as an operating system.
Microsoft will simply not be able to convince hardware makers that over half their costs should be software, and you will see non-pc appliances really take off if Microsoft doesn't address this. Microsoft isn't stupid, so they will be forced to change. In the end the second scenario is probably best for customers anyway since home users don't need the complexity of a full operating system and the best solution is not to hide the complexity like Windows ME does, but to not have the complexity in the first place.
Anyway, if you don't want to use word but are writing for Windows, I suggest editing your documents in MS Frontpage. Frontpage doesn't have the heft of Word and is fairly intuitive, IMO. You will also need to download the MS HTML Help Workshop if you wish to have an online version of your help. You can get it here.
Just print out your help from IE for your documentation or from your favorite HTML viewer/printer. For online use, the Workshop will create a.chm file which can be used in the Microsoft HTML Help viewer, the same viewer used by the MSDN help that you use with Visual Studio.
And rocket fuel, on a baloon? What kind of stupid idea is that?
Ask the Germans. They used a compound containing oxygen and aluminum and is similar in composition to rocket fuels used in the American space program. Slashdot had an article about this a month ago.
It's hard to explode hydrogen efficiently. Don't tell me about the Hindenburg, that was rocket fuel, not hydrogen burning, you can tell by the color of the flames. It would be especially hard if the plant designers did something silly like put the containers underground to exploit the structural stability of the earth and separate the oxygen and hydrogen by a few hundred meters.
Actually, this is not as good as it sounds. What you want in a propulsion system for a space-faring vehicle is a system that provides the most thrust for the minimum expenditure of mass. This means the goal is to accelerate the propulsive mass to the maximum possible speed. The reason this is important is because you must accelerate your propulsive medium as well as your craft until you have expended all of the medium, which means you need a really good ratio to hope to achieve a reasonable velocity.
A hydrogen-oxygen recombination doesn't provide that much energy per gram compared to the ion drive some recent experimental vehicle used (powered by a nuclear source IIRC.)
Also, solar panels are only effective within the orbit of the asteroid belt or so, the sun's radiation is pretty weak out at Jupiter.
There are a couple of possible scenarios that make government involvement worth considering in the case of research as fundamental as this. Perhaps the licensing of this technology will recoup in part the costs of supporting the research. Or perhaps, if they weren't involved, the company who achieved this privately would not engage in RAND licensing practices, thus denying future health care advances and perhaps resulting in preventable deaths. (RAND == Reasonable and non-discriminatory.)
If you assume a lifespan of 76 years than that programmer has robbed the world of the equivalent of 36 lives. Worse than Jeffery Dahmer.
Re:Transferring lifetime TiVo subscriptions...
on
Comparing the DVRs?
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· Score: 1
In fact, I'd argue you are better off upgrading the hard drive before paying lifetime. This is because when you upgrade you can make a backup of the TiVo operating system, and since the only critical moving part (and therefore most likely to fail) in a TiVo is the hard drive, you will likely get at least two years out of it since if the drive should fail you can replace it and restore the backup onto it.
I guess that was my point. why don't the satellite units have MPEG encoders?
Thing12 covered most of the points, but additionally:
* DirecTiVo (as opposed to the normal TiVo) can record two channels at once since the bottleneck is the hard drive transfer rate, not the number of encoders.
* DirectTiVo has very little/no delay between receiving the satellite feed and displaying it when in "live tv" mode. If it was necessary to encode and then decode the signal, channel changing would go from somewhat slow to embarrasingly slow (like on the normal TiVo.)
* The satellite Feeds' encodings are much more efficient than the cheap consumer encoder provided on TiVo, giving you more space per GB of hard drive.
* The sound output is not damaged by placing an MPEG2 encoder between the source and the output. This is important because MPEG2 uses perceptual encoding, meaning that non-audible or less-audible data is snipped out for space savings. This is a problem because Dolby surround subtracts a couple of decibels from the rear channel which the receiver then restores. What happens is the encoder recognizes that those lower amplitudes aren't as audible and clips them to some degree, killing the rear channel. Many regular TiVo owners complain about poor surround performance, especially those with less-than-perfect surround receivers.
With this information, we have all the technology we need to permanently colonize mars at a reasonable price. Take the south pole science stations: self-contained, self heated, comfortable places to live where the only outside resources they utilized were gravity, air, and snow. Mars has all 3, but the air would need a little more work. With hydroponics, solar panels and limited chemical lab and machine shop capabilities, a self-sustaining colony is quite reasonable. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes are incredibly efficient enclosures, and could probably be constructed with polymers created from materials readily available in the ground.
The only thing I am not sure about is iron, copper, and other metals deposits. Polymers replace the need for these in many cases, but not all. Anyone know the mineral layout of Mars? I imagine it is like every unmined region on the Earth, incredibly rich in easily-retrievable resources. Just think of Austria's Tallar gold mines (the largest gold strike in history and the origin of the word "dollar.") or South America's Potassi silver mines (the largest silver strike.)
The only question is whether colonizing Mars is something humanity wants to do. The return on investment on Earth in economic terms would probably be close to nil due to the cost of transport. On the other hand, making sure all our eggs aren't in one basket sounds like a reasonable self-preservation strategy.
I was addressing the argument in the original e-mail, not every conceivable argument as to why it is less than feasible. I'll let history stand in as a proxy for that, since it has never happened it is probably not feasible today (with the exception of incidental blinding in Las Vegas where laser shows have been known to blind pilots, but not on approach as far as I know.)
In this case, they'll have to be so accurate with the laser "targetting" that they may as well be shooting at the plane with a sniper rifle.
I don't think you've taken all the factors into consideration. The surface area of the forward profile of a sniper's bullet is, say,.5 sqare inches or less. If you have a laser with the same profile and it takes.1 seconds to blind someone at a critical time and you have 30 seconds to do this you will have an effective surface area of 30 /.1 *.5 square inches, or approximately 150 square inches of effective exposure, or 300 times the opportunity to hit your target. You merely need to hold the laser steady enough that it tends to expose its target for at least.1 seconds at a time. Or perhaps I'm smoking something.
Re:Can anyone tell me why...
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 1
I am not an expert on the Amazon ecosystem, but neither are you, I suspect. Doesn't it seem likely that we would further shrink the rainforest by changing something as critical as the Amazon's water level? It would require clearing land, quarrying stone and sand, flooding valleys, and interrupting any natural flood/drought cycle (which many ecosystems use to their advantage, btw.) And if we are trying to solve North American energy problems, power generation in the Amazon would have only a marginal effect if any at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I come to this argument with a Keynsian bias: government regulation should only be applied where there is a market failure. In this case the failure is imperfect information: just like at the beginning of the 20th century for virtually any product, the motto for software is "caveat emptor." The government responded to the health dangers of products such as milk laced with formaldehyde by creating labeling standards and outlawing certain chemicals, etc.
Software should be treated in a similar way, IMO. I believe that software that controls systems where human lives are at risk should be regulated by the government to some degree, just as food and drugs are now regulated.
The truth with software market is that the imperfect information is only temporary: serious security defects are quickly discovered and fixed. It is obvious that this is much less expensive to the economy as a whole than government standards for software development or turning software into a vitual feast for liability lawyers. Businesses should now be aware that new software is vulnerable in general, and that means if everyone acts rationally only businesses with little to lose from security defects would use new software products that have not yet been vetted in the wild. This means damage from security defects are minimized, and government impact on software development as an economic activity is also minimized, creating a "good enough" solution.
cryptic
I've been trying to wrap my mind around the basic ideas of quantum physics with the help of one of those popularizing books, but they have not talked about black hole evaporation. Is this like alpha radiation, where the probability curve of the location of a couple of protons is such that there is a reasonable chance that it will find itself outside of the range of the strong nuclear force? (but in the case of the black hole the force would be gravity and the location would be the event horizon or at least the point where the electrical force pushing on an ion would be stronger than gravity.)
Let us dump this web silliness and return to the age of ftp and telnet.
1. Full-power, expensive operating systems become a niche market and more consumer-oriented targeted platforms on the level of TiVo or Palm become the norm. Microsoft and Apple have a big advantage in this scenario due to their code bases, and you would see a market of 3-5 manufacturers of appliances including MS and Apple.
2. General purpose operating systems based on free software become the norm for home use, opening the field to many competitors with an eventual shakeout to who knows who. Advantage: PC makers.
3. Microsoft lowers its OEM pricing for the Windows environment and provides it through a Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing scheme with multiple distribution companies who resell it to home PC manufacturers. Ironically, this is one of the proposed Justice settlement schemes before Bush gave the farm away. Some or most of the current PC manufacturers survive in this scenario and microsoft becomes like a utility: profitable and boring.
OTOH, the number of units sold has dramatically increased, and since RnD is mostly a fixed cost and the incremental cost is a CD and an oversized box, Windows has been getting more and more profitable over the past 12 years. I expect Microsoft will be forced to do one of two things as hardware gets cheaper: either lower prices for the general-purpose windows platform, or move home users to a more targeted consumer platform that will be so focused on household tasks (web, IM, games, letters, multimedia, etc) you would have a hard time describing it as an operating system.
Microsoft will simply not be able to convince hardware makers that over half their costs should be software, and you will see non-pc appliances really take off if Microsoft doesn't address this. Microsoft isn't stupid, so they will be forced to change. In the end the second scenario is probably best for customers anyway since home users don't need the complexity of a full operating system and the best solution is not to hide the complexity like Windows ME does, but to not have the complexity in the first place.
Last year's winning novel can be purchased here.
Just print out your help from IE for your documentation or from your favorite HTML viewer/printer. For online use, the Workshop will create a .chm file which can be used in the Microsoft HTML Help viewer, the same viewer used by the MSDN help that you use with Visual Studio.
Ask the Germans. They used a compound containing oxygen and aluminum and is similar in composition to rocket fuels used in the American space program. Slashdot had an article about this a month ago.
It's hard to explode hydrogen efficiently. Don't tell me about the Hindenburg, that was rocket fuel, not hydrogen burning, you can tell by the color of the flames. It would be especially hard if the plant designers did something silly like put the containers underground to exploit the structural stability of the earth and separate the oxygen and hydrogen by a few hundred meters.
A hydrogen-oxygen recombination doesn't provide that much energy per gram compared to the ion drive some recent experimental vehicle used (powered by a nuclear source IIRC.)
Also, solar panels are only effective within the orbit of the asteroid belt or so, the sun's radiation is pretty weak out at Jupiter.
There are a couple of possible scenarios that make government involvement worth considering in the case of research as fundamental as this. Perhaps the licensing of this technology will recoup in part the costs of supporting the research. Or perhaps, if they weren't involved, the company who achieved this privately would not engage in RAND licensing practices, thus denying future health care advances and perhaps resulting in preventable deaths. (RAND == Reasonable and non-discriminatory.)
If you assume a lifespan of 76 years than that programmer has robbed the world of the equivalent of 36 lives. Worse than Jeffery Dahmer.
In fact, I'd argue you are better off upgrading the hard drive before paying lifetime. This is because when you upgrade you can make a backup of the TiVo operating system, and since the only critical moving part (and therefore most likely to fail) in a TiVo is the hard drive, you will likely get at least two years out of it since if the drive should fail you can replace it and restore the backup onto it.
Thing12 covered most of the points, but additionally:
* DirecTiVo (as opposed to the normal TiVo) can record two channels at once since the bottleneck is the hard drive transfer rate, not the number of encoders.
* DirectTiVo has very little/no delay between receiving the satellite feed and displaying it when in "live tv" mode. If it was necessary to encode and then decode the signal, channel changing would go from somewhat slow to embarrasingly slow (like on the normal TiVo.)
* The satellite Feeds' encodings are much more efficient than the cheap consumer encoder provided on TiVo, giving you more space per GB of hard drive.
* The sound output is not damaged by placing an MPEG2 encoder between the source and the output. This is important because MPEG2 uses perceptual encoding, meaning that non-audible or less-audible data is snipped out for space savings. This is a problem because Dolby surround subtracts a couple of decibels from the rear channel which the receiver then restores. What happens is the encoder recognizes that those lower amplitudes aren't as audible and clips them to some degree, killing the rear channel. Many regular TiVo owners complain about poor surround performance, especially those with less-than-perfect surround receivers.
The only thing I am not sure about is iron, copper, and other metals deposits. Polymers replace the need for these in many cases, but not all. Anyone know the mineral layout of Mars? I imagine it is like every unmined region on the Earth, incredibly rich in easily-retrievable resources. Just think of Austria's Tallar gold mines (the largest gold strike in history and the origin of the word "dollar.") or South America's Potassi silver mines (the largest silver strike.)
The only question is whether colonizing Mars is something humanity wants to do. The return on investment on Earth in economic terms would probably be close to nil due to the cost of transport. On the other hand, making sure all our eggs aren't in one basket sounds like a reasonable self-preservation strategy.
I was addressing the argument in the original e-mail, not every conceivable argument as to why it is less than feasible. I'll let history stand in as a proxy for that, since it has never happened it is probably not feasible today (with the exception of incidental blinding in Las Vegas where laser shows have been known to blind pilots, but not on approach as far as I know.)
I don't think you've taken all the factors into consideration. The surface area of the forward profile of a sniper's bullet is, say, .5 sqare inches or less. If you have a laser with the same profile and it takes .1 seconds to blind someone at a critical time and you have 30 seconds to do this you will have an effective surface area of 30 / .1 * .5 square inches, or approximately 150 square inches of effective exposure, or 300 times the opportunity to hit your target. You merely need to hold the laser steady enough that it tends to expose its target for at least .1 seconds at a time. Or perhaps I'm smoking something.
I am not an expert on the Amazon ecosystem, but neither are you, I suspect. Doesn't it seem likely that we would further shrink the rainforest by changing something as critical as the Amazon's water level? It would require clearing land, quarrying stone and sand, flooding valleys, and interrupting any natural flood/drought cycle (which many ecosystems use to their advantage, btw.) And if we are trying to solve North American energy problems, power generation in the Amazon would have only a marginal effect if any at all.