I don't believe it would have to. The projectile would likely follow a non-ballistic trajectory if the air resistance in that non-ballistic path was low enough relative to the surrounding air. It would be as if the projectile were sent down a barrel of air, which at mach 23 is actually a pretty hard material.
I don't know about others, but my first 760 TV was purchased because I purchased an XBox and of course wanted the nicest display possible for it. The day I purchase a 1080p capable XBox, I will of course also purchase the nicest display possible for it. The console is neither the most important nor the most expensive portion of the gaming system in my mind.
Given the size, I'd doubt if a 1000 of them release much more carbon than one human who in fact contains an almost uncountable number of microscopic engines. Also note that the pollution control on modern car engines is not designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, it both substantially decreases the mileage and increases carbon dioxide emissions in favor of decreasing more directly dangerous emissions. I would guess that the extremely small scale and controlled problem space of this engine would allow it to be tuned to very high efficiencies. That combined with a far more refined and pure fuel that you would likely purchase in small capsules that have price per gallon equivalents many times higher than gasoline could result in emissions that are primarily water vapor.
As a country, I believe the US has forgotten this. Regrettably, the Congress has at least a dual role, enacting laws and determining the budget. The biggest factor in politics here is not changing the laws, its changing the way the budget is spent. Sadly, both of the major parties always want to spend more, just in different ways. I personally believe that separate bodies should have been created to perform these two very different jobs. Then, people would have candidates to elect based on nothing more than the direction they would like to see the law take and more thought would go into that direction. As it stands now though, its more about who is giving you the most money.
Re:It's like nothing we've seen .. since Linux
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A New Kind of OS
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Programming is nothing more than the new writing. It is a basic skill needed in almost every field taught in college. One of the reasons for software quality problems today is that people are trying to write software that encodes the knowledge of domains that they were not trained in. Few specifications are complete enough to communicate more than a gross level of the knowledge of truly specialized fields that take years to learn. And if they were complete enough, you would be able to run the specification and wouldn't need the programmer.
The CS field needs to be changed to be more like the English and Math fields. i.e. the only reason to get a CS degree is to teach CS. Beyond that, every college student should be required to take a level of CS courses that is appropriate to their field. Appropriate levels probably closely match those of the required math courses. i.e. if three years of math is required for a field, three years of CS should be required too.
As for this article, its poppycock. Computers aren't going to be able to do what the article alludes to until we give the computers a true AI. A true AI can't come about until we realize that human thought has an experiential base that is critical to understanding and applying human knowledge. i.e. computers need to understand the visual, auditory, 4 dimensional moving physical world as well as the emotions and social interactions of people and use that understanding in judging what knowledge applies and in extrapolating new knowledge. And even then, that understanding will not necessarily be in the "operating system".
I don't have a reference because it was so long ago, but I do remember reading of a large scale study that I believe ended in the early '90s that showed a surprising reduction in ability to retain information when students were under fluorescent light vs. when they were under incandescent light. There were no conclusions as to why. The only possibilities I can think of are the differences in the fullness of the spectrum, the color temperature (yes, different things), the "flicker" of fluorescent lighting, and the sound of fluorescent lighting (I'm one of those who almost always hears it).
It was surprising to me at the time, but not anymore, that nothing seemed to come of the study. Even at that time, replacing all of the fluorescent bulbs in schools with another technology would have been cost prohibitive. As a society, Americans tend to bury knowledge that would hit their wallets.
As there are solutions to much of the problems of incandescent lighting, such as a recently developed coating that efficiently transforms the infrared heat component of the light produced into light in the visible spectrum (was that at Sandia?), and because 2000+ lumen fluorescents that fit my fixtures are hard to impossible to find (I like my light), and because the CFLs I have purchased don't seem to last longer than incandescents even though I paid more(I really think that no bulb dies naturally around here, they all die due to surges, hence the reason I tend to have to replace bulbs in very short bursts), and because I almost always perceive a "vibration" (more like a buzz in my vision than a flicker) with bulbs that is worse with CFLs than incandescents (though present on both), I'll stick with my incandescents.
"you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got."
If you truly have a runaway process, it will use up all of your swap, no matter how much swap you've got. In most cases, it would be better for it to die sooner rather than later.
I am a very heavy user and run many applications simultaneously. I have been running XP with 1 or 2GB of RAM and no swap file for over a year now. Despite having dozens of tabs open in two different browsers and running programs like Studio 10 for movie editing, I've never come close to running out of RAM.
Interestingly, it seems that Windows programs in general use less RAM if they have less virtual memory available to them. I have experimented with this to prove it to myself by reloading two identical 2GB machines with identical OS and software loads, setting one to have a 5GB swap and the other to have no swap, and starting up the same dozen or so applications on each. The "commit charge" on the machine without the swap was over 200MBs lower than on the one with swap.
The only reason advertisers would pay for this is if they are getting more business in return than the cost of the textbooks. Therefore, on average, the students will be paying more for their textbooks, not less. Schools that are allowing this are simply helping advertisers to take more money from this relatively naive and vulnerable population segment. They are doing no favors.
Back in the days where a simple CRC32 was used to verify file integrity, I designed a deployment system for a test station that eliminated the need to include a file listing the CRC32 values of all of the other files on the test stations disk. All files on the disk were executables, so I simply wrote a program that appended a record to the end of all files causing all of the files to have a 0 CRC32 value. I then added a CRC32 calculation to the OS loader and failed any load that didn't come up with 0. With any methodology that uses a short enough hash, the design of a program to do this should be trivial.
First of all, even with the current increases, the cheapest way to get hydrogen right now is to liberate it from a barrel of oil due to the relative weakness of the chemical bonds versus other widely available hydrogen compounds. To avoid the use of oil takes more power than to use oil. The necessary infrastructure just for the refinery changeover is in the trillions, not billions.
Second, if electricity is used to liberate the hydrogen from a compound, we'd need to at least triple our electric generation depending on the compound used. This cost is also in the many trillions.
Third, a distribution infrastructure needs to be built. If its pipelines, we're talking many new sophisticated pipelines. Existing ones can't generally be converted. If its electric, the electric distribution system needs to at least triple. Again, trillions.
Also, most of our electricity is still produced from fossil fuels. To triple our capacity quickly with as little practical and aesthetic environmental impact as possible, we'd need to go nuclear and we're still hampered by our own cold war propaganda in that area.
Another barrier is simply the time to replace the cars. Many millions of Americans can't afford to spend more than a couple thousand dollars on a car. Most of the fuel cell design directions seem to depend on a much longer lifetime of the base vehicle to offset a much higher initial cost, some even planning on swapping out the bulk of the body a few times to allow the base vehicle to reach into the half million mile realm. This means that it will take a very long time for these vehicles to get down to the level where the lower class can purchase them. The middle class will be purchasing these vehicles on at least 10 year loans. They most likely will not be able to pay for two at one time, so it will take them at least 10 years after they make their first purchase to replace both cars. Count on it taking at least 30 years to evolve gas out and more likely 50 years.
So, much easier said than done. I believe it will be done in time, but its going to take much more than a few 100 billion dollars and a few years. That might pay for the factory changeover of the vehicle manufacturers and reeducation of over a million mechanics though.
Problem though is that you're lumping all game players into one category. I personally prefer it to be as realistic as it can get. An indication of this is that I vastly prefer Ghost Recon to something like Battlefield 2. The ultimate game to me is the one that can come as close as possible to making me think I'm there. One where I truly may have to take an hour just to get into place for that perfect shot. One where planning has to be present instead of just fast reaction. If I move over a twig, I want it to snap, but only if a heavy body part moves over it. My footprints should be findable by the enemy in soft ground. I should be able to make use of things like trees to block roads or crush a building with everyone in it. Being able to cause and watch the effects of rockslides would be really cool. Even with HW acceleration though, lots of this is still years away.
And as far as the graphics coprocessor being usable for this function, forget it. When you put Ageia into the picture, so many more objects become movable usable items that the graphics coprocessor becomes swamped trying to deal with a more complex reality. The inclusion of physics on larger numbers of objects is going to make the graphics vendors very happy because their products are going to actually be behind the curb again.
The majority of software engineers that I have worked with have other degrees and either minored in CS or took just a few CS courses. In my experience (and this is a generality, not an absolute) those that had other majors have been more productive at coding due, I believe, to the broader knowledge base. How many software jobs are there for people to create code that doesn't require domain experience?
It is long past time for us to move the fundamentals of programming to being required base courses for most all degrees, in the same vein as language, math, and science fundamentals. Instead of CS graduates, we need human interface design grads who have had CS courses, doctors who have had CS courses, engineers who have had CS courses, economists who have had CS courses, business majors who have had CS courses, accountants who have had CS, etc.
Perhaps this is exactly what is happening. I'd rather see a study indicating the number of student-hours spent in CS classes than a study indicating how many people are majoring in CS. CS is for those who are going to teach and a few others who are going to create operating systems, database engines, and a few other applications that don't require extensive knowledge of another domain.
I max out my Roadrunner connection for hours at a time several times a week. 5 Mbit connection routinely delivering around 490 KBytes / second on sustained downloads. AT&T is going to be majorly up the creek when everybody but them can offer full telephone, internet, HDTV, and audio service over a single infrastructure.
Though I've not seen studies claiming proof of the type of sensitivities spoken of in this article, I can imagine them based on known sensitivities and the mode of operation of the known sensitivities is such that your lightning example doesn't apply. Basically, the operation of cells in your body depends heavily on ion channel transports through cell membranes. Low frequency EM fields have been shown to physically vibrate the ions to an extent that can interfere with normal movement and transport of the ions in the cells. This is why long term exposure to high energy EM fields of low frequency can have health effects. The effect is not via direct alteration of DNA or other molecules as you might expect from very high frequency sources, but through physically interfering with ions and larger charged molecules that have important roles in energy generation, cancer prevention, etc.
To say that your body could ever "get used to" this is probably incorrect although increased production of what isn't moving as efficiently as it should might be occurring.
Now, as for this article in particular, I wonder if there might be charged particles in the cilia or other areas of the auditory processing system that might be getting physically moved enough to create input below our normal awareness levels.
sigh... apparently, this is one of those government and business promulgated myths that is going to take years to undo, if even undoable. There are a ton of "scientists" out there who are emotionally and economically dependent on the current established "truth". Bad science is killing us all. But, here's the pointer. Read it.
Returning natural amounts of fat to our diet is essential for getting our weight back under control. As we've reduced our fat intake percentage, we have increased our food intake to take in the same overall amount of fat, hence the threefold increase in diabetes.
And while you're at it, add the following to your reading.
I can't find one right now, but there have also been several studies that were suppressed by those funded by the established theories indicating that high concentrations of free iron and calcium, both of which are as essential to the formation of plaque as fat, in the blood stream are more closely associated with heart disease than fat intake. So, yeh, go choke down some more iron and calcium laced supplements if you'd like to die young. And you might throw in the fact that family history, i.e. genetic makeup, is the number one best predictor.
In short, I've decided that your body knows what's best more than current established "science". Since deciding this, I've lost 50 pounds eating what I want instead of what's "good" for me. And the substitution of bacon grease in place of crisco in my corn bread last night was awesome.
First of all, the solution briefly mentioned in the article is apparently software vaporware. A software solution is going to either be overlimiting or worthless because it doesn't take into account the characteristics of the earbuds, headset, speakers, or whatever you are using. A given signal output will generate widely differing volumes depending on those characteristics. Especially if the output device contains amplification or other signal modification capabilities of its own.
Second, the misleading summary on Slashdot is unforgivable. RTFA.
Third, who says that everyone out there has the same threshold of damage in the first place? If they actually succeed in creating a device that reliably limits this, it will quickly be set for the lowest level known to harm anyone and become a defacto built in requirement for all devices as soon as the first lawsuit hits a manufacturer that either doesn't include the capability or allows it to be trivially disabled. Inventions like this are scary for that reason. There are way too many examples of these types of stupid protections being imposed on us.
A common example these days is water temperature regulations. The human body's burn response is actually a response, not a physical burning. The heat activates receptors, actually the same ones activated by capsaicin (pepper), that trigger the body tissues to blister, swell, etc. The trigger point of this response differs widely from one individual to the next and is dependent both on the individuals receptor concentration and the responsiveness of the receptors. The generally accepted worse case is that some individuals burn at a temperature as low as 120F. I've known others who drink 180 degree coffee as if it is nothing and can snack on habernero peppers in relative comfort. Those others do not sense heat the same and a 120F shower is cold to them. Where this hurts them is when the zealot overprotectors in our society do things like put in regulations that the hot water at the tap in a motel room cannot be over 120F, thus impinging on the freedom of many to enjoy a comfortably hot shower.
I'd bet just about anything that, like temperature, the vulnerability of the cilia to damage differs from one person to the next. Moreover, it probably varies even more than temperature because there are so many points at which the transmission of sound to the cilia can vary such as, the shape of the ear, the flexibility of the eardrum, the flexibility of the joints in the bones that transmit the sound through the middle ear, the flexibility of the cochlea's membrane, and even the resiliency of the particular individual's cilia.
We've got to start complaining loudly (no pun intended) when supposed advances are announced by scientists who are ignoring individuality. Individuality is what is being protected by freedom. We have given up much freedom to today's oversimplified "science" and it's influence on things like public perception, medical treatment, government regulation and civil law. No more.
And the truth is, that is likely at least similar to exactly what there plan is. Both parties work for big business. They just use different manipulations to cloak what they are really doing and because of that serve different sets of big business.
"once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft."
Especially when there is a multi-billion dollar industry profiting from it and feeding the press. The security machine has apparently decided either that its MS based business is on the decline or that they simply aren't satisfied with what they have. In either case, Apple, the various cell phone companies, and even the Linux market, beware, they are coming. You are about to feel what MS has felt whether you deserve it or not. Eventually, their minions will be successful in distributing some virus or worm that will cause enough damage to create the business line they desire. Every fortress has a vulnerability. It will be found.
It's beginning to become very obvious that we've accepted a lot of blanket restrictions because of a few people with bad genes. Medicine needs to come to a firm understanding that blanket statements based on statistical studies without an understanding of mechanism do a lot of harm and need to be stopped.
A recent example is the large scale study of fat consumption that destroyed our supposed "knowledge" that increased fat consumption resulted in increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. When many small scale studies indicate there is a risk and a well financed ($450 million) large scale study shows that it doesn't hold for a carefully balanced general population sample, you can bet that genes are at work. Actually, in order for it to work out mathematically, I'd bet there is a subpopulation that has a decreased disease risk with increased fat intake that hasn't been pinned down yet. In chasing this false target since the '60s, we have spent billions that could have been spent better, we have created an obesity problem because we didn't understand that a large population will increase overall intake to achieve the same amount of fat intake if you reduce the percentage of fat intake, and we've tripled the occurrence of diabetes caused by the resultant increase in carbohydrate consumption.
Another example is salt. Yes, all of you who have avoided table salt to control your blood pressure, guess what. It has been known since the '70s that only 1 in 4 of the general American population has the gene that causes blood pressure to be very sensitive to salt intake. But since there was no easy test for it, they just threw a general rule at all of us. 3 out of 4 of those avoiding salt are doing it for no good reason. Now, that one may not have had big medical consequences, but I'd argue its a big quality of life issue as well as a stress generator in many families.
When somebody comes up with a test to determine whether I have the bad coffee gene, I will consider whether I'd prefer to take the risk or quit. Until then, I'm enjoying my coffee.
With the limitations imposed by the license, there doesn't seem to be much value to this. Thinking out of the box though, perhaps it is a setup for new lawsuits against the other clients cracking into the network. By opening up, even to this limited extent, they may be countering some of the arguments anticipated where other clients are claiming that AOL left them no viable alternative other than reverse engineering the protocols and cracking in.
You're oh so close to coming up with a new acronym for RTFA there. Maybe, REad The Actual Real Document (RETARD)? Got to be a better way to get the R in though.
SACRILEGE!!!! That thick stain is the essence of geek coffee flavor!!! I can't tell you how many times I've had to chew out some misguided dogooder for washing my coffee mug.
That's exactly the reason for the range. The last time I researched this (been about a year) the general years when we'd cross the threshold were between 2015 and 2025 depending on how much capability the various paper writers estimated that the brain had while assuming Moore's Law as a constant. 2030 is a bit outside the norm of what I was seeing at that time, but what the hay, add five to my upper estimate and push it out some.
Your other issues are primarily a programming issue, which is why I indicated that we'll have to be able to scan the "program" out of an existing brain. I don't see us ever being able to truly "understand" a program this complex but developers will find a way where researchers fail on this one. I did leave out the remapping of that program onto a massively parallel hardware architecture. That will take some time because all of the delay pipelines must be maintained as a critical part of the program.
In any case, we're more likely to hit this point in the first half of the century than the second half. So, many of us stand a good chance of seeing it barring catastrophes.
Your example actually brings up another interesting research area. Those who have been reverse engineering the optic path to an accurate analog model have found that a tremendous amount of vital processing is performed in the optic nerve path prior to the signal reaching what we generally consider to be "the brain". I've seen overestimates of brain function occur from this. The brain is processing a sensor signal that already contains edge, movement (extracted by splitting signals into multiple paths with different time delays and then passing them through comparators), and lots of other information. So much abstraction has already occurred that the pixelated type of image that most of us think of processing doesn't exist at the brain level. I think that hardware effort was occurring at Stanford if anyone cares to track it down. Cool stuff.
I've been thinking for quite some time of utilizing this type of P2P distributed caching proxy concept with many different protocols. RSS is just one possibility amongst many that could utilize the basic technology here. Some others might include distributed file systems, distributed caching http proxies, or even a Google competitor that uses a distributed P2P implementation of the database and utilizes everyone's everyday web activity to augment the spidering (i.e. every time anyone who is part of the P2P search network hits a site, a side effect is that they update the search index with the latest data from that site).
I'm not sure though that this is truly beneficial in terms of reducing the burden that RSS places on the Internet in general. Yes, it reduces the burden on the originating web site, but I believe it increases the total number of packets that must flow across some internet connection somewhere. So, it appears to be a mechanism for shifting the cost from one at the server to a larger total one at the clients, not a mechanism for helping the internet as a whole. I would in fact be positive that this is not beneficial overall except for the fact that it may have a beneficial reduction of the peak traffic on critical network backbones. But that would only be true if the overlayed network topology is either geographically optimized or is based on something that has an accidental relationship to geography.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe it would have to. The projectile would likely follow a non-ballistic trajectory if the air resistance in that non-ballistic path was low enough relative to the surrounding air. It would be as if the projectile were sent down a barrel of air, which at mach 23 is actually a pretty hard material.
I don't know about others, but my first 760 TV was purchased because I purchased an XBox and of course wanted the nicest display possible for it. The day I purchase a 1080p capable XBox, I will of course also purchase the nicest display possible for it. The console is neither the most important nor the most expensive portion of the gaming system in my mind.
Given the size, I'd doubt if a 1000 of them release much more carbon than one human who in fact contains an almost uncountable number of microscopic engines. Also note that the pollution control on modern car engines is not designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In fact, it both substantially decreases the mileage and increases carbon dioxide emissions in favor of decreasing more directly dangerous emissions. I would guess that the extremely small scale and controlled problem space of this engine would allow it to be tuned to very high efficiencies. That combined with a far more refined and pure fuel that you would likely purchase in small capsules that have price per gallon equivalents many times higher than gasoline could result in emissions that are primarily water vapor.
As a country, I believe the US has forgotten this. Regrettably, the Congress has at least a dual role, enacting laws and determining the budget. The biggest factor in politics here is not changing the laws, its changing the way the budget is spent. Sadly, both of the major parties always want to spend more, just in different ways. I personally believe that separate bodies should have been created to perform these two very different jobs. Then, people would have candidates to elect based on nothing more than the direction they would like to see the law take and more thought would go into that direction. As it stands now though, its more about who is giving you the most money.
Programming is nothing more than the new writing. It is a basic skill needed in almost every field taught in college. One of the reasons for software quality problems today is that people are trying to write software that encodes the knowledge of domains that they were not trained in. Few specifications are complete enough to communicate more than a gross level of the knowledge of truly specialized fields that take years to learn. And if they were complete enough, you would be able to run the specification and wouldn't need the programmer.
The CS field needs to be changed to be more like the English and Math fields. i.e. the only reason to get a CS degree is to teach CS. Beyond that, every college student should be required to take a level of CS courses that is appropriate to their field. Appropriate levels probably closely match those of the required math courses. i.e. if three years of math is required for a field, three years of CS should be required too.
As for this article, its poppycock. Computers aren't going to be able to do what the article alludes to until we give the computers a true AI. A true AI can't come about until we realize that human thought has an experiential base that is critical to understanding and applying human knowledge. i.e. computers need to understand the visual, auditory, 4 dimensional moving physical world as well as the emotions and social interactions of people and use that understanding in judging what knowledge applies and in extrapolating new knowledge. And even then, that understanding will not necessarily be in the "operating system".
I don't have a reference because it was so long ago, but I do remember reading of a large scale study that I believe ended in the early '90s that showed a surprising reduction in ability to retain information when students were under fluorescent light vs. when they were under incandescent light. There were no conclusions as to why. The only possibilities I can think of are the differences in the fullness of the spectrum, the color temperature (yes, different things), the "flicker" of fluorescent lighting, and the sound of fluorescent lighting (I'm one of those who almost always hears it).
It was surprising to me at the time, but not anymore, that nothing seemed to come of the study. Even at that time, replacing all of the fluorescent bulbs in schools with another technology would have been cost prohibitive. As a society, Americans tend to bury knowledge that would hit their wallets.
As there are solutions to much of the problems of incandescent lighting, such as a recently developed coating that efficiently transforms the infrared heat component of the light produced into light in the visible spectrum (was that at Sandia?), and because 2000+ lumen fluorescents that fit my fixtures are hard to impossible to find (I like my light), and because the CFLs I have purchased don't seem to last longer than incandescents even though I paid more(I really think that no bulb dies naturally around here, they all die due to surges, hence the reason I tend to have to replace bulbs in very short bursts), and because I almost always perceive a "vibration" (more like a buzz in my vision than a flicker) with bulbs that is worse with CFLs than incandescents (though present on both), I'll stick with my incandescents.
"you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got."
If you truly have a runaway process, it will use up all of your swap, no matter how much swap you've got. In most cases, it would be better for it to die sooner rather than later.
I am a very heavy user and run many applications simultaneously. I have been running XP with 1 or 2GB of RAM and no swap file for over a year now. Despite having dozens of tabs open in two different browsers and running programs like Studio 10 for movie editing, I've never come close to running out of RAM.
Interestingly, it seems that Windows programs in general use less RAM if they have less virtual memory available to them. I have experimented with this to prove it to myself by reloading two identical 2GB machines with identical OS and software loads, setting one to have a 5GB swap and the other to have no swap, and starting up the same dozen or so applications on each. The "commit charge" on the machine without the swap was over 200MBs lower than on the one with swap.
The only reason advertisers would pay for this is if they are getting more business in return than the cost of the textbooks. Therefore, on average, the students will be paying more for their textbooks, not less. Schools that are allowing this are simply helping advertisers to take more money from this relatively naive and vulnerable population segment. They are doing no favors.
Back in the days where a simple CRC32 was used to verify file integrity, I designed a deployment system for a test station that eliminated the need to include a file listing the CRC32 values of all of the other files on the test stations disk. All files on the disk were executables, so I simply wrote a program that appended a record to the end of all files causing all of the files to have a 0 CRC32 value. I then added a CRC32 calculation to the OS loader and failed any load that didn't come up with 0. With any methodology that uses a short enough hash, the design of a program to do this should be trivial.
First of all, even with the current increases, the cheapest way to get hydrogen right now is to liberate it from a barrel of oil due to the relative weakness of the chemical bonds versus other widely available hydrogen compounds. To avoid the use of oil takes more power than to use oil. The necessary infrastructure just for the refinery changeover is in the trillions, not billions.
Second, if electricity is used to liberate the hydrogen from a compound, we'd need to at least triple our electric generation depending on the compound used. This cost is also in the many trillions.
Third, a distribution infrastructure needs to be built. If its pipelines, we're talking many new sophisticated pipelines. Existing ones can't generally be converted. If its electric, the electric distribution system needs to at least triple. Again, trillions.
Also, most of our electricity is still produced from fossil fuels. To triple our capacity quickly with as little practical and aesthetic environmental impact as possible, we'd need to go nuclear and we're still hampered by our own cold war propaganda in that area.
Another barrier is simply the time to replace the cars. Many millions of Americans can't afford to spend more than a couple thousand dollars on a car. Most of the fuel cell design directions seem to depend on a much longer lifetime of the base vehicle to offset a much higher initial cost, some even planning on swapping out the bulk of the body a few times to allow the base vehicle to reach into the half million mile realm. This means that it will take a very long time for these vehicles to get down to the level where the lower class can purchase them. The middle class will be purchasing these vehicles on at least 10 year loans. They most likely will not be able to pay for two at one time, so it will take them at least 10 years after they make their first purchase to replace both cars. Count on it taking at least 30 years to evolve gas out and more likely 50 years.
So, much easier said than done. I believe it will be done in time, but its going to take much more than a few 100 billion dollars and a few years. That might pay for the factory changeover of the vehicle manufacturers and reeducation of over a million mechanics though.
Problem though is that you're lumping all game players into one category. I personally prefer it to be as realistic as it can get. An indication of this is that I vastly prefer Ghost Recon to something like Battlefield 2. The ultimate game to me is the one that can come as close as possible to making me think I'm there. One where I truly may have to take an hour just to get into place for that perfect shot. One where planning has to be present instead of just fast reaction. If I move over a twig, I want it to snap, but only if a heavy body part moves over it. My footprints should be findable by the enemy in soft ground. I should be able to make use of things like trees to block roads or crush a building with everyone in it. Being able to cause and watch the effects of rockslides would be really cool. Even with HW acceleration though, lots of this is still years away.
And as far as the graphics coprocessor being usable for this function, forget it. When you put Ageia into the picture, so many more objects become movable usable items that the graphics coprocessor becomes swamped trying to deal with a more complex reality. The inclusion of physics on larger numbers of objects is going to make the graphics vendors very happy because their products are going to actually be behind the curb again.
is 100s of millions of dollars to build the browser. When Google pays 100% of Mozilla's development cost, and then pays some more, they can talk.
The majority of software engineers that I have worked with have other degrees and either minored in CS or took just a few CS courses. In my experience (and this is a generality, not an absolute) those that had other majors have been more productive at coding due, I believe, to the broader knowledge base. How many software jobs are there for people to create code that doesn't require domain experience?
It is long past time for us to move the fundamentals of programming to being required base courses for most all degrees, in the same vein as language, math, and science fundamentals. Instead of CS graduates, we need human interface design grads who have had CS courses, doctors who have had CS courses, engineers who have had CS courses, economists who have had CS courses, business majors who have had CS courses, accountants who have had CS, etc.
Perhaps this is exactly what is happening. I'd rather see a study indicating the number of student-hours spent in CS classes than a study indicating how many people are majoring in CS. CS is for those who are going to teach and a few others who are going to create operating systems, database engines, and a few other applications that don't require extensive knowledge of another domain.
I max out my Roadrunner connection for hours at a time several times a week. 5 Mbit connection routinely delivering around 490 KBytes / second on sustained downloads. AT&T is going to be majorly up the creek when everybody but them can offer full telephone, internet, HDTV, and audio service over a single infrastructure.
Though I've not seen studies claiming proof of the type of sensitivities spoken of in this article, I can imagine them based on known sensitivities and the mode of operation of the known sensitivities is such that your lightning example doesn't apply. Basically, the operation of cells in your body depends heavily on ion channel transports through cell membranes. Low frequency EM fields have been shown to physically vibrate the ions to an extent that can interfere with normal movement and transport of the ions in the cells. This is why long term exposure to high energy EM fields of low frequency can have health effects. The effect is not via direct alteration of DNA or other molecules as you might expect from very high frequency sources, but through physically interfering with ions and larger charged molecules that have important roles in energy generation, cancer prevention, etc.
To say that your body could ever "get used to" this is probably incorrect although increased production of what isn't moving as efficiently as it should might be occurring.
Now, as for this article in particular, I wonder if there might be charged particles in the cilia or other areas of the auditory processing system that might be getting physically moved enough to create input below our normal awareness levels.
sigh... apparently, this is one of those government and business promulgated myths that is going to take years to undo, if even undoable. There are a ton of "scientists" out there who are emotionally and economically dependent on the current established "truth". Bad science is killing us all. But, here's the pointer. Read it.
Study Finds Low-Fat Diet Won't Stop Cancer or Heart DiseaseReturning natural amounts of fat to our diet is essential for getting our weight back under control. As we've reduced our fat intake percentage, we have increased our food intake to take in the same overall amount of fat, hence the threefold increase in diabetes.
And while you're at it, add the following to your reading.
Omega 3 might not be a lifesaverI can't find one right now, but there have also been several studies that were suppressed by those funded by the established theories indicating that high concentrations of free iron and calcium, both of which are as essential to the formation of plaque as fat, in the blood stream are more closely associated with heart disease than fat intake. So, yeh, go choke down some more iron and calcium laced supplements if you'd like to die young. And you might throw in the fact that family history, i.e. genetic makeup, is the number one best predictor.
In short, I've decided that your body knows what's best more than current established "science". Since deciding this, I've lost 50 pounds eating what I want instead of what's "good" for me. And the substitution of bacon grease in place of crisco in my corn bread last night was awesome.
First of all, the solution briefly mentioned in the article is apparently software vaporware. A software solution is going to either be overlimiting or worthless because it doesn't take into account the characteristics of the earbuds, headset, speakers, or whatever you are using. A given signal output will generate widely differing volumes depending on those characteristics. Especially if the output device contains amplification or other signal modification capabilities of its own.
Second, the misleading summary on Slashdot is unforgivable. RTFA.
Third, who says that everyone out there has the same threshold of damage in the first place? If they actually succeed in creating a device that reliably limits this, it will quickly be set for the lowest level known to harm anyone and become a defacto built in requirement for all devices as soon as the first lawsuit hits a manufacturer that either doesn't include the capability or allows it to be trivially disabled. Inventions like this are scary for that reason. There are way too many examples of these types of stupid protections being imposed on us.
A common example these days is water temperature regulations. The human body's burn response is actually a response, not a physical burning. The heat activates receptors, actually the same ones activated by capsaicin (pepper), that trigger the body tissues to blister, swell, etc. The trigger point of this response differs widely from one individual to the next and is dependent both on the individuals receptor concentration and the responsiveness of the receptors. The generally accepted worse case is that some individuals burn at a temperature as low as 120F. I've known others who drink 180 degree coffee as if it is nothing and can snack on habernero peppers in relative comfort. Those others do not sense heat the same and a 120F shower is cold to them. Where this hurts them is when the zealot overprotectors in our society do things like put in regulations that the hot water at the tap in a motel room cannot be over 120F, thus impinging on the freedom of many to enjoy a comfortably hot shower.
I'd bet just about anything that, like temperature, the vulnerability of the cilia to damage differs from one person to the next. Moreover, it probably varies even more than temperature because there are so many points at which the transmission of sound to the cilia can vary such as, the shape of the ear, the flexibility of the eardrum, the flexibility of the joints in the bones that transmit the sound through the middle ear, the flexibility of the cochlea's membrane, and even the resiliency of the particular individual's cilia.
We've got to start complaining loudly (no pun intended) when supposed advances are announced by scientists who are ignoring individuality. Individuality is what is being protected by freedom. We have given up much freedom to today's oversimplified "science" and it's influence on things like public perception, medical treatment, government regulation and civil law. No more.
And the truth is, that is likely at least similar to exactly what there plan is. Both parties work for big business. They just use different manipulations to cloak what they are really doing and because of that serve different sets of big business.
"once you've lost a user's confidence, it's hard to get it back. Just ask Microsoft."
Especially when there is a multi-billion dollar industry profiting from it and feeding the press. The security machine has apparently decided either that its MS based business is on the decline or that they simply aren't satisfied with what they have. In either case, Apple, the various cell phone companies, and even the Linux market, beware, they are coming. You are about to feel what MS has felt whether you deserve it or not. Eventually, their minions will be successful in distributing some virus or worm that will cause enough damage to create the business line they desire. Every fortress has a vulnerability. It will be found.
It's beginning to become very obvious that we've accepted a lot of blanket restrictions because of a few people with bad genes. Medicine needs to come to a firm understanding that blanket statements based on statistical studies without an understanding of mechanism do a lot of harm and need to be stopped.
A recent example is the large scale study of fat consumption that destroyed our supposed "knowledge" that increased fat consumption resulted in increased risk of heart disease, cancer, and other diseases. When many small scale studies indicate there is a risk and a well financed ($450 million) large scale study shows that it doesn't hold for a carefully balanced general population sample, you can bet that genes are at work. Actually, in order for it to work out mathematically, I'd bet there is a subpopulation that has a decreased disease risk with increased fat intake that hasn't been pinned down yet. In chasing this false target since the '60s, we have spent billions that could have been spent better, we have created an obesity problem because we didn't understand that a large population will increase overall intake to achieve the same amount of fat intake if you reduce the percentage of fat intake, and we've tripled the occurrence of diabetes caused by the resultant increase in carbohydrate consumption.
Another example is salt. Yes, all of you who have avoided table salt to control your blood pressure, guess what. It has been known since the '70s that only 1 in 4 of the general American population has the gene that causes blood pressure to be very sensitive to salt intake. But since there was no easy test for it, they just threw a general rule at all of us. 3 out of 4 of those avoiding salt are doing it for no good reason. Now, that one may not have had big medical consequences, but I'd argue its a big quality of life issue as well as a stress generator in many families.
When somebody comes up with a test to determine whether I have the bad coffee gene, I will consider whether I'd prefer to take the risk or quit. Until then, I'm enjoying my coffee.
With the limitations imposed by the license, there doesn't seem to be much value to this. Thinking out of the box though, perhaps it is a setup for new lawsuits against the other clients cracking into the network. By opening up, even to this limited extent, they may be countering some of the arguments anticipated where other clients are claiming that AOL left them no viable alternative other than reverse engineering the protocols and cracking in.
You're oh so close to coming up with a new acronym for RTFA there. Maybe, REad The Actual Real Document (RETARD)? Got to be a better way to get the R in though.
SACRILEGE!!!! That thick stain is the essence of geek coffee flavor!!! I can't tell you how many times I've had to chew out some misguided dogooder for washing my coffee mug.
That's exactly the reason for the range. The last time I researched this (been about a year) the general years when we'd cross the threshold were between 2015 and 2025 depending on how much capability the various paper writers estimated that the brain had while assuming Moore's Law as a constant. 2030 is a bit outside the norm of what I was seeing at that time, but what the hay, add five to my upper estimate and push it out some.
Your other issues are primarily a programming issue, which is why I indicated that we'll have to be able to scan the "program" out of an existing brain. I don't see us ever being able to truly "understand" a program this complex but developers will find a way where researchers fail on this one. I did leave out the remapping of that program onto a massively parallel hardware architecture. That will take some time because all of the delay pipelines must be maintained as a critical part of the program.
In any case, we're more likely to hit this point in the first half of the century than the second half. So, many of us stand a good chance of seeing it barring catastrophes.
Your example actually brings up another interesting research area. Those who have been reverse engineering the optic path to an accurate analog model have found that a tremendous amount of vital processing is performed in the optic nerve path prior to the signal reaching what we generally consider to be "the brain". I've seen overestimates of brain function occur from this. The brain is processing a sensor signal that already contains edge, movement (extracted by splitting signals into multiple paths with different time delays and then passing them through comparators), and lots of other information. So much abstraction has already occurred that the pixelated type of image that most of us think of processing doesn't exist at the brain level. I think that hardware effort was occurring at Stanford if anyone cares to track it down. Cool stuff.
I've been thinking for quite some time of utilizing this type of P2P distributed caching proxy concept with many different protocols. RSS is just one possibility amongst many that could utilize the basic technology here. Some others might include distributed file systems, distributed caching http proxies, or even a Google competitor that uses a distributed P2P implementation of the database and utilizes everyone's everyday web activity to augment the spidering (i.e. every time anyone who is part of the P2P search network hits a site, a side effect is that they update the search index with the latest data from that site).
I'm not sure though that this is truly beneficial in terms of reducing the burden that RSS places on the Internet in general. Yes, it reduces the burden on the originating web site, but I believe it increases the total number of packets that must flow across some internet connection somewhere. So, it appears to be a mechanism for shifting the cost from one at the server to a larger total one at the clients, not a mechanism for helping the internet as a whole. I would in fact be positive that this is not beneficial overall except for the fact that it may have a beneficial reduction of the peak traffic on critical network backbones. But that would only be true if the overlayed network topology is either geographically optimized or is based on something that has an accidental relationship to geography.