Not only is the new idea useless and in fact unworkable with most OSes as already pointed out by several posts, the "original idea" of having two heads to speed up analysis by reading from the drive what was just written was just as bad. All they had to do was remember what they wrote. As I remember it, the cost of modifying the drives versus adding cache memory was a loser even in 1985.
Now, what I'd much much rather see is multiple independent read/write heads per platter on consumer level drives!!! Even two heads are enough to provide continuous streaming at the bit rate of the platter as the track to track seek time on most modern hard drives is less than the single rotation time. And, when it is detected that two areas of the disk are being accessed in an interwoven pattern, thrashing could be completely avoided.
they release Microsoft's codec and don't release their own codec. We should not become a tool in the wars between these behemoths. That is a road to mediocrity.
The thing about spam is, it doesn't have to result in sales. All it has to do is fuel someone's dream. There is a market for dream fuel, and it only has to work in your dreams.
While leading a sizable (about 2.5 million+ lines) real time project using Ada, I spent more time debugging at the assembly language level using an In-Circuit-Emulator than with any other language I've ever worked with including many assembly languages.
Ada was designed to replace the DOD's widest used language, Cobol. Then it was forced into hard real time like a Sears Tower sized square into a round post hole.
There are many problems with using Ada for hardware control, but the biggest problem we had was the extremely high degree of abstraction. It was very difficult to know absolutely how long a line of code was going to take to execute. Even a simple assignment statement might consume 1000s of CPU cycles if it was an assignment of an array or structure. The lack of visible syntactic difference between truly simple code and extremely complex code really really hurt.
On the Ada project, I had a staff of 25. We produced about 2.5 million lines of code that ran on about 60 processors in a loosely couple distributed system in about 2 years time. The product was mostly complete but loaded with bugs, instabilities, and performance issues. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we weren't allowed to complete the project.
Two years later we got to essentially repeat the project as an upgrade to an older platform. Constrained to CPUs that had about 1/5 the potential of what we had been using, we chose to use ANSI C as our core language and Gimpel Lint to help with quality control. Using a staff of 5 to 7 people, we created a completely new software package for the system consisting of approximately 1.5 million lines of code written over a period of 2 years. By the way, both of these systems were completely custom, so the operating system, device drivers, and even the ANSI C standard library in the latter case were written from scratch too. The result had more functionality and about 100 times the performance of the Ada version on hardware running 1/5th the speed. Best of all, there were only 5 significant bugs reported in the first couple of years of deployment. Out of embarassment, we fixed all but one of those for free in less than a days time a piece.
I attribute some of the success to greatly decreased compilation times and far greater efficiency, but the main reason was the reduction in abstraction of the code. WYSIWYG behavior in a language being used for hardware control is indispensable.
Some here have recognized that you could speed it up by cooling it... But you'd almost certainly break it also unless the design was extremely conservative and thus not exploiting full potential. Complex asynchronous designs are very sensitive to the delays between components. Even if they all change by the same factor, the delays within components probably would not. An asynchronous processor that is designed without wide margins in this timing (and thus truly pushing limits) would likely need good temperature control to ensure accuracy. Wider margins = lower performance.
Its remarkable to me how unimaginative this community is at times. Terabytes are nothing to use even with today's technology.
This is barely enough to start cracking the doors to the real future of computers. With this, you may be able to store a few seconds of fully immersive video. I'm talking the kind of stuff that gives you limit of human sight resolution for anything beyond arm's length no matter what direction you look in. Add this storage to flight simulator technology that notes your head position and dynamically reproduces the right resolutions across your field of vision using 210 degree goggles, and you've got an experience in the making.
Another technology that would soak it up in seconds would be life recording. I've got a fairly poor memory and generally forget completely almost anything beyond three years ago. I'd LOVE to be able to wear a device that records my every moment in 360 degrees with fully directional audio. But, really, the recording technologies, including storage, won't be the most difficult part of the development. The really tough part will be the technology to search the database. It will need to be able to interpret everything seen and heard in order to be able to replay what I'd like without my having to remember times and places. Furthermore, it would need to do so in near real time as the only time that it might have to "catch up" would be when I slept...actually, I'd probably won't much of that time recorded too. Expand that to recording not only my personal experience but anything occurring anywhere on any property that I own in full 3D realistic resolution and bringing things to my attention that I've told it too and the task is at least 30 years of technology away (2^^30 * current storage capacities + 2^^24 * current processing capacities). Add recording of other aspects of the environment like smell, temperature, RF, etc and you could soak up technology forever. People will want these things.
The day will come, probably within this century, when petabytes and petaips are to us what bits are today.
I think you reached to high for a starting point. Orbital mining of satellites, spent boosters, and other items for metals that could be melted and recast into structural components that would then be supplemented with components sent up from Earth would be a much lower starting target. This would involve separation of the materials and recasting. Materials not useful to the initial factory would be stored for the time when technology catches up with them.
If the facility was designed to create one simple container type that could then be outfitted to be totally different things, then I think you have a starter. Or, too shoot even lower, it could just manufacture a simple structural girder that could be used as a base building component.
OR TO GET REALLY LOW...if you recast the junk into a very dense object of the right shape, you've got a great inertial weapon without the cost of shooting the mass up into space.
Personally, I think international agreements that might block salvage of dead satellites and boosters are more likely to be a problem than the technology. The definition of dead or abandoned could be tricky. Anything that someone has spent a fortune to impart that much momentum too (the energy is the real commodity here) could be considered a resource owned by that someone for all time if you learn how to utilize the energy.
First and foremost, any solution needs to consider the economic factor. A solution that pays for itself will be a hands down winner.
Second, it seems like many of the solutions here would create more debris than already exists. A single large satellite is far simpler to track and avoid than a few thousand pieces of that large satellite. Unless your lasers or other weapons completely convert the debris into energy, you're wasting your time. Even if they force the debris toward Earth, the question would remain of "how did they do it"? The answer is by vaporizing matter which blasted away in the opposite direction. That matter is now not only debris in space, but untrackable debris. Even a paint fleck can do (and has done) serious damage to another orbiting object.
Third, THIS SPACE JUNK HAS VALUE!!! If its matter, and its in orbit, it is worth thousands of dollars a pound. It blows my mind everytime they guide something down that took millions too get up there instead of coming up with a way to get stuff into a parking orbit. Eventually, probably even today, there should be enough materials in space to justify manufacturing in space instead of sending more stuff up.
Steps we should take to turn this lead into gold include a) all future items launched should have provisions to reach an orbiting factory/storage facility at the end of their expected life. b) they need to all have provisions for capture via forces instead of mechanical means. This might mean adding magnetic materials or something. This way, an orbiting vehicle could capture them without contact that could cause further scattering of debris. c) software needs to be developed that can calculate capture plans for multiple objects that utilize the energy (stored in the momentum) of the objects captured effectively to help reach the next object and eventually get back to the orbiting factory/storage facility. Sort of like a game of 3D billiards. d) automated recycling and manufacturing technologies need to be developed to turn these raw materials into useful things like airtight habitat shells. At least initially, we'd probably have to keep bringing the high tech chips and stuff up the hard way, but the heavy shells and stuff could likely be very effectively manufactured in space. Things like girders for the space station should be relatively easy to do.
When owners of entertainment data choose to support the creation of and enforce draconian copyright rules and decisions like we've seen in the last few years, we need to stop reacting and step back and realize that it is there choice and right to do so.
The only lasting answer to recent developments in this area is to create a GPL like data movement. Perhaps a fund/website combination for the creation of public domain entertainment would be in order. The website could attract initial interest by becoming a major distributor of existing public domain data. Contributions could be collected that would go towards the creation of new data on a non-profit basis to be immediately released to the public upon completion. Actually, maybe even before completion. It would be nice to have all raw footage and raw musical recordings made during creation available the day it happens. The community could be involved in deciding what gets funded and in the "directing" or "mixing" during the process.
I think you're on the right track, but off it too. The answer is that everyone has a different genetic makeup with different problems causing their obesity. This is why there is no one size fits all, not even the "balanced" size. What's balanced for one is not balanced for another. When medicine starts recognizing that individuals bodies have different parameters they will recognize that all of these approaches are right for someone and none of them are right for everyone.
Of all that faces us in the next 50 years, resouces is our least worry. As other posts have pointed out, economics will take care of that.
What will hit us sooner? Blindness to the nature of man combined with continued technological advancement will get us.
Things like the development of computers small enough to carry around and powerful enough to perform multimodal analyses on those we talk to in order to determine with a very high degree of fidelity whether or not they are lying. Our societal structure cannot survive without the ability to at least bend the truth. All of the basic research has been done for this device. 9/11 has tremendously accelerated actual development of many of the basic components. It should be widely available in no more than 20 years.
Or, maybe the sheer number of people on the planet combined with modern travel will get us. In a early '90s issue of Omni, a mathematician was purported to have calculated the chances of a global killer virus (deadly + slow incubation + fast transmission) randomly developing and spreading through travel before lockdown of borders. The odds go up as the population (and thus the number of incubators) goes up. He showed us having a 50% chance per year by the year 2030. This calculation may be off now due to decreases in population growth, but I'd bet it still comes out to
Another danger is the simple advancement in the ease with which people can help this process along. As technology continues to advance and spread beyond control and more and more people become capable of developing world killers, eventually the ability will reach a suicidal someone willing to use it. Mass destruction no longer requires government backing. The first few attempts will likely fail, but someone will eventually succeed on a wide scale. 9/11 was a very small hint at what's to come in the next 50 years.
The Difference In Receipt Rates Is In the User
on
Klez: a closer look
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· Score: 3, Insightful
My wife and I both use Outlook for all of our email. Neither of us have ever been infected by the virus because we've kept up with updates to Outlook that block you from opening programs (and we know better).
She receives several copies a day of the Klez virus. I've never received it despite having about the same overall email traffic.
I think that the difference lies in who we know. I'm a Computer Engineer and she's a counselor. Thus, the average individual with my email address is a lot more computer savvy than those with her email address.
This number is completely out of context and nearly useless. To get any use at all from it, we need to AT LEAST know how much money that same software saved the users versus no software.
I also don't know why they say software is unusual in its quality. To even make the comparison, you'd have to build a mechanical equivalent to a million line program. I've seen pictures of simple mechanical processors, but none even close to the complexity of a modern program.
I don't know of any item manufactured that is perfectly bug free. Moreover, most of the bugs in mass produced hardware items are intentionally inserted (or knowingly not removed) by the manufacturers to limit the lifetime of the device.
Automobiles are especially notorious for this and cost way more than our home computers + all of there software. We've known how to build million mile brakes for little more than the cost of the
Let's hear some more about how many billions of dollars the "bugs" in the algorithm of applying the energy of combustion of gas to the rotation of the wheel is costing us.
When are they going to make this protocol secure? Allowing someone to pinpoint your physical location is a security leak in many ways worse than breaking encryption on the data stream.
How long will it be before someone writes a program to track and store the location of every student on campus once every few minutes or so. Stored over time, lots of people would find that useful. The database size is meaningless these days. A standard PC with 80GB drive and MySQL could deal with storing the location of 10,000 students every 5 minutes for a couple months.
Want to know if your girlfriend has been near some other guy at any time in the last month? Just query the database for when the two were located within a certain distance of each other, look for the days with the most hits, even plot the paths of both for those days on a map...
Does anyone think this kind of knowledge about each other is good?
Its already well stated in other articles here, but just can't be stated enough. Just say no. Just say no. Just say no. And then go get yourself a load of self respect and drop it on your bosses desk along with your resignation. There are hurting, unemployed programmers in your neighborhood, guaranteed. There are other ways to save money. For example, if your management thinks they can handle having 4 workers half way across the world, why not just close most of your facilities and allow 4 new workers to join the two left in working from home and only going to the office for meetings. The company I work for has that business model, and I've seen that it works.
At least by going to CMU, the government is guaranteed to get nothing for their money. Most of their expenditures these days result in negative output. Nothing is better than negative. CMU's idea of creating better quality is to remove all creating. Like most such ideas its wrapped in package that makes it look like the ultimate creativity enabler, but that's just the art of the sale. Ask any salesman, if you want to sell a car with a bad engine, you advertise how great the engine is. Its a natural instinct for people to question what they aren't being told, not what they are.
Perfect until the warehouse starts using 2.4GHz devices like WiFi in its management and inventory tracking. That's where this technology will likely die. Corporations installing this will be hampered in other ways and blacklisted by their neighbors.
"and save the environment"....
I like environment models that understand that there is an environmental impact represented in every dollar spent/received. Can these lights truly save the environmental impact caused by the forced restructuring of billions of dollars worth of equipment and development time? Don't forget that developers consume light and energy. Production of new telephones and other devices to replace those obsoleted also consumes light and energy. The environmental impact of a environment saving technology deployed wrongly can be devastating.
A site for nerds should not be furthering this kind of junk science. There is no more basis for predicting climate than the stock market. In fact, I'd say climate has a greater number of more complicated and less known variables. Curve fitting an equation to the climate of the last 50 years is a trivial operation. Attempts to use the fitted curve to predict the future are, however, as worthless as the same attempts have been on the stock market. No one has succeeded in predicting either short or long term stock market trends with any reliability. If they had, the market would be broke.
Interestingly, though we've been brainwashed into believing that fewer kids are actually better off, the average in America is still > 2 children. I have four children and consider four or more to be a decent sized family.
Detroit is having more and more trouble generating enough electricity in cars to run all of the electric gadgets. And I'm not talking wasteful gadgets like radios and GPS units. I'm talking about useful things that could raise fuel efficiency like electronic valves that can be fully computer controlled.
One of their bigger problems is that there always has to be enough left over to run the headlights. This would considerably reduce the necessary budget there.
My Pontiac Montana minivan at 26MPG highway is more efficient at carrying my family than the two fuel efficient cars we'd have to drive otherwise. One man's gas guzzler is another's energy saver.
I will be forced to something less efficient soon though as I'm going to require four wheel drive the next time I move. Snowy dirt roads up and down mountains type deal.
I'll get fuel efficient when someone provides me a fuel efficient vehicle that can do decent battle in a collision, carry a decent real family (6 or more), and negotiate snowy dirt roads with little risk of leaving me stranded.
An acquaintance of mine is particularly susceptable to these. He's a real dreamer type who made lots of money on one gamble (purchased cellular telephone bandwidth rights shortly before cellular telephones took off) and then lost it all on two others.
The scam that took most of it was a guy who was going to wire every stadium box in America with fiber and equip them with dual processor computers and 42" displays (in 1997 time frame). Basically, the idea was to let the rich simultaneously surf the Internet, see their email, get special game statistics, watch replays, etc while watching the game. Even if he did it, I never understood how he was going to make the millions of investment money back. This was an example of a scam that used plausible technology, but never had a sustainable business model. The investment capital was just being pocketed.
The other was actually a perpetual energy scam. Yes, people still fall for that one. This was some sort of device with multiple rings made of just the right metals and spinning in different directions or something. Somehow, it supposedly extracted energy from the Earth's magnetic field. I researched it a couple of years ago and found that the guy has been running the scam for over 40 years. This guy's big hook was religious based at the time. He claimed to have died in a traffic accident with a ruptured aorta and been miraculously brought back to life. When he awoke, the schematics were in his head for this device. They had been given to him directly by God. He was giving this story from the pulpit at really conservative Christian churches across the SouthEast and attracting all sorts of investors.
I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...
I don't see enough noise on here. Talk about a massive violation of privacy. Why give a rip about what can be picked up about you at a website if someone can drive by your home and inventory your every possession?
Police want need a search warrant anymore to check what brand of shoe is in your closet or whether you have a blue blazer, etc.
It will be easier than ever to profile everyone in a neighborhood based on things like what books they read, how many violent video games they own, etc.
There is no question that this is way way bad, so, I only want to know one thing. How do we defeat this thing? How do we prevent someone from driving by and inventorying our every possession?
I don't think we can jam it because the stupid neighbors would complain that they can't find their keys...
It would probably be tough to pull it off of every device...
Maybe a shielded box could be made in which you could place it and aim a high power RF signal at it to burn it out.
If the range is short enough, I could buy the land surrounding my home, but you could still fly over and pick it up.
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Not only is the new idea useless and in fact unworkable with most OSes as already pointed out by several posts, the "original idea" of having two heads to speed up analysis by reading from the drive what was just written was just as bad. All they had to do was remember what they wrote. As I remember it, the cost of modifying the drives versus adding cache memory was a loser even in 1985.
Now, what I'd much much rather see is multiple independent read/write heads per platter on consumer level drives!!! Even two heads are enough to provide continuous streaming at the bit rate of the platter as the track to track seek time on most modern hard drives is less than the single rotation time. And, when it is detected that two areas of the disk are being accessed in an interwoven pattern, thrashing could be completely avoided.
they release Microsoft's codec and don't release their own codec. We should not become a tool in the wars between these behemoths. That is a road to mediocrity.
The thing about spam is, it doesn't have to result in sales. All it has to do is fuel someone's dream. There is a market for dream fuel, and it only has to work in your dreams.
While leading a sizable (about 2.5 million+ lines) real time project using Ada, I spent more time debugging at the assembly language level using an In-Circuit-Emulator than with any other language I've ever worked with including many assembly languages.
Ada was designed to replace the DOD's widest used language, Cobol. Then it was forced into hard real time like a Sears Tower sized square into a round post hole.
There are many problems with using Ada for hardware control, but the biggest problem we had was the extremely high degree of abstraction. It was very difficult to know absolutely how long a line of code was going to take to execute. Even a simple assignment statement might consume 1000s of CPU cycles if it was an assignment of an array or structure. The lack of visible syntactic difference between truly simple code and extremely complex code really really hurt.
On the Ada project, I had a staff of 25. We produced about 2.5 million lines of code that ran on about 60 processors in a loosely couple distributed system in about 2 years time. The product was mostly complete but loaded with bugs, instabilities, and performance issues. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we weren't allowed to complete the project.
Two years later we got to essentially repeat the project as an upgrade to an older platform. Constrained to CPUs that had about 1/5 the potential of what we had been using, we chose to use ANSI C as our core language and Gimpel Lint to help with quality control. Using a staff of 5 to 7 people, we created a completely new software package for the system consisting of approximately 1.5 million lines of code written over a period of 2 years. By the way, both of these systems were completely custom, so the operating system, device drivers, and even the ANSI C standard library in the latter case were written from scratch too. The result had more functionality and about 100 times the performance of the Ada version on hardware running 1/5th the speed. Best of all, there were only 5 significant bugs reported in the first couple of years of deployment. Out of embarassment, we fixed all but one of those for free in less than a days time a piece.
I attribute some of the success to greatly decreased compilation times and far greater efficiency, but the main reason was the reduction in abstraction of the code. WYSIWYG behavior in a language being used for hardware control is indispensable.
Some here have recognized that you could speed it up by cooling it... But you'd almost certainly break it also unless the design was extremely conservative and thus not exploiting full potential. Complex asynchronous designs are very sensitive to the delays between components. Even if they all change by the same factor, the delays within components probably would not. An asynchronous processor that is designed without wide margins in this timing (and thus truly pushing limits) would likely need good temperature control to ensure accuracy. Wider margins = lower performance.
Its remarkable to me how unimaginative this community is at times. Terabytes are nothing to use even with today's technology.
This is barely enough to start cracking the doors to the real future of computers. With this, you may be able to store a few seconds of fully immersive video. I'm talking the kind of stuff that gives you limit of human sight resolution for anything beyond arm's length no matter what direction you look in. Add this storage to flight simulator technology that notes your head position and dynamically reproduces the right resolutions across your field of vision using 210 degree goggles, and you've got an experience in the making.
Another technology that would soak it up in seconds would be life recording. I've got a fairly poor memory and generally forget completely almost anything beyond three years ago. I'd LOVE to be able to wear a device that records my every moment in 360 degrees with fully directional audio. But, really, the recording technologies, including storage, won't be the most difficult part of the development. The really tough part will be the technology to search the database. It will need to be able to interpret everything seen and heard in order to be able to replay what I'd like without my having to remember times and places. Furthermore, it would need to do so in near real time as the only time that it might have to "catch up" would be when I slept...actually, I'd probably won't much of that time recorded too. Expand that to recording not only my personal experience but anything occurring anywhere on any property that I own in full 3D realistic resolution and bringing things to my attention that I've told it too and the task is at least 30 years of technology away (2^^30 * current storage capacities + 2^^24 * current processing capacities). Add recording of other aspects of the environment like smell, temperature, RF, etc and you could soak up technology forever. People will want these things.
The day will come, probably within this century, when petabytes and petaips are to us what bits are today.
I think you reached to high for a starting point. Orbital mining of satellites, spent boosters, and other items for metals that could be melted and recast into structural components that would then be supplemented with components sent up from Earth would be a much lower starting target. This would involve separation of the materials and recasting. Materials not useful to the initial factory would be stored for the time when technology catches up with them.
If the facility was designed to create one simple container type that could then be outfitted to be totally different things, then I think you have a starter. Or, too shoot even lower, it could just manufacture a simple structural girder that could be used as a base building component.
OR TO GET REALLY LOW...if you recast the junk into a very dense object of the right shape, you've got a great inertial weapon without the cost of shooting the mass up into space.
Personally, I think international agreements that might block salvage of dead satellites and boosters are more likely to be a problem than the technology. The definition of dead or abandoned could be tricky. Anything that someone has spent a fortune to impart that much momentum too (the energy is the real commodity here) could be considered a resource owned by that someone for all time if you learn how to utilize the energy.
First and foremost, any solution needs to consider the economic factor. A solution that pays for itself will be a hands down winner.
Second, it seems like many of the solutions here would create more debris than already exists. A single large satellite is far simpler to track and avoid than a few thousand pieces of that large satellite. Unless your lasers or other weapons completely convert the debris into energy, you're wasting your time. Even if they force the debris toward Earth, the question would remain of "how did they do it"? The answer is by vaporizing matter which blasted away in the opposite direction. That matter is now not only debris in space, but untrackable debris. Even a paint fleck can do (and has done) serious damage to another orbiting object.
Third, THIS SPACE JUNK HAS VALUE!!! If its matter, and its in orbit, it is worth thousands of dollars a pound. It blows my mind everytime they guide something down that took millions too get up there instead of coming up with a way to get stuff into a parking orbit. Eventually, probably even today, there should be enough materials in space to justify manufacturing in space instead of sending more stuff up.
Steps we should take to turn this lead into gold include a) all future items launched should have provisions to reach an orbiting factory/storage facility at the end of their expected life. b) they need to all have provisions for capture via forces instead of mechanical means. This might mean adding magnetic materials or something. This way, an orbiting vehicle could capture them without contact that could cause further scattering of debris. c) software needs to be developed that can calculate capture plans for multiple objects that utilize the energy (stored in the momentum) of the objects captured effectively to help reach the next object and eventually get back to the orbiting factory/storage facility. Sort of like a game of 3D billiards. d) automated recycling and manufacturing technologies need to be developed to turn these raw materials into useful things like airtight habitat shells. At least initially, we'd probably have to keep bringing the high tech chips and stuff up the hard way, but the heavy shells and stuff could likely be very effectively manufactured in space. Things like girders for the space station should be relatively easy to do.
When owners of entertainment data choose to support the creation of and enforce draconian copyright rules and decisions like we've seen in the last few years, we need to stop reacting and step back and realize that it is there choice and right to do so.
The only lasting answer to recent developments in this area is to create a GPL like data movement. Perhaps a fund/website combination for the creation of public domain entertainment would be in order. The website could attract initial interest by becoming a major distributor of existing public domain data. Contributions could be collected that would go towards the creation of new data on a non-profit basis to be immediately released to the public upon completion. Actually, maybe even before completion. It would be nice to have all raw footage and raw musical recordings made during creation available the day it happens. The community could be involved in deciding what gets funded and in the "directing" or "mixing" during the process.
I think you're on the right track, but off it too. The answer is that everyone has a different genetic makeup with different problems causing their obesity. This is why there is no one size fits all, not even the "balanced" size. What's balanced for one is not balanced for another. When medicine starts recognizing that individuals bodies have different parameters they will recognize that all of these approaches are right for someone and none of them are right for everyone.
Of all that faces us in the next 50 years, resouces is our least worry. As other posts have pointed out, economics will take care of that.
What will hit us sooner? Blindness to the nature of man combined with continued technological advancement will get us.
Things like the development of computers small enough to carry around and powerful enough to perform multimodal analyses on those we talk to in order to determine with a very high degree of fidelity whether or not they are lying. Our societal structure cannot survive without the ability to at least bend the truth. All of the basic research has been done for this device. 9/11 has tremendously accelerated actual development of many of the basic components. It should be widely available in no more than 20 years.
Or, maybe the sheer number of people on the planet combined with modern travel will get us. In a early '90s issue of Omni, a mathematician was purported to have calculated the chances of a global killer virus (deadly + slow incubation + fast transmission) randomly developing and spreading through travel before lockdown of borders. The odds go up as the population (and thus the number of incubators) goes up. He showed us having a 50% chance per year by the year 2030. This calculation may be off now due to decreases in population growth, but I'd bet it still comes out to
Another danger is the simple advancement in the ease with which people can help this process along. As technology continues to advance and spread beyond control and more and more people become capable of developing world killers, eventually the ability will reach a suicidal someone willing to use it. Mass destruction no longer requires government backing. The first few attempts will likely fail, but someone will eventually succeed on a wide scale. 9/11 was a very small hint at what's to come in the next 50 years.
My wife and I both use Outlook for all of our email. Neither of us have ever been infected by the virus because we've kept up with updates to Outlook that block you from opening programs (and we know better).
She receives several copies a day of the Klez virus. I've never received it despite having about the same overall email traffic.
I think that the difference lies in who we know. I'm a Computer Engineer and she's a counselor. Thus, the average individual with my email address is a lot more computer savvy than those with her email address.
This number is completely out of context and nearly useless. To get any use at all from it, we need to AT LEAST know how much money that same software saved the users versus no software.
I also don't know why they say software is unusual in its quality. To even make the comparison, you'd have to build a mechanical equivalent to a million line program. I've seen pictures of simple mechanical processors, but none even close to the complexity of a modern program.
I don't know of any item manufactured that is perfectly bug free. Moreover, most of the bugs in mass produced hardware items are intentionally inserted (or knowingly not removed) by the manufacturers to limit the lifetime of the device.
Automobiles are especially notorious for this and cost way more than our home computers + all of there software. We've known how to build million mile brakes for little more than the cost of the
Let's hear some more about how many billions of dollars the "bugs" in the algorithm of applying the energy of combustion of gas to the rotation of the wheel is costing us.
When are they going to make this protocol secure? Allowing someone to pinpoint your physical location is a security leak in many ways worse than breaking encryption on the data stream.
How long will it be before someone writes a program to track and store the location of every student on campus once every few minutes or so. Stored over time, lots of people would find that useful. The database size is meaningless these days. A standard PC with 80GB drive and MySQL could deal with storing the location of 10,000 students every 5 minutes for a couple months.
Want to know if your girlfriend has been near some other guy at any time in the last month? Just query the database for when the two were located within a certain distance of each other, look for the days with the most hits, even plot the paths of both for those days on a map...
Does anyone think this kind of knowledge about each other is good?
Its already well stated in other articles here, but just can't be stated enough. Just say no. Just say no. Just say no. And then go get yourself a load of self respect and drop it on your bosses desk along with your resignation. There are hurting, unemployed programmers in your neighborhood, guaranteed. There are other ways to save money. For example, if your management thinks they can handle having 4 workers half way across the world, why not just close most of your facilities and allow 4 new workers to join the two left in working from home and only going to the office for meetings. The company I work for has that business model, and I've seen that it works.
At least by going to CMU, the government is guaranteed to get nothing for their money. Most of their expenditures these days result in negative output. Nothing is better than negative. CMU's idea of creating better quality is to remove all creating. Like most such ideas its wrapped in package that makes it look like the ultimate creativity enabler, but that's just the art of the sale. Ask any salesman, if you want to sell a car with a bad engine, you advertise how great the engine is. Its a natural instinct for people to question what they aren't being told, not what they are.
Perfect until the warehouse starts using 2.4GHz devices like WiFi in its management and inventory tracking. That's where this technology will likely die. Corporations installing this will be hampered in other ways and blacklisted by their neighbors.
"and save the environment".... I like environment models that understand that there is an environmental impact represented in every dollar spent/received. Can these lights truly save the environmental impact caused by the forced restructuring of billions of dollars worth of equipment and development time? Don't forget that developers consume light and energy. Production of new telephones and other devices to replace those obsoleted also consumes light and energy. The environmental impact of a environment saving technology deployed wrongly can be devastating.
A site for nerds should not be furthering this kind of junk science. There is no more basis for predicting climate than the stock market. In fact, I'd say climate has a greater number of more complicated and less known variables. Curve fitting an equation to the climate of the last 50 years is a trivial operation. Attempts to use the fitted curve to predict the future are, however, as worthless as the same attempts have been on the stock market. No one has succeeded in predicting either short or long term stock market trends with any reliability. If they had, the market would be broke.
Interestingly, though we've been brainwashed into believing that fewer kids are actually better off, the average in America is still > 2 children. I have four children and consider four or more to be a decent sized family.
Detroit is having more and more trouble generating enough electricity in cars to run all of the electric gadgets. And I'm not talking wasteful gadgets like radios and GPS units. I'm talking about useful things that could raise fuel efficiency like electronic valves that can be fully computer controlled.
One of their bigger problems is that there always has to be enough left over to run the headlights. This would considerably reduce the necessary budget there.
My Pontiac Montana minivan at 26MPG highway is more efficient at carrying my family than the two fuel efficient cars we'd have to drive otherwise. One man's gas guzzler is another's energy saver.
I will be forced to something less efficient soon though as I'm going to require four wheel drive the next time I move. Snowy dirt roads up and down mountains type deal.
I'll get fuel efficient when someone provides me a fuel efficient vehicle that can do decent battle in a collision, carry a decent real family (6 or more), and negotiate snowy dirt roads with little risk of leaving me stranded.
An acquaintance of mine is particularly susceptable to these. He's a real dreamer type who made lots of money on one gamble (purchased cellular telephone bandwidth rights shortly before cellular telephones took off) and then lost it all on two others.
The scam that took most of it was a guy who was going to wire every stadium box in America with fiber and equip them with dual processor computers and 42" displays (in 1997 time frame). Basically, the idea was to let the rich simultaneously surf the Internet, see their email, get special game statistics, watch replays, etc while watching the game. Even if he did it, I never understood how he was going to make the millions of investment money back. This was an example of a scam that used plausible technology, but never had a sustainable business model. The investment capital was just being pocketed.
The other was actually a perpetual energy scam. Yes, people still fall for that one. This was some sort of device with multiple rings made of just the right metals and spinning in different directions or something. Somehow, it supposedly extracted energy from the Earth's magnetic field. I researched it a couple of years ago and found that the guy has been running the scam for over 40 years. This guy's big hook was religious based at the time. He claimed to have died in a traffic accident with a ruptured aorta and been miraculously brought back to life. When he awoke, the schematics were in his head for this device. They had been given to him directly by God. He was giving this story from the pulpit at really conservative Christian churches across the SouthEast and attracting all sorts of investors.
I wonder why there is no suspected scam site on the Internet? Maybe the legal risks would be too great...
I don't see enough noise on here. Talk about a massive violation of privacy. Why give a rip about what can be picked up about you at a website if someone can drive by your home and inventory your every possession?
Police want need a search warrant anymore to check what brand of shoe is in your closet or whether you have a blue blazer, etc.
It will be easier than ever to profile everyone in a neighborhood based on things like what books they read, how many violent video games they own, etc.
This stuff isn't worrying someone?
There is no question that this is way way bad, so, I only want to know one thing. How do we defeat this thing? How do we prevent someone from driving by and inventorying our every possession?
I don't think we can jam it because the stupid neighbors would complain that they can't find their keys...
It would probably be tough to pull it off of every device...
Maybe a shielded box could be made in which you could place it and aim a high power RF signal at it to burn it out.
If the range is short enough, I could buy the land surrounding my home, but you could still fly over and pick it up.