Cram? Chip designers get more and more transistors to use every year. I don't believe there's any "cramming" involved. into an already bloated CISC CPU? You're about 15 years out of date. The x86 isn't exactly a CISC CPU, it's a complex instruction set that decodes into a simpler one internally. Only the intel engineers know how they added the SSE4 instructions, but based on the comments of the encode/decode guys, these new instructions sound a lot like the old instructions. It's not too hard to imagine that they didn't have to change much silicon around, and maybe got to re-use some old internal stuff and just interpret the new instructions differently.
Anyway, so why not just have a dedicated piece of silicon for this exact purpose? Partly because it'd be more expensive (you'd have to basically implement a lot of the stuff already on CPU like cache, etc), but also because it's just too specific. How many people really care about encoding video? 5% of the market? Less?
Hardware decoding on hardware is already a reality, and has been for some time. GPUs have implemented this feature for at least 10 years. But of course it's generally not a feature that has dedicated silicon, it's integrated into the GPU. If this is the first you've heard of it, it's not surprising. The other problem with non-CPU specific accelerations is they don't ever really become standard, as there's no standard instruction set for GPUs, and ever a GPU maker may just drop that feature in the next line of cards.
In short, specialized means specialized. Specialized things don't tend to survive very well.
Did I break the law? I didn't call up someone at net-security.org and specifically ask them if I can read their article.
How is putting up an unsecured Wi-Fi connection any different than putting up an unsecured website?
The WPA actually ADVERTISES the fact that it exists.
When you connect to the network, most networks will have DHCP happily gives out all the information, even giving you an IP address automatically to any computer that asks.
Many people actually put up an unsecured AP with the INTENTION of giving out access. (And thus this becomes common expectation)
Many client computers will automatically connect to unsecured Wi-Fi APs
The technology exists to easily put a password on the Wi-Fi connection to prevent anyone from connecting to it
oh, and here's one just for you people who like "it's like entering my house" analogies...
The wireless signals often times go right into MY house. i.e. I don't have to be one someone else's property to connect to an AP
Whether you can process the data quickly enough is irrelavent when you're dealing with a medium theoretically limited by nothing but c
Your problem is your assumptions about flash memory. Comparing it to system RAM is totally invalid. The medium DOES make a difference, and the write speeds aren't comparable. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but this technology isn't just system memory that doesn't lose state when turned off.
Here's a hint: How much of the world's population lives withing 20 miles of a coast? How many of those people use cell phones?
Which really has nothing to do with my point at all. How is China interested in stopping us from snooping on terrorists? We aren't at war with China, and we're very unlikely to be at war with them in the foreseeable future.
I suppose you could argue that this stops us from snooping on China. But if you wanted to do that, you'd be smarter to just station some intelligence officers snooping cell-phone traffic.
The ability of a submarine to remain undetected and at the same time to detect enemy submarines is as fundamental to the concept of a submarine as the ability to fly is to an airplane
Did you really miss my point entirely?
Submarine technology is actually way less relevant to the threats of the modern world than even freaking tanks. When was the last time we used a submarine to do any kind of warfare or political maneuvering? I'd say that ended in the cold war.
The US and the rest of the world are fighting enemies that don't have submarines, or any navy at all. Al-Queda doesn't have a navy. These are small, dedicated groups of people who remain hidden. You can't fight people like that with a tank, much less a submarine.
The US can take two roads here. Train a bunch of submariner guys REALLY well, develop technologies to defeat them, basically start another cold war. Of course.. that just might be a slight distraction from that other threat..
The other path is to not over-react. China isn't going to attack the US, if for no other reason they've invested too damn much money in us. I'd bet the Chinese economy would collapse if the US wasn't buying all that crap from them. Concentrate on the real threats, not the Chinese wanting to look like big-shots by sneaking up on a few inexperienced submariners (most of which is probably all still geared up to look for nuclear subs).
Modern submariners are a joke compared to their cold war predecessors.
Do we need to up to cold war standards? I'm sure that the current army soldiers are a joke compared to WWII era hardened veterans.
Submarine warfare is limited to those nations that have the ability to have submarine fleets. Those countries aren't terribly hostile towards the United States. It's extremely doubtful we're going to fight a big naval battle anytime soon.
Although our eyes cannot see the IR light it can still pass onto the retina without much trouble.
Anything that's warm gives off IR light. Are you saying in a dark room looking at another person for too long will do damage to your eyes?
This thing gives off IR in a different frequency than the human body of course, but if in general IR light is "dangerous", then we'd all be blind years ago. Using that thing for an extended period of time would quite probably damage the eyes.
I doubt it. IR is lower in energy/photon than visible light. As long as it's not heating up anything (which you'd feel on your skin at the least), I'd doubt it'd do any damage at all.
I am still at a loss to wonder why a PC does not have a white noise generator built into it yet.
Many do (as others have pointed out). Put white noise hardware and real random number hardware on PCs, and this whole problem goes away.
Some problems go away. You're assuming that random numbers can be generated at the same or greater rate they're consumed. If not, then there's the potential for this same kind of thing happening. If you can't generate random numbers from a noise source fast enough, you'll have to rely on a pseudo random source.
Even when its right in front of you, on the evening news of a major network?
And what am I going to do about it? Call up my representative and waste his/her time on this minor waste, when there's much larger waste going on? So what if it's on the evening news. That doesn't make it any less of a distraction to the larger problems.
If you let those things that are right in front of you go, then you teach people thats its ok to waste and then it gets bigger and bigger.
Huh? We've already wasted a trillion dollars on this stupid war. What stage of the game do you really think we're at here? We're waaaay past the "little waste teaches some people some waste is OK" stage. These aren't jaywalking 6th graders and we think we can set a good example for obeying the law. Yes, $4 million is tons of money, just ask what a NASA scientist/engineer could do with it, besides partying.
I'd rather ask him what he could do with a billion dollars. How many days in Iraq is a billion dollars? One? Two? Try to step out of the box you've constructed and the limitations of scope you're talking about. I want my legislators focused on the big picture, not little sums of money.
Re:Morale booster? No, contractor pleaser.
on
NASA Knows How To Party
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's fairly routine for key consultants to be treated exactly like the true employees when it comes to celebrations.
Maybe. That doesn't mean they should be spending a million bucks on a celebration, airfare, etc. If the real issue was fiscal responsibility, the reporters would be sorting the budget by largest to smallest amounts, and then examining each line.
I agree completely. This article isn't about fiscal responsibility, it's about "look at those guys that have a great big party and you don't! They used "your" money for it!" That's what all that "coconut fried shrimp, spring rolls, shrimp wrapped with bacon, 5-6 desserts" was all about, even though those big "luxuries" likely only cost a few thousand dollars, if that.
That's kind of a sad attitude, and I'm a bit sick of it. Do I think this is a waste? Sure. Do I think this is something to be really concerned about and start rolling heads and instituting dumb reforms? Hell no. In any organization there's always a certain amount of "waste", i.e. money spent on something that's not easy to justify, and might have been better spent elsewhere. Just keep those percentages low, and I'm happy.
Contractors wining and dining federal employees is illegal.
Yah, but we all know this kind of thing happens all the time. I'm not saying it's right or even should be tolerated, but why are we trying to impress or reward the contractors we've already given billions of dollars to?
I can't get too upset at this of course. As a waste item this one is a tiny part of the problem.
If we ever want to get the budget under control we have to look at every little thing and ask, is this really worth the money we're spending on it?
There's a limited amount of attention and oversight available. We simply just CAN'T look at every little thing. Do you sweat every single purchase, no matter how trivial (5 cents extra for toilet paper) and wonder "is it really worth it?" I doubt it, because you've got bigger concerns.
If you really want to get the budget under control, you'd identify the biggest places where we're spending tons of money, and not getting anything out of it. You might just start with the largest of those items, the war in Iraq. Million dollar parties just strike me as a bit excessive, even if they are just a tiny fraction of the budget.
Maybe they are.. but how much of a distraction is this over billion dollar wastes of money? Do you really want to chase down 1000 different million dollar wastes and get all pissed about it to save a billion dollars, or would you rather focus on the billion dollar wastes?
Re:Morale booster? No, contractor pleaser.
on
NASA Knows How To Party
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While expensive, keeping the morale high at NASA means keeping the even more expensive astronauts alive.
Yah, except if the article is correct, most of the people at this party are NASA contractors. Why NASA is spending money on wining and dining contractors instead of the other way around, I don't really understand.
On the other hand I'm not sure I just immediately accept the truth of this article. It's written in a rather sensationalist tone, and presents NASA's side of the argument as a one sentence reply, no doubt taken out of context. That doesn't mean this isn't accurate of course, it's just a bit suspicious.
Re:The problem is that SETI is broken.
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
You said two things I think are true, but I think they're also related. Namely. All current SETI activity is built on the assumption that someone is trying to talk to us.
and A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more
From a pure cost perspective, it makes a lot of sense to get assumption number one out of the way (someone is trying to talk to us) before we start a REAL SETI effort and spend a lot of money.
He knows how blatantly stupid it is to rely on third-party hardware design flaws in your own designs.
Except this wasn't going to be produced for a production system, it was produced to learn something. Understanding the flaws of the system and taking advantage of them is learning.
Suppose your hardware were being used in an aircraft
Suppose it was used to control the sun? As long as we're making stuff up that never happened, why not make up things that aren't physically possible. It's about as relevant. These risks would have been completely unacceptable in any situation other than a silly college-level course.
Turns out this was a college course, so the "risks" weren't really risks.
While I have the greatest admiration for Kkodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???
Maybe they were thinking they can't stop progress and change?
Did Smith-Corona stop computers from replacing typewriters? No. Did the IBM stop the transition from punched cards and mechanical tabulators to magnetic media and digital computes? No.
Which company do you hear a lot about these days, and which one did you think might not even be in business?
The difference between them is that Smith-Corona didn't expand ENOUGH into the technology that would eventually replace them. They made word processors, but I've never heard of a Smith-Corona printer.
Kodak could never stop the digital camera age. Their best bet for replacing them large chunk of the film business that was going away was to embrace the new digital technology. People still want Cameras of course, and they still want prints. Kodak has quite a lucrative print business, and they still have quite a good name in cameras. They'd have been idiots to abandon the new technology simply because it wasn't film based.
No matter how hard I try to dispel these harmful beliefs, I am (ironically) met with skepticism.
People like believing in the paranormal, or even in cures that don't exist. It makes them happy to think there's life after death. They don't like people like you, who try to bring boring explanations that don't make them happy anymore (no matter that your explanation are very likely the true one).
So they fight you. A few people in my family have the same kind of beliefs. They believe in crap like that stupid "airborne" thing that cures colds. It doesn't really matter that there's basically zero evidence that it does anything more than placebo.. they just LIKE to think they can actually do something if they get a cold. People just develop deep attachments to their own belief structures.
The sad thing is there's some very cool REAL science out their that would equally make people equally happy if they understood it. We're all made of stardust for instance, or all the gold in the world was created in a huge explosion of a now dead star billions of years ago.
Why is the always the old guys that are about to die off that enact or get crap passed so that all the rest of us living have to do what they want!
The world changes rather quickly today, and by the time you're past 70, it's so different that some people want part of the world they grew up in back. The world of the 1950s and 60s was a lot more conservative towards sex than it is today.
While I agree with you that these people are out of touch on this issue, and just want to harken back to some kind of golden age that never existed (teen pregancy was a LOT higher in the 40s/50s than it is now, people DID have sex outside marriage, they just didn't talk about it, bawdy talk occurred, just in different places), I don't agree that anyone over a certain age has nothing useful to say. We make too many short sighted decisions these days. People waste a lot of money on a lot of junk. We could probably all learn a lot from some miserly old people.
It's very interesting that only 36% think government regulation of video over the internet into someones private home would be unconstitutional. (But I bet you'd get a VERY different answer about print media).
For the most part, people are willing to accept what they've always accepted and expect what they've always expected. Broadcast television is regulated.. so therefore the government must have some way of regulating moving pictures.
Of course, this is not the case, and I'd be very surprised if it was legal for the US government to regulate anything short of child porn or snuff videos coming across the internet. The only reason broadcast television was ruled constitutional to regulate was because television is a broadcast media, that's sent into everyones home. The other reason was that television had a limited amount of channels available (as with any radio medium), so the FCC was created to regulate the spectrum.
Neither of these conditions are of course true with the internet. There's essentially an infinite amount of choices, and internet service is a subscription based service. It's FAR more like newspapers and magazines than television. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't need another internet equivalent of Larry Flynt to fight any legislation that crops up.
The fear of course is that we've had government regulation of video for 50 some years now, and people have grown up with the idea that it's OK. That's why the current moves towards more and more surveillance, and all the crazy helicopter parents scare the crap out of me. When generations of kids grow up with every moment planned for them, and watched, they'll just expect this is the normal way of life.
Nobody likes paying more money for anything, so the first instinct is to say HOORAY! I'm not going to be taxed!
But I have to wonder. What kind of inequities are being created that aren't solved by the "free market" because of what economists call externalities, or put simply benefits/costs not given to the party who produces the service?
Access to high speed internet at reasonable prices in rural, or outlying areas is certainly a concern. I don't really know if that's still a problem or not. But if it is, one solution is a.. yes, that dirty word, a... tax on internet service to support paying for "rural internetification" (to bastardize the program in the 30s, "rural electrification".
When I was at university I was talking to an old engineering lecturer and he was complaining that they had to lessen the difficulty levels of the courses even more because students were getting dumber.
That's an interesting comment. But there are of course several explanations for the lecturer's observation:
1. Students ARE getting dumber everywhere. 2. Students are only getting dumber at this university, perhaps because of a general decline of this university or the engineering program a this university. 3. The lecturer has a bad memory, and only remembers the really bright students in the past. 4. The lecturer is getting worse at teaching, so the students do more poorly on tests. 5. Something entirely different that I've not even thought of (left as an exercise to the student)
Anyway, I wouldn't put a lot of value on one opinion of one lecturer in one university.
That makes a little more sense, though it still seems like a strange idea. I assumed "developer edition" meant it was for software developers, not hardware developers.
Why does no one understand that the Greenphone was purely a developer platform?
I do understand that, I just don't think it really matters. If the developer version cost $700, how much was the consumer version of whatever this thing would become going to cost? Does the developer version have a whole lot more hardware that the consumer version doesn't? Or did they just price the developer version really high to try to re-coup costs? I didn't see any target prices for the consumer level version, so I'm only left to wonder. I sure as hell wouldn't want to develop software for a phone that costs somewhere around $600-$700. It's just not mass-market enough. If they raised the price to try to re-coup costs, it seems like they really don't have enough cash to market this thing to large amounts of people.
The thing is that the price reflects a lot about what you can't see, or what you aren't told.
Slashdot Mirror
instead of trying to cram extra instructions
Cram? Chip designers get more and more transistors to use every year. I don't believe there's any "cramming" involved.
into an already bloated CISC CPU?
You're about 15 years out of date. The x86 isn't exactly a CISC CPU, it's a complex instruction set that decodes into a simpler one internally. Only the intel engineers know how they added the SSE4 instructions, but based on the comments of the encode/decode guys, these new instructions sound a lot like the old instructions. It's not too hard to imagine that they didn't have to change much silicon around, and maybe got to re-use some old internal stuff and just interpret the new instructions differently.
Anyway, so why not just have a dedicated piece of silicon for this exact purpose? Partly because it'd be more expensive (you'd have to basically implement a lot of the stuff already on CPU like cache, etc), but also because it's just too specific. How many people really care about encoding video? 5% of the market? Less?
Hardware decoding on hardware is already a reality, and has been for some time. GPUs have implemented this feature for at least 10 years. But of course it's generally not a feature that has dedicated silicon, it's integrated into the GPU. If this is the first you've heard of it, it's not surprising. The other problem with non-CPU specific accelerations is they don't ever really become standard, as there's no standard instruction set for GPUs, and ever a GPU maker may just drop that feature in the next line of cards.
In short, specialized means specialized. Specialized things don't tend to survive very well.
How is putting up an unsecured Wi-Fi connection any different than putting up an unsecured website?
oh, and here's one just for you people who like "it's like entering my house" analogies...
Whether you can process the data quickly enough is irrelavent when you're dealing with a medium theoretically limited by nothing but c
Your problem is your assumptions about flash memory. Comparing it to system RAM is totally invalid. The medium DOES make a difference, and the write speeds aren't comparable. I couldn't tell you exactly why, but this technology isn't just system memory that doesn't lose state when turned off.
Here's a hint: How much of the world's population lives withing 20 miles of a coast? How many of those people use cell phones?
Which really has nothing to do with my point at all. How is China interested in stopping us from snooping on terrorists? We aren't at war with China, and we're very unlikely to be at war with them in the foreseeable future.
I suppose you could argue that this stops us from snooping on China. But if you wanted to do that, you'd be smarter to just station some intelligence officers snooping cell-phone traffic.
I hope no one mods me down for saying this, but I really feel like we should consider starting the draft again.
If you really want to end the war in Iraq TODAY, you'll keep talking like that. (hell, I do, so keep on talking).
This Iraq war is already unpopular enough. Start a draft, and we'll be out faster than you can say 2008 election.
The ability of a submarine to remain undetected and at the same time to detect enemy submarines is as fundamental to the concept of a submarine as the ability to fly is to an airplane
Did you really miss my point entirely?
Submarine technology is actually way less relevant to the threats of the modern world than even freaking tanks. When was the last time we used a submarine to do any kind of warfare or political maneuvering? I'd say that ended in the cold war.
The US and the rest of the world are fighting enemies that don't have submarines, or any navy at all. Al-Queda doesn't have a navy. These are small, dedicated groups of people who remain hidden. You can't fight people like that with a tank, much less a submarine.
The US can take two roads here. Train a bunch of submariner guys REALLY well, develop technologies to defeat them, basically start another cold war. Of course.. that just might be a slight distraction from that other threat..
The other path is to not over-react. China isn't going to attack the US, if for no other reason they've invested too damn much money in us. I'd bet the Chinese economy would collapse if the US wasn't buying all that crap from them. Concentrate on the real threats, not the Chinese wanting to look like big-shots by sneaking up on a few inexperienced submariners (most of which is probably all still geared up to look for nuclear subs).
Modern submariners are a joke compared to their cold war predecessors.
Do we need to up to cold war standards? I'm sure that the current army soldiers are a joke compared to WWII era hardened veterans.
Submarine warfare is limited to those nations that have the ability to have submarine fleets. Those countries aren't terribly hostile towards the United States. It's extremely doubtful we're going to fight a big naval battle anytime soon.
Although our eyes cannot see the IR light it can still pass onto the retina without much trouble.
Anything that's warm gives off IR light. Are you saying in a dark room looking at another person for too long will do damage to your eyes?
This thing gives off IR in a different frequency than the human body of course, but if in general IR light is "dangerous", then we'd all be blind years ago.
Using that thing for an extended period of time would quite probably damage the eyes.
I doubt it. IR is lower in energy/photon than visible light. As long as it's not heating up anything (which you'd feel on your skin at the least), I'd doubt it'd do any damage at all.
I am still at a loss to wonder why a PC does not have a white noise generator built into it yet.
Many do (as others have pointed out).
Put white noise hardware and real random number hardware on PCs, and this whole problem goes away.
Some problems go away. You're assuming that random numbers can be generated at the same or greater rate they're consumed. If not, then there's the potential for this same kind of thing happening. If you can't generate random numbers from a noise source fast enough, you'll have to rely on a pseudo random source.
Even when its right in front of you, on the evening news of a major network?
And what am I going to do about it? Call up my representative and waste his/her time on this minor waste, when there's much larger waste going on? So what if it's on the evening news. That doesn't make it any less of a distraction to the larger problems.
If you let those things that are right in front of you go, then you teach people thats its ok to waste and then it gets bigger and bigger.
Huh? We've already wasted a trillion dollars on this stupid war. What stage of the game do you really think we're at here? We're waaaay past the "little waste teaches some people some waste is OK" stage. These aren't jaywalking 6th graders and we think we can set a good example for obeying the law.
Yes, $4 million is tons of money, just ask what a NASA scientist/engineer could do with it, besides partying.
I'd rather ask him what he could do with a billion dollars. How many days in Iraq is a billion dollars? One? Two? Try to step out of the box you've constructed and the limitations of scope you're talking about. I want my legislators focused on the big picture, not little sums of money.
It's fairly routine for key consultants to be treated exactly like the true employees when it comes to celebrations.
Maybe. That doesn't mean they should be spending a million bucks on a celebration, airfare, etc.
If the real issue was fiscal responsibility, the reporters would be sorting the budget by largest to smallest amounts, and then examining each line.
I agree completely. This article isn't about fiscal responsibility, it's about "look at those guys that have a great big party and you don't! They used "your" money for it!" That's what all that "coconut fried shrimp, spring rolls, shrimp wrapped with bacon, 5-6 desserts" was all about, even though those big "luxuries" likely only cost a few thousand dollars, if that.
That's kind of a sad attitude, and I'm a bit sick of it. Do I think this is a waste? Sure. Do I think this is something to be really concerned about and start rolling heads and instituting dumb reforms? Hell no. In any organization there's always a certain amount of "waste", i.e. money spent on something that's not easy to justify, and might have been better spent elsewhere. Just keep those percentages low, and I'm happy.
Contractors wining and dining federal employees is illegal.
Yah, but we all know this kind of thing happens all the time. I'm not saying it's right or even should be tolerated, but why are we trying to impress or reward the contractors we've already given billions of dollars to?
I can't get too upset at this of course. As a waste item this one is a tiny part of the problem.
If we ever want to get the budget under control we have to look at every little thing and ask, is this really worth the money we're spending on it?
There's a limited amount of attention and oversight available. We simply just CAN'T look at every little thing. Do you sweat every single purchase, no matter how trivial (5 cents extra for toilet paper) and wonder "is it really worth it?" I doubt it, because you've got bigger concerns.
If you really want to get the budget under control, you'd identify the biggest places where we're spending tons of money, and not getting anything out of it. You might just start with the largest of those items, the war in Iraq.
Million dollar parties just strike me as a bit excessive, even if they are just a tiny fraction of the budget.
Maybe they are.. but how much of a distraction is this over billion dollar wastes of money? Do you really want to chase down 1000 different million dollar wastes and get all pissed about it to save a billion dollars, or would you rather focus on the billion dollar wastes?
While expensive, keeping the morale high at NASA means keeping the even more expensive astronauts alive.
Yah, except if the article is correct, most of the people at this party are NASA contractors. Why NASA is spending money on wining and dining contractors instead of the other way around, I don't really understand.
On the other hand I'm not sure I just immediately accept the truth of this article. It's written in a rather sensationalist tone, and presents NASA's side of the argument as a one sentence reply, no doubt taken out of context. That doesn't mean this isn't accurate of course, it's just a bit suspicious.
You said two things I think are true, but I think they're also related. Namely.
All current SETI activity is built on the assumption that someone is trying to talk to us.
and
A real SETI project would cost many orders of magnitude more
From a pure cost perspective, it makes a lot of sense to get assumption number one out of the way (someone is trying to talk to us) before we start a REAL SETI effort and spend a lot of money.
He knows how blatantly stupid it is to rely on third-party hardware design flaws in your own designs.
Except this wasn't going to be produced for a production system, it was produced to learn something. Understanding the flaws of the system and taking advantage of them is learning.
Suppose your hardware were being used in an aircraft
Suppose it was used to control the sun? As long as we're making stuff up that never happened, why not make up things that aren't physically possible. It's about as relevant.
These risks would have been completely unacceptable in any situation other than a silly college-level course.
Turns out this was a college course, so the "risks" weren't really risks.
While I have the greatest admiration for Kkodak's engineers and workers, to Kodak as a company I have to say: WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???
Maybe they were thinking they can't stop progress and change?
Did Smith-Corona stop computers from replacing typewriters? No. Did the IBM stop the transition from punched cards and mechanical tabulators to magnetic media and digital computes? No.
Which company do you hear a lot about these days, and which one did you think might not even be in business?
The difference between them is that Smith-Corona didn't expand ENOUGH into the technology that would eventually replace them. They made word processors, but I've never heard of a Smith-Corona printer.
Kodak could never stop the digital camera age. Their best bet for replacing them large chunk of the film business that was going away was to embrace the new digital technology. People still want Cameras of course, and they still want prints. Kodak has quite a lucrative print business, and they still have quite a good name in cameras. They'd have been idiots to abandon the new technology simply because it wasn't film based.
The format of business is PDF. If you're sending around
No matter how hard I try to dispel these harmful beliefs, I am (ironically) met with skepticism.
People like believing in the paranormal, or even in cures that don't exist. It makes them happy to think there's life after death. They don't like people like you, who try to bring boring explanations that don't make them happy anymore (no matter that your explanation are very likely the true one).
So they fight you. A few people in my family have the same kind of beliefs. They believe in crap like that stupid "airborne" thing that cures colds. It doesn't really matter that there's basically zero evidence that it does anything more than placebo.. they just LIKE to think they can actually do something if they get a cold. People just develop deep attachments to their own belief structures.
The sad thing is there's some very cool REAL science out their that would equally make people equally happy if they understood it. We're all made of stardust for instance, or all the gold in the world was created in a huge explosion of a now dead star billions of years ago.
Why is the always the old guys that are about to die off that enact or get crap passed so that all the rest of us living have to do what they want!
The world changes rather quickly today, and by the time you're past 70, it's so different that some people want part of the world they grew up in back. The world of the 1950s and 60s was a lot more conservative towards sex than it is today.
While I agree with you that these people are out of touch on this issue, and just want to harken back to some kind of golden age that never existed (teen pregancy was a LOT higher in the 40s/50s than it is now, people DID have sex outside marriage, they just didn't talk about it, bawdy talk occurred, just in different places), I don't agree that anyone over a certain age has nothing useful to say. We make too many short sighted decisions these days. People waste a lot of money on a lot of junk. We could probably all learn a lot from some miserly old people.
It's very interesting that only 36% think government regulation of video over the internet into someones private home would be unconstitutional. (But I bet you'd get a VERY different answer about print media).
For the most part, people are willing to accept what they've always accepted and expect what they've always expected. Broadcast television is regulated.. so therefore the government must have some way of regulating moving pictures.
Of course, this is not the case, and I'd be very surprised if it was legal for the US government to regulate anything short of child porn or snuff videos coming across the internet. The only reason broadcast television was ruled constitutional to regulate was because television is a broadcast media, that's sent into everyones home. The other reason was that television had a limited amount of channels available (as with any radio medium), so the FCC was created to regulate the spectrum.
Neither of these conditions are of course true with the internet. There's essentially an infinite amount of choices, and internet service is a subscription based service. It's FAR more like newspapers and magazines than television. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't need another internet equivalent of Larry Flynt to fight any legislation that crops up.
The fear of course is that we've had government regulation of video for 50 some years now, and people have grown up with the idea that it's OK. That's why the current moves towards more and more surveillance, and all the crazy helicopter parents scare the crap out of me. When generations of kids grow up with every moment planned for them, and watched, they'll just expect this is the normal way of life.
Nobody likes paying more money for anything, so the first instinct is to say HOORAY! I'm not going to be taxed!
But I have to wonder. What kind of inequities are being created that aren't solved by the "free market" because of what economists call externalities, or put simply benefits/costs not given to the party who produces the service?
Access to high speed internet at reasonable prices in rural, or outlying areas is certainly a concern. I don't really know if that's still a problem or not. But if it is, one solution is a.. yes, that dirty word, a... tax on internet service to support paying for "rural internetification" (to bastardize the program in the 30s, "rural electrification".
When I was at university I was talking to an old engineering lecturer and he was complaining that they had to lessen the difficulty levels of the courses even more because students were getting dumber.
That's an interesting comment. But there are of course several explanations for the lecturer's observation:
1. Students ARE getting dumber everywhere.
2. Students are only getting dumber at this university, perhaps because of a general decline of this university or the engineering program a this university.
3. The lecturer has a bad memory, and only remembers the really bright students in the past.
4. The lecturer is getting worse at teaching, so the students do more poorly on tests.
5. Something entirely different that I've not even thought of (left as an exercise to the student)
Anyway, I wouldn't put a lot of value on one opinion of one lecturer in one university.
That makes a little more sense, though it still seems like a strange idea. I assumed "developer edition" meant it was for software developers, not hardware developers.
Why does no one understand that the Greenphone was purely a developer platform?
I do understand that, I just don't think it really matters. If the developer version cost $700, how much was the consumer version of whatever this thing would become going to cost? Does the developer version have a whole lot more hardware that the consumer version doesn't? Or did they just price the developer version really high to try to re-coup costs? I didn't see any target prices for the consumer level version, so I'm only left to wonder. I sure as hell wouldn't want to develop software for a phone that costs somewhere around $600-$700. It's just not mass-market enough. If they raised the price to try to re-coup costs, it seems like they really don't have enough cash to market this thing to large amounts of people.
The thing is that the price reflects a lot about what you can't see, or what you aren't told.