Imagine no possessions
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The guy who sang that had an entire apartment in NY just to hold his wife's fur coats. I'm sorry, but I truly, deeply would like to see Apple Corp - which is actually just another face of Leviathan - lose out to a corporation that actually has to survive on what it is doing today, not just milking a revenue stream that has its roots in the past. This is just a case of RIAA junior versus new business model, and invites me to think possible things too libellous to recite here (think SCO).
That said, I have to admit that I am very sorry but I have bought my last Mac. I cannot think of a single compelling reason to buy a new iMac given the performance and capabilities of the AMD 64 bit line, and the fact that Microsoft seem at last to be turning into a more mature company. Apple computer needs its music business, and for the sake of competition the world needs Apple Computer rather more than it needs yet another royalties collection agency.
Anyone reading this and not intimately, excessively and nerdishly familiar with the Kelvin scale is new here. Are you sure that's your real user id?
Also, have you actually checked your facts other than just Googling? The last time I stuck a thermometer into a tank of liquid nitrogen, it only registered about -39C. How do you measure these temperatures when the damn mercury freezes? I'm suspicious. I suspect these scientists of just thinking of a number for Absolute Zero. "-273.15C. Do you think that sounds like we measured it? Should we make it -273.147 to be on the safe side?"
This machine is optimised for the acquisition of fairly real-time data; read the architectural description. Multiple channel counters are implemented in hardware, partly because in the days of discrete logic this was relatively easy to do (and, of course, the tube calculators with which people had gained experience used lots of counters, because it is relatively easy to make a counter tube, while binary tube logic is very hardware inefficient.)
Calculators have absolutely minimal I/O and need hardly any interrupt handling capability, and general purpose CPUs like the PDP-8 require a great deal of external hardware to give efficient programmed I/O. It was only really with integrated electronics that general purpose CPUs became appropriate for real time instrumentation and control. It's also important that in a space environment, every added gate is a hazard because it can get flipped by radiation. The ideal is to have the minimum gate count, minimum memory cell count, and the shortest possible path between phyical I/O and computing. The computers used in the Apollo meet this requirement.
Sorry to restate what may be obvious to some people, but a lot of people here will never have had to implement a rad-hard design, and will not understand why simplicity and directness are such virtues in design for space use.
80C is a realistic maximum case temperature for DC motors, which I used as an example. If the environment reaches 80C, what do you think the junction temperatures of the transistors will be?
Also, please note that the junction temperatures you quote are maxima. You will not get good life at high temperatures with silicon but, more importantly, the ability to handle pulses and voltage drops as junction temperature rises. I suggest you look at the SOAR curves for a few power devices to see what I mean.
As for the rest of your remarks, it's clear you are not a serious power electronics designer. No-one says the low level stages have to run that hot (though anyone who has listened to a good tube amp would probably argue that you are exaggerating the importance of shot noise). The big benefit of higher junction temperatures is that heatsinks, in particular, can be smaller, especially if the hot air is vented straight out of the casing. This makes the overall size of the equipment smaller.
Also, don't forget that power amplification is not synonymous with hi-fi. There are many applications for power audio devices (PA systems, for instance) that require considerable audio power but only moderate quality, and the applications for compact RF devices are continually expanding. For instance, one possible goal for a high power SiC device would be a replacement for the magnetrons of microwave ovens, possibly even creating a market for small solar or wind powered microwave ovens that would be useful both for backpackers and for 3rd world countries.
Silicon carbide and diamond both have significant potential use as power semiconductors. Forget CPUs, think I/O. Think smaller power supplies, smaller audio drivers, more rugged automotive systems, and, ultimately, being able to shrink robotics controllers as a next step to producing very small robots. If a robot's motors are running at 80C, you want the power semis to be able to handle that. Furthermore, a lot of possible fuel cell designs run at fairly high temperature and, again, you want the electronics to survive the environment without too much cooling.
There are also huge potential benefits for rad-hard communications satellites, where cooling is a major problem (radiation only.)
W64 is an opportunity to move away from the whole "the system has to be insecure because Joe Sixpack is stupid" syndrome. If OS X can drop down a window asking for an admin password before installing updates, so can W64. W64 will be supposed to be a professional OS, for Turing's sake. Why can't MS simply use a few $$ of the billions to produce a nice "read this first" poster to explain to newbies how their nice new security system works, and how it will make using the computer so much more pleasant?
Tinfoil hat time: perhaps all the FUD about SP2 problems, users unwilling to update etc. is just being put out by spammers and malware merchants.
I agree there is a problem, especially with people who think they are creative. I'm afraid I was positively delighted when the author Louis de Bernieres lost the first 60 pages of his new novel becaue he had failed to make a backup, and complained that he didn't expect to have to make backups, he wasn't a computer expert (or words to that effect). People need to understand that failure to learn the basics can result in pain and distress.
Cutting edge physics research cannot be guaranteed to have spin offs. This is because real science is (duh) experimental. However, let's just follow through one particular train of thought:
Research into cancer and AIDS is a branch of biochemistry.
Biochemistry depends on science like DNA sequencing and protein folding
DNA sequencing and protein folding need fast computers
Fast computers need leading-edge engineering and physics.
The structure of DNA was clarified partly as a result of X-ray analysis
The discovery of X-rays was a byproduct of pure research into conduction of electricity in gases
We have no way to be certain that deeper insights into the fundamental structure of matter will contribute to solving other biological problems - but we have no ay to find out other than to do it.
You might also like to consider that $3billion is less than drug companies spend on advertising and promotion every year.
Don Quijote was the "Knight with the long lance". The Quijote project aims to get enough kinetic energy to move the asteroid by aiming an object at it from a very long way away and building up a huge amount of kinetic energy. The analogy with medieval tilting is pretty good, and the "long lance" is the bit I thought particularly clever.
Part of the UK side of my family at one time lived on the Isle of Sheppey, which is where Sheerness is situated. I visited it once when, for a few years, there was an excellent cross-Channel ferry from Sheerness to Vlissingen.
I have to say that, other than the seabird population, an enormous bomb explosion nearby could do nothing but good. The Thames islands are mostly mudflats (and at least one of them may cease to exist before long during to rising sea levels and strengthening tides) and, without human intervention, would be pretty transient.
Perhaps this really is the time for NASA, the ESA, and Russia to pool their efforts to find a way of detecting, intercepting and deflecting comets and wandering asteroids that present a threat. The European Quijote Project seems to be a step in the right direction(as well as having a very witty title).
Obviously, statistically the chance of an individual being killed by a major meteor strike is fairly low, perhaps lower than that of being killed in a terrorist attack and much lower than that of being killed on the roads. But it's the meteor strike that has the potential to kill perhaps 99% of the human race, and this latest evidence seems to suggest that the frequency of such impacts is higher than expected.
The thing I find seriously interesting is that so much effort has to be put into demonstrating the presence of water on Mars. Starting from the philosophical standard we apply to most things, we would expect to find it there (we live on a planet, it has water, it has life, why would we not expect to find it on the next planet out?)
I have a feeling that we are still fighting Galileo's battle. A particular strand of Christian thought - medieval Aristotelianism - is still making the running. Aristotle, on no particular evidence, thought that the planets were perfect, lifeless and unchanging - the Schoolmen adopted this as dogma - and scientists and engineers at Nasa are still trying to demonstrate that we occupy what is probably a very ordinary little planet, with a very ordinary set of dominant life forms, against people who think we are unique and very important in this huge universe. You know who you are.
You can still see the lens of Galileo's original telescope, which actually destroyed Aristotle's ideas for anyone with an open mind. I hope one day someone brings the Mars Rovers back to Earth, perhaps along with the Hasselblad left on the Moon. They are signs of a human achievement bigger than the Pyramids, St. Peter's or the Great Wall of China - and an achievement which is under threat from fundamentalists, whether Islamic or Christian. I still find it amazing that the country that has produced insitutions like NASA and Woods Hole has places that mandate the teaching of Creationism, and I find that far more worrying than a survey that suggests that only a minority can find the Pacific.
I have given up trying to understand investors. As I understand it, Google is selling what it claims are a small fraction of its available shares. If these are sold for a total of about $1.5 billion, this somehow values the company at the ratio 100% of shares/% sold.
But, as any idiot knows (I know, I am an idiot...) the value of anything is marginal. House prices are only high so long as there is a shortage. If everybody suddenly panics and wants to sell, houses get cheap very quickly. This is economics 101.
So, basically, I do not see how a share can be fairly priced unless the majority of the shares are put up for sale. Can someone explain to me, without being ruder than necessary, why the SEC allows this practice?
IBM needs to protect the GPL, because it is now important to its business model. Years ago, my then boss remarked that operating system software should be like the sewage system: only noticed on the rare occasions it fails. The sewage system is, in effect, Open Source: anyone can read the rules for designing it, and anyone who follows the rules can connect to it. They will have to pay to dispose of waste through it, but that's another matter. What they pay in taxes is the cost of provision, not an IP tax to the person who designed the system in the first placed. Equally, anyone can read the plumbing codes. I don't have to pay a fee for intellectual property to Home Depot every time I want to put a shower in, or connect two pipe lengths.
On the other hand, Home Depot makes good money, and highly skilled plumbers installing big shower rooms do very nicely, thank you.
So I think this is where IBM wants to be. IBM wants, in effect, to put in really big and impressive bathrooms. It's easier to do this if someone else, who hardly has to be thought about, is taking care of the water supply and the sewage. It makes sense to give away some of your knowledge of infrastructure, because others will build on it and make your life easier.
I apologise (a bit) for the extended metaphor, but I think my understanding of the basic economics is right. SCO builds high priced sewage pipes and charges a premium for knowing how to do it. They also want everybody else who digs holes in the ground to pay them a tax. In doing this, they are trying to backflow (sorry) against the entire trend of technology development. IBM, in classic Adam Smith mode, look to their own advantage but, without intending to, benefit everybody.
Excuse my inability to get written German right, but didn't he actually write something like
Nur mit Beschrankten zeigt sich erst der Meister
- i.e. it is through working within limitations that one shows ones mastery of something. And Doktor Faustus in Actionscript would be working in one hell of a limitation.
To be proper Flash, this needs massive load times. What about doing the Hunting of the Snark?
Actually, Dodgson needs to be encoded in a seriously object oriented language. The various characters have methods and properties...it'll look better after I've slept on it.
One use of apostrophes between a noun and the plural s has been to indicate that the noun is not a normal English word. (There is more about this in Eats, shoots and leaves by Lynne Truss.) MP3s is a good example. "MP3" is not a word. It is not even an acronym, since it has no discernible vowels and the "3" is clearly not a pronounceable letter. Furthermore, it does not have a meaningful plural form: MP3s would presumably be pronounced "em pee three ess", but the actual pronunciation "em pee threes" seems to suggest that there are a set of threes of the MP variety.
A really stuffy way of indicating what is intended would be to write "MP3"s, to indicate that the thing in quotes is actually a quotation of informal speech. So it is quite reasonable to put a less ostentatious punctuation mark to say "Hey, this is a complete bastardisation of English, but this is what people are using."
Personally, I think that "MP3 files" is clearer and less offensive to us grammar Nazis, but newspapers have to reflect real world usage.
Dilbert- comparison
on
Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Scott Adams famously was an economist working for Bell on ISDN, who concluded it would flop because it was just made too difficult to understand. So he created Dilbert...which is all about dysfunctional corporate culture. I spent 10 years of my life being Dilbert before becoming a PHB, and Dilbert is still so true it sometimes hurts.
So a Frenchwoman, an economic adviser to the electricity industry no less, does something similar and it's:
Jokes about the French (rather than useless management) on/.
A disciplinary hearing.
My conclusion: We're all much the same. And my other conclusion: I hope she makes as much money as Scott Adams. It would go some way to show there is some kind of justice in the world.
No, actually I agree with almost everything you say (except that Shell got into trouble with its shareholders for investing in solar power...perhaps you should blame the shareholders rather than the oil companies), but solar power is relatively inefficient compared to what? Oil is only apparently efficient because we were not around when all that biomass was growing and then rotting, getting compressed etc. At the moment processes like bioDiesel look comparatively attractive but the actual efficiency of solar utilisation involved in growing oil plants and processing them is, I suspect, not as good as the latest solar cells. I suspect that the efficiency is already good enough, but as you say the price needs to fall (and, probably, the durability needs to increase.)
It's amazing how people keep thinking that fusion will somehow be clean, because AFAIK all the current processes being considered produce a lot of radiation. I think the real problem is that politicians and civil servants want centralised power generation because it puts them in control. Fully distributed power generation would actually greatly weaken central government, as would a mobile population.
The fact that distributed power is more resilient to external attack (it's very hard to destroy all of a wind farm or a significant fraction of small solar plants with conventional weapons, whereas it is all too easy to destroy any feasible form of nuclear or oil based plant) ought to make it attractive to governments, but their military planners want to be able to take out the opposition too.
There is always tracking irregularity to ensure that the traces of previous write cycles aren't completely lost. Reading a hard drive while subtracting the top level bit pattern from the signal will allow the previous signal to be retrieved, and this process can go several levels deep. An electron microscope is unnecessary and won't work (you are thinking of the visible bits on CDs, I guess.) This is why, if you really want to erase a hard drive, the best approach is to take the disks out and heat them to destruction or whack them with a mallet. You can overwrite many times with an alternating bit pattern, of course, but physical destruction is the fastest and surest way.
About the time we stopped being hunter gatherers. In fact, evidence is that the original agrarian communities were underdeveloped and shortlived because agriculture was not efficient, and required a huge underclass to produce food for a relatively few aristocrats. In the last hundred years we have managed to engineer societies with plenty of food in which, once again, the majority does not have to do hard manual work from an early age. Inevitably, we're finding ways to optimise human development and maintenance. Is nutrition science and modern medicine cheating, since it is probably not as available to athletes in the 3rd world?
My belief is that drug testing in sport should just stop, period. But a new criminal offense, that of administering a substance likely to reduce life expectancy, should be created, carrying a mandatory prison sentence equal to the estimated number of years of life expectancy lost. It's likely to be the coaches and team managers who are the real proponents of doping, and the prospect of maybe forty years jail if one of their charges dies of cardiac failure at 45 might have an effect. And if a drug has no adverse effects...well, sorry, but why aren't we all taking it?
If you have the room. Their downsides (very heavy single box solution) become virtues when the general public is concerned. They are hard to move, hard to steal, and - this is very important - can withstand abuse like an LCD can't. The keyboards are robust, you canuse ordinary cheap USB mice, the screen is bright and clear. The design, with all the vents at the back, makes it hard for kids to try dropping paperclips and so on inside.
The only thing missing is the floppy drive, and I'd question whether that really is "missing". There are several workrounds if someone really needs floppy access.
SunRays are a good idea in more controlled environments but, at the end of the day, you still need physical terminals for the users. Terminals designed for use in uncontrolled environments tend to be expensive and not particularly state of the art as far as display type goes. I still think that most people still underestimate how well the eMac is designed for its environment.
Yes, the rest of the world would survive. It survived WW2 and the Cold War, after all. In fact, as the US is a net importer of oil, the oil price would fall (collapse even). And the rest of the world would have a surplus of manufacturing capacity and food.
Whether governments and economic systems would survive is another matter, as the stock markets would collapse, held up as they are by the belief that the US overseas debt will eventually be repaid. Some countries are likely to hold off anarchy better than others, and the core EU states might take over the US role eventually.
As for the US, I guess the long term prospects might actually be beneficial. OK, there would need to be restrictions on oil use. The Bush family would lose influence without the Sa'udis to back them up, but other oil companies would gain power. The Government might have to put down a number of armed uprisings. The economy would go into depression until manufacturing could be restarted, but, let's face it, stuff is changed much too frequently and the skills are there to keep exisitng equipment going, just like the Cubans have to. People might even get healthier as a result of eating less. But there would be a huge one-off benefit from the writing off of US debt to the rest of the world. And the US would be militarily powerful enough to ensure no-one tried to collect on that debt.
I guess the biggest problem would arise if the trade cessation was not associated with an end to military interventionism. If the military intervention stopped as well, the US would benefit financially from bringing the soldiers home. And the likes of Osama Bin Laden would no longer have a USP. OK, Osama, you got what you wanted. Now see how your countrymen, especially the rich ones who just lost their incomes, like it.
Pity about Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, but eventually the fallout will decay, and at least no-one will be fighting over who owns the Jerusalem Crater.
Writing begets writing. Every literary flea has literary fleas on its back (did Pope say that?). But computer science begets computers. Stuff that really works doesn't need a mountain of commentary, though it could probably benefit from a decent manual.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, I have to admit that I am very sorry but I have bought my last Mac. I cannot think of a single compelling reason to buy a new iMac given the performance and capabilities of the AMD 64 bit line, and the fact that Microsoft seem at last to be turning into a more mature company. Apple computer needs its music business, and for the sake of competition the world needs Apple Computer rather more than it needs yet another royalties collection agency.
Also, have you actually checked your facts other than just Googling? The last time I stuck a thermometer into a tank of liquid nitrogen, it only registered about -39C. How do you measure these temperatures when the damn mercury freezes? I'm suspicious. I suspect these scientists of just thinking of a number for Absolute Zero. "-273.15C. Do you think that sounds like we measured it? Should we make it -273.147 to be on the safe side?"
Calculators have absolutely minimal I/O and need hardly any interrupt handling capability, and general purpose CPUs like the PDP-8 require a great deal of external hardware to give efficient programmed I/O. It was only really with integrated electronics that general purpose CPUs became appropriate for real time instrumentation and control.
It's also important that in a space environment, every added gate is a hazard because it can get flipped by radiation. The ideal is to have the minimum gate count, minimum memory cell count, and the shortest possible path between phyical I/O and computing. The computers used in the Apollo meet this requirement.
Sorry to restate what may be obvious to some people, but a lot of people here will never have had to implement a rad-hard design, and will not understand why simplicity and directness are such virtues in design for space use.
Also, please note that the junction temperatures you quote are maxima. You will not get good life at high temperatures with silicon but, more importantly, the ability to handle pulses and voltage drops as junction temperature rises. I suggest you look at the SOAR curves for a few power devices to see what I mean.
As for the rest of your remarks, it's clear you are not a serious power electronics designer. No-one says the low level stages have to run that hot (though anyone who has listened to a good tube amp would probably argue that you are exaggerating the importance of shot noise). The big benefit of higher junction temperatures is that heatsinks, in particular, can be smaller, especially if the hot air is vented straight out of the casing. This makes the overall size of the equipment smaller.
Also, don't forget that power amplification is not synonymous with hi-fi. There are many applications for power audio devices (PA systems, for instance) that require considerable audio power but only moderate quality, and the applications for compact RF devices are continually expanding. For instance, one possible goal for a high power SiC device would be a replacement for the magnetrons of microwave ovens, possibly even creating a market for small solar or wind powered microwave ovens that would be useful both for backpackers and for 3rd world countries.
There are also huge potential benefits for rad-hard communications satellites, where cooling is a major problem (radiation only.)
Tinfoil hat time: perhaps all the FUD about SP2 problems, users unwilling to update etc. is just being put out by spammers and malware merchants.
I agree there is a problem, especially with people who think they are creative. I'm afraid I was positively delighted when the author Louis de Bernieres lost the first 60 pages of his new novel becaue he had failed to make a backup, and complained that he didn't expect to have to make backups, he wasn't a computer expert (or words to that effect). People need to understand that failure to learn the basics can result in pain and distress.
-
Research into cancer and AIDS is a branch of biochemistry.
- Biochemistry depends on science like DNA sequencing and protein folding
- DNA sequencing and protein folding need fast computers
- Fast computers need leading-edge engineering and physics.
- The structure of DNA was clarified partly as a result of X-ray analysis
- The discovery of X-rays was a byproduct of pure research into conduction of electricity in gases
We have no way to be certain that deeper insights into the fundamental structure of matter will contribute to solving other biological problems - but we have no ay to find out other than to do it.You might also like to consider that $3billion is less than drug companies spend on advertising and promotion every year.
Don Quijote was the "Knight with the long lance". The Quijote project aims to get enough kinetic energy to move the asteroid by aiming an object at it from a very long way away and building up a huge amount of kinetic energy. The analogy with medieval tilting is pretty good, and the "long lance" is the bit I thought particularly clever.
I have to say that, other than the seabird population, an enormous bomb explosion nearby could do nothing but good. The Thames islands are mostly mudflats (and at least one of them may cease to exist before long during to rising sea levels and strengthening tides) and, without human intervention, would be pretty transient.
Obviously, statistically the chance of an individual being killed by a major meteor strike is fairly low, perhaps lower than that of being killed in a terrorist attack and much lower than that of being killed on the roads. But it's the meteor strike that has the potential to kill perhaps 99% of the human race, and this latest evidence seems to suggest that the frequency of such impacts is higher than expected.
I have a feeling that we are still fighting Galileo's battle. A particular strand of Christian thought - medieval Aristotelianism - is still making the running. Aristotle, on no particular evidence, thought that the planets were perfect, lifeless and unchanging - the Schoolmen adopted this as dogma - and scientists and engineers at Nasa are still trying to demonstrate that we occupy what is probably a very ordinary little planet, with a very ordinary set of dominant life forms, against people who think we are unique and very important in this huge universe. You know who you are.
You can still see the lens of Galileo's original telescope, which actually destroyed Aristotle's ideas for anyone with an open mind. I hope one day someone brings the Mars Rovers back to Earth, perhaps along with the Hasselblad left on the Moon. They are signs of a human achievement bigger than the Pyramids, St. Peter's or the Great Wall of China - and an achievement which is under threat from fundamentalists, whether Islamic or Christian. I still find it amazing that the country that has produced insitutions like NASA and Woods Hole has places that mandate the teaching of Creationism, and I find that far more worrying than a survey that suggests that only a minority can find the Pacific.
But, as any idiot knows (I know, I am an idiot...) the value of anything is marginal. House prices are only high so long as there is a shortage. If everybody suddenly panics and wants to sell, houses get cheap very quickly. This is economics 101.
So, basically, I do not see how a share can be fairly priced unless the majority of the shares are put up for sale. Can someone explain to me, without being ruder than necessary, why the SEC allows this practice?
Years ago, my then boss remarked that operating system software should be like the sewage system: only noticed on the rare occasions it fails. The sewage system is, in effect, Open Source: anyone can read the rules for designing it, and anyone who follows the rules can connect to it. They will have to pay to dispose of waste through it, but that's another matter. What they pay in taxes is the cost of provision, not an IP tax to the person who designed the system in the first placed.
Equally, anyone can read the plumbing codes. I don't have to pay a fee for intellectual property to Home Depot every time I want to put a shower in, or connect two pipe lengths.
On the other hand, Home Depot makes good money, and highly skilled plumbers installing big shower rooms do very nicely, thank you.
So I think this is where IBM wants to be. IBM wants, in effect, to put in really big and impressive bathrooms. It's easier to do this if someone else, who hardly has to be thought about, is taking care of the water supply and the sewage. It makes sense to give away some of your knowledge of infrastructure, because others will build on it and make your life easier.
I apologise (a bit) for the extended metaphor, but I think my understanding of the basic economics is right. SCO builds high priced sewage pipes and charges a premium for knowing how to do it. They also want everybody else who digs holes in the ground to pay them a tax. In doing this, they are trying to backflow (sorry) against the entire trend of technology development. IBM, in classic Adam Smith mode, look to their own advantage but, without intending to, benefit everybody.
Actually, Dodgson needs to be encoded in a seriously object oriented language. The various characters have methods and properties...it'll look better after I've slept on it.
MP3s is a good example. "MP3" is not a word. It is not even an acronym, since it has no discernible vowels and the "3" is clearly not a pronounceable letter. Furthermore, it does not have a meaningful plural form: MP3s would presumably be pronounced "em pee three ess", but the actual pronunciation "em pee threes" seems to suggest that there are a set of threes of the MP variety.
A really stuffy way of indicating what is intended would be to write "MP3"s, to indicate that the thing in quotes is actually a quotation of informal speech. So it is quite reasonable to put a less ostentatious punctuation mark to say "Hey, this is a complete bastardisation of English, but this is what people are using."
Personally, I think that "MP3 files" is clearer and less offensive to us grammar Nazis, but newspapers have to reflect real world usage.
So a Frenchwoman, an economic adviser to the electricity industry no less, does something similar and it's:
- Jokes about the French (rather than useless management) on
/. - A disciplinary hearing.
My conclusion: We're all much the same. And my other conclusion: I hope she makes as much money as Scott Adams. It would go some way to show there is some kind of justice in the world.It's amazing how people keep thinking that fusion will somehow be clean, because AFAIK all the current processes being considered produce a lot of radiation. I think the real problem is that politicians and civil servants want centralised power generation because it puts them in control. Fully distributed power generation would actually greatly weaken central government, as would a mobile population.
The fact that distributed power is more resilient to external attack (it's very hard to destroy all of a wind farm or a significant fraction of small solar plants with conventional weapons, whereas it is all too easy to destroy any feasible form of nuclear or oil based plant) ought to make it attractive to governments, but their military planners want to be able to take out the opposition too.
Where they land it ain't my fault, says Wernher von Braun".
Before you mark this off-topic, note the "based on the V2" reference.
There is always tracking irregularity to ensure that the traces of previous write cycles aren't completely lost. Reading a hard drive while subtracting the top level bit pattern from the signal will allow the previous signal to be retrieved, and this process can go several levels deep. An electron microscope is unnecessary and won't work (you are thinking of the visible bits on CDs, I guess.) This is why, if you really want to erase a hard drive, the best approach is to take the disks out and heat them to destruction or whack them with a mallet. You can overwrite many times with an alternating bit pattern, of course, but physical destruction is the fastest and surest way.
My belief is that drug testing in sport should just stop, period. But a new criminal offense, that of administering a substance likely to reduce life expectancy, should be created, carrying a mandatory prison sentence equal to the estimated number of years of life expectancy lost. It's likely to be the coaches and team managers who are the real proponents of doping, and the prospect of maybe forty years jail if one of their charges dies of cardiac failure at 45 might have an effect. And if a drug has no adverse effects...well, sorry, but why aren't we all taking it?
The design, with all the vents at the back, makes it hard for kids to try dropping paperclips and so on inside.
The only thing missing is the floppy drive, and I'd question whether that really is "missing". There are several workrounds if someone really needs floppy access.
SunRays are a good idea in more controlled environments but, at the end of the day, you still need physical terminals for the users. Terminals designed for use in uncontrolled environments tend to be expensive and not particularly state of the art as far as display type goes. I still think that most people still underestimate how well the eMac is designed for its environment.
Whether governments and economic systems would survive is another matter, as the stock markets would collapse, held up as they are by the belief that the US overseas debt will eventually be repaid. Some countries are likely to hold off anarchy better than others, and the core EU states might take over the US role eventually.
As for the US, I guess the long term prospects might actually be beneficial. OK, there would need to be restrictions on oil use. The Bush family would lose influence without the Sa'udis to back them up, but other oil companies would gain power. The Government might have to put down a number of armed uprisings. The economy would go into depression until manufacturing could be restarted, but, let's face it, stuff is changed much too frequently and the skills are there to keep exisitng equipment going, just like the Cubans have to. People might even get healthier as a result of eating less. But there would be a huge one-off benefit from the writing off of US debt to the rest of the world. And the US would be militarily powerful enough to ensure no-one tried to collect on that debt.
I guess the biggest problem would arise if the trade cessation was not associated with an end to military interventionism. If the military intervention stopped as well, the US would benefit financially from bringing the soldiers home. And the likes of Osama Bin Laden would no longer have a USP. OK, Osama, you got what you wanted. Now see how your countrymen, especially the rich ones who just lost their incomes, like it.
Pity about Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, but eventually the fallout will decay, and at least no-one will be fighting over who owns the Jerusalem Crater.
I've posted, so I can't mod you up. Good effort, though.
Writing begets writing. Every literary flea has literary fleas on its back (did Pope say that?). But computer science begets computers. Stuff that really works doesn't need a mountain of commentary, though it could probably benefit from a decent manual.