Imagine a console that is top of the line, but has all the games distributed directly to the console with Apple store
Already exists, more or less. It's called AppleTV. It's a console in somewhat the same way that the XBox is basically a desktop computer. All that's missing is a controller and a software update allowing game downloads from the App Store.
Furthermore, countries that possess nukes would still have the knowhow to produce them after the destruction of all of the nuclear weapons. That alone would create an unbalance in the worldpower, some countries can still make nukes if the situation warrants it and they can be produced in a year
You're right in general. Any real disarmament would have to be accompanied by an international organization that oversees fissile material. Something like the European Coal & Steel Community and/or EURATOM on a global level.
You should probably read the links you post. The United States signed and ratified the START II treaty. Russia signed but never really ratified it. They held out for nearly a decade, only ratifying it as a politically symbolic but practically meaningless protest against the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. START II has now been superseded by the SORT treaty, which will reduce deployed warheads to 1700-2200 each by 2012. This essentially cuts both sides' deployed warheads in half, which is a substantial move in the right direction, if both sides actually implement it.
Highly enriched uranium is not made with a reactor. The enrichment process is done either through gaseous diffusion (as was done during the Manhattan Project era) or through centrifuges (as is most common now). Enrichment is simply separating the two naturally occurring isotopes of uranium (U238 and U235) by their tiny weight difference. U238 is not fissile, but it's about 99.7% of all naturally occurring uranium. U235 is fissile, but is only 0.3% of naturally occurring uranium. So to make a basic atomic bomb, you need to get a bunch of uranium and run it through a cascade of centrifuges in order to separate the very small amount of U235 from the bulk of U238.
Once you get up to a concentration of about 90% U235, you have "highly enriched" weapons-grade uranium. You don't really need anything too much more complicated than that for a gun-type fission bomb. You separate the uranium into two sub-critical masses. Set up a tube with one sub-critical mass at one end, and the other sub-critical mass at the other with a chunk of TNT. When the TNT is detonated it slams the sub-critical mass at one end into the sub-critical mass at the other end, creating a super-critical mass that becomes a nuclear explosion.
You don't need a reactor, you don't need beryllium, you don't need reprocessing facilities. Reactors and reprocessing are needed to turn U238 into Plutonium. If you want to design a more complicated, but higher yield, implosion-type bomb (as opposed to the simpler gun-type above), you'll need plutonium reprocessed from the spent U238 fuel used in a breeder reactor. Implosion-type bombs are much more difficult to engineer, because you need to set up a sphere of explosives rigged to all detonate within 10,000ths of a second of each other, so that the implosion into the plutonium mass will be uniform. Beryllium is only used in implosion-types, not gun-types.
It's not clear why North Korea's bomb failed, because we don't know what type of bomb design they used.
Why do so many people think that knowing a lot and being really good with one field of science in any way qualifies you to speak with credability [sic] about another field of science?
Because the scientific method is universal? Because the ability to methodically apply reasoned skepticism is not the privileged domain of hermetic specialists?
Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from "fast and simplified feature set" to "include lots of features to make the web fun & easy." They're working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome & Safari—the new javascript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.
The Mozilla 2.0 project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone's attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.
It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.
...he says, during a maelstrom global financial meltdown caused by an unprecedented run of risk-taking by gigantic, well-established, investment banks.
I once sat in on a meeting involving the Georgian speaker of parliament. One of her aides related to my boss the saying they have in Georgia about Stalin and Beria: "Yes, they were terrible, but they did kill a lot of Russians..."
In any case, Georgia putting down a separatist movement armed & funded by the Russians within its own territory is entirely different than Russia invading and occupying Georgia, a sovereign country.
It's interesting to note the near exponential shape of the graph pre dot com bust era, and how the exponential part resumes around 2005.
Oh for Pete's sake, learn how to switch the chart to log scale. It wasn't exponential growth.
The chart would be much better if it allowed you to see the numbers adjusted for inflation. Charts using nominal values for money are almost uniformly useless if not downright misleading.
Also, note to parent: salting your text with words in ALL CAPS makes you look like a lunatic, not like someone who is adding proper emphasis to your posts. Learn how to use the following tags:
If you want to read a fascinating history of the arms industry and its central role in the development of the European states system, pick up a copy of William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power.
This is a security issue, but it has nothing to do with Firefox, its the user.
That's the excuse we used to use with Windows too. But everyone has since realized that while you can never inoculate against dumb users, some software is inherently less secure because of the way it is designed. You're right that if users had perfect knowledge of what they were running, what they were installing, and what it all meant, then there would be no problem. Unfortunately that is not the case—in practice, people have limited knowledge about what they're running and what they're installing, as evidenced by the wild success of spyware and adware and malware. Tens of millions of users have malware running local code while logged in on admin-level accounts, the malware is running without their full knowledge, and this presents a wide open vector for attack.
We can follow your model, in which we place the onus entirely on the user. And similar to abstinence-only sex ed, which ignores the well-demonstrated reality of human behavior, it will fail and Firefox will be exploited. Or we can follow my model, which adds another layer of security on the assumption that people do make mistakes and ill-informed decisions, and design around that. Firefox's good reputation will be preserved, with trivial hassle to the end user.
This is a security issue really. Firefox shouldn't run any extensions not explicitly approved by the user. If a third-party installer puts an extension in, Firefox should keep it disabled until the user explicitly enables it (or uninstalls it) in the Addons Manager.
If legitimate companies are stooping as low as illicit extension installs into Firefox, it is an obvious next step for spyware and malware programs running on people's computers to begin to do the same. It doesn't matter that Firefox alerts you when new extensions have been installed on startup—if a malware program installs an extension with an innocuous name (e.g. "MS Internet Security") most people won't think twice and will allow it to remain activated.
Mozilla should not wait for Fx3.1 or Fx3.2 to implement some kind of protection scheme against this—this should be rolled out to all Fx3.0+ users in a security update.
I agree with your first bullet point and I think that's the key development that won Google an undeniable monopoly position in the market of online advertising. However, I don't think your other bullet points are evidence of any abuse of monopoly status.
Yahoo: as far as I know, competitive bidding between rivals for the same third party firm is not anti-competitive, unless Google truly had no intention of buying (i.e. just bidding to raise the price Microsoft would have to pay), and even then I think it's a gray area.
Search order: unless it can be demonstrated that there's some illicit favoring specific to Wikipedia, then I think Google is in the clear. Wikipedia seems to do well because of the way PageRank analyzes the structure of the web, not because Google wants Wikipedia results to be higher than other competing online references.
Firefox: while this may be anti-competitive in the browser market, it's not in the advertising market, and the advertising market is where they have a monopoly position. No one can claim that Google has a monopoly position in the browser market, or that supporting a browser produced by a different company that they are enhancing their own position in the browser market unfairly. Moreover, I'm not sure that there's anything wrong with paying for a legitimate service, as Google is funding Mozilla (ostensibly) not out of charity but for the service of prime placement in the search bar, which is 100% legal.
API: I don't recall there being any reason a company, monopoly or not, might be required to open all their APIs to third parties
Clever idea, but it wouldn't work. Their success at targeted advertising relies on the same heap of data and analysis that their success in search relies upon. If you spin off advertising, AdSense would either have to buy all that information and analysis from Google, or duplicate all that information and analysis on their own once independent. Both search and advertising are premised on the same core competency of analyzing the structure of the web—you can't just split one from the other.
An improvement towards what though? Most articles have settled down to reflect the viewpoint of the people that watch them.
I would venture that the change in Wikipedia articles over time is neither teleological nor asymptotic. There is no Platonic ideal article toward which each Wikipedia article progresses. Nor are the changes over time increasingly incremental as Wikipedia articles become more complete or comprehensive in their treatments of the plethora subjects.
Because knowledge is created, the facts of the material world change, and the theories we have explaining those changes are improved as new paradigms arise, there is no ideal end state for Wikipedia or its article. Judging them in terms of an imagined ideal as your criteria for assessing Wikipedia's improvement is an argument loaded against Wikipedia (indeed against any type of encyclopedia).
The more important criterion is that of attribution. Are articles steadily more based on reliable published sources? Do they represent all reliable sides of an argument or issue, instead of presenting one specific view as correct? Do articles avoid original research or unique syntheses of existing research?
Sanger's argument is off-base from the start, because his premise is whether Wikipedia has an alternate standard for The Truth. Fortunately, The Truth is not Wikipedia's project. Wikipedia's project is to have a comprehensive, verifiable, NPOV encyclopedia of extant knowledge.
If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, AND you have published information that needs to be added to an article to better balance its discussion of a subject, by all means edit. If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, but disagree simply on the basis of your opinion, it's likely that the people who watch over the article are going to be wary of your edits. Sometimes those article-watchers stray too far into feelings page ownership, and everyone realizes that's a problem. But in general, they're concerned with preserving what consensus on article quality has been hammered out over the course of editing and discussion on the talk page.
China should, theoretically, be able to pull themselves up even faster than Korea or Japan, if they wanted to, because they're not starting from scratch.
Let's not understate the position the Chinese found themselves in after the Mao era ended. They had experienced the Great Leap Forward, which not only undermined their industrial development (i.e. backyard furnaces for rural, decentralized steel production), but led to the starvation of 30 million Chinese and the foregone births of an additional 30 million Chinese due to the effects of malnutrition on Chinese women's fertility.
Subsequently they had the Four Cleanups campaign throughout the rural areas, the terror of which was then replicated in the decade-long Cultural Revolution in the urban areas—a phenomenon that was equivalent to state-sanctioned civil war for at least the first three years (the Red Guard phase of the conflict).
When Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, their industrial progress had been in abeyance for over 20 years since the first Five Year Plan, and they had just undergone the some of the most devastating state-engineered human catastrophes in recorded history. It's hard to argue that they were not indeed "starting from scratch."
Re:lawyers are the same as computer programmers
on
You Are Not a Lawyer
·
· Score: 1
with the same sort of humility in mind...
This advice is really rich coming from you, cts, considering...
If Apple had been keen on building their media empire, they'd should have gotten into ebooks when the 1st gen kindle was released tbh.
Apple didn't get into portable mp3 players when the first or second generations were released (three years after the first mp3 players were released). Nevertheless, when they entered, they quickly took over the entire market and now hold the hegemonic position. First-mover advantage only applies to certain sectors, and I doubt that ebooks is one of them. If Apple has anything they think they can add to ebooks (the usual suspects: nicer looking hardware, simpler UI, convenient end-to-end experience), I think they'll hold their own competing with Amazon and the other market players.
There was no such thing as a physically contiguous file on disk, and the operating system managed the storage and recall of all data elements.
Would this type of operating system make encrypting your hard drive (through steganography or cryptography) easier, since there are no physical files on disk?
If you would like to hear what non-silent ones sound like, download Orbital's track "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head." The song begins with a sample that they took of a wind turbine swooshing overhead, which they then use as the beat for the rest of the song.
Slashdot Mirror
Already exists, more or less. It's called AppleTV. It's a console in somewhat the same way that the XBox is basically a desktop computer. All that's missing is a controller and a software update allowing game downloads from the App Store.
You're right in general. Any real disarmament would have to be accompanied by an international organization that oversees fissile material. Something like the European Coal & Steel Community and/or EURATOM on a global level.
You should probably read the links you post. The United States signed and ratified the START II treaty. Russia signed but never really ratified it. They held out for nearly a decade, only ratifying it as a politically symbolic but practically meaningless protest against the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. START II has now been superseded by the SORT treaty, which will reduce deployed warheads to 1700-2200 each by 2012. This essentially cuts both sides' deployed warheads in half, which is a substantial move in the right direction, if both sides actually implement it.
Highly enriched uranium is not made with a reactor. The enrichment process is done either through gaseous diffusion (as was done during the Manhattan Project era) or through centrifuges (as is most common now). Enrichment is simply separating the two naturally occurring isotopes of uranium (U238 and U235) by their tiny weight difference. U238 is not fissile, but it's about 99.7% of all naturally occurring uranium. U235 is fissile, but is only 0.3% of naturally occurring uranium. So to make a basic atomic bomb, you need to get a bunch of uranium and run it through a cascade of centrifuges in order to separate the very small amount of U235 from the bulk of U238.
Once you get up to a concentration of about 90% U235, you have "highly enriched" weapons-grade uranium. You don't really need anything too much more complicated than that for a gun-type fission bomb. You separate the uranium into two sub-critical masses. Set up a tube with one sub-critical mass at one end, and the other sub-critical mass at the other with a chunk of TNT. When the TNT is detonated it slams the sub-critical mass at one end into the sub-critical mass at the other end, creating a super-critical mass that becomes a nuclear explosion.
You don't need a reactor, you don't need beryllium, you don't need reprocessing facilities. Reactors and reprocessing are needed to turn U238 into Plutonium. If you want to design a more complicated, but higher yield, implosion-type bomb (as opposed to the simpler gun-type above), you'll need plutonium reprocessed from the spent U238 fuel used in a breeder reactor. Implosion-type bombs are much more difficult to engineer, because you need to set up a sphere of explosives rigged to all detonate within 10,000ths of a second of each other, so that the implosion into the plutonium mass will be uniform. Beryllium is only used in implosion-types, not gun-types.
It's not clear why North Korea's bomb failed, because we don't know what type of bomb design they used.
Because the scientific method is universal? Because the ability to methodically apply reasoned skepticism is not the privileged domain of hermetic specialists?
This is exactly why Microsoft is afraid of Desktop Linux – no money to be made.
Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from "fast and simplified feature set" to "include lots of features to make the web fun & easy." They're working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome & Safari—the new javascript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.
The Mozilla 2.0 project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone's attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.
It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.
...he says, during a maelstrom global financial meltdown caused by an unprecedented run of risk-taking by gigantic, well-established, investment banks.
I once sat in on a meeting involving the Georgian speaker of parliament. One of her aides related to my boss the saying they have in Georgia about Stalin and Beria: "Yes, they were terrible, but they did kill a lot of Russians..."
In any case, Georgia putting down a separatist movement armed & funded by the Russians within its own territory is entirely different than Russia invading and occupying Georgia, a sovereign country.
...SAXA!
Or, more generally, on the web itself. For example, see the new Mozilla Labs project, Bespin.
FWIW, they've landed performance improvements for the AwesomeBar to Fx3.2.
Oh for Pete's sake, learn how to switch the chart to log scale. It wasn't exponential growth.
The chart would be much better if it allowed you to see the numbers adjusted for inflation. Charts using nominal values for money are almost uniformly useless if not downright misleading.
Also, note to parent: salting your text with words in ALL CAPS makes you look like a lunatic, not like someone who is adding proper emphasis to your posts. Learn how to use the following tags:
Cheers.
If you want to read a fascinating history of the arms industry and its central role in the development of the European states system, pick up a copy of William McNeill's The Pursuit of Power.
That's the excuse we used to use with Windows too. But everyone has since realized that while you can never inoculate against dumb users, some software is inherently less secure because of the way it is designed. You're right that if users had perfect knowledge of what they were running, what they were installing, and what it all meant, then there would be no problem. Unfortunately that is not the case—in practice, people have limited knowledge about what they're running and what they're installing, as evidenced by the wild success of spyware and adware and malware. Tens of millions of users have malware running local code while logged in on admin-level accounts, the malware is running without their full knowledge, and this presents a wide open vector for attack.
We can follow your model, in which we place the onus entirely on the user. And similar to abstinence-only sex ed, which ignores the well-demonstrated reality of human behavior, it will fail and Firefox will be exploited. Or we can follow my model, which adds another layer of security on the assumption that people do make mistakes and ill-informed decisions, and design around that. Firefox's good reputation will be preserved, with trivial hassle to the end user.
This is a security issue really. Firefox shouldn't run any extensions not explicitly approved by the user. If a third-party installer puts an extension in, Firefox should keep it disabled until the user explicitly enables it (or uninstalls it) in the Addons Manager.
If legitimate companies are stooping as low as illicit extension installs into Firefox, it is an obvious next step for spyware and malware programs running on people's computers to begin to do the same. It doesn't matter that Firefox alerts you when new extensions have been installed on startup—if a malware program installs an extension with an innocuous name (e.g. "MS Internet Security") most people won't think twice and will allow it to remain activated.
Mozilla should not wait for Fx3.1 or Fx3.2 to implement some kind of protection scheme against this—this should be rolled out to all Fx3.0+ users in a security update.
Clever idea, but it wouldn't work. Their success at targeted advertising relies on the same heap of data and analysis that their success in search relies upon. If you spin off advertising, AdSense would either have to buy all that information and analysis from Google, or duplicate all that information and analysis on their own once independent. Both search and advertising are premised on the same core competency of analyzing the structure of the web—you can't just split one from the other.
I would venture that the change in Wikipedia articles over time is neither teleological nor asymptotic. There is no Platonic ideal article toward which each Wikipedia article progresses. Nor are the changes over time increasingly incremental as Wikipedia articles become more complete or comprehensive in their treatments of the plethora subjects.
Because knowledge is created, the facts of the material world change, and the theories we have explaining those changes are improved as new paradigms arise, there is no ideal end state for Wikipedia or its article. Judging them in terms of an imagined ideal as your criteria for assessing Wikipedia's improvement is an argument loaded against Wikipedia (indeed against any type of encyclopedia).
The more important criterion is that of attribution. Are articles steadily more based on reliable published sources? Do they represent all reliable sides of an argument or issue, instead of presenting one specific view as correct? Do articles avoid original research or unique syntheses of existing research?
Sanger's argument is off-base from the start, because his premise is whether Wikipedia has an alternate standard for The Truth. Fortunately, The Truth is not Wikipedia's project. Wikipedia's project is to have a comprehensive, verifiable, NPOV encyclopedia of extant knowledge.
If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, AND you have published information that needs to be added to an article to better balance its discussion of a subject, by all means edit. If you don't agree with the viewpoint of an article, but disagree simply on the basis of your opinion, it's likely that the people who watch over the article are going to be wary of your edits. Sometimes those article-watchers stray too far into feelings page ownership, and everyone realizes that's a problem. But in general, they're concerned with preserving what consensus on article quality has been hammered out over the course of editing and discussion on the talk page.
Let's not understate the position the Chinese found themselves in after the Mao era ended. They had experienced the Great Leap Forward, which not only undermined their industrial development (i.e. backyard furnaces for rural, decentralized steel production), but led to the starvation of 30 million Chinese and the foregone births of an additional 30 million Chinese due to the effects of malnutrition on Chinese women's fertility.
Subsequently they had the Four Cleanups campaign throughout the rural areas, the terror of which was then replicated in the decade-long Cultural Revolution in the urban areas—a phenomenon that was equivalent to state-sanctioned civil war for at least the first three years (the Red Guard phase of the conflict).
When Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, their industrial progress had been in abeyance for over 20 years since the first Five Year Plan, and they had just undergone the some of the most devastating state-engineered human catastrophes in recorded history. It's hard to argue that they were not indeed "starting from scratch."
This advice is really rich coming from you, cts, considering...
Apple didn't get into portable mp3 players when the first or second generations were released (three years after the first mp3 players were released). Nevertheless, when they entered, they quickly took over the entire market and now hold the hegemonic position. First-mover advantage only applies to certain sectors, and I doubt that ebooks is one of them. If Apple has anything they think they can add to ebooks (the usual suspects: nicer looking hardware, simpler UI, convenient end-to-end experience), I think they'll hold their own competing with Amazon and the other market players.
Would this type of operating system make encrypting your hard drive (through steganography or cryptography) easier, since there are no physical files on disk?
If you would like to hear what non-silent ones sound like, download Orbital's track "The Girl with the Sun in Her Head." The song begins with a sample that they took of a wind turbine swooshing overhead, which they then use as the beat for the rest of the song.