You're probably thinking of the Difference Engine that the London Science Museum built in 1991 (output mechanism added in 2000). Afaik nobody's constructed an Analytical Engine, which is considerably more complex to build.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure where they got that from, unless it's based on popular confusion with the Difference Engine, an earlier design that could not do general-purpose, programmable computation.
Babbage as a forerunner of modern computing isn't a recent acknowledgement either: many of the digital-computing pioneers explicitly referenced him, and compared their work to his, usually viewing his work favorably and chalking up its failures to practical implementation problems, not severe drawbacks in the design. Here's a 1958 article in New Scientist crediting Babbage, which even includes a table comparing the Analytical Engine with EDSAC.
The only serious controversy I know of is whether the design could've been built with technology of the time, not whether the design itself was sound. See e.g. this 1998 journal article, particularly p. 34 (6th page of the PDF), which concludes that it could probably have been built, though it would've been quite expensive and required the top machining abilities of the day.
The court really does appear to have held that "liking" a post isn't speech with sufficient content to even count as speech in the first place, and therefore the court didn't have to look into the question of whether it was really the reason for the person being fired.
That seems very bad and clearly wrong, since it would mean that these kinds of expressions of support could actually be regulated by the federal government, if the First Amendment doesn't apply at all. Expressing your support for something is definitely a kind of expression.
It's clear in the article, but the headline here sort of implies that the chips run hotter in general, whereas this test is only saying the new chips run hotter when overclocked. From what I can find, when run at the rated voltages/speeds, Ivy Bridge CPUs run at about the same temperature as last gen's CPUs.
That's true; at least in a country like the U.S., I recall reading that considerably less farmland is farmed now than used to be the case decades ago, despite a larger population. Mostly, iirc, for economic reasons relating to the mechanization of farming: smallish plots in hilly areas are no longer cost-effective to farm, since the cost is much higher than farming giant tracts of flat land in the California Central Valley, Iowa, Nebraska, etc.
So I agree, in a way it does all boil down to cost, up until the point where you are literally out of arable land, which is probably not close to true in the United States.
I agree it's not surprising, but without studying it, it's at least theoretically possible that the gap could've been a cost rather than yield one, i.e. that organic methods could match pesticide-using methods in output, but only at higher expense. That would stil explain why conventional farming uses pesticides, if it lowered costs. What it looks like this study shows is that the yields can't match even ignoring price (though they can sometimes get close).
In the 21st century, humans have invented fake mines to work in, and fake mining companies that mine in them.
Not fake mines likes the ones in Minecraft that might actually be interesting, of course. And not a side-effect of something else, like WoW's "gold farmers". Fake mines that exist solely and purposely to be tediously mined by fake mining companies! Now that's creating value. Value that's "gotta be in the billions".
They did. Lovelock's "Gaia theory" approach has been greeted pretty skeptically by scientists, who've pointed out that in simple forms it's trivial, and in stronger forms it's unfalsifiable. The new-agey spiritual aspect of it hasn't been popular, either.
Here is a frequently cited 1989 paper that describes it as "untestable, and if taken literally as a basis for research, potentially misleading... ill-defined, unparsimonious, and unfalsifiable".
Obviously he isn't claiming to have invented a touchscreen, since that long predates him. He presumably can't be patenting the idea of "using a touchscreen by touching it" in general, because that's the only way you can use one. Instead it seems to be an enumeration of lots of ways you can drag your finger along a touchscreen and produce UI events: it can move objects, it can produce zoom events, it can cause objects to disappear, to be replaced by other objects, whatever.
My first reaction would be that this is a pretty obvious enumeration of things you can do with a touchscreen. But since courts seem to have a strange definition of what would be obvious to a person skilled in the art, a better angle might be to ask: is there video or discussion of someone using a touchscreen for manipulating objects on a screen prior to 1997? It seems the answer must be yes, but I can't find a smoking gun. By manipulating objects I mean dragging/panning/zooming, not interfacing with a "normal" GUI like touching buttons with your finger.
Scandinavia's are definitely higher, but it's not really "nothing at all" in Greece. Denmark collects about 50% of GDP in taxes, while Greece collects about 30% (that's more than the U.S. collects!).
The bigger problem is that Greece's GDP per capita isn't that high, because the economy is disproportionately small-time industry and agriculture. Scandinavia has Lego, Maersk, IKEA, whereas Greece has thousands of tavernas, shopkeepers, and shepherds. In a global capitalist economy, Maersk beats scrappy small businessmen, no matter how scrappy they are.
Greece's social programs are pretty pitiful. Scandinavia, now there is somewhere with generous social programs. Greece doesn't even have free universal healthcare, and its unemployment insurance is a joke compare to the norms in Scandinavia.
In Europe it seems to vary by airline for intra-Schengen flights. Some ask for ID, others don't. Honestly I bet the ones who check ID are more worried about you selling tickets, cutting down on their margins, than they are about terrorism.
This does have a much higher probability of working than email does, but it only works with politicians below a certain level of prominence. You can definitely reach your small-town mayor by sending a letter by mail, and may be able to reach a mid-sized city mayor, state congressperson, maybe even your U.S. congressperson.
Sending a letter stops working once you're talking about writing to your governor, a senator, the president, the secretary of state, etc., though. They have people open and read their mail for them, and it mostly just gets sorted into the appropriate tally marks (we received n++ letters against the Foo Bill, next).
I find the idea interesting, though in actual practice it can be done in more or less interesting ways, like anything. I don't care all that much whether it's "art" or not, but I tend to categorize it like that because it seems to fit more there than as "engineering" per se, since the goal is to produce interesting aesthetic effects or investigate some kind of conceptual idea, rather than to produce practical devices that accomplish some goal.
It's been done for quite a while, in any case. Here's a classic piece done by modifying a CRT so that an audio input signal modulates the electron beam. I like that kind of stuff for a mix of engineering/aesthetic reasons, it's a nice way of probing how a device works by modifying / "breaking" it in various ways.
There's not much to do about it as an end user; it's part of the protocol. I think the parent poster is just arguing that adopting ASN.1 in the definition of your protocol is a bad idea, so future protocols should avoid doing so.
Have you ever looked at the OpenSSL code? It could have the Ark of the Covenant hidden in all that mess somewhere for all we know and we'd never find it.
That's one reason OpenSSH has been moving towards more restricted/careful use of OpenSSL, and I believe in this case it actually makes OpenSSH not vulnerable, because this is (yet another) bug in the ASN.1 parser, and OpenSSH doesn't use the OpenSSL ASN.1 parser anymore. Sometime a few years ago they replaced it with a minimal, special-cased, audited internal version, which can't handle full ASN.1, but can handle the subset used in OpenSSH. See section 3.2 of this paper (pdf) for a bit more.
A Slashdot story from 2009 on the same idea. That one wasn't operational at the time, though (except as a research prototype), and this seems to be from a different group.
Even if you assume part of it is out of self-interest, there are non-nefarious explanations. For example, Twitter might genuinely not want to use patents offensively, but because of the current patent situation, feel they need to maintain defensive patents. In that case, this policy might actually help them gain more defensive patents. Engineers are often very reluctant to file and sign patent documents for "software inventions" they made. If you sign an agreement with them that you won't use the patent offensively without their permission, more Twitter employees may be willing to file the patents, so Twitter might end up with a bigger defensive patent portfolio than they would've had otherwise.
That's not what the statistics in the linked report show; they show a much bigger age difference than an education or class difference. 41% of people 65+ are online, whereas 94% of people 18-29 are online, a difference that completely swamps the other factors.
Given that the FCC's budget is somewhere around $350 million, levying fines of $0.025 million doesn't seem like a plausible funding strategy. That's just noise to both the FCC and Google's budgets. Imo it's more likely that it's just a symbolic fine.
Logan's Run is such a panacea, really. Not only would it increase internet adoption, but imagine the other statistical benefits: It'd raise our percentage of college graduates, increase the average physical fitness of both men and women, improve our per-capita GDP, and even decrease cancer rates.
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably thinking of the Difference Engine that the London Science Museum built in 1991 (output mechanism added in 2000). Afaik nobody's constructed an Analytical Engine, which is considerably more complex to build.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure where they got that from, unless it's based on popular confusion with the Difference Engine, an earlier design that could not do general-purpose, programmable computation.
Babbage as a forerunner of modern computing isn't a recent acknowledgement either: many of the digital-computing pioneers explicitly referenced him, and compared their work to his, usually viewing his work favorably and chalking up its failures to practical implementation problems, not severe drawbacks in the design. Here's a 1958 article in New Scientist crediting Babbage, which even includes a table comparing the Analytical Engine with EDSAC.
The only serious controversy I know of is whether the design could've been built with technology of the time, not whether the design itself was sound. See e.g. this 1998 journal article, particularly p. 34 (6th page of the PDF), which concludes that it could probably have been built, though it would've been quite expensive and required the top machining abilities of the day.
The court really does appear to have held that "liking" a post isn't speech with sufficient content to even count as speech in the first place, and therefore the court didn't have to look into the question of whether it was really the reason for the person being fired.
That seems very bad and clearly wrong, since it would mean that these kinds of expressions of support could actually be regulated by the federal government, if the First Amendment doesn't apply at all. Expressing your support for something is definitely a kind of expression.
It's clear in the article, but the headline here sort of implies that the chips run hotter in general, whereas this test is only saying the new chips run hotter when overclocked. From what I can find, when run at the rated voltages/speeds, Ivy Bridge CPUs run at about the same temperature as last gen's CPUs.
That's true; at least in a country like the U.S., I recall reading that considerably less farmland is farmed now than used to be the case decades ago, despite a larger population. Mostly, iirc, for economic reasons relating to the mechanization of farming: smallish plots in hilly areas are no longer cost-effective to farm, since the cost is much higher than farming giant tracts of flat land in the California Central Valley, Iowa, Nebraska, etc.
So I agree, in a way it does all boil down to cost, up until the point where you are literally out of arable land, which is probably not close to true in the United States.
I agree it's not surprising, but without studying it, it's at least theoretically possible that the gap could've been a cost rather than yield one, i.e. that organic methods could match pesticide-using methods in output, but only at higher expense. That would stil explain why conventional farming uses pesticides, if it lowered costs. What it looks like this study shows is that the yields can't match even ignoring price (though they can sometimes get close).
Equally distribute it to everyone on earth? I don't see a reason that distributing it proportionally to CPU resources is equitable.
That's what we call "fiat money"; that's not an industrial use. Gold is at least a conductor that doesn't tarnish; that's an actual industrial use.
If I'm going to use fiat money, I'll just use American dollars, thanks.
In the 21st century, humans have invented fake mines to work in, and fake mining companies that mine in them.
Not fake mines likes the ones in Minecraft that might actually be interesting, of course. And not a side-effect of something else, like WoW's "gold farmers". Fake mines that exist solely and purposely to be tediously mined by fake mining companies! Now that's creating value. Value that's "gotta be in the billions".
They did. Lovelock's "Gaia theory" approach has been greeted pretty skeptically by scientists, who've pointed out that in simple forms it's trivial, and in stronger forms it's unfalsifiable. The new-agey spiritual aspect of it hasn't been popular, either.
Here is a frequently cited 1989 paper that describes it as "untestable, and if taken literally as a basis for research, potentially misleading... ill-defined, unparsimonious, and unfalsifiable".
Obviously he isn't claiming to have invented a touchscreen, since that long predates him. He presumably can't be patenting the idea of "using a touchscreen by touching it" in general, because that's the only way you can use one. Instead it seems to be an enumeration of lots of ways you can drag your finger along a touchscreen and produce UI events: it can move objects, it can produce zoom events, it can cause objects to disappear, to be replaced by other objects, whatever.
My first reaction would be that this is a pretty obvious enumeration of things you can do with a touchscreen. But since courts seem to have a strange definition of what would be obvious to a person skilled in the art, a better angle might be to ask: is there video or discussion of someone using a touchscreen for manipulating objects on a screen prior to 1997? It seems the answer must be yes, but I can't find a smoking gun. By manipulating objects I mean dragging/panning/zooming, not interfacing with a "normal" GUI like touching buttons with your finger.
Scandinavia's are definitely higher, but it's not really "nothing at all" in Greece. Denmark collects about 50% of GDP in taxes, while Greece collects about 30% (that's more than the U.S. collects!).
The bigger problem is that Greece's GDP per capita isn't that high, because the economy is disproportionately small-time industry and agriculture. Scandinavia has Lego, Maersk, IKEA, whereas Greece has thousands of tavernas, shopkeepers, and shepherds. In a global capitalist economy, Maersk beats scrappy small businessmen, no matter how scrappy they are.
You forgot Pokey, you insensitive clod!
Greece's social programs are pretty pitiful. Scandinavia, now there is somewhere with generous social programs. Greece doesn't even have free universal healthcare, and its unemployment insurance is a joke compare to the norms in Scandinavia.
In Europe it seems to vary by airline for intra-Schengen flights. Some ask for ID, others don't. Honestly I bet the ones who check ID are more worried about you selling tickets, cutting down on their margins, than they are about terrorism.
This does have a much higher probability of working than email does, but it only works with politicians below a certain level of prominence. You can definitely reach your small-town mayor by sending a letter by mail, and may be able to reach a mid-sized city mayor, state congressperson, maybe even your U.S. congressperson.
Sending a letter stops working once you're talking about writing to your governor, a senator, the president, the secretary of state, etc., though. They have people open and read their mail for them, and it mostly just gets sorted into the appropriate tally marks (we received n++ letters against the Foo Bill, next).
I find the idea interesting, though in actual practice it can be done in more or less interesting ways, like anything. I don't care all that much whether it's "art" or not, but I tend to categorize it like that because it seems to fit more there than as "engineering" per se, since the goal is to produce interesting aesthetic effects or investigate some kind of conceptual idea, rather than to produce practical devices that accomplish some goal.
It's been done for quite a while, in any case. Here's a classic piece done by modifying a CRT so that an audio input signal modulates the electron beam. I like that kind of stuff for a mix of engineering/aesthetic reasons, it's a nice way of probing how a device works by modifying / "breaking" it in various ways.
There's not much to do about it as an end user; it's part of the protocol. I think the parent poster is just arguing that adopting ASN.1 in the definition of your protocol is a bad idea, so future protocols should avoid doing so.
That's one reason OpenSSH has been moving towards more restricted/careful use of OpenSSL, and I believe in this case it actually makes OpenSSH not vulnerable, because this is (yet another) bug in the ASN.1 parser, and OpenSSH doesn't use the OpenSSL ASN.1 parser anymore. Sometime a few years ago they replaced it with a minimal, special-cased, audited internal version, which can't handle full ASN.1, but can handle the subset used in OpenSSH. See section 3.2 of this paper (pdf) for a bit more.
A Slashdot story from 2009 on the same idea. That one wasn't operational at the time, though (except as a research prototype), and this seems to be from a different group.
Even if you assume part of it is out of self-interest, there are non-nefarious explanations. For example, Twitter might genuinely not want to use patents offensively, but because of the current patent situation, feel they need to maintain defensive patents. In that case, this policy might actually help them gain more defensive patents. Engineers are often very reluctant to file and sign patent documents for "software inventions" they made. If you sign an agreement with them that you won't use the patent offensively without their permission, more Twitter employees may be willing to file the patents, so Twitter might end up with a bigger defensive patent portfolio than they would've had otherwise.
That's not what the statistics in the linked report show; they show a much bigger age difference than an education or class difference. 41% of people 65+ are online, whereas 94% of people 18-29 are online, a difference that completely swamps the other factors.
Given that the FCC's budget is somewhere around $350 million, levying fines of $0.025 million doesn't seem like a plausible funding strategy. That's just noise to both the FCC and Google's budgets. Imo it's more likely that it's just a symbolic fine.
Logan's Run is such a panacea, really. Not only would it increase internet adoption, but imagine the other statistical benefits: It'd raise our percentage of college graduates, increase the average physical fitness of both men and women, improve our per-capita GDP, and even decrease cancer rates.
That hypothesis doesn't explain why 94% of people age 18-29 use the internet, unless intelligence and/or literacy rates have massively increased.
A simpler hypothesis is that old people don't use the internet, and young people do, and other factors are minimal.