We are probably approaching the tail of Moore's observation. If this patent is not invalidated, it will expire about the time that semiconductor density progress becomes negligible. So about the time the patent becomes useful, it expires.
On the other hand, the cost of a new data center will probably become insignificant before that time. So you're right that moving the old center is uneconomical. Unless some applications that require much huger data centers become important, special designs that facilitate moving will be pointless.
I think a fully-enclosed water slide is the best solution. No time wasted strapping in, just jump down the hole and you're safe. Water provides some fire protection. Coat the inside with teflon so it'll work if the water supply fails.
kpdf under Linux is decent. It has some rendering problems, but it usually works. Scrolling is instantaneous, whereas acroread re-renders each time you hit the down arrow. Expect to lose a lot of functionality, but if what you need is speed on a slow computer, kpdf wins.
Dealing with incompetence and rudeness is not normally considered part of the price, and those things are why I will never again deal with Tickermaster.
"What's dangerous is if someone manages to come up with a cure for this, or other religious afflictions. Or, even worse, a vaccine or other preventative measures. Then I predict all hell will break lose."
Interesting choice of words. Did you mean it literally, or did you mean that things would become very bad generally, or what? I think that the end of this sort of insanity could bring nothing but benefits once the old generation of wackos died off.
Even those who think copyright law is paramount may have a sense of proportion. There's no reason to believe the woman acted with intent to harm, or achieved or attempted financial gain (beyond having posession of a lot of music she didn't pay for). She was fined far, far beyond any actual demonstrated damages.
A just verdict would have been a fine of perhaps $2000, a requirement that all her internet activity be monitored for several years, and a warning that severe fines would be imposed upon discovery of similar misbehavior in the future. This is, after all, a first offense, and it was until this judgement a grey area in the law.
The GPL analogy is not appropriate because GPL violations generally involve attempts at substancial financial gain for the violator.
For years cars have been getting heavier and heavier in the name of safety.
What planet are you from? Safety features that have been touted in recent years are air bags, crumple zones, and anti-lock brakes. Weight is correlated with safety only as an afterthought; weight-for-safety is not a goal sought by itself. The governmental pressure for higher mpg is one reason that lighter weight is sought. No designer of passenger vehicle deliberately adds weight unless there is some feature (like capacity or power) that demands it.
There are a lot of heavy parts of a car that are probably not appropriate for plastic, especially an expensive plastic. Engine block and bearings come to mind, gears, radiator, electrical wires...
Better windows would be a real plus. If this stuff is transparent and can be engineered to be as flexible as steel, it would have a big advantage over the dangerous stuff we're using now.
Inductance of a cable can be reduced by paralleling cables, provided that the cables aren't positioned so that the magnetic fields reinforce each other. Paralleling will tend to increase the capacitance.
Yes, spacing conductors farther apart reduces capacitance, but, just like inductance, this should not have an audible effect unless the speaker wire is well over 100 feet long.
Any power source capable of being put in a laptop and powering it for 30 years would have numerous uses beyond laptops. Think automobiles. Compare to R. A. Heinlein's "shipstones". If the price were acceptable, there would be tremendous economic pressure to make it practical and widespread.
From a danger standpoint, anything with an energy density that high is risky. Car fires are bad now, imagine what they would be like if available energy were 1000 times greater. (On the other hand, unaccelerated nuclear decay limits the power available, so the primary risk from something like tritium decay is the release of radioactives, not the explosive power.)
Forty years ago photo stores sold a gadget containing a strip of radioactive polonium, used for discharging the static electricity that held dust particles on film. To me, this suggests that the risk of radioactives in consumer products is manageable.
Granted that tritium isn't particularly bad, but things in dumps tend to get ground up and sometimes burned. Gasseous tritium will float away and not be too much of a problem, but tritium (in place of normal hydrogen) made into compounds will stay with the compound, at least until it decays. Thus, it's important that the materials or the containers be reasonably protected for a few decades.
Airplanes. Data transmission rates and electronics in general. Gold when compared to the dollar. Sensitivity of photographic film. All improved by at least 10X during the 20th century.
Engineering is difficult. A four year college education is just barely enough for an intelligent, hard-working student to learn enough in all the major areas of electrical engineering to not be a burden in his first year at work, unless his first job happily coincides with the areas he didn't miss. Time spent on humanities and foolishness like teamwork and courage training is time taken away from learning engineering skills.
Teamwork comes naturally and doen't have to be taught. On the job, your manager gives you part of a project to do and tells you who to talk with to interface with the rest of the project. That talking is where teamwork comes in; you get a glimpse of other portions of the project, and if you can see deficiencies in other places you discuss them (and vice-versa for others looking at your portion). No particular courage needed.
If he's telling the truth, then he is witness to (and possibly participant in) a crime. He claims he's received medical records from hospital employees. Those employees are breaking the law and probably their employment contracts. He may be breaking the law by receiving (and probably soliciting) those records. The law can (to a certain extent) compell witnesses, thus there is some validity to the request that this guy be identified.
So if he's telling the truth, he's screwed. If he's not telling the truth, he's screwed. He should have behaved in a more ehtical manner.
On a hot, sunny, windy day, horse droppings dry quickly and become airborne. The result is an ugly, stinky mess spreading disease and filth everywhere. It has been pointed out previously that cities are more energy-efficient than rural and suburban areas, so if cities have to be depleted to accomodate horses, the country's net energy use might rise.
With keyboard, mouse, DVD +/- R/W, display, 80 G HD, 512 M RAM, ethernet, audio, modem, slow VIA processor. This appears not to be well made, but price point and features are instructive.
Other than Apple, what company sells and nationally advertises home PC workstation hardware and certifies it to run any operating system other than Windows?
Sun, since a website qualifies as national advertising (and I assume they also advertise in trade journals) and the prices on low end systems aren't out of reach for home use. They provide Solaris and various Linuxes.
Richter 3.4 is absolutely trivial. The sensation is about like standing on a very sturdy bridge as a large diesel truck drives by. The 2.5 quake would be unnoticeable to a person walking.
I would contend that roadblocks are illegal. However, you don't need to be doing something else illegal for a policeman to legally pull you over if you are driving in a manner that suggests that you are drunk, for instance: driving very slowly, swerving frequently, reacting slowly. It's called "reasonable suspicion" and is in line with their duty to protect the public safety.
Thanks, you've done a nice job defending the Laffer curve and putting it in today's context. I've never seen a discussion of this, but it's apparent to me that the Laffer curve is a time-dependent function. Increasing taxes will generally result in an instantaneous increase in tax revenue, but the longer a tax increase is in effect, the less effective it will be in increasing revenue (as people act to avoid the tax and as the tax hurts the overall economy). If the tax increase is in effect long enough and the level of tax is high enough, the increased rate decreases revenue, and that yields the Laffer curve of tax revenue versus tax rate. As time passes, the peak should get higher and move to the left.
"The economy" is the summed financial health of all the people. Saying "fuck the economy" is saying "fuck you" to every person, except for the few who manage to gain in a particular bad situation. Even those few lose in the long run, because a degraded economy delays technical progress, including life-preserving technology.
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On the other hand, the cost of a new data center will probably become insignificant before that time. So you're right that moving the old center is uneconomical. Unless some applications that require much huger data centers become important, special designs that facilitate moving will be pointless.
IIRC The Anarchist's Cookbook included instructions for making explosives and mind-degrading drugs. Consider the possibilities.
I think a fully-enclosed water slide is the best solution. No time wasted strapping in, just jump down the hole and you're safe. Water provides some fire protection. Coat the inside with teflon so it'll work if the water supply fails.
kpdf under Linux is decent. It has some rendering problems, but it usually works. Scrolling is instantaneous, whereas acroread re-renders each time you hit the down arrow. Expect to lose a lot of functionality, but if what you need is speed on a slow computer, kpdf wins.
Dealing with incompetence and rudeness is not normally considered part of the price, and those things are why I will never again deal with Tickermaster.
Interesting choice of words. Did you mean it literally, or did you mean that things would become very bad generally, or what? I think that the end of this sort of insanity could bring nothing but benefits once the old generation of wackos died off.
A just verdict would have been a fine of perhaps $2000, a requirement that all her internet activity be monitored for several years, and a warning that severe fines would be imposed upon discovery of similar misbehavior in the future. This is, after all, a first offense, and it was until this judgement a grey area in the law.
The GPL analogy is not appropriate because GPL violations generally involve attempts at substancial financial gain for the violator.
Like a Corvette or a DeLorean? (circa 1953 and 1981, respectively)
Better windows would be a real plus. If this stuff is transparent and can be engineered to be as flexible as steel, it would have a big advantage over the dangerous stuff we're using now.
Yes, spacing conductors farther apart reduces capacitance, but, just like inductance, this should not have an audible effect unless the speaker wire is well over 100 feet long.
From a danger standpoint, anything with an energy density that high is risky. Car fires are bad now, imagine what they would be like if available energy were 1000 times greater. (On the other hand, unaccelerated nuclear decay limits the power available, so the primary risk from something like tritium decay is the release of radioactives, not the explosive power.)
Forty years ago photo stores sold a gadget containing a strip of radioactive polonium, used for discharging the static electricity that held dust particles on film. To me, this suggests that the risk of radioactives in consumer products is manageable.
Granted that tritium isn't particularly bad, but things in dumps tend to get ground up and sometimes burned. Gasseous tritium will float away and not be too much of a problem, but tritium (in place of normal hydrogen) made into compounds will stay with the compound, at least until it decays. Thus, it's important that the materials or the containers be reasonably protected for a few decades.
Airplanes. Data transmission rates and electronics in general. Gold when compared to the dollar. Sensitivity of photographic film. All improved by at least 10X during the 20th century.
Sputnik was nothing like an improvised Triumph, or even an MG. It was more like a 2CV or a Volkswagen Bug.
Teamwork comes naturally and doen't have to be taught. On the job, your manager gives you part of a project to do and tells you who to talk with to interface with the rest of the project. That talking is where teamwork comes in; you get a glimpse of other portions of the project, and if you can see deficiencies in other places you discuss them (and vice-versa for others looking at your portion). No particular courage needed.
So if he's telling the truth, he's screwed. If he's not telling the truth, he's screwed. He should have behaved in a more ehtical manner.
On a hot, sunny, windy day, horse droppings dry quickly and become airborne. The result is an ugly, stinky mess spreading disease and filth everywhere. It has been pointed out previously that cities are more energy-efficient than rural and suburban areas, so if cities have to be depleted to accomodate horses, the country's net energy use might rise.
I thought EMP was supposed to affect computers and other electronic devices, not astronomers.
With keyboard, mouse, DVD +/- R/W, display, 80 G HD, 512 M RAM, ethernet, audio, modem, slow VIA processor. This appears not to be well made, but price point and features are instructive.
Richter 3.4 is absolutely trivial. The sensation is about like standing on a very sturdy bridge as a large diesel truck drives by. The 2.5 quake would be unnoticeable to a person walking.
I would contend that roadblocks are illegal. However, you don't need to be doing something else illegal for a policeman to legally pull you over if you are driving in a manner that suggests that you are drunk, for instance: driving very slowly, swerving frequently, reacting slowly. It's called "reasonable suspicion" and is in line with their duty to protect the public safety.
Thanks, you've done a nice job defending the Laffer curve and putting it in today's context. I've never seen a discussion of this, but it's apparent to me that the Laffer curve is a time-dependent function. Increasing taxes will generally result in an instantaneous increase in tax revenue, but the longer a tax increase is in effect, the less effective it will be in increasing revenue (as people act to avoid the tax and as the tax hurts the overall economy). If the tax increase is in effect long enough and the level of tax is high enough, the increased rate decreases revenue, and that yields the Laffer curve of tax revenue versus tax rate. As time passes, the peak should get higher and move to the left.
"The economy" is the summed financial health of all the people. Saying "fuck the economy" is saying "fuck you" to every person, except for the few who manage to gain in a particular bad situation. Even those few lose in the long run, because a degraded economy delays technical progress, including life-preserving technology.