The three main issues the agency is tackling first are, figuring out how to improve availability, quality and affordability.
We need to bust the local monopolies. They don't like to provide service to remote areas. They don't have any incentive to provide quality. And what people usually think when you mention "monopoly" - they charge high prices.
Unfortunately when the government wants to do something like improve service or availability their "solution" is usually to throw money at the monopoly and tell them to do it - which generally doesn't happen and we're out the tax dollars. Remember the extra charges from the phone company to support fiber deployment - didn't happen, and I think we're still paying that. So lets sit down and fuck the public some more!
Downloading payload a day after the news that computers controlling the grid have been infected by spyware. "oh crap they're on to us. Better attack now before they run spybot on everthing."
Yeah, people keep complaining that the water level on Lake Michigan and Huron is dropping recently. If you look at a terrain rendering it's clear that Saginaw bay and lake StClair used to cover half of lower Michigan. Thay've been receding ever since the glacier melted, so why should we think that process should stop? People have a hard time imagining things ever being different than they are now, so these changes seem like recent events. Dredging the rivers may have contributed in this case, but that doesn't invalidate the trend.
In the paper, he describes a hexagon physics world and makes some rules about it. The rules are inconsistent. If you're standing on a spin-0 hex, you know you'll be on a spin-1 hex the next day due to one of the rules. This is in contradiction to the assertion that you can't know ahead of time what spin you'll be on. Yet they claim the rules of this game are consistent.
Are they equating randomness with free will? i.e. non-determinism? If that's the case, then it's total BS unless they've determined what makes the choices at the quantum level.
If the certificate isn't properly signed, a warning like the one you were presented with should throw a dialog box in the web browser.
IMO the browser should just block access to the site. Then they have to fix it. Why implement security features that throw up warnings the user is expected to ignore? That's a rhetorical question, please don't try to justify this behaviour.
Web browsers should not allow access to sites with messed up security. If all browsers errored out, sites like this would be unusable and would get fixed. Putting up a warning that the user learns to ignore is just crying wolf. People learn to ignore such things - so why implement them at all?
I was going to say just that. Fear of death is the most obvious reason people turn to religion. It follows that strong believers will try harder to avoid death.
They are an oil company, and I bet they need to shut down all "energy company" activities in preparation for getting purchased by ExxonMobil. XOM is sitting on nearly enough cash (in stock) to buy Shell. I've been waiting to see who they're going to buy - I wonder if this is an indication.
You're right. I use Fedora but the situation is the same. I look under "add software" and there are thousands of packages - most of which are libraries or development packages. IMHO the package database should categorize these, or at least flag the ones that are "programs" or "applications" that joe user may want to install. The package selector should have a switch (on by default) to filter on this flag/category. This would eliminate a lot of confusion in finding useful software. Yeah, the dependencies will still have to be installed, but I think people will usually default to clicking "OK" at that point.
I'd like it if there was a "prefetch" instruction to fill cache, but that ignored references to address zero. This way you could prefetch all pointers unconditionally to increase performance. Compilers could then insert these prefetches automatically.
Multitrack recording is great, but if the guitar player screws up, you play back the rest of the band and have him/her rerecord against the other good tracks. Some have pointed out that with click-tracks, you can take a rif and loop it over the entire song. That's the kind of thing that really sucks. I'm all for multitrack in the studio, but this mechanical click-track music is repulsive. If you can't sing or play an instrument, you shouldn't be making music.
Not really. You could store the driver in a FAT16 partition - that's not covered by the patent. It's still a bit of trouble having to install the driver on every windows machine you want to move files to or from.
FAT was publicly documented in the early 80's and is NOT patented. MS has a patent on using long file names on top of FAT. So if any device sticks to only supporting 8.3 file names they can use FAT without violating the patent.
just kick them out of the country "We'll send you to any country of your choice with just the clothes on your back, and you can never set foot here again on penalty of death(or whatever)"
Cute. But that would suggest other countries will not get pissed about us dropping of all our criminals there. I bet even Australia would oppose this behaviour these days:-)
Seriously - about the only thing intel graphics offers is raytracing.
And there you have it. Once you've got ray tracing, every other system will look quaint by comparison. The developers will feel the same way - once you take the plunge ray tracing is way more fun to code. I never met a graphics guy that didn't agree. The problem has always been that it's not fast enough. Back around 2001, both myself and the editor of Ray Tracing News were separately asked when RT would be mainstream (i.e. computers are fast enough). I thik we both estimated 2012. Funny the timing of this...
Meanwhile billions go hungry. Tens of thousands die every day from malnutrition. But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.
It's not a food crisis. It's a population crisis. In fact, most of the worlds problems today are population related. I wish people could see beyond all these other things and get down to the real problem.
Bell's theorem (which is a logical argument) and common sense (which we base logical arguments upon) are at odds. So the physicists side with "spooky action at a distance" because it's more phun. They've been taking the "magic" path ever since Einstein and relativity came along and said reality is unintuitive (which it is, but it follows from his assumptions which were based on observation). Witness "dark matter" and "dark energy" and "string theory".
Back to the topic at hand, no one can explain what is different about a particle whose wave function has "collapsed" and one that hasn't. If you can tell the difference, then you can use entangled pairs to communicate instantly at a distance. One person makes a measurement or not, and the other guy checks for the collapsed-ness of his particle - instant transmission. But since no one knows what the collapse means we just chalk it all up as magic - or unknowable, or parallel universes, etc... By the way, the collapsedness of the particles wave function is therefore a hidden variable that we don't have access to. This proves the existence of hidden variables in contradiction to Bell's theorem, and offers the distinct possibility that the spin is also there all along as a "hidden variable".
I thus predict that an overturn of at least one assumption in Bell's theorem will be one of the biggest headlines in physics some time this century.
Actually no. There is a LOT of stuff in cars of all brands that is actually made in the U.S. There is also a lot made in other countries. But from what I've seen - working in Detroit for a long time - is that China is not the largest contributor of parts. Go ahead and argue that some Ford cars are assembled in Mexico, while some Toyotas are built in Alabama (not sure that's the right state) but China is not involved in the same way they are with toys for example.
I know it's popular to bash Detroit, but this dumping on them with unfounded gibberish is really getting old. When there are 20+ vehicle manufacturers in the US, it's impressive that the 3 still hold as much market share as they do. Someone must be buying the vehicles.
Whether functional programming is the best paradigm to use for parallel computing is undecided. But it does have a couple of advantages over imperative programming.
First, imperative programming specifies the order of evaluation, whilst functional programming does not. In Haskell, for instance, an expression can essentially be evaluated in any order. In Java, evaluation is strictly sequential; you have to evaluate line 1 before line 2.
Second, imperative languages like Java favour mutable data, whilst functional languages like Haskell favour immutable data structures. Mutability is the bane of parallel programming, because you have to have all sorts of locks and constraints to keep your data consistent between threads. Programming languages that do not allow mutable data don't have this problem.
First, in a functional language the runtime has to make a decision that other languages specify - order of evaluaion. If order doesn't mater, a sequential language can start multiple threads too.
Second, you can have immutable data in conventional languages too. Just don't modify variables. I don't think either of these details are what draws people FP.
Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem.
How is maintaining the rate of increase in the number of transistors that can be economically placed on an integrated circuit a software problem?
If software can't utilize those added transistors to do something useful, then people will not pay for the extra transistors and the chip will not be economically viable. I thought you had a point until I thought for a few seconds.
It's one thing to write pages to disk before necessary (which I do question). It's entirely another story to invalidate the memory pages when someone isn't doing anything and then have to read them back in off the disk. You can have valid data in BOTH places. The bottom line is that Windows is just stupid in this regard. My Linux box has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap and it generally uses 1/2 the RAM and none of the swap. And yes, that means I've allocated way more swap than I need.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to bust the local monopolies. They don't like to provide service to remote areas. They don't have any incentive to provide quality. And what people usually think when you mention "monopoly" - they charge high prices.
Unfortunately when the government wants to do something like improve service or availability their "solution" is usually to throw money at the monopoly and tell them to do it - which generally doesn't happen and we're out the tax dollars. Remember the extra charges from the phone company to support fiber deployment - didn't happen, and I think we're still paying that. So lets sit down and fuck the public some more!
Downloading payload a day after the news that computers controlling the grid have been infected by spyware. "oh crap they're on to us. Better attack now before they run spybot on everthing."
Yeah, people keep complaining that the water level on Lake Michigan and Huron is dropping recently. If you look at a terrain rendering it's clear that Saginaw bay and lake StClair used to cover half of lower Michigan. Thay've been receding ever since the glacier melted, so why should we think that process should stop? People have a hard time imagining things ever being different than they are now, so these changes seem like recent events. Dredging the rivers may have contributed in this case, but that doesn't invalidate the trend.
In the paper, he describes a hexagon physics world and makes some rules about it. The rules are inconsistent. If you're standing on a spin-0 hex, you know you'll be on a spin-1 hex the next day due to one of the rules. This is in contradiction to the assertion that you can't know ahead of time what spin you'll be on. Yet they claim the rules of this game are consistent.
I think their definition of free will is rather weak, probably equivalent to non-deterministic.
Are they equating randomness with free will? i.e. non-determinism? If that's the case, then it's total BS unless they've determined what makes the choices at the quantum level.
IMO the browser should just block access to the site. Then they have to fix it. Why implement security features that throw up warnings the user is expected to ignore? That's a rhetorical question, please don't try to justify this behaviour.
Web browsers should not allow access to sites with messed up security. If all browsers errored out, sites like this would be unusable and would get fixed. Putting up a warning that the user learns to ignore is just crying wolf. People learn to ignore such things - so why implement them at all?
I was going to say just that. Fear of death is the most obvious reason people turn to religion. It follows that strong believers will try harder to avoid death.
They are an oil company, and I bet they need to shut down all "energy company" activities in preparation for getting purchased by ExxonMobil. XOM is sitting on nearly enough cash (in stock) to buy Shell. I've been waiting to see who they're going to buy - I wonder if this is an indication.
You're right. I use Fedora but the situation is the same. I look under "add software" and there are thousands of packages - most of which are libraries or development packages. IMHO the package database should categorize these, or at least flag the ones that are "programs" or "applications" that joe user may want to install. The package selector should have a switch (on by default) to filter on this flag/category. This would eliminate a lot of confusion in finding useful software. Yeah, the dependencies will still have to be installed, but I think people will usually default to clicking "OK" at that point.
I'd like it if there was a "prefetch" instruction to fill cache, but that ignored references to address zero. This way you could prefetch all pointers unconditionally to increase performance. Compilers could then insert these prefetches automatically.
Multitrack recording is great, but if the guitar player screws up, you play back the rest of the band and have him/her rerecord against the other good tracks. Some have pointed out that with click-tracks, you can take a rif and loop it over the entire song. That's the kind of thing that really sucks. I'm all for multitrack in the studio, but this mechanical click-track music is repulsive. If you can't sing or play an instrument, you shouldn't be making music.
Not really. You could store the driver in a FAT16 partition - that's not covered by the patent. It's still a bit of trouble having to install the driver on every windows machine you want to move files to or from.
FAT was publicly documented in the early 80's and is NOT patented. MS has a patent on using long file names on top of FAT. So if any device sticks to only supporting 8.3 file names they can use FAT without violating the patent.
So is anyone going after the people at the corporation? Clearly they bribed a judge right?
Cute. But that would suggest other countries will not get pissed about us dropping of all our criminals there. I bet even Australia would oppose this behaviour these days :-)
Is there a "reason" for that? I mean a real technical reason of course. What would be the damage if the DE obeyed the +x bit for these?
And there you have it. Once you've got ray tracing, every other system will look quaint by comparison. The developers will feel the same way - once you take the plunge ray tracing is way more fun to code. I never met a graphics guy that didn't agree. The problem has always been that it's not fast enough. Back around 2001, both myself and the editor of Ray Tracing News were separately asked when RT would be mainstream (i.e. computers are fast enough). I thik we both estimated 2012. Funny the timing of this...
It's not a food crisis. It's a population crisis. In fact, most of the worlds problems today are population related. I wish people could see beyond all these other things and get down to the real problem.
Bell's theorem (which is a logical argument) and common sense (which we base logical arguments upon) are at odds. So the physicists side with "spooky action at a distance" because it's more phun. They've been taking the "magic" path ever since Einstein and relativity came along and said reality is unintuitive (which it is, but it follows from his assumptions which were based on observation). Witness "dark matter" and "dark energy" and "string theory".
Back to the topic at hand, no one can explain what is different about a particle whose wave function has "collapsed" and one that hasn't. If you can tell the difference, then you can use entangled pairs to communicate instantly at a distance. One person makes a measurement or not, and the other guy checks for the collapsed-ness of his particle - instant transmission. But since no one knows what the collapse means we just chalk it all up as magic - or unknowable, or parallel universes, etc... By the way, the collapsedness of the particles wave function is therefore a hidden variable that we don't have access to. This proves the existence of hidden variables in contradiction to Bell's theorem, and offers the distinct possibility that the spin is also there all along as a "hidden variable".
I thus predict that an overturn of at least one assumption in Bell's theorem will be one of the biggest headlines in physics some time this century.
Actually no. There is a LOT of stuff in cars of all brands that is actually made in the U.S. There is also a lot made in other countries. But from what I've seen - working in Detroit for a long time - is that China is not the largest contributor of parts. Go ahead and argue that some Ford cars are assembled in Mexico, while some Toyotas are built in Alabama (not sure that's the right state) but China is not involved in the same way they are with toys for example. I know it's popular to bash Detroit, but this dumping on them with unfounded gibberish is really getting old. When there are 20+ vehicle manufacturers in the US, it's impressive that the 3 still hold as much market share as they do. Someone must be buying the vehicles.
Whether functional programming is the best paradigm to use for parallel computing is undecided. But it does have a couple of advantages over imperative programming.
First, imperative programming specifies the order of evaluation, whilst functional programming does not. In Haskell, for instance, an expression can essentially be evaluated in any order. In Java, evaluation is strictly sequential; you have to evaluate line 1 before line 2.
Second, imperative languages like Java favour mutable data, whilst functional languages like Haskell favour immutable data structures. Mutability is the bane of parallel programming, because you have to have all sorts of locks and constraints to keep your data consistent between threads. Programming languages that do not allow mutable data don't have this problem.
First, in a functional language the runtime has to make a decision that other languages specify - order of evaluaion. If order doesn't mater, a sequential language can start multiple threads too. Second, you can have immutable data in conventional languages too. Just don't modify variables. I don't think either of these details are what draws people FP.
How is maintaining the rate of increase in the number of transistors that can be economically placed on an integrated circuit a software problem?
If software can't utilize those added transistors to do something useful, then people will not pay for the extra transistors and the chip will not be economically viable. I thought you had a point until I thought for a few seconds.
It's one thing to write pages to disk before necessary (which I do question). It's entirely another story to invalidate the memory pages when someone isn't doing anything and then have to read them back in off the disk. You can have valid data in BOTH places. The bottom line is that Windows is just stupid in this regard. My Linux box has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of swap and it generally uses 1/2 the RAM and none of the swap. And yes, that means I've allocated way more swap than I need.