And in fact, molecular assemblers already exist in nature.
That is true, but those assemblers are not general-purpose: They are only capable of constructing certain kinds od molecules, and cannot be used to create completely arbitrary molecules.
The difficulty is that the "tool" is part of the chemical environment: You can't grab an atom without forming bond(s) to that atom, and doing that alters the way that atom interacts with other atoms. The detailed structure of the tool must be compatible with the molecule you wish to build, and that creates a chicken-and-egg problem: How to you build the tool?
There is a fundamental obstacle to creating moleular assemblers: What do you make them out of?
Imagine that you were given the task of designing a machine to lay bricks. This probably would not be all that difficult, considering all of the things we already do with robots. However, the problem becomes much more difficult if I add the stipulation that the machine be constructed entirely from bricks and mortar.
That won't fix anything. The reason we're in such bad shape today is all the couch potatoes that get rousted from their television-induced stupor just long enough to vote the way the television tells them to. Forcing more of them to go do the same thing will just increase the influence the paid ads have over the election outcome.
My idea is to conceal the polling places, so that only people who are willing to go to some effort can find them.
Preposterous! The closed source model of software development has contributed billions, and perhaps trillions, of dollars to the GDP of our country.
Yes, and with each passing day, more of that is profit and less goes to pay programmers.
Open Source software is not about "commoditizing" operating systems, it is about destroying high paying jobs and moving them overseas.
The reason high-paying jobs are going overseas is that capitalist companies are doing what their shareholders demand: Producing the highest possible return on investment. 80% of the money Microsoft takes in for Windows is profit. Despite this huge profit margin, Microsoft is sending jobs overseas to reduce their costs and increase the profits even more. That's what capitalists do, and they don't give a rat's ass whether or not we have a jobs.
Please, everyone, THINK before you go throwing your support behind a concept which is, in its most basic form, designed to undermine our fundamental rights and values.
I have thought about it, and I think that the coming era of commoditized operating system software will be at least as big a boon programmers as the coming of commodity hardware was 15-20 years ago.
I'm thinking about how Apple decided to go with a "closed" hardware platform and MS decided to go with the "open" one. Apple released the first MacIntosh in 1984, and it wasn't until 1990 that MS had a workable Windows. Despite Apple's huge head start, MS won the race and become the dominant desktop OS. Why?
Because MS customers could buy cheap commodity PC's that anyone could build, but Apple customers had to pay top dollar for a special computer only Apple could build.
Face it: Most customers don't want a computer, they want what a computer can do. MS won the race by realizing this, but they want to deny the next step in the logic: People don't want to buy an OS any more than they wanted to buy the computer. Applications are what customers want, and having to pay extra for a proprietary OS may be holding back the application market just as much as having to buy a proprietary computer held back Apple.
We've been creating operating systems for almost a half-century now. A lot of the basics were ironed out a long time ago. It's stupid for people to go on paying high prices for something that's been around for so long.
If you're a programmer, you should welcome Linux the same way a home builder would welcome the availability of inexpensive building materials and tools.
Problem is, somebody will point out "Ah, but what if people can't figure out how to use it or they mark it incorrectly?"
So how is an electronic voting machine going to help with that problem? Is fuckin' Clippy gonna pop up and explain the relative merits of each candidate? If so, who gets to decide what clippy will say?
I agree that a new method would be needed, but the new method doesn't have to be more efficient at the individual circuit level. It just has to be more efficient at the top level. IE, it might be prefectly OK if a "bio-cpu" was only one thousandth as fast as a typical silicon microprocessor if you could build a billion-cpu system just by throwing a "supercompter seed" into a nutrient broth.
I think the area where real advancement is needed is in reducing our dependacy on making components that are all exactly alike. I have a big oak tree in my yard that makes a lot of leaves, no two of which are identical. Despite the low-level variation between individual leaves, the tree has been "running" quite nicely for over 100 years. I think we need to invent computer architectures having the same property is we want to use bio-assembly to build computers.
I'm impressed by the ability to make components, but I think that creating structures of many components may prove to be the more difficult problem.
As an example, it might not be difficult to design a 1-bit memory cell that can be assembled this way, but how do you make an array of them that is exactly some number of cells on a side, and then attach the interface circuitry to the edges? This would seem to require giving the little buggers the ability to count (or measure), and then change their beheviour when a desired state had been attained.
The last time I checked, we know a fair amount about how living cells build proteins, but the problem of how the cells know when to build them and how to stick them together has barely been scratched.
...The problem is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint who is sending all this garbage....
I'm sure the legislators know damn well they haven't a chance of collecting tax from spammers. This isn't about stopping spam, it's about establishing yet another tax to give the politicians more money to piss away. The argument about stopping spam is merely an excuse.
I am an advocate of a law that says the loser in a tort must pay the winner's court costs.
It'll never happen. Trial lawyers know exactly what such a change would do to their business, and they also are a very powerful lobbying force.
Several years ago, one of my state assemblymen admitted to me that our state's (New Jersey) automobile insurance system was completely screwed up, but that nobody could fix it because the trial lawyers' lobby had too much power.
The 419 fraud involves a promise to transfer $millions into the victim's bank account, for some trumped up and obviously rather dubious reason. At the last minute you ask the victim to pay a "transfer fee" of perhaps a few $1000. You then vanish with the "transfer fee", never to be heard of again.
The more skillful 419 scammers don't stop when they get the $1000. Once they have a sucker on the hook, they milk them for all they can get by inventing a series of ever-increasing "fees", "bribes", etc that must be paid to complete the deal. A woman who worked in a law office got scammed into shelling out about $2 million of her employer's money. The Secret Service estimates the total take (so far) for these scams at about a half billion dollars.
The problem is that if Microsoft's power and money was the key element in getting the USPTO to move, the same trick obviously won't work when one of MS's own bogus patents becomes a problem.
Sure, it's good to get rid of a bad patent, but what we really need is a way to get the ball rolling that does not depend on Microsoft's support.
I've stopped buying Sony blank CDR's after getting a few bad batches of them. Some of them even had defects that looked like waterspots which were visible in bright light.
After much shopping, I finally settled on TDK, which have given me zero problems out of several hundred burns. It's too bad the inferior products have gotten all the shelf space at many retail outlets; I have to go to CompUSA to get the TDK's.
If I were a Bastard Web Designer, I would respond to this trend by building my sites in Flash, with HTML used only as a bare-bones wrapper for delivering the Flash files.
Go right on ahead. The chances of your website being the only one with what I'm looking for are practically zero. I'll just move on the the next one.
If you are going to block anybody, block the ISPs that host the web sites and email reply addresses for the spammers
The spammers have already thought of that. One thing they do to counter it is to have to URL point to a trojaned PC, and to change the DNS every few minutes to rotate through a large pool of such owned machines.
I have Earthlink, and they allow me to create and destroy email addresses via their support website. I made a half-dozen new addresses that are all 15-character random strings, and none of those new addys gets any spam at all. If one of them ever starts getting spam, I'll delete it and create a new one to take it's place.
My original email address (dating back to 1995) gets spammed mercilessly, but I don't use it anymore.
... So the actual penalty comes out to about $10 per actual violation, reported or not.
It sound depressing, but consider the fact that only a small fraction of telemarketing calls are successful. Even if only 1 in 1,000 violations leads to a fine, that one $10,000 fine could still eat up the profits made by a few dozen "payoff" calls amoung the 1,000. I'd also think the success rate would be lower than usual on calls to numbers on the DNC list, making the likelihood of profit even lower.
In other words, despite a low proscution rate, the fine might still be enough to make telemarketers avoid numbers on the DNC list becuase it's not profitable to call them. I'll settle for that.
When was the last time slashdot posted a pro-American article? Seems like all they do is bash it at every opportunity, along with Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, etc.
OK, so name a few things that Americans have been doing that they should be proud of.
Slashdot Mirror
And in fact, molecular assemblers already exist in nature.
That is true, but those assemblers are not general-purpose: They are only capable of constructing certain kinds od molecules, and cannot be used to create completely arbitrary molecules.
The difficulty is that the "tool" is part of the chemical environment: You can't grab an atom without forming bond(s) to that atom, and doing that alters the way that atom interacts with other atoms. The detailed structure of the tool must be compatible with the molecule you wish to build, and that creates a chicken-and-egg problem: How to you build the tool?
There is a fundamental obstacle to creating moleular assemblers: What do you make them out of?
Imagine that you were given the task of designing a machine to lay bricks. This probably would not be all that difficult, considering all of the things we already do with robots.
However, the problem becomes much more difficult if I add the stipulation that the machine be constructed entirely from bricks and mortar.
This thing doesn't have a CD or DVD drive. The last time I checked, Blockbuster wasn't renting movies on memory cards.
Where exactly is the user supposed to get "media" they can play on this device?
Hell, that's the letter Darl sent to Boies.
That won't fix anything. The reason we're in such bad shape today is all the couch potatoes that get rousted from their television-induced stupor just long enough to vote the way the television tells them to. Forcing more of them to go do the same thing will just increase the influence the paid ads have over the election outcome.
My idea is to conceal the polling places, so that only people who are willing to go to some effort can find them.
Preposterous! The closed source model of software development has contributed billions, and perhaps trillions, of dollars to the GDP of our country.
Yes, and with each passing day, more of that is profit and less goes to pay programmers.
Open Source software is not about "commoditizing" operating systems, it is about destroying high paying jobs and moving them overseas.
The reason high-paying jobs are going overseas is that capitalist companies are doing what their shareholders demand: Producing the highest possible return on investment. 80% of the money Microsoft takes in for Windows is profit. Despite this huge profit margin, Microsoft is sending jobs overseas to reduce their costs and increase the profits even more. That's what capitalists do, and they don't give a rat's ass whether or not we have a jobs.
Please, everyone, THINK before you go throwing your support behind a concept which is, in its most basic form, designed to undermine our fundamental rights and values.
I have thought about it, and I think that the coming era of commoditized operating system software will be at least as big a boon programmers as the coming of commodity hardware was 15-20 years ago.
I'm thinking about how Apple decided to go with a "closed" hardware platform and MS decided to go with the "open" one. Apple released the first MacIntosh in 1984, and it wasn't until 1990 that MS had a workable Windows. Despite Apple's huge head start, MS won the race and become the dominant desktop OS. Why? Because MS customers could buy cheap commodity PC's that anyone could build, but Apple customers had to pay top dollar for a special computer only Apple could build.
Face it: Most customers don't want a computer, they want what a computer can do. MS won the race by realizing this, but they want to deny the next step in the logic: People don't want to buy an OS any more than they wanted to buy the computer. Applications are what customers want, and having to pay extra for a proprietary OS may be holding back the application market just as much as having to buy a proprietary computer held back Apple.
We've been creating operating systems for almost a half-century now. A lot of the basics were ironed out a long time ago. It's stupid for people to go on paying high prices for something that's been around for so long.
If you're a programmer, you should welcome Linux the same way a home builder would welcome the availability of inexpensive building materials and tools.
Problem is, somebody will point out "Ah, but what if people can't figure out how to use it or they mark it incorrectly?"
So how is an electronic voting machine going to help with that problem?
Is fuckin' Clippy gonna pop up and explain the relative merits of each candidate?
If so, who gets to decide what clippy will say?
I agree that a new method would be needed, but the new method doesn't have to be more efficient at the individual circuit level. It just has to be more efficient at the top level. IE, it might be prefectly OK if a "bio-cpu" was only one thousandth as fast as a typical silicon microprocessor if you could build a billion-cpu system just by throwing a "supercompter seed" into a nutrient broth.
I think the area where real advancement is needed is in reducing our dependacy on making components that are all exactly alike. I have a big oak tree in my yard that makes a lot of leaves, no two of which are identical. Despite the low-level variation between individual leaves, the tree has been "running" quite nicely for over 100 years. I think we need to invent computer architectures having the same property is we want to use bio-assembly to build computers.
I'm impressed by the ability to make components, but I think that creating structures of many components may prove to be the more difficult problem.
As an example, it might not be difficult to design a 1-bit memory cell that can be assembled this way, but how do you make an array of them that is exactly some number of cells on a side, and then attach the interface circuitry to the edges? This would seem to require giving the little buggers the ability to count (or measure), and then change their beheviour when a desired state had been attained.
The last time I checked, we know a fair amount about how living cells build proteins, but the problem of how the cells know when to build them and how to stick them together has barely been scratched.
...The problem is it's nearly impossible to pinpoint who is sending all this garbage. ...
I'm sure the legislators know damn well they haven't a chance of collecting tax from spammers. This isn't about stopping spam, it's about establishing yet another tax to give the politicians more money to piss away. The argument about stopping spam is merely an excuse.
I am an advocate of a law that says the loser in a tort must pay the winner's court costs.
It'll never happen. Trial lawyers know exactly what such a change would do to their business, and they also are a very powerful lobbying force.
Several years ago, one of my state assemblymen admitted to me that our state's (New Jersey) automobile insurance system was completely screwed up, but that nobody could fix it because the trial lawyers' lobby had too much power.
Damn, I hit "Submit" instead of "Preview", but I wasn't done yet.
The persistent success of this scam tells me there's something very important missing from the curriculum being taught in our schools.
The 419 fraud involves a promise to transfer $millions into the victim's bank account, for some trumped up and obviously rather dubious reason. At the last minute you ask the victim to pay a "transfer fee" of perhaps a few $1000. You then vanish with the "transfer fee", never to be heard of again.
The more skillful 419 scammers don't stop when they get the $1000. Once they have a sucker on the hook, they milk them for all they can get by inventing a series of ever-increasing "fees", "bribes", etc that must be paid to complete the deal. A woman who worked in a law office got scammed into shelling out about $2 million of her employer's money. The Secret Service estimates the total take (so far) for these scams at about a half billion dollars.
...And no, you can't have radioactive hydrogen :)
Yes, you can. It's called Tritium, and it's a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons.
Strange I thought Redhat had just abandoned the desktop.
No, I think they abandoned the individual home user to concentrate on selling to business. Businesses use lots of desktop computers.
The problem is that if Microsoft's power and money was the key element in getting the USPTO to move, the same trick obviously won't work when one of MS's own bogus patents becomes a problem.
Sure, it's good to get rid of a bad patent, but what we really need is a way to get the ball rolling that does not depend on Microsoft's support.
"This Website is powered by PostNuke"
I suppose it's appropriate if you're gonna be slashdotted.
I've stopped buying Sony blank CDR's after getting a few bad batches of them. Some of them even had defects that looked like waterspots which were visible in bright light.
After much shopping, I finally settled on TDK, which have given me zero problems out of several hundred burns. It's too bad the inferior products have gotten all the shelf space at many retail outlets; I have to go to CompUSA to get the TDK's.
If I were a Bastard Web Designer, I would respond to this trend by building my sites in Flash, with HTML used only as a bare-bones wrapper for delivering the Flash files.
Go right on ahead. The chances of your website being the only one with what I'm looking for are practically zero. I'll just move on the the next one.
If you are going to block anybody, block the ISPs that host the web sites and email reply addresses for the spammers
The spammers have already thought of that. One thing they do to counter it is to have to URL point to a trojaned PC, and to change the DNS every few minutes to rotate through a large pool of such owned machines.
I have Earthlink, and they allow me to create and destroy email addresses via their support website. I made a half-dozen new addresses that are all 15-character random strings, and none of those new addys gets any spam at all. If one of them ever starts getting spam, I'll delete it and create a new one to take it's place.
My original email address (dating back to 1995) gets spammed mercilessly, but I don't use it anymore.
How have you handled this?
For a long time, I'd call the FCC, the FTC, and my congresscritters every month or so to complain about such calls.
I suspect I wasn't alone, because now we have the DNC list.
... So the actual penalty comes out to about $10 per actual violation, reported or not.
It sound depressing, but consider the fact that only a small fraction of telemarketing calls are successful. Even if only 1 in 1,000 violations leads to a fine, that one $10,000 fine could still eat up the profits made by a few dozen "payoff" calls amoung the 1,000. I'd also think the success rate would be lower than usual on calls to numbers on the DNC list, making the likelihood of profit even lower.
In other words, despite a low proscution rate, the fine might still be enough to make telemarketers avoid numbers on the DNC list becuase it's not profitable to call them. I'll settle for that.
When was the last time slashdot posted a pro-American article? Seems like all they do is bash it at every opportunity, along with Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, etc.
OK, so name a few things that Americans have been doing that they should be proud of.