I notice you're largely concentrating your argument around sand rather than, say, oil.
So what about MPG improvements, pluggable electric cars, telecommuting, etc?
And needless to say, breeder reactors are not perpetual motion machines.
Sure, on the same scale that solar energy isn't renewable because we can't refuel the Sun.
The point is that even with scarce resources, life is not a zero-sum game. A large part of technological progress is in learning how to do more with less.
By all means devote yourself to finding the secret how to turn sand into any other natural resources. Even if you were to succeed, you'd still soon find out the difference between "abundant" and "infinite".
Expansion does not necessarily require using more resources. It can also be obtained by new/better/more efficient use of the same resources. For example, processing your SiO2 into vacuum tubes or high-value i7's instead of low-value windows, or not wasting the vast majority of our fissile material because the terrists might break into a breeder reactor or reprocessing facility.
I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. [...] The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. [...] Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
What does "stepping: 9" in/proc/cpuinfo on my home computer mean? What is a f00f, and what happened with the TLB on the early Phenom processors?
For the computers - a long event could be equivelant to dozens of lightning strikes over a short period of time, as power surges unpredictably - not just once, but many many times. Can modern equipment handle that (honest question - I have no idea)? Unless everyone takes the time to unplug from the grid during the event (which I doubt most businesses and homes would do), it'll all be vulnerable.
Don't know, but I'd expect that a design goal would be for power protection to fail as an open circuit if overloaded so you end up with eg an inch of vaporized wire in the path to your equipment and a half or quarter inch air gap from input to ground. Not that I know if they actually do this...
Are the milsats just as vulnerable to that type of flux damage? Aren't they supposed to be better shielded against higher levels of EM damage and incoming high energy particles (like say, from a nuke going off nearby)?
They most likely are shielded against EM, but I don't think you can shield against particle radiation (I mean, you can on the ground, but lead plates are probably impractical in space). I'd expect that they would use chips with a larger process size to make them more robust, the question is just how that compares to the number of particles, and how the extra expense of custom chips compares to the cost of keeping a few extra replacements ready on the ground.
It actually caused telegraph wires to short out across Europe and the Americas - some even caught on fire. If that happened now, it would cause global power outages, fried computer equipment (including the ones that control your fancy electronic car), and everything except for milsats in orbit could be knocked out.
Power outages, yes.
Fried computers, only if they're plugged in. And even that's questionable, since I'm pretty sure there are surge protectors now that are good enough to protect things from lightning strikes on the power lines.
Things in orbit, might actually include military stuff (unless they use vacuum tubes or something). The problem here isn't the magnetic fields, it's the charged particles. A transistor can only take so many hits from charged particles before it breaks (depends on how big it is),so the questions are "how old are their chips" and "how many particles/cm^2/s might there be".
Third, cell phones, radios and other wireless devices could go down. Your home network will probably be fine. But forget using your 3G phone for anything. Your cordless phone will probably be OK to call emergency services but they won't be able to get them on the radio to tell them where to go.
No, landline phones have really long wires, so they'd have the same problems as the power grid. Wireless would probably actually be OK until the batteries ran down, I think modern schemes are fairly noise resistant.
Once the AM3 systems hit the market Intel will be in a considerable amount of trouble staying competitive.... especially with the current voltage problems (DDR3 performance memory can burn up i7 chips).
I'm fairly sure there's no problem if your DDR3 memory actually follows the DDR3 standard.
We're getting to a point where items like TVs and game systems should have power consumption ratings on them in the store, like with many kitchen appliances.
Which reminds me, why isn't power usage listed for video cards like it is for CPUs?
A cheap way to prove evidence is to write down your ideas in letters, get them notarized, and mail a few copies to yourself and your lawyer (if you have one). Five copies apiece is good. Now you have a notarized (dated) document that was verified by a federal agency (the Post Office, which also dates things). Open as necessary.
If you really want to be hardcore about it, send 'em via registered mail. This is one of those things where the bigger the paper trail is, the better it is for you.
What about just mailing yourself an empty, unsealed envelope and then later when you find a good idea somewhere, you put in in the dated-years-ago envelope?
It's worth adding that in the real world you don't keep your ideas. When you accept a job you are required to sign a piece of paper that assigns ALL your rights to your employer. The corporation automatically gets your ideas and you keep nothing.
Which "real world" is this, that all employers request that, all legal jurisdictions permit it, and no employers will accept having it struck out?
"These measurements use the traditional surveyor's method of triangulation and do not depend on any assumptions based on other properties, such as brightness," Menten said. The direct measurements "are revising our understanding of the structure and motions of our Galaxy."
...this is where we find out that space is convex in some directions and concave in others and not "flat" anywhere, right?
Mark Everett Hall really looks at things from a biased IT perspective. Yes, in his analysis, this will hurt US as IT professionals,
His "analysis" assumes the amount of work to be done is constant, which doesn't seem reasonable. It also assumes that SaaS applications are much better substitutes for custom apps than COTS software is, which also doesn't seem reasonable.
VaR is a pretty decent risk measure on a micro scale. The real problem with it is that VaR constraints tend to make banks less diversified, introducing systemic risk. When things go sour, banks are forced to sell off similar assets, and because all of the banks tend to hold assets with similar risk, markets fluctuate all the more.
Risk is really a bunch of intertwingled probability functions, which are probably infeasible to calculate. This seems remarkably similar to quantum mechanics and entanglement, so perhaps economic modelling would be a good use for quantum computers? Ignoring the intertwingling is probably about as silly as trying to use classical methods to calculate quantum interference, too...
Sorry, but it's true. As such it is no surprise that few people use things he'd consider free. He has a very rigid definition of it, one that many people might disagree with.
The really funny part is that "The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)" is bounded by edict (it has apparently been judged that people do not benefit from having a Tivo) rather than something sane like assuming that anyone who wants a copy probably does benefit from having it.
OSS always represents a false economy with the "but it's free" angle. it's NOT free,
So consider the other angles, such as supporting The Unix Way and helping you stay free of BSA entanglements.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform?
It's perfectly possible for that to be a good platform, but just less good than something like Linux + Postgres (not that I know anything about running databases, I just use them).
99 percent of any and all past and present attacks against airline travel perpetrated - through passengers or baggage! - were committed by people who a) claimed they were doing it for Islam and b) who have declared as being of Muslim faith.
All "airline terrorists" - against which airport security can provide any protection - are a proper subset of "People is Muslim faith".
It's going to be hard to fight this sort of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" type of thing. I mean, what are you? A pedophile? After all, only sex offenders that haven't yet been busted would object, right? So which is it? Little boys or little girls?
So go up a level.
That's a fairly well known hot-button, used to promote an emotional knee-jerk over logical thought. What are the politicians trying to hide with this tactic? If this would really only do what they say it will do, why do they need to suppress logic thought about it that way?
This half-assed stuff just weakens civil liberties for law abiding citizens.
Of course that can't possibly be the reason for it...
</sarcasm></tinhat>
Really it's probably just grandstanding to get extra votes or contributions from particular groups, but that would certainly reflect poorly on the intelligence of the electorate.
small things that are considered to be morally bad but did not harm anyone such as child pornography
What. The. Fuck?
Do you think it's healthy for those children to have their underdeveloped orifices ripped apart?
I'm pretty sure "child pornography" these days doesn't necessarily require any involvement of actual children, isn't it pretty much anything presented as an underage person (so including animation and computer-generated graphics) in something perceived to be a sexual situation?
I realize the above is a troll but what is he referring to with the licensing fee? I've seen this in a few stories and have always wondered what it was.
A while back, SCO tried to claim that they owned Linux, and that anyone using it had to buy licenses at $699 each (I think this may have been related to their lawsuit against IBM, before Novell stepped in). A couple of companies actually paid up, and were duly ridiculed here.
Slashdot Mirror
The cheapest netbook on the market is more powerfull than the computer I had only a few years ago.
But it more than makes up for that by having such a small screen.
I notice you're largely concentrating your argument around sand rather than, say, oil.
So what about MPG improvements, pluggable electric cars, telecommuting, etc?
And needless to say, breeder reactors are not perpetual motion machines.
Sure, on the same scale that solar energy isn't renewable because we can't refuel the Sun.
The point is that even with scarce resources, life is not a zero-sum game. A large part of technological progress is in learning how to do more with less.
By all means devote yourself to finding the secret how to turn sand into any other natural resources. Even if you were to succeed, you'd still soon find out the difference between "abundant" and "infinite".
Expansion does not necessarily require using more resources. It can also be obtained by new/better/more efficient use of the same resources. For example, processing your SiO2 into vacuum tubes or high-value i7's instead of low-value windows, or not wasting the vast majority of our fissile material because the terrists might break into a breeder reactor or reprocessing facility.
I happen to have worked in an industry that requires perfect coding. [...] The industry I'm referring to is the chip industry. [...] Hardware companies can't afford a single mistake because once the chip goes to fab, that's it. No patches like software, no version 1.0.1.
What does "stepping: 9" in /proc/cpuinfo on my home computer mean? What is a f00f, and what happened with the TLB on the early Phenom processors?
The waterfall method is still the best development model. [...] Unfortunately waterfall doesn't fit into the real world
WTF? Not working in the real world makes it a crap model.
When you boil all the trendy stuff out of Agile, you're basically left with a generic iterated waterfall, which is[...]
...not a waterfall.
For the computers - a long event could be equivelant to dozens of lightning strikes over a short period of time, as power surges unpredictably - not just once, but many many times. Can modern equipment handle that (honest question - I have no idea)? Unless everyone takes the time to unplug from the grid during the event (which I doubt most businesses and homes would do), it'll all be vulnerable.
Don't know, but I'd expect that a design goal would be for power protection to fail as an open circuit if overloaded so you end up with eg an inch of vaporized wire in the path to your equipment and a half or quarter inch air gap from input to ground. Not that I know if they actually do this...
Are the milsats just as vulnerable to that type of flux damage? Aren't they supposed to be better shielded against higher levels of EM damage and incoming high energy particles (like say, from a nuke going off nearby)?
They most likely are shielded against EM, but I don't think you can shield against particle radiation (I mean, you can on the ground, but lead plates are probably impractical in space). I'd expect that they would use chips with a larger process size to make them more robust, the question is just how that compares to the number of particles, and how the extra expense of custom chips compares to the cost of keeping a few extra replacements ready on the ground.
It actually caused telegraph wires to short out across Europe and the Americas - some even caught on fire. If that happened now, it would cause global power outages, fried computer equipment (including the ones that control your fancy electronic car), and everything except for milsats in orbit could be knocked out.
Power outages, yes.
Fried computers, only if they're plugged in. And even that's questionable, since I'm pretty sure there are surge protectors now that are good enough to protect things from lightning strikes on the power lines.
Things in orbit, might actually include military stuff (unless they use vacuum tubes or something). The problem here isn't the magnetic fields, it's the charged particles. A transistor can only take so many hits from charged particles before it breaks (depends on how big it is),so the questions are "how old are their chips" and "how many particles/cm^2/s might there be".
Third, cell phones, radios and other wireless devices could go down. Your home network will probably be fine. But forget using your 3G phone for anything. Your cordless phone will probably be OK to call emergency services but they won't be able to get them on the radio to tell them where to go.
No, landline phones have really long wires, so they'd have the same problems as the power grid. Wireless would probably actually be OK until the batteries ran down, I think modern schemes are fairly noise resistant.
No, I didn't. What the infinite-growth-ists forget is that we live on a planet with finite resources.
And that really is relevant, because for example the only thing you can do with silicon dioxide is make window glass.
In capitalism, for every winner, there are necessarily losers.
You forget the possibility to expand the industry, or even create a new industry.
Once the AM3 systems hit the market Intel will be in a considerable amount of trouble staying competitive.... especially with the current voltage problems (DDR3 performance memory can burn up i7 chips).
I'm fairly sure there's no problem if your DDR3 memory actually follows the DDR3 standard.
Get over the fact that the universe doesn't care about you and help science!
But the universe doesn't care about science either.
We're getting to a point where items like TVs and game systems should have power consumption ratings on them in the store, like with many kitchen appliances.
Which reminds me, why isn't power usage listed for video cards like it is for CPUs?
A cheap way to prove evidence is to write down your ideas in letters, get them notarized, and mail a few copies to yourself and your lawyer (if you have one). Five copies apiece is good. Now you have a notarized (dated) document that was verified by a federal agency (the Post Office, which also dates things). Open as necessary.
If you really want to be hardcore about it, send 'em via registered mail. This is one of those things where the bigger the paper trail is, the better it is for you.
What about just mailing yourself an empty, unsealed envelope and then later when you find a good idea somewhere, you put in in the dated-years-ago envelope?
It's worth adding that in the real world you don't keep your ideas. When you accept a job you are required to sign a piece of paper that assigns ALL your rights to your employer. The corporation automatically gets your ideas and you keep nothing.
Which "real world" is this, that all employers request that, all legal jurisdictions permit it, and no employers will accept having it struck out?
"These measurements use the traditional surveyor's method of triangulation and do not depend on any assumptions based on other properties, such as brightness," Menten said. The direct measurements "are revising our understanding of the structure and motions of our Galaxy."
...this is where we find out that space is convex in some directions and concave in others and not "flat" anywhere, right?
Mark Everett Hall really looks at things from a biased IT perspective. Yes, in his analysis, this will hurt US as IT professionals,
His "analysis" assumes the amount of work to be done is constant, which doesn't seem reasonable. It also assumes that SaaS applications are much better substitutes for custom apps than COTS software is, which also doesn't seem reasonable.
VaR is a pretty decent risk measure on a micro scale. The real problem with it is that VaR constraints tend to make banks less diversified, introducing systemic risk. When things go sour, banks are forced to sell off similar assets, and because all of the banks tend to hold assets with similar risk, markets fluctuate all the more.
Risk is really a bunch of intertwingled probability functions, which are probably infeasible to calculate. This seems remarkably similar to quantum mechanics and entanglement, so perhaps economic modelling would be a good use for quantum computers? Ignoring the intertwingling is probably about as silly as trying to use classical methods to calculate quantum interference, too...
Sorry, but it's true. As such it is no surprise that few people use things he'd consider free. He has a very rigid definition of it, one that many people might disagree with.
The really funny part is that "The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)" is bounded by edict (it has apparently been judged that people do not benefit from having a Tivo) rather than something sane like assuming that anyone who wants a copy probably does benefit from having it.
OSS always represents a false economy with the "but it's free" angle. it's NOT free,
So consider the other angles, such as supporting The Unix Way and helping you stay free of BSA entanglements.
does anyone seriously believe windows 2003 with sql server 2005 is a bad platform?
It's perfectly possible for that to be a good platform, but just less good than something like Linux + Postgres (not that I know anything about running databases, I just use them).
99 percent of any and all past and present attacks against airline travel perpetrated - through passengers or baggage! - were committed by people who a) claimed they were doing it for Islam and b) who have declared as being of Muslim faith.
All "airline terrorists" - against which airport security can provide any protection - are a proper subset of "People is Muslim faith".
Take this thread to Cuba!
It's going to be hard to fight this sort of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" type of thing. I mean, what are you? A pedophile? After all, only sex offenders that haven't yet been busted would object, right? So which is it? Little boys or little girls?
So go up a level.
That's a fairly well known hot-button, used to promote an emotional knee-jerk over logical thought. What are the politicians trying to hide with this tactic? If this would really only do what they say it will do, why do they need to suppress logic thought about it that way?
This half-assed stuff just weakens civil liberties for law abiding citizens.
Of course that can't possibly be the reason for it...
</sarcasm></tinhat>
Really it's probably just grandstanding to get extra votes or contributions from particular groups, but that would certainly reflect poorly on the intelligence of the electorate.
small things that are considered to be morally bad but did not harm anyone such as child pornography
What. The. Fuck?
Do you think it's healthy for those children to have their underdeveloped orifices ripped apart?
I'm pretty sure "child pornography" these days doesn't necessarily require any involvement of actual children, isn't it pretty much anything presented as an underage person (so including animation and computer-generated graphics) in something perceived to be a sexual situation?
I realize the above is a troll but what is he referring to with the licensing fee? I've seen this in a few stories and have always wondered what it was.
A while back, SCO tried to claim that they owned Linux, and that anyone using it had to buy licenses at $699 each (I think this may have been related to their lawsuit against IBM, before Novell stepped in). A couple of companies actually paid up, and were duly ridiculed here.