You still have to sit behind the wheel ready to take over the moment you spot danger. No reading the paper.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people will be reading the paper because their car drives itself. What's the point of a car that drives itself when you have to be continually watching for danger?
Air France 447 is a glaring example of what happens when you tell the driver 'don't worry, the computer is driving' and then the computer can't decide what to do and suddenly drops the driver into an extremely dangerous situation where they're expected to take over.
Because there are no virus scanners, rootkit detectors, etc. for Linux, right? Oh wait there are...
Linux virus-scanners are primarily used to detect Windows viruses on servers so the Windows machines accessing those servers don't pass their infections around.
The Afghans are not sharing *all* of the data they have, and the system is in place because the Afghans want it. If they didn't want it, they could force the US to remove it.
That's the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot this month.
If you're after venture capital like this you generally patent your inventions before presenting them to a VC firm, you don't present your idea and then hope they just give you money and don't run off with your idea.
If you can afford to patent them, you're unlikely to be willing to hand over 6% of your company for a measly $20k.
Besides, Microsoft probably already has patents they can use to force you to cross-license yours.
Re:Why so much disbelief in aliens among scientist
on
Exoplanet Count Tops 700
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Part of the problem is that some people use 'alien life' to mean anything from microbe-sized upwards while others use it to mean 'little grey men in flying saucers'. The former is almost certain to exist, but there's no evidence for the latter and good reason to believe that they don't exist; technology merely a few thousand years ahead of ours should be visible across much of the galaxy.
With a microkernel design I could probably reboot the entire display stack (just tell those drivers that the computer is booting up - unload them from memory and load them back in and all that). It would wipe out all my video buffers and maybe kill my X11 session, but it isn't a reboot.
Dunno about you, but for me the difference between a reboot and completely restarting X is about 30 seconds. Most of the time between booting and beginning to do useful work is spent starting up my applications in the right workspaces and VNC sessions, so I really don't care whether the video driver restarts or I have to reboot.
And this is the point: microkernels enforce protection boundaries between components so failure and recovery become feasible.
But still takes a heck of a lot of work. If your video driver dies, something has to recover its state when you restart it, which is far from a trivial task.
Atoms are friggin slow compared to a regular CPU and should only be used for sub-$400 netbooks, not $1000 laptops.
But the earlier poster said "power consumption is a far greater factor than CPU or GPU performance."
Which is clearly false, or Apple would have put an Atom in the box.
In any case, since the closest Apple equivalent to my $1100 laptop was a $2500 laptop, I'd guess that a $1000 Apple laptop is pretty much equivalent to a $400 Windows laptop.
That depends on whether you prefer commercial crap or commercially independent art.
Translation:
"Commercial crap" - stuff people like enough to willingly pay for. "Commercially independent art" - stuff no-one likes enough to willingly pay for.
The UK used to have a system where the government would fund movies, but only movies that weren't 'commercial'. The end result was that money was taken from people who didn't want to watch those movies to fund them and then people seemed surprised when they flopped because.... well, duh... no-one wanted to watch them.
Within 10-20 years after that any conventional (e.g. what most PCs today are capable of) encryption other than one-time-pads or the like will be breakable.
Uh, no. Quantum computers can brute-force conventional encryption in about the square root of the time taken by a conventional computer. Doubling the key size is much easier than building a quantum computer of a usable capability.
This is precisely why AES has a 256-bit key option when conventional computers could never break a 128-bit key anyway. AES256 is about as difficult to brute-force with a quantum computer as AES128 is with a conventional computer.
Any plan that does not include zero population growth and 100% recycling will eventually fail.
The reality is that the people at the frontier will survive because they always have new places to go and new resources to use, while those stuck in the core will die. You cannot build a 'sustainable' society that will survive for billions of years, because one mistake will wipe you out.
Which is why those who choose to stay on Earth are doomed.
Cold rational analysis shows that we have neither the technology nor energy resources to even put a family of four on Mars, let alone spread out to other star systems.
Thank you for proving that Anti-Space Nuttery is a religion.
Cold rational analysis shows that you could put a family of four on Mars for a few billion dollars. Sustaining them would be more difficult, but probably not cost more than a hundred billion. So long as it was a private venture and not run by NASA, anyway.
You sound like the people in 1900 claiming that we'd never fly a heavier-than-air aircraft, or in the 1930s that the fastest airliner might one day reach 250mph and carry a hundred people.
Only a fanatic could believe that humans won't develop the technology to live in space, because all of our past history shows that we will if we're allowed to do so.
While development costs do scale, things like transport, fuel, assembly of rockets, etc. does not scale very well.
Rocket companies would be celebrating if fuel was actually a significant part of the launch costs, because it would mean that launch costs would be down to a few dollars a pound.
The biggest single requirement to decrease launch costs is increasing flight rate. If your rocket flies twice a year, then there's no benefit to spending money making it reusable, whereas if it flies a thousand times a year there's a huge incentive to do so.
The "threats" to humanity are pretty easy to enumerate, because we know them from the geological record: glaciation, global warming, pandemics, meteorites, and volcanoes.
The biggest threat to humanity by far is... humanity. The idea that the human race can sit around a camp fire sitting happy songs and loving each other for thousands of years to come is laughable; if we're stuck on Earth then you have a choice between a totalitarian state that would make 1984 look like utopia, or death.
In the other hand, terraforming/colonizing other planets in our solar system, or managing to build self sustained space stations is more probable, and doing what is needed to get that goal could make things better here, or at least better prepared for some potential disasters.
If you can build self-sustaining habitats, you just point one in the direction of another star and fire the engines. Then who cares whether you take 500 years to get there? Life will be little different to floating in an orbit around the sun here.
I don't see the U.S. leading any more manned space missions. The political climate does not allow that. All projects have to be done the "captialistic" way which means that everyone involved has to make a profit but since the project has to be funded by taxes anything more than $0 is too much.
Uh, what? Are you a member of the Glorious People's Soviet Cryosleep Program who just woke up after thirty years?
Launch costs for the Glorious People's Space Shuttle were around $20,000 a pound. The EVIL CAPITALIST Falcon 9 Heavy is expected to cost around $1,000 a pound.
There are few things government does better than making things more expensive than they need to be. People who are spending their own money care about cost far more than people who are spending other people's money.
Apparently Hawking is worried of our resources running out, but mining other celesatial bodies can be done without colonizing them.
Mining other bodies to send stuff to Earth makes little sense, because the cost of transporting it here would be far more than the value of the resources. About the best you could do would be to crash asteroids somewhere desolate and then mine them on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
You still have to sit behind the wheel ready to take over the moment you spot danger. No reading the paper.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people will be reading the paper because their car drives itself. What's the point of a car that drives itself when you have to be continually watching for danger?
Air France 447 is a glaring example of what happens when you tell the driver 'don't worry, the computer is driving' and then the computer can't decide what to do and suddenly drops the driver into an extremely dangerous situation where they're expected to take over.
and force people to use a non-administrator account for applications?
Because it would break Whizzbangsoft Whizzywriter '96.
Because there are no virus scanners, rootkit detectors, etc. for Linux, right? Oh wait there are...
Linux virus-scanners are primarily used to detect Windows viruses on servers so the Windows machines accessing those servers don't pass their infections around.
When was the last active Linux virus released?
I would love to see governments attacking Microsoft for making its software too secure. That would keep me laughing for years.
It's a shame they couldn't roll one of the other rovers out there to film it :).
When the most important thing in your life is money you're a sad excuse for a human being.
If money isn't important to you I suggest you take all the money you have and send it to the poster you were replying to.
I'll be impressed if it actually manages to land there. Otherwise the things it can do after landing are pointless.
The Afghans are not sharing *all* of the data they have, and the system is in place because the Afghans want it. If they didn't want it, they could force the US to remove it.
That's the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot this month.
startups are risky at the best of times and good guidence and training is invaluable.
Here's two useful pieces of guidance which have been well proven through the years:
1. Never start a land war in Asia.
2. Never get into a 'partnership' with Microsoft.
If you're after venture capital like this you generally patent your inventions before presenting them to a VC firm, you don't present your idea and then hope they just give you money and don't run off with your idea.
If you can afford to patent them, you're unlikely to be willing to hand over 6% of your company for a measly $20k.
Besides, Microsoft probably already has patents they can use to force you to cross-license yours.
I've always assumed that most people who know the numbers involved think that alien life must exist (with a hundred billion stars per galaxy and hundred billion galaxies, it seem like there are pretty good odds).
Part of the problem is that some people use 'alien life' to mean anything from microbe-sized upwards while others use it to mean 'little grey men in flying saucers'. The former is almost certain to exist, but there's no evidence for the latter and good reason to believe that they don't exist; technology merely a few thousand years ahead of ours should be visible across much of the galaxy.
With a microkernel design I could probably reboot the entire display stack (just tell those drivers that the computer is booting up - unload them from memory and load them back in and all that). It would wipe out all my video buffers and maybe kill my X11 session, but it isn't a reboot.
Dunno about you, but for me the difference between a reboot and completely restarting X is about 30 seconds. Most of the time between booting and beginning to do useful work is spent starting up my applications in the right workspaces and VNC sessions, so I really don't care whether the video driver restarts or I have to reboot.
And this is the point: microkernels enforce protection boundaries between components so failure and recovery become feasible.
But still takes a heck of a lot of work. If your video driver dies, something has to recover its state when you restart it, which is far from a trivial task.
Atoms are friggin slow compared to a regular CPU and should only be used for sub-$400 netbooks, not $1000 laptops.
But the earlier poster said "power consumption is a far greater factor than CPU or GPU performance."
Which is clearly false, or Apple would have put an Atom in the box.
In any case, since the closest Apple equivalent to my $1100 laptop was a $2500 laptop, I'd guess that a $1000 Apple laptop is pretty much equivalent to a $400 Windows laptop.
How can someone lie about the EU and make it look bad? The EU is fucking terrible.
Indeed. Saying that the EU is merely bad would be a lie.
That depends on whether you prefer commercial crap or commercially independent art.
Translation:
"Commercial crap" - stuff people like enough to willingly pay for.
"Commercially independent art" - stuff no-one likes enough to willingly pay for.
The UK used to have a system where the government would fund movies, but only movies that weren't 'commercial'. The end result was that money was taken from people who didn't want to watch those movies to fund them and then people seemed surprised when they flopped because.... well, duh... no-one wanted to watch them.
Within 10-20 years after that any conventional (e.g. what most PCs today are capable of) encryption other than one-time-pads or the like will be breakable.
Uh, no. Quantum computers can brute-force conventional encryption in about the square root of the time taken by a conventional computer. Doubling the key size is much easier than building a quantum computer of a usable capability.
This is precisely why AES has a 256-bit key option when conventional computers could never break a 128-bit key anyway. AES256 is about as difficult to brute-force with a quantum computer as AES128 is with a conventional computer.
Any plan that does not include zero population growth and 100% recycling will eventually fail.
The reality is that the people at the frontier will survive because they always have new places to go and new resources to use, while those stuck in the core will die. You cannot build a 'sustainable' society that will survive for billions of years, because one mistake will wipe you out.
Which is why those who choose to stay on Earth are doomed.
Cold rational analysis shows that we have neither the technology nor energy resources to even put a family of four on Mars, let alone spread out to other star systems.
Thank you for proving that Anti-Space Nuttery is a religion.
Cold rational analysis shows that you could put a family of four on Mars for a few billion dollars. Sustaining them would be more difficult, but probably not cost more than a hundred billion. So long as it was a private venture and not run by NASA, anyway.
You sound like the people in 1900 claiming that we'd never fly a heavier-than-air aircraft, or in the 1930s that the fastest airliner might one day reach 250mph and carry a hundred people.
Only a fanatic could believe that humans won't develop the technology to live in space, because all of our past history shows that we will if we're allowed to do so.
Yeah, lots of resources in nearly empty space.
Approximately 99.999999999999999999999% of the resources of the universe are in space.
While development costs do scale, things like transport, fuel, assembly of rockets, etc. does not scale very well.
Rocket companies would be celebrating if fuel was actually a significant part of the launch costs, because it would mean that launch costs would be down to a few dollars a pound.
The biggest single requirement to decrease launch costs is increasing flight rate. If your rocket flies twice a year, then there's no benefit to spending money making it reusable, whereas if it flies a thousand times a year there's a huge incentive to do so.
The "threats" to humanity are pretty easy to enumerate, because we know them from the geological record: glaciation, global warming, pandemics, meteorites, and volcanoes.
The biggest threat to humanity by far is... humanity. The idea that the human race can sit around a camp fire sitting happy songs and loving each other for thousands of years to come is laughable; if we're stuck on Earth then you have a choice between a totalitarian state that would make 1984 look like utopia, or death.
In the other hand, terraforming/colonizing other planets in our solar system, or managing to build self sustained space stations is more probable, and doing what is needed to get that goal could make things better here, or at least better prepared for some potential disasters.
If you can build self-sustaining habitats, you just point one in the direction of another star and fire the engines. Then who cares whether you take 500 years to get there? Life will be little different to floating in an orbit around the sun here.
I don't see the U.S. leading any more manned space missions. The political climate does not allow that. All projects have to be done the "captialistic" way which means that everyone involved has to make a profit but since the project has to be funded by taxes anything more than $0 is too much.
Uh, what? Are you a member of the Glorious People's Soviet Cryosleep Program who just woke up after thirty years?
Launch costs for the Glorious People's Space Shuttle were around $20,000 a pound. The EVIL CAPITALIST Falcon 9 Heavy is expected to cost around $1,000 a pound.
There are few things government does better than making things more expensive than they need to be. People who are spending their own money care about cost far more than people who are spending other people's money.
Apparently Hawking is worried of our resources running out, but mining other celesatial bodies can be done without colonizing them.
Mining other bodies to send stuff to Earth makes little sense, because the cost of transporting it here would be far more than the value of the resources. About the best you could do would be to crash asteroids somewhere desolate and then mine them on Earth.