The final components will be accidentally dropped Tuesday at the Amarillo Crater...
I read an article about the disassembly plant a few years ago; AFAIR they're dismantled inside sealed bunkers underground, so if the HE goes off everyone dies, the bunker collapses and the radioactive materials are safely buried until they can dig them up.
Of course if it did trigger a nuclear explosion that wouldn't help much:).
I've seen a couple sites that use HTTPS exclusively throw up transparent SSL accelerator appliances in front of their servers to allow them to only need a fraction of the number of hosts for actually hosting the data.
Yet people who've actually measured the overhead say it's more like 2% on a modern CPU. I guess if you're serving one-pixel.gif files to track people with then it would cause a lot of overhead, but if you are then who cares?
That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.
Those parents probably got their grades for free, so why should Little Jimmy have to work for them?
We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.
That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.
Aren't most big corporations largely owned by pension funds these days? If so, the numbers aren't really surprising; when the government says 'either hand over 40% of your savings to us or we'll let you give it to our friends in the pension industry tax-free', you should expect most savings to end up in the hands of pension companies who then have to buy something with it.
maybe he meant the productivity increase due to the time saved from the ram upgrade, even through it was the more expensive ecc type ram.
Yes. Just having to shut down the software to recompile it means I can't do any testing while I'm waiting for the compile to finish; that's not a huge amount of time each day but it all adds up in wasted developer time.
16 GB is far more than any desktop user should need, and most laptops simply cannot hold that much, so it's creating a sharp demarcation between user and developer.
I have 8GB in my development system at work. With two copies of Eclipse sucking up a gigabyte each, if I try to compile my C++ software without shutting down the old version, I go over 8GB and start to swap.
16GB would definitely be beneficial; I put 16GB of 1.6GHz DDR3 in my home server when I built it earlier this year and it cost under $150. ECC RAM for the work system would cost more, but would probably pay for itself in a few weeks.
I've never seen a web site built in Flash that was anything other than a slow, bloated piece of crap.
Any time I go to a web site and it says I'm going to have to spend five minute sitting at the 'Loading Flash Crap' animation I find something more useful to do with my time.
So a democrat president and a democrat congress both throw money at these companies and it is the GOP's fault? Interesting theory...
You don't understand the left.
Everything is the fault of the right wing conspiracy; if GM had gone bust and all those union workers had been laid off, that would also have been the fault of the evil right wingers for refusing to give them a ton of taxpayers' money. Of course if GM shut down because the EPA passed a new regulation banning CO2 then it would be like those movies where the computer explodes when you give it data that 'does not compute'. Except they'd blame the right wing for that too.
However, as technology increases, the amount of time necessary to break today's encryption schemes will be reduced, thus making the need for stronger encryption schemes.
A 256-bit secret key algorithm is already unbreakable through brute force by any means known; the problem is that encryption is useless for copy protection if you also have to give the recipient the key.
You'd have to build a computer which was 'secure' from the ground up and wouldn't even boot an operating system which wasn't signed by a 'trusted' developer, which had DRM built into the core all the way through to the output device.
There's been trouble with people stealing copper power lines (this usually makes the news when someone tries to steal an energized one), manhole covers, and the aluminum access covers at the base of street light poles.
So maybe instead of imposing a stupid burden on everyone, they could catch people who are stealing stuff?
Funny how the extremes of Left and Right both end up in exactly the same place: Totalitarianism.
That's because the left define anything they don't like as 'right-wing'. The people the left claim to be 'far right' are mostly just far lefties who don't subscribe to precisely the same interpretation of Marxist dogma.
There's no sensible definition by which both Hitler and Ron Paul can be 'far right', whereas both Hitler and Stalin can easily be placed at the far left of the scale with only a few small differences between them.
Kids go through scads of books, I wouldn't want to keep them all.
I used to buy a lot of books, but then I had to pack them all into boxes to move across the Atlantic and realised that borrowing them made far more sense when it was something I wasn't likely to read multiple times.
Of course e-books make storage much less of a problem.
Doesn't the library keep a record of my reading history that is accessible by the gov'ment under the "patriot" act?
If you'd read the earlier posts, you'd know that they don't. However, the current ebook lending system at my library requires using some crappy Adobe software which presumably has to 'phone home' for DRM, so I'm not sure how this is worse.
Does that mean the government shouldn't be involved in funding research? Of course not. The money has to get into the right hands somehow.
If government is handing taxpayers' money to scientists, it will only get 'into the right hands' by chance, since funding decisions will always be driven by political agendas.
The solution is to get government out of the science business.
Traveling fast, far & for a long future time span means your real chances of space ship surface collision, erosion & even catastrophic failure in contact with small rocky or icy objects only tens of grams in size are extremely high.
As far as we can tell, there seem to be very few objects that are tens of grams in size in interstellar space. And space is really, really big so the odds of hitting one when travelling at really high speed are really small.
Well at least they actually tried to not infringe on patents this time?
Indeed. I'm sure that users would much prefer that the company spent their time trying not to infringe on patents than actually adding useful features to the device.
If there had been a serious market for concorde flights, they would still fly, and they would still be built, crash or not.
There was a serious market for Concorde flights until the US government got into a huff about losing the 'SST Race' and banned supersonic flights across the country.
Richard Branson offered to buy the Concordes after the crash, but AFAIR Airbus said they would no longer provide maintenance support so they were no longer allowed to fly.
This is interesting, but I have to ask, why is Google doing this? What is in it for them?
Once the system is in place, they'll be able to track everyone wherever they go. And they'll be plastering you with ads. 'Do you really want to go to Fancy Restaurant? Based on your past trips I'm sure you'd prefer Burger King, where we can offer a personal two for one combo deal.'
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Look up.
See that bright thing in the sky?
It's called 'The Sun'.
Once you're away from Earth, there's a fsckload of cheap energy just blasting out into space; not enough to support exponential growth forever, but enough to support vastly more people than currently exist. The hard part is getting off of Earth in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The final components will be accidentally dropped Tuesday at the Amarillo Crater...
I read an article about the disassembly plant a few years ago; AFAIR they're dismantled inside sealed bunkers underground, so if the HE goes off everyone dies, the bunker collapses and the radioactive materials are safely buried until they can dig them up.
Of course if it did trigger a nuclear explosion that wouldn't help much :).
I've seen a couple sites that use HTTPS exclusively throw up transparent SSL accelerator appliances in front of their servers to allow them to only need a fraction of the number of hosts for actually hosting the data.
Yet people who've actually measured the overhead say it's more like 2% on a modern CPU. I guess if you're serving one-pixel .gif files to track people with then it would cause a lot of overhead, but if you are then who cares?
That was effective back when parents were interested in making their kids knuckle down and accomplish something in school. But that's becoming less and less common. Instead, we have parents showing up to yell at the teacher for not giving their idiot slacker offspring better grades even though the urchin does none of the work required to earn the grades.
Those parents probably got their grades for free, so why should Little Jimmy have to work for them?
We really do need to come up with a realistic way to evaluate our entire educational system (not just the effectiveness of teachers). We need a way we can identify the real faults in our educational system.
That's easy: get the government out of the way. Then parents will send their kids to good schools and bad schools will go bust.
Aren't most big corporations largely owned by pension funds these days? If so, the numbers aren't really surprising; when the government says 'either hand over 40% of your savings to us or we'll let you give it to our friends in the pension industry tax-free', you should expect most savings to end up in the hands of pension companies who then have to buy something with it.
maybe he meant the productivity increase due to the time saved from the ram upgrade, even through it was the more expensive ecc type ram.
Yes. Just having to shut down the software to recompile it means I can't do any testing while I'm waiting for the compile to finish; that's not a huge amount of time each day but it all adds up in wasted developer time.
16 GB is far more than any desktop user should need, and most laptops simply cannot hold that much, so it's creating a sharp demarcation between user and developer.
I have 8GB in my development system at work. With two copies of Eclipse sucking up a gigabyte each, if I try to compile my C++ software without shutting down the old version, I go over 8GB and start to swap.
16GB would definitely be beneficial; I put 16GB of 1.6GHz DDR3 in my home server when I built it earlier this year and it cost under $150. ECC RAM for the work system would cost more, but would probably pay for itself in a few weeks.
I've never seen a web site built in Flash that was anything other than a slow, bloated piece of crap.
Any time I go to a web site and it says I'm going to have to spend five minute sitting at the 'Loading Flash Crap' animation I find something more useful to do with my time.
Just let the damn thing die.
So a democrat president and a democrat congress both throw money at these companies and it is the GOP's fault? Interesting theory...
You don't understand the left.
Everything is the fault of the right wing conspiracy; if GM had gone bust and all those union workers had been laid off, that would also have been the fault of the evil right wingers for refusing to give them a ton of taxpayers' money. Of course if GM shut down because the EPA passed a new regulation banning CO2 then it would be like those movies where the computer explodes when you give it data that 'does not compute'. Except they'd blame the right wing for that too.
However, as technology increases, the amount of time necessary to break today's encryption schemes will be reduced, thus making the need for stronger encryption schemes.
A 256-bit secret key algorithm is already unbreakable through brute force by any means known; the problem is that encryption is useless for copy protection if you also have to give the recipient the key.
You'd have to build a computer which was 'secure' from the ground up and wouldn't even boot an operating system which wasn't signed by a 'trusted' developer, which had DRM built into the core all the way through to the output device.
Oh, wait...
The cost is in my view expensive, but there's a fair number of people out there even now that could afford to spend $60k on a car.
Sure, but that doesn't mean they'd want to spend $60k on a car that's less capable than a $30k Honda Civic or a $60k BMW.
Don't seem to realise that Top Gear is a comedy show.
There's been trouble with people stealing copper power lines (this usually makes the news when someone tries to steal an energized one), manhole covers, and the aluminum access covers at the base of street light poles.
So maybe instead of imposing a stupid burden on everyone, they could catch people who are stealing stuff?
Just an idea.
Funny how the extremes of Left and Right both end up in exactly the same place: Totalitarianism.
That's because the left define anything they don't like as 'right-wing'. The people the left claim to be 'far right' are mostly just far lefties who don't subscribe to precisely the same interpretation of Marxist dogma.
There's no sensible definition by which both Hitler and Ron Paul can be 'far right', whereas both Hitler and Stalin can easily be placed at the far left of the scale with only a few small differences between them.
Reality has a well known left-bias.
Indeed. That's why communism was such a success.
Kids go through scads of books, I wouldn't want to keep them all.
I used to buy a lot of books, but then I had to pack them all into boxes to move across the Atlantic and realised that borrowing them made far more sense when it was something I wasn't likely to read multiple times.
Of course e-books make storage much less of a problem.
Seriously, when was the last time any of you actually used a library?
Last weekend.
Doesn't the library keep a record of my reading history that is accessible by the gov'ment under the "patriot" act?
If you'd read the earlier posts, you'd know that they don't. However, the current ebook lending system at my library requires using some crappy Adobe software which presumably has to 'phone home' for DRM, so I'm not sure how this is worse.
Does that mean the government shouldn't be involved in funding research? Of course not. The money has to get into the right hands somehow.
If government is handing taxpayers' money to scientists, it will only get 'into the right hands' by chance, since funding decisions will always be driven by political agendas.
The solution is to get government out of the science business.
Yeah, it's obvious Ballmer doesn't know how to make a successful company.
Indeed. Just look at Microsoft's stock price history.
Traveling fast, far & for a long future time span means your real chances of space ship surface collision, erosion & even catastrophic failure in contact with small rocky or icy objects only tens of grams in size are extremely high.
As far as we can tell, there seem to be very few objects that are tens of grams in size in interstellar space. And space is really, really big so the odds of hitting one when travelling at really high speed are really small.
I give it my PITS ranking: Pie in the Sky
Wrong, but thanks for playing.
"Siri, turn off microphone". "Siri. Siri? SIRI?!"
Okay, maybe put in a fail-safe.
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
Well at least they actually tried to not infringe on patents this time?
Indeed. I'm sure that users would much prefer that the company spent their time trying not to infringe on patents than actually adding useful features to the device.
If there had been a serious market for concorde flights, they would still fly, and they would still be built, crash or not.
There was a serious market for Concorde flights until the US government got into a huff about losing the 'SST Race' and banned supersonic flights across the country.
Richard Branson offered to buy the Concordes after the crash, but AFAIR Airbus said they would no longer provide maintenance support so they were no longer allowed to fly.
This is interesting, but I have to ask, why is Google doing this? What is in it for them?
Once the system is in place, they'll be able to track everyone wherever they go. And they'll be plastering you with ads. 'Do you really want to go to Fancy Restaurant? Based on your past trips I'm sure you'd prefer Burger King, where we can offer a personal two for one combo deal.'
Until you come up with essentially unlimited, cheap energy, space is not going to be the place for the huddled masses yearning to be free.
Look up.
See that bright thing in the sky?
It's called 'The Sun'.
Once you're away from Earth, there's a fsckload of cheap energy just blasting out into space; not enough to support exponential growth forever, but enough to support vastly more people than currently exist. The hard part is getting off of Earth in the first place.