Why? It never made much sense that you could still maintain communication with a ship but not beam to it, as the canonical explanation of beaming was that it translated you into information, sent it as a signal and reassembled it. It's not like a displace, where you'd have to keep a wormhole end stable in a different (and changing) frame of reference, all you need to do is send the signal (the mechanism for the reassembly was never explained, presumably it involved magic). Beaming to a moving target is just a bandwidth and synchronisation problem. Next Gen episodes beamed at warp several times, although only by matching speeds.
You seem to continue to side step the issue of the US having the right to control gambling within its borders
No. The US is perfectly free to ban gambling. What they are not free to do, is permit gambling when run by companies in the US, but ban it when run by companies outside the US. That is no different from imposing a ban or levy on any other commodity when not produced domestically and places the US in violation of free trade treaties (which have, for the most part, been of significant net benefit to the USA). If another WTO member imposed an import tariff on some US commodity, then the US would complain to the WTO and expect a fine. Antigua complained to the WTO and a $21m/year fine was imposed on the USA unless they either ban gambling internally, or permit other companies from other countries to compete on an equal footing. They refused to pay, so the WTO authorised collection by other means.
That certainly isn't the case on any of the projects I've worked on with Google contributors. They tend to think a nest of #ifdefs is the correct way of writing cross-platform code, and fall into the trap of thinking that the solution to any problem - especially the problem that the current codebase is overcomplicated - is to add more code.
Not really. The difference between a cheap and an expensive laser printer is often just the cost of an extra CPU and control logic. The mechanical parts are identical (and you can use spares from the cheaper ones in the more expensive ones. Or vice versa if you are a bit crazy). PostScript is quite CPU-intensive. You need at least a 100MHz MIPS CPU to keep up with the print speed of a modern printer, and ideally at least a 250MHz core. You also need a PostScript interpreter. Something simpler can be handled with just a frame buffer the size of a printed page. The extra cost is likely $10-20 for the PostScript parts, but once you get there you're into differentiation territory and so the premium is significantly more.
maybe a rich and big country can't do the same things a poor and tiny country does
There's a lot of truth in this. For example, Brazil invested heavily in biodiesel because it could not afford to import oil. If you have a lot of spare money, then it's much easier to just put up with the increasing prices of fossil fuels. The same thing happens on a smaller scale with companies, where a startup has to innovate to be able to compete with larger, established companies, because it has to have some edge to offset the economies of scale that the big competitor has. Similarly, the larger company can rely on its economies of scale to offset inefficiencies in their workflow.
its the prejudice and racial discrimination. european countries, while appearing to act all modern and chic, are still too steeped in their centuries-old hatred of one-another (especially former powers acting like they still have power) and indoctrinated biases. if you are from eastern europe you are still treated like shit
Really? I work in a university research lab in the UK. The people I work with regularly (in no particular order) include, English, Scottish, Romanian, Russian, Indian, Iranian, Chinese, French, American, Canadian, Lithuania and Germany. I might have missed some out there, as there are some people who have never mentioned where they're from in my presence. There aren't any Hungarians on that list, but given that no nationality is represented by more than 3 people it's not because of discrimination, it's simply that there aren't enough people for every nationality to be represented.
The search term you are looking for is 'port rebinding attack'. This is a vulnerability that only NAT'd networks are vulnerable to. A firewall without NAT doesn't introduce this problem.
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
The only runtime linker I'm familiar with will prefault the entire binary and then let it be demand paged out, on the basis that binaries are usually small and mostly-used, that reading the entire binary is as cheap as faulting in a few pages, and if some pages aren't used for a while then they can be paged out at no cost later.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Since this is the sort of thing that usually deserves a big fat [citation needed], I'll skip that and just point you straight to a peer-reviewed citation that roundly refutes that idea:
A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications, published at ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2011.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
I have one dedicated to the OS, one for programs, and I'm storing my data on standard SATA III hard-drives. As I understand it, this is the current recommended setup for SSD drives
Are you really spending that much time seeking in applications and OS files? That stuff typically gets loaded once on boot and then stays in RAM. It's the data where the fast random read/write times are a big win, and that's the stuff that you're storing on the spinning disks.
The only data being written to the drives are OS generated files and Temporary Internet Files, which I now plan to move off to one of my data drives
So, having identified something where an SSD is a speedup (lots of small random reads and writes), you're now going to stop using it for that? At which point, why do you even bother with an SSD?
I'm not certain that the rationale is bullshit. It worked once, so it's at least logically sound
It's debatable whether it worked then. I presume that you're thinking of the US War of Independence, but that only really worked because the British were far away and had an inadequate military presence (relying significantly on local militias), and the rebels were aided by French, Dutch and Spanish forces that evened the score considerably. It's like saying that Afghanistan managed to rise up and overthrow the Soviet invaders. It's sort-of true, but it ignores the massive amounts of military aid (mostly equipment, some training) that the US was funnelling into the country. I'm not an historian, but the last example of a population overthrowing its rules without the aid of a foreign military that I can think of was the British Civil War, but that ended in 1649, when even muskets were relatively uncommon.
It never really was about 3D printing - it's just another way to manufacture stuff. Ditto receivers and other tracked parts - any good gunsmith can produce their own. Who are probably licensed and all that.
The big deal is that the number of people with both the equipment and skill required to make a gun (or whatever) is fairly limited and therefore easy to track. With a 3D printer, you only need one person with the skill and they upload their designs, then everyone with a 3D printer has the equipment. When they become sufficiently cheap that they're in every home, then that makes building a bad-device-of-the-week as easy as copying a music track. It's something that can be done almost totally untraceably.
Presuming that what we see in movies or on TV is at least close to being accurate, it takes all of what, 3 or 4 seconds to replace a magazine if you're prepared and know what you are doing
I used to shoot L98s (the children's version of the SA-80), and reloading a 3-round magazine took me a bit more than 3-4 seconds, but well under 10. It's basically just press the release, pull it off (this bit's hard, because it's made by the lowest bidder and tends to stick), put it somewhere sensible, push the new one in, push it a bit harder because the lowest-bidder catch didn't lock properly the first time, and keep firing. Assuming that you just drop the old one and have the new one to hand, it's pretty quick. And even with the bolt action, most of my time was spent aiming, not reloading, and if you're only wanting to be accurate to the radius of, say, a person's head or chest, then you can easily fire one round every couple of seconds (probably more if you practice - most of my shooting was at targets where accuracy mattered a lot more than speed, although some drills had moving targets where you get about 2 seconds to aim and fire, then 2 more to reload, so 4 seconds per shot and consistently hitting within the heart circle is quite plausible, and probably easy for someone who practices more than I did). 10 rounds per minute is just about possible with a manual reload on something like a target rifle, if you've got them laid out next to you.
We mock Ted Stevens with the 'series of tubes' thing because it is the most quotable, but the thing that got the real scorn was this:
I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
He's under the impression that delay (probably due to greylisting) between mail servers is due to network latency and that this network latency is due to commercial things in the Internet. Oh, and that an email is 'an Internet'. If someone started with that and then said something that I agreed with, then it would still be very hard to respect them. But then, it would be quite hard for someone with such a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the technology to say anything reasonable about it.
As the other poster pointed out, taxable income is, effectively, the same as profit. It is income minus all allowable business expenses. That includes things like equipment purchase and maintenance, building hire, employee salaries and so on. The thing you pay income tax on is the income after this. If you're taking home $250K per year after paying all of these expenses, I think you can be said to be very comfortably off. If you can save up enough to buy a new house (outright, with no mortgage) every two years then you're doing very well. Of course, that's before taxes. Now, if you have a decent accountant (and, don't forget, you pay him out of the pre-tax income) and want to buy a house then you'll probably have the company buy it with a mortgage and do some juggling so that the acquisition is a loss (with the extra loss carried forward to the next tax year) and so you end up with the company buying the house out of pre-tax profits.
This is not a new idea, in the roman republic the richest roman's fought in the very front line of the legion, because they had the most to loose if Rome fell
Not really. The richest, the Senatorial class, often did serve in the legions, but they'd enter as a Tribune and hope to be promoted to a Legate. They'd stand right at the back, planning the battles, and very rarely actually take place in the fighting. That would be done by the legionnaires, drawn mostly from the Plebeian classes and often from those with a more limited form of citizenship. After 25 years, they could retire with full Roman citizenship (if, by some chance, they somehow managed to survive 25 years). In contrast, the members of the Senatorial class would take credit back home for successful campaigns and use this as the platform for a political career. Members of the Senatorial and Equestrian classes who weren't interested in politics didn't serve in the legions and neither did many of the Senatorial class with Patrician ancestry, who were didn't need the additional boost of a military service to boost their political ambitions. Totally unlike the modern USA...
Because Lincoln was president during the US Civil War, which is intrinsically cool because it's the only war in the entire history of the USA where the side that won did not have overt assistance from the French.
I said in another post that I've written 600GB to my laptop's SSD in the last 72 days. At that rate, writing 72TB would take about 23 years. I do have a 23-year-old laptop in an attic somewhere, but its 60MB hard disk is long since dead.
Even 5,000 rewrite cycles is a lot. It's been 72 days since I last rebooted my laptop, and in that time I've written 600GB to its 256GB SSD. I rebuild LLVM every few days, so I probably have a higher than average write rate. I also ripped a few DVDs to watch on the train when I visited my mother over Christmas, so that adds a little spike, but let's assume that's a pretty average burn rate. That's 0.0326 rewrite cycles per day, assuming perfect wear levelling. In the magic happy land of perfect wear levelling, this drive would therefore last 15,360 days, or about 42 years. Given that laptops rarely last 10 years, and 3-5 is a good operational life, if wear levelling is only 25% effective, the disk will outlast the rest of the laptop.
Wear levelling can't be perfect, because some sectors are never rewritten and so it must use up a write cycle to move the data to a more worn one. Fortunately, manufacturers compensate for this somewhat by adding more cells than are exposed directly and remapping the spare ones over the dead ones.
As long as the typical amount of data written grows at a slower rate than the size of the SSDs, the wear levelling will be able to keep them lasting a long time. I first did this calculation several years ago, when a 32GB SSD was just about affordable, and came up with a burn rate of about 2GB/day. Now I'm at about 8GB/day, but a 256GB SSD is affordable. My average write speed has doubled twice, but the capacity has doubled three times.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for about 18 months. If it can't find what I need, I try Google. In the last year, Google has only once found something that DDG didn't find. If Google decided to pull out of the EU, I think it would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt us...
They were dumping to drive other mines out of business, then they imposed artificial scarcity to drive the price up and increase their profits. It's a very old scam and most countries have laws that, if a company did it, would mean that they got massive fines. When a country does it, you need to wait for the WTO to do it, and then see if you can actually enforce the ruling (which you generally only can against small countries - the US typically just ignores rulings against them, and I presume China does too).
During the 1980s and 1990s DARPA poured tens of millions into research on robotics and automated vehicles, all for little effect. Then they offered a small fraction of their previous spending as a monetary prize for a specific result, and the result was rapid and revolutionary progress. Competition works.
Or, to rephrase for those not completely ignorant of historical context:
During the 1980s and 1990s, when computing power was still very limited, sensors were very expensive, sensor integration was an active and immature research area, DARPA put a lot of money into the kinds of project that would produce the physical devices and algorithms required for this kind of thing. Now that all of the building blocks exist as commodity off-the-shelf parts (many, in part, because of their DARPA funding for the early part of the R&D cycle), they are offering a lot less for something that is nearly ready for commercialisation, with the added incentive that a commercial product will rake in large amounts of money independent of the prize. For some reason, it's only now, after the prize was offered, that we're seeing things close to commercial solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? It never made much sense that you could still maintain communication with a ship but not beam to it, as the canonical explanation of beaming was that it translated you into information, sent it as a signal and reassembled it. It's not like a displace, where you'd have to keep a wormhole end stable in a different (and changing) frame of reference, all you need to do is send the signal (the mechanism for the reassembly was never explained, presumably it involved magic). Beaming to a moving target is just a bandwidth and synchronisation problem. Next Gen episodes beamed at warp several times, although only by matching speeds.
There's absolutely no way you could fit even one of those books into a single film, without cutting most of the material that made it interesting.
You seem to continue to side step the issue of the US having the right to control gambling within its borders
No. The US is perfectly free to ban gambling. What they are not free to do, is permit gambling when run by companies in the US, but ban it when run by companies outside the US. That is no different from imposing a ban or levy on any other commodity when not produced domestically and places the US in violation of free trade treaties (which have, for the most part, been of significant net benefit to the USA). If another WTO member imposed an import tariff on some US commodity, then the US would complain to the WTO and expect a fine. Antigua complained to the WTO and a $21m/year fine was imposed on the USA unless they either ban gambling internally, or permit other companies from other countries to compete on an equal footing. They refused to pay, so the WTO authorised collection by other means.
They were too busy watching Fox News to vote.
That certainly isn't the case on any of the projects I've worked on with Google contributors. They tend to think a nest of #ifdefs is the correct way of writing cross-platform code, and fall into the trap of thinking that the solution to any problem - especially the problem that the current codebase is overcomplicated - is to add more code.
Not really. The difference between a cheap and an expensive laser printer is often just the cost of an extra CPU and control logic. The mechanical parts are identical (and you can use spares from the cheaper ones in the more expensive ones. Or vice versa if you are a bit crazy). PostScript is quite CPU-intensive. You need at least a 100MHz MIPS CPU to keep up with the print speed of a modern printer, and ideally at least a 250MHz core. You also need a PostScript interpreter. Something simpler can be handled with just a frame buffer the size of a printed page. The extra cost is likely $10-20 for the PostScript parts, but once you get there you're into differentiation territory and so the premium is significantly more.
Well, except for the fact that they cost 2-3 times more than ones that don't...
maybe a rich and big country can't do the same things a poor and tiny country does
There's a lot of truth in this. For example, Brazil invested heavily in biodiesel because it could not afford to import oil. If you have a lot of spare money, then it's much easier to just put up with the increasing prices of fossil fuels. The same thing happens on a smaller scale with companies, where a startup has to innovate to be able to compete with larger, established companies, because it has to have some edge to offset the economies of scale that the big competitor has. Similarly, the larger company can rely on its economies of scale to offset inefficiencies in their workflow.
We can fix that by building a massive parabolic reflector around the sun.
its the prejudice and racial discrimination. european countries, while appearing to act all modern and chic, are still too steeped in their centuries-old hatred of one-another (especially former powers acting like they still have power) and indoctrinated biases. if you are from eastern europe you are still treated like shit
Really? I work in a university research lab in the UK. The people I work with regularly (in no particular order) include, English, Scottish, Romanian, Russian, Indian, Iranian, Chinese, French, American, Canadian, Lithuania and Germany. I might have missed some out there, as there are some people who have never mentioned where they're from in my presence. There aren't any Hungarians on that list, but given that no nationality is represented by more than 3 people it's not because of discrimination, it's simply that there aren't enough people for every nationality to be represented.
The search term you are looking for is 'port rebinding attack'. This is a vulnerability that only NAT'd networks are vulnerable to. A firewall without NAT doesn't introduce this problem.
OS binaries and libraries are often read in a random IO pattern, as the process jumps from one section of code to another. This is where a low latency drive on OS/application startup helps.
The only runtime linker I'm familiar with will prefault the entire binary and then let it be demand paged out, on the basis that binaries are usually small and mostly-used, that reading the entire binary is as cheap as faulting in a few pages, and if some pages aren't used for a while then they can be paged out at no cost later.
User data, on the other hand, is usually read/written in a sequential IO pattern, from start to finish.
Since this is the sort of thing that usually deserves a big fat [citation needed], I'll skip that and just point you straight to a peer-reviewed citation that roundly refutes that idea:
A File is Not a File: Understanding the I/O Behavior of Apple Desktop Applications, published at ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2011.
Loading that word doc? Word will read and parse the file in one fell sweep. Saving the updated document? Why not just write it out in one go, rather than update the document in place (not sure if this is how Word works, BTW).
See the above paper.
I have one dedicated to the OS, one for programs, and I'm storing my data on standard SATA III hard-drives. As I understand it, this is the current recommended setup for SSD drives
Are you really spending that much time seeking in applications and OS files? That stuff typically gets loaded once on boot and then stays in RAM. It's the data where the fast random read/write times are a big win, and that's the stuff that you're storing on the spinning disks.
The only data being written to the drives are OS generated files and Temporary Internet Files, which I now plan to move off to one of my data drives
So, having identified something where an SSD is a speedup (lots of small random reads and writes), you're now going to stop using it for that? At which point, why do you even bother with an SSD?
I'm not certain that the rationale is bullshit. It worked once, so it's at least logically sound
It's debatable whether it worked then. I presume that you're thinking of the US War of Independence, but that only really worked because the British were far away and had an inadequate military presence (relying significantly on local militias), and the rebels were aided by French, Dutch and Spanish forces that evened the score considerably. It's like saying that Afghanistan managed to rise up and overthrow the Soviet invaders. It's sort-of true, but it ignores the massive amounts of military aid (mostly equipment, some training) that the US was funnelling into the country. I'm not an historian, but the last example of a population overthrowing its rules without the aid of a foreign military that I can think of was the British Civil War, but that ended in 1649, when even muskets were relatively uncommon.
It never really was about 3D printing - it's just another way to manufacture stuff. Ditto receivers and other tracked parts - any good gunsmith can produce their own. Who are probably licensed and all that.
The big deal is that the number of people with both the equipment and skill required to make a gun (or whatever) is fairly limited and therefore easy to track. With a 3D printer, you only need one person with the skill and they upload their designs, then everyone with a 3D printer has the equipment. When they become sufficiently cheap that they're in every home, then that makes building a bad-device-of-the-week as easy as copying a music track. It's something that can be done almost totally untraceably.
Presuming that what we see in movies or on TV is at least close to being accurate, it takes all of what, 3 or 4 seconds to replace a magazine if you're prepared and know what you are doing
I used to shoot L98s (the children's version of the SA-80), and reloading a 3-round magazine took me a bit more than 3-4 seconds, but well under 10. It's basically just press the release, pull it off (this bit's hard, because it's made by the lowest bidder and tends to stick), put it somewhere sensible, push the new one in, push it a bit harder because the lowest-bidder catch didn't lock properly the first time, and keep firing. Assuming that you just drop the old one and have the new one to hand, it's pretty quick. And even with the bolt action, most of my time was spent aiming, not reloading, and if you're only wanting to be accurate to the radius of, say, a person's head or chest, then you can easily fire one round every couple of seconds (probably more if you practice - most of my shooting was at targets where accuracy mattered a lot more than speed, although some drills had moving targets where you get about 2 seconds to aim and fire, then 2 more to reload, so 4 seconds per shot and consistently hitting within the heart circle is quite plausible, and probably easy for someone who practices more than I did). 10 rounds per minute is just about possible with a manual reload on something like a target rifle, if you've got them laid out next to you.
I just the other day got an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
He's under the impression that delay (probably due to greylisting) between mail servers is due to network latency and that this network latency is due to commercial things in the Internet. Oh, and that an email is 'an Internet'. If someone started with that and then said something that I agreed with, then it would still be very hard to respect them. But then, it would be quite hard for someone with such a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the technology to say anything reasonable about it.
As the other poster pointed out, taxable income is, effectively, the same as profit. It is income minus all allowable business expenses. That includes things like equipment purchase and maintenance, building hire, employee salaries and so on. The thing you pay income tax on is the income after this. If you're taking home $250K per year after paying all of these expenses, I think you can be said to be very comfortably off. If you can save up enough to buy a new house (outright, with no mortgage) every two years then you're doing very well. Of course, that's before taxes. Now, if you have a decent accountant (and, don't forget, you pay him out of the pre-tax income) and want to buy a house then you'll probably have the company buy it with a mortgage and do some juggling so that the acquisition is a loss (with the extra loss carried forward to the next tax year) and so you end up with the company buying the house out of pre-tax profits.
This is not a new idea, in the roman republic the richest roman's fought in the very front line of the legion, because they had the most to loose if Rome fell
Not really. The richest, the Senatorial class, often did serve in the legions, but they'd enter as a Tribune and hope to be promoted to a Legate. They'd stand right at the back, planning the battles, and very rarely actually take place in the fighting. That would be done by the legionnaires, drawn mostly from the Plebeian classes and often from those with a more limited form of citizenship. After 25 years, they could retire with full Roman citizenship (if, by some chance, they somehow managed to survive 25 years). In contrast, the members of the Senatorial class would take credit back home for successful campaigns and use this as the platform for a political career. Members of the Senatorial and Equestrian classes who weren't interested in politics didn't serve in the legions and neither did many of the Senatorial class with Patrician ancestry, who were didn't need the additional boost of a military service to boost their political ambitions. Totally unlike the modern USA...
Because Lincoln was president during the US Civil War, which is intrinsically cool because it's the only war in the entire history of the USA where the side that won did not have overt assistance from the French.
I said in another post that I've written 600GB to my laptop's SSD in the last 72 days. At that rate, writing 72TB would take about 23 years. I do have a 23-year-old laptop in an attic somewhere, but its 60MB hard disk is long since dead.
Even 5,000 rewrite cycles is a lot. It's been 72 days since I last rebooted my laptop, and in that time I've written 600GB to its 256GB SSD. I rebuild LLVM every few days, so I probably have a higher than average write rate. I also ripped a few DVDs to watch on the train when I visited my mother over Christmas, so that adds a little spike, but let's assume that's a pretty average burn rate. That's 0.0326 rewrite cycles per day, assuming perfect wear levelling. In the magic happy land of perfect wear levelling, this drive would therefore last 15,360 days, or about 42 years. Given that laptops rarely last 10 years, and 3-5 is a good operational life, if wear levelling is only 25% effective, the disk will outlast the rest of the laptop.
Wear levelling can't be perfect, because some sectors are never rewritten and so it must use up a write cycle to move the data to a more worn one. Fortunately, manufacturers compensate for this somewhat by adding more cells than are exposed directly and remapping the spare ones over the dead ones.
As long as the typical amount of data written grows at a slower rate than the size of the SSDs, the wear levelling will be able to keep them lasting a long time. I first did this calculation several years ago, when a 32GB SSD was just about affordable, and came up with a burn rate of about 2GB/day. Now I'm at about 8GB/day, but a 256GB SSD is affordable. My average write speed has doubled twice, but the capacity has doubled three times.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for about 18 months. If it can't find what I need, I try Google. In the last year, Google has only once found something that DDG didn't find. If Google decided to pull out of the EU, I think it would hurt them a lot more than it would hurt us...
They were dumping to drive other mines out of business, then they imposed artificial scarcity to drive the price up and increase their profits. It's a very old scam and most countries have laws that, if a company did it, would mean that they got massive fines. When a country does it, you need to wait for the WTO to do it, and then see if you can actually enforce the ruling (which you generally only can against small countries - the US typically just ignores rulings against them, and I presume China does too).
During the 1980s and 1990s DARPA poured tens of millions into research on robotics and automated vehicles, all for little effect. Then they offered a small fraction of their previous spending as a monetary prize for a specific result, and the result was rapid and revolutionary progress. Competition works.
Or, to rephrase for those not completely ignorant of historical context:
During the 1980s and 1990s, when computing power was still very limited, sensors were very expensive, sensor integration was an active and immature research area, DARPA put a lot of money into the kinds of project that would produce the physical devices and algorithms required for this kind of thing. Now that all of the building blocks exist as commodity off-the-shelf parts (many, in part, because of their DARPA funding for the early part of the R&D cycle), they are offering a lot less for something that is nearly ready for commercialisation, with the added incentive that a commercial product will rake in large amounts of money independent of the prize. For some reason, it's only now, after the prize was offered, that we're seeing things close to commercial solutions.