I have been wondering how long it would take for them to make it onto main stream BitTorrent, FreeNet or Wikileaks, if there out there all it takes is one to upload them and the collective geeks desire to own your own nuclear blueprints would do the rest.
It could also be a problem for the future if someone invents molecular assemblers. I guess we would all need a nuke proof coating surrounding us or some kind of brain uploading to distributed servers.
Personally I think it is fairly safe to consider this the year of the Linux desktop.
Several million EeePC's where shipped with Linux on them after all, and many other subnote books are planning too.
Then add into account the exponential Ubuntu user growth and the absolute suckage of Vista.
I'm not sure exactly what conditions are needed to be officially branded the year of the Linux desktop. Or are we expecting over %50 usage or some astronomical usage jump from %4 to %12 within months. Some kind of Linux singularity similar in concept to a technological singularity where the computers basically just start to install Linux themselves and it spreads virally?
Then again, perhaps this is just the year of the Linux laptop instead although for many the laptop is their desktop.
Huge amount of research is actually done at Universities, or for the military. Things like regrowing human limbs and brain-computer interfaces is being funded by DARPA and lets not forget the whole space race. It then taken by companies and claimed as their own, take Microsoft Surface, look back a few years and you will see multi-touch interfaces such as the one by Jeff Hun. And look at the work that guy did with the Wiimote, how long will it be before that's in devices.
Companies need to keep improving their designs in order to sell new stuff, and their designs need to be better than their competitors, and since their competitors would be able to take their improvements they need to do it quickly. This already happens, look at the shit loads of subnote book devices that has popped into existence over the last 3 months. This was mainly due to the XO laptop, then the EeePC's success. What would have happened if there was a patent on making a laptop a specific size? That might sound like a stupid patent but then so its patenting clicking on a link to get an image.
Drug companies have already had a drastic reduction of discoveries, they just pretend to have had real ones. %90 of new drugs are just the old ones changed slightly because the old designs where running out of patents. A companies patented a mirror image of a molecule of a drug. Companies are patenting your genetic code right now and the genetic code of other life forms. The current lifesaving drugs are insanely overpriced for what they are, chemically there is nothing harder about making life saving anti-cancer/aids or whatever medicine than headache medicine, but no one would pay $100 a pill to relieve a headache.
No drug companies want to actually invent cures for anything either, that would be bad business.
The other thing to consider is China, they don't care about patents, they will claim they do to get into the WTO but trying to stop a billion people for making and selling something they can create because someone in America came up with it first isn't likely to get very far. China are starting to get their shit together and with their massive population they should be able to invent much quicker, when things like their new IPv6 internet is rolled out or technologies like WiMax let large chunks of the population get onto it while needing almost no infrastructure. OpenSource education methods would work great in China, sure there are things like censorship but the government isn't likely to try and stop people from learning howto build microprocessors (although computing power will be more likely to cause an overthrow of the government than anything else).
Memory isn't the main reason for Micro kernels, in fact a microkernel (and the servers required to run it) will likely use more memory imho since every process that replaces part of the kernel will require its own crap, unless you strip down the amount of stuff running, but you can do that on a monolithic modularized kernel anyway.
I don't feel that Linus has demonstrated the death of microkernels, just that systems aren't ready for them yet, specifically that they weren't in 1983 (when Hurd was announced, or 1991 when Linux was). Besides we don't know what would have happened if Hurd had seen the same amount of development as Linux, Hurd had some recent activities to change to a newer better kernels (such as L4) at least twice but the development community seems to be stalled. Also don't forget OSX uses a hybrid Microkernel.
I think the future of microkernels will be for things like cloud computing and clusters providing the communication between each node is fast enough, in this case they will run in virtual machines ontop of regular systems. This probably won't be for a while though, ie when cloud computers are made from actual clouds or nanoprocessors or such.
There are quite a few anti-MafiAA groups, things the the EFF stop corporations from abusing copyright laws, they also support thing like anonymous internet usage so if they MAFIAA groups win filesharing can switch to encrypted darknet systems similar to Freenet (but hopefully faster and less painful).
The Piratebay have a few legal cases coming up and when the only witness and the policeman responsible for recent Piratebay stuff happens to now be employed by the opposition they have a fairly good chance of winning.
I though the holy grail was self replicating fabricators effectively killing the economy when people can print diamonds, gold, oil, electric cars, monster trucks, food, medical supplies, platinum, titanium, nanotubes, cake, solar panels, computers (to the point that it becomes a computing power vs mass and probably quantum), mp3 players, replacement organs, replacement people, guns, nukes, space elevator materials, self sustaining spaceships/stations, replacement cells to reverse the aging process, green eggs and ham, money, billions of tiny wireless internet routers, man machine interfaces, an actual holy grail (probably many verities, including those from the Indiana Jones movies), mind uploading systems.
A 3D crystal might be cool and could help lead to that but I wouldn't describing it as the 'holy grail' is a bit much
Problem is that in order to launch rockets for the moon, you need rocks on the moon first, theres nothing up there to build em from so everything must be shipped up.
If you going to be shipping up all that stuff up on rockets then its better to build stuff in orbit and save taking off from the moon.
A telescope on the moon has been planed, from memory it involved a large dish of reflective liquid (quick sliver?) instead of a mirror since having a massive mirror gets you a much better telescope with longer range. But once again its probably better to launch a few small satellites and like them together to get one large image.
Theres nothing we can really do on the moon that we can't do in orbit, and do it with less work since we don't have to relaunch stuff from the moon.
About the only thing I can say about a moon base would be that it would be there to stay, Mir was deorbited, skylab too, and the ISS requires orbit boosts so one day it too will be gone. But you don't want to be relying on equipment that is too old anyway (like 30 year old shuttles:/ although they are being phased out in 2010 with a Orion orbiter to replace them in 2014, dunno what happens in that 4 year gap though)
According to Wikipedia china is going to be using the olympics to show off their new internet systems such as IPv6 based security cameras etc...
"China plans to showcase their new CNGI and their new IPv6 networking at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Everything from the security cameras to the taxis to the cameras filming the Olympic events will be networked via IPv6; the events will be streamed live over the Internet while the networked cars will be able to grasp the traffic situation more readily."
In order to switch to Linux BIOS is would need to be able to boot windows correctly first (last I check there where some BIOS calls that stopped most newer Windows from booting correctly).
It would also need a nice VESA/ASCII config menu and bootscreen. I think if that happened manufacturers might take a serious look at it. It might really happen if they can add suport for full resolutions with animations and such but that would require drivers for most videocards to get full resolutions (1920x1200 isn't suported under VESA 3.0, I don't think most widescreen resolutions are). If bulletproof Xorg was avilable at boot that would be awesome but its too large (There is KDrive but thats VESA so defats the purpose). Maybe just making it prwdy and forgetting about the resolutions or letting people select them. Then there is the problem of weather or not loading hardware that much in the BIOS will allow windows and other OSes to use it.
It is a cool idea but it needs some fixing of the rough edges and vendor support, but then again so does most open source software around today. If a large Mobo manufacturer where to start supporting it, adding in hardware support then we might get somewhere but even the Mobo manufactures will have problems with Chipset manufacturers and other component makers requiring NDAs.
Gigabyte apparently did have some partial support for LinuxBIOS on one of their Mobos so maybe they are starting to look at it. Also OpenBIOS has been used previously as the primary BIOS by at least one motherboard (Might have been either ASUS or GBYTE I forget).
Having the choice of GPLv3 is fairly close to being pointless, the GPLv3 is designed to plug loopholes but if a company wants that can just go with the GPLv2 without the restrictions.
With that said I doubt Launchpad is going to be running on a TIVO any time soon.
The possibility of patents does exist, since a company could take launchpad and code patented stuff into their fork of launchpad, then charge for it and sue anyone who uses the opensource product without a licence.
Having the GPLv3 option does allow someone to fork it and make a GPLv3 only version, but then this version would have no way to share code between the 2, its also unlikely to become widely used unless it has some killer feature (that isn't just reimplemented on the official branch). It does provide the option of allowing the product to change license if the rest of the opensource community goes GPLv3.
I wounder how long until the law says you can't make copies of your apple by planting seeds.
Actually with genetic engineering and patents of life this might already be the case.
I think the real issue is who is better at bribing judges, or using missinformation to confuse people, like how MS send men in black to California to confuse people about which was OOXML and ODF and they ended up voting on OOXML thinking that was the truly open standard.
Its not exactly a real map, its just a really basic heat map, having the ability to zoom in and such isn't really going to be much of an improvement over viewing the jpeg http://ipac.jpl.nasa.gov/media_images/ssc2007-09a_ medium.jpg
Even if it was more than a heat map. the planet doesn't even have anything mappable, its a gas giant so its continuously changing (although maybe there would be some more permanent features like the great red spot on Jupiter).
I imagine the Google landmarks for it would consist of "(A) The hot bit.", at leas on Mars and the Moon there are some craters etc...
Having other planets on Google maps would be nice, but there aren't any maps of any of them yet:(
Technically these are considered worms, as they actively self propagate, they seek out vulnerabilities in other systems and infect them.
Viruses on the other hand attach to similar files and require the user to transfer the file and execute it on another system having a passive attack vector.
I'm not sure i would count the iPod Linux virus as a virus as it would have to be able to infect other iPods somehow, if it can't infect other iPods then its really just malicious code. Granted you can take the binary files from one iPod and put it on another but thats not likely to happen meaning it has basically no self propagation.
I doubt Dell would have much of a price reduction for systems shipped without windows.
There was that article a while back about people using the EULA clause that required OEMs to refund the money if the user didn't agree to the EULA, the Dell refund was for $53. This would indicate that Dell has a fairly good deal with Microsoft to get Windows at a reduced price (This itself might be a reason for not shipping Linux, as MS could start charging full price again as a retaliation).
The other thing is that Dell can ship with spyware, adware, AOL, Yahoo! toolbar, etc... to get a price reduction, unless they can do the same for Linux, they might actually be loosing money by not shipping Windows depending on how much these packages pay Dell. Although if they pay via usage rather than the number of shipped installs then offering systems without an OS might not matter so much because the systems would probally be getting wiped anyway but if they ship Linux installs then there Windows sales would probably go down with people trying to save money.
There are non-GPL user space tools available, we could find that the FreeBSD user space tools are ported to the Linux platform, or alternatively a fork of the tools. Xorg isn't released under the GPL, its got its own license, the MIT X license (I believe its closer to the BSD license than the GPL)
Personally I feel that the GPLv3 could be a huge threat to Freesoftware, i think things like anti-DRM should be in a separate license that developers can choose for their own software and not forced onto the end users through the userspace tools, Linux(well the GNU userspace tools) just doesn't have enough of a market share to try throwing this kind of weight around, its just going to drive more corporations to Windows (or maybe FreeBSD/closedCommericalSolaris).
Not being able implement an open source hardware driver that Linux uses on OpenSolaris(when its GPLv3ed) or FreeBSD because nobody can agree on the definition of Freedom seems the opposite of freedom.
I think any code I release will be released under the most liberal license i can find and let everyone else work it out, I would also recommend considering dual licensing or ensuring that all patches submitted to a project give full permissions to the project owner. It does run the risk of the owner selling out to a company, but the original project will always be free and can be forked.
Nobody in any of my classes buys the textbooks (other than the $7AUD printed notes), my OOP lecturer asked how many people had actually brought the book and only around 2 in a class of 50 had. Maybe its because I'm doing computer stuff and just about everything is available on line on Wikipedia or 1000's of other tutorial sites, compared to a paperback book thats less than 300 pages long and costs around $100AUD, also for most of it the printed lecture notes are generally enough. Not sure how it is with non CS courses.
Then you can screw everyone over by charging sick people $120 a pill for it and not bothering to continue research or improving it, just releasing slight variations of it.
Wounder if we will ever see some medical industries move to countries without these kinds of patent laws and start to produce medication for 10% of the cost. Wouldn't be allowed to export them to the US but there would be nothing stopping ill people from going to there or importing them. Would be interesting to see if governments started to seize needed medical supplies because of patent laws.
With Second Life becoming Opensource soon it would seem a much better solution would be to work out a system of servers based on that.
There would need to be client side storing of items, player avatar, scripts and textures which would either need to be uploaded to the server on client entry or transfered player to player to save server bandwidth.
I don't think the distributed system that second life uses where servers run a fix block of land and you can walk off the edge of one and onto an other server would work since there would need to be a way to work out what servers are next to other servers and servers disappearing would break stuff, but maybe a system of portals to other servers acting like hyperlinks would work.
There are also browsers in some of them:)
This actually does make sense, things like bookmarks and history can be kept online without requiring any bookmark synchronizers or needing to be accessed from a special bookmarks site, other than the initial webOS connection, also you could enable access to the bookmarks through such a portal site and enable synchronizers to get the best of everything.
With that said, I think that webOSes them selfs are kind of pointless. It would be much better to have a web based NX client (like the one VNC has) and just virtualize an entire trimmed down operating system. Although possible it might be useful to be able to click on files in the webos filebrowser and have them downloaded locally, although I'm sure with some basic java script hooks on the browser side and some modification to the file manager being virtualized it could be done.
Might be worth requiring by law that all genetically altered food is of a obviously diffrent colour as a kind of warning, I would love blue apples, then again I had that green tomato sauce, that made me feel sick. Maybe the next Firefox crop circle could be in colour.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been wondering how long it would take for them to make it onto main stream BitTorrent, FreeNet or Wikileaks, if there out there all it takes is one to upload them and the collective geeks desire to own your own nuclear blueprints would do the rest.
It could also be a problem for the future if someone invents molecular assemblers. I guess we would all need a nuke proof coating surrounding us or some kind of brain uploading to distributed servers.
Personally I think it is fairly safe to consider this the year of the Linux desktop.
Several million EeePC's where shipped with Linux on them after all, and many other subnote books are planning too.
Then add into account the exponential Ubuntu user growth and the absolute suckage of Vista.
I'm not sure exactly what conditions are needed to be officially branded the year of the Linux desktop. Or are we expecting over %50 usage or some astronomical usage jump from %4 to %12 within months. Some kind of Linux singularity similar in concept to a technological singularity where the computers basically just start to install Linux themselves and it spreads virally?
Then again, perhaps this is just the year of the Linux laptop instead although for many the laptop is their desktop.
Huge amount of research is actually done at Universities, or for the military. Things like regrowing human limbs and brain-computer interfaces is being funded by DARPA and lets not forget the whole space race. It then taken by companies and claimed as their own, take Microsoft Surface, look back a few years and you will see multi-touch interfaces such as the one by Jeff Hun. And look at the work that guy did with the Wiimote, how long will it be before that's in devices.
Companies need to keep improving their designs in order to sell new stuff, and their designs need to be better than their competitors, and since their competitors would be able to take their improvements they need to do it quickly. This already happens, look at the shit loads of subnote book devices that has popped into existence over the last 3 months. This was mainly due to the XO laptop, then the EeePC's success. What would have happened if there was a patent on making a laptop a specific size? That might sound like a stupid patent but then so its patenting clicking on a link to get an image.
Drug companies have already had a drastic reduction of discoveries, they just pretend to have had real ones. %90 of new drugs are just the old ones changed slightly because the old designs where running out of patents. A companies patented a mirror image of a molecule of a drug. Companies are patenting your genetic code right now and the genetic code of other life forms. The current lifesaving drugs are insanely overpriced for what they are, chemically there is nothing harder about making life saving anti-cancer/aids or whatever medicine than headache medicine, but no one would pay $100 a pill to relieve a headache.
No drug companies want to actually invent cures for anything either, that would be bad business.
The other thing to consider is China, they don't care about patents, they will claim they do to get into the WTO but trying to stop a billion people for making and selling something they can create because someone in America came up with it first isn't likely to get very far. China are starting to get their shit together and with their massive population they should be able to invent much quicker, when things like their new IPv6 internet is rolled out or technologies like WiMax let large chunks of the population get onto it while needing almost no infrastructure. OpenSource education methods would work great in China, sure there are things like censorship but the government isn't likely to try and stop people from learning howto build microprocessors (although computing power will be more likely to cause an overthrow of the government than anything else).
Memory isn't the main reason for Micro kernels, in fact a microkernel (and the servers required to run it) will likely use more memory imho since every process that replaces part of the kernel will require its own crap, unless you strip down the amount of stuff running, but you can do that on a monolithic modularized kernel anyway. I don't feel that Linus has demonstrated the death of microkernels, just that systems aren't ready for them yet, specifically that they weren't in 1983 (when Hurd was announced, or 1991 when Linux was). Besides we don't know what would have happened if Hurd had seen the same amount of development as Linux, Hurd had some recent activities to change to a newer better kernels (such as L4) at least twice but the development community seems to be stalled. Also don't forget OSX uses a hybrid Microkernel. I think the future of microkernels will be for things like cloud computing and clusters providing the communication between each node is fast enough, in this case they will run in virtual machines ontop of regular systems. This probably won't be for a while though, ie when cloud computers are made from actual clouds or nanoprocessors or such.
There are quite a few anti-MafiAA groups, things the the EFF stop corporations from abusing copyright laws, they also support thing like anonymous internet usage so if they MAFIAA groups win filesharing can switch to encrypted darknet systems similar to Freenet (but hopefully faster and less painful). The Piratebay have a few legal cases coming up and when the only witness and the policeman responsible for recent Piratebay stuff happens to now be employed by the opposition they have a fairly good chance of winning.
I though the holy grail was self replicating fabricators effectively killing the economy when people can print diamonds, gold, oil, electric cars, monster trucks, food, medical supplies, platinum, titanium, nanotubes, cake, solar panels, computers (to the point that it becomes a computing power vs mass and probably quantum), mp3 players, replacement organs, replacement people, guns, nukes, space elevator materials, self sustaining spaceships/stations, replacement cells to reverse the aging process, green eggs and ham, money, billions of tiny wireless internet routers, man machine interfaces, an actual holy grail (probably many verities, including those from the Indiana Jones movies), mind uploading systems.
A 3D crystal might be cool and could help lead to that but I wouldn't describing it as the 'holy grail' is a bit much
Problem is that in order to launch rockets for the moon, you need rocks on the moon first, theres nothing up there to build em from so everything must be shipped up. If you going to be shipping up all that stuff up on rockets then its better to build stuff in orbit and save taking off from the moon. A telescope on the moon has been planed, from memory it involved a large dish of reflective liquid (quick sliver?) instead of a mirror since having a massive mirror gets you a much better telescope with longer range. But once again its probably better to launch a few small satellites and like them together to get one large image. Theres nothing we can really do on the moon that we can't do in orbit, and do it with less work since we don't have to relaunch stuff from the moon. About the only thing I can say about a moon base would be that it would be there to stay, Mir was deorbited, skylab too, and the ISS requires orbit boosts so one day it too will be gone. But you don't want to be relying on equipment that is too old anyway (like 30 year old shuttles :/ although they are being phased out in 2010 with a Orion orbiter to replace them in 2014, dunno what happens in that 4 year gap though)
According to Wikipedia china is going to be using the olympics to show off their new internet systems such as IPv6 based security cameras etc...
"China plans to showcase their new CNGI and their new IPv6 networking at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Everything from the security cameras to the taxis to the cameras filming the Olympic events will be networked via IPv6; the events will be streamed live over the Internet while the networked cars will be able to grasp the traffic situation more readily."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Next_Generation_Internet
In order to switch to Linux BIOS is would need to be able to boot windows correctly first (last I check there where some BIOS calls that stopped most newer Windows from booting correctly).
It would also need a nice VESA/ASCII config menu and bootscreen. I think if that happened manufacturers might take a serious look at it. It might really happen if they can add suport for full resolutions with animations and such but that would require drivers for most videocards to get full resolutions (1920x1200 isn't suported under VESA 3.0, I don't think most widescreen resolutions are). If bulletproof Xorg was avilable at boot that would be awesome but its too large (There is KDrive but thats VESA so defats the purpose). Maybe just making it prwdy and forgetting about the resolutions or letting people select them. Then there is the problem of weather or not loading hardware that much in the BIOS will allow windows and other OSes to use it.
It is a cool idea but it needs some fixing of the rough edges and vendor support, but then again so does most open source software around today. If a large Mobo manufacturer where to start supporting it, adding in hardware support then we might get somewhere but even the Mobo manufactures will have problems with Chipset manufacturers and other component makers requiring NDAs.
Gigabyte apparently did have some partial support for LinuxBIOS on one of their Mobos so maybe they are starting to look at it. Also OpenBIOS has been used previously as the primary BIOS by at least one motherboard (Might have been either ASUS or GBYTE I forget).
Having the choice of GPLv3 is fairly close to being pointless, the GPLv3 is designed to plug loopholes but if a company wants that can just go with the GPLv2 without the restrictions. With that said I doubt Launchpad is going to be running on a TIVO any time soon. The possibility of patents does exist, since a company could take launchpad and code patented stuff into their fork of launchpad, then charge for it and sue anyone who uses the opensource product without a licence. Having the GPLv3 option does allow someone to fork it and make a GPLv3 only version, but then this version would have no way to share code between the 2, its also unlikely to become widely used unless it has some killer feature (that isn't just reimplemented on the official branch). It does provide the option of allowing the product to change license if the rest of the opensource community goes GPLv3.
I wounder how long until the law says you can't make copies of your apple by planting seeds. Actually with genetic engineering and patents of life this might already be the case.
Kinda stupid to announced it, any terrorists will just change to a different detonation method.
I started on MS-DOS BAT files and Commodore 64 basic :)
I think the real issue is who is better at bribing judges, or using missinformation to confuse people, like how MS send men in black to California to confuse people about which was OOXML and ODF and they ended up voting on OOXML thinking that was the truly open standard.
Its not exactly a real map, its just a really basic heat map, having the ability to zoom in and such isn't really going to be much of an improvement over viewing the jpeg http://ipac.jpl.nasa.gov/media_images/ssc2007-09a_ medium.jpg
Even if it was more than a heat map. the planet doesn't even have anything mappable, its a gas giant so its continuously changing (although maybe there would be some more permanent features like the great red spot on Jupiter).
I imagine the Google landmarks for it would consist of "(A) The hot bit.", at leas on Mars and the Moon there are some craters etc...
Having other planets on Google maps would be nice, but there aren't any maps of any of them yet :(
Technically these are considered worms, as they actively self propagate, they seek out vulnerabilities in other systems and infect them. Viruses on the other hand attach to similar files and require the user to transfer the file and execute it on another system having a passive attack vector. I'm not sure i would count the iPod Linux virus as a virus as it would have to be able to infect other iPods somehow, if it can't infect other iPods then its really just malicious code. Granted you can take the binary files from one iPod and put it on another but thats not likely to happen meaning it has basically no self propagation.
I doubt Dell would have much of a price reduction for systems shipped without windows.
There was that article a while back about people using the EULA clause that required OEMs to refund the money if the user didn't agree to the EULA, the Dell refund was for $53. This would indicate that Dell has a fairly good deal with Microsoft to get Windows at a reduced price (This itself might be a reason for not shipping Linux, as MS could start charging full price again as a retaliation).
The other thing is that Dell can ship with spyware, adware, AOL, Yahoo! toolbar, etc... to get a price reduction, unless they can do the same for Linux, they might actually be loosing money by not shipping Windows depending on how much these packages pay Dell. Although if they pay via usage rather than the number of shipped installs then offering systems without an OS might not matter so much because the systems would probally be getting wiped anyway but if they ship Linux installs then there Windows sales would probably go down with people trying to save money.
There are non-GPL user space tools available, we could find that the FreeBSD user space tools are ported to the Linux platform, or alternatively a fork of the tools. Xorg isn't released under the GPL, its got its own license, the MIT X license (I believe its closer to the BSD license than the GPL) Personally I feel that the GPLv3 could be a huge threat to Freesoftware, i think things like anti-DRM should be in a separate license that developers can choose for their own software and not forced onto the end users through the userspace tools, Linux(well the GNU userspace tools) just doesn't have enough of a market share to try throwing this kind of weight around, its just going to drive more corporations to Windows (or maybe FreeBSD/closedCommericalSolaris). Not being able implement an open source hardware driver that Linux uses on OpenSolaris(when its GPLv3ed) or FreeBSD because nobody can agree on the definition of Freedom seems the opposite of freedom. I think any code I release will be released under the most liberal license i can find and let everyone else work it out, I would also recommend considering dual licensing or ensuring that all patches submitted to a project give full permissions to the project owner. It does run the risk of the owner selling out to a company, but the original project will always be free and can be forked.
Nobody in any of my classes buys the textbooks (other than the $7AUD printed notes), my OOP lecturer asked how many people had actually brought the book and only around 2 in a class of 50 had. Maybe its because I'm doing computer stuff and just about everything is available on line on Wikipedia or 1000's of other tutorial sites, compared to a paperback book thats less than 300 pages long and costs around $100AUD, also for most of it the printed lecture notes are generally enough. Not sure how it is with non CS courses.
I want a 3d printer that can print... 3d printers Eventually the whole world would be nothing but 3d printers.
Ive had a-loga-rithims (algorithms) and scan-arios (scenarios) from uni tutors.
Then you can screw everyone over by charging sick people $120 a pill for it and not bothering to continue research or improving it, just releasing slight variations of it. Wounder if we will ever see some medical industries move to countries without these kinds of patent laws and start to produce medication for 10% of the cost. Wouldn't be allowed to export them to the US but there would be nothing stopping ill people from going to there or importing them. Would be interesting to see if governments started to seize needed medical supplies because of patent laws.
With Second Life becoming Opensource soon it would seem a much better solution would be to work out a system of servers based on that.
There would need to be client side storing of items, player avatar, scripts and textures which would either need to be uploaded to the server on client entry or transfered player to player to save server bandwidth.
I don't think the distributed system that second life uses where servers run a fix block of land and you can walk off the edge of one and onto an other server would work since there would need to be a way to work out what servers are next to other servers and servers disappearing would break stuff, but maybe a system of portals to other servers acting like hyperlinks would work.
There are also browsers in some of them :)
This actually does make sense, things like bookmarks and history can be kept online without requiring any bookmark synchronizers or needing to be accessed from a special bookmarks site, other than the initial webOS connection, also you could enable access to the bookmarks through such a portal site and enable synchronizers to get the best of everything.
With that said, I think that webOSes them selfs are kind of pointless. It would be much better to have a web based NX client (like the one VNC has) and just virtualize an entire trimmed down operating system. Although possible it might be useful to be able to click on files in the webos filebrowser and have them downloaded locally, although I'm sure with some basic java script hooks on the browser side and some modification to the file manager being virtualized it could be done.
Might be worth requiring by law that all genetically altered food is of a obviously diffrent colour as a kind of warning, I would love blue apples, then again I had that green tomato sauce, that made me feel sick. Maybe the next Firefox crop circle could be in colour.