We've got a *lot* of time to get off the planet before the sun flames out, and even the average amount of time between dinosaur-killer-sized asteroid hits is millions of years.
The odds of winning the lottery are one in 50,000,000 and yet every day some lucky soul hits the jackpot. It has been millions of years since the last dinosaur killer. They're periodic and according to the schedule one is due. These are not the only calamities that can befall us. Only one is needful.
On the other hand, we're a long long way from being able to move any significant fraction of the population into space, and we won't succeed at that if we all die from a messed-up planet first.
A significant fraction is not required. A handful of women and some frozen genetic material should suffice to get started, though as a practical matter we would use more. That and the equipment and engineered biologicals to start the ecology. We can do this today.
We do need to save the planet but we have other needs as well. There are many of us. We can do more than one thing at a time.
If each of us reduces our carbon emissions by half, then in 50 years when there are twice as many of us we will be using the same amount. We will be in no better position to proceed with our other needs than we are now. In 100 years when we're completely out of carbon energy sources and there are four times as many of us the timing will be particularly bad and thereafter will not improve.
If we achieve a colony off of this planet it will be now. Else not. It may already be too late. We are dangerously close to gaining a measurement of L in the Drake Equation in our observable case. L could be less than 300 years, which would go a long way toward explaining the Fermi Paradox.
Windows Sockets specifies a programming interface based on the familiar socket interface from the University of California at Berkeley.
This is only one example out of a great many. Microsoft implements (embraces), extends, and to the extent possible extinguishes other people's standards for their bread and butter. Some people feel it's the only business model they have.
They have the luxury of controlling the largest hoard of software engineers, product planners, marketers, testers, and customers in the desktop application market.
I'm sure in those groups are some individuals who would object to your characterization of them as controlled by Microsoft. No doubt some of them think they're choosing the best platform and that they can change their choice when they find a better one. To the extent they suffer from Microsoft's control many of them resent it. A rebellion is brewing. Regardless, it is amazing how little quality they achieve with so much talent isn't it?
The XML representation of that data sheds a lot of light on it.
The XML representation of a document does indeed shed some light. Have a look at the most trivial letter as an OOXML Word document for an example of why Microsoft programmers should sit quietly in a darkened room until their minds achieve clarity.
Now that Microsoft is marketing Microsoft branded PCs in the emerging markets of India and China their OEM partners who
... depend too much on selling desktop machines...
May feel the need to reevaluate their commitment. In the history of their business when Microsoft comes to the table they want nothing less than the whole pie.
... to risk incurring the wrath of Microsoft.
Dell sells PCs with Linux for individuals and they are expanding their offering to include the European market.
I agree though that IBM is a likely third bidder. Dell would probably love to steal the server thunder of IBM and HP by owning Unix. HP and IBM would not like that. We will have to see if the Novell deal with Microsoft included a poison pill. Lenovo is still too small to play in this game I think.
And of course Novell needs to get their contract with SCO terminated cleanly. Vestigial restrictions could cause issues.
The yearly risk of an "extinction asteroid" isn't compounded like interest, in any way. You don't understand either probability or compounding.
I didn't say it was compounded like interest. I said it was like compound interest. They are both expressed in ratios, fractions or percents and accumulate over time. Those similarities are enough for a fair simile. In your post you say that extinction of the human race is probable:
"Ultimately" the Earth will indeed probably get hit by an "extinction asteroid".
But then you go on to suggest we have more pressing needs. While I would disagree with "Probable" for values of probability less than.999999, let's avoid splitting hairs on this point. What is it about the probable demise of all human life that leads you to the supposition that its prevention is not a matter for current study? Will the discovery of a solution to this problem prevent the cure for cancer, prolong the quest to end hunger, cause balding in kittens? What? An untimely asteroid can solve all of those problems by making them moot. Yes there are other worthy goals to pursue but there are also many people to pursue them.
Let me fix that for you...
on
SCO Loses
·
· Score: 1
Ultimately, that will probably be up to whoever buys Novell.
FTFY. Probably Dell or HP. Now that Novell is found to own Unix they're too small to hold it. Look for either a big player to buy them up in a doomed experiment to prove the power of synergy over entropy or a Microsoft puppet to offer it up as a sacrificial lamb again to distract people from their dog named Vista. It was Ransom Love's hubris that killed Unix, and the arrogance of pride will keep the mummified remains of it on tour forever.
The probability of the Earth catching an extinction asteroid this year is very small. Like compound interest however, over time the small fractions add up to more than one. Ultimately this outcome is not only certain, but it's certain to happen more than once. Not that we would care about the second and third times.
First, whoah, you might want to dial down the dosage just a bit.
To me I appear to be the center of the universe for a number of reasons. In most accepted models, the edges wrap and so every point is as much the center as any other. Like all of us I suffer from the subjective point of view. I won't apologise for this - it's not my fault.
Your views antagonistic to doctrine and dogma, I don't share them. Others don't believe as I do, but I believe in the power of their faith to shape their world for them. Your mileage may vary. Certainly your beliefs don't seem to be leading you to a happy place. You may want to consider the benefit of that.
Whilst our transmitters have shrunk, nearly everyone carries one in their pocket now, so our total power output is huge compared to only 50 years ago.
And they're low power digital frequency hopping radios. The frequencies overlap and in the aggregate, interfere with each other. From the moons of Jupiter with the best equipment available to us they're indistinguishable from background radiation.
The point is moot. It's not just detection of weak remote radio signals. If the rate of expansion assumed in Fermi's Paradox held true we'd have found local artifacts from alien civilizations right here or on the moon at least, at most they'd have colonized earth back before the dinosaur era and we would be pets if we existed at all. Other civilizations would, after all, have had at least a 4 billion year head start and galactic conquest should not take more than 0.025% of that time.
I'm liking the other post that linked to a.ps theory that said gamma ray bursts have been smacking down the rising intelligences and the declining rates of GRBs enable us (and other evolving systems) to achieve sentience across the galaxy simultaneously. The race is on for galactic conquest! Let's go.
Or at the risk of being "Richard Rank" from Contact, maybe they've solved those problems and yet they still like killing other civilizations just for the sheer joy of it.
This is one angle I hadn't considered in my post. I'll concede this point. Although farming creatures to kill are a renewable resource, new and different wild game is a sport some individuals in an advanced civilization might enjoy. Extensions of this concept apply, and alien angles beyond what I imagined. Another poster mentioned backups, but I doubt the occupied -> vacant ratio of livable planets is so high that eradication of us as pests is an efficient solution to this problem.
2) There's energy in the Oort Cloud? I thought it was just a bit of dust flying around.
Not to be pedantic, but mass is energy. That the Oort cloud is rich in hydrogen for fusion and known to have scattered mountain sized collections of frozen hydrocarbons is just bonus. To get manned craft beyond Saturn we would need fusion power at least, or some other as-yet undiscovered fount of energy. Even for unmanned craft that we send that far we use fission.
As another poster pointed out, yes, this brings us back to the question of where are they? Perhaps in the coming decades we will come to see that we've already seen them, we just didn't know how to read the signs. Perhaps the noisy phase of social development is brief enough that no culture passed through it close enough for us to see it, in the brief span we've been looking. Perhaps we are alone for now. If we take the obvious step and expand our sphere everywhere we can, we won't always be. Eventually the lines will diverge enough that "we" will be "them". Space is vast, and after Saturn the landmarks are far apart.
It bothers me that we can't see ion drives in the distance. That must mean the technology is short lived, soon to be surpassed by more efficient means. Otherwise potential alien intelligences would be shifting lunar sized masses with it, and we could see that from a galaxy away.
Creationism is an important aspect of this discussion and shoud not be modded off topic.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator. It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
An important idea in the panspermia theory is that when a star goes nova, the biomass is not totally eliminated. Some fragments remain. When new stars and planets coalesce around the remnant masses those become the seeds for a new generation of life.
So according to that theory, we are the alien life forms we're looking for, in a certain sense.
If mankind is to persist another thousand years we'll have to solve a number of important puzzles. To survive a hundred thousand we'll have to solve many more. By then the pointlessness of immortality as a species may be self evident.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think. Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking? Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
I think what's left is tourism. Intelligence and curiosity are sufficiently linked that a life form evolved enough to solve the necessary problems would want to watch us develop if they could. Perhaps they're here now, secretly recording our ridiculous antics for their own version of reality tv.
Communications infrastructure very much is an essential part of interstate commerce, government and the press. More and more people rely on the Internet exclusively for news and information. Products are ordered and paid for over the Internet. Some products are not available in any other way. Funds are transferred. Travel is arranged. Federal income taxes are paid over it, tax returns are filed on it. Many essential government services at all levels are provided on the Internet. Some places now mandate parallel online services for all public services where possible. Online voting is seeing trials in various places.
You are right that for a state to tell a county or town that they may not build a bridge, road or ferry to allow their citizens to engage in commerce, interact with the federal government, or vote would be a violation of the rights of the citizens. Telling them they can't build a digital bridge to ecommerce, egovernment or slashdot is no different.
But the laws exist. The laws are preventing people from engaging in interstate commerce, interacting with their government in the most accessible way, accessing global commons of information. The laws are not being challenged.
The big money communications interests will buy the death of this bill like they bought the death of the last one. It's coming up on campaign season so lawmakers propose excellent laws as extortion to big money interests. Even the sponsors probably have no real expectation it will pass. Everybody in congress has to have a few of these so they can wave them at the crowds as proof they went to Washington to help their constituents. Then they get their campaign money buy killing the great public spirited laws of the other incumbents. It's a game.
That's a shame. This is an obviously necessary law that would bring great benefit to all US residents. Read the bill. It's only five pages.
I would much prefer my state, county or city government build out fiber networks than build sports stadiums and such things. I would also like a law like "No road project without a pipe to draw fiber through buried under it".
I live in a state where the telco and cableco bought a law to prevent communities from self-helping themselves to modern communications infrastructure even when the commercial interests flat refuse to provide it. The incumbent providers bought the law because they were afraid the projects already under way to build out communications infrastructure in several places in the state would swell into a popular movement of universal broadband for everyone. The muni broadband projects already under way were grandfathered. It's now several years later and guess who has the best bandwidth and lowest prices? Yeah, that would be the munis. Guess who doesn't have service at all? Yeah, that would be the communities that would have built out their infrastructure if it wasn't illegal. Now that the ban is in place the incumbent providers no longer find it so urgent to expand coverage to some areas or improve their offerings at more than a glacial pace.
I would love for this bill to pass, but I'll believe it when I see it.
As our sun orbits toward the face of the galactic disc it encounters extrasolar objects more often due to the more chaotic motion of masses in that zone. The galactic plane is brightest because the vast majority of masses in it never stray and so their motion is orderly in two dimensions. It's the wandering suns with orbits slightly inclined like ours that are the troublemakers that wander away from the order of the plane and mix it up.
1. Technology changes fast, government is slow. Muni-broadband will result in people paying for outdated technology that they won't use. Don't believe me? Go use the computer at your local public library.
My given example is Ephrata, WA, which has had gigabit broadband for MANY YEARS. I don't live there (yet... thinking about buying a shed for some servers though...). The computers at my local library have 10 Mbit links, unfiltered. Tacoma WA muni broadband (Click! Network) has 10Mbit links for the average citizen and has for several years. If your government reps are so slow, replace them.
2. People who can afford better will be forced to pay for something they don't use.
My example muni broadband elements either turn a profit or are scheduled to within the bounds of how much a government entity can turn a profit. The startup costs are funded by bonds that are paid back with interest. The interest is low because cheap muni broadband is a good bet. The fact that competing private sector companies improve their offerings to attempt parity in service and price is just a bonus.
3. Socialist leftist liberals will then complain because the poor is forced to use old sub-par technology, while the rich send their kids to good private schools (Oops, I meant to write 'purchase the latest broadband technology service from the superior private sector'). See a pattern?
Not sure where you're going with this. Schools here also all have good broadband. Where are you, Somalia? Within several miles of my home it's hard to set up a WAP for all the interference. There are so many open WAPs that free broadband for the poor is everywhere. My daughter uses one. I could too but I have servers that require their own IPs.
4. The service will be like every service the government offers. Haven't you ever stood in line at the DMV?
I believe the wait time for installation in the areas under discussion is less than that for other providers. Generally they get exceedingly high marks for service. Perhaps this is because their attitude is not "We don't have to care -- we're the phone company."
5. The real cost will be much greater because the government is inefficient. People won't care because they think the 'rich are paying for it' or whatever, of course.
You just have to trot out every strawman there is, don't you? At your local library and school they have this box where now and then you can put in little slips and change the idjits that run your county if enough of you care. Perhaps the point of my post is to create more awareness and increase the number of people who care. If you're born in the US inefficient government is not your birthright. You have to earn it once a year in November. Part of my point is that new muni broadband has been outlawed in my area so I can't have it until more of my fellow citizens see what the lack is costing us. If you and your neighbors don't care enough to make a change, you deserve what you get.
6. You would stifle innovation if you do not allow third parties to compete to offer you better service than the government.
In the specific areas I referenced third parties are not constrained from competing. Far from it! They are encouraged to compete and they have improved their offerings to meet the market. Many people choose their services for one reason or another. Why people would pay Comcast $100/month for 6/.768 when they could get 1000/1000 for less is beyond me but some do.
Summary: One of the failings of pure capitalism (I'm a capitalist, but not a purist) is that in a monopoly situation (in this case data, but it applies to medicine, insurance, gasoline, and a great many
The service is available to almost everyone in the county. Density is low so the county is huge.
Now how many counties does that golden river of bandwidth flow through? Surely extending that one county over, or two, is no big deal. How many of these mainlines are there, and how many counties are within 100km of one? A: Many and Most of them.
In the 90's I went out and watched them lay this cable. Thousands of strands of single mode glass. How much of it is dark still? 95%?
The politician in my state that signed the prohibition against municipal broadband into law was a Democrat.
Muni broadband is the only known cure for this disease. If you don't fix it where you live, well, the people of central Washington State will be glad to host all of your datacenters and steal most of your high tech jobs.
Lots of those high rise office buildings have fibre connections. The cities you mention are among some of the prime switching points for the internet. The available bandwidth is obscene.
There are available technologies for getting the bandwidth from where it's switched to the common citizen without negotiating a million rights of way. They are not employed for the reason in my post below: the incumbent monopolies have an unlimited budget to maintain the scarcity - and as such the price - of their product.
Let us not pretend there is some other reason. If you can see that skyscraper on the horizon from your roof, it could hit you with more broadband than you and your million neighbors could use, even if you shared it further out. This is about money and nothing else.
Every time somebody trots out this lame excuse I will persist in pointing out that in bucolic Ephrata, Washinton - the middle of nowhere on the road to nowhere - they have gigabit broadband. That's fiber to the premises and gigabit Ethernet to the house, a symmetrical unmetered gigabit link to each subscriber, for less than I pay to Comcast each month.
They get it through their power company and they're grandfathered in but I can't get that deal because the big players bought legislation prohibiting municipal broadband.
So stop already with the story that the last mile is expensive, bandwidth is costly, density is the key lies already. It's about the incumbent monopolies maintaining their profits at the cost of depriving the average citizen of necessary infrastructure full stop.
I agree. Where we are right now is that the pace of improvement will not stop even though the baseline product is far more capable than 90% of the people need. I don't expect this to change any time soon. The person who can make efficient use of a top of the line pc will only become more rare.
The baseline will continue to improve at remarkable rates as each innovation on the bleeding edge drives prior art downmarket.
Peripherals are a different story. I expect more innovation in human-machine interface than we've seen thus far.
but think your information is a little dated. For many years what I said was true. Then for about 18 months it wasn't. I believe the race is back on now.
Today's quad core, vm supporting 64bit machine will be quite useful in 8+ years, especially if you get the ULV processor. But compared to what's on the shelves at WalMart on that day it will still look dated.
What I wonder is what sort of hideous application would require the type of computing horsepower that should be available 8 years hence. By then what's that process supposed to be? 21nm? 24? I trust the rocket scientists at the chip companies will continue to come up with technology to astound us.
They're called errata. The most recent bunch are more plentiful than usual but it's not unheard of. Get your microcode updates, whichevervendor you get your chip from. AMD calls them BIOS updates which partly makes sense since you usually patch the BIOS at the same time. You get them from the OEM of your motherboard or system usually but as you see from those links operating system vendors can put them out too. The errata that have been in the press lately are unlikely to affect chips you buy right now because new chips and systems will almost certainly have their BIOS and microcode updated from those issues before they ship.
No computer is future proof. You can get some extra months on one by buying above average, but the best desktop you can get today will still look sad in three years. Pay extra for bleeding edge if you want to but the best value is middle of the road and frequent upgrades.
She'll need a lot of RAM for VMWare to work well. That will have a huge impact on your cost calculations. Use RAID for performance, she'll need that too.
Processors are important but they're not the whole answer in the performance equation. At this time the bottlenecks tend to be more in the RAM and HD I/O.
Slashdot Mirror
The odds of winning the lottery are one in 50,000,000 and yet every day some lucky soul hits the jackpot. It has been millions of years since the last dinosaur killer. They're periodic and according to the schedule one is due. These are not the only calamities that can befall us. Only one is needful.
A significant fraction is not required. A handful of women and some frozen genetic material should suffice to get started, though as a practical matter we would use more. That and the equipment and engineered biologicals to start the ecology. We can do this today.
We do need to save the planet but we have other needs as well. There are many of us. We can do more than one thing at a time.
If each of us reduces our carbon emissions by half, then in 50 years when there are twice as many of us we will be using the same amount. We will be in no better position to proceed with our other needs than we are now. In 100 years when we're completely out of carbon energy sources and there are four times as many of us the timing will be particularly bad and thereafter will not improve.
If we achieve a colony off of this planet it will be now. Else not. It may already be too late. We are dangerously close to gaining a measurement of L in the Drake Equation in our observable case. L could be less than 300 years, which would go a long way toward explaining the Fermi Paradox.
I'll quote here from "Microsoft Windows 2000 TCP/IP Implementation details" because it's an important and convenient example:
This is only one example out of a great many. Microsoft implements (embraces), extends, and to the extent possible extinguishes other people's standards for their bread and butter. Some people feel it's the only business model they have.
I'm sure in those groups are some individuals who would object to your characterization of them as controlled by Microsoft. No doubt some of them think they're choosing the best platform and that they can change their choice when they find a better one. To the extent they suffer from Microsoft's control many of them resent it. A rebellion is brewing. Regardless, it is amazing how little quality they achieve with so much talent isn't it?
The XML representation of a document does indeed shed some light. Have a look at the most trivial letter as an OOXML Word document for an example of why Microsoft programmers should sit quietly in a darkened room until their minds achieve clarity.
One downmod and you're back to trolling at 1.
Now that Microsoft is marketing Microsoft branded PCs in the emerging markets of India and China their OEM partners who
May feel the need to reevaluate their commitment. In the history of their business when Microsoft comes to the table they want nothing less than the whole pie.
Dell sells PCs with Linux for individuals and they are expanding their offering to include the European market.
I agree though that IBM is a likely third bidder. Dell would probably love to steal the server thunder of IBM and HP by owning Unix. HP and IBM would not like that. We will have to see if the Novell deal with Microsoft included a poison pill. Lenovo is still too small to play in this game I think.
And of course Novell needs to get their contract with SCO terminated cleanly. Vestigial restrictions could cause issues.
I didn't say it was compounded like interest. I said it was like compound interest. They are both expressed in ratios, fractions or percents and accumulate over time. Those similarities are enough for a fair simile. In your post you say that extinction of the human race is probable:
But then you go on to suggest we have more pressing needs. While I would disagree with "Probable" for values of probability less than .999999, let's avoid splitting hairs on this point. What is it about the probable demise of all human life that leads you to the supposition that its prevention is not a matter for current study? Will the discovery of a solution to this problem prevent the cure for cancer, prolong the quest to end hunger, cause balding in kittens? What? An untimely asteroid can solve all of those problems by making them moot. Yes there are other worthy goals to pursue but there are also many people to pursue them.
FTFY. Probably Dell or HP. Now that Novell is found to own Unix they're too small to hold it. Look for either a big player to buy them up in a doomed experiment to prove the power of synergy over entropy or a Microsoft puppet to offer it up as a sacrificial lamb again to distract people from their dog named Vista. It was Ransom Love's hubris that killed Unix, and the arrogance of pride will keep the mummified remains of it on tour forever.
But there's opportunity here.
The probability of the Earth catching an extinction asteroid this year is very small. Like compound interest however, over time the small fractions add up to more than one. Ultimately this outcome is not only certain, but it's certain to happen more than once. Not that we would care about the second and third times.
First, whoah, you might want to dial down the dosage just a bit.
To me I appear to be the center of the universe for a number of reasons. In most accepted models, the edges wrap and so every point is as much the center as any other. Like all of us I suffer from the subjective point of view. I won't apologise for this - it's not my fault.
Your views antagonistic to doctrine and dogma, I don't share them. Others don't believe as I do, but I believe in the power of their faith to shape their world for them. Your mileage may vary. Certainly your beliefs don't seem to be leading you to a happy place. You may want to consider the benefit of that.
And they're low power digital frequency hopping radios. The frequencies overlap and in the aggregate, interfere with each other. From the moons of Jupiter with the best equipment available to us they're indistinguishable from background radiation.
The point is moot. It's not just detection of weak remote radio signals. If the rate of expansion assumed in Fermi's Paradox held true we'd have found local artifacts from alien civilizations right here or on the moon at least, at most they'd have colonized earth back before the dinosaur era and we would be pets if we existed at all. Other civilizations would, after all, have had at least a 4 billion year head start and galactic conquest should not take more than 0.025% of that time.
I'm liking the other post that linked to a .ps theory that said gamma ray bursts have been smacking down the rising intelligences and the declining rates of GRBs enable us (and other evolving systems) to achieve sentience across the galaxy simultaneously. The race is on for galactic conquest! Let's go.
This is one angle I hadn't considered in my post. I'll concede this point. Although farming creatures to kill are a renewable resource, new and different wild game is a sport some individuals in an advanced civilization might enjoy. Extensions of this concept apply, and alien angles beyond what I imagined. Another poster mentioned backups, but I doubt the occupied -> vacant ratio of livable planets is so high that eradication of us as pests is an efficient solution to this problem.
Not to be pedantic, but mass is energy. That the Oort cloud is rich in hydrogen for fusion and known to have scattered mountain sized collections of frozen hydrocarbons is just bonus. To get manned craft beyond Saturn we would need fusion power at least, or some other as-yet undiscovered fount of energy. Even for unmanned craft that we send that far we use fission.
As another poster pointed out, yes, this brings us back to the question of where are they? Perhaps in the coming decades we will come to see that we've already seen them, we just didn't know how to read the signs. Perhaps the noisy phase of social development is brief enough that no culture passed through it close enough for us to see it, in the brief span we've been looking. Perhaps we are alone for now. If we take the obvious step and expand our sphere everywhere we can, we won't always be. Eventually the lines will diverge enough that "we" will be "them". Space is vast, and after Saturn the landmarks are far apart.
It bothers me that we can't see ion drives in the distance. That must mean the technology is short lived, soon to be surpassed by more efficient means. Otherwise potential alien intelligences would be shifting lunar sized masses with it, and we could see that from a galaxy away.
Creationism is an important aspect of this discussion and shoud not be modded off topic.
For myself though, I try to see the world as closely as it appears to be, rather than through the interpretations of men. We discuss here things on a cosmic scale perhaps beyond human imagining and I am comfortable with that. I am not comfortable with speculating on the whims and motives of beings divine as I am certain that is beyond my ken.
Of this I am comfortable though: to describe a thing as being something other than what it clearly is can almost always be considered a slight to its creator. It is beyond me to speculate about why a creator would make the world appear to be one thing and then require his adherents to insist it was another. That sounds to me like a cruel game and even less likely than intelligence as random happenstance.
An important idea in the panspermia theory is that when a star goes nova, the biomass is not totally eliminated. Some fragments remain. When new stars and planets coalesce around the remnant masses those become the seeds for a new generation of life.
So according to that theory, we are the alien life forms we're looking for, in a certain sense.
If mankind is to persist another thousand years we'll have to solve a number of important puzzles. To survive a hundred thousand we'll have to solve many more. By then the pointlessness of immortality as a species may be self evident.
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to come here in force from another star has solved the energy, food and mortality puzzles, which leaves conquest unlikely as a goal I should think. Why take the trouble to scrap it up with a pestilent life form at the bottom of a steep gravity well when mass and energy are abundant in the oort cloud and asteroid belt free for the taking? Why travel all the way to another star just for that since those things are doubtless abundant where you came from?
I think what's left is tourism. Intelligence and curiosity are sufficiently linked that a life form evolved enough to solve the necessary problems would want to watch us develop if they could. Perhaps they're here now, secretly recording our ridiculous antics for their own version of reality tv.
Communications infrastructure very much is an essential part of interstate commerce, government and the press. More and more people rely on the Internet exclusively for news and information. Products are ordered and paid for over the Internet. Some products are not available in any other way. Funds are transferred. Travel is arranged. Federal income taxes are paid over it, tax returns are filed on it. Many essential government services at all levels are provided on the Internet. Some places now mandate parallel online services for all public services where possible. Online voting is seeing trials in various places.
You are right that for a state to tell a county or town that they may not build a bridge, road or ferry to allow their citizens to engage in commerce, interact with the federal government, or vote would be a violation of the rights of the citizens. Telling them they can't build a digital bridge to ecommerce, egovernment or slashdot is no different.
But the laws exist. The laws are preventing people from engaging in interstate commerce, interacting with their government in the most accessible way, accessing global commons of information. The laws are not being challenged.
The big money communications interests will buy the death of this bill like they bought the death of the last one. It's coming up on campaign season so lawmakers propose excellent laws as extortion to big money interests. Even the sponsors probably have no real expectation it will pass. Everybody in congress has to have a few of these so they can wave them at the crowds as proof they went to Washington to help their constituents. Then they get their campaign money buy killing the great public spirited laws of the other incumbents. It's a game.
That's a shame. This is an obviously necessary law that would bring great benefit to all US residents. Read the bill. It's only five pages.
I would much prefer my state, county or city government build out fiber networks than build sports stadiums and such things. I would also like a law like "No road project without a pipe to draw fiber through buried under it".
I live in a state where the telco and cableco bought a law to prevent communities from self-helping themselves to modern communications infrastructure even when the commercial interests flat refuse to provide it. The incumbent providers bought the law because they were afraid the projects already under way to build out communications infrastructure in several places in the state would swell into a popular movement of universal broadband for everyone. The muni broadband projects already under way were grandfathered. It's now several years later and guess who has the best bandwidth and lowest prices? Yeah, that would be the munis. Guess who doesn't have service at all? Yeah, that would be the communities that would have built out their infrastructure if it wasn't illegal. Now that the ban is in place the incumbent providers no longer find it so urgent to expand coverage to some areas or improve their offerings at more than a glacial pace.
I would love for this bill to pass, but I'll believe it when I see it.
As our sun orbits toward the face of the galactic disc it encounters extrasolar objects more often due to the more chaotic motion of masses in that zone. The galactic plane is brightest because the vast majority of masses in it never stray and so their motion is orderly in two dimensions. It's the wandering suns with orbits slightly inclined like ours that are the troublemakers that wander away from the order of the plane and mix it up.
duh.
If you think you need this specific version of Office to make good documents then you are illiterate and no software will help.
You're wrong and here's why:
My given example is Ephrata, WA, which has had gigabit broadband for MANY YEARS. I don't live there (yet... thinking about buying a shed for some servers though...). The computers at my local library have 10 Mbit links, unfiltered. Tacoma WA muni broadband (Click! Network) has 10Mbit links for the average citizen and has for several years. If your government reps are so slow, replace them.
My example muni broadband elements either turn a profit or are scheduled to within the bounds of how much a government entity can turn a profit. The startup costs are funded by bonds that are paid back with interest. The interest is low because cheap muni broadband is a good bet. The fact that competing private sector companies improve their offerings to attempt parity in service and price is just a bonus.
Not sure where you're going with this. Schools here also all have good broadband. Where are you, Somalia? Within several miles of my home it's hard to set up a WAP for all the interference. There are so many open WAPs that free broadband for the poor is everywhere. My daughter uses one. I could too but I have servers that require their own IPs.
I believe the wait time for installation in the areas under discussion is less than that for other providers. Generally they get exceedingly high marks for service. Perhaps this is because their attitude is not "We don't have to care -- we're the phone company."
You just have to trot out every strawman there is, don't you? At your local library and school they have this box where now and then you can put in little slips and change the idjits that run your county if enough of you care. Perhaps the point of my post is to create more awareness and increase the number of people who care. If you're born in the US inefficient government is not your birthright. You have to earn it once a year in November. Part of my point is that new muni broadband has been outlawed in my area so I can't have it until more of my fellow citizens see what the lack is costing us. If you and your neighbors don't care enough to make a change, you deserve what you get.
In the specific areas I referenced third parties are not constrained from competing. Far from it! They are encouraged to compete and they have improved their offerings to meet the market. Many people choose their services for one reason or another. Why people would pay Comcast $100/month for 6/.768 when they could get 1000/1000 for less is beyond me but some do.
Summary: One of the failings of pure capitalism (I'm a capitalist, but not a purist) is that in a monopoly situation (in this case data, but it applies to medicine, insurance, gasoline, and a great many
The service is available to almost everyone in the county. Density is low so the county is huge.
Now how many counties does that golden river of bandwidth flow through? Surely extending that one county over, or two, is no big deal. How many of these mainlines are there, and how many counties are within 100km of one? A: Many and Most of them.
In the 90's I went out and watched them lay this cable. Thousands of strands of single mode glass. How much of it is dark still? 95%?
In short, I call BS.
The politician in my state that signed the prohibition against municipal broadband into law was a Democrat.
Muni broadband is the only known cure for this disease. If you don't fix it where you live, well, the people of central Washington State will be glad to host all of your datacenters and steal most of your high tech jobs.
Lots of those high rise office buildings have fibre connections. The cities you mention are among some of the prime switching points for the internet. The available bandwidth is obscene.
There are available technologies for getting the bandwidth from where it's switched to the common citizen without negotiating a million rights of way. They are not employed for the reason in my post below: the incumbent monopolies have an unlimited budget to maintain the scarcity - and as such the price - of their product.
Let us not pretend there is some other reason. If you can see that skyscraper on the horizon from your roof, it could hit you with more broadband than you and your million neighbors could use, even if you shared it further out. This is about money and nothing else.
Every time somebody trots out this lame excuse I will persist in pointing out that in bucolic Ephrata, Washinton - the middle of nowhere on the road to nowhere - they have gigabit broadband. That's fiber to the premises and gigabit Ethernet to the house, a symmetrical unmetered gigabit link to each subscriber, for less than I pay to Comcast each month.
They get it through their power company and they're grandfathered in but I can't get that deal because the big players bought legislation prohibiting municipal broadband.
So stop already with the story that the last mile is expensive, bandwidth is costly, density is the key lies already. It's about the incumbent monopolies maintaining their profits at the cost of depriving the average citizen of necessary infrastructure full stop.
I agree. Where we are right now is that the pace of improvement will not stop even though the baseline product is far more capable than 90% of the people need. I don't expect this to change any time soon. The person who can make efficient use of a top of the line pc will only become more rare.
The baseline will continue to improve at remarkable rates as each innovation on the bleeding edge drives prior art downmarket.
Peripherals are a different story. I expect more innovation in human-machine interface than we've seen thus far.
but think your information is a little dated. For many years what I said was true. Then for about 18 months it wasn't. I believe the race is back on now.
Today's quad core, vm supporting 64bit machine will be quite useful in 8+ years, especially if you get the ULV processor. But compared to what's on the shelves at WalMart on that day it will still look dated.
What I wonder is what sort of hideous application would require the type of computing horsepower that should be available 8 years hence. By then what's that process supposed to be? 21nm? 24? I trust the rocket scientists at the chip companies will continue to come up with technology to astound us.
They're called errata. The most recent bunch are more plentiful than usual but it's not unheard of. Get your microcode updates, whichever vendor you get your chip from. AMD calls them BIOS updates which partly makes sense since you usually patch the BIOS at the same time. You get them from the OEM of your motherboard or system usually but as you see from those links operating system vendors can put them out too. The errata that have been in the press lately are unlikely to affect chips you buy right now because new chips and systems will almost certainly have their BIOS and microcode updated from those issues before they ship.
No computer is future proof. You can get some extra months on one by buying above average, but the best desktop you can get today will still look sad in three years. Pay extra for bleeding edge if you want to but the best value is middle of the road and frequent upgrades.
She's unlikely to tax either one.
She'll need a lot of RAM for VMWare to work well. That will have a huge impact on your cost calculations. Use RAID for performance, she'll need that too.
Processors are important but they're not the whole answer in the performance equation. At this time the bottlenecks tend to be more in the RAM and HD I/O.
Or you can't use all your memory sockets because the memory controller for half of them is in the second potentially non-extant CPU.
Balancing the amount of memory on each side is a good idea too.