Dealing with global warming isn't the only reason to save. I don't like wasting my money. If there's an easy way to spend less, I'll take it. Doesn't matter if there is global warming or not.
I'm in a 35 year old 2200 sq ft house with 2 other people, gas furnace and gas water heater, and currently we use about 6500 to 7000 kWh of electricity per year, which I understand is very good. Total energy bill is about $1400 per year. About half our money goes towards heating and cooling. I'm always watching for ideas to save more energy.
Lately, I've been thinking about the fridge. It's a 1995 model that takes 800 kWh/year, and was about the least efficient available at the time, according to the Energy Star sticker on it. Still works fine, just that the gap between the freezer and fridge doors is not well insulated, so it's cold, and collects condensation, which makes mold grow on the seal. Might be why it got such a poor efficiency rating. In 1996 (missed by 1 year, doh!), refrigerators got much more efficient. I could get a new fridge that takes only 400 kWh/year, for about $600. That would save us about $50/year on the electricity bill. Worth doing? It's a borderline case. I like to have a payback of at most 5 years. Maybe if a sale comes along, I'll jump on it.
In the years this crazy case has dragged on, we've seen awards of $222,000, $54,000, $1,920,000, $1,500,000, and a settlement offer. We don't know what the offer was, but may have been a few hundred or a few thousand. The $54000 would have been lower if the law had allowed it. Obviously, they're having a very difficult time deciding just what the damages should be. When it is so difficult to set an appropriate damage amount, it seems to me that calls for an examination of the basic premise of the suit and the laws it is based upon.
This whole case tries to treat the defendant as if she was a distributor in an environment where the ability to distribute is uncommon, because duplication and distribution is expensive. In such an environment, it may be reasonable to suppose that she might have done the record companies out of hundreds or even thousands of sales, and so a penalty of many thousands of dollars may be a fair amount. But this is not the environment we live in today. On the Internet, anyone can be a distributor at very little cost, and duplication is very nearly zero cost. This is not 1984, when the only practical way to illegally copy a lot of music was to run a bootleg CD stamping (or even vinyl record stamping) or cassette tape recording business, which cost serious money. The law should be changed to reflect these facts. And the court ought to have the power or guts to do more than regretfully reduce the damages insufficiently to fix the real problem. They're leaving a mess, and hoping the legislature takes the hint and does something about it. Meantime, the victims of these lawsuits are harmed disproportionately.
The industry is abusing the slowness of adaptation of new principles in the law to crucify and make an example of a victim. Letting bullies run wild is a hell of a way to run a justice system.
Nice article to spur a bit of recreational math. They even have a nice little "quality" formula to use for rating your finds. It's obvious that the place to look is powers of small numbers, especially primes.
I used a few command line tools, bc and factor, and some bash shell scripting to check a few combinations. Skimmed through the results of commands like this:
for ((i=1;i < 25;i++));do echo -n "$i "; echo "13^15-5^$i"|bc|factor;done
With that, I found a few decent quality combinations:
For sums less than 10^17, fewer than 2*10^4 combinations exist that are above a quality of 1.2. A brute force search might take a long time to find just 1.
I use LXDE because it is light on the resources. I really do not see why a desktop environment has to use several hundred megabytes of RAM. But even LXDE takes a lot. Needs about 100M. It makes them sluggish. The Firefox developers embarked on a "memshrink" program, and it's yielded excellent dividends. That effort made Firefox faster and more reliable. Seems Linux desktops could benefit from a similar hard look at memory usage.
LXDE has other problems. The file manager, pcmanfm, is still buggy and prone to crashes. Move lots of files around with it, and its stability goes to pot. It'll quit handling commands when it doesn't just crash. I've had to close it and start it up again to get it to work properly. I've not had good experiences with KDE or Gnome's file managers either. The file manager is a core part of any desktop environment, and the ones available in Linux are not good enough. Then there's the window manager, Openbox. Openbox works fine, but it isn't easy to configure. It has unusual commands (Shade/Roll up/down, and Un/decorate) that only serve to confuse the casual user, and which cannot be removed. If I switch to, say jwm, which doesn't have such extraneous features, then I have to deal with lxpanel and jwm's dueling task bars.
The UIs of all these desktop environments are full of holes and missing functionality. Still difficult to do it all and not at some point drag out the old text editor. For an example of a hole in the functionality, in LXDE if you right click on the desktop, a window pops up. Fine so far. Then if you click on the main menu (aka Start) button, that popup window does not go away, and the menu does not come up. You have to click somewhere on the desktop to make that popup window go away, then you can access the menu by clicking on the magic button. Why does it work that way? It's kludgy, that's why. The Linux desktop is still a messy collection of independent apps that don't play nice with each other. It lacks polish.
Peripherals are another weak spot. What happens if you try to print something, but you forgot to turn the printer on first? Depends how CUPS is configured. That job could hang around in the queue forever, and you will not be able to print until it is cleared. And it can't be cleared by any action that makes sense to a casual user. Canceling the job is the way to get printing working again, but this is not so easy. Turning the printer on doesn't work. Even rebooting doesn't work. But first, the user may not know any of this is happening, and will try to print again. Might end up with multiple copies. There may not be a printer dialog in which the user can cancel a job, instead the user has to pull up a browser and navigate to localhost:631. Or bring up ye olde command line prompt and do "lprm *". How many casual users know to do that? Evidently HAL was a wrong turn, and now it's all dbus.
One other thing: games. For games, must have hardware accelerated 3D graphics on commodity low end graphics cards. The open source drivers still can't do it. The proprietary drivers can, but cause other problems.
Where are you guys seeing 6 figure pay? The only positions companies seem to have are very junior positions, for $60k at best. Often they want so much experience and so many skills that the position isn't really junior, but they call it that so they can pay less.
there's no reason to be upset about police or anyone else getting data on how you drive
Oh yes there is! Do you know what a fishing expedition is, in the context of law? This hands them a whole lot of data to fish with.
Governments like to criminalize behavior, at the urging of corporations who stand to profit thereby, for less than honest motives such as taxation disguised as fines for "bad" behavior. Vendors and operators of enforcement equipment make more money, and so does the government. Win win! Did you miss out on the red light camera scam? You know, where they nail you for missing that yellow light by a fraction of a second. They claim it is a matter of public safety, as if red light running is out of control, and rear end collisions caused by drivers desperately slamming on the brakes out of fear of a red light camera ticket never happens. That also overlooks other solutions, such as synchronizing nearby traffic lights, increasing the yellow time, and improving the design of the intersection. When they make the Crime and Punishment method of handling a problem their first option, or even invent a problem, you ought to realize why. Punishment is profitable. They've been known to shorten the yellow light to increase the violation rate, but they've gotten more cautious about that, and now prefer to find a light that never had a long enough yellow to start with, so they can say they never screwed with the timings. Parking meters with excessive fines are another, very old revenue raising technique.
Until the day comes that such underhanded schemes are unthinkable, that "anything you say can and will be used against your pocketbook" never happens, I will not willingly give out that kind of data on me.
The data you're talking about is not private. SSN, seriously? What stinks about something like the SSN is that you are told you have to both keep it secret, keep it away from identity thieves, and you are frequently required to give it out in plaintext for all the things the identity thieves also want to use it for. How many times now have we heard of some company database breach that leaked thousands of customers' credit card numbers and other "sensitive" info? What really is the point of signing your name, when your signature is so easily obtained and forged? It's pure security theater. The system is seriously flawed at a fundamental level. The reason your info is not all over the place is not because you've guarded it well. You can't protect data that's already in many other hands. It's because most people are honest and don't have any use for it.
Banks and governments and the like ought not to rely much on such publicly known information to authenticate people. We're seeing some progress with the availability of one use credit card numbers, but we need a lot more. We could do some kind of digital signature algorithm on a credit card sized device, fairly cheaply. But evidently not so cheaply that banks feel it's worth doing. At the least, they shouldn't expect you to guard those numbers as if they're a huge, important secret. It was certainly made important to you, but it isn't a secret. FDE is overkill for that, but if you're more comfortable using FDE, go for it. Just don't kid yourself that it protects your SSN.
What if you own and operate 2 businesses, a weapons shop, and a people locater service? Maybe they're next door, maybe not. Maybe they have web sites with links to each other, or maybe not. Then, after selling some weapons and locations, some people whose location you sold turn up dead by weapons you sold. We could even toss in a 3rd business of yours, a used car dealership, from which the murderers obtained a cheap ride. Doesn't sound like enough to be a conspiracy on your part. The guilty parties are the ones who did the deeds.
But I think the court will look at intent. If the records of these businesses are sloppy, so that it is difficult or impossible to trace the weapons and cars, and this is deliberate as the businesses go as far as hinting at this in their advertising, then you might be in some trouble.
Part 2 of your method will quickly bog down if you run into many files that are the same size. Takes (n choose 2) comparisons, for a problem that can be done in n time. If you have 100 files all of one size, you'll have to do 4950 comparisons. Much faster to compute and sort 100 checksums.
Also, you don't have to read the whole file to make use of checksums, CRCs, hashes and the like. Just check a few pieces likely to be different if the files are different, such as the first and last 2000 bytes. Then for those files with matching parts, check the full files.
the sanctions, absolutely necessary to keep Saddam from starting ANOTHER war in the middle east, was killing 50,000 Iraqi kids per year.
Sure about that? Iraq could have fed those kids, if indeed that wasn't a minor matter blown out of proportion or an entirely invented problem for purposes of propaganda. Saddam instead found it more convenient to starve the children of his enemies, and blame it on sanctions. It's a triple win for him, if it works. Eliminate internal enemies, whip up popular hatred for the US, and make the sanctions look inhumane. Tricky though, as the people may not believe his nonsense, and blame him instead of the US.
And you forget the stated reason for the war on Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction. WMDs, not children. Not oil either, though that was a strong unstated reason. And then to learn that there weren't any WMDs-- think our allies are ever going to be that credulous again?
The only sort of gov't anyone seems to get there is a brutal dictatorship
That's a typical subjective evaluation too easily made and abused for nefarious purposes. You forget the power of office politics. He could be a well-mannered, polite person who was given the brush off and shoved into a closet, for political reasons. The other people on the "team" were afraid they'd look bad, and this would imperil their jobs. So they maligned and sidelined him, behind his back of course. Said he wasn't a team player, and a whiner, and all sorts of other difficult to assess bad qualities. Blamed him for every problem regardless of actual fault. By such means, the cabal can cover up their own mistakes and push a dangerous rival closer to termination at the same time. They may even resort to sabotage, "accidentally" deleting his work, for instance, then enjoying it when management roasts him for lack of productivity. Very Sienfeldesque. Who is management going to believe when it's one person's word against 5?
Think cabals like that are uncommon? When people are feeling their own necks, feel they can't afford to be nice or fair, situations can quickly turn ugly. It can get rough when one team member greatly outshines the rest.
Meanwhile, the rock star programmer will soon figure out what is going on. What is he to do? The rest of the team has turned against him, and is determined to make his every effort end in failure. He didn't do anything to deserve that, his "crime" was merely being too smart. He could try to rise above the pettiness, ignoring the politics and concentrating on the job. That might work, but much depends on how able the others are at sabotaging him. He could try to befriend them, help them with problems and the like, but that may simply not work. When someone has to be voted off the island, all he is really doing is persuading the others to cut someone else's throat instead of his. Each may still think that their best chance is to get rid of the most dangerous competitors first, while they still have numbers on their side, and the rock star can't dodge that assessment. Once he's gone, the rest have better chances against one another than they would have against him. He's a dead man walking in an environment like that. He could therefore play dumb, but it's difficult to maintain the facade for any length of time. If he complains to management, he merely confirms that he is a whiner. If he quits, he gets painted as yet another flighty, difficult prima donna, further confirming the general view of rock star programmers. This view is very convenient for the incompetent masses, and they are quite good at suckering management into that kind of thinking, that too good is bad, and too smart is dumb. And so it is perpetuated, in crummy articles like this one. He could try to demonstrate to management that the rest of the team is incompetent, show them for the conniving, treacherous scum they are. But this is likely a waste of time. It's rare that management is at that borderline level of competence where they didn't already know it, but once there is evidence, they will be convinced, and will take appropriate action. If they are newly arrived, then there's a chance. But if they've been there awhile, forget it. More likely, they already know the team plays dirty, and can't do anything about it thanks to nepotism. They may not care. Or, they don't know, in which case they can't be very good managers, not to know the temperament of their subordinates. If they aren't any good at that, they won't be much good at seeing through the bull, and are more likely to fire him than the real troublemakers. The management may even side with the incompetents, seeing them as kindred spirits.
Have you actually driven a Metro? Been in a crash in a Metro? I have, to both. They handle, and handle crashes just fine. You don't know what you're talking about when you make that "incredibly unsafe" claim. A 1960s era car of any size is far, far less safe. Motorcycles are worse yet. A young, inexperienced driver ran a red light, and I was the unfortunate who happened to be entering the intersection at the time. I T-boned him at a speed of 45 to 50 mph. My Metro and his car were totaled, but I walked away from that wreck with a few bruises. In most 1960 era cars, big or small, that same accident would have seriously injured or killed me.
Very lucky for him and his passengers that I was driving such a light car. The worst injury they suffered was a cut that required some stitches. Had I instead been in some SUV, they would have been hurt much worse, maybe even fatally. Think about that the next time you opt for a big vehicle solely because you think it's safer. Safer for you, maybe or maybe not, but definitely less safe for everyone else on the road. It's fine if you require a big vehicle for work, but don't use that as an excuse when the truth is you just want a bigger vehicle, for safety, or to show off.
Hopefully, the issue will be moot before too many more years. Be nice when we have cars that drive themselves. With reliable automatic driving, we could really cut back on the reinforcements, padding and so on we currently demand our vehicles have.
There were cars that got over 50 mpg. The 90's Geo Metro was just such a car.
Getting to 54 mpg will actually be fairly easy. There's a ton of low hanging fruit auto manufacturers have simply been ignoring. Aerodynamics is a big, big one where it's easy to improve. Smooth the underside. Add skirts to the rear wheels. Change the rear into a "beaver tail" or "boat tail". Add some dimples like they have on golf balls to the trailing edges. Make grill openings smaller.
That's just aero. There's also plenty to be had in weight savings. Use carbon fiber, it's lighter, cheaper, and stronger than aluminum. Weight savings tends to snowball. If you aren't dragging around as much weight, you can have a smaller engine, saving even more weight. Your structural components can be lighter. Get the weight under 2000 pounds, and you can omit the power steering, for yet more weight savings.
Another area ripe for improvement is the torque converter on the classic automatic transmission we've been living with for decades. Those torque converters impose a 20% hit to fuel economy! It's disgusting that the industry couldn't be bothered to switch to more efficient designs, and that the public didn't demand it. Even just a lock for the torque converter helps. You don't have to have a manual transmission and clutch pedal to dodge that 20% hit.
Why don't we already do all this? In the case of rear wheel skirts and smaller grill openings, the reason is pure cosmetics. People think such things look ugly! That we've been willing to burn all this extra gas over such frivolous considerations is a sign of just how much waste, slop, and slack there is.
a close race is good, it means both sides will go out and vote more.
Participation is good, and insofar as a close race raises participation, that's good. But I don't agree that a close race is necessarily good, not when one side has gone bonkers. I'd like to see the Republicans put out of everyone's misery, and replaced with another party, they're so damned crazy anymore.
Republicans have fallen a long, long way from the party of Lincoln, the party that stood proudly against slavery, while the Democrats talked of maintaining the status quo and trying to compromise, of wimpily avoiding the horrors of war at all costs. Would've been nice if the slavery issue could have been resolved without a savage war. The South knew they could not win if the North was determined, yet they started the war anyway, vainly hoping the North would back down. That was never going to happen, not after the first battles threw the North's manhood into doubt!
There was a time when the Republicans were the sober, prudent, well grounded, fiscal conservatives, firmly tied to facts and sound scientific reasoning, and the Democrats were the woolly thinking, misty-eyed fools would thought they could do such things as declare and win a War on Poverty. Those were Republicans I could vote for.
Now the Republicans are the delusional fools. They paint a seemingly lovely picture of the way the world and America was, and seem unable to face reality and the present. They act like it's still the 1950s, still Happy Days. Nice fantasy, for older white men perhaps, but dangerously wrong. But they press on, favoring actions based upon the thought that 1950's America is still with us now. They've cranked up the production of delusional "facts" to frightful levels. They've turned against the very science they used to cherish, becoming scarily contemptuous of it. This denial of Global Warming is just one of many anti-science efforts they've sullied themselves with. Even on fiscal matters, they've blown it. The War of Choice in Iraq was a huge, huge expense. They refuse to consider any kind of health care whatsoever, even those plans that would reduce all our expenses and get us better health care. They won't hear of even just closing tax loopholes to solve these budget issues that have so exercised them lately. They don't say it outright, but what they promise is to take America back to the paradise of the 1950s, if only we will elect them. The most damnable thing is, that in many ways the world of today is way, way better than those "good" old days they recall so fondly. I'm not crazy about the Democrats, but voting for this screwball Republican party is absolutely out of the question.
LendInk's most valuable contribution to society may be the outing of a bunch of authors as at best woefully confused fools vainly fighting the march of technology. I find it hard to believe in the perceptiveness, insight, and progressiveness of these authors-- traits we find make for the best story telling-- when they make a blunder like this. Did they ever admit they got it very wrong, and apologize? I don't know but I guess some slunk away silently in embarrassment, and the rest are still on the warpath, still convinced of the moral inferiority of the balance of society. By their lights we are all cheap, greedy jerks who will read without paying if we can. Perhaps so, but that is an unnecessarily negative way of viewing the situation, as it is based on wrong thinking. Those authors who feel this way are not worth reading. What this really says, again, to anyone who will listen, is that the copyright system is broken. Piracy should not be vilified. Copies of data are simply not a scarce resource, and no amount of legislation can reverse this fact of nature. Most of all, we shouldn't fight copying, we should embrace it as the huge public good it is. We are all more knowledgeable for copying being easy.
Interesting that the latest salvo from the copyright extremists against LendInk is from a doubtful lawyer with a dubious and unsavory reputation. Once again we're looking at an age old question: does the end justify the means? Is it okay to get in bed with the slimiest lawyers on the planet to save copyright? Shouldn't our wiser folks, including authors, already know the answer to such questions? If this DMCA takedown is an unsanctioned, independent act, not done at the behest of the authors, they ought to be quick to say so, and quick to publicly support LendInk.
High elevations can do it too. Mechanical hard drives need some air pressure. Take a typical hard drive up to 17000 ft, unpressurized, and it will fail very quickly. Most hard drive documentation mentions somewhere that they shouldn't be used above 10000 ft, and aren't warranted for that.
We shouldn't need to collect books and music. Only reason I do is as a hedge against copyright extremism, and because the Internet isn't always handy, and storage is cheap. And to serve as a list of stuff I like, but that's easily handled by keeping just lists, not content. This "problem" is not an issue.
I've tried a lot of distros (Slackware, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Gentoo, Zenwalk, Voyage, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, Knoppix, Puppy, Damn Small, Vector, Tiny Core), and am currently using Arch. Arch gets me the closest to current software, without having to spend too much time on updates, and offers a variety of desktop environments and graphics drivers. If the open graphics drivers ever achieve good 3D acceleration, Arch will have them by the next day or 2. When Firefox or kernel.org release updates, Arch is among the 1st to have them packaged. Arch used to be missing some important features, such as 32bit support on 64bit machines, and package signing, but these have been remedied.
I abandoned Gentoo when I saw for myself that compiling everything took too much time. A typical package is updated perhaps 4 times a year, there are about 1000 packages in a typical installation, and an average compile and install time is 10 minutes per package. That means roughly 11 updates every day, for a total of nearly 2 hours per day spent on updating. The killer package was gcc. Use old version of gcc to compile new version, then use newly compiled new version to compile gcc again. Plus, ought to recompile every package on the system when a new gcc comes out, but hardly anyone was that crazy. Worst was when there was some problem that manifested at the end of this lengthy process, and you had to start over after fixing it, if you could. Even Gentoo backed away from the worst pains of updating from source code, offering these different "levels" (level 1, 2 and 3 as I recall), in which some precompiled packages were provided.
I started with Slackware because there wasn't anything else, and stuck with it for a long time. Biggest problem with Slackware was the long delay between updates, and then when an update did come, having it be easier to start all over with a fresh install rather than try to update. Unavoidable, perhaps, for something major such as the change from libc5 and a.out to libc6 and ELF, but shouldn't always be necessary.
Ubuntu tends towards the heavy side. It's not so good for old computers and small hard drives. I could get an i586 version of Arch installed in a 1.6G partition on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M RAM, and have a desktop environment and browser. (Last time I tried it, Firefox 3.5 was current. Can't update to Firefox 4 or later, those take too much memory.) However, so far I prefer Ubuntu over Arch for ARM devices.
I'm still searching for better desktop environments. I'm using LXDE with Openbox, and it's okay but not great. PCManFM is still buggy. Openbox has features ("roll up/down", aka "shade", and "un/decorate") that are useless and confusing to casual users, but which cannot be turned off. Saving of sessions doesn't work. And light though LXDE is, it still takes about 100M RAM. No big deal on a modern PC with 2G or more of RAM, but crippling for an old box with only 256M. On such a machine, I go with just a window manager (usually IceWM), and forget the environment.
Doesn't sound like you appreciate the difficulties of doing an interstellar probe. It's not like silicon chips, in which we've seen astounding improvements. We simply can't do it, not now, and probably not in the next 20 years or even 100 years.
Currently, our fastest escaping probe is Voyager 1, at about 17 km/s relative to the sun. At that rate, a probe will need about 70000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Suppose the velocity we can give probes improves by a factor of 100, which is assuming a lot. (For one thing, gravity assists would be of little value.) That's still 700 years. We have no experience making machines that can last that long. Our civilization might not last that long. We need perhaps 1000 times the velocity, then we're talking only a 70 year wait.
To achieve 1000 times the velocity is not a matter of 1000 times the fuel, it's 1000^2 times the fuel. It's even worse than that, if the probe has to carry its fuel. No matter how we accelerate the probe-- whether with on board ion drives, nuclear bombs, light sails, or something else-- that's such a huge amount of energy that none of these ideas are even remotely feasible. That means it will have to be slower, which puts us back to the problem of how to build something that can last the 1000 plus years such a trip will take. There are many other problems, such as communication, but the primary one is simply the distance. I wouldn't hold my breath for science fantasy either. It's not at all likely we will invent warp drive or some other means of FTL travel.
Sure, they have problems. Firstly, it's an SF themed retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Medieval civilization, right down to the power of the church gradually giving way to merchants. A bit unoriginal perhaps? Then, the entire idea of psychohistory might be depressing. We're no better than the molecules of a gas cloud? The universe is just a giant machine, ticking away like utterly predictable and fatally boring clockwork, and we really do not have free will, we're just puppets going through the motions, as everything is preordained? Except that all that is deeply flawed. At the time those stories were written, Chaos Theory was unknown. I didn't care for the mentalics or the "psycho" terminology. But lot of SF works from the 1950s dabbled with the paranormal, treating those age old superstitions as though there might be something to them. Three to Dorsai! (an omnibus edition) by Gordon Dickson is an example of that. Childhood's End did it too. In a new foreword written some 35 years later, Clarke confessed to embarrassment over that, though I thought he was expecting too much of himself.
SF in particular cannot avoid the problem of getting it very, very wrong because it is all about futuristic speculation which is usually wrong. What I find more grating is getting humanity wrong. Many of the depressing works I find implausible rather than depressing because the premise is based on some seeming flaw in humanity that isn't true. Malthusian stories spring to mind here. Life faced the population pressure problem repeatedly, long before we were around. Exhaustion of resources is a similar theme that usually doesn't hold up. We have the arrogance to think that every problem we face is new. These fearful stories like to wallow in our supposed unwillingness to deal with change. Often there are many solutions, and some are actually easy and pleasant, but in these stories we stupidly choose misery and suffering, preferring to believe the problems we are trying to ignore are impossibly hard to solve when they really aren't. In reality, powerful anti-social control freaks aren't powerful. It's incredible what people imply the President of the US can do when they blame him for basically everything. What will happen when we run out of oil? To hear some people carry on, you'd think the End is Nigh.
The market collapsed because of massive fraud, especially in the home mortgage finance business. The criminals who stole our wealth would love to blame it all on computers, high frequency trading, Europe, oil, God, or whatever. Anything but them.
Guess computers are the whipping boys for the moment. There may be inherent problems with high frequency trading, but no one is sure. What we can be sure of is that fraud, insider trading, and excessive executive compensation hurts the market.
Not at all. Unlike murder, rape, terrorism, and stealing, sharing should not be a crime. Sharing of information is a huge public good. No one gets hurt, no one loses anything, except for imaginary harms done to undeserving, controlling, self appointed gatekeepers who we neither need nor want. Drugs can hurt people, so we should have some regulation of them. The question is, how much? Right now it seems we have too much drug regulation, and it's too punitive and harsh.
Don't be so quick to brand some activity a crime. And stop trying to equate sharing with stealing. They are not the same thing. There are dozens of crimes that we distinguish between for the excellent reason that they are different and merit different handling. Here's a small list of crimes that are not stealing: speeding, vandalism, littering, trespassing, assault and battery, slander and libel, drug possession. There's also a long list of activities that should never have been crimes, things like lese-majesty, blasphemy, heresy, and consumption of alcohol.
Today we have freedom of speech and religion. We lack freedom of knowledge and sharing, and I think we ought to enshrine that in the Constitution alongside those other freedoms, to once and for all squash the intellectual property extremists and permanently end this debate.
Letting crackers know whether someone has used a password lets them try to guess passwords all at once, instead of one user at a time. Once they've harvested a few passwords, the problem of matching them up with usernames is trivial. Grab usernames from email archives and the like, then brute force it from there. It does not take long to go through a few million usernames. The service can't even stop this with the bad idea of locking an account after 3 failed attempts since the cracker would be trying a different account each time.
A much better approach is to not let users choose the whole password. Let users make part of the password, then generate something to add to it that also guarantees it is unique. That way, the service never has to tell new users to choose another password because their first choice is taken. Wouldn't have to reject passwords for being too weak either.
What's really fun are those services that let you enter a 30 character password, then silently truncate it to 8 characters.
Also thrilling when a service is able to tell you what your forgotten password is.
Then there was the login web page that would let you start typing in your credentials before it was finished loading, then move the cursor back to the username input box when it finished loading. I recall Yahoo's webmail did that for a while. Actually, it was a combination of bad design on both the web page and the browser's part. On those occasions when it was a bit slow to load, you'd be typing in your password just as the cursor warped back to the username box. If you hit enter before noticing what had happened, the overly helpful, advanced browser would remember your username...
Another fun one was the service that insisted on selectively applying capitalization rules to usernames. When I created my account, I used all lower case for my username, and it silently changed the first letter to upper case. But it didn't change the case when I attempted to log in. Took me a while to figure out why I couldn't log in...
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Dealing with global warming isn't the only reason to save. I don't like wasting my money. If there's an easy way to spend less, I'll take it. Doesn't matter if there is global warming or not.
I'm in a 35 year old 2200 sq ft house with 2 other people, gas furnace and gas water heater, and currently we use about 6500 to 7000 kWh of electricity per year, which I understand is very good. Total energy bill is about $1400 per year. About half our money goes towards heating and cooling. I'm always watching for ideas to save more energy.
Lately, I've been thinking about the fridge. It's a 1995 model that takes 800 kWh/year, and was about the least efficient available at the time, according to the Energy Star sticker on it. Still works fine, just that the gap between the freezer and fridge doors is not well insulated, so it's cold, and collects condensation, which makes mold grow on the seal. Might be why it got such a poor efficiency rating. In 1996 (missed by 1 year, doh!), refrigerators got much more efficient. I could get a new fridge that takes only 400 kWh/year, for about $600. That would save us about $50/year on the electricity bill. Worth doing? It's a borderline case. I like to have a payback of at most 5 years. Maybe if a sale comes along, I'll jump on it.
In the years this crazy case has dragged on, we've seen awards of $222,000, $54,000, $1,920,000, $1,500,000, and a settlement offer. We don't know what the offer was, but may have been a few hundred or a few thousand. The $54000 would have been lower if the law had allowed it. Obviously, they're having a very difficult time deciding just what the damages should be. When it is so difficult to set an appropriate damage amount, it seems to me that calls for an examination of the basic premise of the suit and the laws it is based upon.
This whole case tries to treat the defendant as if she was a distributor in an environment where the ability to distribute is uncommon, because duplication and distribution is expensive. In such an environment, it may be reasonable to suppose that she might have done the record companies out of hundreds or even thousands of sales, and so a penalty of many thousands of dollars may be a fair amount. But this is not the environment we live in today. On the Internet, anyone can be a distributor at very little cost, and duplication is very nearly zero cost. This is not 1984, when the only practical way to illegally copy a lot of music was to run a bootleg CD stamping (or even vinyl record stamping) or cassette tape recording business, which cost serious money. The law should be changed to reflect these facts. And the court ought to have the power or guts to do more than regretfully reduce the damages insufficiently to fix the real problem. They're leaving a mess, and hoping the legislature takes the hint and does something about it. Meantime, the victims of these lawsuits are harmed disproportionately.
The industry is abusing the slowness of adaptation of new principles in the law to crucify and make an example of a victim. Letting bullies run wild is a hell of a way to run a justice system.
Nice article to spur a bit of recreational math. They even have a nice little "quality" formula to use for rating your finds. It's obvious that the place to look is powers of small numbers, especially primes.
I used a few command line tools, bc and factor, and some bash shell scripting to check a few combinations. Skimmed through the results of commands like this:
for ((i=1;i < 25;i++));do echo -n "$i "; echo "13^15-5^$i"|bc|factor;done
With that, I found a few decent quality combinations:
5 + 2^10*227^2*970060037 = 13^15, quality = 1.2417
3^28 + 2^7*5*137*4804889 = 13^12, quality = 1.1716
For sums less than 10^17, fewer than 2*10^4 combinations exist that are above a quality of 1.2. A brute force search might take a long time to find just 1.
I use LXDE because it is light on the resources. I really do not see why a desktop environment has to use several hundred megabytes of RAM. But even LXDE takes a lot. Needs about 100M. It makes them sluggish. The Firefox developers embarked on a "memshrink" program, and it's yielded excellent dividends. That effort made Firefox faster and more reliable. Seems Linux desktops could benefit from a similar hard look at memory usage.
LXDE has other problems. The file manager, pcmanfm, is still buggy and prone to crashes. Move lots of files around with it, and its stability goes to pot. It'll quit handling commands when it doesn't just crash. I've had to close it and start it up again to get it to work properly. I've not had good experiences with KDE or Gnome's file managers either. The file manager is a core part of any desktop environment, and the ones available in Linux are not good enough. Then there's the window manager, Openbox. Openbox works fine, but it isn't easy to configure. It has unusual commands (Shade/Roll up/down, and Un/decorate) that only serve to confuse the casual user, and which cannot be removed. If I switch to, say jwm, which doesn't have such extraneous features, then I have to deal with lxpanel and jwm's dueling task bars.
The UIs of all these desktop environments are full of holes and missing functionality. Still difficult to do it all and not at some point drag out the old text editor. For an example of a hole in the functionality, in LXDE if you right click on the desktop, a window pops up. Fine so far. Then if you click on the main menu (aka Start) button, that popup window does not go away, and the menu does not come up. You have to click somewhere on the desktop to make that popup window go away, then you can access the menu by clicking on the magic button. Why does it work that way? It's kludgy, that's why. The Linux desktop is still a messy collection of independent apps that don't play nice with each other. It lacks polish.
Peripherals are another weak spot. What happens if you try to print something, but you forgot to turn the printer on first? Depends how CUPS is configured. That job could hang around in the queue forever, and you will not be able to print until it is cleared. And it can't be cleared by any action that makes sense to a casual user. Canceling the job is the way to get printing working again, but this is not so easy. Turning the printer on doesn't work. Even rebooting doesn't work. But first, the user may not know any of this is happening, and will try to print again. Might end up with multiple copies. There may not be a printer dialog in which the user can cancel a job, instead the user has to pull up a browser and navigate to localhost:631. Or bring up ye olde command line prompt and do "lprm *". How many casual users know to do that? Evidently HAL was a wrong turn, and now it's all dbus.
One other thing: games. For games, must have hardware accelerated 3D graphics on commodity low end graphics cards. The open source drivers still can't do it. The proprietary drivers can, but cause other problems.
Where are you guys seeing 6 figure pay? The only positions companies seem to have are very junior positions, for $60k at best. Often they want so much experience and so many skills that the position isn't really junior, but they call it that so they can pay less.
there's no reason to be upset about police or anyone else getting data on how you drive
Oh yes there is! Do you know what a fishing expedition is, in the context of law? This hands them a whole lot of data to fish with.
Governments like to criminalize behavior, at the urging of corporations who stand to profit thereby, for less than honest motives such as taxation disguised as fines for "bad" behavior. Vendors and operators of enforcement equipment make more money, and so does the government. Win win! Did you miss out on the red light camera scam? You know, where they nail you for missing that yellow light by a fraction of a second. They claim it is a matter of public safety, as if red light running is out of control, and rear end collisions caused by drivers desperately slamming on the brakes out of fear of a red light camera ticket never happens. That also overlooks other solutions, such as synchronizing nearby traffic lights, increasing the yellow time, and improving the design of the intersection. When they make the Crime and Punishment method of handling a problem their first option, or even invent a problem, you ought to realize why. Punishment is profitable. They've been known to shorten the yellow light to increase the violation rate, but they've gotten more cautious about that, and now prefer to find a light that never had a long enough yellow to start with, so they can say they never screwed with the timings. Parking meters with excessive fines are another, very old revenue raising technique.
Until the day comes that such underhanded schemes are unthinkable, that "anything you say can and will be used against your pocketbook" never happens, I will not willingly give out that kind of data on me.
The data you're talking about is not private. SSN, seriously? What stinks about something like the SSN is that you are told you have to both keep it secret, keep it away from identity thieves, and you are frequently required to give it out in plaintext for all the things the identity thieves also want to use it for. How many times now have we heard of some company database breach that leaked thousands of customers' credit card numbers and other "sensitive" info? What really is the point of signing your name, when your signature is so easily obtained and forged? It's pure security theater. The system is seriously flawed at a fundamental level. The reason your info is not all over the place is not because you've guarded it well. You can't protect data that's already in many other hands. It's because most people are honest and don't have any use for it.
Banks and governments and the like ought not to rely much on such publicly known information to authenticate people. We're seeing some progress with the availability of one use credit card numbers, but we need a lot more. We could do some kind of digital signature algorithm on a credit card sized device, fairly cheaply. But evidently not so cheaply that banks feel it's worth doing. At the least, they shouldn't expect you to guard those numbers as if they're a huge, important secret. It was certainly made important to you, but it isn't a secret. FDE is overkill for that, but if you're more comfortable using FDE, go for it. Just don't kid yourself that it protects your SSN.
What if you own and operate 2 businesses, a weapons shop, and a people locater service? Maybe they're next door, maybe not. Maybe they have web sites with links to each other, or maybe not. Then, after selling some weapons and locations, some people whose location you sold turn up dead by weapons you sold. We could even toss in a 3rd business of yours, a used car dealership, from which the murderers obtained a cheap ride. Doesn't sound like enough to be a conspiracy on your part. The guilty parties are the ones who did the deeds.
But I think the court will look at intent. If the records of these businesses are sloppy, so that it is difficult or impossible to trace the weapons and cars, and this is deliberate as the businesses go as far as hinting at this in their advertising, then you might be in some trouble.
Part 2 of your method will quickly bog down if you run into many files that are the same size. Takes (n choose 2) comparisons, for a problem that can be done in n time. If you have 100 files all of one size, you'll have to do 4950 comparisons. Much faster to compute and sort 100 checksums.
Also, you don't have to read the whole file to make use of checksums, CRCs, hashes and the like. Just check a few pieces likely to be different if the files are different, such as the first and last 2000 bytes. Then for those files with matching parts, check the full files.
the sanctions, absolutely necessary to keep Saddam from starting ANOTHER war in the middle east, was killing 50,000 Iraqi kids per year.
Sure about that? Iraq could have fed those kids, if indeed that wasn't a minor matter blown out of proportion or an entirely invented problem for purposes of propaganda. Saddam instead found it more convenient to starve the children of his enemies, and blame it on sanctions. It's a triple win for him, if it works. Eliminate internal enemies, whip up popular hatred for the US, and make the sanctions look inhumane. Tricky though, as the people may not believe his nonsense, and blame him instead of the US.
And you forget the stated reason for the war on Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction. WMDs, not children. Not oil either, though that was a strong unstated reason. And then to learn that there weren't any WMDs-- think our allies are ever going to be that credulous again?
The only sort of gov't anyone seems to get there is a brutal dictatorship
Not any more, not after the Arab Spring.
he's a whiny sod who no-one likes.
That's a typical subjective evaluation too easily made and abused for nefarious purposes. You forget the power of office politics. He could be a well-mannered, polite person who was given the brush off and shoved into a closet, for political reasons. The other people on the "team" were afraid they'd look bad, and this would imperil their jobs. So they maligned and sidelined him, behind his back of course. Said he wasn't a team player, and a whiner, and all sorts of other difficult to assess bad qualities. Blamed him for every problem regardless of actual fault. By such means, the cabal can cover up their own mistakes and push a dangerous rival closer to termination at the same time. They may even resort to sabotage, "accidentally" deleting his work, for instance, then enjoying it when management roasts him for lack of productivity. Very Sienfeldesque. Who is management going to believe when it's one person's word against 5?
Think cabals like that are uncommon? When people are feeling their own necks, feel they can't afford to be nice or fair, situations can quickly turn ugly. It can get rough when one team member greatly outshines the rest.
Meanwhile, the rock star programmer will soon figure out what is going on. What is he to do? The rest of the team has turned against him, and is determined to make his every effort end in failure. He didn't do anything to deserve that, his "crime" was merely being too smart. He could try to rise above the pettiness, ignoring the politics and concentrating on the job. That might work, but much depends on how able the others are at sabotaging him. He could try to befriend them, help them with problems and the like, but that may simply not work. When someone has to be voted off the island, all he is really doing is persuading the others to cut someone else's throat instead of his. Each may still think that their best chance is to get rid of the most dangerous competitors first, while they still have numbers on their side, and the rock star can't dodge that assessment. Once he's gone, the rest have better chances against one another than they would have against him. He's a dead man walking in an environment like that. He could therefore play dumb, but it's difficult to maintain the facade for any length of time. If he complains to management, he merely confirms that he is a whiner. If he quits, he gets painted as yet another flighty, difficult prima donna, further confirming the general view of rock star programmers. This view is very convenient for the incompetent masses, and they are quite good at suckering management into that kind of thinking, that too good is bad, and too smart is dumb. And so it is perpetuated, in crummy articles like this one. He could try to demonstrate to management that the rest of the team is incompetent, show them for the conniving, treacherous scum they are. But this is likely a waste of time. It's rare that management is at that borderline level of competence where they didn't already know it, but once there is evidence, they will be convinced, and will take appropriate action. If they are newly arrived, then there's a chance. But if they've been there awhile, forget it. More likely, they already know the team plays dirty, and can't do anything about it thanks to nepotism. They may not care. Or, they don't know, in which case they can't be very good managers, not to know the temperament of their subordinates. If they aren't any good at that, they won't be much good at seeing through the bull, and are more likely to fire him than the real troublemakers. The management may even side with the incompetents, seeing them as kindred spirits.
Have you actually driven a Metro? Been in a crash in a Metro? I have, to both. They handle, and handle crashes just fine. You don't know what you're talking about when you make that "incredibly unsafe" claim. A 1960s era car of any size is far, far less safe. Motorcycles are worse yet. A young, inexperienced driver ran a red light, and I was the unfortunate who happened to be entering the intersection at the time. I T-boned him at a speed of 45 to 50 mph. My Metro and his car were totaled, but I walked away from that wreck with a few bruises. In most 1960 era cars, big or small, that same accident would have seriously injured or killed me.
Very lucky for him and his passengers that I was driving such a light car. The worst injury they suffered was a cut that required some stitches. Had I instead been in some SUV, they would have been hurt much worse, maybe even fatally. Think about that the next time you opt for a big vehicle solely because you think it's safer. Safer for you, maybe or maybe not, but definitely less safe for everyone else on the road. It's fine if you require a big vehicle for work, but don't use that as an excuse when the truth is you just want a bigger vehicle, for safety, or to show off.
Hopefully, the issue will be moot before too many more years. Be nice when we have cars that drive themselves. With reliable automatic driving, we could really cut back on the reinforcements, padding and so on we currently demand our vehicles have.
There were cars that got over 50 mpg. The 90's Geo Metro was just such a car.
Getting to 54 mpg will actually be fairly easy. There's a ton of low hanging fruit auto manufacturers have simply been ignoring. Aerodynamics is a big, big one where it's easy to improve. Smooth the underside. Add skirts to the rear wheels. Change the rear into a "beaver tail" or "boat tail". Add some dimples like they have on golf balls to the trailing edges. Make grill openings smaller.
That's just aero. There's also plenty to be had in weight savings. Use carbon fiber, it's lighter, cheaper, and stronger than aluminum. Weight savings tends to snowball. If you aren't dragging around as much weight, you can have a smaller engine, saving even more weight. Your structural components can be lighter. Get the weight under 2000 pounds, and you can omit the power steering, for yet more weight savings.
Another area ripe for improvement is the torque converter on the classic automatic transmission we've been living with for decades. Those torque converters impose a 20% hit to fuel economy! It's disgusting that the industry couldn't be bothered to switch to more efficient designs, and that the public didn't demand it. Even just a lock for the torque converter helps. You don't have to have a manual transmission and clutch pedal to dodge that 20% hit.
Why don't we already do all this? In the case of rear wheel skirts and smaller grill openings, the reason is pure cosmetics. People think such things look ugly! That we've been willing to burn all this extra gas over such frivolous considerations is a sign of just how much waste, slop, and slack there is.
a close race is good, it means both sides will go out and vote more.
Participation is good, and insofar as a close race raises participation, that's good. But I don't agree that a close race is necessarily good, not when one side has gone bonkers. I'd like to see the Republicans put out of everyone's misery, and replaced with another party, they're so damned crazy anymore.
Republicans have fallen a long, long way from the party of Lincoln, the party that stood proudly against slavery, while the Democrats talked of maintaining the status quo and trying to compromise, of wimpily avoiding the horrors of war at all costs. Would've been nice if the slavery issue could have been resolved without a savage war. The South knew they could not win if the North was determined, yet they started the war anyway, vainly hoping the North would back down. That was never going to happen, not after the first battles threw the North's manhood into doubt!
There was a time when the Republicans were the sober, prudent, well grounded, fiscal conservatives, firmly tied to facts and sound scientific reasoning, and the Democrats were the woolly thinking, misty-eyed fools would thought they could do such things as declare and win a War on Poverty. Those were Republicans I could vote for.
Now the Republicans are the delusional fools. They paint a seemingly lovely picture of the way the world and America was, and seem unable to face reality and the present. They act like it's still the 1950s, still Happy Days. Nice fantasy, for older white men perhaps, but dangerously wrong. But they press on, favoring actions based upon the thought that 1950's America is still with us now. They've cranked up the production of delusional "facts" to frightful levels. They've turned against the very science they used to cherish, becoming scarily contemptuous of it. This denial of Global Warming is just one of many anti-science efforts they've sullied themselves with. Even on fiscal matters, they've blown it. The War of Choice in Iraq was a huge, huge expense. They refuse to consider any kind of health care whatsoever, even those plans that would reduce all our expenses and get us better health care. They won't hear of even just closing tax loopholes to solve these budget issues that have so exercised them lately. They don't say it outright, but what they promise is to take America back to the paradise of the 1950s, if only we will elect them. The most damnable thing is, that in many ways the world of today is way, way better than those "good" old days they recall so fondly. I'm not crazy about the Democrats, but voting for this screwball Republican party is absolutely out of the question.
LendInk's most valuable contribution to society may be the outing of a bunch of authors as at best woefully confused fools vainly fighting the march of technology. I find it hard to believe in the perceptiveness, insight, and progressiveness of these authors-- traits we find make for the best story telling-- when they make a blunder like this. Did they ever admit they got it very wrong, and apologize? I don't know but I guess some slunk away silently in embarrassment, and the rest are still on the warpath, still convinced of the moral inferiority of the balance of society. By their lights we are all cheap, greedy jerks who will read without paying if we can. Perhaps so, but that is an unnecessarily negative way of viewing the situation, as it is based on wrong thinking. Those authors who feel this way are not worth reading. What this really says, again, to anyone who will listen, is that the copyright system is broken. Piracy should not be vilified. Copies of data are simply not a scarce resource, and no amount of legislation can reverse this fact of nature. Most of all, we shouldn't fight copying, we should embrace it as the huge public good it is. We are all more knowledgeable for copying being easy.
Interesting that the latest salvo from the copyright extremists against LendInk is from a doubtful lawyer with a dubious and unsavory reputation. Once again we're looking at an age old question: does the end justify the means? Is it okay to get in bed with the slimiest lawyers on the planet to save copyright? Shouldn't our wiser folks, including authors, already know the answer to such questions? If this DMCA takedown is an unsanctioned, independent act, not done at the behest of the authors, they ought to be quick to say so, and quick to publicly support LendInk.
High elevations can do it too. Mechanical hard drives need some air pressure. Take a typical hard drive up to 17000 ft, unpressurized, and it will fail very quickly. Most hard drive documentation mentions somewhere that they shouldn't be used above 10000 ft, and aren't warranted for that.
Yeah, the article's precepts are really off.
We shouldn't need to collect books and music. Only reason I do is as a hedge against copyright extremism, and because the Internet isn't always handy, and storage is cheap. And to serve as a list of stuff I like, but that's easily handled by keeping just lists, not content. This "problem" is not an issue.
I've tried a lot of distros (Slackware, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Gentoo, Zenwalk, Voyage, Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, Mandriva, Knoppix, Puppy, Damn Small, Vector, Tiny Core), and am currently using Arch. Arch gets me the closest to current software, without having to spend too much time on updates, and offers a variety of desktop environments and graphics drivers. If the open graphics drivers ever achieve good 3D acceleration, Arch will have them by the next day or 2. When Firefox or kernel.org release updates, Arch is among the 1st to have them packaged. Arch used to be missing some important features, such as 32bit support on 64bit machines, and package signing, but these have been remedied.
I abandoned Gentoo when I saw for myself that compiling everything took too much time. A typical package is updated perhaps 4 times a year, there are about 1000 packages in a typical installation, and an average compile and install time is 10 minutes per package. That means roughly 11 updates every day, for a total of nearly 2 hours per day spent on updating. The killer package was gcc. Use old version of gcc to compile new version, then use newly compiled new version to compile gcc again. Plus, ought to recompile every package on the system when a new gcc comes out, but hardly anyone was that crazy. Worst was when there was some problem that manifested at the end of this lengthy process, and you had to start over after fixing it, if you could. Even Gentoo backed away from the worst pains of updating from source code, offering these different "levels" (level 1, 2 and 3 as I recall), in which some precompiled packages were provided.
I started with Slackware because there wasn't anything else, and stuck with it for a long time. Biggest problem with Slackware was the long delay between updates, and then when an update did come, having it be easier to start all over with a fresh install rather than try to update. Unavoidable, perhaps, for something major such as the change from libc5 and a.out to libc6 and ELF, but shouldn't always be necessary.
Ubuntu tends towards the heavy side. It's not so good for old computers and small hard drives. I could get an i586 version of Arch installed in a 1.6G partition on a 133MHz Pentium with 96M RAM, and have a desktop environment and browser. (Last time I tried it, Firefox 3.5 was current. Can't update to Firefox 4 or later, those take too much memory.) However, so far I prefer Ubuntu over Arch for ARM devices.
I'm still searching for better desktop environments. I'm using LXDE with Openbox, and it's okay but not great. PCManFM is still buggy. Openbox has features ("roll up/down", aka "shade", and "un/decorate") that are useless and confusing to casual users, but which cannot be turned off. Saving of sessions doesn't work. And light though LXDE is, it still takes about 100M RAM. No big deal on a modern PC with 2G or more of RAM, but crippling for an old box with only 256M. On such a machine, I go with just a window manager (usually IceWM), and forget the environment.
You ought to be a member of the Prohibition Party
Doesn't sound like you appreciate the difficulties of doing an interstellar probe. It's not like silicon chips, in which we've seen astounding improvements. We simply can't do it, not now, and probably not in the next 20 years or even 100 years.
Currently, our fastest escaping probe is Voyager 1, at about 17 km/s relative to the sun. At that rate, a probe will need about 70000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Suppose the velocity we can give probes improves by a factor of 100, which is assuming a lot. (For one thing, gravity assists would be of little value.) That's still 700 years. We have no experience making machines that can last that long. Our civilization might not last that long. We need perhaps 1000 times the velocity, then we're talking only a 70 year wait.
To achieve 1000 times the velocity is not a matter of 1000 times the fuel, it's 1000^2 times the fuel. It's even worse than that, if the probe has to carry its fuel. No matter how we accelerate the probe-- whether with on board ion drives, nuclear bombs, light sails, or something else-- that's such a huge amount of energy that none of these ideas are even remotely feasible. That means it will have to be slower, which puts us back to the problem of how to build something that can last the 1000 plus years such a trip will take. There are many other problems, such as communication, but the primary one is simply the distance. I wouldn't hold my breath for science fantasy either. It's not at all likely we will invent warp drive or some other means of FTL travel.
Why do you think Foundation is garbage?
Sure, they have problems. Firstly, it's an SF themed retelling of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Medieval civilization, right down to the power of the church gradually giving way to merchants. A bit unoriginal perhaps? Then, the entire idea of psychohistory might be depressing. We're no better than the molecules of a gas cloud? The universe is just a giant machine, ticking away like utterly predictable and fatally boring clockwork, and we really do not have free will, we're just puppets going through the motions, as everything is preordained? Except that all that is deeply flawed. At the time those stories were written, Chaos Theory was unknown. I didn't care for the mentalics or the "psycho" terminology. But lot of SF works from the 1950s dabbled with the paranormal, treating those age old superstitions as though there might be something to them. Three to Dorsai! (an omnibus edition) by Gordon Dickson is an example of that. Childhood's End did it too. In a new foreword written some 35 years later, Clarke confessed to embarrassment over that, though I thought he was expecting too much of himself.
SF in particular cannot avoid the problem of getting it very, very wrong because it is all about futuristic speculation which is usually wrong. What I find more grating is getting humanity wrong. Many of the depressing works I find implausible rather than depressing because the premise is based on some seeming flaw in humanity that isn't true. Malthusian stories spring to mind here. Life faced the population pressure problem repeatedly, long before we were around. Exhaustion of resources is a similar theme that usually doesn't hold up. We have the arrogance to think that every problem we face is new. These fearful stories like to wallow in our supposed unwillingness to deal with change. Often there are many solutions, and some are actually easy and pleasant, but in these stories we stupidly choose misery and suffering, preferring to believe the problems we are trying to ignore are impossibly hard to solve when they really aren't. In reality, powerful anti-social control freaks aren't powerful. It's incredible what people imply the President of the US can do when they blame him for basically everything. What will happen when we run out of oil? To hear some people carry on, you'd think the End is Nigh.
I think the whole notion is a diversion.
The market collapsed because of massive fraud, especially in the home mortgage finance business. The criminals who stole our wealth would love to blame it all on computers, high frequency trading, Europe, oil, God, or whatever. Anything but them.
Guess computers are the whipping boys for the moment. There may be inherent problems with high frequency trading, but no one is sure. What we can be sure of is that fraud, insider trading, and excessive executive compensation hurts the market.
Not at all. Unlike murder, rape, terrorism, and stealing, sharing should not be a crime. Sharing of information is a huge public good. No one gets hurt, no one loses anything, except for imaginary harms done to undeserving, controlling, self appointed gatekeepers who we neither need nor want. Drugs can hurt people, so we should have some regulation of them. The question is, how much? Right now it seems we have too much drug regulation, and it's too punitive and harsh.
Don't be so quick to brand some activity a crime. And stop trying to equate sharing with stealing. They are not the same thing. There are dozens of crimes that we distinguish between for the excellent reason that they are different and merit different handling. Here's a small list of crimes that are not stealing: speeding, vandalism, littering, trespassing, assault and battery, slander and libel, drug possession. There's also a long list of activities that should never have been crimes, things like lese-majesty, blasphemy, heresy, and consumption of alcohol.
Today we have freedom of speech and religion. We lack freedom of knowledge and sharing, and I think we ought to enshrine that in the Constitution alongside those other freedoms, to once and for all squash the intellectual property extremists and permanently end this debate.
No, this is a terrible idea.
Letting crackers know whether someone has used a password lets them try to guess passwords all at once, instead of one user at a time. Once they've harvested a few passwords, the problem of matching them up with usernames is trivial. Grab usernames from email archives and the like, then brute force it from there. It does not take long to go through a few million usernames. The service can't even stop this with the bad idea of locking an account after 3 failed attempts since the cracker would be trying a different account each time.
A much better approach is to not let users choose the whole password. Let users make part of the password, then generate something to add to it that also guarantees it is unique. That way, the service never has to tell new users to choose another password because their first choice is taken. Wouldn't have to reject passwords for being too weak either.
What's really fun are those services that let you enter a 30 character password, then silently truncate it to 8 characters.
Also thrilling when a service is able to tell you what your forgotten password is.
Then there was the login web page that would let you start typing in your credentials before it was finished loading, then move the cursor back to the username input box when it finished loading. I recall Yahoo's webmail did that for a while. Actually, it was a combination of bad design on both the web page and the browser's part. On those occasions when it was a bit slow to load, you'd be typing in your password just as the cursor warped back to the username box. If you hit enter before noticing what had happened, the overly helpful, advanced browser would remember your username...
Another fun one was the service that insisted on selectively applying capitalization rules to usernames. When I created my account, I used all lower case for my username, and it silently changed the first letter to upper case. But it didn't change the case when I attempted to log in. Took me a while to figure out why I couldn't log in...