Attempts to create analogies between the Internet and TV are not meaningful because the nature of the two media are completely different.
TV is something you turn on and data starts flowing with no way to turn it off other than switching to another channel. The Internet is something where you have to ask others to recieve any data, and stopping it is as easy as hitting the 'stop' button on your browser.
A better analogy is to compare the Internet and dead-tree-format mail. If you're going to let your kids access the mailbox, have someone check it first for objectionable content that isn't arriving in response to anything (Hardware firewall: Viruses, porn popups gone). Now you're only going to get porn tapes in the mail if you order them from a mail-order catalog (Google 'boobies'). Contact the mail catalog distributor and tell them not to send you porn catalogs (Google filter: strict). The only porn you're going to get now is from companies whose mailing address you already know.
"2. Protest. I'm keeping my web site shitty as a protest against all the slick-looking, contentless web sites out there. Nobody cares about your stupid rotating icons and fading links. Mine isn't the only site on the internet that uses a simple layout, perhaps you've heard of this one?
_Picture of Google here_
Some webmasters have spent years tweaking their layout and designing their site, and very few get any traffic. This site, as shitty as it looks, gets over 1 million visits per month. I use large fonts also as a protest against all the stylish garbage you see out there. When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn't nearly as original as they think...."
I'm going to install cameras throughout your house. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're growing weed or bringing home prostitutes.
I'm going to install a satellite phone/monitor/GPS on your car that will phone the police if you exceed the current speed limit. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're breaking the speed limit.
I'm going to install a keystroke logger on your computer that will record everything you type. I don't see how this will harm you unless you use your computer to transfer money for gangsters.
I'm going to log every packet your computer sends that leaves the USA (Oh, wait, the NSA beat me to it...). I don't see how this will harm you unless you're secretly communicating with al Qaeda.
I'm going to steam every piece of mail that arrives in your mailbox open and photocopy it before it gets to you. I don't see how this will harm you unless you were the bastard who was sending the Anthrax letters.
I'm going to put a rootkit on that CD you bought that will contact me if you try to copy it and then break your computer. I don't see how this will harm you unless you like to rip and share music illegally.
OTOH, I'm used to PostgreSQL and find myself having to learn MySQL, and MySQL feels just as weird and unintuitive to me as PostgreSQL might to a long-time PostgreSQL user.
So, what you're saying is... PostgreSQL will be strange and unintuitive, no matter what database you prefer and use?:P
If supporters of a bill, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, dismiss the concerns as purely hypothetical, they are lying. They intend to use such a law exactly that way as early and often as possible.
Conservatives say that the terrorists hate our freedom. Liberals say that if that were the case, they'd attack some small European country. With the Denmark/Mohammed fiasco, us liberals need to rethink our response:P
Sure... just read a previous article, where hundreds of people pontificate on how bad a 2-tier 'Net is.
In short: It breaks the end-to-end quality of the Internet, and betrays the very concept of the Internet. It's greedy telcos trying to double-dip on website owners: Owners already paid for bandwidth, and I already paid for DSL: These telcos want them to pay again for the continued non-suckage of their connection.
Parent is describing the situation in Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. Go read it - it's a great book, and might give some insight into the problem of over-dependence.
The problem isn't generating the heat (Just blast hydrogen with microwaves or set off a small fission bomb), it's making the fusion put out more power than it takes to keep generating RF and keeping the hydrogen contained.
Particle accelerators (which CRTs are) produce motion in a unified direction. Heat/temperature is the average speed of molecules moving randomly. Do we consider the air swirling around a tornado to be hotter because it's moving at several hundred MPH relative to us?
No one is stopping you from running power lines throughout your house and wiring them into a single AC-DC converter. The problem would be the resistive losses of having your PC, monitor, and misc components drawing 10 to 20 times more amperage to get the same power input. There comes a point where you lose as much power to resistance as you gain in improved utilization efficiency. Take, say, a computer and it's miscellany and assume they're purely resistive loads drawing 500W AC. Assume that direct DC will double efficiency, requiring only 250W DC. That means using a 10AWG wire, which would add 5.9 watts/foot in resistive heating. When the power cable hits 42 feet, you're back to 500 watts consumption again.
When room-temperature superconductors are created, of course, transmission resistance will be zero and the world will convert to low-voltage DC overnight:)
Do you suppose that it might not be that Congress is powerless to stop the abuses, but has no desire to do so? Consider the serious ethical lapses in the Republican leadership recently, and that they have been described as "absolutely drunk with power."
Under Republican control, this Congress has shown itself to be a patsy of the Bush administration. They quietly kill all investigations into it's questionable activities: Lying about Iraq, the Valery Plame incident, massive no-bid contracts to Cheney's friends, the NSA wiretapping, Bush and torture, you name it and they'll decieve you to cover him.
So I suppose what I'm saying is... it's not impotent, it just doesn't want to do it right now:P
You extreme environmentalists... There's no way to win with you, is there? If they try to build dams for hydro power, you protest because of the effects of the lake. If they try to put up wind farms, you bitch because it ruins the shoreline. If we started manufacturing massive numbers of solar cells, I have no doubt you'd scream bloody murder because of the chemical unpleasantness involved in their manufacture.
Here's the cold, hard facts: We need an energy gradient we can extract power out of, it has to have a lot of energy potential and it has to be dense. Solar and wind power simply aren't dense enough, geothermal isn't an option except at the end of the trans-oceanic ridge in Iceland and Yellowstone, biofuel isn't an option because it's not dense enough and we need that land to grow food on, and fossil fuels pollute unacceptably.
Guess what? Nuclear power is the only currently feasable way to generate the amount of power the world demands without burning dead plants. If you damn hippies would let the government reprocess the fuel, 95% of the wast problem would disappear and the remainder can be buried in a mountain in Nevada or in the abyssal plains of the Pacific.
But no, we all need to become Earth Children... Okay, I'm done ranting.
If we cut ourselves off from China, they will stop buying up our debt. If they stop buying our debt, America will meltdown overnight. As is, it's a live and let live situation: They keep buying our debt, we keep buying their products. Until we stop diving into debt, we will be forced to keep playing with nasty governments.
Goddamnit, WHY doesn't Congress UNDERSTAND this! We HAVE to stop running up debt. Just like a stereotypical American, Congress is living beyond it's means, is buried up to it's eyes in debt, and lives in fear of the day the Credit Card People (CCP) call.
It will have no effect on people who already believe global warming is happening other than confirming what we believe.
People who have a vested interest in the world not moving to combat global warming (like energy company lobbyists) will cite the fact that the climate has changed in the past, claim this accelerating melting is part of that natural change, and use it as an excuse to do nothing. When the effects of global warming become too sever to ignore any longer, they will feign ignorance, claim noone could have seen it coming, then demand a silver bullet-type solution from the same scientists who have been telling them what needs to be done for decades, but were ignored because the executives possess a shortsightedness bordering on myopia (that is to say, their utter inability to see beyond next quarter's profit goal).
I speculate that the applications which would create anything like this amount of data are few and far between, and those applications tend to create a fairly small number of enormous files: 3D rendering, extremely high-fidelity (8000x6000x120fps) or high-speed (10^7+fps) video systems, and molecular dynamics are all that immediately jump to mind. Perhaps ECHELON might need a drive or two, also.
Into the realm of fact, I can answer your last question. Sun's ZFS file system can handle this drive and any other drive that could conceivably be created. It supports individual file systems and files up to 16 exabytes.
Would the code posted above not in fact be a memory leak? Unless something's different about C++ vs C, won't each call create a new int*, allocate it new memory, and lose the pointer on returning (except that you don't usually call main repeatedly)?
Scientific American had a rather lengthy article on magnetologic devices not long ago. MRAM is a limited version of them that can only change the magnetization of the top magnetic layer - full magnetologic devices can switch both sides.
Although they're a wonderful technology that in the right hands would permit vast improvements in computation, I'm scared to think what a painful experience it would be to program such a device. We have enough trouble dealing with CPUs that have fixed instruction sets and few enough ASM programmers as it is. Is a person even capable of programming such a device efficiently, or writing software to do the same? I'm pretty sure that just having a 10x10 matrix of them to keep track of would be hard for me - I can't imagine trying to write code to control a whole CPU of them that wouldn't be hopelessly bogged down with getGateStatus()- and setGateStatus()-type functions.
Or would their role be more limited - switching individual gates to be AND/OR/NOT/NAND in hardware, for instance, so you would do setGateFunction(gate_no, wanted_function); LOGIC_OP rather than having a switch? Or perhaps they would be hard enough to program that you would have to use just a handful of pre-written setups for them, optimizing for games or math performance? loadChipSetup(long_math.mag) or loadChipSetup(fast_string_ops.mag)?
Now imagine the next generation of viruses rewiring your CPU to do God-knows-what.
Well, if you ask the people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in the US, you'll find that most of them realize that their problems are entirely solvable about half way down. Then they hit the water at 80 MPH and cost their families tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.
"It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life."
Our population isn't rising on an exponential curve. It's more like a logistic equation. Right now, we're at or just past 1/2 earth's carrying capacity, so population growth will decrease until it levels off around 10 billion.
Okay, but don't complain when businesses start acting like psychopaths. Because that's exactly what a person (and a corporation is legally a person) who doesn't know any moral right or wrong is.
The attitude of "keep morals out of business" combines with regulation to produce a very strange effect indeed: We issue the corporation a charter that says they must think of shareholder value and nothing else. And then not only forbid some very profitable actions (dump untreated waste into river, sell leaded high-sulfur gasoline) but force them to take unprofitable actions (install waste treatment, remove sulfur from oil during refinement) in the name of the community good.
These corporations are like HAL: Being fed two streams of fundamentally incompatible commands. No wonder they act so strangely.
As a refugee from California (now living in Oregon), I agree that schools need more money. But I also think there need to be strings attached and/or more oversight to stop them from wasting it.
Exhibit A: My old high school. They had enough money to totally rebuild the football field/track with astroturf, and enough bling left over to buy almost every class brand-new P4 Dell computers (that no-one uses for education except the CompSci classes). On the other hand, we didn't have a class set of French books and it's only a matter of time before the PIF (Portable Invasion Force) forces the Parking Lot Alliance to surrender unconditionally.
if(land.value / land.area > MAX_AREAL_VALUE) { flagForHumanReview(land); }// I don't imagine too many parcels of land in an area legitimately exceed a certain value per area. FIXME: Add a flag to the structure for those that do?
Slashdot Mirror
Attempts to create analogies between the Internet and TV are not meaningful because the nature of the two media are completely different.
TV is something you turn on and data starts flowing with no way to turn it off other than switching to another channel. The Internet is something where you have to ask others to recieve any data, and stopping it is as easy as hitting the 'stop' button on your browser.
A better analogy is to compare the Internet and dead-tree-format mail. If you're going to let your kids access the mailbox, have someone check it first for objectionable content that isn't arriving in response to anything (Hardware firewall: Viruses, porn popups gone). Now you're only going to get porn tapes in the mail if you order them from a mail-order catalog (Google 'boobies'). Contact the mail catalog distributor and tell them not to send you porn catalogs (Google filter: strict). The only porn you're going to get now is from companies whose mailing address you already know.
From the Best Page in the Universe, about halfway down:
..."
"2. Protest. I'm keeping my web site shitty as a protest against all the slick-looking, contentless web sites out there. Nobody cares about your stupid rotating icons and fading links. Mine isn't the only site on the internet that uses a simple layout, perhaps you've heard of this one?
_Picture of Google here_
Some webmasters have spent years tweaking their layout and designing their site, and very few get any traffic. This site, as shitty as it looks, gets over 1 million visits per month. I use large fonts also as a protest against all the stylish garbage you see out there. When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn't nearly as original as they think.
All Hail Maddox!
I'm going to install cameras throughout your house. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're growing weed or bringing home prostitutes.
I'm going to install a satellite phone/monitor/GPS on your car that will phone the police if you exceed the current speed limit. I don't see how this will harm you unless you're breaking the speed limit.
I'm going to install a keystroke logger on your computer that will record everything you type. I don't see how this will harm you unless you use your computer to transfer money for gangsters.
I'm going to log every packet your computer sends that leaves the USA (Oh, wait, the NSA beat me to it...). I don't see how this will harm you unless you're secretly communicating with al Qaeda.
I'm going to steam every piece of mail that arrives in your mailbox open and photocopy it before it gets to you. I don't see how this will harm you unless you were the bastard who was sending the Anthrax letters.
I'm going to put a rootkit on that CD you bought that will contact me if you try to copy it and then break your computer. I don't see how this will harm you unless you like to rip and share music illegally.
Have I made my point?
Why would an OS installer record the root password you enter except properly encrypted in /etc/shadow?
How's that cliche go?
If supporters of a bill, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, dismiss the concerns as purely hypothetical, they are lying. They intend to use such a law exactly that way as early and often as possible.
Conservatives say that the terrorists hate our freedom. Liberals say that if that were the case, they'd attack some small European country. With the Denmark/Mohammed fiasco, us liberals need to rethink our response :P
They already re-imaged it: Linky
Though, like you said, it doesn't matter: If you disagree with him, you're part of the conspiracy!
Sure... just read a previous article, where hundreds of people pontificate on how bad a 2-tier 'Net is.
In short: It breaks the end-to-end quality of the Internet, and betrays the very concept of the Internet. It's greedy telcos trying to double-dip on website owners: Owners already paid for bandwidth, and I already paid for DSL: These telcos want them to pay again for the continued non-suckage of their connection.
Parent is describing the situation in Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. Go read it - it's a great book, and might give some insight into the problem of over-dependence.
The problem isn't generating the heat (Just blast hydrogen with microwaves or set off a small fission bomb), it's making the fusion put out more power than it takes to keep generating RF and keeping the hydrogen contained.
Particle accelerators (which CRTs are) produce motion in a unified direction. Heat/temperature is the average speed of molecules moving randomly. Do we consider the air swirling around a tornado to be hotter because it's moving at several hundred MPH relative to us?
No one is stopping you from running power lines throughout your house and wiring them into a single AC-DC converter. The problem would be the resistive losses of having your PC, monitor, and misc components drawing 10 to 20 times more amperage to get the same power input. There comes a point where you lose as much power to resistance as you gain in improved utilization efficiency. Take, say, a computer and it's miscellany and assume they're purely resistive loads drawing 500W AC. Assume that direct DC will double efficiency, requiring only 250W DC. That means using a 10AWG wire, which would add 5.9 watts/foot in resistive heating. When the power cable hits 42 feet, you're back to 500 watts consumption again.
:)
When room-temperature superconductors are created, of course, transmission resistance will be zero and the world will convert to low-voltage DC overnight
If these are "major, crippling bugs" why are they marked 'minor' and 'future' in severity?
Do you suppose that it might not be that Congress is powerless to stop the abuses, but has no desire to do so? Consider the serious ethical lapses in the Republican leadership recently, and that they have been described as "absolutely drunk with power."
:P
Under Republican control, this Congress has shown itself to be a patsy of the Bush administration. They quietly kill all investigations into it's questionable activities: Lying about Iraq, the Valery Plame incident, massive no-bid contracts to Cheney's friends, the NSA wiretapping, Bush and torture, you name it and they'll decieve you to cover him.
So I suppose what I'm saying is... it's not impotent, it just doesn't want to do it right now
You extreme environmentalists... There's no way to win with you, is there? If they try to build dams for hydro power, you protest because of the effects of the lake. If they try to put up wind farms, you bitch because it ruins the shoreline. If we started manufacturing massive numbers of solar cells, I have no doubt you'd scream bloody murder because of the chemical unpleasantness involved in their manufacture.
Here's the cold, hard facts: We need an energy gradient we can extract power out of, it has to have a lot of energy potential and it has to be dense. Solar and wind power simply aren't dense enough, geothermal isn't an option except at the end of the trans-oceanic ridge in Iceland and Yellowstone, biofuel isn't an option because it's not dense enough and we need that land to grow food on, and fossil fuels pollute unacceptably.
Guess what? Nuclear power is the only currently feasable way to generate the amount of power the world demands without burning dead plants. If you damn hippies would let the government reprocess the fuel, 95% of the wast problem would disappear and the remainder can be buried in a mountain in Nevada or in the abyssal plains of the Pacific.
But no, we all need to become Earth Children... Okay, I'm done ranting.
If we cut ourselves off from China, they will stop buying up our debt. If they stop buying our debt, America will meltdown overnight. As is, it's a live and let live situation: They keep buying our debt, we keep buying their products. Until we stop diving into debt, we will be forced to keep playing with nasty governments.
Goddamnit, WHY doesn't Congress UNDERSTAND this! We HAVE to stop running up debt. Just like a stereotypical American, Congress is living beyond it's means, is buried up to it's eyes in debt, and lives in fear of the day the Credit Card People (CCP) call.
It will have no effect on people who already believe global warming is happening other than confirming what we believe.
People who have a vested interest in the world not moving to combat global warming (like energy company lobbyists) will cite the fact that the climate has changed in the past, claim this accelerating melting is part of that natural change, and use it as an excuse to do nothing. When the effects of global warming become too sever to ignore any longer, they will feign ignorance, claim noone could have seen it coming, then demand a silver bullet-type solution from the same scientists who have been telling them what needs to be done for decades, but were ignored because the executives possess a shortsightedness bordering on myopia (that is to say, their utter inability to see beyond next quarter's profit goal).
Am I psychic, or just really, really cynical?
I speculate that the applications which would create anything like this amount of data are few and far between, and those applications tend to create a fairly small number of enormous files: 3D rendering, extremely high-fidelity (8000x6000x120fps) or high-speed (10^7+fps) video systems, and molecular dynamics are all that immediately jump to mind. Perhaps ECHELON might need a drive or two, also.
Into the realm of fact, I can answer your last question. Sun's ZFS file system can handle this drive and any other drive that could conceivably be created. It supports individual file systems and files up to 16 exabytes.
Would the code posted above not in fact be a memory leak? Unless something's different about C++ vs C, won't each call create a new int*, allocate it new memory, and lose the pointer on returning (except that you don't usually call main repeatedly)?
Scientific American had a rather lengthy article on magnetologic devices not long ago. MRAM is a limited version of them that can only change the magnetization of the top magnetic layer - full magnetologic devices can switch both sides.
Although they're a wonderful technology that in the right hands would permit vast improvements in computation, I'm scared to think what a painful experience it would be to program such a device. We have enough trouble dealing with CPUs that have fixed instruction sets and few enough ASM programmers as it is. Is a person even capable of programming such a device efficiently, or writing software to do the same? I'm pretty sure that just having a 10x10 matrix of them to keep track of would be hard for me - I can't imagine trying to write code to control a whole CPU of them that wouldn't be hopelessly bogged down with getGateStatus()- and setGateStatus()-type functions.
Or would their role be more limited - switching individual gates to be AND/OR/NOT/NAND in hardware, for instance, so you would do setGateFunction(gate_no, wanted_function); LOGIC_OP rather than having a switch? Or perhaps they would be hard enough to program that you would have to use just a handful of pre-written setups for them, optimizing for games or math performance? loadChipSetup(long_math.mag) or loadChipSetup(fast_string_ops.mag)?
Now imagine the next generation of viruses rewiring your CPU to do God-knows-what.
"These people kill themselves for a reason."
Well, if you ask the people who survive jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in the US, you'll find that most of them realize that their problems are entirely solvable about half way down. Then they hit the water at 80 MPH and cost their families tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills.
"It really disturbs me that, at the same time our population keeps rising on an exponential curve, we still cling to archaic notions of the "sacredness" of every life."
Our population isn't rising on an exponential curve. It's more like a logistic equation. Right now, we're at or just past 1/2 earth's carrying capacity, so population growth will decrease until it levels off around 10 billion.
Okay, but don't complain when businesses start acting like psychopaths. Because that's exactly what a person (and a corporation is legally a person) who doesn't know any moral right or wrong is.
The attitude of "keep morals out of business" combines with regulation to produce a very strange effect indeed: We issue the corporation a charter that says they must think of shareholder value and nothing else. And then not only forbid some very profitable actions (dump untreated waste into river, sell leaded high-sulfur gasoline) but force them to take unprofitable actions (install waste treatment, remove sulfur from oil during refinement) in the name of the community good.
These corporations are like HAL: Being fed two streams of fundamentally incompatible commands. No wonder they act so strangely.
As a refugee from California (now living in Oregon), I agree that schools need more money. But I also think there need to be strings attached and/or more oversight to stop them from wasting it.
Exhibit A: My old high school. They had enough money to totally rebuild the football field/track with astroturf, and enough bling left over to buy almost every class brand-new P4 Dell computers (that no-one uses for education except the CompSci classes). On the other hand, we didn't have a class set of French books and it's only a matter of time before the PIF (Portable Invasion Force) forces the Parking Lot Alliance to surrender unconditionally.
if(land.value / land.area > MAX_AREAL_VALUE) { flagForHumanReview(land); } // I don't imagine too many parcels of land in an area legitimately exceed a certain value per area. FIXME: Add a flag to the structure for those that do?