There's a study out that correlates misperceptions about the Iraq war with news source. You can read the whole.pdf if you like.
They took 3 polls with 3334 respondents, gathering data on three misperceptions about the Iraq war
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Queda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war
Yep, you read that right; fully 80% of Faux watchers had at least 1 of the misperceptions; fully 77% of the NPR/PBS crowd had zero. Wow!
They also attempted to control for demographic variations in the audience. Here's what they say (end of P.15)
Looking just at Republicans, the average rate for the three key
misperceptions was 43%. For Republican Fox viewers, however the
average rate was 54% while for Republicans who get their news from
PBS- NPR the average rate is 32%. This same pattern obtains with
Democrats and independents.
I also really like this paragraph (page 16):
Misperceptions According to Level of
Attention to News
While it would seem that misperceptions
are derived from a failure to pay
attention to the news, overall, those who
pay greater attention to the news are no
less likely to have misperceptions. Among
those who primarily watch Fox, those
who pay more attention are more likely to
have misperceptions. Only those who
mostly get their news from print media,
and to some extent those who primarily
watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as
they pay more attention.
Isn't that amazing? The more you read the paper, or watch CNN, the better informed you are. But the more you watch Faux News, the more likely you are to be misled!! Now of course these are correlations; they don't prove causation, but they are pretty darned persuasive.
So what Murray has done is to split up accomplishment
into a number of fields and tried to take a neutral
measure of each person's respective 'eminence' in the
field. He measures 'eminence' by taking a number of
comprehensive sources on each field and counting the
references to each person and how many paragraphs
they get. The sources are from as many different
languages as possible and Murray does a good job of
avoiding the distorting effects of ethnocentrism. He
uses sharp cutoff dates at 800 B.C. and 1950 A.D. to
limit the data.
Are these "comprehensive sources on each field" written in russian or arabic or chinese or sanskrit or swahili?
I don't think so! I'll bet the great majority of sources are english and the rest are western european. Guess what? People tend to reference works written in their own native language! This is bias up the wazoo! So much for a neutral measure!
I've only spent about 5 minutes thinking about it, but a slightly less biased (but not neutral) measure would involve counting works translated into multiple languages. The idea being that if a work is worth the effort of importing from another language/culture, then it's more significant than an untranslated work.
The fact that Murray could build this obvious fundamental bias into his metric is laughable. Then to proceed blithely with the whole book pretending his metric is neutral is just absurd. A whole book about measuring science, and it's based on a warped ruler!
Truly, Schiller was right: against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
Oh, so you're citing John Lott for your "guns reduce crime" statistics. according to this article
Earlier this year, Lott found himself facing serious criticism of his professional ethics. Pressed by critics, he failed to produce evidence of the existence of a survey -- which supposedly found that "98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack" -- that he claimed to have conducted in the second edition of "More Guns, Less Crime". Lott then made matters even worse by posing as a former student, "Mary Rosh,"
and using the alias to attack his critics and defend his work online. When an Internet blogger exposed the ruse, the scientific community was outraged. Lott had created a
"false identity for a scholar," charged Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy. "In most circles, this goes down as fraud."
Now of course Lott's fraud doesn't prove his conclusions are false; it only proves he's a liar an has no evidence for the conclusions drawn from that study. As for Lott & Mustard's famous 1997 paper, these folks found that small changes in Lott's model erase any influence of right-to-carry laws.
And according to Ayres and Donohue who extended Lott's data through later years,
Lott mostly managed to discover the start and end of the crack epidemic -- Crime rose and dropped just as much in urban areas without any changes in right-to-carry laws.
So you've answered my second question, and I thank you. You do have research to back up your claims; it's not good research, but at least it is research. Now how about getting rid of your straw man and dealing with what Clark actually said rather than what you find easy to argue against?
One of the nice-sounding ideas is gun bans, and
the Himmler quote that Clark paraphrased is one
form of that meme. The nice-sounding meme:
"Guns hurt and kill. Geting rid of guns will
stop the hurting and killing. (Murder, robbery,
rape, etc. will be reduced.)" But among the
unintended consequences are a RISE in murder,
robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more
than they assault. And a far greater one is
genocide - because privately-held guns are
essentially the only defense against it once
someone in power gets the idea into his head.
First, that is a classic example of a Straw Man.
You haven't argued against what Clark said. Instead, you argued against an extreme distortion of what Clark said. So what? Clark's not in
favor of a complete gun ban, and neither am I. Why change the subject? I know it's sometimes impolite to introduce facts into discussions like this one, but here's what Clark actually said:
I have got 20 some odd guns in the house. I like to hunt. I have grown up with guns all my life, but people who like assault weapons should join the United States Army, we have them.
Source: Interview on CNN Crossfire Jun 25, 2003
Second, can you cite any statistics to support
your broad claims about unintended consequences?
Certainly when you look at the gun-free societies
they have a lot less assault, robbery, rape, etc.
Not that I'm claiming such simple comparisons are
valid, I'm just wondering if you can cite any evidence.
Third, going back to what Clark said,
rather than what you find easy to argue against,
what Clark says is not a gun ban, it's
an assault weapon ban. Here's a little context for you. We already have a ban on
privately owned rocket propelled grenade launchers, shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles,
anti-tank rockets, and lots of other heavy duty weapons. We have a de facto ban on automatic weapons. We have an assault weapon ban from 1994 that's set to expire in 2004. We allow handguns, rifles, 'sport' guns, and pre-1994 of assault guns. In this context, can you suggest the unintended consequences of keeping the assault weapons in the disallowed category?
Fourth, we have an interesting example before us of a society that allowed gun ownership, yet the
gun ownership failed to prevent either totalitarian rule or foreign invasion. I'm referring of course to Iraq. Are you ready to retire the nice-sounding meme that gun ownership == free society? I didn't think so. Why not? Well, for starters, maybe because an instance is not an argument. And maybe there's a straw man in this paragraph too. Do you appreciate being trolled any more than I do?
So instead of attacking straw men and assuming all your interlocutors are gun-phobic nutcases, why don't you try actually arguing the point in question?
Given the disparity of penalties between, say, a mugging and this spam attack, it's clear that the government would prefer that we express our rage with assault and battery. Most murderers get off with less than 471 years.
Lemme know your favorite assault weapon so I can start settling my scores the gov't approved way.
note to humor impaired: that's sarcasm there. I agree with General Clark: if you want assault weapons, join the Army -- they've got lot's of 'em.
It's a common misconception that superconductivity means zero electrical resistance. This is true, but it's only one of the oddities of superconductivity. Another main one is the Meissner Effect. This is the expulsion of magnetic fields from a material as it makes its transition from normal to superconducting.
Pure zero resistance would prevent electric fields from entering a block of superconductor (the change in magnetic fields will induce eddy currents) to counter any change in the local magnetic field) and this effect is called perfect diamagnetism.
The Meissner effect is different: it's a phase change effect -- it takes energy to expel the magnetic field. If the magnetic field is strong enough, the material may never superconduct. In any case, the transition temperature T_c is actually a function of the local magnetic field.
Furthermore, if you boost the field enough, you can quench the superconductivity and initiate resistance heating -- it can get nasty with high currents.
Is the magnetic expulsion perfect? Sometimes it is, and sometimes not, because of flux pinning.
Since we often want to use superconductors to either make high magnetic fields (like in magnetic resonance imagers) or to carry large currents (that induce high magnetic fields) the Meissner Effect, and the magnetic dependence of the transition temperature are important considerations for practical superconductors.
Don't forget movix, the bootable mplayer
on
Mplayer Revisited
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you're a fan of mplayer, you might want to check out MoviX which makes bootable mplayer distributions. My favorite variation is MoviX^2. You boot from the movix2 CD, eject the movix2 CD, pop in a CD or DVD with any mplayer supported format, and there you go!
Walking robots have been around for over 20 years. I worked on a running biped at the MIT Leg Lab in 1990. According to the timeline Miura and Shimoyama had the first actively balancing biped in 1981. The cutting edge of research would be to walk more efficiently (i.e. low energy per foot walked), to walk on rough terrain, to navigate stairs, to couple with sonar or vision sensors... In other words, basic walking is solved, but doing anything useful with it is still a tough problem.
Well, maybe not. The benefits of Java described in the parent apply equally well to C++ and maybe C# and their respective development environments. Greenspun says explicitly that the students who chose Java are having a harder time than those who chose C++ and C#. You (author of the parent) need to explain not just what Java is good for, but why you think it's superior to C++ and C#.
That's why the comparison to SUVs is appropriate. On paved roads, in wet or dry weather, most any modern sedan will hold the road better than an SUV. And they're more efficient. In snowy weather, the all-wheel-drive sedans are still better than the SUV. The conditions that make an SUV shine are off-road conditions. It's the wrong tool for city and suburban driving. Greenspun's argument is that Java is inferior to C++ and C# (i.e. the wrong tool for) for database backed web services programming. You need to say where it 's better than the competition.
I like the size of the hard disk, but these days we expect more from our tivo-like devices. For example, camcorder input, output onto CD rom or DVD rom, and maybe network access. How well can it control a cable box? What about recording two channels at once? How much does the program guide cost?
The RCA Scenium gets its program guide for free from the TV signal (only 2-3 days ahead though.)
The Panansonic DMR-HS2 writes DVD+RW and DVD RAM disks (RAM might be a proprietary format) but it can't control a cable box.
The box doesn't show room for a writable optical drive, and that's what I want most. On the other hand, if we can get the source, maybe we can make a do-it-all box with a decent user interface...
I believe the kind of probabalistic computing Intel's talking about is analagous to error correction. On your average data CD about 15% of the bits are redundant and devoted to error correction. This reduces the probability of erroneously reading the CD, although the probability of error is still non-zero. Same deal with ECC memory. I'm guessing Intel is looking at ways to apply that kind of trick to the computational logic.
Two possibly dumb questions (but this is slashdot, after all). (1) Can you change the scheduler default timeslice (10 msec seems a bit long for a multi-GHz CPU). (2) does it do the right thing for hyperthreading? (for hyperthreading, the scheduler needs to understand that one of the CPUs is sorta crippled, so jobs should flop back & forth between both CPUs).
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking. Sure you can drop a couple grand for a purify license or learn to use valgrind, but it should be an easy-to-switch compiler option.
Re:Interesting technology
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My original message was modded down for being redundant, but most of your objections could have been answered by reading the original article. There's a simple solution: the tags will be removed from the products you buy at the store, much like current devices are.
If you read the article you'd see be aware that Michelin, for example, plans to embed tags in every tire, and to associate the tags with your VIN. As the article says: "Do you really want your car's tires broadcasting your every move?"
Again, if you read the article, you'd be aware that "The European Central Bank may embed RFID chips in the euro note." Get tagged cash from an ATM, and the bank knows which bills you're carrying. Spend it on a hammer, and there's enough RFID trail to identify who bought the hammer. If you were to read the article before flaming, you'd see it's not completely irrational at all.
Also, who's to say that there will be any connection between the id stored in the tag and your name?
there may not be a connection immediately. It may be made later (the same way HTML cookie information is collated). Like when you hand over your ticket and step on an airplane, or when your EZpass equipped car goes through a tollbooth.
The data can be collected now, and the individual identified later. Like when the police come to your door to pick you up as a material witness.
Companies would have no reason to keep track, and they're the only ones who could get that information.
That's showing a distinct lack of imagination. Companies have a ton of incentive to keep track. For example, think of all the great marketing information you can gather. For example, maybe Gap sweatshirt buyers hang out at the mall food court. Good place to advertise specials. What brands of clothing show up at a baseball game, or a chick flick, or the tool dept. at Sears? This information is valuable, and as it becomes cheaper to collect, companies will want to.
Instead of spreading FUD, try promoting proper use and regulation of a new technology that could be very beneficial in a lot of areas.
I'd love to see your suggestions for regulations controlling the use of RFID information. And I'd love to see a bill about it introduced in Congress before it becomes a problem. But as we know from the spam situation, Congress usually waits for something to become a big problem before it's willing to limit the freedom of marketers.
I also think you should withdraw that comment about FUD. Everything I wrote follows from intentions or potential intentions announced by companies or other institutions and described in the original article.
Re:Interesting technology
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
Here's a quote from the article, which, to me, indicates why we should all be against ubiquitous RFIDs:
Right now, you can buy a hammer, a pair of jeans, or a razor blade with anonymity. With RFID tags, that may be a thing of the past. Some manufacturers are planning to tag just the packaging, but others will also tag their products. There is
no law requiring a label indicating that an RFID chip is in a product. Once you buy your RFID-tagged jeans at The Gap with RFID-tagged money, walk out of the store wearing RFID-tagged shoes, and get into your car with its RFID-tagged tires, you could be tracked anywhere you travel. Bar codes are usually scanned at the store, but not after purchase. But RFID transponders are, in many cases, forever part of the product, and designed to respond when they receive a signal. Imagine everything you own is "numbered, identified, catalogued, and tracked." Anonymity and privacy? Gone in a hailstorm of invisible communication, betrayed by your very property.
Spelling it out, this means institutions that choose to can automatically and cheaply start assembling a history of which RFID tags go where, and when. Still not scared? Next step: when the cops come to pick you up as a "material witness" they can easily scan your clothing and compare it to the RFID histories. Is everyone going to feel just as free to complain about the moron-in-chief, worship unpopular religions, and excercise their legal right to dissent against the powers-that-be if such technology becomes widespread?
The test results are invalidated by severely lopsided testing conditions. Among them, Apple used a prototype G5 running its special GNU compiler and an unreleased version of OS X. The Dells used shipping hardware, vanilla GNU compilers and Red Hat 9.
... Dell's published results on the SPEC site--regarded as the definitive repository for SPEC results--are best-case. They're far better than the results cited by Veritest in the Apple report. That bit takes no special knowledge to ferret out.
Thank you, Apple, for a fine lesson in how to lie with statistics.
The parent cites this byte article which claims the original Bell Labs Unix license deeded all derivative works back to AT&T. Ouch.
In perpetuity.
Actually, that may not be an ouch because courts generally frown on perpetual contracts (IANAL).
Now I'm not claiming that therefore SCO has a slam dunk. But it does indicate SCO's main line of attack. And it does make all the arguments about date and place of invention somewhat tangential.
One key question is: exactly how much work is covered by the original license? Another key question: how much of the original UNIX is tainted by unlicensed imports from BSD? I'll be watching while the billion dollar boys battle it out...
You caught me there; I had the right exponent, but the wrong name. Doesn't even work according to the British naming convention (in Britain, a billion officially means a million million. It's so confusing the Brits rarely use the term). But I learned something important: if you want to get a lot of replies on slashdot, then introduce a small error that lots of folks can spot and correct!
OK, the article actually says 1 billion computer chips. The early CPUs only had 29000 transistors; the new ones have about 50 million. Some of the support chips don't have so many transistors. But I think we can safely assume an average of 1 million transistors/chip over this time period. So we get an amazing one trillion (10^15) transistors! WOW!
One of the big reasons for using supercomputers over the past decade or more has been to simulate nuclear explosions. When we (the USA) simulate weapons instead of testing them, it allows us to lead by example when we argue for a ban on nuclear tests. Because simulation is technically challenging, it slows down nuclear proliferation. It's a creative form of deterrence.
All this for the price of a few supercomputers every year. And the market for supercomputers pushes several technologies; for example, high speed interconnect and gallium arsenide, and sets the bar for high performance silicon. Pretty good deal, doncha think?
But now the Moron-in-Chief wants to bring back nuclear testing.
(pardon me, 'nookyuler.' Bush can't be wrong about something as simple as pronunciation, can he?). Farewell to deterrence. Farewell to common sense...
Here's a little quote from The Crying of Lot 49 that might show how the software title pays homage to Pynchon:
"Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she knew of communicated by
WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what undergrounds didn't....[H]ere were God knew how
many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly
even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever
else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this
withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?),
there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."
Google silent tristero or trystero and you'll find plenty of hip references to private communications. There's even a sourcforge project called tristero.
I believe the name "Waste" is a references to Thomas Pynchon's novel "The Crying of Lot 49." In the novel, W.A.S.T.E is either a hoax or a secret system for communication, and (might) stand for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire." Here's a little quote:
"Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she knew of communicated by
WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what undergrounds didn't....[H]ere were God knew how
many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly
even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever
else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this
withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?),
there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."
Re:End Manned spaceflight But dont end spaceflight
on
Shuttle Politics
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Very very few of the experiments that can be done in space need a human on site. Most of them can be done remotely, at much lower cost. Check out space station related issues of What's New .
For example, the famous protein crystals were no better than earth-grown ones, and the flu drug came from an Australian crystal, not a Space Lab 1 crystal.. Other than spiders in zero G, very little research has been done on the ISS (International Space Station), and none of it needed human minders.
For example, we could float about 10 more space telescopes for the cost of the ISS. And in fact, NASA repeatedly
transferred money out of research to cover ISS cost overruns.
Don't get me wrong, the shuttles and the space station are great for inspiring school kids, but they really soak up $billions that could go to research.
As for shooting down Dinosaur Killers, what Bruce Willis movie have you been watching? An unmanned rocket that can send a robot to Mars can deliver a warhead to an incoming asteroid, and several ground based radars and space based telescopes can scan the skies much better than an astronaut looking out the ISS window!
Slashdot Mirror
They took 3 polls with 3334 respondents, gathering data on three misperceptions about the Iraq war
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Queda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war
News_source______FOX_____CBS_____ABC_____NBC_____ CNN___Print_____NPR/
_________________________________________________ _____Sources____PBS
0_misperceptions_20%_____30%_____39%_____45%_____ 45%_____53%_____77%
1_or_more
misperceptions___80______71______61______55______ 55______47______23
Yep, you read that right; fully 80% of Faux watchers had at least 1 of the misperceptions; fully 77% of the NPR/PBS crowd had zero. Wow!
They also attempted to control for demographic variations in the audience. Here's what they say (end of P.15)
I also really like this paragraph (page 16): Isn't that amazing? The more you read the paper, or watch CNN, the better informed you are. But the more you watch Faux News, the more likely you are to be misled!! Now of course these are correlations; they don't prove causation, but they are pretty darned persuasive.This study was commented on in the wash post seattle times twin cities and other places
The one place you I can guarentee you won't find it is fox news!
I don't think so! I'll bet the great majority of sources are english and the rest are western european. Guess what? People tend to reference works written in their own native language! This is bias up the wazoo! So much for a neutral measure!
I've only spent about 5 minutes thinking about it, but a slightly less biased (but not neutral) measure would involve counting works translated into multiple languages. The idea being that if a work is worth the effort of importing from another language/culture, then it's more significant than an untranslated work.
The fact that Murray could build this obvious fundamental bias into his metric is laughable. Then to proceed blithely with the whole book pretending his metric is neutral is just absurd. A whole book about measuring science, and it's based on a warped ruler!
Truly, Schiller was right: against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.
One thing you can't deny about that pic: the case is OutStanding in its Field!!
And according to Ayres and Donohue who extended Lott's data through later years, Lott mostly managed to discover the start and end of the crack epidemic -- Crime rose and dropped just as much in urban areas without any changes in right-to-carry laws.
So you've answered my second question, and I thank you. You do have research to back up your claims; it's not good research, but at least it is research. Now how about getting rid of your straw man and dealing with what Clark actually said rather than what you find easy to argue against?
First, that is a classic example of a Straw Man. You haven't argued against what Clark said. Instead, you argued against an extreme distortion of what Clark said. So what? Clark's not in favor of a complete gun ban, and neither am I. Why change the subject? I know it's sometimes impolite to introduce facts into discussions like this one, but here's what Clark actually said: Source: Interview on CNN Crossfire Jun 25, 2003
Second, can you cite any statistics to support your broad claims about unintended consequences? Certainly when you look at the gun-free societies they have a lot less assault, robbery, rape, etc. Not that I'm claiming such simple comparisons are valid, I'm just wondering if you can cite any evidence.
Third, going back to what Clark said, rather than what you find easy to argue against, what Clark says is not a gun ban, it's an assault weapon ban. Here's a little context for you. We already have a ban on privately owned rocket propelled grenade launchers, shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank rockets, and lots of other heavy duty weapons. We have a de facto ban on automatic weapons. We have an assault weapon ban from 1994 that's set to expire in 2004. We allow handguns, rifles, 'sport' guns, and pre-1994 of assault guns. In this context, can you suggest the unintended consequences of keeping the assault weapons in the disallowed category?
Fourth, we have an interesting example before us of a society that allowed gun ownership, yet the gun ownership failed to prevent either totalitarian rule or foreign invasion. I'm referring of course to Iraq. Are you ready to retire the nice-sounding meme that gun ownership == free society? I didn't think so. Why not? Well, for starters, maybe because an instance is not an argument. And maybe there's a straw man in this paragraph too. Do you appreciate being trolled any more than I do?
So instead of attacking straw men and assuming all your interlocutors are gun-phobic nutcases, why don't you try actually arguing the point in question?
Given the disparity of penalties between, say, a mugging and this spam attack, it's clear that the government would prefer that we express our rage with assault and battery. Most murderers get off with less than 471 years. Lemme know your favorite assault weapon so I can start settling my scores the gov't approved way. note to humor impaired: that's sarcasm there. I agree with General Clark: if you want assault weapons, join the Army -- they've got lot's of 'em.
Pure zero resistance would prevent electric fields from entering a block of superconductor (the change in magnetic fields will induce eddy currents) to counter any change in the local magnetic field) and this effect is called perfect diamagnetism.
The Meissner effect is different: it's a phase change effect -- it takes energy to expel the magnetic field. If the magnetic field is strong enough, the material may never superconduct. In any case, the transition temperature T_c is actually a function of the local magnetic field.
Furthermore, if you boost the field enough, you can quench the superconductivity and initiate resistance heating -- it can get nasty with high currents. Is the magnetic expulsion perfect? Sometimes it is, and sometimes not, because of flux pinning.
Since we often want to use superconductors to either make high magnetic fields (like in magnetic resonance imagers) or to carry large currents (that induce high magnetic fields) the Meissner Effect, and the magnetic dependence of the transition temperature are important considerations for practical superconductors.
If you're a fan of mplayer, you might want to check out MoviX which makes bootable mplayer distributions. My favorite variation is MoviX^2. You boot from the movix2 CD, eject the movix2 CD, pop in a CD or DVD with any mplayer supported format, and there you go!
Walking robots have been around for over 20 years. I worked on a running biped at the MIT Leg Lab in 1990. According to the timeline Miura and Shimoyama had the first actively balancing biped in 1981. The cutting edge of research would be to walk more efficiently (i.e. low energy per foot walked), to walk on rough terrain, to navigate stairs, to couple with sonar or vision sensors... In other words, basic walking is solved, but doing anything useful with it is still a tough problem.
That's why the comparison to SUVs is appropriate. On paved roads, in wet or dry weather, most any modern sedan will hold the road better than an SUV. And they're more efficient. In snowy weather, the all-wheel-drive sedans are still better than the SUV. The conditions that make an SUV shine are off-road conditions. It's the wrong tool for city and suburban driving. Greenspun's argument is that Java is inferior to C++ and C# (i.e. the wrong tool for) for database backed web services programming. You need to say where it 's better than the competition.
I like the size of the hard disk, but these days we expect more from our tivo-like devices. For example, camcorder input, output onto CD rom or DVD rom, and maybe network access. How well can it control a cable box? What about recording two channels at once? How much does the program guide cost?
The RCA Scenium gets its program guide for free from the TV signal (only 2-3 days ahead though.) The Panansonic DMR-HS2 writes DVD+RW and DVD RAM disks (RAM might be a proprietary format) but it can't control a cable box.
The box doesn't show room for a writable optical drive, and that's what I want most. On the other hand, if we can get the source, maybe we can make a do-it-all box with a decent user interface...
I believe the kind of probabalistic computing Intel's talking about is analagous to error correction. On your average data CD about 15% of the bits are redundant and devoted to error correction. This reduces the probability of erroneously reading the CD, although the probability of error is still non-zero. Same deal with ECC memory. I'm guessing Intel is looking at ways to apply that kind of trick to the computational logic.
You want to talk to Bush? It's easy -- just raise $100,000 for his re-election campaign and you'll get 10 minutes of face time! No problem.
Two possibly dumb questions (but this is slashdot, after all). (1) Can you change the scheduler default timeslice (10 msec seems a bit long for a multi-GHz CPU). (2) does it do the right thing for hyperthreading? (for hyperthreading, the scheduler needs to understand that one of the CPUs is sorta crippled, so jobs should flop back & forth between both CPUs).
I think what C and C++ really lack is the option to turn on array range checking. Sure you can drop a couple grand for a purify license or learn to use valgrind, but it should be an easy-to-switch compiler option.
If you read the article you'd see be aware that Michelin, for example, plans to embed tags in every tire, and to associate the tags with your VIN. As the article says: "Do you really want your car's tires broadcasting your every move?" Again, if you read the article, you'd be aware that "The European Central Bank may embed RFID chips in the euro note." Get tagged cash from an ATM, and the bank knows which bills you're carrying. Spend it on a hammer, and there's enough RFID trail to identify who bought the hammer. If you were to read the article before flaming, you'd see it's not completely irrational at all.
Also, who's to say that there will be any connection between the id stored in the tag and your name?
there may not be a connection immediately. It may be made later (the same way HTML cookie information is collated). Like when you hand over your ticket and step on an airplane, or when your EZpass equipped car goes through a tollbooth. The data can be collected now, and the individual identified later. Like when the police come to your door to pick you up as a material witness.
Companies would have no reason to keep track, and they're the only ones who could get that information.
That's showing a distinct lack of imagination. Companies have a ton of incentive to keep track. For example, think of all the great marketing information you can gather. For example, maybe Gap sweatshirt buyers hang out at the mall food court. Good place to advertise specials. What brands of clothing show up at a baseball game, or a chick flick, or the tool dept. at Sears? This information is valuable, and as it becomes cheaper to collect, companies will want to.
Instead of spreading FUD, try promoting proper use and regulation of a new technology that could be very beneficial in a lot of areas.
I'd love to see your suggestions for regulations controlling the use of RFID information. And I'd love to see a bill about it introduced in Congress before it becomes a problem. But as we know from the spam situation, Congress usually waits for something to become a big problem before it's willing to limit the freedom of marketers.
I also think you should withdraw that comment about FUD. Everything I wrote follows from intentions or potential intentions announced by companies or other institutions and described in the original article.
In perpetuity.
Actually, that may not be an ouch because courts generally frown on perpetual contracts (IANAL).
Now I'm not claiming that therefore SCO has a slam dunk. But it does indicate SCO's main line of attack. And it does make all the arguments about date and place of invention somewhat tangential.
One key question is: exactly how much work is covered by the original license? Another key question: how much of the original UNIX is tainted by unlicensed imports from BSD? I'll be watching while the billion dollar boys battle it out...
You caught me there; I had the right exponent, but the wrong name. Doesn't even work according to the British naming convention (in Britain, a billion officially means a million million. It's so confusing the Brits rarely use the term). But I learned something important: if you want to get a lot of replies on slashdot, then introduce a small error that lots of folks can spot and correct!
OK, the article actually says 1 billion computer chips. The early CPUs only had 29000 transistors; the new ones have about 50 million. Some of the support chips don't have so many transistors. But I think we can safely assume an average of 1 million transistors/chip over this time period. So we get an amazing one trillion (10^15) transistors! WOW!
All this for the price of a few supercomputers every year. And the market for supercomputers pushes several technologies; for example, high speed interconnect and gallium arsenide, and sets the bar for high performance silicon. Pretty good deal, doncha think?
But now the Moron-in-Chief wants to bring back nuclear testing. (pardon me, 'nookyuler.' Bush can't be wrong about something as simple as pronunciation, can he?). Farewell to deterrence. Farewell to common sense...
For example, the famous protein crystals were no better than earth-grown ones, and the flu drug came from an Australian crystal, not a Space Lab 1 crystal.. Other than spiders in zero G, very little research has been done on the ISS (International Space Station), and none of it needed human minders.
For example, we could float about 10 more space telescopes for the cost of the ISS. And in fact, NASA repeatedly transferred money out of research to cover ISS cost overruns.
Don't get me wrong, the shuttles and the space station are great for inspiring school kids, but they really soak up $billions that could go to research.
As for shooting down Dinosaur Killers, what Bruce Willis movie have you been watching? An unmanned rocket that can send a robot to Mars can deliver a warhead to an incoming asteroid, and several ground based radars and space based telescopes can scan the skies much better than an astronaut looking out the ISS window!