Youtube's biggest problem isn't really the struggle that the article presents, it's that it's a monolithic entity that can be censored or manipulated by the nation-state, even if that state is limited to blocking. It's also subject to the whims of the corporation that owns it, as was demonstrated very poignantly by the integration of a social networking site and the adjustment of the way that usernames and the comments system function.
Granted, Youtube is not the sole video site on the Internet for personal content, and sometimes the huge amount of content that is acceptable to a nation-state makes it hard for them to justify blocking the whole site just to get a little bit of unacceptable content, but when one site emerges as the de facto default it becomes more likely that users don't even consider other sites or other options. Usually a competitive system is a healthy system, and this lack of competition threatens the health as it leaves the concept threatened to unilateral manipulation despite the interests of the users.
You assume that a cop (and/or a DA) who thinks his OS is either Firefox or Internet Explorer will know that and not cause me several really bad days and a stink that won't wash off.
It has been rumored that during the Casey Anthony investigation and trial, the investigating authorities only submitted evidence of web-browsing history from Internet Explorer, and that there was only very minimal circumstantial evidence of searching for things that could be interpreted as criminal. After the trial and acquittal, supposedly, it was able to be demonstrated that evidence of browser history for Firefox existed that showed someone used the computer to search for techniques to dispose of a body, which was apparently not part of the Prosecution's case. With our Double Jeopardy laws unless it can be demonstrated that there was some kind of intentional illegal act on the part of law enforcement or prosecution it would not be possible to re-prosecute Anthony based on this omitted evidence.
That was a very high-profile murder trial, and if this rumor is accurate then they couldn't even get it right when it's literally a capital case with probably a significant budget for the investigation then I don't know that we can rely on them to get computer forensics right in other circumstances.
They get what they want: cheap land, cheap electricity (coal), low or no taxes (incentives), cheap labor. The states get employment. Oh wait, you're data center is only going to employ 100 people?? Aw, shucks!
I'd bet labor and land/rent costs are the principal reasons. If it's $100,000 a year per datacenter worker in California and $60,000 per year for that same worker in Georgia, if there are a hundred workers, that's four million dollars a year. There may not be as many workers in Georgia or other Southeastern states to source from compared to California and other places known for tech, but there's not as much demand for them either, so the wages aren't being inflated through worker scarcity and competition among employers for a limited pool.
Besides, operating a datacenter does not require a whole lot of creativity. There are existing standards and practices to implement, one literally can do it without coming up with anything original at all if one wants. As such it makes sense to put what effectively is a reimplementation of an existing thing in a place that costs less to do so.
spaceX is way ahead of the real players... in the 1950's.
Given how the vision of launching, landing, and re-launching a rocket became widely popular in the fifties, and only now are we on the cusp of seeing it really work as described, that kind of makes all other expendable launch systems look like something even more retrograde than SpaceX's...
And this is why Blue Origin's accomplishment, while interesting, is not as noteworthy as it initially sounds. If I understand right, they've sent a payload-less rocket up to the arbitrary border of space (ie, 100km) twice and landed it. As it was payload-less it didn't do any actual work.
If the rocket doesn't do any actual work then it's not a lot different than my shooting-off model rockets. It's interesting, it's fun, but it's not accomplishing a goal other than shooting-off rockets.
SpaceX has launched a payload for a customer and landed the rocket. Hopefully in their next few launches they'll land more rockets and be able to turn around and fly them again with more payloads. That would actually be a noteworthy accomplishment.
I was under the impression that it was wrong to dig through a customer's files without reason, and possibly in-itself illegal to do so, even if it is a widespread practice.
To me, this strikes of a feel-good, circle-jerk law. Computer service technicians are already going to make such a report if they find child pornography to be abhorrent, and there isn't a good mechanism for identifying who opened or looked at a file long after service was performed or even who had custody of the computer at that time. Unless a computer is seized and investigators manage to connect-the-dots right after it's serviced I don't see this law ever being applied. Instead by passing this law that won't ever do anything it makes the legislature feel warm-and-fuzzy and gives them the ability to tell their constituents that they did something, when in reality they did effectively nothing.
The bigger worry is that this may give muddy the ability to prosecute the owner/user of the computer. If the computer was serviced and if time/date stamps indicate that the files were accessed while in the care of that outside business, the defendant that owns the computer might be able to claim that he wasn't the one that put the files there, but that the person(s) that serviced it did, as the timestamps match that time when the computer was not in the owner's control. If the case against the defendant is strongly reliant on these files that case might be irreparably damaged. If the prosecution brings up that timestamps can be changed, then the defendant could use that to further make a point that the computer professional (ie, the service tech) would be in a better position to manipulate timestamps than the ignorant user (ie, the defendant) such that the history of the files themselves is completely unverifiable.
That's absurd. This is a regulated monopoly. If the government wasn't regulating them, they would dramatically raise rates and prohibit solar altogether. When you have a monopoly, you have to regulate.
They effectively have prohibited solar. If I understand what they've done correctly, they've set a ridiculously high grid-tie charge with a ridiculously-low kWh payout, such that it is impossible to even break-even.
I'm a little curious what Mr. Musk is going to do. In addition to batteries for cars, the Gigafactory was also intended to supply batteries for the Tesla Powerwall, which was intended to interface with solar systems to provide nighttime power. As I understand it the factory's construction is still in the build-the-building phase, which is far less money committed than the, "furnish the finished building with manufacturing lines and crank-up production," phase where the real expense is. I would not be surprised if the Gigafactory either never opens, or if they start looking at alternate sites on which to build the bigger, better replacement factory when battery demand exceeds the current factory's capabilities. After all, there is no reason to reward behavior like this.
Part of what's so frustrating about utility companies doing things like this is that it means they still must operate power plants that pollute, plants that could be retired if solar were widely deployed. There needs to be real consideration for forcing power generation and power distribution to split into separate companies if this kind of thing is going to become more of an issue.
I've always found the nonviolent, walk-in, walk-up robberies interesting to read about. They don't try to clear-out the whole bank, they just clear-out the one teller and leave, no actual stated/printed threats, no scene. Depending on the circumstances they get a couple thousand dollars.
That said, it's ultimately impractical. Some of the people that have discussed this after they were caught and served their time commented on how they had to be careful for everything from parking the car to confirming that there was no security guard there that day to mess it up. They had to visit other cities, but where their visits didn't leave any discernible pattern to tip-off where they actually were from. They had to use the element of surprise, and if they wanted to commit multiple robberies to put together real money they often had to rob several in one day before a suitable response could be made on the part of the police, and had to hope that they didn't slip-up anywhere. In the end they made at-most middle-income money, nothing to retire-on.
In a world where physical bank heists are rare, a PHB will cut back funding for the strong vault, motion sensors, glass break sensors, etc. They can save their chain with thousands of branches millions of dollars in this way. Why pay for all those security measures from non-existent threats?
Of course, once those security measures are compromised we will see an uptick in physical bank robberies again.
You're forgetting the one thing that would probably still stop them, which is the insurance company. They won't be inurable if they don't have that stuff, or the cost of the insurance that would cover them without those things will far-outstrip the savings for not having them.
When computers were obsolete the minute you bought it, that was not bad for the people who sold them. Now that computers are "good enough" for half a decade or more, the industry seems to be in much more trouble.
In the nineties comptuers were, "good enough," too, even though marketing didn't want to say that, or could be made good-enough through well planned simple upgrades. I had a 350MHz machine (Pentium III? can't remember for certian) that kept up with my friends' machines with GHz processors because I had a 1.5GB RAM while most of them were in the 128MB-256MB range, and I had a really nice video card, for the time.
As for cars, once electric cars have a range about the same as what a half a tank of gasoline gives a gas-powered car, which is usually around 150 miles, electric cars will be viable for a lot of the population. Sure, technology will improve and the cars may get better, but my buddy's '73 Dart with its two barrel carburetor, manual windows, fully hydraulic transmission without overdrive, and bench seat gets him around just fine.
If anything, simpler electric cars may be better cars for people of less means. Again looking at gasoline-powered cars, simple gas-powered cars are usually easier to repair than complex luxury cars as they have less parts. They also might be less prone to breaking as there are less things that can break.
I don't think it's nearly as dire as the summary makes it sound.
Sounds to me like the idea of refining a set of rules, then someone else looking at those rules and refining a new set of rules based on what they saw. I admit that I am not a tabletop gamer, but when I've been around where people have been playing I haven't seen them use inches in-game as units. I've seen some battletech tabletop gaming where distance and vector were employed, but converted to units to scale in the game rather than in human terms.
Another consideration is how codified the gaming rules were prior to Gygax's part. If Patt's rules were not hard fixed rules but were more along the lines of guidelines or house rules that spread organically through play with random people, then while it could be argued that Gygax shouldn't have owned any intellectual rights over those rules, Patt also might not have been able to claim rights either.
In some ways look at games like Tag or Hide and Go Seek, or any other of a multitude of kids games where guidelines exist but hard-fast rules are only adopted when the games commence. Depending on how Patt's rules spread, they may have been a lot more along those lines.
Facebook appears to have gone a lot further than MySpace did in integrating itself into basic web services. As such it will be harder to dislodge even if its core end-user business ceases growing or even shrinks, as they'll be able to be come a metrics and ratings and data company.
That said, there's still no reason to assume that any given tech or Internet services company will always be around. Go back a few years and AOL and Yahoo were juggernauts. Go back before that and IBM was hot.
Companies live and die by the research and development or the design they do that turns into products. Cut off the R&D, eventually the company withers on the vine. Apple has experienced it when Jobs wasn't at the helm, and other tech companies have folded because they myopically assumed that whatever thing they'd done to make their name would continue to bring in revenue. Look at how long Palm hung-on to PalmOS. Palm could have been what the iPhone and the Android platform have become if they'd not stunted themselves. Granted, their various corporate masters over the years didn't help, but the end result is that they're gone despite having been quite innovative when their products debuted.
IQ testing is not exactly the definitive method to benchmark ability or brain-power, especially if individuals don't want to participate.
It's not exactly a stretch to consider that those who smoke marijuana despite being told that they're not supposed to might also not commit themselves to tests designed to show their IQ.
No, if one is already into woodworking, then building something small like this doesn't cost very much.
Based on the craftsmanship of the end result the person is already into woodworking. The bulk of the purchases for this project are supplies, not tools, and that's assuming that there isn't a cache of cutoffs or other remnants to use.
Open architectures have been tried in portable computers before. I have one sitting under my desk at work, a 100MHz Pentium that was sold through a local vendor much in the same way that ATX for tower PC cases and NLX for desktop "pizza box" PC cases were open. At the time proprietary portable computers were larger than they are now and this was a little larger still, but is probably smaller than the wood-case portable featured in the article.
The size needed to make an open architecture, let lone fully open-source hardware, does not appear to be conducive to portable computers. That thing is huge. There is no way that I could justify traveling with that computer, either for work around-town or for air travel, because I can't dedicate that kind of weight or space to a computer. Hell, it's bigger than the Alienware M17 that I use as a desktop at work, which is far too big to take with me for any kind of real work.
There no reason the components of the enclosure itself couldn't be made as modular as the innards.
Except that the components inside are off-the-shelf from a specific vendor, and a lot of interconnections are proprietary, even if just the ribbon cables.
Woodworking itself isn't all that expensive if you already have the tools. I had to buy some maple when we were rebuilding a TV-show prop and the 8' hardwood boards were like $15 each if memory serves.
"Replace the innards" doesn't work for most laptops as each laptop line is engineered as an assembly based on the components that are considered necessary at the time. Fifteen years ago laptops would have needed a floppy diskette drive, a CD-ROM drive, a 2.5" hard disk drive, PS/2 port, 15-pin SVGA, a 9-pin RS-232 serial port, a dual-slot PCMCIA slot, and an RJ11 socket tied to an internal modem. Some machines would have had a 25-pin Parallel port too.
Now, we need SSD, USB, 802.11 wireless with internal antennas, SDXC socket, possibly SIM 3G/4G capability with internal antennas, digital video-out like HDMI or Mini-HDMI or a Displayport variant, and on machines designed to be workstations, docking ports and RJ-45 Ethernet port. Even optical drives are not considered essential anymore and are limited to specific models.
Now, look at the price of a high-end laptop and of a low-end laptop. When we bought my wife's Thinkpad X301 when it it was new it was about $1700, and was equipped with just about every option available at the time. When we replaced it a little over a year ago with a Thinkpad Yoga 12 it was around $1200, with the Core i7, the 8GB RAM, the big SSD (can't remember offhand if 512GB or 256GB), etc. We got five years of usage out of the X301 and it got dragged across two continents and probably sixty flights. Amortized over time it cost $340 per year while it was in regular service. If that Yoga 12 lasts five years it'll cost $240/year, and so far it's handled probably half a dozen flights without any problems. We replaced the X301 in-part because the performance was no longer meeting our needs, and in-part because the battery was getting to the point where it wasn't lasting even two hours anymore, so no good on flights, and the cost of a battery was high enough relative to the performance of the machine to turn us away from buying another.
It does not make economic sense to build a portable, personal computer to last longer than five years when the computer will no longer meet the needs of the user after those five years are up. Moore's Law states that computing power doubles every eighteen months. Assuming the same class of machine, replacement computer five years later is around eight times more powerful than the computer it replaced. From an engineering perspective, it simply doesn't make sense to overbuild on orders of magnitude past the realistic lifespan of the computer.
US currency cash as a unit of exchange is only worthwhile to those that aren't enthusiasts if it actually holds its value. If US currency cash crashes, drug dealers will simply switch to a different fiat currency again. It was used because it was convenient, not because it was special.
I have absolutely no disagreement with your statement.
It helps that the Federal Reserve Note is the fiat currency of the healthiest large economy (as compared to problems in the European Union, problems in China, and problems in India) and that the government of nation that economy is part-of actively works to maintain that currency.
In some ways Bitcoin really is like gold, there's only so much of it, creating more of it is difficult and does not happen at a terribly fast rate, and its value can change quite rapidly based on popular perceptions. Fiat currencies are backed by governments that use the ability to create money as a means to regulate that money artificially, which can allow for problems to be mitigated depending on how good that government is at doing just that.
Bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but for the foreseeable future I don't think that it'll amount to much more than that.
Who thinks this reads like a "Netcraft Confirms" post? Besides, Bitcoin's not going anywhere as long as folks are using it to buy drugs
Bitcoin as a unit of exchange is only worthwhile to those that aren't enthusiasts if it actually holds its value. If Bitcoin crashes, drug dealers will simply switch to a fiat currency again. It was used because it was convenient, not because it was special.
Since NASA is effectively becoming a procurement department to outsource everything it used to do, why not just get rid of NASA entirely? Put the whole contract, etc on eBay.
All mass human endeavors are essentially some form of distributed work. At some point the work is handed-off from one entity to another. What has mattered, historically, is who makes the decisions.
If you look at NASA historically from their early formation as NACA, their role has been to steer new technology to push the envelope. At times they adapted existing technology to suit their purposes like the Mercury with Redstone ICBM rockets or Gemini with Titan II, and at other times they used purpose-built machines that were designed under their supervision like the Saturn rockets and eventually the Shuttle. NASA didn't manufacture these themselves, but they did use them to attempt to do new things.
Getting to Earth Orbit and remaining in space generally isn't pushing the limit anymore. If anything it's figuring out how to make-routine something that we've successfully done many times. As such it makes sense that now we should figure how to do it cheaper and with more capacity and with more frequency. That hadn't been NASA's mission, and it really shouldn't be NASA's mission. They need to figure out our return to the Moon. They need to figure out how to get to Mars. They need to find some awesome uses for Lagrange Points. They need to investigate new propulsion systems that reduce the demand for reaction mass. Once a given technology is reasonably mature they need to hand it off and pick up the next new thing.
On the surface of it that sounds good, but many food and drink products do not translate well to microgravity, and given beer's carbon dioxide content and how once the container is opened dissolved carbon dioxide will release from the liquid, beer seems like it would be a poor choice of beverage to try to drink in such circumstances. The carbon dioxide would not rise out of the container like we're used to and probably would force the liquid out of the opening in the vessel.
And that's not even getting to possible taste issues...
Something I've noticed about old hardware, it was very expensive even before accounting for inflation compared to modern hardware. As such it was generally manufactured to much more robust standards than modern, increasingly commodity gear.
You have three categories; good, cheap, fast. Pick two.
I may look into that. I'm currently keeping an eye on a 3750G 24-port PoE switch on CL, but it's not PoE+, so I'm hesitating. Ideally a 2960S-24 or even one of the CG small switches will come up.
Slashdot Mirror
Youtube's biggest problem isn't really the struggle that the article presents, it's that it's a monolithic entity that can be censored or manipulated by the nation-state, even if that state is limited to blocking. It's also subject to the whims of the corporation that owns it, as was demonstrated very poignantly by the integration of a social networking site and the adjustment of the way that usernames and the comments system function.
Granted, Youtube is not the sole video site on the Internet for personal content, and sometimes the huge amount of content that is acceptable to a nation-state makes it hard for them to justify blocking the whole site just to get a little bit of unacceptable content, but when one site emerges as the de facto default it becomes more likely that users don't even consider other sites or other options. Usually a competitive system is a healthy system, and this lack of competition threatens the health as it leaves the concept threatened to unilateral manipulation despite the interests of the users.
You assume that a cop (and/or a DA) who thinks his OS is either Firefox or Internet Explorer will know that and not cause me several really bad days and a stink that won't wash off.
It has been rumored that during the Casey Anthony investigation and trial, the investigating authorities only submitted evidence of web-browsing history from Internet Explorer, and that there was only very minimal circumstantial evidence of searching for things that could be interpreted as criminal. After the trial and acquittal, supposedly, it was able to be demonstrated that evidence of browser history for Firefox existed that showed someone used the computer to search for techniques to dispose of a body, which was apparently not part of the Prosecution's case. With our Double Jeopardy laws unless it can be demonstrated that there was some kind of intentional illegal act on the part of law enforcement or prosecution it would not be possible to re-prosecute Anthony based on this omitted evidence.
That was a very high-profile murder trial, and if this rumor is accurate then they couldn't even get it right when it's literally a capital case with probably a significant budget for the investigation then I don't know that we can rely on them to get computer forensics right in other circumstances.
They get what they want: cheap land, cheap electricity (coal), low or no taxes (incentives), cheap labor. The states get employment. Oh wait, you're data center is only going to employ 100 people?? Aw, shucks!
I'd bet labor and land/rent costs are the principal reasons. If it's $100,000 a year per datacenter worker in California and $60,000 per year for that same worker in Georgia, if there are a hundred workers, that's four million dollars a year. There may not be as many workers in Georgia or other Southeastern states to source from compared to California and other places known for tech, but there's not as much demand for them either, so the wages aren't being inflated through worker scarcity and competition among employers for a limited pool.
Besides, operating a datacenter does not require a whole lot of creativity. There are existing standards and practices to implement, one literally can do it without coming up with anything original at all if one wants. As such it makes sense to put what effectively is a reimplementation of an existing thing in a place that costs less to do so.
spaceX is way ahead of the real players ... in the 1950's.
Given how the vision of launching, landing, and re-launching a rocket became widely popular in the fifties, and only now are we on the cusp of seeing it really work as described, that kind of makes all other expendable launch systems look like something even more retrograde than SpaceX's...
And this is why Blue Origin's accomplishment, while interesting, is not as noteworthy as it initially sounds. If I understand right, they've sent a payload-less rocket up to the arbitrary border of space (ie, 100km) twice and landed it. As it was payload-less it didn't do any actual work.
If the rocket doesn't do any actual work then it's not a lot different than my shooting-off model rockets. It's interesting, it's fun, but it's not accomplishing a goal other than shooting-off rockets.
SpaceX has launched a payload for a customer and landed the rocket. Hopefully in their next few launches they'll land more rockets and be able to turn around and fly them again with more payloads. That would actually be a noteworthy accomplishment.
I was under the impression that it was wrong to dig through a customer's files without reason, and possibly in-itself illegal to do so, even if it is a widespread practice.
To me, this strikes of a feel-good, circle-jerk law. Computer service technicians are already going to make such a report if they find child pornography to be abhorrent, and there isn't a good mechanism for identifying who opened or looked at a file long after service was performed or even who had custody of the computer at that time. Unless a computer is seized and investigators manage to connect-the-dots right after it's serviced I don't see this law ever being applied. Instead by passing this law that won't ever do anything it makes the legislature feel warm-and-fuzzy and gives them the ability to tell their constituents that they did something, when in reality they did effectively nothing.
The bigger worry is that this may give muddy the ability to prosecute the owner/user of the computer. If the computer was serviced and if time/date stamps indicate that the files were accessed while in the care of that outside business, the defendant that owns the computer might be able to claim that he wasn't the one that put the files there, but that the person(s) that serviced it did, as the timestamps match that time when the computer was not in the owner's control. If the case against the defendant is strongly reliant on these files that case might be irreparably damaged. If the prosecution brings up that timestamps can be changed, then the defendant could use that to further make a point that the computer professional (ie, the service tech) would be in a better position to manipulate timestamps than the ignorant user (ie, the defendant) such that the history of the files themselves is completely unverifiable.
That's absurd. This is a regulated monopoly. If the government wasn't regulating them, they would dramatically raise rates and prohibit solar altogether. When you have a monopoly, you have to regulate.
They effectively have prohibited solar. If I understand what they've done correctly, they've set a ridiculously high grid-tie charge with a ridiculously-low kWh payout, such that it is impossible to even break-even.
I'm a little curious what Mr. Musk is going to do. In addition to batteries for cars, the Gigafactory was also intended to supply batteries for the Tesla Powerwall, which was intended to interface with solar systems to provide nighttime power. As I understand it the factory's construction is still in the build-the-building phase, which is far less money committed than the, "furnish the finished building with manufacturing lines and crank-up production," phase where the real expense is. I would not be surprised if the Gigafactory either never opens, or if they start looking at alternate sites on which to build the bigger, better replacement factory when battery demand exceeds the current factory's capabilities. After all, there is no reason to reward behavior like this.
Part of what's so frustrating about utility companies doing things like this is that it means they still must operate power plants that pollute, plants that could be retired if solar were widely deployed. There needs to be real consideration for forcing power generation and power distribution to split into separate companies if this kind of thing is going to become more of an issue.
I've always found the nonviolent, walk-in, walk-up robberies interesting to read about. They don't try to clear-out the whole bank, they just clear-out the one teller and leave, no actual stated/printed threats, no scene. Depending on the circumstances they get a couple thousand dollars.
That said, it's ultimately impractical. Some of the people that have discussed this after they were caught and served their time commented on how they had to be careful for everything from parking the car to confirming that there was no security guard there that day to mess it up. They had to visit other cities, but where their visits didn't leave any discernible pattern to tip-off where they actually were from. They had to use the element of surprise, and if they wanted to commit multiple robberies to put together real money they often had to rob several in one day before a suitable response could be made on the part of the police, and had to hope that they didn't slip-up anywhere. In the end they made at-most middle-income money, nothing to retire-on.
In a world where physical bank heists are rare, a PHB will cut back funding for the strong vault, motion sensors, glass break sensors, etc. They can save their chain with thousands of branches millions of dollars in this way. Why pay for all those security measures from non-existent threats?
Of course, once those security measures are compromised we will see an uptick in physical bank robberies again.
You're forgetting the one thing that would probably still stop them, which is the insurance company. They won't be inurable if they don't have that stuff, or the cost of the insurance that would cover them without those things will far-outstrip the savings for not having them.
When computers were obsolete the minute you bought it, that was not bad for the people who sold them. Now that computers are "good enough" for half a decade or more, the industry seems to be in much more trouble.
In the nineties comptuers were, "good enough," too, even though marketing didn't want to say that, or could be made good-enough through well planned simple upgrades. I had a 350MHz machine (Pentium III? can't remember for certian) that kept up with my friends' machines with GHz processors because I had a 1.5GB RAM while most of them were in the 128MB-256MB range, and I had a really nice video card, for the time.
As for cars, once electric cars have a range about the same as what a half a tank of gasoline gives a gas-powered car, which is usually around 150 miles, electric cars will be viable for a lot of the population. Sure, technology will improve and the cars may get better, but my buddy's '73 Dart with its two barrel carburetor, manual windows, fully hydraulic transmission without overdrive, and bench seat gets him around just fine.
If anything, simpler electric cars may be better cars for people of less means. Again looking at gasoline-powered cars, simple gas-powered cars are usually easier to repair than complex luxury cars as they have less parts. They also might be less prone to breaking as there are less things that can break.
I don't think it's nearly as dire as the summary makes it sound.
Sounds to me like the idea of refining a set of rules, then someone else looking at those rules and refining a new set of rules based on what they saw. I admit that I am not a tabletop gamer, but when I've been around where people have been playing I haven't seen them use inches in-game as units. I've seen some battletech tabletop gaming where distance and vector were employed, but converted to units to scale in the game rather than in human terms.
Another consideration is how codified the gaming rules were prior to Gygax's part. If Patt's rules were not hard fixed rules but were more along the lines of guidelines or house rules that spread organically through play with random people, then while it could be argued that Gygax shouldn't have owned any intellectual rights over those rules, Patt also might not have been able to claim rights either.
In some ways look at games like Tag or Hide and Go Seek, or any other of a multitude of kids games where guidelines exist but hard-fast rules are only adopted when the games commence. Depending on how Patt's rules spread, they may have been a lot more along those lines.
Facebook appears to have gone a lot further than MySpace did in integrating itself into basic web services. As such it will be harder to dislodge even if its core end-user business ceases growing or even shrinks, as they'll be able to be come a metrics and ratings and data company.
That said, there's still no reason to assume that any given tech or Internet services company will always be around. Go back a few years and AOL and Yahoo were juggernauts. Go back before that and IBM was hot.
Companies live and die by the research and development or the design they do that turns into products. Cut off the R&D, eventually the company withers on the vine. Apple has experienced it when Jobs wasn't at the helm, and other tech companies have folded because they myopically assumed that whatever thing they'd done to make their name would continue to bring in revenue. Look at how long Palm hung-on to PalmOS. Palm could have been what the iPhone and the Android platform have become if they'd not stunted themselves. Granted, their various corporate masters over the years didn't help, but the end result is that they're gone despite having been quite innovative when their products debuted.
IQ testing is not exactly the definitive method to benchmark ability or brain-power, especially if individuals don't want to participate.
It's not exactly a stretch to consider that those who smoke marijuana despite being told that they're not supposed to might also not commit themselves to tests designed to show their IQ.
No, if one is already into woodworking, then building something small like this doesn't cost very much.
Based on the craftsmanship of the end result the person is already into woodworking. The bulk of the purchases for this project are supplies, not tools, and that's assuming that there isn't a cache of cutoffs or other remnants to use.
Open architectures have been tried in portable computers before. I have one sitting under my desk at work, a 100MHz Pentium that was sold through a local vendor much in the same way that ATX for tower PC cases and NLX for desktop "pizza box" PC cases were open. At the time proprietary portable computers were larger than they are now and this was a little larger still, but is probably smaller than the wood-case portable featured in the article.
The size needed to make an open architecture, let lone fully open-source hardware, does not appear to be conducive to portable computers. That thing is huge. There is no way that I could justify traveling with that computer, either for work around-town or for air travel, because I can't dedicate that kind of weight or space to a computer. Hell, it's bigger than the Alienware M17 that I use as a desktop at work, which is far too big to take with me for any kind of real work.
There no reason the components of the enclosure itself couldn't be made as modular as the innards.
Except that the components inside are off-the-shelf from a specific vendor, and a lot of interconnections are proprietary, even if just the ribbon cables.
Woodworking itself isn't all that expensive if you already have the tools. I had to buy some maple when we were rebuilding a TV-show prop and the 8' hardwood boards were like $15 each if memory serves.
"Replace the innards" doesn't work for most laptops as each laptop line is engineered as an assembly based on the components that are considered necessary at the time. Fifteen years ago laptops would have needed a floppy diskette drive, a CD-ROM drive, a 2.5" hard disk drive, PS/2 port, 15-pin SVGA, a 9-pin RS-232 serial port, a dual-slot PCMCIA slot, and an RJ11 socket tied to an internal modem. Some machines would have had a 25-pin Parallel port too.
Now, we need SSD, USB, 802.11 wireless with internal antennas, SDXC socket, possibly SIM 3G/4G capability with internal antennas, digital video-out like HDMI or Mini-HDMI or a Displayport variant, and on machines designed to be workstations, docking ports and RJ-45 Ethernet port. Even optical drives are not considered essential anymore and are limited to specific models.
Now, look at the price of a high-end laptop and of a low-end laptop. When we bought my wife's Thinkpad X301 when it it was new it was about $1700, and was equipped with just about every option available at the time. When we replaced it a little over a year ago with a Thinkpad Yoga 12 it was around $1200, with the Core i7, the 8GB RAM, the big SSD (can't remember offhand if 512GB or 256GB), etc. We got five years of usage out of the X301 and it got dragged across two continents and probably sixty flights. Amortized over time it cost $340 per year while it was in regular service. If that Yoga 12 lasts five years it'll cost $240/year, and so far it's handled probably half a dozen flights without any problems. We replaced the X301 in-part because the performance was no longer meeting our needs, and in-part because the battery was getting to the point where it wasn't lasting even two hours anymore, so no good on flights, and the cost of a battery was high enough relative to the performance of the machine to turn us away from buying another.
It does not make economic sense to build a portable, personal computer to last longer than five years when the computer will no longer meet the needs of the user after those five years are up. Moore's Law states that computing power doubles every eighteen months. Assuming the same class of machine, replacement computer five years later is around eight times more powerful than the computer it replaced. From an engineering perspective, it simply doesn't make sense to overbuild on orders of magnitude past the realistic lifespan of the computer.
US currency cash as a unit of exchange is only worthwhile to those that aren't enthusiasts if it actually holds its value. If US currency cash crashes, drug dealers will simply switch to a different fiat currency again. It was used because it was convenient, not because it was special.
I have absolutely no disagreement with your statement.
It helps that the Federal Reserve Note is the fiat currency of the healthiest large economy (as compared to problems in the European Union, problems in China, and problems in India) and that the government of nation that economy is part-of actively works to maintain that currency.
In some ways Bitcoin really is like gold, there's only so much of it, creating more of it is difficult and does not happen at a terribly fast rate, and its value can change quite rapidly based on popular perceptions. Fiat currencies are backed by governments that use the ability to create money as a means to regulate that money artificially, which can allow for problems to be mitigated depending on how good that government is at doing just that.
Bitcoin is an interesting experiment, but for the foreseeable future I don't think that it'll amount to much more than that.
It's been my experience in life that not everything nailed down mathematically is a bit of a clusterfuck. Why would Bitcoin be any different?
Who thinks this reads like a "Netcraft Confirms" post? Besides, Bitcoin's not going anywhere as long as folks are using it to buy drugs
Bitcoin as a unit of exchange is only worthwhile to those that aren't enthusiasts if it actually holds its value. If Bitcoin crashes, drug dealers will simply switch to a fiat currency again. It was used because it was convenient, not because it was special.
Since NASA is effectively becoming a procurement department to outsource everything it used to do, why not just get rid of NASA entirely? Put the whole contract, etc on eBay.
All mass human endeavors are essentially some form of distributed work. At some point the work is handed-off from one entity to another. What has mattered, historically, is who makes the decisions.
If you look at NASA historically from their early formation as NACA, their role has been to steer new technology to push the envelope. At times they adapted existing technology to suit their purposes like the Mercury with Redstone ICBM rockets or Gemini with Titan II, and at other times they used purpose-built machines that were designed under their supervision like the Saturn rockets and eventually the Shuttle. NASA didn't manufacture these themselves, but they did use them to attempt to do new things.
Getting to Earth Orbit and remaining in space generally isn't pushing the limit anymore. If anything it's figuring out how to make-routine something that we've successfully done many times. As such it makes sense that now we should figure how to do it cheaper and with more capacity and with more frequency. That hadn't been NASA's mission, and it really shouldn't be NASA's mission. They need to figure out our return to the Moon. They need to figure out how to get to Mars. They need to find some awesome uses for Lagrange Points. They need to investigate new propulsion systems that reduce the demand for reaction mass. Once a given technology is reasonably mature they need to hand it off and pick up the next new thing.
On the surface of it that sounds good, but many food and drink products do not translate well to microgravity, and given beer's carbon dioxide content and how once the container is opened dissolved carbon dioxide will release from the liquid, beer seems like it would be a poor choice of beverage to try to drink in such circumstances. The carbon dioxide would not rise out of the container like we're used to and probably would force the liquid out of the opening in the vessel.
And that's not even getting to possible taste issues...
Something I've noticed about old hardware, it was very expensive even before accounting for inflation compared to modern hardware. As such it was generally manufactured to much more robust standards than modern, increasingly commodity gear.
You have three categories; good, cheap, fast. Pick two.
I may look into that. I'm currently keeping an eye on a 3750G 24-port PoE switch on CL, but it's not PoE+, so I'm hesitating. Ideally a 2960S-24 or even one of the CG small switches will come up.