True, I haven't bothered watching more of Enterprise; but between my lack of being impressed with the pilot and the commercials for other episodes just looking plain stupid (I have caught maybe another hour of Enterprise, just never a full episode) was not enough to convince me.
And the 10 episodes of Voyager were more than enough for me to think it entirely too contrived with characters that remind me of the people I hated in high school because they were trying so hard.
That said, Firefly only aired 9 episodes, and I was hooked after watching only two of them (caught them on DVD actually). Then again, Whedon's a bit of a genious with the writers he finds...I could be convinced that the new Treks could be (could have been) better with the right staff.
The best assessment I can make is that some people like the new Treks, some don't; it's all up to taste anyway. That said, it's fun to discuss the why's of it all on one's lunch break...
It wouldn't bother me at all to see the current generation of Trek put on hold. I can't really stand any of it since TNG ended (I don't even enjoy the movies all that much). I had such high hopes for Voyager, and that was a let down (I've maybe seen 10 episodes). I had such high hopes for Enterprise, and I think I only watched the pilot.
I'd agree that there is too much exposure, lack of creativity (it's the same old plots over and over) and way too much trying to be uber-politically-correct and "visionary". It was better when they put the social commentary in without ramming it down your throat.
I love the idea of having a great spacefaring future, but the best new sci-fi / space shows out there were canned (Farscape and Firefly). I don't really care too much for Stargates; too sappy for my tastes.
While it may be sad to have no new Trek, I think it would be best if they just let a good thing go and not risk tarnishing the franchise any further.
I think you've hit on something very interesting here with your description of a program using stdin/stdout from a GPLed program by your program. I'm not sure I agree that this makes your program a derivative work. There is a case where I think yours would be a derivative work, but using input and output might not be. I realize these are my observations and opinions on the matter, but I think this type of discussion needs to happen when talking about this kind of thing.
If my program is just using the input and output from program X, my program might require program X, but it's not really derived from program X. In my book, and using a strict definition, a "derivation" is something that is a modification of the entity. For instance, most of the 8-cylinder engines used by Ford are derivatives of each other (they share common components, common limitations, etc). However, a vehicle that uses that engine is NOT a derivative of the engine! (Of course, some cars themeselves are derivatives of each other - like the Lincoln Navigator and Ford Expedition). Something that uses a library should not be considered a "derivative" of that library - only other things that are a modification of that library should be considered a derivative. Other libraries that serve the same purpose as a given library should also not be considered derivatives (unless they are, of course, modifications of another library).
This probably sounds like I'm trying to take away ownership power from those folks who write core libraries, but that's not my intention. My goal is to point out that if you start broadening the definition of "derivative" then [greedy folks] will likely start to extend this into the physical realm - is a house a derivative work of a brick?
Sure, I'm beating the semantic horse here, but it's important to understand the implications of all proposals. The goal of GPL is to increase public knowledge by making source code available while affording the authors some appropriate protection to the ownership of their work. Another goal of the GPL (and similar licenses) is to discourage making a profit by people with no vested work in some resource (namely libraries, a tool, etc) without making those same resources available. (There is nothing against making a profit by using the resources - just against keeping a lid on those resources).
Another thing mentioned in a grandparent post brought up a tricky point: is output a derivative work of code? It's very dangerous to say that this is true in a general case because then you create precedent for saying things like "the sound waves produced by my speaker are a derivative work of this copyrighted song". If the output of a [piece of code] is some other similarly usable form of that [piece of code] then the output could be considered a derivative work, but output in general is not a derivative work of anything. (If the output of a picture-editing program is a modified other picture, is that a new picture entirely or a derivative of the first picture? This is a tricky thing in the print world - think about making a mosaic of pictures from magazines; that mosaic uses all copyrighted pictures, but itself is a new piece of art - does permission from each of the individual copyright holders of each little image need to be obtained to reproduce the mosaic? I don't know the answer to that one...It's trying to answer the question "how much do I have to modify a thing or things to make them no longer the original things or based on the original things?" - much more challenging with creative products rather than physical ones.)
Playing the "derivative works" card is powerful, but much care needs to be taken. I think I've only touched on a couple of the issues, but as you can see there's a lot at stake.
While I respect the view that it should be the "author's decision" if something is derivative or not, I'd rather have some objective measure defined - even if I might not agree with it.
Especially if the FPS is already above the vertical refresh rate of your monitor... what good is 200 FPS when the monitor can only update at 80-85 FPS?
The philosophical debate was on "is it better to improve the average at the sacrifice of a few" or "sacrifice improving the average to avoid sacrificing a few", not on the general business stuff. I suppose I was not clear on that.
It would not take long for serious repercussions on a world-wide scale due to loss of productivity.
Hrm... but what about those instances where loss of the internet will increase productivity? For instance, I should be doing work right now...what if there's an interesting balance that happens (no internet hurts some folks, but helps others) such that the net effect is zero? And what's more important - net effect or effect for a given individual?
... 950 American soldiers killed, 12000+ injured American soliders...
I am quite tired of people complaining that soldiers get killed in battle. It's not like these are McDonald's employees. We're not in a draft, so these people chose as their profession one in which there is a real risk of having people shoot at you, and if people are shooting at you, well, you might just get shot and die. I'd like to see the interesting statistic of how many soldiers would die if none were fighting but just driving their cars and what not (statistically, I bet some number of troops could have been killed - or at least injured - in car accidents).
Sure, you can question if we should go to war or not, but saying it's bad that people die in war is just stating that war is bad - which most of us know already. It's dishonoring, I think, to those who have given their lives on the battlefield though - because it's like you're saying "you're stupid for sacrificing yourself!" And yes, I know that some people join the military just for the discipline, because they're uneducated, etc. I would wager, though, that it's made quite clear to them early on that they have a chance of getting hurt or killed. I would wager that people in the armed forces who are surprised when people shoot at them are in the extreme minority.
As an aside, why do people not complain about the hundreds of people who die each day in car accidents (my guess is that very few are professional drivers who test possibly dangerous cars)? What's really interesting is that, by profession, lumberjacks are mor likely to get killed on the job than modern US armed forces personnel.
It's also naive to think that, just because some folks are capable of being reasonable and saying, "ok, you asked nice, I'll stop shooting you if you give me X and Y" all people have that capacity; some people will keep shooting you even if they said they'd stop. That's why war exists: not because good people are weak, but because some people truly have no regard for others (and does it matter if it's because of genetics, experience, or choice when it comes to effects of this lack of regard?)
...if your actions don't harm anyone other than the willing participants...
This may be true, but first you have to define 'harm'. Sometimes, for instance, allowing a philosophy to be construed as valid is just as harmful as preventing a philosophy to be construed as valid. The world in general, and the US in particular, seems to think that all discrimination is bad, and if you say that one idea has less merit than another you're being a bigot.
I don't really know where this idea came from, since I don't think anone would consider you a bigot if you didn't want to have someone without a medical degree and good references operating on your. This is discrimination: making an educated decision among alternatives. When discrimination is based on things that have no bearing on the outcome, then I agree that it is inappropriate (i.e., discriminating based on the color of one's skin or what country in which you were born). However, discrimination on things like philosophy and world view is *not* inappropriate in most cases. For instance, there is a fundamental difference in the belief that, say, women should be allowed to vote or not. There is a fundamental difference in the stances that abortion is morally acceptable or not. There is a fundamental difference between views that homosexuality should be accepted or not. There's even a fundamental difference between believing that one of governments' roles is to promote a certain moral standard or not (in the US the general public seems to forget that most of the laws we have are based on some idea of morality: stealing is bad, murder is bad, etc. - police exist to enforce most of these moral laws. However, the same people that like those moral laws start yapping when the government wants to make other laws against, say, abortion - which is also a moral issue).
This is definitely a complicated issue, so just throwing "as long as you don't hurt anyone" out there is kind of a cop-out.
The graph is correct if you know that the assumption is 'at a constant number of units sold.' Sink didn't, of course, state this assumption explicitly but it's there.
If you did read the article, though, you'll see that later on he does mention that there is an effect of price on demand (sometimes lowering price can actually lower demand - go figure) but he correctly points out that this is complicated and basically impossible to predict. Also, there is a difference between things like commodities (such as a bolt, or even a song to follow your answer) where there are so many alternatives that a slight change in price will have a big effect on demand.
For the type of product described here, demand is more or less independent of price up until a very high price, at which point demand goes from some number rapidly to zero. It's not unlike gasoline, which people will pay for - even high prices - because they need it and would rather pay higher prices than figure out an alternative.
I don't even want to go into the "funny money" aspects of things like "cost of piracy" or "cost of a virus". In my book, unrealized revenue is not a "cost" or a "loss" but just people complaining about what-if scenarios.
Uh, I think he understands, but do you know how long a single current-day [Linux] node would take to compute a cloud simulation? The reason you use supercomputers for this is because it's a really huge set of simultaneous (possibly nonlinear) floating-point equations. Most (if not all) desktop / server type computers are not designed for that type of computation; they're better at nice sequential stuff (like RC5). For example, trying to compute one car crash on my desktop would probably take it on the order of weeks (if not months). A cray will typically do that type of computation in about 12-24 hours. So, do you have 15 computers each taking 2 weeks to crunch 15 different simulations and not get any result for 2 weeks, or do you run 1 simulation a day for 15 consecutive days and make decisions based on the current result? The latter makes much more sense for most of the applications.
Of course, it really does depend on the problem you're facing. Most people who pay for results, though, want results as fast as possible, and that's why supercomputers win for problems that aren't "embarassingly parallel".
True, there's no "prior art" for being console-specific, but this should fail the "obvious to someone skilled in the art" clause. If there are other things out there that use these features but don't happen to be for a console, then it should be obvious to anyone on the online computing industry to apply those to a console.
The trouble with software patents in general is they are fundamentally different than hardware patents; hardware patents patent an implementation of something, where software patents (and process patents) are generally a patent on the idea of doing something, rather than how to do that thing. This is why people get all up in arms, because anyone can come up with ideas without establishing a means to implement it.
This is the reason I don't like these types of patents - they aren't on an implementation but on an idea, and those are fundamentally different concepts.
Replace "better influence" with "more effective influence" and I'll buy that statement. I believe it is still unclear which choice in the upcoming US presidential election will be "better" from an objective standpoint. (Mostly because people don't even know against which objective measures the quality of a president's term should be evaluated.) "better" depends on "better for whom" and "better in what way" which is usually a qualitative situation rather than a quantitative one.
"Decreasing dependence on foreign oil" only works locally; the world dependence on oil, period, is what matters, and China and India are ramping up a lot. Even if we completely cut out our use for oil in surface transportation (right now there's not really a viable alternative to hydrocarbons for aircraft), we still consume petroleum products as raw materials for manufacturing. Since the entire world isn't going to curb its oil consumption, we'll be in trouble even if we don't use it to power our vehicles.
Sorry you missed my point about "management direction" above. I'm not saying that I can write bug free assembly, or even that assembly is required (OSEK and many RTOSs are written in C). Basically my point is that it's a sad day when people say, "ah, the hardware will handle it, and I've got a toolbox which will let me be sloppy, so what the heck?"
sure, for fast things, being able to throw lots of money and buy hardware is nice - but that assumes you have lots of money (or, perhaps, a hard-/software vendor giving you free stuff to use for good press and to get people familiar with their products). That's no substitute, though, for well thought-out solutions and careful code. I'm not saying that these folks at Cornell didn't do good engineering; my comment was on the seemingly obscene amount of hardware they used. Like most things in the "modern world" our problems - even things like viruses - aren't technical so no amount of technology can solve them. Until folks realize that technology cannot solve social issues, people will continue to be disappointed when technology doesn't solve all the problems.
512 MB is glorious amounts of space for embedded applications... where can I get that much!?! Most of the stuff I work with has at most 2 MB (ROM) and about 512kB RAM, and most of the ROM is taken up by data tables!
Also, who uses some grossly huge OS for real-time embedded applications? Typically there isn't even an OS, or people use very small things like OSEK, which are basically just interrupt handlers that schedule all the tasks you need.
I just don't think people know how to program any more, when they can't even figure out how to write solid code and avoid buffer overruns and decide to use a "sandboxed" language to make up for their (laziness? lack of competence? management directives to work so fast time for care is squandered?).
"I am too small for Big Brother to even care about".
I amused that folks are so presumptuous as to think that the government really cares what they are doing. The "government" doesn't care a whit about if you speed or not, or even if you buy Coke or Pepsi, or even if you buy anything at all. The only time you have to worry about "them" is if you do something big enough to get on their radar.
I think people confuse "government" with "the local guy in power who wants to strut his/her stuff".
Exactly - the problem isn't in the technology, it's in the use of the technology.
The flip side of the argument, though, is that if there is, on the sticker of every new car or perhaps something added to the airbag label on the sunvisors, a notice that says "your car has a device which records vechicle dynamics data" I would think that should be a notice that "people are watching". As it is, I think "privacy" when driving on public roads is not a valid argument, since it is possible for anyone to measure your speed and watch your behavior, etc. The fact that there would now be a box doesn't change the "privacy" of your driving (except, of course, where there aren't people around to see what you're doing - but I disagree with the notion that the legality of an action depends on its state of observation).
There are lots of issues here, but generally the only people who would complain about such things are those who stand to lose from it. I don't care if I have a black box in my car, because I actually try to obey traffic laws. Sure, I speed from time to time, and sometimes do other dubious things in my vehicle, but if I get "caught" then I can't complain. The fact that "everyone does it" does not excuse the fact that it's against the law. (There was a post further up which said - "if you don't like the [posted speed limit] get involved in local politics to change it!" which is the correct course of action - not speeding because you disagree.)
Personally, if having better indications of who is [speeding] and what happens in wrecks (did the car tip over because it's unsafe or because the driver initiated a 2-g turn?) lowers my cost of ownership to drive (lower car insurance, etc - assuming laws are written to say that permiums must be better tied to individuals' driving records) I'm all for it.
Trouble is, the whole problem here isn't a technological one anyway, and no amount of technology can solve fundamentally non-technical issues...
I really wish folks would remember that "Mach" isn't a speed at all, but a measure of dynamic pressure. As you get less and less atmosphere, the speed of Mach 1 changes. Since, even in space, there is *some* small medium there is a Mach speed, but it's sure not the same as Mach 1 here at "ground level" As it is, Mach 1 easily changes 10% just going up to 35000 feet. Using Mach as a speed for anything other than compressible flow calculations ranks right up there on my pet-peeve list...
As most of you noticed quite correctly, I yet again failed my simple aritmetic test of the day... I knew there were more than ~25M shares, but I forgot to divide the earnings by all those extra shares as well - and that the "stock price" suddenly applies to all the shares rather than just the ones sold at a given price in an IPO. In that case, yes, the P/E is up over 100 and, in most measures, is pretty ridiculously high (even with a high growth rate).
To determine if a stock is "high priced" or not, you don't look at the price of the stock. You look at other things, notably the price to earnings ratio (P/E). If you look at $135/share, that's a steal compared to other tech stocks. If there are only 24.6M shares (which there are actually more), going by the latest quarter where Google earned $79.1M, that's an earnings per share (EPS) of ~$3.21. Assuming that's an average for 4 quarters, that's a P/E of only about 10 ($12.84/$135 = 10.5)! Most tech stocks are trading around a P/E of 30, some even up in the stratosphere of 50+ (in the dot-com boom they were around 90+). More total shares means a P/E that's even lower since EPS.
Basic stock market concepts here boys... you buy based on P/E ratio, not "sticker price" of a stock. The reason? Even though it's completely made up, you expect that if earnings goes up 10%, the price of a stock will go up by 10% * P/E. The P/E ratio is like a "magnifier" on the earnings growth, and it's why people like stocks with high P/E - but not too high because that can indicate a bubble. Basically you look at P/E relative to competitors, and no matter how you cut it Google's P/E looks like bargain-basement pricing to me at $130/share. Heck, it's a relative bargain at even $300/share by those measures... (P/E somewhere around 30).
For comparison, the P/E of M$ is 42, Apple is 54, Amazon is 107, Yahoo! is 107... so Google is indeed a bargain.
Hrm. If you sell 24.6M shares at $135, and only raise $2B, where the heck did the other $1.3 B go? (24.6M x $135 = $3.3 B - and I know they're not paying 30% to the underwriters!)
Also, how can the market cap be $36.25B when 24.6M x $135 = $3.3B? For the market cap to be $36.25B at 24.6 M shares, the share price needs to be $1473.58. If the share price is $135, that means there are really 268.5M shares and less than 10% were made public.
Perhaps there was a misplaced decimal point in that $36.25B number?
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And the 10 episodes of Voyager were more than enough for me to think it entirely too contrived with characters that remind me of the people I hated in high school because they were trying so hard.
That said, Firefly only aired 9 episodes, and I was hooked after watching only two of them (caught them on DVD actually). Then again, Whedon's a bit of a genious with the writers he finds...I could be convinced that the new Treks could be (could have been) better with the right staff.
The best assessment I can make is that some people like the new Treks, some don't; it's all up to taste anyway. That said, it's fun to discuss the why's of it all on one's lunch break...
I'd agree that there is too much exposure, lack of creativity (it's the same old plots over and over) and way too much trying to be uber-politically-correct and "visionary". It was better when they put the social commentary in without ramming it down your throat.
I love the idea of having a great spacefaring future, but the best new sci-fi / space shows out there were canned (Farscape and Firefly). I don't really care too much for Stargates; too sappy for my tastes.
While it may be sad to have no new Trek, I think it would be best if they just let a good thing go and not risk tarnishing the franchise any further.
If my program is just using the input and output from program X, my program might require program X, but it's not really derived from program X. In my book, and using a strict definition, a "derivation" is something that is a modification of the entity. For instance, most of the 8-cylinder engines used by Ford are derivatives of each other (they share common components, common limitations, etc). However, a vehicle that uses that engine is NOT a derivative of the engine! (Of course, some cars themeselves are derivatives of each other - like the Lincoln Navigator and Ford Expedition). Something that uses a library should not be considered a "derivative" of that library - only other things that are a modification of that library should be considered a derivative. Other libraries that serve the same purpose as a given library should also not be considered derivatives (unless they are, of course, modifications of another library).
This probably sounds like I'm trying to take away ownership power from those folks who write core libraries, but that's not my intention. My goal is to point out that if you start broadening the definition of "derivative" then [greedy folks] will likely start to extend this into the physical realm - is a house a derivative work of a brick?
Sure, I'm beating the semantic horse here, but it's important to understand the implications of all proposals. The goal of GPL is to increase public knowledge by making source code available while affording the authors some appropriate protection to the ownership of their work. Another goal of the GPL (and similar licenses) is to discourage making a profit by people with no vested work in some resource (namely libraries, a tool, etc) without making those same resources available. (There is nothing against making a profit by using the resources - just against keeping a lid on those resources).
Another thing mentioned in a grandparent post brought up a tricky point: is output a derivative work of code? It's very dangerous to say that this is true in a general case because then you create precedent for saying things like "the sound waves produced by my speaker are a derivative work of this copyrighted song". If the output of a [piece of code] is some other similarly usable form of that [piece of code] then the output could be considered a derivative work, but output in general is not a derivative work of anything. (If the output of a picture-editing program is a modified other picture, is that a new picture entirely or a derivative of the first picture? This is a tricky thing in the print world - think about making a mosaic of pictures from magazines; that mosaic uses all copyrighted pictures, but itself is a new piece of art - does permission from each of the individual copyright holders of each little image need to be obtained to reproduce the mosaic? I don't know the answer to that one...It's trying to answer the question "how much do I have to modify a thing or things to make them no longer the original things or based on the original things?" - much more challenging with creative products rather than physical ones.)
Playing the "derivative works" card is powerful, but much care needs to be taken. I think I've only touched on a couple of the issues, but as you can see there's a lot at stake.
While I respect the view that it should be the "author's decision" if something is derivative or not, I'd rather have some objective measure defined - even if I might not agree with it.
Especially if the FPS is already above the vertical refresh rate of your monitor... what good is 200 FPS when the monitor can only update at 80-85 FPS?
The philosophical debate was on "is it better to improve the average at the sacrifice of a few" or "sacrifice improving the average to avoid sacrificing a few", not on the general business stuff. I suppose I was not clear on that.
Hrm... but what about those instances where loss of the internet will increase productivity? For instance, I should be doing work right now...what if there's an interesting balance that happens (no internet hurts some folks, but helps others) such that the net effect is zero? And what's more important - net effect or effect for a given individual?
Now there's a philosophical mind-bender...
Sure, you can question if we should go to war or not, but saying it's bad that people die in war is just stating that war is bad - which most of us know already. It's dishonoring, I think, to those who have given their lives on the battlefield though - because it's like you're saying "you're stupid for sacrificing yourself!" And yes, I know that some people join the military just for the discipline, because they're uneducated, etc. I would wager, though, that it's made quite clear to them early on that they have a chance of getting hurt or killed. I would wager that people in the armed forces who are surprised when people shoot at them are in the extreme minority.
As an aside, why do people not complain about the hundreds of people who die each day in car accidents (my guess is that very few are professional drivers who test possibly dangerous cars)? What's really interesting is that, by profession, lumberjacks are mor likely to get killed on the job than modern US armed forces personnel.
It's also naive to think that, just because some folks are capable of being reasonable and saying, "ok, you asked nice, I'll stop shooting you if you give me X and Y" all people have that capacity; some people will keep shooting you even if they said they'd stop. That's why war exists: not because good people are weak, but because some people truly have no regard for others (and does it matter if it's because of genetics, experience, or choice when it comes to effects of this lack of regard?)
I don't really know where this idea came from, since I don't think anone would consider you a bigot if you didn't want to have someone without a medical degree and good references operating on your. This is discrimination: making an educated decision among alternatives. When discrimination is based on things that have no bearing on the outcome, then I agree that it is inappropriate (i.e., discriminating based on the color of one's skin or what country in which you were born). However, discrimination on things like philosophy and world view is *not* inappropriate in most cases. For instance, there is a fundamental difference in the belief that, say, women should be allowed to vote or not. There is a fundamental difference in the stances that abortion is morally acceptable or not. There is a fundamental difference between views that homosexuality should be accepted or not. There's even a fundamental difference between believing that one of governments' roles is to promote a certain moral standard or not (in the US the general public seems to forget that most of the laws we have are based on some idea of morality: stealing is bad, murder is bad, etc. - police exist to enforce most of these moral laws. However, the same people that like those moral laws start yapping when the government wants to make other laws against, say, abortion - which is also a moral issue).
This is definitely a complicated issue, so just throwing "as long as you don't hurt anyone" out there is kind of a cop-out.
Whoops, long day at work... problems with simple math again. Thanks for the astute - and correct - observations by these other folks!
</embarassed>
If you did read the article, though, you'll see that later on he does mention that there is an effect of price on demand (sometimes lowering price can actually lower demand - go figure) but he correctly points out that this is complicated and basically impossible to predict. Also, there is a difference between things like commodities (such as a bolt, or even a song to follow your answer) where there are so many alternatives that a slight change in price will have a big effect on demand.
For the type of product described here, demand is more or less independent of price up until a very high price, at which point demand goes from some number rapidly to zero. It's not unlike gasoline, which people will pay for - even high prices - because they need it and would rather pay higher prices than figure out an alternative.
I don't even want to go into the "funny money" aspects of things like "cost of piracy" or "cost of a virus". In my book, unrealized revenue is not a "cost" or a "loss" but just people complaining about what-if scenarios.
Of course, it really does depend on the problem you're facing. Most people who pay for results, though, want results as fast as possible, and that's why supercomputers win for problems that aren't "embarassingly parallel".
The trouble with software patents in general is they are fundamentally different than hardware patents; hardware patents patent an implementation of something, where software patents (and process patents) are generally a patent on the idea of doing something, rather than how to do that thing. This is why people get all up in arms, because anyone can come up with ideas without establishing a means to implement it.
This is the reason I don't like these types of patents - they aren't on an implementation but on an idea, and those are fundamentally different concepts.
Replace "better influence" with "more effective influence" and I'll buy that statement. I believe it is still unclear which choice in the upcoming US presidential election will be "better" from an objective standpoint. (Mostly because people don't even know against which objective measures the quality of a president's term should be evaluated.) "better" depends on "better for whom" and "better in what way" which is usually a qualitative situation rather than a quantitative one.
Holy crap dude, that is a phenomenal sig!
Forget not being able to read - what about having no electricity?
"When a society starts requiring photo identification, it's time to move to a different planet." -- Lazarus Long
"Decreasing dependence on foreign oil" only works locally; the world dependence on oil, period, is what matters, and China and India are ramping up a lot. Even if we completely cut out our use for oil in surface transportation (right now there's not really a viable alternative to hydrocarbons for aircraft), we still consume petroleum products as raw materials for manufacturing. Since the entire world isn't going to curb its oil consumption, we'll be in trouble even if we don't use it to power our vehicles.
sure, for fast things, being able to throw lots of money and buy hardware is nice - but that assumes you have lots of money (or, perhaps, a hard-/software vendor giving you free stuff to use for good press and to get people familiar with their products). That's no substitute, though, for well thought-out solutions and careful code. I'm not saying that these folks at Cornell didn't do good engineering; my comment was on the seemingly obscene amount of hardware they used. Like most things in the "modern world" our problems - even things like viruses - aren't technical so no amount of technology can solve them. Until folks realize that technology cannot solve social issues, people will continue to be disappointed when technology doesn't solve all the problems.
Also, who uses some grossly huge OS for real-time embedded applications? Typically there isn't even an OS, or people use very small things like OSEK, which are basically just interrupt handlers that schedule all the tasks you need.
I just don't think people know how to program any more, when they can't even figure out how to write solid code and avoid buffer overruns and decide to use a "sandboxed" language to make up for their (laziness? lack of competence? management directives to work so fast time for care is squandered?).
"I am too small for Big Brother to even care about".
I amused that folks are so presumptuous as to think that the government really cares what they are doing. The "government" doesn't care a whit about if you speed or not, or even if you buy Coke or Pepsi, or even if you buy anything at all. The only time you have to worry about "them" is if you do something big enough to get on their radar.
I think people confuse "government" with "the local guy in power who wants to strut his/her stuff".
The flip side of the argument, though, is that if there is, on the sticker of every new car or perhaps something added to the airbag label on the sunvisors, a notice that says "your car has a device which records vechicle dynamics data" I would think that should be a notice that "people are watching". As it is, I think "privacy" when driving on public roads is not a valid argument, since it is possible for anyone to measure your speed and watch your behavior, etc. The fact that there would now be a box doesn't change the "privacy" of your driving (except, of course, where there aren't people around to see what you're doing - but I disagree with the notion that the legality of an action depends on its state of observation).
There are lots of issues here, but generally the only people who would complain about such things are those who stand to lose from it. I don't care if I have a black box in my car, because I actually try to obey traffic laws. Sure, I speed from time to time, and sometimes do other dubious things in my vehicle, but if I get "caught" then I can't complain. The fact that "everyone does it" does not excuse the fact that it's against the law. (There was a post further up which said - "if you don't like the [posted speed limit] get involved in local politics to change it!" which is the correct course of action - not speeding because you disagree.)
Personally, if having better indications of who is [speeding] and what happens in wrecks (did the car tip over because it's unsafe or because the driver initiated a 2-g turn?) lowers my cost of ownership to drive (lower car insurance, etc - assuming laws are written to say that permiums must be better tied to individuals' driving records) I'm all for it.
Trouble is, the whole problem here isn't a technological one anyway, and no amount of technology can solve fundamentally non-technical issues...
I really wish folks would remember that "Mach" isn't a speed at all, but a measure of dynamic pressure. As you get less and less atmosphere, the speed of Mach 1 changes. Since, even in space, there is *some* small medium there is a Mach speed, but it's sure not the same as Mach 1 here at "ground level" As it is, Mach 1 easily changes 10% just going up to 35000 feet. Using Mach as a speed for anything other than compressible flow calculations ranks right up there on my pet-peeve list...
As most of you noticed quite correctly, I yet again failed my simple aritmetic test of the day... I knew there were more than ~25M shares, but I forgot to divide the earnings by all those extra shares as well - and that the "stock price" suddenly applies to all the shares rather than just the ones sold at a given price in an IPO. In that case, yes, the P/E is up over 100 and, in most measures, is pretty ridiculously high (even with a high growth rate).
To determine if a stock is "high priced" or not, you don't look at the price of the stock. You look at other things, notably the price to earnings ratio (P/E). If you look at $135/share, that's a steal compared to other tech stocks. If there are only 24.6M shares (which there are actually more), going by the latest quarter where Google earned $79.1M, that's an earnings per share (EPS) of ~$3.21. Assuming that's an average for 4 quarters, that's a P/E of only about 10 ($12.84/$135 = 10.5)! Most tech stocks are trading around a P/E of 30, some even up in the stratosphere of 50+ (in the dot-com boom they were around 90+). More total shares means a P/E that's even lower since EPS.
Basic stock market concepts here boys... you buy based on P/E ratio, not "sticker price" of a stock. The reason? Even though it's completely made up, you expect that if earnings goes up 10%, the price of a stock will go up by 10% * P/E. The P/E ratio is like a "magnifier" on the earnings growth, and it's why people like stocks with high P/E - but not too high because that can indicate a bubble. Basically you look at P/E relative to competitors, and no matter how you cut it Google's P/E looks like bargain-basement pricing to me at $130/share. Heck, it's a relative bargain at even $300/share by those measures... (P/E somewhere around 30).
For comparison, the P/E of M$ is 42, Apple is 54, Amazon is 107, Yahoo! is 107... so Google is indeed a bargain.
Also, how can the market cap be $36.25B when 24.6M x $135 = $3.3B? For the market cap to be $36.25B at 24.6 M shares, the share price needs to be $1473.58. If the share price is $135, that means there are really 268.5M shares and less than 10% were made public.
Perhaps there was a misplaced decimal point in that $36.25B number?