It would not stop you if you put your foot on the main brake pedal, either. The brakes in cars aren't designed to overcome the engine.
What? Please don't make sarcastic jokes that people might believe. There are people whom, crazily enough, believe that to be true.
There is not a car on the road today that doesn't have higher power brakes than engine. The ratio is beyond ridiculous for smaller cars... my little ancient saturn accelerates at barely 120 HP yet brakes at something near 600 HP.
Its the rare car indeed that takes more than a hundred or so feet to stop from HWY speeds, yet can accelerate to highway speeds in less than a hundred feet or so.
The final test, if you own an automatic transmission car, on the highway, push the accelerator and brake as hard as you can and see what happens. Guaranteed you make an extremely quick stop. Alternately, at a stop sign, all teenage boys get the idea of pushing the brakes and accelerator at the same time, to rev the engine up and squeal the tires when the brakes are released, this tends to overheat the transmission if done on a regular basis. Also it wears the tires out rather quickly.
I once drove a rental manual transmission car, and failed to completely release the parking brake. I'd never heard of one where you have to hold the release button for a second or two, I had only driven cars there you just kind of stab at the button and the parking brake instantly fully releases. Anyway, every time I'd try to get moving, the engine would stall. Even if I floor it while releasing the clutch, the wimpy parking brake left about one tenth actuated on, stalled the engine each time. Everyone accidentally does something like this at one point or another in their manual transmission driving education.
Taxpayer bears the risk of default, Tesla execs get to keep any windfalls of development, all the while drawing their salary against the loan. Doesn't sound like the best deal for the taxpayer to me.
Geeze dude, you make them sound like the American banking system. They aren't that bad, they might actually produce something useful, that being cars.
Do your students a real favor. If any of your students are thinking of becoming chemists, you could tell them to use the computer to look for other fields of study. Companies in the US and Europe are firing chemists at unprecedented rates. If they choose that path, they better be ready to compete with Ivy League PhD's for jobs titrating paint samples.
Well, I transferred out of the field more or less for the same reasons about 2 decades ago. Has the outlook for chemists ever been bright? Ever?
Aside from our whopping two anecdotes, Nothing wrong with making a homework assignment be researching the occupational career outlook for chemists, as compared to... whatever it is the kids have selected as a major. Making it clear that the point is not to kiss up to the teacher by sugar coating everything like a journalist.
The only place I see a computer being really useful in a high school chemistry curriculum is in a lab setting. A few thermocouples and a digital voltmeter used to capture data over the course of an experiment could be used to pretty good effect.
I can think of all kinds of calorimetry experiments, quantitative labs involving light adsorption, pH, etc, but all it really boils down to is automating the graphs and reducing the need to pay attention to the thermometers.
Unfortunately, in a learning environment, the best time to think about whats going on was during the otherwise brainless task of reducing and graphing data... Taking that away by automation trains the kids to be lab techs, aka script kiddies, not how to think like a chemist.
You're better off using the computer as a communication and reference tool. Write an essay about some facet of chemistry or chem engineering, using the computer to research. In google maps, you can see an aerial view of such and such chemical plant. Use that as inspiration to ask, "why" type questions.
Another fun thing to do is essentially simulated large scale experiments via spreadsheets. Essentially doing the same word problem multiple times via spreadsheet.
I've always considered doing that, but having to do a registry edit every time a guest wants to use my wireless is just not acceptable. I'm the resident techy and my housemates would hate me.
You use your "special" wifi channel. Your house guests use your neighbors wifi. No problemo!
I've still never found an explanation for what this frequency is used for in the US, if anything.
Short summary, nothing important, just other unlicensed ISM stuff.
ISM is supposed to be for bulk raw stuff like industrial heating, cooking, diathermy, NMR/MRI basically the kind of stuff where the specs need be no tighter than "a couple gigs and a zillion watts". But wouldn't it be funny to try to use the same band for communications stuff? Thus Wifi. A stupid idea from a frequency coordination standpoint, but it was the best solution to a bad situation etc etc.
Channel 14 is going to cover 2.473-2.495 GHz. The 2.4G ISM band is 2.4 to 2.5 GHz, so superficially, channel 14 is all good.
However, the FCC thought it would be fun to regulate the unlicensed ISM spectrum into segments, probably to avoid chaos like pre-rebanded 800 MHz Nextel interference. Theoretically, it should be possible for wifi and 2.4G wireless mikes and other 2.4G stuff to coexist. Theoretically. And channel 14 just happens to live outside the proper band segment, so its not going to cooperate. The idea is a joke because "Industrial" users like microwave ovens tend to crap all over the entire band, so any interference to a subband is generally blamed on the high power industrial stuff rather than a "mistuned" piece of communications gear.
So, you won't be knocking out military radar or interfering with satellites, but you will be interfering with other unlicensed ISM users. Are there any local communications users other than phones and WiFi? Frankly, probably not. And the industrial ISM guys are not going to care.
Wikipedia has links to the CFRs. Good Luck with reading those.
Americans, Britons, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Egyptian, Indian... etc... people who crew boats are called "sailors".
Actually, in Japanese, the word for "boat crew" is not the English word "sailor".
Likewise, people from all nations who fly planes are called "pilots" or "aircrew".
What about the use of the word "Kamikaze" by American journalists and historians?
Why anyone thinks the nationality of a human being in space is so important that we ought to have 200 different words for "human being in space" is beyond me.
It would be a heroic achievement to just standardize chemical element names. Aluminium vs aluminum. Tungsten vs Wolfrum. For some real fun, try applying a universal international standard to weights and measures, or screw threads.
The easiest way to do this is to write an app that intercepts connections to the server and just responds to them the same as the server does.
And the funniest part is the UBI guys have to write and build a server farm to scale to "millions of users" and instant response to keep total system latency down and interoperate with multiple versions of multiple games. However, the pirates only have to scale to a whopping one user and since it's local there is no transmission latency so there is plenty of time for slow simple unoptimized code, and only interoperate with the one version of one game that its distributed with... Also the UBI guys are small in number to develop their complicated proprietary server compared to the resources of the whole pirate community sharing a semi-openly developed server emulator.
Or, if 80-90% of your potential customers are willing to expend the effort of piracy rather than purchase your product
Because the pirated version is BETTER because it doesn't have all the copy protection in the way of the game experience. Gaming is getting pretty weird psychologically, one minute you're having a blast playing something scientifically designed to be fun because you paid money and the game designers love you, next minute you're suffering through copy protection because the game designers hate the folks whom pay them money. Makes you wonder about the average non-pirate gamers sex life (if any)
perhaps your product is overpriced. You may not feel it is. You may feel entitled to greater pay for your work. The market cares not.
The stereotypical $1000 video card gamer doesn't care about the game price. Looking at the economics of it, I don't think price is why pirates pirate. Now cellphone gamers, they have a reasonable economic reason to pirate because cell phones are cheap. I've never pirated a game that doesn't have copy protection / CD checks / printed manual questions / etc.
Like I noted, this system has some parts of the code (savegames, possible game objects, etc) and requires ubisoft account login to play. It will require complete rewrite of those missing parts into the game and creating local equivalents to them. And no, you don't get to use c++ for this; you do it in assembly.
At first glance that is totally the wrong way to go. Rather than writing new routines for the games in assembly, you write an emulator for evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com in a modern interpreted language and add a line to your hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1. A modern interpreted language is way faster to develop for, and if it runs slow, who cares you've got 100s of ms of "internet" latency to work around. I imagine there'll be a CPAN perl module for this within perhaps a week of the release.
They could try to crypto sign the traffic between evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com and the game. Now, the crypto auth part of the game executable is where you go back to the old skool tradition of binary patching machine language branches into jumps and nops.
Bonus is you can use the evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com emulator for presumably all their games not just one, plus you can trivially integrate in a nice savegame editor, savegame backup system, etc.
This all seems terribly obvious to me, ergo I must be caffeine deficient at this early hour. All I'm really seeing is UBI wasting a lot of money to lose sales without affecting piracy? And they're creating yet another "big content" ecosystem where yet again, the "pirated" product actually provides a better end user experience than the "pay" product, aside from economic costs? Since this will tank UBI, I'm not predicting other marketing conglomerates copying UBIs idea, other than the usual tongue in cheek "I strongly encourage my competitors to also shoot themselves in their feet".
My first experiment is named "Venus", she is 9 years old now and is a sweet, lovable (if hyperactive) cheerleader. Overall, I'd say this experiment was a resounding success, although I am still waiting for others to replicate my results.
Arrrrrr, I was going to snarkily suggest I'll try my best to replicate your result, if you send her mother over here, but then I realized I was assuming Venus is a H. Sapiens and not, perhaps, a Shetland Sheepdog... nothing is more of a sweet lovable hyperactive cheerleader than a sheltie doggie. See, that is EXACTLY the kind of mistake an amateur molecular biologist like myself could make, scary, eh?
Any progress since the last time this was on slashdot? No? Thought so.
Downloading computational biology software, that you have no idea how to use, makes you a molecular biologist, the same way that downloading finite element analysis software that you don't know how to use, makes you a mechanical engineer, downloading a SPICE simulator that you don't know how to use, makes you an electrical engineer, or downloading Pr0n that you can't re-enact makes you a sex expert. At least the Pr0n is easier to apply than a FEM or SPICE package, it being a "pictorial diagram", the disadvantage being that it requires a member of the appropriate sex (and species!) to re-enact.
Once you lose the expertise and infrastructure, it costs a lot to rebuild it.
For a normal person or business, costing alot is bad. For a "stimulus" or govt job, its good. Who wants "managed a $1M program with 10 people" on their resume when they can get "managed a $100M program with 1000 people"
"Invented spelling" is now a failure directly because of technology.
The idea was good. Following a strict step by step procedure and stressing out and getting stuck is the right way to go math (?) but miserably fails for language arts. If you can't figure out one word, get on with life and finish the rest of the task. Its also a great way to learn to read, if you can't figure out one word, don't chuck the book across the room and go play donkey kong, just work around it, you'll figure it out later by osmosis or whatever. Its like solving an equation by successive approximation vs simple plug and chug.
Now, before BBS leet speak, email, SMS, myspace, kids had good osmosis sources. I never learned anything in English classes in school, I learned English solely by osmosis from Clarke, Asimov, and whomever wrote the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys Mysteries.
The bad news, is now kids learn English by osmosis from illiterate morons on myspace, youtube, rap videos, text messages, etc. That directly leads to:
She still misspells many words the same way she misspelled them before she learned to read (she's 22 now).
To build support for the project, the group created three prototypes: an educational video game for biology students called Immune Attack; a game for museums, called Discovering Babylon; and a computer simulation to train firefighters in high-rise fires. They typify the projects the center will be looking to finance.
So, basically, its about building a virtual simulation that costs more per user than doing something real? My guess is the immune system video game will cost more than buying books, microscopes, and slides. The Babylon museum game (wtf?) will cost more than a field trip to a real museum. The virtual fire fighting simulator will cost more than having the building trades class build a freaking building.
The National Science Foundation, Mr. Grossman said, started in 1950 with a six-figure appropriation; its fiscal year 2009 appropriation was nearly $6.5 billion.
Ahh, thats the goal, build a new bureaucracy. God knows we need more million dollar executive bonuses.
The other problem is that layers of printing ink have thickness. It doesn't matter a whole lot with paper (for most inks, anyway) because paper is so thick relative to the ink, but relative to 1.27 micron metal leaf, it's another matter altogether.
Electroplated gold? Gold leaf seems to run about a tenth of a gram per square inch... Compared to the cost of making the nickel "paper", the gold "ink" will be pretty cheap.
Another thing to worry about is that in 10+ years we will have a whole generation of games (not just MMOs) that will no longer be able to be played on emulators, etc. because the networks they connect with will be gone.
So, today the warez versions that don't connect to the network are merely better than the official versions, but in 10+ years, they'll not only be better, but be the only way to play? No problemo.
First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
I assume you're basing that on the venerable Kraus and his graphs showing how far away we could detect analog TV AM video carriers, etc.
Three problems:
1) Kraus never got into exotic modulation techniques that work at lower SNR. We can probably get a better range if we try.
2) Kraus assumed we'd continue transmitting those nice constant television AM carrier signals. We stopped some years ago. Ooops. Appears the lifetime of AM carrier transmission is vaguely around one century, not "forever".
3) Per Kraus's calculations NTSC TV AM video carriers were the strongest and most continuous transmissions. It would be VERY unreasonable to call TV "intelligent life".
In Kraus's defense, he was correct when he wrote it, his classic radio astronomy text was first published in the 60s, and hes been dead for half a decade.
Presumably, only very large mail servers (or an aggregated network of smaller servers) would be able to collect enough messages to rapidly divine the various templates.
If they don't graylist, and if they insist on putting the spam filtering in between accepting and placing in the mbox/maildir.
If they wait for enough other small sites to aggregate the info, and then spamfilter mbox/maildir instead of spamfiltering the inputs to mbox/maildir...
You guys are missing the real, secret marketing plan. Those files will be available P2P. The "album art" will not be the tiny little CD cover, but a goatse. Fans of music that would like a goatse will get a different yet equally offensive picture. The "social networking" will not "friend" you to the band, but to alqada or some other james bond-ian villian. Instead of the web integration making the band your new homepage, it will make 4chan your new home page (assuming it isn't already, of course). You get the idea, basically it'll be trash.
And those "bad" files will be widely distributed P2P by the music middlemen themselves, to poison the well. I can see the whiny public service infomercial now... "remember when you could download music safely? Well those days are over, now a simple music file and totally screw up your computer and ipod. But on the good side, you can pay a mere $2 per track for one of our guaranteed SAFE music files at our new web store."
The thing is, the companies that provide that insurance want to make a profit. That means that they charge less to those companies that takes steps to minimize their risk. That means that it costs the company to be vulnerable, even if nobody hacks their system. SO, if a company does not mitigate its risk of a data breach and its competitor does, it is at a competitive disadvantage.
One of my wife's friends, an insurance underwriter, once explained that underwriters are experts on applied statistics. They are like an experimentalist scientist whom doesn't know anything about the subject but is an expert at making predictions based on correlation coefficients and regression analysis. Maybe she was oversimplifying or drunk, whatever, thats just what I heard.
The relevance to the story is, that no insurance underwriter can provide an honest intelligent evaluation of data breach costs, much less specialize the market into those whom spend more or less on security, or those whom use certain OS and apps vs others. Its just a bunch of anecdotes, not real statistics. Any goof can take a sum, and divide it by a quantity, but that doesn't imply it means anything.
Now, marketing might try to spin it as they're experienced enough to do it, when they are actually not. Sales may use it as a negotiating tactic, they are not cutting the price by $100K because they're caving in, but because the client uses linux or whatever face saving claim they can make. Or the opposite, they were going to raise premiums by $100K anyway, but thankfully the fools had a breech, now we can blame the increase on the breech.
Also most businesses self insure anyway. The little ones are too fly by night and poor to afford insurance and are judgment proof anyway, and the big ones take risks that are bigger than the insurers themselves and have large enough legal and lobbying departments to be above the law. So the only companies affected are vaguely medium sized. Think, like a small restaurant chain sized company, maybe a single plant manufacturing company.
What, you can't design and build a simple rocket within 4 years?
Come on, this is 2010 - surely we can design rockets a lot faster than in 1969...
I can't think of any rocket designed in '69...
Depending on how you want to count the saturn-1, it took somewhere between 1960 to 1967 or 1962 (really 1961) to 1967 to design and build the moon rockets, so figure 5 to 7 years back in the olden days.
Slashdot Mirror
It would not stop you if you put your foot on the main brake pedal, either. The brakes in cars aren't designed to overcome the engine.
What? Please don't make sarcastic jokes that people might believe. There are people whom, crazily enough, believe that to be true.
There is not a car on the road today that doesn't have higher power brakes than engine. The ratio is beyond ridiculous for smaller cars... my little ancient saturn accelerates at barely 120 HP yet brakes at something near 600 HP.
Its the rare car indeed that takes more than a hundred or so feet to stop from HWY speeds, yet can accelerate to highway speeds in less than a hundred feet or so.
The final test, if you own an automatic transmission car, on the highway, push the accelerator and brake as hard as you can and see what happens. Guaranteed you make an extremely quick stop. Alternately, at a stop sign, all teenage boys get the idea of pushing the brakes and accelerator at the same time, to rev the engine up and squeal the tires when the brakes are released, this tends to overheat the transmission if done on a regular basis. Also it wears the tires out rather quickly.
I once drove a rental manual transmission car, and failed to completely release the parking brake. I'd never heard of one where you have to hold the release button for a second or two, I had only driven cars there you just kind of stab at the button and the parking brake instantly fully releases. Anyway, every time I'd try to get moving, the engine would stall. Even if I floor it while releasing the clutch, the wimpy parking brake left about one tenth actuated on, stalled the engine each time. Everyone accidentally does something like this at one point or another in their manual transmission driving education.
Taxpayer bears the risk of default, Tesla execs get to keep any windfalls of development, all the while drawing their salary against the loan. Doesn't sound like the best deal for the taxpayer to me.
Geeze dude, you make them sound like the American banking system. They aren't that bad, they might actually produce something useful, that being cars.
Do your students a real favor. If any of your students are thinking of becoming chemists, you could tell them to use the computer to look for other fields of study. Companies in the US and Europe are firing chemists at unprecedented rates. If they choose that path, they better be ready to compete with Ivy League PhD's for jobs titrating paint samples.
Well, I transferred out of the field more or less for the same reasons about 2 decades ago. Has the outlook for chemists ever been bright? Ever?
Aside from our whopping two anecdotes, Nothing wrong with making a homework assignment be researching the occupational career outlook for chemists, as compared to ... whatever it is the kids have selected as a major. Making it clear that the point is not to kiss up to the teacher by sugar coating everything like a journalist.
The only place I see a computer being really useful in a high school chemistry curriculum is in a lab setting. A few thermocouples and a digital voltmeter used to capture data over the course of an experiment could be used to pretty good effect.
I can think of all kinds of calorimetry experiments, quantitative labs involving light adsorption, pH, etc, but all it really boils down to is automating the graphs and reducing the need to pay attention to the thermometers.
Unfortunately, in a learning environment, the best time to think about whats going on was during the otherwise brainless task of reducing and graphing data... Taking that away by automation trains the kids to be lab techs, aka script kiddies, not how to think like a chemist.
You're better off using the computer as a communication and reference tool. Write an essay about some facet of chemistry or chem engineering, using the computer to research. In google maps, you can see an aerial view of such and such chemical plant. Use that as inspiration to ask, "why" type questions.
Another fun thing to do is essentially simulated large scale experiments via spreadsheets. Essentially doing the same word problem multiple times via spreadsheet.
I've always considered doing that, but having to do a registry edit every time a guest wants to use my wireless is just not acceptable. I'm the resident techy and my housemates would hate me.
You use your "special" wifi channel. Your house guests use your neighbors wifi. No problemo!
I've still never found an explanation for what this frequency is used for in the US, if anything.
Short summary, nothing important, just other unlicensed ISM stuff.
ISM is supposed to be for bulk raw stuff like industrial heating, cooking, diathermy, NMR/MRI basically the kind of stuff where the specs need be no tighter than "a couple gigs and a zillion watts". But wouldn't it be funny to try to use the same band for communications stuff? Thus Wifi. A stupid idea from a frequency coordination standpoint, but it was the best solution to a bad situation etc etc.
Channel 14 is going to cover 2.473-2.495 GHz. The 2.4G ISM band is 2.4 to 2.5 GHz, so superficially, channel 14 is all good.
However, the FCC thought it would be fun to regulate the unlicensed ISM spectrum into segments, probably to avoid chaos like pre-rebanded 800 MHz Nextel interference. Theoretically, it should be possible for wifi and 2.4G wireless mikes and other 2.4G stuff to coexist. Theoretically. And channel 14 just happens to live outside the proper band segment, so its not going to cooperate. The idea is a joke because "Industrial" users like microwave ovens tend to crap all over the entire band, so any interference to a subband is generally blamed on the high power industrial stuff rather than a "mistuned" piece of communications gear.
So, you won't be knocking out military radar or interfering with satellites, but you will be interfering with other unlicensed ISM users. Are there any local communications users other than phones and WiFi? Frankly, probably not. And the industrial ISM guys are not going to care.
Wikipedia has links to the CFRs. Good Luck with reading those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_band
All she does is browse the internet and update her facebook.
I've seen her pick up her sister's iPhone and use it with 0 learning curve.
Ipod touch with the free facebook app?
Americans, Britons, Canadians, Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Sri Lankan, Egyptian, Indian... etc... people who crew boats are called "sailors".
Actually, in Japanese, the word for "boat crew" is not the English word "sailor".
Likewise, people from all nations who fly planes are called "pilots" or "aircrew".
What about the use of the word "Kamikaze" by American journalists and historians?
Why anyone thinks the nationality of a human being in space is so important that we ought to have 200 different words for "human being in space" is beyond me.
It would be a heroic achievement to just standardize chemical element names. Aluminium vs aluminum. Tungsten vs Wolfrum. For some real fun, try applying a universal international standard to weights and measures, or screw threads.
The easiest way to do this is to write an app that intercepts connections to the server and just responds to them the same as the server does.
And the funniest part is the UBI guys have to write and build a server farm to scale to "millions of users" and instant response to keep total system latency down and interoperate with multiple versions of multiple games. However, the pirates only have to scale to a whopping one user and since it's local there is no transmission latency so there is plenty of time for slow simple unoptimized code, and only interoperate with the one version of one game that its distributed with... Also the UBI guys are small in number to develop their complicated proprietary server compared to the resources of the whole pirate community sharing a semi-openly developed server emulator.
Epic fail for UBI.
Or, if 80-90% of your potential customers are willing to expend the effort of piracy rather than purchase your product
Because the pirated version is BETTER because it doesn't have all the copy protection in the way of the game experience. Gaming is getting pretty weird psychologically, one minute you're having a blast playing something scientifically designed to be fun because you paid money and the game designers love you, next minute you're suffering through copy protection because the game designers hate the folks whom pay them money. Makes you wonder about the average non-pirate gamers sex life (if any)
perhaps your product is overpriced. You may not feel it is. You may feel entitled to greater pay for your work. The market cares not.
The stereotypical $1000 video card gamer doesn't care about the game price. Looking at the economics of it, I don't think price is why pirates pirate. Now cellphone gamers, they have a reasonable economic reason to pirate because cell phones are cheap. I've never pirated a game that doesn't have copy protection / CD checks / printed manual questions / etc.
Like I noted, this system has some parts of the code (savegames, possible game objects, etc) and requires ubisoft account login to play. It will require complete rewrite of those missing parts into the game and creating local equivalents to them. And no, you don't get to use c++ for this; you do it in assembly.
At first glance that is totally the wrong way to go. Rather than writing new routines for the games in assembly, you write an emulator for evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com in a modern interpreted language and add a line to your hosts file to point to 127.0.0.1. A modern interpreted language is way faster to develop for, and if it runs slow, who cares you've got 100s of ms of "internet" latency to work around. I imagine there'll be a CPAN perl module for this within perhaps a week of the release.
They could try to crypto sign the traffic between evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com and the game. Now, the crypto auth part of the game executable is where you go back to the old skool tradition of binary patching machine language branches into jumps and nops.
Bonus is you can use the evilbigbrother.ubisoft.com emulator for presumably all their games not just one, plus you can trivially integrate in a nice savegame editor, savegame backup system, etc.
This all seems terribly obvious to me, ergo I must be caffeine deficient at this early hour. All I'm really seeing is UBI wasting a lot of money to lose sales without affecting piracy? And they're creating yet another "big content" ecosystem where yet again, the "pirated" product actually provides a better end user experience than the "pay" product, aside from economic costs? Since this will tank UBI, I'm not predicting other marketing conglomerates copying UBIs idea, other than the usual tongue in cheek "I strongly encourage my competitors to also shoot themselves in their feet".
My first experiment is named "Venus", she is 9 years old now and is a sweet, lovable (if hyperactive) cheerleader. Overall, I'd say this experiment was a resounding success, although I am still waiting for others to replicate my results.
Arrrrrr, I was going to snarkily suggest I'll try my best to replicate your result, if you send her mother over here, but then I realized I was assuming Venus is a H. Sapiens and not, perhaps, a Shetland Sheepdog ... nothing is more of a sweet lovable hyperactive cheerleader than a sheltie doggie. See, that is EXACTLY the kind of mistake an amateur molecular biologist like myself could make, scary, eh?
Any progress since the last time this was on slashdot? No? Thought so.
Downloading computational biology software, that you have no idea how to use, makes you a molecular biologist, the same way that downloading finite element analysis software that you don't know how to use, makes you a mechanical engineer, downloading a SPICE simulator that you don't know how to use, makes you an electrical engineer, or downloading Pr0n that you can't re-enact makes you a sex expert. At least the Pr0n is easier to apply than a FEM or SPICE package, it being a "pictorial diagram", the disadvantage being that it requires a member of the appropriate sex (and species!) to re-enact.
Once you lose the expertise and infrastructure, it costs a lot to rebuild it.
For a normal person or business, costing alot is bad. For a "stimulus" or govt job, its good. Who wants "managed a $1M program with 10 people" on their resume when they can get "managed a $100M program with 1000 people"
"Invented spelling" is now a failure directly because of technology.
The idea was good. Following a strict step by step procedure and stressing out and getting stuck is the right way to go math (?) but miserably fails for language arts. If you can't figure out one word, get on with life and finish the rest of the task. Its also a great way to learn to read, if you can't figure out one word, don't chuck the book across the room and go play donkey kong, just work around it, you'll figure it out later by osmosis or whatever. Its like solving an equation by successive approximation vs simple plug and chug.
Now, before BBS leet speak, email, SMS, myspace, kids had good osmosis sources. I never learned anything in English classes in school, I learned English solely by osmosis from Clarke, Asimov, and whomever wrote the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys Mysteries.
The bad news, is now kids learn English by osmosis from illiterate morons on myspace, youtube, rap videos, text messages, etc. That directly leads to:
She still misspells many words the same way she misspelled them before she learned to read (she's 22 now).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_spelling
To quote the fine article:
To build support for the project, the group created three prototypes: an educational video game for biology students called Immune Attack; a game for museums, called Discovering Babylon; and a computer simulation to train firefighters in high-rise fires. They typify the projects the center will be looking to finance.
So, basically, its about building a virtual simulation that costs more per user than doing something real? My guess is the immune system video game will cost more than buying books, microscopes, and slides. The Babylon museum game (wtf?) will cost more than a field trip to a real museum. The virtual fire fighting simulator will cost more than having the building trades class build a freaking building.
The National Science Foundation, Mr. Grossman said, started in 1950 with a six-figure appropriation; its fiscal year 2009 appropriation was nearly $6.5 billion.
Ahh, thats the goal, build a new bureaucracy. God knows we need more million dollar executive bonuses.
The other problem is that layers of printing ink have thickness. It doesn't matter a whole lot with paper (for most inks, anyway) because paper is so thick relative to the ink, but relative to 1.27 micron metal leaf, it's another matter altogether.
Electroplated gold? Gold leaf seems to run about a tenth of a gram per square inch... Compared to the cost of making the nickel "paper", the gold "ink" will be pretty cheap.
Another thing to worry about is that in 10+ years we will have a whole generation of games (not just MMOs) that will no longer be able to be played on emulators, etc. because the networks they connect with will be gone.
So, today the warez versions that don't connect to the network are merely better than the official versions, but in 10+ years, they'll not only be better, but be the only way to play? No problemo.
First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
I assume you're basing that on the venerable Kraus and his graphs showing how far away we could detect analog TV AM video carriers, etc.
Three problems:
1) Kraus never got into exotic modulation techniques that work at lower SNR. We can probably get a better range if we try.
2) Kraus assumed we'd continue transmitting those nice constant television AM carrier signals. We stopped some years ago. Ooops. Appears the lifetime of AM carrier transmission is vaguely around one century, not "forever".
3) Per Kraus's calculations NTSC TV AM video carriers were the strongest and most continuous transmissions. It would be VERY unreasonable to call TV "intelligent life".
In Kraus's defense, he was correct when he wrote it, his classic radio astronomy text was first published in the 60s, and hes been dead for half a decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Kraus
Presumably, only very large mail servers (or an aggregated network of smaller servers) would be able to collect enough messages to rapidly divine the various templates.
If they don't graylist, and if they insist on putting the spam filtering in between accepting and placing in the mbox/maildir.
If they wait for enough other small sites to aggregate the info, and then spamfilter mbox/maildir instead of spamfiltering the inputs to mbox/maildir...
(Spam will only go away when email does)
Email is going away, but the spam will remain.
Socially, "everyone" uses social networking sites or instant messaging instead of email.
Corporations prefer you log in to their website to look at order status, to better track and market to you.
Email is for .... old people? Services that haven't migrated to something newer?
Usenet still gets spammed, its just very few people use usenet anymore. My email address will get spam for decades after I stop reading email.
You guys are missing the real, secret marketing plan. Those files will be available P2P. The "album art" will not be the tiny little CD cover, but a goatse. Fans of music that would like a goatse will get a different yet equally offensive picture. The "social networking" will not "friend" you to the band, but to alqada or some other james bond-ian villian. Instead of the web integration making the band your new homepage, it will make 4chan your new home page (assuming it isn't already, of course). You get the idea, basically it'll be trash.
And those "bad" files will be widely distributed P2P by the music middlemen themselves, to poison the well. I can see the whiny public service infomercial now... "remember when you could download music safely? Well those days are over, now a simple music file and totally screw up your computer and ipod. But on the good side, you can pay a mere $2 per track for one of our guaranteed SAFE music files at our new web store."
before I believe this. How does one spend that much per record? A bit more detail would be nice...
(Made up number) / (Another made up number) = $204
The thing is, the companies that provide that insurance want to make a profit. That means that they charge less to those companies that takes steps to minimize their risk. That means that it costs the company to be vulnerable, even if nobody hacks their system. SO, if a company does not mitigate its risk of a data breach and its competitor does, it is at a competitive disadvantage.
One of my wife's friends, an insurance underwriter, once explained that underwriters are experts on applied statistics. They are like an experimentalist scientist whom doesn't know anything about the subject but is an expert at making predictions based on correlation coefficients and regression analysis. Maybe she was oversimplifying or drunk, whatever, thats just what I heard.
The relevance to the story is, that no insurance underwriter can provide an honest intelligent evaluation of data breach costs, much less specialize the market into those whom spend more or less on security, or those whom use certain OS and apps vs others. Its just a bunch of anecdotes, not real statistics. Any goof can take a sum, and divide it by a quantity, but that doesn't imply it means anything.
Now, marketing might try to spin it as they're experienced enough to do it, when they are actually not. Sales may use it as a negotiating tactic, they are not cutting the price by $100K because they're caving in, but because the client uses linux or whatever face saving claim they can make. Or the opposite, they were going to raise premiums by $100K anyway, but thankfully the fools had a breech, now we can blame the increase on the breech.
Also most businesses self insure anyway. The little ones are too fly by night and poor to afford insurance and are judgment proof anyway, and the big ones take risks that are bigger than the insurers themselves and have large enough legal and lobbying departments to be above the law. So the only companies affected are vaguely medium sized. Think, like a small restaurant chain sized company, maybe a single plant manufacturing company.
What, you can't design and build a simple rocket within 4 years?
Come on, this is 2010 - surely we can design rockets a lot faster than in 1969...
I can't think of any rocket designed in '69...
Depending on how you want to count the saturn-1, it took somewhere between 1960 to 1967 or 1962 (really 1961) to 1967 to design and build the moon rockets, so figure 5 to 7 years back in the olden days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V