something that doesn't require the use of his hands?
That's the problem with "find something geeky" being a little too vague. What, like watch Star Trek reruns? Play RPGs like pathfinder or DnD? If he means "something geeky thats electronic related", maybe amateur radio?
This is a pretty interesting idea, and one that I'm inclined to ascribe some level of truth.
Ask yourself, did (almost entirely female) schoolteacher blogs scare me away from being a kindergarten teacher? Uh, no, I think a lifetime of wiping snotty noses scared me away.
In retrospect my social life would have been more fun in a "mostly female" major. Yet another "what was I thinking" moment from my youth. Imagine a 25 person marketing class consisting of me, and 24 lonely future booth babes.
Has anyone bothered to ask women directly why they chose not to do Computer Science?
You know, rather than just guessing...
I know you're probably going for the laughs, but if X% decide to go into almost entirely female nursing or early childhood education or mostly female education, then you're going to have a hell of a time convincing an extra X% to go into CS just to balance it out.
You're really screwed (uh, metaphorically, although it worked out for me practically) if there are more female nursing students than your entire engineering school. You need quotas, not so much to keep the boys out of engineering and CS, but to keep the girls out of ed and marketing and nursing.
I'd be unholy pissed off at the world if I were forced into early childhood education just to "get the ratios correct", and I'm sure the chicks being forced into neckbeard-land would be equally pissed.
Most of us know that a degree in Computer Science is FAR more related to mathematics
That's based on the assumption Barbie can't do math, therefore no comp sci. However very nearly a majority of the math grads and profs I know are women (in fact I'm pretty sure there are more F than M). The M/F ratio is much more favorable in the math dept than the CS dept. In fact the only bigger sausage fest than CS that I have ever experienced was 100% male EE. Now if you claimed EE was scaring chicks away from CS you might have a point. Maybe.
This argument is naive on it's face and ignore supply and demand forces for housing.
Ah but interest rates are the Strongest force controlling house prices. Your local income rates set how much you can spend per month. Govt controlled interest rates set how much can be borrowed for that monthly payment. Those two factors control 99.999% of housing price.
(Your median resident walks in with $X downpayment) + (The govt controlled interest rate means you can borrow $Y given (the median income available for housing for the median resident))
There is also speculation... if you're in a non-recourse state, or judgment proof, then you may as well buy whatever you want while the bubble is going up, or even, heck, on the downside. If you're not intending to pay, doesn't matter.
Unions don't really matter... ten union janitors at $50K/yr don't make a dent compared to five $250K/yr VPs and one $1M/yr CEO.
you know, if you had spent 25 bucks a week more on food (probably more than you would need to) you would have accrued 5K or so more debt over 4 years. While that seems like a lot, the benefits, both physically and mentally, of not being malnourished while you were in school
Most important life skill at high school graduation is knowing how to cook. Not how to read directions on a frozen pizza wrapper, but really cook. Aside from the obvious health benefits its incredibly freaking cheap and tasty food simply puts you in a better mood, not to mention how the ladies enjoyed my home cooked meals. Try to survive on hot pockets and McD value meals and Raman and you won't live well or long.
Of course, you could go to community college or a trade school, but that's going to have a major impact on your career,
You've got to be kidding. Nobody cares where you went to school after your first "real job". Just does he have a BS degree or not, checkbox yes or no. Also to the best of my knowledge none of my "real job" employers ever found out I did my first two years at trade school and transferred in. In fact at my current employer I'm on the honor system, they have no idea if I have a degree or not, having never requested a transcript. They were extremely interested in my references who work here and my boss knew me tangentially from being in the "biz". I'm only 7 years out of school and already school doesn't matter at all. Nobody in the "biz" knows or cares where I took public speaking, or calc, or pre-civil war american history, or even my first post secondary programming class.
The major impact on your career, is you'll have a lot less debt.
Schools are interested in upgrading their campus, doing basic research and increasing staff salaries.
Don't forget they drop a lot of promotional advertising money. In fact, the more money you sprinkle on the buyers, the more competitive the buyers, so the more you need to spend on advertising. TV commercials, billboards, hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of direct mail per high school senior...
Living on minimum wage is hardly a living wage. It is hardly enough to cover the bare necessities in the US. Most likely you will need to get a second job to make ends meet.
Or move out of Chicago. My bachelor pad was $425/month about 100 miles north living alone and it was a little fancy for my social class, my fellow students were dropping only $250 to $300 for crummy student grade housing (subdivided houses that were falling apart, that sort of disreputable establishment). That extra $250/month paid for a pretty darn nice car and its insurance. Also my taxes were lower, as a "rich" middle age dude you wouldn't think $75/month would matter, but it really did at that low of an income. I couldn't afford medical insurance for myself unfortunately, because a single dudes monthly med insurance, if there is no employer plan, is more than I earned per month. Also food is cheaper the further you get from the city, I ate like a freaking king for about $80/month, given nearly 100% inflation since then I'd say $160/month but if you cut back on steak and caviar $100 is probably reasonable. I was told I could get food stamps but I didn't feel that poor so I never applied (heck I lived in a pretty 'leet apartment and had a nice car compared to my university buddies). The GI bill took care of tuition.
You are not intended to live on minimum wage. Anybody who shows up on time and sober will be making above minimum in three months.
LOL you must not be from the US, or live in a hyperinflated area like Manhattan or Hollywood. Merely on time and sober won't even get you a job of any sort in most of the country.
If you're not intended to live on minimum wage, what are you supposed to do for your "three months", spend three months dead for tax purposes (douglas adams reference, although also a serious question)?
There are plenty of students who won't borrow 60k just because they can.
They don't make that decision. That decision is made for them by the school when they set their tuition rate.
Its like mistakenly thinking individual home buyers set the price of homes. Not so... They've got a out of pocket budget of (for example) $1000K/month and the govt sets the interest rate which sets the amount they can borrow which sets the price of the house.
In a similar way, a school knows the median student (and family) can toss in $5K/yr outta pocket, and the govt will toss in an additional guaranteed $20K. Therefore the price will be set by the school at $25K because $5K + $20K = $25K.
Us stingy non-compassionate curmudgeonly types not swayed by cries that everyone must be educated or accusations of elitism have been saying this for a very long time.
The combined un and under employment rate for recent grads is now 54%... I have personal knowledge of waitresses, sales clerks, and walmart shelf stockers with degrees, and I fail to see why I should want to pay for their degree out of my taxes. I get a benefit from the masters degree my kids teacher has, or my doc and dentists degree. Or the civil engineer who designed the freeway overpass I drove over on the way to work to pay for all these degrees. My bachelors degree waitress? Eh not seeing the point of educating her. If only 10% of jobs need university level skills, I see no reason beyond profit to send more than 10% of the population there.
Don't fall into the mistake of thinking education is only obtained magically solely by spending money on campus. And there's nothing wrong with spending your own money on a useless hobby, I've certainly blown thru enough cash on my hobbies... but I don't send men with guns to take your income from you to pay for my science fiction books... and we shouldn't do the same for my over-educated waitress.
Student aid is flat, tuition rates rise, can't explain that!
Low interest rates means you can borrow more means they charge more.
See the housing bubble, where multi-generational low interest rates lead to multi-generational high house prices despite real median family income declining and median family non-housing expenses increasing.
You need more instructors and more classrooms and that takes about a ten year timeframe to ramp up.
If you want to be a educational success. If you just want to set up a degree mill to collect money, that takes about six months. Evidence is two blocks from where I'm working, but there are at least 3 other recently opened degree mills in the area here.
If I am a school and I have learned that students can borrow $60,000 a year from the government, then I am sure as hell I will raise my prices to get htat "free money".
No, not at all. If you had a full campus while charging $5K/yr, you'll raise your tuition to $65K a year, because you'll collect the "free" $60K plus your campus full of students obviously can afford $5K/yr.
Not one extra person will attend (duh, the out of pocket cost remains $5K) and not one extra person will not attend (free money for all !!!)
If you're talking about my 22 relay bitslice ALU assuming I could magically energize all 22 relays simultaneously (unlikely) on a 8 bit CPU design the entire ALU could only draw 22 * 8 *.1 = about 20 *.1 * 8 = 2 * 8 = 16 or so amps. Compared to ham radio gear that's nothing. I have a HF transceiver that draws something like 25 amps at 100 watts out on ssb voice peaks and that is not unusual at all in the hobby.
If you're talking about my insane $6000 relay based memory unit yeah the current draw is why I'm going latching relays, no current draw except when you switch states. This also makes them static instead of dynamic, I could power down the works and come back in a month and the memory would still be loaded. The decode logic only burned a couple amps worst case, as I recall. The only problem is 2048 latching relays are kind of expensive at a couple bucks a piece yet 256 bytes is kind of memory constrained.
I've put quite a bit of thought into it, and really the only thing stopping me is bulk memory storage. Yes I could use a microcontroller, a large memory chip, some optoisolators, and some SSRs but its way more fun to do it all electromechanically... if its possible.
Might work, might be a bit fumbly. The closest "solution" I could come up with involved something that looks like a magnetic chess piece with a little neo-magnet on the bottom and a gripper on top. Given a decent gripper/mover I could implement something like that on my milling machine table right now. This brings up my really weird idea of a robot arm making QR codes using black square magnets on a steel sheet. But this is getting pretty far off from the original "mostly-electromechanical" design.
OK now no fair cheating and claiming there is more than one or two song in the playlist difference between "adult contemporary" "hot adult contemporary" "top 40" or "urban contemporary". Also there are several different names for gen-X rock but the playlists are almost the same.
On FM I count something like 10 top 40 hits stations, about 5 gen-x rock and a smattering of religious. There are 3 smooth jazz stations, the classical station went all saxaphone a couple years ago (I'm thinking this station list is not up to date), there is no local classical. There's 3 NPR outlets. So thats it, all a major city has on FM is top 40, gen-X rock, religion, jazz, and the (I kid you not) Polka station. There are only 5 playlists available in a 2 million person metropolitan area, the 28th largest city in the USA, and none of those playlists particularly interest me. AM is pretty much a wasteland. I'm not even going there.
I listen to audiobooks in my car during the commute and when one runs out I have to listen to local radio. Gag. Its very motivational to get me to load up another audiobook. Other than keeping the gas tank filled there is nothing of higher priority WRT to the commute than avoiding radio.
reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results
Those skills are all anti-american. You're supposed to follow the herd and believe whatever the preacher and TV say. Anything else isn't cool.
They need questions like: 1) Sally takes three plants and puts one in the dark, one in the shade, one in open sunlight. What is the most likely thing to happen next: a) The DEA agents find the plant in the dark and bust her b) The DEA agents find the plant in the shade and bust her c) The DEA agents find the plant in open sunlight and bust her d) Sally switches into the far more lucrative prostitution trade and dies of a half dozen STDs.
As has been (kinda harshly) hashed out on hackernews, this is really a turing machine emulated on a NXT using lego as a physical memory display. This is still cool, but its not "turing machine built out of lego" except by the extreme interpretation that a NXT computer is sold by the lego corporation.
There have been some genuine mechanical turing machines built with varying level of success.
Its pretty easy to make an electromechanical relay based turing machine if for no reason other than price (well, price compared to when I was a kid, its still gonna be a chunk of change)
When I was a teenage kid a simple DPDT 12 volt relay at radio shack cost me something like two HOURS of labor income, and now as a "highly" paid jack(-ass) of all computational trades I can buy a simple DPDT from Mouser for something like two MINUTES of labor income. I've got a bitslice ALU design (admittedly not a turing machine) down to about 22 relays per bit. Latching relays are about 50% more money than non-latching. Also QPDT relays are "cheap" and commercially available.
large PCBs are expensive. Yet sockets and hand wiring is not cheap either (although it looks cool)
I'm stuck on (electro-)mechanical memory storage devices. There was a single bit core memory design from a 1970s electronics magazine that used simple steel washers as cores, terrible magnetic properties but cheaply and widely available. However I don't want an electronic design. Latching relays are cheap enough for registers and... surprisingly enough... latches... but they're a bit expensive for main memory. For example an Altair size of memory made of latching relays would cost me about 256 bytes * 8 bits * 3 bucks per latching relay equals $6.1K just for storage not to mention decode logic. Until I can figure out a way to get below $1/bit purely electromechanically I think I'm stuck.
The history of computation, since the 1940s (before even my time) has always been "computation is cheap, memory is expensive"
Seriously, what does it accomplish?... People don't organize domain names in a hierarchy like they did with Usenet groups,...
We did, in the old days. Back in 91 when I first got on the net, the original goal was caching with a secondary of segregating traffic.
The hope is that 99% of traffic to.us would be from inside.us therefore limiting expensive high latency international traffic. Doesn't map so well with massive multinational corp traffic to.com
In the ancient days of "no commercial traffic on the ARPA-net" anything.com over the ARPA was verboten.
Slashdot Mirror
something that doesn't require the use of his hands?
That's the problem with "find something geeky" being a little too vague. What, like watch Star Trek reruns? Play RPGs like pathfinder or DnD? If he means "something geeky thats electronic related", maybe amateur radio?
Ghostery?
I have not read the article but the summary sounds like a lot of effort to avoid directly naming the FF/Chrome extension called ghostery.
This is a pretty interesting idea, and one that I'm inclined to ascribe some level of truth.
Ask yourself, did (almost entirely female) schoolteacher blogs scare me away from being a kindergarten teacher? Uh, no, I think a lifetime of wiping snotty noses scared me away.
In retrospect my social life would have been more fun in a "mostly female" major. Yet another "what was I thinking" moment from my youth. Imagine a 25 person marketing class consisting of me, and 24 lonely future booth babes.
Has anyone bothered to ask women directly why they chose not to do Computer Science?
You know, rather than just guessing...
I know you're probably going for the laughs, but if X% decide to go into almost entirely female nursing or early childhood education or mostly female education, then you're going to have a hell of a time convincing an extra X% to go into CS just to balance it out.
You're really screwed (uh, metaphorically, although it worked out for me practically) if there are more female nursing students than your entire engineering school. You need quotas, not so much to keep the boys out of engineering and CS, but to keep the girls out of ed and marketing and nursing.
I'd be unholy pissed off at the world if I were forced into early childhood education just to "get the ratios correct", and I'm sure the chicks being forced into neckbeard-land would be equally pissed.
Most of us know that a degree in Computer Science is FAR more related to mathematics
That's based on the assumption Barbie can't do math, therefore no comp sci. However very nearly a majority of the math grads and profs I know are women (in fact I'm pretty sure there are more F than M). The M/F ratio is much more favorable in the math dept than the CS dept. In fact the only bigger sausage fest than CS that I have ever experienced was 100% male EE. Now if you claimed EE was scaring chicks away from CS you might have a point. Maybe.
This argument is naive on it's face and ignore supply and demand forces for housing.
Ah but interest rates are the Strongest force controlling house prices. Your local income rates set how much you can spend per month. Govt controlled interest rates set how much can be borrowed for that monthly payment. Those two factors control 99.999% of housing price.
(Your median resident walks in with $X downpayment) + (The govt controlled interest rate means you can borrow $Y given (the median income available for housing for the median resident))
There is also speculation... if you're in a non-recourse state, or judgment proof, then you may as well buy whatever you want while the bubble is going up, or even, heck, on the downside. If you're not intending to pay, doesn't matter.
Unions don't really matter... ten union janitors at $50K/yr don't make a dent compared to five $250K/yr VPs and one $1M/yr CEO.
you know, if you had spent 25 bucks a week more on food (probably more than you would need to) you would have accrued 5K or so more debt over 4 years. While that seems like a lot, the benefits, both physically and mentally, of not being malnourished while you were in school
Most important life skill at high school graduation is knowing how to cook. Not how to read directions on a frozen pizza wrapper, but really cook. Aside from the obvious health benefits its incredibly freaking cheap and tasty food simply puts you in a better mood, not to mention how the ladies enjoyed my home cooked meals. Try to survive on hot pockets and McD value meals and Raman and you won't live well or long.
Of course, you could go to community college or a trade school, but that's going to have a major impact on your career,
You've got to be kidding. Nobody cares where you went to school after your first "real job". Just does he have a BS degree or not, checkbox yes or no. Also to the best of my knowledge none of my "real job" employers ever found out I did my first two years at trade school and transferred in. In fact at my current employer I'm on the honor system, they have no idea if I have a degree or not, having never requested a transcript. They were extremely interested in my references who work here and my boss knew me tangentially from being in the "biz". I'm only 7 years out of school and already school doesn't matter at all. Nobody in the "biz" knows or cares where I took public speaking, or calc, or pre-civil war american history, or even my first post secondary programming class.
The major impact on your career, is you'll have a lot less debt.
Schools are interested in upgrading their campus, doing basic research and increasing staff salaries.
Don't forget they drop a lot of promotional advertising money. In fact, the more money you sprinkle on the buyers, the more competitive the buyers, so the more you need to spend on advertising. TV commercials, billboards, hundreds (thousands?) of dollars of direct mail per high school senior...
Living on minimum wage is hardly a living wage. It is hardly enough to cover the bare necessities in the US. Most likely you will need to get a second job to make ends meet.
Or move out of Chicago. My bachelor pad was $425/month about 100 miles north living alone and it was a little fancy for my social class, my fellow students were dropping only $250 to $300 for crummy student grade housing (subdivided houses that were falling apart, that sort of disreputable establishment). That extra $250/month paid for a pretty darn nice car and its insurance. Also my taxes were lower, as a "rich" middle age dude you wouldn't think $75/month would matter, but it really did at that low of an income. I couldn't afford medical insurance for myself unfortunately, because a single dudes monthly med insurance, if there is no employer plan, is more than I earned per month. Also food is cheaper the further you get from the city, I ate like a freaking king for about $80/month, given nearly 100% inflation since then I'd say $160/month but if you cut back on steak and caviar $100 is probably reasonable. I was told I could get food stamps but I didn't feel that poor so I never applied (heck I lived in a pretty 'leet apartment and had a nice car compared to my university buddies). The GI bill took care of tuition.
You are not intended to live on minimum wage. Anybody who shows up on time and sober will be making above minimum in three months.
LOL you must not be from the US, or live in a hyperinflated area like Manhattan or Hollywood. Merely on time and sober won't even get you a job of any sort in most of the country.
If you're not intended to live on minimum wage, what are you supposed to do for your "three months", spend three months dead for tax purposes (douglas adams reference, although also a serious question)?
There are plenty of students who won't borrow 60k just because they can.
They don't make that decision. That decision is made for them by the school when they set their tuition rate.
Its like mistakenly thinking individual home buyers set the price of homes. Not so... They've got a out of pocket budget of (for example) $1000K/month and the govt sets the interest rate which sets the amount they can borrow which sets the price of the house.
In a similar way, a school knows the median student (and family) can toss in $5K/yr outta pocket, and the govt will toss in an additional guaranteed $20K. Therefore the price will be set by the school at $25K because $5K + $20K = $25K.
Us stingy non-compassionate curmudgeonly types not swayed by cries that everyone must be educated or accusations of elitism have been saying this for a very long time.
The combined un and under employment rate for recent grads is now 54%... I have personal knowledge of waitresses, sales clerks, and walmart shelf stockers with degrees, and I fail to see why I should want to pay for their degree out of my taxes. I get a benefit from the masters degree my kids teacher has, or my doc and dentists degree. Or the civil engineer who designed the freeway overpass I drove over on the way to work to pay for all these degrees. My bachelors degree waitress? Eh not seeing the point of educating her. If only 10% of jobs need university level skills, I see no reason beyond profit to send more than 10% of the population there.
Don't fall into the mistake of thinking education is only obtained magically solely by spending money on campus. And there's nothing wrong with spending your own money on a useless hobby, I've certainly blown thru enough cash on my hobbies... but I don't send men with guns to take your income from you to pay for my science fiction books... and we shouldn't do the same for my over-educated waitress.
Student aid is flat, tuition rates rise, can't explain that!
Low interest rates means you can borrow more means they charge more.
See the housing bubble, where multi-generational low interest rates lead to multi-generational high house prices despite real median family income declining and median family non-housing expenses increasing.
You need more instructors and more classrooms and that takes about a ten year timeframe to ramp up.
If you want to be a educational success. If you just want to set up a degree mill to collect money, that takes about six months. Evidence is two blocks from where I'm working, but there are at least 3 other recently opened degree mills in the area here.
If I am a school and I have learned that students can borrow $60,000 a year from the government, then I am sure as hell I will raise my prices to get htat "free money".
No, not at all. If you had a full campus while charging $5K/yr, you'll raise your tuition to $65K a year, because you'll collect the "free" $60K plus your campus full of students obviously can afford $5K/yr.
Not one extra person will attend (duh, the out of pocket cost remains $5K) and not one extra person will not attend (free money for all !!!)
If you're talking about my 22 relay bitslice ALU assuming I could magically energize all 22 relays simultaneously (unlikely) on a 8 bit CPU design the entire ALU could only draw 22 * 8 * .1 = about 20 * .1 * 8 = 2 * 8 = 16 or so amps. Compared to ham radio gear that's nothing. I have a HF transceiver that draws something like 25 amps at 100 watts out on ssb voice peaks and that is not unusual at all in the hobby.
If you're talking about my insane $6000 relay based memory unit yeah the current draw is why I'm going latching relays, no current draw except when you switch states. This also makes them static instead of dynamic, I could power down the works and come back in a month and the memory would still be loaded. The decode logic only burned a couple amps worst case, as I recall. The only problem is 2048 latching relays are kind of expensive at a couple bucks a piece yet 256 bytes is kind of memory constrained.
I've put quite a bit of thought into it, and really the only thing stopping me is bulk memory storage. Yes I could use a microcontroller, a large memory chip, some optoisolators, and some SSRs but its way more fun to do it all electromechanically... if its possible.
Might work, might be a bit fumbly. The closest "solution" I could come up with involved something that looks like a magnetic chess piece with a little neo-magnet on the bottom and a gripper on top. Given a decent gripper/mover I could implement something like that on my milling machine table right now. This brings up my really weird idea of a robot arm making QR codes using black square magnets on a steel sheet. But this is getting pretty far off from the original "mostly-electromechanical" design.
a half baked democracy on a third-world country (hey, I live on one of these, I know what I'm talking)
Greetings fellow USA resident
http://www.ontheradio.net/metro/milwaukee_wi.aspx
OK now no fair cheating and claiming there is more than one or two song in the playlist difference between "adult contemporary" "hot adult contemporary" "top 40" or "urban contemporary". Also there are several different names for gen-X rock but the playlists are almost the same.
On FM I count something like 10 top 40 hits stations, about 5 gen-x rock and a smattering of religious. There are 3 smooth jazz stations, the classical station went all saxaphone a couple years ago (I'm thinking this station list is not up to date), there is no local classical. There's 3 NPR outlets. So thats it, all a major city has on FM is top 40, gen-X rock, religion, jazz, and the (I kid you not) Polka station. There are only 5 playlists available in a 2 million person metropolitan area, the 28th largest city in the USA, and none of those playlists particularly interest me. AM is pretty much a wasteland. I'm not even going there.
I listen to audiobooks in my car during the commute and when one runs out I have to listen to local radio. Gag. Its very motivational to get me to load up another audiobook. Other than keeping the gas tank filled there is nothing of higher priority WRT to the commute than avoiding radio.
reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results
Those skills are all anti-american. You're supposed to follow the herd and believe whatever the preacher and TV say. Anything else isn't cool.
They need questions like:
1) Sally takes three plants and puts one in the dark, one in the shade, one in open sunlight. What is the most likely thing to happen next:
a) The DEA agents find the plant in the dark and bust her
b) The DEA agents find the plant in the shade and bust her
c) The DEA agents find the plant in open sunlight and bust her
d) Sally switches into the far more lucrative prostitution trade and dies of a half dozen STDs.
whiteboard markers will dry out too quickly. Been there, thought of that.
As has been (kinda harshly) hashed out on hackernews, this is really a turing machine emulated on a NXT using lego as a physical memory display. This is still cool, but its not "turing machine built out of lego" except by the extreme interpretation that a NXT computer is sold by the lego corporation.
There have been some genuine mechanical turing machines built with varying level of success.
Its pretty easy to make an electromechanical relay based turing machine if for no reason other than price (well, price compared to when I was a kid, its still gonna be a chunk of change)
When I was a teenage kid a simple DPDT 12 volt relay at radio shack cost me something like two HOURS of labor income, and now as a "highly" paid jack(-ass) of all computational trades I can buy a simple DPDT from Mouser for something like two MINUTES of labor income. I've got a bitslice ALU design (admittedly not a turing machine) down to about 22 relays per bit. Latching relays are about 50% more money than non-latching. Also QPDT relays are "cheap" and commercially available.
large PCBs are expensive. Yet sockets and hand wiring is not cheap either (although it looks cool)
I'm stuck on (electro-)mechanical memory storage devices. There was a single bit core memory design from a 1970s electronics magazine that used simple steel washers as cores, terrible magnetic properties but cheaply and widely available. However I don't want an electronic design. Latching relays are cheap enough for registers and ... surprisingly enough ... latches ... but they're a bit expensive for main memory. For example an Altair size of memory made of latching relays would cost me about 256 bytes * 8 bits * 3 bucks per latching relay equals $6.1K just for storage not to mention decode logic. Until I can figure out a way to get below $1/bit purely electromechanically I think I'm stuck.
The history of computation, since the 1940s (before even my time) has always been "computation is cheap, memory is expensive"
Wipe em out. Everyone registers everything top level, boom, done.
How bout reverse-reverse DNS where you get no name at all just a ip address... the Mighty GOOG indexes, you bookmark, thats it.
Seriously, what does it accomplish? ... People don't organize domain names in a hierarchy like they did with Usenet groups,...
We did, in the old days. Back in 91 when I first got on the net, the original goal was caching with a secondary of segregating traffic.
The hope is that 99% of traffic to .us would be from inside .us therefore limiting expensive high latency international traffic. Doesn't map so well with massive multinational corp traffic to .com
In the ancient days of "no commercial traffic on the ARPA-net" anything .com over the ARPA was verboten.