They really ought to try and be more proactive in posting notes about how "this is not the official release OMG leave it alone already". This is at least the second time (some 2.0-prereleases were also Slashdot-"leaked" when a lot of it was testing major-version-number changing).
I disagree. IRC is generally a topic based system divided into discrete channels, several of which you can occupy simultaneously. Second Life is a location-based system with a moving radius of audibility, and it's quite possible to get lost. There are spatial concerns regarding crowding. The modes of interaction in these two environments are substantially different enough that Second Life by itself is inadequate as a replacement.
Come up with a multi-location (tabbed?) VR client, perhaps, with a slightly more discrete transmission mode, and you might have something. Oh, and try not to floor the graphics cards too hard.
It would be next to impossible to convince a non-technical person to virtually walk through a filing system to find their work when they could just browse to it normally without the 3D stuff.
This reminds me of something else. I had been on a Tom Clancy spree, had read most of his big thick books, and I thought I'd pick up Net Force. (Big mistake. Avoid the Ops Center stuff as well.) The novel posited a fantastic virtual reality world of some sort for people to traverse the Net with. And what were people doing with this virtual reality? Driving cars. Commuting. On a virtual highway with exit ramps to virtual nations, packed with real commuters. There followed a virtual car chase.
mmmhmm. yep. All the things people have been dying to experience online there, eh Clancy?
Depends on who you ask. I for one would be wary of trusting whatever Linden Labs says on the matter, and note that last I checked they still weren't making any money off it. Aside from that, there are a lot of generally "net savvy" types there who are looking for the "next big thing", and there's a small population of rather creative and sometimes entrepenurial people, and a number of people who are there to do something to fulfill their own fantasies in a 3D online space (deviant fantasies, or otherwise).
That said, I think there's a whole lot of hype around this thing. I know one of these "embedded reporters" is a Linden Labs employee - oooooh wow *cough*. As for companies... I hear there was something with Sun a while back? It sounded like a lame publicity stunt, if you ask me.
This comment (on Wed February 08, 04:10 PM) put it far more cynically than I could ever.
I think thie idea is: They sent Viking to Mars. It had this experiment on it to detect organic molecules. It all came back negative. They thought that meant there might be an oxidant that's actively destroying organic molecules, but these guys say that maybe the experiment was just broken.
We had a big Supreme Court case in this country back in 1819, relating to taxes and who could levy them - a little conflict between the Maryland government and the federal government.
Taking as undeniable the fact that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy", the court concluded that the Maryland tax could not be levied against the government. If states were allowed to continue their acts, they would destroy the institution created by federal government and oppose the principle of federal supremacy which originated in the text of the Constitution.
So. The power to tax is the power to destroy. And Germany (and Britain and other places) are taxing TV, radio, the Internet. I've seen enough WWII films (and read books, fiction and otherwise) about World War II and people with radios trying to hide them away or tune them to illegal channels (BBC) and such that this notion worries me.
Copper pennies aren't made anymore, because, you guessed it, the amount of copper required to make a penny is worth more than 1c,
Pennies are made of over 95% zinc. But the price of zinc has risen to more than 1c per penny as well (blame the Chinese economy). But that's only the beginning of why
pennies ought to be eliminated.
You jest, but have you heard about the recent rise in America of the potato cartel? Apparently, as a result, wholesale potato prices have risen about 50% over the past year or so, to about $10 per 100 pounds.
(Link is to random blog. Actual article was in the Wall Street Journal and is presently available online on a subscription-only basis. Random blog reproduces a portion of actual article, however.)
Also, cue complaints about how they just destroy these potatoes instead of giving them to hungry third-world countries or stuff like that.
Because the whole point of Spamhaus is that you don't lookup spamhaus.org, you query something like eh.net.sbl.spamhaus.org and if it returns a certain value (127.0.0.2) then you go, "oh, mail from EH.Net, they must be spammers" whereas if it returns a Not Found then you go "oh, okay, let it through like normal".
Dunno about credit, but they have debit cards that function wheverver you would use your credit card these days. They just take money from your bank account. Sometimes they're branded as "check cards".
Essentially they're data-mining the text of newspapers and magazines and other such stuff from The Press - material which is already publicly available - for material which may indicate that there is some sort of threat. How is this involvement of computers legally different from, say, obtaining a subscriptions to various foreign and domestic newspapers and having your analysts look over them for potential threats?
The only objection I could really see is a ridiculous one involving the copyrights to the article... and that's just a ridiculous one, not that it would stop people from objecting...
The empirical data suggest otherwise. Mind you, I don't actually have any empirical data with me at the moment, though I could Google search for scholarly articles on the topic or something I suggest. But standards of livings have risen - even if inequality has also risen. (Speaking of inequality, how is that measured? Do you measure wealth inequality, or income inequality? What of intangible wealth - the expected value of your own person as human capital - its ability to bring you anticipated future earnings - your health and well-being - et cetera? Is this measurement for a moment in time, or over a lifetime? ah, measurements are fun...) Recognize also that there is a certain economic trade-off between equity and efficiency. How much is equity worth? What sort of economic losses are we as a society willing to incur to make things fair? (The only system where we're all truly equal is where we're all dead. Launch the nukes, anyone?)
Tell you what. Go look for some data on the topic. Not for me, not for this discussion - for your own personal edificaiton. Look for some data that's not just there to spin things the way you want them spun. See if you can get any scholarly analysis of the data, critiques of the analysis... do actual research instead of going with a gut emotional instinct.
Obviously someone is paying less for something, or else no one would bother sending these things overseas. Even if the Nike Corporation managed to eat 100% of the price difference (which would really only be entirely the case if they are facing a perfectly inelastic demand) it would at the very least mean more profit their shareholders - and that means more value in the mutual funds which include Nike stock, and whatever retirement funds include these mutual funds, and...
Costs go down, yet Nikes manufactured in China do not cost less than Nikes made in the US a while ago, no?
I don't have any data on this.
So, expect those jobs to come back in 10 years or so. Of course, it may be that by then the US turns into a third-world nation of nurses and burger-flippers, seeing as in the meantime the incentives of getting a higher (technical) education will be extremely low.
Nurses and the demand for high-quality medical attention are a very first-world nation phenomenon (care for a random fun paper relating income and health expenditures anyone?); and in any event a nursing position is perhaps much more sophisticated and perhaps more valuable to society than some random cable-running or website-tweaking job in an information technology position.
As long as we insist on things like clean air, good police protection, something approaching a "living wage" for our lowest-paid workers, good health care, safe cars, good infrastructure, etc. etc. etc., then we will have higher costs to do business here than in countries whose citizens don't demand these things.
Indeed. But, look on the bright side - as those countries overseas are systematically enriched by doing business with a wealthy country like the United States, they will begin to insist on those things like clean air, health care, better infrastructure...
So. How many child slaves are there working in IT overseas? Which of those "42-56 million American service-sector jobs" susceptible to offshoring are staffed by these prisoner slaves from China?
As with most economic concerns like this, of course there are both winners and losers to globalization. The losers are the US workers and firms who were formerly employed in this industry. The winners are the workers elsewhere, and anyone who can now pay less for IT services (and less for products and services in general because the businesses in question can now pay less for IT services).
The gains from doing this are large, but very spread out. The losses are small, but concentrated. As a result, those who lose out have a big incentive to try and stop this from happening - more so than those who would gain from it. They may attempt to have the government regulate the practice. This is known to economists as rent seeking, when one group seeks the uncompensated transfer of wealth from others (people who buy IT) to themselves through government intervention. These Other People have to expend more resources to get the same things done. This is not a spectacularly noble cause, though it often is hailed in the name of "saving jobs".
But then, if our first concern should be about saving jobs, we ought to do away with computers entirely so there is more work to be done for paper-shufflers in offices. We can save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of office secretaries! Indeed, we could get rid of machines entirely and go back to simple hand tools for everything. Except, well, not.
Of course, that doesn't stop it all from happening. Take textiles. The average US family spends $160 more a year on textiles because of import quotas. Each job saved costs $221,000 a year. This is paid for by other people. Yay.
Decimation was a form of extreme military discipline used by officers in the Roman Army to punish mutinous or cowardly soldiers. The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth."
Well, there are real theoretical limits to the efficiency of a photovoltaic solar cell, and they are significantly less than 100%. I found this 2002 article with a search:
One of the most fundamental limitations on solar cell efficiency is the band gap of the semiconductor from which the cell is made. In a photovoltaic cell, negatively doped (n-type) material, with extra electrons in its otherwise empty conduction band, makes a junction with positively doped (p-type) material, with extra holes in the band otherwise filled with valence electrons. Incoming photons of the right energy -- that is, the right color of light -- knock electrons loose and leave holes; both migrate in the junction's electric field to form a current.
Photons with less energy than the band gap slip right through. For example, red light photons are not absorbed by high-band-gap semiconductors. While photons with energy higher than the band gap are absorbed -- for example, blue light photons in a low-band gap semiconductor -- their excess energy is wasted as heat.
The maximum efficiency a solar cell made from a single material can achieve in converting light to electrical power is about 30 percent; the best efficiency actually achieved is about 25 percent. To do better, researchers and manufacturers stack different band gap materials in multijunction cells.
Dozens of different layers could be stacked to catch photons at all energies, reaching efficiencies better than 70 percent, but too many problems intervene. When crystal lattices differ too much, for example, strain damages the crystals. The most efficient multijunction solar cell yet made -- 30 percent, out of a possible 50 percent efficiency -- has just two layers.
So. Things might theoretically get better, but you might consider just how realistic your hopes for improvement are.
A little off-topic, but fun story. It was 2004. I was in a computer science class - I forget the official name, but we were doing circuit-level stuff with transistors and NAND-gates and multiplexers and what-have-you. Those of you who have taken a class may be familiar with a particular configuration of NAND gates which, for example, stores one input when the other is strobed. These are known as bistable multivibrators or, more commonly, "flip-flops". This simplest one is the SR flip-flop (set/reset) but only a little more complicated is the one termed a JK flip-flop.
The JK flip-flop augments the behavior of the SR flip-flop by interpreting the S = R = 1 condition as a "flip" command. Specifically, the combination J = 1, K = 0 is a command to set the flip-flop; the combination J = 0, K = 1 is a command to reset the flip-flop; and the combination J = K = 1 is a command to toggle the flip-flop, i.e., change its output to the logical complement of its current value. Setting J = K = 0 results in a D-type flip-flop. The JK flip-flop is therefore a universal flip-flop, because it can be configured to work as an SR flip-flop, a D flip-flop or a T flip-flop.
Slashdot Mirror
They really ought to try and be more proactive in posting notes about how "this is not the official release OMG leave it alone already". This is at least the second time (some 2.0-prereleases were also Slashdot-"leaked" when a lot of it was testing major-version-number changing).
Come up with a multi-location (tabbed?) VR client, perhaps, with a slightly more discrete transmission mode, and you might have something. Oh, and try not to floor the graphics cards too hard.
This reminds me of something else. I had been on a Tom Clancy spree, had read most of his big thick books, and I thought I'd pick up Net Force. (Big mistake. Avoid the Ops Center stuff as well.) The novel posited a fantastic virtual reality world of some sort for people to traverse the Net with. And what were people doing with this virtual reality? Driving cars. Commuting. On a virtual highway with exit ramps to virtual nations, packed with real commuters. There followed a virtual car chase.
mmmhmm. yep. All the things people have been dying to experience online there, eh Clancy?
Depends on who you ask. I for one would be wary of trusting whatever Linden Labs says on the matter, and note that last I checked they still weren't making any money off it. Aside from that, there are a lot of generally "net savvy" types there who are looking for the "next big thing", and there's a small population of rather creative and sometimes entrepenurial people, and a number of people who are there to do something to fulfill their own fantasies in a 3D online space (deviant fantasies, or otherwise).
That said, I think there's a whole lot of hype around this thing. I know one of these "embedded reporters" is a Linden Labs employee - oooooh wow *cough*. As for companies... I hear there was something with Sun a while back? It sounded like a lame publicity stunt, if you ask me.
This comment (on Wed February 08, 04:10 PM) put it far more cynically than I could ever.
I think thie idea is: They sent Viking to Mars. It had this experiment on it to detect organic molecules. It all came back negative. They thought that meant there might be an oxidant that's actively destroying organic molecules, but these guys say that maybe the experiment was just broken.
We had a big Supreme Court case in this country back in 1819, relating to taxes and who could levy them - a little conflict between the Maryland government and the federal government.
So. The power to tax is the power to destroy. And Germany (and Britain and other places) are taxing TV, radio, the Internet. I've seen enough WWII films (and read books, fiction and otherwise) about World War II and people with radios trying to hide them away or tune them to illegal channels (BBC) and such that this notion worries me.
IMAP mail, instead of POP3 access.
Pennies are made of over 95% zinc. But the price of zinc has risen to more than 1c per penny as well (blame the Chinese economy). But that's only the beginning of why pennies ought to be eliminated.
I
B
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I think you just described about a third their corporate vision.
(Link is to random blog. Actual article was in the Wall Street Journal and is presently available online on a subscription-only basis. Random blog reproduces a portion of actual article, however.)
Also, cue complaints about how they just destroy these potatoes instead of giving them to hungry third-world countries or stuff like that.
Because the whole point of Spamhaus is that you don't lookup spamhaus.org, you query something like eh.net.sbl.spamhaus.org and if it returns a certain value (127.0.0.2) then you go, "oh, mail from EH.Net, they must be spammers" whereas if it returns a Not Found then you go "oh, okay, let it through like normal".
Keeps you from spending money you don't have.
The only objection I could really see is a ridiculous one involving the copyrights to the article... and that's just a ridiculous one, not that it would stop people from objecting...
Tell you what. Go look for some data on the topic. Not for me, not for this discussion - for your own personal edificaiton. Look for some data that's not just there to spin things the way you want them spun. See if you can get any scholarly analysis of the data, critiques of the analysis... do actual research instead of going with a gut emotional instinct.
Obviously someone is paying less for something, or else no one would bother sending these things overseas. Even if the Nike Corporation managed to eat 100% of the price difference (which would really only be entirely the case if they are facing a perfectly inelastic demand) it would at the very least mean more profit their shareholders - and that means more value in the mutual funds which include Nike stock, and whatever retirement funds include these mutual funds, and...
I don't have any data on this. Nurses and the demand for high-quality medical attention are a very first-world nation phenomenon (care for a random fun paper relating income and health expenditures anyone?); and in any event a nursing position is perhaps much more sophisticated and perhaps more valuable to society than some random cable-running or website-tweaking job in an information technology position.I seem to recall this being the reason that a number of locations were reported as considering banning Skype in a recent Slashdot story.
Indeed. But, look on the bright side - as those countries overseas are systematically enriched by doing business with a wealthy country like the United States, they will begin to insist on those things like clean air, health care, better infrastructure...
So. How many child slaves are there working in IT overseas? Which of those "42-56 million American service-sector jobs" susceptible to offshoring are staffed by these prisoner slaves from China?
The gains from doing this are large, but very spread out. The losses are small, but concentrated. As a result, those who lose out have a big incentive to try and stop this from happening - more so than those who would gain from it. They may attempt to have the government regulate the practice. This is known to economists as rent seeking, when one group seeks the uncompensated transfer of wealth from others (people who buy IT) to themselves through government intervention. These Other People have to expend more resources to get the same things done. This is not a spectacularly noble cause, though it often is hailed in the name of "saving jobs".
But then, if our first concern should be about saving jobs, we ought to do away with computers entirely so there is more work to be done for paper-shufflers in offices. We can save the jobs of hundreds of thousands of office secretaries! Indeed, we could get rid of machines entirely and go back to simple hand tools for everything. Except, well, not.
Of course, that doesn't stop it all from happening. Take textiles. The average US family spends $160 more a year on textiles because of import quotas. Each job saved costs $221,000 a year. This is paid for by other people. Yay.
But we digress. What was the topic? Antimatter? :P
I'm not even at a spectacularly big university.