Politically motivated or not, religion was a useful tool to justify them. Without that tool, they would have had to fall back on reason, which means they might have found it a lot harder to justify their position.
I really, really wanted a port of PalmOS (even one of the old monochrome ones) for my DS - a PDA that you can also play games on... it even looked the part held in "book" aspect - just like an old yuppie filofax. The instant-on suspend mode really lasts, it has an alarm, etc, etc.
It's not impossible to build a voting machine ; but it is impossible to drag the average high school graduate off the street and have him audit the thing.
In general, people understand ballot boxes but find computers to be a delirious mystery. Don't build voting computers. Use a pencil.
This could be a step towards making it impossible - if Google make it a great deal easier to do a patent search for software, then it will get done more often. This will be shortly followed by a wider spread realization that you can't write any significant program without infringing a disastrous number of patents, which will hopefully lead to a larger lobby against patenting software.
Re:It's also time to dump dumb terminals...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
Our shop is moving to these. All new starters will get a VDI and an RDPterm unless their line manager justifies why they need their own hardware.
Of course, they are trialling this on the tech-savvy people first - the section of the organization least likely to be satisfied with the same cookie-cutter machine with Office for every user...
"So, we noticed that you spent an hour at a known brothel today. The good news is we offer our special customers preferential rates for non-geographic billing!"
How ironic. A watermarking technology exploiting machine persistence of vision stolen by people who depend on human persistence of vision for their business.
You've caught me out.... I oppose electronic voting systems for exactly the same reason - that they are incomprehensible by the average citizen and thus impossible for them to audit. I even note that geeks love to noodle with the ideas for implementing a successful e-voting system because they love a complex problem.
Thanks for clarifying an extra benefit though - not being a lawyer I wouldn't have thought about laws being composed of what is effectively a stream of patches, that the user has to read verbatim and apply mentally instead of just applying to the original "source".
Perhaps make the law accessible via a wiki. But most wiki revision control systems aren't very sophisticated.
Keep the law in git branches. If people wish to amend the law, let them branch the law, make their amendment, and propose it for merging to the master branch. What the proposed changes are become very easy to track, as does the person responsible for each and every line.
Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...
Minutes? They should, at a minimum, make audio recordings, with a "voice key" that identifies each speaker. The amount of data required wouldn't be too bad using decent voice codecs. Video would be nice as it restores the non-verbal communications channels that you miss out on.
Minutes rarely convey the actual content of a meeting, in my experience.
The EULA clearly states that OEM licenses are only valid for the machine they are initially installed on. This is probably why they require the license sticker to be affixed to the machine (again, written into the license).
Now, EULAs themselves are perhaps a grey area, but Microsoft's opinion on the matter is quite clear.
But it isn't just 20km of wire. Just getting to the Manchester backbone (10 miles away) for my ISP needs 4 hops and has a latency of 20ms (0.02 s). Getting to the web page for Manchester university routes the packets through London, and uses 17 hops and is about 30ms latency.
Just the process of compressing the video for the client will add latency. You can't squish an HD frame instantly. You can't decode it instantly either. While analogue TV was still broadcast in my region, you could flick between digital and analogue and the digital always lagged behind - yes, it was buffered, but that's a necessary consequence of the technology.
Even if they are setting up the video rendering servers in the local exchange - which assumes a ridiculous amount of competence - you are talking about adding between 2 and 5 Mbit/s of traffic per client. The local loop of copper wire can only accommodate a certain amount of traffic for a given pool of customers - your contention ratio is based on this fact.
So ; twitch gaming is right out. In fact, the only kind of game this would work well for would be high-latency games like World of Warcraft, strategy games, etc. In other words, the kind of games for which you don't exactly need a stellar rendering setup anyway.
It's really offensive from an engineering viewpoint as well. All the same components have to be there (game client computer with expensive GPU, game server, internet connection to carry multiplayer messages), but you have to add an extra computer (the "thin" client), add extra messages across the network for the controller, and of course, pipe a video stream across the internet instead of a monitor cable. It's just not efficient. Even if the service is pitched at casual gamers who can't be bothered to install a game and want instant gratification, it will be equally damaging to all the other customers on that network because they have to share their bandwidth with people streaming HD video.
I'm actually really glad that BT has signed them up exclusively because I'm on cable - thanks guys... you just saved my ISP from shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
Hmm, maybe that's why all the memory units in Star Trek are "quads"..... (I've heard it retconned as "quadrillion bits" - but really this fits better).
signing billion dollar IT contracts for useless projects that they knew the next government would want to cancel, intentionally negotiating contracts with huge penalties for cancellation.
They should just man up and cancel the contract without penalty - after all, they are the frickin' GOVERNMENT.
On a similarly frivolous note, perhaps they should say "your contract is with the Labour government, and MMMM they don't seem to be around anymore. Get them voted back in if you want your cancellation payment."....
Some viruses are "ransom-ware" - they encrypt your files and send the key to the virus author. Then they demand money to get the key to unencrypt your files.
The problem with VB6 was that it made it easy to program badly.
On the other hand, you could still write useful software in it very quickly compared to C or C++. If you were disciplined, you could even write fairly good software in VB6 ; as my ability with it matured, my code ended up having error handling with full stack traces, which cut the time to debug most problems down by an order of magnitude.
In the end, it was killed off by it's lack of implementation inheritance, the use of COM as an interface model, and of course, by having it's support withdrawn by Microsoft.
Of course "killed" is a relative term ; there are still huge bodies of VB6 code out there in production use. It's still the macro language for Office. I keep a VM image with a VB6 development kit in it hanging around in the event I need to whip it out and patch some of our first-line VB6 applications. In some senses, it's the COBOL of the desktop.
I also know of at least one company that still has a flagship product written in VB3. A lot of the code I wrote for it was very much informed by improved practices I learned from VB6, and from newer languages like C#.
Watts per day? What the hell are you talking about? Watts are a unit of power - the unit already has a time dimension and you don't need to add one. Perhaps you mean Watt hours (Wh), which are a unit of energy, not the canonical one, but in common use in the electricity industry (most commonly as kilowatt hours).
If you're going to back things up with numbers, you need to demonstrate that you understand them.
Yes, the GP is an idiot. It would be quite possible to provide all our conceivable energy needs through solar energy collection. On the other hand, the infrastructure required would be very expensive in comparison to our current exploitation of stored solar energy (oil and coal), and we'd have to put up with a relatively less wealthy existence for quite some time in order to construct it.
If we can crack fusion - I'm not talking about multi-gigawatt aircraft carrier sized reactors, I'm talking small scale 5MW units - if we can crack that, it will be a far more viable energy source than any solar infrastructure could ever be. The return on investment for all forms of harvesting environmental energy is just too low to be attractive compared to almost anything we are used to using, which means that if renewables become our only energy source, we are looking at relative poverty - and oddly enough, in general, people don't like that idea.
This article concentrates on Deuterium-Tritium fusion, and I agree with it in that context.
Most of the concerns are addressed by the design of a DPF reactor.
withstand temperatures of millions of degrees for years on end
That's just FUD, I'm afraid. Even in tokamak reactors, the plasma is kept separate from the reactor vessel. The plasma is at millions of degrees ; the reactor vessel is not. In a DPF reactor, the plasma is a teensy little 12 microns across - even if the contents are running at about a billion Kelvin, they won't heat the reactor vessel to millions of degrees. The reactor is also designed to emit most of it's energy through non-thermal vectors.
constantly bombarded by high-energy nuclear particles
True, in a DT reactor. Not so true in a pB reactor - the reaction produces helium and electrons, not neutrons.
has to make its own nuclear fuel
This one is the big winner. As they rightly noted, tritium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. A pB reaction uses no tritium, it uses common or garden "normal" hydrogen, and boron, an element that's abundant enough to sell as eyewash.
no outages, interruptions or mishaps—for decades on end
When a 1 GW reactor goes offline, yes, you have a shortfall problem. When the proposed 5MW output DPF reactor goes offline for it's routine maintenance (for about 12 hours), you just lean on the others you have running. Lots of small, local, redundant reactors the size of shipping containers make for more reliability than a few whacking great behemoths the size of aircraft carriers. When they cost $300,000 instead of $10,000,000,000, you can afford to pile them high, and sell them cheap.
must also convert energy from the neutrons into heat that drives a turbine
The design is intended to use 2 methods of direct energy collection that are not heat engines, a more elegant and efficient solution that places it closer to "power plant" break-even.
At least they report the purpose of NIF correctly, albeit couched in soft language - it's about "National Security", not energy generation.
Despite it's earlier mention in the thread, I have to take the opportunity to point out that Focus Fusion involves a reactor design that extracts power from the reaction via 2 routes ;
Direct induction of current by a stream of helium ions
Gamma-voltaic collector
Both of which are very much more direct than steam generation. I believe the reaction has plenty of waste heat which could be used industrially as well.
Indeed, reaching temperatures of 65keV now, at currents half those of previous experiments ; apparently they can ignite a pB11 mix if they can get it to 100keV.
I have more confidence in their project than NIF, which is just a giant weapon simulator. Their design has some engineering elegance. Should they demonstrate over-unity, I will throw one hell of a party, and happily put up with having to explain why to all the invitees.
Yeah, it's a shame that you need a working Windows installation to do that. I remember my first Windows 95 install and I really struggled with it until I discovered that you could boot from the CD-ROM.
Later on, especially with new hardware, it's only nLite that enables you to install the OS. I haven't built a machine with a floppy drive in many years. It's a joke that XP couldn't use flash drives - the format had been more popular than floppies for some time.
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Politically motivated or not, religion was a useful tool to justify them. Without that tool, they would have had to fall back on reason, which means they might have found it a lot harder to justify their position.
I really, really wanted a port of PalmOS (even one of the old monochrome ones) for my DS - a PDA that you can also play games on... it even looked the part held in "book" aspect - just like an old yuppie filofax. The instant-on suspend mode really lasts, it has an alarm, etc, etc.
It's not impossible to build a voting machine ; but it is impossible to drag the average high school graduate off the street and have him audit the thing.
In general, people understand ballot boxes but find computers to be a delirious mystery. Don't build voting computers. Use a pencil.
This could be a step towards making it impossible - if Google make it a great deal easier to do a patent search for software, then it will get done more often. This will be shortly followed by a wider spread realization that you can't write any significant program without infringing a disastrous number of patents, which will hopefully lead to a larger lobby against patenting software.
Our shop is moving to these. All new starters will get a VDI and an RDPterm unless their line manager justifies why they need their own hardware.
Of course, they are trialling this on the tech-savvy people first - the section of the organization least likely to be satisfied with the same cookie-cutter machine with Office for every user...
"So, we noticed that you spent an hour at a known brothel today. The good news is we offer our special customers preferential rates for non-geographic billing!"
You mean it's a zoetrope?
How ironic. A watermarking technology exploiting machine persistence of vision stolen by people who depend on human persistence of vision for their business.
I'm sorry, but I just can't bring myself to consume any substance with which the phrase "anal leakage" is associated.
You've caught me out.... I oppose electronic voting systems for exactly the same reason - that they are incomprehensible by the average citizen and thus impossible for them to audit. I even note that geeks love to noodle with the ideas for implementing a successful e-voting system because they love a complex problem.
Thanks for clarifying an extra benefit though - not being a lawyer I wouldn't have thought about laws being composed of what is effectively a stream of patches, that the user has to read verbatim and apply mentally instead of just applying to the original "source".
LawCAPTCHA!
Perhaps make the law accessible via a wiki. But most wiki revision control systems aren't very sophisticated.
Keep the law in git branches. If people wish to amend the law, let them branch the law, make their amendment, and propose it for merging to the master branch. What the proposed changes are become very easy to track, as does the person responsible for each and every line.
Even better, produce an unambiguous machine-readable language for law, one that can be used to make legal inferences (e.g. - is this particular act legal?). Of course, this would cause a huge mess when people realise how self-contradictory and downright logically impossible some of the law is...
Minutes? They should, at a minimum, make audio recordings, with a "voice key" that identifies each speaker. The amount of data required wouldn't be too bad using decent voice codecs. Video would be nice as it restores the non-verbal communications channels that you miss out on.
Minutes rarely convey the actual content of a meeting, in my experience.
Legally gray but I consider it fair use.
The EULA clearly states that OEM licenses are only valid for the machine they are initially installed on. This is probably why they require the license sticker to be affixed to the machine (again, written into the license).
Now, EULAs themselves are perhaps a grey area, but Microsoft's opinion on the matter is quite clear.
But it isn't just 20km of wire. Just getting to the Manchester backbone (10 miles away) for my ISP needs 4 hops and has a latency of 20ms (0.02 s). Getting to the web page for Manchester university routes the packets through London, and uses 17 hops and is about 30ms latency.
Just the process of compressing the video for the client will add latency. You can't squish an HD frame instantly. You can't decode it instantly either. While analogue TV was still broadcast in my region, you could flick between digital and analogue and the digital always lagged behind - yes, it was buffered, but that's a necessary consequence of the technology.
Even if they are setting up the video rendering servers in the local exchange - which assumes a ridiculous amount of competence - you are talking about adding between 2 and 5 Mbit/s of traffic per client. The local loop of copper wire can only accommodate a certain amount of traffic for a given pool of customers - your contention ratio is based on this fact.
So ; twitch gaming is right out. In fact, the only kind of game this would work well for would be high-latency games like World of Warcraft, strategy games, etc. In other words, the kind of games for which you don't exactly need a stellar rendering setup anyway.
It's really offensive from an engineering viewpoint as well. All the same components have to be there (game client computer with expensive GPU, game server, internet connection to carry multiplayer messages), but you have to add an extra computer (the "thin" client), add extra messages across the network for the controller, and of course, pipe a video stream across the internet instead of a monitor cable. It's just not efficient. Even if the service is pitched at casual gamers who can't be bothered to install a game and want instant gratification, it will be equally damaging to all the other customers on that network because they have to share their bandwidth with people streaming HD video.
I'm actually really glad that BT has signed them up exclusively because I'm on cable - thanks guys... you just saved my ISP from shooting themselves in the foot with this crap.
can switch among four conducting states
Hmm, maybe that's why all the memory units in Star Trek are "quads"..... (I've heard it retconned as "quadrillion bits" - but really this fits better).
"censorship= evil" etc, but basically you don't want to make it so easy for teenagers to get stupid ideas
No, no, no. If you allow it for a good reason, people start doing it for bad reasons.
Just don't censor the videos of teenagers doing stupid-ass stunts and ending up as chunky hamburger. And make them compulsory in Drivers Ed.
signing billion dollar IT contracts for useless projects that they knew the next government would want to cancel, intentionally negotiating contracts with huge penalties for cancellation.
They should just man up and cancel the contract without penalty - after all, they are the frickin' GOVERNMENT.
On a similarly frivolous note, perhaps they should say "your contract is with the Labour government, and MMMM they don't seem to be around anymore. Get them voted back in if you want your cancellation payment."....
Some viruses are "ransom-ware" - they encrypt your files and send the key to the virus author. Then they demand money to get the key to unencrypt your files.
The problem with VB6 was that it made it easy to program badly.
On the other hand, you could still write useful software in it very quickly compared to C or C++. If you were disciplined, you could even write fairly good software in VB6 ; as my ability with it matured, my code ended up having error handling with full stack traces, which cut the time to debug most problems down by an order of magnitude.
In the end, it was killed off by it's lack of implementation inheritance, the use of COM as an interface model, and of course, by having it's support withdrawn by Microsoft.
Of course "killed" is a relative term ; there are still huge bodies of VB6 code out there in production use. It's still the macro language for Office. I keep a VM image with a VB6 development kit in it hanging around in the event I need to whip it out and patch some of our first-line VB6 applications. In some senses, it's the COBOL of the desktop.
I also know of at least one company that still has a flagship product written in VB3. A lot of the code I wrote for it was very much informed by improved practices I learned from VB6, and from newer languages like C#.
How did you get modded informative?
Watts per day? What the hell are you talking about? Watts are a unit of power - the unit already has a time dimension and you don't need to add one. Perhaps you mean Watt hours (Wh), which are a unit of energy, not the canonical one, but in common use in the electricity industry (most commonly as kilowatt hours).
If you're going to back things up with numbers, you need to demonstrate that you understand them.
Yes, the GP is an idiot. It would be quite possible to provide all our conceivable energy needs through solar energy collection. On the other hand, the infrastructure required would be very expensive in comparison to our current exploitation of stored solar energy (oil and coal), and we'd have to put up with a relatively less wealthy existence for quite some time in order to construct it.
If we can crack fusion - I'm not talking about multi-gigawatt aircraft carrier sized reactors, I'm talking small scale 5MW units - if we can crack that, it will be a far more viable energy source than any solar infrastructure could ever be. The return on investment for all forms of harvesting environmental energy is just too low to be attractive compared to almost anything we are used to using, which means that if renewables become our only energy source, we are looking at relative poverty - and oddly enough, in general, people don't like that idea.
This article concentrates on Deuterium-Tritium fusion, and I agree with it in that context.
Most of the concerns are addressed by the design of a DPF reactor.
withstand temperatures of millions of degrees for years on end
That's just FUD, I'm afraid. Even in tokamak reactors, the plasma is kept separate from the reactor vessel. The plasma is at millions of degrees ; the reactor vessel is not. In a DPF reactor, the plasma is a teensy little 12 microns across - even if the contents are running at about a billion Kelvin, they won't heat the reactor vessel to millions of degrees. The reactor is also designed to emit most of it's energy through non-thermal vectors.
constantly bombarded by high-energy nuclear particles
True, in a DT reactor. Not so true in a pB reactor - the reaction produces helium and electrons, not neutrons.
has to make its own nuclear fuel
This one is the big winner. As they rightly noted, tritium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. A pB reaction uses no tritium, it uses common or garden "normal" hydrogen, and boron, an element that's abundant enough to sell as eyewash.
no outages, interruptions or mishaps—for decades on end
When a 1 GW reactor goes offline, yes, you have a shortfall problem. When the proposed 5MW output DPF reactor goes offline for it's routine maintenance (for about 12 hours), you just lean on the others you have running. Lots of small, local, redundant reactors the size of shipping containers make for more reliability than a few whacking great behemoths the size of aircraft carriers. When they cost $300,000 instead of $10,000,000,000, you can afford to pile them high, and sell them cheap.
must also convert energy from the neutrons into heat that drives a turbine
The design is intended to use 2 methods of direct energy collection that are not heat engines, a more elegant and efficient solution that places it closer to "power plant" break-even.
At least they report the purpose of NIF correctly, albeit couched in soft language - it's about "National Security", not energy generation.
Despite it's earlier mention in the thread, I have to take the opportunity to point out that Focus Fusion involves a reactor design that extracts power from the reaction via 2 routes ;
Both of which are very much more direct than steam generation. I believe the reaction has plenty of waste heat which could be used industrially as well.
65keV is hardly cold - 715 million degrees, or 45 times hotter than the Sun.
You really should read the pages. Or just watch the video of Eric Lerner giving a Google tech talk about their research.
And I'll join you in wishing them good luck. ;-)
If they succeed, or anyone else trying to crack the energy problem, it could be the salvation of our race if we handle it right.
Indeed, reaching temperatures of 65keV now, at currents half those of previous experiments ; apparently they can ignite a pB11 mix if they can get it to 100keV.
I have more confidence in their project than NIF, which is just a giant weapon simulator. Their design has some engineering elegance. Should they demonstrate over-unity, I will throw one hell of a party, and happily put up with having to explain why to all the invitees.
Yeah, it's a shame that you need a working Windows installation to do that. I remember my first Windows 95 install and I really struggled with it until I discovered that you could boot from the CD-ROM.
Later on, especially with new hardware, it's only nLite that enables you to install the OS. I haven't built a machine with a floppy drive in many years. It's a joke that XP couldn't use flash drives - the format had been more popular than floppies for some time.