Hell, I'd say humans are still on the menu for some predators; people are still attacked somehwat regularly by tigers in parts of Asia.
As to the other issues in the article, I think it's fairly obvious that cooperation among humans is one of the big reasons for our dominance on this planet. The division of labor and the use of tools are the secrets of our success.
Evolutionarily, one of the constraints on what features are successful is the physical ruleset. If the feature is to be successful, to some degree it must work reliably and efficiently within the rules of physics.
That said, we have discovered solutions for locomotion that take better advantage of physics principles than those developed by life. Rotary motion, almost entirely missing from biology, is the basis for some of our simplest and most efficient devices, such as the wheel and the screw. If such methods are better, why has no animal evolved them?
Now, they'll have to deal with the trolls who will register craploads of accounts for use in the future against the semi-protected pages.
Seems to me that this could be resolved by restricting modification of semi-protected pages to users with a certain number of edits rather than time since registration. This would force dummy account holders to post some content before they can get to those pages, increasing the likelihood of having their trollish behaviour discovered.
I don't get it. Why would Google to do this? Where is the percentage?
I really don't believe that they're after AOL's email service, as GMail is already the class of the field in webmail and a strong competitor for Yahoo and Hotmail. As for AIM, I thought Google launched their own IM service a while ago and it is likely to grow as well as previous Google projects.
Is Google after customer data? An entry into the ISP field? I don't get it.
You forgot: Slashdotters flame each other as to the interpretation of the fart, whether Linus is qualified to fart, if he has farted this way in the past, and if the fart is indeed truthful.
Why is it that every Microsoft solution involves a "manager"? They never seem to get to the point and just fix a problem. Instead, we get these grandiose stacks of hierarchy. It's like the French government is behind every design decision.
Why, the French government is behind every design decision. Except they called it the Restart Manger, because it gobbled up so many system resources. Guess something got lost in translation.
It is really quite simple. You are allowed to copy copyrighted works all you want. What is illegal is either selling or giving those copies to someone else. There is a "fair use" exception that lets you use short snippets for review purposes.
That's it. "Copying" is not illegal. Never has been. You can take a book of your shelf, rip it apart, create 5000 copies. All perfectly legal as long as you don't give/sell those copies.
Man, you really need to tell this to the MPAA and RIAA.
If I connect them to each other, not only can I send files, email, pictures, etc to my computer from my computer, but with this technology I can do it wirelessly.
I think it is the fact they have a four-letter domain that is the stopper. Finding a short domain name is tough, or in the case of four letters, impossible.
Perhaps they could change it to "The Internet Media Database." It would be a little more indicative of what they do, but wouldn't require a domain change.
I think the network effect is the more important one here, and is the one of the bases of Microsoft's monopoly. It would be good if government adoption would help OSS reach critical mass for this effect to work in OSS' favor rather than Microsoft's.
...where it could provide education and government services as well as entertainment via the television.
Yes, because we've all seen how the proliferation of television has resulted in a more informed, educated populace. If anything, it's just the opposite: A lowest-common-denominator, consent-manufacturing propaganda tool. I'm pretty sure people grow less critical and more sheep-like with each hour they watch.
Just the sort of thing we want in the hands of a company with a history like Microsoft's.
No problem, you put the waste in beer-keg size container and lift it above geo-sync. Release it such that it impacts the moon at a crater that we've designated as a dumping ground.
Why send it to the moon, which presumably we'll inhabit at some point? Loft it toward the sun and be done with it.
We really shouldn't spare any resources researching and developing fusion power. It has the potential to solve many of our environmental and energy-scarcity problems in one fell swoop.
The development of fusion is more important than just about any other scientific project, as the abundance of cheap energy would enable other projects. And yet how much are governments/energy companies devoting to it? Less than what we spend securing a limited oil supply in an unstable part of the world. I wish we had more far-sighted, responsible leaders who are interested in more than lining their own pockets or winning the next election (pretty much the same thing).
...should be migrated as formats/media change. Got directions to a family fortune? Don't burn a CD and hide it in the attic. If data is important to you, you should be backing it up regularly anyway, so the dying media problem should take care of itself. As for data formats, just make sure you can access all your data in the programs you use for that data type. That way, when you change programs/formats, presumably some form of converter will translate your important data to the new standard.
That said, I think there will be a burgeoning market in the near future for data-archaeologists that specialize in data recovery from old media. Hold on to your floppy drives!
This is a little off-topic, but the first dozen or so replies (emitted?) to this story made me wonder about the poor spelling in many Slashdot articles. We all know spellcheckers have been around forever, and it would seem to be a trivial task to fix errors in accepted stories. So what's going on? I have two theories:
1. The editors are shielding themselves from liability by not changing submitted stories in any fashion whatsoever. Similar to the way that comments are never deleted or modified, only moderated down.
2. They're deliberate troll-food. Slashdot seems to have more than its fair share of grammar/spelling Nazis, and the occasional error is an easy way to throw them a bone. Trolls are happiest trolling, and they generate hits just like the rest of us. I think sometimes that dupe stories are the same thing.
P.S. Since I mentioned the spelling/grammar Nazis, I'm sure you (you know who you are) are looking at this psot very carefully. The question is, did I really make an error or am I just demonstrating #2 above?
For my money, the mATX boards are a much better value. Cheaper, mainstream processor support, support for the usual PCI/PCIe/AGP peripherals means a more powerful, robust, upgradeable system. Plus, you can get cases that look like a piece of stereo equipment and can be unobtrusive in your living room.
IMHO, ITX is better suited for embedded systems, not a more general purpose computer. Unless you have a very specific, limited use (like a MythTV frontend), you'll almost always be better served getting an mATX-based system.
This same idea scares the life out of RIAA and MPAA, but eventually they'll realize that it costs more, in the long run, to keep everything protected than to just release it as is and make what you can from the millions of honest customers.
Silly poster, the MPAA/RIAA isn't going to pay for the protection, they're going to make us pay for the "service" of protecting their content. By law, if they can swing it. Look at the levy on CD-Rs in Canada going to copyright holders. It cost them nothing but some lobbying and brought them in untold millions in unearned revenues.
Personally, I'm protesting these business practices by not buying content from organizations that are members of the MPAA/RIAA.
Without copyright or a shitload of money, an author cannot be an author. The general public will not let them.
Authors wrote and ate long before copyright laws were invented. And the audience was much smaller, too. Some people will be willing to pay for hard copies of a book, even if it is available online for free. Look how many people pay for AV software, even though free alternatives exist. Or how many people buy bottled water, even though it's an order of magnitude (or more) more expensive than tap water. Or how many people pay $20 for a steak in a restaurant when they could buy the same steak for $5.
If an author is good, (s)he will find a way to be paid for it, copyright or no. How much more is a signed edition worth over the regular book?
thought that there was no extra energy so it could never be outputting more power than is necessary.
When a hybrid is using battery stored power to accelerate or is standing still, the engine is doing no useful work and is only producing enough power to overcome internal friction. Since it's not being used to power the car, it can be safely shut down. To some degree you can do this in a normal car by shutting down when stopped at a traffic light, etc.
You even post where I state this as a matter of course: "Now we can't get the entire subatomic amounts Einstein was talking about..."
What does Einstein have to do with a chemical reaction? Why bring his theory into the discussion at all?
"...we can have the best chemical reaction amounts if we make a system that extracts the energy more effeciently from this reaction."
This is the basis of all fire related energy extraction. it is a chemical reaction between a fuel source, oxygen and a spark that they teach in 4th grade science class.
Combustion releases all the potential energy stored in the fuel. ALL of it. We just can't convert all that energy into mechanical energy. The efficiency of the combustion is moot, as we've pretty much perfected it. Now, if the system claimed to capture more of the energy released in combustion, I might be interested.
That sounds kinda like a hydrogen oxygen "combination" resulting in water. This in enabled by hydrogens easy combination charactoristics.
True, hydrogen combines easily, but it doesn't separate easily. Making water from hydrogen and oxygen is easy and releases energy; making hydrogen (and oxygen) from water is more difficult and consumes energy. Because some energy is always lost as waste heat, you never get back as much energy from recombination as you used to separate it.
Then why go to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle if it takes more energy to make the hydrogen in the first place? Big plants generating hydrogen could have just used the power by putting it on the electric grid and we could all go around using electric powered vehicles for cheaper than hydrogen right? use the costs associated in transporting and storing and distributing hydrogen to make electrical outlets and battery swap stations in the back of gas stations.
These are some of the big reasons why we don't use hydrogen cars now, and part of the debate about the transition to a hydrogen economy. The major reason to move to fuel cells is emissions reduction and greater energy storage than a battery.
but wait, there's another 4th grade science experiment that creates hydrogen with a small 9v battery!
No one is debating that hydrogen can be produced through electrolysis. It just isn't efficient to do it in a vehicle. If you have an electricity source powerful enough to separate a useful amount of hydrogen, you're better off just using that electricity to power an electric motor directly. Less energy wasted, no hot exhaust, fewer moving parts, and no highly flammable gases stored onboard.
But oh wait, hydrogen does help an internal combustion engine. Ford already did it last year. from the article: "fuel efficiency improves by 25 percent with hydrogen" But yes, they have to store it onboard.
The article refers to an engine running on hydrogen alone, and you'll note they aren't electrolysizing it on the vehicle. That's because it doesn't work. As to the 25% improvement claim, the article is not specific what the improvement is compared to, I suspect it is to a previous generation hydrogen engine.
so you combine a 4th grade 9v battery experiment and an engine ford built in 2004 and... but wait, Fortress says it can't work so we all go home.
I don't say it can't work, the laws of physics do. If you look at your description of this process, it's basically a car that runs on water, whose only waste product is water. You really should patent this, but be careful the big, evil oil companies don't try to keep it "quiet."
Slashdot Mirror
Hell, I'd say humans are still on the menu for some predators; people are still attacked somehwat regularly by tigers in parts of Asia.
As to the other issues in the article, I think it's fairly obvious that cooperation among humans is one of the big reasons for our dominance on this planet. The division of labor and the use of tools are the secrets of our success.
Evolutionarily, one of the constraints on what features are successful is the physical ruleset. If the feature is to be successful, to some degree it must work reliably and efficiently within the rules of physics.
That said, we have discovered solutions for locomotion that take better advantage of physics principles than those developed by life. Rotary motion, almost entirely missing from biology, is the basis for some of our simplest and most efficient devices, such as the wheel and the screw. If such methods are better, why has no animal evolved them?
Seems to me that this could be resolved by restricting modification of semi-protected pages to users with a certain number of edits rather than time since registration. This would force dummy account holders to post some content before they can get to those pages, increasing the likelihood of having their trollish behaviour discovered.
I don't get it. Why would Google to do this? Where is the percentage?
I really don't believe that they're after AOL's email service, as GMail is already the class of the field in webmail and a strong competitor for Yahoo and Hotmail. As for AIM, I thought Google launched their own IM service a while ago and it is likely to grow as well as previous Google projects.
Is Google after customer data? An entry into the ISP field? I don't get it.
Your search - gbroswer - did not match any documents.
Did you mean: gbrowser
Either post it as plain old text or learn a few HTML tags. A <br> at the end of each paragraph is probably enough for what you need.
You forgot: Slashdotters flame each other as to the interpretation of the fart, whether Linus is qualified to fart, if he has farted this way in the past, and if the fart is indeed truthful.
Why, the French government is behind every design decision. Except they called it the Restart Manger, because it gobbled up so many system resources. Guess something got lost in translation.
Not to be pedantic, but every year is mod 4. That's like saying the year is plus 2. I think what you meant to say is the year mod 4 is zero.
Man, you really need to tell this to the MPAA and RIAA.
I'm really only interested if I can bond the two connections together and stea^H^H^H^H borrow twice as much bandwidth.
If I connect them to each other, not only can I send files, email, pictures, etc to my computer from my computer, but with this technology I can do it wirelessly.
Only if there is routing between the two connections, which I suspect will be optional.
Perhaps they could change it to "The Internet Media Database." It would be a little more indicative of what they do, but wouldn't require a domain change.
I think the network effect is the more important one here, and is the one of the bases of Microsoft's monopoly. It would be good if government adoption would help OSS reach critical mass for this effect to work in OSS' favor rather than Microsoft's.
Yes, because we've all seen how the proliferation of television has resulted in a more informed, educated populace. If anything, it's just the opposite: A lowest-common-denominator, consent-manufacturing propaganda tool. I'm pretty sure people grow less critical and more sheep-like with each hour they watch.
Just the sort of thing we want in the hands of a company with a history like Microsoft's.
Why send it to the moon, which presumably we'll inhabit at some point? Loft it toward the sun and be done with it.
We really shouldn't spare any resources researching and developing fusion power. It has the potential to solve many of our environmental and energy-scarcity problems in one fell swoop.
The development of fusion is more important than just about any other scientific project, as the abundance of cheap energy would enable other projects. And yet how much are governments/energy companies devoting to it? Less than what we spend securing a limited oil supply in an unstable part of the world. I wish we had more far-sighted, responsible leaders who are interested in more than lining their own pockets or winning the next election (pretty much the same thing).
...should be migrated as formats/media change. Got directions to a family fortune? Don't burn a CD and hide it in the attic. If data is important to you, you should be backing it up regularly anyway, so the dying media problem should take care of itself. As for data formats, just make sure you can access all your data in the programs you use for that data type. That way, when you change programs/formats, presumably some form of converter will translate your important data to the new standard.
That said, I think there will be a burgeoning market in the near future for data-archaeologists that specialize in data recovery from old media. Hold on to your floppy drives!
This is a little off-topic, but the first dozen or so replies (emitted?) to this story made me wonder about the poor spelling in many Slashdot articles. We all know spellcheckers have been around forever, and it would seem to be a trivial task to fix errors in accepted stories. So what's going on? I have two theories:
1. The editors are shielding themselves from liability by not changing submitted stories in any fashion whatsoever. Similar to the way that comments are never deleted or modified, only moderated down.
2. They're deliberate troll-food. Slashdot seems to have more than its fair share of grammar/spelling Nazis, and the occasional error is an easy way to throw them a bone. Trolls are happiest trolling, and they generate hits just like the rest of us. I think sometimes that dupe stories are the same thing.
P.S. Since I mentioned the spelling/grammar Nazis, I'm sure you (you know who you are) are looking at this psot very carefully. The question is, did I really make an error or am I just demonstrating #2 above?
For my money, the mATX boards are a much better value. Cheaper, mainstream processor support, support for the usual PCI/PCIe/AGP peripherals means a more powerful, robust, upgradeable system. Plus, you can get cases that look like a piece of stereo equipment and can be unobtrusive in your living room.
IMHO, ITX is better suited for embedded systems, not a more general purpose computer. Unless you have a very specific, limited use (like a MythTV frontend), you'll almost always be better served getting an mATX-based system.
As with everything, YMMV.
This same idea scares the life out of RIAA and MPAA, but eventually they'll realize that it costs more, in the long run, to keep everything protected than to just release it as is and make what you can from the millions of honest customers.
Silly poster, the MPAA/RIAA isn't going to pay for the protection, they're going to make us pay for the "service" of protecting their content. By law, if they can swing it. Look at the levy on CD-Rs in Canada going to copyright holders. It cost them nothing but some lobbying and brought them in untold millions in unearned revenues.
Personally, I'm protesting these business practices by not buying content from organizations that are members of the MPAA/RIAA.
Without copyright or a shitload of money, an author cannot be an author. The general public will not let them.
Authors wrote and ate long before copyright laws were invented. And the audience was much smaller, too. Some people will be willing to pay for hard copies of a book, even if it is available online for free. Look how many people pay for AV software, even though free alternatives exist. Or how many people buy bottled water, even though it's an order of magnitude (or more) more expensive than tap water. Or how many people pay $20 for a steak in a restaurant when they could buy the same steak for $5.
If an author is good, (s)he will find a way to be paid for it, copyright or no. How much more is a signed edition worth over the regular book?
thought that there was no extra energy so it could never be outputting more power than is necessary.
When a hybrid is using battery stored power to accelerate or is standing still, the engine is doing no useful work and is only producing enough power to overcome internal friction. Since it's not being used to power the car, it can be safely shut down. To some degree you can do this in a normal car by shutting down when stopped at a traffic light, etc.
You even post where I state this as a matter of course: "Now we can't get the entire subatomic amounts Einstein was talking about..."
What does Einstein have to do with a chemical reaction? Why bring his theory into the discussion at all?
"...we can have the best chemical reaction amounts if we make a system that extracts the energy more effeciently from this reaction."
This is the basis of all fire related energy extraction. it is a chemical reaction between a fuel source, oxygen and a spark that they teach in 4th grade science class.
Combustion releases all the potential energy stored in the fuel. ALL of it. We just can't convert all that energy into mechanical energy. The efficiency of the combustion is moot, as we've pretty much perfected it. Now, if the system claimed to capture more of the energy released in combustion, I might be interested.
That sounds kinda like a hydrogen oxygen "combination" resulting in water. This in enabled by hydrogens easy combination charactoristics.
True, hydrogen combines easily, but it doesn't separate easily. Making water from hydrogen and oxygen is easy and releases energy; making hydrogen (and oxygen) from water is more difficult and consumes energy. Because some energy is always lost as waste heat, you never get back as much energy from recombination as you used to separate it.
Then why go to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle if it takes more energy to make the hydrogen in the first place? Big plants generating hydrogen could have just used the power by putting it on the electric grid and we could all go around using electric powered vehicles for cheaper than hydrogen right? use the costs associated in transporting and storing and distributing hydrogen to make electrical outlets and battery swap stations in the back of gas stations.
These are some of the big reasons why we don't use hydrogen cars now, and part of the debate about the transition to a hydrogen economy. The major reason to move to fuel cells is emissions reduction and greater energy storage than a battery.
but wait, there's another 4th grade science experiment that creates hydrogen with a small 9v battery!
No one is debating that hydrogen can be produced through electrolysis. It just isn't efficient to do it in a vehicle. If you have an electricity source powerful enough to separate a useful amount of hydrogen, you're better off just using that electricity to power an electric motor directly. Less energy wasted, no hot exhaust, fewer moving parts, and no highly flammable gases stored onboard.
But oh wait, hydrogen does help an internal combustion engine. Ford already did it last year. from the article: "fuel efficiency improves by 25 percent with hydrogen" But yes, they have to store it onboard.
The article refers to an engine running on hydrogen alone, and you'll note they aren't electrolysizing it on the vehicle. That's because it doesn't work. As to the 25% improvement claim, the article is not specific what the improvement is compared to, I suspect it is to a previous generation hydrogen engine.
so you combine a 4th grade 9v battery experiment and an engine ford built in 2004 and... but wait, Fortress says it can't work so we all go home.
I don't say it can't work, the laws of physics do. If you look at your description of this process, it's basically a car that runs on water, whose only waste product is water. You really should patent this, but be careful the big, evil oil companies don't try to keep it "quiet."
Internet Explorer for example would've been forked long ago if it was open source.
Some would say it's pretty forked up right now...