I'm glad someone thought of Peak Oil It seems likely to me that by the time 2012 and 2015 roll around, the price of oil will make these carriers prohibitively expensive to run. Unless they're already nuclear-powered.
Most other ocean transport will either be drastically reduced, or changed over to a non-oil technology. Steamboats?
Hey, I got that for free! My condo has such poor cell coverage that nobody could call me in there if they wanted to, and I haven't had to pay for any high-tech nanopaint yet!
Now this brings up another point -- a truly high-tech EM blocking paint would allow you to turn its blocking OFF...
More than that, see the privacy policy changes posted above .
It looks like all the privacy reassurances from before (we won't record, we won't store, your private conversations), have been deleted and replaced with:
# During a particular chat, you can go off the record with your conversation. This means that you can prevent the person you are chatting with from automatically storing the chat as a message in his or her Gmail account. This feature does not prevent that person from copying and pasting text chats or otherwise manually recording them. Also, the feature is available only if both you and the other person are using the Google Talk client, Google Talk in Gmail, or a third-party client that enables this feature.
It also implies that the copy stored on the Google server will be kept until it's "periodically" removed, where you have no knowledge or control about that.
And yet, the Wright Brothers' idea was commercially viable. The problem wasn't the arguments against human flight, which were, like your description of anodization, perfectly valid.
The problem was your assumption that if they seemed similar, they had to suffer from the same challenges.
You're probably right. The Wright Brothers' idea smacks of human flight, which we all know is impossible because:
1- Humans do not have feathers 2- Humans' bones are not hollow and therefore are too heavy for flight 3- Imitating the motion of bird's wings is mechanically very complex and requires heavy machinery which is itself too heavy to fly 4- Hot air balloons and zeppelins work just fine anyway.
Moral: Comparing a technology to another similar one doesn't add any useful information.
Ironic how they've undermined their own business model
Actually, now that they've become rich by mining the public domain and selling it back to the public, they can afford to license stories for future films. It's the business model of any of their smaller, newer competitors they've undermined.
I'm not sure if this counts as evil or just canny business practise.
Wonder away, Vassar Chinese Student, but get your language credentials for sure. This technology will not be useful in everyday conversation anytime in the next 15 years.
If you don't believe me, look at what it's made of:
1. Mechanical language translation (read any article through Babelfish to see how clear and comprehensible these currently are) 2. Voice recognition software (there's a reason it's been around for over 10 years and hasn't caught on yet except in niche applications) 3. Text-to-speech software (see 2)
So I confidently predict that by the time these "simple computers" make your Chinese education obsolete, you will have already made your career, probably be on your second career, and possibly be near retirement.
The first two technologies especially are easy to get working at 80%, but each percentage point after that requires much harder problem-solving and bigger databases and processing power. It just doesn't get easier.
Re:The Colour of Magic is a weird choice...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: 1
Yes. Small Gods is the best of the series, is a geek treasure, and should be higher.
This case, plus last weeks refusal of the Supremes to consider the RIM appeal, have an interesting result.
In the RIM case, Microsoft has sided with NTP as in here and filed a "none-of-my-business, but" brief stating that they think patents from the US should be enforced worldwide. By refusing to hear the RIM appeal last week, the Supremes effectively backed up Microsoft on this.
Now by refusing to hear Microsoft's appeal on Eolas, the Supremes have again asserted (this time contrary to Microsoft's wishes) that patents from the US should be enforced worldwide.
Fascinating precedents, and an interesting support of US IP hegemony.
What I can't understand is why NTP would want the US to be without Blackberries. Surely their patent-farm business model does better if they get license fees than if they don't.
Shouldn't they be trying like hell to get RIM to settle?
Good comment, Ahab, and I'm glad compatibility is a design feature. But, call me conservative --
My perl scripts are never object oriented. If I wanted a full-blown class-inheritance system in my scripts, I wouldn't be writing scripts.
So class members, accessors, methods, etc are completely beyond anything I'd ever use, and completely not exciting to me. If I want to deal with that stuff, I write in Java or C#.
I may be alone, but I suspect a lot of people use Perl as a quick 'n dirty scripting language to just convert text file formats or process data, and there's really no need for all that extra O-O fanciness IMHO.
I like Perl, but I honestly don't see why anyone's waiting for Perl 6. Anything i want to do with Perl I can do just fine with Perl5 anyway. And a whole new, incompatible perl version doesn't seem like any big advantage to me.
Will the Phone kill the high-end classic disk-based iPod? Probably not. Will it kill things like the iPod nano/shuffle? Certainly, I think.
Not this decade it won't!
At the moment, even to outfit a ROKR to have the song capacity of the smallest iPod Nano requires a Sony Memory Stick Duo costing, well, more than an iPod Nano!
And then you still can't do it because the Sony has a software limit of 100 songs.
So there's really no way for them to compete just yet. Capacity/size is and always has been one of the top three reasons why the iPod rules.
> In the USA we do the same thing but use France for the predictable knee-jerk response....yet another thing the Americans have in common with the British.
Did you know that English spelling reform was almost undertaken but was shelved because the French were doing it? We've suffered 300 years of crazy English spelling for that one.
While I have little sympathy for spammers being attacked on the network, I think it's a bad BAD idea to attack spammers through their unsubscribe facility.
Think about it. If that facility is disconnected or nonexistent, as many of them are, they don't suffer. If on the other hand it's honest and it works, they're punished. And future spammers will simply know not to have such a facility.
This Amicus Brief from August (From the EFF site) explains in excruciating legal detail why the Government is not permitted, by the Fourth Amendment and many obvious precedents, to demand ID "coercively" at airports. Nor even to pass a new law doing so. It's quite clear.
It also explains why any chance the government has of claiming that their law is constitutional (if it indeed exists) is nullified if they make it secret.
Enjoy, and many many thanks John Gilmore for doing what you do!
Korea sounds like a good place for broadband, but then so is Sweden and so are large cities in Italy.
Here in Sweden I get 10 mbit up and 10 down (tested, yes it's really 10, using a fiber feed right into my home) with a semi-static IP (changes only when I reboot) for about $55 per month. For another 30 a month I can upgrade that to 100 mbit up/down. This has no earthly use I can think of other than sucking down TV and movies but it's grand and not expensive. In fact it's entirely replaced my TV.
You can get similar service at similar prices from Fastweb in the biggest cities in Italy.
And unlike Korea, per-capita income is higher here, (even after taxes) so you can discount those prices a bit.
Maybe it's not Korea being heaven so much as the U.S. slipping behind... Even back in 1999 when I lived in Canada, Canada had more broadband at better prices than the US.
I quit doing anything on Orkut months ago, since their servers have become so overloaded and buggy that it's nearly impossible to follow a thread or post a reply.
In fact I run (or ran) my own community with over 600 members, but I suspect most of them got up and left about the same time I did. When I go back to check, the conversation has died.
If the Brazilians have found a way to use Orkut without constantly seeing "Bad Server: No Donut for you!", then more power to them. And if enjoying yourself in Brazil means whipping losers into a frenzy of scapegoating and irrational racism and hate, well, I'm just not that impressed with Brazilians....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad someone thought of Peak Oil It seems likely to me that by the time 2012 and 2015 roll around, the price of oil will make these carriers prohibitively expensive to run. Unless they're already nuclear-powered.
Most other ocean transport will either be drastically reduced, or changed over to a non-oil technology. Steamboats?
Hey, I got that for free! My condo has such poor cell coverage that nobody could call me in there if they wanted to, and I haven't had to pay for any high-tech nanopaint yet!
Now this brings up another point -- a truly high-tech EM blocking paint would allow you to turn its blocking OFF...
More than that, see the privacy policy changes posted above .
It looks like all the privacy reassurances from before (we won't record, we won't store, your private conversations), have been deleted and replaced with:
# During a particular chat, you can go off the record with your conversation. This means that you can prevent the person you are chatting with from automatically storing the chat as a message in his or her Gmail account. This feature does not prevent that person from copying and pasting text chats or otherwise manually recording them. Also, the feature is available only if both you and the other person are using the Google Talk client, Google Talk in Gmail, or a third-party client that enables this feature.
It also implies that the copy stored on the Google server will be kept until it's "periodically" removed, where you have no knowledge or control about that.
And yet, the Wright Brothers' idea was commercially viable. The problem wasn't the arguments against human flight, which were, like your description of anodization, perfectly valid.
The problem was your assumption that if they seemed similar, they had to suffer from the same challenges.
Previous poster 100 years ago:
You're probably right. The Wright Brothers' idea smacks of human flight, which we all know is impossible because:
1- Humans do not have feathers
2- Humans' bones are not hollow and therefore are too heavy for flight
3- Imitating the motion of bird's wings is mechanically very complex and requires heavy machinery which is itself too heavy to fly
4- Hot air balloons and zeppelins work just fine anyway.
Moral: Comparing a technology to another similar one doesn't add any useful information.
Ironic how they've undermined their own business model
Actually, now that they've become rich by mining the public domain and selling it back to the public, they can afford to license stories for future films. It's the business model of any of their smaller, newer competitors they've undermined.
I'm not sure if this counts as evil or just canny business practise.
Please mod parent up. I was watching when that exchange occurred and thinking the exact same thing...
Wonder away, Vassar Chinese Student, but get your language credentials for sure. This technology will not be useful in everyday conversation anytime in the next 15 years.
If you don't believe me, look at what it's made of:
1. Mechanical language translation (read any article through Babelfish to see how clear and comprehensible these currently are)
2. Voice recognition software (there's a reason it's been around for over 10 years and hasn't caught on yet except in niche applications)
3. Text-to-speech software (see 2)
So I confidently predict that by the time these "simple computers" make your Chinese education obsolete, you will have already made your career, probably be on your second career, and possibly be near retirement.
The first two technologies especially are easy to get working at 80%, but each percentage point after that requires much harder problem-solving and bigger databases and processing power. It just doesn't get easier.
Yes. Small Gods is the best of the series, is a geek treasure, and should be higher.
This case, plus last weeks refusal of the Supremes to consider the RIM appeal, have an interesting result.
In the RIM case, Microsoft has sided with NTP as in here and filed a "none-of-my-business, but" brief stating that they think patents from the US should be enforced worldwide. By refusing to hear the RIM appeal last week, the Supremes effectively backed up Microsoft on this.
Now by refusing to hear Microsoft's appeal on Eolas, the Supremes have again asserted (this time contrary to Microsoft's wishes) that patents from the US should be enforced worldwide.
Fascinating precedents, and an interesting support of US IP hegemony.
What I can't understand is why NTP would want the US to be without Blackberries. Surely their patent-farm business model does better if they get license fees than if they don't.
Shouldn't they be trying like hell to get RIM to settle?
Good comment, Ahab, and I'm glad compatibility is a design feature. But, call me conservative --
My perl scripts are never object oriented. If I wanted a full-blown class-inheritance system in my scripts, I wouldn't be writing scripts.
So class members, accessors, methods, etc are completely beyond anything I'd ever use, and completely not exciting to me. If I want to deal with that stuff, I write in Java or C#.
I may be alone, but I suspect a lot of people use Perl as a quick 'n dirty scripting language to just convert text file formats or process data, and there's really no need for all that extra O-O fanciness IMHO.
But then I'm old and probably a dinosaur.
I like Perl, but I honestly don't see why anyone's waiting for Perl 6. Anything i want to do with Perl I can do just fine with Perl5 anyway. And a whole new, incompatible perl version doesn't seem like any big advantage to me.
Oops, comments apply to the Sony/Ericsson W800 walkman Phone. ROKR has same 100 song limit though!
Will the Phone kill the high-end classic disk-based iPod? Probably not. Will it kill things like the iPod nano/shuffle? Certainly, I think.
Not this decade it won't!
At the moment, even to outfit a ROKR to have the song capacity of the smallest iPod Nano requires a Sony Memory Stick Duo costing, well, more than an iPod Nano!
And then you still can't do it because the Sony has a software limit of 100 songs.
So there's really no way for them to compete just yet. Capacity/size is and always has been one of the top three reasons why the iPod rules.
...and my question is where will that energy come from?
In unrelated news, shadowy German mad scientists announce they have created titanium mouse skeletons with long, nasty claws.
> In the USA we do the same thing but use France for the predictable knee-jerk response. ...yet another thing the Americans have in common with the British.
Did you know that English spelling reform was almost undertaken but was shelved because the French were doing it? We've suffered 300 years of crazy English spelling for that one.
While I have little sympathy for spammers being attacked on the network, I think it's a bad BAD idea to attack spammers through their unsubscribe facility.
Think about it. If that facility is disconnected or nonexistent, as many of them are, they don't suffer. If on the other hand it's honest and it works, they're punished. And future spammers will simply know not to have such a facility.
Attack them through their smtps instead, please.
Don't forget Picasa, which is mucho cool.
Or check what's there today:
http://www.google.com/downloads/
This Amicus Brief from August (From the EFF site) explains in excruciating legal detail why the Government is not permitted, by the Fourth Amendment and many obvious precedents, to demand ID "coercively" at airports. Nor even to pass a new law doing so. It's quite clear.
It also explains why any chance the government has of claiming that their law is constitutional (if it indeed exists) is nullified if they make it secret.
Enjoy, and many many thanks John Gilmore for doing what you do!
Amicus Brief Aug 2004
Correction: closer to $50, not $55, and it was more like $40 when I bought it, before the US dollar went in the toilet.
Other countries with good cheap broadband include Canada (still) and the Netherlands. The real ripoffs are the US and the UK. So be it.
Korea sounds like a good place for broadband, but then so is Sweden and so are large cities in Italy.
Here in Sweden I get 10 mbit up and 10 down (tested, yes it's really 10, using a fiber feed right into my home) with a semi-static IP (changes only when I reboot) for about $55 per month. For another 30 a month I can upgrade that to 100 mbit up/down. This has no earthly use I can think of other than sucking down TV and movies but it's grand and not expensive. In fact it's entirely replaced my TV.
You can get similar service at similar prices from Fastweb in the biggest cities in Italy.
And unlike Korea, per-capita income is higher here, (even after taxes) so you can discount those prices a bit.
Maybe it's not Korea being heaven so much as the U.S. slipping behind... Even back in 1999 when I lived in Canada, Canada had more broadband at better prices than the US.
I quit doing anything on Orkut months ago, since their servers have become so overloaded and buggy that it's nearly impossible to follow a thread or post a reply.
In fact I run (or ran) my own community with over 600 members, but I suspect most of them got up and left about the same time I did. When I go back to check, the conversation has died.
If the Brazilians have found a way to use Orkut without constantly seeing "Bad Server: No Donut for you!", then more power to them. And if enjoying yourself in Brazil means whipping losers into a frenzy of scapegoating and irrational racism and hate, well, I'm just not that impressed with Brazilians....
A serious suggestion --
Look at your favorite text, sound, or graphic format that you've had trouble converting to or from some other format. Write the converter.
This can range from 1 hour to a week's work, but it's always instructive and usually fun.