AFAIK the practice originated with the first automated (mechanical) cash registers. By taking that $.01 off the price they ensured there would always be some change, forcing the "ring" of the sale (which would log it).
However it is likely that the survival of this abominable practice is due to the psychological effect you describe. Or at least to retailes belief in it:-)
BTW, in Israel the smallest coin is 5 "agorot" (pennies). In a rational world the prices would always divide by 5, right? In practice we see prices like "19.98". There's a *law* that defines how to round your change to the nearest 5... It is truly amazing how irrational people can behave as a group.
It seems my chances of living to ride the space elevator have just increased.
AFAIK the space elevator requires a material roughly 30 times stronger than steel. True, these guys are "only" five times stronger, which leaves just another factor of five (ok, six) to reach the required strength. So in a way we are about half-way there:-)
I'm not clear about the cost of their material, though. Anyone have an idea of how hard is it to create enough nano-tubes raw material to feed their process?
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (Daniel Dennett). Excellent in-depth description of modern evolutionary theory. Very readable but goes deep. It also does a great job going through the history and explaining how evolution progressed through difficult steps, without glossing over areas where details are in dispute or unknown.
"A surprising number of people have asked about the doctoral thesis my partner wrote on this machine. Just to clarify, it was written using it, not about it (i.e. it was about feminist philosophy, and not what nerds do in their spare time)."
I think it is next to impossible to come up with two subjects with less common ground...
And anyway, by sticking to Lego and computers, nerds at least get something out of their spare time. In contrast, non-nerds who try to figure out female philosophy are simply wasting their efforts.
Example: his girlfriend accepted him spending his evenings building this case, rather than being with her, for a whole month. And then actually used it! Any would-be expert in female philosophy would have predicted she'd dump him after the first week or two.:-)
OK, this is limited to one or two-seater ultralights and powered paragliders. So what? Bring it on! The most annoying aspect of these, for me, is the horrible incessent noise you must suffer all through the flight. You don't even get the limited noise-reduction of an enclosed cockpit.
I've looked into the possibility of using a fuel cell to power an electrical powerglider, and the main problem was price. Fuel cells are still horribly expensive compared to glorified lawnmower engines:-)
Perhaps if Boeing started making these in large quantities for auxilery power systems for airplanes, we'll get a chance to buy them at a more reasonable cost (maybe used ones).
It is too easy to send currupted information into the database. They have *no choice* but to trust the clients. Sure they could run spot checks on the results, but they would be very partial and it would be easy enough to fake responses for those as well.
So the more popular it gets, the more incentive people will have to promote their sites by feeding it fake index information. If this magically got to be very popular, within weeks search results would become meaningelss and it would drop back into obscurity. The more likely result would be that it will never become popular in the first place.
Besides, who wants to donate his CPU and bandwidth resources for a commercial company, anyway?
Applying relativity to the cosmos at large requires us to come up with exotic explanations for the "dark matter" problem. So far quantum mechanics had the luxury of not having such a problem. It is nice to know it has finally acuired one. It makes things more fair, somehow:-)
What I'd love to see is someone showing that the effect on light over long distances was not to blur it, but rather to shift it to the red. Now *that* would really make a "big bang" out of our theories:-)
"A hint of his sense of humor can be found on his Web site, which features a photo of Goldston, seemingly dozing off, as two small kids climb on his back. He and his wife, Ryoko, have three children -- Shota, 7, Aiko, 5, and Makoto, 3."
Can we can expect his next theorem to deal with prime triplets?
I'll be willing to forgive it all if you make this your pet project and provide cheap space access, by the pound, to everyone. Just... please... don't use Windows NT to control the ground station boat, OK?
See www.yaml.org. YAML is an project that evolved from SML-DEV. SML-DEV attempted to define a subset of XML that would be both useful and simple enough to avoid XML's biggest headaches.
After much wrangling (this was about the same time XML came up with the namespaces rules that blew up any chance for a reasonable data model for XML), the best we could come up with was Common-XML (http://www.simonstl.com/articles/cxmlspec.txt). While it does avoid some of XML's built-in boobytraps, and I'd strongly recommend any XML user to read it, it doesn't solve the inherent problem - XML is not a good match for common programming data structures, and at the same time *data* XML files are not very human readable.
It isn't XML's fault, really; XML is a great mark-up language. However, it sucks as a data serialization languege, for the above reasons. So, figuring one should use the right tool for the right job, two of us SML-DEV people (Clark and myself) decided to give up on XML compatibility and try to design a data serialization language from scratch. We immediately combined efforts with Brian, the author of Perl's Data::Denter (and Inline::C).
The result is YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language). After almost two years of working on it, the spec has stabilized and is as good as frozen (it is in "last call" and we plan on announcing a release candidate in April), there is healthy participation in the mailing list, implementations in Perl and Ruby, and active work on additional languages.
YAML is great for data serialization, configuration files, messaging, etc. Take a peek - you might like what you see. (OK, this is a shameless plug for my open source project. That's a valid use for Karma if I've seen any...)
I mean, trying to force a DRM-like system into a gun is such an idiotic notion anyway. Only a Holywood graduate could come up with such an idea and expect anyone to buy it voluntarily or to be able to force people to use it. The backlash against copy-protected CDs would be mild by comparison:-)
What I find interesting is the laser-based trigger, instead of the use of a hammer. A problem with all existing hand guns today is that it is cumbersome to get off the very first round. Double action (as in a revolver) reduces accuracy, and chambering the first round (in an automatic) is a downright ridiculous process.
Any sort of "electronic" trigger would allow working around this. There has been attempts in the past, all requiring special bullets, but I never heard of a laser based trigger.
*If* it can be made reliable enough, and the cost of bullets isn't over the top, that's about the only technology that may make it into "next generation" hand guns. Otherwise, these things are about as mature as technology can get.
Adding scripting into games is a great idea, but it is (mostly) wasted on first-person games. Where it is really useful is in real-time strategy games (Command and Conquer, Homeworld etc.). A player with prepared "smart" scripts would be able to give high-level orders to his units and have them act with rudimentary intelligence, gaining a real advantage. It would also make the games more realistic.
Sure, most such games allow one to group units and perform rudimentry "smart" actions (such as returning for repair/refuel when damage is high or fuel is low) but that isn't sufficient, especially when handling a large number of units. Everyone who played these games knows the sinking feeling of watching helplessly when some critical units take the most inane course of action... The game then reduces to a glorified ardace game, won by the faster-clicker instead of, well, the better strategy.
Does anyone know of a reasonable scriptable real-time strategy game?
Once the technology is out for stimulating the pleasure center in the brain, using this sort of trick, it would be the cheapest, most popular drug ever. Probably made by Sony. As a tribute to Larry Niven, they should name it the "WireHead(TM)" after his nickname to the addicts of this "drug". Isn't modern science wonderful? I don't want to even think of the potential use of the reverse - directly stimulating the pain center. Shudder.
Technically it is feasable to create a system where a web site could publish a price for viewing each page. My ISP would keep track of what I view and include it in my bill. The ISP would batch the payments from all its subscribers to the web site. If the payment to a web site is below some minimum, the ISP could delay payment to the next month. So there would be no micro-transactions involved. The ISPs already tracks how long each user is online, bills them and collects the money. Assuming they would get some cut of the payments (say, 1%), the extra overhead would be more than worth it. This model works perfectly for the phone company... my phone bill shows "opayments to other companies" - airtime to cellular phones, long distance, and so on. There's really no reason that it shouldn't work for the Internet. Why hasn't something like that ever even been attempted?
The pet rock company has announced the availability of a robot capable of performing zen meditation. This is an upgrade of the intelligent pet rock (capable of obeying commands such as "kill" and "play dead"). Owners of pet rocks can install the upgrade at a special price of 0.00$ (limited time offer).
The company is working on adding a third function (ornament in a rock garden), to be released at an unspecified time in the future.
Well, in UNIX, if you haven't wrapped system calls in an excutable, you can't access them from the shell. Assuming a.NET based OS, all system calls would be available as methods of a "System" object or some such. This holds for more than system calls. The shell model enforces the executable as the basic level of granularity. Hence if I run, say, Perl, I can't access a specific Perl module from the shell; I need to wrap it in an executable Perl script first.
In contrast, theoretically, in a.NET based OS, where all code is written to the.NET run time, one should be able to access any class defined in any VB project and hook it with any other class written in a C# one, without having to go through creating a special "executable" wrapper for each one first.
That's all in theory of course; you still have one hell of a naming space problem, for starters, not to mention typing problems and the like. Good documentation of available classes and interfaces would be vital. UNIX had 'man' for that, and it did its job admirebly well. Microsoft would have to set up an equivalent system if this is to fly.
Of course, Microsoft isn't known for helping code not written by Microsoft work together with the system (these are the same people who brought us 10 years of DLL hell, for example). They'd probably document (some of) their stuff in MSDN and leave everyone else SOL. So I wouldn't worry too much. It would probably fizzle to become their version of AppleScript - killer application in theory, but rarely used in practice.
You are missing the point about this shell making heavy use of the.NET framework. Presumably, any.NET object would be accessible to the command line... Given that they intend for their whole OS to be based on.NET, this means the command line may offer access to more functionality than/bin/sh offers on a UNIX platform. If you want to compare this to existing non-MS projects, this sounds like a combination of bash and BeanShell, rather than a simple shell replacement. If this achieves its potential, Linux/UNIX may end up playing catch-up on the CLI front as well as on the GUI front. Good move for Microsoft, and one that would be hard to counter in the open/free software world because we have no universal object-based virtual machine/interface for use as a basis. Or rather, I should say we have too many - Java, CORBA, the Mozila components, and even.NET (Mono). Microsoft could, if it plays nice, actually set a new portable standard for shells (based on.NET on Windows and Mono on UNIX). Of course, knowing Microsoft, they'll blow it by succumbing to the temptation of poisoning it with all sort of Windos-isms. This will be interesting to watch...
Now that it is proved that Linux TCO is higher than Windows, why settle for a second best? Obviously they'd move to the platform more expensive to the customer. After all, they have to make a living, right?
"I, Robot" is a series of short stories, and there's no single character - human or robot - that appears in all of them. They are all told to a reporter by Dr. Susan Calvin, the robo-psychologist, but she doesn't appear in most of them. That said, I think that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones would make a great Powel & Donoven casting, if they are going for the comedy angle. The stories with these two are great. Of course, what I'd _really_ like to see is a high cost/profile TV series doing all the robot stories (from both "I, Robot" and "The Rest of the Robots"), with a changing cast (since there's little character continuation), a pile of special effects where called for ("Victory Unintentional") and almost none when that's called for ("Robot L-76 Goes Astray"). Something like "The Twilight Zone" "series". The worse would be Will Smith playing Dr. Susan Calvin in a "serious" way (re-writing her as a black man instead of a woman). Shudder. Any bet which extreme is closer to what will actually happen?:-(
The first clue to an easier and better route came when Walukiewicz and his colleagues were studying the opposite problem -- not how semiconductors absorb light to create electrical power, but how they use electricity to emit light.
Heinlein described in one of his short stories how some guy using nano-crystals to create the ultimate "cold light source" and noticing that, like most physical processes, this one is works in reverse as well - he's just invented the "perfect" solar collector! Of course the technical specifics are wrong, he got even them pretty close, and he got the basic idea right...
I also loved how he threw in "small" inventions with thought-out consequences into his stories as background. There's a scene I'll always remember where a young cadet-wannabe facing testing answers his father's call on the cell phone while his friend smirks "I tricked my parents - packed the phone in my bags". I bet this scene is replayed with variants all over the world by now. Pretty good for a story written in the 50s or 60s.
Now, where's my budget rental spaceship he was so derogatory about?
So, in ~20 years (1983 - 2003, assuming it would take at least a year until you could buy one of these), CPU speeds have increased by a factor of ~2^10, giving us a nice doubling every 2 years. Neat.
Fast forward to 20 years from now, CPU speeds would be 4 TERA-Hertz. So that thing would be radiating, what, X-rays, and computer casing would be made out of lead? Give it 20 years more and you'll get to the PETA-Hertz and Gamma ray land...
Either we'd be switching to Quantum or optical computer or something in the next few decades of Moor's law will grind to a halt. This is going to be interesting...
Re:Plans and Countermeasures
on
Stopping Palladium?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Open source tools must inhibit interoperability with DRM enabled hardware. "I'm sorry, but your machine does not meet the minimum requirements to view this web page"
Nah, too radical. It is better to do the following: allow free use of the software on non-DRM platforms, and charge money for it - even a measly 1$/month, paid once a year - for anyone using it on a DRM platform.
This would drive the point home for anyone considering to purchase DRM platforms - a taste of how things would be if DRM really catches on. These 1$/month would add up very fast (count the number of packages on the minimal Debian install for example).
Parrot as Universal Virtual Machine
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
Once Java has made "Virtual Machine" a respectable approach, the next step seems to be "Universal Virtual Machines" that allow many languages to interoperate. How well does Parrot play this role as compared to JVM and the CLR?
Another interesting question is how difficult would it be to migrate byte codes between the different environments (libraries allowing). There are already attempts to allow this between the JVM and the CLR; would that be easy/possible to do the same for Parrot?
You got it all wrong. This proposal would *help* terrorists. It places a non-defeatable tamper-proof hardware-based encryption in the hands of the masses.
There's zero difference between an MP3 pirate trying to listen to a song he hasn't paid for and the NSA trying to listen to an MP3 with a message to a terrorist. I doubt the author would be willing to sell them the key:-)
Unless the initiative would also say that one can't author such content without going through some sort of an equivalent of VeriSign.
Imagine that - a world where you can only run an MS-approved OS and only buy RIAA/MPAA approved content.
I don't know about you, but this has stopped being funny any more.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK the practice originated with the first automated (mechanical) cash registers. By taking that $.01 off the price they ensured there would always be some change, forcing the "ring" of the sale (which would log it).
:-)
However it is likely that the survival of this abominable practice is due to the psychological effect you describe. Or at least to retailes belief in it
BTW, in Israel the smallest coin is 5 "agorot" (pennies). In a rational world the prices would always divide by 5, right? In practice we see prices like "19.98". There's a *law* that defines how to round your change to the nearest 5... It is truly amazing how irrational people can behave as a group.
It seems my chances of living to ride the space elevator have just increased.
:-)
AFAIK the space elevator requires a material roughly 30 times stronger than steel. True, these guys are "only" five times stronger, which leaves just another factor of five (ok, six) to reach the required strength. So in a way we are about half-way there
I'm not clear about the cost of their material, though. Anyone have an idea of how hard is it to create enough nano-tubes raw material to feed their process?
"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (Daniel Dennett). Excellent in-depth description of modern evolutionary theory. Very readable but goes deep. It also does a great job going through the history and explaining how evolution progressed through difficult steps, without glossing over areas where details are in dispute or unknown.
"A surprising number of people have asked about the doctoral thesis my partner wrote on this machine. Just to clarify, it was written using it, not about it (i.e. it was about feminist philosophy, and not what nerds do in their spare time)."
:-)
I think it is next to impossible to come up with two subjects with less common ground...
And anyway, by sticking to Lego and computers, nerds at least get something out of their spare time. In contrast, non-nerds who try to figure out female philosophy are simply wasting their efforts.
Example: his girlfriend accepted him spending his evenings building this case, rather than being with her, for a whole month. And then actually used it! Any would-be expert in female philosophy would have predicted she'd dump him after the first week or two.
OK, this is limited to one or two-seater ultralights and powered paragliders. So what? Bring it on! The most annoying aspect of these, for me, is the horrible incessent noise you must suffer all through the flight. You don't even get the limited noise-reduction of an enclosed cockpit.
:-)
I've looked into the possibility of using a fuel cell to power an electrical powerglider, and the main problem was price. Fuel cells are still horribly expensive compared to glorified lawnmower engines
Perhaps if Boeing started making these in large quantities for auxilery power systems for airplanes, we'll get a chance to buy them at a more reasonable cost (maybe used ones).
It is too easy to send currupted information into the database. They have *no choice* but to trust the clients. Sure they could run spot checks on the results, but they would be very partial and it would be easy enough to fake responses for those as well.
So the more popular it gets, the more incentive people will have to promote their sites by feeding it fake index information. If this magically got to be very popular, within weeks search results would become meaningelss and it would drop back into obscurity. The more likely result would be that it will never become popular in the first place.
Besides, who wants to donate his CPU and bandwidth resources for a commercial company, anyway?
Applying relativity to the cosmos at large requires us to come up with exotic explanations for the "dark matter" problem. So far quantum mechanics had the luxury of not having such a problem. It is nice to know it has finally acuired one. It makes things more fair, somehow :-)
:-)
What I'd love to see is someone showing that the effect on light over long distances was not to blur it, but rather to shift it to the red. Now *that* would really make a "big bang" out of our theories
"A hint of his sense of humor can be found on his Web site, which features a photo of Goldston, seemingly dozing off, as two small kids climb on his back. He and his wife, Ryoko, have three children -- Shota, 7, Aiko, 5, and Makoto, 3."
Can we can expect his next theorem to deal with prime triplets?
I'll be willing to forgive it all if you make this your pet project and provide cheap space access, by the pound, to everyone. Just... please... don't use Windows NT to control the ground station boat, OK?
See www.yaml.org. YAML is an project that evolved from SML-DEV. SML-DEV attempted to define a subset of XML that would be both useful and simple enough to avoid XML's biggest headaches.
After much wrangling (this was about the same time XML came up with the namespaces rules that blew up any chance for a reasonable data model for XML), the best we could come up with was Common-XML (http://www.simonstl.com/articles/cxmlspec.txt). While it does avoid some of XML's built-in boobytraps, and I'd strongly recommend any XML user to read it, it doesn't solve the inherent problem - XML is not a good match for common programming data structures, and at the same time *data* XML files are not very human readable.
It isn't XML's fault, really; XML is a great mark-up language. However, it sucks as a data serialization languege, for the above reasons. So, figuring one should use the right tool for the right job, two of us SML-DEV people (Clark and myself) decided to give up on XML compatibility and try to design a data serialization language from scratch. We immediately combined efforts with Brian, the author of Perl's Data::Denter (and Inline::C).
The result is YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language). After almost two years of working on it, the spec has stabilized and is as good as frozen (it is in "last call" and we plan on announcing a release candidate in April), there is healthy participation in the mailing list, implementations in Perl and Ruby, and active work on additional languages.
YAML is great for data serialization, configuration files, messaging, etc. Take a peek - you might like what you see. (OK, this is a shameless plug for my open source project. That's a valid use for Karma if I've seen any...)
I mean, trying to force a DRM-like system into a gun is such an idiotic notion anyway. Only a Holywood graduate could come up with such an idea and expect anyone to buy it voluntarily or to be able to force people to use it. The backlash against copy-protected CDs would be mild by comparison :-)
What I find interesting is the laser-based trigger, instead of the use of a hammer. A problem with all existing hand guns today is that it is cumbersome to get off the very first round. Double action (as in a revolver) reduces accuracy, and chambering the first round (in an automatic) is a downright ridiculous process.
Any sort of "electronic" trigger would allow working around this. There has been attempts in the past, all requiring special bullets, but I never heard of a laser based trigger.
*If* it can be made reliable enough, and the cost of bullets isn't over the top, that's about the only technology that may make it into "next generation" hand guns. Otherwise, these things are about as mature as technology can get.
Adding scripting into games is a great idea, but it is (mostly) wasted on first-person games. Where it is really useful is in real-time strategy games (Command and Conquer, Homeworld etc.). A player with prepared "smart" scripts would be able to give high-level orders to his units and have them act with rudimentary intelligence, gaining a real advantage. It would also make the games more realistic.
Sure, most such games allow one to group units and perform rudimentry "smart" actions (such as returning for repair/refuel when damage is high or fuel is low) but that isn't sufficient, especially when handling a large number of units. Everyone who played these games knows the sinking feeling of watching helplessly when some critical units take the most inane course of action... The game then reduces to a glorified ardace game, won by the faster-clicker instead of, well, the better strategy.
Does anyone know of a reasonable scriptable real-time strategy game?
Once the technology is out for stimulating the pleasure center in the brain, using this sort of trick, it would be the cheapest, most popular drug ever. Probably made by Sony.
As a tribute to Larry Niven, they should name it the "WireHead(TM)" after his nickname to the addicts of this "drug". Isn't modern science wonderful?
I don't want to even think of the potential use of the reverse - directly stimulating the pain center. Shudder.
Technically it is feasable to create a system where a web site could publish a price for viewing each page. My ISP would keep track of what I view and include it in my bill.
The ISP would batch the payments from all its subscribers to the web site. If the payment to a web site is below some minimum, the ISP could delay payment to the next month. So there would be no micro-transactions involved.
The ISPs already tracks how long each user is online, bills them and collects the money. Assuming they would get some cut of the payments (say, 1%), the extra overhead would be more than worth it.
This model works perfectly for the phone company... my phone bill shows "opayments to other companies" - airtime to cellular phones, long distance, and so on. There's really no reason that it shouldn't work for the Internet.
Why hasn't something like that ever even been attempted?
The pet rock company has announced the availability of a robot capable of performing zen meditation. This is an upgrade of the intelligent pet rock (capable of obeying commands such as "kill" and "play dead"). Owners of pet rocks can install the upgrade at a special price of 0.00$ (limited time offer).
The company is working on adding a third function (ornament in a rock garden), to be released at an unspecified time in the future.
And how would that [more functionality] be?
.NET based OS, all system calls would be available as methods of a "System" object or some such. This holds for more than system calls. The shell model enforces the executable as the basic level of granularity. Hence if I run, say, Perl, I can't access a specific Perl module from the shell; I need to wrap it in an executable Perl script first.
.NET based OS, where all code is written to the .NET run time, one should be able to access any class defined in any VB project and hook it with any other class written in a C# one, without having to go through creating a special "executable" wrapper for each one first.
Well, in UNIX, if you haven't wrapped system calls in an excutable, you can't access them from the shell. Assuming a
In contrast, theoretically, in a
That's all in theory of course; you still have one hell of a naming space problem, for starters, not to mention typing problems and the like. Good documentation of available classes and interfaces would be vital. UNIX had 'man' for that, and it did its job admirebly well. Microsoft would have to set up an equivalent system if this is to fly.
Of course, Microsoft isn't known for helping code not written by Microsoft work together with the system (these are the same people who brought us 10 years of DLL hell, for example). They'd probably document (some of) their stuff in MSDN and leave everyone else SOL. So I wouldn't worry too much. It would probably fizzle to become their version of AppleScript - killer application in theory, but rarely used in practice.
You are missing the point about this shell making heavy use of the .NET framework. Presumably, any .NET object would be accessible to the command line... Given that they intend for their whole OS to be based on .NET, this means the command line may offer access to more functionality than /bin/sh offers on a UNIX platform. .NET (Mono). Microsoft could, if it plays nice, actually set a new portable standard for shells (based on .NET on Windows and Mono on UNIX). Of course, knowing Microsoft, they'll blow it by succumbing to the temptation of poisoning it with all sort of Windos-isms. This will be interesting to watch...
If you want to compare this to existing non-MS projects, this sounds like a combination of bash and BeanShell, rather than a simple shell replacement.
If this achieves its potential, Linux/UNIX may end up playing catch-up on the CLI front as well as on the GUI front. Good move for Microsoft, and one that would be hard to counter in the open/free software world because we have no universal object-based virtual machine/interface for use as a basis.
Or rather, I should say we have too many - Java, CORBA, the Mozila components, and even
Now that it is proved that Linux TCO is higher than Windows, why settle for a second best? Obviously they'd move to the platform more expensive to the customer. After all, they have to make a living, right?
"I, Robot" is a series of short stories, and there's no single character - human or robot - that appears in all of them. They are all told to a reporter by Dr. Susan Calvin, the robo-psychologist, but she doesn't appear in most of them. :-(
That said, I think that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones would make a great Powel & Donoven casting, if they are going for the comedy angle. The stories with these two are great.
Of course, what I'd _really_ like to see is a high cost/profile TV series doing all the robot stories (from both "I, Robot" and "The Rest of the Robots"), with a changing cast (since there's little character continuation), a pile of special effects where called for ("Victory Unintentional") and almost none when that's called for ("Robot L-76 Goes Astray"). Something like "The Twilight Zone" "series".
The worse would be Will Smith playing Dr. Susan Calvin in a "serious" way (re-writing her as a black man instead of a woman). Shudder.
Any bet which extreme is closer to what will actually happen?
Heinlein described in one of his short stories how some guy using nano-crystals to create the ultimate "cold light source" and noticing that, like most physical processes, this one is works in reverse as well - he's just invented the "perfect" solar collector! Of course the technical specifics are wrong, he got even them pretty close, and he got the basic idea right...
I also loved how he threw in "small" inventions with thought-out consequences into his stories as background. There's a scene I'll always remember where a young cadet-wannabe facing testing answers his father's call on the cell phone while his friend smirks "I tricked my parents - packed the phone in my bags". I bet this scene is replayed with variants all over the world by now. Pretty good for a story written in the 50s or 60s.
Now, where's my budget rental spaceship he was so derogatory about?
Once upon a time there was an argument whether XSLT was turing-complete (this was when the spec was being worked out), so I posted an XSLT "stylesheet" that places N queens on an NxN chessboard so that none threatens the other. You can see the post here: http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/199 906/msg00289.html and the stylesheet here: http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/199 906/bin00003.bin. That's a pretty twisted piece of code if I do say so myself :-) Strangely enough it has been actually "used" - to benchmark XSLT processors etc. (e.g., here: http://www.machi.pe.kr/xml/document/xslt/xslt_benc hmark.htm.
So, in ~20 years (1983 - 2003, assuming it would take at least a year until you could buy one of these), CPU speeds have increased by a factor of ~2^10, giving us a nice doubling every 2 years. Neat.
Fast forward to 20 years from now, CPU speeds would be 4 TERA-Hertz. So that thing would be radiating, what, X-rays, and computer casing would be made out of lead? Give it 20 years more and you'll get to the PETA-Hertz and Gamma ray land...
Either we'd be switching to Quantum or optical computer or something in the next few decades of Moor's law will grind to a halt. This is going to be interesting...
Open source tools must inhibit interoperability with DRM enabled hardware. "I'm sorry, but your machine does not meet the minimum requirements to view this web page"
Nah, too radical. It is better to do the following: allow free use of the software on non-DRM platforms, and charge money for it - even a measly 1$/month, paid once a year - for anyone using it on a DRM platform.
This would drive the point home for anyone considering to purchase DRM platforms - a taste of how things would be if DRM really catches on. These 1$/month would add up very fast (count the number of packages on the minimal Debian install for example).
Once Java has made "Virtual Machine" a respectable approach, the next step seems to be "Universal Virtual Machines" that allow many languages to interoperate. How well does Parrot play this role as compared to JVM and the CLR?
Another interesting question is how difficult would it be to migrate byte codes between the different environments (libraries allowing). There are already attempts to allow this between the JVM and the CLR; would that be easy/possible to do the same for Parrot?
You got it all wrong. This proposal would *help* terrorists. It places a non-defeatable tamper-proof hardware-based encryption in the hands of the masses.
:-)
There's zero difference between an MP3 pirate trying to listen to a song he hasn't paid for and the NSA trying to listen to an MP3 with a message to a terrorist. I doubt the author would be willing to sell them the key
Unless the initiative would also say that one can't author such content without going through some sort of an equivalent of VeriSign.
Imagine that - a world where you can only run an MS-approved OS and only buy RIAA/MPAA approved content.
I don't know about you, but this has stopped being funny any more.