"It makes me sad that almost 40 years later, they have to reinvent the technology from scratch."
That's probably because it was all staged in the desert back then anyway. At least the TV transmission bits:)
The real problem about correlations is that they only prove something, when you can actually take all factors into account.
When you correlate all factors with each other and only one shows significant correlaction, then obviously you have proven something.
When you're observing things as complex as an entire society, it's almost impossible to include all important factors into the study, let alone all factors in total. Thus, while there may be a correlation between leaded gas and violent crime rate, there might also me an even stronger correlation between violent crime rate and a whole set of other factors, that have not been considered, maybe not even thought about.
Just an example I'm pulling out of my arse: Bigger cities may have had (due to higher population), higher exposure to lead. But they are also bigger cities, with a lot more population, bringing a whole array of social problems with them. We've seen repeatedly, that the bigger a city, the higher often also the crime rate (not always, but often). So since size of city and level of exposure likely correlate, so may exposure and crime rate, because size and crimerate may also correlate. It's certainly an interesting study, but you just have to take these things with a grain of salt.
Another Vista sucks, Linux rocks article.
We already knew that, where's the news about it?
If you were to ask me, Vista can absolutely be ignored on Slashdot, at least until SP2.
I consider it much less of a problem if its only a software product, as opposed to some hypocritical "liberation-invasion".
They will handle themselves, just give them a little bit more time, with or without censorware.
I know another game that likely about 96% of all men have been playing for several years and that they have likely also enjoyed more than Pong.
It's called uWank and it involves a single joystick.
"You could perform a study that would "prove" that the type of car you drive decides whether you will get diabetes or not... Correlation does not show cause, and it's a sad comment on society that news organizations like to report the results of every such study, as if they mean ANYTHING at all. It's crap like that which causes people to think that certain foods are unhealthy one week, and healthy the next."
I certainly agree. However, the heating up of tissue by cellphone radiation is not a myth, you can even visualize it with thermal scans. Whether that heating up of the head, the brain etc is by any means harmful, remains to be proven, as far as I know. Still, there is an effect.
It likely isn't the same whether you just scan (ie send) or if the wave is also received. There will be feedback from the chip, when it is read and that feedback is probably what is causing the problems. But yeah, I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about, I never said I did either. I'm just suspicious of ever more radio technology entering our lives without us knowing anything about long-term effects these technologies might or might not have on our health. There are several studies that show that cellphone frequencies do have an effect on the body. None of them have been conducted BEFORE the technology entered the market. That leads me to assume that we're eventually just being the labrats for the big tech companies. They have no idea whether it's going to kill us or not. They don't give a damn either, as long as we buy the latest gadget.
RFID chips will increase exposure because the areas around the chips will be exposed to the radiation more often, when the RFID sender is held against the chip in order to read the chip.
Making phonecalls from a cellphone will not heat your toetips tissue, obviously, but it will heat the part of your head that is next to the phone. Same thing likely applies to RFID.
60GHz then, being very high freq, likely requires more focused radiation, thus probably, PROBABLY, increasing the risk of damage.
Again, I'm just asking questions and the links I provided where just the first hits from 2 google searches on the topic, because you wanted sources.
If you want scientific sources or proof, you will have to ask the respective experts.
Damn, you computer freaks have just way too much time on your hand to babble about pointless formalities.
I don't think Slashdot articles are any more relevant than any other site posting brief articles about some scientific study. The study itself might be more relevant, but they're often hard to get to publicly.
However, I do think that having a chip inside you actually does increase exposure.
Normally, high frequency radio might be absorbed very early in the outer skin. For the RFID chip in order to make sense, the radio must penetrate at least as deep as the chip itself, thus has to be more powerful, therefore likely more harmful. I don't see how this concept is so hard to grasp.
Just think about the Slashdot articles about the military Microwave Raygun and the RFID chips, combine with millions of questions surrounding Wifi and cellphone networks, or even in general electrosmog, and you will start to ask questions, which is just what I did.
Well, whether the radiowave is harmful or not obviously depends on its intensity. Cancer developing from RFID chips inside the body may not be directly linked to WiFi, but it does show that higher dosages seem to be more harmful.
Knowing that the shorter the wavelength, the more energy is needed to reach a certain distance, we can conclude that shorter wavelength technologies do at least bear the risk of being more harmful.
I'm not a physician, but there's a plethora of information about WiFi/cellphones being a possible threat to health on the web, and frankly, you can google it up yourself. This is a Slashdot discussion board, not a scientific review. I'm not making any claims, I'm just asking questions about a possible threat from this new technology the article discusses, based on discussions about possible threats from other wireless technologies.
If that makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome to research further into the topic.
Now with software deciding what is right and what is wrong to do, the US can have presidents even more stupid than George W.
I can also imagine how the software will manage making a decision based on millions of factors. You just weigh factors accordingly.
If an individual life for example has a factor of 1, a barrel of raw oil would have a factor of 10.
Then equations where you'd have to decide between keeping alive a million civilians and getting 10.5million barrels of oil suddenly seem very easy to resolve.
Seriously, once computers start making policy, how far from "SkyNet" are we then? Why doesn't it surprise me that this program was launched in the US?
If you think a computer can decide better what to do than your politicians, it's about bloody time to replace them.
Well, the fact that such fundamental design and philosophy changes are still under way, I feel reassured in my decision to wait for iPhone 2.0 before shelling out any money. Needless to say, Switzerland is likely not going to see iPhone 1.0 on the official market any time soon anyway.
However, iPod touch and iPhone, given a proper SDK, could easily turn into some rather amazing products, far more than they are now. Imagine the potential for games for example. PSP anyone? Or tying iPhone and Mac tighter together via Bluetooth. Imagine a possible UMTS support on a future iPhone coupled with a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Sounds rather sweet imo.
they will eventually come to their right mind -or be forced by law- to open up the iPhone and thus be able to release it in every country they want. Switzerland isn't going to get an iPhone either, if they stick with their stupid lock-in policy.
Now that sounds like rain that is finally not going to ruin your camp fire grill party.
It's more like "duck and cover, rain is about to hit the fire".
Filing a lawsuit against Apple for sticking to their EULA is pointless and childish.
Much more promising, and more intelligent would be to file a lawsuit against Apple for locking their phones in the first place, thus not leaving any room for competition, creating an artificial monopoly. There's much more legal leverage in that field than in complaining about something Apple did not permit in the first place - and informed the user that it wasn't permitted.
That stupid "Apple + Provider lock-in = iPhone availability" is already causing delays in several other countries, where the iPhone should/will be released. They should really give it up, before it's going to start hurting sales. (It arguably already does).
So if you want to go to court, do it because of the locking, not the unlocking.
What you are missing is that after ME was released, Microsoft did exactly what Reisinger suggests: They dropped the Windows 9x codebase (basically DOS) and continued with the NT codebase from Windows 2000 and later XP.
So, if ME was as bad as Vista, that would mean that Microsoft would indeed have to ditch Vistas codebase (if you want to call it that) and continue with something new. The dumb thing about that is that this time around, Microsoft doesn't have a more advanced codebase to start from.
frankly, I think 5% of total world electricity isn't all that much, considering we're talking about a worldwide network of computers.
Electricity is only a fraction of the total energy consumption worldwide, traffic and heating being much worse. Honestly, I'd have expected more than merely 5%. That's like 2% of the total world energy consumption. That's about 20-25 times less than traffic.
It's less than lights and it's even less than you'd save if everyone in the world simply switched to power saving lightbulbs.
Surely, making IT equipment consume even less power is sensible and a good thing, but don't try to show how utterly bad it is. There are factors considerably worse than the internet, factors that HAVE to be run with fossil energies, for example.
That's true if you can run faster than sound. Unless you can do that, armor is the only way to protect you from bullets. They're not fighting with swords and clubs over there, and this is not WoW. Agility isn't the be all end all.
Slashdot Mirror
"meaning they only support specific hardware" They already do that. It's called a Mac and it works very well.
...what I call a solid state disk. Thick as a brick, so to say.
"It makes me sad that almost 40 years later, they have to reinvent the technology from scratch." That's probably because it was all staged in the desert back then anyway. At least the TV transmission bits:)
The real problem about correlations is that they only prove something, when you can actually take all factors into account. When you correlate all factors with each other and only one shows significant correlaction, then obviously you have proven something. When you're observing things as complex as an entire society, it's almost impossible to include all important factors into the study, let alone all factors in total. Thus, while there may be a correlation between leaded gas and violent crime rate, there might also me an even stronger correlation between violent crime rate and a whole set of other factors, that have not been considered, maybe not even thought about. Just an example I'm pulling out of my arse: Bigger cities may have had (due to higher population), higher exposure to lead. But they are also bigger cities, with a lot more population, bringing a whole array of social problems with them. We've seen repeatedly, that the bigger a city, the higher often also the crime rate (not always, but often). So since size of city and level of exposure likely correlate, so may exposure and crime rate, because size and crimerate may also correlate. It's certainly an interesting study, but you just have to take these things with a grain of salt.
Another Vista sucks, Linux rocks article. We already knew that, where's the news about it? If you were to ask me, Vista can absolutely be ignored on Slashdot, at least until SP2.
I consider it much less of a problem if its only a software product, as opposed to some hypocritical "liberation-invasion". They will handle themselves, just give them a little bit more time, with or without censorware.
I know another game that likely about 96% of all men have been playing for several years and that they have likely also enjoyed more than Pong. It's called uWank and it involves a single joystick.
"You could perform a study that would "prove" that the type of car you drive decides whether you will get diabetes or not... Correlation does not show cause, and it's a sad comment on society that news organizations like to report the results of every such study, as if they mean ANYTHING at all. It's crap like that which causes people to think that certain foods are unhealthy one week, and healthy the next." I certainly agree. However, the heating up of tissue by cellphone radiation is not a myth, you can even visualize it with thermal scans. Whether that heating up of the head, the brain etc is by any means harmful, remains to be proven, as far as I know. Still, there is an effect.
It likely isn't the same whether you just scan (ie send) or if the wave is also received. There will be feedback from the chip, when it is read and that feedback is probably what is causing the problems. But yeah, I have no fucking clue what I'm talking about, I never said I did either. I'm just suspicious of ever more radio technology entering our lives without us knowing anything about long-term effects these technologies might or might not have on our health. There are several studies that show that cellphone frequencies do have an effect on the body. None of them have been conducted BEFORE the technology entered the market. That leads me to assume that we're eventually just being the labrats for the big tech companies. They have no idea whether it's going to kill us or not. They don't give a damn either, as long as we buy the latest gadget.
RFID chips will increase exposure because the areas around the chips will be exposed to the radiation more often, when the RFID sender is held against the chip in order to read the chip. Making phonecalls from a cellphone will not heat your toetips tissue, obviously, but it will heat the part of your head that is next to the phone. Same thing likely applies to RFID. 60GHz then, being very high freq, likely requires more focused radiation, thus probably, PROBABLY, increasing the risk of damage. Again, I'm just asking questions and the links I provided where just the first hits from 2 google searches on the topic, because you wanted sources. If you want scientific sources or proof, you will have to ask the respective experts. Damn, you computer freaks have just way too much time on your hand to babble about pointless formalities.
I don't think Slashdot articles are any more relevant than any other site posting brief articles about some scientific study. The study itself might be more relevant, but they're often hard to get to publicly. However, I do think that having a chip inside you actually does increase exposure. Normally, high frequency radio might be absorbed very early in the outer skin. For the RFID chip in order to make sense, the radio must penetrate at least as deep as the chip itself, thus has to be more powerful, therefore likely more harmful. I don't see how this concept is so hard to grasp. Just think about the Slashdot articles about the military Microwave Raygun and the RFID chips, combine with millions of questions surrounding Wifi and cellphone networks, or even in general electrosmog, and you will start to ask questions, which is just what I did.
Well, whether the radiowave is harmful or not obviously depends on its intensity. Cancer developing from RFID chips inside the body may not be directly linked to WiFi, but it does show that higher dosages seem to be more harmful. Knowing that the shorter the wavelength, the more energy is needed to reach a certain distance, we can conclude that shorter wavelength technologies do at least bear the risk of being more harmful. I'm not a physician, but there's a plethora of information about WiFi/cellphones being a possible threat to health on the web, and frankly, you can google it up yourself. This is a Slashdot discussion board, not a scientific review. I'm not making any claims, I'm just asking questions about a possible threat from this new technology the article discusses, based on discussions about possible threats from other wireless technologies. If that makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome to research further into the topic.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=335219&cid=21069839 misposted the last reply
http://capitalpress.com/Main.asp?SectionID=94&ArticleID=35165 http://crunchgear.com/2007/05/21/dangers-of-wi-fi-should-be-reevaluated-possibly-more-harmful-than-previosuly-indicated/ And about a zillion other articles debating the harmfulness of all the various wireless technologies. Of course you will always find a study that counters the previous one. Still, things like cellphones heating up body tissue are undebatable, long time studies aren't available for modern technologies, for obvious reasons.
...will it fry your brains this time? We already know WiFi and RFID are harmful to some extent, how bad will it be with even shorter wavelengths?
So, basically they're saying they want to go back to DOS roots for Windows 7, right? 640k is enough for everyone, after all. :)
Now with software deciding what is right and what is wrong to do, the US can have presidents even more stupid than George W. I can also imagine how the software will manage making a decision based on millions of factors. You just weigh factors accordingly. If an individual life for example has a factor of 1, a barrel of raw oil would have a factor of 10. Then equations where you'd have to decide between keeping alive a million civilians and getting 10.5million barrels of oil suddenly seem very easy to resolve. Seriously, once computers start making policy, how far from "SkyNet" are we then? Why doesn't it surprise me that this program was launched in the US? If you think a computer can decide better what to do than your politicians, it's about bloody time to replace them.
Well, the fact that such fundamental design and philosophy changes are still under way, I feel reassured in my decision to wait for iPhone 2.0 before shelling out any money. Needless to say, Switzerland is likely not going to see iPhone 1.0 on the official market any time soon anyway. However, iPod touch and iPhone, given a proper SDK, could easily turn into some rather amazing products, far more than they are now. Imagine the potential for games for example. PSP anyone? Or tying iPhone and Mac tighter together via Bluetooth. Imagine a possible UMTS support on a future iPhone coupled with a MacBook or MacBook Pro. Sounds rather sweet imo.
they will eventually come to their right mind -or be forced by law- to open up the iPhone and thus be able to release it in every country they want. Switzerland isn't going to get an iPhone either, if they stick with their stupid lock-in policy.
Now that sounds like rain that is finally not going to ruin your camp fire grill party. It's more like "duck and cover, rain is about to hit the fire".
Filing a lawsuit against Apple for sticking to their EULA is pointless and childish. Much more promising, and more intelligent would be to file a lawsuit against Apple for locking their phones in the first place, thus not leaving any room for competition, creating an artificial monopoly. There's much more legal leverage in that field than in complaining about something Apple did not permit in the first place - and informed the user that it wasn't permitted. That stupid "Apple + Provider lock-in = iPhone availability" is already causing delays in several other countries, where the iPhone should/will be released. They should really give it up, before it's going to start hurting sales. (It arguably already does). So if you want to go to court, do it because of the locking, not the unlocking.
What you are missing is that after ME was released, Microsoft did exactly what Reisinger suggests: They dropped the Windows 9x codebase (basically DOS) and continued with the NT codebase from Windows 2000 and later XP. So, if ME was as bad as Vista, that would mean that Microsoft would indeed have to ditch Vistas codebase (if you want to call it that) and continue with something new. The dumb thing about that is that this time around, Microsoft doesn't have a more advanced codebase to start from.
frankly, I think 5% of total world electricity isn't all that much, considering we're talking about a worldwide network of computers. Electricity is only a fraction of the total energy consumption worldwide, traffic and heating being much worse. Honestly, I'd have expected more than merely 5%. That's like 2% of the total world energy consumption. That's about 20-25 times less than traffic. It's less than lights and it's even less than you'd save if everyone in the world simply switched to power saving lightbulbs. Surely, making IT equipment consume even less power is sensible and a good thing, but don't try to show how utterly bad it is. There are factors considerably worse than the internet, factors that HAVE to be run with fossil energies, for example.
Keep things on topic and write your political drivel somewhere else, thanks.
That's true if you can run faster than sound. Unless you can do that, armor is the only way to protect you from bullets. They're not fighting with swords and clubs over there, and this is not WoW. Agility isn't the be all end all.