I work for a wholesale company in Sydney Australia, and we ship terabytes a week, if we had the order it wouldnt be to big a jump for us to provide 350 terabyte hard drives. At the same time we're seeing huge sales surges in NAS/SAS units of 1 terabyte and up. For consumers, the 1TB Western Digital World Book is the best example, we sell alot of those to media and entertainment stores already.
In only a year the size and value of hard disk drives has increased monumentally, and tomorrow at work i see no sign of that ceasing.
I work for a computer repair shop between uni, a similar thing happened at our shop.
We were hired to do regular matinence, but discovered huge amounts of child pornography.
The legal concerns of our position were important to us, but not as important as the possibility that this crime could go on, uninhibited.
The case was tried and the idea that we had no right to look at the files was not even mentioned in the case. The fact was that he had child porn. It was wrong and everything else was a non issue. I agree people should have privacy and civil liberties, but sometimes you have to put aside the politics and take things at face value.
Several European towns and cities attempted to curb their consumption levels earlier this decade if i remember an article i read.
What i mean is, they didnt try just to produce their energy and products in a cleaner way, but also used less, generated less and so on.
I wont go into details, but by the time the local power generation was supported by renewable and distributed sources, and the cities and towns were on their third rolling blackout, the local government wasnt exactly popular with the people.
The point of the story is, conservation and better efficiency are two different things. Not only is conservation impossible (the planets population will always be growing somewhere and will negate any gains) but people plain old dont like it. Imagine walking into your local store and finding very little on the shelves, then going home to use the electricity for only a few hours. No governement, no people will ever move forward as a society by consuming less.
What needs to happen is we need to accept that we will eventually always use more resources as a races over time, BUT we need to use resources more efficiently per person.
Renewables are great, they can help alot in powering towns and small cities like the one i live in. However even i, a proponent of renewable energy can face the facts. Renewables are NOT feasible at the moment for large industrial cities. Not only are places for them hard to find, but they are generally inefficent and unreliable. Plus they do not cope well with the changing demands of a city over winter and summer months, even day and night.
Distributed electiicity generation is also a pipe dream. Look how fragile out electricity grids are, imagine adding thousands, perhaps millions of small, unpredictable loads to that grid. Chaos would ensue.
Same with biofuels. We already comaplin that crops are responsible for so of the worst environmental impacts. Could you imagine if we had to provide the labour, fresh water and lan to produce the oil supplies for a country like the US, China, or continental Europe. Its just not possible.
No. The fact of the matter is we live in a world where electricity generation is centralised. For civil and engeineered reasons. What we need is a hydrogen economy, where a combination of nuclear power, later possibly fusion, is supplemented by renewable sources for the production of not only electricity, but hyrdogen fuel and fresh water from desal. The world wants more more more. Thats it. Theres no escape. But we can manage how we provide it. We just have to be practical about it.
Perhaps in addition to your argument a simple listing of priorities isn't adequate to describe the importance of thise priorities. For instance: 1. Staying alive 2. Maintaining physical security. 3. Making sure my computer is secure. Those 3 priorites will never have a proportional amount of resources dedicated to them in a persons life.
Taking it to the extreme. I would rather have the FBI (or what good is left of it) investigating organised crime, murders and even corporate crime with 99% of its resources, than spending those resources on fighting cyber crime.
Im not saying cyber crime isnt important. It has a real possibility to cripple parts of society. But at the same time, isn't it more important to catch the rapists, thieves, and murderers of this world, no matter how many resources that job consumes? We cant rebuild a person, as easy as we can a computer system, be it finance, utilities etc.
Im all for the community knowlege on a whole range of subjects. But although i believe your comment and other comments to be correct, if i was this guy, and was worried about being shut down over issues of national security i would see a lawyer.
Really, slashdot is not the place to be seeking legal advice, a lawyer, no matter how cliche, is whats needed here, someone who knows the laws down to the letter.
Imo though, it should be within any citizens right to pursue happiness so long as what they do does not impact directly or indirectly upon the wealthfare of others.
Actually just because its compounded doesnt mean it exponential. A growth rate of 2% sustained over a number of years is "geometric". Exponential, in this case, implies that the growth rate is more then a factor of the original value. Thus most commonly 100% would be an exponential growth rate.
In other news: Several defendants in cases against piracy, bought to the courts by the RIAA, have mysteriously disappeared, died of cancer, heart attacks and car crashes. Amazingly all of their families have donated their entire estates to a charity setup to support artists forced into poverty by the growing piracy epidemic.
"There Gates will be, deciding who lives and who dies and charging everybody 50 cents to breathe"
Don't forget giving out free vacinations, building schools, improveing healthcare, researching technology, paying taxes and employing people. How darstedly evil!
Oh and between you and me, he plans to be both Evil Overlord and Good guy between loving and raising his children and being a good husband to his wife.
You might think im missing the point here, that his business tactics are evil. Well i agree, they were and still are. But thats not the point you raised, you implied that he has some kind of 1000 year fourth Richt plan for the human race. What im pointing out here is that he is a business man, living in the US, mainly concenred with technology, who has done some bad business things in the past, he has a loving wife and some beautiful kids. His investments do cover alot of fields yes, but so does any investors. Oh and he is the most charitable person in our generation.
Before you go and spend your time photoshoping hate images of Bill Gates for his most evil business moves read up on companies like Texaco, ExxonMobil, Amgen, The US Government, Shell, BP, Disney and Nike.
For all that is good and evil in this world, if Bill Gates and Microsoft is the worse we can do in the industry most of make a living from then we could ALOT worse. Now grow up and place your activism somewhere where it counts, say maybe worrying less about IT business and worrying more about the education and health tomorrows children. And in case your wondering where to start, heres a good charity: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
I agree with on on every point, and hope that the future turns out to be nuclear/fusion powered, with hydrogen and battery cars on the road.
One question i have above future power sources is how, if battery power is made the norm, we will find all the materials to make all these batterys and what will their cycle lifes be?
BTW ethanol would never work, we did calculations in high school chemistry. Everything about ethanol is great, the only problem is that in order to produce enough to run the USA's cars alone (not industry, or other countries) we would need to devote most of the worlds farmland to the venture.
"In fact, I was most impressed with the few probes which altered their trajectories in mid-mission to do swing-bys of targets of opportunity. You need flexible fuel provision to do that!"
Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (From a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)
Yeh, democracy doesn't always work, yeh people are generally prone to make bad choices, especially when they're in a group, and yeh democracy has a tendency to have short term and majority orientated interests. But for the most part it's the best system of government we can manage on a scaleable basis in this world, at this time.
I'm sure right now you're thinking about retorts based on items like the PATRIOT act and invasion of privacy, the wars that democracy has caused, or been part of, and even the corruption that exists in our governments. And I agree with every single one of those arguments, and more. But the point is, democracy is the lesser of all evils.
I'm sure you could recommend many other forms of government which promise to eliminate the problems that democracy has, along with those of communism and others, but the fact is those recommendations are not tried and proven like democracy is. So often these days you hear about infringements on privacy and corruption by governments and businesses alike in the west. But you hardly ever hear about the good things: kids going to school if they want to, people finding work if they want to, a normal person running for government if they want to, a person helping another person if they want to.
Also, the reason you're on your computer now, the reason you're healthy, the reason you're well fed and the reason you can say what you just said is because you live in a democracy. It's because of the basic ideals of democracy that you CAN criticise democracy. Sure capitalism has a part to play, its competitiveness has helped move things along, but it's the freedom to share ideals and ideas that has really made all the difference.
If all that isn't enough to make you both continue to better your own government and appreciate what you already have, well just take a look at the world outside the west, or the OECD. It's not the Garden of Eden that some anarchists make it out to be. I have been to places in Africa and Papua New Guinea (setting up telephone networks), and it sickens me to hear someone sit and not criticise policy, but cities democracy itself. You spend a few days in every type of government in the world, then come back to somewhere like the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and let me know how much you appreciate democracy then.
Yes, it's a form of government with a lot of peoples, but it's the best we have. And by definition, it's up to us as voters and representatives to make it better.
Im not agreeing with any of the conclusions this article is attempting to make, but i would like to let the parent of this thread know that scientists have successfully tested something called a "guided" thats right, a "guieded" missle, that is actually capable of flight that is not parabolic. It makes use of new high tech hydrogen and oxygen engines that allow the missle to control its direction of flight.
It is because of this new innovation that missle defence systems are scattered and not always directly in the line of a possible missle trajectory.
Just to clarify (im australian), when Australia signed the US-Australia Free Trade agreement it also adopted the same legal guidelines set out in the DMCA (though it wasn't called by the same name in our legistlation) as part of the agreement.
For the current bid of $120 Trillion who wouldnt want to own a piece of internet history, i know i would. I'd just have to occupy the output of every human being and factory on earth for a few years...
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a wholesale company in Sydney Australia, and we ship terabytes a week, if we had the order it wouldnt be to big a jump for us to provide 350 terabyte hard drives. At the same time we're seeing huge sales surges in NAS/SAS units of 1 terabyte and up. For consumers, the 1TB Western Digital World Book is the best example, we sell alot of those to media and entertainment stores already.
In only a year the size and value of hard disk drives has increased monumentally, and tomorrow at work i see no sign of that ceasing.
Science doesnt prove things, it provides a best fit explaination of observed phenomena.
If you're looking to entice a flame war, that isnt the way to start it. Read up on what science is, and is not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
I work for a computer repair shop between uni, a similar thing happened at our shop.
We were hired to do regular matinence, but discovered huge amounts of child pornography.
The legal concerns of our position were important to us, but not as important as the possibility that this crime could go on, uninhibited.
The case was tried and the idea that we had no right to look at the files was not even mentioned in the case. The fact was that he had child porn. It was wrong and everything else was a non issue. I agree people should have privacy and civil liberties, but sometimes you have to put aside the politics and take things at face value.
Reduced Functionality mode is only instated when Vista isnt fully licenced and activated, not when it has been turned off for a while.
Infact funnily enough the period between install and reduced functionality due to incorrect activation is exactly the time period your quoted.
Try out thepiratebay for a permanently activated version of Windows Vista.
Anyone read Prey by Michael Crichton?
Several European towns and cities attempted to curb their consumption levels earlier this decade if i remember an article i read.
What i mean is, they didnt try just to produce their energy and products in a cleaner way, but also used less, generated less and so on.
I wont go into details, but by the time the local power generation was supported by renewable and distributed sources, and the cities and towns were on their third rolling blackout, the local government wasnt exactly popular with the people.
The point of the story is, conservation and better efficiency are two different things. Not only is conservation impossible (the planets population will always be growing somewhere and will negate any gains) but people plain old dont like it. Imagine walking into your local store and finding very little on the shelves, then going home to use the electricity for only a few hours. No governement, no people will ever move forward as a society by consuming less.
What needs to happen is we need to accept that we will eventually always use more resources as a races over time, BUT we need to use resources more efficiently per person.
Renewables are great, they can help alot in powering towns and small cities like the one i live in. However even i, a proponent of renewable energy can face the facts. Renewables are NOT feasible at the moment for large industrial cities. Not only are places for them hard to find, but they are generally inefficent and unreliable. Plus they do not cope well with the changing demands of a city over winter and summer months, even day and night.
Distributed electiicity generation is also a pipe dream. Look how fragile out electricity grids are, imagine adding thousands, perhaps millions of small, unpredictable loads to that grid. Chaos would ensue.
Same with biofuels. We already comaplin that crops are responsible for so of the worst environmental impacts. Could you imagine if we had to provide the labour, fresh water and lan to produce the oil supplies for a country like the US, China, or continental Europe. Its just not possible.
No. The fact of the matter is we live in a world where electricity generation is centralised. For civil and engeineered reasons. What we need is a hydrogen economy, where a combination of nuclear power, later possibly fusion, is supplemented by renewable sources for the production of not only electricity, but hyrdogen fuel and fresh water from desal. The world wants more more more. Thats it. Theres no escape. But we can manage how we provide it. We just have to be practical about it.
This device is not a reactor, even though it uses nuclear power.
This thing is called a "Radioisotope thermoelectric generator".
It is nothing new, they were used on the Voyager spacecraft.
They can be much smaller or larger than a bathtub, as the article says.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
A watt is the number of joules per second. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
Perhaps in addition to your argument a simple listing of priorities isn't adequate to describe the importance of thise priorities. For instance: 1. Staying alive 2. Maintaining physical security. 3. Making sure my computer is secure. Those 3 priorites will never have a proportional amount of resources dedicated to them in a persons life.
Taking it to the extreme. I would rather have the FBI (or what good is left of it) investigating organised crime, murders and even corporate crime with 99% of its resources, than spending those resources on fighting cyber crime.
Im not saying cyber crime isnt important. It has a real possibility to cripple parts of society. But at the same time, isn't it more important to catch the rapists, thieves, and murderers of this world, no matter how many resources that job consumes? We cant rebuild a person, as easy as we can a computer system, be it finance, utilities etc.
Would you rather have us use more land and more people to produce less productive crops?
With the explosion in the planets population, our only choices are education, culling people, and making current crops more productive.
Right now we're using a combination of two, at least in most countries. Ill let you guess.
Im all for the community knowlege on a whole range of subjects. But although i believe your comment and other comments to be correct, if i was this guy, and was worried about being shut down over issues of national security i would see a lawyer.
Really, slashdot is not the place to be seeking legal advice, a lawyer, no matter how cliche, is whats needed here, someone who knows the laws down to the letter.
Imo though, it should be within any citizens right to pursue happiness so long as what they do does not impact directly or indirectly upon the wealthfare of others.
Actually just because its compounded doesnt mean it exponential. A growth rate of 2% sustained over a number of years is "geometric". Exponential, in this case, implies that the growth rate is more then a factor of the original value. Thus most commonly 100% would be an exponential growth rate.
In other news: Several defendants in cases against piracy, bought to the courts by the RIAA, have mysteriously disappeared, died of cancer, heart attacks and car crashes. Amazingly all of their families have donated their entire estates to a charity setup to support artists forced into poverty by the growing piracy epidemic.
And by "big brother" you mean the local government representative YOU elected for your area to vote on issue like this for you.
We have no one to blame but ourselves for the way our governments act.
"There Gates will be, deciding who lives and who dies and charging everybody 50 cents to breathe"
Don't forget giving out free vacinations, building schools, improveing healthcare, researching technology, paying taxes and employing people. How darstedly evil!
Oh and between you and me, he plans to be both Evil Overlord and Good guy between loving and raising his children and being a good husband to his wife.
You might think im missing the point here, that his business tactics are evil. Well i agree, they were and still are. But thats not the point you raised, you implied that he has some kind of 1000 year fourth Richt plan for the human race. What im pointing out here is that he is a business man, living in the US, mainly concenred with technology, who has done some bad business things in the past, he has a loving wife and some beautiful kids. His investments do cover alot of fields yes, but so does any investors. Oh and he is the most charitable person in our generation.
Before you go and spend your time photoshoping hate images of Bill Gates for his most evil business moves read up on companies like Texaco, ExxonMobil, Amgen, The US Government, Shell, BP, Disney and Nike.
For all that is good and evil in this world, if Bill Gates and Microsoft is the worse we can do in the industry most of make a living from then we could ALOT worse. Now grow up and place your activism somewhere where it counts, say maybe worrying less about IT business and worrying more about the education and health tomorrows children. And in case your wondering where to start, heres a good charity: http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm
In communist china, I for one welcome a beowolf cluster of firewalls that uses only old people against you?
I agree with on on every point, and hope that the future turns out to be nuclear/fusion powered, with hydrogen and battery cars on the road.
One question i have above future power sources is how, if battery power is made the norm, we will find all the materials to make all these batterys and what will their cycle lifes be?
BTW ethanol would never work, we did calculations in high school chemistry. Everything about ethanol is great, the only problem is that in order to produce enough to run the USA's cars alone (not industry, or other countries) we would need to devote most of the worlds farmland to the venture.
With the added power of Bluegene, the Bell Labs team will now be able to add more then on colour to their GUI.
WikiMovie?
Plot spins faster than an episode of Lost and Heroes combined.
"In fact, I was most impressed with the few probes which altered their trajectories in mid-mission to do swing-bys of targets of opportunity. You need flexible fuel provision to do that!"
And very good math!
Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (From a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)
Yeh, democracy doesn't always work, yeh people are generally prone to make bad choices, especially when they're in a group, and yeh democracy has a tendency to have short term and majority orientated interests. But for the most part it's the best system of government we can manage on a scaleable basis in this world, at this time.
I'm sure right now you're thinking about retorts based on items like the PATRIOT act and invasion of privacy, the wars that democracy has caused, or been part of, and even the corruption that exists in our governments. And I agree with every single one of those arguments, and more. But the point is, democracy is the lesser of all evils.
I'm sure you could recommend many other forms of government which promise to eliminate the problems that democracy has, along with those of communism and others, but the fact is those recommendations are not tried and proven like democracy is. So often these days you hear about infringements on privacy and corruption by governments and businesses alike in the west. But you hardly ever hear about the good things: kids going to school if they want to, people finding work if they want to, a normal person running for government if they want to, a person helping another person if they want to.
Also, the reason you're on your computer now, the reason you're healthy, the reason you're well fed and the reason you can say what you just said is because you live in a democracy. It's because of the basic ideals of democracy that you CAN criticise democracy. Sure capitalism has a part to play, its competitiveness has helped move things along, but it's the freedom to share ideals and ideas that has really made all the difference.
If all that isn't enough to make you both continue to better your own government and appreciate what you already have, well just take a look at the world outside the west, or the OECD. It's not the Garden of Eden that some anarchists make it out to be. I have been to places in Africa and Papua New Guinea (setting up telephone networks), and it sickens me to hear someone sit and not criticise policy, but cities democracy itself. You spend a few days in every type of government in the world, then come back to somewhere like the USA, Canada, Australia, Europe and let me know how much you appreciate democracy then.
Yes, it's a form of government with a lot of peoples, but it's the best we have. And by definition, it's up to us as voters and representatives to make it better.
Im not agreeing with any of the conclusions this article is attempting to make, but i would like to let the parent of this thread know that scientists have successfully tested something called a "guided" thats right, a "guieded" missle, that is actually capable of flight that is not parabolic. It makes use of new high tech hydrogen and oxygen engines that allow the missle to control its direction of flight.
It is because of this new innovation that missle defence systems are scattered and not always directly in the line of a possible missle trajectory.
Saying "Let there be Light" implies there was no light before-hand, thus how could we see this man before light existed.
Just to clarify (im australian), when Australia signed the US-Australia Free Trade agreement it also adopted the same legal guidelines set out in the DMCA (though it wasn't called by the same name in our legistlation) as part of the agreement.
For the current bid of $120 Trillion who wouldnt want to own a piece of internet history, i know i would. I'd just have to occupy the output of every human being and factory on earth for a few years...