Governments will become extinct, replaced by transparent, user-run communities. If democratic governments disappeared ambitious and ruthless people would fill the power vacuum with something much nastier. Bummer if you live in a rich country, because it's going to turn into something out of a Mad Max movie. Lots of mini states, each run by a warlord.
Intellectual property will disappear, too Then capital will abandon the rich world and move where the labour is cheap. Face it, IP is what keeps money in the rich world. People are just as smart in say China and a lot more willing to work incredibly hard.
Borders and frontiers will disappear. Been to many really poor countries? How well do you think your local police would be able to cope with criminals from there arriving en masse. Oh right, no government means no police. Don't worry though the local warlord would probably form a militia to keep outsiders out. Mind you, the resulting gang war would be pretty nasty with no government of police to keep it under control and where the gang leaders have absolute power in their fiefdoms. And there's a danger of other predatory countries taking advantage of the chaos and colonising you.
You think I'm being facetious but this sort of Hobbesian nightmare is quite a good description of a failed state like Somalia or Afghanistan.
Anarchy isn't freedom, it's actually pretty much the opposite.
None of what you said will happen because of the OLPC of course.
Are you some sort of cripple? Another Mac fan shows his people skills. Bet he'd have been more polite if you said you had Aspergers, or one of the other geek chique diseases.
Name one case where a corporation was convicted of being a hacker and made to pay out millions Large companies with deep pockets are hit with lawsuits all the time. This one seems frivolous to me, someone sued Apple because the battery in the iPhone was non replaceable. But that's something he should have checked before he bought it. I don't like my iPod touch, but there's no way I'd sue Apple for all the misfeatures.
This one seems more sympathetic - a judge ordered a bunch of spam companies to pay $1bn, presumably bankrupting them. As far as I can tell the guy they spammed had given them the opportunity to stop earlier.
My guess is it would be hard to find a big company that actually let it go this far though, and that the spammers had a bunch of disposable companies they could afford to ditch because their business model only worked if they could ignore lawsuits like this.
If you are a big company it's cheaper to pay off anyone who complains early than to risk being obliterated if they actually win the lawsuit. Of course, it's cheaper still to not be evil. And it's interesting that the few evil companies I've personally dealt with tend to collapse suddenly due to a dispute with some third party, whereas the more pragmatic ones tend to survive.
Deep pockets is a recognized legal term by the way, meant to describe the sort of companies that are plagued by class action lawsuits. My point is that once you get big your lawyers will hopefully advise you not to piss off people who might sue you, and you'd be well advised to take that advice.
And individual hackers get away with a lot more than you'd think from reading slashdot. I've dealt with big pragmatic companies who've been advised not to sue 'hobby' hackers, even though their hacks leak to other commercial entities and end up costing the big company a fortune. Actually my point is that the real world works very differently than slashdot would have you believe.
No, good GPL programmers sign over their work to the collective farm, err FSF and patents are a tool of greedy kulaks. That is why the GPLv3 forces you to license them for free to everyone. You should work solely for the betterment of society - money is an obsolete concept in this new Socialist age of plenty.
Except corporations can be sued for millions if they damage other people's computers. They are a much more inviting lawsuit target than some penniless hacker. Particularly class action lawsuits which allow people to sue them without being individually able to afford lawyers.
Of course there are good reasons for it to replace the MBR/partion table, like running into a brick wall on the max drive size. Actually you don't need to change the Bios to get that. Currently the Bios loads sector 0 into memory and jumps into it. There's no reason why sector 0 couldn't be a GPT MBR. Pre GPT people worked out ways to allow for 64 bit LBA addresses in the partition table
And the Bios has supported 64 bit LBA addresses in int 13 for ages, so there is no disk size problem for a very long time - probably many decades. Seriously, you don't need EFI to get 64 bit LBA support.
Those Apple sites make me sad though. Usually they go something like this
OMG! OMG! The Apple iCar will cost $2000 and offer free iTunes downloads [Site closed down by Apple lawyers, journalist shipped to Infinite Loop to be waterboarded to get his source]
A bit later the iCar is released but it costs $5000 and you need to buy iMiles for it from iTunes in addition to gas. And you need to redownload all your iTunes purchases to make them work on the iCar.
Aluminum (Aluminium for you Brits) Actually in EUnified Ingleesh version 1.0 a compromise spelling has been standardised, Aluminiminmum and will be added to dictionaries on both sides of the atlantic. However, to be compatible with current Unified English 0.9 dictionaries you should probably use Aluminiminimium for a decade or so.
Actually the simulation argument has other consequences too. E.g. the Judeo Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent and omnipresent and the first cause of the Universe. If he's actually in the Universe that doesn't make any sense at all - information can only travel at the speed of light and that limits any entity's possible knowledge to a sphere of radius ct, where c is the speed of light and t is the time the entity has existed. In practice it would be much worse than this of course, since the inverse square law makes distant signals hard to see clearly. As someone put it, the Judeo Christian God is not consistent with known physics.
But if the universe is a simulation and God is the guy running booting it up and finely tuning it to be interesting it does. Omnipotence and omnipresence is easy if you can tweak the simulation, reset it back to a previous time and so on. If you were in the simulation and entity like this would essentially be your God, quite unlimited by the physical laws he chose to simulate. Outside the simulation of course he's not all powerful - he's probably some low level worker administering a server for the experiment.
So an all powerful God is certainly possible. Having said that I don't believe there is one since I don't see any evidence for it.
Actually, I'm highly skeptical of IQ tests. I went to a secondary school that had a test, the 11+ to get in. It's actually very closely related to IQ tests. The primary school I went to advertised itself as being able to get a high percentage of its pupils to pass the test. Which they did by making us all take a bunch of very similar tests once a week for a few months before we took the 11+ and encouraging us to compete over the results. Being 10 and rather unimaginative, I competed and passed the exam. But by that point they weren't measuring intelligence I think. It's more like a test of whether you went to the right primary school and did what you were told, because if you did that you'd pass no matter how dumb you were. Actually the song Teenage Lobotomy by the Ramones springs to mind for some reason.
So if you want to brag about your IQ for some reason, just take a lot of tests and you'll quickly go from slightly above average to supergenius level as you learn all the possible question/answer pairs. But doing that didn't really make you smarter, you've just rote learned all the answers you're not smart enough to figure out on the fly. And it won't impress anyone, because they'll estimate your intelligence based on your performance of everyday stuff compared to other people, not on some synthetic benchmark that you chose carefully to make you look good.
In addition to a poor command of basic English, you see to have a seriously flawed ability to argue. So I'll ignore the numerous spelling errors, not all deliberate, in your post and focus on the logical fallacies and psychological flaws.
Some how I think you don't know anything about what you're talking about....wait I do...cause you don't know me. Wait what? What does that even mean? The main point here is that I don't know you. Well true, I've read one post by you on the internet. But that post tells me a lot about you.
You're a semi literate unsocialized nerd who brags on slashdot about his IQ and manipulative abilities. Yeah, I think I have a pretty clear mental picture. It's all an act isn't it? You have the tech equivalent of a clerical job or maybe not even have that and feel inferior to more successful people who really can manipulate their way to success. You think you're smarter than the people you see zooming past you in the race that is life and have taken numerous IQ tests with a spread of results to try to prove it. You quote the highest score to everyone who talks to you, possibly with some fudge factor added on for things you "really knew" but still managed to get wrong. Despite all this you are academically mediocre in addition to being a social and professional failure and deep down you know it. Otherwise why bother taking all those tests and telling complete strangers how smart you have proved you are? If you really believed it you wouldn't need to keep telling people.
And for proof of previous arguement (note I know how to spell argument I've done this to further annoy you) I would almost be willing to put money on the fact that you respond to this.
But by doing that you'd prove me right Well I am going to respond because I like tormenting you, but it doesn't prove your previous 'arguement'. That's a good word for it actually, it's not coherent enough to be considered an argument.
I see you have studied Basic Trolling Theory though, no doubt during the huge proportion of your life you spend in (possibly your parents) basement, or in the huge downtime in your dead end tech job posting on the internet. Nice gambit there. 'If you argue with me I win [and if you don't I win by default]'. But you didn't invent it, and I'm not going to fall for it. You haven't actually used properly anyway, another sign of below average intelligence.
....and would probably go against the natural instint everyone has (except for you right?) to argue there side of the arguement. In my experience the natural instinct of people when they meet people like you is to troll the living shit out of them.
No doubt you'll follow up with unsubstantiated claims that you're actually rich and successful, married to a supermodel etc. Not only will I not believe a word of it, it will just prove that I'm getting to you and therefore my criticisms are at least somewhat accurate. In short, if you respond to this post, I win!
A genious who thinks he won't be caught. Arrogance is a mother fucker. Just because he's an genious doesn't automatically make him an expert criminal. It's "a genius", not "an genious". Somehow I doubt you're as skilled at fooling your room mates as you believe you are. Maybe they just got bored arguing with you.
It's vs its can be a typo if you are a native English speaker. Certainly if you read back what you wrote it is easy to miss it and other similar homonyms (e.g. their and they're). I think your brain just error corrects them away if you consciously focus on the higher level meaning rather than spelling and grammar. Since I come here to criticise people for their sloppy thinking, I tend to ignore their sloppy spelling and grammar.
Incidentally, it is also possible that language is changing - because so many people make this mistake that it will become accepted. Unlike other less popular languages correct English is eventually determined democratically by usage, not by some unelected council of pedants. Style guides and textbooks exist, but they are merely descriptive of the current usage of language. An example would be that split infinitives were widely regarded as an grammatical mistake in English English but because they are accepted in American English (famously "to boldly go"), they are not regarded as an error now. At least not by anyone worth listening too unless you are a linguist.
Of course all this probably drives non native speakers (and the anally retentive) crazy because they do all the parsing consciously. But that is by design. If people want to speak a rigorous Germanic language, they should learn German.
It's not about instruction sets per se. The CE version of Office was built from scratch (as far as I know) for CE back when a CE device had a few megs of memory, a tiny screen and a slow processor. It's not the same codebase as the desktop Office and it is much more limited. And OpenOffice doesn't work on CE either. So the fact is that an x86 device in a handheld does make sense because you get run desktop apps. Now there's no reasom why you couldn't run Desktop MS Office or OpenOffice on a handheld these days, but unfortunately neither is ported to CE. Oddly enough, MS Office does run on Macs and did back when they had both a different processor and a different OS.
It works with low temperature differences too. So you could stick a bunch of black pipes on the roof, heat the water in them and use that to drive the stirling engine.
The interesting thing about this is that it's all very low tech and you could easily built it yourself. I'd probably buy the stirling engine I think, but the rest of it seems buildable.
Maybe you could build a sort of monolith in the back yard of your house which captures energy from the sun or wind and stores it until you need it. You could sell them to places where people absolutely must be offgrid. Because they would be environmentally friendly, you could probably stay in business selling them even if they are more expensive than a traditional system that stores power in ultra toxic lead acid batteries with a short lifetime.
I'm thinking of designing some sort of backup system for my parents' house actually. They live in the country and the mains is often off.
It would probably be based on conventional technologies like lead acid batteries and a combined charger/inverter that would charge off mains voltage when present and convert say n*12V DC (from n lorry batteries in series) to AC when the mains was off. They would probably be ok with one or two lorry batteries, enough to keep the electric motor in the gas powered central heating running and some lights on for 8 hours. Some other people have petrol generators, but these are too noisy to have inside. So they need to unplug the mains, walk up the garden and start the generator when the power goes off, which is not very user friendly
Surprisingly though, it's quite hard to buy a prebuilt module to do this, even though there must be something similar in uninterruptible power supplies.
Suppose that solar cells get to the point where a few kilowatts of peak power can be put on the roof. That's a huge amount of energy, and the fatal problem is that you get it during the day when you're at work. Storing it in batteries would lead to a huge and expensive array. Even worse, that many batteries would mean that one would fail rather often.
But consider a hollow cylinder with a weight inside it. An electric motor would run from the solar cells during the day to lift the weight during the day. When you get home that same motor would run in dynamo mode. The weight would sink and you could use power. Once the weight hit the bottom you'd use the grid instead. A microprocessor would work out if you would be likely to have surplus power and sell it back to the grid if you live somewhere like Germany where this is worthwhile. Essentially you pay for the energy storage mechanism by exploiting the fact that power is more expensive in the evenings. And it would be if solar cells became economic. During the day, vast numbers of solar cells would push the price down.
My idea is that you sell a plastic cylinder containing a hollow tank. When it is installed, the installers would bury the cylinder and fill the hollow tank with concrete to increase the weight. Actually, you could build a shed sized storage device where a concrete cylinder is surrounded by concrete walls for safety. The whole thing would be sold hollow, you'd fill the cavities with concrete on installation.
Consider a 5m cube of concrete lifted 10m. That's 125m^3 of concrete, which weighs about 2300 kg/m^3. So 287000kg. Putting it into the equation for potential energy I get 28.175 MJ. Now 1kWh is 3.6MJ. So I can store 7.8kWh. Which is sufficient for storing energy from solar cells, even a sizable array. Done right it should have a much longer life than rechargeable batteries too.
Another possibility would be to build the house to weigh as much as possible, possibly around concrete weights, and on a mechanism that lets it rise a few centimetres when it was storing energy from the solar cells, then slowly sink back as the energy was used. I think I'd probably have a central chamber containing the weight though, and just move that.
Of course, you could build a huge storage device and attach it to a renewable power station too, to level out the varying power output from solar cells or wind generators. Or just attach it to the grid and buy power when it is expensive and sell it when it is cheap. People have actually built storage systems like this, using water as the weight -
But the US completely fucked it up by rejecting Mao and hanging their socks on a washed up tyrant; Chang Kai-shek and his utterly routed Nationalists. It forced Mao completely into the Soviet sphere (though that lasted a little over a decade), because Mao needed someone's help... It also violated one of the key notions of international diplomacy, that one must remain pragmatic in all things. It was a reality-defying leap of stupidity that only made sense within the context of domestic US politics at the time. It certainly made no sense within the contexts of diplomacy, international relations, international law and within the long-term interests of the US in the Far East, and ultimately the world. Nixon's normalization, while the right thing to do, has put the US in an even trickier situation as per Taiwan, which it treats as a defacto state, while all the while trying to play it with the PRC. If the US had simply admitted that Chang Kai-shek was a spent force and recognized Mao, this awkward position could have been avoided.
Yeah, but foreign policy is not a game and you don't just make friends with the winners.
Mao killed millions of people, more than Hitler and Chang Kai Shek ran Taiwan quite well and eventually his son allowed it to democratise. Admittedly mostly due to pressure from the Taiwanese people and the US, but Mao's successors dealt with peaceful protests in favour of democracy by running people over with tanks. And this incidentally was at a point when relations with the US were at their warmest, in fact China and the US were allies against the USSR.
So sucking up to tyranny doesn't cause it to moderate its behaviour. Which is as you'd expect really - when the student protests erupted in 1989, it's hard to imagine that the people that decided to kill them really gave any thought whatsoever to the reaction of the US. So an alliance with the PRC doesn't moderate its behaviour. But an alliance with Taiwan does have give the US something. It's also morally right.
Let's try to use your policy in Europe in 1940. Clearly the US should ally with Stalin and Hitler since they controlled a lot of territory. Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on were spent forces and should be ditched. Now you're no doubt thinking Godwin at this point, and by the rules of an Internet argument you're probably right. But outside the internet, it does seem a valid criticism of a potential foreign policy principle that it would cause you to back Stalin and Hitler over the governments of smaller and freer countries they had conquered or were about to conquer. Actually it would be totally catastrophic in other situations too. At one point Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and was militarily quite capable of overrunning Saudi Arabia. Your principle seems to be that once he took over, the US should recognize that and attempt to engage with him. To me it seems quite clear that the US should absolutely not allow him to stay in either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.
I actually think that the US should not have normalised with China and should not recognize hostile tyrannies in general. I wouldn't get into silly games like the Chinese do with Taiwan, but I would definitely regard those governments as essentially overgrown crime families rather than anyone you want to regard as being an equal. Certainly there is no point trying to form a relationship with them in the way that Nixon and Kissinger tried to do. The US lost out big time in that, and the PRC gained. But that government has by any reasonable standard far less legitimacy that the ROC one. Come to think of it it has far less legitimacy than the post Soviet Russian government, which can at least win a plebiscite every few years, even if it probably doesn't qualify as a full democracy anymore.
I think the problem I have with international diplomacy is that most of the principles were invented long before the era of mass democracy. Then, at least by modern standards, very few governments were representative. So in the abse
I can quite believe that Mao and Lenin resembled the Tsars and Emperors they replaced and that Communism was a state religion.
But that doesn't mean that the US should treat them in the same way. New religions intolerant religions like Communism have a need to spread. And Communism was a much worse system than the ones it replaced. E.g. Russia before the revolution had secret police and prison camps, this is true. But after the revolution the death rate due to political violence rose astronomically. Someone worked out that the Tsar killed a few hundred people for political crimes. But the Russian communists killed many millions. And the old regimes in Russia and China were not expansionist in the sense that they wanted to spread their system around the world. E.g. Russian communism came very close to engulfing all of the US's allies in Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe. Communism in Asia actually managed it. The whole world could quite easily have ended up resembling Orwell's 1984. This is something which US foreign policy, like its UK counterpart absolutely cannot let happen because of the danger of being completely surrounded by countries which are essentially hostile slave states.
The old state religions in China and Russia were also not monotheistic - they each tolerated Buddhism and Christianity (and Islam in places) in their empires. Lastly, both of them had started to liberalise. If the Communists hadn't hijacked the process, it's quite possible that they would have ended up as something much more liberal.
So whilst it's true to say that their is a degree of continuity the post revolutionary powers were a lot more threatening than the pre revolutionary ones. And it seems like US foreign policy should be about strangling new murderous monotheisms if possible, not accepting them as a permanent fixture.
You could probably test the chips on the wafer before you chop it up. I can imagine supply power to the wafer and looping JTAG test lines through all the chips. Then some self test would run in parallel on all chips and you'd know which chips were bad, which had one bad core and so on. Actually just testing the cache would be a good idea. Since most of the die area is cache, most of the dust-spec style defects should be found there.
Of course a few chips might fail in other ways and you'd catch them after packaging, but that should be rare - most of the defects should be caught before you chop up the wafer and package the chips.
I am not an IC engineer, but it seems plausible you could do this.
Slashdot Mirror
You think I'm being facetious but this sort of Hobbesian nightmare is quite a good description of a failed state like Somalia or Afghanistan.
Anarchy isn't freedom, it's actually pretty much the opposite.
None of what you said will happen because of the OLPC of course.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/27/iphone-class-action-lawsuit/
This one seems more sympathetic - a judge ordered a bunch of spam companies to pay $1bn, presumably bankrupting them. As far as I can tell the guy they spammed had given them the opportunity to stop earlier.
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2004/12/22/207606/judge-awards-isp-1bn-in-spam-damages.htm
My guess is it would be hard to find a big company that actually let it go this far though, and that the spammers had a bunch of disposable companies they could afford to ditch because their business model only worked if they could ignore lawsuits like this.
If you are a big company it's cheaper to pay off anyone who complains early than to risk being obliterated if they actually win the lawsuit. Of course, it's cheaper still to not be evil. And it's interesting that the few evil companies I've personally dealt with tend to collapse suddenly due to a dispute with some third party, whereas the more pragmatic ones tend to survive.
Deep pockets is a recognized legal term by the way, meant to describe the sort of companies that are plagued by class action lawsuits. My point is that once you get big your lawyers will hopefully advise you not to piss off people who might sue you, and you'd be well advised to take that advice.
And individual hackers get away with a lot more than you'd think from reading slashdot. I've dealt with big pragmatic companies who've been advised not to sue 'hobby' hackers, even though their hacks leak to other commercial entities and end up costing the big company a fortune. Actually my point is that the real world works very differently than slashdot would have you believe.
No, good GPL programmers sign over their work to the collective farm, err FSF and patents are a tool of greedy kulaks. That is why the GPLv3 forces you to license them for free to everyone. You should work solely for the betterment of society - money is an obsolete concept in this new Socialist age of plenty.
Except corporations can be sued for millions if they damage other people's computers. They are a much more inviting lawsuit target than some penniless hacker. Particularly class action lawsuits which allow people to sue them without being individually able to afford lawyers.
http://home.no.net/tkos/info/embr.html
And the Bios has supported 64 bit LBA addresses in int 13 for ages, so there is no disk size problem for a very long time - probably many decades. Seriously, you don't need EFI to get 64 bit LBA support.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html
Those Apple sites make me sad though. Usually they go something like this
OMG! OMG! The Apple iCar will cost $2000 and offer free iTunes downloads
[Site closed down by Apple lawyers, journalist shipped to Infinite Loop to be waterboarded to get his source]
A bit later the iCar is released but it costs $5000 and you need to buy iMiles for it from iTunes in addition to gas. And you need to redownload all your iTunes purchases to make them work on the iCar.
Actually the simulation argument has other consequences too. E.g. the Judeo Christian God is supposed to be omnipotent and omnipresent and the first cause of the Universe. If he's actually in the Universe that doesn't make any sense at all - information can only travel at the speed of light and that limits any entity's possible knowledge to a sphere of radius ct, where c is the speed of light and t is the time the entity has existed. In practice it would be much worse than this of course, since the inverse square law makes distant signals hard to see clearly. As someone put it, the Judeo Christian God is not consistent with known physics.
But if the universe is a simulation and God is the guy running booting it up and finely tuning it to be interesting it does. Omnipotence and omnipresence is easy if you can tweak the simulation, reset it back to a previous time and so on. If you were in the simulation and entity like this would essentially be your God, quite unlimited by the physical laws he chose to simulate. Outside the simulation of course he's not all powerful - he's probably some low level worker administering a server for the experiment.
So an all powerful God is certainly possible. Having said that I don't believe there is one since I don't see any evidence for it.
Actually, I'm highly skeptical of IQ tests. I went to a secondary school that had a test, the 11+ to get in. It's actually very closely related to IQ tests. The primary school I went to advertised itself as being able to get a high percentage of its pupils to pass the test. Which they did by making us all take a bunch of very similar tests once a week for a few months before we took the 11+ and encouraging us to compete over the results. Being 10 and rather unimaginative, I competed and passed the exam. But by that point they weren't measuring intelligence I think. It's more like a test of whether you went to the right primary school and did what you were told, because if you did that you'd pass no matter how dumb you were. Actually the song Teenage Lobotomy by the Ramones springs to mind for some reason.
So if you want to brag about your IQ for some reason, just take a lot of tests and you'll quickly go from slightly above average to supergenius level as you learn all the possible question/answer pairs. But doing that didn't really make you smarter, you've just rote learned all the answers you're not smart enough to figure out on the fly. And it won't impress anyone, because they'll estimate your intelligence based on your performance of everyday stuff compared to other people, not on some synthetic benchmark that you chose carefully to make you look good.
You're a semi literate unsocialized nerd who brags on slashdot about his IQ and manipulative abilities. Yeah, I think I have a pretty clear mental picture. It's all an act isn't it? You have the tech equivalent of a clerical job or maybe not even have that and feel inferior to more successful people who really can manipulate their way to success. You think you're smarter than the people you see zooming past you in the race that is life and have taken numerous IQ tests with a spread of results to try to prove it. You quote the highest score to everyone who talks to you, possibly with some fudge factor added on for things you "really knew" but still managed to get wrong. Despite all this you are academically mediocre in addition to being a social and professional failure and deep down you know it. Otherwise why bother taking all those tests and telling complete strangers how smart you have proved you are? If you really believed it you wouldn't need to keep telling people. And for proof of previous arguement (note I know how to spell argument I've done this to further annoy you) I would almost be willing to put money on the fact that you respond to this.
But by doing that you'd prove me right Well I am going to respond because I like tormenting you, but it doesn't prove your previous 'arguement'. That's a good word for it actually, it's not coherent enough to be considered an argument.
I see you have studied Basic Trolling Theory though, no doubt during the huge proportion of your life you spend in (possibly your parents) basement, or in the huge downtime in your dead end tech job posting on the internet. Nice gambit there. 'If you argue with me I win [and if you don't I win by default]'. But you didn't invent it, and I'm not going to fall for it. You haven't actually used properly anyway, another sign of below average intelligence.
....and would probably go against the natural instint everyone has (except for you right?) to argue there side of the arguement. In my experience the natural instinct of people when they meet people like you is to troll the living shit out of them.No doubt you'll follow up with unsubstantiated claims that you're actually rich and successful, married to a supermodel etc. Not only will I not believe a word of it, it will just prove that I'm getting to you and therefore my criticisms are at least somewhat accurate. In short, if you respond to this post, I win!
For a self proclaimed genius "Masterpieces of Murder" seems rather lowbrow reading.
It's vs its can be a typo if you are a native English speaker. Certainly if you read back what you wrote it is easy to miss it and other similar homonyms (e.g. their and they're). I think your brain just error corrects them away if you consciously focus on the higher level meaning rather than spelling and grammar. Since I come here to criticise people for their sloppy thinking, I tend to ignore their sloppy spelling and grammar.
Incidentally, it is also possible that language is changing - because so many people make this mistake that it will become accepted. Unlike other less popular languages correct English is eventually determined democratically by usage, not by some unelected council of pedants. Style guides and textbooks exist, but they are merely descriptive of the current usage of language. An example would be that split infinitives were widely regarded as an grammatical mistake in English English but because they are accepted in American English (famously "to boldly go"), they are not regarded as an error now. At least not by anyone worth listening too unless you are a linguist.
Of course all this probably drives non native speakers (and the anally retentive) crazy because they do all the parsing consciously. But that is by design. If people want to speak a rigorous Germanic language, they should learn German.
It's not about instruction sets per se. The CE version of Office was built from scratch (as far as I know) for CE back when a CE device had a few megs of memory, a tiny screen and a slow processor. It's not the same codebase as the desktop Office and it is much more limited. And OpenOffice doesn't work on CE either. So the fact is that an x86 device in a handheld does make sense because you get run desktop apps. Now there's no reasom why you couldn't run Desktop MS Office or OpenOffice on a handheld these days, but unfortunately neither is ported to CE. Oddly enough, MS Office does run on Macs and did back when they had both a different processor and a different OS.
I'm not a native English speaker - not even a near-native - and I can see them, hunderds of slashdotters see them, they look just silly
Snicker.
Hmm, I like the idea of getting rid of the electric motor, but a ratchet system sounds like it would wear out.
Maybe you could capture heat from the sun and use that to drive and heat engine which lifts the weight. A Stirling Engine would be high efficiency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine
It works with low temperature differences too. So you could stick a bunch of black pipes on the roof, heat the water in them and use that to drive the stirling engine.
The interesting thing about this is that it's all very low tech and you could easily built it yourself. I'd probably buy the stirling engine I think, but the rest of it seems buildable.
Maybe you could build a sort of monolith in the back yard of your house which captures energy from the sun or wind and stores it until you need it. You could sell them to places where people absolutely must be offgrid. Because they would be environmentally friendly, you could probably stay in business selling them even if they are more expensive than a traditional system that stores power in ultra toxic lead acid batteries with a short lifetime.
I'm thinking of designing some sort of backup system for my parents' house actually. They live in the country and the mains is often off.
It would probably be based on conventional technologies like lead acid batteries and a combined charger/inverter that would charge off mains voltage when present and convert say n*12V DC (from n lorry batteries in series) to AC when the mains was off. They would probably be ok with one or two lorry batteries, enough to keep the electric motor in the gas powered central heating running and some lights on for 8 hours. Some other people have petrol generators, but these are too noisy to have inside. So they need to unplug the mains, walk up the garden and start the generator when the power goes off, which is not very user friendly
Surprisingly though, it's quite hard to buy a prebuilt module to do this, even though there must be something similar in uninterruptible power supplies.
I like the idea of gravitational batteries.
Suppose that solar cells get to the point where a few kilowatts of peak power can be put on the roof. That's a huge amount of energy, and the fatal problem is that you get it during the day when you're at work. Storing it in batteries would lead to a huge and expensive array. Even worse, that many batteries would mean that one would fail rather often.
But consider a hollow cylinder with a weight inside it. An electric motor would run from the solar cells during the day to lift the weight during the day. When you get home that same motor would run in dynamo mode. The weight would sink and you could use power. Once the weight hit the bottom you'd use the grid instead. A microprocessor would work out if you would be likely to have surplus power and sell it back to the grid if you live somewhere like Germany where this is worthwhile. Essentially you pay for the energy storage mechanism by exploiting the fact that power is more expensive in the evenings. And it would be if solar cells became economic. During the day, vast numbers of solar cells would push the price down.
My idea is that you sell a plastic cylinder containing a hollow tank. When it is installed, the installers would bury the cylinder and fill the hollow tank with concrete to increase the weight. Actually, you could build a shed sized storage device where a concrete cylinder is surrounded by concrete walls for safety. The whole thing would be sold hollow, you'd fill the cavities with concrete on installation.
Consider a 5m cube of concrete lifted 10m. That's 125m^3 of concrete, which weighs about 2300 kg/m^3. So 287000kg. Putting it into the equation for potential energy I get 28.175 MJ. Now 1kWh is 3.6MJ. So I can store 7.8kWh. Which is sufficient for storing energy from solar cells, even a sizable array. Done right it should have a much longer life than rechargeable batteries too.
Another possibility would be to build the house to weigh as much as possible, possibly around concrete weights, and on a mechanism that lets it rise a few centimetres when it was storing energy from the solar cells, then slowly sink back as the energy was used. I think I'd probably have a central chamber containing the weight though, and just move that.
Of course, you could build a huge storage device and attach it to a renewable power station too, to level out the varying power output from solar cells or wind generators. Or just attach it to the grid and buy power when it is expensive and sell it when it is cheap. People have actually built storage systems like this, using water as the weight -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
But the US completely fucked it up by rejecting Mao and hanging their socks on a washed up tyrant; Chang Kai-shek and his utterly routed Nationalists. It forced Mao completely into the Soviet sphere (though that lasted a little over a decade), because Mao needed someone's help ...
It also violated one of the key notions of international diplomacy, that one must remain pragmatic in all things. It was a reality-defying leap of stupidity that only made sense within the context of domestic US politics at the time. It certainly made no sense within the contexts of diplomacy, international relations, international law and within the long-term interests of the US in the Far East, and ultimately the world. Nixon's normalization, while the right thing to do, has put the US in an even trickier situation as per Taiwan, which it treats as a defacto state, while all the while trying to play it with the PRC. If the US had simply admitted that Chang Kai-shek was a spent force and recognized Mao, this awkward position could have been avoided.
Yeah, but foreign policy is not a game and you don't just make friends with the winners.
Mao killed millions of people, more than Hitler and Chang Kai Shek ran Taiwan quite well and eventually his son allowed it to democratise. Admittedly mostly due to pressure from the Taiwanese people and the US, but Mao's successors dealt with peaceful protests in favour of democracy by running people over with tanks. And this incidentally was at a point when relations with the US were at their warmest, in fact China and the US were allies against the USSR.
So sucking up to tyranny doesn't cause it to moderate its behaviour. Which is as you'd expect really - when the student protests erupted in 1989, it's hard to imagine that the people that decided to kill them really gave any thought whatsoever to the reaction of the US. So an alliance with the PRC doesn't moderate its behaviour. But an alliance with Taiwan does have give the US something. It's also morally right.
Let's try to use your policy in Europe in 1940. Clearly the US should ally with Stalin and Hitler since they controlled a lot of territory. Poland, Czechoslovakia and so on were spent forces and should be ditched. Now you're no doubt thinking Godwin at this point, and by the rules of an Internet argument you're probably right. But outside the internet, it does seem a valid criticism of a potential foreign policy principle that it would cause you to back Stalin and Hitler over the governments of smaller and freer countries they had conquered or were about to conquer. Actually it would be totally catastrophic in other situations too. At one point Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait and was militarily quite capable of overrunning Saudi Arabia. Your principle seems to be that once he took over, the US should recognize that and attempt to engage with him. To me it seems quite clear that the US should absolutely not allow him to stay in either Saudi Arabia or Kuwait.
I actually think that the US should not have normalised with China and should not recognize hostile tyrannies in general. I wouldn't get into silly games like the Chinese do with Taiwan, but I would definitely regard those governments as essentially overgrown crime families rather than anyone you want to regard as being an equal. Certainly there is no point trying to form a relationship with them in the way that Nixon and Kissinger tried to do. The US lost out big time in that, and the PRC gained. But that government has by any reasonable standard far less legitimacy that the ROC one. Come to think of it it has far less legitimacy than the post Soviet Russian government, which can at least win a plebiscite every few years, even if it probably doesn't qualify as a full democracy anymore.
I think the problem I have with international diplomacy is that most of the principles were invented long before the era of mass democracy. Then, at least by modern standards, very few governments were representative. So in the abse
I can quite believe that Mao and Lenin resembled the Tsars and Emperors they replaced and that Communism was a state religion.
But that doesn't mean that the US should treat them in the same way. New religions intolerant religions like Communism have a need to spread. And Communism was a much worse system than the ones it replaced. E.g. Russia before the revolution had secret police and prison camps, this is true. But after the revolution the death rate due to political violence rose astronomically. Someone worked out that the Tsar killed a few hundred people for political crimes. But the Russian communists killed many millions. And the old regimes in Russia and China were not expansionist in the sense that they wanted to spread their system around the world. E.g. Russian communism came very close to engulfing all of the US's allies in Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe. Communism in Asia actually managed it. The whole world could quite easily have ended up resembling Orwell's 1984. This is something which US foreign policy, like its UK counterpart absolutely cannot let happen because of the danger of being completely surrounded by countries which are essentially hostile slave states.
The old state religions in China and Russia were also not monotheistic - they each tolerated Buddhism and Christianity (and Islam in places) in their empires. Lastly, both of them had started to liberalise. If the Communists hadn't hijacked the process, it's quite possible that they would have ended up as something much more liberal.
So whilst it's true to say that their is a degree of continuity the post revolutionary powers were a lot more threatening than the pre revolutionary ones. And it seems like US foreign policy should be about strangling new murderous monotheisms if possible, not accepting them as a permanent fixture.
"Strong allies?" We're willing to engage in commerce with Cuba; that's a little different from treating them like a NATO member or something.
Next you'll be telling us Canada has no weapons of mass destruction.
Auditing can work if the auditors know that they must find any security problems UNDER PAIN OF TORTURE.
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/EXTREME_ADVERTISING
You could probably test the chips on the wafer before you chop it up. I can imagine supply power to the wafer and looping JTAG test lines through all the chips. Then some self test would run in parallel on all chips and you'd know which chips were bad, which had one bad core and so on. Actually just testing the cache would be a good idea. Since most of the die area is cache, most of the dust-spec style defects should be found there.
Of course a few chips might fail in other ways and you'd catch them after packaging, but that should be rare - most of the defects should be caught before you chop up the wafer and package the chips.
I am not an IC engineer, but it seems plausible you could do this.