Not sure I really believe that. The 45nm version of the processor should be cheaper to make than the the old one since the die size is smaller and manufacturing cost is very dependent on die size. IIRC cost is proportional to die size squared. So they could either sell it cheaper and be more competitive or sell it at the same price and make more profit, or decide on some market dependent mix of the two.
E.g. back when Core2 came out prices seemed to me to be surprisingly low, presumably because AMD were starting to increase their market share because Netburst was a turkey. Now post Core2, Intel will have a lead until the K9 so they'll probably keep retail prices the same even though 45nm cuts production costs.
The other thing of course is that manufacturing cost is proportional to chip yield. So initially, the 45nm process will turn out less good chips than the old process which tends to eat into their cost savings until the glitches are ironed out. So maybe they need to tune the process before they use it for production.
Well you could photocopy them too. But most people would accept that making more copies of the coupons (or anything else which has monetary value) than you're supposed to do by any means is likely to illegal.
Actually from TFA, photocopying is protected by unique serial number -
The 500 brands Coupons Inc. represents also suffer from fraud the old-fashioned way. They fall victim to photocopying of their coupons. Weitzman says the company shuts off coupon-printing access to violators if photocopied coupons with the same serial numbers show up at markets.
Mind you I don't understand why coupons.com trust the PC to generate the serial numbers and thus enforce the number of coupons rule. Anyone who knows anything about PCs knows that pretty much any scheme will get cracked eventually, because PC OSs don't really have any protection agains the owner hacking them. It seems like a better design would be to have a trusted server doll out blocks of serial numbers - possibly encrypting them with the clients public key. Then the PC could decrypt and print them out, but it wouldn't be able to generate extra ones. Another trusted server check the numbers for validity when the coupons are redeemed. Then hacking the PC doesn't matter, because it's not able to generate any extra serial numbers.
The encryption is just to make sure that only one client gets the block of serial numbers - it doesn't matter to coupons.com if two people get them since only one can redeem them, but it might annoy some honest user of the software if their coupons could not be redeemed because a hacker eavesdropped on the conversation to the server and beat them to the punch.
The nice thing about this scheme is that you make the serial number space very large for longish numbers but mostly full of invalid numbers. In fact only the numbers issued but not yet redeemed can be valid. In fact this is the security pay as you go phone cards use - the cell phone company prints cards with random and unique serial numbers and marks them valid in a database. Then the subscriber calls a voice server and enters the number. If it's in the database as valid it gets removed and the subscriber is credited with cash, otherwise it is rejected. With a 13 digit number, even if millions of coupons have been printed but not redeemed, you'd still have to try millions of times to guess a valid one. Which is easy to spot or prevent at the voice server.
But what I am pointing out is that the research in question only provides a possible architecture for life (one of an infinite number), and doesn't in my mind present a clearvision for how we'd actually find out if such life exists or has existed.
But as far as I can tell we only know of one architecture of life that actually works, i.e. the DNA/RNA/protein one so it seems like discovering or inventing any radically different ones is progress. Especially ones like this that sound as if they could bootstrap themselves out of lifeless interstellar dust - that seems to be the interesting thing about it. And if you could find a version of it that makes carbon based molecules as tools, it seems like you have a plausible explanation of how life got started on Earth via panspermia.
But if not, maybe some of the ideas will get reused to deduce other plausible bootstrap architecures.
I don't think that's really important. There's a deep problem with the origin of life, since the current DNA and protein based life is far to sophisticated to be the original. So there's a fair chance that it's not the first generation and it has simpler precursors.
Graham Cairns Smith talked about clay based life as essentially making organic molecules as tools which eventually took over. It's a poetic idea, particularly Richard Dawkins comment that our silicon based tools make eventually take on a life of their own and complete the cycle from Silicon to Carbon and back to Silicon based life. But I don't think the clay based life is really plausible - it's just too inflexible. But my guess is that there are earlier generations of 'life' out there. I use the quotes because they would would be hard to spot as life since they are far closer to boundary between complex chemistry and simple life.
And any research that discovers/invents alternative architectures for life may tell how they could possibly work.
Maybe you just converged asymptotically on a world view that fits the news sources you choose to read. That seems like a good trait in terms of evolution since your 30's are the time where you're supposed to have kids. Parents are supposed to be stable and stability requires that you believe that you understand the world. You can also pass on your world view to them.
And it's not like you're stuck with it forever - I know people in their 60's who were forced to essentially go through the convergence process again because the world changed around them - e.g. politically going from a naive liberalism to a world weary, cynical conservatism. Or from being apolitical to being rabibly left wing.
So don't worry, as you get older you won't continue to believe the things you believe now. You'll still live in interesting times as the double edged Chinese phrase has it. Much of the things you believe now will turn out to be catastophically wrong and an greater exposure to the world will force you to accept this.
CyberDogs Inc offer dogs up to 120kg built in shotguns and wifi webcams. They have an collar that electrocutes them if they growl at employees with a RFID badges
You can monitor them with SNMP too, to see how many rounds they have fired and who they've eaten, should your company be hit by a lawsuit for some reason. As a bonus, the number of people forgetting their badges drops dramatically a week or so after introduction.
Can't you die from the voltages inside a colour TV?
I remember reading a long time ago that contact with the back of a colour TV tube was "invariably fatal". Mind you from your experience and a bit of Googling maybe they were just being overly cautious -
http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_safety.html "TVs and monitors may have up to 35 KV on the CRT but the current is low - a couple of milliamps. However, the CRT capacitance can hold a painful charge for a long time. "
Elsewhere they mention that if you add a capacitor, it's dangerous, but so long as there's no capacitance connected, there isn't enough current available at 35kV to kill you.
Except that since you're forced to give away the source code market forces will limit how much you can charge.
Imagine if my company makes some software and licenses it under the GPL. We make money out of maintainance fees. Initially we have copyright since we wrote it. But we accept some patches and either the contributors keep copyright or we assign all copyright to the FSF as they recommend. But either way we don't keep copyright on the software so we can't change the license. Now some other company can come along and make another distribution for less cash than we charge. And someone can do the same to them. Or people can just download it for free and not pay a penny.
So we essentially ended up competing with a free version of our own code. So clearly the amount we can charge is going to be less than it we chose a BSD license. We're even forced to give back any changes we make, so the marginal value of these will tend to zero. Not to mention that anyone that pays us to work knows that their competitors will get the work for free.
So while they say that charging is ok, the whole point of the license is to make the code so open that it's impossible proprietarize it enough to make any money from it. And in software the key to making money is to proprierarize the code you work on, because otherwise you end up competing with people that have low or zero overheads since they can just freeload off your work.
I've never heard anyone say GNU correctly in person (it's always G.N.U.), because it's such a terrible name and doesn't roll off the tongue like Linux. "Debian Sarge Guh-noo slash Linux", "Fedora Core Guh-noo slash Linux", "Damn Small Guh-noo slash Linux".
You can shorten it to just "GNU" or "Stallmanix" if you want.
Then in scenario #1, I'll just invite the whole town over. There, now involves thousands of people, but still legal (pray my house is big enough). There's not a setup number of people that all of a sudden makes this go from legal to illegal, so even though I understand your point, it is not valid.
I don't think it's legal in the UK. Tolerated possibly but not legal. Certainly rented videos have a sticker on them that says not for public performance. But I don't know if it is enforced.
In the US if it is legal it's against the wishes of the copyright holders. Remember Jack Valenti's comment - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Presumably the courts didn't agree with him, so home taping is legal. But showing a video to the whole town is not home taping, and if you decided to do it, I suspect you have legal issues.
Law, unlike software, has loads of grey areas like this, and it's quite possible that showing a videotaped TV program to your family is legal whereas showing it to the whole town is not. And quite frankly if you use reductio ad absurdem tactics on fair use rights like claiming that showing a home taped TV program is the same as distributing to thousands of strangers over the internet, you don't deserve to have fair use rights.
Because in scenario 1 you share with a few friends. Actually, I've never done this - the nearest I've got is watching a rented movie with other people, never something I recorded.
Wherease in Scenario #2 I'm sharing a movie with hundreds of other people. And look at pirate bay - a popular torrent is downloaded by thousands of people over its lifetime.
It's completley disingenuous to say that the two are equivalent from the point of view of the copyright holder. #1 is rare and involves few people, #2 is common and involves thousands.
The artists that are known by 75% of everyone are well known because some media company hyped them, not because of talent. So it's not too surprising that the media company ends with most of the money.
Yes... because that is the fault of copyright law, and not the artists, who sign over the rights to their works for a pittance
If there was no copyright of course, they wouldn't get a penny. The media companies would just mass produce CDs with their music, sell them to the public and keep all the money for themselves.
Bagle is an interesting virus that affects both people and computers. Not only is it polymorphic in computer memory to evade virus scanners, the name is also polymorphic in English when infected people talk about it to confuse the uninfected.
The solution is to wear gloves when disinfecting infected systems. If someone like the unfortunate GP fumbles the name repeatedly, they are probably infected too and you should kill them and then burn their body. There are also some reports that people infected with Beagle spread misinformation and incite chaos to sabotage attempts at eradicating it.
- Easily select all emails from a date range with a simple command line (T~d dd/mm/yyyy-dd/mm/yyyy);
You can do this in a GUI of course - sort by date, scroll to the start of the range, hold down shift and use the arrow keys or PgUp, PgDn to select.
- Open and edit any part of the email, including attachments;
But most of the attachments I get are office documents, and you can't edit those in Mutt. Or pictures, but Thunderbird displays them inline.
- Reply, forward or bounce multiple messages at once.
I haven't ever tried this in Thunderbird. I think it will forward them all as attachments in one message though, which is pretty useless. I can see if you're an admin on a server, batch forward, reply and bounce is useful though.
- Open any mailbox from any user on the server (as root, of course) without having to configure an email account;
Another admin type thing.
Ok, I see what you mean. If you're a mail admin then this sort of thing is useful. But for regular users, not so much. But I know people who swear that Mutt, Vi/Emacs and other character mode stuff are more powerful than Thunderbird and UltraEdit for example.
And it seems to be a European thing too - geeks there tend to use Vi or Emacs, but if you go to Asia everyone seems to use Ultraedit. Which is pretty slick - you can easily use it without taking your hands off the keyboard due to accelerator keys. E.g. the first time you use Find in files you go through the menu, but afterwards you know it's Ctrl+Shift+F and then tab though the dialog fields and use the cursor keys to scroll through the history.
In Europe I suspect it's a geek credibility thing mostly. That and the fact that since you need to invest an enormous amount of time in learning to use a geek tool without it trashing your work, you become fiercely loyal to it. Much like a battered wife learns becomes loyal to her brutish husband once she learns to avoid provoking him.
Mutt is a pure Mail User Agent (MUA) and cannot send e-mail in isolation. To do this, it needs to communicate with a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) using, for example, the common Unix sendmail interface. However smtp support has been added to the unstable branch at version 1.5.15 and will work its way into the stable branch.
It is rather configurable: it has hundreds of configuration directives and commands. It allows for changing all the key bindings and making keyboard macros for complex actions, as well as the colors and the layout of most of the interface. There are also many patches and extensions available that add functionality, such as NNTP support or a sidebar.
Mutt is fully controlled with the keyboard, and has support for mail threading, meaning one can easily move around long discussions such as in mailing lists. New messages are composed with an external text editor by default, unlike pine which embeds its own editor known as pico (though you can configure pine to shell out to an external editor).
Sounds ghastly really. What can it do that Thunderbird can't?
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Not sure I really believe that. The 45nm version of the processor should be cheaper to make than the the old one since the die size is smaller and manufacturing cost is very dependent on die size. IIRC cost is proportional to die size squared. So they could either sell it cheaper and be more competitive or sell it at the same price and make more profit, or decide on some market dependent mix of the two.
E.g. back when Core2 came out prices seemed to me to be surprisingly low, presumably because AMD were starting to increase their market share because Netburst was a turkey. Now post Core2, Intel will have a lead until the K9 so they'll probably keep retail prices the same even though 45nm cuts production costs.
The other thing of course is that manufacturing cost is proportional to chip yield. So initially, the 45nm process will turn out less good chips than the old process which tends to eat into their cost savings until the glitches are ironed out. So maybe they need to tune the process before they use it for production.
Actually from TFA, photocopying is protected by unique serial number -
Mind you I don't understand why coupons.com trust the PC to generate the serial numbers and thus enforce the number of coupons rule. Anyone who knows anything about PCs knows that pretty much any scheme will get cracked eventually, because PC OSs don't really have any protection agains the owner hacking them. It seems like a better design would be to have a trusted server doll out blocks of serial numbers - possibly encrypting them with the clients public key. Then the PC could decrypt and print them out, but it wouldn't be able to generate extra ones. Another trusted server check the numbers for validity when the coupons are redeemed. Then hacking the PC doesn't matter, because it's not able to generate any extra serial numbers.
The encryption is just to make sure that only one client gets the block of serial numbers - it doesn't matter to coupons.com if two people get them since only one can redeem them, but it might annoy some honest user of the software if their coupons could not be redeemed because a hacker eavesdropped on the conversation to the server and beat them to the punch.
The nice thing about this scheme is that you make the serial number space very large for longish numbers but mostly full of invalid numbers. In fact only the numbers issued but not yet redeemed can be valid. In fact this is the security pay as you go phone cards use - the cell phone company prints cards with random and unique serial numbers and marks them valid in a database. Then the subscriber calls a voice server and enters the number. If it's in the database as valid it gets removed and the subscriber is credited with cash, otherwise it is rejected. With a 13 digit number, even if millions of coupons have been printed but not redeemed, you'd still have to try millions of times to guess a valid one. Which is easy to spot or prevent at the voice server.
Tbe best way to describe it is
...
Random Leaf Node: Hey! Root node! I think you should make all your data public!
Root node:
You know that the people who run Tor specifically ask you not to use it for bandwidth intensive stuff like downloading Ubuntu, right?
But as far as I can tell we only know of one architecture of life that actually works, i.e. the DNA/RNA/protein one so it seems like discovering or inventing any radically different ones is progress. Especially ones like this that sound as if they could bootstrap themselves out of lifeless interstellar dust - that seems to be the interesting thing about it. And if you could find a version of it that makes carbon based molecules as tools, it seems like you have a plausible explanation of how life got started on Earth via panspermia.
But if not, maybe some of the ideas will get reused to deduce other plausible bootstrap architecures.
I don't think that's really important. There's a deep problem with the origin of life, since the current DNA and protein based life is far to sophisticated to be the original. So there's a fair chance that it's not the first generation and it has simpler precursors.
Graham Cairns Smith talked about clay based life as essentially making organic molecules as tools which eventually took over. It's a poetic idea, particularly Richard Dawkins comment that our silicon based tools make eventually take on a life of their own and complete the cycle from Silicon to Carbon and back to Silicon based life. But I don't think the clay based life is really plausible - it's just too inflexible. But my guess is that there are earlier generations of 'life' out there. I use the quotes because they would would be hard to spot as life since they are far closer to boundary between complex chemistry and simple life.
And any research that discovers/invents alternative architectures for life may tell how they could possibly work.
Maybe you just converged asymptotically on a world view that fits the news sources you choose to read. That seems like a good trait in terms of evolution since your 30's are the time where you're supposed to have kids. Parents are supposed to be stable and stability requires that you believe that you understand the world. You can also pass on your world view to them.
And it's not like you're stuck with it forever - I know people in their 60's who were forced to essentially go through the convergence process again because the world changed around them - e.g. politically going from a naive liberalism to a world weary, cynical conservatism. Or from being apolitical to being rabibly left wing.
So don't worry, as you get older you won't continue to believe the things you believe now. You'll still live in interesting times as the double edged Chinese phrase has it. Much of the things you believe now will turn out to be catastophically wrong and an greater exposure to the world will force you to accept this.
The dielectric constant, e, of the vacuum inside the tube is not very high either.
This guy, who seems to know what he's talking about, said
http://members.misty.com/don/samflyhv.html
CyberDogs Inc offer dogs up to 120kg built in shotguns and wifi webcams. They have an collar that electrocutes them if they growl at employees with a RFID badges
You can monitor them with SNMP too, to see how many rounds they have fired and who they've eaten, should your company be hit by a lawsuit for some reason. As a bonus, the number of people forgetting their badges drops dramatically a week or so after introduction.
Can't you die from the voltages inside a colour TV?
I remember reading a long time ago that contact with the back of a colour TV tube was "invariably fatal". Mind you from your experience and a bit of Googling maybe they were just being overly cautious -
http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_safety.html
"TVs and monitors may have up to 35 KV on the CRT but the current is low - a couple of milliamps. However, the CRT capacitance can hold a painful charge for a long time. "
Elsewhere they mention that if you add a capacitor, it's dangerous, but so long as there's no capacitance connected, there isn't enough current available at 35kV to kill you.
He's probably just some paid Wintel shill though.
Except that since you're forced to give away the source code market forces will limit how much you can charge.
Imagine if my company makes some software and licenses it under the GPL. We make money out of maintainance fees. Initially we have copyright since we wrote it. But we accept some patches and either the contributors keep copyright or we assign all copyright to the FSF as they recommend. But either way we don't keep copyright on the software so we can't change the license. Now some other company can come along and make another distribution for less cash than we charge. And someone can do the same to them. Or people can just download it for free and not pay a penny.
So we essentially ended up competing with a free version of our own code. So clearly the amount we can charge is going to be less than it we chose a BSD license. We're even forced to give back any changes we make, so the marginal value of these will tend to zero. Not to mention that anyone that pays us to work knows that their competitors will get the work for free.
So while they say that charging is ok, the whole point of the license is to make the code so open that it's impossible proprietarize it enough to make any money from it. And in software the key to making money is to proprierarize the code you work on, because otherwise you end up competing with people that have low or zero overheads since they can just freeload off your work.
I've never heard anyone say GNU correctly in person (it's always G.N.U.), because it's such a terrible name and doesn't roll off the tongue like Linux. "Debian Sarge Guh-noo slash Linux", "Fedora Core Guh-noo slash Linux", "Damn Small Guh-noo slash Linux".
You can shorten it to just "GNU" or "Stallmanix" if you want.
I was thinking about current top 40 artists.
Then in scenario #1, I'll just invite the whole town over. There, now involves thousands of people, but still legal (pray my house is big enough). There's not a setup number of people that all of a sudden makes this go from legal to illegal, so even though I understand your point, it is not valid.
I don't think it's legal in the UK. Tolerated possibly but not legal. Certainly rented videos have a sticker on them that says not for public performance. But I don't know if it is enforced.
In the US if it is legal it's against the wishes of the copyright holders. Remember Jack Valenti's comment - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Presumably the courts didn't agree with him, so home taping is legal. But showing a video to the whole town is not home taping, and if you decided to do it, I suspect you have legal issues.
Law, unlike software, has loads of grey areas like this, and it's quite possible that showing a videotaped TV program to your family is legal whereas showing it to the whole town is not. And quite frankly if you use reductio ad absurdem tactics on fair use rights like claiming that showing a home taped TV program is the same as distributing to thousands of strangers over the internet, you don't deserve to have fair use rights.
Because in scenario 1 you share with a few friends. Actually, I've never done this - the nearest I've got is watching a rented movie with other people, never something I recorded.
Wherease in Scenario #2 I'm sharing a movie with hundreds of other people. And look at pirate bay - a popular torrent is downloaded by thousands of people over its lifetime.
It's completley disingenuous to say that the two are equivalent from the point of view of the copyright holder. #1 is rare and involves few people, #2 is common and involves thousands.
I agree! I hope GPL4 will have a clause that stops people using it for pragmatic as opposed to idealistic reasons.
The artists that are known by 75% of everyone are well known because some media company hyped them, not because of talent. So it's not too surprising that the media company ends with most of the money.
Yes... because that is the fault of copyright law, and not the artists, who sign over the rights to their works for a pittance
If there was no copyright of course, they wouldn't get a penny. The media companies would just mass produce CDs with their music, sell them to the public and keep all the money for themselves.
Kind of like Youtube/Napster does/did in fact.
But what about the cathedral and the bazaar? Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow? Surely only evil closed source software contains bugs?
Bagle is an interesting virus that affects both people and computers. Not only is it polymorphic in computer memory to evade virus scanners, the name is also polymorphic in English when infected people talk about it to confuse the uninfected.
The solution is to wear gloves when disinfecting infected systems. If someone like the unfortunate GP fumbles the name repeatedly, they are probably infected too and you should kill them and then burn their body. There are also some reports that people infected with Beagle spread misinformation and incite chaos to sabotage attempts at eradicating it.
- Easily select all emails from a date range with a simple command line (T~d dd/mm/yyyy-dd/mm/yyyy);
You can do this in a GUI of course - sort by date, scroll to the start of the range, hold down shift and use the arrow keys or PgUp, PgDn to select.
- Open and edit any part of the email, including attachments;
But most of the attachments I get are office documents, and you can't edit those in Mutt. Or pictures, but Thunderbird displays them inline.
- Reply, forward or bounce multiple messages at once.
I haven't ever tried this in Thunderbird. I think it will forward them all as attachments in one message though, which is pretty useless. I can see if you're an admin on a server, batch forward, reply and bounce is useful though.
- Open any mailbox from any user on the server (as root, of course) without having to configure an email account;
Another admin type thing.
Ok, I see what you mean. If you're a mail admin then this sort of thing is useful. But for regular users, not so much. But I know people who swear that Mutt, Vi/Emacs and other character mode stuff are more powerful than Thunderbird and UltraEdit for example.
And it seems to be a European thing too - geeks there tend to use Vi or Emacs, but if you go to Asia everyone seems to use Ultraedit. Which is pretty slick - you can easily use it without taking your hands off the keyboard due to accelerator keys. E.g. the first time you use Find in files you go through the menu, but afterwards you know it's Ctrl+Shift+F and then tab though the dialog fields and use the cursor keys to scroll through the history.
In Europe I suspect it's a geek credibility thing mostly. That and the fact that since you need to invest an enormous amount of time in learning to use a geek tool without it trashing your work, you become fiercely loyal to it. Much like a battered wife learns becomes loyal to her brutish husband once she learns to avoid provoking him.
Do you also want to question why we're still using bourne compatible shells, vi derivatives, or Perl?
;-)
Umm yeah, why are people still using those
It's a tremendously powerful email client, no other comes even close.
For personal email I use Gmail or Thunderbird, thought.
In what sense is it powerful? Why do you like it? I looked it up on Wikipedia and found
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(e-mail_client)
Sounds ghastly really. What can it do that Thunderbird can't?
Well some of us care about the orphans in Uganda, and some of us just want to edit text I guess.
Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the second camp.