From TFA: ".. and that they struggle to hear much difference over 192kbps MP3 in many situations."
That's the whole point, isn't it? So what if a (very) large percentage of the music sounds "fine" in MP3? That still leaves the rest where you can tell "something is off" and in some cases it's just plain annoying.
Typical examples include high quality recordings of classical music in rooms with characteristic reverberation (the reverb is lost, resulting in location of instruments being hard to pinpoint, unlike in the lossless original on good hardware). Or live recordings of crowds cheering over "open" music, like acoustical guitar and song (applause and cheering tends to sound like it's been caught in too tight an envelope). Or heavy distortion in high density music like really noisy techno or very fuzzy guitars (as in stoner rock or some metal).
If you listen to none of these and basically only care for heavily compressed pop music with clear production, you're likely not to care. If you happen to like these more than anything else, you're probably hating MP3. On average, most people won't care most of the time, but whenever they do care, they'll wish they had chosen a lossless format. It's not like we don't have the space to store it, after all.
Streaming is another story altogether of course, the cost of size factors in differently.
".. especially the fear in relation to criminal acts"
So yes, more so than most criminals I would imagine. A normal criminal only fears getting caught and perhaps going to jail if their lawyer sucks.
A terrorist has far more to lose from their point of view, so if this figures into it at all, I would expect elevated fear levels. Unless of course their religious belief includes a rock-solid belief that their deity of choice will get them on board safely. Basically, in my opinion the whole religion thing is a bit irrational. I assume terrorist networks will use this research to figure out things to make their suicide bomber believe, to minimize the feeling they are doing something criminal.
So, let me get this straight: you're saying Reiser murdered these people -because- he knew people would joke about it on/. and that somehow made it worth his while?
Or are you saying that relatives of his victims will frequent/. and be offended by people opening up old wounds? Unlikely in my book and others have already remarked that they're free to move on to the next comment. Also, that would hardly be "at the expense of".
At worst, the joke was in poor taste (I don't think so, but I get you do). And there's no arguing taste, bud.
I was saying: has my (heart)'s because instead of having to reverse engineer everything you want in there but don't need to change, you can just leave all the code that's fine and add you clever modifications.
You can do this back and forth all year. The end result: a comprehensive history and family tree of applications. Fun, yes. Useful, maybe.
But the ultimate conclusion is likely to be that very few software companies ever create very original applications. Most software (most products in general in fact) out there is merely a variation on what was already out there. Combining features of other software; or changing the way in which some features work and the releasing the product as the latest innovation.
Several people have remarked "Because you can". Someone stated "Because you can and you can benefit from it" as a better reason.
More particularly, I would say that "showing you can" shows you that it's at all possible to replace whatever the device was running. Immediate utility isn't even required. So, if anyone thinks of a better interface or new function that -would- improve the device as a whole, they now know it's possible to do it. They don't have to stop at "I wonder..."
It's the strangest thing that people allow the internet to convince them that there's no longer a need to experience things first-hand, especially with something like a museum.
I know I'm on/., so this will probably fall on dry earth here, but at some point you may find out that actual sex with a living, breathing person is actually a worthwhile addition to browsing pr0n. And driving a car at breakneck speeds actually adds a bit of a thrill when compared to a round of Need for Speed.
You'll have to trust me when I tell you it's pretty much the same thing with museums vs. Wikipedia articles...
The issue is, of those 13 million people, how many people would individually have the $100 million it cost to produce, and would be willing to spend $100 million to have a game produced, if after it was produced anyone could copy it.
That's not what the parent is saying, twisting it into this just makes it a ridiculous problem. The "one individual" that would pay that amount is the company that has it developed and thinks it can turn a profit by selling enough copies.
Bullshit. How many commercial vendors selling copied media exist and openly operate in the United States. None.
The parent merely stated "The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.". It's a bit of a leap from "circles" to "commercial vendors" and I think we all know there's individuals profiting from distributing illegal software in virtually every university, school or playground.
It's exactly the social and distributed nature of software piracy that makes it so hard to fight it. That some people along the way are making a (tiny) profit is not the issue. The issue is that hardly anyone seems to think copying software or media hurts businesses.
Sadly, Poingggg is voicing an ever more common popular Dutch adage: "most of the world's current problems are America's" fault. And an American making a quip about it will probably garner little more than a "Typical" from the likes of Poingggg.
Being Dutch myself, I would like to add that Poingggg is wrong, or at least woefully incomplete. We -are- required by law to be able to show our ID, however we are not by law required to carry it. This may seem silly, since you need to carry it to be able to show it, but what it means is that police are not allowed to ask for ID unless you are under suspicion of some other offense (that is, other than not carrying your ID).
Also, the ID produced does not have to be a passport. Dutch driver's license or Dutch identity cards are also accepted valid IDs. Additionally, the law only applies to people over the age of 14.
So, the only people at serious risk from getting their ID's copied as described (when not using a tinfoil wallet) are people in the age range 15-18 (impossible to get a valid driver's license), foreigners (only a passport, or some specific documents pertaining to asylum and long-term stay will do) and people unable or unwilling to get a driver's license.
And sofar, the only people fined for not being able to produce the ID have been - to my knowledge - people who refused to produce it (even when allowed to retrieve it from elsewhere) or people who committed some other punishable offense in addition to not carrying the ID.
Really now, the only benefit the Koreans could have from this data still being public (assuming it would be live) is detecting launches of US missiles against them. I hope I'm right in assuming such a launch would only take place as a countermeasure or possibly retaliation (let's hope they're a bit smarter than that) and in either case, wouldn't you want early warning crowdsourced as well as from the military?
Frankly I don't see how anyone could have much of a strategic benefit from keeping this information in the dark, unless they planned on striking first... Well deniability of knowledge of the facts after the fact for political gain perhaps, but that seems a stretch.
So we may see new movies with virtual actors looking like Bogart, Wayne, Hepburn, Garbo and many others.
Fixed that for you.
As many people have pointed out, these virtual actors won't be these people, they just look like them. Their acting performance will only be as good as the combination of the software creating them and possibly the actors controlling them. Motion capture, digital overlay, whatever technology will be used to turn the actor's input into a rendering that looks like a famous actor from the past.
I fail to see why it's relevant to suggest that the hackers in question were mostly Chinese. It's not like there is any proof they were put up to it by the Chinese government, so it seems to matter little - if anything - whether they're based in China, Russia, the Netherlands (where I happen to live) or the US even.
This is just politics and Slashdot merrily joins the choir that sings the anti-Chinese song. Excellent journalism, as usual.
The only issue here is that China seems to be doing little to fight this type of crime within it's borders on the net. Asking (or even forcing) China to do better is certainly fair, suggesting that its "the Chinese" doing the hacking isn't.
I actually read a paper with the article in it, the Dutch Volkskrant carried 2 articles, one as local news and one in the science section.
Both articles state that 3.8 meters per second on average is actually slightly LOWER than usual, not higher as the summary suggests. Since there is an inverse cubic relationship between wind speed and energy yield (i.e. halve the wind speed and only get an eighth in energy), it's not straightforward to say what the results would have been in a windy year.
The articles state that the larger models are sufficiently efficient to make a profit over one or two decades, but that none of the tested models actually break even in terms of overall energy savings, considering the amount of energy required to produce the windmills. Personally, I think that's hard to say, since you would no longer be needing the alternative infrastructure, but that's what the authors stated.
Also, note that this is news from a newspaper, not a scientific publication, so there might be some details missing that can really skew the results.
Doesn't matter in this case though, since the summary can't even get the details that WERE provided right...
Many games, open world games in particular, put you in the place of the protagonist. Or, at the very least, you play the persona of an observer in the game world.
This type of storytelling seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction on story telling in this type of game format. When watching a movie, or reading a book, the same limitations can occur, but there are many variations.
Having a story in a movie be about many characters never bothers me, at least not in the sense that I'm wondering who is holding the camera that allows me to see the story. As a disembodied observer, the story unfolds itself just as convincingly as it would from the point of view of some of the characters. The game can focus on manipulating the game world, changing the rules or even just tracking several characters in an interesting way, effectively playing 'director' of an interactive movie.
".. Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch" hmm, Phatch? Never heard of that one, but since it's being mentioned in one breath with those two awesome products... Lands me on a page of a utility cobbled together by the winner of the prize himself, Stani. Offering downloads for 3 releases of Ubuntu and nothing more, unless you count the oodles of Google ads.
Guess all he really needed was Python, PIL, pyCairo, GIMP and Inkscape and then some way to do a little batch processing. Which is not to say that I don't like the fact that a coder won a design contest by coding his own tools that were perfect for the job...
Yes, it's a shame that this time-honored tradition of good programming will be lost to humanity. Back in the days, when people still knew how to program...
Besides that, your argument is flawed. Even if we do hit a physical or cost limit on RAM, that won't imply that less RAM will get more expensive all of a sudden. Good programming will never become a requirement for the same reasons that it was before.
There are plenty of other reasons for good programming right now and none of those have anything to do with the price of RAM.
Personally, I think the problem is with the fact that people still want shinier toys with more needless features. At some point, people will tire of the complexity of their toys. I think some of that may already be showing, since people seem to be critical about Vista for more reasons than just the need for insane hardware. Same goes with reluctance to upgrade office applications or web browsers.
No kidding... neither am, I but this is pretty basic stuff here. How does something like that earn +5 insightful??
The use of nice bold headings, a numbered list and proper quoting earned them 4 points. The last point was scored by answering their own question for the lazy/. crowd.
An informative post can still be wrong. You say that the longer a thread runs, the probability of any topic coming up increases. You attribute this to every topic coming up eventually.
As others have remarked, any thread that is actually about something is likely to remain close to that topic and eventually endless repeat earlier statements. I think/. directly proves that threads can actually go on endlessly about the same topic, although not always the topic the OP intended. So I have to disagree with the premise that every topic will come up eventually, this is not 'the way probability works'.
But even in the more basic statement you're making, you're probabilistically wrong. Even if the topic is likely to come up eventually, this likelihood does not increase over time, except if you assume the need of the speakers to start talking about something they haven't mentioned sofar.
It does no more than the odds of throwing a six with a die increase as you throw it more often. Obviously the odds of you not throwing a six that often are tiny beforehand, but as you keep throwing the odds for every individual casting of the die remain the same (not accounting for wear of a physical die).
Godwin's Law makes sense in that it makes a statement about the specific probability of nazism being brought up and it proposes that this probability actually approaches 1 for -any- discussion. Whether that's true or not is besides the point; it definitely does make sense.
By the way, you actually avoided what the parent poster said they wanted to do: you brought up nazism and thereby adding evidence in favor of Godwin's Law. (or rather, failing to provide evidence disproving it) This thread won't violate the law now...
Interesting theory but wrong. Or at least partially, since in my mother tongue (weak pun intended) the word for mother is 'mem'. I'm betting German babies have an even harder time with Mutti, although a German/. reader may be able to tell us more about babies picking that as their 'first word'.
Of course I'd have to agree that it's probably no coincidence that in so many languages, the kiddy talk word for mother is ma-ma, but there does seem to be a little more going on than just wishful thinking on the part of the parents. I'd say positive feedback from the parents whenever something is uttered that sounds like a word is a strong factor in whatever the baby selects to repeat.
This is where someone steps in and tells us that apparently, toddlers may learn language with neural networks and we pretend to understand the brain a little better, which is about as helpful as comparing language acquisition to data mining...
And since we can all agree to both the argument against letting Joe Average fly a vehicle and the argument about an autopilot being unable to handle many emergencies, we can just put the whole flying car concept to bed.
It's not going to happen anytime soon, at least not until we've developed sufficiently intelligent technology that we would actually entrust with our lives. Would you get into a 747 that's being flown by wire, 100%?
It reminds me of a popular joke that used to be told to computer science students by one of my favorite teachers: 3 IT guys get into an airplane. In their row, an important looking guy, who turns out to own the airline strikes up a conversation. "Boy, I'm really excited about this flight, we just put a new autopilot system in place." One of the guys starts to sweat profusely, makes up an excuse and gets out of the plane. "In fact, aren't you guys part of the company that developed it for us?" Now the second guy start looking really uncomfortable and mumbles something about leaving his workstation logged in, while getting off the plane. "Hey, why did both of your friends leave, yet you are still here?" The final guy responds: "I'm fairly certain we won't even get off the ground."
- Mount the hard drive as specified in the manual, in a bay that's intended for it, with adequate cooling, depending on the other hardware.
- Make sure the other hardware has proper specs. A crappy controller or shoddy PSU can ruin your harddrive.
- Get decent surge protection, put your case on a solid base, out of reach of children, pets and your own feet.
- Keep the case relatively free of dust and don't smoke in the room that has the system with the hard drive in it.
- Install 2 smaller drives in a RAID mirror array and configure the relevant software to notify you when one of the drives still fails.
If you follow these instructions, you won't have any trouble at all. This problem is not for the HDD manufacturers to solve per se. Ofcourse they can contribute, but nobody else can make the drives larger, whereas all of the above helps to make them more reliable. I think they have their priorities straight, considering that hard drives hardly ever fail if you treat them properly.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA: ".. and that they struggle to hear much difference over 192kbps MP3 in many situations."
That's the whole point, isn't it? So what if a (very) large percentage of the music sounds "fine" in MP3? That still leaves the rest where you can tell "something is off" and in some cases it's just plain annoying.
Typical examples include high quality recordings of classical music in rooms with characteristic reverberation (the reverb is lost, resulting in location of instruments being hard to pinpoint, unlike in the lossless original on good hardware). Or live recordings of crowds cheering over "open" music, like acoustical guitar and song (applause and cheering tends to sound like it's been caught in too tight an envelope). Or heavy distortion in high density music like really noisy techno or very fuzzy guitars (as in stoner rock or some metal).
If you listen to none of these and basically only care for heavily compressed pop music with clear production, you're likely not to care. If you happen to like these more than anything else, you're probably hating MP3. On average, most people won't care most of the time, but whenever they do care, they'll wish they had chosen a lossless format. It's not like we don't have the space to store it, after all.
Streaming is another story altogether of course, the cost of size factors in differently.
Greetings, Grismar
".. especially the fear in relation to criminal acts"
So yes, more so than most criminals I would imagine. A normal criminal only fears getting caught and perhaps going to jail if their lawyer sucks.
A terrorist has far more to lose from their point of view, so if this figures into it at all, I would expect elevated fear levels. Unless of course their religious belief includes a rock-solid belief that their deity of choice will get them on board safely. Basically, in my opinion the whole religion thing is a bit irrational. I assume terrorist networks will use this research to figure out things to make their suicide bomber believe, to minimize the feeling they are doing something criminal.
So, let me get this straight: you're saying Reiser murdered these people -because- he knew people would joke about it on /. and that somehow made it worth his while?
Or are you saying that relatives of his victims will frequent /. and be offended by people opening up old wounds? Unlikely in my book and others have already remarked that they're free to move on to the next comment. Also, that would hardly be "at the expense of".
At worst, the joke was in poor taste (I don't think so, but I get you do). And there's no arguing taste, bud.
Crap, don't use < in your posts...
I was saying: has my (heart)'s because instead of having to reverse engineer everything you want in there but don't need to change, you can just leave all the code that's fine and add you clever modifications.
You can do this back and forth all year. The end result: a comprehensive history and family tree of applications. Fun, yes. Useful, maybe.
But the ultimate conclusion is likely to be that very few software companies ever create very original applications. Most software (most products in general in fact) out there is merely a variation on what was already out there. Combining features of other software; or changing the way in which some features work and the releasing the product as the latest innovation.
This is exactly why open source has my
Several people have remarked "Because you can". Someone stated "Because you can and you can benefit from it" as a better reason.
More particularly, I would say that "showing you can" shows you that it's at all possible to replace whatever the device was running. Immediate utility isn't even required. So, if anyone thinks of a better interface or new function that -would- improve the device as a whole, they now know it's possible to do it. They don't have to stop at "I wonder ..."
It's the strangest thing that people allow the internet to convince them that there's no longer a need to experience things first-hand, especially with something like a museum.
I know I'm on /., so this will probably fall on dry earth here, but at some point you may find out that actual sex with a living, breathing person is actually a worthwhile addition to browsing pr0n. And driving a car at breakneck speeds actually adds a bit of a thrill when compared to a round of Need for Speed.
You'll have to trust me when I tell you it's pretty much the same thing with museums vs. Wikipedia articles...
Very effective use of straw man arguments there.
The issue is, of those 13 million people, how many people would individually have the $100 million it cost to produce, and would be willing to spend $100 million to have a game produced, if after it was produced anyone could copy it.
That's not what the parent is saying, twisting it into this just makes it a ridiculous problem. The "one individual" that would pay that amount is the company that has it developed and thinks it can turn a profit by selling enough copies.
Bullshit. How many commercial vendors selling copied media exist and openly operate in the United States. None.
The parent merely stated "The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.". It's a bit of a leap from "circles" to "commercial vendors" and I think we all know there's individuals profiting from distributing illegal software in virtually every university, school or playground.
It's exactly the social and distributed nature of software piracy that makes it so hard to fight it. That some people along the way are making a (tiny) profit is not the issue. The issue is that hardly anyone seems to think copying software or media hurts businesses.
Sadly, Poingggg is voicing an ever more common popular Dutch adage: "most of the world's current problems are America's" fault. And an American making a quip about it will probably garner little more than a "Typical" from the likes of Poingggg.
Being Dutch myself, I would like to add that Poingggg is wrong, or at least woefully incomplete. We -are- required by law to be able to show our ID, however we are not by law required to carry it. This may seem silly, since you need to carry it to be able to show it, but what it means is that police are not allowed to ask for ID unless you are under suspicion of some other offense (that is, other than not carrying your ID).
Also, the ID produced does not have to be a passport. Dutch driver's license or Dutch identity cards are also accepted valid IDs. Additionally, the law only applies to people over the age of 14.
So, the only people at serious risk from getting their ID's copied as described (when not using a tinfoil wallet) are people in the age range 15-18 (impossible to get a valid driver's license), foreigners (only a passport, or some specific documents pertaining to asylum and long-term stay will do) and people unable or unwilling to get a driver's license.
And sofar, the only people fined for not being able to produce the ID have been - to my knowledge - people who refused to produce it (even when allowed to retrieve it from elsewhere) or people who committed some other punishable offense in addition to not carrying the ID.
Really now, the only benefit the Koreans could have from this data still being public (assuming it would be live) is detecting launches of US missiles against them. I hope I'm right in assuming such a launch would only take place as a countermeasure or possibly retaliation (let's hope they're a bit smarter than that) and in either case, wouldn't you want early warning crowdsourced as well as from the military? Frankly I don't see how anyone could have much of a strategic benefit from keeping this information in the dark, unless they planned on striking first... Well deniability of knowledge of the facts after the fact for political gain perhaps, but that seems a stretch.
So we may see new movies with virtual actors looking like Bogart, Wayne, Hepburn, Garbo and many others.
Fixed that for you.
As many people have pointed out, these virtual actors won't be these people, they just look like them. Their acting performance will only be as good as the combination of the software creating them and possibly the actors controlling them. Motion capture, digital overlay, whatever technology will be used to turn the actor's input into a rendering that looks like a famous actor from the past.
Sounds like good news for impersonators.
I fail to see why it's relevant to suggest that the hackers in question were mostly Chinese. It's not like there is any proof they were put up to it by the Chinese government, so it seems to matter little - if anything - whether they're based in China, Russia, the Netherlands (where I happen to live) or the US even.
This is just politics and Slashdot merrily joins the choir that sings the anti-Chinese song. Excellent journalism, as usual.
The only issue here is that China seems to be doing little to fight this type of crime within it's borders on the net. Asking (or even forcing) China to do better is certainly fair, suggesting that its "the Chinese" doing the hacking isn't.
I actually read a paper with the article in it, the Dutch Volkskrant carried 2 articles, one as local news and one in the science section.
Both articles state that 3.8 meters per second on average is actually slightly LOWER than usual, not higher as the summary suggests. Since there is an inverse cubic relationship between wind speed and energy yield (i.e. halve the wind speed and only get an eighth in energy), it's not straightforward to say what the results would have been in a windy year.
The articles state that the larger models are sufficiently efficient to make a profit over one or two decades, but that none of the tested models actually break even in terms of overall energy savings, considering the amount of energy required to produce the windmills. Personally, I think that's hard to say, since you would no longer be needing the alternative infrastructure, but that's what the authors stated.
Also, note that this is news from a newspaper, not a scientific publication, so there might be some details missing that can really skew the results.
Doesn't matter in this case though, since the summary can't even get the details that WERE provided right...
Many games, open world games in particular, put you in the place of the protagonist. Or, at the very least, you play the persona of an observer in the game world.
This type of storytelling seems to me to be an unnecessary restriction on story telling in this type of game format. When watching a movie, or reading a book, the same limitations can occur, but there are many variations.
Having a story in a movie be about many characters never bothers me, at least not in the sense that I'm wondering who is holding the camera that allows me to see the story. As a disembodied observer, the story unfolds itself just as convincingly as it would from the point of view of some of the characters. The game can focus on manipulating the game world, changing the rules or even just tracking several characters in an interesting way, effectively playing 'director' of an interactive movie.
Oh great, gay-hate modded Score:5, Funny.
Way to go /.
".. Gimp, Inkscape and Phatch" hmm, Phatch? Never heard of that one, but since it's being mentioned in one breath with those two awesome products... Lands me on a page of a utility cobbled together by the winner of the prize himself, Stani. Offering downloads for 3 releases of Ubuntu and nothing more, unless you count the oodles of Google ads.
Guess all he really needed was Python, PIL, pyCairo, GIMP and Inkscape and then some way to do a little batch processing. Which is not to say that I don't like the fact that a coder won a design contest by coding his own tools that were perfect for the job...
Awww, everybody got their hopes up and it wasn't even April 1. Quick, find something that -is- wrong with the title so we can save face!
Yes, it's a shame that this time-honored tradition of good programming will be lost to humanity. Back in the days, when people still knew how to program ...
Besides that, your argument is flawed. Even if we do hit a physical or cost limit on RAM, that won't imply that less RAM will get more expensive all of a sudden. Good programming will never become a requirement for the same reasons that it was before.
There are plenty of other reasons for good programming right now and none of those have anything to do with the price of RAM.
Personally, I think the problem is with the fact that people still want shinier toys with more needless features. At some point, people will tire of the complexity of their toys. I think some of that may already be showing, since people seem to be critical about Vista for more reasons than just the need for insane hardware. Same goes with reluctance to upgrade office applications or web browsers.
On the other hand,
Hey babe, wanna go for a ride in my collider?
vs.
Hey babe, wanna go see my fighter jet?
C is definitely unpopular, but the supportes of B would rather have him than A.
If B-voters would rather have C than A, they shouldn't have acted like twats and gave both of them 2. Instead they should just give C 3 and A 1.
How 7+4+1 adds up to 7+2 or 9+0, I don't really understand, so perhaps I'm clueless as to what you're talking about here.
No kidding... neither am, I but this is pretty basic stuff here. How does something like that earn +5 insightful??
The use of nice bold headings, a numbered list and proper quoting earned them 4 points. The last point was scored by answering their own question for the lazy /. crowd.
An informative post can still be wrong. You say that the longer a thread runs, the probability of any topic coming up increases. You attribute this to every topic coming up eventually.
As others have remarked, any thread that is actually about something is likely to remain close to that topic and eventually endless repeat earlier statements. I think /. directly proves that threads can actually go on endlessly about the same topic, although not always the topic the OP intended. So I have to disagree with the premise that every topic will come up eventually, this is not 'the way probability works'.
But even in the more basic statement you're making, you're probabilistically wrong. Even if the topic is likely to come up eventually, this likelihood does not increase over time, except if you assume the need of the speakers to start talking about something they haven't mentioned sofar.
It does no more than the odds of throwing a six with a die increase as you throw it more often. Obviously the odds of you not throwing a six that often are tiny beforehand, but as you keep throwing the odds for every individual casting of the die remain the same (not accounting for wear of a physical die).
Godwin's Law makes sense in that it makes a statement about the specific probability of nazism being brought up and it proposes that this probability actually approaches 1 for -any- discussion. Whether that's true or not is besides the point; it definitely does make sense.
By the way, you actually avoided what the parent poster said they wanted to do: you brought up nazism and thereby adding evidence in favor of Godwin's Law. (or rather, failing to provide evidence disproving it) This thread won't violate the law now...
Interesting theory but wrong. Or at least partially, since in my mother tongue (weak pun intended) the word for mother is 'mem'. I'm betting German babies have an even harder time with Mutti, although a German /. reader may be able to tell us more about babies picking that as their 'first word'.
Of course I'd have to agree that it's probably no coincidence that in so many languages, the kiddy talk word for mother is ma-ma, but there does seem to be a little more going on than just wishful thinking on the part of the parents. I'd say positive feedback from the parents whenever something is uttered that sounds like a word is a strong factor in whatever the baby selects to repeat.
This is where someone steps in and tells us that apparently, toddlers may learn language with neural networks and we pretend to understand the brain a little better, which is about as helpful as comparing language acquisition to data mining...
And since we can all agree to both the argument against letting Joe Average fly a vehicle and the argument about an autopilot being unable to handle many emergencies, we can just put the whole flying car concept to bed.
It's not going to happen anytime soon, at least not until we've developed sufficiently intelligent technology that we would actually entrust with our lives. Would you get into a 747 that's being flown by wire, 100%?
It reminds me of a popular joke that used to be told to computer science students by one of my favorite teachers: 3 IT guys get into an airplane. In their row, an important looking guy, who turns out to own the airline strikes up a conversation. "Boy, I'm really excited about this flight, we just put a new autopilot system in place." One of the guys starts to sweat profusely, makes up an excuse and gets out of the plane. "In fact, aren't you guys part of the company that developed it for us?" Now the second guy start looking really uncomfortable and mumbles something about leaving his workstation logged in, while getting off the plane. "Hey, why did both of your friends leave, yet you are still here?" The final guy responds: "I'm fairly certain we won't even get off the ground."
If you want more reliability:
- Mount the hard drive as specified in the manual, in a bay that's intended for it, with adequate cooling, depending on the other hardware.
- Make sure the other hardware has proper specs. A crappy controller or shoddy PSU can ruin your harddrive.
- Get decent surge protection, put your case on a solid base, out of reach of children, pets and your own feet.
- Keep the case relatively free of dust and don't smoke in the room that has the system with the hard drive in it.
- Install 2 smaller drives in a RAID mirror array and configure the relevant software to notify you when one of the drives still fails.
If you follow these instructions, you won't have any trouble at all. This problem is not for the HDD manufacturers to solve per se. Ofcourse they can contribute, but nobody else can make the drives larger, whereas all of the above helps to make them more reliable. I think they have their priorities straight, considering that hard drives hardly ever fail if you treat them properly.