As several posters before you have pointed out, there was no injunction whatsoever against any US-based organisation; TFS is misleading. The injunction was brought up against a german website, not wikipedia.org.
What is a racial opinion? What are races anyway? The concept of "human races" has a long and dark history, it has never done any good to anyone, except that some people can claim themselves superior and others inferior. It only serves to de-humanise whole nations or other groups followed by the inevitable extermination campaign. Pretty much every nation, past or present, that has or ever has had lust for power and domination, has used this strategy. Now if you don't mind, Germany does not want to repeat this horrendous mistake by letting demagogues rise. There is a lot of evil hiding inside every population, and it's called indifference. This evil is going strong in Western nations nowadays, and the more important it is that such people need to be stopped in their tracks. And you, Anonymous Coward, wherever you live, just hope your country never needs to get its own Hitler to realize this.
"Alternate versions" of the Holocaust are to the actual Holocaust what Intelligent Design is to Evolution, only infinitely worse.
What the OP refers to, IIRC, is a story element of the PC game Deus Ex. Gray Death is a disease. A cure exists, but it is monopolized by its creators, thus controlling the unwashed masses. It's all a big conspiracy involving the government and that corporation. "Gray Death" is less a story about the dangers of technology than about the possible dangers of power monopolies.
BS. The discussion is under full steam both in public and in science, and some believe it might become the next Frankenfood in terms of public backlash and rejection because of mostly uninformed hype in all directions (positive and negative). The reality is, nano-sized particles have been around since shortly after the creation of the universe, they are nothing fundamentally new, and anybody who claims otherwise is ignorant and/or a liar, erhm, needs to check his facts again. Think carbon nanotubes: Originally, they have been discovered in ordinary soot. This means, they have been existing at least since the first time organic matter burned up in flames and they were being inhaled by humans since humans have been sitting around fireplaces roasting marshmallows and pissing it out afterwards.
Newly designed particles which did not exist in nature or only in neglibile concentration obviously should require testing before they are used in products, i.e. released into the environment. However, you don't need new laws to ensure that or to sort out responsibilities if something goes wrong; it could be regulated like usual chemistry, because most of the time it is usual chemistry. Of course, if a certain country's legislature is somehow lobbied into effectively not creating or enforcing such laws, then you have a problem. But then again, in such a case you're having a far greater problem with your system anyway.
First off, I am aware of Newton's laws. That being said, it doesn't have to apply here to the extent that is always described, i.e., "if a bullet knocks the victim 10 feet through the air, the same has to happen to the one firing the gun" That may be true in a micro-gravity system where there is almost no resistance to momentum (which makes fist fighting in zero g almost pointless). So I doubt the reasoning, for mainly 2 reasons: Consider, for example, medieval catapults, Trebuchets, whatever. They released enough kinetic energy to smash city walls of stone, yet they were not destroyed by this energy themselves. Where the energy goes depends on the weapon design and, in case of hand-held kinetic weapons, on the posture of the marksman. If one holds a powerful gun casually and unprepared while firing, it's no surprise to see it flinging out of one's hand. Hold it tightly and in correct posture, and the gun barely moves.
Another reason: I have served my time in the Bundeswehr, the German army. Our trainer in basic training told us why modern battle helmets (in Germany, at least) have a kind of safety latch on the chin strap which opens and releases the helmet when a certain amount of pull is applied to the opposing ends of the latch. According to our trainer, the reason for this provision is that during WW II soldiers died because a rifle shot happened to graze their helmet and break the wearer's neck, because the helmet was strapped tightly to the wearer's head. And it just might make sense too: If you fire a strong rifle, you have the inertia of your whole body and posture to absorb the released kinetic energy, whereas the hit helmet and head would be a local, much lighter system which can absorb a lot less momentum and accelerate to much higher velocities. The neck, being the pivotal point which connects the moving head/helmet system and the fixed body system, would be the weak point and subject to leverage.
FTA: "It turns out what people are looking for is something is something that has the full functionality of a PC," he said. "Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown up PC... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for[sic] hand cranks for power"
Uhm, as opposed to be dependant on a power grid infrastructure, centralized power plants, money to pay for the power, and whatnot? Truly an ugly piece of competition diss.
There is virtually no hassle to register a free account. Virtually is the keyword. This little hassle is what might reduce the creation of flamebait or other nonsense articles. If you are going to create a legit article, then I'd wager you have enough determination to take this little step anyway, so there's no problem in that respect, either.
Yeah I remember that one. Wasn't one of the Japanes divisions called "23rd Tamagotchi Division", nicknamed "Devil Spawns of Infernal Evil" (translation) or somesuch? Also, who could forget the dreaded "Pokemon Legion". More recently, the "Hello Kitty" spec-ops have joined the fight as well. The race isn't going too well for the Chinese, eh?
I think conventional silicon semiconductors might never see bottom-up fabrication, for a couple of reasons:
a) There is too much money invested in the traditional top-down process, and
b) the industry will not abandon a proven concept for at best marginal improvements in a dying technology. As we know, silicone is doomed to fail as keeper of Moore's Law, because you can only reduce features to so such and such dimensions before tunneling effects kick in, heat ablation becomes an insurmountable problem, and the statistics of impurity induction fails in practice. These limits are hard-coded in the laws of Physics as we understand them, and cannot easily, as of today, be engineered around, if at all.
c) Silicone and especially silicone in semiconductors (thus including statistical impurities of other elements) is not a rigid, defined atomic grid, which is pretty much a requirement for a bottom up fabrication. Bottom up directs every atom or molecule to a specific, well-known place where it then remains, which simply doesn't apply in a material that's almost a liquid, constantly rearranging its atomic structure, especially at temperatures of a working CPU.
Of course there are other materials that could be used as semiconductors, like diamond, which will make a far superior material in every respect. But as long as there is so much money in silicone and as long as diamond wafer fabrication remains in its infancy, silicone will be the way to go. But eventually, the semiconductor industry will have to make the jump to diamond or some other material, to maintain Moore's Law of transistor density.
I prefer an analogy I came up with for myself, being sick of all the "width of a hair" anal-ogies I so often read. Maybe it's just as useless, because in one or the other direction, you'll always have to face distances that are far from what is important in everyday life. Ok, here it goes:
The moon has a minimum distance to Earth of around 360.000 km.
The International Space Station has a minimum orbit to Earth of around 350 km.
The pillars of the Millau Viaduct are 340 meters tall.
If we take the minimum distance to the moon as our reference meter, then the ISS would orbit Earth at around 1 millimeter, the mentioned bridge would have pillars of slightly less than 1 micrometer, and finally a ruler of 35 centimeter length or (a little less than) the circumference of a compact disc would be 1 nanometer.
The term has, over the last years, become something of a catch-all phrase for all things below 100 nm, also including fairly ordinary chemistry, unfortunately. Originally, the term was invented by Norio Taniguchi, but broadly popularized by Eric Drexler with the famous book "Engines of Creation" (available for free as in beer at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html). "Engines" was over the top in some respects and often criticized, but even ardent opponents of Drexler's vision of nanotech like the recently deceased Richard Smalley admit they have been brought into nanotechnology by this very book. Back in the days of "Engines", nanotechnology was strictly confined to the not yet developed "mass-manufacturing of devices to atomic precision and specification".
Note that Drexler himself has presumably ceded the term to its current usage and has called Intel's 90nm chips "nanotechnology", although it bears no resemblence whatsoever to Engines-style nanotech. He prefers "zetatech" (mega, tera, peta, exa, zeta) nowadays because of the quantity of atoms involved, but I think it's rarely used. Molecular Manufacturing is the preferred term for what used to be Nanotechnology. Let's see how many more rearguard action Nanotechnology has yet to fight before it becomes reality at last.
There is not a single mentioning of the Pen and Paper nature of the RPGs TFA is talking about. I've been playing some of these myself, for years, but it actually took me a couple of sentences before I knew they TFS was not talking about character generation in computer games.
What you say? The "real world" in the headline should've ticked me off? Dude, to me, the opposite of "real world" has become "ISP down" or "some asshat roommate plugged me out of the LAN" or something to that effect.
First of all: prescriptive linguistics is not bound to induce linguistic stasis, it can be and has been intended to force a change in a language. This alone makes the issue more one of how much should the government interfere with everyday life, not one of whether government should conserve their state language against "foreign influence", whatever that may be.
Now what strict prescriptivist critics and advocates both fail to grasp: The evolution of a language common to one cultural or sub-cultural group is exclusively driven by the people of that respective group, in the most direct, democratic sense. Ultimately, no number of laws and recommendations will have lasting influence on how a natural every-day language evolves or does not evolve unless they mirror the majority's opinion (in which case the laws have been irrelevant to begin with anyway). Beware the day when that changes, for then "1984" will have come to full reality, because then The Man will have taken control of your thoughts. If you control language, the tool of your thoughts, then all your brains are belong to us, if you so prefer.
BellSouth wants to create demand where there was none before, and profit off it. While I had no problem with their plans if it would really put no site at a disadvantage by providing additional bandwidth for paying sites, the plan is merely to redistribute the existing bandwidth, which automatically means that some sites (the non-paying ones) will suffer compared to others, but the overall bandwidth will be the same. This means: A competetive advantage (no matter how big or small) for sites that have financial resources to blow, an equal disadvantage for smaller and non-profit sites, and in any case many happy network operators that win either way. Internet users that pay for a service might face rising fees, too (a shame, although it's mostly pr0n sites anyway).
All in all, it'd be just another small step to kill the Internet's function as a tool for (almost) free speech ('almost free' both as in beer and as in, uh, speech).
At least Microsoft won't be able to sell all their recent Internet-based innovations (read: Google rip-offs) as true innovations. Copying off small companies and Apple might've gone relatively unnoticed, because, let's face it, Apple market share, how shall I put it, has growth potential. Google, however, is unchallenged in its area of expertise and in popularity, so Microsoft's rip-offs will be exactly that.
Well you see, that's the problem with generalisations of the sort I am guilty of in my original post: The actual question, which was intended a serious one, simply got lost in the laughter. Ok, one more time:
Consoles, with the notable exception of the xbox series, were/are pretty weak when compared to contemporary PCs. Would it be possible to create a distro that targets this specific set of hardware of the console in question to gain the same performance boost that their respective game software can, as opposed to running on diverse PC hardware?
As other posters have noted, game consoles share the distinctive trait of standardized, special-purpose hardware, on which a general-purpose Linux OS is installed. But even the best game consoles make for pretty poor PCs if you just look at the specs, so it seems to me that this is more of a proof-of-concept and the sheer devilish joy of seeing Tux on an Xbox.
But is it not possible to modify a distro for specifically that set of hardware that comes with, say, the Xbox 360? Would the gain in performance not be equal to that of games software written for that set of hardware?
Slashdot Mirror
As several posters before you have pointed out, there was no injunction whatsoever against any US-based organisation; TFS is misleading. The injunction was brought up against a german website, not wikipedia.org.
What is a racial opinion? What are races anyway? The concept of "human races" has a long and dark history, it has never done any good to anyone, except that some people can claim themselves superior and others inferior. It only serves to de-humanise whole nations or other groups followed by the inevitable extermination campaign. Pretty much every nation, past or present, that has or ever has had lust for power and domination, has used this strategy. Now if you don't mind, Germany does not want to repeat this horrendous mistake by letting demagogues rise. There is a lot of evil hiding inside every population, and it's called indifference. This evil is going strong in Western nations nowadays, and the more important it is that such people need to be stopped in their tracks. And you, Anonymous Coward, wherever you live, just hope your country never needs to get its own Hitler to realize this.
"Alternate versions" of the Holocaust are to the actual Holocaust what Intelligent Design is to Evolution, only infinitely worse.
What the OP refers to, IIRC, is a story element of the PC game Deus Ex. Gray Death is a disease. A cure exists, but it is monopolized by its creators, thus controlling the unwashed masses. It's all a big conspiracy involving the government and that corporation. "Gray Death" is less a story about the dangers of technology than about the possible dangers of power monopolies.
BS. The discussion is under full steam both in public and in science, and some believe it might become the next Frankenfood in terms of public backlash and rejection because of mostly uninformed hype in all directions (positive and negative). The reality is, nano-sized particles have been around since shortly after the creation of the universe, they are nothing fundamentally new, and anybody who claims otherwise is ignorant and/or a liar, erhm, needs to check his facts again. Think carbon nanotubes: Originally, they have been discovered in ordinary soot. This means, they have been existing at least since the first time organic matter burned up in flames and they were being inhaled by humans since humans have been sitting around fireplaces roasting marshmallows and pissing it out afterwards.
Newly designed particles which did not exist in nature or only in neglibile concentration obviously should require testing before they are used in products, i.e. released into the environment. However, you don't need new laws to ensure that or to sort out responsibilities if something goes wrong; it could be regulated like usual chemistry, because most of the time it is usual chemistry. Of course, if a certain country's legislature is somehow lobbied into effectively not creating or enforcing such laws, then you have a problem. But then again, in such a case you're having a far greater problem with your system anyway.
First off, I am aware of Newton's laws. That being said, it doesn't have to apply here to the extent that is always described, i.e., "if a bullet knocks the victim 10 feet through the air, the same has to happen to the one firing the gun" That may be true in a micro-gravity system where there is almost no resistance to momentum (which makes fist fighting in zero g almost pointless). So I doubt the reasoning, for mainly 2 reasons:
Consider, for example, medieval catapults, Trebuchets, whatever. They released enough kinetic energy to smash city walls of stone, yet they were not destroyed by this energy themselves. Where the energy goes depends on the weapon design and, in case of hand-held kinetic weapons, on the posture of the marksman. If one holds a powerful gun casually and unprepared while firing, it's no surprise to see it flinging out of one's hand. Hold it tightly and in correct posture, and the gun barely moves.
Another reason: I have served my time in the Bundeswehr, the German army. Our trainer in basic training told us why modern battle helmets (in Germany, at least) have a kind of safety latch on the chin strap which opens and releases the helmet when a certain amount of pull is applied to the opposing ends of the latch. According to our trainer, the reason for this provision is that during WW II soldiers died because a rifle shot happened to graze their helmet and break the wearer's neck, because the helmet was strapped tightly to the wearer's head. And it just might make sense too: If you fire a strong rifle, you have the inertia of your whole body and posture to absorb the released kinetic energy, whereas the hit helmet and head would be a local, much lighter system which can absorb a lot less momentum and accelerate to much higher velocities. The neck, being the pivotal point which connects the moving head/helmet system and the fixed body system, would be the weak point and subject to leverage.
/me slaps you with a trout for this comment.
"what went right"
"what went wrong (note the #1 hit here)
"the funny happenings in between"
Preliminary conclusion: A lot more went wrong than right, but only because of slashdot coverage of Lego Mindstorms. Nothing funny happened in between.
FTA:
"It turns out what people are looking for is something is something that has the full functionality of a PC," he said. "Reprogrammable to run all the applications of a grown up PC... not dependent on servers in the sky to deliver content and capability to them, not dependent for[sic] hand cranks for power"
Uhm, as opposed to be dependant on a power grid infrastructure, centralized power plants, money to pay for the power, and whatnot? Truly an ugly piece of competition diss.
Yeah, especially as opposed to rootkit *shudder*
Does the guide contain anything else but "try to make your site's content the best there is of its kind"?
There is virtually no hassle to register a free account. Virtually is the keyword. This little hassle is what might reduce the creation of flamebait or other nonsense articles. If you are going to create a legit article, then I'd wager you have enough determination to take this little step anyway, so there's no problem in that respect, either.
Yeah I remember that one. Wasn't one of the Japanes divisions called "23rd Tamagotchi Division", nicknamed "Devil Spawns of Infernal Evil" (translation) or somesuch? Also, who could forget the dreaded "Pokemon Legion". More recently, the "Hello Kitty" spec-ops have joined the fight as well. The race isn't going too well for the Chinese, eh?
I think conventional silicon semiconductors might never see bottom-up fabrication, for a couple of reasons:
a) There is too much money invested in the traditional top-down process, and
b) the industry will not abandon a proven concept for at best marginal improvements in a dying technology. As we know, silicone is doomed to fail as keeper of Moore's Law, because you can only reduce features to so such and such dimensions before tunneling effects kick in, heat ablation becomes an insurmountable problem, and the statistics of impurity induction fails in practice. These limits are hard-coded in the laws of Physics as we understand them, and cannot easily, as of today, be engineered around, if at all.
c) Silicone and especially silicone in semiconductors (thus including statistical impurities of other elements) is not a rigid, defined atomic grid, which is pretty much a requirement for a bottom up fabrication. Bottom up directs every atom or molecule to a specific, well-known place where it then remains, which simply doesn't apply in a material that's almost a liquid, constantly rearranging its atomic structure, especially at temperatures of a working CPU.
Of course there are other materials that could be used as semiconductors, like diamond, which will make a far superior material in every respect. But as long as there is so much money in silicone and as long as diamond wafer fabrication remains in its infancy, silicone will be the way to go. But eventually, the semiconductor industry will have to make the jump to diamond or some other material, to maintain Moore's Law of transistor density.
I prefer an analogy I came up with for myself, being sick of all the "width of a hair" anal-ogies I so often read. Maybe it's just as useless, because in one or the other direction, you'll always have to face distances that are far from what is important in everyday life. Ok, here it goes:
The moon has a minimum distance to Earth of around 360.000 km.
The International Space Station has a minimum orbit to Earth of around 350 km.
The pillars of the Millau Viaduct are 340 meters tall.
If we take the minimum distance to the moon as our reference meter, then the ISS would orbit Earth at around 1 millimeter, the mentioned bridge would have pillars of slightly less than 1 micrometer, and finally a ruler of 35 centimeter length or (a little less than) the circumference of a compact disc would be 1 nanometer.
The term has, over the last years, become something of a catch-all phrase for all things below 100 nm, also including fairly ordinary chemistry, unfortunately. Originally, the term was invented by Norio Taniguchi, but broadly popularized by Eric Drexler with the famous book "Engines of Creation" (available for free as in beer at http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html). "Engines" was over the top in some respects and often criticized, but even ardent opponents of Drexler's vision of nanotech like the recently deceased Richard Smalley admit they have been brought into nanotechnology by this very book. Back in the days of "Engines", nanotechnology was strictly confined to the not yet developed "mass-manufacturing of devices to atomic precision and specification".
Note that Drexler himself has presumably ceded the term to its current usage and has called Intel's 90nm chips "nanotechnology", although it bears no resemblence whatsoever to Engines-style nanotech. He prefers "zetatech" (mega, tera, peta, exa, zeta) nowadays because of the quantity of atoms involved, but I think it's rarely used. Molecular Manufacturing is the preferred term for what used to be Nanotechnology. Let's see how many more rearguard action Nanotechnology has yet to fight before it becomes reality at last.
There is not a single mentioning of the Pen and Paper nature of the RPGs TFA is talking about. I've been playing some of these myself, for years, but it actually took me a couple of sentences before I knew they TFS was not talking about character generation in computer games.
What you say? The "real world" in the headline should've ticked me off? Dude, to me, the opposite of "real world" has become "ISP down" or "some asshat roommate plugged me out of the LAN" or something to that effect.
First of all: prescriptive linguistics is not bound to induce linguistic stasis, it can be and has been intended to force a change in a language. This alone makes the issue more one of how much should the government interfere with everyday life, not one of whether government should conserve their state language against "foreign influence", whatever that may be.
Now what strict prescriptivist critics and advocates both fail to grasp: The evolution of a language common to one cultural or sub-cultural group is exclusively driven by the people of that respective group, in the most direct, democratic sense. Ultimately, no number of laws and recommendations will have lasting influence on how a natural every-day language evolves or does not evolve unless they mirror the majority's opinion (in which case the laws have been irrelevant to begin with anyway). Beware the day when that changes, for then "1984" will have come to full reality, because then The Man will have taken control of your thoughts. If you control language, the tool of your thoughts, then all your brains are belong to us, if you so prefer.
From Grateful over Ungrateful back to Grateful. The REAL news, however, would be if that transition happened with the other part of their name.
BellSouth wants to create demand where there was none before, and profit off it. While I had no problem with their plans if it would really put no site at a disadvantage by providing additional bandwidth for paying sites, the plan is merely to redistribute the existing bandwidth, which automatically means that some sites (the non-paying ones) will suffer compared to others, but the overall bandwidth will be the same. This means: A competetive advantage (no matter how big or small) for sites that have financial resources to blow, an equal disadvantage for smaller and non-profit sites, and in any case many happy network operators that win either way. Internet users that pay for a service might face rising fees, too (a shame, although it's mostly pr0n sites anyway).
All in all, it'd be just another small step to kill the Internet's function as a tool for (almost) free speech ('almost free' both as in beer and as in, uh, speech).
At least Microsoft won't be able to sell all their recent Internet-based innovations (read: Google rip-offs) as true innovations. Copying off small companies and Apple might've gone relatively unnoticed, because, let's face it, Apple market share, how shall I put it, has growth potential. Google, however, is unchallenged in its area of expertise and in popularity, so Microsoft's rip-offs will be exactly that.
Drug dealing ruled illegal in North Carolina, drug dealers threaten to leave North Carolina.
I call dupe :)
Well you see, that's the problem with generalisations of the sort I am guilty of in my original post: The actual question, which was intended a serious one, simply got lost in the laughter. Ok, one more time:
Consoles, with the notable exception of the xbox series, were/are pretty weak when compared to contemporary PCs. Would it be possible to create a distro that targets this specific set of hardware of the console in question to gain the same performance boost that their respective game software can, as opposed to running on diverse PC hardware?
As other posters have noted, game consoles share the distinctive trait of standardized, special-purpose hardware, on which a general-purpose Linux OS is installed. But even the best game consoles make for pretty poor PCs if you just look at the specs, so it seems to me that this is more of a proof-of-concept and the sheer devilish joy of seeing Tux on an Xbox.
But is it not possible to modify a distro for specifically that set of hardware that comes with, say, the Xbox 360? Would the gain in performance not be equal to that of games software written for that set of hardware?