As I understand it (and I don't know orbital mechanics so I could be wrong) the ISS is useless as a waystation for a Mars mission because the orbit is too tilted.
Take AI for example. Most AI problems can be expressed as searching through some abstract space for a solution.
Ummm, maybe. That approach does work with chess, but it hasn't exactly been generlisable to much else.
Anyway, maybe I was exaggerating a bit, but they're not the magic solution to all our computing speed requirements, they're likely to have severe limitations, they'll only ever be an adjunct to conventional computation, and they're not going to give us an attack on NP-completeness which *would* be something to get really excited about.
Unless somebody figures out how to build one with nonlinear operators, which if I understand the gobbeldygook would give us a computer capable of solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time. If we ever got that, I don't think there would be a computer scientist sober for a year:)
AFAIK, there are a grand total of three sorts of problems that it is known can be solved more efficiently by quantum computers: integer factorization/discrete log (solved by the same algorithm, and both mainly of use in cracking public-key cryptography), brute-forcing symmetric key cryptography (easily defeated by doubling the size of the key), and quantum physics simulations. Outside that, they are completely useless.
Are any of those tasks particularly interesting for you? Unless you're a physicist or the NSA, I doubt it.
They're talking about squeezing HD-DVD onto the same physical medium, but using MPEG-4 compression rather than the MPEG-2 currently used. Now, assuming that a DVD can hold 9 gigabytes and a necessary minimum capacity of two hours, that's about 4.5 gigabytes per hour. That gives about 220 hours of storage.
Alston and the rest of the government almost certainly know the internet censorship system doesn't work. However, they don't care. It was only ever about placating a nutball Christian fundy Tasmanian Independent Senator in the (misguided) hope that he'd support the privatisation of Telstra, and to a lesser extent keeping the nutball Christan fundies in his own party happy. They believe the problem is solved, all the local pr0n moves its hosting offshore, everybody and their uncle keeps on downloading pornography of every kind, Telstra itself keeps running a full feed of usenet porn groups. Everyone is happy.
To reply to your actual point, yes it's a complete contradiction. However, the sector of the population who care about IT policy (beyond the ridiculous debate about "selling Telstra") is vanishingly small, and probably vote solidly Labor anyway. So Alston can do what he pleases on every other IT and communications issue.
Yes, Alston is incompetent, but corruption (in the traditional sense) is a bit harsh. Compared to the US, the level of out-and-out corruption in Australian politics is relatively low - for the simple reason that you can't buy individual votes like you can in the States (parties virtually always vote as a bloc).
The other thing that should be pointed out is that the policies Alston implements are probably not entirely his own views. He has them imposed from above (the Prime Minister and the rest of cabinet) and below (the Liberal parliamentary caucus imposing things on Cabinet occasionally), and he just implements them. Blame the government as a whole, not Alston. He's just the schmuck that drew the short straw.
I'd suggest people, before they criticise Amnesty for going off half-cocked, read the entire report.
It's quite short.
They don't claim what the companies are doing is illegal. What they do point out is that, in their view, it is incumbent on all organisations to promote human rights and they are concerned that these foriegn companies are actively working with the Chinese government to deny their citizens human rights.
I don't know about you, but I find that concern entirely reasonable.
The rest of the world all has differnt oppinions about guns mostly because they are something that can destabalize nations.
Maybe some of the world thinks that way, but the reasons for restricting gun ownership in Australia have nothing to do with that. Heck, we're probably more stable than you guys are;)
The restrictions are there because the overwhelming majority (>70% according to most polls) believe that these things pose an unacceptable risk to themselves and to others, and have no other legitimate use. You may disagree with that view (in fact, I fully agree that there are many complexities that this view ignores), but it is the majority one.
BTW, I fully agree that many rural-based people have a legitimate need for guns. Most Australian farmers own one or two, something that is still fully legal.
The reason behind the second amendment is that the government is truly putting its trust in the people, and hence, they have the right to be armed if they so desire.
OK, then, should we trust people with.50 calibre machine guns? RPGs? Stinger missiles? F-22's? Tactical nukes? Unless you're going to argue that private citizens should be allowed to posess any weaponry they choose, you have to draw the line somewhere. The difference between US gun laws and the rest of the world's is merely that the line is drawn differently.
And, taking your argument from the other end, if the government trusts its people so much, why aren't people allowed to smoke dope? With dope, the risk of a third party being harmed is surely much smaller than that with a rifle.
Why doesn't my Grandma deserve the benefits that free software offers? She probably appreciates the cost savings more than I would. She certainly would appreciate the flexibility free software allows to customise things to her needs, not to mention the inbuilt remote administration so I can fix things for her without being present.
Does this mean your Grandma is going to be hanging round the local LUG and submitting kernel patches any time soon? Not likely. Is it going to stop you from running Slackware with the latest development kernel, the CVS DRI version, a leaked beta of Quake VII running under the daily snapshot of WINE and the custom voice recognition project you're working on (Grandma's fingers are getting a bit arthritic, after all)? No. Is Grandma's Linux desktop going to affect yours one iota. No - except the money the grandmas of the world pay to Redhat and the like will support a whole lot more software development that you'll be able to take advantage of, and will ensure that hardware manufacturers get with the program and make sure their gear works under Linux.
So, yes, Linux (or more to the point free software) on everything helps you, and it helps Grandma, and isn't going to stop the 'elite club' from existing.
The Academy is incredibly conservative, bean-counterish, parochial, heavily marketed to, and occasionally gets desperate for credibility. Now, let's look at anime. Conservatism - that has to work against these weird-ass animated (kiddie) movies from Japan - but hey, some of them are violent and contain a bit of sex, so they're obviously going to Corrupt Our Children(TM). Bean-counterish - anime is relatively small beans compared to mainstream cinema (at least in the West). Heavily marketed to - as I've just said, there's much more money to be made in making sure Oscars go to English-language, mainstream stuff, particularly stuff that appeals to women (and anime, at this point, appeals more to Western men than women). Parochial? Say no more.
Suffice to say I'm not expecting Oscars to be heading the way of anime directors any time soon.
How did the United States or Australia for that matter prosper when they never have relied on agricultural exports as a foundation of their economy?
Oh, please. I don't know enough about early US history, but I certainly know enough about early Australian history to be able to tell that in Australia's case that's complete and utter crap.
Australia basically remained a prison colony until one British officer figured out that Australia was a damn good place to raise sheep and grow high-quality wool. The next big discovery was that there was a crapload of gold in various parts of Australia, which brought in a huge wave of immigrants. Many of those went into farming after the initial gold boom ended.
Australia's exports are still concentrated around agriculture and mining. The latest boom export industry? Wine. The biggest issue in negotiations on a free trade deal with the US? US agricultural protectionism. Trust me, agricultural exports are *vital* to Australia.
Yep, as long as I can recall the gap has remained remarkably stable, both in terms of absolute performance and price-performance.
As long as high-performance chips chew lots of electricity and turn it in to lots of heat, desktops are modular, and laptops remain branded items rather than generic I can't see this situation changing.
As I understand it (haven't played them so I'm not sure) Everquest and the like were quite free-form. However, the Star Wars universe, as well as any number of clans and races who fall into temporary alliances, contains one huge, honkin, authoritarian Empire. Now, I'm sure that military and civilian leaders in the Empire had all sorts of extracurricular activities going on, but how do you model the obligations of being a cog in the Imperial wheel in a MMORPG? Or does the game simply ignore this aspect of the Star Wars universe?
If I recall my history books correctly, some people used to talk about "VAX MIPS", where a particular model of VAX minicomputer was defined as a 1 MIP (though I suppose it should still be "MIPS") machine, and other systems' benchmarks were compared to that model's performance and quoted in "VAX MIPS". Whilst a 4 MHZ Z80 might have been able to do more than 1 million instructions per second, I'd imagine its performance would probably have been slower than that that particular VAX.
My parents are now in their mid-50's, and they've managed to cope with computers and stuff just fine. However, my grandparents were never really able to get the hang of new technology. Funny thing is, according to my parents this was the case since they were children.
I think the main difference is that my parents received a much more comprehensive education than my grandparents, and consequently didn't treat new technology as some sort of voodoo.
On the off chance the Armadillo guys read this post, I'd just like to congratulate them for making it as far as they have, and hope that they aren't too discouraged by the less-than-perfect result of this test. If you expect things to work perfectly every time, you'll never try anything new.
Good luck, and count me in for a ticket when the bugs are out of the system!
IIRC, the main GSM frequencies (800 and 1800 MHz) are reserved for the US military. You can either blame the US for wasting that spectrum, or the Europeans for being so bloody-minded as to use a chunk of spectrum that they knew wasn't going to be available in the US.
I believe most new GSM phones support the 1900 MHz band used in the US, so there's no technical reason that people can't roam from the GSM-enabled US to the rest of the world, now.
Whilst I can accept that maybe X is slower than Windows on the same machine, it's surely fast enough (and yes, I am forced to Windows on a daily basis at work so I have a basis for comparison). I run X with a Matrox G400 on a PIII/733 at 1600x1200, and it's fast and responsive. I can expand xine to full-screen size and play video smoothly, for instance, and photoediting with the gimp is very smooth.
I'll take your work that you're sincere, but I really have to say that you've either configured your Linux systems wrong (don't have DRI working, perhaps?) or you're just letting your assumptions about X cloud your judgement.
The PGP documentation also emphasises that such a scheme is trivially vulnerable as, once the data is decrypted, the program has no actual control on where its output goes. It can be redirected to a file, to a printer, anywhere.
In principle, any similar scheme is vulnerable to the same hack - intercept the unencrypted data, transfer it to disk. Whilst I am aware that *in practice* this can be made harder, cryptography is no defence because, by definition, the data has to be encrypted somewhere between the data source and the output device. Ultimately, you might put the decryption in the DAC - but then somebody will either hack that chip to crack the encryption or, at last resort, just point a camera at the screen.
Of course, if the cryptography is broken directly, none of this is necessary, and according to an apparent authority on the matter that's quite likely:
Time and again, it's been demonstrated that any crypto system that precludes resourceful and clever people from getting at stuff they want will be subjected to scrutiny, attacked, and finally broken.
As for your views on the consumer-friendliness of Intertrust's scheme, I have to say the whole things sounds like a) a usability nightmare, and b) a chance for content providers to nickel-and-dime consumers into the never-never. For both reasons I would recommend consumers avoid it like the plague (at least until somebody hacks around it like CSS and region coding).
The very reason the term "open source" was invented was to avoid the overloaded meanings of "free software" - and dickheads like yourself have again confused the issue.
As to being a "stupid karma whore cocksucker" I hardly need more karma - I've been at maximum karma since the cap was instituted without any particular effort. With regards to your other claim, my porn collection would tend to indicate otherwise...
Oh, in case I'm not making myself absolutely clear, go crawl back into your hole, fucknuckle.
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As I understand it (and I don't know orbital mechanics so I could be wrong) the ISS is useless as a waystation for a Mars mission because the orbit is too tilted.
Ummm, maybe. That approach does work with chess, but it hasn't exactly been generlisable to much else.
Anyway, maybe I was exaggerating a bit, but they're not the magic solution to all our computing speed requirements, they're likely to have severe limitations, they'll only ever be an adjunct to conventional computation, and they're not going to give us an attack on NP-completeness which *would* be something to get really excited about.
Unless somebody figures out how to build one with nonlinear operators, which if I understand the gobbeldygook would give us a computer capable of solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time. If we ever got that, I don't think there would be a computer scientist sober for a year :)
Are any of those tasks particularly interesting for you? Unless you're a physicist or the NSA, I doubt it.
They're talking about squeezing HD-DVD onto the same physical medium, but using MPEG-4 compression rather than the MPEG-2 currently used. Now, assuming that a DVD can hold 9 gigabytes and a necessary minimum capacity of two hours, that's about 4.5 gigabytes per hour. That gives about 220 hours of storage.
To reply to your actual point, yes it's a complete contradiction. However, the sector of the population who care about IT policy (beyond the ridiculous debate about "selling Telstra") is vanishingly small, and probably vote solidly Labor anyway. So Alston can do what he pleases on every other IT and communications issue.
The other thing that should be pointed out is that the policies Alston implements are probably not entirely his own views. He has them imposed from above (the Prime Minister and the rest of cabinet) and below (the Liberal parliamentary caucus imposing things on Cabinet occasionally), and he just implements them. Blame the government as a whole, not Alston. He's just the schmuck that drew the short straw.
The British don't eat British cuisine(s) any more...or at least the infamous parts of it. They're too busy munching curry ... :)
They don't claim what the companies are doing is illegal. What they do point out is that, in their view, it is incumbent on all organisations to promote human rights and they are concerned that these foriegn companies are actively working with the Chinese government to deny their citizens human rights.
I don't know about you, but I find that concern entirely reasonable.
Yes, but making it much harder to get an automatic large-calibre rifle makes it much harder to kill lots of people in one go.
Maybe some of the world thinks that way, but the reasons for restricting gun ownership in Australia have nothing to do with that. Heck, we're probably more stable than you guys are ;)
The restrictions are there because the overwhelming majority (>70% according to most polls) believe that these things pose an unacceptable risk to themselves and to others, and have no other legitimate use. You may disagree with that view (in fact, I fully agree that there are many complexities that this view ignores), but it is the majority one.
BTW, I fully agree that many rural-based people have a legitimate need for guns. Most Australian farmers own one or two, something that is still fully legal.
OK, then, should we trust people with .50 calibre machine guns? RPGs? Stinger missiles? F-22's? Tactical nukes? Unless you're going to argue that private citizens should be allowed to posess any weaponry they choose, you have to draw the line somewhere. The difference between US gun laws and the rest of the world's is merely that the line is drawn differently.
And, taking your argument from the other end, if the government trusts its people so much, why aren't people allowed to smoke dope? With dope, the risk of a third party being harmed is surely much smaller than that with a rifle.
Does this mean your Grandma is going to be hanging round the local LUG and submitting kernel patches any time soon? Not likely. Is it going to stop you from running Slackware with the latest development kernel, the CVS DRI version, a leaked beta of Quake VII running under the daily snapshot of WINE and the custom voice recognition project you're working on (Grandma's fingers are getting a bit arthritic, after all)? No. Is Grandma's Linux desktop going to affect yours one iota. No - except the money the grandmas of the world pay to Redhat and the like will support a whole lot more software development that you'll be able to take advantage of, and will ensure that hardware manufacturers get with the program and make sure their gear works under Linux.
So, yes, Linux (or more to the point free software) on everything helps you, and it helps Grandma, and isn't going to stop the 'elite club' from existing.
Suffice to say I'm not expecting Oscars to be heading the way of anime directors any time soon.
Oh, please. I don't know enough about early US history, but I certainly know enough about early Australian history to be able to tell that in Australia's case that's complete and utter crap.
Australia basically remained a prison colony until one British officer figured out that Australia was a damn good place to raise sheep and grow high-quality wool. The next big discovery was that there was a crapload of gold in various parts of Australia, which brought in a huge wave of immigrants. Many of those went into farming after the initial gold boom ended.
Australia's exports are still concentrated around agriculture and mining. The latest boom export industry? Wine. The biggest issue in negotiations on a free trade deal with the US? US agricultural protectionism. Trust me, agricultural exports are *vital* to Australia.
I'm well aware of the Clarke quote. My sig is a parody, not a paraphrase.
As long as high-performance chips chew lots of electricity and turn it in to lots of heat, desktops are modular, and laptops remain branded items rather than generic I can't see this situation changing.
As I understand it (haven't played them so I'm not sure) Everquest and the like were quite free-form. However, the Star Wars universe, as well as any number of clans and races who fall into temporary alliances, contains one huge, honkin, authoritarian Empire. Now, I'm sure that military and civilian leaders in the Empire had all sorts of extracurricular activities going on, but how do you model the obligations of being a cog in the Imperial wheel in a MMORPG? Or does the game simply ignore this aspect of the Star Wars universe?
If I recall my history books correctly, some people used to talk about "VAX MIPS", where a particular model of VAX minicomputer was defined as a 1 MIP (though I suppose it should still be "MIPS") machine, and other systems' benchmarks were compared to that model's performance and quoted in "VAX MIPS". Whilst a 4 MHZ Z80 might have been able to do more than 1 million instructions per second, I'd imagine its performance would probably have been slower than that that particular VAX.
I think the main difference is that my parents received a much more comprehensive education than my grandparents, and consequently didn't treat new technology as some sort of voodoo.
Good luck, and count me in for a ticket when the bugs are out of the system!
I believe most new GSM phones support the 1900 MHz band used in the US, so there's no technical reason that people can't roam from the GSM-enabled US to the rest of the world, now.
Aside from checking out the incredible views of Earth, I would have thought that there was at least one perfectly obvious activity to try....
I'll take your work that you're sincere, but I really have to say that you've either configured your Linux systems wrong (don't have DRI working, perhaps?) or you're just letting your assumptions about X cloud your judgement.
The PGP documentation also emphasises that such a scheme is trivially vulnerable as, once the data is decrypted, the program has no actual control on where its output goes. It can be redirected to a file, to a printer, anywhere.
In principle, any similar scheme is vulnerable to the same hack - intercept the unencrypted data, transfer it to disk. Whilst I am aware that *in practice* this can be made harder, cryptography is no defence because, by definition, the data has to be encrypted somewhere between the data source and the output device. Ultimately, you might put the decryption in the DAC - but then somebody will either hack that chip to crack the encryption or, at last resort, just point a camera at the screen.
Of course, if the cryptography is broken directly, none of this is necessary, and according to an apparent authority on the matter that's quite likely:
Who said that? You did.Why the massive change of heart?
As for your views on the consumer-friendliness of Intertrust's scheme, I have to say the whole things sounds like a) a usability nightmare, and b) a chance for content providers to nickel-and-dime consumers into the never-never. For both reasons I would recommend consumers avoid it like the plague (at least until somebody hacks around it like CSS and region coding).
As to being a "stupid karma whore cocksucker" I hardly need more karma - I've been at maximum karma since the cap was instituted without any particular effort. With regards to your other claim, my porn collection would tend to indicate otherwise...
Oh, in case I'm not making myself absolutely clear, go crawl back into your hole, fucknuckle.