PR (when done properly) is a Good Thing, as it allows the votes of the people to be translated as accurately as possible into electoral influence.
I'm glad it works in Ireland, but the point remains that the combination of constitutional arrangements and political character has led to problems in some countries.
Overall, I was just trying to point out the somewhat glassy nature of the houses people were throwing stones from, and I think the point is still valid.
Even if the CIA did precipitate the events of 1975 (which I find *very* difficult to believe for a variety of reasons which I can't be bothered going in to here), the fact remains that the hole in the constitution which left John Kerr and Gough Whitlam in the farcical situation of being able to sack the other at a moment's notice, and the fact that without the double dissolution triggers the whole Senate would not have faced the people, shows the constitution was and is seriously flawed.
How long until robots are bending the distinctions
between the dead and the alive
Judging by how well our previous 50 years of effort have worked, a very long time. However, maybe some brilliant piece of biological research will figure out how the brain works and simulating it in software will become a doddle. Who knows? Making predictions like this is well nigh impossible, because technological progress is almost always irregular.
I see real potential for robots to become the next civil liberty issue, as various pressure groups call for them to be given rights, and not be exploited.
While Asimov's Bicentennial Man is probably the most well-known fictional examination of the issue, it's by no means the only one. If anyone remembers Astroboy, the rights of robots were a recurring theme - to take an example I recall, in one episode Astro visited Antarctica with Dr. Elephant, who rode the bus to their hotel while Astro was forced to ride in a truck. One wonders whether the Japanese audience drew the (IMHO) intended parallels to the US civil rights struggle.
Of course, all such speculation is just that - speculation. While computers/robots might become "intelligent", whether that intelligence will have a nature close enough to our own to make civil rights remotely relevant is still unknown.
American democracy has some problems with the health of political debate and electoral fairness. However, none of us are perfect - witness:
The potential constitutional quagmire in Australia exposed in 1975 but still left to fester until it is exposed again.
The fact that the British PM comes dangerously close to being an elected dictator.
Chaotic coalition governments in countries that rely on proportional representation for parliament (Italy, Israel etc.)
I don't know Canadian politics well enough to comment, but I'm sure there are problems with your own constitution (beyond the fact that your head of state, like ours, is a hereditary monarch who lives half a world away and has rules governing succession which undoubtedly violate your own anti-discrimation laws).
Yes, it's nice to have a chuckle at the expense of arrogant Yanks, but get some perspective. Just because they don't understand the world beyond their own borders doesn't mean we should be the same:)
Re:Developers will hit the wall sooner or later
on
Nvidia's NV20
·
· Score: 2
I agree totally. The premise of this argument, translated to sound hardware, goes like:
It's harder to write game music for a modern soundcard than for the Commodore 64, because with the Commodore 64 you only had to worry about doing 3 channels of sound.
Try that one on a musician friend one day and see how far you get:)
I could be wrong, but I heard that this has now been shown to be impossible - complex "silicon chains" are far too unstable to be the basis of any kind of life.
I think it would be very unlikely that a true ET would just happen to be DNA
I'm no biologist, but I've got a couple of possibilities to throw up:
As other people mentioned, say this organism has ET origins, but shares a common ancestor with earthly life. That explains why DNA.
Maybe there is no other naturally-occuring molecule that can serve as the basis for life. I know there are RNA-based viruses, but I'm not of anything that counts as "life" based on anything else. I do know that any ET life, would more than likely be carbon-based - IIRC no other element supports the constructions of sufficiently complex molecules to be "life".
Could somebody with more knowledge than I have comment?
I didn't think I could have a lesser opinion of him being that I already considered him a mentally insane, socially isolated, thoroughly unpleasant radical communist hippie. Now I have found that it was possible.
Can't you differentiate between RMS the thinker and programmer, and RMS the person? While I don't know him personally, I don't think he'd be much of a drinking buddy, but that doesn't stop me admiring his work.
I see everyone talking about him as a great man around here... in my eyes, he's simply a man of accomplishment and a man of strong opinions.
To me those two traits, particularly if those accomplishments and opinions are truly exceptional contributions towards the greater good (and RMS's arguably get close to that), put you well on the way to one form of "greatness".
I've seen the video of this baby, and I've got to admit that it looks really impressive. However, the media reports I saw didn't really get into the "how did they do it". So:
How robust is it?
What clever hardware is used?
Is the software "clever new algorithms" or a collection of special-purpose hacks not applicable beyond this particular robot.
In Oz, as a Telstra customer last night, data rates to the US were down to a few hundred bytes per second (assuming you could successfully connect at all), and ping times were up to ~5000 msec. Thankfully, I didn't have any big up/downloads that needed doing. Things have improved today - ping times are back to normal and bandwidth is up to ~5-6 kilobytes per second (I'm on a cable modem).
How is it for others in the region? All we've heard so far is Australian reports, but this outage will unfortunately be affecting people throughout Asia:(
a large fraction of Australia's traffic is carried by Telstra, the partly government-owned telco, who aren't yet using that big, fat, redundant connection. Telstra customers (both direct and indirect as their ISP's use Telstra's backbone) were the ones affected.
This made the newspapers (at least in a minor way) here, and believe me, there's a lot of unhappy people. I'd imagine that Telstra might well be leasing some space on that big, redundant connection in the not-too-distant future:)
There's always someone for just about every article here on Slashdot who says "What a worthless waste of time! Who cares?". Just because you may not, doesn't mean noone else does. So, in summary, lighten up.
I'm not doubting that, but *I* found it boring.
Obviously others, like yourself, didn't, and I was frankly curious as to why. Perhaps that's not how the post came out - I'll be more careful next time.
Reading it and finding out that there should be 2 GHz CPUs a year from now excites me.
Ah, there's the crux of the matter. It doesn't excite me anymore, for several reasons:
I've watched computers get faster every year for the past twenty. It's not exactly a shock that they're going to continue to get faster.
In practical terms, I know many of the perceivable slowdowns in my day-to-day computing experiences are either from disk or network I/O. A new CPU isn't going to help with that.
Incremental speedups aren't going to add any fundamentally new capabilities to my computing experience, unlike some wacky new peripheral or something.
Perhaps it's just that I prefer looking at roadmaps from motorcycle manufacturers these days. At least the bikes *look* cool:-)
As a computer buyer, I couldn't care less about the details of the coming lineup from Intel. Both price/performance and absolute performance are going to continue to improve, but when I come to buy my next computer, I'll have a look at what's available *then*. Trying to pick the optimal time for a computer purchase by reading roadmaps like these is like chasing the rainbow.
As a software developer, I don't care a great deal either, as the ABI isn't going to change. Games developers might care slightly, but even they are probably more interested in what video cards are likely to be mainstream in one or two years time as.
If I was involved in the computer hardware business, particularly, say, the memory business, this might be somewhat interesting, but these articles are not written for that audience.
Similarly If I was interested in guess what Intel's and AMD's stock was going to do, I might be interested in this article - but then again there are myriad other factors likely to impinge on their stock price, and it's not written for a financial analyst either.
So could somebody explain to me who seriously reads this stuff anymore?
Digital video is going to be incredibly popular, as it gives consumers the ability to actually turn their home movies into something actually *watchable* (in essence, returning to to what 8mm film offered 50 years ago). Video will chew up CPU, memory, and disk for the forseeable future, thank you very much.
Do you reckon little Johnny has actually *used* the internet?
Anyway, I think the statement was in the context of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Forum) meeting, and the goal was to let every community in every APEC country (including most of east Asia, Russia, and the US) have access to the net. Personally, if I was Burmese, Cambodian (or Chinese for that matter) I'd like a government that wasn't so keen on killing its own citizens *before* I worried too much about net access:-/
Want to power slide a corner or two? Here. Have a turbo charged boxer in a lightweight AWD chassis.
While I haven't driven a high-powered constant awd vehicle, I have driven a (non-turbo) Subaru Outback wagon as well as various high-powered rear-wheel-drive cars. The Subaru was overwhelmingly neutral with a slight touch of understeer - driving it was basically a matter of point, steer, and hang on. The rear-wheel-drive cars were the ones to power slide out of corners. While the WRX is obviously a lot more powerful than the outback, it retains the same 50/50 torque split and, by all media reports, retains the ever-so-slight bias towards understeer, which definitely makes it safer and probably faster (certainly on a dirt road) but not as flambouyantly entertaining.
9. All American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars, you will understand what we mean.
I'd just like to add a few exceptions - the Viper, Prowler, PT Cruiser (particularly if you ripped out the engine and put something decent in), and Corvette. The Corvette should be preserved not only for its inherit merit but because the motor is used in the HSV GTS - a full-sized sedan that does the standing quarter in well under 14 seconds with handling and brakes to match for a fraction of the cost of a BMW or Mercedes sports sedan.
I've read more accurate, and better-researched science articles in my local tabloid paper! As far as I can see, this article fails a basic common-sense test.
As far as a satellite is concerned, it doesn't matter if the commands it is issued come from a machine on a TCP/IP-based LAN in a satellite operator's headquaters connected to a satellite dish, or a machine connected to the wider net. What having a SPARC chip on the satellite has to do with things I *really* don't know.
As far as the operators of satellites are concerned, when a satellite costs millions of dollars, do you seriously think that they're going to let Joe Sixpack send direct orders to a satellite and run the risk of crackers getting into their systems - even if they build a strong-crypto buzzword-compliant secure system, and all orders are sanity-checked by software. When you consider the cost of a satellite and the cost of a technician, it's pretty damn cheap to have a human process requests for usage of satellite resources and let that technician issue the appropriate orders to the satellite.
In any case, I'm appalled that such a crappy article could make it into what I believed was a reasonably reputable magazine. Is it a case of mindlessly regurgitating a press release, or a truly clueless journalist? Either way, the journalist and the section editor responsible should be shot at dawn.
Guys - Australians *don't* drink Fosters Lager. The most common Australian domestic beer is Victoria Bitter, and each state has their own brewery and prevalent brand (Cascade, Swan, Fourex, and Tooheys).
If you want a really nice Australian beer, try Crown Lager, James Boag's Premium Lager, or some of the range of Coopers beers.
There is no "filter server" sitting at the network choke points. The censorship authority has issued a few "takedown notices" for material to be removed from Australian servers (the material inevitably bobbing up on US servers a few milliseconds later), but net free speech continues on totally unaffected.
Basically, the government is *totally* uninterested in censoring the net - it just likes the legislation so it can point to it and convince the wowsers that it is doing something to protect the Children. While I dislike this kind of thing, I would prefer a situation of bad legislation being ignored to bad legislation wreaking havoc by enforcing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad it works in Ireland, but the point remains that the combination of constitutional arrangements and political character has led to problems in some countries.
Overall, I was just trying to point out the somewhat glassy nature of the houses people were throwing stones from, and I think the point is still valid.
Even if the CIA did precipitate the events of 1975 (which I find *very* difficult to believe for a variety of reasons which I can't be bothered going in to here), the fact remains that the hole in the constitution which left John Kerr and Gough Whitlam in the farcical situation of being able to sack the other at a moment's notice, and the fact that without the double dissolution triggers the whole Senate would not have faced the people, shows the constitution was and is seriously flawed.
It also gets brownie points for mentioning Linux before the mainstream media got hold of it :)
Judging by how well our previous 50 years of effort have worked, a very long time. However, maybe some brilliant piece of biological research will figure out how the brain works and simulating it in software will become a doddle. Who knows? Making predictions like this is well nigh impossible, because technological progress is almost always irregular.
While Asimov's Bicentennial Man is probably the most well-known fictional examination of the issue, it's by no means the only one. If anyone remembers Astroboy, the rights of robots were a recurring theme - to take an example I recall, in one episode Astro visited Antarctica with Dr. Elephant, who rode the bus to their hotel while Astro was forced to ride in a truck. One wonders whether the Japanese audience drew the (IMHO) intended parallels to the US civil rights struggle.
Of course, all such speculation is just that - speculation. While computers/robots might become "intelligent", whether that intelligence will have a nature close enough to our own to make civil rights remotely relevant is still unknown.
Yes, it's nice to have a chuckle at the expense of arrogant Yanks, but get some perspective. Just because they don't understand the world beyond their own borders doesn't mean we should be the same :)
Try that one on a musician friend one day and see how far you get :)
I could be wrong, but I heard that this has now been shown to be impossible - complex "silicon chains" are far too unstable to be the basis of any kind of life.
I'm no biologist, but I've got a couple of possibilities to throw up:
Could somebody with more knowledge than I have comment?
For the benefit of those who haven't heard of him, Jonah Lomu is the world's best rugby player and a Mack truck on legs, only faster :)
Can't you differentiate between RMS the thinker and programmer, and RMS the person? While I don't know him personally, I don't think he'd be much of a drinking buddy, but that doesn't stop me admiring his work.
To me those two traits, particularly if those accomplishments and opinions are truly exceptional contributions towards the greater good (and RMS's arguably get close to that), put you well on the way to one form of "greatness".
Answers on a postcard please . . . :)
In Oz, as a Telstra customer last night, data rates to the US were down to a few hundred bytes per second (assuming you could successfully connect at all), and ping times were up to ~5000 msec. Thankfully, I didn't have any big up/downloads that needed doing. Things have improved today - ping times are back to normal and bandwidth is up to ~5-6 kilobytes per second (I'm on a cable modem).
How is it for others in the region? All we've heard so far is Australian reports, but this outage will unfortunately be affecting people throughout Asia :(
This made the newspapers (at least in a minor way) here, and believe me, there's a lot of unhappy people. I'd imagine that Telstra might well be leasing some space on that big, redundant connection in the not-too-distant future :)
I'm not doubting that, but *I* found it boring. Obviously others, like yourself, didn't, and I was frankly curious as to why. Perhaps that's not how the post came out - I'll be more careful next time.
Ah, there's the crux of the matter. It doesn't excite me anymore, for several reasons:
Perhaps it's just that I prefer looking at roadmaps from motorcycle manufacturers these days. At least the bikes *look* cool :-)
As a software developer, I don't care a great deal either, as the ABI isn't going to change. Games developers might care slightly, but even they are probably more interested in what video cards are likely to be mainstream in one or two years time as.
If I was involved in the computer hardware business, particularly, say, the memory business, this might be somewhat interesting, but these articles are not written for that audience.
Similarly If I was interested in guess what Intel's and AMD's stock was going to do, I might be interested in this article - but then again there are myriad other factors likely to impinge on their stock price, and it's not written for a financial analyst either.
So could somebody explain to me who seriously reads this stuff anymore?
Digital video is going to be incredibly popular, as it gives consumers the ability to actually turn their home movies into something actually *watchable* (in essence, returning to to what 8mm film offered 50 years ago). Video will chew up CPU, memory, and disk for the forseeable future, thank you very much.
Anyway, I think the statement was in the context of the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Forum) meeting, and the goal was to let every community in every APEC country (including most of east Asia, Russia, and the US) have access to the net. Personally, if I was Burmese, Cambodian (or Chinese for that matter) I'd like a government that wasn't so keen on killing its own citizens *before* I worried too much about net access :-/
While I haven't driven a high-powered constant awd vehicle, I have driven a (non-turbo) Subaru Outback wagon as well as various high-powered rear-wheel-drive cars. The Subaru was overwhelmingly neutral with a slight touch of understeer - driving it was basically a matter of point, steer, and hang on. The rear-wheel-drive cars were the ones to power slide out of corners. While the WRX is obviously a lot more powerful than the outback, it retains the same 50/50 torque split and, by all media reports, retains the ever-so-slight bias towards understeer, which definitely makes it safer and probably faster (certainly on a dirt road) but not as flambouyantly entertaining.
One way to settle the argument would be the real Anne Marie to post their /. ID on the (remnants of) educatedescort.com.
And, though the STi WRX is a truly fine vehicle, it still doesn't sound like a V8 on full song.
I'd just like to add a few exceptions - the Viper, Prowler, PT Cruiser (particularly if you ripped out the engine and put something decent in), and Corvette. The Corvette should be preserved not only for its inherit merit but because the motor is used in the HSV GTS - a full-sized sedan that does the standing quarter in well under 14 seconds with handling and brakes to match for a fraction of the cost of a BMW or Mercedes sports sedan.
As far as a satellite is concerned, it doesn't matter if the commands it is issued come from a machine on a TCP/IP-based LAN in a satellite operator's headquaters connected to a satellite dish, or a machine connected to the wider net. What having a SPARC chip on the satellite has to do with things I *really* don't know.
As far as the operators of satellites are concerned, when a satellite costs millions of dollars, do you seriously think that they're going to let Joe Sixpack send direct orders to a satellite and run the risk of crackers getting into their systems - even if they build a strong-crypto buzzword-compliant secure system, and all orders are sanity-checked by software. When you consider the cost of a satellite and the cost of a technician, it's pretty damn cheap to have a human process requests for usage of satellite resources and let that technician issue the appropriate orders to the satellite.
In any case, I'm appalled that such a crappy article could make it into what I believed was a reasonably reputable magazine. Is it a case of mindlessly regurgitating a press release, or a truly clueless journalist? Either way, the journalist and the section editor responsible should be shot at dawn.
I don't expect it to be affordable right away, but how unaffordable it is should give an indication as to how far away from the mainstream it is.
If you want a really nice Australian beer, try Crown Lager, James Boag's Premium Lager, or some of the range of Coopers beers.
Basically, the government is *totally* uninterested in censoring the net - it just likes the legislation so it can point to it and convince the wowsers that it is doing something to protect the Children. While I dislike this kind of thing, I would prefer a situation of bad legislation being ignored to bad legislation wreaking havoc by enforcing it.