I have ADD. I discovered gaming well after I developed ADD, which was in 2nd grade. I wish I'd discovered gaming earlier, as I strongly believe that watching television with commercial breaks 4 times every half hour had a profound impact on the development of my young brain. My parents thought video games would be bad for my development. When I discovered them by way of my exploration of computers, I found that I finally had a good excuse to concentrate on something for hours on end. Books couldn't do this, since the books in the elementary school library took me less than an hour to read each. I'd read 4 Boxcar Children books in a single night. Only video games could get me focused on something long enough to really block out distractions. This is often thought of as a bad thing, as a sign of addiction, but for someone with ADD, it's very therapeutic. I have no idea if it's therapeutic for the ADD itself, but it's a stress relief like none other, which is quite critical when you're the smartest kid in the class and you can't write more than two lines on your homework in 6 hours, and nobody knows why. (ADD without hyperactivity didn't exist in DSM-III, and DSM-IV wasn't out when they first tested me)
I was never addicted to gaming, but it was certainly my default. When in doubt, I played games. My parents thought it negatively impacted my schoolwork, because I was gaming while I was behind on my work. Of course, it wasn't really a choice between gaming and doing my homework, but rather a choice between gaming and sitting in front of the homework all night, maybe managing to write a few lines, if I was lucky. Of course, as I got older, I found other things to be doing with my time. Suddenly there were books long enough that I could only read one in a night. As I and my friends reached driving age, my well-meaning parents' ability to keep me at home when I was behind on my homework (which was pretty much all of the time) was sharply curtailed. There were friends to hang out with for hours learning about industrial music from. Girlfriends to spend hours on end with... ummm... talking... Having a default focus when I needed to settle down was no longer healthy.
Since then, I've never played a game for more than two weeks before putting it down for a long time or forever. A couple times a year I'll pick something up, usually something with a coherent single-player campaign, play it through, and then I'm done. As wonderful as gaming is to help me refocus, once I'm refocused, I want to do something else useful with that refreshed mental discipline, since it's so hard for me to come by, and there are so many things that need it.
Once we reverse-engineer the remote-disable protocol, we can flash our firmware to permanently disable this bullshit, and stop worrying about it. In fact, if it's got an ethernet cable, we could even broadcast our movies to the internet, provided there's enough space on the firmware chips.
I recall a few months ago a collider experiment where the resulting radiation was quite different from expected, because it was being absorbed into a short-lived black hole, which promptly collapsed and released its contents in a rather different manner. This required gravity being much stronger on a very small scale, and the scientists involved conjectured higher dimensions, but didn't have enough data to propose the details of these higher dimensions.
If sounds familiar to anyone, please post a link, because I can't remember enough about the experiment to find it right now.
They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States.
What scares me about this idea is the environmental impact. Anything growing in the ground in (or near) the affected region will die. How much "gunk" does the steam-cleaning process generate, and what will we do with it? How much is the targeted plot of land permanently altered by the process, and in what ways? There are all kinds of ways this could go wrong.
Still, I very much like the idea of the U.S. not depending on foreign sources of oil. Economic entanglement turns into political entanglement, and political entanglement has a nasty habit of turning into military entanglement. Maybe someday we'll have enough troops rested, trained, equipped, and ready to stop genocides and maintain order during natural disasters, like we used to.
As previously reported on slashdot, scientists have also found it possible to replace blood with ice-cold saline, and revive the subject hours later. In other words, before long it will be possible to survive any bodily injury as long as you get medical attention before brain damage begins. With this, you can then grow back whatever was damaged, too.
I can't find a link handy, but I know that research into preventing brain cells from dying after trauma is progressing nicely as well. Ultimately we'll reach the point where just about any non-catastrophic physical injury is recoverable, assuming prompt medical attention.
When all that's left are death, aging (but we might be fixing that too) and psychological problems, maybe people will finally realize just how horribly we've been neglecting mental health for so long.
Repeat after me: "Unlicensed copying is not theft."
Really. Unlicensed copying is not theft. Nor is personal downloading piracy. Piracy, in matters of copyright, is when you sell unlicensed copies of a work, thereby denying the authorized publisher and the author revenue from customers who without question would have made a purchase, as they purchased it from you. Congress has never passed a law explicitly criminalizing personal downloading, and if they actually intended for a law which provides for $250,000 fines to apply to copying a $15 CD, once, then that law would certainly fail the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. This isn't just me talking, you'll see comments to this effect in several judicial rulings related to copyright infringement.
I'm seeing comments in this thread trying to compare the freeloaders to people who actually break into someone's house and steal their stuff. That's not what's going on here at all. The recording industry has engaged in a long term effort to brainwash us all into believing that it is a matter of natural law that we do not have the right to copy information. In fact, the clause in the constitution explicitly permitting copyrights and patents reflect that those who crafted the constitution saw that as a matter of natural law we should be able to do whatever we please with our information, and Congress had to be explicitly authorized to restrict this. Copying can be fair use, or it can be civil or criminal infringement.
So, why are they trying to crack down on the very same downloading that's driving revenue? It's all about power. They want to control everything you do with their content. They want to ram DRM down your throat so far that you can't play any content that they or their allies have not (cryptographically) signed, which implies any content produced by someone they have not contractually signed. Extreme laws are passed only in response to perceived emergencies, so they're creating an emergency.
Teaching zOS in Universities is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of in my entire life. First, it's a logistical nightmare. To do it right, you need to give the class their own ridiculously expensive mainframe. Now, before all the mainframe admins scream "No, that's the whole point of LPARs and z/VM, you can do this on the school's mainframe." I would like to point out that with the many-layered architecture on those mainframes, to really know what you're doing you have to understand all the layers. That means messing with them, and breaking them.
Second, specific technologies I have been taught in school: AES Assembly Language (m68k, mips, ultrasparc, x86) Bash Brainfuck C C++ C# Java OpenGL RSA TCP/IP
None of these are niche for the purpose they're used for, except for the one that's deliberately oversimplified as an exercise in extremism, which is quite useful for education. Mainframes, in contrast, are completely niche. It's perhaps marginally useful as an example of virtualization, but there are all kinds of better ways to acheive that which do not involve EBCDIC, 3270 terminals, OS install from tape, or a computer which, along with its disk unit, requires 4 power taps as big around as my arm, costs 4 years tuition per processor. Most small software companies probably don't have a single employee who's ever even logged into one, except of course with an application that has a mainframe backend.
If you want employees who know mainframe, unless you have the money to shell out for a veteran, you're probably much better off hiring someone with strong technical skills and then sending them to training. That way, you know what their familiarity is with it, instead of merely hoping that the picked up enough wisdom from the guru at their last job that they won't break your system.
Humans will notice anything over about 100 milliseconds. That allows you about 18,600 miles at vacuum light speed. At fiber light speed, that doesn't get you halfway around the world. It also doesn't even get you to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, let alone back again. (That's why satellite internet has really horrible latency.)
So, yes, speed of light is a huge limiting factor in telecom.
Blowers aren't half as good as vacuum pumps. If you microperforate the upper leading edge and attach a vacuum pump underneath that section of wing, you can get a wing performance boost as high as 50%. Still experimental, but don't be surprised if you see it before too long.
The significance of this has nothing to do with adding kinetic energy to the flow, and everything to do with adding small-scale irregularities to it. It's the same reason why golf balls are dimples, why putting a little sand in the top coat of paint on your racing yacht will make it go faster (they have more sophisticated techniques for this now), and why sharks' bumpy skin actually helps them glide more smoothly through the water. The irregularity creates a thicker boundary layer, though I admit I don't know why, which makes it easier for flow to stay attached.
I personally got the target image on the first and third sequences, but couldn't get it on the second one no matter how many times I repeated it.
That said, I don't think they've been exhaustive enough to support the conclusion. Sure, they've proven that people are less likely to recognize a distinctive image shortly after another distinctive image. I RTFA, and I don't see any mention of testing where, instead of violent or erotic images, they used checkerboard patterns or other emotion-neutral pictures that nonetheless stand out from the rest in the set.
I still think it's interesting and useful research, but I don't think they've really controlled for enough variables to support all of their claims.
Well, considering that you can only drive on a set of tires for so long before there's so little tread that just about any road hazard will put a hole in them.
Being "well maintained" pretty much simply requires following the manufacturer's recommended maintenance and fixing any damage. Checking your remaining tread and replacing the tires is the same.
Yeah, you know that and I know that. Some states (the one I'm from, but not the one I currently live in) mandate annual inspections that include tire checks. Given how some people use their cars, that's not often enough if we allow people to drive 85.
And by setting a limit that's artificially low, you only encourage disparity in speed, which is the true killer.
If the average driver doesn't have to worry that his 'natural speed' is going to get the cops after him, he may be a little more likely to pay attention to the road than the spedometer.
It's not artificially low by a whole lot. When I say "artificially low", I mean that there's a range where a slight change in speed has a substantial impact on your likelyhood of an accident, and the limit is set well below this range. When the cost of (often catastrophic) failure is so much higher than the slight inefficiencies caused by taking a little longer to get where you're going, it's really nuts to set a limit that's in the range where you can pretty much guarantee accidents even on the safest of roads. Disparity in speed is going to exist no matter where you set the limit, because some people don't feel comfortable going 85. I once had a car that *couldn't* go 85, though it was otherwise a very safe vehicle. I just didn't take it on interstate highways, because it wasn't safe in a 65 MPH zone where lots of people were going 75.
Also, there will always be idiots (especially drunk ones) who overestimate their abilities, and drive however fast they think they can go without pissing off the police, which is typically speed limit +X, where X is inversely proportional to good judgement and, where applicable, penis size. If you don't want to be subject to regulations that account for other people being stupid, you can build your own road system.
The US has the safest limited access highway system in the world, and with the highest official speed limits. Correspondingly, we also have the largest, most expensive, and least fuel efficient cars. Raising speed limits even more would require even bigger, more expensive, less fuel efficient vehicles to remain so safe. Outside of limited access, speed limits account for other things, like neighborhood kids and pets prone to wandering carelessly into the road.
That said, I sure don't mind speed limits of 70, and 75 wouldn't bother me, but 85 really pushes the limits of current cars and drivers. Maybe not on a minute-to-minute basis, but if everyone drove that fast every day, we'd have a lot more accidents.
My usual 'solution' to driving problems in the USA is to suggest more education and enforcement of 'polite driving'.
Enforcing "polite driving" more aggressively is very problematic. The only evidence is usually a qualitative observation from a very different perspective from the offender. It makes it very difficult to establish that someone did something that they knew or should have known they shouldn't have done. Even if you convince a judge, it's still quite easy to convict someone who firmly believes they did nothing wrong, which can cause an appearance of impropriety on the part of the police, even if there is none. This encourages disrespect for the law, particularly among minorities who historically have been the subject of police abuse, which is generally something that ought to be avoided.
I do however completely agree about the education. I was appalled when the AARP opposed mandatory vision tests on license renewal, and think that it's just the tip of the iceberg. As dangerous as unsafe driving can be, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to have to take a skil
On the flip side, preregistration allows a creator to secure their claim prior to entering negotiations with a publisher. Then you don't get years of litigation about which stuff you did before you signed the contract and which stuff you did afterwards. This is just one more step towards putting distributors in their place, which is that of a business providing a service to the creative talent, rather than a business that employs the creative talent.
I imagine that wasn't the intent of those who lobbied for the law, but that doesn't mean we can't use it to put the power where it belongs.
The problem is, most cars are "well-maintained with good tires" and most drivers are above average, if you ask them. As extreme as the cost of being wrong is, not only to the driver who is wrong about such things but to everyone else on the road, it's really quite reasonable to have a limit that's artificially a little low.
I don't question that it's been evolving rapidly. In fact, mainframes seem to be acquiring major new architectural features at an alarming rate, but without retiring any old ones. I've seen *versions* EOL, only to be replaced with something more complicated and faster if and only if expertly configured. Maybe it's just because I work in support and only see the problem cases, but it seems in a lot of these shops which are spending their suitcases full of $100 bills underwriting the impressive engineering decide that the administrators of these systems are so individually critical they can't afford to send them away to train on the new stuff for a week or two, so they can't tolerate losing any of the legacy stuff they already know.
I completely agree with you in the short term. The salvation from this is that there are some artists who are so influential that the studios can't commoditize them before they've made their indelible mark on their craft, and drawn huge and loyal audiences.
If the electronics manufacturers had started marketing CD players that couldn't play Nirvana when I was in middle school, or that couldn't play Nine Inch Nails when I was in high school, they would have dry-rotted on the shelves.
If just one top-name artist establishes an unencumbered distribution channel, everyone else will have a trail blazed for them. Sure, the manufactured crap will still be DRM, but that'll be a blessing in disguise.
It really ought to be a matter of common sense that employees won't know their status immediately. Someone decides at a high level that they're going to change their priorities, and each division needs to cut their spending by a certain percentage. That percolates down, with managers at each level deciding which portions of their organization are most valuable and efficient. Sometimes whole divisions will be cut or merged (with cuts delegated down) and often the cuts will go down to the individual employee level. As much as it sucks to be uncertain about this, employees now have some warning and time to prepare their resumes and ask their contacts in the industry about positions while management carefully weighs how to do this in a manner that will best serve the company, so that they won't have to do anything else of the sort in the foreseeable future.
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
DRM is only a problem if the content is being distributed with it attached. When the artists are in charge of their own distribution, they are free to not do this. As technology drives the cost of distribution towards zero, distribution will become commoditized. Artistic effort, by its very nature, can't be commoditized. The end result will be that the artists will be in control, as customers and clients. Some will choose to use DRM, some will not. The market will take this into account when deciding who is most convenient to pay attention to, and any DRM that inconveniences consumers substantially will not be economically viable.
If you're supporting your product, encouraging your customers to run on more modern hardware is usually a very good thing. Even if you're doing per-incident support, performance-related problems will take far more resources to solve than your average case, so you're probably losing money on that too. I guess it works if you're selling them by-the-hour consulting though.
In any case, there are a whole lot of things that mainframe vendors have been doing for years that aren't a particularly good idea, but every time they want to change anything qualitative or remove something, their customers pummel them with suitcases full of $100 bills until they agree to leave things exactly how they've been for a decade or two.
Commodity hardware vendors are much more likely to be struck with rocks than suitcases full of $100 bills.
MIPS based licensing is feasible when the software vendor knows that there's one vendor delivering all the hardware components, and can use their authoritative performane data. When you've got interchangeable commodity components from several vendors, and these components are themselves assembled on the circuit boards from interchangeable commodity chips from several other vendors, it's a nightmare.
I should have explained myself better. You're right to be calling me on the stereotype, but I will explain:
I didn't mean to imply that finding a girlfriend magically solves all their problems, rather that powerful biological instincts temporarily overcame their fears of healthy socialization and self-exploration, and they got dragged into trying things slightly beyond their comfort zones. It's the "trying things slightly beyond their comfort zones" that made all the difference. There are other ways to motivate these people to try new things, but I've yet to see one as effective as a cute smile.
It should be noted that many of the drug addict cases involved unhealthy relationships. The relationships by themselves don't solve anything, but they're a powerful impetus for change for those who are in a rut, and as human beings are generally resilient, that tends to be for the better in the long run.
I bet the Warez traders are really furious that their "service to the public" is being shut down. After all, they're doing it as a matter of principle. The Warez world is a gift culture, just like open source, except in the Warez world all you need to be 1337 is the ability to operate both mIRC and a pirated copy of Norton Registry Tracker.
I hope you understand why I don't have the least bit of sympathy about this. I read the press release, and they don't get into BSA-speak or wax philosophical about the nature of copying bits from one computer to another. They throw out some figures which cannot either be proven or disproven, but everyone knows this. They (obviously) applaud the action that international law enforcement took on their behalf. Whether or not you think Warez should be a crime, you can't fault them for thanking people who are doing things that are good for them.
Everyone I've ever known who was heavily into Warez did one of three things:
1) Got a girlfriend and discovered more important things they could be doing. 2) Learned how to program, got into open source, and changed their IRC handle and will now deny to the death that they ever used the old one. 3) Became a drug addict and dropped out of school.
I do, however, oppose putting Warez traders in jail, as they will no longer have their mothers coming downstairs every afternoon nagging them to get a job. Many of them are in fact quite intelligent, and will become productive members of society once they get out of their parents' house, and get some education and/or therapy.
All these things you've described are implementation problems, not design problems. DLL Hell is a result of developers completely missing the point of dynamic linking, implementing it as though it were just a form of static linking that's slower, less stable, and randomly breaks other applications or system libraries.
Package managers solve all of these problems. My familiarity is with apt and rpm with yum/up2date on Linux, but I understand that as of WinXP, the system installer attempts to enforce a certain degree of discipline on application installers, and things like Installshield help the developer distribute an installer that is not likely to either cause or suffer from DLL Hell.
Granted, I have suffered plenty of pain from dependency problems with apt and rpm (all software sucks), but the package manager has always given me enough information to figure out the cause, and resolving it has generally required little more research than reading a man page. In the Windows (95, 98, occasionally XP) world, I was rarely ever able to do any better than determining (by trial and error) that I needed to install my applications in one precise order to get them to work. Without the aid of registry trackers, even that wouldn't have been possible.
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I have ADD. I discovered gaming well after I developed ADD, which was in 2nd grade. I wish I'd discovered gaming earlier, as I strongly believe that watching television with commercial breaks 4 times every half hour had a profound impact on the development of my young brain. My parents thought video games would be bad for my development. When I discovered them by way of my exploration of computers, I found that I finally had a good excuse to concentrate on something for hours on end. Books couldn't do this, since the books in the elementary school library took me less than an hour to read each. I'd read 4 Boxcar Children books in a single night. Only video games could get me focused on something long enough to really block out distractions. This is often thought of as a bad thing, as a sign of addiction, but for someone with ADD, it's very therapeutic. I have no idea if it's therapeutic for the ADD itself, but it's a stress relief like none other, which is quite critical when you're the smartest kid in the class and you can't write more than two lines on your homework in 6 hours, and nobody knows why. (ADD without hyperactivity didn't exist in DSM-III, and DSM-IV wasn't out when they first tested me)
I was never addicted to gaming, but it was certainly my default. When in doubt, I played games. My parents thought it negatively impacted my schoolwork, because I was gaming while I was behind on my work. Of course, it wasn't really a choice between gaming and doing my homework, but rather a choice between gaming and sitting in front of the homework all night, maybe managing to write a few lines, if I was lucky. Of course, as I got older, I found other things to be doing with my time. Suddenly there were books long enough that I could only read one in a night. As I and my friends reached driving age, my well-meaning parents' ability to keep me at home when I was behind on my homework (which was pretty much all of the time) was sharply curtailed. There were friends to hang out with for hours learning about industrial music from. Girlfriends to spend hours on end with... ummm... talking... Having a default focus when I needed to settle down was no longer healthy.
Since then, I've never played a game for more than two weeks before putting it down for a long time or forever. A couple times a year I'll pick something up, usually something with a coherent single-player campaign, play it through, and then I'm done. As wonderful as gaming is to help me refocus, once I'm refocused, I want to do something else useful with that refreshed mental discipline, since it's so hard for me to come by, and there are so many things that need it.
Once we reverse-engineer the remote-disable protocol, we can flash our firmware to permanently disable this bullshit, and stop worrying about it. In fact, if it's got an ethernet cable, we could even broadcast our movies to the internet, provided there's enough space on the firmware chips.
I recall a few months ago a collider experiment where the resulting radiation was quite different from expected, because it was being absorbed into a short-lived black hole, which promptly collapsed and released its contents in a rather different manner. This required gravity being much stronger on a very small scale, and the scientists involved conjectured higher dimensions, but didn't have enough data to propose the details of these higher dimensions.
If sounds familiar to anyone, please post a link, because I can't remember enough about the experiment to find it right now.
They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States.
What scares me about this idea is the environmental impact. Anything growing in the ground in (or near) the affected region will die. How much "gunk" does the steam-cleaning process generate, and what will we do with it? How much is the targeted plot of land permanently altered by the process, and in what ways? There are all kinds of ways this could go wrong.
Still, I very much like the idea of the U.S. not depending on foreign sources of oil. Economic entanglement turns into political entanglement, and political entanglement has a nasty habit of turning into military entanglement. Maybe someday we'll have enough troops rested, trained, equipped, and ready to stop genocides and maintain order during natural disasters, like we used to.
As previously reported on slashdot, scientists have also found it possible to replace blood with ice-cold saline, and revive the subject hours later. In other words, before long it will be possible to survive any bodily injury as long as you get medical attention before brain damage begins. With this, you can then grow back whatever was damaged, too.
I can't find a link handy, but I know that research into preventing brain cells from dying after trauma is progressing nicely as well. Ultimately we'll reach the point where just about any non-catastrophic physical injury is recoverable, assuming prompt medical attention.
When all that's left are death, aging (but we might be fixing that too) and psychological problems, maybe people will finally realize just how horribly we've been neglecting mental health for so long.
Repeat after me: "Unlicensed copying is not theft."
Really. Unlicensed copying is not theft. Nor is personal downloading piracy. Piracy, in matters of copyright, is when you sell unlicensed copies of a work, thereby denying the authorized publisher and the author revenue from customers who without question would have made a purchase, as they purchased it from you. Congress has never passed a law explicitly criminalizing personal downloading, and if they actually intended for a law which provides for $250,000 fines to apply to copying a $15 CD, once, then that law would certainly fail the "cruel and unusual punishment" clause. This isn't just me talking, you'll see comments to this effect in several judicial rulings related to copyright infringement.
I'm seeing comments in this thread trying to compare the freeloaders to people who actually break into someone's house and steal their stuff. That's not what's going on here at all. The recording industry has engaged in a long term effort to brainwash us all into believing that it is a matter of natural law that we do not have the right to copy information. In fact, the clause in the constitution explicitly permitting copyrights and patents reflect that those who crafted the constitution saw that as a matter of natural law we should be able to do whatever we please with our information, and Congress had to be explicitly authorized to restrict this. Copying can be fair use, or it can be civil or criminal infringement.
So, why are they trying to crack down on the very same downloading that's driving revenue? It's all about power. They want to control everything you do with their content. They want to ram DRM down your throat so far that you can't play any content that they or their allies have not (cryptographically) signed, which implies any content produced by someone they have not contractually signed. Extreme laws are passed only in response to perceived emergencies, so they're creating an emergency.
Q. What do you call large numbers of objects no larger than a milk carton moving at orbital velocity?
A. Shrapnel
Teaching zOS in Universities is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of in my entire life. First, it's a logistical nightmare. To do it right, you need to give the class their own ridiculously expensive mainframe. Now, before all the mainframe admins scream "No, that's the whole point of LPARs and z/VM, you can do this on the school's mainframe." I would like to point out that with the many-layered architecture on those mainframes, to really know what you're doing you have to understand all the layers. That means messing with them, and breaking them.
Second, specific technologies I have been taught in school:
AES
Assembly Language (m68k, mips, ultrasparc, x86)
Bash
Brainfuck
C
C++
C#
Java
OpenGL
RSA
TCP/IP
None of these are niche for the purpose they're used for, except for the one that's deliberately oversimplified as an exercise in extremism, which is quite useful for education. Mainframes, in contrast, are completely niche. It's perhaps marginally useful as an example of virtualization, but there are all kinds of better ways to acheive that which do not involve EBCDIC, 3270 terminals, OS install from tape, or a computer which, along with its disk unit, requires 4 power taps as big around as my arm, costs 4 years tuition per processor. Most small software companies probably don't have a single employee who's ever even logged into one, except of course with an application that has a mainframe backend.
If you want employees who know mainframe, unless you have the money to shell out for a veteran, you're probably much better off hiring someone with strong technical skills and then sending them to training. That way, you know what their familiarity is with it, instead of merely hoping that the picked up enough wisdom from the guru at their last job that they won't break your system.
Humans will notice anything over about 100 milliseconds. That allows you about 18,600 miles at vacuum light speed. At fiber light speed, that doesn't get you halfway around the world. It also doesn't even get you to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, let alone back again. (That's why satellite internet has really horrible latency.)
So, yes, speed of light is a huge limiting factor in telecom.
Blowers aren't half as good as vacuum pumps. If you microperforate the upper leading edge and attach a vacuum pump underneath that section of wing, you can get a wing performance boost as high as 50%. Still experimental, but don't be surprised if you see it before too long.
The significance of this has nothing to do with adding kinetic energy to the flow, and everything to do with adding small-scale irregularities to it. It's the same reason why golf balls are dimples, why putting a little sand in the top coat of paint on your racing yacht will make it go faster (they have more sophisticated techniques for this now), and why sharks' bumpy skin actually helps them glide more smoothly through the water. The irregularity creates a thicker boundary layer, though I admit I don't know why, which makes it easier for flow to stay attached.
I personally got the target image on the first and third sequences, but couldn't get it on the second one no matter how many times I repeated it.
That said, I don't think they've been exhaustive enough to support the conclusion. Sure, they've proven that people are less likely to recognize a distinctive image shortly after another distinctive image. I RTFA, and I don't see any mention of testing where, instead of violent or erotic images, they used checkerboard patterns or other emotion-neutral pictures that nonetheless stand out from the rest in the set.
I still think it's interesting and useful research, but I don't think they've really controlled for enough variables to support all of their claims.
Well, considering that you can only drive on a set of tires for so long before there's so little tread that just about any road hazard will put a hole in them.
Being "well maintained" pretty much simply requires following the manufacturer's recommended maintenance and fixing any damage. Checking your remaining tread and replacing the tires is the same.
Yeah, you know that and I know that. Some states (the one I'm from, but not the one I currently live in) mandate annual inspections that include tire checks. Given how some people use their cars, that's not often enough if we allow people to drive 85.
And by setting a limit that's artificially low, you only encourage disparity in speed, which is the true killer.
If the average driver doesn't have to worry that his 'natural speed' is going to get the cops after him, he may be a little more likely to pay attention to the road than the spedometer.
It's not artificially low by a whole lot. When I say "artificially low", I mean that there's a range where a slight change in speed has a substantial impact on your likelyhood of an accident, and the limit is set well below this range. When the cost of (often catastrophic) failure is so much higher than the slight inefficiencies caused by taking a little longer to get where you're going, it's really nuts to set a limit that's in the range where you can pretty much guarantee accidents even on the safest of roads. Disparity in speed is going to exist no matter where you set the limit, because some people don't feel comfortable going 85. I once had a car that *couldn't* go 85, though it was otherwise a very safe vehicle. I just didn't take it on interstate highways, because it wasn't safe in a 65 MPH zone where lots of people were going 75.
Also, there will always be idiots (especially drunk ones) who overestimate their abilities, and drive however fast they think they can go without pissing off the police, which is typically speed limit +X, where X is inversely proportional to good judgement and, where applicable, penis size. If you don't want to be subject to regulations that account for other people being stupid, you can build your own road system.
The US has the safest limited access highway system in the world, and with the highest official speed limits. Correspondingly, we also have the largest, most expensive, and least fuel efficient cars. Raising speed limits even more would require even bigger, more expensive, less fuel efficient vehicles to remain so safe. Outside of limited access, speed limits account for other things, like neighborhood kids and pets prone to wandering carelessly into the road.
That said, I sure don't mind speed limits of 70, and 75 wouldn't bother me, but 85 really pushes the limits of current cars and drivers. Maybe not on a minute-to-minute basis, but if everyone drove that fast every day, we'd have a lot more accidents.
My usual 'solution' to driving problems in the USA is to suggest more education and enforcement of 'polite driving'.
Enforcing "polite driving" more aggressively is very problematic. The only evidence is usually a qualitative observation from a very different perspective from the offender. It makes it very difficult to establish that someone did something that they knew or should have known they shouldn't have done. Even if you convince a judge, it's still quite easy to convict someone who firmly believes they did nothing wrong, which can cause an appearance of impropriety on the part of the police, even if there is none. This encourages disrespect for the law, particularly among minorities who historically have been the subject of police abuse, which is generally something that ought to be avoided.
I do however completely agree about the education. I was appalled when the AARP opposed mandatory vision tests on license renewal, and think that it's just the tip of the iceberg. As dangerous as unsafe driving can be, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable to have to take a skil
On the flip side, preregistration allows a creator to secure their claim prior to entering negotiations with a publisher. Then you don't get years of litigation about which stuff you did before you signed the contract and which stuff you did afterwards. This is just one more step towards putting distributors in their place, which is that of a business providing a service to the creative talent, rather than a business that employs the creative talent.
I imagine that wasn't the intent of those who lobbied for the law, but that doesn't mean we can't use it to put the power where it belongs.
The problem is, most cars are "well-maintained with good tires" and most drivers are above average, if you ask them. As extreme as the cost of being wrong is, not only to the driver who is wrong about such things but to everyone else on the road, it's really quite reasonable to have a limit that's artificially a little low.
It would seem that posting a link on slashdot is a far more effective method of censorship than anything this ISP is capable of.
I don't question that it's been evolving rapidly. In fact, mainframes seem to be acquiring major new architectural features at an alarming rate, but without retiring any old ones. I've seen *versions* EOL, only to be replaced with something more complicated and faster if and only if expertly configured. Maybe it's just because I work in support and only see the problem cases, but it seems in a lot of these shops which are spending their suitcases full of $100 bills underwriting the impressive engineering decide that the administrators of these systems are so individually critical they can't afford to send them away to train on the new stuff for a week or two, so they can't tolerate losing any of the legacy stuff they already know.
I completely agree with you in the short term. The salvation from this is that there are some artists who are so influential that the studios can't commoditize them before they've made their indelible mark on their craft, and drawn huge and loyal audiences.
If the electronics manufacturers had started marketing CD players that couldn't play Nirvana when I was in middle school, or that couldn't play Nine Inch Nails when I was in high school, they would have dry-rotted on the shelves.
If just one top-name artist establishes an unencumbered distribution channel, everyone else will have a trail blazed for them. Sure, the manufactured crap will still be DRM, but that'll be a blessing in disguise.
It really ought to be a matter of common sense that employees won't know their status immediately. Someone decides at a high level that they're going to change their priorities, and each division needs to cut their spending by a certain percentage. That percolates down, with managers at each level deciding which portions of their organization are most valuable and efficient. Sometimes whole divisions will be cut or merged (with cuts delegated down) and often the cuts will go down to the individual employee level. As much as it sucks to be uncertain about this, employees now have some warning and time to prepare their resumes and ask their contacts in the industry about positions while management carefully weighs how to do this in a manner that will best serve the company, so that they won't have to do anything else of the sort in the foreseeable future.
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
DRM is only a problem if the content is being distributed with it attached. When the artists are in charge of their own distribution, they are free to not do this. As technology drives the cost of distribution towards zero, distribution will become commoditized. Artistic effort, by its very nature, can't be commoditized. The end result will be that the artists will be in control, as customers and clients. Some will choose to use DRM, some will not. The market will take this into account when deciding who is most convenient to pay attention to, and any DRM that inconveniences consumers substantially will not be economically viable.
The only problem is that this will take a while.
If you're supporting your product, encouraging your customers to run on more modern hardware is usually a very good thing. Even if you're doing per-incident support, performance-related problems will take far more resources to solve than your average case, so you're probably losing money on that too. I guess it works if you're selling them by-the-hour consulting though.
In any case, there are a whole lot of things that mainframe vendors have been doing for years that aren't a particularly good idea, but every time they want to change anything qualitative or remove something, their customers pummel them with suitcases full of $100 bills until they agree to leave things exactly how they've been for a decade or two.
Commodity hardware vendors are much more likely to be struck with rocks than suitcases full of $100 bills.
I've been getting a few of these per day, so that's more like a thousand per day. So far none of them have guessed my root password, which is 12345.
MIPS based licensing is feasible when the software vendor knows that there's one vendor delivering all the hardware components, and can use their authoritative performane data. When you've got interchangeable commodity components from several vendors, and these components are themselves assembled on the circuit boards from interchangeable commodity chips from several other vendors, it's a nightmare.
I should have explained myself better. You're right to be calling me on the stereotype, but I will explain:
I didn't mean to imply that finding a girlfriend magically solves all their problems, rather that powerful biological instincts temporarily overcame their fears of healthy socialization and self-exploration, and they got dragged into trying things slightly beyond their comfort zones. It's the "trying things slightly beyond their comfort zones" that made all the difference. There are other ways to motivate these people to try new things, but I've yet to see one as effective as a cute smile.
It should be noted that many of the drug addict cases involved unhealthy relationships. The relationships by themselves don't solve anything, but they're a powerful impetus for change for those who are in a rut, and as human beings are generally resilient, that tends to be for the better in the long run.
I bet the Warez traders are really furious that their "service to the public" is being shut down. After all, they're doing it as a matter of principle. The Warez world is a gift culture, just like open source, except in the Warez world all you need to be 1337 is the ability to operate both mIRC and a pirated copy of Norton Registry Tracker.
I hope you understand why I don't have the least bit of sympathy about this. I read the press release, and they don't get into BSA-speak or wax philosophical about the nature of copying bits from one computer to another. They throw out some figures which cannot either be proven or disproven, but everyone knows this. They (obviously) applaud the action that international law enforcement took on their behalf. Whether or not you think Warez should be a crime, you can't fault them for thanking people who are doing things that are good for them.
Everyone I've ever known who was heavily into Warez did one of three things:
1) Got a girlfriend and discovered more important things they could be doing.
2) Learned how to program, got into open source, and changed their IRC handle and will now deny to the death that they ever used the old one.
3) Became a drug addict and dropped out of school.
I do, however, oppose putting Warez traders in jail, as they will no longer have their mothers coming downstairs every afternoon nagging them to get a job. Many of them are in fact quite intelligent, and will become productive members of society once they get out of their parents' house, and get some education and/or therapy.
All these things you've described are implementation problems, not design problems. DLL Hell is a result of developers completely missing the point of dynamic linking, implementing it as though it were just a form of static linking that's slower, less stable, and randomly breaks other applications or system libraries.
Package managers solve all of these problems. My familiarity is with apt and rpm with yum/up2date on Linux, but I understand that as of WinXP, the system installer attempts to enforce a certain degree of discipline on application installers, and things like Installshield help the developer distribute an installer that is not likely to either cause or suffer from DLL Hell.
Granted, I have suffered plenty of pain from dependency problems with apt and rpm (all software sucks), but the package manager has always given me enough information to figure out the cause, and resolving it has generally required little more research than reading a man page. In the Windows (95, 98, occasionally XP) world, I was rarely ever able to do any better than determining (by trial and error) that I needed to install my applications in one precise order to get them to work. Without the aid of registry trackers, even that wouldn't have been possible.