It may or may not be true that the various network daemons installed on most Mac OS X installs are 'secure' (I'll go with the premise for the time, but, really, who knows what currently undiscovered vulnerabilities therein lie? Yes, that applies for the same daemons installed on any Unix), but really, what protects Macs from the same kind of user 'tricking' that are commonly used against windows users.
Things like:
* A website of, err, questionable repute, which tells you that you need to download and run an installer for a new 'video player' to see videos on the website, but which is really the installer for a rootkit or botnet zombie.
* An email claiming to have an attachment or a link to a file which purports to be some business related file, or a video or photo the receiver might find funny, or a holiday greeting card, etc, but is really the installer for a rootkit or botnet zombie.
Don't say that Mac users are just too smart to fall for that kind of thing - I'm sure some of them are, but I'm equally sure some of them aren't.
I think the main thing which protects Mac and Linux users from such things is mainly that, right now, the installed base for both O/Ses is just too small for anyone to care about attacking. But, the Mac community is rather larger, and growing somewhat quickly, so they could be soon a large enough user base to be 'worth' trying to exploit.
Transit, peering, whatever. All I care about is that I'm paying you to deliver my packets. If Bob disconnects from you, then until you can re-peer with Bob, I expect you to transit through Charlie. Find a route, any route, but get the packet there. Cogent seriously screwed their customers by not having some alternate routing in place, and they should be sued for breaching their contractual obligations to their customers. Same thing for Sprint. They both deserve to be sued over this, by their customers.
Seems to me that if any possible route exists between two hosts, and if the 'preferred' route, based on costs, is unavailable, then the packets should automatically be re-routed through the next best available route. If you are my backbone provider, I expect you to get packets to their destination one way or another, and I don't give a damn how much it costs you; after all, I've already payed you for my Internet connection, which means that routing and associated costs are your problem, not mine.
If that's really true, that Cogent purposefully sabotaged their own customers' ability to do business, I would suspect there is grounds for a class-action lawsuit somewhere there. Time will tell, but if there's any *chance* of a payout, some lawyer must be on the scent by now.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too. It's true that home users, and sprint cell phone customers aren't going to have more than one provider at their side, BUT, it seems to me like any company/government entity/ISP/etc doing any kind of business on the Internet should always have at least two seperate links to route traffic over. That way, if you are a cogent customer and Sprint cuts them off, hopefully your secondary provider still can route traffic to sprint.
As long as *one end* of the end-user/server connection has two routes, then the severing of direct connections between two networks shouldn't terminate service.
On the other hand, I don't understand why both Sprint and Cogent didn't end up routing traffic through one or more third-party networks that they both peered with (e.g. AT&T, Verizon, etc). Sure, that might have been more expensive than direct traffic exchange but 1) you then don't get 10,000 angry customers calling you, and maybe even suing you for breach of contract, and 2) you can try to sue the other party for the additional expenses incurred by. the breach of contract (one of the must have breached the contract, the only question is who).
"(Though does anyone use Yahoo! Search? Come to think of it, does anyone use any Yahoo! properties other than Flickr and del.icio.us these days?)"
I think a lot of people still use Yahoo! Mail, and finance.yahoo.com (their financial info website; the finance site is really well done, as far as I can tell, and I don't think Google has anything that quite compares to finance.yahoo.com).
I mostly stopped using Yahoo search a long time ago, though occasionally I'll try it to see if it gives me different results than Google does. But I still think the finance site is an excellent informational resource.
To be fair, this proposal isn't the Fed government providing access. It's a proposal to give some company a block of spectrum (I think for free) with the requirement that the company provide some kind of free Internet access using part of the spectrum, and they would be allowed to provide a 'premium' internet service which they would charge for with the rest of the spectrum. So what you would probably get is free Internet access at probably very low speeds, with 1/2 of the web 'filtered', along with, I bet, things like games, P2P file sharing, etc, also filtered, or you can pay $50-$80/mo for full, high-speed access.
These Muni Wi-Fi projects that are failing by the dozen - I've always wondered. . . "Why Wi-Fi"? WiFi was never intended to be a very wide area technology. Its meant for a house or small office, or a small sub-volume of a larger building (that is, it's not uncommon to need more than one *per-building* in large buildings like office buildings, hotels, hospitals, libraries, etc.
Seems to me that if you want to roll out municipal high-speed wireless access, you need something like 3G Mobile Telco networks. Those, by their nature, are *designed* to work as reliably as they are able to pull off, in a very wide area, without needing the excessive number of access points that you need for Muni WiFi. But wait, we *already have those*. Yeah, they're kinda expensive right now. Maybe the FCC could just look into price-fixing/gouging in the mobile telecom industry.
Still, my point is, I think that WiFi is just the wrong answer to the whole city-wide wireless internet question. I think the engineers that developed the 3G tech standards have solved the municipal wireless problem, mostly, it's just a matter of getting that wireless data connection reasonably priced so people can afford it. For example, the FCC could look into the nonsense of mobile telcos requiring a seperate data plan for your laptop than your cell phone. If I'm paying for wireless data bandwidth, what does it matter what device I use it on, I'm paying for the bandwidth? Don't allow the telcos to force the customer to pay twice. Don't allow them to charge such exorbitant rates for data (for an example, see AT&T DataConnect Plan Pricing; they charge $40/mo for a 50MB limit, or $60/mo for 5GB - I mean, if the actual cost of the data connection were in anywhere approaching a scale to the price you pay, AT&T could never afford to let you jump to 100 TIMES more data for a mere 20 dollars, so they just obviously charge you whatever the hell they want).
The absolute fastest and easiest way to get wireless internet access out to the country and have it be affordable is to simply put an end to this price-gouging crap by the mobile telcos.
"One reason is, even if we were to give out what you played today - even if we put invisible walls around it and said, here's the demo, you can go anywhere you like inside these walls and play it how you want - that's potentially right there eight-to-ten hours of gameplay," said Hocking.
"I don't know too many people who are willing to give away a 12-hour game for free"
Wow, that has got to be one of the most BS arguments I've ever heard.
This is one of those things that probably wouldn't happen, but could. . . if you ever get audited by RIAA over music 'piracy' allegations, it's good to still have the original CDs with their packaging as proof of license. I ripped all my CD's a long time ago too, now I keep them in a box in a storage unit in my building's basement. I don't listen to the original CD's, but I got em if I need em.
Well, to start with, most online sales are through digital stores, like Amazon, iTMS, Walmart, RealNetworks, etc, so you still have the "costs the store adds to it."
There's also the reality that, in the past, people would often buy a whole album for $10-20 because they new they liked one or two tracks. With online sales, a lot of people are buying tracks a-la carte, so the record companies are driving up the per-track cost, somewhat, to compensate for lost revenue from the albums. You still pay less than you would for an entire album, but more for the individual songs. Seems like a economically reasonable compromise. If you do buy the entire album, most of the stores do give you what amounts to a dollar or two discount off the per-track price.
Finally, in a free market, price is not really a function of cost. People selling goods will charge as much as consumers are willing to pay them for the goods. Cost acts as a 'floor', below which the price cannot really fall (well, it can if the publishers decide to have a 'clearance sale' on stuff that otherwise won't sell at all, to try to cut their losses some). So, the ultimate answer to the question "how these assholes get off charging even 1/4 of the price of a physical cd for a digital download", is that people are willing to pay it.
Maybe my perceptions on this are skewed, but it seems to me that a few years ago, most games had downloadable demos to try. I've been noticing in the last 2 or 3 years that more and more games are being released with no demos.
Personally, I've decided to, generally, not buy any games without demos. The only exception I make is when I have a friend who has the game in question, where I can use his/her copy of the game to try it on my PC first (I did that with Mass Effect, and did go buy ME once I'd verified it worked on my PC and that I generally liked it).
But, I'm with the parent - game companies really are costing themselves opportunities by not releasing demos, because as a buyer of video games, I just can't *afford* to buy a game without trying a demo first. I don't have money to waste on titles that won't work for me or which I don't find sufficiently entertaining, and because of the very *wide* range of hardware in PC systems, there is a very real risk the game *won't* run (or at least won't run right) on my computer.
I suppose this might be slightly off-topic, but one concern I have with the use of DNA evidence is that, now that everybody knows about DNA evidence, what's to stop someone from planting DNA evidence at a crime scene? Splash some body fluids here, drop some hair there, and smear some skin cells at a strategic location, and voila "we have DNA evidence that places the defendant at the scene of the crime."
Personally, I would like to see more R&D into synthesizing chemical fuels, efficiently, from electricity. I just think that, for convenience and power, it's hard to beat chemical fuels. The trick is, can we efficiently produce any type of relatively safe chemical fuel using electricity. The 'obvious' solution is creating hydrogen from water (gas or liquid), but hydrogen has it's own problems, such as difficulty in containing it safely.
Again, any electric solution does depend on cheap electricity, but I think that, at least eventually, practical fusion power will become a reality.
I wonder if it's possibly to synthesize gasoline, or diesel, or anything like that, efficiently/cheaply, using electricity?
It's true, some accounts you would probably just let die with you. But there are other things which are more important. I don't think I would have/. notified if I died, because I'm not important enough around here for anyone to care, but, you know, maybe if I was involved in an online gaming clan/guild, I might want them notified when I passed. Perhaps if I was the maintainer for an open source software program, it might be good to notify the users and/or upstream maintainers (e.g. if a Debian package maintainer died, it'd be nice for the Debian project to know so they can pick another maintainer). Maybe I maintain a server which is going to go down, the users of which should maybe be notified so that they can get off whatever stuff they need to.
Maybe an online friend entrusted me with an encrypted truecrypt file of stuff they wanted me to hold as 'off-site backup' for them, maybe my next of kin or estate executor should know about that, so they can notify the person who gave me the copy, so that they can either find someone else to hold backups for them, or if necessary, retrieve the backup from your next-of-kin/executor.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, software patents in general, or the many dumb patents, but I have to wonder. . .
Microsoft (and many other companies, I presume) spent, I presume, an awful lot of money on patent application fees, not to mention attorney's fees, engineer time, etc to develop and submit the patents, under a regime which had previously, I believe, been recognized as 'legal'. That is, they played the game by the rules as they were at the time. Now, after all that money is spent, the judiciary decides to change the rules on patentability, which will likely result in many of those patents becoming invalid.
Will all the companies and individuals who spent money applying for patents that would now declared invalid under the *new* rules, be able to get back their application fees?
I don't so much mind that the rules are being changed, because I think it's an improvement over the old situation. Still, it doesn't sit right with me that the government arbitrarily changes the rules after taking your money. Seems like the 'old' patents should either be 'grandfathered' in the system (that is, they remain valid because they were filed under different rules), or the people and companies who are losing their patents should be compensated somehow.
". ..if you ask me. If anything, we need more science and engineering spending to stimulate the economy directly at a time of recession."
There, fixed it for you.
I do think there is a place for the government to spend money on science and engineering R&D, but I have to at least partly agree with the GP. While I don't think we should completely cut NASA, I think it might be time for us to consider scaling down our space spending, for awhile (future generations can increase space funding again, when the country is no longer bankrupt).
We need science and engineering spending with more short and mid term applications. Things like energy R&D (a good start would be to re-start the Integral Fast Reactor program that was cancelled by Clinton when it was about 80% finished, and to increase funding for Fusion, Biomass, and other alternative energy research). Increased spending on Health R&D, and improved use of government IT to reduce costs related to administrative overhead and fraud.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of terrestrial science and engineering that are currently under-funded, which would have more concrete benefits to our economy in the short and near term (near being, say, within 50 years; e.g. I've seen estimates that we can probably develop practical, economical fusion power plant designs within 30 - 50 years if we commit sufficient funding to it - that might sound like a long time, but really, the sooner we commit to giving it enough funding, the sooner we can get fusion tech, which could have a very big positive impact on the world economy; another example would be superconductor research - I've seen some estimates about how much energy is lost during electrical transmission on the current grid, and the impact super conductors would have on that ), than the space programs do.
Note, I don't think NASA should be completely scaled back, because there is, I believe, a lot of scientific research with terrestrial applications which can only be done in space (because of the need for microgravity), but as the GP said, we do need to think carefully about how we spend money, because the US is close to bankruptcy.
. ..Don't you think? After all, fundamentally, DRM-ed games *are* only temporarily available, by definition. Someday the user *will* be locked out of the game.
What version of IE are you using? I've used IE6 and IE7 with Slashdot (though I haven't used 6 recently, so that might be broken now, not sure) and I don't think I've had problems with the tags (though I have had some nasty rendering issues with stuff on the page overlapping other stuff, but that's life, I guess).
I suspect that the problem is just that you are using an old version of IE. You're free to use whatever browser you want, but it's usually a good idea to use a recent version of the browser instead of an old one.
Also, there's a difference between coding to a specific browser and trying to force people to switch to that browser, and coding to the published Standards, and having people using broken browsers having a problem. I really don't see any moral wrong in coding to a Standard even though some browsers don't support it. Let Microsoft fix IE.
I don't think this is much of an issue to worry about because:
1) This tech is only really useful in areas where there isn't already abundant fresh water. For example, I live in Ohio, USA. We have lots of rivers (including the Ohio River, which is a large tributary river of the Mississippi R.), streams, lakes (including a northern coast on Lake Erie, one of the "Great Lakes", which contains a pretty massive amount of fresh water), and lots of ground water as well. Because of the energy requirements to operate this thing, I suspect that treated water from a municipal water network is probably much cheaper in much of the world.
2) I don't think that 6, or even 10 billion humans could out-use the water evaporated from the oceans, rivers, and lakes by the Sun, although I suppose that, *maybe* we could inadvertently change weather patterns a little bit. This point, however, I will admit, is pure speculation on my part and I don't have any hard data to back it up. Just a knowledge that a massive amount of solar energy hits the earth's surface every day, and that some 80% of the earth is covered by water, so, basically, about 80% of the energy from the Sun goes to evaporating water (ok, some percentage of the energy is reflected off the surface of the water, so that statement's not, probably, quite true, but gives us a good starting point for thinking about the problem).
"It probably would be cheaper just to have the astronauts make sure the bag is continually tethered to something."
Yeah, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to just "not get sick or have any accidents" than to pay for health insurance.
Seriously, sh-t happens, as the saying goes. I really don't think it would be that hard to create some sort of little robot, like the person suggested, to fetch stuff. Heck, it doesn't have to even be a robot in the sense of being autonomous. It could just be an R/C device. You probably wouldn't even need any sort of combustion-based engine for the bot, just some sort of compressed gas (air, nitrogen, CO2) nozzles.
"And we could really use a project that would kick-start a new wave of technological innovation."
I agree with the sentiment, but I think that perhaps right now isn't the time for mankind to be focusing it's scientific and engineering resources on manned missions to mars. Someday, yes, but we really have soom looming crises right here on Earth that need addressing in the short and mid terms.
For example, I propose some candidates:
* Restart and actually *finish* this time, the Integral Fast Reactor project (which was started in the 80s, work progressed for about a decade, had gotten a lot of practical results, and was about 3 years from completion when the Clinton administration decided to moth-ball the project. The IFR was a new fission power-plant design that was dramatically safer (this was shown, experimentally, to be true, not just theoretically), and which included on-site fuel reprocessing which would both increase the amount of energy we extract from the fuel dramatically, while also causing the final waste products to be much safer/less toxic than traditional nuclear waste.
* Pebble Bed nuclear reactor technology (which might make it possible to have safe small-scale nuclear reactors, for things like commercial ship engines (which could double as portable emergency electric generators; think of something like sailing one or two of these ships to Florida or the Gulf Coast after a hurricane, switching the engine power from driving the screws to driving electric generators, and hooking the generators up to the municipal power grid (well, what's left of it anyhow).
* Fusion research - this is a bit longer term research program (already underway, but apparently underfunded, so that practical results may take a very long time indeed). Fission with IFR and/or other new safer and more efficient designs could certainly help fill the gap until we have fusion research, but fusion would seem to be safer and more 'renewable' than fission, if it could be made practical.
This is only, I'm sure, a small sampling of the types of practical R&D programs which we could fund for terrestrial applications. Not that I'm against a manned mission to mars, in the long term (I think it'd be great), but there are some very pressing problems like a looming energy crisis, which we really need to take care of before, I think, our economy can really bear the burden of more 'academic' scientific pursuits of the scale that a manned mission to Mars would be. You don't really 'need' a space project to drive scientific and engineering progress. Yes, a space project *can* drive them, but mostly that is a function of the space project making funding available. There's no reason we can't make funding available for research and development for practical, immediate-benefit terrestrial applications.
Seriously, how do you define excessive reserves? I don't agree that any such thing exists in the universe. Any reserves, which aren't already allocated to specific expenditures are, it would seem to me to be self-obviously true, put in holding to cover future operating expenses.
I mean, consider the current economic troubles that the US and Europe are experiencing. We, right now, don't even know if, say, a few months from now, the economy will totally collapse into a great depression. I would say that *any* entity, whether it be non-profit or for-profit, should be holding as much money as possible in reserve right now, just in case revenues/donations drop staggeringly over the next year or two (seriously, if a full-blown depression hits, I could see donations to non-profit orgs dropping >50% overnight).
I don't see why having savings, even savings which some might argue are large compared to revenues (e.g. 1 or 2 years worth of operating expenses), should be illegal for a non-profit. They need to survive and continue providing the services and goods which they were created to provide, *especially* during hard economic times, the exact times when they would see the least donations.
If you look at something like Mozilla, they would probably see much more severe drops in donations than would, say, local food, clothing, housing, or medical non-profits, since most people who have any money to donate during times of economic distress, are likely going to want to help people with the necessities of life before worrying about computer software.
Slashdot Mirror
It may or may not be true that the various network daemons installed on most Mac OS X installs are 'secure' (I'll go with the premise for the time, but, really, who knows what currently undiscovered vulnerabilities therein lie? Yes, that applies for the same daemons installed on any Unix), but really, what protects Macs from the same kind of user 'tricking' that are commonly used against windows users.
Things like:
* A website of, err, questionable repute, which tells you that you need to download and run an installer for a new 'video player' to see videos on the website, but which is really the installer for a rootkit or botnet zombie.
* An email claiming to have an attachment or a link to a file which purports to be some business related file, or a video or photo the receiver might find funny, or a holiday greeting card, etc, but is really the installer for a rootkit or botnet zombie.
Don't say that Mac users are just too smart to fall for that kind of thing - I'm sure some of them are, but I'm equally sure some of them aren't.
I think the main thing which protects Mac and Linux users from such things is mainly that, right now, the installed base for both O/Ses is just too small for anyone to care about attacking. But, the Mac community is rather larger, and growing somewhat quickly, so they could be soon a large enough user base to be 'worth' trying to exploit.
Transit, peering, whatever. All I care about is that I'm paying you to deliver my packets. If Bob disconnects from you, then until you can re-peer with Bob, I expect you to transit through Charlie. Find a route, any route, but get the packet there. Cogent seriously screwed their customers by not having some alternate routing in place, and they should be sued for breaching their contractual obligations to their customers. Same thing for Sprint. They both deserve to be sued over this, by their customers.
Seems to me that if any possible route exists between two hosts, and if the 'preferred' route, based on costs, is unavailable, then the packets should automatically be re-routed through the next best available route. If you are my backbone provider, I expect you to get packets to their destination one way or another, and I don't give a damn how much it costs you; after all, I've already payed you for my Internet connection, which means that routing and associated costs are your problem, not mine.
If that's really true, that Cogent purposefully sabotaged their own customers' ability to do business, I would suspect there is grounds for a class-action lawsuit somewhere there. Time will tell, but if there's any *chance* of a payout, some lawyer must be on the scent by now.
Yeah, I was thinking about this too. It's true that home users, and sprint cell phone customers aren't going to have more than one provider at their side, BUT, it seems to me like any company/government entity/ISP/etc doing any kind of business on the Internet should always have at least two seperate links to route traffic over. That way, if you are a cogent customer and Sprint cuts them off, hopefully your secondary provider still can route traffic to sprint.
As long as *one end* of the end-user/server connection has two routes, then the severing of direct connections between two networks shouldn't terminate service.
On the other hand, I don't understand why both Sprint and Cogent didn't end up routing traffic through one or more third-party networks that they both peered with (e.g. AT&T, Verizon, etc). Sure, that might have been more expensive than direct traffic exchange but 1) you then don't get 10,000 angry customers calling you, and maybe even suing you for breach of contract, and 2) you can try to sue the other party for the additional expenses incurred by. the breach of contract (one of the must have breached the contract, the only question is who).
"(Though does anyone use Yahoo! Search? Come to think of it, does anyone use any Yahoo! properties other than Flickr and del.icio.us these days?)"
I think a lot of people still use Yahoo! Mail, and finance.yahoo.com (their financial info website; the finance site is really well done, as far as I can tell, and I don't think Google has anything that quite compares to finance.yahoo.com).
I mostly stopped using Yahoo search a long time ago, though occasionally I'll try it to see if it gives me different results than Google does. But I still think the finance site is an excellent informational resource.
To be fair, this proposal isn't the Fed government providing access. It's a proposal to give some company a block of spectrum (I think for free) with the requirement that the company provide some kind of free Internet access using part of the spectrum, and they would be allowed to provide a 'premium' internet service which they would charge for with the rest of the spectrum. So what you would probably get is free Internet access at probably very low speeds, with 1/2 of the web 'filtered', along with, I bet, things like games, P2P file sharing, etc, also filtered, or you can pay $50-$80/mo for full, high-speed access.
These Muni Wi-Fi projects that are failing by the dozen - I've always wondered. . . "Why Wi-Fi"? WiFi was never intended to be a very wide area technology. Its meant for a house or small office, or a small sub-volume of a larger building (that is, it's not uncommon to need more than one *per-building* in large buildings like office buildings, hotels, hospitals, libraries, etc.
Seems to me that if you want to roll out municipal high-speed wireless access, you need something like 3G Mobile Telco networks. Those, by their nature, are *designed* to work as reliably as they are able to pull off, in a very wide area, without needing the excessive number of access points that you need for Muni WiFi. But wait, we *already have those*. Yeah, they're kinda expensive right now. Maybe the FCC could just look into price-fixing/gouging in the mobile telecom industry.
Still, my point is, I think that WiFi is just the wrong answer to the whole city-wide wireless internet question. I think the engineers that developed the 3G tech standards have solved the municipal wireless problem, mostly, it's just a matter of getting that wireless data connection reasonably priced so people can afford it. For example, the FCC could look into the nonsense of mobile telcos requiring a seperate data plan for your laptop than your cell phone. If I'm paying for wireless data bandwidth, what does it matter what device I use it on, I'm paying for the bandwidth? Don't allow the telcos to force the customer to pay twice. Don't allow them to charge such exorbitant rates for data (for an example, see AT&T DataConnect Plan Pricing; they charge $40/mo for a 50MB limit, or $60/mo for 5GB - I mean, if the actual cost of the data connection were in anywhere approaching a scale to the price you pay, AT&T could never afford to let you jump to 100 TIMES more data for a mere 20 dollars, so they just obviously charge you whatever the hell they want).
The absolute fastest and easiest way to get wireless internet access out to the country and have it be affordable is to simply put an end to this price-gouging crap by the mobile telcos.
"One reason is, even if we were to give out what you played today - even if we put invisible walls around it and said, here's the demo, you can go anywhere you like inside these walls and play it how you want - that's potentially right there eight-to-ten hours of gameplay," said Hocking.
"I don't know too many people who are willing to give away a 12-hour game for free"
Wow, that has got to be one of the most BS arguments I've ever heard.
This is one of those things that probably wouldn't happen, but could. . . if you ever get audited by RIAA over music 'piracy' allegations, it's good to still have the original CDs with their packaging as proof of license. I ripped all my CD's a long time ago too, now I keep them in a box in a storage unit in my building's basement. I don't listen to the original CD's, but I got em if I need em.
Well, to start with, most online sales are through digital stores, like Amazon, iTMS, Walmart, RealNetworks, etc, so you still have the "costs the store adds to it."
There's also the reality that, in the past, people would often buy a whole album for $10-20 because they new they liked one or two tracks. With online sales, a lot of people are buying tracks a-la carte, so the record companies are driving up the per-track cost, somewhat, to compensate for lost revenue from the albums. You still pay less than you would for an entire album, but more for the individual songs. Seems like a economically reasonable compromise. If you do buy the entire album, most of the stores do give you what amounts to a dollar or two discount off the per-track price.
Finally, in a free market, price is not really a function of cost. People selling goods will charge as much as consumers are willing to pay them for the goods. Cost acts as a 'floor', below which the price cannot really fall (well, it can if the publishers decide to have a 'clearance sale' on stuff that otherwise won't sell at all, to try to cut their losses some). So, the ultimate answer to the question "how these assholes get off charging even 1/4 of the price of a physical cd for a digital download", is that people are willing to pay it.
Well, I never heard of Gattaca before, but I might have to check it out now that you mention it.
Wow. . . planting a blood tube in your arm. . . that takes the idea to a whole new level. Nice reference there. Thanks for sharing that.
Maybe my perceptions on this are skewed, but it seems to me that a few years ago, most games had downloadable demos to try. I've been noticing in the last 2 or 3 years that more and more games are being released with no demos.
Personally, I've decided to, generally, not buy any games without demos. The only exception I make is when I have a friend who has the game in question, where I can use his/her copy of the game to try it on my PC first (I did that with Mass Effect, and did go buy ME once I'd verified it worked on my PC and that I generally liked it).
But, I'm with the parent - game companies really are costing themselves opportunities by not releasing demos, because as a buyer of video games, I just can't *afford* to buy a game without trying a demo first. I don't have money to waste on titles that won't work for me or which I don't find sufficiently entertaining, and because of the very *wide* range of hardware in PC systems, there is a very real risk the game *won't* run (or at least won't run right) on my computer.
I suppose this might be slightly off-topic, but one concern I have with the use of DNA evidence is that, now that everybody knows about DNA evidence, what's to stop someone from planting DNA evidence at a crime scene? Splash some body fluids here, drop some hair there, and smear some skin cells at a strategic location, and voila "we have DNA evidence that places the defendant at the scene of the crime."
Personally, I would like to see more R&D into synthesizing chemical fuels, efficiently, from electricity. I just think that, for convenience and power, it's hard to beat chemical fuels. The trick is, can we efficiently produce any type of relatively safe chemical fuel using electricity. The 'obvious' solution is creating hydrogen from water (gas or liquid), but hydrogen has it's own problems, such as difficulty in containing it safely.
Again, any electric solution does depend on cheap electricity, but I think that, at least eventually, practical fusion power will become a reality.
I wonder if it's possibly to synthesize gasoline, or diesel, or anything like that, efficiently/cheaply, using electricity?
It's true, some accounts you would probably just let die with you. But there are other things which are more important. I don't think I would have /. notified if I died, because I'm not important enough around here for anyone to care, but, you know, maybe if I was involved in an online gaming clan/guild, I might want them notified when I passed. Perhaps if I was the maintainer for an open source software program, it might be good to notify the users and/or upstream maintainers (e.g. if a Debian package maintainer died, it'd be nice for the Debian project to know so they can pick another maintainer). Maybe I maintain a server which is going to go down, the users of which should maybe be notified so that they can get off whatever stuff they need to.
Maybe an online friend entrusted me with an encrypted truecrypt file of stuff they wanted me to hold as 'off-site backup' for them, maybe my next of kin or estate executor should know about that, so they can notify the person who gave me the copy, so that they can either find someone else to hold backups for them, or if necessary, retrieve the backup from your next-of-kin/executor.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, software patents in general, or the many dumb patents, but I have to wonder. . .
Microsoft (and many other companies, I presume) spent, I presume, an awful lot of money on patent application fees, not to mention attorney's fees, engineer time, etc to develop and submit the patents, under a regime which had previously, I believe, been recognized as 'legal'. That is, they played the game by the rules as they were at the time. Now, after all that money is spent, the judiciary decides to change the rules on patentability, which will likely result in many of those patents becoming invalid.
Will all the companies and individuals who spent money applying for patents that would now declared invalid under the *new* rules, be able to get back their application fees?
I don't so much mind that the rules are being changed, because I think it's an improvement over the old situation. Still, it doesn't sit right with me that the government arbitrarily changes the rules after taking your money. Seems like the 'old' patents should either be 'grandfathered' in the system (that is, they remain valid because they were filed under different rules), or the people and companies who are losing their patents should be compensated somehow.
". . .if you ask me. If anything, we need more science and engineering spending to stimulate the economy directly at a time of recession."
There, fixed it for you.
I do think there is a place for the government to spend money on science and engineering R&D, but I have to at least partly agree with the GP. While I don't think we should completely cut NASA, I think it might be time for us to consider scaling down our space spending, for awhile (future generations can increase space funding again, when the country is no longer bankrupt).
We need science and engineering spending with more short and mid term applications. Things like energy R&D (a good start would be to re-start the Integral Fast Reactor program that was cancelled by Clinton when it was about 80% finished, and to increase funding for Fusion, Biomass, and other alternative energy research). Increased spending on Health R&D, and improved use of government IT to reduce costs related to administrative overhead and fraud.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of terrestrial science and engineering that are currently under-funded, which would have more concrete benefits to our economy in the short and near term (near being, say, within 50 years; e.g. I've seen estimates that we can probably develop practical, economical fusion power plant designs within 30 - 50 years if we commit sufficient funding to it - that might sound like a long time, but really, the sooner we commit to giving it enough funding, the sooner we can get fusion tech, which could have a very big positive impact on the world economy; another example would be superconductor research - I've seen some estimates about how much energy is lost during electrical transmission on the current grid, and the impact super conductors would have on that ), than the space programs do.
Note, I don't think NASA should be completely scaled back, because there is, I believe, a lot of scientific research with terrestrial applications which can only be done in space (because of the need for microgravity), but as the GP said, we do need to think carefully about how we spend money, because the US is close to bankruptcy.
. . .Don't you think? After all, fundamentally, DRM-ed games *are* only temporarily available, by definition. Someday the user *will* be locked out of the game.
What version of IE are you using? I've used IE6 and IE7 with Slashdot (though I haven't used 6 recently, so that might be broken now, not sure) and I don't think I've had problems with the tags (though I have had some nasty rendering issues with stuff on the page overlapping other stuff, but that's life, I guess).
I suspect that the problem is just that you are using an old version of IE. You're free to use whatever browser you want, but it's usually a good idea to use a recent version of the browser instead of an old one.
Also, there's a difference between coding to a specific browser and trying to force people to switch to that browser, and coding to the published Standards, and having people using broken browsers having a problem. I really don't see any moral wrong in coding to a Standard even though some browsers don't support it. Let Microsoft fix IE.
I don't think this is much of an issue to worry about because:
1) This tech is only really useful in areas where there isn't already abundant fresh water. For example, I live in Ohio, USA. We have lots of rivers (including the Ohio River, which is a large tributary river of the Mississippi R.), streams, lakes (including a northern coast on Lake Erie, one of the "Great Lakes", which contains a pretty massive amount of fresh water), and lots of ground water as well. Because of the energy requirements to operate this thing, I suspect that treated water from a municipal water network is probably much cheaper in much of the world.
2) I don't think that 6, or even 10 billion humans could out-use the water evaporated from the oceans, rivers, and lakes by the Sun, although I suppose that, *maybe* we could inadvertently change weather patterns a little bit. This point, however, I will admit, is pure speculation on my part and I don't have any hard data to back it up. Just a knowledge that a massive amount of solar energy hits the earth's surface every day, and that some 80% of the earth is covered by water, so, basically, about 80% of the energy from the Sun goes to evaporating water (ok, some percentage of the energy is reflected off the surface of the water, so that statement's not, probably, quite true, but gives us a good starting point for thinking about the problem).
"It probably would be cheaper just to have the astronauts make sure the bag is continually tethered to something."
Yeah, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to just "not get sick or have any accidents" than to pay for health insurance.
Seriously, sh-t happens, as the saying goes. I really don't think it would be that hard to create some sort of little robot, like the person suggested, to fetch stuff. Heck, it doesn't have to even be a robot in the sense of being autonomous. It could just be an R/C device. You probably wouldn't even need any sort of combustion-based engine for the bot, just some sort of compressed gas (air, nitrogen, CO2) nozzles.
"And we could really use a project that would kick-start a new wave of technological innovation."
I agree with the sentiment, but I think that perhaps right now isn't the time for mankind to be focusing it's scientific and engineering resources on manned missions to mars. Someday, yes, but we really have soom looming crises right here on Earth that need addressing in the short and mid terms.
For example, I propose some candidates:
* Restart and actually *finish* this time, the Integral Fast Reactor project (which was started in the 80s, work progressed for about a decade, had gotten a lot of practical results, and was about 3 years from completion when the Clinton administration decided to moth-ball the project. The IFR was a new fission power-plant design that was dramatically safer (this was shown, experimentally, to be true, not just theoretically), and which included on-site fuel reprocessing which would both increase the amount of energy we extract from the fuel dramatically, while also causing the final waste products to be much safer/less toxic than traditional nuclear waste.
* Pebble Bed nuclear reactor technology (which might make it possible to have safe small-scale nuclear reactors, for things like commercial ship engines (which could double as portable emergency electric generators; think of something like sailing one or two of these ships to Florida or the Gulf Coast after a hurricane, switching the engine power from driving the screws to driving electric generators, and hooking the generators up to the municipal power grid (well, what's left of it anyhow).
* Fusion research - this is a bit longer term research program (already underway, but apparently underfunded, so that practical results may take a very long time indeed). Fission with IFR and/or other new safer and more efficient designs could certainly help fill the gap until we have fusion research, but fusion would seem to be safer and more 'renewable' than fission, if it could be made practical.
This is only, I'm sure, a small sampling of the types of practical R&D programs which we could fund for terrestrial applications. Not that I'm against a manned mission to mars, in the long term (I think it'd be great), but there are some very pressing problems like a looming energy crisis, which we really need to take care of before, I think, our economy can really bear the burden of more 'academic' scientific pursuits of the scale that a manned mission to Mars would be. You don't really 'need' a space project to drive scientific and engineering progress. Yes, a space project *can* drive them, but mostly that is a function of the space project making funding available. There's no reason we can't make funding available for research and development for practical, immediate-benefit terrestrial applications.
Seriously, how do you define excessive reserves? I don't agree that any such thing exists in the universe. Any reserves, which aren't already allocated to specific expenditures are, it would seem to me to be self-obviously true, put in holding to cover future operating expenses.
I mean, consider the current economic troubles that the US and Europe are experiencing. We, right now, don't even know if, say, a few months from now, the economy will totally collapse into a great depression. I would say that *any* entity, whether it be non-profit or for-profit, should be holding as much money as possible in reserve right now, just in case revenues/donations drop staggeringly over the next year or two (seriously, if a full-blown depression hits, I could see donations to non-profit orgs dropping >50% overnight).
I don't see why having savings, even savings which some might argue are large compared to revenues (e.g. 1 or 2 years worth of operating expenses), should be illegal for a non-profit. They need to survive and continue providing the services and goods which they were created to provide, *especially* during hard economic times, the exact times when they would see the least donations.
If you look at something like Mozilla, they would probably see much more severe drops in donations than would, say, local food, clothing, housing, or medical non-profits, since most people who have any money to donate during times of economic distress, are likely going to want to help people with the necessities of life before worrying about computer software.