How does it differenciate between the different wattages that all my devices take? I don't want to start cooking my ipod because this thing is giving it laptop voltages...
We have redundant power supplies in those servers. Where's our redundant [sp.?] food supply?
Uh... you don't HAVE to eat GM/cloned food - there are "organic" aisles in supermarkets for a reason (aka backup) (who rely on people with your concerns:)). Personally, I'm just as willing to trust a (albeit heartless) company (eg, McDonalds) (who aren't particularly interested in tieing their names to "mass carcinogen") as I am natural diseases (which don't discriminate) (eg, solar radiation/poisons elsewhere in the food preperation process/crappy third-rate meat processing) which are not currently screened for in foods. It's not as if the geneticists in charge of cloning the proteins will stagger into the office after a heavy Saturday night's drinking and say "hey, screw checking strand A012195-JQRS5, I'm sure it's fine" - there are systems of control, both during and after the cloning process (the media are already eager enough to attack morally dubious scientific processes like cloning, it would turn into a media frenzy). I'm just as likely to be the person who dies of GM food to trigger the media circus as I am to win the $200M NYE lottery jackpot, or be killed by any other awful but freakishly improbable danger...
PS. No...I don't get that "water in nuclear reactor" reference... what is it?
Of course it's possible to crack with enough computing power - just brute force it (ie make EVERY CONCIEVABLE KEY and try it against that), have the computer spit out solutions it thinks might be the one (test for words formed) and have the user tell it which is correct and which ones just happened to form words. It'd take a long long time with todays computing power, but its not IMPOSSIBLE.
uh, if they're being declassified at exactly the start of the new year(ie, 1 second after 11:59:59 12/31), then wouldn't that mean that they're ACTUALLY being declassified on the 1/1? The new day actually begins at 00:00:00...
Also with this september 11/conspiracy theory/craziness spin that this thread has taken... If they were clever enough to blow up (their own) building and cover it up, surely they would be clever enough to
1) Do a good job of covering it up (recycled argument from moon landing conspiracy)
2) Pick something that wasn't so difficult to orchestrate (rigging an inner city building with explosives with no credible witnesses willing to testify) eg, a chemical attack (like the 95 subway thing), a car/truck-bomb (terrorists seem to like those), or attacks on foreign US embassies.
3) Pick something that more strongly supports attacking Iraq - they had to do an AWFUL lot of fancy footwork to get from "an afghani terrorist blowing up a US building" to "attack a regime which had little to do with 9/11 (although still guilty of terrible atrocities)"
4) Forget trying to attack anything.. the government spin engine is an incredibly powerful one, it would be just as easy to justify a war with no 9/11 than having to orchestrate a 9/11 attack AND THEN justify a war with it.
It's a little ignorant to say what SHOULD happen and compare it to what DID happen, considering there are thousands of variables involved that we'll never accurately know (how much fuel the plane had, its exact speed, its exact mass, the exact condition of the building, its weight load, its natural fault lines, the fault lines created by the impact of the plane, other environmental elements etc etc etc). Plus, if the conspirators didn't expect it to fall over (enough to put use secondary explosives, which would be a big giveaway) just from a plane crash, then why would they think that we wouldn't figure it out? There are enough demolition experts out there that it would be a glaring omission to ignore the fact that the experts would notice that a plane couldn't do that on it's own. It's much like how you cannot see the stars in the background of the moonwalk, it's too obvious for such a big conspiracy to miss, the "moon's reflection makes too much contrast" argument is so weak that it must be true. It's much more sensible to disregard the conspiracy given that it's unnecessary and far too difficult a conspiracy to organise.
Cable TV is basically the poster-boy for this kind of triple dipping bullshit/lies that companies are giving us more and more these days - First they offer cable TV because it's "Ad free", now that we sign up, they charge us for content AND advertise not ONLY in the middle of the shows, but now, DURING THEM. It's ludicrous that people are willing to put up with this as a "minor inconvenience" - it undermines the whole basis of a capitalist system. In terms of supply and demand, supply is held ransom as a cartel/monopoly - just like cable, I'd be willing to bet that we'll be seeing this on every phone in a few years. Since demand is dependant on both SUPPLY (which we cannot control) and customer choice (which we CAN control) - which unfortunately means that once this becomes standard, customers will have to choose no service rather than crappy service, which means no net-on-the-go without a laptop/PDA:(
However, they'd all be accessing the same memory and would probably bottleneck there instead
We may start to see ram chips having more and more pins (they may get thicker and thicker - end up looking like many ram chips glued together?), and perhaps external dongles from cpu (or a socket located on the motherboard beside the cpu) to memory. Compared to the complexity of these photonic processors and massively parallel cores, the memory bottleneck issue is quite trivial. I'm sure back in ye olden days, they wouldn't have imagined any of our modern buses handling what they can ("3GB/S hdd buses, it'll never happen")
I think 2 cores is about right for desktop machines
Given that we're starting to see the end of increasing clock cycles (due to power draw reaching near wall-socket limits), I'm betting that (once they've optimised FLOPS/cycle to a point where it's near impossible to get any more per cycle) they'll start to branch out with multiple cores.
- who needs more than that
""640K ought to be enough for anyone""
Though you do have a point about storage access.. it's already the major bottleneck in most people's systems - I'd be interested to see larger caches/automated built-in hard drive defragmentation/ moves towards 10,000rpm as a standard instead of something quite uncommon.
Your computer would draw more like.7KWs on peak, when you consider peripherals (monitors/HIDs/speakers/routers+switches)..
But (GP) what is this about pine forests being hurt? Did you mean, if the electricity is used to operate chainsaws maybe? If anything, the carbon mono/dio-xide is to them what oxygen is to us.. Perhaps the article you read said that ideally, we need another 52,000 trees/year (for XYZ years) planted to catch up to our carbon gas outputs?
[On Topic] Wow this technology sounds awesome... it would be ideal as a "frontdrop" for holographic technology... or even better, just use this technology and a complex array of mirrors! bam, 3DTV.
They're going to have to learn to make sensible choices: like not using Outlook express, IE [...]operating systems like Windows
To be fair, one of the reasons that OE/IE/Windoze are so insecure is that they're so popular - and thus, hackers/etc work overtime to find every little security hole. If everyone switched over to say, Thunderbird/Firefox/Linux, then the hackers/etc would do the exact same thing as what they're doing to IE/OE/Windoze.
Having said that, it would HELP if everyone switched to Thunderbird/Firefox/Linux, because 1) They're better written, 2) It's harder to hit a moving target, 3) That level of mobility would put a serious crimp in the morality of hackers/etc. It's a little like how smalltime MMOs can easily control and boot out (goldfarmers/general troublemakers) since there's so few of them as noone wants THEIR ingame money, and the ones that are there stick out like a sore thumb... but in WoW, you'll never be able to fully erradicate them, there's just too many and the lure is too great.
Yes, the users will look elsewhere. And someday they might realize that what these linux phanbois/geeks kept blabbering about was really true and they are paying far too much for too little. At that time it would be too late to change the history.
There are still a disturbing number of people who don't care about where petrol comes from (it comes from the pump at the petrol station, right?), the history of streetcars, and don't know about the history of said monopolies. The dissenters (luddites/poverty-lovers/socialists) aren't vindicated because no-one cares that they were right about the monopolies being evil. These are the same people that don't vote when election day rolls around, and then complain about the outcome. I'd like to think that these people's line of thinking goes further than "this is good/bad" (ie, "this is good/bad; therefore we should do xyz about abc problem") but unfortunately the evidence points towards the non-thinking/non-caring being the prevalent.
The reason Linux will never become popular through it's own merits (and thus the monopolies win) is not just that people don't *not understand*, they also *don't care* - to them, a computer is WORKING or BROKEN, and if it's DIFFERENT then it's BROKEN. It's the same reason many slashdotters don't spend hours shoe shopping - shoes either FIT or they DON'T, none of this "do they go with the clothes I own/is it worth the extra hours shopping if I can find something similar for slightly less?" business:). Without some massive external force pushing linux into the limelight (perhaps we're starting to see it with more businesses and governments taking up OSS initiatives), it will probably stay on the fringes, since there's no reason to change OSs (since this "windows" thing seems to WORK).
On an intersting sidenote/sideproof, it's funny to note that phanbois/geeks are simultaneously the ones with the strongest opinions also the most underappreciated (that pretty girl on fifth didn't thank you for fixing her computer for the twelth time this year did she?)..
Sorry to be so cynical/negative, but it would be recursively ironic to not bother posting about "why apathy is bad".
And of course, within 5 minutes of the advertisers putting their stuff up, they'll realise that people (well, the ones that haven't left in disgust) are largely doing in game what they do in real life with ads, and that is - IGNORE THEM. So they'll make them the type that jump out at you, flashing (they might be kind enough to explain it away with crap like "broken flurescence backlight" but I doubt they give that much of a crap about even being logical) and generally intrude on gameplay. It's disgusting that they keep doing things to annoy people who have GIVEN THEM MONEY (eg, changing weapon costs according to demand, but at least they had good intentions there).
I was considering buying CS, was slightly put off by the market-demand-for-weapon thing. After this, there's no way in hell I'm *PAYING* money to see ads, I'd sure never do it in any other case (No I dont have cable TV/subscriptions to ad laden sites/don't watch product-placement movies like "I, Robot"/etc). I shouldn't have to pay money so that I can make someone else money ON TOP OF what I've already given them.
IANAL, but...
Hmmm this trademark loophole is a bit of a catch-22.. you can only start suing when someone releases a marketable product, you can't stop them in the middle of initial production. To infringe on someone's trademark, you have to do TWO things; reverse-engineer their product, AND release it (you also have to make an inferior copy, but that's another point). So EVEN IF Autodesk win this one (and establish new precidence) (which they won't - Parent post), it still won't stop someone in the future releasing reverse-engineered products and having an unrelated third party release it - each party is only breaking "half" the law (last I checked, it's not illegal to resell software someone else made, only to copy it against their wishes). Since "accessory" only applies to criminal law, you can't get anyone, since no-one broke a law.
It's a little circuitous to argue, but the short of is that using the trademark loophole allows defendants to use already existing loopholes.
$200M would be over 112% of Sony BMG's 4th quarter 2005 profits.
So? Jailtime for break-and-enter is ~10,000,000% of the time it took me to commit the crime. And, as we all know, time=money.. so you're saying we should cut sentancing time for people down to 5 months, worst case scenario? Or does this kind of ultra-lenient sentancing only apply to the rich? Justice may be blind, but apparently it can hear the chink of coins into overstuffed piggybanks...
Here, there isn't such a massive conspiracy conglomeration of media/state/corporations as in the US, but it scares me to think.. I already know that the media is not reporting some things, and over hyping other things. How can I be sure that they aren't reporting on something massive? I'm not talking JFK/Roswell/Aliens/whatnot (but that raises an interesting sidenote - if they were doing that, noone could expose them without being labelled a nut), but what if, for example, we're losing the war in Iraq by a substantial amount? What if some country I've never heard of is having some natural disaster/civil war/famine? What if they cut funding from some research programme for something I care about (cancer/quantum computing/whatever you can think of)? The media are supposed to keep the government/corporations in check, but it seems these days more that the government/corporations are keeping the MEDIA in cheque (yes that was the word I meant to spell)...
Well that's about right, if you were using a spherical monitor (I know it said "soccer ball shaped" but a sphere is an easy-to-understand concept of something finite with no boundaries, eg, earth)
Hopefully if the EVD overtakes the DVD, then someone will pay the DVD royalties (which will have plummeted in cost) and make a marginally more expensive but widely more popular backwards-compatible player. Of course by that point, DVD will be the equivalent of VHS - old hat.
The only problem will be with the early adapters (who, ironically(1), are necessary to make the EVD popular in the first place), who will buy a seperate EVD player and run it in conjunction with their current DVD players, who will lose when they make said backwards-compatible player...
*1; Yes I know it's not true irony, but as far as I know there isnt another word for "unfortunate coincidence that is self-referring/self-generating"
A "simple cell" has more processes and functions going on inside than a city like LA or Tokyo
Self referencial; LA/Tokyo have squillions of 'simple cells' in them:P
However you raise a good point... I don't see why Evolution and religion cant peacefully co-exist, ala evolution guided by God. Genesis is written in a very fable/analogy/etc-like structure, even compared to the rest of the bible (which isn't exactly the world's foremost example of How To Write A Book With No Fables Whatsoever). Plus, the creation is only about half a page long - it's a bit stupid to make such a fuss over half a page of a several hundred page book.
There's a "Blue Card" system here in Australia (perhaps you have a similar system?); where anyone who wants to work with children in any way (even if its just driving a taxi that may or may not carry children) has to get one (which entails a full background check etc). Perhaps if you used said system and then treated ex-sex offenders like any other citizen (except for the fact that they are denied blue cards) then it would all work out OK.
Having said that, it's not unreasonable (double negative is ok; reasonability is not black/white) to argue that since the risks and punishment associated with the original crime wasn't enough of a deterrant in the first place, there's reason to believe that there will be recidivism. I personally don't follow this school of thought, but it is a valid arguement.
I whole-heartedly agree with such a law passing. If/When it does, it will automatically exclude the entire slashdot community from police investigations; the punishment is far too great to risk it!
Slashdot Mirror
How does it differenciate between the different wattages that all my devices take? I don't want to start cooking my ipod because this thing is giving it laptop voltages...
W d?
Of course it's possible to crack with enough computing power - just brute force it (ie make EVERY CONCIEVABLE KEY and try it against that), have the computer spit out solutions it thinks might be the one (test for words formed) and have the user tell it which is correct and which ones just happened to form words. It'd take a long long time with todays computing power, but its not IMPOSSIBLE.
Cable TV is basically the poster-boy for this kind of triple dipping bullshit/lies that companies are giving us more and more these days - First they offer cable TV because it's "Ad free", now that we sign up, they charge us for content AND advertise not ONLY in the middle of the shows, but now, DURING THEM. It's ludicrous that people are willing to put up with this as a "minor inconvenience" - it undermines the whole basis of a capitalist system. In terms of supply and demand, supply is held ransom as a cartel/monopoly - just like cable, I'd be willing to bet that we'll be seeing this on every phone in a few years. Since demand is dependant on both SUPPLY (which we cannot control) and customer choice (which we CAN control) - which unfortunately means that once this becomes standard, customers will have to choose no service rather than crappy service, which means no net-on-the-go without a laptop/PDA :(
Here, there isn't such a massive conspiracy conglomeration of media/state/corporations as in the US, but it scares me to think.. I already know that the media is not reporting some things, and over hyping other things. How can I be sure that they aren't reporting on something massive? I'm not talking JFK/Roswell/Aliens/whatnot (but that raises an interesting sidenote - if they were doing that, noone could expose them without being labelled a nut), but what if, for example, we're losing the war in Iraq by a substantial amount? What if some country I've never heard of is having some natural disaster/civil war/famine? What if they cut funding from some research programme for something I care about (cancer/quantum computing/whatever you can think of)? The media are supposed to keep the government/corporations in check, but it seems these days more that the government/corporations are keeping the MEDIA in cheque (yes that was the word I meant to spell)...
Well that's about right, if you were using a spherical monitor (I know it said "soccer ball shaped" but a sphere is an easy-to-understand concept of something finite with no boundaries, eg, earth)