On decent chipsets it isn't: the hardware handles the polling then generates a linked list of data fetched from the devices for the CPU to process at its leisure. Likewise any data the CPU wants to send it packages up into a linked list for the hardware to schedule out next timeslice.
So you don't think it'd be nice to just have a single connector on your mobile phone/tablet that did everything from charging it to connecting to a display? Want to connect up you mobile to the TV to show the vidoe clip you recorded: use USB. Want to print from your tablet: use USB Want to take the video clip from your mobile to edit it on your tablet: USB Want to charge your device while it is connected to printer or TV,: USB
It is after all supposed to be a Universal connection standard, if we can use it for everything, then then surely this is a good thing?
You don't even need anything that complex. Take an inductor and run a current through it. Then turn off the current. The voltage across the inductor will increase to whatever voltage is necessary to discharge the magnetic flux. see Lenz's law...
You also can't use price comparison websites,(they sell your information as part of their service) Most large company's websites (amazon, screwfix, M&S, Tesco - sorry for the UK slant there). Basically anything you do at all on the web gives away your privacy. Also you can't go outside because people will take photos of you and with face recognition software soon to be available (10-20 years is soon right if all content stays online forever).
Face it, technology has meant the end of privacy as we have expected it in the past. Kind of like it has meant the end of the copyright/distribution as RIAA has known it. How we deal with this is the next question, but hiding under a rock is a very luddite reaction. I'm not saying we should all give out credit card details out to anyone, and post photos of what i got up to with the wife last night on LinkedIn, but the world has changed and hiding from it won't help.
You said that DC and Marvel comics' characters were not part of his (presumably American) culture. This you claimed was because they belonged to other people. If a culture cannot take things and adopt them into their culture regardless of intellectual ownership then what right does a culture have to take things from another culture(The English culture in my example). As for using such an old example I was trying to get at the fact that the way things are going those characters will never go out of copyright therefore they will according to you never enter American culture. Now maybe this isn't your point, but it sure sounds like you are shilling for perpetual and total copyright. Now back to my point that a culture actually adopt things into it whether anyone likes it or not, it's the shared set of memes and experiences that make a culture not the original creators of those ideas. You seem to like the idea that copyright holders can force total control on their content to the detriment of everyone else, and that's a defensible position to hold, but it's one that would mean that things like Shakespeare and Virgil and Beethoven would still be restricted.
I just think that in the modern social network world surely everyone has access to the kind of things that were reserved for celebrities - stalkers, identity theft, fans, followers, past coming back to haunt you decades later etc. Why shouldn't everyone have celebrity status? And at what point does someone become a celebrity? How many friends/followers do you need to have? Or is the rule when Google's CEO has heard of you then that's the rule - kind of like "I'll know pornography when i see it"?
Simple, if it is desert then 1) have troughs under sprinklers spraying sea water. 2) let the heat evaporate the water 3) In the chimney when the saturated air rises let the water precipitate out. 4) collect the rain 5) Fresh Water!
So your source of power also becomes a desalination plant. I don't see why this would spoil the efficiency, it might in fact enhance it because you have increased the thermal capacity of the air by saturating it with water.
Not really no. Take my blog, obscure and possibly disliked by many who read it. That does not mean anyone who dislikes it should be banned. In fact what i want from the like/+1 system is that it shows me obscure gems that would otherwise fall under the radar. What's wrong with each user has a certain value, not all +1's being equal and all that. If google tracks you as well as some people think they do then fixing this could be as simple as: 1) track all the websites a person visits (probably by IP address to prevent scripts from gaming the system). 2) Each visit creates an internal currency (with some limits placed to prevent bots from gaming the system) 3) each +1 spends some of that currency. Let's say each +1 spends a quarter of the available currency.
Then if someone likes everything at a whim then they don't skew the search results compared to those who only like one or two things a day/week, but when they do like something it is something very special so it really counts. Yes i can see a few ways that this system could still be gamed, but it seems to me a vast improvement over the current one. Unless someone can call me out on this?
Way to miss my point. "Are things better/more productive now? Arguably yes" You spent an entire post saying what I just said. My point was that while the total experience might have improved and have a much higher specification the fundamental user experience has gone from "press a button, instant response", to "press a button, wait, possible response if it hasn't crashed". The response might be in higher resolution and from a larger library and able to do all these things on a single device but it's a shift from the human is the boss to me asking a device to do something and it doing it when it damn well pleases. If software had halved in speed while hardware doubled in speed then we wouldn't see this. Bear in mind that in many systems discussed above it's the hardware that's doing the heavy lifting of the increased graphics processing, but i digress. The point is if this trend carries on then it's not just going to be VHS faster than DVD faster than blue ray,two or three generations on just how long are we going to have to wait to do anything. It can't go on getting slower forever surely? Hopefully we can agree this is a trend that exists and it has to stop. I don't see any reason why it can't stop and won't stop as soon as it gets to be a problem noticed by more people, but if people are being trained to expect crap because the crap is in high definition then this is not a good thing in my books.
I like the irony that the gene therapy developed would save you from the virus you created in the research. So by terminating the research you don't develop the cure you'll later need;-)
Worse than that. If clever well funded scientists under careful observation do this there is a none zero chance of danger. However they will publish their findings and the state of the art will advance. If you make it illegal to do this kind of research then someone somewhere will tinker with it.* They are much more likely to make mistakes and skip safety protocols. Nothing significant will be learnt from their findings (because they can't publish) but we will face all the danger of their mistakes.
*They may be elite scientist working for military/uber-pharmaceutical company or they may be a less than fully talented fringe scientist in some less well funded/observed company/country - neither of those options are reassuring.
It's actually got worse: I have to wait for my satellite receiver/PVR box to boot; I used to be able to turn on my VCR and it instantly responded. I press an eject button on a cassette player it spits it out as if it can't serve me fast enough. A DVD player listens to you, thinks about it and maybe it it hasn't crashed slowly trundles out the tray. I unlock my mobile phone, wait for the screen to respond, open up the call app, and then a second or so later start to dial. Compare to the old phones. It seems that we're slowly being conditioned to accept waiting for technology to think. I don't know why this is acceptable. Okay fine I'm being unfair you say? Compare the responsiveness of an Amiga to a modern PC. Compare using dos to file manager on windows 7. I can type dir and get the result faster than modern PC can do that (on a directory with a few hundred files in, if they are media files it can take a few seconds even f there are only a few dozen of them). Are things better/more productive now? Arguably yes, is there enough emphasis on the human is the boss arguably not.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
So you are saying that a person whose mate has been unfaithful is upset simply because he has learned that his mate is a sinner? By your logic, persons together in a long-term sexual relationship but unmarried should not feel jelousy because they each already know that they are both fornicators.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What i am saying is: I believe that most of the behaviour and beliefs that a person has come from upbringing rather than biology. I believe that in current western society the biggest influence on those learned behaviours when it comes to sexual ethics is religion. Biologically we appear to be programmed to appear to our mates to be monogamous, and to try and be polygamous behind their backs. Being so is a clear evolutionary advantage if we can get away with a pair bonding arrangement that gives us our stable home and then get some more around the edges for free that gives us wider spread genes and a guarantee of our own genes survivial too. Historically religious memes then sprung up to support the public perception, subscribing to a religion showed you were a good mate, showed you were monogamous and a good choice to raise children with (and if you managed somehow to get in some extra offspring at the side then your biology didn't mind). So we are left with a society now that has biology driving us to want monogamy from our partners and to seek out polygamy for ourselves. We have left over social attitudes that publicly welcome monogamy (and also call men who sleep around before marriage studs and other positive terms). Frankly it's a mess of a situation we're never going to be able to explain a slashdot post;-) However I still argue that the greater thing that tells you that polygamy is wrong as you are raised that is social programming even if it has good genetic roots., and that social programming comes from religion. For proof of this look at other religions that don't have such a monogamous requirement. (actually just look at the old testament which openly supports many wives). I never mentioned anything about persons' past behaviour, so where you most of your post from I'm a little puzzled.
For me (when I was in an open relationship) we didn't use the term cheating. Having sex with someone else was not cheating as long as we told the other person about it (we were also allowed to vito the other person's choices if we felt the need). Now if she had lied to me about sex with someone or i had said "Look I'm not happy with you keeping seeing him whilst I'm away on business" and she had done it anyway then that would have been cheating and been a serious problem; but simply having sex was not cheating because it wasn't against the rules/agreement. So yes I would have had a massive problem with her cheating but cheating for us had a different definition. There were also rules about contraception that you had to trust the other person to follow that would have made it obvious if she was not following the rules, therefore I'd have known that they'd have been someone else's kids just as much as if this had been a normal relationship.
I disagree it is positive to feel jealous about their sexual activity. I might as well be jealous of the social life that they have that I don't. Consider an alternate society where it was considered unfaithful for your wife to have male friends. You might then feel jealous when you realise she is friends with her boss. I don't see the difference between that situation and the current one in our society re: sex; it's just a matter of where you draw the line.
What has trust got to do with sexual activity(anymore than it has to do with any other activity in a relationship)? Why not have sexual activity with other people as long as both parties are happy with it and are honest about it? If they are not, then that is probably as a result of social memes not because of honesty and trust. I'm not saying that is wrong, but it is what it is.
As long as social networking sites don't interoperate (I can't for example through linked_in friend someone on facebook) then this is going to be the problem because they have to be free because they only work if they have enough people on them. True in the early days they could limit it to just college students because to a large approximation you caught the entire social circle with that restriction. Now if they did interoperate then you could have pay sites that didn't sell your information and yet still allowed you to interact with others on free websites. Can you imagine what email would be/have been like if there was only one company that provided email services and no-one else could send email to them? Why do we allow this for social networking?
You've got me thinking, why could you not have a distributed social networking standard? Why (from a technology viewpoint) could you not have competing social networking sites, or even run my own one much as I would an email server or a blog? In this case friending a person would create a two way link between the two identities allowing you to tag them in photos, invite them to events and effectively subscribe you to their rss feed of news posts. The technology is all there - anyone interested in creating an open standard to implement this?
Thing is it asks this when I load the browser When I load the browser I want to do something not spend time downloading, installing and restarting the computer. If this happens say once a year my response is to immediately do the update. If it happens every time I start it, then my response is to ignore it/start using a different browser because with that browser i can do something useful rather than perpetually download and update the browser.
Could we have two levels of kindle store? One that is published without barriers (the current free one) and one that has the $10 fee. As long as buyers could filter appropriately then the reader can make the choice.
Side note: I'm currently "publishing" my first novel attempt on my blog a tiny section at a time. I have considered publishing it under the Kindle scheme but don't want to be lost in the flood of crud. I'd happily pay $50 never mind 10 to get it published in even a barely reputable place; but I don't see that the kindle store adds anything over my current method. I wouldn't mind the $10 because I have literally spent years working on this thing and I'm almost certain that no current publisher would accept it because it has issues (being written by a geek for his own pleasure) that correcting would take away the point of the exercise. Sorry off topic now...
Hang on if you can automate the publishing of the books, why not automate a good review too? A few set templates of good reviews form random login accounts would soon do the job.
Without a cost of entry or a certified human interaction how do you prevent spam?
No, some European nations are bankrupt. France, Germany etc are doing very nicely thank you and they are the ones (along with the UK, Netherlands etc) who are providing the money to bail out the other EU nations. Besides, it's a stupid argument that because we can't cure poverty we shouldn't have a space program. That's like arguing that because we're starving we shouldn't write poetry, or try a new design of irrigation system, or work on that internal combustion engine we've been tinkering with.
Slashdot Mirror
On decent chipsets it isn't: the hardware handles the polling then generates a linked list of data fetched from the devices for the CPU to process at its leisure. Likewise any data the CPU wants to send it packages up into a linked list for the hardware to schedule out next timeslice.
So you don't think it'd be nice to just have a single connector on your mobile phone/tablet that did everything from charging it to connecting to a display?
Want to connect up you mobile to the TV to show the vidoe clip you recorded: use USB.
Want to print from your tablet: use USB
Want to take the video clip from your mobile to edit it on your tablet: USB
Want to charge your device while it is connected to printer or TV,: USB
It is after all supposed to be a Universal connection standard, if we can use it for everything, then then surely this is a good thing?
You don't even need anything that complex. Take an inductor and run a current through it. Then turn off the current. The voltage across the inductor will increase to whatever voltage is necessary to discharge the magnetic flux. see Lenz's law...
You also can't use price comparison websites,(they sell your information as part of their service) Most large company's websites (amazon, screwfix, M&S, Tesco - sorry for the UK slant there). Basically anything you do at all on the web gives away your privacy.
Also you can't go outside because people will take photos of you and with face recognition software soon to be available (10-20 years is soon right if all content stays online forever).
Face it, technology has meant the end of privacy as we have expected it in the past. Kind of like it has meant the end of the copyright/distribution as RIAA has known it. How we deal with this is the next question, but hiding under a rock is a very luddite reaction.
I'm not saying we should all give out credit card details out to anyone, and post photos of what i got up to with the wife last night on LinkedIn, but the world has changed and hiding from it won't help.
You said that DC and Marvel comics' characters were not part of his (presumably American) culture. This you claimed was because they belonged to other people.
If a culture cannot take things and adopt them into their culture regardless of intellectual ownership then what right does a culture have to take things from another culture(The English culture in my example).
As for using such an old example I was trying to get at the fact that the way things are going those characters will never go out of copyright therefore they will according to you never enter American culture. Now maybe this isn't your point, but it sure sounds like you are shilling for perpetual and total copyright.
Now back to my point that a culture actually adopt things into it whether anyone likes it or not, it's the shared set of memes and experiences that make a culture not the original creators of those ideas.
You seem to like the idea that copyright holders can force total control on their content to the detriment of everyone else, and that's a defensible position to hold, but it's one that would mean that things like Shakespeare and Virgil and Beethoven would still be restricted.
Is Shakespeare part of your culture?
If you're an American then by your logic it's not allowed to be.
I just think that in the modern social network world surely everyone has access to the kind of things that were reserved for celebrities - stalkers, identity theft, fans, followers, past coming back to haunt you decades later etc.
Why shouldn't everyone have celebrity status?
And at what point does someone become a celebrity? How many friends/followers do you need to have? Or is the rule when Google's CEO has heard of you then that's the rule - kind of like "I'll know pornography when i see it"?
Simple, if it is desert then
1) have troughs under sprinklers spraying sea water.
2) let the heat evaporate the water
3) In the chimney when the saturated air rises let the water precipitate out.
4) collect the rain
5) Fresh Water!
So your source of power also becomes a desalination plant. I don't see why this would spoil the efficiency, it might in fact enhance it because you have increased the thermal capacity of the air by saturating it with water.
Not really no.
Take my blog, obscure and possibly disliked by many who read it. That does not mean anyone who dislikes it should be banned. In fact what i want from the like/+1 system is that it shows me obscure gems that would otherwise fall under the radar.
What's wrong with each user has a certain value, not all +1's being equal and all that. If google tracks you as well as some people think they do then fixing this could be as simple as:
1) track all the websites a person visits (probably by IP address to prevent scripts from gaming the system).
2) Each visit creates an internal currency (with some limits placed to prevent bots from gaming the system)
3) each +1 spends some of that currency. Let's say each +1 spends a quarter of the available currency.
Then if someone likes everything at a whim then they don't skew the search results compared to those who only like one or two things a day/week, but when they do like something it is something very special so it really counts.
Yes i can see a few ways that this system could still be gamed, but it seems to me a vast improvement over the current one. Unless someone can call me out on this?
Way to miss my point.
"Are things better/more productive now? Arguably yes"
You spent an entire post saying what I just said.
My point was that while the total experience might have improved and have a much higher specification the fundamental user experience has gone from "press a button, instant response", to "press a button, wait, possible response if it hasn't crashed". The response might be in higher resolution and from a larger library and able to do all these things on a single device but it's a shift from the human is the boss to me asking a device to do something and it doing it when it damn well pleases. If software had halved in speed while hardware doubled in speed then we wouldn't see this. Bear in mind that in many systems discussed above it's the hardware that's doing the heavy lifting of the increased graphics processing, but i digress.
The point is if this trend carries on then it's not just going to be VHS faster than DVD faster than blue ray,two or three generations on just how long are we going to have to wait to do anything. It can't go on getting slower forever surely? Hopefully we can agree this is a trend that exists and it has to stop. I don't see any reason why it can't stop and won't stop as soon as it gets to be a problem noticed by more people, but if people are being trained to expect crap because the crap is in high definition then this is not a good thing in my books.
I like the irony that the gene therapy developed would save you from the virus you created in the research. So by terminating the research you don't develop the cure you'll later need ;-)
Worse than that.
If clever well funded scientists under careful observation do this there is a none zero chance of danger. However they will publish their findings and the state of the art will advance.
If you make it illegal to do this kind of research then someone somewhere will tinker with it.* They are much more likely to make mistakes and skip safety protocols.
Nothing significant will be learnt from their findings (because they can't publish) but we will face all the danger of their mistakes.
*They may be elite scientist working for military/uber-pharmaceutical company or they may be a less than fully talented fringe scientist in some less well funded/observed company/country - neither of those options are reassuring.
It's actually got worse:
I have to wait for my satellite receiver/PVR box to boot; I used to be able to turn on my VCR and it instantly responded.
I press an eject button on a cassette player it spits it out as if it can't serve me fast enough. A DVD player listens to you, thinks about it and maybe it it hasn't crashed slowly trundles out the tray.
I unlock my mobile phone, wait for the screen to respond, open up the call app, and then a second or so later start to dial. Compare to the old phones.
It seems that we're slowly being conditioned to accept waiting for technology to think. I don't know why this is acceptable.
Okay fine I'm being unfair you say?
Compare the responsiveness of an Amiga to a modern PC.
Compare using dos to file manager on windows 7. I can type dir and get the result faster than modern PC can do that (on a directory with a few hundred files in, if they are media files it can take a few seconds even f there are only a few dozen of them).
Are things better/more productive now? Arguably yes, is there enough emphasis on the human is the boss arguably not.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
So you are saying that a person whose mate has been unfaithful is upset simply because he has learned that his mate is a sinner? By your logic, persons together in a long-term sexual relationship but unmarried should not feel jelousy because they each already know that they are both fornicators.
That's not what I'm saying at all. ;-)
What i am saying is:
I believe that most of the behaviour and beliefs that a person has come from upbringing rather than biology. I believe that in current western society the biggest influence on those learned behaviours when it comes to sexual ethics is religion.
Biologically we appear to be programmed to appear to our mates to be monogamous, and to try and be polygamous behind their backs. Being so is a clear evolutionary advantage if we can get away with a pair bonding arrangement that gives us our stable home and then get some more around the edges for free that gives us wider spread genes and a guarantee of our own genes survivial too.
Historically religious memes then sprung up to support the public perception, subscribing to a religion showed you were a good mate, showed you were monogamous and a good choice to raise children with (and if you managed somehow to get in some extra offspring at the side then your biology didn't mind).
So we are left with a society now that has biology driving us to want monogamy from our partners and to seek out polygamy for ourselves. We have left over social attitudes that publicly welcome monogamy (and also call men who sleep around before marriage studs and other positive terms). Frankly it's a mess of a situation we're never going to be able to explain a slashdot post
However I still argue that the greater thing that tells you that polygamy is wrong as you are raised that is social programming even if it has good genetic roots., and that social programming comes from religion. For proof of this look at other religions that don't have such a monogamous requirement. (actually just look at the old testament which openly supports many wives). I never mentioned anything about persons' past behaviour, so where you most of your post from I'm a little puzzled.
For me (when I was in an open relationship) we didn't use the term cheating. Having sex with someone else was not cheating as long as we told the other person about it (we were also allowed to vito the other person's choices if we felt the need). Now if she had lied to me about sex with someone or i had said "Look I'm not happy with you keeping seeing him whilst I'm away on business" and she had done it anyway then that would have been cheating and been a serious problem; but simply having sex was not cheating because it wasn't against the rules/agreement. So yes I would have had a massive problem with her cheating but cheating for us had a different definition. There were also rules about contraception that you had to trust the other person to follow that would have made it obvious if she was not following the rules, therefore I'd have known that they'd have been someone else's kids just as much as if this had been a normal relationship.
I disagree it is positive to feel jealous about their sexual activity. I might as well be jealous of the social life that they have that I don't.
Consider an alternate society where it was considered unfaithful for your wife to have male friends. You might then feel jealous when you realise she is friends with her boss. I don't see the difference between that situation and the current one in our society re: sex; it's just a matter of where you draw the line.
What has trust got to do with sexual activity(anymore than it has to do with any other activity in a relationship)?
Why not have sexual activity with other people as long as both parties are happy with it and are honest about it? If they are not, then that is probably as a result of social memes not because of honesty and trust.
I'm not saying that is wrong, but it is what it is.
But is it not religious memes that make you have this problem?
As long as social networking sites don't interoperate (I can't for example through linked_in friend someone on facebook) then this is going to be the problem because they have to be free because they only work if they have enough people on them. True in the early days they could limit it to just college students because to a large approximation you caught the entire social circle with that restriction. Now if they did interoperate then you could have pay sites that didn't sell your information and yet still allowed you to interact with others on free websites.
Can you imagine what email would be/have been like if there was only one company that provided email services and no-one else could send email to them? Why do we allow this for social networking?
You've got me thinking, why could you not have a distributed social networking standard? Why (from a technology viewpoint) could you not have competing social networking sites, or even run my own one much as I would an email server or a blog?
In this case friending a person would create a two way link between the two identities allowing you to tag them in photos, invite them to events and effectively subscribe you to their rss feed of news posts.
The technology is all there - anyone interested in creating an open standard to implement this?
That just tells me who I should invest my pension in. (if it is certain to make a profit)
Thing is it asks this when I load the browser
When I load the browser I want to do something not spend time downloading, installing and restarting the computer.
If this happens say once a year my response is to immediately do the update.
If it happens every time I start it, then my response is to ignore it/start using a different browser because with that browser i can do something useful rather than perpetually download and update the browser.
Could we have two levels of kindle store?
One that is published without barriers (the current free one) and one that has the $10 fee. As long as buyers could filter appropriately then the reader can make the choice.
Side note: I'm currently "publishing" my first novel attempt on my blog a tiny section at a time. I have considered publishing it under the Kindle scheme but don't want to be lost in the flood of crud. I'd happily pay $50 never mind 10 to get it published in even a barely reputable place; but I don't see that the kindle store adds anything over my current method. I wouldn't mind the $10 because I have literally spent years working on this thing and I'm almost certain that no current publisher would accept it because it has issues (being written by a geek for his own pleasure) that correcting would take away the point of the exercise. Sorry off topic now...
Hang on if you can automate the publishing of the books, why not automate a good review too?
A few set templates of good reviews form random login accounts would soon do the job.
Without a cost of entry or a certified human interaction how do you prevent spam?
No, some European nations are bankrupt. France, Germany etc are doing very nicely thank you and they are the ones (along with the UK, Netherlands etc) who are providing the money to bail out the other EU nations.
Besides, it's a stupid argument that because we can't cure poverty we shouldn't have a space program. That's like arguing that because we're starving we shouldn't write poetry, or try a new design of irrigation system, or work on that internal combustion engine we've been tinkering with.