Isn't the whole point of serious asteroid mining that we don't need to exploit Earth anymore? And if some people leave Earth while it rots isn't that better than them staying here while it rots?
"How much pipelining is needed - that's something determined during CPU design, is it not?" That depends on your design team and the Ip block providers - but chances are you have to analise it and give feedback to the Ip vendor. You may choose not to, but if you do you stand a good chance of beating your competitor.
"same thing on where in the FPU to add a register stage to improve timing." again not really because that will depend on things like your clock tree layout and power grid. You may choose to not optimise these things yourself, but a good designer would (given the time and resource) adapt them to their specific system
"But even if you are just gluing the IP blocks together, the design of the glue logic is itself considerable, given that it has to work within the limitations of the CPU, the memory and all other sub blocks." Agreed, I never ment to imply otherwise, I was just trying to say that assembling an SOC requires a heck of a lot of hardware implementation and it is certainly not just sticking blocks together even if you are just sticking blocks together.
"If asteroid mining is implemented improperly, the potential returns will be vastly negative." really? do you have any idea how hard it is to de-orbit something? You have to get rid of all that energy you put into getting it up there. As long as you keep it out of the atmosphere for a multi-ton object or for a proper asteroid a multi million ton object that's just plain silly to imagine de-orbiting it. Even if it gets into the atmosphere any impact would be atmospheric grazing - that is it would have a very long path through the atmosphere in which to break up; that's if it didn't just bounce off the atmosphere - have you ever skimmed a stone across water?.
Hard to say, but imagine your car chassis was platinum rather than steel - lighter, stronger more corrosion resistant. With its high temperature stability there's dozens of places that would welcome a strong corrosion resistant material that is comparatively light.
"Will we all be wearing platinum belt buckles in 50 years?" well in the early 1900s aluminium was more expensive than gold., Then they discovered how to purify it using electrolysis and bingo it's now common as muck. Imagine a world without aluminium for airplanes and coke cans, alloy wheels and sauce pans. etc.
Sure the price would plummet, but new resources create new markets create new wealth.
Yes the markets would suffer like the gold standard did in spain shortly after Columbus returned from the new world with ships full of gold, but the difference here is platinum is not just a valuable metal it is a really useful one too. (Compared to gold which apart from its anti-corrosion and electrical properties is little more useful than lead, platinum almost matches those properties and gains the advantages of strength and easier workability),.
"If they're not doing it for profit it's strange that they set it up as a business." There is the concept of limited liability as a business. i.e. if they screw up chances are people will sue the business, not them. the business goes under sure, but unless it is proved they themselves were incompetant they should get away with it.
"The printf() statement is not synthesizable." Actually in a previous company we were experimenting with tools like this. We got it to wrap printf statements up as a trigger to a machine to read the string from memory and pipe it to a 8 bit stream. This 8 bit stream them went to a serial port and voila your RTl would print to the serial port. It even coped with concurrency, but if you hit error states one error code could swamp out the real error so it was far from perfect.
Just because you can use the language to write synthesizable code does not mean all code is synthesizable. An easy example is a re-entrant function that in software would be repeatedly called to solve the input. Assuming for different inputs you call it a different number of times a translation into pure hardware would require an arbitrary sized piece of hardware. Now you could set a limit on the range of values the hardware can solve for, but it's a tricky problem. Likewise software would call new() and get a new function and associated dataypes including procedures and memory. Translating this into hardware would require you to get new memories and logic each time you reached a certain state. Not an option in a pure ASIC. Now I've been trying to work out for a few years how to do this in an FPGA. You could pre-layout a multiplier (for example) and effectively calculate your FPGA's routing on the fly and then re-program sub slices of your fpga as you go. But it's a very difficult problem, and I'm not ready to quit my job and form the startup on that idea just yet...
"Isn't a system-on-a-chip just CPU+GPU+soundset+RAM+flash on one chip? Is there any real hardware to implement" Which CPU, Which GPU? How much pipelining is needed? Where is the best place in the FPU or in the individual multiplier to add a register stage to improve timing? Should you upsize the gate to improve timing, or duplicate the flop and logic to reduce loading? Is your problem caused by too large a gate and you need to shrink it? What bus architecture will you use? How do you patch between bus standards? How will you close top level timing? How do you implement your test infrastructure (JTAG LBIST etc)? What about power distribution, power islands? What about floorplanning, where is the best arrangement for each block? What about analogue IP, how are your clocks distributed? At this process node what are the power characteristics of different ram architectures and are you better doubling the width of your memory and accessing it half as often? How much cache is needed for the available system bandwidth, under congestion how do you flow control the intercommunicating block, how do you handle discard under congestion? How do you avoid and debug interlock and data loss?
But apart from that, no there is no hardware to design if you are just gluing IP blocks together.
Re:They have lost all trust, but they retain distr
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 1
And who is to blame for that? The voters.
Re:They have lost all trust, but they retain distr
on
In Nothing We Trust
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· Score: 1
And by doing that you are failing the system. Take the concept of single issue candidates. Let's assume someone stood with the only policy of "stop the killing" and all the disenfranchised 25% did turn out and vote for that person. Romney at the election BTW gets 31% of the vote and Obama gets 29% of the vote. You don't think Obama in that case wouldn't after the election say "Smeg if i had been anti-war i might have won that election, it clearly really mattered to the voters and would have probably won me the election" Suddenly the media is talking about how important the anti war movement is and how it is something that really matters to voters. etc. The next election suddenly everyone is falling over themselves to be as antiwar as possible because they see it as a way to win the election.
Okay i exaggerate above but you get the idea. A vote is never wasted except when it isn't used. Even if you vote monster raving loony party you still are making a clear point to the politicians. If they believe that people don't care they won't cater to you, if there is a vote to be won they will listen because if they don't you can vote them out. As an alternative try looking at democracy not as a way to get in the people who you want, but to get rid of people who screw things up.
Is the implication that Nuclear power, or any dangerous technology can never work in capitalism? I think that may be right but I'm not sure, how do other industries cope with this? e.g. Mining? Chemical Plants? etc
My understanding was that government regulation (mostly) worked in these fields so why not in Nuclear? Is it just the risk reward ratios are higher and for the moment more unpredictable or is it something fundamental in the technology itself?
"I reiterate my initial concern that Britain's doing fuck all today." Mr Upton is a UK based SOC architect, I think it's safe to assume he is on the team that designed the BCM2835 therefore that's designed in the UK PowerVR's Graphics - Imagination technology - (you know that thing that's in most mobile 3D chips) designed in UK. Most digital radio is based on Pure's chips which again are designed by imagination technology CSR - the basis of most bluetooth devices, again UK. Cytrix, UK based Symbian - about half of their development was UK - ok bad example perhaps. ARM - nuff said.
okay I'm biased here being Uk based and see this stuff all around me, I have friends who work for qualcom or ARM or doing wierd stuff with Sonar they can't really talk about or one guy who works on evidence management systems for the police. My ex boss has semi-retired and now designs car stereos, if you have a new BMW chances are you have one of his designs in your car. That's without mentioning all the bio-tech, or engine design, or architecture based here. The two largest European engineering projects of the last two decades are both currently happening in London right now. The vast majority of F1 engineering is done in the UK.
Now I won't argue most of these are a fairly niche areas, but there is stuff going on. That's without going into all the silly stuff going on in finance and internet fads. there may be few sucessful UK based companies, but there is no shortage of engineering or science in all its forms.
He did simplify, he did not however make it simple. Complaining however that someone hasn't made it simple enough for you to understand is however part their failing for not being able to explain it well enough, but also part your problem for not having the required background to understand the first attempt at an answer to the question.
Let me try a different answer to the question, try thinking of it like this: bosons (i.e. photons in the example) do not tend to interact with each other, one laser does not deflect the path of another it intersects with; fermions (i.e. protons & anti-protons, or more fundamentally quarks) do interact. An anti-particle and a particle are truly opposite, they have opposite charge, when they annihilate their mass is converted into energetic photons. Photons however have nothing opposite to cancel out. A photon has no mass to convert to energy, it is already the force and energy carrier for particle interaction.
If you stop thinking of the proton as a single particle and think of it as a composite structure made of billions of quarks then things might start to make more sense. Only when you have the right number of these particles do you get a stable configuration. All that happens when you get an annihalation is that in one location the stable number gets upset, destabilised and falls apart. In my mind it's analagous to the process that means that electron shells exist in well defined energy zones. So the question becomes why and how are a certain number of quarks stable and form a proton, neutron etc and other combinations fall apart and annihilate. That I can't claim to know the answer to but I will offer this: It's easy to imagine that a certain number of quark-antiquark pairs are needed to collect enough strong nuclear force to hold the proton together (like you need enough gravity to hold the sun together in the face of the heat forcing it apart*) Too many however and the like an atom with too many protons there is also not enough strong force to hold it together.* Or you can look at the wikipedia explanation of what proton is says that a proton is just two ups and a down, which is a simpler model and requires none of the above confusion but is incorrect.
* this is a flawed analogy, but i think it will do for now
So let's try again: what of the above made sense and I can try and gauge what to try and explain anything that still does not make sense, but sooner or later you have to stop asking for analogies and explanations and just look at, study and understand the equations; at which point no explanation is needed or useful once you understand how to do that maths.
"Do you believe that before anyone seeks justice he should perform an economic analysis?" If I cannot afford lawyers then yes, I have no choice. If i cannot afford the years of legal battle needed to win against a vastly better funded opponent then yes. It's not how it should work, but it is how it does work.
See this is it. I ask the question and I always get an answer like that. What would you change? What did it do different that you think would have worked better in cinematic form if they had done the same. It's like those people who complain that the Watchmen film would have been better for leaving in the pirate sub-theme, or the psychic tentacle monster. What works in comics does not work directly on the silver screen, some changes have to be made unless you want the audience in the middle of an action sequence to sit through the Rorschach psych profile, or the pages of dialogue that were the Adrian interview.
Democracy: The ability of the people choose the leaders (or I believe more accurately the ability of the populace to displace a failed politician)
Communism: The people own the means of production
Real Communism: The political party owns the means of production.
What we have here is a crackdown on people using online methods in order to bully, abuse and attack others. I don't see how that is undemocratic. For every person who is (rightly) critical over some of the things that happen in war, is a dozen other people whose family/friend died as a result of an IED cheering on the war. Very democratic to have a witch hunt on the unpopular opinion. Now I'll agree that all of those examples you proposed are worrying and set a concerning precident, but I would argue that is democracy working as much as it is democracy and freedom failing. Let's not forget though it swings both ways, I believe the guy had the right to say he held the soldiers responsible for the deaths at their hands. But I also believe a returning soldier has the right to not be spat at on the street by those who opposed the war. It's a slippery road from online abuse to verbal abuse to physical abuse. And I don't buy the line that "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me"
But freedom of speech has always had limitations. The classic of example of limits on freedom of speech being you do not have the freedom to yell "FIRE" in a crowded cinema just to laugh and watch as everyone panics and tramples over each other to escape. Now should inciting racial hatred be in the same class of action as one likely to cause injury or death to others? In most situations I would hope that sane rational people would be annoyed by such incitement but not take it further. If however you have a situation where you say it's okay to pick on people - particularly people deemed vulnerable by society - then at some point you have to draw the line and say it's not okay. As a society/judicial system the UK has decided that it will put its foot down about these things because it wants to take a stand that racial abuse in all its forms is wrong. I don't see the problem with this. So let's argue that 56 days in jail is a bit extreme, let's perhaps argue that it wasn't that offensive to the person concerned (although I would argue I don't know what he could have said that was more offensive) but can we agree that there are some things that in some circumstances it is just wrong to say.
Off topic (sorry mods) but: After the last slashdot discussion on this subject I re-read the novel and re-watched the film. What did I miss? Sure they were slightly different but I didn't see them in the chalk and cheese awesome and rubbish that most people seem to. I wouldn't have picked some of the actors that they did, but other than that i don't know what they should have done differently. I know on slashdot this sentiment will come across as flaimbait but it honestly isn't. Why the hatred for the film?
Aren't most inventions X, but on Y? "It's a steam engine, but on a rail carriage" "It's a speaking tube, but on electricity" "It's a wheel but on inflatable sausages"
I honestly think it might still turn around. And I mean completely turn around. Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market. Let's assume that in the age of quad/octal core multi GHz processors they can make windows 8 mobile a similar user experience to Windows 7 desktop. Buggy, sure, but good enough.Windows always used to be useless at phone call quality, so let's asume that the Nokia guys have spent a few years getting that up to a good level (remember how bad the Iphone call quality was on the first few models) From the average user perspective why choose android? All the apps they want to run run on windows. The web browser isn't great but IE is still fairly dominant as a browser so it's clearly good enough for most people (or you can download fiorefox for your phone because you know, desktop in your hand). They can plug their phone into their docking station and it's their work and home PC. It's their media centre etc.
Now in this future time the android user is talking about how less buggy their phone is, how they have much more vendor choice and how we all agree it is the better technical solution. However they have trouble interfacing the phone to their car because Microsoft signed deals with the car manufacturers and were a single target rather than half a dozen competing manufacturers We on slashdot would probably be saying how this was inevitable, how the idiot that is the general public would always take the path of least resistance. How much of a shame it was that the promise that was android was doomed to fail except in niche markets, how it was all {xyz's} fault for trying to branch out on their own and ended up fragmenting the market to the confusion of the general consumer.
I honestly believe that mobile is the future and that home PCs and even laptops are dead so the market will fragment into servers and mobile phone + docking station (a tablet/laptop becoming a docking station for your phone). In that world I don't see microsoft giving up and I don't see the average Jo or the CTO taking a risk and choosing android for their desktop. It's the same argument that "nobody got fired for buying IBM" but they're certainly not what they once were, so who knows, we could all be using android on the desktop in a couple of years but I am certain that mobile and desktop will soon run the same OS and I'd be astonished if windows isn't in that equation. If that's true then it could be that this is in fact a very low risk bet for Nokia. It could be that Nokia is experiencing the clam before the storm at the moment and it's all about to kick off. It could be the wisest thing Nokia ever did.
Or he's not using thr same spacecraft to go all the way. One to LEO, one to MTO, etc.
Building one craft to go from earth surface to Mars is like building one craft to take you from your apartment in New York to a concert in London. You're talking about a transatlantic helecoptor, he's talking about a car, a bus, an airplane, a tube line and a taxi; each as separate vehicles.
But there's one good way to get that kid good at maths. Certainly I'd agree that at the supermarket the "assistants" are useless just as you describe, but those at the Pub seem to be completely fluent, as in for example I've given them £5.30 to pay for a £2.80 pint and they've given me £2.50 back (two coins).
It seems to be a matter of practice not raw capability.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the whole point of serious asteroid mining that we don't need to exploit Earth anymore?
And if some people leave Earth while it rots isn't that better than them staying here while it rots?
"How much pipelining is needed - that's something determined during CPU design, is it not?"
That depends on your design team and the Ip block providers - but chances are you have to analise it and give feedback to the Ip vendor. You may choose not to, but if you do you stand a good chance of beating your competitor.
"same thing on where in the FPU to add a register stage to improve timing."
again not really because that will depend on things like your clock tree layout and power grid. You may choose to not optimise these things yourself, but a good designer would (given the time and resource) adapt them to their specific system
"But even if you are just gluing the IP blocks together, the design of the glue logic is itself considerable, given that it has to work within the limitations of the CPU, the memory and all other sub blocks."
Agreed, I never ment to imply otherwise, I was just trying to say that assembling an SOC requires a heck of a lot of hardware implementation and it is certainly not just sticking blocks together even if you are just sticking blocks together.
"If asteroid mining is implemented improperly, the potential returns will be vastly negative."
really? do you have any idea how hard it is to de-orbit something? You have to get rid of all that energy you put into getting it up there. As long as you keep it out of the atmosphere for a multi-ton object or for a proper asteroid a multi million ton object that's just plain silly to imagine de-orbiting it.
Even if it gets into the atmosphere any impact would be atmospheric grazing - that is it would have a very long path through the atmosphere in which to break up; that's if it didn't just bounce off the atmosphere - have you ever skimmed a stone across water?.
Hard to say, but imagine your car chassis was platinum rather than steel - lighter, stronger more corrosion resistant.
With its high temperature stability there's dozens of places that would welcome a strong corrosion resistant material that is comparatively light.
"Will we all be wearing platinum belt buckles in 50 years?"
well in the early 1900s aluminium was more expensive than gold., Then they discovered how to purify it using electrolysis and bingo it's now common as muck.
Imagine a world without aluminium for airplanes and coke cans, alloy wheels and sauce pans. etc.
Sure the price would plummet, but new resources create new markets create new wealth.
Yes the markets would suffer like the gold standard did in spain shortly after Columbus returned from the new world with ships full of gold, but the difference here is platinum is not just a valuable metal it is a really useful one too. (Compared to gold which apart from its anti-corrosion and electrical properties is little more useful than lead, platinum almost matches those properties and gains the advantages of strength and easier workability),.
"If they're not doing it for profit it's strange that they set it up as a business."
There is the concept of limited liability as a business. i.e. if they screw up chances are people will sue the business, not them. the business goes under sure, but unless it is proved they themselves were incompetant they should get away with it.
"The printf() statement is not synthesizable."
Actually in a previous company we were experimenting with tools like this.
We got it to wrap printf statements up as a trigger to a machine to read the string from memory and pipe it to a 8 bit stream. This 8 bit stream them went to a serial port and voila your RTl would print to the serial port.
It even coped with concurrency, but if you hit error states one error code could swamp out the real error so it was far from perfect.
Very cool though.
Just because you can use the language to write synthesizable code does not mean all code is synthesizable.
An easy example is a re-entrant function that in software would be repeatedly called to solve the input. Assuming for different inputs you call it a different number of times a translation into pure hardware would require an arbitrary sized piece of hardware. Now you could set a limit on the range of values the hardware can solve for, but it's a tricky problem.
Likewise software would call new() and get a new function and associated dataypes including procedures and memory. Translating this into hardware would require you to get new memories and logic each time you reached a certain state. Not an option in a pure ASIC.
Now I've been trying to work out for a few years how to do this in an FPGA. You could pre-layout a multiplier (for example) and effectively calculate your FPGA's routing on the fly and then re-program sub slices of your fpga as you go. But it's a very difficult problem, and I'm not ready to quit my job and form the startup on that idea just yet...
I'd love to see them malloc a new piece of hardware.
"Isn't a system-on-a-chip just CPU+GPU+soundset+RAM+flash on one chip? Is there any real hardware to implement"
Which CPU, Which GPU? How much pipelining is needed? Where is the best place in the FPU or in the individual multiplier to add a register stage to improve timing? Should you upsize the gate to improve timing, or duplicate the flop and logic to reduce loading? Is your problem caused by too large a gate and you need to shrink it?
What bus architecture will you use? How do you patch between bus standards? How will you close top level timing? How do you implement your test infrastructure (JTAG LBIST etc)? What about power distribution, power islands? What about floorplanning, where is the best arrangement for each block? What about analogue IP, how are your clocks distributed? At this process node what are the power characteristics of different ram architectures and are you better doubling the width of your memory and accessing it half as often?
How much cache is needed for the available system bandwidth, under congestion how do you flow control the intercommunicating block, how do you handle discard under congestion? How do you avoid and debug interlock and data loss?
But apart from that, no there is no hardware to design if you are just gluing IP blocks together.
And who is to blame for that? The voters.
And by doing that you are failing the system.
Take the concept of single issue candidates. Let's assume someone stood with the only policy of "stop the killing" and all the disenfranchised 25% did turn out and vote for that person.
Romney at the election BTW gets 31% of the vote and Obama gets 29% of the vote. You don't think Obama in that case wouldn't after the election say "Smeg if i had been anti-war i might have won that election, it clearly really mattered to the voters and would have probably won me the election"
Suddenly the media is talking about how important the anti war movement is and how it is something that really matters to voters.
etc.
The next election suddenly everyone is falling over themselves to be as antiwar as possible because they see it as a way to win the election.
Okay i exaggerate above but you get the idea. A vote is never wasted except when it isn't used. Even if you vote monster raving loony party you still are making a clear point to the politicians. If they believe that people don't care they won't cater to you, if there is a vote to be won they will listen because if they don't you can vote them out.
As an alternative try looking at democracy not as a way to get in the people who you want, but to get rid of people who screw things up.
Is the implication that Nuclear power, or any dangerous technology can never work in capitalism?
I think that may be right but I'm not sure, how do other industries cope with this? e.g. Mining? Chemical Plants? etc
My understanding was that government regulation (mostly) worked in these fields so why not in Nuclear? Is it just the risk reward ratios are higher and for the moment more unpredictable or is it something fundamental in the technology itself?
"I reiterate my initial concern that Britain's doing fuck all today."
Mr Upton is a UK based SOC architect, I think it's safe to assume he is on the team that designed the BCM2835 therefore that's designed in the UK
PowerVR's Graphics - Imagination technology - (you know that thing that's in most mobile 3D chips) designed in UK.
Most digital radio is based on Pure's chips which again are designed by imagination technology
CSR - the basis of most bluetooth devices, again UK.
Cytrix, UK based
Symbian - about half of their development was UK - ok bad example perhaps.
ARM - nuff said.
okay I'm biased here being Uk based and see this stuff all around me, I have friends who work for qualcom or ARM or doing wierd stuff with Sonar they can't really talk about or one guy who works on evidence management systems for the police. My ex boss has semi-retired and now designs car stereos, if you have a new BMW chances are you have one of his designs in your car.
That's without mentioning all the bio-tech, or engine design, or architecture based here. The two largest European engineering projects of the last two decades are both currently happening in London right now.
The vast majority of F1 engineering is done in the UK.
Now I won't argue most of these are a fairly niche areas, but there is stuff going on. That's without going into all the silly stuff going on in finance and internet fads. there may be few sucessful UK based companies, but there is no shortage of engineering or science in all its forms.
He did simplify, he did not however make it simple. Complaining however that someone hasn't made it simple enough for you to understand is however part their failing for not being able to explain it well enough, but also part your problem for not having the required background to understand the first attempt at an answer to the question.
Let me try a different answer to the question, try thinking of it like this:
bosons (i.e. photons in the example) do not tend to interact with each other, one laser does not deflect the path of another it intersects with; fermions (i.e. protons & anti-protons, or more fundamentally quarks) do interact.
An anti-particle and a particle are truly opposite, they have opposite charge, when they annihilate their mass is converted into energetic photons. Photons however have nothing opposite to cancel out. A photon has no mass to convert to energy, it is already the force and energy carrier for particle interaction.
If you stop thinking of the proton as a single particle and think of it as a composite structure made of billions of quarks then things might start to make more sense. Only when you have the right number of these particles do you get a stable configuration. All that happens when you get an annihalation is that in one location the stable number gets upset, destabilised and falls apart. In my mind it's analagous to the process that means that electron shells exist in well defined energy zones.
So the question becomes why and how are a certain number of quarks stable and form a proton, neutron etc and other combinations fall apart and annihilate. That I can't claim to know the answer to but I will offer this: It's easy to imagine that a certain number of quark-antiquark pairs are needed to collect enough strong nuclear force to hold the proton together (like you need enough gravity to hold the sun together in the face of the heat forcing it apart*) Too many however and the like an atom with too many protons there is also not enough strong force to hold it together.*
Or you can look at the wikipedia explanation of what proton is says that a proton is just two ups and a down, which is a simpler model and requires none of the above confusion but is incorrect.
I strongly suggest reading:
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/largehadroncolliderfaq/whats-a-proton-anyway/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/particleanti-particle-annihilation/
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/why-do-particles-decay/most-particles-decay-why/
* this is a flawed analogy, but i think it will do for now
So let's try again: what of the above made sense and I can try and gauge what to try and explain anything that still does not make sense, but sooner or later you have to stop asking for analogies and explanations and just look at, study and understand the equations; at which point no explanation is needed or useful once you understand how to do that maths.
"Do you believe that before anyone seeks justice he should perform an economic analysis?"
If I cannot afford lawyers then yes, I have no choice.
If i cannot afford the years of legal battle needed to win against a vastly better funded opponent then yes.
It's not how it should work, but it is how it does work.
See this is it.
I ask the question and I always get an answer like that.
What would you change? What did it do different that you think would have worked better in cinematic form if they had done the same.
It's like those people who complain that the Watchmen film would have been better for leaving in the pirate sub-theme, or the psychic tentacle monster. What works in comics does not work directly on the silver screen, some changes have to be made unless you want the audience in the middle of an action sequence to sit through the Rorschach psych profile, or the pages of dialogue that were the Adrian interview.
Democracy:
The ability of the people choose the leaders (or I believe more accurately the ability of the populace to displace a failed politician)
Communism:
The people own the means of production
Real Communism:
The political party owns the means of production.
What we have here is a crackdown on people using online methods in order to bully, abuse and attack others. I don't see how that is undemocratic. For every person who is (rightly) critical over some of the things that happen in war, is a dozen other people whose family/friend died as a result of an IED cheering on the war. Very democratic to have a witch hunt on the unpopular opinion.
Now I'll agree that all of those examples you proposed are worrying and set a concerning precident, but I would argue that is democracy working as much as it is democracy and freedom failing.
Let's not forget though it swings both ways, I believe the guy had the right to say he held the soldiers responsible for the deaths at their hands. But I also believe a returning soldier has the right to not be spat at on the street by those who opposed the war. It's a slippery road from online abuse to verbal abuse to physical abuse. And I don't buy the line that "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me"
But freedom of speech has always had limitations.
The classic of example of limits on freedom of speech being you do not have the freedom to yell "FIRE" in a crowded cinema just to laugh and watch as everyone panics and tramples over each other to escape.
Now should inciting racial hatred be in the same class of action as one likely to cause injury or death to others? In most situations I would hope that sane rational people would be annoyed by such incitement but not take it further. If however you have a situation where you say it's okay to pick on people - particularly people deemed vulnerable by society - then at some point you have to draw the line and say it's not okay. As a society/judicial system the UK has decided that it will put its foot down about these things because it wants to take a stand that racial abuse in all its forms is wrong. I don't see the problem with this.
So let's argue that 56 days in jail is a bit extreme, let's perhaps argue that it wasn't that offensive to the person concerned (although I would argue I don't know what he could have said that was more offensive) but can we agree that there are some things that in some circumstances it is just wrong to say.
Off topic (sorry mods) but:
After the last slashdot discussion on this subject I re-read the novel and re-watched the film. What did I miss? Sure they were slightly different but I didn't see them in the chalk and cheese awesome and rubbish that most people seem to. I wouldn't have picked some of the actors that they did, but other than that i don't know what they should have done differently.
I know on slashdot this sentiment will come across as flaimbait but it honestly isn't. Why the hatred for the film?
3. Pneumatic tyres
Aren't most inventions X, but on Y?
"It's a steam engine, but on a rail carriage"
"It's a speaking tube, but on electricity"
"It's a wheel but on inflatable sausages"
you get the idea...
I honestly think it might still turn around. And I mean completely turn around.
Paint a picture of in 5 years time where Nokia's bombproof hardware combined with Microsoft's just good enough software has once again dominated the market.
Let's assume that in the age of quad/octal core multi GHz processors they can make windows 8 mobile a similar user experience to Windows 7 desktop. Buggy, sure, but good enough.Windows always used to be useless at phone call quality, so let's asume that the Nokia guys have spent a few years getting that up to a good level (remember how bad the Iphone call quality was on the first few models)
From the average user perspective why choose android? All the apps they want to run run on windows. The web browser isn't great but IE is still fairly dominant as a browser so it's clearly good enough for most people (or you can download fiorefox for your phone because you know, desktop in your hand). They can plug their phone into their docking station and it's their work and home PC. It's their media centre etc.
Now in this future time the android user is talking about how less buggy their phone is, how they have much more vendor choice and how we all agree it is the better technical solution. However they have trouble interfacing the phone to their car because Microsoft signed deals with the car manufacturers and were a single target rather than half a dozen competing manufacturers
We on slashdot would probably be saying how this was inevitable, how the idiot that is the general public would always take the path of least resistance. How much of a shame it was that the promise that was android was doomed to fail except in niche markets, how it was all {xyz's} fault for trying to branch out on their own and ended up fragmenting the market to the confusion of the general consumer.
I honestly believe that mobile is the future and that home PCs and even laptops are dead so the market will fragment into servers and mobile phone + docking station (a tablet/laptop becoming a docking station for your phone). In that world I don't see microsoft giving up and I don't see the average Jo or the CTO taking a risk and choosing android for their desktop.
It's the same argument that "nobody got fired for buying IBM" but they're certainly not what they once were, so who knows, we could all be using android on the desktop in a couple of years but I am certain that mobile and desktop will soon run the same OS and I'd be astonished if windows isn't in that equation. If that's true then it could be that this is in fact a very low risk bet for Nokia.
It could be that Nokia is experiencing the clam before the storm at the moment and it's all about to kick off. It could be the wisest thing Nokia ever did.
Or he's not using thr same spacecraft to go all the way.
One to LEO, one to MTO, etc.
Building one craft to go from earth surface to Mars is like building one craft to take you from your apartment in New York to a concert in London. You're talking about a transatlantic helecoptor, he's talking about a car, a bus, an airplane, a tube line and a taxi; each as separate vehicles.
But there's one good way to get that kid good at maths.
Certainly I'd agree that at the supermarket the "assistants" are useless just as you describe, but those at the Pub seem to be completely fluent, as in for example I've given them £5.30 to pay for a £2.80 pint and they've given me £2.50 back (two coins).
It seems to be a matter of practice not raw capability.