Which is one of the main reasons I hate MySpace. Aside from it being slow, I loathe that it is so easy to customise. It means that every person can mess up the CSS and HTML and destroy the look and feel of the site. By not telling people what to do they all run off and do things I that damage the site.
I agree completely. That's why I never go to bars or
clubs where they let the patrons dress themselves.
Some people just end up wearing the ugliest shit,
and it messes up the atmosphere when people have bad
taste like that.
Seriously, one thing I like about myspace is that it's
a way to meet people, and it allows people to express
themselves through their page. Some pages I really
like, and some I think are just dumb and completely
gaudy. And you know what? That information helps me,
to some extent, figure out whether I am going to click
with that person. If their page is all embedded rap
videos in every corner and bright yellow text against
pink with a scrolling hearts as the background, I
probably don't have much in common with them.
Contrariwise, somebody out there probably sees that
same page and goes, "wow, nice page! that looks
really awesome!", and those two people will become
friends or something.
Frankly, and I know this is cynical as all hell, I really think the child porn thing is just an excuse to aggrandize their power. I mean, the child porn people are smart. They'll just encrypt their traffic.
Somehow I doubt they'll encrypt all their traffic.
They're quite likely to leave the source and destination
IP addresses of pretty much all the packets unencrypted.
Doing otherwise tends to have a negative effect on
the ability of packets to reach their destination and
replies to return on the way back. If the authorities
can figure out the IP addresses of web sites they hit
and at what time, then they can figure out whether
they are visiting child porn web sites, provided
they know the IP addresses of child porn web sites.
Yes, there are ways around that too, surely, but now
you're getting into the realm of setting up special
servers and/or writing special network protocols to
do fancy stuff, and even if child pornographers aren't
dumb, that may be beyond the level of skill that most
of them have.
For what it's worth, I think it's quite possible that
the Internet has made child porn more common and is
increasingly doing so. The Internet lets people with
similar interests get together and get in touch with
each other in a way that is difficult otherwise.
That applies to child molesters just as much as it
applies to car collectors, computer nerds, and so on.
Actually, it might apply to child molesters even more,
because certain avenues of communication aren't
available to them. They can't exactly place an ad
in the newspaper or in the back of a magazine to get
in touch with each other.
Actually, Bush spoke at my sister's commencement ceremony
at the University of Texas at Austin
back when he was the Governor of Texas, and I do not
know whether he wrote his own material, but he had several
good jokes in his speech, and he delivered them
well and got several good laughs out of the audience.
One of the jokes was where he was going on quite
earnestly about how you should hold true to your values
in life, and he started listing off important values
like family, your religion, hard work, and one
of the values he listed was that baseball should always
be played on real grass and never astroturf. It
was pretty funny even to me, and I am one who easily
tires of sports jokes and sports analogies in speeches.
In fact, having been there and gotten a taste of
Bush's sense of humor, I wouldn't be surprised
at all if the iPod thing was totally
intended as a joke. I can picture his delivery,
and it probably would be pretty funny.
Where Saddam stopped, USA continued, and committing many war crimes as well. Why do you think that USA is so hated by the general population in the Middle-East?
Partly because many of them think the US is a nation
full of Christians. I'm not saying that people who
live in countries in the Middle East are bad people
or hateful by nature, but keep in mind that we
are talking about countries which for the most part
are theocracies. All this stuff about freedom of
religion that we've developed in the West during the
last few centuries since the days of the Protestant
Reformation mostly doesn't apply in the Middle East
yet. 400-500 years ago in Europe, the Protestant
Reformation was going on, people were challenging
the state religion and getting burned at the stake
for stuff like translating the Bible into English.
That gives you an idea of what humans are capable of
when someone disagrees with their beliefs, and some
similar stuff is going on in the Middle East right
now. In fact, consider the recent case of
Abdul
Rahman, who was put on trial in Afghanistan
for converting to
Christianity, for which the penalty was to be death.
He was released, but what's significant is that it
even went to trial and that there were many people
in favor of having him executed. Read the Wikipedia
article and see how many supporters he had within
Afghanistan.
Once again, I'm not saying that Islamic people are
bad, but at the same time, it's important not to
lie to ourselves about what kinds of attitudes are
out there. They may not be representative of the
views of all Islamic people, but they are out
there, and not they are not that far from the
mainstream in certain areas.
The ironic thing about all this is that not that
many people in the US actually care that much about
Christianity. Sure, there are plenty of people who
are Christians, but church membership has been slowly
but steadily dropping over the course of the last
few decades, and Christianity has lost a whole lot
of influence in mainstream culture.
Job cuts are down by 40% but that still means jobs were cut which still means that there is less employment.
No, not really. It's not the rate at which the total
number of jobs is changing which has changed. It's
the number of jobs that are cut. To compare it to
finances, it's analogous to cutting your expenses.
If your expenses are still greater than your income
after the cut, you are still in a bad position. But
even if so, you are still in a better position
than you would be if your expenses didn't fall.
Why develop for a tiny fraction of the market when you can develop for the other 95% and wait for the remaining holdouts to install Windows on their Macs?
If you want a decent headset, get a Sennheiser... For the same price you will get much much better sound quality. Even TFA mentions this particular headset isn't great for music.
Indeed. And with the Sennheiser ones,
you will get a set
of headphones that is designed to last. Ever
been frustrated after buying a new set of headphones
or earphones and finding that the cord has gone
flaky on you and you have to buy a whole new set?
With the Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones I have,
the cord is designed to be easily replaced by the
user (no soldering, etc. -- just take off the cover
and snap a new cord in). So are the ear cushions
and so is the headband cushion. And if you should
have the misfortune to screw up and blow the
drivers, they're replaceable too.
Oh yeah, and they fold flat (ear pieces
rotate 90 degrees around what would be the
vertical axis if you were wearing them) or
fold into two other compact shapes for easy
transport. And they're also $99, just like
this "gaming headset", and they have a 2 year
warranty, and they're comfortable for long
periods of time, and they certainly ARE
great for music.
Or you can try to go real fancy and get Turtle Beach HPA 5.1 channel gaming headset complete with actual miniature subwoofers in each cup
Why would I want subwoofers in a set of headphones when
tons of
well-designed models of headphones have already
had ridiculously good
low bass response (virtually flat resopnse down
to 10 Hz) without subwoofers for decades?
Adding a subwoofer to headphones is like adding
a turbocharger to a big block V-8 or a protein
supplement to a great big juicy steak.
But, of course someone will buy the things because
they say "subwoofer" and "5.1" on them, even though
the subwoofer isn't needed and most people have
2 ears rather than 5.1 of them.
Mecury arc lamps have much _lower_ profit margins then other consumer electronic parts. So do projectors in general. The lamps have very exotic materials in them, like very very pure tungsten and specially manufactured quartz casings. You're not getting ripped off. The prices would come down some if more projectors were out there in people's living rooms, but not by much.
While I see your point, the same thing can be said
about microchips: they're made in an extremely
pure environment, built by advanced robotic machines
in factories that are so expensive that most companies
would go broke just thinking about building one,
and the process uses a wide variety of highly toxic
chemicals.
And yet, unless it's the very fanciest, latest
technology (like a current-generation CPU),
most microchips are made for at most a dollar
or two, if not as low as
pennies. It seems like it should be possible
to do the same with projector lamps if the
industry really gears up to focus on that
one day.
Actually, I don't think "Moore's Law" has a limit. An off-the-cuff comment that the number of transistors in a processor will double every 18 months doesn't have a limit. It just keeps getting higher and higher.
The value of the number of transistors as a function
of time doesn't have a limit. However, the accuracy
with which Moore's Law continues to correlate with
reality does (or may) have a limit.
Whether or not the physics of the universe allows such a thing, I can't see any obvious reason why it would cause big problems -- or even be interesting. Certainly it could not manifest itself the way it's shown in the movies, in which you see the loop first one way (Marty McFly's parents marry and produce him), and then another way (Marty's parents fail to marry, because McFly travels back in time and interferes with their meeting). That's logically impossible. If the loop exists at all, it must have one unchanging form.
That is, if Marty McFly does go "back in time" he obviously can't (or rather doesn't) prevent his parents from marrying and having him, because they actually did. Whatever he does "back in time" is already part of history. His "changes" already exist, and have always existed.
Nonsense. The universe in its past state that
Marty McFly becomes part of
when he travels back in time can simply
fork() and make a private copy
for Marty McFly to make his changes in.
This avoids causality loops at the cost
of believing the universe can fork().
Still, even though you might point out that
the universe fork()ing is a wild
and fantastic notion, I would argue that
the universe's having come into existence
in the first place is an equally
wild and fantastic notion.
Another possibility is that the past simply
isn't immutable. Sure, we're very much
used to the idea that it's not, but
perhaps that's just because we haven't ever
observed the mutability of the past. And
it's not wonder, because if time travel is
impractical, it may be that it has never
happened, and it would be necessary to
travel time or observe someone traveling
time in order to see that it's not immutable.
The reason is that HIV integrates itself into the victim's DNA and hides there, pretty much forever. Short of rebuilding the victim molecule-by-molecule, you can never get rid of HIV. The best you can hope for is to put the virus into remission, and hope people take their pills faithfully enough to prevent a shadow epidemic from forming.
I think the problem here is that you know too much
about biology. Thus you know the difficulties of
curing AIDS too well, and you conclude that a cure
is impossible.
However, look back at the things people thought
were impossible, or even inconceivable, in the
past. A few hundred years ago, most people were
certain it was impossible that man would ever
develop the ability to fly. 500 years ago, the
idea of travelling to the moon wasn't even
thought impossible: it was so out there that it
was inconceivable, because I don't think they
even thought of the moon as a place.
It was just a light in the sky.
Also, think about radio. Do you think that 500
years ago people would think it would be ever
be possible to send invisible messages from one
side of the planet to the other almost
instantly? Back then, the only way to get
a message across the ocean was to hop on a
boat.
The point is, it may be really, really damned
difficult to cure AIDS. So tough that it's
hard to imagine how it could ever be done.
But, that doesn't mean it will never be done.
It might be a century or two before it's
figured out, but it may eventually be solved.
Yes, the AIDS virus gets into the victim's
DNA and messes with it. But, if the AIDS
virus can get in there and mess around with
the DNA, then some perhaps some other virus
can be engineered to go in and fix it back.
Unless that virus can check every strand of
DNA in the whole organism, it will from that
point on be a constant battle between AIDS
and the other virus, but if you can design
a virus that's more efficient at repairing
DNA than AIDS is at messing it up, that
may be a non-issue.
The blood-brain barrier issue sounds tricky
too, but obviously there is some sort of
mechanism that the brain uses to control
access. If that method can be understood,
then there is the potential that it can be
controlled. Furthermore, if AIDS can make
it past that barrier, then some other virus
(carrying a cure) can then potentially make
it past the barrier as well.
I'm not saying I have feasible ideas on how to
get around these problems. I'm just trying
to think of examples to challenge your
assumptions about why it's supposedly
impossible.
You mention a lot of factors, but you haven't said
what area you're having the most problem with.
Have you at least managed to
identify what the actual bottleneck is?
It could be bandwidth at your servers, or between
your ISP and some peer (through which most of your
traffic is going), or it could be CPU load on your
servers, or it could be disk I/O limits on your
servers, or it could be lack of memory on your
servers (causing them to thrash), or it could be
uneven load balancing to DNS-based load balancing
being somewhat random, or it could be that you've
reached the maximum capacity (in terms of hosts
per response record in DNS) with DNS load balancing
and you need to add another layer of load balancing.
The first step is going to be to check into all
those areas and identify where the failure is
currently happening. Once you know that, the
solution will be more obvious. You might just
need to add striping for your disks (to increase
throughput by brute force) or RAM (to be able to
cache all active streams) if the problem is that
your disks can't keep up. But, if your ISP's
connection to a major peer isn't sufficient, then
you will need to do something much more involved
(and will probably include gathering data during
an actual event where the streaming can't keep
up in order to prove that the ISP is the problem).
I'm not much of a hardware person, so maybe I'm missing something, but
aren't different types of antennas needed for different
applications? Isn't the best size of antenna a function
of its frequency? I understand how you can use software
to replace some of the active circuitry, but how are
you going to change the size and shape of an antenna
via software?
A fee? That sounds counter-productive to encouraging prior art submissions.
Actually, making someone pay a fee for prior art is
an idea with some merit. But it shouldn't be the
person who points out the prior art who has to pay.
Instead, the person who filed for the patent should
have to pay a fee to the patent office when someone
points out valid prior art. After the patent office
determines it really is prior art, they would take
part of the fee for themselves and pay part of it
as a bounty to the person who first pointed out the
prior art. This would be beneficial in three ways:
(1) it would create disincentive for people to try
to file patents when they think there's any real
chance that there is prior art out there (because
of the threat of having to pay a large fee),
and (2) it would create an incentive for the patent
office to examine reasonable claims of prior art,
and (3) it would create an incentive for others
to look for prior art to submit to the patent office.
At a very well-known, well-funded, academic institute, I had to write a formal business case to submit to not one but TWO directors to justify why I needed an extra 512MB in my laptop...despite the fact that it would at worst be about fifty bucks and, regardless, it was a FREE upgrade. A "business case."
That's a dumb requirement, but it's easily satisfied.
The business case is that getting the free upgrade
increases the expected resale value of the equipment,
yet opting for the upgrade costs nothing. The fact
that it helps you get your job done better
is immaterial and doesn't need to be mentioned.
suppose midichlorians are so bad they needn't be dignified with a debunking.
I nearly walked out on Episode I because of them. Reducing The Force to a symbiotic critter in your bloodstream is just plain wrong. I don't know what kind of crack Lucas was smoking when he came up with that concept.
It's really very simple. Lucas put The Force into
the first three movies. The Force is an inherently
supernatural concept, and it's part of the appeal of
the movies.
But by the time the prequels rolled around,
Lucas was embarrassed by the fact that he'd
put a supernatural element into the movies. So, he
did his best to explain it away to ease his
embarrassment. The fact that the midichlorian
explanation was
exceedingly contrived
and bogus didn't deter him,
because the goal of eliminating any reference
to the supernatural was a high priority.
Just why this is I don't know. It could be
because his personal views in that area had
changed. Or it could just be that he realized
expressing any belief in the supernatural
had become unfashionable.
Star Wars is pure myth and eye candy with a pseudo sci fi coating. Analyzing or myth-busting it is just silly. What's next, Sound of Music? Wizard of Oz?
The Flying Nun. That's a myth that really needs to be
busted. I mean, what possible scientific justification
is there for a nun that just flies over the hillsides?
I mean, sure, her habit looked like it had little
wings,
but it's just not realistic, and it's high time the
MythBusters or somebody like them took this on and
debunked it.
Back in the Solaris 5 timeframe there was a PowerPC version available. The idea was that it was going to be available on the IBM/Apple/Motorolla 'Refrence Platform'.
Although there is no such thing as Solaris 5, I
can confirm that a PowerPC port of Solaris existed.
It was Solaris 2.5 that was available for SPARC,
PowerPC, and x86. Here's
some of Sun's documentation
about it.
I also remember seeing PowerPC versions of
patches on the SunSolve
contract support site for Solaris, so I can
only assume based on this that they not only
made it but actually sold it to customers.
(If not, why provide supported patches?)
Of course, at the time, so many industry players
were getting behind the PowerPC (such as IBM,
Apple, Sun, and Motorola) that lots of people
thought it might unseat x86. Especially since
x86 performance had stagnated a bit at that
time. So lots of people ported to PowerPC as
a bit of insurance, just like they ported to
Itanium for insurance a few years later.
I am affected by the same condition! I keep a spray bottle filled with water on my desk when my ears get too hot.
Well, since we are talking about being really nerdy
already, and since this is slashdot, I might as
well go into the nerdy stuff. Your ears
getting hot makes a strange kind of sense,
because as I understand it
the main function of the outer part of your
ear (the earlobes, etc.) has nothing to do with
hearing. Instead, it's there to radiate heat.
It's basically a heatsink for your head (and body).
Incidentally, this is why elephants have really
big ears: they
have extra difficulty radiating heat because their
ratio of volume to surface area is really high
(since volume grows with the cube and surface area
with the square). It's also why
elephants flap their ears around.
By the way, the thing you describe seems to be
called Red Ear Syndrome, and here's a web
discussion page
about it. It's not that informative a web
site (mostly "I thought I was the only one!"
comments), but it's something.
Now, if someone could just tell me why my ears
get tingly on the inside when I get really
hungry, that'd be helpful.
It's called a Crock pot.
[...]
What is the upside of this oven?
It can be used to cook things that
don't have the consistency of soup
or stew.
It cooks by convection and radiation
rather than by boiling. And you
can boil things in an oven as well,
so this thing seems a lot more versatile.
who would really benefit from an oven like this? Ask yourself:
When was the last time you used your oven?
Yesterday afternoon. It's winter, after all,
and using the oven also heats the house. Plus
the food comes out better than when you
microwave it.
Are you willing to prepare a dish in the morning and put it in the oven before you leave for work?
Sometimes. Probably not usually, but with an
oven like this, you could in theory prepare a
few dishes on the weekend, put them in the bottom
of the refrigerator for the rest of the weekend,
then put Tuesday's dinner in the oven (set to
refrigerate) on Monday night before you go to
bed.
Also, lots of people who do serious cooking
could make use of these on special occasions.
For example, on Thanksgiving or Christmas, if
you cook a big meal with turkey, ham, dressing,
sweet potatoes, a pie or two, etc. there is a
LOT of scrambling to do to get it all done.
It's not uncommon for people who are hosting
a Christmas gathering to get up at like 4:00am
or 5:00am to start cooking so that it can be
ready at lunch time. If part of that could be
prepared the night before and could take itself
through the rest of the process automatically,
that could seriously cut down on stress in
situations like that.
Would you actually trust this thing not to burn down your house?
There are millions of people who are perfectly
comfortable going out or even going
on vacation and leaving
running appliances that work by burning
explosive gases. If you don't believe me,
then answer this: when you go out of town, do
you turn off the natural gas supply to your
water heater and furnace? Do you even think
about it possibly burning your house down?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely. That's why I never go to bars or clubs where they let the patrons dress themselves. Some people just end up wearing the ugliest shit, and it messes up the atmosphere when people have bad taste like that.
Seriously, one thing I like about myspace is that it's a way to meet people, and it allows people to express themselves through their page. Some pages I really like, and some I think are just dumb and completely gaudy. And you know what? That information helps me, to some extent, figure out whether I am going to click with that person. If their page is all embedded rap videos in every corner and bright yellow text against pink with a scrolling hearts as the background, I probably don't have much in common with them. Contrariwise, somebody out there probably sees that same page and goes, "wow, nice page! that looks really awesome!", and those two people will become friends or something.
Somehow I doubt they'll encrypt all their traffic. They're quite likely to leave the source and destination IP addresses of pretty much all the packets unencrypted. Doing otherwise tends to have a negative effect on the ability of packets to reach their destination and replies to return on the way back. If the authorities can figure out the IP addresses of web sites they hit and at what time, then they can figure out whether they are visiting child porn web sites, provided they know the IP addresses of child porn web sites.
Yes, there are ways around that too, surely, but now you're getting into the realm of setting up special servers and/or writing special network protocols to do fancy stuff, and even if child pornographers aren't dumb, that may be beyond the level of skill that most of them have.
For what it's worth, I think it's quite possible that the Internet has made child porn more common and is increasingly doing so. The Internet lets people with similar interests get together and get in touch with each other in a way that is difficult otherwise. That applies to child molesters just as much as it applies to car collectors, computer nerds, and so on. Actually, it might apply to child molesters even more, because certain avenues of communication aren't available to them. They can't exactly place an ad in the newspaper or in the back of a magazine to get in touch with each other.
Actually, Bush spoke at my sister's commencement ceremony at the University of Texas at Austin back when he was the Governor of Texas, and I do not know whether he wrote his own material, but he had several good jokes in his speech, and he delivered them well and got several good laughs out of the audience. One of the jokes was where he was going on quite earnestly about how you should hold true to your values in life, and he started listing off important values like family, your religion, hard work, and one of the values he listed was that baseball should always be played on real grass and never astroturf. It was pretty funny even to me, and I am one who easily tires of sports jokes and sports analogies in speeches.
In fact, having been there and gotten a taste of Bush's sense of humor, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the iPod thing was totally intended as a joke. I can picture his delivery, and it probably would be pretty funny.
Partly because many of them think the US is a nation full of Christians. I'm not saying that people who live in countries in the Middle East are bad people or hateful by nature, but keep in mind that we are talking about countries which for the most part are theocracies. All this stuff about freedom of religion that we've developed in the West during the last few centuries since the days of the Protestant Reformation mostly doesn't apply in the Middle East yet. 400-500 years ago in Europe, the Protestant Reformation was going on, people were challenging the state religion and getting burned at the stake for stuff like translating the Bible into English. That gives you an idea of what humans are capable of when someone disagrees with their beliefs, and some similar stuff is going on in the Middle East right now. In fact, consider the recent case of Abdul Rahman, who was put on trial in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity, for which the penalty was to be death. He was released, but what's significant is that it even went to trial and that there were many people in favor of having him executed. Read the Wikipedia article and see how many supporters he had within Afghanistan.
Once again, I'm not saying that Islamic people are bad, but at the same time, it's important not to lie to ourselves about what kinds of attitudes are out there. They may not be representative of the views of all Islamic people, but they are out there, and not they are not that far from the mainstream in certain areas.
The ironic thing about all this is that not that many people in the US actually care that much about Christianity. Sure, there are plenty of people who are Christians, but church membership has been slowly but steadily dropping over the course of the last few decades, and Christianity has lost a whole lot of influence in mainstream culture.
You must be a programmer. How do I know? Because of the glaring off-by-one error in your statement.
No, not really. It's not the rate at which the total number of jobs is changing which has changed. It's the number of jobs that are cut. To compare it to finances, it's analogous to cutting your expenses. If your expenses are still greater than your income after the cut, you are still in a bad position. But even if so, you are still in a better position than you would be if your expenses didn't fall.
Because programming for the Mac is more fun?
Indeed. And with the Sennheiser ones, you will get a set of headphones that is designed to last. Ever been frustrated after buying a new set of headphones or earphones and finding that the cord has gone flaky on you and you have to buy a whole new set? With the Sennheiser HD280Pro headphones I have, the cord is designed to be easily replaced by the user (no soldering, etc. -- just take off the cover and snap a new cord in). So are the ear cushions and so is the headband cushion. And if you should have the misfortune to screw up and blow the drivers, they're replaceable too.
Oh yeah, and they fold flat (ear pieces rotate 90 degrees around what would be the vertical axis if you were wearing them) or fold into two other compact shapes for easy transport. And they're also $99, just like this "gaming headset", and they have a 2 year warranty, and they're comfortable for long periods of time, and they certainly ARE great for music.
Why would I want subwoofers in a set of headphones when tons of well-designed models of headphones have already had ridiculously good low bass response (virtually flat resopnse down to 10 Hz) without subwoofers for decades? Adding a subwoofer to headphones is like adding a turbocharger to a big block V-8 or a protein supplement to a great big juicy steak.
But, of course someone will buy the things because they say "subwoofer" and "5.1" on them, even though the subwoofer isn't needed and most people have 2 ears rather than 5.1 of them.
That doesn't necessarily mean he's ineffective at what he does or computer illiterate, considering that Don Knuth doesn't either.
While I see your point, the same thing can be said about microchips: they're made in an extremely pure environment, built by advanced robotic machines in factories that are so expensive that most companies would go broke just thinking about building one, and the process uses a wide variety of highly toxic chemicals.
And yet, unless it's the very fanciest, latest technology (like a current-generation CPU), most microchips are made for at most a dollar or two, if not as low as pennies. It seems like it should be possible to do the same with projector lamps if the industry really gears up to focus on that one day.
The value of the number of transistors as a function of time doesn't have a limit. However, the accuracy with which Moore's Law continues to correlate with reality does (or may) have a limit.
Nonsense. The universe in its past state that Marty McFly becomes part of when he travels back in time can simply fork() and make a private copy for Marty McFly to make his changes in. This avoids causality loops at the cost of believing the universe can fork(). Still, even though you might point out that the universe fork()ing is a wild and fantastic notion, I would argue that the universe's having come into existence in the first place is an equally wild and fantastic notion.
Another possibility is that the past simply isn't immutable. Sure, we're very much used to the idea that it's not, but perhaps that's just because we haven't ever observed the mutability of the past. And it's not wonder, because if time travel is impractical, it may be that it has never happened, and it would be necessary to travel time or observe someone traveling time in order to see that it's not immutable.
I don't get it -- what's a 134 instruction set?
I think the problem here is that you know too much about biology. Thus you know the difficulties of curing AIDS too well, and you conclude that a cure is impossible.
However, look back at the things people thought were impossible, or even inconceivable, in the past. A few hundred years ago, most people were certain it was impossible that man would ever develop the ability to fly. 500 years ago, the idea of travelling to the moon wasn't even thought impossible: it was so out there that it was inconceivable, because I don't think they even thought of the moon as a place. It was just a light in the sky.
Also, think about radio. Do you think that 500 years ago people would think it would be ever be possible to send invisible messages from one side of the planet to the other almost instantly? Back then, the only way to get a message across the ocean was to hop on a boat.
The point is, it may be really, really damned difficult to cure AIDS. So tough that it's hard to imagine how it could ever be done. But, that doesn't mean it will never be done. It might be a century or two before it's figured out, but it may eventually be solved.
Yes, the AIDS virus gets into the victim's DNA and messes with it. But, if the AIDS virus can get in there and mess around with the DNA, then some perhaps some other virus can be engineered to go in and fix it back. Unless that virus can check every strand of DNA in the whole organism, it will from that point on be a constant battle between AIDS and the other virus, but if you can design a virus that's more efficient at repairing DNA than AIDS is at messing it up, that may be a non-issue.
The blood-brain barrier issue sounds tricky too, but obviously there is some sort of mechanism that the brain uses to control access. If that method can be understood, then there is the potential that it can be controlled. Furthermore, if AIDS can make it past that barrier, then some other virus (carrying a cure) can then potentially make it past the barrier as well.
I'm not saying I have feasible ideas on how to get around these problems. I'm just trying to think of examples to challenge your assumptions about why it's supposedly impossible.
You mention a lot of factors, but you haven't said what area you're having the most problem with. Have you at least managed to identify what the actual bottleneck is? It could be bandwidth at your servers, or between your ISP and some peer (through which most of your traffic is going), or it could be CPU load on your servers, or it could be disk I/O limits on your servers, or it could be lack of memory on your servers (causing them to thrash), or it could be uneven load balancing to DNS-based load balancing being somewhat random, or it could be that you've reached the maximum capacity (in terms of hosts per response record in DNS) with DNS load balancing and you need to add another layer of load balancing.
The first step is going to be to check into all those areas and identify where the failure is currently happening. Once you know that, the solution will be more obvious. You might just need to add striping for your disks (to increase throughput by brute force) or RAM (to be able to cache all active streams) if the problem is that your disks can't keep up. But, if your ISP's connection to a major peer isn't sufficient, then you will need to do something much more involved (and will probably include gathering data during an actual event where the streaming can't keep up in order to prove that the ISP is the problem).
I'm not much of a hardware person, so maybe I'm missing something, but aren't different types of antennas needed for different applications? Isn't the best size of antenna a function of its frequency? I understand how you can use software to replace some of the active circuitry, but how are you going to change the size and shape of an antenna via software?
Actually, making someone pay a fee for prior art is an idea with some merit. But it shouldn't be the person who points out the prior art who has to pay. Instead, the person who filed for the patent should have to pay a fee to the patent office when someone points out valid prior art. After the patent office determines it really is prior art, they would take part of the fee for themselves and pay part of it as a bounty to the person who first pointed out the prior art. This would be beneficial in three ways: (1) it would create disincentive for people to try to file patents when they think there's any real chance that there is prior art out there (because of the threat of having to pay a large fee), and (2) it would create an incentive for the patent office to examine reasonable claims of prior art, and (3) it would create an incentive for others to look for prior art to submit to the patent office.
That's a dumb requirement, but it's easily satisfied. The business case is that getting the free upgrade increases the expected resale value of the equipment, yet opting for the upgrade costs nothing. The fact that it helps you get your job done better is immaterial and doesn't need to be mentioned.
It's really very simple. Lucas put The Force into the first three movies. The Force is an inherently supernatural concept, and it's part of the appeal of the movies. But by the time the prequels rolled around, Lucas was embarrassed by the fact that he'd put a supernatural element into the movies. So, he did his best to explain it away to ease his embarrassment. The fact that the midichlorian explanation was exceedingly contrived and bogus didn't deter him, because the goal of eliminating any reference to the supernatural was a high priority.
Just why this is I don't know. It could be because his personal views in that area had changed. Or it could just be that he realized expressing any belief in the supernatural had become unfashionable.
The Flying Nun. That's a myth that really needs to be busted. I mean, what possible scientific justification is there for a nun that just flies over the hillsides? I mean, sure, her habit looked like it had little wings, but it's just not realistic, and it's high time the MythBusters or somebody like them took this on and debunked it.
Although there is no such thing as Solaris 5, I can confirm that a PowerPC port of Solaris existed. It was Solaris 2.5 that was available for SPARC, PowerPC, and x86. Here's some of Sun's documentation about it.
I also remember seeing PowerPC versions of patches on the SunSolve contract support site for Solaris, so I can only assume based on this that they not only made it but actually sold it to customers. (If not, why provide supported patches?)
Of course, at the time, so many industry players were getting behind the PowerPC (such as IBM, Apple, Sun, and Motorola) that lots of people thought it might unseat x86. Especially since x86 performance had stagnated a bit at that time. So lots of people ported to PowerPC as a bit of insurance, just like they ported to Itanium for insurance a few years later.
Well, since we are talking about being really nerdy already, and since this is slashdot, I might as well go into the nerdy stuff. Your ears getting hot makes a strange kind of sense, because as I understand it the main function of the outer part of your ear (the earlobes, etc.) has nothing to do with hearing. Instead, it's there to radiate heat. It's basically a heatsink for your head (and body).
Incidentally, this is why elephants have really big ears: they have extra difficulty radiating heat because their ratio of volume to surface area is really high (since volume grows with the cube and surface area with the square). It's also why elephants flap their ears around.
By the way, the thing you describe seems to be called Red Ear Syndrome, and here's a web discussion page about it. It's not that informative a web site (mostly "I thought I was the only one!" comments), but it's something.
Now, if someone could just tell me why my ears get tingly on the inside when I get really hungry, that'd be helpful.
It can be used to cook things that don't have the consistency of soup or stew. It cooks by convection and radiation rather than by boiling. And you can boil things in an oven as well, so this thing seems a lot more versatile.
Yesterday afternoon. It's winter, after all, and using the oven also heats the house. Plus the food comes out better than when you microwave it.
Sometimes. Probably not usually, but with an oven like this, you could in theory prepare a few dishes on the weekend, put them in the bottom of the refrigerator for the rest of the weekend, then put Tuesday's dinner in the oven (set to refrigerate) on Monday night before you go to bed.
Also, lots of people who do serious cooking could make use of these on special occasions. For example, on Thanksgiving or Christmas, if you cook a big meal with turkey, ham, dressing, sweet potatoes, a pie or two, etc. there is a LOT of scrambling to do to get it all done. It's not uncommon for people who are hosting a Christmas gathering to get up at like 4:00am or 5:00am to start cooking so that it can be ready at lunch time. If part of that could be prepared the night before and could take itself through the rest of the process automatically, that could seriously cut down on stress in situations like that.
There are millions of people who are perfectly comfortable going out or even going on vacation and leaving running appliances that work by burning explosive gases. If you don't believe me, then answer this: when you go out of town, do you turn off the natural gas supply to your water heater and furnace? Do you even think about it possibly burning your house down?