Toyota and Honda have both been leveraging variable valve timing techniques to boost performance and efficiency for over a decade.
Nissan may have been doing it for longer. The engine of the
300ZX,
introduced in the US in 1990, had variable valve timing.
According to other information at Wikipedia, that engine seems to have been available in Japan as early as 1997. So that'd
be two decades.
The big difference here is that finally someone realizes we can do that independent of crankshaft, pistons, and cams.
Presumably many people have realized that for a while, and it is just
now that we are reaching the point where it is considered practical.
I know I realized it when I understood about people switching out
cams for "racing profile" cams and when I heard about what to me seemed
like
complicated mechanisms for doing variable valve timing mechanically.
My thought was that it would be a
whole lot simpler to just use a solenoid and open/close the valves
whenever you want. I told that to some guy that I knew who was into
cars and he basically told me I was an idiot.
Well, the scientists think the companies will use this to boost mileage.
Yeah, and the scientists who developed silicone breast implants
thought they would be used by breast cancer victims who'd had
mastectomies and just wanted to look normal again.
Well, I'm sure they had some idea, but that was the intent at
least.
bank.etrade.com would tend to disagree with your blanket statement.
Obviously, when I said that E*Trade was not a bank, I meant the
company which is a discount brokerage. There is also a separate
company also called E*Trade, which is a bank.
The fact that they found it necessary (or preferable, whichever is
the case) to establish two completely separate companies just
underscores the fact that there are legal distinctions between
different types of financial corporations.
So, once again, were we to use.bank, what domain name
should E*TRADE Securities LLC use, given that it is not a
bank but is a financial institution with account names that
people would (and do) try to phish for?
What happened to respecting other peoples cultures and religious beliefs anyway?
They are *tolerated* not respected.
This is as it should be.
The law should always require everyone to tolerate others with
different beliefs (as long as they aren't harming anyone). The
law should never require anyone to behave as if they respect
others' beliefs.
Good character and humility should motivate people to try to
understand, appreciate, and respect others' beliefs. Not all
beliefs are worthy of respect, and there is nothing wrong with
believing that your own view is the right one (after all, if you
didn't believe your view was right, you wouldn't have that
view, would you?). But then there is also some value in
knowing that nobody is right about everything; therefore,
some of the things that you think you're right about, you're
actually wrong about, and it's valuable to keep that in mind
when comparing your own views to others' views.
if your faith or love is storng, idiots and childish pranks don't move you. if it does move you, it only shows your love or faith is cheap and shallow and insecure
Nah, it doesn't show that you're insecure in your faith. It just
shows that you don't grasp cause and effect, that forcing people to
behave as if they had a certain attitude doesn't make them have
that attitude.
He also has gone on record stating that the laws against criticizing the monarch are stupid, and often pardons those convicted of criticizing him.
You mean, like, 100.000000000% of the time, or just
"lots" of the time? Because anything less than 100.000000000%
is not really a good track record.
'Course, he could get a wonderful guy. It just grates on this
American's ears to hear about countries where this kind of thing
is illegal, since it is one of our founding principles and
deeply-held values that you ought to be able to say any sort
of insult you want about the king or any of the rest of the
government.
I live in Thailand, and there's no doubting the King is genuinely universally adored. For example, to celebrate his 60th year on the throne the royal family asked people to wear yellow shirts (the royal colour) on Mondays. That was months ago, but still in Bangkok now every Monday at least 50% of the people you see about are voluntarily wearing yellow shirts with "We live the King" written in Thai on them. No one has a bad word to say about the King even in private, and just about every household has a picture of the King and Queen too.
The problem here is that:
If everyone really does adore the King, that's exactly what you'd say.
If people didn't adore the king at all but merely feared punishment,
that's also exactly what you'd say.
Therefore, either true adoration or fear of punishment
is a perfectly good explanation for the
words you've said.
It's difficult to be sure which
without going to Thailand and observing things firsthand.
This is a dumb idea in the first place. But assuming we went
with it,.bank is the wrong domain name.
First of all, I have a credit union. It's not a bank. There
is an important legal difference. Its domain should not end
with.bank. Then there are also savings and loans,
which are also not banks.
On top of that, people try to phish for account information for
other financial institutions which aren't credit unions,
savings and loans, or banks. For example, investment companies
and stockbrokers. This scheme would force us to have
fidelity.bank and vanguard.bank and
etrade.bank and so forth.
They're not banks, yet people often have accounts there with
millions of dollars that bad guys want to phish for.
Effectively, the idea of putting it into DNS all under.bank seems to be based on the assumption
that the set "things crooks want to phish for" equals
the set "banks". Which is not reality.
A much better idea would be a separate SSL/TLS certificate
signing authority that would specifically mark the registered
domain as having some proven attribute, like "this is a bank"
or "this is a credit union". That is certificate authorities
that not only sign, but make specific assertions like "we
verified that this web site belongs to a bank named Foo licensed
in the following states: CA, CT, NJ, NY, TX".
Over the past 10 years, I've had utterly horrible service with anything with the AT&T letters in it.
You realize that the present "AT&T" is mostly an entirely different
company from the previous "AT&T" over the last 10 years, right?
The much-larger SBC Communications bought AT&T partly for the normal
reasons for a merger, but partly because they had trashed their
reputation and wanted a new, more respectable name to do business
under.
SBC is just like any shady business: once people start
catching on to your tricks, pick a new name, and then
keep doing
what you were doing before.
I would've expected them to cut service off with no warning and continue to bill people and refuse to stop billing or to refund for charges rendered after service was cut off. Or, maybe that's coming?
Given my experience with SBC, billing errors are a regular
occurrence, so that will probably happen.
You know, sometimes people who call 911 are *unable to speak*. You may be having a stroke, to pick an example. Standard procedure for the 911 operator when 911 is called but no one talks on the other end is to dispatch emergency response to the phone number's location, for precisely this reason. Which can be done only when the 911 operator knows where the phone number is, of course.
OK, so the show-stopper problem with VoIP is that it's hard to know
where the caller is for 911 service. You can require people to
register their location whenever they move, but people are lazy,
and databases frequently diverge from reality, so that doesn't
work well.
But there's an easy solution for this. Make USB handsets
(and speaker-phones and whatever else) with built-in GPS
receivers and an "emergency" button. When you press the
emergency button, it phones 911 and transmits your precise
location.
The amount of information is low, so it could
easily be transmitted in-band with low-bandwidth (and
thus lossy-compression-proof) modulation. DTMF might
be a candidate, because it's dead simple, it has
been proven in use for several decades, and there is
already lots of hardware widely available for recognizing
it.
Oh, and in case the GPS can't get a signal at the moment of
the emergency, the handset would periodically poll the GPS
during normal operation and remember the last location.
If a GPS signal wasn't available, it would transmit the
last known location.
Let's suppose that Reiser sent a one-line patch to the Linux kernel, would you stop using Linux?
Clearly no, so at which percentage does Reiser contribution matter enough to stop using a product?
I don't think I can just pick a percentage. It's a judgment call.
But I don't think the inability to pick a number means the principle
is invalid.
Please learn to use
an em dash.
Hint: it does not go between
the subject and the verb of a clause.
I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi, but you, the Slashdot editors,
aren't trying either. You're not trying in the sense that you
aren't making an effort.
You are editors of a publication, and you don't do
any editing. You ought to learn the English language
if only to maintain your own dignity, since it is your job.
Honestly, whatever he has done on a social level (killing could be considered social interaction) has NOTHING to do with the technical merit/achievements..
I would say it's more useful to describe killing as something that
happens on a moral level. Sure, it's social as well, but
morality is the main thing that's relevant here.
Whether you want to view the killing (assuming
it happened and assuming he did it) as related to the software
is really mostly personal preference, I think.
Having said that, my preference (again, assuming he is
guilty) is to avoid using ReiserFS in the future regardless of
its technical merits, and let me tell you why: contributing
something as major as a filesystem to the Linux kernel affords
someone a certain amount of honor and respect and a sort of limited
immortality. In the same sense that
Newton's achievements (calculus and the laws of motion) mean
he will be remembered for centuries, ReiserFS means Reiser
will be remembered for decades at least. In my opinion, if he
has murdered someone, he does not deserve even that limited
level of immortality. To allow it to him is, in an indirect
sense, to say that society approves of Hans Reiser. My
feeling is that society should say the opposite, even if it
means throwing away software which is otherwise perfectly good.
(On a more practical note, shipping ReiserFS might not be
especially good PR for Linux. Were I starting a new
commercial distribution, I might leave it out for that
reason.)
First we get news that Microsoft was recently acting all Mac Happy, and now Sun is acting Mac Happy. My, my, my, but these coincidences of timing in the software world never cease to boggle the mind!
Thanks for making my prediction come true. My prediction was that,
this being Slashdot, there will be a Sun-hater who will find a way
to interpret this as a bad thing. Sun is putting resources towards
improving an open-source project (yes, a GPL one), so we've got to
find a way to interpret that as a bad thing. It has to be a
conspiracy between MS and Sun. (That's what you're saying, right?)
There's no possible way it could just be that they want to
contribute something to an open-source project.
I'd like to suggest an alternate viewpoint. Sun is doing this
because they have a vested interest in there being good software
available for non-MS platforms. Making OpenOffice work well on
the Mac just about doubles OpenOffice's audience, which should
boot OpenOffice's momentum. Everybody including Sun (but
excluding MS) wins if Sun helps out OpenOffice.
Tell them that you are going to Install Open Office or quit.
I wouldn't bring OpenOffice into the discussion. It's fine to
throw it out there as an alternative one time, but once it has
been mentioned and rejected, drop it.
The best thing to do is to make a personal decision about
whether you want to seek to continue to work there or
whether the relationship you have with the company has
been damaged beyond recovery. Although human nature is
to want to get away from something like this, often
relatively minor stuff like this can be worked out.
So, if you want to quit, then quit. If you want to
stay, I think you need to do something like the
following:
Refuse to install the software. Don't adopt an
attitude of moral superiority. Don't be particularly
adversarial. Don't offer ideas on
what to do instead. Just refuse, and explain your
refusal: that it's illegal, that it's
neither reasonable nor professional of them to ask you to
do that, that you're not obligated to do it, and that
you won't do it.
If you feel that a situation is developing where there
may be repercussions (perhaps someone who will try to find
a way to punish you for refusing), then go to HR or
the company owners/management and make them aware of the
situation. Again, don't be adversarial. Just let them
know that you want things to work out with the company
and that these things must be taken care of if that
is going to happen.
If they refuse or won't back you up, then you know where
they stand, and staying is probably a losing battle.
It's possible, though, that they will back you up.
They may even respect you for standing your ground.
Do they plan to sell this on less capable machines because the drivers just aren't available for the latest and greatest of options? Or, will they still sell you a machine with the hottest hardware, but no ability to use it?
You have a point, since Dell has screwed this up in the past (like the time I
worked for a company that ordered Linux servers with modems, and Dell installed
Winmodems in them). And there are limits to what hardware Linux currently supports.
On the other hand, having seen first hand what kind of relationship Dell maintains
with its hardware vendors, I can say with confidence that Dell has the leverage to
take care of this if they want to. Dell dictates to manufacturers what the
hardware is going to look like. If you get some (say) Altec Lansing speakers
with your Dell machine, they are a special model made only for Dell and made
to Dell's specifications, so even though they are a product of a third party,
Dell is telling them what product to make (or what modifications to make to
one of their existing products). There are Dell-specific versions
of other components as well.
It's very much a relationship where vendors want to sell to Dell because of the
huge volume and are therefore willing
to do everything on Dell's terms. This could even possibly include taking a loss
on some products just to establish goodwill with Dell initially. It would not
be out of the question for Dell to say, "Going forward, Linux support is a
requirement on certain platforms if you want to continue to sell to us."
For supply chain reasons, Dell often multiple suppliers for the same
component. This also conveniently gives them the ability to say, "Do what we
ask, or we stop buying from you immediately."
Going a step further, the whole reason Linux doesn't always have the driver
availability of Windows boils down partly to market forces. The reason
driver support exists is to sell hardware to customers, and Dell is one of
the biggest customers anywhere. In fact, I know for at least a few types of
hardware, Dell is the biggest customer in the world.
All in all, with the power that Dell has, it could be a very good thing
for Linux that Dell has new business reasons to want Linux support for
desktop hardware. (They've had business reasons to want Linux support
for server hardware for a while.) The question that remains to be
answered will be whether Dell choose to go with the "low-hanging fruit"
approach and only pick configurations that don't require new drivers or
whether Dell makes choices that requires drivers to be written (or
improved).
4) A risk reduction of 60% (= relative risk of 0.4) is epidemiologically very strong and if that was the case, we would have already found such a role of Vitamin D much earlier (like 30 years before or so). There is something called Bradford Hill's criteria for causation in epidemiology which has strength of association as one of the criteria. The rationale for that is if we had a confounder which is actually responsible for the effect, we would have known it before because it is more likely to have a stronger effect. The same principle goes here. We do not know anything that could prevents so many types of cancer with such great attributable fraction. The magnitude of effects of like 2.5 or reduction of risk to 0.4 were the strengths we used to see in the papers of 1970s.
I see where you're going with that. The more obvious things tend to be the
ones discovered first. It's not a hard and fast rule because it's quite
possible for everyone to miss something obvious for a long time (due to
groupthink or just chance), but it is a good rule of thumb.
On the other hand, there's another possible explanation for why this was
not discovered in the 1970's when all the other big factors were being
discovered: if a variable doesn't change much, it's harder to notice what
happens when it does change. The push to wear high-SPF sunscreen didn't
occur until after the 1970's and neither did the warnings to stay out of
the sun. So it seems possible that the reason this phenomenon wasn't
discovered in the 1970's was that it didn't exist in the 1970's.
I'm not saying that the (supposed) causal link between vitamin D
deficiency and cancer didn't exist; what I am saying is that vitamin D
deficiency may have been uncommon enough that the causal link didn't
matter because it wasn't being "triggered".
Of course, I'm postulating something about how common vitamin D deficiency
is now versus 30-ish years ago, and I don't really have any data to say
that difference actually exists, so my whole argument may be BS. Not only
that, vitamin D deficiency would have to have been rare enough not just to
be uncommon but to actually reduce the effects down near the noise level.
Apparently, getting a warning that you may be delisted from NASDAQ is not
that earth-shattering a thing, necessarily. Dell is on its
second
warning now.
This is not to say it's nothing, but it doesn't by itself mean that the
company is going down in flames.
If you want more solid arguments for this, read The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil. He makes a convincing argument.
Having read "The Age of Spiritual Machines", I'd be surprised to see
Kurzweil make a convincing argument. He's a smart guy who has invented
some cool things (not the least of which was the Kurzweil K250 -- basically
the first keyboard with a realistic piano sound), but having started knowing
about his inventions and going to reading that book, I was very disappointed.
His argument that computers will be artificially intelligent was simply
that computers will have the same complexity (gates vs. neurons/connections)
as brains at some point, therefore it will happen. There is a HUGE
philosophical open question here ("What is the nature of the mind?")
that he simply skipped over like the answer was trivial and obvious.
I have no problem if
he has thought all that out and holds a certain viewpoint, but when
someone fails to even mention that their argument's validity rests on
the answer to a hotly-disputed open question, I start to wonder if
they even know whether the question exists or are really make an
assumption they don't even know they're making.
Hence, IBM's big assumption may be wrong. However, at least, the IBM experiment will tell us whether the operation of the brain is strictly Newtonian. If this artifical brain behaves differently from a mouse brain, then we would know that non-Newtonian physics is crucial to the operation of a flesh-and-blood brain.
I'm pretty all we'd know (if it behaves differently) is that there is
some sort of difference between the operation of the simulated and real
versions. We wouldn't necessarily know that, out of all possible
flaws in the simulation, that the non-Newtonian difference in construction
is the one responsible for the difference in behavior.
Penrose said unique thought and intellegence requires cosmic rays firing random neurons. Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.
Penrose is apparently a pretty smart guy, but I find this to be a weird
argument. If I step inside a very well-shielded environment that protects
me from exposure to particles coming from cosmic rays, should I expect
it to become more difficult to think? Conversely, when astronauts
travel into space where they (presumably) have somewhat less shielding
and more exposure to cosmic rays, do they become more creative?
Obviously, cutting in half or doubling the randomness may not have a
big effect on the ability to think (since it would stand to reason that
if this were true, our brains would have a "normal operating range" of
cosmic rays that we require), but it's still hard to believe it has
any effect at all.
I can't deny that it might affect uniqueness not to have randomness.
Obviously, it's clear that two identical deterministic machines with
identical starting states would do the same thing. But I'm not so
ready to admit that a deterministic machine can't be intelligent.
To put it more concisely, nondeterministic operation is required for
uniqueness (given everything else being identical), but is it really
required for intelligence? I can't see why it necessarily is.
Other have come up with some good definitions, but one thing that hasn't
been emphasized and which I think is essential, is ownership.
Who owns The Internet? The internet is owned by everybody and nobody
in particular. The government does not own it. You don't own it.
The telephone company does not own it. When you've paid for internet
access, you aren't renting part of the internet. Instead, you're paying
someone to run some equipment so you can take part in the internet.
You may own or rent equipment or service, but the internet is what happens
when the whole thing works together as a system.
That is not very succinct, of course. Maybe something like, "The internet
is the phenomenon of everyone hooking their computers together and
operating according a common standard of communication so all the
computers have an opportunity to talk to each other. The internet is
owned by nobody and everybody at the same time."
Slashdot Mirror
Am I the only one who instantly thought of Arj Barker when reading that headline?
Too long to be shorts
Too short to be pants
Shpants!
ah-ah-ah
uh-ah-ah
oh-oh-oh
Yeah, I thought so...
Nissan may have been doing it for longer. The engine of the 300ZX, introduced in the US in 1990, had variable valve timing. According to other information at Wikipedia, that engine seems to have been available in Japan as early as 1997. So that'd be two decades.
Presumably many people have realized that for a while, and it is just now that we are reaching the point where it is considered practical. I know I realized it when I understood about people switching out cams for "racing profile" cams and when I heard about what to me seemed like complicated mechanisms for doing variable valve timing mechanically. My thought was that it would be a whole lot simpler to just use a solenoid and open/close the valves whenever you want. I told that to some guy that I knew who was into cars and he basically told me I was an idiot.
Yeah, and the scientists who developed silicone breast implants thought they would be used by breast cancer victims who'd had mastectomies and just wanted to look normal again.
Well, I'm sure they had some idea, but that was the intent at least.
Obviously, when I said that E*Trade was not a bank, I meant the company which is a discount brokerage. There is also a separate company also called E*Trade, which is a bank.
The easiest way to explain this is in their own words: "E*TRADE Securities LLC and E*TRADE Bank are separate but affiliated companies."
The fact that they found it necessary (or preferable, whichever is the case) to establish two completely separate companies just underscores the fact that there are legal distinctions between different types of financial corporations.
So, once again, were we to use .bank, what domain name
should E*TRADE Securities LLC use, given that it is not a
bank but is a financial institution with account names that
people would (and do) try to phish for?
The law should always require everyone to tolerate others with different beliefs (as long as they aren't harming anyone). The law should never require anyone to behave as if they respect others' beliefs.
Good character and humility should motivate people to try to understand, appreciate, and respect others' beliefs. Not all beliefs are worthy of respect, and there is nothing wrong with believing that your own view is the right one (after all, if you didn't believe your view was right, you wouldn't have that view, would you?). But then there is also some value in knowing that nobody is right about everything; therefore, some of the things that you think you're right about, you're actually wrong about, and it's valuable to keep that in mind when comparing your own views to others' views.
Nah, it doesn't show that you're insecure in your faith. It just shows that you don't grasp cause and effect, that forcing people to behave as if they had a certain attitude doesn't make them have that attitude.
You mean, like, 100.000000000% of the time, or just "lots" of the time? Because anything less than 100.000000000% is not really a good track record.
'Course, he could get a wonderful guy. It just grates on this American's ears to hear about countries where this kind of thing is illegal, since it is one of our founding principles and deeply-held values that you ought to be able to say any sort of insult you want about the king or any of the rest of the government.
The problem here is that:
Therefore, either true adoration or fear of punishment is a perfectly good explanation for the words you've said. It's difficult to be sure which without going to Thailand and observing things firsthand.
This is a dumb idea in the first place. But assuming we went with it, .bank is the wrong domain name.
First of all, I have a credit union. It's not a bank. There is an important legal difference. Its domain should not end with .bank. Then there are also savings and loans,
which are also not banks.
On top of that, people try to phish for account information for other financial institutions which aren't credit unions, savings and loans, or banks. For example, investment companies and stockbrokers. This scheme would force us to have fidelity.bank and vanguard.bank and etrade.bank and so forth. They're not banks, yet people often have accounts there with millions of dollars that bad guys want to phish for.
Effectively, the idea of putting it into DNS all under .bank seems to be based on the assumption
that the set "things crooks want to phish for" equals
the set "banks". Which is not reality.
A much better idea would be a separate SSL/TLS certificate signing authority that would specifically mark the registered domain as having some proven attribute, like "this is a bank" or "this is a credit union". That is certificate authorities that not only sign, but make specific assertions like "we verified that this web site belongs to a bank named Foo licensed in the following states: CA, CT, NJ, NY, TX".
I have dibs on data.bank.
Then why do AT&T's customer service representatives do it so often?
You realize that the present "AT&T" is mostly an entirely different company from the previous "AT&T" over the last 10 years, right? The much-larger SBC Communications bought AT&T partly for the normal reasons for a merger, but partly because they had trashed their reputation and wanted a new, more respectable name to do business under.
SBC is just like any shady business: once people start catching on to your tricks, pick a new name, and then keep doing what you were doing before.
Given my experience with SBC, billing errors are a regular occurrence, so that will probably happen.
OK, so the show-stopper problem with VoIP is that it's hard to know where the caller is for 911 service. You can require people to register their location whenever they move, but people are lazy, and databases frequently diverge from reality, so that doesn't work well.
But there's an easy solution for this. Make USB handsets (and speaker-phones and whatever else) with built-in GPS receivers and an "emergency" button. When you press the emergency button, it phones 911 and transmits your precise location.
The amount of information is low, so it could easily be transmitted in-band with low-bandwidth (and thus lossy-compression-proof) modulation. DTMF might be a candidate, because it's dead simple, it has been proven in use for several decades, and there is already lots of hardware widely available for recognizing it.
Oh, and in case the GPS can't get a signal at the moment of the emergency, the handset would periodically poll the GPS during normal operation and remember the last location. If a GPS signal wasn't available, it would transmit the last known location.
I don't think I can just pick a percentage. It's a judgment call. But I don't think the inability to pick a number means the principle is invalid.
Please learn to use an em dash. Hint: it does not go between the subject and the verb of a clause.
I'm not trying to be a grammar nazi, but you, the Slashdot editors, aren't trying either. You're not trying in the sense that you aren't making an effort. You are editors of a publication, and you don't do any editing. You ought to learn the English language if only to maintain your own dignity, since it is your job.
I would say it's more useful to describe killing as something that happens on a moral level. Sure, it's social as well, but morality is the main thing that's relevant here.
Whether you want to view the killing (assuming it happened and assuming he did it) as related to the software is really mostly personal preference, I think.
Having said that, my preference (again, assuming he is guilty) is to avoid using ReiserFS in the future regardless of its technical merits, and let me tell you why: contributing something as major as a filesystem to the Linux kernel affords someone a certain amount of honor and respect and a sort of limited immortality. In the same sense that Newton's achievements (calculus and the laws of motion) mean he will be remembered for centuries, ReiserFS means Reiser will be remembered for decades at least. In my opinion, if he has murdered someone, he does not deserve even that limited level of immortality. To allow it to him is, in an indirect sense, to say that society approves of Hans Reiser. My feeling is that society should say the opposite, even if it means throwing away software which is otherwise perfectly good.
(On a more practical note, shipping ReiserFS might not be especially good PR for Linux. Were I starting a new commercial distribution, I might leave it out for that reason.)
Thanks for making my prediction come true. My prediction was that, this being Slashdot, there will be a Sun-hater who will find a way to interpret this as a bad thing. Sun is putting resources towards improving an open-source project (yes, a GPL one), so we've got to find a way to interpret that as a bad thing. It has to be a conspiracy between MS and Sun. (That's what you're saying, right?) There's no possible way it could just be that they want to contribute something to an open-source project.
I'd like to suggest an alternate viewpoint. Sun is doing this because they have a vested interest in there being good software available for non-MS platforms. Making OpenOffice work well on the Mac just about doubles OpenOffice's audience, which should boot OpenOffice's momentum. Everybody including Sun (but excluding MS) wins if Sun helps out OpenOffice.
I wouldn't bring OpenOffice into the discussion. It's fine to throw it out there as an alternative one time, but once it has been mentioned and rejected, drop it.
The best thing to do is to make a personal decision about whether you want to seek to continue to work there or whether the relationship you have with the company has been damaged beyond recovery. Although human nature is to want to get away from something like this, often relatively minor stuff like this can be worked out.
So, if you want to quit, then quit. If you want to stay, I think you need to do something like the following:
You have a point, since Dell has screwed this up in the past (like the time I worked for a company that ordered Linux servers with modems, and Dell installed Winmodems in them). And there are limits to what hardware Linux currently supports.
On the other hand, having seen first hand what kind of relationship Dell maintains with its hardware vendors, I can say with confidence that Dell has the leverage to take care of this if they want to. Dell dictates to manufacturers what the hardware is going to look like. If you get some (say) Altec Lansing speakers with your Dell machine, they are a special model made only for Dell and made to Dell's specifications, so even though they are a product of a third party, Dell is telling them what product to make (or what modifications to make to one of their existing products). There are Dell-specific versions of other components as well.
It's very much a relationship where vendors want to sell to Dell because of the huge volume and are therefore willing to do everything on Dell's terms. This could even possibly include taking a loss on some products just to establish goodwill with Dell initially. It would not be out of the question for Dell to say, "Going forward, Linux support is a requirement on certain platforms if you want to continue to sell to us." For supply chain reasons, Dell often multiple suppliers for the same component. This also conveniently gives them the ability to say, "Do what we ask, or we stop buying from you immediately."
Going a step further, the whole reason Linux doesn't always have the driver availability of Windows boils down partly to market forces. The reason driver support exists is to sell hardware to customers, and Dell is one of the biggest customers anywhere. In fact, I know for at least a few types of hardware, Dell is the biggest customer in the world.
All in all, with the power that Dell has, it could be a very good thing for Linux that Dell has new business reasons to want Linux support for desktop hardware. (They've had business reasons to want Linux support for server hardware for a while.) The question that remains to be answered will be whether Dell choose to go with the "low-hanging fruit" approach and only pick configurations that don't require new drivers or whether Dell makes choices that requires drivers to be written (or improved).
I see where you're going with that. The more obvious things tend to be the ones discovered first. It's not a hard and fast rule because it's quite possible for everyone to miss something obvious for a long time (due to groupthink or just chance), but it is a good rule of thumb.
On the other hand, there's another possible explanation for why this was not discovered in the 1970's when all the other big factors were being discovered: if a variable doesn't change much, it's harder to notice what happens when it does change. The push to wear high-SPF sunscreen didn't occur until after the 1970's and neither did the warnings to stay out of the sun. So it seems possible that the reason this phenomenon wasn't discovered in the 1970's was that it didn't exist in the 1970's. I'm not saying that the (supposed) causal link between vitamin D deficiency and cancer didn't exist; what I am saying is that vitamin D deficiency may have been uncommon enough that the causal link didn't matter because it wasn't being "triggered".
Of course, I'm postulating something about how common vitamin D deficiency is now versus 30-ish years ago, and I don't really have any data to say that difference actually exists, so my whole argument may be BS. Not only that, vitamin D deficiency would have to have been rare enough not just to be uncommon but to actually reduce the effects down near the noise level.
Apparently, getting a warning that you may be delisted from NASDAQ is not that earth-shattering a thing, necessarily. Dell is on its second warning now.
This is not to say it's nothing, but it doesn't by itself mean that the company is going down in flames.
Having read "The Age of Spiritual Machines", I'd be surprised to see Kurzweil make a convincing argument. He's a smart guy who has invented some cool things (not the least of which was the Kurzweil K250 -- basically the first keyboard with a realistic piano sound), but having started knowing about his inventions and going to reading that book, I was very disappointed. His argument that computers will be artificially intelligent was simply that computers will have the same complexity (gates vs. neurons/connections) as brains at some point, therefore it will happen. There is a HUGE philosophical open question here ("What is the nature of the mind?") that he simply skipped over like the answer was trivial and obvious. I have no problem if he has thought all that out and holds a certain viewpoint, but when someone fails to even mention that their argument's validity rests on the answer to a hotly-disputed open question, I start to wonder if they even know whether the question exists or are really make an assumption they don't even know they're making.
I'm pretty all we'd know (if it behaves differently) is that there is some sort of difference between the operation of the simulated and real versions. We wouldn't necessarily know that, out of all possible flaws in the simulation, that the non-Newtonian difference in construction is the one responsible for the difference in behavior.
Penrose is apparently a pretty smart guy, but I find this to be a weird argument. If I step inside a very well-shielded environment that protects me from exposure to particles coming from cosmic rays, should I expect it to become more difficult to think? Conversely, when astronauts travel into space where they (presumably) have somewhat less shielding and more exposure to cosmic rays, do they become more creative?
Obviously, cutting in half or doubling the randomness may not have a big effect on the ability to think (since it would stand to reason that if this were true, our brains would have a "normal operating range" of cosmic rays that we require), but it's still hard to believe it has any effect at all.
I can't deny that it might affect uniqueness not to have randomness. Obviously, it's clear that two identical deterministic machines with identical starting states would do the same thing. But I'm not so ready to admit that a deterministic machine can't be intelligent. To put it more concisely, nondeterministic operation is required for uniqueness (given everything else being identical), but is it really required for intelligence? I can't see why it necessarily is.
Other have come up with some good definitions, but one thing that hasn't been emphasized and which I think is essential, is ownership.
Who owns The Internet? The internet is owned by everybody and nobody in particular. The government does not own it. You don't own it. The telephone company does not own it. When you've paid for internet access, you aren't renting part of the internet. Instead, you're paying someone to run some equipment so you can take part in the internet. You may own or rent equipment or service, but the internet is what happens when the whole thing works together as a system.
That is not very succinct, of course. Maybe something like, "The internet is the phenomenon of everyone hooking their computers together and operating according a common standard of communication so all the computers have an opportunity to talk to each other. The internet is owned by nobody and everybody at the same time."