The thing that amazes me is that more emphasis is being put upon services and intangible businesses. A service increases sales / GNP but does not produce anything - if I mow my neighbour's lawn and he mows mine and we charge each other, our sales have increased compared to if we stick to our own turf.
This being the case, it has to be asked if the world is really still advancing in standard of living (as measured by material wealth). Are we really getting more efficient, or just looking good by shuffling money around?
It should also be pointed out that this is not necessarily all bad. This appears to be a case of the rich getting richer, but a lot of not-so-rich people own shares in these companies, so it does not necessarily indicate this. And, while many of the companies on the list are notorious for their lack of ethics (looking at no. 28 in particular), there are also many there who I do consider to be generally well behaved. Is a huge corporation which has reasonable ethical standards and does its best to please its customers still evil?
However, I doubt many of those 1.2 billion poorest people have shares in General Motors.
Lastly, what happened to Microsoft? I'm sure they should be on this list somewhere, but I can't find them.
Dammit, Amazon is the best candidate for helping me earn money from my pet website. I don't really want to ask people for donations - seems like asking for something for nothing, and it's still a pain getting small transactions.
But it's obvious Amazon is going to behave less and less ethically before it finally starts making a profit or goes down the gurgler. Even worse, it's pointless crap like marketing data which is not going to save them, just piss lots pf people off. It's getting to the point where I'm ashamed to have their logo on my site - guess it'll be back to the old drawing board.
It's obvious the aliens have been monitoring our media, and they have had plenty of time to alter their face to look like a normal plateau. Perhaps they simply camoflaged it when the orbiter went over. Obviously a manned mission is the only way to be sure, as their technology can fool any of our instruments.
This is an excellent article, however there is one point I have to make. It seems the media are heavily biased against coal power generation, believing it is heavily polluting. While burning coal generates more CO2 than most other forms of power generation, it does not necessarily release large amounts of other pollutants.
The quantities of SO2, NO2, metals and other pollutants depend heavily on the quality of coal used. Where I live (NSW, Australia) most electric power is generated from black coal, which has low amounts of pollutants. In addition, modern power stations equipped with filters capture most of the pollution which would enter the atmosphere. In fact much of the waste can be converted to fertiliser or inert filler. Carbon monoxide emissions are close to zero due to the efficient, high-temperature combustion.
While coal-fired power stations are a non-optimal solution, it makes no sense to simply rule them out without any investigation of the facts. For the media to do this is particularly bad, as the public will be against coal power in their ignorance, and another option to improve generation capacity will be lost.
thinks Bluetooth will be so successful that it will completely fill the 2.4-GHz frequency and the only hope for any competing solution is maybe to handle the overflow in some different frequency range.
I don't see why, especially with the ranges of the devices so small. It should be interesting to see how the different types of network interact when you bring devices within range of each other though. People making network jammers should also be a nuisance, although they may just decide to sneak in a bluetooth-enabled bug to sniff your network.
I'd also just like to say that this story has the mo.
Actually, transmission lines already have very little loss due to the extremely high voltage they operate at. Superconducting cables could reduce loss in distribution systems considerably, but there is still the loss in transformers and low voltage wiring, which is considerable.
The real killer here is the initial cost, although a 57MVA (I think) cable is very impressive, I'd bet it's still 10 times the cost of the aluminium-plastic cables currently used. Another thing against it is that smaller capacity cables are often good - if you have 5 normal cables and one has a fault, you're OK but if you're supplying a large area with one of these babies and it goes, it will take a long time and a lot of money to fix.
And considering the current price of electricity (even in California), I suspect this is not going to be economically justifiable for a long time.
And dammit we're just talking about 70 minutes of fun
What the hell is it with movies in the last decade or so? I don't recall any movies before about 1990 that were less than 90 minutes long, some older film were epics which had to be viewed over more than 1 evening. Now it seems rare to find a movie over 90 minutes long, and that seems to consist mainly of visual effects and inane taglines.
This is obviously a plot by the RIAA to squeeze more money out of the cinemas. One or two extra sessions per day amounts to many millions of dollars in their pockets. When I pay my 12$ or so I expect to be entertained for a while by a good story, not fed a few tidbits of action and left wondering where the sequel is going to be tacked on to the half-baked plot.
I realise the quality of a movie is not necessarily proportional to its length, but there is a reason movies are a bit longer than TV show episodes. They're meant to have a bit more depth and meaning, and be a self-contained story. This doesn't necessarily apply to shreck as its a kids movie, but I would think most parent would appreciate a movie holding their young ones interest for a bit longer.
As for the advances in computer animation, I'm sorry Taco but I just don't give a shit. Think of animated movies I have seen I quickly realise that the quality of their animation mattered very little. The three most important components of a movie are premise, people and plot. Get these right and no-one will even talk about how realistic the movie is.
Well, now that this has turned into the common rant about the movie industry, I guess I should say that there are many recent movies which I thought where really great. Invariably these were not hyped at the box office, weren't popular and weren't made by major hollywood studios. Many of them weren't even shown at cinemas in my area, I had to track them down on video or wait for a TV station to show them. So to all those people who agree with what I've written above, please ignore the blithering of the advertisements and entertainment shows, find some good movie reviews (in Oz I recommend SBS's The Movie Show) and I'm sure you can find something to watch that is worthwhile.
Unfortunately, the world has changed considerably since George's time. Back then interaction between continents was extremely limited due to its cost. Now we have almost instantaneous transmission of information, and transfer of huge amounts of goods.
Without international trade treaties, less trade would occur due to protectionism, distrust and lack of standards. Trade should be encouraged because it (usually) helps both parties. Imagine life with no coffee, no cheap taiwanese memory chips or no petroleum.
This is in fact a classic case of the prisoner's dilemma - individually, countries would inhibit trade to protect themselves against bad behaiviour. But if parties have an agreement and stick to it they can both benefit far more.
It also follows from this that such agreements must be formulated very carefully and responsibly. In this case the real number of affected parties includes everyone on earth. We can all benefit, or we can all suffer.
No matter how much I like Red Hat, it would be hypocritical of me to support them doing this. Many people (including me) have spoken up when corporations get to "influence" (or write) laws. How is this any different?
I can see why they would want to protect themselves from a law that would damage their business, but even then their voice should not amount to mare than anyone elses in a democratic society. The bottom line is, this law is not wanted by the average person (or at least wouldn't be if they knew about it).
The most common excuse for this kind of crap is "to help the economy" - as long as businesses do well, everyone does well so let's just let them write all the rules, right? What if I think there are more important things that the economy? What if compromises aren't best decided by whatever makes the most money? What if increasing the average wealth just means making the wealthiest people a bit more wealthy?
I bitch when the global giants get to set their own agenda, so I feel I have to bitch now. Why can't Red Hat simply help the opposition to UCITA, to show that not all companies are in favour of it? Or is there some part of it that will benefit them?
Which is the biggest reason why the description, at least, is inaccurate. Faster transistors can help to a point - but by making the entire chip die smaller, and reducing the distance between the logic gates - that is where the speed gain is to be found.
Which is one reason why smaller == faster. Smaller transistors means less distance between them, which means shorter signal paths.
The other big factor is the energy involved in switching the transformer, which must be dispersed as heat. Smaller transistors also means less capacitance (or less charge to alter the state of the transistor), which means less current and less waste heat.
Unfortunately, these devices are getting to the point where they are triggered by only a few electrons, which means they will be easily affected by thermal noise. This will make designing a processor extremely difficult.
I can make a few guesses. Perceptrons and other neural networks basically map a set of inputs to a set of outputs. An external error is generated each time the network runs and the network is adjusted to try to reduce this error. In the case of a game the error would be derived from the success of the unit. Each sample theoretically drive the network to minimise the error, however it is a rather random process, especially with such a non-linear system.
The real problem is to choose the right inputs and outputs for the network, and to get the thing to actually work. The inputs and outputs must be general enough that the network can analyse them, but specific enough to represent the environment and control the unit.
As for decision trees, they would be useful to breaking down the situations a unit is faced with, and isolating them so that the decision making is effective. It also provides a look ahead mechanism to try to predict what will happen. The decision tree would be the main memory of previous experiences. I think in the case of a game it would be very difficult to recognise similar circumstances to fit branches of the tree.
AI is a very interesting area, and not really that difficult to get started in. I suggest looking up some of the terms on the net and seeing what turns up, although a good textbook will be much better.
I have already had strange looks from people simply for mentioning MP3s in conversation. And people trying to tell me that copying from my own CDs to MP3s is illegal.
Looks like it's not going to be long before parents are searching their kids' HDs fof MP3s (hey, great product opportunity!) and government ads are coming out with moronic slogans.
"Friends don't let friend's use MP3s!"
"Every download is doing you damage!"
Why have more than 1 space station.
on
Mir 2
·
· Score: 4
Fortunately, the Russian government has no plans to put this on the agenda. Why can't we all just build the ISS like good little countries??"
I don't know what this guy has against Russia, but I can think of a few reasons why having more than 1 space station would be good.
Firstly, one thing mentioned in the article is orbital inclination. There are things you can only do from certain orbital inclinations and heights, like observe parts of the earth and other celestial bodies, launch and retrieve probes and satellites and examine solar particles. So 2 satellites can do things that 1 can't.
There may also be experiments which can be performed using 2 stations, for example using interferometry.
It will also be good for advancing space technology, especially if one of the countries with the most experience in space launches another station. The fact is Russia will not be able to do all it wants to with the ISS because it is only a partner. I'm sure MIR2 would also be much cheaper than the ISS, more people would be able to perform experiments on it.
Russia is also far more open and cooperative these days, so all space agencies would learn a lot. If we are ever going to send people to mars or for long missions elsewhere we are going to need to know a lot more than we do now.
Finally, I can't be the only person who wants more money to be spent on space exploration. The governments of the world seem to be adept at rationalising funding for the military, spying on other countries and harsher law enforcement but when it comes to advancing the human race they decide it has to be economically viable.
It's 2001, weren't we supposed to have acheived much more by now? Our industrial production and economy is supposed to be a geometric progression, where are all the things we should be able to acheive with all our wealth?
On a side note, the restructuring is software-controlled.
From what I recall about parallel computing, the structure and using it are the hard part of parallel computing. So,the "Viva" library is just as important as the hardware itself.
However, from the look of it, the library just makes parallel processing easy - it doesn't transform serial code into parallel algorithms. This makes porting pretty difficult.
From their web site:
Star Bridge's unique computing environment that blurs the distinctions between hardware and software
This seems like the opposite of abstraction to me. Of course, I could be wrong
The main question is, when are these things going to be available? Seems like we've been reading about them for quite a while.
The efficiency is not as important as where the energy comes from. Currently much of the energy for transport comes from petroleum, much of which is imported into my country (Australia) and the US. With hydrogen engines the energy comes from electricity.
Admittedly electricity is more generic, but considering the trouble the US is having with supply now it has to be asked whether the electricity system can supply the extra power for all transport. In addition to this, gas reserves are looking pretty thin, the US will probably be moving to coal-fired powerstations soon. If this happens the use of coal will skyrocket and it current prediction of 100 years worth will drop considerably.
Hydrogen may help us transition to other forms of power, but what is really needed are new energy sources, not just ways of storing energy.
I think sooner or later the human race is going to have to face up to the fact that we cannot grow forever. Short of usable fusion power our numbers and industry are already too great to sustain for more than a couple of decades. Getting smarter about energy is good, but as long as our society is modelled on exponential growth it can only postpone the inevitable collapse.
How do black holes form? Normally when matter coalesces it rotates, forming a galaxy , cloud, solar system, etc. I believe the accepted theory on formation of black holes is that a massive star supernovas, exerting huge compression on it own core and collapsing the matter into a black hole which then consumes the rest of the star.
As there were presumably no old stars to supernova at the beginning of the universe, how did these form? Possibly they are remnants from the big bang or perhaps there were huge amounts of matter which collapsed quickly shortly after the big bang, although these should also leave microwave imprints.
It's also worth noting that black holes could solve the convex/concave universe problem. It's been postulated that there is "dark matter" we cannot see accounting for the rest of the mass of the universe. If there are lots of small black holes out there it could explain this. This could prove that the universe will eventually collapse back in on itself creating a new big bang, instead of expanding forever.
Now, can anyone tell me whether this is definitive proof of the existence of black holes, or could these signals be produced by any type of dense matter?
That is the entire point of this project, to reduce the bandwidth which X needs. Advice to the void: please gain understanding before posting, intelligence beats speed every time.
PS: This would be cool - I run a client on my laptop for computing while in bed. Doing so over the internet would mean that every place is my home:-)
That principle is used in our courts, but the police do not subscribe to it. In their eyes they have to assume you are guilty and try to prove it. No suprise that our lawmakers and the media are following their lead.
The real question is, when are we going to start facing up to real problems? How many people are killed in the world by terrorism each year, and how many by drunk drivers or polluted water supplies? How many people in your city die from drug overdoses and murders while congress makes pointless laws that affect you and I more than any criminals. It's things like this that remind me the media doesn't really care at all. And the politicians are doing their best to pretend to care, while publicising any small problems they think they can solve with a law or four.
Re:If you want to carry on where Feynman left off.
on
Quantum Computers
·
· Score: 2
You might need a quantum computer to find the information necessary to build one. No wonder it's so difficult.
It's also the big service packs, and the fact that each one breaks other things in addition to the bugs it's supposed to fix. If an NT admin wants to install the latest service pack because of security concerns, management is likely to say no. Why? "Everything works fine now, a new service pack is likely to cause more problems that it's worth".
Of course, a good admin should find out what security flaws are present on his system - but the only way to fix it may be to disable some software. At least on Linux I can only update the things I know have problems.
I don't understand. Software cannot be patented in Europe, yes? So the hardware for the IDEA algorithm is patented. If write a piece of software to implement IDEA (in Europe) it cannot infringe any patent because software cannot be patented. If they want to prosecute the patent they will have to do it against the hardware manufacture, because their patent is on hardware. It would be funny to see someone try to sue Intel because someone implemented a hardware-patented algorithm which runs on an x86.
Similarly for the other stuff you mention. Amazon's patent doesn't affect veding machines which use the "1-button-press business method".
If a business process is patented, I can write software which implements it with no problems - the patent is for the people who use the software to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that amazes me is that more emphasis is being put upon services and intangible businesses. A service increases sales / GNP but does not produce anything - if I mow my neighbour's lawn and he mows mine and we charge each other, our sales have increased compared to if we stick to our own turf.
This being the case, it has to be asked if the world is really still advancing in standard of living (as measured by material wealth). Are we really getting more efficient, or just looking good by shuffling money around?
It should also be pointed out that this is not necessarily all bad. This appears to be a case of the rich getting richer, but a lot of not-so-rich people own shares in these companies, so it does not necessarily indicate this. And, while many of the companies on the list are notorious for their lack of ethics (looking at no. 28 in particular), there are also many there who I do consider to be generally well behaved. Is a huge corporation which has reasonable ethical standards and does its best to please its customers still evil?
However, I doubt many of those 1.2 billion poorest people have shares in General Motors.
Lastly, what happened to Microsoft? I'm sure they should be on this list somewhere, but I can't find them.
Dammit, Amazon is the best candidate for helping me earn money from my pet website. I don't really want to ask people for donations - seems like asking for something for nothing, and it's still a pain getting small transactions.
But it's obvious Amazon is going to behave less and less ethically before it finally starts making a profit or goes down the gurgler. Even worse, it's pointless crap like marketing data which is not going to save them, just piss lots pf people off. It's getting to the point where I'm ashamed to have their logo on my site - guess it'll be back to the old drawing board.
It's obvious the aliens have been monitoring our media, and they have had plenty of time to alter their face to look like a normal plateau. Perhaps they simply camoflaged it when the orbiter went over. Obviously a manned mission is the only way to be sure, as their technology can fool any of our instruments.
This is an excellent article, however there is one point I have to make. It seems the media are heavily biased against coal power generation, believing it is heavily polluting. While burning coal generates more CO2 than most other forms of power generation, it does not necessarily release large amounts of other pollutants.
The quantities of SO2, NO2, metals and other pollutants depend heavily on the quality of coal used. Where I live (NSW, Australia) most electric power is generated from black coal, which has low amounts of pollutants. In addition, modern power stations equipped with filters capture most of the pollution which would enter the atmosphere. In fact much of the waste can be converted to fertiliser or inert filler. Carbon monoxide emissions are close to zero due to the efficient, high-temperature combustion.
While coal-fired power stations are a non-optimal solution, it makes no sense to simply rule them out without any investigation of the facts. For the media to do this is particularly bad, as the public will be against coal power in their ignorance, and another option to improve generation capacity will be lost.
I don't see why, especially with the ranges of the devices so small. It should be interesting to see how the different types of network interact when you bring devices within range of each other though. People making network jammers should also be a nuisance, although they may just decide to sneak in a bluetooth-enabled bug to sniff your network.
I'd also just like to say that this story has the mo.
Actually, transmission lines already have very little loss due to the extremely high voltage they operate at. Superconducting cables could reduce loss in distribution systems considerably, but there is still the loss in transformers and low voltage wiring, which is considerable.
The real killer here is the initial cost, although a 57MVA (I think) cable is very impressive, I'd bet it's still 10 times the cost of the aluminium-plastic cables currently used. Another thing against it is that smaller capacity cables are often good - if you have 5 normal cables and one has a fault, you're OK but if you're supplying a large area with one of these babies and it goes, it will take a long time and a lot of money to fix.
And considering the current price of electricity (even in California), I suspect this is not going to be economically justifiable for a long time.
What the hell is it with movies in the last decade or so? I don't recall any movies before about 1990 that were less than 90 minutes long, some older film were epics which had to be viewed over more than 1 evening. Now it seems rare to find a movie over 90 minutes long, and that seems to consist mainly of visual effects and inane taglines.
This is obviously a plot by the RIAA to squeeze more money out of the cinemas. One or two extra sessions per day amounts to many millions of dollars in their pockets. When I pay my 12$ or so I expect to be entertained for a while by a good story, not fed a few tidbits of action and left wondering where the sequel is going to be tacked on to the half-baked plot.
I realise the quality of a movie is not necessarily proportional to its length, but there is a reason movies are a bit longer than TV show episodes. They're meant to have a bit more depth and meaning, and be a self-contained story. This doesn't necessarily apply to shreck as its a kids movie, but I would think most parent would appreciate a movie holding their young ones interest for a bit longer.
As for the advances in computer animation, I'm sorry Taco but I just don't give a shit. Think of animated movies I have seen I quickly realise that the quality of their animation mattered very little. The three most important components of a movie are premise, people and plot. Get these right and no-one will even talk about how realistic the movie is.
Well, now that this has turned into the common rant about the movie industry, I guess I should say that there are many recent movies which I thought where really great. Invariably these were not hyped at the box office, weren't popular and weren't made by major hollywood studios. Many of them weren't even shown at cinemas in my area, I had to track them down on video or wait for a TV station to show them. So to all those people who agree with what I've written above, please ignore the blithering of the advertisements and entertainment shows, find some good movie reviews (in Oz I recommend SBS's The Movie Show) and I'm sure you can find something to watch that is worthwhile.
Unfortunately, the world has changed considerably since George's time. Back then interaction between continents was extremely limited due to its cost. Now we have almost instantaneous transmission of information, and transfer of huge amounts of goods.
Without international trade treaties, less trade would occur due to protectionism, distrust and lack of standards. Trade should be encouraged because it (usually) helps both parties. Imagine life with no coffee, no cheap taiwanese memory chips or no petroleum.
This is in fact a classic case of the prisoner's dilemma - individually, countries would inhibit trade to protect themselves against bad behaiviour. But if parties have an agreement and stick to it they can both benefit far more.
It also follows from this that such agreements must be formulated very carefully and responsibly. In this case the real number of affected parties includes everyone on earth. We can all benefit, or we can all suffer.
No matter how much I like Red Hat, it would be hypocritical of me to support them doing this. Many people (including me) have spoken up when corporations get to "influence" (or write) laws. How is this any different?
I can see why they would want to protect themselves from a law that would damage their business, but even then their voice should not amount to mare than anyone elses in a democratic society. The bottom line is, this law is not wanted by the average person (or at least wouldn't be if they knew about it).
The most common excuse for this kind of crap is "to help the economy" - as long as businesses do well, everyone does well so let's just let them write all the rules, right? What if I think there are more important things that the economy? What if compromises aren't best decided by whatever makes the most money? What if increasing the average wealth just means making the wealthiest people a bit more wealthy?
I bitch when the global giants get to set their own agenda, so I feel I have to bitch now. Why can't Red Hat simply help the opposition to UCITA, to show that not all companies are in favour of it? Or is there some part of it that will benefit them?
Which is one reason why smaller == faster. Smaller transistors means less distance between them, which means shorter signal paths.
The other big factor is the energy involved in switching the transformer, which must be dispersed as heat. Smaller transistors also means less capacitance (or less charge to alter the state of the transistor), which means less current and less waste heat.
Unfortunately, these devices are getting to the point where they are triggered by only a few electrons, which means they will be easily affected by thermal noise. This will make designing a processor extremely difficult.
I can make a few guesses. Perceptrons and other neural networks basically map a set of inputs to a set of outputs. An external error is generated each time the network runs and the network is adjusted to try to reduce this error. In the case of a game the error would be derived from the success of the unit. Each sample theoretically drive the network to minimise the error, however it is a rather random process, especially with such a non-linear system.
The real problem is to choose the right inputs and outputs for the network, and to get the thing to actually work. The inputs and outputs must be general enough that the network can analyse them, but specific enough to represent the environment and control the unit.
As for decision trees, they would be useful to breaking down the situations a unit is faced with, and isolating them so that the decision making is effective. It also provides a look ahead mechanism to try to predict what will happen. The decision tree would be the main memory of previous experiences. I think in the case of a game it would be very difficult to recognise similar circumstances to fit branches of the tree.
AI is a very interesting area, and not really that difficult to get started in. I suggest looking up some of the terms on the net and seeing what turns up, although a good textbook will be much better.
I have already had strange looks from people simply for mentioning MP3s in conversation. And people trying to tell me that copying from my own CDs to MP3s is illegal.
Looks like it's not going to be long before parents are searching their kids' HDs fof MP3s (hey, great product opportunity!) and government ads are coming out with moronic slogans.
"Friends don't let friend's use MP3s!"
"Every download is doing you damage!"
I don't know what this guy has against Russia, but I can think of a few reasons why having more than 1 space station would be good.
Firstly, one thing mentioned in the article is orbital inclination. There are things you can only do from certain orbital inclinations and heights, like observe parts of the earth and other celestial bodies, launch and retrieve probes and satellites and examine solar particles. So 2 satellites can do things that 1 can't.
There may also be experiments which can be performed using 2 stations, for example using interferometry.
It will also be good for advancing space technology, especially if one of the countries with the most experience in space launches another station. The fact is Russia will not be able to do all it wants to with the ISS because it is only a partner. I'm sure MIR2 would also be much cheaper than the ISS, more people would be able to perform experiments on it.
Russia is also far more open and cooperative these days, so all space agencies would learn a lot. If we are ever going to send people to mars or for long missions elsewhere we are going to need to know a lot more than we do now.
Finally, I can't be the only person who wants more money to be spent on space exploration. The governments of the world seem to be adept at rationalising funding for the military, spying on other countries and harsher law enforcement but when it comes to advancing the human race they decide it has to be economically viable.
It's 2001, weren't we supposed to have acheived much more by now? Our industrial production and economy is supposed to be a geometric progression, where are all the things we should be able to acheive with all our wealth?
... How many of the other stories today are hoaxes.
And guess which operating system it runs? That's right, Windows 98.
From what I recall about parallel computing, the structure and using it are the hard part of parallel computing. So ,the "Viva" library is just as important as the hardware itself.
However, from the look of it, the library just makes parallel processing easy - it doesn't transform serial code into parallel algorithms. This makes porting pretty difficult.
From their web site:
This seems like the opposite of abstraction to me. Of course, I could be wrong
The main question is, when are these things going to be available? Seems like we've been reading about them for quite a while.
The efficiency is not as important as where the energy comes from. Currently much of the energy for transport comes from petroleum, much of which is imported into my country (Australia) and the US. With hydrogen engines the energy comes from electricity.
Admittedly electricity is more generic, but considering the trouble the US is having with supply now it has to be asked whether the electricity system can supply the extra power for all transport. In addition to this, gas reserves are looking pretty thin, the US will probably be moving to coal-fired powerstations soon. If this happens the use of coal will skyrocket and it current prediction of 100 years worth will drop considerably.
Hydrogen may help us transition to other forms of power, but what is really needed are new energy sources, not just ways of storing energy.
I think sooner or later the human race is going to have to face up to the fact that we cannot grow forever. Short of usable fusion power our numbers and industry are already too great to sustain for more than a couple of decades. Getting smarter about energy is good, but as long as our society is modelled on exponential growth it can only postpone the inevitable collapse.
I have a question: how do you test the speed of the script vs the database vs the web server?
The main problem I have is knowing what the load looks like. Should I just pull back pages as fast as possible and measure CPU use?
How do black holes form? Normally when matter coalesces it rotates, forming a galaxy , cloud, solar system, etc. I believe the accepted theory on formation of black holes is that a massive star supernovas, exerting huge compression on it own core and collapsing the matter into a black hole which then consumes the rest of the star.
As there were presumably no old stars to supernova at the beginning of the universe, how did these form? Possibly they are remnants from the big bang or perhaps there were huge amounts of matter which collapsed quickly shortly after the big bang, although these should also leave microwave imprints.
It's also worth noting that black holes could solve the convex/concave universe problem. It's been postulated that there is "dark matter" we cannot see accounting for the rest of the mass of the universe. If there are lots of small black holes out there it could explain this. This could prove that the universe will eventually collapse back in on itself creating a new big bang, instead of expanding forever.
Now, can anyone tell me whether this is definitive proof of the existence of black holes, or could these signals be produced by any type of dense matter?
That is the entire point of this project, to reduce the bandwidth which X needs. Advice to the void: please gain understanding before posting, intelligence beats speed every time.
PS: This would be cool - I run a client on my laptop for computing while in bed. Doing so over the internet would mean that every place is my home :-)
That principle is used in our courts, but the police do not subscribe to it. In their eyes they have to assume you are guilty and try to prove it. No suprise that our lawmakers and the media are following their lead.
The real question is, when are we going to start facing up to real problems? How many people are killed in the world by terrorism each year, and how many by drunk drivers or polluted water supplies? How many people in your city die from drug overdoses and murders while congress makes pointless laws that affect you and I more than any criminals. It's things like this that remind me the media doesn't really care at all. And the politicians are doing their best to pretend to care, while publicising any small problems they think they can solve with a law or four.
You might need a quantum computer to find the information necessary to build one. No wonder it's so difficult.
It's also the big service packs, and the fact that each one breaks other things in addition to the bugs it's supposed to fix. If an NT admin wants to install the latest service pack because of security concerns, management is likely to say no. Why? "Everything works fine now, a new service pack is likely to cause more problems that it's worth".
Of course, a good admin should find out what security flaws are present on his system - but the only way to fix it may be to disable some software. At least on Linux I can only update the things I know have problems.
I don't understand. Software cannot be patented in Europe, yes? So the hardware for the IDEA algorithm is patented. If write a piece of software to implement IDEA (in Europe) it cannot infringe any patent because software cannot be patented. If they want to prosecute the patent they will have to do it against the hardware manufacture, because their patent is on hardware. It would be funny to see someone try to sue Intel because someone implemented a hardware-patented algorithm which runs on an x86.
Similarly for the other stuff you mention. Amazon's patent doesn't affect veding machines which use the "1-button-press business method".
If a business process is patented, I can write software which implements it with no problems - the patent is for the people who use the software to deal with.
Have I got this wrong?
Encrypted SHell