It's interesting to me that over the millions of years of evolution life has gone through, we're still using the same basic outlines for anatomy.
The reason we think this is because of our perspective. Stand back and look and then it's different. Live has existed on earth for maybe 4 billion years. Dinosaurs lived 160 million years ago. 160 million yeas is only four percent of the total time life has existed on Earth.
"College is a means to an end....and while it is nice to learn other things to be a bit well rounded, that is extra fluff if you have the time and money for it while there, but, don't forget the real reason for going."
"College" is a general term that can mean a university or a trade school or a Comunity College. Basically learning a programming language is something that should be covered in a trade school or two year community collage. If all you want to do is write the back end to some web site go the trade school route and learn all about 2008 vintage technology.
A computer science student at a university should be learning "computer science" not 2008 vintage technology. The importent stuff that you need to know will let you do more then just right small programs. You should be lerning some theory that will remain valid for decades. Kind of like what a math major learns -- stuff that will remain valid in 2108.
Where I went to school I think they did it right but then back then a CS major was almost an "independent studies major" and we were able to adapt the program to each student. My faculty adviser would load me some of his books and we'd make up some assignments and we'd talk every week about my projects. (Hard to make that system work in a 30,000 student public university.)
Bottom line: ALL university CS education is not screwed up. A lot of it maybe is. What save it is that to graduate the university requires that you have a rounded education that includes liberal arts and so on. and after four year of this ou learn how to think on your own. This last part is the most important thing they can teach.
"...one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app. OSX on the other hand, if you want to install some new piece of software, be prepared to pay for it, or to get a really useless trial version."
Which of those Ubuntu apps is not available on the Mac? Most of what ships with Umbuntu also ships on the Mac OSX install disc and you can download the rest from Source Forge or where ever. In fact I have Ubuntu itself running on my Mac (using VMware Fusion) but most of the Linux software that I use I have running on Mac OS X without any emulation layer. Most of it builds cleanly under Mac OS X. So I'm finding I'm using Linux lass and lass at home. At work it's different, I'm on Linux 90% and Solaris 10%. (I develop UNIX software here at work) But my next computer here at work will be a Mac Pro and I'll run Solaris on it inside a VM.
I got the Mac at home because of iLife, iTunes, the Abobe Suit and Apples Final Cut Express. I did not like any of the Open Source video edit software.
I've been telling people lately that mac OS X is the best desktop UNIX system out there right now. If you are running a server take a good look at Solaris For those not able to have Apple hardware and need to run a desktop then Ubuntu is the way to go. Not everyone can affor a new Mac
"This is why hydroelectric power is appealing: Once built they stay there generating power for only the cost of maintenance, the problem is there are only so many places where a dam can be built."
No, a hydro plant has a limited lifetime. It could be 100 years. What happens is the lake in back of the dam silts up. For example when Hoover Dam flooded a section of the Grand Canyon the water stopped flowing fast enough to cary it's load of silt so it falls out to the bottom of the lake. I think the lake was a realitivly short lifespan. OK yo could dig it out but take a look at the volume of Lake Mead and figure how many dump trucks it will take. In 200 year they will be building condos on what was once a lake and before that a canyon. But you do get a good 150 year of "free" power.
"...there isn't even a pressure booster for the brake pedal so at least you get a quad/calf workout when you drive. How about power steering? I didn't see any mention of that either..."
I've owned a few motorcycles. None of them had power steering or power asist on the brakes. It is not needed on such a light vehicle. This thing is a three wheeled bike with a faring, not a car. I don't think any of my bikes had heat or A/C either
Talk about the RIAA shooting itself in the foot, no this is more like a self inflicted head shot. Radio is nothing more then free advertising for records. If you make the stations pay more to play records then they will play less. Heck they might even start inviting local bands to come into the station and play live over the air. Any band would do this in a heartbeat This could be great.
Actually for music fans the best thing the RIAA could do is raise the price of CDs to $250, invent un-breakable DRM and charge broadcasted some huge fee. Basically a self inflicted head shot. I realy do have feelings for the RIAA and don't want to see them die a slow and painful death, a clean head shot is best for everyone.
I think the co2 problem will correct itself. Eventually we will burn all the oil and there will be none left. It is only a matter of time. Even if we all do everything right and cut our consumption all that will do is postpone the day when we run out of oil. Maybe we can push it out 50 years. I doubt it. Wait till every family in both Idea and Chine want two cars and a 3,000 square foot house with heat and A/C. Those people are smart and work hard, they will get it, maybe in 20 t 30 years. Al the oil will be gone within my kid's lifetime, OK maybe not gone, but so scarce and expensive that you may as well burn money.
If this device really can deliver power at 5 cents per KWH. and if Toshiba can offer 30 year financing then it makes sense for even poor people in Africa to buy this. If toshiba is smart they should deliver these things for free and just sel the power at 1/2 market rate, adjusted every 6 months to the new market rate. They will make a fortune and their customers will be hapy to pay 1/2 price for power
This is easy. You tell the police in advance what's up. You don't tell the night watchman or more likely you tell the night watchman to pretend like he does not know. I mean how could he ignore a TV crew, their white carting trucks the lighting equipment actors and so on.
People who believe that reality shows are not scripted and shot with multiple takes, likely believe pro wrestling is real too.
Have you been following the writer's strike. One of the things the writers want is for their work on reality shows to be covered by the contract. Why would they care if reality shows did not have many writers working?
One could fly around the Earth even if it were flat. Image the flat earth layed out exactly as with any of the map projections where the entire Earth is drawn on a flat paper map. It is possable to fly in a circle (no, a "closed loop") such that you would see the same ground track as if you flew over a great circle route over a sperical Earth. I don't think you could tell the difference just be flying and looking out the window.
One way to prove that it is round is to measure the local curvature. This is easy to do it the land is very flat or on water. All you do is stay in one place while you watch something slip over the horizon as it goes away from you. The horizon is only a few miles away. It does not take long. But this only proves a local curvature, like maybe a small hill. So you repete this experimant at many locations untill you find that the "hill" is 6,000 miles tall
You could also fly to the moon and look at the Earth. But this is expensive. The above experiment was done in Eypt 4,000 years ago using just simple tools
I think we are comparing Apples to Oranges here. (Sorry could not resist) But it is true Apple counts ever small nt pick fix to every program. For example the recent Mac OS update listed about two dozen fixes. Microsoft lumps this kind of stuff all together and counts it as one fix.
The other thing is "Who cares" what mattersis the final result: No one, or "hardly anyone" runs anti-virus or anti-spyware software on a Mac. It is simply not required. The fire wall is open by default too. It is not needed. So given the fact that most Macs have the firewall disabled and no anti-whatever can anyone point to even one Mac that have problems. I'm sure some did but the problem is very rare.
On the other hand even with firewalls and anti-virus programs widely used we do hear now and then about eople having problems with Windows PCs.
I would have thought that Microsoft as a company would be embarrassed that an anti-virus industry even exists.
The fact that it does speaks volumes about Windows.
People say it s only because Windows is the majority OS, so it is targeted. Hell no. Could you imagine the "bragging rights" a hacker could get if he was able to write a Mac OS virus that would spread in the wild? Believe me this is the Holly Grail and there is strong motivation. Use this analogy, do termites eat wood houses because most are made with wood and they leave brick houses alone because there are so few of them "so why bother?" No, the engineers who wrote Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Linux simply used bricks and avoided the whole termite problem. They built and OS that viruses can't live in.
But, 96 KHz sampling? You do know the Nyquist theorem
What happens if you digitize and open mic at 44Khz. All the sound below 22Khz gets recored just fine but what hapens to the sounds in the room that are at 33Khz?. They are there, no one but the dog can hear them but they are there and the mic picks them up not well but it picks up 33Khz. If this high frequency sound is able to make it's way to the digital converyer it will alias to an 11Khz signal and fall right into the band of human hearing. This is a hard problem to fix and in theory realy can never be fixed.
Please re-read the wiki article. What it says is that they really do need to go to at least 96Khz sample rate and in fact "everyone" does. The studios all use 96KHz or higher and the player all oversample the CD. The root of the problem i "What happens if you do violate Nyquist?" All analog hardware is not perfect so violation of Nyquest is unaviodable with real-world equipment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem#Aliasing
Another way to look at aliasing is to think of the input analog signal (a singer's voice) as "beating" with the sample frequency. You can think of the sampling process as "multiplying" the signal by a square wave who's value is either one or zero. The square wve has the 44Khz fundimental plus all the hormonics up to infinity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)
AM radio uses this. It "beats" the audio signal with an radio frequency carier
Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate.
That is 100% true. But in the real world, if you are sampling a digital recorder at 44Khz how do you ensure that NOTHING above 22Khz gets to the analog to digital converter? You need a strong analog filter but there are no filters that have an exactly square cut off Maybe let's say you have a 24db per octave filter. This mens you will have only attenuated the higher frequencies, not eliminated them. Same on playback. You need a theoretically perfect analog filter to playback. Such analog filers do not exist.
The way they get around all this is to sample at 96 or 128Khz. If you do this then real-world analog filters can be used.
No one who thought about the problem for long thought the Earth was flat. Certainly there where many uneducated people 2,000 years ago but those who studied astronomy knwo the earth was turning under a set of fixed stars. The person who made that first map that used the word "America" said he based his work on an Egyptian geographer 4,000 years before his time.
It is actually easy to measure the diameter of the Earth with crude and simple tools and get an answer that is not to bad.
Back to the experiment, it was reasonable to expect a different result. We have the abilty to physically react to emergencies with strenght and speed not normally present. One might guess the brain had the ability to "thin fast" for a second or so it need be. Evolution should have provided this. If it didn't why not? Knowing the answer to "why not" may tell us something about how the mind works perhaps that it _always_ works at the only possable speed? New data always makes us ask more questions
don't understand you need a fab to do anything with this,
Not quite.... One can burn this into an FPGA. I don't know how fast it would run but if the goal is to study and experiment with processor design then an FPGA is the tool. The purpose ere is to allow people to study and modify the CPU
how does the spacecraft survive in those temperatures?
Look up the difference between "heat" and "temperature". The ultra-low density gas that contacts the spacecraft can not conduct much heat. What matters is not the temperature of the gas but the temperatur of the spacecraft.
Everyone seems to be complaining about "spyware". Two comments:
1) How else can Microsoft address usability except by collecting data about which functions are used and when and in what order. I doubt they care about your document they just ned to know things like which of four methods you use to (say) make a word bold face. They are offing to pay you for this data and you get to decide if you want ot accept.
2) Other organizations have done the exact same thing. Do you really thing Microsoft invents new ideas? This has been done on open source projects
3) Software that runs on a web browser always does this. Your actions get written to a server log file. I wonder what slashdot.org serve logs look like. They likely contain a list of what each of is are reading and when we read it.
NTPD is not good enough? How far off does your system drift after being disconnected from a server? Typically not more than seconds per day. Have you ever lost an Internet connection for more then a day. Even so all your servers would still remain sync'd to each other. I hope you do not have all of your local machines going over the Internet to get time. Set up three or four local machines to be level 3 and then the others sync to those.
What's the fascination with uber-accuracy at home?
They are calling these "clocks" only because that is what the typical reader understands. A better term is "frequency standard". There are many uses for a stable frequency, the most common one is running a microwave transmitter. This is the major source of the surplus devices too, from cell towers. As the phone companies modernize equipment these "clocks" find their way to eBay and then into people's houses.
If you distribute the software you must accept the GPL. Read the GPL. They can't say "I got this from X nd X offers source code." NO, each distributer must also distribute source. The GPL says you do not have to agree to this but agreeing is the only way you can distribute the software
"I'd think that over a hundred million samples would be quite a bit better than a few thousand,"
You are right and if you'd ever studied statistic you'd know how to calculate exactly how much better. So you do the math and find out your result is something like 2% more accurate. Inother words you reduce the 2% margin of error to nearly zero. The next question is was that 2% worth the cost. Every few years you have to re-evaluate becasue the cost might change but I doubt they will ever need to sample more then a small percent of the viewers
Why not just stick radar on them? Or beam them radar images?
The current system with piloted aircraft does not require radar on each plane. It does not even require radar on the ground. You don't need radar in controlled airspace. If you tell a plan to fly at a certain speed and heading you can write that down on a post-it note and any time later you can computer where that airplan is based on speed, direction and last known location. This si exactly how air traffic control works. OK they do have ground based radar at many high traffic locations. It make the controlers job MUCH easier But there is never a need to send radar "images" to the airplan. All they send are directions, speeds and altitudes
You just said all opinions are equally valid. Lots of people are of the opinion that it is both true, and science. Who are you to claim different?
All OPINIONS are valid because they are by definition true. If I say "I prefer red to blue" of course it is true. Same if I say "I hate John." Thiose are opinions but if I say "my cars has three wheels" that is NOT an opinion. It is a statement that s either true or false. If I say "FSM is science" that is not opinion because we can test it. first we get a definition of science, choose any definition you like and you can't make FSM fit.
So "all opinions are valid" must be true. But do remember that all statements are not opinion. For example "3 + 2 = 6" is a statement of fact that happens to be false it is not an opinion.
Being an Apple user I just assumed all wireless keyboards and mice used Bluetooth. Al the wireless stuff I've seen is all BT. But I just checked and wow, those cheep PCs really do use some cheaper kind of radio link. Anything to save 50 cents.
"OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows"
Sun has an interesting warranty with Solaris. If the new version of Solaris breaks any old program you have, Sun will work continuously with you until the problem is solved. What this means is that they will put real engineers (not telephone support people) on your problem and change the OS if required.
I wonder if the motivation was the same. If the rewrd for getting it right was an apple. the chimp might really, really want an apple. A doubt they rewarded the students with fruit and I doubt they gave the chips money. How could they know if the two groups had equal motivation and worked as hard to get a correct answer?
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to me that over the millions of years of evolution life has gone through, we're still using the same basic outlines for anatomy.
The reason we think this is because of our perspective. Stand back and look and then it's different. Live has existed on earth for maybe 4 billion years. Dinosaurs lived 160 million years ago. 160 million yeas is only four percent of the total time life has existed on Earth.
"College is a means to an end....and while it is nice to learn other things to be a bit well rounded, that is extra fluff if you have the time and money for it while there, but, don't forget the real reason for going."
"College" is a general term that can mean a university or a trade school or a Comunity College. Basically learning a programming language is something that should be covered in a trade school or two year community collage. If all you want to do is write the back end to some web site go the trade school route and learn all about 2008 vintage technology.
A computer science student at a university should be learning "computer science" not 2008 vintage technology. The importent stuff that you need to know will let you do more then just right small programs. You should be lerning some theory that will remain valid for decades. Kind of like what a math major learns -- stuff that will remain valid in 2108.
Where I went to school I think they did it right but then back then a CS major was almost an "independent studies major" and we were able to adapt the program to each student. My faculty adviser would load me some of his books and we'd make up some assignments and we'd talk every week about my projects. (Hard to make that system work in a 30,000 student public university.)
Bottom line: ALL university CS education is not screwed up. A lot of it maybe is. What save it is that to graduate the university requires that you have a rounded education that includes liberal arts and so on. and after four year of this ou learn how to think on your own. This last part is the most important thing they can teach.
"...one feature about Ubuntu that I love more than my Mac is that you can install a TON of applications from Synaptic or via the awesome Add/Remove app. OSX on the other hand, if you want to install some new piece of software, be prepared to pay for it, or to get a really useless trial version." Which of those Ubuntu apps is not available on the Mac? Most of what ships with Umbuntu also ships on the Mac OSX install disc and you can download the rest from Source Forge or where ever. In fact I have Ubuntu itself running on my Mac (using VMware Fusion) but most of the Linux software that I use I have running on Mac OS X without any emulation layer. Most of it builds cleanly under Mac OS X. So I'm finding I'm using Linux lass and lass at home. At work it's different, I'm on Linux 90% and Solaris 10%. (I develop UNIX software here at work) But my next computer here at work will be a Mac Pro and I'll run Solaris on it inside a VM. I got the Mac at home because of iLife, iTunes, the Abobe Suit and Apples Final Cut Express. I did not like any of the Open Source video edit software. I've been telling people lately that mac OS X is the best desktop UNIX system out there right now. If you are running a server take a good look at Solaris For those not able to have Apple hardware and need to run a desktop then Ubuntu is the way to go. Not everyone can affor a new Mac
"This is why hydroelectric power is appealing: Once built they stay there generating power for only the cost of maintenance, the problem is there are only so many places where a dam can be built."
No, a hydro plant has a limited lifetime. It could be 100 years. What happens is the lake in back of the dam silts up. For example when Hoover Dam flooded a section of the Grand Canyon the water stopped flowing fast enough to cary it's load of silt so it falls out to the bottom of the lake. I think the lake was a realitivly short lifespan. OK yo could dig it out but take a look at the volume of Lake Mead and figure how many dump trucks it will take. In 200 year they will be building condos on what was once a lake and before that a canyon. But you do get a good 150 year of "free" power.
"...there isn't even a pressure booster for the brake pedal so at least you get a quad/calf workout when you drive. How about power steering? I didn't see any mention of that either..."
I've owned a few motorcycles. None of them had power steering or power asist on the brakes. It is not needed on such a light vehicle. This thing is a three wheeled bike with a faring, not a car. I don't think any of my bikes had heat or A/C either
Talk about the RIAA shooting itself in the foot, no this is more like a self inflicted head shot. Radio is nothing more then free advertising for records. If you make the stations pay more to play records then they will play less. Heck they might even start inviting local bands to come into the station and play live over the air. Any band would do this in a heartbeat This could be great.
Actually for music fans the best thing the RIAA could do is raise the price of CDs to $250, invent un-breakable DRM and charge broadcasted some huge fee. Basically a self inflicted head shot. I realy do have feelings for the RIAA and don't want to see them die a slow and painful death, a clean head shot is best for everyone.
I think the co2 problem will correct itself. Eventually we will burn all the oil and there will be none left. It is only a matter of time. Even if we all do everything right and cut our consumption all that will do is postpone the day when we run out of oil. Maybe we can push it out 50 years. I doubt it. Wait till every family in both Idea and Chine want two cars and a 3,000 square foot house with heat and A/C. Those people are smart and work hard, they will get it, maybe in 20 t 30 years. Al the oil will be gone within my kid's lifetime, OK maybe not gone, but so scarce and expensive that you may as well burn money.
If this device really can deliver power at 5 cents per KWH. and if Toshiba can offer 30 year financing then it makes sense for even poor people in Africa to buy this. If toshiba is smart they should deliver these things for free and just sel the power at 1/2 market rate, adjusted every 6 months to the new market rate. They will make a fortune and their customers will be hapy to pay 1/2 price for power
This is easy. You tell the police in advance what's up. You don't tell the night watchman or more likely you tell the night watchman to pretend like he does not know. I mean how could he ignore a TV crew, their white carting trucks the lighting equipment actors and so on.
People who believe that reality shows are not scripted and shot with multiple takes, likely believe pro wrestling is real too.
Have you been following the writer's strike. One of the things the writers want is for their work on reality shows to be covered by the contract. Why would they care if reality shows did not have many writers working?
One could fly around the Earth even if it were flat. Image the flat earth layed out exactly as with any of the map projections where the entire Earth is drawn on a flat paper map. It is possable to fly in a circle (no, a "closed loop") such that you would see the same ground track as if you flew over a great circle route over a sperical Earth. I don't think you could tell the difference just be flying and looking out the window. One way to prove that it is round is to measure the local curvature. This is easy to do it the land is very flat or on water. All you do is stay in one place while you watch something slip over the horizon as it goes away from you. The horizon is only a few miles away. It does not take long. But this only proves a local curvature, like maybe a small hill. So you repete this experimant at many locations untill you find that the "hill" is 6,000 miles tall You could also fly to the moon and look at the Earth. But this is expensive. The above experiment was done in Eypt 4,000 years ago using just simple tools
I think we are comparing Apples to Oranges here. (Sorry could not resist) But it is true Apple counts ever small nt pick fix to every program. For example the recent Mac OS update listed about two dozen fixes. Microsoft lumps this kind of stuff all together and counts it as one fix. The other thing is "Who cares" what mattersis the final result: No one, or "hardly anyone" runs anti-virus or anti-spyware software on a Mac. It is simply not required. The fire wall is open by default too. It is not needed. So given the fact that most Macs have the firewall disabled and no anti-whatever can anyone point to even one Mac that have problems. I'm sure some did but the problem is very rare. On the other hand even with firewalls and anti-virus programs widely used we do hear now and then about eople having problems with Windows PCs. I would have thought that Microsoft as a company would be embarrassed that an anti-virus industry even exists. The fact that it does speaks volumes about Windows. People say it s only because Windows is the majority OS, so it is targeted. Hell no. Could you imagine the "bragging rights" a hacker could get if he was able to write a Mac OS virus that would spread in the wild? Believe me this is the Holly Grail and there is strong motivation. Use this analogy, do termites eat wood houses because most are made with wood and they leave brick houses alone because there are so few of them "so why bother?" No, the engineers who wrote Mac OS X, Solaris, BSD and Linux simply used bricks and avoided the whole termite problem. They built and OS that viruses can't live in.
But, 96 KHz sampling? You do know the Nyquist theorem What happens if you digitize and open mic at 44Khz. All the sound below 22Khz gets recored just fine but what hapens to the sounds in the room that are at 33Khz?. They are there, no one but the dog can hear them but they are there and the mic picks them up not well but it picks up 33Khz. If this high frequency sound is able to make it's way to the digital converyer it will alias to an 11Khz signal and fall right into the band of human hearing. This is a hard problem to fix and in theory realy can never be fixed. Please re-read the wiki article. What it says is that they really do need to go to at least 96Khz sample rate and in fact "everyone" does. The studios all use 96KHz or higher and the player all oversample the CD. The root of the problem i "What happens if you do violate Nyquist?" All analog hardware is not perfect so violation of Nyquest is unaviodable with real-world equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem#Aliasing Another way to look at aliasing is to think of the input analog signal (a singer's voice) as "beating" with the sample frequency. You can think of the sampling process as "multiplying" the signal by a square wave who's value is either one or zero. The square wve has the 44Khz fundimental plus all the hormonics up to infinity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics) AM radio uses this. It "beats" the audio signal with an radio frequency carier
Nyquist's theorem states that you can accurately represent frequencies up to 1/2 the sampling rate. That is 100% true. But in the real world, if you are sampling a digital recorder at 44Khz how do you ensure that NOTHING above 22Khz gets to the analog to digital converter? You need a strong analog filter but there are no filters that have an exactly square cut off Maybe let's say you have a 24db per octave filter. This mens you will have only attenuated the higher frequencies, not eliminated them. Same on playback. You need a theoretically perfect analog filter to playback. Such analog filers do not exist. The way they get around all this is to sample at 96 or 128Khz. If you do this then real-world analog filters can be used.
No one who thought about the problem for long thought the Earth was flat. Certainly there where many uneducated people 2,000 years ago but those who studied astronomy knwo the earth was turning under a set of fixed stars. The person who made that first map that used the word "America" said he based his work on an Egyptian geographer 4,000 years before his time.
It is actually easy to measure the diameter of the Earth with crude and simple tools and get an answer that is not to bad.
Back to the experiment, it was reasonable to expect a different result. We have the abilty to physically react to emergencies with strenght and speed not normally present. One might guess the brain had the ability to "thin fast" for a second or so it need be. Evolution should have provided this. If it didn't why not? Knowing the answer to "why not" may tell us something about how the mind works perhaps that it _always_ works at the only possable speed? New data always makes us ask more questions
don't understand you need a fab to do anything with this,
Not quite.... One can burn this into an FPGA. I don't know how fast it would run but if the goal is to study and experiment with processor design then an FPGA is the tool. The purpose ere is to allow people to study and modify the CPU
Wikipeadia of course has some info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
how does the spacecraft survive in those temperatures?
Look up the difference between "heat" and "temperature".
The ultra-low density gas that contacts the spacecraft can not conduct much heat. What matters is not the temperature of the gas but the temperatur of the spacecraft.
Everyone seems to be complaining about "spyware". Two comments:
1) How else can Microsoft address usability except by collecting data about which functions are used and when and in what order. I doubt they care about your document they just ned to know things like which of four methods you use to (say) make a word bold face. They are offing to pay you for this data and you get to decide if you want ot accept.
2) Other organizations have done the exact same thing. Do you really thing Microsoft invents new ideas? This has been done on open source projects
3) Software that runs on a web browser always does this. Your actions get written to a server log file. I wonder what slashdot.org serve logs look like. They likely contain a list of what each of is are reading and when we read it.
NTPD is not good enough? How far off does your system drift after being disconnected from a server? Typically not more than seconds per day. Have you ever lost an Internet connection for more then a day. Even so all your servers would still remain sync'd to each other. I hope you do not have all of your local machines going over the Internet to get time. Set up three or four local machines to be level 3 and then the others sync to those.
What's the fascination with uber-accuracy at home?
They are calling these "clocks" only because that is what the typical reader understands. A better term is "frequency standard". There are many uses for a stable frequency, the most common one is running a microwave transmitter. This is the major source of the surplus devices too, from cell towers. As the phone companies modernize equipment these "clocks" find their way to eBay and then into people's houses.
If you distribute the software you must accept the GPL. Read the GPL. They can't say "I got this from X nd X offers source code." NO, each distributer must also distribute source. The GPL says you do not have to agree to this but agreeing is the only way you can distribute the software
"I'd think that over a hundred million samples would be quite a bit better than a few thousand," You are right and if you'd ever studied statistic you'd know how to calculate exactly how much better. So you do the math and find out your result is something like 2% more accurate. Inother words you reduce the 2% margin of error to nearly zero. The next question is was that 2% worth the cost. Every few years you have to re-evaluate becasue the cost might change but I doubt they will ever need to sample more then a small percent of the viewers
Why not just stick radar on them? Or beam them radar images?
The current system with piloted aircraft does not require radar on each plane. It does not even require radar on the ground. You don't need radar in controlled airspace. If you tell a plan to fly at a certain speed and heading you can write that down on a post-it note and any time later you can computer where that airplan is based on speed, direction and last known location. This si exactly how air traffic control works. OK they do have ground based radar at many high traffic locations. It make the controlers job MUCH easier But there is never a need to send radar "images" to the airplan. All they send are directions, speeds and altitudes
You just said all opinions are equally valid. Lots of people are of the opinion that it is both true, and science. Who are you to claim different?
All OPINIONS are valid because they are by definition true. If I say "I prefer red to blue" of course it is true. Same if I say "I hate John." Thiose are opinions but if I say "my cars has three wheels" that is NOT an opinion. It is a statement that s either true or false. If I say "FSM is science" that is not opinion because we can test it. first we get a definition of science, choose any definition you like and you can't make FSM fit.
So "all opinions are valid" must be true. But do remember that all statements are not opinion. For example "3 + 2 = 6" is a statement of fact that happens to be false it is not an opinion.
Being an Apple user I just assumed all wireless keyboards and mice used Bluetooth. Al the wireless stuff I've seen is all BT. But I just checked and wow, those cheep PCs really do use some cheaper kind of radio link. Anything to save 50 cents.
"OS upgrades tend to break compatability with older software, be it in Ubuntu, OS X or Windows"
Sun has an interesting warranty with Solaris. If the new version of Solaris breaks any old program you have, Sun will work continuously with you until the problem is solved. What this means is that they will put real engineers (not telephone support people) on your problem and change the OS if required.
I wonder if the motivation was the same. If the rewrd for getting it right was an apple. the chimp might really, really want an apple. A doubt they rewarded the students with fruit and I doubt they gave the chips money. How could they know if the two groups had equal motivation and worked as hard to get a correct answer?