Are you kidding? From Microsoft's point of view it has done the WORST possible thing. Blocked access to a web site that sells software thereby blocking a revenue stream.
So one day we see on the 7:00PM news that an entire kindergarten class, teacher and all where sued for reading "See spot run. Run Spot." out loud in class. The authors union claims that the children, aided by their teacher were a conspiracy to commit a "public performance" of copyrighted work.
No. Cars will evolve into PRT systems. What is lacking is automated drivers. Once a car can drive itself you can do many great things like have then hook up into trains or one car can tell other cars that it needs to change lans and the others move out of the way.
Little by little cars will gain "smarts" at first with automatic braking then steering controls to follow a lane and so one until maybe 50 years they no longr need a driver at all -- great for kids and old people.... and drunks
That's what they do here, where I like. I see a huge buss with maybe four people riding. Then it stops in a traffic lane and backs up traffic foor blocks as one person gets off at the stop. Then not only the bus but 25 cars in back of it all have to speed up again.
Busses have to be sized for the maximum load but the agverage load must be much smaller so much of the time they are a waste
I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
What will happen is that the "average consumer PC" wiil do different tasks, not just today's job faster. For example what about replacing a mouse with just your hand. A webcam-like camera watches your hands and finders. It's multi-touch but without the touch pad. OK there is one use for 8 or your 16 cores. Maybe the other 8 cores can answer the telephone for you and determine if the phone should ring (smart phone call screening) I can think of LOT of things I could do with 16, 32 or 1,000 cores that simple can not be done today.
Who would have thought 30 years ago that most compute power would be used to move pixels around on a glass screen. That is mostly what computers "compute" today, the user interface.
Even if the Kindle were free, I'd still not want to use it because the e-books are DRM'd and expensive.
What do you get for your $350? Really all you get is the ability to buy e-books. It is kind of lke if they charged a fee to go into a physical book store.
I would expect, after buying a reader the books would sell for about $2 each. That's about what the auithor gets the rest of the price is for printing and distribution.
That's always been the trouble with petty third world dictators. You make an agreement with the country but really the agreement only holds so long as the dictator remains in power. That is because dictators rule by edict not by law.
What Bush did was show to the world that the US is like that too. Everyon enow knows that if you make an greement with the US them maybe years later there might be another Bush who in effect says "screw you, I do what I want"
If Obama can do anything that would have lasting good it would be to institutionalize "openness". He could raise everyone expectations about open government so high that the next person would have ahard time shutting it down
The ban would be on "space based" weapons. That means thing the stay in space until you use them. Like bombs in orbit. Other things like big lasers the stay on the ground are not covered.
Notice that no one has "space based" weapons currently so no one is "dis arming"
When it comes to space the contry with the most to loose would be the one most motivated to keep weopons out of space. That would be the US. The US has by far the most "stuff" up there. Banning space based weopons is in the US' self interrest and I doubt anyone who feels threatened by the US' overhead assests would want such a ban.
As a long time Linux user, I say let's be fair. Try running Photoshop on both Windows and Linux and see which is faster. Now let's run Final Cut Pro and do the test and now try Logic.
My point is "who cares" you buy operating systems so you can run applications, not bench marks.
I really do which Aperture, Logic 8, Photoshop and iTunes ran on Linux.
That said, I do software development on this Linux system but I'll be moving to a Mac Pro maybe this year or next when this dual xeon system gets replaced.
And from the Windows user point of view, who cares how fast Linux is if it can't run some game you want
Don't laugh. In ancient times in some cities swords were banned. People were only allowed knives up to a certain size.
Back in the day, 100 Roman soldiers were a huge and powerful force. A Centurion, the man who commands only 100 men was allowed to make binding agreements and speak for the Roman government
In a city where swords are outlawed 100 armed men could do as they wanted.
What Linux really needs is mainstream applications to be supported. I bought a Mac so I could run Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Express, Logic Express and iTunes. And YES I do use all those and NO there is nothing comparable for Linux.
I do use Linux full time at work as my main desktop but then I do software developments and Linux is well suited to that. I started with Linux back in the pre 1.0 Kernel days but I do like to use Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Express, Logic Express and iTunes.
It's WORSE. They didn't even build a kit. They BOUGHT a working radio from Icom and then connected it to an antenna they assembled. Ok so technically they "built a radio station"
This is far worse than the kid who says he "built" a computer when all he did has install a working logic board into a metal case. These guys didn't even do that much.
The ISS caries a simple 2 meter FM radio. When over head the station is about 200 miles away, not very far.
Ham radio has a 100 year tradition of "home brewing". Hams (radio amateurs) have been building equipment at home in large numbers for about 100 years now. It's a very common world wide hobby. There are about 1/2 million people with amateur radio licenses living in the USA right now. A lot of these people build radio equipment and the radio used in ISS is NOT what you'd call "high tech" A couple hundred dollars worth of gear is all that is needed to make contact. Well that and the some free computer software that will tell you when the station is over your location and where to aim the antenna.
As for designing your own radio. That was a big deal in the 1930's back when we used tubes and slide rules. But now the parts are so easy to use. Some really nice integrated circuits are available that make designing almost like building a with Lego blacks.
(1) cathedrals. People spend longer than a centery to build a large stone church. None of the founder had a hope of seeing the project complete yet they spend huge resources on the project.
(2) humans don't have to be the ones we send. We will send robot ships to explore.
Here is how it will happen. Soon, within 100 years we may find an exo-planet that has both water vapor and oxygen in the atmosphere. We are quite close to being able to detect these now. I'm sure one will be found some day. There will be a huge motivation to send a probe. Likely we will send many with later, faster ones over taking the first slower probes. Like the cathedrals we will build probe factories and launch them, a few every year for centuries. Some day one of the probes will return data. One day that data will show a world with life where people can live. Going there will be irresistable at least to a few people.
There are only two possibilities of how humans will like in 1,000 and in 10,000 years.
(1) They will be extinct
(2) They will have learned to live in a steady, non-growth state and in a sustainable manner where resources are never added to nor removed from the natural environment.
The Earth was in state #2 up until only a few thousand years ago and will be back in that state within a thousand years by either of the two numbered paragraphs above.
No, What Fermi said was that if you sit on that beach you SHOULD expect to be knee deep in bottles. He said that be any reasonable calculation thegalaxy should be overflowing even if they only used rocket powered tin cans to tavel in. The universe is very, very old and the galaxy, while large is not really large conpared to it's age.
The argument is that we (yes us) will likely in 10,000 years move outside of the solar system, using if nothing else rockets that take 2,000 years to get to the next star. But then in 10,000 year they launch another rocket to another star. Even at that rate humans will over fill the galaxy "soon".
The fact that we do not see the galaxy over filled with slow moving rockets means there can be on one else like us.
Notice the last two words above "like us". Fermi was not a dumb guy. He made a very specific statement.
If ET is building a beacon, something "bright" that will get noticed he could not want it to look to much like noise. He'd compromise a little.
But you ARE right. ET would have to make some assumption about the technical ability his targets. He might just pick a technical level that is about 100 years ahead of our current state. Doing so might not reduce his chances by much. but might reduce his cost by 100 times allowing him to build 100 times more beacons.
Even so a negative result teaches us something by setting a floor on some estimates.
This really is the answer, no kidding. ETs have discovered physics that we have yet to discover. I doubt the technology will be entangled photons but it will be "something."
But there is a worse problem. Even if ET comunicates by sending slower then light space ships with hand written notes there has been enough time for the entire galaxy to have been covered in paper notes. You can go one hell of a long ways in a billion years with a rocket powered tin can. If the tin can contians a tin can building robot then exponential growth takes hold and we should be knee deep in note carrying robots. Why no slower than light self replicating robots???
The problem with local control of schools is that some locations will not demand much of their school and think low standards are OK. Other locations wil under fund their schools.
What's needed is balance. There should be national or state level goals and standards but the locals need to have room to addrees those goals in a way that works for them then their available staff.
Staffing is a major issue. Some schools like those where I live have a 100 teachers apply for every opening. "Everyone" wants to work ing the best place. In other areas there is a teacher shortage.
But you know what the bottom line is? Demographics. Schools that have "better" students do better. Kids tend to grow up to be just like their parents. If the district is filled with poor under educated parents then those are the kids you get. Yes there are exceptions but we measure using statistics. The thing that needs to be broken is the thing where kids aspire to be like their parents and peers. Some how you have to expose them to some other environment.
Siting a laptop is stronger than an old cray is a clever misdirection.
Clever misdirection? No it's also flat out wrong. A 1980's vintage mainframe computer has huge I/O bandwidth. An order of magnitude (at least) more then a noebook. For most server based applactions the old 80's computer is much better. We don't use them only because of cost.
The old computer I used to work on had 500 teminals connected and dozens of disk drives and maybe a half dozen printers. And those printers moved paper so fast you could not see the paper move. the only thing "wrong" was that the CPU sold for an even $12 million dollars.
Todays PC/Mac computers are very fast but all that power is designed into moving pixels around on a screen. Just TRY and process an entire month's worth of bank transactions on a notebook PC.
How come you feel that the government owes you a converter box in the first place?
The government acting on behalf of TV viewers SOLD the bit of airwaves that TV uses with the idea that some of the money would go to users.
So they mailed you your money and then someone took it from you.
Those are two unrelated things. If you sold your car and then some one took the money could you ask the buyer to pay again? No not really.
So the money WAS yours, you throught the governemtn sold off some property and then someone took your share of the money. Call the police not the FCC, the FCC already did their job
Slashdot Mirror
What gives my ISP the right to start monitoring my packets just because they suspect I'm pirating something?
Likely the contract you signed gives then permission to look at any data going over the wire. Did you actually read all of it?
Has Conficker done anything malicious yet?
Are you kidding? From Microsoft's point of view it has done the WORST possible thing. Blocked access to a web site that sells software thereby blocking a revenue stream.
So one day we see on the 7:00PM news that an entire kindergarten class, teacher and all where sued for reading "See spot run. Run Spot." out loud in class. The authors union claims that the children, aided by their teacher were a conspiracy to commit a "public performance" of copyrighted work.
This is how cars will eventually be replaced.
No. Cars will evolve into PRT systems. What is lacking is automated drivers. Once a car can drive itself you can do many great things like have then hook up into trains or one car can tell other cars that it needs to change lans and the others move out of the way.
Little by little cars will gain "smarts" at first with automatic braking then steering controls to follow a lane and so one until maybe 50 years they no longr need a driver at all -- great for kids and old people.... and drunks
That's what they do here, where I like. I see a huge buss with maybe four people riding. Then it stops in a traffic lane and backs up traffic foor blocks as one person gets off at the stop. Then not only the bus but 25 cars in back of it all have to speed up again.
Busses have to be sized for the maximum load but the agverage load must be much smaller so much of the time they are a waste
I know my workload could use 16 cores, but the average consumer PC? Not so sure. That's why I'd like to see prices starting to fall, instead of having same prices, more power PCs.
What will happen is that the "average consumer PC" wiil do different tasks, not just today's job faster. For example what about replacing a mouse with just your hand. A webcam-like camera watches your hands and finders. It's multi-touch but without the touch pad. OK there is one use for 8 or your 16 cores. Maybe the other 8 cores can answer the telephone for you and determine if the phone should ring (smart phone call screening) I can think of LOT of things I could do with 16, 32 or 1,000 cores that simple can not be done today.
Who would have thought 30 years ago that most compute power would be used to move pixels around on a glass screen. That is mostly what computers "compute" today, the user interface.
Even if the Kindle were free, I'd still not want to use it because the e-books are DRM'd and expensive.
What do you get for your $350? Really all you get is the ability to buy e-books. It is kind of lke if they charged a fee to go into a physical book store.
I would expect, after buying a reader the books would sell for about $2 each. That's about what the auithor gets the rest of the price is for printing and distribution.
That's always been the trouble with petty third world dictators. You make an agreement with the country but really the agreement only holds so long as the dictator remains in power. That is because dictators rule by edict not by law.
What Bush did was show to the world that the US is like that too. Everyon enow knows that if you make an greement with the US them maybe years later there might be another Bush who in effect says "screw you, I do what I want"
If Obama can do anything that would have lasting good it would be to institutionalize "openness". He could raise everyone expectations about open government so high that the next person would have ahard time shutting it down
The ban would be on "space based" weapons. That means thing the stay in space until you use them. Like bombs in orbit. Other things like big lasers the stay on the ground are not covered.
Notice that no one has "space based" weapons currently so no one is "dis arming"
When it comes to space the contry with the most to loose would be the one most motivated to keep weopons out of space. That would be the US. The US has by far the most "stuff" up there. Banning space based weopons is in the US' self interrest and I doubt anyone who feels threatened by the US' overhead assests would want such a ban.
As a long time Linux user, I say let's be fair. Try running Photoshop on both Windows and Linux and see which is faster. Now let's run Final Cut Pro and do the test and now try Logic.
My point is "who cares" you buy operating systems so you can run applications, not bench marks.
I really do which Aperture, Logic 8, Photoshop and iTunes ran on Linux.
That said, I do software development on this Linux system but I'll be moving to a Mac Pro maybe this year or next when this dual xeon system gets replaced.
And from the Windows user point of view, who cares how fast Linux is if it can't run some game you want
Don't laugh. In ancient times in some cities swords were banned. People were only allowed knives up to a certain size.
Back in the day, 100 Roman soldiers were a huge and powerful force. A Centurion, the man who commands only 100 men was allowed to make binding agreements and speak for the Roman government
In a city where swords are outlawed 100 armed men could do as they wanted.
What Linux really needs is mainstream applications to be supported. I bought a Mac so I could run Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Express, Logic Express and iTunes. And YES I do use all those and NO there is nothing comparable for Linux.
I do use Linux full time at work as my main desktop but then I do software developments and Linux is well suited to that. I started with Linux back in the pre 1.0 Kernel days but I do like to use Photoshop, Aperture, Final Cut Express, Logic Express and iTunes.
So is your "super simple" distro going to run on my Linksys router? What about an old iPod. Neither of these devices has an Intel CPU or a CD drive.
What about my old 32-bit Sun SPARCs and that DEC alpha I actually still have
Linx is not just for current model desktop PCs
It's WORSE. They didn't even build a kit. They BOUGHT a working radio from Icom and then connected it to an antenna they assembled. Ok so technically they "built a radio station"
This is far worse than the kid who says he "built" a computer when all he did has install a working logic board into a metal case. These guys didn't even do that much.
The ISS caries a simple 2 meter FM radio. When over head the station is about 200 miles away, not very far.
Ham radio has a 100 year tradition of "home brewing". Hams (radio amateurs) have been building equipment at home in large numbers for about 100 years now. It's a very common world wide hobby. There are about 1/2 million people with amateur radio licenses living in the USA right now. A lot of these people build radio equipment and the radio used in ISS is NOT what you'd call "high tech" A couple hundred dollars worth of gear is all that is needed to make contact. Well that and the some free computer software that will tell you when the station is over your location and where to aim the antenna.
As for designing your own radio. That was a big deal in the 1930's back when we used tubes and slide rules. But now the parts are so easy to use. Some really nice integrated circuits are available that make designing almost like building a with Lego blacks.
Two counter examples
(1) cathedrals. People spend longer than a centery to build a large stone church. None of the founder had a hope of seeing the project complete yet they spend huge resources on the project.
(2) humans don't have to be the ones we send. We will send robot ships to explore.
Here is how it will happen. Soon, within 100 years we may find an exo-planet that has both water vapor and oxygen in the atmosphere. We are quite close to being able to detect these now. I'm sure one will be found some day. There will be a huge motivation to send a probe. Likely we will send many with later, faster ones over taking the first slower probes. Like the cathedrals we will build probe factories and launch them, a few every year for centuries. Some day one of the probes will return data. One day that data will show a world with life where people can live. Going there will be irresistable at least to a few people.
The true answer here is that nothing that can be observed can be in conflict with what is believed on faith.
Faith by definition is the belief in something that can not be falsified.
There can be no argument. Arguing is as pointless as using voting to prove a mathematical theorem.
Religion and science address non-overlapping areas. The conflict happens when people forget this
There are only two possibilities of how humans will like in 1,000 and in 10,000 years.
(1) They will be extinct
(2) They will have learned to live in a steady, non-growth state and in a sustainable manner where resources are never added to nor removed from the natural environment.
The Earth was in state #2 up until only a few thousand years ago and will be back in that state within a thousand years by either of the two numbered paragraphs above.
No, What Fermi said was that if you sit on that beach you SHOULD expect to be knee deep in bottles. He said that be any reasonable calculation thegalaxy should be overflowing even if they only used rocket powered tin cans to tavel in. The universe is very, very old and the galaxy, while large is not really large conpared to it's age.
The argument is that we (yes us) will likely in 10,000 years move outside of the solar system, using if nothing else rockets that take 2,000 years to get to the next star. But then in 10,000 year they launch another rocket to another star. Even at that rate humans will over fill the galaxy "soon".
The fact that we do not see the galaxy over filled with slow moving rockets means there can be on one else like us.
Notice the last two words above "like us". Fermi was not a dumb guy. He made a very specific statement.
If ET is building a beacon, something "bright" that will get noticed he could not want it to look to much like noise. He'd compromise a little.
But you ARE right. ET would have to make some assumption about the technical ability his targets. He might just pick a technical level that is about 100 years ahead of our current state. Doing so might not reduce his chances by much. but might reduce his cost by 100 times allowing him to build 100 times more beacons.
Even so a negative result teaches us something by setting a floor on some estimates.
(entangled photon radios?).
This really is the answer, no kidding. ETs have discovered physics that we have yet to discover. I doubt the technology will be entangled photons but it will be "something."
But there is a worse problem. Even if ET comunicates by sending slower then light space ships with hand written notes there has been enough time for the entire galaxy to have been covered in paper notes. You can go one hell of a long ways in a billion years with a rocket powered tin can. If the tin can contians a tin can building robot then exponential growth takes hold and we should be knee deep in note carrying robots. Why no slower than light self replicating robots???
The problem with local control of schools is that some locations will not demand much of their school and think low standards are OK. Other locations wil under fund their schools.
What's needed is balance. There should be national or state level goals and standards but the locals need to have room to addrees those goals in a way that works for them then their available staff.
Staffing is a major issue. Some schools like those where I live have a 100 teachers apply for every opening. "Everyone" wants to work ing the best place. In other areas there is a teacher shortage.
But you know what the bottom line is? Demographics. Schools that have "better" students do better. Kids tend to grow up to be just like their parents. If the district is filled with poor under educated parents then those are the kids you get. Yes there are exceptions but we measure using statistics. The thing that needs to be broken is the thing where kids aspire to be like their parents and peers. Some how you have to expose them to some other environment.
Siting a laptop is stronger than an old cray is a clever misdirection.
Clever misdirection? No it's also flat out wrong. A 1980's vintage mainframe computer has huge I/O bandwidth. An order of magnitude (at least) more then a noebook. For most server based applactions the old 80's computer is much better. We don't use them only because of cost.
The old computer I used to work on had 500 teminals connected and dozens of disk drives and maybe a half dozen printers. And those printers moved paper so fast you could not see the paper move. the only thing "wrong" was that the CPU sold for an even $12 million dollars.
Todays PC/Mac computers are very fast but all that power is designed into moving pixels around on a screen. Just TRY and process an entire month's worth of bank transactions on a notebook PC.
How come you feel that the government owes you a converter box in the first place?
The government acting on behalf of TV viewers SOLD the bit of airwaves that TV uses with the idea that some of the money would go to users.
So they mailed you your money and then someone took it from you.
Those are two unrelated things. If you sold your car and then some one took the money could you ask the buyer to pay again? No not really.
So the money WAS yours, you throught the governemtn sold off some property and then someone took your share of the money. Call the police not the FCC, the FCC already did their job
No, Others will just have to do it differently. They will have to think for them selves and just maybe come up with a better idea than Apple did.
Why use "touch" at all? why not just move your fingers in the air and let some kind of optical trackers watch?
So you are prevented from copying. No big deal.