High speed rail could work well but here in the US we have a very good interstate highway system. Yes gas is expensive. But guess what? even at the highest price point this summer it was still cheaper to drive on the highway then to take a train. And you know what? driving is faster. Faster AND cheaper. People will move ro trains when they are 20% or so LESS expensive than cars. The car has the great advantage of gong from door to door.
Within a city cars can move slowly but outside on the highway it is easy to go 65 or 70MPH If the car gets 30 miles to the galon it costs less then $10 an hour to operate. No train tickets are o cheap as $10 per hour on travel time.
One more thing. Carpools. I can but my entire family in the car travel but if I took a train I'd have to buy a ticket for each person. Trains work only if traveling solo. Carpool give a 2X to 4X advantage to cars.
What is really needed are zero emission cars that are fully automatic and self driving Once we have those we don't need trains
"wouldn't that be more useful in places with HUGE distances to trek"
Not really. Airplanes work best over long distances. The reason is the cost of the track.
Trains work best for medium distances. Airplanes don't work well for 200 mile runs because you have to wait so long to board the plane that you might as well drive a car but a train can make stops and then zip back up to high speed and only take five minutes at each stop.
My brother has aonther good trick. Anyone offring to sell any home product his says "yes" please come out to my place and we can talk. This works for realestate people and roffers and painters and so on. Then he gives them the address of the house across the street. This is good because if seriously wastes their time and costs them money.
This is NOT new. Anyone using Asterix has likey programmed their system to do just that. You can have it do whatever you like.
ONe trhing is that telemarketers and certainly scammers will block their caller ID. So you don't gt any number. These calls would go to an automated system that asked them questions and has them press numbers. The questions never (literally near) end... If you are a telemarketer press 3, if you are selling household goods press1, services ppress 3,,,,,, please enter you suoe size and then the pounf key,,, Please enter your social security number and the press pond,.... and then it starts over.
Most of then get the idea after the first question and hang up.
He is dead wrong. What else is there to say. During periods when I was between jobs I contributed more to Open Source projects then I do now. I had the time then. Now with a real job I don't do so much.
We is also dead wrong when it talks about free web services as "open source". It's not the same thing and the free service might not even be running with free software.
What he does not know,it seems is that many of these people who wite the free software do it because they like to. Some people like to go fishing. Do they do it because they want a fish? Same here these software developers just like to develop software. Yes I know it is hard to understand if you are just some hack writing banging out text to make ends meet and hating every minute of it.
"Yea, because we all backup 12TB of home data to an offsite location."
If you really had 132TB of data you cared about of ourse you'd back it up. When home users get ot the point of having 12TB of data and can afford the 12TB disk then they will be able to afford the 12Tb backup drives. After all a pair of backups only tripples the total cost.
Today I have 1TB of data at home. Each back up only costs $150. I can afford to own several of these backup drives. I rotate them so as to never over write my last good backup.
In ten years I might say the same thing but replace 1TB with 12TB. and I'm sure the backup devices will cost about the same or maybe less.
What size is your project? For small projects with one to three people who all work in the same place yu can use RCS. It is serverless and works inside the file system. For many years I simply NFS mounted the RCS directories onto the development machine. There is almost zero setup and very little learning curve.
CVS was a server centric RCS. If you don't need a server because you are the only developer on the project RCS is everything you need
I also use RCS for all those small 8.conf file in/etc. just do a "mkdir/etc/RCS" and you are setup and running. It's that easy.
I think some one figured out that a winch is ligher weight then a folding ramp. You have to remember that this next rover is the size of a car. Think about how you'd make a folding ramp that would allow a car to drive off a lander. The winch is very compact and light
A ramp carries a risk too. It would need a set of motoers and gears to make it unfold. If there is anything in spacecraft that will fail it is those kinds of moving parts and they depand on batteries that have beenin space for a year.
The winch could be a simple fiction device. Not a motor, just a spool of cable that is pulled open by the weight of the rover and some kind of friction device to reduce th speed that the cable can unroll.
As an example an ant can fall off a 20 story building and hit the ground so softly that it hardly notices the landing. It just walks away. If you or I fell off the building we'd make a crater. The reason is simple Mass increases with the cube of size. For example a 4 foot ball is 8 times as heavy then a 2 foot ball of the same material. When you double the dimensions of any part it's weight goes up by a factor of eight and it's strenght goes up by a smaller factor So for several reasons you can't simply "scale up" a small design. What happens in the case of the airbag system is that for small payloads the bags weigh less then the payload but for large payloads the bags are a larger fraction of the total weight.
"No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it."
While I agree that no one has yet seen any ETs. I do think they might still exist.
That is what bothers me too about all the abduction stories. An advanced race spend a thousand years to get here and then what? They act stupid and do useless stuff?
When they do come they will do it much like we have been exploring the solar system. With small robot spacecraft. We may never meet the ETs but one day maybe in 100,000 years we might meet their robots. Or more likely our robots will meet theirs
DC only works well if the wires are very short. You can't put DC up on the power poles because you can't use transformers with DC. Without transformers you's need distribution cables as thick as your arm. The coper in those cables would cost thousands of dollars per oushold. You NEED transformers to distribute power.
But within one house DC could work. I still think you'd want to run 120 volts but 120VDC could work for some loads but not all loads. Think about motors.
Next question: Is 120VDC safe? Is it as safe as AC?
OK so there are at least 300 ET civilizations. Or should I say "on order of 100 ET civilizations." So where are they?
We have only two things we know for sure about technological civilizations (1) They are possible because we know of one. and (2) They are very hard to find because we've not found another one.
The Drake equations ignores half the data we have about ETs. The parts about them not being here ("Here" meaning all the places we've looking using SETI) there should be a way to combine Fermi's idea with Drake's to come up with a better estimate.
To all those who say "Set up your own email server", I ask, "Have yu ever tried it". It is easy to set up just one server but it you want 100% uptime then yu are going to have to set up at least three MX records in your DNS and have each point to a different geographical location servered by a different ISP. Then at each location you need a pair of cross strapped router/switches that control fail out or do round robbin. Then you need a set of servers. Each of those would be dual power supplies, RAID and so on. OK so you CAN do this but at what cost? You are looking at about $100K to tand up something like this if you don't count your time.
Yes yu can set up a Linux box running sendmail but will you have 100% uptime. What if your Internet connection goes down? or the building catches fire? No onw can do 100% but "five nines" can be done (that 99.999%) but five nines is not cheap.
Much depends on the customer. Most are quite stupid. But then you say the price the over $10K. Then I might expect the customer will at least have asked around. They will quickly find out that even with the version at 6.3 there ARE NO OTHER CUSTOMERS. They will then think "something is wrong" suspect fraud and bail.
If I knew it was a 1.0 release then that would explain the lack of existing customers but a 6.0 with no existing user base? I'd be thinking "scam".
But on the other hand if the software were to be sold retail in a box as an "impulse buy" for $29.95 thaen you could expect you customers would fall for the scam and maybe never even find out. But with a $20K price they will at least try Google to find reviews and the like and when they come up missing... not good you've just lost the trust of a potential customer.
Let's see now. There are on order of a few billion IP addresses and on order of a few million of them unused. That works out to abut 0.1 percent un-used. In other words 99.9 percent are in use.
"millions" is not enough when you need billions. In fact it is thousands of times not enough
Why would anyone want to have a light bulb with a data connection?
Car manufactures want this. Have you ever seen the wire bundles in cars? If the lights had network address all you'd need one just ONE wire ad the switch on the dash would broadcast the "turn on" command. Every light bulb and every switch could have just one wire.
In your house it is the same. Light switches would simply issue commands and the light woould wait for a command to turn off/on. Housewiring would be hugely simplifed. and then automation would be easy. Room sensors could detect if people were there and kill the lights. All of this without mods to existing building.
Think of how much you could save if a 20 story building used network lights? Millions.
What in the Constitution would give the Government the power to regulate where and when I can use my cell phone?
That question has been settled long ago. We've had radio now for 100+ years. cell phones are just radios. The way it works is that the "air" is a public resource like a road and while we all have the right to use the road we can't let one person's use of it stop others from using it. for example I can't park my large R across all four lanes on the freeway so we need rules and enforcment of same. Lincoln Said it well "the right to swing my arm ends wee your nose begins."
So the argument is that we have to limit people's actios in order toensure others can exercise their rights. Remember slavery? their is an extream example we had to take away slave owners "property rights" in order to others any rights at all. Here we limit your use of a phone so that others can safely walk and drive on public roads.
Another example. You own a TV set right? What gives the government the right to prevent you from watching it while you drive to work? The same way they can ask you not to have a TV in the front seats they can ask you not to use a cell phone.
It would be FAR worse of an electronic device would have been found to have caused the problem. That would mean I could design a "death ray" transmitter. The powerfull microwave with a beam antenna. I aim it at airliners as they fly over. No need to get a bomb past TSA. What a disaster that would be.
Now it sounds like they can fix this with some procedural changes and training and later with a software fix.
Do ypu think maybe that Google is using DC power? That way they have just a few large power supplies and another room and send DC power over large copper bus bars to the racks. These DC systems are expensive but you make the money back in power/cooling and you save money with the UPS too.
NO. It seems Apple's now 24" monitor has a matching mini size connector. No adapor needed if you buy the two together.
Someone asked Jobs "why not HDMI". Answer was that the HDMI ca't drive the 30" display. Turns out HDMI was only designed with TV in mind and big computer monitors have much higher resolution than TVs
Yes, glossy is not good at all if you are a pro photographer or a graphic artist working with print media. But Apple sees the numbers: There are more people who use the computer as an entertainment console than there are graphic professionals. They want to sell to the larger numbers
Remember Plato, that Greek guy? He said that it does not mater how many people vote that an ass is a horse the ass will still be an ass. (Then he went on to say that if you vote XXX to be a general he will not be a military leader he'll still be an ass.) Plato was an annoying guy, so they got rid of him but he was right. What he was saying is that if you let stupid people vote you get stupid results. True 2,500 years ago, true today. (But then as Winston Churchill said democracy is a poor system but the others are worse.)
OK back on topic. Fooling even 30% of the judges just means that 30% of the judges are uneducated or stupid. I can think of a few things to say that in a minute would determine if the machine were intelligent. Just ask a question that requires some thought to answer like
"Do you think everyone could learn to fly an airplane or are there some people who could never learn and would kill themselves trying. What's the difference between those two groups?"
"Hold up three fingers on one hand on five on the other. How many fingers are you holding up total? What would your reaction be if I asked someone with no hands to do this?"
I figure Google does not want it to take over the world. All they need right now are enough users to generate bug reports. They can let the software mature using a small user base. After they have the bugs works out, some plug ins available and so on then they can do a marketing push.
What's new here is not just another revision of an exxisting product. Apple has turned the physical structure of the notebook inside out. Older notebooks have an internal metal frame of some kind. Parts were screwed to the frame and then the case acted as a cover. What Apple has done is mde the cae out of very rigid aluminum. The parts are now screwed to the inside of the case and there is no internal frame. The case itself is the frame.
Cars and airplanes went through this kind of transition too. In the early days of cars and planes each had an internal frame but now the skin itself is the frame.
What we should expect is a stronger and lighter computer. Maybe better cooling too and easier to re-cycle later after it is no longer useful as a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
High speed rail could work well but here in the US we have a very good interstate highway system. Yes gas is expensive. But guess what? even at the highest price point this summer it was still cheaper to drive on the highway then to take a train. And you know what? driving is faster. Faster AND cheaper. People will move ro trains when they are 20% or so LESS expensive than cars. The car has the great advantage of gong from door to door.
Within a city cars can move slowly but outside on the highway it is easy to go 65 or 70MPH If the car gets 30 miles to the galon it costs less then $10 an hour to operate. No train tickets are o cheap as $10 per hour on travel time.
One more thing. Carpools. I can but my entire family in the car travel but if I took a train I'd have to buy a ticket for each person. Trains work only if traveling solo. Carpool give a 2X to 4X advantage to cars.
What is really needed are zero emission cars that are fully automatic and self driving Once we have those we don't need trains
"wouldn't that be more useful in places with HUGE distances to trek"
Not really. Airplanes work best over long distances. The reason is the cost of the track.
Trains work best for medium distances. Airplanes don't work well for 200 mile runs because you have to wait so long to board the plane that you might as well drive a car but a train can make stops and then zip back up to high speed and only take five minutes at each stop.
My brother has aonther good trick. Anyone offring to sell any home product his says "yes" please come out to my place and we can talk. This works for realestate people and roffers and painters and so on. Then he gives them the address of the house across the street. This is good because if seriously wastes their time and costs them money.
This is NOT new. Anyone using Asterix has likey programmed their system to do just that. You can have it do whatever you like.
ONe trhing is that telemarketers and certainly scammers will block their caller ID. So you don't gt any number. These calls would go to an automated system that asked them questions and has them press numbers. The questions never (literally near) end... If you are a telemarketer press 3, if you are selling household goods press1, services ppress 3,,,,,, please enter you suoe size and then the pounf key,,, Please enter your social security number and the press pond,.... and then it starts over.
Most of then get the idea after the first question and hang up.
A free home oriented system is here
http://www.trixbox.org/
The full up free asterix system is here
http://www.asterisk.org/
He is dead wrong. What else is there to say. During periods when I was between jobs I contributed more to Open Source projects then I do now. I had the time then. Now with a real job I don't do so much.
We is also dead wrong when it talks about free web services as "open source". It's not the same thing and the free service might not even be running with free software.
What he does not know,it seems is that many of these people who wite the free software do it because they like to. Some people like to go fishing. Do they do it because they want a fish? Same here these software developers just like to develop software. Yes I know it is hard to understand if you are just some hack writing banging out text to make ends meet and hating every minute of it.
"Yea, because we all backup 12TB of home data to an offsite location."
If you really had 132TB of data you cared about of ourse you'd back it up. When home users get ot the point of having 12TB of data and can afford the 12TB disk then they will be able to afford the 12Tb backup drives. After all a pair of backups only tripples the total cost.
Today I have 1TB of data at home. Each back up only costs $150. I can afford to own several of these backup drives. I rotate them so as to never over write my last good backup.
In ten years I might say the same thing but replace 1TB with 12TB. and I'm sure the backup devices will cost about the same or maybe less.
What size is your project? For small projects with one to three people who all work in the same place yu can use RCS. It is serverless and works inside the file system. For many years I simply NFS mounted the RCS directories onto the development machine. There is almost zero setup and very little learning curve.
CVS was a server centric RCS. If you don't need a server because you are the only developer on the project RCS is everything you need
I also use RCS for all those small 8.conf file in /etc. just do a "mkdir /etc/RCS" and you are setup and running. It's that easy.
I think some one figured out that a winch is ligher weight then a folding ramp. You have to remember that this next rover is the size of a car. Think about how you'd make a folding ramp that would allow a car to drive off a lander. The winch is very compact and light
A ramp carries a risk too. It would need a set of motoers and gears to make it unfold. If there is anything in spacecraft that will fail it is those kinds of moving parts and they depand on batteries that have beenin space for a year.
The winch could be a simple fiction device. Not a motor, just a spool of cable that is pulled open by the weight of the rover and some kind of friction device to reduce th speed that the cable can unroll.
As an example an ant can fall off a 20 story building and hit the ground so softly that it hardly notices the landing. It just walks away. If you or I fell off the building we'd make a crater. The reason is simple Mass increases with the cube of size. For example a 4 foot ball is 8 times as heavy then a 2 foot ball of the same material. When you double the dimensions of any part it's weight goes up by a factor of eight and it's strenght goes up by a smaller factor So for several reasons you can't simply "scale up" a small design. What happens in the case of the airbag system is that for small payloads the bags weigh less then the payload but for large payloads the bags are a larger fraction of the total weight.
In space weight drives cost very strongly
"No alien civilization is expending the mammoth amount of resources needed to traverse the vast distances of interstellar space just to stick a probe up your ass. Deal with it."
While I agree that no one has yet seen any ETs. I do think they might still exist.
That is what bothers me too about all the abduction stories. An advanced race spend a thousand years to get here and then what? They act stupid and do useless stuff?
When they do come they will do it much like we have been exploring the solar system. With small robot spacecraft. We may never meet the ETs but one day maybe in 100,000 years we might meet their robots. Or more likely our robots will meet theirs
Computer the size of a cell phone?? Sounds like an iPhone. Or an iPod Touch.
I remeber hearing Steve Job introduce the iPhone. He said to think of this not as a phone but as a computer that runs a phone application.
DC only works well if the wires are very short. You can't put DC up on the power poles because you can't use transformers with DC. Without transformers you's need distribution cables as thick as your arm. The coper in those cables would cost thousands of dollars per oushold. You NEED transformers to distribute power.
But within one house DC could work. I still think you'd want to run 120 volts but 120VDC could work for some loads but not all loads. Think about motors.
Next question: Is 120VDC safe? Is it as safe as AC?
OK so there are at least 300 ET civilizations. Or should I say "on order of 100 ET civilizations." So where are they?
We have only two things we know for sure about technological civilizations (1) They are possible because we know of one. and (2) They are very hard to find because we've not found another one.
The Drake equations ignores half the data we have about ETs. The parts about them not being here ("Here" meaning all the places we've looking using SETI) there should be a way to combine Fermi's idea with Drake's to come up with a better estimate.
To all those who say "Set up your own email server", I ask, "Have yu ever tried it". It is easy to set up just one server but it you want 100% uptime then yu are going to have to set up at least three MX records in your DNS and have each point to a different geographical location servered by a different ISP. Then at each location you need a pair of cross strapped router/switches that control fail out or do round robbin. Then you need a set of servers. Each of those would be dual power supplies, RAID and so on. OK so you CAN do this but at what cost? You are looking at about $100K to tand up something like this if you don't count your time.
Yes yu can set up a Linux box running sendmail but will you have 100% uptime. What if your Internet connection goes down? or the building catches fire? No onw can do 100% but "five nines" can be done (that 99.999%) but five nines is not cheap.
Much depends on the customer. Most are quite stupid. But then you say the price the over $10K. Then I might expect the customer will at least have asked around. They will quickly find out that even with the version at 6.3 there ARE NO OTHER CUSTOMERS. They will then think "something is wrong" suspect fraud and bail.
If I knew it was a 1.0 release then that would explain the lack of existing customers but a 6.0 with no existing user base? I'd be thinking "scam".
But on the other hand if the software were to be sold retail in a box as an "impulse buy" for $29.95 thaen you could expect you customers would fall for the scam and maybe never even find out. But with a $20K price they will at least try Google to find reviews and the like and when they come up missing... not good you've just lost the trust of a potential customer.
Let's see now. There are on order of a few billion IP addresses and on order of a few million of them unused. That works out to abut 0.1 percent un-used. In other words 99.9 percent are in use.
"millions" is not enough when you need billions. In fact it is thousands of times not enough
Why would anyone want to have a light bulb with a data connection?
Car manufactures want this. Have you ever seen the wire bundles in cars? If the lights had network address all you'd need one just ONE wire ad the switch on the dash would broadcast the "turn on" command. Every light bulb and every switch could have just one wire.
In your house it is the same. Light switches would simply issue commands and the light woould wait for a command to turn off/on. Housewiring would be hugely simplifed. and then automation would be easy. Room sensors could detect if people were there and kill the lights. All of this without mods to existing building.
Think of how much you could save if a 20 story building used network lights? Millions.
What in the Constitution would give the Government the power to regulate where and when I can use my cell phone?
That question has been settled long ago. We've had radio now for 100+ years. cell phones are just radios. The way it works is that the "air" is a public resource like a road and while we all have the right to use the road we can't let one person's use of it stop others from using it. for example I can't park my large R across all four lanes on the freeway so we need rules and enforcment of same. Lincoln Said it well "the right to swing my arm ends wee your nose begins."
So the argument is that we have to limit people's actios in order toensure others can exercise their rights. Remember slavery? their is an extream example we had to take away slave owners "property rights" in order to others any rights at all. Here we limit your use of a phone so that others can safely walk and drive on public roads.
Another example. You own a TV set right? What gives the government the right to prevent you from watching it while you drive to work? The same way they can ask you not to have a TV in the front seats they can ask you not to use a cell phone.
It would be FAR worse of an electronic device would have been found to have caused the problem. That would mean I could design a "death ray" transmitter. The powerfull microwave with a beam antenna. I aim it at airliners as they fly over. No need to get a bomb past TSA. What a disaster that would be.
Now it sounds like they can fix this with some procedural changes and training and later with a software fix.
Do ypu think maybe that Google is using DC power? That way they have just a few large power supplies and another room and send DC power over large copper bus bars to the racks. These DC systems are expensive but you make the money back in power/cooling and you save money with the UPS too.
..if you buy the $30 adapter for it..
NO. It seems Apple's now 24" monitor has a matching mini size connector. No adapor needed if you buy the two together.
Someone asked Jobs "why not HDMI". Answer was that the HDMI ca't drive the 30" display. Turns out HDMI was only designed with TV in mind and big computer monitors have much higher resolution than TVs
Yes, glossy is not good at all if you are a pro photographer or a graphic artist working with print media. But Apple sees the numbers: There are more people who use the computer as an entertainment console than there are graphic professionals. They want to sell to the larger numbers
25% of the population has 25th percentile or lower IQ. I am not to surprised that you can fool them.
Remember Plato, that Greek guy? He said that it does not mater how many people vote that an ass is a horse the ass will still be an ass. (Then he went on to say that if you vote XXX to be a general he will not be a military leader he'll still be an ass.) Plato was an annoying guy, so they got rid of him but he was right. What he was saying is that if you let stupid people vote you get stupid results. True 2,500 years ago, true today. (But then as Winston Churchill said democracy is a poor system but the others are worse.)
OK back on topic. Fooling even 30% of the judges just means that 30% of the judges are uneducated or stupid. I can think of a few things to say that in a minute would determine if the machine were intelligent. Just ask a question that requires some thought to answer like
"Do you think everyone could learn to fly an airplane or are there some people who could never learn and would kill themselves trying. What's the difference between those two groups?"
"Hold up three fingers on one hand on five on the other. How many fingers are you holding up total? What would your reaction be if I asked someone with no hands to do this?"
I figure Google does not want it to take over the world. All they need right now are enough users to generate bug reports. They can let the software mature using a small user base. After they have the bugs works out, some plug ins available and so on then they can do a marketing push.
What's new here is not just another revision of an exxisting product. Apple has turned the physical structure of the notebook inside out. Older notebooks have an internal metal frame of some kind. Parts were screwed to the frame and then the case acted as a cover. What Apple has done is mde the cae out of very rigid aluminum. The parts are now screwed to the inside of the case and there is no internal frame. The case itself is the frame.
Cars and airplanes went through this kind of transition too. In the early days of cars and planes each had an internal frame but now the skin itself is the frame.
What we should expect is a stronger and lighter computer. Maybe better cooling too and easier to re-cycle later after it is no longer useful as a computer.