Churchill, Beatovian, and Hawkin(g?) are not ADHD, cerebral palsy, and mental illness. They are individuals in whom the largely random factors causing greatness overlapped with the largely random factors causing various disorders. I argue above that had they never been born, they would have been replaced by other individuals -- in whom the chances of greatness would have been the same. If we assume that excelling as a human is independent of the presence or absence of disabilities and diseases (as evidenced by the many great, non-disabled people out there), then the number of great people we prevented from existing due to disability would be equal to the number of great people who were conceived as a result.
An excellent response. I would just add that if eugenics == Nazism, then our society badly needs to throw off the fascistic fetters of our incest prohibitions. In the distant past, our ancestors noted that close relatives who mated tended to have messed-up children. But now our 21st-century enlightenment enlightenment reveals that this was because of bad combinations of genes -- you know, those things it's immoral to tamper with to make a better life for your children.
In fact, every time we are attracted to an intelligent or beautiful individual, we're hearing a genetic call to SELECT good genes to pass on, improving the survival potential of our own. But large chunks of that attraction are also due to the environmental aspect of child-rearing, as well as our own developed intelligence and preferences, so it would be desirable even if inheritance were a total crapshoot.
Consider also that not passing on genes -- even in the form of killing an already-fertilized egg -- isn't just stopping a potential individual from existing. If it were, the argument that "life with an incurable disease is better than no life at all" (what bioethicists call the "gift of life" argument) might be convincing. But these parents will probably have another child, one which might not have the genetic ailment. In this case, you might as well say that having the first child would have been depriving the second of life!
I was briefly annoyed when I saw this article, but fortunately the scientists were smarter than the blurb made them sound. Of course throwing some random bacteria into space won't prove anything about the long-term space-endurance of their entire form of life. Bacteria, thanks to their rudimentary life-support needs and short generations, can undergo some truly striking mutations. The extremophiles are a group of bacteria that have evolved to live in ridiculously inhospitable extremes of heat, cold, and toxicity. Some species grow optimally at >100C and pH1.0 -- a hundred times more acidic than stomach acid and hot enough to boil water! In fact, the project appears to be using something similar, a bacterium which was discovered in an extremely hot geothermal spring.
Even then, Earth bacteria aren't necessarily going to have the right stuff. Bacteria that evolved on a planed without a magnetic field to block harmful high-energy particles and an ozone layer to absorb UV might have tolerances to radiation that would be stupidly excessive for anything in our relatively lax biosphere. Like bacteria from our own poles, life from a very cold planet might have a metabolism slow enough that traveling through space for 10,000 years wouldn't be a big problem (and if not, we always have spores). If you had some bacteria initially living on the interior of a chunk of ground that became a meteor, it's even conceivable that they could gradually evolve specifically to survive on the surface of a spacefaring rock.
If this fails, biologists might turn to trying to engineer bacteria that can survive in space. Creating selection pressure for radiation, vacuum, etc. isn't so hard...
DDoS is a problem because 1) it goes over systems that have to respond quickly and 2) it actually overloads the capacity of the network. If we assume that the goal of the DDoL group isn't to actually take down King's computer, we can ignore 2). In this case, 1) also isn't a problem. A 1-second delay in every packet going over a network would be a complete disaster, but taking an extra 10 seconds to get a copy of a novel won't be a problem for anyone who's already willing to pay the dollar.
Given that, there are all sorts of solutions that are open. The system could require that you enter an e-mailed password, or it could display one graphically and ask you to retype it (I stole this from a recent posting about stopping slashdot trollbots). It could just block a domain for a brief time after each download; even in a DDoS each box sends a relatively large number of requests, and this would slow them all down (this would inconvenience some humans, but perhaps it could put them on queue and display the first few pages to whet their appetites).
Or, to be realistic, the administrator could look at the logs, note that one domain increased its downloads a thousandfold for a couple of hours at 0200, and throw those out of the average. It's not like King is looking for an excuse not to write the book...
Of course, the real nightmare comes when most of the readers are honest, but some Moral Majority-type group sets up a bot to download the novel over and over and over and over...
And of course it eventually develops a malevolent, superhuman intelligence and kills them all one by one, but we still don't have the novel. An unlikely group of slashdot misfits convince the bot to look at the RIAA website, and it decides it would be deliciously evil to deprive King of his unwritten intellectual property by finishing the novel in his style...
But it still goes around killing and eating people and stuff. The evil is finally quieted - but never destroyed - when it's convinced to settle down and become a node on Freenet.
if you start applying further checks to every packet then the network will surely start to slow and in such a competitive world isps dont want that.
What if you were to check randomly, 5 or 10 percent of the time? I don't think there's an equivalent to ninja pressure point of death skills that will allow someone to 0wn your system with two or three packets, so this should still be enough to alert you but not enough to kill performance.
There's an amusing business model... Internet research companies offer great prizes and incentives in exchange for personal information, which people accept because of their model privacy agreement. Then they "discover" that they don't have enough capital to continue, go bankrupt, and sell their database for pennies to Microsoft/Disney/NikeCorp... which just happens to be the company that spun them off a few months ago.
This brings to mind another scenario I've wondered about for a while... what happens if a company sells its domain name, and you have an e-mail address with them? Suddenly your e-mail is being routed to an owner who has no obligation to give you access, let alone to keep "your" mail private. It doesn't seem like there would be any legal barriers to their destroying or reading your mail. The mapping between a person and an e-mail address seems much fuzzier than the one for your physical address. E-mail may not even have the intended recipient's name on it, so it seems it would be hard to claim that there's any fundamental proof that mail sent to stringofcharacters@anotherstring.tld wasn't meant for whomever owns anotherstring@tld.
Can this happen? Has this happened? Is there anything that can be done, short of running your own domain and hoping that a company with a similar name doesn't rise to prominence?
Neither LSD nor marijuana is addictive (or, if marijuana is "psychologically addictive" because people get used to its pleasant effects, then caffeine is too). Neither one is dangerous or harmful to health. So while your point is taken, I don't think it indicates any hypocracy on the author's part.
Also note that Caffeine isn't as physically habituating as some drugs, but overall it may be harder to quit -- people who are trying to get off speed get some social support and substantial approval for it, whereas society practically encourages caffeine overuse.
- Michael Cohn
Re:I don't think it's that weird.
on
Caffeine Vault
·
· Score: 1
And here I was thinking I'd have to write a long, involved reply. My thanks, HF.
- Michael Cohn
Re:Caffeine has it'sown MSDS too
on
Caffeine Vault
·
· Score: 3
I don't think I've EVERY heard of someone reaching Lethal dosage...
Oh, it's not just theoretical rat-torture. Although the guy in question did have to take ~90 pills = 18g = ~180 cups of strong coffee = 600 Penguin Mints...
Of course, I must warn against someone eating half a pound of chocolate covered espresso beans, unless they want to stay up for two days.
Yeah, the half-life can be a problem. You're much better off with ephedrine (clean, no jitters), Nicorette(TM) (shorter-acting), or cocaine (the side effect where you turn into God is pretty nice).
Okay, this is definitely bad. Fraud and theft. Debases society, robs us of the civility that lets us act like humans, spreads paranoia and hatred.
On the other hand, it's pretty smooth. And maybe this will help break down the widespread confusion between address and content that everyone complains about whenever the TLD fiasco comes up. Maybe it will call attention to the need for encrypted site certificates. Maybe it will get people -- and software -- to pay more attention to fake links, like this one to goatse.cx.
Thanks for the interesting reply. Of course it was foolish of me to say that we never thought of glia as inert...
current thinking is astrocytes are good for you when you're developing your brain (providing pathways to guide neurons to 'final' destinations) but 'bad', if you're an adult who has a penetrating nerve-killing injury.
Funny how often we have to fight against the fruits of evolution when trying to do unreasonable things like transplant organs, travel in microgravity, and live 140 years...
The experiment involved artificially increasing levels of calcium in astrocytes (a type of glial cell) while monitoring adjacent neurons for signs of response to released neurotransmitters. Since the levels of calcium required were comparable to those found in the natural environment, the researchers concluded that glial cells may control neurotransmitter balance in the brain as well. I'd like to know if there's evidence that glial cells also have functional calcium uptake pumps, and if their level of calcium fluctuates with blood level or remains constant. Unfortunately, reading the full article requires a paid subscription...
While this is interesting news, it's certainly not true that we ever thought of glia as (in the words of the press release) "little more than glue." Glial cells produce the myelin sheathing that allows motor signals to travel rapidly from the brain to the extremities, and their signals are important to laying down the organization of different areas in the early months of brain development. They're also an important adversary when it comes to repairing nerve damage in the periphery. Severed nerves actually try to grow back along their established pathways, but the glial cells poison them (presumably to prevent inappropriate overgrowth). Learning to inhibit this process may be the key to restoring limbs that are paralyzed.
A lot of people think that " Deja can do whatever it wants on its excellent service," but that's the result of a skewed outlook. The fact is that Deja is a very important and powerful business that controls the window through which its users look on the world, a power which they can easily abuse to trick users into making horrible mistakes. While adding a word or two to a post might seem to be a reasonable way to draw users towards companies that want to serve them, it also controls how those users comprehend the very fabric of the world wide web. I'm certainly glad that no such awful lies and manipulations are being visited on me by my MSN!
In the anticipation and aftermath for Episode I, I noted a good deal of discussion on whether the week-long lines and general fanboy anticipation would be greater or lesser the second time around. Now that it's closer, I'd like to get a better idea... how many people here are planning to do the vigil this time?
This guy seems to know what he's talking about. His syllabus includes specific, high-level applications of the technology, and shows an understanding of the ways this could be more than just another way to frag in (your | your employer's) spare time. However, he also makes the perplexing comment
Instead of the current vision of ``smart floors'', ``smart lightswitches'', and ``smart toilets'' that watch us and respond to our actions, what we will witness is the emergence of ``smart people''
All you folks in tech support can vouch that computers currently seem to be pushing in the opposite direction...
The first mention of the word "geek" on this page is in "geeks in space," featuring the highly rated CmdrTaco. The second is yours. In the past, Katz's overextension of the disaffected-geek paradigm has earned my reproof, but I saw none of it here.
Your comments were entirely unrelated to the event that supposedly prompted them. Ironically, you're guilty of the very sin of which you accuse Katz.
You do realize that him getting Karma doesn't deprive you of any, right?
Unless that was intended as an insult, it's actually not correct. At any time, there's a finite number of moderator points assigned, and giving them to one post means they won't go to another.
This is an aspect of +2 posting that might easily be overlooked... it not only makes the poster vulnerable to losing karma, it saves points to be bestowed on people who haven't earned the automatic upmod yet. This means that a greater number of worthwhile posts will end up with high scores (we assume that someone with the automatic point is going to post worthwhile things, so we don't have to waste moderation on them).
Los Angeles (AP) -- The next release of the Linux computer operating system will include a paying passenger - a businessman from Los Angeles, U.S.
"I've always loved computers," said entrepreneur Malcom Lyle Jacobson-McGraw, "now I get to be in one!" Last month he made a donation of $20,000,000 to the Free Software Foundation in exchange for a place in one of its more common programs.
"Starting with version 2.3 of the kernel, the ls command will be renamed malcomlylejacobsonmcgraw," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds at a press conference Thursday.
Like churches that name pews and windows after patrons, the free software community seems to have avidly adopted this new fundraising model. "rm and chmod are still open," hinted Torvalds.
Reading that aticle made me feel like a ninja -- now I know the hidden domain! My friend here points out that ten years ago, there was ARPAnet, and on the web it became.arpa. Then ARPAnet disappears for a while. All the sudden, there's.arpa ("address and routing parameters area") again! When we teach History of the Internet in the high schools of 2020, this is going to confuse the hell out of the students.
"History of the internet?" I ask. "How's it going to end?"
"Probably when you can't tell whether something is on the internet anymore. This hammer... is it on the internet? Hmmm."
This is just a beginning, of course. Next we should work on:
variable contrast, so that colors and shapes are discernable in low light and bright light can be seen without glare. This is effectively what pupillary dilation and contraction do... glasses could superimpose extra iris that would cover up even more pupil than normal, but boosting incoming photons would be considerably more cumbersome.
IR/UV vision: This could be achieved with little footprint by coating the glasses with a material that absorbed the desired band and emitted visible light, Of course, you'd have to focus on the glasses, which might be strenuous...
telescopic vision: Just make the lenses flexable...
Flicker correction: I've heard some people are bothered by certain monitors, fluorescent lights, or a combination, because the refresh rate causes a subliminally perceptable flicker. Perhaps phosphorescent materials in the glasses could create a "persistence of vision" that would blur out the flashing. There would be a cost in resolution, perhaps, but it would ease a lot of headaches.
Just because internet businesses stand to lose the most doesn't mean that they're the place to work on reducing power consumption. Perhaps they should be working to secure the power grid by investing in areas that are more easily fixed.
For example, what if e-commerce corps started investing in new power plants? Fortunately, the curent energy limits aren't fundamental problems like the speed of light or the minimal thinness of a silicon wafer; they can be solved in a fairly linear fashion simply by doing more of the same. With the assurance of backing from big computer firms, it would be easier for municipalities to issue bonds, thus improving the speed with which new facilities could be built.
Of course, I'd rather see a decrease in power consumption, and computer businesses can help too. Aside from hardware manufacturers making their own products lower-power (Crusoe, anyone?), the computer industry could fund public-service campaigns to decrease energy waste. They could even fund R&D in other high-energy-consumption industries. air conditioning uses up 13% of residential power. I'm not sure how that figure compares to the 12% of all national power that goes to computers, as cited in the CNET article, but it's clearly a big chunk. If making more efficient air conditioners could free up more power-space for computers, perhaps that's something the computer people should be pushing forwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Churchill, Beatovian, and Hawkin(g?) are not ADHD, cerebral palsy, and mental illness. They are individuals in whom the largely random factors causing greatness overlapped with the largely random factors causing various disorders. I argue above that had they never been born, they would have been replaced by other individuals -- in whom the chances of greatness would have been the same. If we assume that excelling as a human is independent of the presence or absence of disabilities and diseases (as evidenced by the many great, non-disabled people out there), then the number of great people we prevented from existing due to disability would be equal to the number of great people who were conceived as a result.
- Michael Cohn
An excellent response. I would just add that if eugenics == Nazism, then our society badly needs to throw off the fascistic fetters of our incest prohibitions. In the distant past, our ancestors noted that close relatives who mated tended to have messed-up children. But now our 21st-century enlightenment enlightenment reveals that this was because of bad combinations of genes -- you know, those things it's immoral to tamper with to make a better life for your children.
In fact, every time we are attracted to an intelligent or beautiful individual, we're hearing a genetic call to SELECT good genes to pass on, improving the survival potential of our own. But large chunks of that attraction are also due to the environmental aspect of child-rearing, as well as our own developed intelligence and preferences, so it would be desirable even if inheritance were a total crapshoot.
Consider also that not passing on genes -- even in the form of killing an already-fertilized egg -- isn't just stopping a potential individual from existing. If it were, the argument that "life with an incurable disease is better than no life at all" (what bioethicists call the "gift of life" argument) might be convincing. But these parents will probably have another child, one which might not have the genetic ailment. In this case, you might as well say that having the first child would have been depriving the second of life!
- Michael Cohn
I was briefly annoyed when I saw this article, but fortunately the scientists were smarter than the blurb made them sound. Of course throwing some random bacteria into space won't prove anything about the long-term space-endurance of their entire form of life. Bacteria, thanks to their rudimentary life-support needs and short generations, can undergo some truly striking mutations. The extremophiles are a group of bacteria that have evolved to live in ridiculously inhospitable extremes of heat, cold, and toxicity. Some species grow optimally at >100C and pH1.0 -- a hundred times more acidic than stomach acid and hot enough to boil water! In fact, the project appears to be using something similar, a bacterium which was discovered in an extremely hot geothermal spring.
Even then, Earth bacteria aren't necessarily going to have the right stuff. Bacteria that evolved on a planed without a magnetic field to block harmful high-energy particles and an ozone layer to absorb UV might have tolerances to radiation that would be stupidly excessive for anything in our relatively lax biosphere. Like bacteria from our own poles, life from a very cold planet might have a metabolism slow enough that traveling through space for 10,000 years wouldn't be a big problem (and if not, we always have spores). If you had some bacteria initially living on the interior of a chunk of ground that became a meteor, it's even conceivable that they could gradually evolve specifically to survive on the surface of a spacefaring rock.
If this fails, biologists might turn to trying to engineer bacteria that can survive in space. Creating selection pressure for radiation, vacuum, etc. isn't so hard...
- Michael Cohn
DDoS is a problem because 1) it goes over systems that have to respond quickly and 2) it actually overloads the capacity of the network. If we assume that the goal of the DDoL group isn't to actually take down King's computer, we can ignore 2). In this case, 1) also isn't a problem. A 1-second delay in every packet going over a network would be a complete disaster, but taking an extra 10 seconds to get a copy of a novel won't be a problem for anyone who's already willing to pay the dollar.
Given that, there are all sorts of solutions that are open. The system could require that you enter an e-mailed password, or it could display one graphically and ask you to retype it (I stole this from a recent posting about stopping slashdot trollbots). It could just block a domain for a brief time after each download; even in a DDoS each box sends a relatively large number of requests, and this would slow them all down (this would inconvenience some humans, but perhaps it could put them on queue and display the first few pages to whet their appetites).
Or, to be realistic, the administrator could look at the logs, note that one domain increased its downloads a thousandfold for a couple of hours at 0200, and throw those out of the average. It's not like King is looking for an excuse not to write the book...
- Michael Cohn
Of course, the real nightmare comes when most of the readers are honest, but some Moral Majority-type group sets up a bot to download the novel over and over and over and over...
And of course it eventually develops a malevolent, superhuman intelligence and kills them all one by one, but we still don't have the novel. An unlikely group of slashdot misfits convince the bot to look at the RIAA website, and it decides it would be deliciously evil to deprive King of his unwritten intellectual property by finishing the novel in his style...
But it still goes around killing and eating people and stuff. The evil is finally quieted - but never destroyed - when it's convinced to settle down and become a node on Freenet.
- Michael Cohn
if you start applying further checks to every packet then the network will surely start to slow and in such a competitive world isps dont want that.
What if you were to check randomly, 5 or 10 percent of the time? I don't think there's an equivalent to ninja pressure point of death skills that will allow someone to 0wn your system with two or three packets, so this should still be enough to alert you but not enough to kill performance.
- Michael Cohn
Actually, marijuana can be very harmful to ones health. Long-term usage can cause considerable brain damage.
Substantiate please.
- Michael Cohn
There's an amusing business model... Internet research companies offer great prizes and incentives in exchange for personal information, which people accept because of their model privacy agreement. Then they "discover" that they don't have enough capital to continue, go bankrupt, and sell their database for pennies to Microsoft/Disney/NikeCorp... which just happens to be the company that spun them off a few months ago.
- Michael Cohn
This brings to mind another scenario I've wondered about for a while... what happens if a company sells its domain name, and you have an e-mail address with them? Suddenly your e-mail is being routed to an owner who has no obligation to give you access, let alone to keep "your" mail private. It doesn't seem like there would be any legal barriers to their destroying or reading your mail. The mapping between a person and an e-mail address seems much fuzzier than the one for your physical address. E-mail may not even have the intended recipient's name on it, so it seems it would be hard to claim that there's any fundamental proof that mail sent to stringofcharacters@anotherstring.tld wasn't meant for whomever owns anotherstring@tld.
Can this happen? Has this happened? Is there anything that can be done, short of running your own domain and hoping that a company with a similar name doesn't rise to prominence?
- Michael Cohn
Neither LSD nor marijuana is addictive (or, if marijuana is "psychologically addictive" because people get used to its pleasant effects, then caffeine is too). Neither one is dangerous or harmful to health. So while your point is taken, I don't think it indicates any hypocracy on the author's part.
Also note that Caffeine isn't as physically habituating as some drugs, but overall it may be harder to quit -- people who are trying to get off speed get some social support and substantial approval for it, whereas society practically encourages caffeine overuse.
- Michael Cohn
And here I was thinking I'd have to write a long, involved reply. My thanks, HF.
- Michael Cohn
I don't think I've EVERY heard of someone reaching Lethal dosage...
Oh, it's not just theoretical rat-torture. Although the guy in question did have to take ~90 pills = 18g = ~180 cups of strong coffee = 600 Penguin Mints...
Of course, I must warn against someone eating half a pound of chocolate covered espresso beans, unless they want to stay up for two days.
Yeah, the half-life can be a problem. You're much better off with ephedrine (clean, no jitters), Nicorette(TM) (shorter-acting), or cocaine (the side effect where you turn into God is pretty nice).
- Michael Cohn
Okay, this is definitely bad. Fraud and theft. Debases society, robs us of the civility that lets us act like humans, spreads paranoia and hatred.
On the other hand, it's pretty smooth. And maybe this will help break down the widespread confusion between address and content that everyone complains about whenever the TLD fiasco comes up. Maybe it will call attention to the need for encrypted site certificates. Maybe it will get people -- and software -- to pay more attention to fake links, like this one to goatse.cx.
- Michael Cohn
Thanks for the interesting reply. Of course it was foolish of me to say that we never thought of glia as inert...
current thinking is astrocytes are good for you when you're developing your brain (providing pathways to guide neurons to 'final' destinations) but 'bad', if you're an adult who has a penetrating nerve-killing injury.
Funny how often we have to fight against the fruits of evolution when trying to do unreasonable things like transplant organs, travel in microgravity, and live 140 years...
- Michael Cohn
The experiment involved artificially increasing levels of calcium in astrocytes (a type of glial cell) while monitoring adjacent neurons for signs of response to released neurotransmitters. Since the levels of calcium required were comparable to those found in the natural environment, the researchers concluded that glial cells may control neurotransmitter balance in the brain as well. I'd like to know if there's evidence that glial cells also have functional calcium uptake pumps, and if their level of calcium fluctuates with blood level or remains constant. Unfortunately, reading the full article requires a paid subscription...
While this is interesting news, it's certainly not true that we ever thought of glia as (in the words of the press release) "little more than glue." Glial cells produce the myelin sheathing that allows motor signals to travel rapidly from the brain to the extremities, and their signals are important to laying down the organization of different areas in the early months of brain development. They're also an important adversary when it comes to repairing nerve damage in the periphery. Severed nerves actually try to grow back along their established pathways, but the glial cells poison them (presumably to prevent inappropriate overgrowth). Learning to inhibit this process may be the key to restoring limbs that are paralyzed.
- Michael Cohn
A lot of people think that " Deja can do whatever it wants on its excellent service," but that's the result of a skewed outlook. The fact is that Deja is a very important and powerful business that controls the window through which its users look on the world, a power which they can easily abuse to trick users into making horrible mistakes. While adding a word or two to a post might seem to be a reasonable way to draw users towards companies that want to serve them, it also controls how those users comprehend the very fabric of the world wide web. I'm certainly glad that no such awful lies and manipulations are being visited on me by my MSN!
In the anticipation and aftermath for Episode I, I noted a good deal of discussion on whether the week-long lines and general fanboy anticipation would be greater or lesser the second time around. Now that it's closer, I'd like to get a better idea... how many people here are planning to do the vigil this time?
- Michael Cohn
This guy seems to know what he's talking about. His syllabus includes specific, high-level applications of the technology, and shows an understanding of the ways this could be more than just another way to frag in (your | your employer's) spare time. However, he also makes the perplexing comment
Instead of the current vision of ``smart floors'', ``smart lightswitches'', and ``smart toilets'' that watch us and respond to our actions, what we will witness is the emergence of ``smart people''
All you folks in tech support can vouch that computers currently seem to be pushing in the opposite direction...
- Michael
The first mention of the word "geek" on this page is in "geeks in space," featuring the highly rated CmdrTaco. The second is yours. In the past, Katz's overextension of the disaffected-geek paradigm has earned my reproof, but I saw none of it here.
Your comments were entirely unrelated to the event that supposedly prompted them. Ironically, you're guilty of the very sin of which you accuse Katz.
- Michael Cohn
You do realize that him getting Karma doesn't deprive you of any, right?
Unless that was intended as an insult, it's actually not correct. At any time, there's a finite number of moderator points assigned, and giving them to one post means they won't go to another.
This is an aspect of +2 posting that might easily be overlooked... it not only makes the poster vulnerable to losing karma, it saves points to be bestowed on people who haven't earned the automatic upmod yet. This means that a greater number of worthwhile posts will end up with high scores (we assume that someone with the automatic point is going to post worthwhile things, so we don't have to waste moderation on them).
- Michael
Well, at least now I understand why it was modded down. Thank you for the clarification.
- Michael
Los Angeles (AP) -- The next release of the Linux computer operating system will include a paying passenger - a businessman from Los Angeles, U.S.
"I've always loved computers," said entrepreneur Malcom Lyle Jacobson-McGraw, "now I get to be in one!" Last month he made a donation of $20,000,000 to the Free Software Foundation in exchange for a place in one of its more common programs.
"Starting with version 2.3 of the kernel, the ls command will be renamed malcomlylejacobsonmcgraw," said Linux creator Linus Torvalds at a press conference Thursday.
Like churches that name pews and windows after patrons, the free software community seems to have avidly adopted this new fundraising model. "rm and chmod are still open," hinted Torvalds.
Reading that aticle made me feel like a ninja -- now I know the hidden domain! My friend here points out that ten years ago, there was ARPAnet, and on the web it became .arpa. Then ARPAnet disappears for a while. All the sudden, there's .arpa ("address and routing parameters area") again! When we teach History of the Internet in the high schools of 2020, this is going to confuse the hell out of the students.
"History of the internet?" I ask. "How's it going to end?"
"Probably when you can't tell whether something is on the internet anymore. This hammer... is it on the internet? Hmmm."
variable contrast, so that colors and shapes are discernable in low light and bright light can be seen without glare. This is effectively what pupillary dilation and contraction do... glasses could superimpose extra iris that would cover up even more pupil than normal, but boosting incoming photons would be considerably more cumbersome.
IR/UV vision: This could be achieved with little footprint by coating the glasses with a material that absorbed the desired band and emitted visible light, Of course, you'd have to focus on the glasses, which might be strenuous...
telescopic vision: Just make the lenses flexable...
Flicker correction: I've heard some people are bothered by certain monitors, fluorescent lights, or a combination, because the refresh rate causes a subliminally perceptable flicker. Perhaps phosphorescent materials in the glasses could create a "persistence of vision" that would blur out the flashing. There would be a cost in resolution, perhaps, but it would ease a lot of headaches.
Just because internet businesses stand to lose the most doesn't mean that they're the place to work on reducing power consumption. Perhaps they should be working to secure the power grid by investing in areas that are more easily fixed.
For example, what if e-commerce corps started investing in new power plants? Fortunately, the curent energy limits aren't fundamental problems like the speed of light or the minimal thinness of a silicon wafer; they can be solved in a fairly linear fashion simply by doing more of the same. With the assurance of backing from big computer firms, it would be easier for municipalities to issue bonds, thus improving the speed with which new facilities could be built.
Of course, I'd rather see a decrease in power consumption, and computer businesses can help too. Aside from hardware manufacturers making their own products lower-power (Crusoe, anyone?), the computer industry could fund public-service campaigns to decrease energy waste. They could even fund R&D in other high-energy-consumption industries. air conditioning uses up 13% of residential power. I'm not sure how that figure compares to the 12% of all national power that goes to computers, as cited in the CNET article, but it's clearly a big chunk. If making more efficient air conditioners could free up more power-space for computers, perhaps that's something the computer people should be pushing forwards.
- Michael Cohn