There are several reasons why the industry is focused on smaller. I do not work for a semiconductor manufacturer, so some of my information may be a little off.
1) Defects and Yield. Most processors are manufactuered out of silicon wafers 300 mm in diameter. The wafer is very pure silicon (before they start doping it), and the crystal structure is one of the most perfect and regular that humankind has ever been able to produce (at least on a large scale). The industry doesn't do this merely to be perfectionist - it costs a LOT of money and infrastructure to do it - but simply because defects in the crystal structure and silicon purity result in a non-functional chips. The statistics and probabilities behind how many defects get scattered on a wafer, and how many potentially useful chips do those defects knock out has been heavily studied by the industry. The yield that one gets from a single wafer that has many chips on it is a function of defect density and chip size (and other things). A larger chip naturally has a greater chance of having a defect than a smaller chip. There isn't much more that the industry can do to reduce the number of defects on a wafer. In order to increase yield, one of the things the industry banks on is decreasing the chip size. The yield for, say, op-amps (which are very tiny chips) is much higher than for full-blown processors.
2) Signal Distance. The upper limit of speed for an electronic signal in a chip is the speed of light. That's really fast, but not infinite. In fact, compared to the clock speed of the chip itself, the speed of light becomes significant. The speed of light in a vaccum is 3 * 10^8 m/s. In one nanosecond, light travels 30 cm. For a 4 GHz processor, light can travel only 7.5 cm between clock cycles. In truth, the electronic signals in the chip travel slower than that. So, the distance between various parts of the chip become significant. For a chip as large as several inches, it can take quite a long time, many clock cycles, for bits to make it from one end to the other. Wasted clock cycles = reduced performance. So, in order to continue increasing performance, the industry has worked very hard to keep the size of processor chip very small, so that it takes very little time for signals to travel across it.
3) Power. It would take a while to explain the physical reasons behind it (see an VLSI or semiconductor textbook for a full analysis), but the operating voltage of a transistor goes down as its physical size goes down. It used to be that 5 V was the working voltage of most all transistors. Then it moved to 3.3 V. Nowadays, the core voltage of most processors is around 1 V. As the operating voltage has decreased, so too has the power dissipation per transistor. The deceasing feature size of transistors and photolithographic techniques is largely to thank for this. The reason that processors now dissipate such a large amount of heat is that, even though the per transistor power has decreased, the number of transistors in the chip has increased more rapidly. If one tried to make a P4 chip using 350 nm techniques (which used to be the standard feature size les than a decade ago), the chip probably would dissipate many hundreds of Watts.
4) Speed. One would again have to check out a VLSI textbook for a full explanation, but (physically) smaller transistors can switch states faster than large ones. While clock speed is far from the be-all, end-all measure of processor performance, it is generally true that faster transistors result in faster performance (hence the whole notion of overclocking). Using the szame "P4 made using 350 nm technology" example, it would be impossible to run such a chip at anything close to 4 GHz. In fact, I doubt you'd be able to get it to run at even 1 GHz - the transistors would simply be too slow. I don't recall exactly when 350 nm was the standard technology used by the industry, but I imagine that you'd find it coincided roughly to the times when chip speeds were mea
I think that you have some misconceptions about what a voting paper trail consists of. While I don't know of any hard and fast regulations about what form such a trail should take, I doubt that it would take the form you seem to fear.
First off: the paper "receipt" does not leave with the voter. It is not like the slip of paper you can get at the post office as proof that you mailed something, or that allows you to track the parcel's progress. The receipt stays at the polling location, just like paper ballots currently do. It would be retained as a permanent record of an individual's vote so that, if the electronic results were ever in doubt or lost, a recount could be done with the receipts.
Second: Like paper ballots today, the receipts would not contain information that could link a certain vote to a certain person. This has been a feature of elections in the United States for years, and there is no reason that a paper trail would require any change.
Third: "Thugs," as you call them, are not allowed to interrogate voters on how they vote. Since the paper receipt stays at the polling station, the thug wouldn't have any way to verify which way someone voted. This kind of thing is taken very seriously, and coercing voters will land you in jail pretty quickly.
Fourth: Incorrect votes (i.e., when a person looks at the receipt and determines that what it shows is not what they intended it to be) would be discovered and dealt with at the polling station. Correcting a ballot would most likely consist of filling out a new one by hand, which would later be counted separately like absentee ballots. As I stated at the beginning, the receipt stays at the polling station. Once the voter hands it over (or places it in a scanner, etc.) their vote is considered "cast" and is irrevocable. This is essentially no different than how things work today with paper ballots - once you put it through that slot in the box, that's it.
I will not delve into the debate about whether using electronic voting with a paper trail is "more secure" other than to say that it is far and away more transparent and accountable than electronic voting without a paper trail. If anyone has reason to believe that the electronically collected votes have been tampered with or lost, then there is something physical to fall back on. Spoofing a paper trail takes a great deal more work and preparation than spoofing an electronic record. In that sense, having the paper trail makes our democracy more secure in the face of idiots blindly latching onto electronic voting as some inherently better way.
I believe that the case isn't going to go in this guy's favor. But, let's just assume for a moment that the judge ultimately rules that the combination of iTMS and iPod have given Apple and unfair monopoly in the digital music marketplace, just what does the plaintiff expect to have happen? What sorts of measures would the judge impose to soften Apple's alleged monopoly?
If the probe will be orbiting 50 km from the lunar surface, then it will be about twice as close as the Apollo CSM ever got. The typical orbiting distance for that was about 60 nautical miles (about 100 km). By contrast, spy satellites for the military in a Low Earth Orbit are about 500 km above the Earth's surface, and they can (purportedly) read lisence plates. Naturally, the LRO won't be the size, or have the capabilities, of a military spy satellite. Even so, considering the advances in camera technology, even at NASA's cautious rate of adoption, the image quality one can expect will be extraordinary. If NASA was able to get meter-resolution back in the Apollo days, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get an order or magnitude (10 cm) finer detail this go around.
I don't think so - the remnants of the landings site are almost certainly in pristine condition. The moon has (essentially) no atmosphere for winds to blow around, and no atmospheric dust to settle on the site. There are no corrosives to eat away at the remaining equipment - principally the lower half of the LEM. Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare, so there is basically no chance that the sites have been swallowed up.
I can think of only two mechanisms that could bring about wholesale changes to the sites. First a large meteor could have landed on or near the landing site and obliterated it, or covered it with debris. An impact like that would require a substantially-sized meteor - I'd guess on the order of 10 kg. Those kinds of impacts are rare enough as it is, and the chances of any one Apollo site being hit with one are miniscule, let alone all 6. Second, the intense radiation has weakened the man-made objects left behind to the point that they have crumbled to dust. This may be true of the plastics, but the metal remains would be nearly impervious to it, at least on the timescale of decades.
The lunar explorations (robotic and manned) have proven that the Moon's surface does not change quickly. The Apollo astronauts fully expected that their footprints would still be visible in the dust thousands of years from now. In a million years, there may indeed be nothing left of the Apollo sites. On the whole, however, the Moon's surface has not changed during the whole timescale of human civilization.
If Apple wanted to try and break back into the PDA market (which I think would be a poor strategic move, but I could be wrong), then buying out Palm might be a way to speed up their development. But, does Apple really want to be associated with - and have responsibility for - the existing Palm product line, from Zires to Tungstens to Treos? I think the answer there is an emphatic NO. I think that, if Apple were to develop another PDA, it would be a real slick product that would have very little in common with the current Palm product line. In that case, I would have doubts that buying (or even lisencing) Palm would give Apple an advantage enough to justify the transaction.
That said, I have a 60GB iPod Video which I use every day when I'm on the metro, bus, shopping etc. I always have the volume set to max but it's still too damn low. It's impossible to hear the music when people sitting next to me are talking, there is motor noise from the bus, etc. The background noise is often louder than the music...
I fail to see how you can get hearing damages from the iPod. I have never used an older iPod though, could they go louder?
It all boils down to signal-to-noise ratio. On the metro, bus, etc., the background noise is tremendous. I believe that, in a lot of cases, it can peak above 80 dB, which is the OSHA limit for an 8-hour daily exposure. As a result, the people sitting next to you, or talking on their cellphones, practically have to shout at one another to be heard. In those situations, in order for your brain to be able to hear the music, you need to crank it up ever higher to be able to distinguish it above the noise. There is also the fact that, as the suit claims, the earbuds do nothing to dampen the outside noise, while pumping their output directly into the ear canal. If you already have hearing damage, you'll need to turn it up all the more.
So, if you crank the iPod output up high enough to hear well above the noise, you will cause hearing damage over time. This is old news, and has been known by lots of folks for a long time. It is no basis for a lawsuit.
To answer you final question: I have a 3G iPod, and more or less normal hearing, and I can crank it up high enough to hear music just fine on the bus or next to a busy road. I have to crank it pretty high, though, up to levels I know, over a long period of continuous exposure (a few hours a day for months or years), could damage my hearing. Thankfully, i don't have it cranked for that long. If you are having problems hearing your iPod, one thing I could suggest would be to increase the volume of the individual tracks in iTunes (there is a volume slider in the properties of each track, with which you can use to double the volume (add 6 dB)). Note that, if the track is already pretty loud, you may end up clipping the signal and ruining the quality of the audio. I believe that, from 3rd generation through the current models, the audio has been handled by the same PortalPlayer components, which would suggest that mine is just as loud as yours.
But, even so, you'll never be able to listen to, say, classical music in the middle of a busy subway, not unless you have some noise-cancelling headphones that can take out a lot of the background noise, and even those have major limitations.
Another point is in this comparison is that Big Tobacco knowingly increased the nicotine in its product, thereby making it more addictive. While some people might claim that Apple, in all its hip design glory, made the iPod addictive, I'd have my doubts.
Without actually answering the relevant and deserving question...
I contend that, considering the way that Congress and the Presidency works (no matter who's in power), such subtleties are likely to be long lost in the debate. So, while one probably could come up with a much more pleasing statement (i.e, pleasing to a wider audience; a compromise) by removing a piece or two, or expanding on explanations and definitions, that kind of thoughtful debate is nearly impossible in this day and age. I would say that, in the case of the current administration and Republican leadership in Congress, such debate is even less likely: they like to deal in absolutes and sweeping statements.
Yes, but what happens when you have an RTG in your laptop, and you have the thing on your lap? Since they are typically used in spacecraft, I guess waste heat and leaked radiation isn't usually much of a problem in their design. On your lap, right near your crotch, I think there might be a problem or two.
Whew. It's a good thing I'm an ordinary American, unlike the rest of you commie techno-freak Slashdotters.
While the parent has been moderated up for making a funny statement (and it is), the statement also cuts to the deathly serious nature of what exactly is wrong with the NSA wiretapping program. Few people, myself included, debate that we need as much intel as possible to try and curb future terrorist attacks. I do not debate that there are times when expediency is needed, as provided for in the FISA. While there are surely plenty of persons surveilled with probably cause, who is to say that "ordinary Americans" couldn't be next, with or without probable cause?
Traditionally, the person to say is the judicial and, to a lesser extent, the legislative branches. But, without the judicial or congressional checks, which this administration has flouted, it the President (along with the attorney general, and others) who has decided. The framers of the constitution were fearful of that kind of unchecked power in the hands of the presidency. I for one am even more skeptical of this presidency.
President Nixon was forced into resignation for ordering, and subsequently attempting to cover-up, the break-in at the Watergate Hotel (among other abuses, such as bombing Cambodia). That, too, was in some ways a President using his powers to spy on his enemies (in this case, the DNC), and breaking the law to do so. In this case, the president has been given a lot of leeway because the enemies are terrorists - enemies of the state and people. However, I (and numerous legal scholars, and half of Congress to boot) suspect that the President has still broken the law in pursuit of these enemies.
If Nixon was forced into resignation (lest he be impeached), shouldn't this President at least be under more heat than he currently is receiving? I asking a genuine question: can someone explain to me why more Americans are not up in arms over this?
Re:Aren't we getting close to the Theoretical Limi
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Intel Makes 45nm Chip
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I once had a conversation with someone who was doing developmental research for an even smaller process for some very large semiconductor manufacturer. According to him, they were one day running some measurements on the first prototype wafers. From experience with every previous process (65, 90, 130, etc.), they were expecting this particular measurement to yield a nice bell curve. Instead, they got a strongly quantized bell curve: it looked more like a histogram. The reason, they realized, was because the gate oxide was becoming only a handful of atoms thick. The quantization between two steps in that bell curve was the difference between, say, a gate oxide 5 atoms thick and 6 atoms thick.
So, yes, they are indeed coming up against some real physical limitations for CMOS technology. Of course, people have been saying that for years.
I'd just like to ask a technical question: just how does the government intend to garner much of anything from what Google gives them, even if they got it. The request for one million random web sites alone would keep them pretty busy for a while, let alone the queries of a typical week at Google. Can anyone ballpark how many queries that might be? 10^6? 10^9? The government has some data mining capabilities, but I doubt it has anything that could be readily used on that scale. As a matter of fact, one of the only organizations out there that could do it would be... Google? Does anyone suppose that part of the subpeona is that Google has to analyze the data for the government as well?
There have been other efforts to develop speech-to-sign robots. I recall one being featured on the Discovery channel many years ago that was able to fingerspell a variant of ASL that is used by persons that are both deaf and blind. That was nearly 10 years ago. In that case, the person "listens" by placing their hand over the signer's hand, and feels the different handshapes.
On another note, this sort of translation is actually more difficult than a voice-to-text, text-to-sign translation. As someone who studied sign language for several years, I can categorically state that such a direct translation is not the same as ASL, which has a different grammar and word order. The way things are described and conveyed in ASL is often not just a matter of stringing different signs that represent different words together into a sentence. Oftentimes it uses spatial and directional relations as well. Humans are able to understand these meanings quite naturally, but it is difficult to program that kind of style into a computer. The translation of voice-to-sign is just as difficult as translating between, say, spoken english and chinese. A more difficult task than voice-to-sign would be to go the other way around: a camera or motion-based system that extrapolates what a signer is saying, and then translate that to normal English.
The article states that the hand is 80 cm large (doesn't specify, but I'm guessing that's height). 80 cm is almost three feet for non-metric types. My own hand is only about 12 cm long. Is this the largest communicating hand on the planet? Or, as is more likely, the 80 cm takes into account the massive box of micromotors and computing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Just like (mostly American) car manufacturers are introducing new models roughly fashioned on their old classics: the T-Bird, the Impala, the Mustang, GT-40, and about a dozen others. Prehaps in 20 years, if Intel is still in the game, they'll release a "New Processor with Classic Styling" and call it the Pentium. Do you think that, as with Cadillacs from the 60s, we'll be able to get away from having fins (i.e., heatsinks) on the back?
In the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum, the feature article is a list of some of the biggest winners and losers in recent technology. Samsung's play for solid state drives (SSD) breaking into the mainstream hard drive market was listed as one of the losers for several important reasons:
* Significantly higher cost than magnetic drives (60-70 times the price per GB).
* Signficantly smaller capacity tha magnetic drives (even a 16 gigabyte drive doesn't come close to the 80 gigabyte drives that are now becoming standard in a lot of laptops).
* Slower read access (about 1.5x slower), and slower write access (2-4x slower).
* Finite write cyles before the cells start crapping out (10^5 to 10^7).
These are compelling reasons that don't seem to be going away any time soon.
Don't get me wrong, I think that Apple can produce a winner in any tech area if it set its collective mind and resources to it. But, in my opinion, I don't really think this is something Apple would want to try. Apple has no technological experience in cell phone technology, other than what it might have learned from Motorola during their brief collaboration. The market is already awash in cell phones. Granted, few of them have the panache of the iPod, and they are bloated in pointless features that could be done much better. The profit margins for cell phones are much slimmer than the iPod, even for something high-end like the RAZR. Could Apple produce something with both iPod and cellphone technology crammed into it, and still charge a reasonable market price for it?
When Apple hit the mp3-player scene in 2002, there were some competing products from mostly small companies that had limitations due to the necessary tradeoffs. But, mp3-players were a nascent luxury item at the time, whereas cellphones are now, more or less, a commodity item. Almost nobody at the time had experience in mp3-player design and manufacture, whereas cellular phones are a mature product. Consider the players in today's cellphone market: Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, and about a dozen others that aren't as prevalent in the U.S. In comparison to the mp3-player market of 2002, the cellphone market of today is a cut-throught, kill-or-be-killed, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"-like world filled with a bunch of predators.
Even if Apple were to make an iCell, what would it do with it? Without a service provider to back it, the phone is dead-on-arrival. Will the allure of Apple's logo and the iPod brand be enough for service providers to risk the wrath of the other cellphone manufacturers? I don't know.
I guess if a convergence between the iPod and a cellphone is inevitable, then I'd prefer Apple to take a crack at it first (and don't cite the ROKR as a counterexample, that thing was a kludge of competing interests). Steve Jobs has often said that cellphones are poorly designed - trying to get the feature list make up for the fact that they aren't better thought out. Still, is this something that Apple really wants to be a part of?
Quick Question: what year are they referring to? If most of the source material comes from CES, then I suppose they mean 2006, the next 11+ months stretched out ahead of us. Or do they make the claim that 2005, the year just past, was the watershed/tipping point year for HTPCs?
Here's a prediction for 2006: Apple adds PVR functionality to Mac OS and Front Row. As it rolls out Intel processors to the rest of its hardware lineup, it'll probably tweak the Mac Mini a bit (some additional features have been rumored, such as a built-in iPod Dock, better A/V outputs, etc.), and add Front Row functionality to it, along with the Apple Remote. This prediction is hardly original.
What I think Apple will do is add PVR functionality to Front Row. I am not sure if they will be so bold as to release their own tuner card for video capture, or rely on third-party solutions such as EyeTV and Tivo. In the latter case, my guess is that they would release an API for Front Row, and then collaborate with the third parties to produce an add-on for Front Row (just as they have modules currently for iPhoto, iMovie, DVD player, and iTunes). I think it would be pretty slick to be able to control a Tivo from Front Row with the Apple Remote.
I had a sad experience with my 12" powerbook and the power connector. I managed to trip on the cord, pulling the whole computer off a coffee table and onto a hardwood floor in the process. The damage: a new hard drive and power adapter. The MagSafe would have saved my ass that day.
I can't see this standing up to the inevitable challenge by the ACLU in front of the Supreme Court.
Really, I don't see it ever getting that far: the first federal district bench it gets to will be the end of it. It's indefensible, meaning that it cannot be defended from a legal standpoint. Ironically, it probably would be tolerated even less by conservative judges, as they tend to be more absolutist about Bill of Rights arguments.
I agree. This sort of tactic of attaching insipid legislation into must-pass bills, where it'll either be so small it won't be noticed, or will be ignored because the rest of the bill must pass, has got to be stricken from the Congressional rules. I do not know how far back it dates, and I know that both political parties have been guilty of it, but the current Republican congressional leadership has elevated it to a fine and thoroughly asinine art. It has, at times, been used to elevate some useful legislation that otherwise would have been flattened by the powers that be; but on the whole, it is an immoral twisting of the legislative body to the agenda of the few.
This is an example that bolsters the case for a Line Item Veto amendment to the Constitution, if Congress cannot remove this kind of practice from its rules. Most state governments have it, President Clinton briefly had it (by legislation) before it was struck down. It would be difficult to word such an amendment, however, without a significant alterning of the checks and balances of government. But, at least in the case of this practice, I believe that Congress needs checking. I think we are unlikely to get any movement on it, one way or another.
It is a little tough to see from the images, but it appears that this mouse has no moving parts. This is probably a good thing. Are the two mice buttons and scroll "wheel" are touch sensitive? It also appears that the bottom of the mouse is not in contact with whatever surface you are using for a mousepad. It has a little arm that props it up a bit, so your fingers can grasp around the edges. How does it get translational information? Is it an optical mouse that can "see" further than a typical mouse? Just as a little test, the Dell optical mouse I'm using at work stops translating if it is even 1/4" from the mousepad.
Let's be clear on this: Apple does not make lots of money on the iTunes Music Store. It was not until just recently (4Q FY2005) that iTMS finally posted a profitable quarter. It's primary purpose is to sell iPods.
Recall also that, while the exact details are confidential, it is known that about 70 cents of each 99 cent download goes straight to the music labels that lisence the music to iTMS, which in turn keep about half of that as profit. Apple's costs to run the iTMS probably eat into a big chunk of the remaining 29 cents - imagine the datacenter infrastructure and bandwidth costs. The push behind flexible pricing (mostly so that prices can go higher for popular songs) comes from the music labels - Steve Jobs has vehemently resisted it for quite some time.
so while it is true that iTMS does not have the traditional costs of CD distribution, tthe $0.99 price point isn't about being greedy.
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There are several reasons why the industry is focused on smaller. I do not work for a semiconductor manufacturer, so some of my information may be a little off.
1) Defects and Yield. Most processors are manufactuered out of silicon wafers 300 mm in diameter. The wafer is very pure silicon (before they start doping it), and the crystal structure is one of the most perfect and regular that humankind has ever been able to produce (at least on a large scale). The industry doesn't do this merely to be perfectionist - it costs a LOT of money and infrastructure to do it - but simply because defects in the crystal structure and silicon purity result in a non-functional chips. The statistics and probabilities behind how many defects get scattered on a wafer, and how many potentially useful chips do those defects knock out has been heavily studied by the industry. The yield that one gets from a single wafer that has many chips on it is a function of defect density and chip size (and other things). A larger chip naturally has a greater chance of having a defect than a smaller chip. There isn't much more that the industry can do to reduce the number of defects on a wafer. In order to increase yield, one of the things the industry banks on is decreasing the chip size. The yield for, say, op-amps (which are very tiny chips) is much higher than for full-blown processors.
2) Signal Distance. The upper limit of speed for an electronic signal in a chip is the speed of light. That's really fast, but not infinite. In fact, compared to the clock speed of the chip itself, the speed of light becomes significant. The speed of light in a vaccum is 3 * 10^8 m/s. In one nanosecond, light travels 30 cm. For a 4 GHz processor, light can travel only 7.5 cm between clock cycles. In truth, the electronic signals in the chip travel slower than that. So, the distance between various parts of the chip become significant. For a chip as large as several inches, it can take quite a long time, many clock cycles, for bits to make it from one end to the other. Wasted clock cycles = reduced performance. So, in order to continue increasing performance, the industry has worked very hard to keep the size of processor chip very small, so that it takes very little time for signals to travel across it.
3) Power. It would take a while to explain the physical reasons behind it (see an VLSI or semiconductor textbook for a full analysis), but the operating voltage of a transistor goes down as its physical size goes down. It used to be that 5 V was the working voltage of most all transistors. Then it moved to 3.3 V. Nowadays, the core voltage of most processors is around 1 V. As the operating voltage has decreased, so too has the power dissipation per transistor. The deceasing feature size of transistors and photolithographic techniques is largely to thank for this. The reason that processors now dissipate such a large amount of heat is that, even though the per transistor power has decreased, the number of transistors in the chip has increased more rapidly. If one tried to make a P4 chip using 350 nm techniques (which used to be the standard feature size les than a decade ago), the chip probably would dissipate many hundreds of Watts.
4) Speed. One would again have to check out a VLSI textbook for a full explanation, but (physically) smaller transistors can switch states faster than large ones. While clock speed is far from the be-all, end-all measure of processor performance, it is generally true that faster transistors result in faster performance (hence the whole notion of overclocking). Using the szame "P4 made using 350 nm technology" example, it would be impossible to run such a chip at anything close to 4 GHz. In fact, I doubt you'd be able to get it to run at even 1 GHz - the transistors would simply be too slow. I don't recall exactly when 350 nm was the standard technology used by the industry, but I imagine that you'd find it coincided roughly to the times when chip speeds were mea
I think that you have some misconceptions about what a voting paper trail consists of. While I don't know of any hard and fast regulations about what form such a trail should take, I doubt that it would take the form you seem to fear.
First off: the paper "receipt" does not leave with the voter. It is not like the slip of paper you can get at the post office as proof that you mailed something, or that allows you to track the parcel's progress. The receipt stays at the polling location, just like paper ballots currently do. It would be retained as a permanent record of an individual's vote so that, if the electronic results were ever in doubt or lost, a recount could be done with the receipts.
Second: Like paper ballots today, the receipts would not contain information that could link a certain vote to a certain person. This has been a feature of elections in the United States for years, and there is no reason that a paper trail would require any change.
Third: "Thugs," as you call them, are not allowed to interrogate voters on how they vote. Since the paper receipt stays at the polling station, the thug wouldn't have any way to verify which way someone voted. This kind of thing is taken very seriously, and coercing voters will land you in jail pretty quickly.
Fourth: Incorrect votes (i.e., when a person looks at the receipt and determines that what it shows is not what they intended it to be) would be discovered and dealt with at the polling station. Correcting a ballot would most likely consist of filling out a new one by hand, which would later be counted separately like absentee ballots. As I stated at the beginning, the receipt stays at the polling station. Once the voter hands it over (or places it in a scanner, etc.) their vote is considered "cast" and is irrevocable. This is essentially no different than how things work today with paper ballots - once you put it through that slot in the box, that's it.
I will not delve into the debate about whether using electronic voting with a paper trail is "more secure" other than to say that it is far and away more transparent and accountable than electronic voting without a paper trail. If anyone has reason to believe that the electronically collected votes have been tampered with or lost, then there is something physical to fall back on. Spoofing a paper trail takes a great deal more work and preparation than spoofing an electronic record. In that sense, having the paper trail makes our democracy more secure in the face of idiots blindly latching onto electronic voting as some inherently better way.
I believe that the case isn't going to go in this guy's favor. But, let's just assume for a moment that the judge ultimately rules that the combination of iTMS and iPod have given Apple and unfair monopoly in the digital music marketplace, just what does the plaintiff expect to have happen? What sorts of measures would the judge impose to soften Apple's alleged monopoly?
If the probe will be orbiting 50 km from the lunar surface, then it will be about twice as close as the Apollo CSM ever got. The typical orbiting distance for that was about 60 nautical miles (about 100 km). By contrast, spy satellites for the military in a Low Earth Orbit are about 500 km above the Earth's surface, and they can (purportedly) read lisence plates. Naturally, the LRO won't be the size, or have the capabilities, of a military spy satellite. Even so, considering the advances in camera technology, even at NASA's cautious rate of adoption, the image quality one can expect will be extraordinary. If NASA was able to get meter-resolution back in the Apollo days, I wouldn't be surprised if we could get an order or magnitude (10 cm) finer detail this go around.
I don't think so - the remnants of the landings site are almost certainly in pristine condition. The moon has (essentially) no atmosphere for winds to blow around, and no atmospheric dust to settle on the site. There are no corrosives to eat away at the remaining equipment - principally the lower half of the LEM. Earthquakes are pretty weak and rare, so there is basically no chance that the sites have been swallowed up.
I can think of only two mechanisms that could bring about wholesale changes to the sites. First a large meteor could have landed on or near the landing site and obliterated it, or covered it with debris. An impact like that would require a substantially-sized meteor - I'd guess on the order of 10 kg. Those kinds of impacts are rare enough as it is, and the chances of any one Apollo site being hit with one are miniscule, let alone all 6. Second, the intense radiation has weakened the man-made objects left behind to the point that they have crumbled to dust. This may be true of the plastics, but the metal remains would be nearly impervious to it, at least on the timescale of decades.
The lunar explorations (robotic and manned) have proven that the Moon's surface does not change quickly. The Apollo astronauts fully expected that their footprints would still be visible in the dust thousands of years from now. In a million years, there may indeed be nothing left of the Apollo sites. On the whole, however, the Moon's surface has not changed during the whole timescale of human civilization.
If Apple wanted to try and break back into the PDA market (which I think would be a poor strategic move, but I could be wrong), then buying out Palm might be a way to speed up their development. But, does Apple really want to be associated with - and have responsibility for - the existing Palm product line, from Zires to Tungstens to Treos? I think the answer there is an emphatic NO. I think that, if Apple were to develop another PDA, it would be a real slick product that would have very little in common with the current Palm product line. In that case, I would have doubts that buying (or even lisencing) Palm would give Apple an advantage enough to justify the transaction.
That said, I have a 60GB iPod Video which I use every day when I'm on the metro, bus, shopping etc. I always have the volume set to max but it's still too damn low. It's impossible to hear the music when people sitting next to me are talking, there is motor noise from the bus, etc. The background noise is often louder than the music...
I fail to see how you can get hearing damages from the iPod. I have never used an older iPod though, could they go louder?
It all boils down to signal-to-noise ratio. On the metro, bus, etc., the background noise is tremendous. I believe that, in a lot of cases, it can peak above 80 dB, which is the OSHA limit for an 8-hour daily exposure. As a result, the people sitting next to you, or talking on their cellphones, practically have to shout at one another to be heard. In those situations, in order for your brain to be able to hear the music, you need to crank it up ever higher to be able to distinguish it above the noise. There is also the fact that, as the suit claims, the earbuds do nothing to dampen the outside noise, while pumping their output directly into the ear canal. If you already have hearing damage, you'll need to turn it up all the more.
So, if you crank the iPod output up high enough to hear well above the noise, you will cause hearing damage over time. This is old news, and has been known by lots of folks for a long time. It is no basis for a lawsuit.
To answer you final question: I have a 3G iPod, and more or less normal hearing, and I can crank it up high enough to hear music just fine on the bus or next to a busy road. I have to crank it pretty high, though, up to levels I know, over a long period of continuous exposure (a few hours a day for months or years), could damage my hearing. Thankfully, i don't have it cranked for that long. If you are having problems hearing your iPod, one thing I could suggest would be to increase the volume of the individual tracks in iTunes (there is a volume slider in the properties of each track, with which you can use to double the volume (add 6 dB)). Note that, if the track is already pretty loud, you may end up clipping the signal and ruining the quality of the audio. I believe that, from 3rd generation through the current models, the audio has been handled by the same PortalPlayer components, which would suggest that mine is just as loud as yours.
But, even so, you'll never be able to listen to, say, classical music in the middle of a busy subway, not unless you have some noise-cancelling headphones that can take out a lot of the background noise, and even those have major limitations.
Another point is in this comparison is that Big Tobacco knowingly increased the nicotine in its product, thereby making it more addictive. While some people might claim that Apple, in all its hip design glory, made the iPod addictive, I'd have my doubts.
Without actually answering the relevant and deserving question...
I contend that, considering the way that Congress and the Presidency works (no matter who's in power), such subtleties are likely to be long lost in the debate. So, while one probably could come up with a much more pleasing statement (i.e, pleasing to a wider audience; a compromise) by removing a piece or two, or expanding on explanations and definitions, that kind of thoughtful debate is nearly impossible in this day and age. I would say that, in the case of the current administration and Republican leadership in Congress, such debate is even less likely: they like to deal in absolutes and sweeping statements.
Yes, but what happens when you have an RTG in your laptop, and you have the thing on your lap? Since they are typically used in spacecraft, I guess waste heat and leaked radiation isn't usually much of a problem in their design. On your lap, right near your crotch, I think there might be a problem or two.
Whew. It's a good thing I'm an ordinary American, unlike the rest of you commie techno-freak Slashdotters.
While the parent has been moderated up for making a funny statement (and it is), the statement also cuts to the deathly serious nature of what exactly is wrong with the NSA wiretapping program. Few people, myself included, debate that we need as much intel as possible to try and curb future terrorist attacks. I do not debate that there are times when expediency is needed, as provided for in the FISA. While there are surely plenty of persons surveilled with probably cause, who is to say that "ordinary Americans" couldn't be next, with or without probable cause?
Traditionally, the person to say is the judicial and, to a lesser extent, the legislative branches. But, without the judicial or congressional checks, which this administration has flouted, it the President (along with the attorney general, and others) who has decided. The framers of the constitution were fearful of that kind of unchecked power in the hands of the presidency. I for one am even more skeptical of this presidency.
President Nixon was forced into resignation for ordering, and subsequently attempting to cover-up, the break-in at the Watergate Hotel (among other abuses, such as bombing Cambodia). That, too, was in some ways a President using his powers to spy on his enemies (in this case, the DNC), and breaking the law to do so. In this case, the president has been given a lot of leeway because the enemies are terrorists - enemies of the state and people. However, I (and numerous legal scholars, and half of Congress to boot) suspect that the President has still broken the law in pursuit of these enemies.
If Nixon was forced into resignation (lest he be impeached), shouldn't this President at least be under more heat than he currently is receiving? I asking a genuine question: can someone explain to me why more Americans are not up in arms over this?
I once had a conversation with someone who was doing developmental research for an even smaller process for some very large semiconductor manufacturer. According to him, they were one day running some measurements on the first prototype wafers. From experience with every previous process (65, 90, 130, etc.), they were expecting this particular measurement to yield a nice bell curve. Instead, they got a strongly quantized bell curve: it looked more like a histogram. The reason, they realized, was because the gate oxide was becoming only a handful of atoms thick. The quantization between two steps in that bell curve was the difference between, say, a gate oxide 5 atoms thick and 6 atoms thick.
So, yes, they are indeed coming up against some real physical limitations for CMOS technology. Of course, people have been saying that for years.
I'd just like to ask a technical question: just how does the government intend to garner much of anything from what Google gives them, even if they got it. The request for one million random web sites alone would keep them pretty busy for a while, let alone the queries of a typical week at Google. Can anyone ballpark how many queries that might be? 10^6? 10^9? The government has some data mining capabilities, but I doubt it has anything that could be readily used on that scale. As a matter of fact, one of the only organizations out there that could do it would be ... Google? Does anyone suppose that part of the subpeona is that Google has to analyze the data for the government as well?
There have been other efforts to develop speech-to-sign robots. I recall one being featured on the Discovery channel many years ago that was able to fingerspell a variant of ASL that is used by persons that are both deaf and blind. That was nearly 10 years ago. In that case, the person "listens" by placing their hand over the signer's hand, and feels the different handshapes.
On another note, this sort of translation is actually more difficult than a voice-to-text, text-to-sign translation. As someone who studied sign language for several years, I can categorically state that such a direct translation is not the same as ASL, which has a different grammar and word order. The way things are described and conveyed in ASL is often not just a matter of stringing different signs that represent different words together into a sentence. Oftentimes it uses spatial and directional relations as well. Humans are able to understand these meanings quite naturally, but it is difficult to program that kind of style into a computer. The translation of voice-to-sign is just as difficult as translating between, say, spoken english and chinese. A more difficult task than voice-to-sign would be to go the other way around: a camera or motion-based system that extrapolates what a signer is saying, and then translate that to normal English.
The article states that the hand is 80 cm large (doesn't specify, but I'm guessing that's height). 80 cm is almost three feet for non-metric types. My own hand is only about 12 cm long. Is this the largest communicating hand on the planet? Or, as is more likely, the 80 cm takes into account the massive box of micromotors and computing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Just like (mostly American) car manufacturers are introducing new models roughly fashioned on their old classics: the T-Bird, the Impala, the Mustang, GT-40, and about a dozen others. Prehaps in 20 years, if Intel is still in the game, they'll release a "New Processor with Classic Styling" and call it the Pentium. Do you think that, as with Cadillacs from the 60s, we'll be able to get away from having fins (i.e., heatsinks) on the back?
Sorry, forgot to include links:
IEEE Spectrum magazine
And the article describing NAND drives as a loser.
In the latest issue of the IEEE Spectrum, the feature article is a list of some of the biggest winners and losers in recent technology. Samsung's play for solid state drives (SSD) breaking into the mainstream hard drive market was listed as one of the losers for several important reasons:
* Significantly higher cost than magnetic drives (60-70 times the price per GB).
* Signficantly smaller capacity tha magnetic drives (even a 16 gigabyte drive doesn't come close to the 80 gigabyte drives that are now becoming standard in a lot of laptops).
* Slower read access (about 1.5x slower), and slower write access (2-4x slower).
* Finite write cyles before the cells start crapping out (10^5 to 10^7).
These are compelling reasons that don't seem to be going away any time soon.
Don't get me wrong, I think that Apple can produce a winner in any tech area if it set its collective mind and resources to it. But, in my opinion, I don't really think this is something Apple would want to try. Apple has no technological experience in cell phone technology, other than what it might have learned from Motorola during their brief collaboration. The market is already awash in cell phones. Granted, few of them have the panache of the iPod, and they are bloated in pointless features that could be done much better. The profit margins for cell phones are much slimmer than the iPod, even for something high-end like the RAZR. Could Apple produce something with both iPod and cellphone technology crammed into it, and still charge a reasonable market price for it?
When Apple hit the mp3-player scene in 2002, there were some competing products from mostly small companies that had limitations due to the necessary tradeoffs. But, mp3-players were a nascent luxury item at the time, whereas cellphones are now, more or less, a commodity item. Almost nobody at the time had experience in mp3-player design and manufacture, whereas cellular phones are a mature product. Consider the players in today's cellphone market: Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, and about a dozen others that aren't as prevalent in the U.S. In comparison to the mp3-player market of 2002, the cellphone market of today is a cut-throught, kill-or-be-killed, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle"-like world filled with a bunch of predators.
Even if Apple were to make an iCell, what would it do with it? Without a service provider to back it, the phone is dead-on-arrival. Will the allure of Apple's logo and the iPod brand be enough for service providers to risk the wrath of the other cellphone manufacturers? I don't know.
I guess if a convergence between the iPod and a cellphone is inevitable, then I'd prefer Apple to take a crack at it first (and don't cite the ROKR as a counterexample, that thing was a kludge of competing interests). Steve Jobs has often said that cellphones are poorly designed - trying to get the feature list make up for the fact that they aren't better thought out. Still, is this something that Apple really wants to be a part of?
Quick Question: what year are they referring to? If most of the source material comes from CES, then I suppose they mean 2006, the next 11+ months stretched out ahead of us. Or do they make the claim that 2005, the year just past, was the watershed/tipping point year for HTPCs?
Here's a prediction for 2006: Apple adds PVR functionality to Mac OS and Front Row. As it rolls out Intel processors to the rest of its hardware lineup, it'll probably tweak the Mac Mini a bit (some additional features have been rumored, such as a built-in iPod Dock, better A/V outputs, etc.), and add Front Row functionality to it, along with the Apple Remote. This prediction is hardly original.
What I think Apple will do is add PVR functionality to Front Row. I am not sure if they will be so bold as to release their own tuner card for video capture, or rely on third-party solutions such as EyeTV and Tivo. In the latter case, my guess is that they would release an API for Front Row, and then collaborate with the third parties to produce an add-on for Front Row (just as they have modules currently for iPhoto, iMovie, DVD player, and iTunes). I think it would be pretty slick to be able to control a Tivo from Front Row with the Apple Remote.
I had a sad experience with my 12" powerbook and the power connector. I managed to trip on the cord, pulling the whole computer off a coffee table and onto a hardwood floor in the process. The damage: a new hard drive and power adapter. The MagSafe would have saved my ass that day.
I can't see this standing up to the inevitable challenge by the ACLU in front of the Supreme Court.
Really, I don't see it ever getting that far: the first federal district bench it gets to will be the end of it. It's indefensible, meaning that it cannot be defended from a legal standpoint. Ironically, it probably would be tolerated even less by conservative judges, as they tend to be more absolutist about Bill of Rights arguments.
I agree. This sort of tactic of attaching insipid legislation into must-pass bills, where it'll either be so small it won't be noticed, or will be ignored because the rest of the bill must pass, has got to be stricken from the Congressional rules. I do not know how far back it dates, and I know that both political parties have been guilty of it, but the current Republican congressional leadership has elevated it to a fine and thoroughly asinine art. It has, at times, been used to elevate some useful legislation that otherwise would have been flattened by the powers that be; but on the whole, it is an immoral twisting of the legislative body to the agenda of the few.
This is an example that bolsters the case for a Line Item Veto amendment to the Constitution, if Congress cannot remove this kind of practice from its rules. Most state governments have it, President Clinton briefly had it (by legislation) before it was struck down. It would be difficult to word such an amendment, however, without a significant alterning of the checks and balances of government. But, at least in the case of this practice, I believe that Congress needs checking. I think we are unlikely to get any movement on it, one way or another.
It is a little tough to see from the images, but it appears that this mouse has no moving parts. This is probably a good thing. Are the two mice buttons and scroll "wheel" are touch sensitive? It also appears that the bottom of the mouse is not in contact with whatever surface you are using for a mousepad. It has a little arm that props it up a bit, so your fingers can grasp around the edges. How does it get translational information? Is it an optical mouse that can "see" further than a typical mouse? Just as a little test, the Dell optical mouse I'm using at work stops translating if it is even 1/4" from the mousepad.
Let's be clear on this: Apple does not make lots of money on the iTunes Music Store. It was not until just recently (4Q FY2005) that iTMS finally posted a profitable quarter. It's primary purpose is to sell iPods.
Recall also that, while the exact details are confidential, it is known that about 70 cents of each 99 cent download goes straight to the music labels that lisence the music to iTMS, which in turn keep about half of that as profit. Apple's costs to run the iTMS probably eat into a big chunk of the remaining 29 cents - imagine the datacenter infrastructure and bandwidth costs. The push behind flexible pricing (mostly so that prices can go higher for popular songs) comes from the music labels - Steve Jobs has vehemently resisted it for quite some time.
so while it is true that iTMS does not have the traditional costs of CD distribution, tthe $0.99 price point isn't about being greedy.