With that comment (from your sig) Heinlein identified himself as a Pelagian. This is the generic description for people who side with the Irish monk Pelagius, of whom Hilaire Belloc wrote:
Pelagius lived in Kardanoel, he preached a doctrine there
How whether you went to Heaven or Hell, it was your own affair.
Pelagius believed that everybody at all times had the ability to make free decisions, and therefore there was no excuse for any criminal behaviour whatsoever.
Nowadays we live in a world in which neurologists and psychologists have demonstrated that this is fundamentally flawed, that much of our decision making is unconscious, and that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice. The views of Pelagius are associated only with far-right evangelical fundamentalist Christians and ditto ditto ditto Muslims, and affect many American legal systems largely because the former group had so much influence in creating them. However, I guess that the great majority of neurologists, experimental psychologists and, in fact, theologians would reject them. From this point of view, Heinlein was massively wrong and was, in fact, allying himself with people whose other views he did not share.
You can't blame Heinlein for this because he was a product of his own time and upbringing. And he did write in the so-called "hard science" fiction school. Physicists, chemists and engineers have often been very dismissive of the soft sciences, and it's only really in the last 30 years or so that they have come to dominate our culture. Heinlein's own cultural exposure would tend to blind him to alternative theories of human behaviour.
So it seems to me you are supporting Heinlein because of one of his mistakes, not because of his very real role as someone who helped map out a large new area of middlebrow literature.
Are you talking here about quarrying (i.e. open cast with lots of rock removal and open to air) or mining?, i.e. doing things underground? There is a bit of a difference, especially when working with coal in deep seams, or those gold mines on the Reef that go two miles down.
The history of my family on one side is a 150 year process of moving from coal mining through railways to systems design, but I still keep a non-toy miner's lamp in full working order as a reminder, twin meshes and magnetic catch and all. Coal mining is a long way from safe.
Because mining explosives are different?
on
Explosives Camp
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Mining explosives is a very specialised subject. The object is to produce shock waves with no blast and no fire (think about it.) You want to break up rock or minerals with the absolute minimum of side effects, using the absolute minimum amount of energy necessary and raising as little dust as possible, not only because of health and safety risks but because any other approach adds cost. If you want to be a mining engineer, you learn explosives at mining school not summer camp. And you learn it, mostly, from mining engineers who are still alive, which gives you some confidence in the training. No, I am not a mining engineer, but I have talked to enough of them, in South Africa and elsewhere, and most of us would not want to earn our living that way.
Now go away and read the article properly. The Southern duck population mostly washed up long ago. What part of "are" (present tense) and "last 15 years" do you not understand?
I can't help thinking that they can't be any worse than our local District Council. The ducks are mostly going in the same direction, and not spending all their time in in-fighting. What's more, they've spent the last 15 years doing useful scientific research instead of allowing unrestricted development in towns and blocking anything that might cause a rich NIMBY from London to have to look at a house belonging to someone else.
Yes, replacing the Council with faded yellow Chinese rubber ducks might actually be an improvement.
and amazing that it got a reasonable and sensible write up in the Daily Mail. Perhaps now Mr. Blair has departed the Mail will be less of a feral beast (that's a UK reference for those of you in the rest of the world, don't worry about it) and more of a newspaper.
However, given the way the climate change deniers have been trying to rubbish oceanographers and meteorologists because of their agreement on inconvenient data, the fact that this guy predicted something as counter intuitive as the ducks traveling through a North-west passage in pack ice should give pause for thought.
When even people like Dyson try and rubbish climatologists (presumably because he wants unrestricted space travel and they are warning that this is impossible without doing severe damage to the Earth) this sort of thing reminds us of just (1) how much these people know and (2) what a lot they still want to learn, while their opponents seem to rely on soundbites and dodgy statistics rather than science.
Ever met a copier salesperson? It used to be said, if an IBM salesman fell in shark infested water, the sharks would leave him alone out of professional courtesy. But if a copier salesman fell in, the sharks would flee in terror.
Copier contracts make locked-in ink cartridges look sweet and innocent. Never, ever get into a deal where you are being billed with hidden costs and where capital items are being expensed or leased. You will be in the process of being screwed.
As an example, copier salesmen like to "pre-estimate" for you your predicted usage. Then they persuade you to go for a click-included contract, e.g. 6000 "free" pages per month. Only your real predicted usage is 3000 pages...and there are penalties for downrating. Laugh all the way to the bonus for the next 5 years. And that's without "Colour costs three times as much as B/W" - so that's pretty good because everybody knows you mix three colours - only that's 3* per colour and a colour page is rated as CMYK, so that is 10 times the price of B/W the moment there is the smallest colour dot on the page.
Believe me, stick to costs you can analyse for yourself.
Many laser printers already have cartridge identification. In fact we have had a Xerox printer throw a false alert when it decided a cartridge was not genuine Xerox, so I can state categorically that this kind of DRM is already being implemented
The only real answer is for anti-trust legislation. However, it is clearly legitimate that the use of non-manufacturer consumables should invalidate any portion of the manufacturer warranty that could be affected. In the meantime the answer is not to buy cheap printers. Although HP has the largest market share they are not necessarily the most economical to operate. For basic mono printing Samsung will suit most people, and for colour both Xerox and Oki have some nice mid-range machines (in fact I believe at least one Xerox is a badged Oki.) For high volume mono at lowest cost per page, look at Kyocera, or buy a second user machine e.g. in the HP 4000 series (anything between 4050 and 4350). If possible, before buying insist on a test, bump up the machine web page and check the lifetime page count and, if possible, belt and fuser life remaining.
Redundancy and failover are rather different. However, if you know of a system where the servers get together and decide which one is elected to serve files (and then presumably contribute those files) I'd like to know more.
I'm not, in fact, absolutely clear what you mean in your post. There is a difference between implementing redundancy and failover as a policy, using dedicated hardware, and the idea of having servers get together and somehow vote on which is to fulfil a management function, which the article suggests.
Obviously you haven't ever looked into the implications of writing a large, frequently modified program in assembler. For very low power real time systems there is no real alternative, but it is far from easy to write large programs. Why do you think compiled languages were invented in the first place? The extra cost of implementation is irrelevant when the technology just does not exist to code complex systems in assembler.
The nearest thing we have nowadays to assembler is tools for compiler optimisation and execution profiling. I expect that Google uses the latest and greatest of these. The simple fact is that nowadays Java is not particularly inefficient, especially when the competition nowadays works in more or less the same way. On the other hand it is possible to build really quite large programs out of Java relatively easily, and expect them to work. Just as you can build an apparently very efficient car (e.g. Toyota Prius) but there is a huge upfront cost in additional development and manufacturing which may outweigh savings compared to conventional technology, so the additional development cost and time to market of developing programs to use less power may exceed the savings. On the other hand, reducing processor power per cycle is a manageable hit with the huge virtue that it then has a vast field of application, i.e. almost every program that runs uses less power without further development. This is therefore the most sensible approach.
Individual servers that are running the GEMS agent can organize themselves into functional groups and elect a group leader that does thermal monitoring and power optimization for the entire group.
I'd like to say "I for one welcome our new thermal monitoring and power optimising group leaders" but I shouldn't encourage the guy who constantly mods my feeble attempts at humor overrated. (I'm sure it's a guy because intelligent women have far better things to do than read feeble humor on Slashdot.)
However, this does look a bit worrying in that at first sight it seems to offer a new single point of failure in that one server has the power to affect others, and if failures occur then fixing monitoring is yet more overhead as part of the overall system workround.
Having said that, and having tried to do something vaguely similar but at a much less advanced level in the 80s, I am sure that Intel have been working out the reliability balance between system complexity on the one hand, and increased reliability due to lower system stress on the other. Does anyone know of any recent publications on the subject?
No, you are wrong. Boeing use good old US carbon fiber, while the Europeans use that low rent carbon fibre stuff. No comparison at all. Carbon fibre comes in litres and the fibre length is in metres, while carbon fiber comes in gallons (or perhaps liters) and fibers are measured in feet, (or perhaps meters). See how easy they are to distinguish?
What makes the Speaker case even more interesting is two factors. First, an educated professional given grave personal information behaved in a way that could possibly be interpreted by some people as irrational and maybe even putting others in danger. Second, subsequent comments reported to be by Speaker suggested that, like many lawyers, he is a very forceful individual who sees his own interests as paramount. It would be very interesting to know if the customs agent felt intimidated by Speaker and this accounted for his being allowed into the country.
In the UK, a large number of intelligence protection failures have occurred basically because of the perceived status of the perpetrators. (the best known cases being Philby, Blunt, MacLean and Burgess, all of whom were fairly upper class members of the Intelligence services.) In his fictional books based on composites of the Philby-Burgess case (A Perfect Spy and Tinker,Tailor,Soldier,Spy), John le Carré (who was in a position to know) suggested that the Intelligence services suspected or half knew that they had traitors in their midst all along, but were inhibited from acting against fellow members of the upper classes and their own community.
It would be very interesting indeed to know how far this culture extends into research establishments. It would be expected to be quite pervasive because of the esprit de corps among any professional group.
Of course, perhaps the real answer is that scientists and engineers, by their nature, are the worst people to be allowed to work on secret weapons systems because it contravenes their tendency to want to cooperate, share knowledge and see their own work published. Let's replace them all with Fortune 500 CEOs. That should result in a real peace dividend.
I declare a special interest. At one time in my career I used to design industrial computers that had to run 24/7. It was possible than without much trouble to buy uprated components ("industrial" rather than "commercial" grade) and then run them with tight tolerances. The overall cost premium wasn't very great, in fact, around 20% of system cost.
I've had no real problems with either AMD or Intel, but none of our recent boxes have been around long enough to be sure. What I would like to know is the likely life upfront, that's the problem.
By the way, though I agree with you in general, as many fans as possible is not always a good idea. It makes a lot of difference where they are placed, and the thing you do not want to do is to create internal vortices. As a matter of principle I pay attention to getting heat away from the CPU and graphics, but it is important to get a good flow over the HDDs and sometimes you find that large coolers actually have a bad effect on the board chipset by blocking flow. My preferred technique is not to use cheap fans but to buy good ones, especially now Muffin fans are available again and there are some really good 5W 120mm ones from Papst. These just produce a huge flow (over a cubic metre per minute) without being too noisy, and with so much air available it is easy to ensure it is going everywhere. The main thing to ensure is that they support the power supply rather than oppose it.
In fact, the last two causes of system failure we had have been a PSU fail (3V going out of regulation) and a SATA chip throw intermittent errors - which wrecked a mirrored setup. Talk about common mode failure. Overclocking is all very well, but not if you actually need to do any real work.
Pay more for memory, reduce the error margin on the motherboard, all for a virtually unnoticeable improvement in performance. Someone is trying to cash in to pay for the development of versions that will consistently run at higher clock speeds. The processor companies are getting like the drug companies - hyping things that work hardly any better than the one before, and then seeking to profit from early adopters.
Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices. How about a Core Duo Reliability Edition? I would reallyt like to be able to build a server and a few desktops from commodity hardware and almost be able to forget about them for 5 years. I can get HDDs that will do that, but where can I get the commodity silicon where the manufacturer will make a statement about long term reliability?
Your post is utterly stupid. Galileo never commented on the Bible. He stuck entirely to what he personally observed and knew about. In fact, he was actually a good Catholic and the Church has very belatedly realised that they should have been promoting him, not putting him under house arrest.
This is the exact opposite of Dyson, who is so arrogant that he assumes that he can completely master something as large as climate modelling and then reject it, without in fact knowing much about it at all.
Put bluntly, when did a think tank ever have to deal with the real world? And would you trust a trade union to propose a fair and effective system that in any way ran counter to the special interests of its members?
There is no such thing as the free market, because access to every market is controlled by special interest gatekeepers. If you don't believe me, just try visiting the NYSE and buying some shares directly. Free market think tanks are as prone to special interest pleading as anybody else - unless you really believe, say, that the Cato Institute takes money from the oil and tobacco industries and is totally uninfluenced by it.
And here in the UK, we have had to move away from the medical profession being allowed to regulate itself as a result of numerous scandals. Although the great majority of physicians are doubtless more altruistic than the majority of society, it's been said that trade unions are like dishwater - the scum rises to the top.
I think that experience in Canada, the UK and most of Europe shows that you must be able to vote for the people that control the health care system, because there are too many ethical, special interest, and economic factors to be left to people acting blindly in their own interests. Adam Smith never foresaw a world of mega-corporations, and his understanding of capitalism was a long way short of that of Marx.
We should absolutely clamp down on everything related to IP theft. And it will work.
We can do it very effectively.
First, ban all trading on eBay and Craigslist etc. That will immediately have an impact on pirated goods.
Secondly, employ large numbers of suitably skilled IT people to find and deal with all servers which allow file sharing. Shut them down regardless of the consequences. If your website is on one of those servers, well, guilt by association was good enough for Sen. McCarthy.
Third, punish student file sharers appropriately. Put a large police force (let's call it the KGB for short) in all universities, public places, high schools etc. Send convicted criminals to - well, somewhere unpleasant. I'm sure the Russians would lease the Kuril islands, or even parts of Siberia.
Fourth, only allow CDs and DVDs to be sold by shops with a permanent KGB presence.
Fifth, ban all computers capable of storing user-transferred content to everybody except corporations with a turnover in excess of $1 billion per year.
In fact, to be on the safe side, mandate a return to magnetic drum technology and dishwasher size storage. That will get rid of all those iPods and similar piracy devices.
This will work because, before long, the annual turnover of the presently constituted recording industry will fall so dramatically that losses from piracy will be completely insignificant.
You may not have noticed, but in Europe at least the Axis was defeated primarily by two states that relied heavily on central planning: the USSR and Great Britain. In fact, Britain converted more of its economy proportionally to a war economy than did Germany.
The USSR inherited what was basically a failed State - Russia - there were after all sound reasons why there were a series of revolutions in the early 1900s. Although the early USSR had a bad record, it was probably better than Tsarist Russia - only we don't know because under the tsars nobody knew or cared how many peasants were killed or starved every year. All the evidence seems to suggest that, for ordinary Russians, the Soviet Union was a better place to live than post-collapse "capitalist" Russia.
And that's before we get started on success stories like Japan, whose post-war economic rise owed a lot to central planning. Or France.
As for economists, they mostly function by telling the people with economic power what they want to hear. That's because they are economists...and they know how to maximise their own incomes. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, only this weekend, on the American Civil War the Economist got it wrong (because they told the supporters of slavery and the South in the UK what they wanted to hear) while Karl Marx, no less, correctly predicted that the North would win and that it would have to bring about the end of slavery. You have to go to real academic economists, not popularists like the people you mention, (ones who win Nobel prizes, for instance) to find information about how so-called free markets do not in fact work because they are distorted in the interests of the people with the money.
The original report came out in April, which is the name of a month and a time period, _not_ the "April time frame". Adding verbiage does not make your submission look more impressive or indeed add any meaning whatsoever.
Moving forwards from this present moment in time, I think we should take on board the suggestion that redundant verbiage be deep-sixed, or at least run the concept up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.
That off my chest, calling this thing a V8 is just as annoying as it presumably does not have two angled banks of 4 cores running off a common crankshaft.
Yes, if you must use stupid analogies I will prod them till they break.
The US invades China. In the first battle, a million Chinese are killed for the loss of two Americans. In the second, a million Chinese are killed for the loss of three Americans. In the third, a million Chinese are killed for the loss of four Americans.
The Politburo asks Chairman Mao for a statement. He says "We run out of Americans first".
Now look at the world map, preferably centred on the North Pole, think about global warming, and think _where_ an invading Chinese army would be heading.
T S Eliot also got the OM. For those who don't know (this is after all Slashdot) he was the New Englander who came to England, published some enormously influential poems (The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets), wrote religious plays that actually turned a profit and still get performed, but above all was a hard working director of Faber & Faber, the literary publisher, and had a lot to do with making it a very successful literary publisher. And he was no religious fundamentalist: his religious writings are a million miles from the awful stuff in "Christian" bookshops and he was as likely to be writing about Hinduism or Buddhism as the Bible.
The point being, that Berners-Lee is actually in much better company than the list given in the introduction might have suggested, and this award extends beyond the British gene pool to Americans like Eliot and Anglo-Americans like Churchill.
Slashdot Mirror
Then the storm came for Kingston upon Hull, but I live on a hill on the other side of England and it did not worry me.
Then the storm came for the Mars Rovers, and I was really quite worried about them. What a relief to know that I'm not sociopathic.
Pelagius lived in Kardanoel, he preached a doctrine there
How whether you went to Heaven or Hell, it was your own affair.
Pelagius believed that everybody at all times had the ability to make free decisions, and therefore there was no excuse for any criminal behaviour whatsoever. Nowadays we live in a world in which neurologists and psychologists have demonstrated that this is fundamentally flawed, that much of our decision making is unconscious, and that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice. The views of Pelagius are associated only with far-right evangelical fundamentalist Christians and ditto ditto ditto Muslims, and affect many American legal systems largely because the former group had so much influence in creating them. However, I guess that the great majority of neurologists, experimental psychologists and, in fact, theologians would reject them. From this point of view, Heinlein was massively wrong and was, in fact, allying himself with people whose other views he did not share.
You can't blame Heinlein for this because he was a product of his own time and upbringing. And he did write in the so-called "hard science" fiction school. Physicists, chemists and engineers have often been very dismissive of the soft sciences, and it's only really in the last 30 years or so that they have come to dominate our culture. Heinlein's own cultural exposure would tend to blind him to alternative theories of human behaviour.
So it seems to me you are supporting Heinlein because of one of his mistakes, not because of his very real role as someone who helped map out a large new area of middlebrow literature.
The history of my family on one side is a 150 year process of moving from coal mining through railways to systems design, but I still keep a non-toy miner's lamp in full working order as a reminder, twin meshes and magnetic catch and all. Coal mining is a long way from safe.
Mining explosives is a very specialised subject. The object is to produce shock waves with no blast and no fire (think about it.) You want to break up rock or minerals with the absolute minimum of side effects, using the absolute minimum amount of energy necessary and raising as little dust as possible, not only because of health and safety risks but because any other approach adds cost. If you want to be a mining engineer, you learn explosives at mining school not summer camp. And you learn it, mostly, from mining engineers who are still alive, which gives you some confidence in the training. No, I am not a mining engineer, but I have talked to enough of them, in South Africa and elsewhere, and most of us would not want to earn our living that way.
Yes, replacing the Council with faded yellow Chinese rubber ducks might actually be an improvement.
However, given the way the climate change deniers have been trying to rubbish oceanographers and meteorologists because of their agreement on inconvenient data, the fact that this guy predicted something as counter intuitive as the ducks traveling through a North-west passage in pack ice should give pause for thought.
When even people like Dyson try and rubbish climatologists (presumably because he wants unrestricted space travel and they are warning that this is impossible without doing severe damage to the Earth) this sort of thing reminds us of just (1) how much these people know and (2) what a lot they still want to learn, while their opponents seem to rely on soundbites and dodgy statistics rather than science.
Copier contracts make locked-in ink cartridges look sweet and innocent. Never, ever get into a deal where you are being billed with hidden costs and where capital items are being expensed or leased. You will be in the process of being screwed.
As an example, copier salesmen like to "pre-estimate" for you your predicted usage. Then they persuade you to go for a click-included contract, e.g. 6000 "free" pages per month. Only your real predicted usage is 3000 pages...and there are penalties for downrating. Laugh all the way to the bonus for the next 5 years. And that's without "Colour costs three times as much as B/W" - so that's pretty good because everybody knows you mix three colours - only that's 3* per colour and a colour page is rated as CMYK, so that is 10 times the price of B/W the moment there is the smallest colour dot on the page.
Believe me, stick to costs you can analyse for yourself.
The only real answer is for anti-trust legislation. However, it is clearly legitimate that the use of non-manufacturer consumables should invalidate any portion of the manufacturer warranty that could be affected. In the meantime the answer is not to buy cheap printers. Although HP has the largest market share they are not necessarily the most economical to operate. For basic mono printing Samsung will suit most people, and for colour both Xerox and Oki have some nice mid-range machines (in fact I believe at least one Xerox is a badged Oki.) For high volume mono at lowest cost per page, look at Kyocera, or buy a second user machine e.g. in the HP 4000 series (anything between 4050 and 4350). If possible, before buying insist on a test, bump up the machine web page and check the lifetime page count and, if possible, belt and fuser life remaining.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I wonder what I've done to upset you?
I'm not, in fact, absolutely clear what you mean in your post. There is a difference between implementing redundancy and failover as a policy, using dedicated hardware, and the idea of having servers get together and somehow vote on which is to fulfil a management function, which the article suggests.
Could you clarify what you are saying?
The nearest thing we have nowadays to assembler is tools for compiler optimisation and execution profiling. I expect that Google uses the latest and greatest of these. The simple fact is that nowadays Java is not particularly inefficient, especially when the competition nowadays works in more or less the same way. On the other hand it is possible to build really quite large programs out of Java relatively easily, and expect them to work. Just as you can build an apparently very efficient car (e.g. Toyota Prius) but there is a huge upfront cost in additional development and manufacturing which may outweigh savings compared to conventional technology, so the additional development cost and time to market of developing programs to use less power may exceed the savings. On the other hand, reducing processor power per cycle is a manageable hit with the huge virtue that it then has a vast field of application, i.e. almost every program that runs uses less power without further development. This is therefore the most sensible approach.
I'd like to say "I for one welcome our new thermal monitoring and power optimising group leaders" but I shouldn't encourage the guy who constantly mods my feeble attempts at humor overrated. (I'm sure it's a guy because intelligent women have far better things to do than read feeble humor on Slashdot.)
However, this does look a bit worrying in that at first sight it seems to offer a new single point of failure in that one server has the power to affect others, and if failures occur then fixing monitoring is yet more overhead as part of the overall system workround.
Having said that, and having tried to do something vaguely similar but at a much less advanced level in the 80s, I am sure that Intel have been working out the reliability balance between system complexity on the one hand, and increased reliability due to lower system stress on the other. Does anyone know of any recent publications on the subject?
No, you are wrong. Boeing use good old US carbon fiber, while the Europeans use that low rent carbon fibre stuff. No comparison at all. Carbon fibre comes in litres and the fibre length is in metres, while carbon fiber comes in gallons (or perhaps liters) and fibers are measured in feet, (or perhaps meters). See how easy they are to distinguish?
In the UK, a large number of intelligence protection failures have occurred basically because of the perceived status of the perpetrators. (the best known cases being Philby, Blunt, MacLean and Burgess, all of whom were fairly upper class members of the Intelligence services.) In his fictional books based on composites of the Philby-Burgess case (A Perfect Spy and Tinker,Tailor,Soldier,Spy), John le Carré (who was in a position to know) suggested that the Intelligence services suspected or half knew that they had traitors in their midst all along, but were inhibited from acting against fellow members of the upper classes and their own community.
It would be very interesting indeed to know how far this culture extends into research establishments. It would be expected to be quite pervasive because of the esprit de corps among any professional group.
Of course, perhaps the real answer is that scientists and engineers, by their nature, are the worst people to be allowed to work on secret weapons systems because it contravenes their tendency to want to cooperate, share knowledge and see their own work published. Let's replace them all with Fortune 500 CEOs. That should result in a real peace dividend.
Some (many) /.ers have yet to discover this, but the quest is worthwhile.
I've had no real problems with either AMD or Intel, but none of our recent boxes have been around long enough to be sure. What I would like to know is the likely life upfront, that's the problem.
By the way, though I agree with you in general, as many fans as possible is not always a good idea. It makes a lot of difference where they are placed, and the thing you do not want to do is to create internal vortices. As a matter of principle I pay attention to getting heat away from the CPU and graphics, but it is important to get a good flow over the HDDs and sometimes you find that large coolers actually have a bad effect on the board chipset by blocking flow. My preferred technique is not to use cheap fans but to buy good ones, especially now Muffin fans are available again and there are some really good 5W 120mm ones from Papst. These just produce a huge flow (over a cubic metre per minute) without being too noisy, and with so much air available it is easy to ensure it is going everywhere. The main thing to ensure is that they support the power supply rather than oppose it.
In fact, the last two causes of system failure we had have been a PSU fail (3V going out of regulation) and a SATA chip throw intermittent errors - which wrecked a mirrored setup. Talk about common mode failure. Overclocking is all very well, but not if you actually need to do any real work.
Now what I would like to see advertised - but won't - is slower but highly reliable motherboards, processors and memory at commercial prices. How about a Core Duo Reliability Edition? I would reallyt like to be able to build a server and a few desktops from commodity hardware and almost be able to forget about them for 5 years. I can get HDDs that will do that, but where can I get the commodity silicon where the manufacturer will make a statement about long term reliability?
This is the exact opposite of Dyson, who is so arrogant that he assumes that he can completely master something as large as climate modelling and then reject it, without in fact knowing much about it at all.
There is no such thing as the free market, because access to every market is controlled by special interest gatekeepers. If you don't believe me, just try visiting the NYSE and buying some shares directly. Free market think tanks are as prone to special interest pleading as anybody else - unless you really believe, say, that the Cato Institute takes money from the oil and tobacco industries and is totally uninfluenced by it.
And here in the UK, we have had to move away from the medical profession being allowed to regulate itself as a result of numerous scandals. Although the great majority of physicians are doubtless more altruistic than the majority of society, it's been said that trade unions are like dishwater - the scum rises to the top.
I think that experience in Canada, the UK and most of Europe shows that you must be able to vote for the people that control the health care system, because there are too many ethical, special interest, and economic factors to be left to people acting blindly in their own interests. Adam Smith never foresaw a world of mega-corporations, and his understanding of capitalism was a long way short of that of Marx.
We can do it very effectively.
- First, ban all trading on eBay and Craigslist etc. That will immediately have an impact on pirated goods.
- Secondly, employ large numbers of suitably skilled IT people to find and deal with all servers which allow file sharing. Shut them down regardless of the consequences. If your website is on one of those servers, well, guilt by association was good enough for Sen. McCarthy.
- Third, punish student file sharers appropriately. Put a large police force (let's call it the KGB for short) in all universities, public places, high schools etc. Send convicted criminals to - well, somewhere unpleasant. I'm sure the Russians would lease the Kuril islands, or even parts of Siberia.
- Fourth, only allow CDs and DVDs to be sold by shops with a permanent KGB presence.
- Fifth, ban all computers capable of storing user-transferred content to everybody except corporations with a turnover in excess of $1 billion per year.
- In fact, to be on the safe side, mandate a return to magnetic drum technology and dishwasher size storage. That will get rid of all those iPods and similar piracy devices.
This will work because, before long, the annual turnover of the presently constituted recording industry will fall so dramatically that losses from piracy will be completely insignificant.The USSR inherited what was basically a failed State - Russia - there were after all sound reasons why there were a series of revolutions in the early 1900s. Although the early USSR had a bad record, it was probably better than Tsarist Russia - only we don't know because under the tsars nobody knew or cared how many peasants were killed or starved every year. All the evidence seems to suggest that, for ordinary Russians, the Soviet Union was a better place to live than post-collapse "capitalist" Russia.
And that's before we get started on success stories like Japan, whose post-war economic rise owed a lot to central planning. Or France.
As for economists, they mostly function by telling the people with economic power what they want to hear. That's because they are economists...and they know how to maximise their own incomes. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out, only this weekend, on the American Civil War the Economist got it wrong (because they told the supporters of slavery and the South in the UK what they wanted to hear) while Karl Marx, no less, correctly predicted that the North would win and that it would have to bring about the end of slavery. You have to go to real academic economists, not popularists like the people you mention, (ones who win Nobel prizes, for instance) to find information about how so-called free markets do not in fact work because they are distorted in the interests of the people with the money.
Moving forwards from this present moment in time, I think we should take on board the suggestion that redundant verbiage be deep-sixed, or at least run the concept up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.
That off my chest, calling this thing a V8 is just as annoying as it presumably does not have two angled banks of 4 cores running off a common crankshaft.
Yes, if you must use stupid analogies I will prod them till they break.
The Politburo asks Chairman Mao for a statement. He says "We run out of Americans first".
Now look at the world map, preferably centred on the North Pole, think about global warming, and think _where_ an invading Chinese army would be heading.
The point being, that Berners-Lee is actually in much better company than the list given in the introduction might have suggested, and this award extends beyond the British gene pool to Americans like Eliot and Anglo-Americans like Churchill.