"Most places in the world, local calls are 'free'"? Actually, that turns out not to be the case. In the USA and Canada, local calls are unmetered, i.e. included in your monthly line rental charge. But in every other country that I have lived in (Costa Rica, Norway, UK) and most other countries that I have checked (Kenya, France, Japan, Brazil), local calls are charged per call or per unit of time (i.e. per minute or per six seconds). In Germany and Australia, you can get line rental packages that include free unmetered local calls, but lower-priced packages charge you per call or per minute.
About those natural gas taxis... NGVAmerica says there are 150,000 natural gas vehicles on U.S. roads today and over 5 million worldwide. Apparently this includes at least 300 New York taxis (admittedly a small fraction of the city's 12,000 taxicabs).
Ford even offered natural gas as an option on quite a few cars in the late '90s and early '00s, including the Crown Victoria, but they apparently stopped offering it around 2003 and now it's only available as an aftermarket conversion. Fleets of taxis, buses, and delivery vehicles do use natural gas but few "normal people" do.
I'm not sure the Moore's Law analogy holds. In the argument that leads to procrastination being the best strategy for the big computing problem, there's an assumption that your computing project is independent of the development of the technology it uses. The technology would continue to advance no matter when you bought your equipment, or even whether you bought it or not, and your project won't affect the improvement of the technology.
For the spaceflight problem, though, spaceflight technology will only advance if people are building, flying, and improving spaceships. If everybody just sits around waiting for the technology to appear, it won't.
Here in the UK, you can install an "economy 7" meter in your house which is essentially two meters in one, with "day" and "night" (typically 1:00-8:00 am) readings. "Night" consumption is charged at a lower rate. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7. All power companies support this scheme.
I don't think that's the real problem. What "normal" person has ever installed an operating system of any kind? They don't install Windows or MacOS, that's done in the shop for them. The real problem of Linux is that it's rare to find a computer retailer offering it as an option, preinstalled as part of buying the computer.
Actually that was what I was talking about. A simulator might save on computational effort by simulating photons as probability distributions most of the time, rather than tracking each and every photon. Thus in the double-slit experiment, an interference pattern is produced. But if we set up detectors at the slits, in order to find out which slit the photon is passing through, then we force the simulator to simulate each individual photon -- and as a result, a different pattern appears on the screen.
Hm. That's an interesting idea. One of the articles at that site includes the observation that such a simulation wouldn't have to simulate everything down to the greatest level of detail at all times, but could conserve computing power by just simulating things that are under direct observation.
"If the book you are holding in your hands is a simulated book, the simulation would only need to include its visual appearance, its weight and texture, and a few other macroscopic properties, because you have no way of knowing what its individual atoms are doing at this moment. If you were to study the book more carefully, for example by examining it under a powerful microscope, additional details of the simulation could be filled in as needed. Objects that nobody is perceiving could have an even more compressed representation. Such simplifications would dramatically reduce the computational requirements."
Isn't that what actually happens in quantum-level experiments? If we are observing the double slits, the photons do one thing, but if we're not watching the slits, they do something else?
George Monbiot recently suggested that the arguments of those who "deny" climate change have passed through four phases:
Global warming isn't happening.
Well, ok, global warming is happening, but it's a good thing. We can grow grapes in Yorkshire!
Ok, yes it's happening and yes it's a bad thing, but it would cost more to prevent it than to live with it.
It's happening, it's a bad thing, it will cost more to live with it than to deal with it... but it's the fault of the Chinese
He then suggests that the next stage will be: Yes it's happening, it's a bad thing, it will cost more to live with than to prevent, it's not just the fault of the Chinese... but it's too late.
In the UK there is an established emergency services protocol called "Access Overload Control". In "major incidents" the senior police officer on the scene can invoke ACCOLC, specifying the location of the incident, and the mobile phone companies will restrict calls to phones whose SIM cards have been programmed in advance with an authorisation code (ambulance, police, fire, etc, plus phone company techs). Everyone else gets a network busy signal.
Most reports say that on the day of the bombings in London, the mobile phone networks were overloaded, but were not shut down by the security services. Some reports say ACCOLC was invoked only in one 1-km square area, although Vodaphone is cited as saying they invoked ACCOLC across all of London while other network operators said they hadn't done so but had simply been overloaded.
I think several of the things I mentioned would also work in Texas, but it's true that different places do have different problems. I use a lot of energy to heat my house, whereas I suppose you use a lot of energy to cool yours. So some of the solutions may be different, but they do exist. For example, I suspect that solar power has a lot more potential for you than it does for me. And with three times the land area you have plenty of space for wind farms, in fact the BBC reported that "According to a US Department of Energy study, most of the electricity needs of the whole country could be provided by the wind power potential of three states: Kansas, North Dakota and Texas". Anyway, although I can't speak from personal experience of living in Texas, herearesomemade-in-Texasideas.
The one thing I consistently see lacking from the "lets do something" crowd is specific, realistic recommendations of what to do.
Here are some realistic ideas. I consider them realistic because I have done all of them, and they all save money as well as energy & environmental impact:
Energy-saving (compact flourescent) lightbulbs in every lamp in the house.
Double-glazing in all windows. Ok, that's not rocket science but here in the UK it's not universal either.
Home heating system on a timer. No need to heat the house when I'm at work.
I deliberately chose to live in a house that is close enough to my workplace that I can walk or bicycle to work easily. Location, location, location.
This may not be possible in all countries, but here in the UK, you can choose from multiple competing electricity suppliers, just like you have a selection of long-distance telephone companies in other countries. I have chosen a supplier that generates its electricity primarily from wind and hydro. I know that not everyone likes wind turbines, but I happen to think they look quite nice -- certainly much nicer than the smokestacks of a coal-burning power station! These days, most power companies here have similar offers, and they normally cost about the same as electricity from fossil fuel.
Getting a bit more radical: I don't own a car. As noted above, I don't need a motor vehicle to get to and from work, and most of the shopping that I do is not much farther away than my office, all of which covers the majority of the trips I make. I happen to live in a city that has buses and trains and taxis, so I use those when I need to -- the money I save by not running a car more than covers taking a taxi several times a month, and my total motor vehicle travel is much less than it would be if I had a car in my drive. I normally take longer trips by train, but I know people who subscribe to car-sharing schemes (e.g. http://www.carplus.org.uk/carplus/ukv2.php) if they need more frequent use or longer trips.
Even more radical: when I go shopping for fruit and veg, I buy things that are grown locally whenever possible. I don't like the idea of sponsoring airplane tickets for fruit flying around the planet, so I tend to buy local. I'm not fanatical, but I think my food miles (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/food_matters/foodmiles. shtml) are fewer than most people's.
I'm told that a rooftop solar panel will take care of all of my water-heating needs in the summer, and about half in the winter. I'm going to give it a try. I figure it should help a bit with the radiators for room heating, too.
"Fair use" has a proper definition, and what you describe above ain't it. Computer companies think of software licenses the same way government vehicle licensing authorities think of car license plates. You have to buy a license plate for each car you own, and if you say, "I consider using the single license plate that I bought on all of my cars to be fair use", the cop will say, "ha ha ha, no."
Switch to Linux, then you can use the single copy of Linux that you downloaded on all of your computers and everyone will agree it's fair.
Corporations -- not just music companies, but the very concept of corporations as legal constructs -- were invented to allow people to work together on bigger projects and take on more risk than they could do if they were risking their personal assets. Book and music publishers arose for the same reason: authors/musicians couldn't afford to produce and distribute their own works, so publishing houses sprung up to raise capital and manage risk. But now publishing (either online or vanity press) costs very little, and many musicians can produce and distribute their own music. Publishers, being middlemen, capital-raisers, and risk managers, are no longer required, at least not in the form they have taken up to now. But just like an organism, an organisation's first priority is survival.
I remember a few years ago hearing people say that the last remaining function of record companies was filtering: in a world of self-publishing, there will be a lot of crap and the good stuff will be hard to find, so record companies would find the good stuff and filter out the crap. I suppose the results speak for themselves, in a way... but besides that, there are now enough user-driven filters and recommendation and referral services that this function will also be unnecessary.
At the universities I have attended or worked at, there were university regulations that explicitly prohibited students from submitting the same paper for more than one course. I doubt most high schools have such detailed rules, though.
In previous discussions on this, quite a few/.ers have questioned the need for machines at all. It's been pointed out that the old-fashioned method of people scribbling marks on pieces of paper, with people counting those papers by hand while other people look over their shoulders, is not only as open and transparent a process as you can imagine, it also scales really well: as the number of available and motivated voters increases, the number of available and motivated counters likely increases at about the same rate.
In Canada, for example, voting is done on paper and votes are counted by hand on the night of the election, with representatives of each political party (i.e. party volunteers) watching the counts at each polling station. This seems to work fairly well and the results are completed the same night. The USA may have ten times as many people but it also has therefore ten times as many counters.
I guess the main difference is that Canadian ballots are much simpler, as USA ballots have many positions on the ballot paper. But this doesn't seem like a showstopper to me. Are machines necessary at all?
It's been pointed out here before that manual vote-counting scales well. If you have ten times as many voters, you also have ten times as many vote-counters. You can keep the number of voters per polling station constant, and just set up more polling stations, which therefore cover smaller geographic areas. Ok, you have to add up more numbers from more polling stations, but that's hardly a barrier.
Mark Pesce argues that the broadcast TV industry is about to fundamentally change, and this Google deal seems to be part of what he is suggesting. Pesce also suggests that it might be more economical to distribute an advertising-supported TV show for free on DVD (e.g. given away with your daily newspaper) than on broadcast television, and that on-screen advertising during the programme (e.g. flashing in the corner of your screen) may replace ads placed between acts. A video of his presentation is available via BitTorrent (see link above) and in a lower-quality version via Google video.
And conversely, try dividing a foot in 10 in your head, then try it with a meter.
Why would you want to divide something by 10? Well, for one thing, +/- 10% is a pretty common margin of error that you would want to quantify. For another, one often wishes to design something to accommodate, say, the 90th percentile; I've never heard anyone say they want to design for 11/12ths of the population.
When I studied civil engineering in Canada we were actually exposed to the concept of using decimal fractions of English units -- 12.35 feet, for example. But most of what we did was in metric units, which are much more convenient for pretty much any kind of calculations.
Slashdot Mirror
"Most places in the world, local calls are 'free'"? Actually, that turns out not to be the case. In the USA and Canada, local calls are unmetered, i.e. included in your monthly line rental charge. But in every other country that I have lived in (Costa Rica, Norway, UK) and most other countries that I have checked (Kenya, France, Japan, Brazil), local calls are charged per call or per unit of time (i.e. per minute or per six seconds). In Germany and Australia, you can get line rental packages that include free unmetered local calls, but lower-priced packages charge you per call or per minute.
About those natural gas taxis... NGVAmerica says there are 150,000 natural gas vehicles on U.S. roads today and over 5 million worldwide. Apparently this includes at least 300 New York taxis (admittedly a small fraction of the city's 12,000 taxicabs).
Ford even offered natural gas as an option on quite a few cars in the late '90s and early '00s, including the Crown Victoria, but they apparently stopped offering it around 2003 and now it's only available as an aftermarket conversion. Fleets of taxis, buses, and delivery vehicles do use natural gas but few "normal people" do.
I'm not sure the Moore's Law analogy holds. In the argument that leads to procrastination being the best strategy for the big computing problem, there's an assumption that your computing project is independent of the development of the technology it uses. The technology would continue to advance no matter when you bought your equipment, or even whether you bought it or not, and your project won't affect the improvement of the technology.
For the spaceflight problem, though, spaceflight technology will only advance if people are building, flying, and improving spaceships. If everybody just sits around waiting for the technology to appear, it won't.
Here in the UK, you can install an "economy 7" meter in your house which is essentially two meters in one, with "day" and "night" (typically 1:00-8:00 am) readings. "Night" consumption is charged at a lower rate. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_7. All power companies support this scheme.
I don't think that's the real problem. What "normal" person has ever installed an operating system of any kind? They don't install Windows or MacOS, that's done in the shop for them. The real problem of Linux is that it's rare to find a computer retailer offering it as an option, preinstalled as part of buying the computer.
Actually that was what I was talking about. A simulator might save on computational effort by simulating photons as probability distributions most of the time, rather than tracking each and every photon. Thus in the double-slit experiment, an interference pattern is produced. But if we set up detectors at the slits, in order to find out which slit the photon is passing through, then we force the simulator to simulate each individual photon -- and as a result, a different pattern appears on the screen.
Hm. That's an interesting idea. One of the articles at that site includes the observation that such a simulation wouldn't have to simulate everything down to the greatest level of detail at all times, but could conserve computing power by just simulating things that are under direct observation.
Isn't that what actually happens in quantum-level experiments? If we are observing the double slits, the photons do one thing, but if we're not watching the slits, they do something else?
George Monbiot recently suggested that the arguments of those who "deny" climate change have passed through four phases:
He then suggests that the next stage will be: Yes it's happening, it's a bad thing, it will cost more to live with than to prevent, it's not just the fault of the Chinese... but it's too late.
In the UK there is an established emergency services protocol called "Access Overload Control". In "major incidents" the senior police officer on the scene can invoke ACCOLC, specifying the location of the incident, and the mobile phone companies will restrict calls to phones whose SIM cards have been programmed in advance with an authorisation code (ambulance, police, fire, etc, plus phone company techs). Everyone else gets a network busy signal.
Most reports say that on the day of the bombings in London, the mobile phone networks were overloaded, but were not shut down by the security services. Some reports say ACCOLC was invoked only in one 1-km square area, although Vodaphone is cited as saying they invoked ACCOLC across all of London while other network operators said they hadn't done so but had simply been overloaded.
I think several of the things I mentioned would also work in Texas, but it's true that different places do have different problems. I use a lot of energy to heat my house, whereas I suppose you use a lot of energy to cool yours. So some of the solutions may be different, but they do exist. For example, I suspect that solar power has a lot more potential for you than it does for me. And with three times the land area you have plenty of space for wind farms, in fact the BBC reported that "According to a US Department of Energy study, most of the electricity needs of the whole country could be provided by the wind power potential of three states: Kansas, North Dakota and Texas". Anyway, although I can't speak from personal experience of living in Texas, here are some made-in-Texas ideas.
The one thing I consistently see lacking from the "lets do something" crowd is specific, realistic recommendations of what to do.
Here are some realistic ideas. I consider them realistic because I have done all of them, and they all save money as well as energy & environmental impact:
I'm told that a rooftop solar panel will take care of all of my water-heating needs in the summer, and about half in the winter. I'm going to give it a try. I figure it should help a bit with the radiators for room heating, too.
"Fair use" has a proper definition, and what you describe above ain't it. Computer companies think of software licenses the same way government vehicle licensing authorities think of car license plates. You have to buy a license plate for each car you own, and if you say, "I consider using the single license plate that I bought on all of my cars to be fair use", the cop will say, "ha ha ha, no."
Switch to Linux, then you can use the single copy of Linux that you downloaded on all of your computers and everyone will agree it's fair.
Corporations -- not just music companies, but the very concept of corporations as legal constructs -- were invented to allow people to work together on bigger projects and take on more risk than they could do if they were risking their personal assets. Book and music publishers arose for the same reason: authors/musicians couldn't afford to produce and distribute their own works, so publishing houses sprung up to raise capital and manage risk. But now publishing (either online or vanity press) costs very little, and many musicians can produce and distribute their own music. Publishers, being middlemen, capital-raisers, and risk managers, are no longer required, at least not in the form they have taken up to now. But just like an organism, an organisation's first priority is survival.
I remember a few years ago hearing people say that the last remaining function of record companies was filtering: in a world of self-publishing, there will be a lot of crap and the good stuff will be hard to find, so record companies would find the good stuff and filter out the crap. I suppose the results speak for themselves, in a way... but besides that, there are now enough user-driven filters and recommendation and referral services that this function will also be unnecessary.
At the universities I have attended or worked at, there were university regulations that explicitly prohibited students from submitting the same paper for more than one course. I doubt most high schools have such detailed rules, though.
In previous discussions on this, quite a few /.ers have questioned the need for machines at all. It's been pointed out that the old-fashioned method of people scribbling marks on pieces of paper, with people counting those papers by hand while other people look over their shoulders, is not only as open and transparent a process as you can imagine, it also scales really well: as the number of available and motivated voters increases, the number of available and motivated counters likely increases at about the same rate.
In Canada, for example, voting is done on paper and votes are counted by hand on the night of the election, with representatives of each political party (i.e. party volunteers) watching the counts at each polling station. This seems to work fairly well and the results are completed the same night. The USA may have ten times as many people but it also has therefore ten times as many counters.
I guess the main difference is that Canadian ballots are much simpler, as USA ballots have many positions on the ballot paper. But this doesn't seem like a showstopper to me. Are machines necessary at all?
Take off, eh. Hoser.
It's been pointed out here before that manual vote-counting scales well. If you have ten times as many voters, you also have ten times as many vote-counters. You can keep the number of voters per polling station constant, and just set up more polling stations, which therefore cover smaller geographic areas. Ok, you have to add up more numbers from more polling stations, but that's hardly a barrier.
Spanish is spreading pretty quickly in the USA. I wonder if it might not be much longer before the USA becomes a bilingual country?
Mark Pesce argues that the broadcast TV industry is about to fundamentally change, and this Google deal seems to be part of what he is suggesting. Pesce also suggests that it might be more economical to distribute an advertising-supported TV show for free on DVD (e.g. given away with your daily newspaper) than on broadcast television, and that on-screen advertising during the programme (e.g. flashing in the corner of your screen) may replace ads placed between acts. A video of his presentation is available via BitTorrent (see link above) and in a lower-quality version via Google video.
"I honestly expected better from the CERT [us-cert.gov] folks. I don't know why, but I really did."
Maybe you were thinking of the original CERT http://www.cert.org/ at Carnegie Mellon.
And conversely, try dividing a foot in 10 in your head, then try it with a meter. Why would you want to divide something by 10? Well, for one thing, +/- 10% is a pretty common margin of error that you would want to quantify. For another, one often wishes to design something to accommodate, say, the 90th percentile; I've never heard anyone say they want to design for 11/12ths of the population. When I studied civil engineering in Canada we were actually exposed to the concept of using decimal fractions of English units -- 12.35 feet, for example. But most of what we did was in metric units, which are much more convenient for pretty much any kind of calculations.
Re-read TFA more carefully. The Filipina in question is Marie, the nurse described in the first paragraph (and the fourth paragraph).