Well, it really depends. I'm not a hard drive expert, but if you just leave a very complex mechanical device sitting around in an uncontrolled environment, it will be subject to things like thermal stress (which is bad for magnetic things and small, calibrated mechanical parts).
Then of course you have to worry about magnets not holding their state forever.
Probably the best bet would be to get a really high quality, slow spinning drive (or one that can be made to spin up slowly), and hooking it up to a tiny embedded controller that will spin it up gently (accelerating a disk to 7200 RPM also isn't too good for mechanical longevity) every once in 6 months or so, as calmofthestorm suggested below. Then run some sort of checksum on the data, and do some drive diagnostics, and if the drive looks like it's failing, send an email to someone. And keep a couple of these setups in different locations with the same data in temperature controlled environments.
Keeping a hard drive powered off isn't bad for a drive, but no storage system can last forever. And, once bits are stored in such a small space, quantum effects will start to degrade data visibly over time no matter what the medium.
My money (longer term in say 3-5 years) is on Memristors winning over flash. Memristors can be made very small, they are also easy to design with and easy to make (on existing production lines) and they have better speed and better lifespan than Flash.
Memristors, the components that are less than a year old? The ones that there are probably less than a thousand of in existence?
Something tells me we might need to wait and see a little bit(no pun intended) before knowing that they are faster and have a better lifespan than flash, which lasts longer than solid state memristors have existed.
I have an interesting idea...
Start up a company that sells "synthetic" diamonds, but inflates the cost by about 50%
Take some of the money from the 50% as revenue, and donate the rest to African charities.
Shallow women will love it because it still costs more than it should, and you won't feel like an asshole buying it because it actually helped people, and it would still be cheaper than "natural" diamonds.
If they are going to shave the patient's head, then why bother with the fancy probes? They would just use normal electrodes if the skin wasn't covered with hair.
The idea behind these is that you can easily place the electrodes--easy being without cutting all their hair off.
Well, the idea isn't to just have all of your disk(s) encrypted, you should break it up a bit.
If you have 10, 1TB RAID arrays, and one of them happens to be a random mess, it's not going to hold up in any reasonable court of law that it is actually encrypted.
As for why you have TrueCrypt, well just encode confidential stuff like receipts from legal purchases and credit card records.
I actually have TrueCrypt installed and was planning on encrypting my main RAID array and never got around to it, but I did encrypt a 10GB partition to test it, and immediately forgot the key. Rather than fixing it (I'm not running out of space anytime soon, why bother?) I just wrote random bits to it for the hell of it.
Good luck finding the key for my 'secret partition'
(Yes that is a true story, although obviously you can't verify that)
If you were going to do something like that, you might as well just destroy your hard disks with thermite or something to ensure that no one can read them.
In either case you are destroying evidence that you know the police are looking for, so you'll still be in trouble.
This is why TrueCrypt (and other encryption programs) can make partitions that are indistinguishable from random data.
So basically, say oh that 2TB of disks? I accidentally typed in `cat/dev/urandom >/dev/md0` while logged in as root. There's no encrypted files there!
And (well if they are being legal and reasonable) there is no way to prove otherwise, and they can't legally hold you responsible.
Crap, you're right, sorry. I guess I just lumped microwaves and ionizing radiation into the same category for some stupid reason...
So to modify what I said before, as long as it isn't ionizing radiation or microwave radiation (or some other frequency at which things in our body resonate) there isn't a safety problem, is there?
I remember getting the RCX a few years ago, I think that was probably one of my first experiences programming even...
I would not recommend the default graphic programming language for 11-14 year-olds, however. There are a lot of third part languages you can use to program it, which not only allow you to do more, but also will be more educational and feel less like a toy to the kids.
I agree with you that programming something like a robot is nice because they get to do something in the real world, but at that age, the kids should really be doing something more than sticking blocks together on a screen.
On a similar note, you may want to try Processing/Wiring. Both are based on Java, so they are pretty easy. Wiring is used in a lot of micro-controllers, so it might be interesting to try that route instead of the Lego kit if the kids are really into it.
The problem with cell phones isn't really the amount of EM radiation, it's the fact that it is ionizing radiation.
It's the same reason only UV rays give you sunburns/skin cancer, they are the only ionizing radiation.
I don't know what frequency they are using (I didn't read the article, of course), but if they use a frequency of non-ionizing radiation, there isn't much of a problem.
(That isn't to say there is no problem, but the effects of non-ionizing radiation are significantly less. That's why radio or TV towers don't just sterilize everyone in a mile radius)
Technology isn't as horrible as you think. Sure, kids should know how to do math and other basic skills without a computer, but if we keep teaching in the 20th century, how are we going to make any real progress?
I am sure that some people protested the use of books in education, when they first became widely available, citing the fact that the advancements up to that time were made with very few people every owning books! Not only that, but if kids get books they might go off reading fictional stories when they could be working!
Just because people can learn with less, doesn't mean that it is better. Why not teach kids to use all the tools they need, including their brains? It doesn't make sense to purposefully handicap them.
If my phone number and address were available, then people could easily contact and harass me. It's true that they could do the same to anyone, but that doesn't mean they will stop harassing people all together. Instead what would (probably) happen, is people would just choose who they want to harass. (Just think about 4chan, for instance, they don't do it because it's difficult, they do it to harass people)
Likewise, the government wouldn't just change laws, instead they would (probably) just use the information they have to go after people they don't like.
I am just speculating of course, and you do have a lot of valid points, like with SSNs for isntance. But I don't agree that if society was completely open, people would suddenly stop abusing their power and stop being assholes to other people. Instead, it would just be easier for them to do these things.
We (or at least some of us) also want privacy to prevent annoyances and for protection.
I certainly don't want to have to answer to the government anytime I say the word "bomb" or "terrorist" on the telephone, in email, or in an IM.
I also don't want some company complaining anytime they see me buy a product from one of their competitors.
I also don't want to have everyone on the internet knowing my social security number, address, license plate number, or telephone number.
That isn't because of "shame" that's because people can be assholes, and some people will abuse information. I don't care if people that I trust know these things, but I don't think shame or masks or whatever has anything to do with getting one's identity stolen, or having the government ensure you don't say anything bad about them.
That said, I don't think this public dataset business really affects individual privacy. This is more a database of already public, but hard to find, data, that doesn't contain personally identifiable anything in it.
Let's just hope they keep it that way.
I don't see any issues here.
Anything made by the government should already be available with an open license, and I'm pretty sure that YouTube will be willing to bend a few policies for the President of the United States if they are asked.
I also don't think that it would be difficult for someone working with Obama to just convert the videos to various open formats and put them up on the official White House website, as well as YouTube so Joe the Plumber can watch them easily. (Most people wouldn't watch the videos if they couldn't just find them immediately on YouTube.)
I don't think they need a whole petition, none of this is hard to do. Just ask nicely and I think Obama would gladly agree? Or is there some large problem I'm missing here because I didn't read the article?
I have the Logitech G7 wireless mouse.
It's designed for gaming, so it's not quite the same as a normal wireless mouse, but the performance is great (it also has two Lithium Ion battery packs because it goes through them so quickly...)
I can move the mouse as fast as I can on almost any surface and it doesn't lose track of how I am moving it, and even though it's wireless, I haven't noticed any latency problems at all.
I don't have any numbers, just anecdotal evidence, but maybe you're just buying really cheap mice? or maybe they just don't bother fixing stuff like that unless they have to, so they can market the mice to gamers and charge more money for it...
Ahhh, I thought from your original post you were talking about more conventional methods (well, if you can ever call FTL travel conventional...) of traveling.
I retract my previous statements, sorry doubting you:)
</discussion>
Sorry I didn't mean to offend you, I was mainly saying that
I must be dumb. How? Can you break it down for us?
1. Travel to Mars faster than 4 minutes, say X.
2. Travel back to Earth faster than 4 minutes, so now 2*X.
3. Ok, so now it's S+2*X at Earth, how did you travel back in time?
was an over simplification, and that time doesn't really act as one would expect it to (or at least not how I would)
As for why faster than light means back in time, well, my understanding of special relativity is not very deep, but from what I gather, moving faster than light means that an inertial reference frame can exist where time is moving backwards. (This comes from time dilation)
And then, since special relativity states that physics is the same for all reference frames, then if something can move back in time in one reference frame, it can move back in all reference frames.
Yea, unfortunately it isn't anything as simple as taking the time traveled and just multiplying it by two.
Basically what relativity tells us is that time is relative, so the time you spend going to Mars and back at the speed of light or faster is actually a different amount of time than is observed on Earth.
You can read up on it here or here a bit.
Unless I missed something and nowadays downloading at high speeds suddenly endangers the lives of those sharing your connection, you may want to rethink that comparison.
I don't think that the economy will be affected too much because of wealth not being redistributed. After all, it's not like all the rich folk simply have their money go to charities when they die, it usually goes to their already rich families.
But as for resources... we are already (sort of) feeling the strain of our energy resources being depleted. Having the same thing apply to food, land, and other resources will be devastating unless we can figure out some workaround for all of those.
Even with that said though, I'm not sure if we can be sure that the quality of life will go down. I think our quality of life is probably higher than it was a thousand years ago, and our lifespans have been mostly increasing since then. Most of the same arguments about class issues would apply to them too, as Monarchies are even more affected by longer lives.
If the life expectancy jumped to 120 overnight, we certainly couldn't support it, but if it's a gradual change, we will probably be able to adjust, and have the quality of life improve too.
Well, at least people are waiting until more research comes in on the effects of this before trying to mass market this as some sort of magical age extender for humans.
Oh... wait...
Though it will be interesting to see if this has any noticeable effects on the many people that I'm sure are taking this stuff regularly.
Right, I would think that they will keep the old system too.
The point is if we still keep the old system, which never had any problems, and have this new system over it, we're not really seeing any change it's just the same old thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it really depends. I'm not a hard drive expert, but if you just leave a very complex mechanical device sitting around in an uncontrolled environment, it will be subject to things like thermal stress (which is bad for magnetic things and small, calibrated mechanical parts).
Then of course you have to worry about magnets not holding their state forever.
Probably the best bet would be to get a really high quality, slow spinning drive (or one that can be made to spin up slowly), and hooking it up to a tiny embedded controller that will spin it up gently (accelerating a disk to 7200 RPM also isn't too good for mechanical longevity) every once in 6 months or so, as calmofthestorm suggested below. Then run some sort of checksum on the data, and do some drive diagnostics, and if the drive looks like it's failing, send an email to someone. And keep a couple of these setups in different locations with the same data in temperature controlled environments.
Keeping a hard drive powered off isn't bad for a drive, but no storage system can last forever. And, once bits are stored in such a small space, quantum effects will start to degrade data visibly over time no matter what the medium.
My money (longer term in say 3-5 years) is on Memristors winning over flash. Memristors can be made very small, they are also easy to design with and easy to make (on existing production lines) and they have better speed and better lifespan than Flash.
Memristors, the components that are less than a year old? The ones that there are probably less than a thousand of in existence?
Something tells me we might need to wait and see a little bit(no pun intended) before knowing that they are faster and have a better lifespan than flash, which lasts longer than solid state memristors have existed.
I have an interesting idea...
Start up a company that sells "synthetic" diamonds, but inflates the cost by about 50%
Take some of the money from the 50% as revenue, and donate the rest to African charities.
Shallow women will love it because it still costs more than it should, and you won't feel like an asshole buying it because it actually helped people, and it would still be cheaper than "natural" diamonds.
If they are going to shave the patient's head, then why bother with the fancy probes? They would just use normal electrodes if the skin wasn't covered with hair.
The idea behind these is that you can easily place the electrodes--easy being without cutting all their hair off.
You wouldn't care about a little 5% increase.
But 1%-2%... that's more like it!
Well, the idea isn't to just have all of your disk(s) encrypted, you should break it up a bit.
If you have 10, 1TB RAID arrays, and one of them happens to be a random mess, it's not going to hold up in any reasonable court of law that it is actually encrypted.
As for why you have TrueCrypt, well just encode confidential stuff like receipts from legal purchases and credit card records.
I actually have TrueCrypt installed and was planning on encrypting my main RAID array and never got around to it, but I did encrypt a 10GB partition to test it, and immediately forgot the key. Rather than fixing it (I'm not running out of space anytime soon, why bother?) I just wrote random bits to it for the hell of it.
Good luck finding the key for my 'secret partition'
(Yes that is a true story, although obviously you can't verify that)
Unfortunately, that is obstruction of justice.
If you were going to do something like that, you might as well just destroy your hard disks with thermite or something to ensure that no one can read them.
In either case you are destroying evidence that you know the police are looking for, so you'll still be in trouble.
This is why TrueCrypt (and other encryption programs) can make partitions that are indistinguishable from random data.
/dev/urandom > /dev/md0` while logged in as root. There's no encrypted files there!
So basically, say oh that 2TB of disks? I accidentally typed in `cat
And (well if they are being legal and reasonable) there is no way to prove otherwise, and they can't legally hold you responsible.
Crap, you're right, sorry. I guess I just lumped microwaves and ionizing radiation into the same category for some stupid reason...
So to modify what I said before, as long as it isn't ionizing radiation or microwave radiation (or some other frequency at which things in our body resonate) there isn't a safety problem, is there?
I remember getting the RCX a few years ago, I think that was probably one of my first experiences programming even...
I would not recommend the default graphic programming language for 11-14 year-olds, however. There are a lot of third part languages you can use to program it, which not only allow you to do more, but also will be more educational and feel less like a toy to the kids.
I agree with you that programming something like a robot is nice because they get to do something in the real world, but at that age, the kids should really be doing something more than sticking blocks together on a screen.
On a similar note, you may want to try Processing/Wiring. Both are based on Java, so they are pretty easy. Wiring is used in a lot of micro-controllers, so it might be interesting to try that route instead of the Lego kit if the kids are really into it.
The problem with cell phones isn't really the amount of EM radiation, it's the fact that it is ionizing radiation.
It's the same reason only UV rays give you sunburns/skin cancer, they are the only ionizing radiation.
I don't know what frequency they are using (I didn't read the article, of course), but if they use a frequency of non-ionizing radiation, there isn't much of a problem.
(That isn't to say there is no problem, but the effects of non-ionizing radiation are significantly less. That's why radio or TV towers don't just sterilize everyone in a mile radius)
How about a $300 PC?
Technology isn't as horrible as you think. Sure, kids should know how to do math and other basic skills without a computer, but if we keep teaching in the 20th century, how are we going to make any real progress?
I am sure that some people protested the use of books in education, when they first became widely available, citing the fact that the advancements up to that time were made with very few people every owning books! Not only that, but if kids get books they might go off reading fictional stories when they could be working!
Just because people can learn with less, doesn't mean that it is better. Why not teach kids to use all the tools they need, including their brains? It doesn't make sense to purposefully handicap them.
I know know what the fuss is about brainfuck, it's a bit annoying, but as far as esoteric programming languages go it isn't that bad.
If you like using whitespaces, you should love whitespace!
If my phone number and address were available, then people could easily contact and harass me. It's true that they could do the same to anyone, but that doesn't mean they will stop harassing people all together. Instead what would (probably) happen, is people would just choose who they want to harass. (Just think about 4chan, for instance, they don't do it because it's difficult, they do it to harass people)
Likewise, the government wouldn't just change laws, instead they would (probably) just use the information they have to go after people they don't like.
I am just speculating of course, and you do have a lot of valid points, like with SSNs for isntance. But I don't agree that if society was completely open, people would suddenly stop abusing their power and stop being assholes to other people. Instead, it would just be easier for them to do these things.
We (or at least some of us) also want privacy to prevent annoyances and for protection.
I certainly don't want to have to answer to the government anytime I say the word "bomb" or "terrorist" on the telephone, in email, or in an IM.
I also don't want some company complaining anytime they see me buy a product from one of their competitors.
I also don't want to have everyone on the internet knowing my social security number, address, license plate number, or telephone number.
That isn't because of "shame" that's because people can be assholes, and some people will abuse information. I don't care if people that I trust know these things, but I don't think shame or masks or whatever has anything to do with getting one's identity stolen, or having the government ensure you don't say anything bad about them.
That said, I don't think this public dataset business really affects individual privacy. This is more a database of already public, but hard to find, data, that doesn't contain personally identifiable anything in it.
Let's just hope they keep it that way.
I don't see any issues here.
Anything made by the government should already be available with an open license, and I'm pretty sure that YouTube will be willing to bend a few policies for the President of the United States if they are asked.
I also don't think that it would be difficult for someone working with Obama to just convert the videos to various open formats and put them up on the official White House website, as well as YouTube so Joe the Plumber can watch them easily. (Most people wouldn't watch the videos if they couldn't just find them immediately on YouTube.)
I don't think they need a whole petition, none of this is hard to do. Just ask nicely and I think Obama would gladly agree? Or is there some large problem I'm missing here because I didn't read the article?
I have the Logitech G7 wireless mouse.
It's designed for gaming, so it's not quite the same as a normal wireless mouse, but the performance is great (it also has two Lithium Ion battery packs because it goes through them so quickly...)
I can move the mouse as fast as I can on almost any surface and it doesn't lose track of how I am moving it, and even though it's wireless, I haven't noticed any latency problems at all.
I don't have any numbers, just anecdotal evidence, but maybe you're just buying really cheap mice? or maybe they just don't bother fixing stuff like that unless they have to, so they can market the mice to gamers and charge more money for it...
Ahhh, I thought from your original post you were talking about more conventional methods (well, if you can ever call FTL travel conventional...) of traveling. :)
I retract my previous statements, sorry doubting you
</discussion>
I must be dumb. How? Can you break it down for us?
1. Travel to Mars faster than 4 minutes, say X.
2. Travel back to Earth faster than 4 minutes, so now 2*X.
3. Ok, so now it's S+2*X at Earth, how did you travel back in time?
was an over simplification, and that time doesn't really act as one would expect it to (or at least not how I would)
As for why faster than light means back in time, well, my understanding of special relativity is not very deep, but from what I gather, moving faster than light means that an inertial reference frame can exist where time is moving backwards. (This comes from time dilation)
And then, since special relativity states that physics is the same for all reference frames, then if something can move back in time in one reference frame, it can move back in all reference frames.
Yea, unfortunately it isn't anything as simple as taking the time traveled and just multiplying it by two.
Basically what relativity tells us is that time is relative, so the time you spend going to Mars and back at the speed of light or faster is actually a different amount of time than is observed on Earth.
You can read up on it here or here a bit.
Relativity and time dilation.
What? That makes no sense.
Unless I missed something and nowadays downloading at high speeds suddenly endangers the lives of those sharing your connection, you may want to rethink that comparison.
I don't think that the economy will be affected too much because of wealth not being redistributed. After all, it's not like all the rich folk simply have their money go to charities when they die, it usually goes to their already rich families.
But as for resources... we are already (sort of) feeling the strain of our energy resources being depleted. Having the same thing apply to food, land, and other resources will be devastating unless we can figure out some workaround for all of those.
Even with that said though, I'm not sure if we can be sure that the quality of life will go down. I think our quality of life is probably higher than it was a thousand years ago, and our lifespans have been mostly increasing since then. Most of the same arguments about class issues would apply to them too, as Monarchies are even more affected by longer lives.
If the life expectancy jumped to 120 overnight, we certainly couldn't support it, but if it's a gradual change, we will probably be able to adjust, and have the quality of life improve too.
Well, at least people are waiting until more research comes in on the effects of this before trying to mass market this as some sort of magical age extender for humans.
Oh... wait...
Though it will be interesting to see if this has any noticeable effects on the many people that I'm sure are taking this stuff regularly.
Right, I would think that they will keep the old system too.
The point is if we still keep the old system, which never had any problems, and have this new system over it, we're not really seeing any change it's just the same old thing.