***To ensure another Katrina doesn't happy, the Imperial Federal Government will establish behavior guidelines to make sure the citizens are acting in a way that is friendly to our environment.***
And, of course. behavior guidelines for citizens will be augmented by behavior guidelines for tropical storms and hurricanes. They will behave or they will be dealt with most harshly. America will not tolerate terrorist behavior by meteorological entities.
I take it that you won't be back soon. Can't say that I blame you.
I wonder what the hell our department of Homeland Stupidity is doing with all those photographs and fingerprints. Nothing sensible, I'll wager. These are the same guys whose secret No-Fly list has been revealed to be pretty much of a joke.
How about replacing BUY NOW with a button that sends off an email to every congressman and senator asking them to start thinking about reforming the patent and copyright systems to reflect public good rather than the narrow interests of a few parties.
One email to each for every click.
Might give our elected representatives a new perspective on how popular the software/business process patent aspect of Intellectual Property is.
***They dont have to release code.. just give out a 100% accurate specifications.***
Are you assuming that MS has a complete and accurate specification for any of their products? I'd say that the evidence suggests that at best MS starts off with a sort of definition of concept document which is probably rarely updated to reflect what is actually implemented. In my experience, that's how most coding is done, and I certainly don't see any evidence that Microsoft development is a model of rigor.
I'm sure that you are right. But I also remember -- and I think you probably do also -- that when we first saw the Children's Internet Protection Act, it was not interpreted as requiring filtering. It just seem to require that schools think about how they were going to protect students from pornography and other 'harmful content' and come up with a policy. e.g. We aren't going to allow internet access except by staff and from a couple of teacher monitored PCs.
But somehow -- I'm not sure how -- with no change to the law -- filtering (which is expensive and doesn't work very well) became an absolute requirement if you wanted E-rate money. Are you sure some silly thing like that isn't going to happen here?
As for the $##(*@& vendors. They must be breaking some law when they go out and make assertions that they know damn well are false. There's no real difference between this behavior and selling some little old lady junk bonds with the false assertion that they are fully insured and virtually risk free. My own feeling is that the vast majority of software salesmen will surely rot in hell, but perhaps letting them rot in county jails for a while would be a better and more immediate way to discourage their bad behavior.
***I could be that I'm just showing my age, but it doesn't seem right to me that an OS requires a gigabyte of RAM to function. I know they say 512M is the minimum, but I wouldn't want to run with that.***
I imagine that in ten years, the Microsoft and "Linux" offerings d'jour will need 10-20GB of RAM just to boot and run basic stuff. Is that way more than is necessary? Sure. But absent any meaningful pressure to keep things compact, it's always easy to burn size to gain performance. (Title that "Tain't engineering exactly, but it works... sometimes... sorta...") The ONLY thing I can think of that might reverse the trend would be if it suddenly becomes conventional wisdom that the only way to actually achieve computer security is to keep things small, simple, and concise. Could happen, but that wouldn't be the way I would bet.
***At some point, gasoline is going to be too expensive to use as common fuel...***
Gasoline is just a mix of liquid hydrocarbons. Tiday, it's generally made from crude oil, but it could be made from coal, wood chips,or -- I suppose -- fermented grass clippings. At some point, it becomes cost effective to make the stuff from one of the alternative materials.
It's not a bad fuel -- reasonable energy density, easy to store and transport, not all that hazardous, not too toxic, easy to convert to mechanical motion. It can even, with enough hardware, be burnt in a fashion that yields few products other than Carbon Dioxide and Water. I wouldn't be suprised if 'gasoline' powered vehicles are around for a much longer time than anyone anticipates. The actual liquid may be closer to kerosene or diesel, and it may be made with carbon extracted from the atmosphere. But don't be too suprised if the hearse that eventually hauls your body off after a long and productive life runs on "gasoline".
(But you're right. The cost in current dollars is likely going to be lots more than $3.00 a gallon)
***In an unregulated scenario, it would be whoever has the most powerful transmitter would win.***
The guy with the most watts is certainly a likely winner. There are other classes of possible winner who might even beat out the man with the monster transmitter.. For example, the service with the greatest tolerance for interference. I don't know what has happened recently with RF-lighting technology in the 2.4GHz segment, but it seems likely to me that this is a user who is essentially immune from any (realistic) sort of interference. Without regulation, what, other than cost/usability issues in the technology, could prevent it from driving most everyone else from the band?
***The problem is that RMS is a spaced out hippy with not concept of the real world and there are an awful lot of people who think the same way.***
Sounds to me like you want something for nothing and are displeased that you aren't getting it. GNU is Stallman's house. You play there, you play by his rules.
You are perfectly free to not use GPLed software. You are also free to to organize an effort to rewrite the GNU utilities and license your version in some way that fits your (rather peculiar if you ask me) view of reality.
Not all businesses find GPL to be intolerable. Linksys, for example, uses GPLed software, and, as a result, made their Broadcom chip drivers available to the public. Doesn't strike me as being nuts or unbusinesslike in any way.
BTW, it would be more appropriate to accuse Stallman of being a Socialist or Communist than of being a Hippie. Not that there is all that much wrong with people who believe that hitting other people over the head with sticks is not necessarily the best way of interacting with others.
***RCA didn't use transistors in small radios until it was too late***
Actually, American manufacturers did make transistor radios early on, but they were insanely expensive.
The way I heard the story was that American enginners were used to high impedence (voltage driven) tightly-speced vacuum tubes. The first transistors to appear on the market were fairly low impedence (current driven) junction devices with characteristics that varied a lot from device to device. American engineers redesigned their circuits for lower impedence, but continued to expect that the active devices would meet tight specs. That meant that manufacturing had to buy devices that were among the tiny subset of the production run that met the engineer's specs. So their transistors were expensive. And so were the radios made using them.
Japanese engineers on the other hand, designed new circuits that would work reliably with just about any transistor that worked at all. That meant that their radios could be built with the semiconductors that were left over after all the ones that met American Engineering specs had been selected out. Those transistors were cheap because there were a lot of them and not many people willing to buy them. As a result, Japanese transistor radios were a LOT cheaper than American designed radios.
***Why re-invent the wheel? This is open to everyone and well documented on MSDN and countless forums all over the web.***
I dunno. Maybe because Microsoft's designed wheels tend to be irregular polygons with the axle connected at someplace other than the centroid? Often, not always, but often, they ride really rough..
OTOH, I'm far from sure that it is possible to do much better. Microsoft made some really awful decisions early on with regard to data handling (expanding the Windows 3 OLE Registry into the Windows 9-NT horror show) and libraries (failure to control libraries and to provide rational support for multiple versions of DLLs). I fear that it's going to be just about impossible to unmake those decisions.
===========
Since I expect the original poster will read through everything posted I'll comment here that he or she might want to look at http://www.tinyapps.org/blog/ for a fairly decent trove of small, well-behaved, MSDOS/Windows programs. Many are ports of Unix software. Some are real jewels -- OffByOne is a small, fast, Web Browser that does a pretty good job with most web sites (better than, say dillo). Scanner is a very pretty disk analysis tool. OffByOne runs fine with Wine BTW. Haven't tried Scanner -- think I'll go do that right now.
In addition to partitioning the class A addresses, how about taking a serious look at class D and Class E allocations? Hardly anyone uses or supports multicast. Does it really need 16 Class D allocations? And why do we need 16 experimental (class E) allocations? Maybe we need more than 1, but 16?
***Have you considered that Y2K problems were only averted because we recongized the problem beforehand and took steps to correct it? Y2K was a success, not a poster-boy for scare-mongering.***
Yep
Now if you want to see scare-mongering, just wait until 2037 -- about a year before a huge number of systems -- including an immense number of (probably) un-reprogrammable appliances will overflow their 32 bit time counters. I won't be around then, but many slashdotters will. You folks better hope that roll-over is handled as well as Y2K was. My guess. The major stuff will be. The world will keep running. But there will be a gazillion 'intelligent' devices that will suddenly get a lot dumber.
***An interesting aspect of the Chinese system is that the basic symbols have alternate "fancy" forms with a lot more strokes. These characters have the property that you can't add strokes to convert them to a different character. So they're an anti-tampering, fraud-proof way of writing numbers. I don't know of another numeric notation with this feature. Asian financial documents have historically used these fancy forms of numbers.***
I'd never thought about it. Not only are you right, but Chinese numbers -- even the basic forms -- are much less ambiguous than our familiar 'arabic' forms. I was once involved in a project that tried to OCR the amount field on checks. Amongst the many problems, some people manage to handwrite 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 in shapes that are virtually identical. Try decoding that sort of check. The biggest suprise. Courier typeface 5s and 6s differ only in a couple of dots. Even people sometimes can't distinguish the two when typed/printed with an old ribbon.
***But there are thousands of example of people who legitimatly made money from patent, as well as many, many examples of progress made with patents.***
Both true. BUT There are too many patents that are based on (often known) prior art, are incomprehensbible, overreach, or are obvious. I personally don't think the occasional case where the system works as intended is enough to offset its flaws. Neither does the system seem to be fixable.
If it were fixed, I wouldn't object to it.
***The patent system is fine except for 2 things: Software patents, business method patents.***
No, it's really not. An acquaintance bent my ear a few months ago about patents on chemical compounds that he was sure the "inventor" couldn't even make. (how the hell can you justify patents on a chemical compound -- not a technology for making it -- the compound itself?) . And how about patents on DNA sequences?. And the incredible royalty fees associated with some patented drugs and medical tests -- although straightening out the shambles that is the pharmaceutical/medical industry is a monumental job and patents are only a small part of the job.
Far as I can see, patents are an 18th Century system that should have been dratically altered and eventually discarded as times changed.
It's not entirely relevant, but it seems not to be as well known as it ought to be. There actually was was a patent on the automobile -- the Selden Patent -- US Patent 549,160. It was issued in 1895 and was used to extort substantial royalty payments from early automobile makers. Henry Ford refused to go along and Selden -- a patent attorney -- not only sued Ford but threatened to sue Ford's customers. The case, of course dragged on forever with a lot of the antics that we are only too familiar with today. eventually, the courts narrowed the scope of Seldon's patent so much that it no longer applied to any vehicle made in the US.
This is only one of the numerous examples of how the patent system has impeded innovation and has mostly made a mess of things. Another shining example was the airplane. Most of the basic patents in the US were held by either the Wright Brothers or Glen Curtiss. The Wrights and Curtiss despised one another and engaged in a decade of pointless and expensive legal wrangling. Aircraft makers were unsure what to license from whom and often couldn't negotiate terms. The result was that when World War I came along, the US was far behind Europe in aircraft technology even though the airplane was invented in the US. In order to get the US back into the aircraft business before the huns or turks or whoever started bombing New York, a patent pool was established and litigation was put on hold. Thankfully it was not reinstated after the war.
Y'know what. We got along just fine without software patents for 20 years. I think we could do so again. I'd go further than that, and (carefully) dismantle the entire damn Patent system. It's pointless, doesn't -- so far as I can see -- encourage innovation, and doesn't even work very well. We've got enough problems with global warming, overpopulation, incompetent and mendacious leaders, corporations run amock, etc, etc, etc. Why go out of our way to create more?
It's only in the past year or two that Linux has reached the point where one could consider giving it to a non-geek user. And it isn't going to work out for all of them because of hardware or software support issues. Or because the geek who set it up for them was a fan of some elaborate user interface like NextStep that is absolutely incomprehensible to a Windows User. Or because something they do often works poorly. Or maybe because they just plain don't like Linux.
But as time goes by and more and more geeks and semi-geeks and small businesses, and even some big businesses start using Linux, ordinary people will start to switch. PC vendors that will sell and support Linux machines --- maybe for a few bucks less than Windows will help. It'll take a while. But as Windows becomes more and more bloated, more user hostile, harder to work on, and continues to be a security nightmare, folks will switch. Just give it time.
(Exactly how 'Intellectual Property' owners are going to get their tithes isn't real clear to me. Maybe they won't and will have to find real work... Oh well...)
Oh yeah. And get a Linux box up yourself even if you only use to to check Slashdot and a few other simple tasks. How can geeks expect others to flock to Linux if they themselves stick with Windows?
Summary: For telegraphy, Chinese characters are assigned numeiic codes in radical-stroke count order. That's the way that Japanese, and -- I assume -- Chinese, dictionaries, are arranged.
It may seem inefficient to use 20 bits (sort of) to encode a character, but remember that each character is a word, not a letter, and that composite words like "Beijing" or "paleontology" are only two words. That means that most "words" will be either 2.5 or 5 eight "bit" characters. Conventional telegraphy is really a trinary rather than a binary code -- pause, short, and long, and the 'digits' differ in length -- so bit count isn't really all that accurate an analogy.
So, no, the Chinese language probably wouldn't have made the development of computers by the Chinese all that much more difficult than European languages did. And the classic Chinese numeric notation is not as convenient as 'arabic' notation. But it's much less unwieldy than say Roman numerals, so I don't think it would have been an insumountable hurdle either.
Scanning through the comments already posted, I see some of the usual strengths and weaknesses of Slashdot postings. the weaknesses being mostly the Post_Fast_Or_No_One_Will_Read_It syndrome.
This article is about AGRESSIVE prostate cancer which is relatively rare.
Ordinary prostate cancer is very common and often proceeds so slowly that it is often left untreated in older patients. It is often said that men die WITH prostate cancer, not OF prostate cancer. True of the general population. Not true of those with the agressive form.
There is a perfectly OK and inexpensive blood test for prostate cancer that is generally covered by insurance. It's biggest deficiency is a large number of false positives.
There are three treatments for prostate cancer -- Surgery which can cause impotence and other nasty problems. Chemical therapy which is tough on the body. (X)Radiation which leads to some temporary discomfort but is not otherwise even especially unpleasant.
Hormone (Testosterone) supression is also used as a therapy, generally in conjunction with chemotherapy and radiation. The idea is that the therapy weakens the cancer cells and the lack of Testosterone finishes them off.
The principle utility of this discovery -- if it leads to a test -- is that it will help in screening patients who need immediate treatment for their prostate cancer from those where it is reasonable to wait and see how fast the cancer progresses. That's important because a large number of elderly men have prostate cancer (50% is a common estimate) and there aren't close to enough resources to treat them all. Nor, probably, is there any need to do so.
***Heck, this card will be TOO important! What if it is lost! Why, I can't be identified, buy or sell, get health care...***
There are some obvious benefits to tying some medical information to a person's ID to discourage inappropriate medical treatment (e.g antibiotic restricions) and to notify emergency workers of other special situations. Other than that, how about we just stick to cash, checks, and credit cards? Got enough problems with those. Let's don't compound the problems just now.
***These have existed more or less unchanged for a couple thousand years. It's not as though all the minds contemplating the Bible simply skipped over that, and all of a sudden someone on slashdot points it out and "disproves" the Bible.***
Lets ignore the fact that the New testament is -- pretty much by definition -- less than 2000 years old. We'll go with the Old Testament where it is a given that most of the historical minds contemplating the bible really have simply skipped over the numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies in the material. It is only in the past Century or so that pointing out that Genesis is a jumble of inconsistent stories, that the biblical flood is obvious nonsense, etc has not been a quick route to ostracism, torture or death. Even Mark Twain who died in 1910 held off on publishing some of his more extreme material on the Bible until after his death.
Even today, stating that the God depicted in the old testament looks to be a pychopathic mass murderer is considered to be extreme.
Personally, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the Bible -- especially the New Testament -- contains a lot of important ethical teachings. But divinely inspired? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, why the hell are his teachings in such obvious and serious need of basic copy editing?
They still have a way to go in a number of respects, but it looks like when they do start to be deployed, they will have energy densities that are substantially higher than chemical batteries.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course. behavior guidelines for citizens will be augmented by behavior guidelines for tropical storms and hurricanes. They will behave or they will be dealt with most harshly. America will not tolerate terrorist behavior by meteorological entities.
I wonder what the hell our department of Homeland Stupidity is doing with all those photographs and fingerprints. Nothing sensible, I'll wager. These are the same guys whose secret No-Fly list has been revealed to be pretty much of a joke.
One email to each for every click.
Might give our elected representatives a new perspective on how popular the software/business process patent aspect of Intellectual Property is.
Are you assuming that MS has a complete and accurate specification for any of their products? I'd say that the evidence suggests that at best MS starts off with a sort of definition of concept document which is probably rarely updated to reflect what is actually implemented. In my experience, that's how most coding is done, and I certainly don't see any evidence that Microsoft development is a model of rigor.
But somehow -- I'm not sure how -- with no change to the law -- filtering (which is expensive and doesn't work very well) became an absolute requirement if you wanted E-rate money. Are you sure some silly thing like that isn't going to happen here?
As for the $##(*@& vendors. They must be breaking some law when they go out and make assertions that they know damn well are false. There's no real difference between this behavior and selling some little old lady junk bonds with the false assertion that they are fully insured and virtually risk free. My own feeling is that the vast majority of software salesmen will surely rot in hell, but perhaps letting them rot in county jails for a while would be a better and more immediate way to discourage their bad behavior.
I dunno. How about, it's news because it indicates that Microsoft's product testing is less than industrial strength?
I imagine that in ten years, the Microsoft and "Linux" offerings d'jour will need 10-20GB of RAM just to boot and run basic stuff. Is that way more than is necessary? Sure. But absent any meaningful pressure to keep things compact, it's always easy to burn size to gain performance. (Title that "Tain't engineering exactly, but it works ... sometimes ... sorta...") The ONLY thing I can think of that might reverse the trend would be if it suddenly becomes conventional wisdom that the only way to actually achieve computer security is to keep things small, simple, and concise. Could happen, but that wouldn't be the way I would bet.
Gasoline is just a mix of liquid hydrocarbons. Tiday, it's generally made from crude oil, but it could be made from coal, wood chips,or -- I suppose -- fermented grass clippings. At some point, it becomes cost effective to make the stuff from one of the alternative materials.
It's not a bad fuel -- reasonable energy density, easy to store and transport, not all that hazardous, not too toxic, easy to convert to mechanical motion. It can even, with enough hardware, be burnt in a fashion that yields few products other than Carbon Dioxide and Water. I wouldn't be suprised if 'gasoline' powered vehicles are around for a much longer time than anyone anticipates. The actual liquid may be closer to kerosene or diesel, and it may be made with carbon extracted from the atmosphere. But don't be too suprised if the hearse that eventually hauls your body off after a long and productive life runs on "gasoline".
(But you're right. The cost in current dollars is likely going to be lots more than $3.00 a gallon)
The guy with the most watts is certainly a likely winner. There are other classes of possible winner who might even beat out the man with the monster transmitter.. For example, the service with the greatest tolerance for interference. I don't know what has happened recently with RF-lighting technology in the 2.4GHz segment, but it seems likely to me that this is a user who is essentially immune from any (realistic) sort of interference. Without regulation, what, other than cost/usability issues in the technology, could prevent it from driving most everyone else from the band?
Sounds to me like you want something for nothing and are displeased that you aren't getting it. GNU is Stallman's house. You play there, you play by his rules.
You are perfectly free to not use GPLed software. You are also free to to organize an effort to rewrite the GNU utilities and license your version in some way that fits your (rather peculiar if you ask me) view of reality.
Not all businesses find GPL to be intolerable. Linksys, for example, uses GPLed software, and, as a result, made their Broadcom chip drivers available to the public. Doesn't strike me as being nuts or unbusinesslike in any way.
BTW, it would be more appropriate to accuse Stallman of being a Socialist or Communist than of being a Hippie. Not that there is all that much wrong with people who believe that hitting other people over the head with sticks is not necessarily the best way of interacting with others.
Actually, American manufacturers did make transistor radios early on, but they were insanely expensive.
The way I heard the story was that American enginners were used to high impedence (voltage driven) tightly-speced vacuum tubes. The first transistors to appear on the market were fairly low impedence (current driven) junction devices with characteristics that varied a lot from device to device. American engineers redesigned their circuits for lower impedence, but continued to expect that the active devices would meet tight specs. That meant that manufacturing had to buy devices that were among the tiny subset of the production run that met the engineer's specs. So their transistors were expensive. And so were the radios made using them.
Japanese engineers on the other hand, designed new circuits that would work reliably with just about any transistor that worked at all. That meant that their radios could be built with the semiconductors that were left over after all the ones that met American Engineering specs had been selected out. Those transistors were cheap because there were a lot of them and not many people willing to buy them. As a result, Japanese transistor radios were a LOT cheaper than American designed radios.
Could well be true.
I dunno. Maybe because Microsoft's designed wheels tend to be irregular polygons with the axle connected at someplace other than the centroid? Often, not always, but often, they ride really rough..
OTOH, I'm far from sure that it is possible to do much better. Microsoft made some really awful decisions early on with regard to data handling (expanding the Windows 3 OLE Registry into the Windows 9-NT horror show) and libraries (failure to control libraries and to provide rational support for multiple versions of DLLs). I fear that it's going to be just about impossible to unmake those decisions.
===========
Since I expect the original poster will read through everything posted I'll comment here that he or she might want to look at http://www.tinyapps.org/blog/ for a fairly decent trove of small, well-behaved, MSDOS/Windows programs. Many are ports of Unix software. Some are real jewels -- OffByOne is a small, fast, Web Browser that does a pretty good job with most web sites (better than, say dillo). Scanner is a very pretty disk analysis tool. OffByOne runs fine with Wine BTW. Haven't tried Scanner -- think I'll go do that right now.
In addition to partitioning the class A addresses, how about taking a serious look at class D and Class E allocations? Hardly anyone uses or supports multicast. Does it really need 16 Class D allocations? And why do we need 16 experimental (class E) allocations? Maybe we need more than 1, but 16?
Yep
Now if you want to see scare-mongering, just wait until 2037 -- about a year before a huge number of systems -- including an immense number of (probably) un-reprogrammable appliances will overflow their 32 bit time counters. I won't be around then, but many slashdotters will. You folks better hope that roll-over is handled as well as Y2K was. My guess. The major stuff will be. The world will keep running. But there will be a gazillion 'intelligent' devices that will suddenly get a lot dumber.
***An interesting aspect of the Chinese system is that the basic symbols have alternate "fancy" forms with a lot more strokes. These characters have the property that you can't add strokes to convert them to a different character. So they're an anti-tampering, fraud-proof way of writing numbers. I don't know of another numeric notation with this feature. Asian financial documents have historically used these fancy forms of numbers.***
I'd never thought about it. Not only are you right, but Chinese numbers -- even the basic forms -- are much less ambiguous than our familiar 'arabic' forms. I was once involved in a project that tried to OCR the amount field on checks. Amongst the many problems, some people manage to handwrite 1, 2, 4, 7, 9 in shapes that are virtually identical. Try decoding that sort of check. The biggest suprise. Courier typeface 5s and 6s differ only in a couple of dots. Even people sometimes can't distinguish the two when typed/printed with an old ribbon.
Yup! Goes to show what happens when you let Godless athiests establish the curriculum in schools.
Both true. BUT There are too many patents that are based on (often known) prior art, are incomprehensbible, overreach, or are obvious. I personally don't think the occasional case where the system works as intended is enough to offset its flaws. Neither does the system seem to be fixable.
If it were fixed, I wouldn't object to it.
***The patent system is fine except for 2 things: Software patents, business method patents.***
No, it's really not. An acquaintance bent my ear a few months ago about patents on chemical compounds that he was sure the "inventor" couldn't even make. (how the hell can you justify patents on a chemical compound -- not a technology for making it -- the compound itself?) . And how about patents on DNA sequences?. And the incredible royalty fees associated with some patented drugs and medical tests -- although straightening out the shambles that is the pharmaceutical/medical industry is a monumental job and patents are only a small part of the job.
Far as I can see, patents are an 18th Century system that should have been dratically altered and eventually discarded as times changed.
This is only one of the numerous examples of how the patent system has impeded innovation and has mostly made a mess of things. Another shining example was the airplane. Most of the basic patents in the US were held by either the Wright Brothers or Glen Curtiss. The Wrights and Curtiss despised one another and engaged in a decade of pointless and expensive legal wrangling. Aircraft makers were unsure what to license from whom and often couldn't negotiate terms. The result was that when World War I came along, the US was far behind Europe in aircraft technology even though the airplane was invented in the US. In order to get the US back into the aircraft business before the huns or turks or whoever started bombing New York, a patent pool was established and litigation was put on hold. Thankfully it was not reinstated after the war.
Y'know what. We got along just fine without software patents for 20 years. I think we could do so again. I'd go further than that, and (carefully) dismantle the entire damn Patent system. It's pointless, doesn't -- so far as I can see -- encourage innovation, and doesn't even work very well. We've got enough problems with global warming, overpopulation, incompetent and mendacious leaders, corporations run amock, etc, etc, etc. Why go out of our way to create more?
But as time goes by and more and more geeks and semi-geeks and small businesses, and even some big businesses start using Linux, ordinary people will start to switch. PC vendors that will sell and support Linux machines --- maybe for a few bucks less than Windows will help. It'll take a while. But as Windows becomes more and more bloated, more user hostile, harder to work on, and continues to be a security nightmare, folks will switch. Just give it time.
(Exactly how 'Intellectual Property' owners are going to get their tithes isn't real clear to me. Maybe they won't and will have to find real work ... Oh well ...)
Oh yeah. And get a Linux box up yourself even if you only use to to check Slashdot and a few other simple tasks. How can geeks expect others to flock to Linux if they themselves stick with Windows?
The answer would seem to be -- sort of ... maybe. See http://www.njstar.com/tools/telecode/jim-reeds-ctc .htm.
Summary: For telegraphy, Chinese characters are assigned numeiic codes in radical-stroke count order. That's the way that Japanese, and -- I assume -- Chinese, dictionaries, are arranged.
It may seem inefficient to use 20 bits (sort of) to encode a character, but remember that each character is a word, not a letter, and that composite words like "Beijing" or "paleontology" are only two words. That means that most "words" will be either 2.5 or 5 eight "bit" characters. Conventional telegraphy is really a trinary rather than a binary code -- pause, short, and long, and the 'digits' differ in length -- so bit count isn't really all that accurate an analogy.
So, no, the Chinese language probably wouldn't have made the development of computers by the Chinese all that much more difficult than European languages did. And the classic Chinese numeric notation is not as convenient as 'arabic' notation. But it's much less unwieldy than say Roman numerals, so I don't think it would have been an insumountable hurdle either.
Very nice. Thanks.
There are some obvious benefits to tying some medical information to a person's ID to discourage inappropriate medical treatment (e.g antibiotic restricions) and to notify emergency workers of other special situations. Other than that, how about we just stick to cash, checks, and credit cards? Got enough problems with those. Let's don't compound the problems just now.
Lets ignore the fact that the New testament is -- pretty much by definition -- less than 2000 years old. We'll go with the Old Testament where it is a given that most of the historical minds contemplating the bible really have simply skipped over the numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies in the material. It is only in the past Century or so that pointing out that Genesis is a jumble of inconsistent stories, that the biblical flood is obvious nonsense, etc has not been a quick route to ostracism, torture or death. Even Mark Twain who died in 1910 held off on publishing some of his more extreme material on the Bible until after his death.
Even today, stating that the God depicted in the old testament looks to be a pychopathic mass murderer is considered to be extreme.
Personally, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the Bible -- especially the New Testament -- contains a lot of important ethical teachings. But divinely inspired? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, why the hell are his teachings in such obvious and serious need of basic copy editing?
They still have a way to go in a number of respects, but it looks like when they do start to be deployed, they will have energy densities that are substantially higher than chemical batteries.