No, it isn't. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Many large employers allow casual net use, as long as it is incidental, doesn't interfere with your work and doesn't hog the resources.
These same employers, of course, also have ethics guidelines prohibiting watching porn, of course. Or using the company computers for political activity or for anything illegal.
Obviously a gun or booze is more dangerous than the internet,
I doubt that.
I can know and understand all the ways in which a gun or alcohol can be dangerous and I can educate my children about these modes of danger and the appropriate measures to be taken to protect oneself against them.
The internet, on the other hand, breeds new forms of danger on a daily basis - no matter what I teach my children, they may still fall for the scam that starts going around tomorrow. Heck, I might fall for it myself. And if we're all lucky it'll only cost us some money (as opposed to stolen identities, wrecked public records, lost jobs, expulsions from schools etc).
A gun is a single thing, that behaves in a deterministic manner. "The Internet" is a billion people with all kinds of intents, backgrounds, motivations. Just mentioning that you're home alone to the wrong person can cost you dearly - and on the net you can never be entirely sure who you're talking to in the first place.
And how is this power produced. I'm going to guess what is happening is that it comes up and warms up till it's core temperature is at the ambient surface temperature. Then it drops like a rock, and uses the heat differential between the core and the cold water to drive some thermo electric engine in reverse. perhaps they toss in some phase change material to extend the thermal capacity.
Special Phase Change Materials (PCMs) on-board the SOLO-TREC expand about 13% when heated above 10 degree Celsius and then correspondingly contract when cooled below 10 degree Celsius. This expansion/contraction produces a high pressure oil that can be collected and periodically released to drive a hydraulic motor for electricity generation and battery recharging. Since its deployment, SOLO-TREC has been making 3~4 dives per day between the surface and 500 meters depth, producing about 1.6 Watt-hours of power each dive to operate the on-board sensors, GPS receiver and communication device.
I'd like to add that JPL is of course the place to go to if you need to run gizmos for a long time on almost-no-energy input, reliably, in rather hostile environments. I mean - the Voyagers are still sending data home, 30+ years later , 100+ AU away and with a transmitter not much better than a modern cell phone...
So wait - artificial physical contact generated by a computer can desensitize people from their real fear of being touched?
But artificial mayhem in video games generated by a computer does not desensitize them against real violence?
Somewhere, a behavioral psychologist is quietly crying...
Yup. This guy is an idiot. How does he know government can always be trusted with the information, among other things.
In order to doubt whether the government can be "trusted" with this information, you'd need to be able to give us some kind of scenario where/how this information could be ab-/mis-used.
Summary says "Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy," and I fear the issue must be less "obvious" than the submitter thought, because I have no idea what "genetic privacy" might be. My genes are read a million times an hour by all kinds of mechanisms - some part of my own cellular apparatus, some part of external infrastructures like bacteria. I'm curious to hear where/how someone might get the idea that there is such a thing as "privacy" on the molecular level.
The biggest potential cause of action here is that the hospital may have violated state procurement laws for publicly funded institutions.
This suggestion, like every similar one, must necessarily be meaningless and useless, since the original poster failed to tell us where in the world this happened. There may not be a "State" or a "procurement law" or any number of things in... well, wherever this might have transpired.
I can send a letter from coast to coast via the USPS. It'll take a couple days and it'll cost me 50 cents.
Meanwhile the great "efficient" "industry" (aka UPS, FedEX, DHL...) who can do everything cheaper than the the government will deliver the same letter for $10 overnight. $20 if I want it insured (which lowers the loss rate to what the USPS gives me for my $0.50)
Is the "overnight" thing worth it to me? Sometimes, yes. At those times I'm happy to pay the price. Most of the time the $0.50 can-take-a-week type of service is entirely sufficient for my letters.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
Sure, assuming we get a revolution in power storage/generation/transmission of a suitable size.
One of the problems with making smaller silicon transistors is the leakage currents start to creep back up higher. This means more power consumption for the same speed. That's in addition to the normal increase in power consumption that goes along with faster clock rates. This type of transistor would sidestep this issue, as well as avoid the limitations of photolithography.
Not really - you're telling the Y2K story here. In reality, nobody has cared much about instructions per second (i.e. "Moore's Law") for the last decade or so - the driver of modern technology has been instructions per second PER WATT.
As others have noted - the P3-500 type box that was the prevalent computing equipment of the year 2000 can be reasonably approximated by a modern smartphone. Without "nanowires" and similar stuff that is good for a neat press-release every couple years (like, uh, this one from 2005: http://www.physorg.com/news4889.html). Materials technology hasn't stood still, layouts are getting smarter, architectures that re-use electrons for more than one task, smarter branch-predictions and, in the end, better integration of component building blocks
I definitely don't see how these are any "easier to make" than random MOSFETs (of which we make a billion to a chip these days and they all work out of the box).
I also don't really see how much "more ideal" they are than MOSFETs. In the end you're going to have to send a couple electrons around. The average transistor these days is switched by maybe a hundred electrons or so (maybe a few hundred, I haven't kept up with the field in the last 10 years). You're definitely not going to get that number below 1 electron for pure quantization reasons, and sheer statistical reliability will probably require many tens of them - so there's not much more "idealness" left to be squeezed out of the concept of "a small switch".
Quite frankly, nanowires have attained the status of nuclear fusion: always just around the corner in terms of economic/technological feasibility.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the day when Moore's law hits a brick wall and people are forced to start thinking in better terms than "I want the same thing that I had last year, only faster and cheaper". Because that thinking has stunted actual (qualitative, not quantitative) technological progress for the last two decades.
Granted, most cheap computers are probably easily covered. but that doesn't mean their network cards are, or modems, or other things.
Wow, you're right - and it's really difficult to install Windows on a toaster as well.
In the real world, of course, I haven't seen a computer with a "network card" or a "modem" in a decade or so. I am guessing that you are living somewhere in the third world and when you write about "installing Windows" you mean "Installing Win95 on a 486DX".
Can you name one brand-name motherboard made in the last 5 years that does NOT have ethernet built in? Or that does have it and WinXP is NOT able to talk to it? Just one?
I've been running Slackware since kernel version 0.9something (93? 94? there abouts) and I definitely know what I'm doing - and yet I gave up on an Ubuntu install just a couple weeks ago, because I simply was unable to get sound to work on a generic white-box with no special hardware in it.
Poking around the website I find that I cannot actually have sound in the current version of Ubuntu unless I'm willing to use a kernel from a different (previous) version of the distro. Had nothing to do with my qualifications, and everything with a borked distribution (that I had downloaded from the official mirror just that day).
Like the GP, I ended up slapping XPpro on it and forget about Ubuntu. I understand that the hardware has to be supported by the OS one way or the other, but when a whole class of hardware (namely every sound card ever made) is amongst the "unsupported hardware" then the OS is faulty.
Some caveats to what you wrote about Chinese: spoken Chinese is actually one of the simplest languages one earth - certainly a lot less confusing than the many cases and forms of English. Written Chinese, however, is surely one of the hardest. The article you link to hints at the reason: it was not in the interests of the upper class through most of Chinese history to be understood by the lower classes. In Europe this was "solved" by the upper classes conducting their business in a different language - the Germans speaking Spanish, the Spanish English, and where necessary you could always fall back on Latin or maybe Greek - which every "educated" (read "rich") person kinda had to know some of anyways. In Chinese, the trick was to keep the spoken language simple enough to give everybody the benefit of language - but keep the written language obscure and unlearnable enough to reserve note-taking and bookkeeping to those with clout.
This means that translation of written Chinese to English will always be harder than, say, Spanish-to-English. However it also means that translation of spoken Chinese-to-English may well be easier than the Spanish counterpart. The troble there is that the representation of meaning will have to be done in a form other than "simple" voice recognition (i.e. speech to text to translated text back to speech) but will have to find some intermediary that preserves the simplicity of the spoken word without introducing the added complexity of the script.
As far as I can tell, that is the real problem with translating Chinese to English by a machine.
[...]I think that Google is jumping the gun on this. [...]
Funny that you should mention a gun there - because guns are already-existing universal translators. They can deliver only one message, but they can say it in every language conceived of by man.
Just sayin...
And for something like the Super Bowl, which nearly everyone watches,
If I read Sports Illustrated correctly (though this is from 2006), not even 1/3 of US Americans watch the Super Bowl (~95M out of ~320M) and maybe another few million around the globe outside the US.
That makes the claim that "nearly everyone watches" it a little vacuous.
Uh - there's a contradiction when, on the one hand, you've been cutting public funding for universities (in real dollars/as fraction of GDP) for the last four decades straight and then, on the other hand, complain that universities should somehow not be allowed to make industrial profits by patenting things.
Cornell, in particular, is a private university. I do not know what fraction of their research funding is public money, but I seriously doubt it's anything to write home about.
Your refusal to put the costs of higher education and the attendant research into the public domain keeps the results of it out of the public domain.
When Lawyers find out how to bill for time travel, especially lawyers with a.signature that mentions the Grey Goo disaster 3 billion years ago, the rest of society will become their indentured servants retroactively a thousand years ago.
It's close enough to the free-fall velocity in vacuum in km per hour, that I'm suspecting that someone at Networkworld just wasn't paying attention to units.
Unfortunately NASA has been hobbled by all kinds of external contractors/suppliers/manufacturers/operators and, apparently, reporters who just aren't quite bright enough to get metric units.
Of course any article about anything that NASA supposedly does/did/said that doesn't come with a link to an official souce might as well be considered a fabrication. There's certainly enough of those around on the net.
how many helicopters are generating zero lift when they hit the ground?
All of them.
As a matter of fact, that's one reason why helicopter crashes are so much more often fatal than regular fixed-wing airplane crashes. A plane gets most of its lift from the wing, and the engine merely provides the propulsion (which is needed to reach the speeds at which you get good lift, of course). An airplane that has all engines failing is still airworthy and will still glide to a degree -- quite frequently well enough such as to allow for an emergency landing. As you have seen many times on TV - plane encounters trouble, does an emergency landing on a field, street, river, anything.
A helicopter, on the other hand, has no aerodynamic lift whatsoever. It is essentially a brick, held up in the air by sheer brute force. If/when the engine goes, there's not such thing as "gliding" back to the ground.
A plane at non-zero speed always has a little lift left as long as there's any part of the lift surfaces (aka wings) still around. A helicopter doesn't have any lift surfaces other than the rotor/engine itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow - the most insightful post in the thread and I don't have mod-points handy. Seriously - you're losing karma here for posting AC...
No, it isn't. You have no idea what you're talking about. Many large employers allow casual net use, as long as it is incidental, doesn't interfere with your work and doesn't hog the resources. These same employers, of course, also have ethics guidelines prohibiting watching porn, of course. Or using the company computers for political activity or for anything illegal.
Obviously a gun or booze is more dangerous than the internet,
I doubt that.
I can know and understand all the ways in which a gun or alcohol can be dangerous and I can educate my children about these modes of danger and the appropriate measures to be taken to protect oneself against them.
The internet, on the other hand, breeds new forms of danger on a daily basis - no matter what I teach my children, they may still fall for the scam that starts going around tomorrow. Heck, I might fall for it myself. And if we're all lucky it'll only cost us some money (as opposed to stolen identities, wrecked public records, lost jobs, expulsions from schools etc).
A gun is a single thing, that behaves in a deterministic manner. "The Internet" is a billion people with all kinds of intents, backgrounds, motivations. Just mentioning that you're home alone to the wrong person can cost you dearly - and on the net you can never be entirely sure who you're talking to in the first place.
And how is this power produced. I'm going to guess what is happening is that it comes up and warms up till it's core temperature is at the ambient surface temperature. Then it drops like a rock, and uses the heat differential between the core and the cold water to drive some thermo electric engine in reverse. perhaps they toss in some phase change material to extend the thermal capacity.
or is it something different?
Why not ask the people who built it? From http://solo-trec.jpl.nasa.gov/SOLO-TREC/ :
I'd like to add that JPL is of course the place to go to if you need to run gizmos for a long time on almost-no-energy input, reliably, in rather hostile environments. I mean - the Voyagers are still sending data home, 30+ years later , 100+ AU away and with a transmitter not much better than a modern cell phone...
My toilet baroque; it's all Bach'd up despite jiggling the Handel.
That's what you get from 325 year old plumbing. Time to upgrade.
But artificial mayhem in video games generated by a computer does not desensitize them against real violence?
Somewhere, a behavioral psychologist is quietly crying...
Yup. This guy is an idiot. How does he know government can always be trusted with the information, among other things.
In order to doubt whether the government can be "trusted" with this information, you'd need to be able to give us some kind of scenario where/how this information could be ab-/mis-used.
Summary says "Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy," and I fear the issue must be less "obvious" than the submitter thought, because I have no idea what "genetic privacy" might be. My genes are read a million times an hour by all kinds of mechanisms - some part of my own cellular apparatus, some part of external infrastructures like bacteria. I'm curious to hear where/how someone might get the idea that there is such a thing as "privacy" on the molecular level.
Why would anybody retract a concept dealing with reality because someone once made a fictional movie?
Should we destroy all computers because of "Metropolis"? Or "Terminator", for that?
The biggest potential cause of action here is that the hospital may have violated state procurement laws for publicly funded institutions.
This suggestion, like every similar one, must necessarily be meaningless and useless, since the original poster failed to tell us where in the world this happened. There may not be a "State" or a "procurement law" or any number of things in ... well, wherever this might have transpired.
any half decent composer should be able to imitate a non-living composer... particularly one in the past.
As opposed to a non-living composer ... in the future?
I think the expert witnesses interpretation carries more weight.
(and don't you love the lack of a posessive apostrophe on the plural of a word ending in 's'... )
I can send a letter from coast to coast via the USPS. It'll take a couple days and it'll cost me 50 cents.
Meanwhile the great "efficient" "industry" (aka UPS, FedEX, DHL ...) who can do everything cheaper than the the government will deliver the same letter for $10 overnight. $20 if I want it insured (which lowers the loss rate to what the USPS gives me for my $0.50)
Is the "overnight" thing worth it to me? Sometimes, yes. At those times I'm happy to pay the price. Most of the time the $0.50 can-take-a-week type of service is entirely sufficient for my letters.
I can see cell phones with the computing power of todays desktops in the next 5-10 years WITHOUT this.
Sure, assuming we get a revolution in power storage/generation/transmission of a suitable size.
One of the problems with making smaller silicon transistors is the leakage currents start to creep back up higher. This means more power consumption for the same speed. That's in addition to the normal increase in power consumption that goes along with faster clock rates. This type of transistor would sidestep this issue, as well as avoid the limitations of photolithography.
Not really - you're telling the Y2K story here. In reality, nobody has cared much about instructions per second (i.e. "Moore's Law") for the last decade or so - the driver of modern technology has been instructions per second PER WATT.
As others have noted - the P3-500 type box that was the prevalent computing equipment of the year 2000 can be reasonably approximated by a modern smartphone. Without "nanowires" and similar stuff that is good for a neat press-release every couple years (like, uh, this one from 2005: http://www.physorg.com/news4889.html). Materials technology hasn't stood still, layouts are getting smarter, architectures that re-use electrons for more than one task, smarter branch-predictions and, in the end, better integration of component building blocks
I definitely don't see how these are any "easier to make" than random MOSFETs (of which we make a billion to a chip these days and they all work out of the box).
I also don't really see how much "more ideal" they are than MOSFETs. In the end you're going to have to send a couple electrons around. The average transistor these days is switched by maybe a hundred electrons or so (maybe a few hundred, I haven't kept up with the field in the last 10 years). You're definitely not going to get that number below 1 electron for pure quantization reasons, and sheer statistical reliability will probably require many tens of them - so there's not much more "idealness" left to be squeezed out of the concept of "a small switch".
Quite frankly, nanowires have attained the status of nuclear fusion: always just around the corner in terms of economic/technological feasibility.
Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to the day when Moore's law hits a brick wall and people are forced to start thinking in better terms than "I want the same thing that I had last year, only faster and cheaper". Because that thinking has stunted actual (qualitative, not quantitative) technological progress for the last two decades.
Also, an argument could be made that base 12 unit systems, e.g. inches/feet/miles, are computationally more convenient. I think.
No. The claim can be made, but there's no argument here anywhere.
How many cm are in a km? How many inches in a mile? How is the latter "computationally more convenient"?
Granted, most cheap computers are probably easily covered. but that doesn't mean their network cards are, or modems, or other things.
Wow, you're right - and it's really difficult to install Windows on a toaster as well.
In the real world, of course, I haven't seen a computer with a "network card" or a "modem" in a decade or so. I am guessing that you are living somewhere in the third world and when you write about "installing Windows" you mean "Installing Win95 on a 486DX".
Can you name one brand-name motherboard made in the last 5 years that does NOT have ethernet built in? Or that does have it and WinXP is NOT able to talk to it? Just one?
I've been running Slackware since kernel version 0.9something (93? 94? there abouts) and I definitely know what I'm doing - and yet I gave up on an Ubuntu install just a couple weeks ago, because I simply was unable to get sound to work on a generic white-box with no special hardware in it.
Poking around the website I find that I cannot actually have sound in the current version of Ubuntu unless I'm willing to use a kernel from a different (previous) version of the distro. Had nothing to do with my qualifications, and everything with a borked distribution (that I had downloaded from the official mirror just that day).
Like the GP, I ended up slapping XPpro on it and forget about Ubuntu. I understand that the hardware has to be supported by the OS one way or the other, but when a whole class of hardware (namely every sound card ever made) is amongst the "unsupported hardware" then the OS is faulty.
Some caveats to what you wrote about Chinese: spoken Chinese is actually one of the simplest languages one earth - certainly a lot less confusing than the many cases and forms of English. Written Chinese, however, is surely one of the hardest. The article you link to hints at the reason: it was not in the interests of the upper class through most of Chinese history to be understood by the lower classes. In Europe this was "solved" by the upper classes conducting their business in a different language - the Germans speaking Spanish, the Spanish English, and where necessary you could always fall back on Latin or maybe Greek - which every "educated" (read "rich") person kinda had to know some of anyways. In Chinese, the trick was to keep the spoken language simple enough to give everybody the benefit of language - but keep the written language obscure and unlearnable enough to reserve note-taking and bookkeeping to those with clout.
This means that translation of written Chinese to English will always be harder than, say, Spanish-to-English. However it also means that translation of spoken Chinese-to-English may well be easier than the Spanish counterpart. The troble there is that the representation of meaning will have to be done in a form other than "simple" voice recognition (i.e. speech to text to translated text back to speech) but will have to find some intermediary that preserves the simplicity of the spoken word without introducing the added complexity of the script.
As far as I can tell, that is the real problem with translating Chinese to English by a machine.
[...]I think that Google is jumping the gun on this. [...]
Funny that you should mention a gun there - because guns are already-existing universal translators. They can deliver only one message, but they can say it in every language conceived of by man. Just sayin...
And for something like the Super Bowl, which nearly everyone watches,
If I read Sports Illustrated correctly (though this is from 2006), not even 1/3 of US Americans watch the Super Bowl (~95M out of ~320M) and maybe another few million around the globe outside the US.
That makes the claim that "nearly everyone watches" it a little vacuous.
Uh - there's a contradiction when, on the one hand, you've been cutting public funding for universities (in real dollars/as fraction of GDP) for the last four decades straight and then, on the other hand, complain that universities should somehow not be allowed to make industrial profits by patenting things.
Cornell, in particular, is a private university. I do not know what fraction of their research funding is public money, but I seriously doubt it's anything to write home about.
Your refusal to put the costs of higher education and the attendant research into the public domain keeps the results of it out of the public domain.
Oh, god - don't give them any ideas.
When Lawyers find out how to bill for time travel, especially lawyers with a .signature that mentions the Grey Goo disaster 3 billion years ago, the rest of society will become their indentured servants retroactively a thousand years ago.
Said a Google spokesperson: "JFS performed really well, XFS was superb, but EXT4 was the killer!""
It's close enough to the free-fall velocity in vacuum in km per hour, that I'm suspecting that someone at Networkworld just wasn't paying attention to units. Unfortunately NASA has been hobbled by all kinds of external contractors/suppliers/manufacturers/operators and, apparently, reporters who just aren't quite bright enough to get metric units. Of course any article about anything that NASA supposedly does/did/said that doesn't come with a link to an official souce might as well be considered a fabrication. There's certainly enough of those around on the net.
how many helicopters are generating zero lift when they hit the ground?
All of them. As a matter of fact, that's one reason why helicopter crashes are so much more often fatal than regular fixed-wing airplane crashes. A plane gets most of its lift from the wing, and the engine merely provides the propulsion (which is needed to reach the speeds at which you get good lift, of course). An airplane that has all engines failing is still airworthy and will still glide to a degree -- quite frequently well enough such as to allow for an emergency landing. As you have seen many times on TV - plane encounters trouble, does an emergency landing on a field, street, river, anything. A helicopter, on the other hand, has no aerodynamic lift whatsoever. It is essentially a brick, held up in the air by sheer brute force. If/when the engine goes, there's not such thing as "gliding" back to the ground. A plane at non-zero speed always has a little lift left as long as there's any part of the lift surfaces (aka wings) still around. A helicopter doesn't have any lift surfaces other than the rotor/engine itself.