As much as you might complain about it, the fact that it works its way up to affect the rich people, who can afford to be outraged and can afford the publicity means that it becomes a lot bigger news than a victim from a less wealthy background. Stories like this slip through the cracks all the time, and they're publicized only on a local level, possibly to friends or family. When it affects someone of this kind of standing, he raises his buddies, lawyers up, and gathers a legal defense and a public outcry, and the government has to step down, hopefully for everybody. The government often has to take the response of the people into consideration, and the more publicity a story about a high-profile person receives, the higher the chance that it becomes a persistent or issue that requires addressing. So yes, it happens to everybody, and not much gets done about it. But the more people it affects and the more people complain, loudly, the more likely it is that powers could be rolled back, instead of quietly advanced.
I'm curious now, but if there's an inherent instability, would the properties of physics slowly change over time, as its constituents begin to alter or decay?
I remember in the book Battlefield Earth, the invaders had protected their technology by making a dummy circuit with traditional methods, but etching the actual circuit at a molecular level to make it invisible. When the system detected that it was being tampered with or opened without the proper methods, it blew the dummy circuit to look like it was booby-trapped, and then wiped out the actual circuit to eliminate all the traces. Anyone who didn't know how to properly work around the tamper would end up with a dead board. I'm curious, but do things like that exist in modern hardware? I'd love to have the community chime in on how forensic analysis and/or reverse engineering of circuits is done these days, and methods of preventing it from occurring.
Patents are also only valid for 20 years. I see this bandied point around to the point of being nearly trollish - by patenting something, yes, you tie it up, but you've also created 1) an asset you can license out 2) a codified body of knowledge that anyone can refer to. You've done your homework well enough that someone else can look at later and see what you did, in exchange for protection of that process. Big Oil companies have been around a lot longer than 20 years and have their fair share of patents, some of which have already expired. By revealing that they've done the research and patenting the process, they've started the clock ticking on what will eventually become public domain. So yes, they can "stifle innovation" for a short while, but it's not a permanent block, just a temporary stopgap to widespread use, if they found something that would get in the way of their own commercial success.
So I realize that the internet, bluetooth, and 2G signals are ways of getting devices to interact with each other, but is there any centralized off-the-shelf solution for conglomerating feeds and getting things to talk with each other, or does everything require customized approaches for receiving and working with the data in any way?
Amazon has done something right with their Kindles. While there are others out there that work amazingly well, the Kindle 4 with the ad-supported option is the closest I've come to ever treating a fancy electronic gadget as a "consumble" - if it gets stolen, it's not going to make me *that* upset, since it's only $69 and does everything I expect it to. That's the price of a few hardback books, and it can hold gigabytes worth of literature; I don't know about you guys, but I can't read more than a few dozen megabytes worth of text in a month.
I already have enough trouble focusing and reading it with my other gadgets handy without the option for websurfing on my device. It's not a tablet, and I don't want it to be. It's all of my library that can be "turned on" with a button, charged up once a month or two, fits in a pocket, and can be taken on any sort of trip. If it's stolen, big deal - at that price, it won't ruin your day. It's easily hackable to remove the ads, but those ads aren't terribly intrusive to begin with. The format options leave a little to be desired, but 2 minutes with Calibre gives you any format you could want for all of your books. Is it as functional as a tablet? No. It's not trying to be though. It's a book alternative with a pretty damn cool technology they've cooked up, at a price where you don't have to choose between which device you want to own.
How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.
VLC is one of those must-haves on any newly reformatted system. They've done an excellent job of making a player that Just Works, for every single format I could encounter in the field. I use it as a simple video player, but in the many years that I've been using it, I've only encountered one format ever that even VLC threw up its hands and refused to play. They're constantly updating performance, threading capability, offering all kinds of new features and options well beyond what I use VLC for. Since Windows stopped bundling a lot of DVD software natively, they've been the go-to software of choice for close to a decade, and they deserve to have their efforts and their project rewarded with solid backing, since they've managed to navigate through the morass of codecs and incompatible formats, while remaining lightweight, intuitive, and universally functional. Good luck guys =)!
There's been a trend on Slashdot to shoot down questions like this without due consideration of what the submitter is asking, or just posting some obvious answers and consider the issue resolved. It was really nice to see this thread put forth a lot of information from the community. I didn't realize that there were 1) issues with SATA drives having issues on things like this 2) that there were people who cared about this kind of thing enough to have done the homework and the research behind it. It's called to my attention that there's a sub-genre of people for whom this matters, a lot. I've ripped scores of CDs in the last decade, but never paid enough mind to have it as more than a rarely-used utility. Thanks for the information, and you go, geeks =)!
I'm really interested to know how this affects Intel. If their main competitor is (theoretically) starting to die off as a company, that would naturally push them towards a monopolistic state, simply because so few companies *can* compete any more. Building next gen chips seems like it's an awfully high barrier to entry for a company just getting started. With the prospect of becoming an actual monopoly it seems like Intel would really want AMD to continue thriving in just enough capacity to keep sharpening their claws against them. Throwing it out there for the business-savvy or people who have seen it before in the economy, but what do you do to keep your competitor alive?
I've seen people answering both sides of this saying the other is wrong. Can we get some further discussion and consensus on this? I'd love to know in one way or another.
I realize Google is my friend in this, but I'd love to hear from insider perspective what sort of advances are actually *in use* in clinics and hospitals these days. About 10-15 years ago I used to read in Pop Sci about the innovations in needle technology - serrating the edge like a mosquito, using thinner needles, new kinds of shots, and using these painless, efficient methods of delivering vaccines and medicine. What of those actually panned out? It's been about 10 years since I've received a vaccination; did any of those technologies we read about 10 years ago make it into the field?
In the increasingly litigious world of software, it seemed like a lot of Easter eggs disappeared from operating systems and from business software. Software became professional and had less use for a sense of humor, undocumented code became a possible liability, and it seems to be looked upon a little more as having no place in the business world. Which is said, I think.
We all love the stories, but I'm curious what the last twenty years have suggested as we've become more detailed and accurate with some of our modelings and scientific theories. I *am* wondering what the actual state of science is currently. FTL is proposed to be impossible, but has science concluded that things like wormholes can actually function the way sci-fi suggests and frequently makes use of? Are there any physical properties that don't violate FTL laws, but work around them? Or have we decided that conventional acceleration is the only known way to actually move through space, both in theory and in practice?
Slashdot Mirror
You're welcome to start a company even a fraction as successful as Amazon and run things the way you see fit.
As much as you might complain about it, the fact that it works its way up to affect the rich people, who can afford to be outraged and can afford the publicity means that it becomes a lot bigger news than a victim from a less wealthy background. Stories like this slip through the cracks all the time, and they're publicized only on a local level, possibly to friends or family. When it affects someone of this kind of standing, he raises his buddies, lawyers up, and gathers a legal defense and a public outcry, and the government has to step down, hopefully for everybody. The government often has to take the response of the people into consideration, and the more publicity a story about a high-profile person receives, the higher the chance that it becomes a persistent or issue that requires addressing. So yes, it happens to everybody, and not much gets done about it. But the more people it affects and the more people complain, loudly, the more likely it is that powers could be rolled back, instead of quietly advanced.
I'm curious now, but if there's an inherent instability, would the properties of physics slowly change over time, as its constituents begin to alter or decay?
Seems to have worked for the bottled water industry.
I remember in the book Battlefield Earth, the invaders had protected their technology by making a dummy circuit with traditional methods, but etching the actual circuit at a molecular level to make it invisible. When the system detected that it was being tampered with or opened without the proper methods, it blew the dummy circuit to look like it was booby-trapped, and then wiped out the actual circuit to eliminate all the traces. Anyone who didn't know how to properly work around the tamper would end up with a dead board. I'm curious, but do things like that exist in modern hardware? I'd love to have the community chime in on how forensic analysis and/or reverse engineering of circuits is done these days, and methods of preventing it from occurring.
Patents are also only valid for 20 years. I see this bandied point around to the point of being nearly trollish - by patenting something, yes, you tie it up, but you've also created 1) an asset you can license out 2) a codified body of knowledge that anyone can refer to. You've done your homework well enough that someone else can look at later and see what you did, in exchange for protection of that process. Big Oil companies have been around a lot longer than 20 years and have their fair share of patents, some of which have already expired. By revealing that they've done the research and patenting the process, they've started the clock ticking on what will eventually become public domain. So yes, they can "stifle innovation" for a short while, but it's not a permanent block, just a temporary stopgap to widespread use, if they found something that would get in the way of their own commercial success.
So I realize that the internet, bluetooth, and 2G signals are ways of getting devices to interact with each other, but is there any centralized off-the-shelf solution for conglomerating feeds and getting things to talk with each other, or does everything require customized approaches for receiving and working with the data in any way?
Amazon has done something right with their Kindles. While there are others out there that work amazingly well, the Kindle 4 with the ad-supported option is the closest I've come to ever treating a fancy electronic gadget as a "consumble" - if it gets stolen, it's not going to make me *that* upset, since it's only $69 and does everything I expect it to. That's the price of a few hardback books, and it can hold gigabytes worth of literature; I don't know about you guys, but I can't read more than a few dozen megabytes worth of text in a month.
I already have enough trouble focusing and reading it with my other gadgets handy without the option for websurfing on my device. It's not a tablet, and I don't want it to be. It's all of my library that can be "turned on" with a button, charged up once a month or two, fits in a pocket, and can be taken on any sort of trip. If it's stolen, big deal - at that price, it won't ruin your day. It's easily hackable to remove the ads, but those ads aren't terribly intrusive to begin with. The format options leave a little to be desired, but 2 minutes with Calibre gives you any format you could want for all of your books. Is it as functional as a tablet? No. It's not trying to be though. It's a book alternative with a pretty damn cool technology they've cooked up, at a price where you don't have to choose between which device you want to own.
How is a Super Nintendo emulator in any way comparable to WiFi when they're looking for a way to stay connected to the internet while they're traveling? I'm glad you can so easily be amused by your foresight to entertain yourself in such a lightweight manner, but for some people there's business to do, people to contact, emails to write, travel arrangements to make, and countless other tasks that someone would want and need internet for.
VLC is one of those must-haves on any newly reformatted system. They've done an excellent job of making a player that Just Works, for every single format I could encounter in the field. I use it as a simple video player, but in the many years that I've been using it, I've only encountered one format ever that even VLC threw up its hands and refused to play. They're constantly updating performance, threading capability, offering all kinds of new features and options well beyond what I use VLC for. Since Windows stopped bundling a lot of DVD software natively, they've been the go-to software of choice for close to a decade, and they deserve to have their efforts and their project rewarded with solid backing, since they've managed to navigate through the morass of codecs and incompatible formats, while remaining lightweight, intuitive, and universally functional. Good luck guys =)!
Checking your history, MacArthur was *very* keen to use nuclear weapons in those little skirmishes.
There's been a trend on Slashdot to shoot down questions like this without due consideration of what the submitter is asking, or just posting some obvious answers and consider the issue resolved. It was really nice to see this thread put forth a lot of information from the community. I didn't realize that there were 1) issues with SATA drives having issues on things like this 2) that there were people who cared about this kind of thing enough to have done the homework and the research behind it. It's called to my attention that there's a sub-genre of people for whom this matters, a lot. I've ripped scores of CDs in the last decade, but never paid enough mind to have it as more than a rarely-used utility. Thanks for the information, and you go, geeks =)!
According to yesterday's news, pretty soon. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/11/29/2339252/staples-to-offer-3d-printing-services
Amazing explanation. I wish I had mod points :)
I agree with the other commenter. Citations if you've got them - I want to know more =)!
Google has a similar plan for the world :)
http://www.theonion.com/articles/google-announces-plan-to-destroy-all-information-i,1783/
Mod parent up!
I've always been curious, but is there an upper limit on energy density for a given space, or an upper ceiling on how hot something can get?
I'm really interested to know how this affects Intel. If their main competitor is (theoretically) starting to die off as a company, that would naturally push them towards a monopolistic state, simply because so few companies *can* compete any more. Building next gen chips seems like it's an awfully high barrier to entry for a company just getting started. With the prospect of becoming an actual monopoly it seems like Intel would really want AMD to continue thriving in just enough capacity to keep sharpening their claws against them. Throwing it out there for the business-savvy or people who have seen it before in the economy, but what do you do to keep your competitor alive?
I've seen people answering both sides of this saying the other is wrong. Can we get some further discussion and consensus on this? I'd love to know in one way or another.
I realize Google is my friend in this, but I'd love to hear from insider perspective what sort of advances are actually *in use* in clinics and hospitals these days. About 10-15 years ago I used to read in Pop Sci about the innovations in needle technology - serrating the edge like a mosquito, using thinner needles, new kinds of shots, and using these painless, efficient methods of delivering vaccines and medicine. What of those actually panned out? It's been about 10 years since I've received a vaccination; did any of those technologies we read about 10 years ago make it into the field?
Dashing and daring
Courageous and caring
Faithful and friendly
With stories to share
Taaaaaardibears!
In the increasingly litigious world of software, it seemed like a lot of Easter eggs disappeared from operating systems and from business software. Software became professional and had less use for a sense of humor, undocumented code became a possible liability, and it seems to be looked upon a little more as having no place in the business world. Which is said, I think.
We all love the stories, but I'm curious what the last twenty years have suggested as we've become more detailed and accurate with some of our modelings and scientific theories. I *am* wondering what the actual state of science is currently. FTL is proposed to be impossible, but has science concluded that things like wormholes can actually function the way sci-fi suggests and frequently makes use of? Are there any physical properties that don't violate FTL laws, but work around them? Or have we decided that conventional acceleration is the only known way to actually move through space, both in theory and in practice?
Aquifers, pssshhh. The best place to store water is in the body.