Or more accurately, how soon? Smart money says "monday before lunch."
I appreciate your sentiment, but I would look at it a different way. There were a lot of ways in which we granted authority but it was not physically possible for it to be abused, so we didn't worry about it. The 'How soon?' was thought to be never, or a very long time from now.
We are now faced with a situation where a lot of previously granted authority is now much scarier because technology has given it more ways to be abused which were thought to be impossible only a few decades earlier.
40 years ago, if someone mentioned that the government might be capable of monitoring every phone/data connection and would record everything, it would be assumed that they might be better off in a padded room.
20 years ago, someone asking the same question would be told such a thing would require more storage space than all the drives in the world could store.
I zoomed in on a random portion of the map, and it lost a lot of it's charm when it listed Phil Plait, heading up 21st century Astronomy along the same line as Carl Sagan.
I don't want to knock what Phil has done, and I DO read his BadAstronomy blog fairly regularly. However, I think that including him in this map is highly premature. He is well educated, and can put together a somewhat interesting article, but I'm thinking it's a bit more pop-celebrity and reaching to find a 'current' astronomer that put him on there.
Not that in 15-20 years I would be surprised to see him on a later version of this map, but it just feels like a rush to make it more relevant. No offence Phil, if you read this, but I'm sure you can agree that there are likely a great number of more influential Astronomers who may better deserve the 'inheritance'.
There will probably be a few other 'gripes', and if the creator of this map had ended it a little earlier we might have been able to avoid statements like mine. It becomes an easy debate topic like a top 100 list.
Perhaps some metrics to show why the latest people were placed there?
Actually it's a 20-volume set weighing a COMBINED total of 150 lbs. That's only 7.5 lbs a book. You're right though, you still don't check them out. They are typically in the "reference" section and you MUST keep it in the library (you can't check it out).
Correct, you don't check it out. Which is why in my post I said it wouldn't go home with the student. Check-out in this context means taking it off the shelf and using it, then putting it back. Only one student is using a single volume at once.
Also, having the average person open up their devices is ultimately going to result in screw-ups and an increased volume of customer support requests, which is expensive.
How ever will the watchmakers deal with such a flood of customer support requests?
Whatever would someone do if they opened up their watch, and crushed a gem or lost a screw? If they went complaining to their neighbor, do you think they would get any sympathy? "Oh no, I just bent that escapement. How dare WATCHCOMPANY allow me to make such a mistake. I will now demand a refund or replacement."
and for those that don't want or need such tools can probably get most (all?) of what they need relatively cheaply from say emachineshop or the like.
Huh. I didn't know about them. I've always had my dad as he works in a machine shop, but as I was just about to set about designing a small heat engine, that might be a bit more time efficient. Cool site, I love the internet! Wouldn't have imagined this 15 years ago.
I'm going to take the role of a devil's advocate here and see if ther perhaps is a cost savings even with the seemingly higher costs.
Let's assume a large university of 10,000 or more students. Perhaps the students only need to access the OED twice during their four years. That's 20,000 'uses' over 4 years... 5,000 times PER YEAR. Even if you assume uniform access across the 20 volumes, each volume will be physically handled 250 times per year.
Now, it's hard to treat this like a normal library book, but a normal access will probably be rather rough. The student will flip through the volume trying to find the exact word, and then perhaps flip back and forth a few more times (adjacent pages, maybe a quick lookup of another definition) The result is that each access will have a rather higher likelyhood of damage than a normal page turn in a regular library checkout, but each access will be for a much shorter duration (and won't go home with the student).
Given a 2 week checkout time the most a normal book could ever be checked out is only 26 times per year maximum if the next person picks it up the instant it is returned. With 50-60% access for a popular book, it would probably only be checked out 13-16 times in a single year. Granted the use cases are different, but as we see how quickly a library book wears out, something that is being 'accessed' at a rate of nearly 1700% as a library book...
Would it even last ten years? Any librarians here on Slashdot?
There is no possible way that provision is enforceable. Have you noticed how it has doubtlessly been violated all over the place? Not one lawsuit from the MPEG-LA. It's not going to fly and they know it.
It's enforceable as far as you have the financial means to say that it isn't.
Also, the computer hobbyist industry is oriented around zero resale value and extremely fast obsolesce, whereas all the tools you listed are pretty much "buy once per lifetime"
Or in some cases buy once per several lifetimes. I fully expect to inherit several of my father's tools, just as he still uses some of his father's tools. Granted they do wear down, but a lot of these items can even be rebuilt/repaired as a hobby in itself. In a pinch, I can still call him up and have him work with me on some of the items where I require a tool he has in his workshop.
And somewhere in the background, Harry Chapin plays on the radio.
Heat dissipation is still a factor, though. Power usage goes up as clock frequency squared, I think - so energy per operation goes up linearly with frequency. We could go to 6 GHz, but we'd have to halve the amount that the processor does per cycle (essentially canceling out our gains), and we'd still produce twice as much heat.
Well, yeah. I don't think anyone said it wasn't. This whole line of the thread was about someone saying that the speed of light wasn't a hurdle.
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
I really would mod this informative, since I was about to make a similar point. I think a lot of the confusion is that people hear things like the Speed of Light in terms of Kilometers per second, and it gets filed away by the brain as inconsequential for scales which are measured in centimeters and MUCH smaller.
But when you realize that that scale which is only a factor measured in millions meters per second is being divided into segments that are fractions of billionths of a second, the speed of light manifests in a much more physically understandable term.
government is so clumsy and incompetent they'll screw up anything they touch (if that were the case, wouldn't we be in default by 2004?).
People wouldn't go bankrupt if they could force their employers to give them a raise when they run low on money.
Governments can sell assets (Mineral rights, etc) as well as increase its 'paycheck' by raising taxes. Governments can't go bankrupt unless it lets itself go bankrupt or literally bankrupts those it has physical control over.
And the situations they encounter as part of their job.
You might be surprised that what people encounter during a job might even make someone develop beliefs that run counter to your own.
I'd suggest that someone not nurse a child in an ER waiting room because those places are breeding grounds for communicable diseases. At least in a bathroom (I agree a separate area would be better than a BR) the child won't be eating in the presence of people with influenza and other infectious agents. Reducing airflow that is shared with these people might not be a bad idea.
I didn't wait with my infant daughter in the waiting room at the ER for this exact purpose. I didn't let her diaper bag touch anything, and generally was very cautious.
But back on point, nurses can EASILY draw different conclusions even when exposed to the same situations just because they are different people. And being exposed to ER situations won't cause them to react in a manner that everyone would agree with in all circumstances.
I never once said it wasn't ok. I simply commented that if you're going to pull out the boob that doing it on the front row might not be the best place to do it. Use some common sense.
I am using common sense. If it isn't something wrong, why should she be concerned about moving elsewhere?
If she did something wrong, then I'd like to know what was wrong. If not, then you don't really have a strong position to object, which by suggesting that she shouldn't have done what she did, you ARE objecting to her behavior. I'm curious why.
.. out of which 0.1% is developing malware? Or even better, of which 40-60% are malwared and target MS.com? That would imply that those 1-2 billion concurrent user all use a Windows computer.
Please share your references used with us
Windows has an 85% market share (conservative estimate) It's general common knowledge sourced in a great many places.
It shows of 22 million scanned computers, 48% were infected.
I don't think my statements were unreasonable in their assumptions. It would be like me saying the US population is somewhere over 300 million. I'm not a research paper, and this isn't a journal where sources are always given.
The thing that gets me is the word "shit". Everyone says this word including fairly young children. It's just goofy to ban it. It's a bodily function.
Think about the roots of our 'curse' words. They share a common denominator (for the most part), Germanic origins.
There has been a huge push by the 'enlightened' to view the latin (and tangentially, French) origins as 'pure' and the german origins as 'impure'. It's the same reason that a taboo was created with regard to ending sentences with prepositions, it was something not done in latin, but due to the germanic structure of English, some sentences do sound and appear better when ended with a preposition. We aren't speaking Latin (or French), so a lot of the rules are just appeals to tradition. A tradition started as a mild cultural cleansing.
But back on point, look at the 'curse' words and their entymological origins. It is very eye opening to see how a push for cleansing a culture became a social taboo.
One of the nurses (WTF? shouldn't they be the most understanding?)
The only thing that separates a nurse from anyone else is the material they chose to memorize during school. They are the same people, with the same virtues and faults as any of us.
I didn't ask her to move, and never said she wasn't allowed to sit anywhere.
No she can't choose when the kid wants food, but it really isn't that hard to get a kid on a schedule. This wasn't a 6 month old. He was about 16 months old.
What's your point?
What's your point? If she pulled out a bottle it would have been ok? What's the difference?
It was only an issue because YOU decided to view it as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Or more accurately, how soon? Smart money says "monday before lunch."
I appreciate your sentiment, but I would look at it a different way. There were a lot of ways in which we granted authority but it was not physically possible for it to be abused, so we didn't worry about it. The 'How soon?' was thought to be never, or a very long time from now.
We are now faced with a situation where a lot of previously granted authority is now much scarier because technology has given it more ways to be abused which were thought to be impossible only a few decades earlier.
40 years ago, if someone mentioned that the government might be capable of monitoring every phone/data connection and would record everything, it would be assumed that they might be better off in a padded room.
20 years ago, someone asking the same question would be told such a thing would require more storage space than all the drives in the world could store.
Today? 10 years from now?
When will it be abused IS a good question.
I zoomed in on a random portion of the map, and it lost a lot of it's charm when it listed Phil Plait, heading up 21st century Astronomy along the same line as Carl Sagan.
I don't want to knock what Phil has done, and I DO read his BadAstronomy blog fairly regularly. However, I think that including him in this map is highly premature. He is well educated, and can put together a somewhat interesting article, but I'm thinking it's a bit more pop-celebrity and reaching to find a 'current' astronomer that put him on there.
Not that in 15-20 years I would be surprised to see him on a later version of this map, but it just feels like a rush to make it more relevant. No offence Phil, if you read this, but I'm sure you can agree that there are likely a great number of more influential Astronomers who may better deserve the 'inheritance'.
There will probably be a few other 'gripes', and if the creator of this map had ended it a little earlier we might have been able to avoid statements like mine. It becomes an easy debate topic like a top 100 list.
Perhaps some metrics to show why the latest people were placed there?
Back to reading Phil's posts on Fark...
Yeah... I mentioned that in my post.
Also that use is spread over 20 books rather than just one.
Umm, did anyone read my post?
I DID say the book stays at the library, and I DID say the use would be spread over a multi-volume set.
Actually it's a 20-volume set weighing a COMBINED total of 150 lbs. That's only 7.5 lbs a book. You're right though, you still don't check them out. They are typically in the "reference" section and you MUST keep it in the library (you can't check it out).
Correct, you don't check it out. Which is why in my post I said it wouldn't go home with the student. Check-out in this context means taking it off the shelf and using it, then putting it back. Only one student is using a single volume at once.
Also, having the average person open up their devices is ultimately going to result in screw-ups and an increased volume of customer support requests, which is expensive.
How ever will the watchmakers deal with such a flood of customer support requests?
Whatever would someone do if they opened up their watch, and crushed a gem or lost a screw? If they went complaining to their neighbor, do you think they would get any sympathy? "Oh no, I just bent that escapement. How dare WATCHCOMPANY allow me to make such a mistake. I will now demand a refund or replacement."
Stick a warranty seal on it and be done with it.
It sounds to me like you have an issue with authority in general, as you immediately suspect that operators would gladly abuse their power
Actually, it's pretty much guaranteed. If there is ever a proposal to increase the authority one human has over another, the first question should be:
How will/can this authority be abused?
and for those that don't want or need such tools can probably get most (all?) of what they need relatively cheaply from say emachineshop or the like.
Huh. I didn't know about them. I've always had my dad as he works in a machine shop, but as I was just about to set about designing a small heat engine, that might be a bit more time efficient. Cool site, I love the internet! Wouldn't have imagined this 15 years ago.
I'm going to take the role of a devil's advocate here and see if ther perhaps is a cost savings even with the seemingly higher costs.
Let's assume a large university of 10,000 or more students. Perhaps the students only need to access the OED twice during their four years. That's 20,000 'uses' over 4 years... 5,000 times PER YEAR. Even if you assume uniform access across the 20 volumes, each volume will be physically handled 250 times per year.
Now, it's hard to treat this like a normal library book, but a normal access will probably be rather rough. The student will flip through the volume trying to find the exact word, and then perhaps flip back and forth a few more times (adjacent pages, maybe a quick lookup of another definition) The result is that each access will have a rather higher likelyhood of damage than a normal page turn in a regular library checkout, but each access will be for a much shorter duration (and won't go home with the student).
Given a 2 week checkout time the most a normal book could ever be checked out is only 26 times per year maximum if the next person picks it up the instant it is returned. With 50-60% access for a popular book, it would probably only be checked out 13-16 times in a single year. Granted the use cases are different, but as we see how quickly a library book wears out, something that is being 'accessed' at a rate of nearly 1700% as a library book...
Would it even last ten years? Any librarians here on Slashdot?
There is no possible way that provision is enforceable. Have you noticed how it has doubtlessly been violated all over the place? Not one lawsuit from the MPEG-LA. It's not going to fly and they know it.
It's enforceable as far as you have the financial means to say that it isn't.
Also, the computer hobbyist industry is oriented around zero resale value and extremely fast obsolesce, whereas all the tools you listed are pretty much "buy once per lifetime"
Or in some cases buy once per several lifetimes. I fully expect to inherit several of my father's tools, just as he still uses some of his father's tools. Granted they do wear down, but a lot of these items can even be rebuilt/repaired as a hobby in itself. In a pinch, I can still call him up and have him work with me on some of the items where I require a tool he has in his workshop.
And somewhere in the background, Harry Chapin plays on the radio.
If the evil is an enourmous corporation or a government, how can you stop that? What could Superman do against BP or the RIAA?
They way he solves all the world's problems, by tossing them into the Sun!
Heat dissipation is still a factor, though. Power usage goes up as clock frequency squared, I think - so energy per operation goes up linearly with frequency. We could go to 6 GHz, but we'd have to halve the amount that the processor does per cycle (essentially canceling out our gains), and we'd still produce twice as much heat.
Well, yeah. I don't think anyone said it wasn't. This whole line of the thread was about someone saying that the speed of light wasn't a hurdle.
(and that the NSA gives a shit about what they are doing)
Well for one, it isn't generally the NSA that 'gives a shit', it's other agencies.
Two: If you make it a point to collect and store everything, even if it isn't of immediate interest to you NOW, it might be LATER.
Want to bet?
At 3 GHz, light moves just 7.2 cm, given a typical upper range for the velocity factor of copper of 0.72. Silicon and fibre optics are usually worse, with a VF between 0.4 and 0.6, or between 4 and 6cm per clock. That's barely enough to traverse a CPU die, let alone the motherboard. Moving parts physically closer together has a lot to do with the speed of light!
I really would mod this informative, since I was about to make a similar point. I think a lot of the confusion is that people hear things like the Speed of Light in terms of Kilometers per second, and it gets filed away by the brain as inconsequential for scales which are measured in centimeters and MUCH smaller.
But when you realize that that scale which is only a factor measured in millions meters per second is being divided into segments that are fractions of billionths of a second, the speed of light manifests in a much more physically understandable term.
Gyrocopter style lift?
government is so clumsy and incompetent they'll screw up anything they touch (if that were the case, wouldn't we be in default by 2004?).
People wouldn't go bankrupt if they could force their employers to give them a raise when they run low on money.
Governments can sell assets (Mineral rights, etc) as well as increase its 'paycheck' by raising taxes. Governments can't go bankrupt unless it lets itself go bankrupt or literally bankrupts those it has physical control over.
And the situations they encounter as part of their job.
You might be surprised that what people encounter during a job might even make someone develop beliefs that run counter to your own.
I'd suggest that someone not nurse a child in an ER waiting room because those places are breeding grounds for communicable diseases. At least in a bathroom (I agree a separate area would be better than a BR) the child won't be eating in the presence of people with influenza and other infectious agents. Reducing airflow that is shared with these people might not be a bad idea.
I didn't wait with my infant daughter in the waiting room at the ER for this exact purpose. I didn't let her diaper bag touch anything, and generally was very cautious.
But back on point, nurses can EASILY draw different conclusions even when exposed to the same situations just because they are different people. And being exposed to ER situations won't cause them to react in a manner that everyone would agree with in all circumstances.
I never once said it wasn't ok. I simply commented that if you're going to pull out the boob that doing it on the front row might not be the best place to do it. Use some common sense.
I am using common sense. If it isn't something wrong, why should she be concerned about moving elsewhere?
If she did something wrong, then I'd like to know what was wrong. If not, then you don't really have a strong position to object, which by suggesting that she shouldn't have done what she did, you ARE objecting to her behavior. I'm curious why.
.. out of which 0.1% is developing malware?
Or even better, of which 40-60% are malwared and target MS.com?
That would imply that those 1-2 billion concurrent user all use a Windows computer.
Please share your references used with us
Windows has an 85% market share (conservative estimate) It's general common knowledge sourced in a great many places.
As for infection rates? Here is a simple graphic. Again a search will turn up more info.
http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/apwg_pandasecurity_crimeware2.jpg
from: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/report-48-of-22-million-scanned-computers-infected-with-malware/5365
It shows of 22 million scanned computers, 48% were infected.
I don't think my statements were unreasonable in their assumptions. It would be like me saying the US population is somewhere over 300 million. I'm not a research paper, and this isn't a journal where sources are always given.
Universal health care, cure French girls,
Why? Are they sick?
Ugh... etymological, not entymological. I'm sure there are a few other typos in there.
The thing that gets me is the word "shit". Everyone says this word including fairly young children.
It's just goofy to ban it. It's a bodily function.
Think about the roots of our 'curse' words. They share a common denominator (for the most part), Germanic origins.
There has been a huge push by the 'enlightened' to view the latin (and tangentially, French) origins as 'pure' and the german origins as 'impure'. It's the same reason that a taboo was created with regard to ending sentences with prepositions, it was something not done in latin, but due to the germanic structure of English, some sentences do sound and appear better when ended with a preposition. We aren't speaking Latin (or French), so a lot of the rules are just appeals to tradition. A tradition started as a mild cultural cleansing.
But back on point, look at the 'curse' words and their entymological origins. It is very eye opening to see how a push for cleansing a culture became a social taboo.
One of the nurses (WTF? shouldn't they be the most understanding?)
The only thing that separates a nurse from anyone else is the material they chose to memorize during school. They are the same people, with the same virtues and faults as any of us.
I didn't ask her to move, and never said she wasn't allowed to sit anywhere.
No she can't choose when the kid wants food, but it really isn't that hard to get a kid on a schedule. This wasn't a 6 month old. He was about 16 months old.
What's your point?
What's your point? If she pulled out a bottle it would have been ok? What's the difference?
It was only an issue because YOU decided to view it as such.