This is pretzel logic at its worst. Memo to Apple: build a machine that has a price point between the Mac mini and Mac Pro, that isn't an all-in-one machine, and is internally expandable, and people will buy that machine from YOU rather than buy a PC and make a Hackintosh. People know the difference between a Mac and a crappy PC. They know that the Mac will be the better quality machine. They will pay more -- not a King's Ransom, but modestly more -- for Apple quality. This is why the MacBook has pwn3d most lappies for years, and why the MacBook Pro is the best damn lappie experience currently available. Build something BETTER for a little more than a Dell or a HP or a Compaq and you will have the business back. I guarantee it.
Wow. A Latter-day Singularitan.
I think it's safe to say that we are well past the limits of sustainability, given the current set of technologies we're using to provide for ourselves. In the short to mid term, oil disappears. In the next couple of centuries, coal disappears (even if we did find a way of harvesting its energy without a huge increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations). Even nuclear fuel will eventually hit a peak. Water is going to be a huge issue over the next couple of decades.
I'm sure that solutions will be found for many of these challenges. But generally speaking, each solution usually brings about its own new set of problems. The import of the potato to Ireland led to a massive population increase, as food suddenly became far cheaper and more plentiful than before. But the underlying dynamics of poverty didn't change, so when the technology supporting the growth suddenly disappeared (as it did during the potato famine), it resulted in mass starvation and emigration. In the same way, we're now completely dependent on the technology that supports us in a way that we wouldn't be had we limited our population to perhaps half a billion from the outset.
In that hypothetical, small population world, we could survive the sudden disappearance of oil relatively easily. We'd all have to be farmers for a while, but it's a much simpler problem than trying to feed thirteen times as many people with the same resources and technology. Engineering our way to ever greater populations is a risky path. I'm hoping that we'll level out around 10B
I'm half-inclined to agree with what your blog post says about population control. But I think you overestimate the population effects of differential breeding on attitudes (and apparently, intelligence). Arguably, Republicans have been outbreeding Democrats for quite a while now, but that trend has been pretty much negated by the increasing urbanization of the United States (urban dwellers tend to vote Democratic). Even if you had a hard-line group of ideological non-breeders, they would never entirely die out, because their attitudes didn't come from being descendants of a long line of childless people. Their attitudes also come from the cultural influences of the day, from the way their formative experiences wired their brains, etc.
You wrote, "We need a political party that encourages intelligent, resourceful people to have lots of children--and to educate them well." Given the massive wave of genetic manipulation that will happen over the next fifty years, will a couple of generations of incentives for selective breeding make a hint of difference? No, we should grow our supergeniuses the way God intended: in giant plexiglass cylinders filled with green glop, overseen by a cackling mad scientist.
Yep. I know there are a lot of people who won't see it the same as I do especially on this site. That's why it makes a good place to discuss it. Granted most responses don't go all Paris Hilton and try to dismiss me. lol
Not all parents understand what a white list is or how to set one up. You and I as geeks do. I use OpenDNS at the router level and block specific IP addresses that make it through as I find them.
Some parents just don't know that much about the hardware or software. That is why I'd like to see a more simplified method than currently exists.
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. - MLK Jr.
What about getting RID of the file selector, and just using the normal file views + drag and drop to open and save files? Drag a file to your word processor, and it opens. Drag the tab from the word processor to a disk, and you save. Drag a section of a file, and you save that section. Drag that section to the desktop, and you save a cut buffer, and you can have as many cut buffers as you want.
Most of these things have been in MacOS and/or Windows (and/or others, like OS/2) since the mid-90s, if not longer.
I want half of my ashes incorporated into a WORKING computer. Maybe in a box in an empty 5.25" bay, that would work. The other half can be scattered at the same coordinates my deceased husband was scattered at: basically 3 miles off the coast of San Pedro, CA, US.
What good is a computer buried six feet underground, with all the guts taken out of it? I want to be part of something USEFUL.
Yeah, unfortunately eBay will pretty much always follow through on a requested auction takedown from a content producer. They just don't want to be involved in their lawsuit.
eBay's business is in the second-hand sale. They have a strong interest in this practice to be legal.
You would think so. I tried to sell an "R4" cartridge for the Nintendo DS on ebay. It allows you to run homebrew software, play music, and watch movies on the DS. But because it *can* be used to run pirated software, ebay claimed my item violated the DMCA, canceled my auction, and threatened to pull my account if I relisted the item.
Ebay is legally required to take it down if they are served with a DMCA notice. However, if you file a counter-notice, they are correspondingly legally required to put it back up unless the Copyright owner files suit against you.
Service providers operating under the DMCA safe harbor are required to hold a subscriber's counter-notice for at least two weeks before putting the disputed information back up, so that the complaining party has an opportunity to get a court order against the subscriber. Auction listings expire before then.
It's true it is not told in schools. But you would be surprised by the number of people here who know it or at least suspect it. Even at the time some people in my native region, near the german border, wondered why the steel smelters in Völklingen (D) were never destroyed by an air strike. Bad minded people kept saying that the fact it belonged to US steel was a good reason.
FON creates two different networks, one for sharing and one for private use, and AFAIK you can limit the bandwidth and throughput used by the public one.
A conductive metal has free electrons which will block and reflect any waves below its plasma frequency. However, an ionic solid does not have free electrons - instead, it has just a few resonant other mechanisms with limited range so it will block a more specific part of the electromagnetic spectrum than a metal would. The frequency of wifi signals happens to be in the range of one of these mechanisms for the paint used.
perhaps enough monitors could be built in that it could via wifi or the like send signals to the local dispatch office if the blood stops flowing
Finally, a use case for IPv6. Give an address to every human organ in every human. I purpose that we use the 2001:911::/32 address space so that it is easy to remember your organs' IP address.
Oh God! I think I'm having a heart attack, quick someone SNMP to 2001:911:34A:2F71::2 and send the restart command!
Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine