Comment: Re:What about OpenGL ? (Score 1) 108
I don't like the binary blobs for because they 1) break when I get automatic updates that include a kernel
What about a distro with DKMS? Wikipedia claims Fedora supports it these days...
I don't like the binary blobs for because they 1) break when I get automatic updates that include a kernel
What about a distro with DKMS? Wikipedia claims Fedora supports it these days...
Right. The Greenland glaciers melting may be bad. Now, would you so kindly tell me how a fresh water plume will affect glaciers ON LAND?
Directly? Not at all. But it's worth keeping in mind that white ice has a higher albedo than dark blue seawater, which keeps arctic / antarctic summers cold by reflecting away summer sunlight.
There's no reason for saying that. IPv6 is just another cyber space, there's nothing fancy, new, with it, it should be commonly accepted as something we MUST have, right now.
Except that it's not. There are billions of addresses - entire A blocks - locked up in early-adopter organizations that could be made available. For example, the US Post Office doesn't really need it's own A block. Nor do most organizations who own them. And B blocks? Thousands are unneeded. My old university has a B block and it's ridiculous...it's all behind a firewall except for a few numbers anyway. For most orgs, it's just that the money that these big blocks could be sold for doesn't exceed the cost of renumbering to 10.x internally. It will someday soon.
We're years away from ipv4 exhaustion.
Great plan: spend man-years of effort forcing the handful of companies with class A blocks to re-architect their networks... only for each class A block to be consumed by the RIRs in 6 months or less. Did you even pay attention to how fast APNIC ate two of its last three
"IP addresses are not identity." Thank you. The hypocrisy around here is large, but not surprising. Does Google offer guest Wi-Fi access at any of their locations? Does anyone in Google run a Tor exit node? Are there any live jacks in Google meeting rooms? Do they NAT multiple internal addresses? It's one thing to confirm suspicions by setting up a honeypot phone number like Mocality did, and then receive calls from people identifying themselves as being from Google. It's quite another to only point to an IP addresses and place blame with no further evidence.
AppEngine apps can make HTTP requests from Google's IP blocks. Not sayin' that's what happened here, but just throwing that out there.
No, these are actually imaginary Canadian dollars, which are worth much, much less than real American dollars.
As of this writing, an American dollar will purchase 1.02 Canadian dollars. I admit that I was surprised. I stopped following it for a while, but I had thought the Canadian was worth more. What did Canada do to screw up their economy?
You have it backwards: the CAD per USD ratio hasn't gone much above 1.07 CAD per USD in the last 10 years, and used to swim in 0.75 territory for the longest time. Hence the well-known phenomenon of books and magazines with two list prices, a US price plus a Canadian price that's a good nudge higher. That suddenly became obsolete when the CAD achieved rough parity around 2007 or so, in part because of the USD inflating a bit faster than the CAD.
Android needs some sort of remote wipe software to make it even remotely feasible for most businesses. For example, the government requires remote wipe, and some sort of encryption. Until Android has a solution for these two, the VPN-less capability is moot.
The Google Apps Device Policy app supports password policies and remote wipe, and Ice Cream Sandwich supports full-device encryption (I turned it on for my own ICS phone, took about an hour to encrypt the 16GB internal storage partition plus two or three reboots).
Ethically loaded? How? I don't see how the brain would be suffering? Or are they worried about skynet?
Here in meatspace, putting a human in a sensory deprivation tank is torture and one of the more surefire ways to drive a person insane. The brain isn't wired to believe in null sensory data. If a region of the brain stops receiving stimulation, it frantically strengthens its connections to other regions, tapping randomly into its neighbors and interpreting their arbitrary stimulation as sense data (compare the hallucinations of sensory deprivation to phantom limb syndrome and somatosensory remapping in amputees, e.g. touching an amputee's face triggering sensation on the amputee's phantom fingers because the face and fingers are next to each other in the sensory map of the postcentral gyrus). If this frantic effort fails and the brain regions can't find a source of stimulus, they start to die outright, nerve by nerve, because nerves are wired to commit suicide if they don't fire regularly.
But even a sensory deprivation tank still provides senses of sound, proprioception, temperature, gravity. If we were to create an accurate nerve-by-nerve simulation of an entire vertebrate brain and then provide it with no sensory input.... Well, at best the result would be phantom body syndrome. At worst, it could go well beyond torture and become the greatest suffering ever inflicted on a single sentient being. And we don't understand the brain well enough to know which pieces of sensory data must be provided to maintain sanity and prevent existence from being torture.
And that's not even getting into the legal and moral issues. Let's say we can put a sane mind on a chip by cloning the synaptic structure of a recently deceased human and feeding it all the appropriate sensory inputs. Is it a person? Is it a citizen? Can it consent to a contract? Is it a minor until the hardware turns 18? May I enslave it? Is it ethical to feed it false sensory data culled from a virtual reality simulation, i.e. trap it in The Matrix? If I turn it off and erase it at the end of my scientific study, have I murdered it? If yes, am I legally obligated to keep it powered until the hardware fails? Am I morally obligated to transfer the synapse data to new hardware before the old hardware fails, making the uploaded human immortal? Alternatively, am I morally prohibited from doing that for more than N years, for some value of N? If I'm transferring the mind to new hardware, and my mistake causes a power surge that erases its synapses, am I protected by existing Good Samaritan laws, or have I committed involuntary manslaughter? As it's a simulated human mind, complete with all human appetites, am I obligated to provide it with pornography and the means to masturbate itself to orgasm? Do I have to obtain consent from the human whose deceased mind will be used to create the chip? Am I obligated to pick an atheist, or more to the point a subject who doesn't believe in souls? How well informed does the consenting subject have to be before dying? Does the family have to consent as well, or are we content with provoking another HeLa controversy for the greater good? And so on...
The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body. Our hearts arent made for 150 years of use and we build up various plaques and toxins in our bodies as time goes by. Even if we all lived under controlled and ideal circumstances the last seven decades would be pretty much seven decades of being eighty.
Actually, there's some research that strongly suggests that there's only a finite amount of aging going on. What's happening in aging might not be "the body's self repair process falls behind entropy", as commonly thought. Instead, aging would be "the same tradeoffs which favor reproductive success in youth exact a cost later in life"; after some finite time, you've paid those costs in full and aging stops, leaving only a constant risk of disability and death per year instead of the ever-growing one postulated by the "falling behind on entropy" model. In this view, there are still some specific things that actually do wear out with age because they aren't constantly replaced (tooth decay and cornea clouding / cataracts are the obvious ones), but general health doesn't suffer the same fate.
See New Scientist's The end of ageing: Why life begins at 90 (behind a paywall, sadly), which references a demographic study where annual mortality rates became constant above age 93 (Greenwood and Irwin, Human Biology, 1939), a study confirming the same pattern in fruit fly populations (Carey and Curtsinger, Science vol. 258 p. 457 and p. 461, 1992), and an exploration of a mathematical model of mutation which concluded that a mortality plateau is inevitable, not a mere special case (Rose and Mueller; PNAS vol. 93 pp. 15249-15253, 1996). (Of note: Rose is the author of the New Scientist article, with all the confirmation bias that implies.)
Also, the research into aging suggests there are only a handful systemic problems that actually cause it (accumulation of crosslinked proteins; declining telomerase production causing cells to stop dividing; etc.), and if those systemic problems were addressed we could largely arrest the aging process. Aubrey de Gray's TED talk is pretty much mandatory viewing on that front.
It's worth keeping in mind that if metabolism and entropy inevitably led to cell death after 100 years, then human beings as a species would have already died out: sperm and egg cells are metabolically active cells that contain DNA that's millions of years old, and there's no time machine that allows a pristine copy of the germline DNA to be copied forward from conception to adulthood without at least a childhood's worth of accumulated error. Likewise for our mitochondria, pseudo-cells that they are, with their own mtDNA separate from the DNA of the nucleus, exposed to the entropic ravages of the Krebs cycle firsthand without a nuclear membrane to protect it; our bodies pass these pseudo-cells on from mother to child unchanged, without even giving their mtDNA a de-methylation/re-methylation spring cleaning like mammalian nuclear DNA receives. But they thrive in the germ cell line, generation after generation, even as they suffer and decline in the somatic cell lines. There must be a difference in upkeep, some cost that evolution is willing to pay for the germline but unwilling for the somatic lines, that allows the germline mitochondria to remain healthy and "young" for millions of years.
psychopaths used more conjunctions such as “because “ or “since,”
Sounds like another attempt to label left-brain people as psychopaths.
Uh... the old "left brain is logical, right brain is creative" stuff is out the window. Please refer to Dr. Ramachandran's work on anosognosia in stroke victims.
I realize that IPv4 is going to be with us for quite some time, but is this going to be worth the effort? It requires a bit of jiggery-pokery to repoint your DNS, the kind of thing that appeals to the Slashdot crowd but which your grandma will never, ever pull off. ISPs could help, but will they do so before IPv6 makes it irrelevant?
It's described in IPv4 terms, but extending it to work with IPv6 addresses should be simple enough. The trickiest part will be finding the golden CIDR mask to replace IPv4
Other than that, the described technique is still fully relevant because IPv6 doesn't change the game in any other way: DNS still works the same way, HTTP still works the same way, and websites are still slow for the same reasons, so you have the same incentives for regional caching and the same choices in how to do it.
Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.