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Comment: Re:Personal Responsibility? (Score 1) 396

by swillden (#43761389) Attached to: Of 1000 Americans Polled, Most Would Ban Home Printing of Guns

The problem with printed firearms is that they're plastic. We have no means to detect them. They instantly obsolete our security infrastructure. You can walk onto an airplane with one. You could walk into a courtroom with one. You could walk into the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court with one. That is a major problem.

And banning them will do exactly nothing to address that problem.

A person who would make a gun with the intention of committing murder with it isn't likely to be deterred by a law banning his gun. Actually, that law already exists... the Defense Distributed guy was careful to epoxy a six ounce block of metal to his before fully assembling it into an operable gun, because it's a federal felony to manufacture an undetectable gun.

Comment: Re:Personal Responsibility? (Score 2) 396

by swillden (#43761313) Attached to: Of 1000 Americans Polled, Most Would Ban Home Printing of Guns

However, not everyone who uses guns irresponsibly are punished. For example it is legal to have an accessible gun in your house and leave your teenager alone with it.

Is that irresponsible? Depends on the kid. There are many examples of kids using guns to defend themselves and their siblings against home intruders.

Comment: Did anyone actually watch the talk? (Score 1) 478

by swillden (#43750403) Attached to: Larry Page: You Worry Too Much About Medical Privacy

All of the commentary here completely misunderstands what Page said.

He wasn't suggesting that we ought to give up on medical privacy. He was saying that we'd be better off if we could do so -- if we chose to -- without fear of repercussions. He said that in some cases being more open might be beneficial... but he clearly chose to keep his condition secret for quite a long time, even though it was obvious to everyone that something was wrong, and he didn't say anything to imply that we shouldn't have the right to privacy.

Comment: Re:How can you have a software defined network? (Score 2) 56

by swillden (#43743295) Attached to: A Peek At Google's Software-Defined Network

Translation: Google Big.

Yep. And there comes a point when you're scaling up that quantitative differences become qualitative differences that demand completely different solutions to the old problems.

Translation: Firmware Is Magic.

No, firmware is static, and the code it contains must fit in limited capacity storage devices and run on low-end CPUs, unless you want to pay big money for your switches. Much better to make the switch firmware simple and the switches cheap, and put your logic in a few much more powerful machines with visibility into the bigger picture.

Comment: Re:The opposite might also be true (Score 1) 471

by swillden (#43734357) Attached to: Global Warming Shifts the Earth's Poles

On the range.... give it a few years. The Tesla already has a 200+-mile range (though not when racing, obviously), but it'll get better. It's also worth pointing out that the Tesla Model S in that video is not a sports car. It's a nearly 5000-pound luxury road sedan. The fact that it's even remotely competitive with a Viper which weighs 2000 pounds less, and has a monstrous engine, is very impressive.

As for sound... in the real world I really like the utter silence of my LEAF.

Comment: Re:Ha, not the first (Score 3, Interesting) 184

by swillden (#43722281) Attached to: Has Supercomputing Hit a Brick Wall?

building a supercomputer means getting thousands of CPUs to cooperate which is a much harder challenge.

Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.

Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.

He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.

Comment: Re:Enough! (Score 1) 622

by swillden (#43710205) Attached to: UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?

These are makeshift solutions. With an ever growing population all solution we come up with, besides of reducing population and consumption, is rather temporary.

We don't have an ever-growing population. Worldwide, we're already basically at replacement level reproduction, and the industrialized world is at less than replacement level when you remove immigration. Europe's population is declining, period. In Hans Rosling's terms, we have reached and passed "peak child"; there are just shy of 2B children in the world and that number is not increasing and -- based on current trends -- not going to increase.

Assuming we maintain a constant level of 2B children, that means that there will be 2B people in each living generation, putting us at a steady-state population of about 10B. Actually, barring significant changes in current trends, that won't be a steady state, it will be a high water mark. As wealth and -- more importantly -- female education levels continue to rise around the world, the birthrate in what we now call the developing world will also drop below replacement and the population will gradually decline.

Rosling explains it well: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. -- G.B. Shaw

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