Re: bah

It's also a nice illustration of what is called the economic calculation problem in a socialistic outfit. You don't know how much anyone would pay for your service. You don't know what service to provide. You don't know how much to invest where. You don't know your pay levels. You can, however, demand more money from the taxpayer by wailing enough.

In a rational economic actor, what would happen is that there would be an evaluation of whether to invest in business re-engineering for more data protection [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place] or whether to incur the risk of being fined by ICO if case SHTF [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place]. Assign a price to each eventuality. Take the cheapest.

You want standards? There are truckloads. Who is going to implement them? How many years will it take? How many contractors do you need? Take them from EDS? PwC? Repeat every year or every two years? Train existing personnel for two weeks ... need more personnel etc. etc. etc.

The economic calculations are NOT trivial.

Re: If ever they were found out...

So the Chinese are crazy prepared, is that it?

Re: Some of us build our own routers ...

> using off-the-shelf parts

Sourced from China. Not that I take this latest US moral panic seriously.

Upcoming: Wahabbis and Salafists in our oil, ZOMG! After this message...

I draw you a Mohammed!!

> Just adapt to people whose values are different from your own.

I have no intention to adapt to people whose value is being professionally offended in the name of $DEITY and who go out of their way to tell me about it in no uncertain terms. I would rather use a daisy cutter on them.

Re: Upgrade Edition

Clearly, you are a Cylon.

Re: Too right, typical Apple

I remember the 16 bit machines...

Amiga 2000, 1987 (Motorola 68000 @ 7.14 MHz, 512 KiB): USD 1'500

Mac II, 1987 (Motorola 68020 @ 15 MHz, 1 MiB): USD 3'769

Good times, good times... somebody had an acoustic coupler ....

Re: im going to rush out and get it on release day

No, you just yum update

You don't quite understand how central banking works.

Re: limits are made to be broken...

Of course, of course. But that means a whole new production and engineering chain, so might well take several decades. Unlike what politicians believe, you cannot just fart whole new approaches out of nothing.

I still remember my amazement at this from February 1993 in Communications of the ACM. 4 KW for 250 MHz. My dad was laughing at me and thought I was a retard for believing the power uptake numbers:

"The CPU module contains one microprocessor chip, its external cache, and an interface to the bus. A storage module contains two 32-megabyte (MB) interleaved banks of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The I/O channels that are connected to one or two DECstation 5000 workstations, which provide disk and network I/O as well as a high-performance debugging environment. Most of the logic, with the exception of the CPU chip, is emitter-coupled logic (ECL), which we selected for its high speed and predictable electrical characteristics. Modules plug into a 14-slot card cage. The card cage and power supplies are housed in a 0.5- by 1.1-meter (m) cabinet. A fully loaded cabinet dissipates approximately 4,000 watts, and is cooled by forced air. Figures 1 and 2 are photographs of the system and the modules.

....

We designed the bus to provide high bandwidth, which is suitable for a multiprocessor system, and to offer minimal latency. As the CPU cycle time becomes very small, 5 nanoseconds (ns) [250 MHz] for the DECchip 21064, the main memory latency becomes an important component of system performance. The ADU bus can supply 320MB of user data, but still is able to satisfy a cache read miss in just 200ns."

Re: Limits.

> I'll cling on to hope, thanks.

Do not hope to do impossible things. Hope to do feasible things. Anything else is religion in a terribly bad way.

This is the Slow Zone. Better accept it.

Do they hang around the coffee vending machine most of the day?

Re: I guess

That's why there is some kind of celebration around that time...

As H.P. Lovecraft wrote....

"I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember."

Re: "a test for human empathy"

Just scan their braaiiinnnns. I want all politicians to get a mandatory scan here!

Interestingly, in the PKD novel, the replicants are the psychopaths - they don't connect (even among themselves IIRC) and don't understand anything about peoples' motiviations. Consequently they are just out to fuck up peoples' lives. Deckhard is confused at first but rejoins the mainstream after his new expensive goat his thrown off a building by Rachael. There was even a discussion about whether he should shoot the girl immediately or after bedding her first. Definitely not PC.

Re: Not far enough....

Excellent. I have a proposal to set up a lobby to make that idea mandatory across the board. After all, what CAN be done, SHOULD be done. It will also help save children.

10/10 would troll with!

Re: something meandering and brown

"They hated machines being used by unscrupulous businessmen to put them out of work. They were actually pretty forward thinking and progressive...."

Yeah, that's the problem with "progressivism" in one pithy sentence, thank you very much.

Re: Though

It depends on the relative probability of "the failure in an engine which takes everything with it" vs. "the failure in an engine which just shuts the engine down".

Basically, all your eggs in one sturdy basket.....?

Anyone who has looked at DayZ lately knows the drill.

Re: What's the issue?

jake [hog farmer], Matt Bryant [no particular ability except dissing, dislikes Sun] and RICHTO [unfinished Microsoft astroturf engine] in the same thread?

This is turning into a 4chan fest.

Re: sucked into the event horizon?

> for you that limit (event horizon) will move as you fall and will always be some distance below you

What? I don't think so. The event horizon is crossed (by you, freefalling observer) once all the sky has collapsed into a single blueshifted point directly overhead, with all the rest being black. From that point on "the singularity" is no longer "where" but "when", it becomes your immediate head-butting future. The event horizon has been left behind. It is quite literally your past.

Greg Egan puts it like this:

“Yes! The centre of the hole lies in our future, now. We won't hit the singularity face-first, we'll hit it future-first — just like hitting the Big Crunch. And the direction on this platform that used to point towards the singularity is now facing ‘down’ on the map — into what seems from the outside to be the hole's past, but is really a vast stretch of space. There are billions of light years laid out in front of us — the entire history of the hole's interior, converted into space — and it's expanding as we approach the singularity. The only catch is, elbow room and head room are in short supply. Not to mention time.”

Re: "straight-line path"

This brings me to criticizing the use of "SUCKED". Nothing is being "sucked" (in, out, or off) as this implies acceleration. Disregarding tidal effects, the star is free-falling. Nobody would say that the International Space Station is "sucked" by planet Earth.

Re: "The US has an employment problem"

Uh.... communism of the South Korean style? Something is wrong here.

But I gotta agree - Crony-Capitalism of the US kind seems to have problems in relation to Crony-Capitalism of the PRC kind. Fat moviemakers with baseball cap may think the problems are due to absence to tax-and-spend schemes, but that's not it at all.

Capitalism - a good idea that should actually be tried again.

Re: Intel & IBM & MS

Whatever happened to the Parallel Inference Machines and PARLOG and whatnot of the 5th Generation Computer Project (back in the early 80's, the time of SDI and War Games). Sank without a trace?

Re: Who mentioned solar? A knob, that's who.

"Relying too heavily on imports can leave countries vulnerable to fluctuating international market prices and disruptions to fuel supplies caused by geopolitical disturbances."

This may be transmitted to the EU parliament as they have come around to following Israeli "SECOND HOLOCAUST SOON" hype and will now ban Iranian gas imports too.

Expensive or cold winter coming up. Or both.

At least Gazprom's coffers will fill.

Re: Meanwhile, in Germany.....

"Yes," grinned Hardin. "A military target to stay away from. Isn't it obvious why I brought the subject up? It happened to confirm a very strong suspicion I had had."

"And that was what?"

"That Anacreon no longer has a nuclear-power economy. If they had, our friend would undoubtedly have realized that plutonium, except in ancient tradition is not used in power plants. And therefore it follows that the rest of the Periphery no longer has nuclear power either. Certainly Smyrno hasn't, or Anacreon wouldn't have won most of the battles in their recent war. Interesting, wouldn't you say?"

"Bah!" Pirenne left in fiendish humor, and Hardin smiled gently.

He threw his cigar away and looked up at the outstretched Galaxy. "Back to oil and coal, are they?" he murmured – and what the rest of his thoughts were he kept to himself.

Probably the dreaded Dumbass Attack Truncheon of Fail, a fearsome weapon that instantly covers the victim in ridicule and opprobium.

Re: Terrorists / Freedom fighters

> A freedom fighter attacks the organs of the state (government, police, army, etc).

> A terrorist attacks the people, to induce terror.

And when the organs of the state attack the people, we become terrorists.

Re: Of Course if this info was seen by the US

Where are all the people from the other thread who swore this was a clearly proof of collusion between Iran and Osama/Al-Qaeda/Taliban, which everyone knows about anyway?

Fox news must be showing something about Romney's Missus again.

Re: If we are no alone

> Culturally Bounded Rationality by S Kaur where applying Gödel's incompleteness theorems

Applying "Gödel's incompleteness theorems" to crappy cobbled-together, no-pretense-at-having-any-kind-of-consistency,-completeness,-or-mathematical-relevance-whatsoever automatons like the brain strikes me as a particularly retarded, childish and useless undertaking. We are not and never will be theorem provers or instantiations of a mathematical axiomatic structure.

Penrose falls into the same trap, which is a shame.

Re: Nothing can make a wedding nicer than...

It's like that celebration scene in Star Wars ROTJ where at the end Evil Guy turns up in Ghost Form.

Only here, he hasn't repented yet. And he's for real.

I'm expecting downvotes by the Independent's John Rentoul....

Re: I for one...

A downvote? Are there God-botherers here tonight??