Already Noted

It's already been noted that HDTV has multiple resolutions, such as both 768p and 1080i.

Scan lines are visible when NTSC is blown up to the size of a movie theatre screen, so HDTV is worthwhile. I'm not sure that even 2160-line television is really useful for the kind of viewing involved in watching TV, but equipment capable of that standard would be appropriate for presenting feature films digitally in theatres.

Given that, it might well be handy to be able to get camcorders at that kind of resolution, to be able to preserve what one records at a resolution comparable to film. And ambitious home theatre, with projection devices, for example, could perhaps benefit from that resolution as well.

Strange

Making a spaceship look like the fictional Enterprise isn't important enough for the amount of money that would need to be raised.

What counts is something that it is not practical to raise money for yet: first, a way to travel faster than light has to be invented.

Better Than Air

Since we can't use Freon for this purpose any more, and, of course, water dissolves all sorts of ionic substances and quickly becomes a good conductor, the use of mineral oil to get more heat away from electronics more quickly has long been an obvious thing to try.

But there could be issues - like the one about capacitors pointed out here. And, ideally, to realize the full benefits of a medium that has a higher density and heat capacity, there should still be fans on the processors, modified ones that will circulate mineral oil instead of air.

Obvious Solution

Just pass a law making it illegal for contracts between ISPs and their customers to in any way restrict or limit lawsuits if one's E-mail service fails to work reliably due to negligence on the part of the ISP in swiftly dealing with spam complaints... and incidents like this would stop happening.

One Hopes...

that this was a joke. Since advertisers pay for clicks, clicking on an ad if you're not interested in possibly buying whatever it is - just to give the website a boost - constitutes fraud!

Or, at least, it comes close enough that some online advertising providers view it that way. And that is a fair concern for protecting the value of ad banners and the like.

Bully for Iran!

I'm glad to see Iran joining the fight to protect the English language, in which that particular body of water's correct and proper name is the Persian Gulf, from erosion and manipulation by the same sinister Arab cabal that oversees the boycott of Israel!

For once, even if, no doubt, for the wrong reasons, they're on the side of the angels!

Good Idea

Hybrid computing is popular because it's a good idea: GPUs provide an economical and energy-efficient source of floating-point horsepower.

They're not ideal because they're severely limited in their flexibility. It would be better if you could get off-the-shelf microprocessors which, like the chip that powered the NEC SX-7, that perform vector calculations in the style of a Cray-1 and its successors. But supercomputing is such a small market that custom hardware for it is uneconomical: plus such an architecture appears to require a very high-bandwidth path to memory to be useful.

I think that Cray-style vector computing will someday make a comeback. Intel has finally decided to catch up with AltiVec through its recent adoption of AVX, and cache sizes in modern microchips equal the entire memory of the original Cray-1. So there's a demand for better vector power in mass-market chips, so the option of going with the classics is one that seems obvious enough that someone is eventually going to consider it.

They're Not All That Wrong

It doesn't help one's case in arguing against the extreme position taken by the WWF to take an equally extreme position in the other direction. Then, neither side can really marshal the facts in its defense.

Yes, what they're aiming at is to impose global poverty. But they're quite right if we instead go on with business as usual, more species will go extinct as people intrude more into the few remaining untouched wildlife habitats.

There are basically two alternatives we have to the choice between a decent, prosperous life for all of humanity on the one hand, and the survival of the glories of wild Nature on the other. Two ways we could have both.

One is population control. If we decided not to have very many children, and our children decided not to have very many grandchildren, eventually, barring major advances in gerontology, there would be few enough of us that we could live comfortably without destroying the planet.

The other is nuclear power. That lets us produce the abundant energy our lifestyle depends on without impinging on the biosphere to any significant extent. We still probably would have to ration airplane travel, but that would not be a big deal if people could travel from London to New York in hours on high-speed electric trains.

You know, through the Channel Tunnel, and then on to the bridge across the Bering Strait...

No, I'm not kidding. We have options. We can build a meaningful future for humanity that doesn't mean ruin and destruction for the natural world.

Why?

I should think that there is an obvious explanation for this.

The last time most people had even heard of desalination was back when it was used by places like Sa'udi Arabia back when there was no such thing as a modern reverse-osmosis desalination plant. Hence, people tend to think of it as an exotic and specialized option.

So there's no existing public pressure to keep providing water by that method, and if politicians can continue to keep it a secret, then they're free to avoid other public pressures by not adding to energy use through expanded desalination.

Of course, boiling seawater with solar mirrors doesn't even have a carbon footprint, but then people would complain about the environmental impact of huge reservoirs.

Undermining

Whatever they do, they must not undermine... sales of machines which have a higher price for comparable performance. Whether this is aimed at AS/400 or System i customers, or System z customers, basically it's a tax on people who are stuck with legacy software from IBM.

They need to stop trying to maximize profits at their customers' expense. A miffed customer is not a happy customer. Instead, work on making the price comparable across all the systems - and then blow x86 out of the water by pointing out that these equally-priced systems can also run IBM's flagship mainframe software.

Because x86 can run Windows, and so pitting a Linux-only system against that is selling less for an equal amount of money. Offering System i or System z software would be something to balance against Windows.

That way, IBM would be competing. This way, it's offering semi-competitive Linux systems... and making money off of existing legacy customers who are unlikely to be joined by new customers. That is not a strategy for growth.

Obviously

While the article is tongue-in-cheek about laptops, still, everyone is excited about various pad and cellphone devices which really aren't all that useful yet. Because they are more convenient to carry about.

People will put up with a lot in return for something they can always have with them, instead of something that is an effort to carry around. I wish I had an answer to the tradeoffs between portability and functionality.

Basically Right and Tragically Wrong

Up until now, it has indeed been true that Nature is very resilient. Human activities have resulted in the extinction of occasional species, which is a tragic loss, but they have not seriously threatened human survival.

But our technological reach as humans keeps growing, and so do our numbers. We are starting to affect the environment on a global scale. The "ozone hole" which led to a need to ban CFCs was the first striking evidence of that to enter the public consciousness. Some of the early effects of global warming - polar bears threatened with interbreeding from grizzlies, the Great Barrier Reef threatened by ocean acidification, methane release from thawing permafrost - can be added to a list that also includes the fouling of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean by garbage produced by humans.

The radical environmentalists who had been crying "Wolf" before may not be the people to turn to advice even now, but that doesn't mean that the wolf hasn't finally arrived this time.

Sensible and sober advice, from people who respect the environment without being fringe activists, can show us the way out - if we can find the right people to advise us. And of course that's difficult what with everyone with an agenda, whether it's radical environmentalists or corporate shills trying to present themselves as qualified. The mainstream scientific community, though not perfect, is still the best resource we have.

Product Niche

I wonder if they have anything like UniKix but for FORTRAN instead of COBOL?

Other Issue

While I cannot quarrel with the Supreme Court's decision that authorities have the right to do what is necessary to prevent contraband from being smuggled into prisons, the police had absolutely no right not to keep their records up-to-date, no right to fail to correctly record that the man's fine was paid.

It's not as if people sign an agreement to waive their rights in return for having the police protect them from crime, since the latter is not a choice. So they should still face wide-open unlimited liability for the mistaken arrest.

And Here I Thought

And here I thought that Apple products were just for the "top 1%" of income-earners. But then, some models of the iPod are probably affordable by proletarians.

The Failure

The problem was that most scientists would consider that neutrinos being able to travel faster than light so unlikely that even if no source of experimental error could be found, it would still be almost certain that it was the cause.

So if it was needful to publish something in order to establish priority, it should still have been presented in a very cautious way, so as not to cause embarassment by implying that any of the scientists involved ever for a moment seriously believed that any neutrinos were actually going faster than light, despite all the measures they took to eliminate known sources of possible error.

The eventual discovery of the loose connection was not the blow that destroyed the credibility of those involved. That, instead, helped to restore some of the credibility lost in the initial announcement of the apparent discovery.

Despite open-mindedness being an essential virtue in science, this incident has led to the suspicion that some of the scientists working at CERN are a little too open-minded.

Unfortunately

It's unfortunate all these attacks are apparently initiated from Chinese soil.

I would love to see some of those responsible face espionage charges in a Western country in addition to criminal computer crime charges.

Is it Strictly True

...that the shockwave has to be strictly proportional to the lift? If not, if one can design wings that make more annoying shockwave for the same amount of lift, then one can cancel the shockwave without also cancelling all the lift.

But then one will get only a little lift for a lot of drag, which is why this is a challenging thing to design.

Food

Easter has ham... Thanksgiving has turkey. Christmas... in England, goose was associated with it. Turkey is definitely a choice for Christmas dinner in the United States, but it isn't really associated with the holiday.

Of course, there are also Easter eggs, but they're for painting, not eating.

Age of Aquarius (song)

Mars is conjunct Jupiter about once every two years, and the Moon is always in the seventh house somewhere on Earth.

Hence, that particular part of the song from 'Hair' was just astrological patter, unconnected with the precession of the equinoxes.

Always

I had thought that Martin Landau would always and forever be Rollin Head (from Mission Impossible) no matter what other roles - including that of Commander John Koenig in Space: 1999 - that he might take.

Confusing the Koreans

A web search turned up a video about "making pasties in Cornwall" by The Guardian, a British newspaper, that was really about pastry, not the adhesive nipple covers once used by strippers. So apparently this confusion is not confined to North Korea.

My Only Concern

What if the evidence against the accused was shaky - but he actually had committed the crime he was accused of? Then the jury having this additional information might have helped to ensure that the victim would obtain justice, and the public would be protected.

A previous rape conviction is not irrelevant - people rightly believe it makes it significantly more probable that a current accusation is correct. So I fault the laws for withholding this information from jurors.

On The Other Hand

A film with actual scenes shot in weightlessness won a Hugo award several years ago... but it wasn't shot in outer space - the scenes in question were shot aboard an airplane flown in the manner of the "Vomit Comet" instead.

Given the genre of the film, it was definitely a foregone conclusion that approval from organizations such as NASA would not be forthcoming. The movie was "The Uranus Project" - a hardcore porn film.

Extradition?

They should be tried in New Zealand for any breaches of New Zealand laws they committed. If they haven't set foot in the United States, and they don't vote in U.S. elections, why should U.S. laws have anything to do with them?

After all, New Zealand does have copyright laws, and it does have laws which forbid its citizens, for example, from amusing themselves by launching missiles at Australia.

It is distressing that the U.S. has apparently pressured many countries into ceding an important element of their sovereignity to it.

What Is Wrong With Canada?

We should have carried out regime change on Iran long ago and brought him home.

Slowing Down

I would much prefer going back to what we had before leap seconds: having a second of civil time which corresponds to the Earth's rotation, even though it is slightly longer than the SI second. This avoids the potential for software problems.

Comparison

Of course it isn't as good as a laptop with a big screen and a real keyboard.

But Android devices usually come with no keyboard and one small screen. So this, by offering two screens a bit larger than those, is an improvement on that.

Untangling

The property of Hollywood movie studios may belong to them, not the government, but it is true that they're major earners of foreign exchange for the United States. This is important, because it means that more people may be allowed to have jobs, and buy Chinese-made products, without putting the country into debt.

People in Britain should be able to understand this; after all, the Beatles received the OBE even when their music was still controversial.

Obviously

Obviously, there should have been some kind of display on the dashboard on which the computer in question explained what it was doing - and why - giving the driver the opportunity to override it.

I don't care that it is possible to complain that "oh, this would be too complicated".

The Problem

Given that TV commercials are louder than the shows they're in because they have undergone dynamic range compression, it's certainly understandable that it was difficult to form a sufficiently precise definition of subjective average loudness (as against maximum volume) for such a law.

Other Way Around

I was pleased to see the comment quoted at the end of the article.

I was expecting the remark to be from an MP, asking why they were being paid so much.

However, I think it's the junior code-crackers who are being paid £25k, so he needn't worry.

Back to Some of Their Old Tricks

Russia may not be the same totalitarian state as the former Soviet Union, but it committed a war of aggression against Georgia under Medvedev and Putin. It will be difficult even for a democratic Russian government to hand Medvedev and Putin over to Georgian authorities to be tried for the crime of aggressive war the way Tojo was - but that's what will be needed to convince the world Russia is serious about being a responsible member of the community of democratic nations.

Quite Right, Except

I've always wondered why one would buy an extra box just to play games - but the advantage of a games console over a PC is that it's standardized and (for the manufacturer of the game) secure.

Things like the iPad are standardized too, and they are increasing in power. So they might squeeze game consoles from the other direction.

But the appetite of games for CPU cycles can grow - for example, full 3-D might be the next frontier that saves the game console.

Spectrum

Her contribution in this area was probably first brought to general notice by an article in the September 1984 IEEE Spectrum written by The Codebreakers author David Kahn.

Revenge for 1895

I take it the headline was meant to picture this as Earth taking its revenge for the Martian attack, with heat rays, on Britain in the late nineteenth century as chronicled by one Herbert George Wells. Or at least to note with irony that instead of the Martians sending walking tripods with heat rays to us, we're the ones sending robots with heat rays to them.

But our intellects are neither cool nor unsympathetic, and we are confident there is no intelligent life on Mars against which we could stumble into war.

Oh, Dear.

The world didn't end 5,200 years ago. We're still here, aren't we? So why would anyone be worried?

Passive Drinking

Having followed the link, I see that "passive drinking" was merely misnamed. It's not about people getting cirrhosis of the liver from inhaling alcohol fumes from other people drinking - that would indeed be junk science. It's about people injured by drunk drivers and so on. That is a real enough problem.

The Company They Keep

Very shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, those nice people in the U.S. who picket the funerals of American soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq told us that he was burning in Hell, since he did not give God the glory for his achievements, and he encouraged sin.

Now more respectable people are jumping on the bandwagon.

Even if their points are valid, to most of us, Steve Jobs is important for what he has done for us, and his faults are between him and those affected by them. That may be selfish of us, of course.

Solutions

Obviously, if the world gets its act together, people will want to have meat in their diet, and that pretty much kills any hope of controlling greenhouse gases from agriculture. Unless we get to the point of being able to produce it by tissue culture of a sort - which was the subject of a recent news item.

But read The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan - or watch Romance by Catherine Breillat. Men want a woman in their arms - women want a baby to hold.

So if unmarried men commit the crimes and start the wars, for the men to get what they want, the women have to get what they want, and we're doomed. A massive expansion of nuclear power, and using some of it to do geoengineering, seems to be our only choice. Not that improving agriculture in the Third World, as suggested, isn't a good idea that can be part of an all-out strategy.

Endangering Life

The limit in Canada is still 0.08, but when the police stop people, at first over 0.05, but now with any detectable alcohol, they still impose penalties such as a 24 hour license suspension.

So, while the criminal limit of impaired driving has not been reduced more, from a level at which a driver is not an accident waiting to happen, but his reflexes are simply a bit off, so that a near-accident caused by other factors would become more serious, provincial driving regulations have gone beyond that.

Thus, 0.2 or 0.24 or thereabouts is simply garden-variety drunk driving, where the driver is an accident waiting to happen. That should result in significantly worse penalties than merely impaired drivers, but somehow getting tougher on drivers that are just barely impaired (if they really are impaired) is more important than having harsher penalties for those who really do put others at significant risk.

Polynesia

Hawaii is in Polynesia, although it isn't in the South Pacific. Or, at least, Hawaiians are Polynesians - Hawaii, like Easter Island, isn't really in the archipelago.

But Polynesia isn't part of Asia, even if one would think of Japan or Indonesia as part of Asia.

Like the Babel Fish

If science says that the Universe shouldn't exist, but it does, that's a dead giveaway that God has been rigging the game. But if He is supposed to depend on faith...

Doomed Anyways

Just because a giant solar flare won't send us back into the Dark Ages doesn't mean we're not doomed. Between the effects of globalization, which have led to an economy in which only the top 1% of the people matter, and global warming - we're doomed well enough without having the Mayan calendar to time it.

No More Vectors

Today's microprocessors have vector instruction sets such as MMX, AltiVec, and SSE, which involve dividing a wide chunk of memory into several numbers. This derives from such computers as the AN/FSQ-32 and the Lincoln Laboratory TX-2.

The other kind of vector instruction, where a vector might consist of a large number of double-precision numbers - 64 of them, instead of 2 - but instead of being fetched all at once, is processed one number to a clock in a dense pipeline sequence - is the one used in computers like the Cray I.

Back around 1994, you could buy a board with the Fujitsu MB92831 on it - it was a single-chip co-processor with vector registers and vector instructions like those of a Cray, used in machines like the Mieko CS2.

Why we don't have things like that now, but even better, is well-known, so they say: the extreme cost advantages of commodity hardware, and the huge gap between memory bandwidth and computing speed, which reduces the benefits from vector instructions. But I still wonder, and suspect that classic vector instructions would benefit commodity micros for prosaic tasks like computer games.

Importance

The question, of course, is: how important is it that the U.S, have greater manned space capabilities than Russia? The U.S. is still a technological leader, but it is possible that manned space activity of the sort which involved the Shuttle and the ISS is not particularly important to the well-being of U.S. citizens, to U.S. national prestige, or U.S. national security.

Building a colony on the Moon, landing a man on Mars - now, that would be something. But without the reasons that existed in the Cold War, it's not clear if the expense can be accepted.

The Legitimate Intent

Of course, though, this wouldn't stop people from running Linux software with the help of applications such as andLinux. But you would still have to buy a copy of Windows.

What it would do is lock out boot sector viruses - which, of course, would be a good thing, because it would also lock out low-level anti-virus products.

Basically, this is indeed a disaster. But something like it would be a good idea. The right way to achieve this would be for the user to have to go into the BIOS screen, and digitally sign his Windows CD, or his Linux CD, or his antivirus product CD, from there to allow it to be installed - so that viruses, not being explicitly authorized by the user for booting from, would have no chance of invading.

Eliminate viruses not by locking the user out of the machine, but by giving the user more control over the machine!

Another way to do this: let the user go into the BIOS screen and add new keys - so that it would come with Microsoft's public key, but you could add one from your Linux supplier. (Or you could make a public/private key pair yourself and encrypt the kernel you compiled...)

So there is a way to make this work and avoid it ending OS competition.

Cellphone

He deliberately included a radio receiving device in the decorated toilet, which gave reasonable cause under present circumstances for authorities to suspect the possibility of a remotely controlled explosive. Therefore, charging him with a bomb hoax, nut just littering, was appropriate, and he should have been convicted, as far as I can tell from the article.

Free speech and protest are rights - but deliberately creating more work for the police is not a right.

Protectionism Isn't Crazy

If we all had to grow our own food and weave our own clothes, we'd be a lot poorer. So trade is a good thing.

However, the government doesn't allow a village facing hard time to print local scrip so that people can work and trade with each other even if there's no money from outside coming in. Because then they wouldn't be able to pay their taxes in real money. The idea is that you either starve, or you have earned cash some of which you can pay in taxes.

Forcing people into the money economy is the reason why the economy has to decline, throwing people out of work, when there aren't enough export sales to pay for the cheap imports people individually choose to buy. So it's not that protectionism is a bit of government interference that's intrinsically good, merely that it ameliorates the effects of earlier government interference.