What is socialistic about this? To me, it sounds like a really good thing to have, as bus service in the US is generally really crappy to begin with.
When I read the summary of the article, the first thing that occurred to me is that it sounded really similar to the transportation system that prevails on the island of Efate in Vanauatu (but in Vanuatu there is no cellphone app for it. You just stand by the road and wait for the bus to come by), and when I was there I found it to be more convenient and more effective than any public transportation system that I had encountered before, first or third world.
Results of such experiments sometimes take days to be known and verified to the point of publication. The news reported in early October may well be as early as possible. Who knows why the US press did not get it out first?
The one I see most often is in downtown Nelson, right beside the entrance to the parking lot that I use most often when I am in town. It is very noticeable, a tall glass and aluminum box with a big Telecom logo on the glass and a sign saying "Free WiFi Hotspot". Hard to miss that one. I also see a free Telecom WiFi network available on my phone when I am in Richmond, though I could not tell you if there is a phone box anywhere near. I never set out to look for any.
As someone who lives in NZ, I assure you there are Telecom phonebooths in lots of places. You may have not been looking carefully enough to see them.
And, also, they would be mainly in urban centers. Arrowtown is not an urban center, though it is a popular holiday spot. Much of NZ is very rural with small communities and they may have never had a booth.
It has been my thought that Telecom embarked on this program to cater to the tourists who come every summer.
No need to sympathize with Telecom. They are THE phone company in NZ, not just the payphone network. Telecom has most of the landline, mobile, and broadband business in NZ, and own the wires they lease to most of the other providers. So, they are not hurting over the demise of payphones.
The Telecom WiFi hotspots have been set up around NZ for a couple of years now. I guess it was a trial. Where I live in Nelson, there are at least two that I encounter often. They work, and they are free to everyone. I have used them several times when out shopping or getting a coffee. And I am not a Telecom customer.
I think the original poster you have responded to meant "past", not "passed" as he said. That changes the meaning of what he said to you, and makes your comment kind of pointless.
Yup, what you say is quite true about the CDC 6500. I was at the University of Texas in 1966 when they received #13 CDC 6600. There was a bank of 12 x 12 switches in which the ultimate boot program was encoded. Typically they caused a read to be initiated at location 0 of the hard disk, and thus loaded in the rest of the boot sequence. In its day, it was the be-all end-all supercomputer with a 1 microsecond cycle time.
My thesis work, computing a potential energy curve for a diatomic molecule took 8 solid hours of computing on the 6600 for each plotted point. I don't know what it would have taken on the machine we had before. I was the night operators' friend. They started my runs at the beginning of their shift, and had nothing to do until morning.
I wonder the same, but then I seem to be quite a different consumer than those who post here. I don't play games. I don't download music. If I want to watch a movie, I go to the cinema and enjoy sitting in the dark while eating popcorn. I watch TV shows on the "gasp" TV from my satellite service. I spend 4 - 6 hours every day on the internet, mainly following news items (a lot on/.) I watch videos associated with those news items when I want. Sometimes my wife watches the same videos, which costs the data transfer again. I do automatic backup of both computers to the cloud. And all my landline phone usage is VOIP. I use about 25GB per month.
Streaming video services are just almost beginning to be available in NZ.
Here in NZ, we have limited choices I guess. There are quite a few ISPs, but they generally are reselling DSL services on lines owned by the telco. My speeds are ~12 Mbps down, ~1Mbps up. Almost all providers have data caps, either going to dialup speed or $$ extra when the cap is exceeded. I chose one that had no data allowance at all. I much preferred just paying for what I used at NZ$1/GB plus a base monthly charge. I am quite happy with that.
No decent human being would push young women in the direction she went.
I had the privilege of meeting Capt Hopper (she was not Adm. yet) many years ago. She was a real dynamo, enjoying her life and very turned on about what she was doing. Everyone would be well to have someone encourage them into a lifetime activity that would give them such enjoyment as she had!
I cannot actually say whether she was a really good developer or not. Much of the accolades she got were because she was the first to do a number of things, not necessarily because she was the "best" in some sense.
Is there an evolution of the American English language going on of which I have not been aware? In this series of comments, I have seen many, many instances of the use of "breaks" when "brakes" is intended. It is mind-boggling that people who seem to be very competent in the language otherwise will then dip into this aberration.
Since NZ has no written constitution, or supreme law, those freedoms that make NZ one of the freest countries are established by legislation. Parliament can eliminate them at will if they wanted to.
When I first looked at the infographic on the referenced blog, I misread the label for California to be "Socialistan", thinking it to be a comment on the liberalism of the place. Later I realized it said "Socalistan", referring to the locale of the center of influence. I wonder if anyone else did the same.
I am surprised that "Socalistan" showed such localized connections on the map. Since so very many people in California are from outside California originally I would have thought there would be really strong connections to "back home".
I think you got that right! BART has been in the works since the 1970s, and still has not reached San Jose. Santa Clara Valley has a light-rail system that was all implemented within the time that BART was "underway". I used to ride it from San Jose to Mountain View when my car had to go into the shop or something. It worked OK, but took an hour and a half for that ride, which is kind of a long time.
I used to live and work in Silicon Valley, and I don't recall ever hearing of the local governments getting payroll taxes. But, in California, cities and counties can and do levy their own sales taxes which are tacked on top of the state-mandated tax rate. Typically the local sales tax would be 0.5 %. Often (maybe always), the local taxes are targeted to fund some long-term expenses like transportation. Santa Clara County had a half percent tax that was targeted for transportation, and funded the building of a couple of new freeways to relieve congestion. Another good thing about those taxes in California is that the residents of the local area have to approve the tax by ballot.
It's because software was free back then. Hardware was so bizarly expensive and rare that no one gave a damn about giving away software and software ideas for free.
As someone who was working in the computing milieu back in those days, let me tell you that you have THAT comment completely wrong! Back in the old days nobody gave anything away, unless you might share something with the guy at the next desk working in the same shop. You might share something with a colleague at another university, say, but realized that you did not know how to set it up to run on his particular computing system.
Back then, every manufacturer of hardware tended to create their own OS and compilers. It was very hard to share software of any kind because unless you had a machine from the big guys (IBM) there was just not enough of a common market to make the headaches worthwhile. Remember it took people to take the orders, pack the product, and ship it out. There were no online servers where one could make an online request and download the result. Delivery of software was often done in the form of punchcard decks, or maybe on a tape that turned out to not quite work on your tape drive. Typically, if one could find software available (I am talking about libraries and tools here, not big accounting packages.) and make it available on your machine, it would be maybe "almost" useful, but require you to go in and tweak it somehow.
By contrast, today I can sit at my home computer half a world away from much of the software is and select and easily acquire massive useful packages of free high quality software that can help me create amazing things sitting in my home office. That is something I could never have done 50 years ago.
You may be too young to know much about this topic. 50 years ago, when I turned voting age, the rules about residency were far more stringent. To register to vote one typically had to demonstrate residence in a location for 6 months prior to registering. Often a poll tax payment was also due. And the age was 21, not 18!
After I graduated from university I did a couple of postgraduate fellowships which caused me to move around a bit. The gist was I missed voting in several elections, including the presidential elections of both 1964 and 1968, simply because I was not in one place long enough to ever register.
The situation is very different today -- for the better.
I wonder how I would be affected today if the same rules were in effect. I now live outside the USA, and I can vote by mail after registering by mail in my former place of residence. I don't know what the rules about foreign residency would have been 50 years ago.
I cannot understand why this entire set of comments is devoted to the question of the feds monitoring traffic. To me, what happened does not appear to be any different from me searching for X on Google and then receiving targeted ads for X for days after when I use a Google service.
The advertisers make a simple commercial deal with Google to tell them about searches for their products. The Feds can make the same kind of deal with Google to tell them about searches for what they are interested in. (and I suppose they would not have to reveal that they are the Feds).
ITAR information is NOT classified information. ITAR is a lower-level categorization than classified. Not only does ITAR information need to remain inside the US, it also must not be accessible by foreign nationals who happen to be in the US.
About 30 years ago my job encompassed ITAR information and classified information. We would never have thought about data storage anywhere outside the company, and likely not outside the building. Of course, not so much information back then was digital, and cloud solutions were nonexistent.
I have done exactly that. I have pretty much eliminated all the spam which had an "unsubscribe" link. I am left with a fair amount of traffic that does not have an "unsubscribe" link in the body of the message. The from addresses seem to morph daily, so setting a "whitelist" or "blacklist" is kind of hard. I quickly peruse my spam folder every day and take out the messages that are not spam, then empty the folder once a day.
Now what is bothering me is the messages that get into the spam folder which are not spam. I use Thunderbird, and with POP3 mail I used its spam-detection capability and I could tell it that a piece of mail was "not junk". Now, I get mail via Google Apps using IMAP protocol and Google does the spam detection and the ability to say "not junk" has disappeared in Thunderbird.
Does Google Mail have a "whitelist" capability? I did a little bit of searching for an answer, but did not find such a capability.
Slashdot Mirror
What is socialistic about this? To me, it sounds like a really good thing to have, as bus service in the US is generally really crappy to begin with.
When I read the summary of the article, the first thing that occurred to me is that it sounded really similar to the transportation system that prevails on the island of Efate in Vanauatu (but in Vanuatu there is no cellphone app for it. You just stand by the road and wait for the bus to come by), and when I was there I found it to be more convenient and more effective than any public transportation system that I had encountered before, first or third world.
Results of such experiments sometimes take days to be known and verified to the point of publication. The news reported in early October may well be as early as possible. Who knows why the US press did not get it out first?
When I first saw:
What if you could build a computer that works just like the human brain?
My first reaction was: And what if you wound up with the brain of a Hitler?
The one I see most often is in downtown Nelson, right beside the entrance to the parking lot that I use most often when I am in town. It is very noticeable, a tall glass and aluminum box with a big Telecom logo on the glass and a sign saying "Free WiFi Hotspot". Hard to miss that one. I also see a free Telecom WiFi network available on my phone when I am in Richmond, though I could not tell you if there is a phone box anywhere near. I never set out to look for any.
As someone who lives in NZ, I assure you there are Telecom phonebooths in lots of places. You may have not been looking carefully enough to see them.
And, also, they would be mainly in urban centers. Arrowtown is not an urban center, though it is a popular holiday spot. Much of NZ is very rural with small communities and they may have never had a booth.
It has been my thought that Telecom embarked on this program to cater to the tourists who come every summer.
No need to sympathize with Telecom. They are THE phone company in NZ, not just the payphone network. Telecom has most of the landline, mobile, and broadband business in NZ, and own the wires they lease to most of the other providers. So, they are not hurting over the demise of payphones.
The Telecom WiFi hotspots have been set up around NZ for a couple of years now. I guess it was a trial. Where I live in Nelson, there are at least two that I encounter often. They work, and they are free to everyone. I have used them several times when out shopping or getting a coffee. And I am not a Telecom customer.
I think the original poster you have responded to meant "past", not "passed" as he said. That changes the meaning of what he said to you, and makes your comment kind of pointless.
Yup, what you say is quite true about the CDC 6500. I was at the University of Texas in 1966 when they received #13 CDC 6600. There was a bank of 12 x 12 switches in which the ultimate boot program was encoded. Typically they caused a read to be initiated at location 0 of the hard disk, and thus loaded in the rest of the boot sequence. In its day, it was the be-all end-all supercomputer with a 1 microsecond cycle time.
My thesis work, computing a potential energy curve for a diatomic molecule took 8 solid hours of computing on the 6600 for each plotted point. I don't know what it would have taken on the machine we had before. I was the night operators' friend. They started my runs at the beginning of their shift, and had nothing to do until morning.
I wonder the same, but then I seem to be quite a different consumer than those who post here. I don't play games. I don't download music. If I want to watch a movie, I go to the cinema and enjoy sitting in the dark while eating popcorn. I watch TV shows on the "gasp" TV from my satellite service. I spend 4 - 6 hours every day on the internet, mainly following news items (a lot on /.) I watch videos associated with those news items when I want. Sometimes my wife watches the same videos, which costs the data transfer again. I do automatic backup of both computers to the cloud. And all my landline phone usage is VOIP. I use about 25GB per month.
Streaming video services are just almost beginning to be available in NZ.
Here in NZ, we have limited choices I guess. There are quite a few ISPs, but they generally are reselling DSL services on lines owned by the telco. My speeds are ~12 Mbps down, ~1Mbps up. Almost all providers have data caps, either going to dialup speed or $$ extra when the cap is exceeded. I chose one that had no data allowance at all. I much preferred just paying for what I used at NZ$1/GB plus a base monthly charge. I am quite happy with that.
No decent human being would push young women in the direction she went.
I had the privilege of meeting Capt Hopper (she was not Adm. yet) many years ago. She was a real dynamo, enjoying her life and very turned on about what she was doing. Everyone would be well to have someone encourage them into a lifetime activity that would give them such enjoyment as she had!
I cannot actually say whether she was a really good developer or not. Much of the accolades she got were because she was the first to do a number of things, not necessarily because she was the "best" in some sense.
Is there an evolution of the American English language going on of which I have not been aware? In this series of comments, I have seen many, many instances of the use of "breaks" when "brakes" is intended. It is mind-boggling that people who seem to be very competent in the language otherwise will then dip into this aberration.
Hear! Hear! You got that right.
Might be very effective, however.
Hey! That is rude! Gasoline was 20 cents a gallon when I was a teen.
Driving is not much "fun" any more for me.
Since NZ has no written constitution, or supreme law, those freedoms that make NZ one of the freest countries are established by legislation. Parliament can eliminate them at will if they wanted to.
When I first looked at the infographic on the referenced blog, I misread the label for California to be "Socialistan", thinking it to be a comment on the liberalism of the place. Later I realized it said "Socalistan", referring to the locale of the center of influence. I wonder if anyone else did the same.
I am surprised that "Socalistan" showed such localized connections on the map. Since so very many people in California are from outside California originally I would have thought there would be really strong connections to "back home".
I think you got that right! BART has been in the works since the 1970s, and still has not reached San Jose. Santa Clara Valley has a light-rail system that was all implemented within the time that BART was "underway". I used to ride it from San Jose to Mountain View when my car had to go into the shop or something. It worked OK, but took an hour and a half for that ride, which is kind of a long time.
Not working in the city does not make them "part-time residents". Their property taxes are levied the same as their neighbor who works downtown.
I used to live and work in Silicon Valley, and I don't recall ever hearing of the local governments getting payroll taxes. But, in California, cities and counties can and do levy their own sales taxes which are tacked on top of the state-mandated tax rate. Typically the local sales tax would be 0.5 %. Often (maybe always), the local taxes are targeted to fund some long-term expenses like transportation. Santa Clara County had a half percent tax that was targeted for transportation, and funded the building of a couple of new freeways to relieve congestion. Another good thing about those taxes in California is that the residents of the local area have to approve the tax by ballot.
It's because software was free back then. Hardware was so bizarly expensive and rare that no one gave a damn about giving away software and software ideas for free.
As someone who was working in the computing milieu back in those days, let me tell you that you have THAT comment completely wrong! Back in the old days nobody gave anything away, unless you might share something with the guy at the next desk working in the same shop. You might share something with a colleague at another university, say, but realized that you did not know how to set it up to run on his particular computing system.
Back then, every manufacturer of hardware tended to create their own OS and compilers. It was very hard to share software of any kind because unless you had a machine from the big guys (IBM) there was just not enough of a common market to make the headaches worthwhile. Remember it took people to take the orders, pack the product, and ship it out. There were no online servers where one could make an online request and download the result. Delivery of software was often done in the form of punchcard decks, or maybe on a tape that turned out to not quite work on your tape drive. Typically, if one could find software available (I am talking about libraries and tools here, not big accounting packages.) and make it available on your machine, it would be maybe "almost" useful, but require you to go in and tweak it somehow.
By contrast, today I can sit at my home computer half a world away from much of the software is and select and easily acquire massive useful packages of free high quality software that can help me create amazing things sitting in my home office. That is something I could never have done 50 years ago.
Who is Tom Hopkins? What has he done?
Never heard of him.
You may be too young to know much about this topic. 50 years ago, when I turned voting age, the rules about residency were far more stringent. To register to vote one typically had to demonstrate residence in a location for 6 months prior to registering. Often a poll tax payment was also due. And the age was 21, not 18!
After I graduated from university I did a couple of postgraduate fellowships which caused me to move around a bit. The gist was I missed voting in several elections, including the presidential elections of both 1964 and 1968, simply because I was not in one place long enough to ever register.
The situation is very different today -- for the better.
I wonder how I would be affected today if the same rules were in effect. I now live outside the USA, and I can vote by mail after registering by mail in my former place of residence. I don't know what the rules about foreign residency would have been 50 years ago.
I cannot understand why this entire set of comments is devoted to the question of the feds monitoring traffic. To me, what happened does not appear to be any different from me searching for X on Google and then receiving targeted ads for X for days after when I use a Google service.
The advertisers make a simple commercial deal with Google to tell them about searches for their products. The Feds can make the same kind of deal with Google to tell them about searches for what they are interested in. (and I suppose they would not have to reveal that they are the Feds).
ITAR information is NOT classified information. ITAR is a lower-level categorization than classified. Not only does ITAR information need to remain inside the US, it also must not be accessible by foreign nationals who happen to be in the US.
About 30 years ago my job encompassed ITAR information and classified information. We would never have thought about data storage anywhere outside the company, and likely not outside the building. Of course, not so much information back then was digital, and cloud solutions were nonexistent.
The OP surprised me, indeed.
I have done exactly that. I have pretty much eliminated all the spam which had an "unsubscribe" link. I am left with a fair amount of traffic that does not have an "unsubscribe" link in the body of the message. The from addresses seem to morph daily, so setting a "whitelist" or "blacklist" is kind of hard. I quickly peruse my spam folder every day and take out the messages that are not spam, then empty the folder once a day. Now what is bothering me is the messages that get into the spam folder which are not spam. I use Thunderbird, and with POP3 mail I used its spam-detection capability and I could tell it that a piece of mail was "not junk". Now, I get mail via Google Apps using IMAP protocol and Google does the spam detection and the ability to say "not junk" has disappeared in Thunderbird. Does Google Mail have a "whitelist" capability? I did a little bit of searching for an answer, but did not find such a capability.