Exactly this, and even if it's a few GB. It's just too small amount to bother about.
Agreed. 500MB is trivial, especially if it includes a bunch of large attachments. I just checked my email directory at home, and it's 2.7GB in size. It's on a network drive and Thunderbird accesses it more-or-less instantly; there is no discernible lag in showing the content of any mail folder - the hierarchy of folders is complicated, but some folders are large. The network drive is backed-up automatically three times a week, so its risk of loss is tolerably low. With modern email clients, the penalty of huge email directories should be tiny.
Even today "a few thousand" for a computer is a hell of a lot of money for most people, as you're well into the secondhand car league there. Twenty years ago you must have been able to buy a new car for that.
A new car??? Not even close in Finland. At that time, cars had in excess of 100% taxes, leading people to keep them running a long time. So used cars were not much cheaper than new ones, and the price curve was very long and declined rather slowly. In the early 1990s, even a clunker which was already 20 years old would have cost rather more than a brand new T5200. Don't assume that car prices in all countries are similar to those in the US, especially used car prices.
FYI, my current car has more than 320000km on the clock, and is in very good condition; I hope to keep it well past 500000km. BTW, car taxes are slightly less than 100% now, part of it being a large "registration fee" component to avoid EU issues. There is, of course, an additional 23% VAT on the car and on the registration fee.
The UN can do better because it theoretically represents the interests of more than just the US, and since the internet is international they should be the authority on it.
In principle, your argument has some merit. In practice, it is probably enormously flawed. The general concern is that under UN regulation global internet censorship would encompass the union of all local censorship wishes (biases of all religious viewpoints, every tinpot dictator or wannabe, DRM morons, etc.), rather than just their intersection (probably just kiddie porn, snuff videos, and suchlike).
You must have been rolling in the dough back then to have 16MB ram. 8MB about broke my bank.
Well, I had a T5200 portable which had 14MB RAM (its maximum) along with a 100MB disk. It had a 20MHz 386 which had the protected-mode bug which was only supposed to affect 16MHz chips (maybe Toshiba just overclocked it) and a 387 chip, too. It also only had the lousy orange plasma VGA display, because they didn't release the color VGA LCD until a year later. Damn thing was built like a tank, and survived repeatedly being accidentally dropped onto concrete - impossible to kill the thing. It cost a few thousand, but hardly broke the bank.
Or block all of Facebook's IP ranges on your router (if it has that ability). I added their known IPv4 ranges to the facebook page on Wikipedia on 3 September 2011, but that information was removed by "Gary King" on 8 October. For educational purposes, the IPv4 ranges were (as of 3 September 2011):
65.201.208.24 - 65.201.208.31
65.203.134.64 - 65.203.134.79
65.204.104.128 - 65.204.104.143
66.92.180.48 - 66.92.180.63
66.93.78.176 - 66.93.78.183
66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
67.200.105.48 - 67.200.105.51
69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
99.188.162.240 - 99.188.162.247
204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
208.252.1.128 - 208.252.1.159
The reference I cited was at iBlockList, which may have been updated since then.
Having said that, if I asked just about anyone I know what torrents they last downloaded - it would be rather unlikely to be one of the three examples above and it would also be unlikely that they were not downloading torrents containing copyrighted material.
Try asking your friends. Maybe you'll get a surprise, especially if you remind them about the WoW updates.
The last torrents I participated in were Linux distributions (Ubuntu & PCLinuxOS). In each case, I kept seeding until the traffic had essentially died away - that was after about 50GiB uploaded. In the most recent release, I restricted myself to Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu torrents, and left out the poxed Unity/GnomeShell Ubuntu. Mind you, I still run 10.04 on our home systems.
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
This is a classic example of stage 4 morality on Kohlberg's scale. Both stage 3 [social conformity] and stage 4 [obedience to authority] appear to be common in modern societies. Luckily, your Constitution was written by people operating (perhaps temporarily, and just for that purpose) at stage 5 [social contract], and who recognized that laws which are counter to the general welfare should be changed.
For air travel, the long distance craft never needs to set down at all, so make it an airship. Transport passengers up and down using catapult-launched gliders. No airplanes needed at all. What could possibly go wrong?
The gliders sound superfluous as well. Just use catapults aiming for nets on the airships.
What could possibly go wrong?
Fly-wheels where probably the ones with 90%+ efficiency, 75% is pretty good, these technologies have some way to go, we haven't even started using them yet but the point is that they are there and we just need to start using them instead of repeating the coal and nuclear industries mantra of renewables are no good because they are intermittent energy sources, a problem with many solutions waiting.
Flywheels are fairly good for short-term storage at small to moderate scales, and for medium term storage of small amounts of energy. For instance, to achieve above 90% efficiency, they need both magnetic bearings and near-vacuum confinement, which limits them to a few kWh in capacity. Without the magnetic bearings, they can be larger but are still rather limited in capacity, and are rarely practical above a few tens of kWh (about 85% efficiency for short term storage, but less longer term as energy is lost through the bearings). Typical capacities here, and some pros and cons here.
Flywheels have their uses, and are often among the best choices for certain tasks, but they don't scale up very far. At least, not in the way that pumped storage hydro can be scaled.
...there are technologies to store energy with 90% efficiency.
Care to enlighten us on these mysterious technologies? I can think of only one that comes close for large scale storage, and it's kind of limited by lack of suitable sites (and rarely even reaches 85% efficiency, anyway, and is usually closer to 75%).
If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood
Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.
Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".
I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens (IBM/360 followed by DEC-20, not exactly home computers). Using a computer was essential in any science or engineering education in those days, but probably outside the experience of most people. Ten years later, there were computers all over the place, and not just at workplaces and universities; they were probably in the lives of a large fraction of people (in developed nations) in one way or another. I eventually got a PC at home when I was around 25, but would have liked to have some kind of computer for fiddling about when younger - even a PDP-8.
It may or may not be a small part of the problem, but it isn't a small problem to crawl that many web pages.
Indeed, and there are more crawlers on the net than might be commonly supposed. Our home site is regularly visited by bots from Google, Bing, and Yandex, and occasionally by several others. The entire site (10s of GB) was slurped in a single visit by an unknown bot at an EC2 IP address recently. That bot's user-agent string was not the same as the string used by the Common Crawl Foundation's bot.
FYI, Labview has used a square menu system for years for block-insertion and other item selections - cascading rectangular grids of icons (and/or text) which change as you mouse over the upper level grid. It's almost forced by the large number of choices at each menu level.
Seriously... I'm sure your kids are great an' all, but how often are there really 3 people streaming their ballet performances?
Well, if it was just our kids, the web interest would be smaller (not so many grannies, and we're the parents). However, we shoot photos and videos for the whole ballet group, and for the whole group in showjumping. So there are quite a few other parents and grandparents who are interested in their little star (as well as the instructors), and the kids probably grab stuff for themselves as well. Then consider that they mostly want to watch/download as soon as we announce (by email) that the videos or photo galleries are available.
So, most of the time, there is nobody downloading stuff. But after we put up some new videos, there are several days where the traffic is very high and can easily include two or three people streaming/downloading simultaneously. Our server keeps statistics, and most months its traffic is between 50GiB and 120GiB while we rarely add even 1GiB of material per month. Much of this traffic is in bursts over several days, and it is equivalent to quite a lot of videos or photo galleries. A few bots drop by as well, and they also slurp the new additions. Think of them as Granny Google, Granny Bing, and Crazy Uncle Yandex. Then there was that mysterious EC2 bot which slurped the whole site in one visit.
Even if you're a torrent freak, there's only so much content you can download and watch, and 100Mbit download is just overkill unless you've got a huge household.
Now upload speed for running a business demo website -- that I could use.
Speak for yourself. Our non-huge household of 2 adults and 2 kids has had 100/10 for four years, and found the download speed very useful, without any torrents. We recently switched to 100/100 symmetric for 43euro/month (it includes IP TV as well).
You're correct in asserting that the upload speed is important, although for a household rather than a business. Our web server has many photo slideshows and quite a few SD/HD videos (mostly of our kids at ballet performances or horse riding competitions), and at 10Mbps upload it could get congested if more than 2 or 3 people were streaming them. At 100Mbps, there are no issues with streaming.
I'm trying to post from my phone while controlling the unicycle using only my ass. It takes some skill but I think I got it under con^C^C NO CARRIER
Obviously your ass was not wide enough. TFA and TFS both state the tyres are 25 inches thick. That's in serious hamburger territory, and you better weigh well over 150 kg to be able to span that with your ass.
that when Physicist can't explain anything these days, they just invent a particle for it?
I rather suspect that when an AC can't understand something in physics or some other scientific field, and the arguments and evidence on the matter are incomprehensible to him, he tries to project his ignorance onto those who do understand the issue. Yet another manifestation of the Kruger-Dunning effect.
For me, the final straw was Microsoft's nice phone support lady (she called me, in response to my disgruntled email) telling me that to install SP1 onto XP, I would have to disable all firewalls, including those in my router during the installation and setup of SP1. I had been able to download SP1, but it kept barfing during installation. Now XP SP1 was supposed to make XP a bit more secure, but since my router's firewall was rejecting many bad packets per second, I was loath to disable it during the installation. My expectation was that I'd have a rather wormy system before SP1 was in place.
So I upgraded instead to Hoary, quickly followed by a beta of Breezy. All of my laptop's hardware was supported and automatically configured by Breezy.
I use Linux exclusively at home. At work, they give me a laptop installed with the company default stuff. I could switch to Linux if I wanted to, but then, every time ANY thing went wrong, I'd be blamed for it, because I had gone off the "standard" and used "weird" software.
Don't underestimate the power of the Microsoft drones.
Likewise, we use Linux almost exclusively at home (2 servers, 2 desktops, 1 laptop). There are also a couple of Android devices intermittently connected to the home net, and these are sort-of Linux.
At work we are required/compelled to use Windows - the corporation is an official MS partner, and no alternative desktop is allowed. It's SharePoint and IIS and suchlike everywhere. Luckily, Linux has penetrated some of our product lines (cost and customisability are hard to beat), so our Linux knowledge is actually paying off.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly this, and even if it's a few GB. It's just too small amount to bother about.
Agreed. 500MB is trivial, especially if it includes a bunch of large attachments. I just checked my email directory at home, and it's 2.7GB in size. It's on a network drive and Thunderbird accesses it more-or-less instantly; there is no discernible lag in showing the content of any mail folder - the hierarchy of folders is complicated, but some folders are large. The network drive is backed-up automatically three times a week, so its risk of loss is tolerably low. With modern email clients, the penalty of huge email directories should be tiny.
But the food all comes from the same big factory now.
And it's called Soylent something-or-other. Let's see, could be Soylent Grown or is it Soylent Grain, or Soylent Grin, or Soylent Grease, or ...
Even today "a few thousand" for a computer is a hell of a lot of money for most people, as you're well into the secondhand car league there. Twenty years ago you must have been able to buy a new car for that.
A new car??? Not even close in Finland. At that time, cars had in excess of 100% taxes, leading people to keep them running a long time. So used cars were not much cheaper than new ones, and the price curve was very long and declined rather slowly. In the early 1990s, even a clunker which was already 20 years old would have cost rather more than a brand new T5200. Don't assume that car prices in all countries are similar to those in the US, especially used car prices.
FYI, my current car has more than 320000km on the clock, and is in very good condition; I hope to keep it well past 500000km. BTW, car taxes are slightly less than 100% now, part of it being a large "registration fee" component to avoid EU issues. There is, of course, an additional 23% VAT on the car and on the registration fee.
I live in California and it's a mess.
What's it got to do with Calif? AFAIK, ca is the TLD for Canada...
Oh wait, those wily Canucks must be angling for a Californian climate again.
The UN can do better because it theoretically represents the interests of more than just the US, and since the internet is international they should be the authority on it.
In principle, your argument has some merit. In practice, it is probably enormously flawed. The general concern is that under UN regulation global internet censorship would encompass the union of all local censorship wishes (biases of all religious viewpoints, every tinpot dictator or wannabe, DRM morons, etc.), rather than just their intersection (probably just kiddie porn, snuff videos, and suchlike).
You must have been rolling in the dough back then to have 16MB ram. 8MB about broke my bank.
Well, I had a T5200 portable which had 14MB RAM (its maximum) along with a 100MB disk. It had a 20MHz 386 which had the protected-mode bug which was only supposed to affect 16MHz chips (maybe Toshiba just overclocked it) and a 387 chip, too. It also only had the lousy orange plasma VGA display, because they didn't release the color VGA LCD until a year later. Damn thing was built like a tank, and survived repeatedly being accidentally dropped onto concrete - impossible to kill the thing. It cost a few thousand, but hardly broke the bank.
Don't forget to block Facebook on your computer.
Or block all of Facebook's IP ranges on your router (if it has that ability). I added their known IPv4 ranges to the facebook page on Wikipedia on 3 September 2011, but that information was removed by "Gary King" on 8 October. For educational purposes, the IPv4 ranges were (as of 3 September 2011):
65.201.208.24 - 65.201.208.31
65.203.134.64 - 65.203.134.79
65.204.104.128 - 65.204.104.143
66.92.180.48 - 66.92.180.63
66.93.78.176 - 66.93.78.183
66.220.144.0 - 66.220.159.255
67.200.105.48 - 67.200.105.51
69.63.176.0 - 69.63.191.255
74.119.76.0 - 74.119.79.255
99.188.162.240 - 99.188.162.247
204.15.20.0 - 204.15.23.255
208.252.1.128 - 208.252.1.159
The reference I cited was at iBlockList, which may have been updated since then.
Having said that, if I asked just about anyone I know what torrents they last downloaded - it would be rather unlikely to be one of the three examples above and it would also be unlikely that they were not downloading torrents containing copyrighted material.
Try asking your friends. Maybe you'll get a surprise, especially if you remind them about the WoW updates.
The last torrents I participated in were Linux distributions (Ubuntu & PCLinuxOS). In each case, I kept seeding until the traffic had essentially died away - that was after about 50GiB uploaded. In the most recent release, I restricted myself to Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu torrents, and left out the poxed Unity/GnomeShell Ubuntu. Mind you, I still run 10.04 on our home systems.
Because as much as I hate and disagree with it, breaking DRM is illegal in the US under the DMCA, and there are still some of us who grudgingly but respectfully honor the rule of law.
This is a classic example of stage 4 morality on Kohlberg's scale. Both stage 3 [social conformity] and stage 4 [obedience to authority] appear to be common in modern societies. Luckily, your Constitution was written by people operating (perhaps temporarily, and just for that purpose) at stage 5 [social contract], and who recognized that laws which are counter to the general welfare should be changed.
It lives on also among the DoD's general specifications, and can be downloaded from this page.
They're colonists.
They can send someone with balls:
In that case, they better send some with pussies, too. Otherwise the colony won't last long.
For air travel, the long distance craft never needs to set down at all, so make it an airship. Transport passengers up and down using catapult-launched gliders. No airplanes needed at all. What could possibly go wrong?
The gliders sound superfluous as well. Just use catapults aiming for nets on the airships.
What could possibly go wrong?
Fly-wheels where probably the ones with 90%+ efficiency, 75% is pretty good, these technologies have some way to go, we haven't even started using them yet but the point is that they are there and we just need to start using them instead of repeating the coal and nuclear industries mantra of renewables are no good because they are intermittent energy sources, a problem with many solutions waiting.
Flywheels are fairly good for short-term storage at small to moderate scales, and for medium term storage of small amounts of energy. For instance, to achieve above 90% efficiency, they need both magnetic bearings and near-vacuum confinement, which limits them to a few kWh in capacity. Without the magnetic bearings, they can be larger but are still rather limited in capacity, and are rarely practical above a few tens of kWh (about 85% efficiency for short term storage, but less longer term as energy is lost through the bearings). Typical capacities here, and some pros and cons here.
Flywheels have their uses, and are often among the best choices for certain tasks, but they don't scale up very far. At least, not in the way that pumped storage hydro can be scaled.
Care to enlighten us on these mysterious technologies? I can think of only one that comes close for large scale storage, and it's kind of limited by lack of suitable sites (and rarely even reaches 85% efficiency, anyway, and is usually closer to 75%).
If you are 40 then computers were a part of your childhood
Nonsense. If you are 40 then you were born in 1970. Home computing started to appear in the very late '70s, but didn't become common until the '90s. I'm just under 30, and at least half of the people I knew growing up didn't have a home computer. When I came to university, a lot of my friends didn't have their own computer (well, all of my geek friends did). I bought the computer I took to university with money from a summer job, and it cost about as much as four months rent in student accommodation. People who had to work a part-time job to afford the rent certainly couldn't afford one.
Just nit-picking here, but he did not actually mention "home computers" or "personal computers"; he just said "computers".
I'm in my 50s, and I have used computers since my teens (IBM/360 followed by DEC-20, not exactly home computers). Using a computer was essential in any science or engineering education in those days, but probably outside the experience of most people. Ten years later, there were computers all over the place, and not just at workplaces and universities; they were probably in the lives of a large fraction of people (in developed nations) in one way or another. I eventually got a PC at home when I was around 25, but would have liked to have some kind of computer for fiddling about when younger - even a PDP-8.
It may or may not be a small part of the problem, but it isn't a small problem to crawl that many web pages.
Indeed, and there are more crawlers on the net than might be commonly supposed. Our home site is regularly visited by bots from Google, Bing, and Yandex, and occasionally by several others. The entire site (10s of GB) was slurped in a single visit by an unknown bot at an EC2 IP address recently. That bot's user-agent string was not the same as the string used by the Common Crawl Foundation's bot.
The Tea Party is a reference to the Boston Tea Party
From the antics of those involved, it's more like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
Any more silly than "The Tea Party?"
Depends. Are you referring to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, or the immensely stupider modern one?
FYI, Labview has used a square menu system for years for block-insertion and other item selections - cascading rectangular grids of icons (and/or text) which change as you mouse over the upper level grid. It's almost forced by the large number of choices at each menu level.
Seriously... I'm sure your kids are great an' all, but how often are there really 3 people streaming their ballet performances?
Well, if it was just our kids, the web interest would be smaller (not so many grannies, and we're the parents). However, we shoot photos and videos for the whole ballet group, and for the whole group in showjumping. So there are quite a few other parents and grandparents who are interested in their little star (as well as the instructors), and the kids probably grab stuff for themselves as well. Then consider that they mostly want to watch/download as soon as we announce (by email) that the videos or photo galleries are available.
So, most of the time, there is nobody downloading stuff. But after we put up some new videos, there are several days where the traffic is very high and can easily include two or three people streaming/downloading simultaneously. Our server keeps statistics, and most months its traffic is between 50GiB and 120GiB while we rarely add even 1GiB of material per month. Much of this traffic is in bursts over several days, and it is equivalent to quite a lot of videos or photo galleries. A few bots drop by as well, and they also slurp the new additions. Think of them as Granny Google, Granny Bing, and Crazy Uncle Yandex. Then there was that mysterious EC2 bot which slurped the whole site in one visit.
Even if you're a torrent freak, there's only so much content you can download and watch, and 100Mbit download is just overkill unless you've got a huge household.
Now upload speed for running a business demo website -- that I could use.
Speak for yourself. Our non-huge household of 2 adults and 2 kids has had 100/10 for four years, and found the download speed very useful, without any torrents. We recently switched to 100/100 symmetric for 43euro/month (it includes IP TV as well).
You're correct in asserting that the upload speed is important, although for a household rather than a business. Our web server has many photo slideshows and quite a few SD/HD videos (mostly of our kids at ballet performances or horse riding competitions), and at 10Mbps upload it could get congested if more than 2 or 3 people were streaming them. At 100Mbps, there are no issues with streaming.
I'm trying to post from my phone while controlling the unicycle using only my ass. It takes some skill but I think I got it under con^C^C NO CARRIER
Obviously your ass was not wide enough. TFA and TFS both state the tyres are 25 inches thick. That's in serious hamburger territory, and you better weigh well over 150 kg to be able to span that with your ass.
Or did they mean 25 inches diameter?
that when Physicist can't explain anything these days, they just invent a particle for it?
I rather suspect that when an AC can't understand something in physics or some other scientific field, and the arguments and evidence on the matter are incomprehensible to him, he tries to project his ignorance onto those who do understand the issue. Yet another manifestation of the Kruger-Dunning effect.
For me, the final straw was Microsoft's nice phone support lady (she called me, in response to my disgruntled email) telling me that to install SP1 onto XP, I would have to disable all firewalls, including those in my router during the installation and setup of SP1. I had been able to download SP1, but it kept barfing during installation. Now XP SP1 was supposed to make XP a bit more secure, but since my router's firewall was rejecting many bad packets per second, I was loath to disable it during the installation. My expectation was that I'd have a rather wormy system before SP1 was in place.
So I upgraded instead to Hoary, quickly followed by a beta of Breezy. All of my laptop's hardware was supported and automatically configured by Breezy.
I use Linux exclusively at home. At work, they give me a laptop installed with the company default stuff. I could switch to Linux if I wanted to, but then, every time ANY thing went wrong, I'd be blamed for it, because I had gone off the "standard" and used "weird" software.
Don't underestimate the power of the Microsoft drones.
Likewise, we use Linux almost exclusively at home (2 servers, 2 desktops, 1 laptop). There are also a couple of Android devices intermittently connected to the home net, and these are sort-of Linux.
At work we are required/compelled to use Windows - the corporation is an official MS partner, and no alternative desktop is allowed. It's SharePoint and IIS and suchlike everywhere. Luckily, Linux has penetrated some of our product lines (cost and customisability are hard to beat), so our Linux knowledge is actually paying off.