Did you even read the wiki link that I posted? Look at this section. The carbon isn't produced solely as gaseous carbon. The methane produced is actually re-used to keep the process going. The hydrocarbons in the oil produced are certainly not gaseous (yes, I know that they will be after the oil is consumed, but much of the carbon would have found it's way into the atomsphere anyway if left to decompose), and the site itself speaks of carbon solids as a byproduct (which can then be used for filtering, fertilizer, etc. It's not like they are just pitching waste into a fire to drive turbines with steam... They actually use the byproducts of the process as well.
What, exactly, are we supposed to do without agriculture? My body is addicted to eating from time to time and we aren't quite to the vat-grown textured yeasts/artificially produced meats/vegetables stage yet (though from some of the articles posted on slashdot, it sounds like we might be getting closer). As long as it's here, why waste our waste? Plastic is thrown away every day. Why not recoup some of it into something useful? I'm not a huge fan of oil either and would like to see us use purely renewable sources, but I also don't like landfills and unused waste. They've even had success at converting junk tires with this technology. I'm not saying that it is perfect, it just seems like it is better than not using it in the first place. I'd certainly rather see them use this technology for sewage treatment/waste disposal than anything else I've seen. At least you get something in return. It also seems much preferable to drilling for oil in Alaska, etc.
Most of the solar cells I have seen are about 12-15% efficient, while this wiki link I saw posted above mentioned that the process above was about 85% efficient. Sounds better than most solar I've read about in terms of efficiency anyway. It even mentions that drier waste containing high levels of carbon (like plastics) could yield even higher effiencies. Also, if the waste is there why not use it? It's not like people are going to start creating waste soley to create bio-diesel. Being able to go into landfills and convert a lot of our waste into usable fuel sounds good to me--especially since the byproducts are mostly solid carbon and water.
Although it would be nice to give Digium some money, for a company that has a good sized IT department it is unnecessary. Asterisk isn't particularly difficult to get running. Going through the setup and configuration could come in handy if they are planning on maintaining it as well. And, if they are really lazy, they can use the Asterisk Management Portal or even Asterisk@Home (which uses AMP, but includes some other features).
The poster didn't mention how many phones/lines they need, but if they need to they can use VoIP internally (for unlimited internal phones), and just hook up T1s from the POTS for as many voice lines as they need (if they are worried about the voice quality/potential unreliability of VoIP providers). Digium has Quad-span T1 cards with onboard echo cancellation, so it should scale to the number of lines that are needed.
Look, I'm an asterisk fan (I even have some bugfix code in it), but there are plenty of things that SIP was designed to do that IAX wasn't. One of the things is seperation of media from audio (which is why it works with NAT). But, once you complete an IAX transfer, the call is gone. If you wanted to be able to bill for that call, too bad. Now, when we all go to IP and don't have to interoperate with the PSTN, hey that's great. But for now, it doesn't work out so well. IAX doesn't have nearly the same number of features built in that sip does (of course, if you count all of the pages of RFCs dealing with SIP and SIP addons you've got thousands of pages of documentation). Built-in attended transfers, blind transfers, multi ring, language selection, instant messaging, etc (IAX moves these features into the domain of the server--Asterisk). They were just designed to do different things. Not to mention debugging an IAX call is a bit of a pain (well, especially before etheral had an IAX dissecter) being a binary protocol, whereas SIP is legible. Now, SIP has had a lot more time to mature than has IAX and IAX may eventually end up with a lot of these features. It also had the benefit of being designed before NAT was wide spread. See my other responses in this thread as to whether or not SIP had that benefit. If I needed to hook two asterisk boxes together across the Internet and they would primarily only be talking to each other, I'd use IAX in a heartbeat (trunking is great). But, if you want to hook up a bunch of non-analog phones you pretty much have H323, MGCP, and SIP as options--not a lot of IAX hardphones out there yet.
The first SIP implementation came out in Mar 1999. Here is a link to linksys(via wayback machine Aug. 1999) stating "As an added bonus, the Fast Ethernet 10/100 Network in a Box now comes with a free copy of Virtual Motion's Internet LanBridge LAN-to-Internet connectivity software with Unlimited user licenses and 15 days of Internet access on the EarthLink Network -- share modems or ISDN connections and get networked today!" They didn't have any "routers" listed on the site.
It seems that people forget that for the most part of the early internet days it was all SLIP/PPP. People didn't use NAT. They got a public IP when they dialed up. SIP has been around a long time. They banked on address availability (or later IPv6) when they designed it. The widespread adoption of NAT was not a foregone conclusion at that point. NAT just gained momentum a lot faster. It is one solution to a shortage of IPs, I would just argue that it isn't the best.
Except that everyone is moving to SIP anyway. It has created a market for boxes that "work around the problem". There are lots of solutions out there, but they rely on doing somewhat messy things. The people who implemented SIP purposefully didn't work around the NAT problem because they too saw it as a hack and assumed people would adopt IPv6. Also, the first incarnation of SIP wasn't way after NAT being widely deployed. The RFC for NAT came out in mid 1994 and the RFC for SIP came out in early 1999. Widespread adoption didn't happen over-night. The truth is, NAT breaks things that normal IP traffic would allow. Having your signalling be separate from your media is a very good thing for scalability. Why funnel all of the media through a non-optimal path (from customer, to you, to other customer) when they are adjacent to each other? Almost all VoIP providers use SIP, they just have to work around the NAT problem. My main point is that it is quite frustrating having to work around the problem.
Anyone who has to deal with SIP absolutely hates NAT. SIP is a VoIP protocol that is pretty much where everything is headed. Some instant messenger clients/servers even use it. And it is most definitely not NAT-friendly. In SIP, the call setup information and the media can travel differnt paths. This means that endpoints can comunicate directly without having to send media through a central location. Since the SIP message contains a description of what ports to expect the audio to arrive on in the body of the packet, NAT boxes will generally block the media coming from the other device. 90% of the problems that VoIP providers end up having to deal with is NAT-related.
You have to go to all kinds of lengths (using special session border controllers, media proxies, etc.) to be able to support SIP calls where one or both parties are behind a NAT. It is awful. NAT is a hack--a useful one in certain situations, but still a hack.
If Bob Glassofwine writes a takes months to wrtite a toolkit and wants to license it under the GPL so that anyone who wants to use his toolkit in their product (including Joe Sevenpack) must do the same (or choose another toolkit, or pay him money), then he as every right to do that as well.
Looking at the words, one would thing that would be the case. I'm guessing you must be British. Amazing how much difference an ocean and a couple hundred years can have on a language. Burglarize defined in the U.S. I happen to like burgle better though. It seems much truer to the meaning of the word+suffix.
See, here's the thing: most of the girls on the Internet probably don't actually care if you want them. Amazingly enough, there are a quite a few attractive, intelligent, computer-savvy females in the world who might enjoy doing some of the things (some of) us guys do. Some are even into gaming, programming, math, science, and other things that (some) guys are into. Another amazing thing: some of us guys are *really* into those girls. My girlfriend happens to fit the above description. She runs Linux at work and frequently ngrep, ethereal (ususaly tethereal), understands regex's and grep, and has been known to write perl code on occasion.
I bring all this up not to say "ha, ha I have an awesome girlfriend" (well, not just to say that), nor am I suggesting that you should like the same kinds of girls I do. But equating "girls on the internet" with people who pork out surfing the internet all night long might be a very narrow view of who these girls are. Some of us like girls that can actually challenge us at things--even things we like to do.
Actually, the correct lyrics really are "there's no place I can be". And I even decided to put up a clip (which I will be taking down in a week or two) to prove it!:-)
Disable posting for the specific user if they were logged in
Disable user registration from the subnet so the troll can't just get new usernames
It still might be a little heavy handed (other users from the subnet wouldn't be able to register--but the only real reason to register is to post which they wouldn't be able to do anyway as it currently is), but it would be better and (I think) still solve the problem.
Another couple of books that explore the concept of Neandertals and Homo sapiens being contemporaries is Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children". Both are great reads about the possiblity of retroviruses being a potential cause of abrubt evolutionary change. From reading them, I'm pretty sure he did a lot of homework.
I see where you are coming from, but I still respectfully disagree with your conclusion. The article may "avoid" the question as to whether or not aging in general is good or bad, but that is not the only requirement to be "begging the question". The article would have to be assuming that life extension was good. I keep re-reading the article and don't see where they are making this assumption. It sounds like they are merely reporting on work that scientists are doing.
If the article was suggesting that people should take a new drug because it would make them live longer--without justifying the correctness of increasing one's lifespan--then that would be begging the question that people need to live longer. The article was informational, not persuasive, so I fail to see how begging the question applies.
If one really wants to see an example of begging the question, they have to look no further than your original post in this thread. Your supposition, "we don't need people living longer" in response to a list of current problems that we may be facing seems to assume that we will not be able to solve any of those problems. You assume that we should just accept our current lifespans instead of trying to resolve the issues that could come up if our individual lifespans were increased. It is like you are saying "The aged are already having problems as they get older and it is only going to get worse if people live longer" without justifying your conclusion that things are going to get worse. You beg the question by making the assumption that the problems are unsolvable (the only way that your conclusion could be supported would be if this were the case).
I wasn't trying to be clever in correcting you, nor was I trying to attack you. I was merely trying to inform. If you feel that the information that I passed on has no value, you are free to ignore or refute it--though I would prefer that your refutations didn't include derision.
Except that the article never made a comment as to whether or not aging was good or bad... It isn't like they said "Stopping aging is good because you get to live longer." For Pete's sake, don't be so defensive. Breathe. It's not like I was attacking you or anything.
Not trying to be an ass, but I thought you might want to know that begging the question doesn't mean what you (or many other people for that matter) think it does...
Yes, money will be made in VoIP-to-POTS services (cheap international and being able to have any phone number anywhere you have an internet connection), but another way that you will attract and keep customers is with features. With POTS can you set your phone to ring for 10 seconds, then try calling you at home and work numbers simultaneously for 10 seconds then go to voicemail? How about having your phone do different things based on who is calling and at what time of the day (or day of week/month or month of year)? What about auto-attendents, company directories, etc. without hooking up any equipment?
Sure, you may be able to download Asterisk and set up a good system in your home or office--but there are millions of people who can't (or don't have a staff to maintain it). The market is in providing an affordable service with great features and making it simple and reliable for those millions of potential customers. Sure, there will always be free options, but running a nation-wide service costs a ton of money. If they are going to survive though, they will always have "premium" services that they charge for.
But what do I know? I only helped design the back-end system for a successful nation-wide VoIP provider. (ok, there was a little shameless plug there towards the end. i was weak.)
Cheap option: Linux box hooked up to an ethernet tap at interconnects with the telco's lines. Run ethereal's tethereal in ring buffer mode (making sure that individual files are under 2GB). You are only limited by hard drive space in how much you can store. When viewing the dumps, use etheral > 0.10.10 and go to Statistics->Voip Calls. It will allow you to choose specific calls and even graph things such as latency, jitter, etc. Since you will be dealing with lots of very large files, I recommend using tcpslice (which usually ships in distros with tcpdump) to grab specific chunks that you would like to look at.
Expensive option:Empirx Hammer XMS. It does all of the above with a nice web interface plus it gives you RTP quality metrics like r-factor and MOS. It's not cheap, but I've used and it does a good job (it is basically a SuSE Linux box with some networking gear running their network monitoring software).
All of the above I have tested only with SIP/RTP traffic. If you youse MGCP or H.323, I can't personally vouch for either of the above solutions, though both support them.
Slashdot Mirror
What, exactly, are we supposed to do without agriculture? My body is addicted to eating from time to time and we aren't quite to the vat-grown textured yeasts/artificially produced meats/vegetables stage yet (though from some of the articles posted on slashdot, it sounds like we might be getting closer). As long as it's here, why waste our waste? Plastic is thrown away every day. Why not recoup some of it into something useful? I'm not a huge fan of oil either and would like to see us use purely renewable sources, but I also don't like landfills and unused waste. They've even had success at converting junk tires with this technology. I'm not saying that it is perfect, it just seems like it is better than not using it in the first place. I'd certainly rather see them use this technology for sewage treatment/waste disposal than anything else I've seen. At least you get something in return. It also seems much preferable to drilling for oil in Alaska, etc.
Most of the solar cells I have seen are about 12-15% efficient, while this wiki link I saw posted above mentioned that the process above was about 85% efficient. Sounds better than most solar I've read about in terms of efficiency anyway. It even mentions that drier waste containing high levels of carbon (like plastics) could yield even higher effiencies. Also, if the waste is there why not use it? It's not like people are going to start creating waste soley to create bio-diesel. Being able to go into landfills and convert a lot of our waste into usable fuel sounds good to me--especially since the byproducts are mostly solid carbon and water.
The poster didn't mention how many phones/lines they need, but if they need to they can use VoIP internally (for unlimited internal phones), and just hook up T1s from the POTS for as many voice lines as they need (if they are worried about the voice quality/potential unreliability of VoIP providers). Digium has Quad-span T1 cards with onboard echo cancellation, so it should scale to the number of lines that are needed.
Look, I'm an asterisk fan (I even have some bugfix code in it), but there are plenty of things that SIP was designed to do that IAX wasn't. One of the things is seperation of media from audio (which is why it works with NAT). But, once you complete an IAX transfer, the call is gone. If you wanted to be able to bill for that call, too bad. Now, when we all go to IP and don't have to interoperate with the PSTN, hey that's great. But for now, it doesn't work out so well. IAX doesn't have nearly the same number of features built in that sip does (of course, if you count all of the pages of RFCs dealing with SIP and SIP addons you've got thousands of pages of documentation). Built-in attended transfers, blind transfers, multi ring, language selection, instant messaging, etc (IAX moves these features into the domain of the server--Asterisk). They were just designed to do different things. Not to mention debugging an IAX call is a bit of a pain (well, especially before etheral had an IAX dissecter) being a binary protocol, whereas SIP is legible. Now, SIP has had a lot more time to mature than has IAX and IAX may eventually end up with a lot of these features. It also had the benefit of being designed before NAT was wide spread. See my other responses in this thread as to whether or not SIP had that benefit. If I needed to hook two asterisk boxes together across the Internet and they would primarily only be talking to each other, I'd use IAX in a heartbeat (trunking is great). But, if you want to hook up a bunch of non-analog phones you pretty much have H323, MGCP, and SIP as options--not a lot of IAX hardphones out there yet.
It seems that people forget that for the most part of the early internet days it was all SLIP/PPP. People didn't use NAT. They got a public IP when they dialed up. SIP has been around a long time. They banked on address availability (or later IPv6) when they designed it. The widespread adoption of NAT was not a foregone conclusion at that point. NAT just gained momentum a lot faster. It is one solution to a shortage of IPs, I would just argue that it isn't the best.
Except that everyone is moving to SIP anyway. It has created a market for boxes that "work around the problem". There are lots of solutions out there, but they rely on doing somewhat messy things. The people who implemented SIP purposefully didn't work around the NAT problem because they too saw it as a hack and assumed people would adopt IPv6. Also, the first incarnation of SIP wasn't way after NAT being widely deployed. The RFC for NAT came out in mid 1994 and the RFC for SIP came out in early 1999. Widespread adoption didn't happen over-night. The truth is, NAT breaks things that normal IP traffic would allow. Having your signalling be separate from your media is a very good thing for scalability. Why funnel all of the media through a non-optimal path (from customer, to you, to other customer) when they are adjacent to each other? Almost all VoIP providers use SIP, they just have to work around the NAT problem. My main point is that it is quite frustrating having to work around the problem.
You have to go to all kinds of lengths (using special session border controllers, media proxies, etc.) to be able to support SIP calls where one or both parties are behind a NAT. It is awful. NAT is a hack--a useful one in certain situations, but still a hack.
Watch and learn :-)
If Bob Glassofwine writes a takes months to wrtite a toolkit and wants to license it under the GPL so that anyone who wants to use his toolkit in their product (including Joe Sevenpack) must do the same (or choose another toolkit, or pay him money), then he as every right to do that as well.
yes, but the interfaces are remarkably similar between them all, wouldn't you agree?
Thanks, that is good to know. :-)
Looking at the words, one would thing that would be the case. I'm guessing you must be British. Amazing how much difference an ocean and a couple hundred years can have on a language. Burglarize defined in the U.S. I happen to like burgle better though. It seems much truer to the meaning of the word+suffix.
Ooh, let me try! "Are these Internet degrees even worth the paper on which they're printed?" is the corrected sentence. At least, I hope it is. :-)
I bring all this up not to say "ha, ha I have an awesome girlfriend" (well, not just to say that), nor am I suggesting that you should like the same kinds of girls I do. But equating "girls on the internet" with people who pork out surfing the internet all night long might be a very narrow view of who these girls are. Some of us like girls that can actually challenge us at things--even things we like to do.
Actually, the correct lyrics really are "there's no place I can be". And I even decided to put up a clip (which I will be taking down in a week or two) to prove it! :-)
- Disable Anonymous posting from the subnet
- Disable posting for the specific user if they were logged in
- Disable user registration from the subnet so the troll can't just get new usernames
It still might be a little heavy handed (other users from the subnet wouldn't be able to register--but the only real reason to register is to post which they wouldn't be able to do anyway as it currently is), but it would be better and (I think) still solve the problem.Another couple of books that explore the concept of Neandertals and Homo sapiens being contemporaries is Greg Bear's "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's Children". Both are great reads about the possiblity of retroviruses being a potential cause of abrubt evolutionary change. From reading them, I'm pretty sure he did a lot of homework.
Actually a lot this has published since 1998.
I see where you are coming from, but I still respectfully disagree with your conclusion. The article may "avoid" the question as to whether or not aging in general is good or bad, but that is not the only requirement to be "begging the question". The article would have to be assuming that life extension was good. I keep re-reading the article and don't see where they are making this assumption. It sounds like they are merely reporting on work that scientists are doing.
If the article was suggesting that people should take a new drug because it would make them live longer--without justifying the correctness of increasing one's lifespan--then that would be begging the question that people need to live longer. The article was informational, not persuasive, so I fail to see how begging the question applies.
If one really wants to see an example of begging the question, they have to look no further than your original post in this thread. Your supposition, "we don't need people living longer" in response to a list of current problems that we may be facing seems to assume that we will not be able to solve any of those problems. You assume that we should just accept our current lifespans instead of trying to resolve the issues that could come up if our individual lifespans were increased. It is like you are saying "The aged are already having problems as they get older and it is only going to get worse if people live longer" without justifying your conclusion that things are going to get worse. You beg the question by making the assumption that the problems are unsolvable (the only way that your conclusion could be supported would be if this were the case).
I wasn't trying to be clever in correcting you, nor was I trying to attack you. I was merely trying to inform. If you feel that the information that I passed on has no value, you are free to ignore or refute it--though I would prefer that your refutations didn't include derision.
Except that the article never made a comment as to whether or not aging was good or bad... It isn't like they said "Stopping aging is good because you get to live longer." For Pete's sake, don't be so defensive. Breathe. It's not like I was attacking you or anything.
Not trying to be an ass, but I thought you might want to know that begging the question doesn't mean what you (or many other people for that matter) think it does...
Sure, you may be able to download Asterisk and set up a good system in your home or office--but there are millions of people who can't (or don't have a staff to maintain it). The market is in providing an affordable service with great features and making it simple and reliable for those millions of potential customers. Sure, there will always be free options, but running a nation-wide service costs a ton of money. If they are going to survive though, they will always have "premium" services that they charge for.
But what do I know? I only helped design the back-end system for a successful nation-wide VoIP provider. (ok, there was a little shameless plug there towards the end. i was weak.)
:-)
Wow, going for the semi-colon-changes-the-meaning-of-the-sentence joke when you could have had him on using their instead of they're... gutsy. :-)
Expensive option:Empirx Hammer XMS. It does all of the above with a nice web interface plus it gives you RTP quality metrics like r-factor and MOS. It's not cheap, but I've used and it does a good job (it is basically a SuSE Linux box with some networking gear running their network monitoring software).
All of the above I have tested only with SIP/RTP traffic. If you youse MGCP or H.323, I can't personally vouch for either of the above solutions, though both support them.
Not mute. Moot. :-)