Draw up an estimate on the number of person-hours it's going to require you to convert to some other notification method and what functionality your company is going to lose by it.
And make sure your resume is up to date, you may want to use it soon.
If there were an easy way to sue Joe Sixpack for $500 each for every spam we get from his IP because Mr. Sixpack doesn't care that his box is Own3d by half a dozen script kiddies and a couple of pr0n spammers, Joe Sixpack would either get his machine fixed or unplug it from the Net.
SOHO users don't care about computer security because generally, the consequences are suffered by the rest of us.
We don't care which a clueless technophobe does, one or the other works fine.
That's exactly why anyone who does reviews should never purchase products for reviews and expect to maintain any credibility.
Horseshit.
You just lost all your credibility with me and with any other pro tech journalist who read the crap you just wrote. So you depend exclusively on freebies? What happens if a vendor doesn't like your review? Enough unhappy vendors and you're out of business. Or is it that you never give bad reviews for products?
Do you always return the products you review to the vendors in salable condition? Do you return them at all?
If the reviewer is a professional, it doesn't matter whether the review product was purchased by the reviewer, will be reimbursed by the publication, or was sent as a review copy by the vendor. Good products get good reviews, bad products get bad reviews.
How many not-so-good products get excellent reviews from you because they've got something else that you really want on your system and you really want to make that vendor happy? The answer should be zero... but I'm not going to waste time at your site finding out.
Speaking as a reviewer who has written product reviews for various CMP publications and for other media since 1987 of product I've purchased myself, I don't hesitate to slag products I've bought if they merit it. I enjoy telling readers the bad news about products they're thinking about buying as well as the good news.
My review of the Belkin UPS disclosed that the default software install allowed anybody on earth with an Internet connection to shut it down remotely. (fixed a couple of months after my review came out) I didn't have to worry about my vendor relationship with Belkin, I'm just another customer.
I'm writing a review of a CPU silencing kit... and will tell the public that my system runs quieter and cooler... and what the vendor forgot to include with the product.
Imagine getting one designed to work with bulk ink and intended to last several years. Probably would make sense only for an office or pro graphics shop...
I know that there are several aftermarket kits, but I'd like to see this built into a printer at the factory.
The article plainly indicates that the decision to victimize the burglary victim a second time can be considered corporate policy.
A spokesperson for EB Games told Action News anchor Ren Scott, "this is an unfortunate situation and this rarely happens. We are not in the business of dealing in stolen goods?we always cooperate with police, but in this case there was a communication breakdown. We were just trying to verify that everything Michelle Doganis said was true."
I find it difficult to believe that the corporation would allow an individual store manager to speak on behalf of the corporation when dispensing information guaranteed to generate bad publicity for the company as a whole, the comment came from an unidentified "spokesperson". I consider this straight out of corporate.
If they'd intended to compensate the victim and fire the manager, they could have easily announced that to the reporter instead and have gotten good publicity instead of bad.
I'm inclined to doubt that your association with EB Games is as "former" as you would like us to believe.
Anybody who dislikes this should buy from the competitors, whether their local EB store is in Gulfview Square or anyplace else.
1/29/2004, and a Google search didn't turn up any new articles between now and then discussing arrest or a raid or any other legal action by the local District Attorney and/or police.
IANAL, but I think there was enough information in the article to demonstrate that there was indeed grounds to investigate EB for possession of stolen goods. Who else have they bought stolen property from?
Does anybody really think there is going to be any law enforcement action? If nobody's going to enforce the law against them, they have broken the law and gotten away with it.
Which political contributions persuaded law enforcement to look the other way?
Interesting question.
Yes, if you or I had pulled the same stunt, we'd be behind bars.
I'd say the great majority don't need anything remotely close to what EV1 is selling. I've been poking over EV1's site, and I'm not remotely interested in buying. Does anybody really believe that there are 400,000 people that need 700G/month BW? I know I don't.
Unless one is a major publication (or mid-sized pr0n provider) or serving up primarily multimedia content or expects to be slashdotted every other day, who the hell needs 700G bandwidth per month? If you're a user, are you burning even 1Gbyte a month in BW?
My guess is that most of their users would be better off switching to another provider for a level of service more appropriate to actual usage.
2000 megs and 100 megs of storage space is perfectly adequate for the average individual or small business. That's like $10/month or less. Intelligent shopping will find you plenty of shops selling virtual domains running on *nix boxes.
$100/month is low-end colo if you shop around.
Is ev's service that good to be worth $99/month?
If you're an ev1 user, figure out what your bandwidth usage really is. If it's under 2G/month, there's no particular reason for you to be spending more than $10/month. Start your new account almost anywhere and change your nameservers and run content in parallel until you know your new site has propagated through all the nameservers. Replacing a typical individual or small business website that isn't getting heavy traffic is not a big deal. A colo is a much bigger deal, but do you know a cheaper way to buy BW?
If you're buying (or reselling) several hundred EV1 sites, you probably should be thinking of running your own box anyway.
(IANAL DISCLAIMER) Their purchase of a SCO license appears much more likely to expose you to legal action than protect you from it. Are the suggestions elsewhere in the discussion about blacklisting due to pr0n spam and Microsoft promotions making you wonder if what you are buying is really worth $99/month? Do you want to depend on this kind of professional judgement to present your business to the world?
Once you know traffic is going to the new site,you can tell ev1's owner "blow it out your ass" without the least bit of concern about service impract.
What would a ballpark figure on a limited-functionality space crew shack capable of keeping 10 people alive as long as consumables are shipped up, with the usual solar power array with the emphasis on simple, reliable design?
Would nuclear submarine technology apply here?
it's just information... sometimes useful
on
Cyberchondria
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One simply has to use it with common sense.
I had what was initially diagnosed as possible carpal tunnel syndrome. I'd heard plenty about the standard carpal release operation from people who'd had it. When I run across 3 out of 3 dissatisfied customers (YMMV, of course, this might be your best solution), I decided I'd better look into alternatives REAL fast.
Well, the chief of Orthopedic Surgery who was examining me was very interested, this was new at the time and new to him as well, and the URL was from a source he was extremely unlikely to dismiss, given that he was probably paying them membership dues.
He referred me to a lab test, an EMG (electromyogram) checking nerve conductivity that showed I did not have carpal tunnel, and when the results came back, sent me to a physical therapist who essentially, taught me how to use my wrists and hands on the keyboard so as to reduce the specific actions that led to the problem. That was 8 years ago, and I've had no problems past minor wrist pain since then, and the use of ice several times and wrist braces once or twice took care of it.
While this did not help me directly other than getting more respect and perhaps better care than I might have otherwise, I'm sure that any patient who the doctor might have considered standard carpal tunnel release surgery for was well served because the doctor knew of a less intrusive alternative.
I think this is how doctor-patient interaction for the common purpose of getting fixed is supposed to work. Use common sense, listen to the doctor, and if you want him to listen to the information you've found, find sources he is unlikely to argue with because he, too regards them as authoritative..
If he suggests alternatives to surgery or medication, LISTEN, this is his field of expertise. He'll probably listen to you if the question is Linux vs OpenBSD.
You've got the time to google, use sources like Medline, etc.... time a doctor frequently doesn't have. If you're here, you might be even better at using websearch and possibly even searching medical databases than she/he does. You can use this time to give a doctor information he doesn't have time to get. Your common purpose is getting your ass fixed.
If you have a doctor that won't work with you towards this common goal, find another doctor.
Given the growing energy consumption of the Third World, it is exceedingly unlikely that earth-based renewable energy will replace the need for oil. So we need a new source of power to permanently replace the old.
This is why I've been calling for a Space Power Satellite program instead of a Mars program. In 20 years, we might be able to get a 20 TW power satellite system up capable of replacing Middle East oil if we start now. This will require infrastructure items like a lunar mining and processing facility and a railgun to get processed silicon to an orbital factory capable of cheaply turning silicon into solar cells and other semiconductors.
It will be expensive, it will require pushing some technologies to the limit. It will not relieve us of the necessity of conserving energy in the meantime. The incandescent light bulb needs to become a thing of the past. We should already have started looking for low-hanging fruit type items, i.e. easy to do that would save substantial energy.
Bush should defund the Mars project in favor of reviving the Space Power Satellite.
I'm sure you've heard the phrase "You don't know what you are talking about" a lot.
Why don't you tell the scientists CNN refers to here about your peculiar "urban legend". Or find out exactly what Fortune Magazine actually said about this.
oops... "We can get cost numbers down by buying" should have been:
We can get cost numbers down by buying Russian space launcher capability at a fraction of the cost of US, since a large part of Space Power Satellite costs are based directly on payload launch costs.
For the amount of money a new major space initiative is going to cost, we need more than a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks and a thousand research publications which is all we're likely to get from the alleged Mars project.
NASA has already worked on a Space Power Satellite project, it estimates the costs for a 250MW demo for $10 B and discusses a 10,000 gigawatt system capable of replacing all other earth energy sources.
Throwing in a moon mining and processing facility and a space crew shack and either a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun might add tens or hundreds of billions to the cost but would make building the powersat system capable of rendering oil a non-issue a believable investment for the private sector.
We can get cost numbers down by buying
If the major oil companies want to continue selling energy, they can pay for the space power satellite systems which will make it possible to stop buying oil out of the Middle East.
As in the days of the railroads in the American West, a government/private sector initiative is needed to make a new place for industry and habitation and research available to the rest of us.
The best news about this is that the space infrastructure we need to build will make a trip to Mars a lot cheaper and safer and probably happen sooner than in the original Bush "plan". Fueling a Mars probe is a lot cheaper if one can simply order propellant shipped from a Moon facility to L-5.
For more discussion of this and other initiatives proposed to get America's brainpower working for the profit of everyone instead of sitting wasted and idle as current outsourcing promises to do, click here. The links on which this post and my further discussion are based can be found there.
BTW, moderators - MOD PARENT DOWN. The parent post is recycled RIAA propaganda, not fresh insight.
You know, you might actually get more respect if you were to name the PR firm you're working for and which client you're working on behalf of. Are you ashamed of working as a propagandist?
"the spirit of copyright" - hey, either change your favorite recreational drug or at least get it from an honest dealer, what you're doing has got you fuxx0red in the head.
I notice that you don't mention the words "fair use" anywhere in your post. Since the only people who don't get the concept of "fair use" are the RIAA and their paid apologists, I'm calling "Astroturf", not "Bullshit" for your post as a whole.
You don't even get the "bright-lining" concept... which is supposed to in the copyright context allow easy differentiation of "fair use" from "copyright infringement" in a manner that any reasonable person can understand, not a coverup for copyright infringement.
As for your "examples":
"sharing music with everybody's kid sister" Ever seen an FM radio? Do you know the difference between a 128K MP3 track played over FM radio and one that's shared via P2P? Either might sell a record. ONE use is illegal. The difference is that your bosses bought enough politicians to make digital rebroadcasting of broadcast quality material illegal. Why? To cut off a channel by which non-RIAA artists can distribute their material to the public free of charge.
photocopying one page is ok, so let's set up a distributed system via amazon's new full-text thing by which everybody downloads one page and somehow they are combined again (slashdot/amazon) Somehow, that sounds like too stupid an idea even for the n00bs around here to come up with. One of your handlers under the delusion that he can come up with k3wl new tech ideas of his own?
MIT has a blanket license for analog music / copying music from existing analog sources of music is ok (radio - unscheduled recordings, includes ads, not complete songs), so let's play a clever trick by which people can get whatever they want in a high quality, but analog format (MIT)
In other words, broadcasting FM radio in response to listner requests is good in exchange for substantial money paid for licensing is good, but figuring as a reasonable person would that broadcasting the same content over wires shows that MIT people are trying to steal content they are paying to use?
What you call "examples" I call self-serving industry propaganda bullshit.
Go to your bosses and tell them that if they expect you to post propaganda in public policy discusseion, you need enough background to be able to write posts that indicate that you're something other than clueless. Did you really think you'd get away with this?
When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations
For your "interpretations"... try googling on "Audio Home Recording Act".
Come back when you know what the fuck you're talking about.
There are things we can do with manned space projects that would mean a hell of a lot more to the taxpayers than a small handful of people bringing back a few pounds of Mars rocks and a ton of observations that'll be of use to generations of science grad students, and we need to get on with them.
Whether you believe the peak oil projections that say:
already happened
2010
2030
it's plain that we're looking at the end of cheap oil and the beginning of the fossil-fuel energy end game. This means that we already need to be at work on reducing our own energy demand and replacing fossil fuel with something else. Renewable is cool, but it probably won't cover all the demand and will probably be too expensive for the Third World.
We're better off starting with the quick-fix measures for energy conservation now and starting work on a the demo Space Power Satellite (SPS) satellite project already designed by NASA while development is done on an SPS network, a cheap orbital skyhook for at least freight, (elevator or railgun), a moon mining and processing facility.
The timeframes and the cost to do the above are about the same as Bush is calling for in order to send a handful of people to the moon and Mars, with these resources in place, a trip to Mars and to the asteroids to scout locations for the next phase of expanding our industrial base into the Solar System as a whole will be far less expensive, a lot safer, a lot faster, and will probably be done by the private sector. Looking for profit, not just scientific research.
If you want to read about alternatives to current technology policies of the Bush Adminstration and of all the Democratic candidates, check this page out. The information links that would ordinarily substantiate my post here are on that page and mostly work. If you don't like what I've got in mind, come up with something better and start working on turning it into public policy.
The best way to celebrate the lives of the astronauts who died in space is the way we celebrated the pioneers who died in the American West. By turning the lonely, isolated places where they died into places for human industry and human habitation.
We've mourned our astronauts for long enough. It's time to get on with the real goals they were working for.
Other than musical toys, I suspect that the most important use for this product isn't going to be to replace singers, it's going to be a rapid prototyping tool for composers.
Reminds me of when I worked at Radio Shack... someone got the idea to run a (as it turns out, mono) adult movie in our nice 5.1 surround sound system...
Someone brought in a personal (non RS) system from home?
It makes a lot more sense to mine it for the materials needed to build a space power satellite based on technologies we understand (we know how solar cells and microwave power transmission work and we know where silicon-based materials we can turn into silicon are) than start serious planning on a project based on the possibility that we might be able to someday build He3 fusion reactors and fuel them from the moon if there is a significant quantity of He3 and if we can find it.
You like the number if ifs and mights in that sentence enough to put bucks into the fusion project? Use your own. Unless the university researchers can point at a working He3 reactor,they are wasting our time.
The price to first power for a 250 Mw SPS is estimated at $10B using launchers we don't have yet with a $400/kg cost to orbit. However, the price to first power using Russian launch vehicles available now (roughly $4000/pound) shouldn't be more than roughly 10x that... i.e. building one should be no more expensive than the War on Iraq has been so far. Once we know it works, we can expand it using cheaper launch systems like the Space Elevator or railgun technology, hopefully including railgun launches of raw material from the moon. (cheaper than earth in terms of energy, if you don't know why, what are you doing here?
Which would we get more security from, a technology being actively researched that'll make the Middle East unnecessary or a war that at best, secures part of our energy supply for a few years?
He could have looked for hactivists in Saudi Arabia to see what tools they were using and how they were furthering the cause of freedom. He could have spoken to dissidents, but he didin't. It's easy to stay at a comfy hotel and write from the sidelines. It's easier to be an expectator paying lipservice to free softaware than to stand up for what free softare actually represents.
In summary, being technically superior without being morally committed to the cause of freedom is a very hollow undertaking.
WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF IDIOT WOULD POST THE KIND OF INFO YOU ARE ASKING FOR FROM INSIDE SAUDI ARABIA?
The kind of dickhead that gets all his contacts busted and gives the secret police a field day. Even if he doesn't reveal names in the article, do you think that the Saudi Arabian secret police would hesitate to take him into a back room to beat the info out of him? Ever heard of what Bruce Schneier calls "rubber hose cryptography"?
Would YOU happen to be that kind of dickhead?
The whole point behind hacktivism and anonymous networks is to make sure an oppressive government does NOT find out who and where you are, not to make the kind of STAND FOR PRINCIPLES that gets you and all your friends face time with the secret police. Of course, given current political trends, perhaps Americans will get to make choices like this for real.
Perhaps when Roblimo returns, he'll tell us the kind of info you're asking for. I regard his judgement as trustworthy as what, whom, when, and from where to tell this. Yours is another matter.
To make this stuff useful for space industrialization, people are going to have to be able to commute regularly to orbit. This means things like regular passenger flights, lots of crews, lots of... sounds like the airline industry, doesn't it? And like the airline industry, we can NOT figure on no operator error, ever, and we can NOT figure on perfect maintenance procedures every single time.
How tolerant of fuckups are designs based on the technology discussed here going to be?
While plane crashes are unusual, they are also not unheard of. Safety standards that are good for very occasional research flights are not appropriate for when flights to orbit are an everyday thing and flights to/from other planets are regularly scheduled.
The supporters of nuclear space propulsion seem to be thinking of flights of frequency similar to that of the Shuttle. To open the door to the Solar System via direct launch, we're talking lots of flights per day, and to pay for this, we're going to have to industrialize space. Powersats are a good first step with a short-term return.
Personally, for hauling freignt to orbit, I prefer the Space Elevator with railgun technology as the backup possibility if we find that CNT can't be scaled up to mass production at the strength levels required to make the Elevator practical.
If nuclear-powered vehicles can be made safer than more conventional designs (I include scramjet-rocket hybrids in the "more conventional" category), then they're worth looking at.
Google is strict about not allowing political causes, no matter how justified, to throw around their search results.
This is business, not politics. Though given that the great majority of search hits on SCO go to articles that make SCO look like jackasses, as funny as a google-enforced SCO news vacuum would be, they're better off with the status quo.
The ingenuity of the Southern white racist was exercised on the invention of the first gun control laws, which were intended to prevent blacks from having access to guns, NOT literacy tests.
Take a few seconds to appreciate the irony of the most fanatic support for gun control coming from Democratic Congresscritters representing urban areas, though I think this is actually the work of some unknown GOP operative who saw an opportunity to screw the Democrats in the wake of the Kennedy Assassinations.
Your racist fantasies aside, blacks really aren't any dumber than whites, and at the time these tests were invented, a poor black was on the average no more illiterate than the average poor white and no more or less likely to fail a literacy test.
The problem with the tests weren't that they were set up to favor any specific group, it's that the exemptions were, i.e. if one's parents were allowed to vote or if a voter had voted in previous elections, one could vote without taking the tests.
With respect to your bullshit about " would imaging that if Eskimos created an intelligence test that you would fail it quite dramatically.", that's an irrelevant piece of crap almost worthy of Karl Rove. The knowledge base required to cast an intelligent vote is based on American history and knowledge of our form of government, it is specific to this culture, and an objective test can be put together.
Sample questions:
Who is the President?
Who are your Senators?
Who is your Congressman?
[insert 7 similar questions here, and 6/10 passes. I'm not even suggesting that the question "Did Saddam have anything to do with 9/11?" with an automatic fail to anyone who says YES be asked]
Simple, objective stuff, which can be answered by anyone willing to spend 5 minutes with the leaflets various political organizations would put together in response to this before taking the test. The drivers' license exam is far more difficult, and 5 minutes behind the wheel will convince you that there are plenty of licensed tards on the roads.
Do you want anybody who doesn't know things like this voting?
If the literacy test is ever reinstituted (unlikely, we wouldn't want the Religious Right to be excluded wholesale from the voting process) and I have anything to do with it, feel free to pick the "Cowboy Neal" option on all the questions.
The first thing we need is cheap freight shipping to orbit and cheaper and safer ways to get people up there. The two candidates for freight are the Space Elevator and BIG railguns.
As for passengers, lots of interesting things going on in pursuit of the X-Prize. What if the Feds guaranteed that they'd buy a certain number of trips from any company with a demonstrated capability to get people into orbit? Or worked up an insurance deal like the one the nuclear industry gets that limits total liability per disaster (and there WILL be some) and organized a government-backed insurance pool to cover making insurance affordable for private space ventures?
IMHO, the first thing we can do with this is to build a space infrastructure capable of supporting
space industrialization and designed for indefinite expansion, not pure research.
To build space factories, we need space stations capable of providing life support to hundreds, then thousands of people, and we need space industrial parks to build the factories to make cheap zero-G semiconductors and industrial materials. We need a moon base capable of mining and supplying materials for the new space industrial base.
However, the first industrial project that needs doing is a powersat project to eliminate dependence on an oil supply all responsible people agree will run out in 50 years with luck and a lot sooner if we aren't lucky.
To have solar cells by the square mile collecting power to be beamed back to earth by the time we HAVE to have them to preserve technological civilization means we're going to have to start somewhere around NOW with a lot more than just research bases on the moon and a trip to Mars someday.
The question isn't whether this needs to be done or not. New middle classes in India and China and locations which will be a surprise to us are going to want their own home computers and SUVs, too, and anyone who thinks that conservation and renewable energy will make this possible is insanely optimistic. Plus, of course, anyone projecting we've got 50 years worth of oil based on current energy usage also has to be counted as insanely optimistic.
We can do this, or we can spend the time until the energy runs out fighting wars about who gets to run the last few billion barrels. Personally, I'd rather force the pace of R&D while the cost of getting this working is only higher taxes. It's worth paying for a world that our grandchildren will find worth living in. Though electricity at a fraction of current costs in 20-30 years doesn't sound so bad.
If we do this, the research will get done anyway. Some of the answers will be life-and-death for anyone living up there, and the people calling for robotic exploration only while Earth's civilization falls apart around them will be pleasantly surprised when given availabiliy of space housing and lab space, it gets cost-effective to send graduate students up on fellowhips as routine parts of campus science budgets disbursed by the NSF and major corporations who want to pay somebody to research solutions into problems they've got.
Slashdot Mirror
And make sure your resume is up to date, you may want to use it soon.
SOHO users don't care about computer security because generally, the consequences are suffered by the rest of us.
We don't care which a clueless technophobe does, one or the other works fine.
Horseshit.
You just lost all your credibility with me and with any other pro tech journalist who read the crap you just wrote. So you depend exclusively on freebies? What happens if a vendor doesn't like your review? Enough unhappy vendors and you're out of business. Or is it that you never give bad reviews for products?
Do you always return the products you review to the vendors in salable condition? Do you return them at all?
If the reviewer is a professional, it doesn't matter whether the review product was purchased by the reviewer, will be reimbursed by the publication, or was sent as a review copy by the vendor. Good products get good reviews, bad products get bad reviews.
How many not-so-good products get excellent reviews from you because they've got something else that you really want on your system and you really want to make that vendor happy? The answer should be zero... but I'm not going to waste time at your site finding out.
Speaking as a reviewer who has written product reviews for various CMP publications and for other media since 1987 of product I've purchased myself, I don't hesitate to slag products I've bought if they merit it. I enjoy telling readers the bad news about products they're thinking about buying as well as the good news.
My review of the Belkin UPS disclosed that the default software install allowed anybody on earth with an Internet connection to shut it down remotely. (fixed a couple of months after my review came out) I didn't have to worry about my vendor relationship with Belkin, I'm just another customer.
I'm writing a review of a CPU silencing kit... and will tell the public that my system runs quieter and cooler... and what the vendor forgot to include with the product.
I know that there are several aftermarket kits, but I'd like to see this built into a printer at the factory.
A spokesperson for EB Games told Action News anchor Ren Scott, "this is an unfortunate situation and this rarely happens. We are not in the business of dealing in stolen goods?we always cooperate with police, but in this case there was a communication breakdown. We were just trying to verify that everything Michelle Doganis said was true."
I find it difficult to believe that the corporation would allow an individual store manager to speak on behalf of the corporation when dispensing information guaranteed to generate bad publicity for the company as a whole, the comment came from an unidentified "spokesperson". I consider this straight out of corporate.
If they'd intended to compensate the victim and fire the manager, they could have easily announced that to the reporter instead and have gotten good publicity instead of bad.
I'm inclined to doubt that your association with EB Games is as "former" as you would like us to believe.
Anybody who dislikes this should buy from the competitors, whether their local EB store is in Gulfview Square or anyplace else.
1/29/2004, and a Google search didn't turn up any new articles between now and then discussing arrest or a raid or any other legal action by the local District Attorney and/or police.
IANAL, but I think there was enough information in the article to demonstrate that there was indeed grounds to investigate EB for possession of stolen goods. Who else have they bought stolen property from?
Does anybody really think there is going to be any law enforcement action? If nobody's going to enforce the law against them, they have broken the law and gotten away with it.
Which political contributions persuaded law enforcement to look the other way?
Interesting question.
Yes, if you or I had pulled the same stunt, we'd be behind bars.
I'd say the great majority don't need anything remotely close to what EV1 is selling. I've been poking over EV1's site, and I'm not remotely interested in buying. Does anybody really believe that there are 400,000 people that need 700G/month BW? I know I don't.
Unless one is a major publication (or mid-sized pr0n provider) or serving up primarily multimedia content or expects to be slashdotted every other day, who the hell needs 700G bandwidth per month? If you're a user, are you burning even 1Gbyte a month in BW?
My guess is that most of their users would be better off switching to another provider for a level of service more appropriate to actual usage. 2000 megs and 100 megs of storage space is perfectly adequate for the average individual or small business. That's like $10/month or less. Intelligent shopping will find you plenty of shops selling virtual domains running on *nix boxes.
$100/month is low-end colo if you shop around.
Is ev's service that good to be worth $99/month?
If you're an ev1 user, figure out what your bandwidth usage really is. If it's under 2G/month, there's no particular reason for you to be spending more than $10/month. Start your new account almost anywhere and change your nameservers and run content in parallel until you know your new site has propagated through all the nameservers. Replacing a typical individual or small business website that isn't getting heavy traffic is not a big deal. A colo is a much bigger deal, but do you know a cheaper way to buy BW?
If you're buying (or reselling) several hundred EV1 sites, you probably should be thinking of running your own box anyway.
(IANAL DISCLAIMER) Their purchase of a SCO license appears much more likely to expose you to legal action than protect you from it. Are the suggestions elsewhere in the discussion about blacklisting due to pr0n spam and Microsoft promotions making you wonder if what you are buying is really worth $99/month? Do you want to depend on this kind of professional judgement to present your business to the world?
Once you know traffic is going to the new site,you can tell ev1's owner "blow it out your ass" without the least bit of concern about service impract.
Would nuclear submarine technology apply here?
I had what was initially diagnosed as possible carpal tunnel syndrome. I'd heard plenty about the standard carpal release operation from people who'd had it. When I run across 3 out of 3 dissatisfied customers (YMMV, of course, this might be your best solution), I decided I'd better look into alternatives REAL fast.
So I googled, and I found something. The something was on the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons site, for A new procedure to alleviate carpal tunnel syndrome uses a balloon catheter to stretch and expand the ligament and relieve pressure on the median nerve in the carpal tunnel of the wrist. It also mentioned a 95% customer satisfaction rate.
Well, the chief of Orthopedic Surgery who was examining me was very interested, this was new at the time and new to him as well, and the URL was from a source he was extremely unlikely to dismiss, given that he was probably paying them membership dues.
He referred me to a lab test, an EMG (electromyogram) checking nerve conductivity that showed I did not have carpal tunnel, and when the results came back, sent me to a physical therapist who essentially, taught me how to use my wrists and hands on the keyboard so as to reduce the specific actions that led to the problem. That was 8 years ago, and I've had no problems past minor wrist pain since then, and the use of ice several times and wrist braces once or twice took care of it.
While this did not help me directly other than getting more respect and perhaps better care than I might have otherwise, I'm sure that any patient who the doctor might have considered standard carpal tunnel release surgery for was well served because the doctor knew of a less intrusive alternative.
I think this is how doctor-patient interaction for the common purpose of getting fixed is supposed to work. Use common sense, listen to the doctor, and if you want him to listen to the information you've found, find sources he is unlikely to argue with because he, too regards them as authoritative..
If he suggests alternatives to surgery or medication, LISTEN, this is his field of expertise. He'll probably listen to you if the question is Linux vs OpenBSD.
You've got the time to google, use sources like Medline, etc. ... time a doctor frequently doesn't have. If you're here, you might be even better at using websearch and possibly even searching medical databases than she/he does. You can use this time to give a doctor information he doesn't have time to get. Your common purpose is getting your ass fixed.
If you have a doctor that won't work with you towards this common goal, find another doctor.
Given the growing energy consumption of the Third World, it is exceedingly unlikely that earth-based renewable energy will replace the need for oil. So we need a new source of power to permanently replace the old.
This is why I've been calling for a Space Power Satellite program instead of a Mars program. In 20 years, we might be able to get a 20 TW power satellite system up capable of replacing Middle East oil if we start now. This will require infrastructure items like a lunar mining and processing facility and a railgun to get processed silicon to an orbital factory capable of cheaply turning silicon into solar cells and other semiconductors.
It will be expensive, it will require pushing some technologies to the limit. It will not relieve us of the necessity of conserving energy in the meantime. The incandescent light bulb needs to become a thing of the past. We should already have started looking for low-hanging fruit type items, i.e. easy to do that would save substantial energy.
Bush should defund the Mars project in favor of reviving the Space Power Satellite.
It beats the hell out of the alternatives.
Why don't you tell the scientists CNN refers to here about your peculiar "urban legend". Or find out exactly what Fortune Magazine actually said about this.
Got any references to back your odd claims?
Your tinfoil hat looks a lot like a dunce cap.
We can get cost numbers down by buying Russian space launcher capability at a fraction of the cost of US, since a large part of Space Power Satellite costs are based directly on payload launch costs.
For the amount of money a new major space initiative is going to cost, we need more than a few hundred pounds of Mars rocks and a thousand research publications which is all we're likely to get from the alleged Mars project.
NASA has already worked on a Space Power Satellite project, it estimates the costs for a 250MW demo for $10 B and discusses a 10,000 gigawatt system capable of replacing all other earth energy sources.
Throwing in a moon mining and processing facility and a space crew shack and either a Space Elevator or earth-to-orbit railgun might add tens or hundreds of billions to the cost but would make building the powersat system capable of rendering oil a non-issue a believable investment for the private sector.
We can get cost numbers down by buying
If the major oil companies want to continue selling energy, they can pay for the space power satellite systems which will make it possible to stop buying oil out of the Middle East.
As in the days of the railroads in the American West, a government/private sector initiative is needed to make a new place for industry and habitation and research available to the rest of us.
The best news about this is that the space infrastructure we need to build will make a trip to Mars a lot cheaper and safer and probably happen sooner than in the original Bush "plan". Fueling a Mars probe is a lot cheaper if one can simply order propellant shipped from a Moon facility to L-5.
For more discussion of this and other initiatives proposed to get America's brainpower working for the profit of everyone instead of sitting wasted and idle as current outsourcing promises to do, click here. The links on which this post and my further discussion are based can be found there.
You know, you might actually get more respect if you were to name the PR firm you're working for and which client you're working on behalf of. Are you ashamed of working as a propagandist?
"the spirit of copyright" - hey, either change your favorite recreational drug or at least get it from an honest dealer, what you're doing has got you fuxx0red in the head.
I notice that you don't mention the words "fair use" anywhere in your post. Since the only people who don't get the concept of "fair use" are the RIAA and their paid apologists, I'm calling "Astroturf", not "Bullshit" for your post as a whole.
You don't even get the "bright-lining" concept... which is supposed to in the copyright context allow easy differentiation of "fair use" from "copyright infringement" in a manner that any reasonable person can understand, not a coverup for copyright infringement.
As for your "examples":
Ever seen an FM radio? Do you know the difference between a 128K MP3 track played over FM radio and one that's shared via P2P? Either might sell a record. ONE use is illegal. The difference is that your bosses bought enough politicians to make digital rebroadcasting of broadcast quality material illegal. Why? To cut off a channel by which non-RIAA artists can distribute their material to the public free of charge.
Somehow, that sounds like too stupid an idea even for the n00bs around here to come up with. One of your handlers under the delusion that he can come up with k3wl new tech ideas of his own?
In other words, broadcasting FM radio in response to listner requests is good in exchange for substantial money paid for licensing is good, but figuring as a reasonable person would that broadcasting the same content over wires shows that MIT people are trying to steal content they are paying to use?
What you call "examples" I call self-serving industry propaganda bullshit.
Go to your bosses and tell them that if they expect you to post propaganda in public policy discusseion, you need enough background to be able to write posts that indicate that you're something other than clueless. Did you really think you'd get away with this?
When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations
For your "interpretations"... try googling on "Audio Home Recording Act".
Come back when you know what the fuck you're talking about.
There are things we can do with manned space projects that would mean a hell of a lot more to the taxpayers than a small handful of people bringing back a few pounds of Mars rocks and a ton of observations that'll be of use to generations of science grad students, and we need to get on with them.
Whether you believe the peak oil projections that say:
- already happened
- 2010
- 2030
it's plain that we're looking at the end of cheap oil and the beginning of the fossil-fuel energy end game. This means that we already need to be at work on reducing our own energy demand and replacing fossil fuel with something else. Renewable is cool, but it probably won't cover all the demand and will probably be too expensive for the Third World.We're better off starting with the quick-fix measures for energy conservation now and starting work on a the demo Space Power Satellite (SPS) satellite project already designed by NASA while development is done on an SPS network, a cheap orbital skyhook for at least freight, (elevator or railgun), a moon mining and processing facility.
The timeframes and the cost to do the above are about the same as Bush is calling for in order to send a handful of people to the moon and Mars, with these resources in place, a trip to Mars and to the asteroids to scout locations for the next phase of expanding our industrial base into the Solar System as a whole will be far less expensive, a lot safer, a lot faster, and will probably be done by the private sector. Looking for profit, not just scientific research.
If you want to read about alternatives to current technology policies of the Bush Adminstration and of all the Democratic candidates, check this page out. The information links that would ordinarily substantiate my post here are on that page and mostly work. If you don't like what I've got in mind, come up with something better and start working on turning it into public policy.
The best way to celebrate the lives of the astronauts who died in space is the way we celebrated the pioneers who died in the American West. By turning the lonely, isolated places where they died into places for human industry and human habitation.
We've mourned our astronauts for long enough. It's time to get on with the real goals they were working for.
Other than musical toys, I suspect that the most important use for this product isn't going to be to replace singers, it's going to be a rapid prototyping tool for composers.
Someone brought in a personal (non RS) system from home?
You like the number if ifs and mights in that sentence enough to put bucks into the fusion project? Use your own. Unless the university researchers can point at a working He3 reactor,they are wasting our time.
The price to first power for a 250 Mw SPS is estimated at $10B using launchers we don't have yet with a $400/kg cost to orbit. However, the price to first power using Russian launch vehicles available now (roughly $4000/pound) shouldn't be more than roughly 10x that... i.e. building one should be no more expensive than the War on Iraq has been so far. Once we know it works, we can expand it using cheaper launch systems like the Space Elevator or railgun technology, hopefully including railgun launches of raw material from the moon. (cheaper than earth in terms of energy, if you don't know why, what are you doing here?
Which would we get more security from, a technology being actively researched that'll make the Middle East unnecessary or a war that at best, secures part of our energy supply for a few years?
Oh god, I misread that "or" as an "and".
You didn't misread it. He mistyped it.
In summary, being technically superior without being morally committed to the cause of freedom is a very hollow undertaking.
WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF IDIOT WOULD POST THE KIND OF INFO YOU ARE ASKING FOR FROM INSIDE SAUDI ARABIA?
The kind of dickhead that gets all his contacts busted and gives the secret police a field day. Even if he doesn't reveal names in the article, do you think that the Saudi Arabian secret police would hesitate to take him into a back room to beat the info out of him? Ever heard of what Bruce Schneier calls "rubber hose cryptography"?
Would YOU happen to be that kind of dickhead?
The whole point behind hacktivism and anonymous networks is to make sure an oppressive government does NOT find out who and where you are, not to make the kind of STAND FOR PRINCIPLES that gets you and all your friends face time with the secret police. Of course, given current political trends, perhaps Americans will get to make choices like this for real.
Perhaps when Roblimo returns, he'll tell us the kind of info you're asking for. I regard his judgement as trustworthy as what, whom, when, and from where to tell this. Yours is another matter.
To make this stuff useful for space industrialization, people are going to have to be able to commute regularly to orbit. This means things like regular passenger flights, lots of crews, lots of ... sounds like the airline industry, doesn't it? And like the airline industry, we can NOT figure on no operator error, ever, and we can NOT figure on perfect maintenance procedures every single time.
How tolerant of fuckups are designs based on the technology discussed here going to be?
While plane crashes are unusual, they are also not unheard of. Safety standards that are good for very occasional research flights are not appropriate for when flights to orbit are an everyday thing and flights to/from other planets are regularly scheduled.
The supporters of nuclear space propulsion seem to be thinking of flights of frequency similar to that of the Shuttle. To open the door to the Solar System via direct launch, we're talking lots of flights per day, and to pay for this, we're going to have to industrialize space. Powersats are a good first step with a short-term return.
Personally, for hauling freignt to orbit, I prefer the Space Elevator with railgun technology as the backup possibility if we find that CNT can't be scaled up to mass production at the strength levels required to make the Elevator practical.
If nuclear-powered vehicles can be made safer than more conventional designs (I include scramjet-rocket hybrids in the "more conventional" category), then they're worth looking at.
This is business, not politics. Though given that the great majority of search hits on SCO go to articles that make SCO look like jackasses, as funny as a google-enforced SCO news vacuum would be, they're better off with the status quo.
If from experience, we'd ALL like to hear the details.
Take a few seconds to appreciate the irony of the most fanatic support for gun control coming from Democratic Congresscritters representing urban areas, though I think this is actually the work of some unknown GOP operative who saw an opportunity to screw the Democrats in the wake of the Kennedy Assassinations.
Your racist fantasies aside, blacks really aren't any dumber than whites, and at the time these tests were invented, a poor black was on the average no more illiterate than the average poor white and no more or less likely to fail a literacy test.
The problem with the tests weren't that they were set up to favor any specific group, it's that the exemptions were, i.e. if one's parents were allowed to vote or if a voter had voted in previous elections, one could vote without taking the tests.
With respect to your bullshit about " would imaging that if Eskimos created an intelligence test that you would fail it quite dramatically.", that's an irrelevant piece of crap almost worthy of Karl Rove. The knowledge base required to cast an intelligent vote is based on American history and knowledge of our form of government, it is specific to this culture, and an objective test can be put together.
Sample questions:
Who is the President?
Who are your Senators?
Who is your Congressman?
[insert 7 similar questions here, and 6/10 passes. I'm not even suggesting that the question "Did Saddam have anything to do with 9/11?" with an automatic fail to anyone who says YES be asked]
Simple, objective stuff, which can be answered by anyone willing to spend 5 minutes with the leaflets various political organizations would put together in response to this before taking the test. The drivers' license exam is far more difficult, and 5 minutes behind the wheel will convince you that there are plenty of licensed tards on the roads.
Do you want anybody who doesn't know things like this voting?
If the literacy test is ever reinstituted (unlikely, we wouldn't want the Religious Right to be excluded wholesale from the voting process) and I have anything to do with it, feel free to pick the "Cowboy Neal" option on all the questions.
As for passengers, lots of interesting things going on in pursuit of the X-Prize. What if the Feds guaranteed that they'd buy a certain number of trips from any company with a demonstrated capability to get people into orbit? Or worked up an insurance deal like the one the nuclear industry gets that limits total liability per disaster (and there WILL be some) and organized a government-backed insurance pool to cover making insurance affordable for private space ventures?
IMHO, the first thing we can do with this is to build a space infrastructure capable of supporting space industrialization and designed for indefinite expansion, not pure research.
To build space factories, we need space stations capable of providing life support to hundreds, then thousands of people, and we need space industrial parks to build the factories to make cheap zero-G semiconductors and industrial materials. We need a moon base capable of mining and supplying materials for the new space industrial base.
However, the first industrial project that needs doing is a powersat project to eliminate dependence on an oil supply all responsible people agree will run out in 50 years with luck and a lot sooner if we aren't lucky.
To have solar cells by the square mile collecting power to be beamed back to earth by the time we HAVE to have them to preserve technological civilization means we're going to have to start somewhere around NOW with a lot more than just research bases on the moon and a trip to Mars someday.
The question isn't whether this needs to be done or not. New middle classes in India and China and locations which will be a surprise to us are going to want their own home computers and SUVs, too, and anyone who thinks that conservation and renewable energy will make this possible is insanely optimistic. Plus, of course, anyone projecting we've got 50 years worth of oil based on current energy usage also has to be counted as insanely optimistic.
We can do this, or we can spend the time until the energy runs out fighting wars about who gets to run the last few billion barrels. Personally, I'd rather force the pace of R&D while the cost of getting this working is only higher taxes. It's worth paying for a world that our grandchildren will find worth living in. Though electricity at a fraction of current costs in 20-30 years doesn't sound so bad.
If we do this, the research will get done anyway. Some of the answers will be life-and-death for anyone living up there, and the people calling for robotic exploration only while Earth's civilization falls apart around them will be pleasantly surprised when given availabiliy of space housing and lab space, it gets cost-effective to send graduate students up on fellowhips as routine parts of campus science budgets disbursed by the NSF and major corporations who want to pay somebody to research solutions into problems they've got.