You choose your entertainment, I will choose mine.
Going on a hike or camping (real camping) is one thing. That's vacation time. Reading books is also good, but I like to read a book with minimal distraction so I think ahead on when I can do that.
While I am working on a project, I have a few hours at night while I am trying to unwind. That is when I would like to watch stuff, with ZERO advertisements.
That was my real point. The only way they can get me back near $100 per month for entertainment is without advertisements of any kind. If they want advertisements, they have to pay me. Period. $1.99 per show and I will watch it with commercials. I watch a couple shows per night and offset a percentage of my food costs for the day.
'll pay, really. If netflix streamed what they have on mail request i'd stop torrenting altogether
I'll up you one.
I hate advertisements, water marks, and disruptive in-show advertisements SO MUCH, that I would pay Netflix $75-100 per month for full streaming access to everything they have, plus recent TV shows.
Does not have to be 1080p either. 720p is just fine.
Does not have to be all the TV shows either. Something like 20 shows for $14.99, 40 shows for 24.99$, etc. I get to pick them.
As long as you deliver me that content without advertisements, and in an easy consumable fashion, I will PAY MORE.
I am not interested in maintaining a huge inventory of DVDs any longer. I can rip them, but it costs me 5-7 gigs each to store them. Of course, I use RAID and NAS. My actual costs of maintaining DRM free access to my DVDs is ultimately more than $50 per month once I factor in hardware costs.
The only drawback, is that I cannot maintain perfect anonymity (cash purchases) about what I watch. However, I would give that up (which is huge to me) just to be able to access larger catalogues of movies on demand and not pay for the costs of personal storage.
Just how much power could a single family home use?
Include 4 electric cars and a ton of electronics, and a 1000 sqft datacenter underneath the house, and you still don't get anywhere near it. Unless you start talking about advanced technology we don't even have yet like anti-gravity, I doubt we will be using the 1.6 terawatt hours.
Add some shielding and a death-ray for the neighbors dog and maybe we might start talking.
The industry specifically is not interested in adapting at all, because it would mean less revenue. It has to be less revenue, because you no longer have to buy the whole music album for one, you cannot get nearly as much money for advertisements, and the corporate greed-need for constant growth seems to completely disregard the fact that the consumer only has so much money they are willing to spend. They seem to think we can ultimately get to the point where we will spend as much on entertainment as we do transportation. Their dream goal is per eyeball payments like toll booths where retinal scans will automatically charge the consumer and it will be enforced by a new division of law enforcement.
ESPN is by far the worst. It is the Emperor Palpatine, the Dark Lord, Sauron of the industry. The rate increases it demands each year are so excessive, it begs a psychological study to determine what the fuck those executives are thinking.
Instead of having any measure of sanity and acceptance the industry is in complete and utter denial mode and using PACS to do through law what they cannot do through the markets.
I stopped spending quadruple my Netflix bill on Dish Network because I had a realization that 45% of all content I was flipping through was mind numbingly stupid advertisements. Channel surfing became an exercise in pain because the Dish Network box could only change channels so fast (takes time to start decoding the signal) and I was exposed to way too much noise instead of signal. It's way too disruptive to the experience as well.
I was literally paying Dish Network to sell myself as a commodity (pimping) to the content providers, and ultimately the advertising companies. WTF? Why I am doing this? How retarded could I have been for all these years not to see this?
It got worse during the last 3 years when I was one of these blind stupid consumers because I had a DVR. However, the industry did adapt to this. They started with watermarks, progressed to small indicators of the upcoming shows, to finally full on 25% moving pop-up advertisements IN-FUCKING-SHOW.
AMC? Seriously.... I get it. Breaking Bad is your cash cow. Do you have to have 30% of your screen taken up at all times advertising it?
I don't even torrent most shows anymore because they have effectively become unwatchable. Sorry, I guess I am too old already. I just can't enjoy an experience where there is tickers all over the place and information overload. Whatever happened to just watching a movie or show without interruptions, or a single 5 minute interruption in the middle to allow you go to bathroom, get a drink, etc. Advertisements used to be useful to the consumer before the wide usage of VCRs for that purpose alone.
Anybody remember the new channels before 9/11? They did not always have tickers like that. New channels used to just the news and without sidebars, holograms, and 19 billion discrete channels of information flooding you at once.
It's overkill on a massive scale.
You look at all the alternatives out there and it becomes clear that they want DRM locked down content that you "purchased" (laughable at best), and premium rental rates per title. All of the cable providers are trying to offer movies for $3.99 and on up. Sometimes nearly 65-70% of the movie ticket price. That's insanity.
Even Amazon and Block Buster are part of that game, and only Amazon has Prime. Prime is also dismally prepared to do battle with Netflix on title selection and it will never get better because content owners don't want unlimited access to huge catalogues for a fixed low monthly price. It directly competes with the ultra-premium offerings found elsewhere.
It's like having 45 stores out there selling your product for $19.99 and a single store selling it for $2.99. Wouldn't you resist and try to destroy the $2.99 priced store?
That's why adaptation is impossible. It directly conflicts with
Apparently it's actually something like 6% of the people in the US. It's just perplexing too. The credulousness required to believe most of the hoaxers theories is incredible.
Try to look at it another way.
If you were not that sophisticated and had average (or below average) intelligence and it was told, or proven, time and time and time again that all the "big", "powerful", and "smart" people, governments, and corporations were lying to you... how much of a leap is it to conclude that they would be lying about somebody/something else?
You mention credibility. Quite frankly, there is not a whole lot of it left in governments, corporations, and other organizations now.
In a way, the smartest thing they are doing is questioning the veracity of what they are being told in their lives. I find it a natural response to our environment that they would seek out conspiracy theory based explanations of why their world sucks as much as it does, when they truly lack the sophistication to do otherwise.
While I do believe we went to the moon, I also believe there is a heck of a lot of corruption, manipulation, and lies from corporations and government institutions that are supposed to be representing The People's interests, but clearly do not.
There are clearly some conspiracies at work, but it does not have to be aliens, ancient groups of men led by occult worship, etc. It is just powerful and greedy people seeking to maintain and increase their power base. That is a far more likely explanation.
It is greatly concerning that the percentage of people like this are increasing, but the only thing to counteract it is education. Specifically critical thinking skills.
Right now we are talking about faked moon landings, but what about California falling off into the Pacific Ocean and creating new beaches in Nevada? If you think it through rationally for just a minute, you will realize the energies and materials involved don't allow for such a radical event and it would affect Japan, China, South America, and large parts of Mexico. Not to mention the Mid-West. The easy immediate answer is akin to Star Trek science.... the aliens have some sort of technology that makes it just happen without affecting the surrounding environment with 10+ earthquakes and 100ft+ tidal waves.
Of course, they also completely ignore that the surface of the Earth simply cannot contain that much energy without releasing it in stages. It's like thinking that can blow up a balloon to 5,000 times its capacity without it exploding. California might disappear beneath the ocean, but it will be on a geological timescale and not within 24 hours, much less 24,000 years.
Well if it creates that much energy then it is viable. At those amounts we can start economically harvesting it from other planets and asteroids in our own system.
Of course, if that really were true, then the entire energy industry will be reduced by 99.9999%. All I would need is 3 or 4 of those machines and my weight in nickel to provide power for my family for life. Probably my grandchildren too.
So we know it is fake because these people have not been killed.
A) That is a reason to create the technology if we need more copper. B) It won't be common or cheap if we keep using it to make more copper. It will just exchange places with copper. How much energy is produced from 1 pound of nickel? Asteroids? Really? Sounds like that would make nickel more expensive than any other metal on Earth just to get out there and bring it back. Safely, would be a bonus. C) Why did you bring that up? I never mentioned anything about currencies. D) An energy technology is not worth implementing if it requires large amounts of non-renewable resources at this point. We are beyond that and need to focus our efforts on technology that will focus on renewable energy systems. I never said, and most people don't say, that it needs to last as long as the Sun. Only that it does not "eat" a resource that is limited, but is just part of a larger cycle where the resource is created over and over again.
As an example, Aluminum-Gallium reactors can be refurbished and won't make either elements more rare over time. All that is required is large amounts of energy which we can get from other renewable resources, the Sun included. The Aluminum-Gallium reactors themselves are really just energy storage devices that allow you to take regular old water and get hydrogen from it to use in whatever way you want. The byproduct of that reaction is water. Overall, it is a much better energy system since none of the elements involved are actually changed into anything else.
This system is changing nickel into copper, forever removing the nickel. How can that possibly be a good idea or a sustainable system?
So yes, this is 99.9999999999% certain to be a scam.
Does not matter if it is not a scam:
claims to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper
All that is doing is turning nickel into a non-renewable resource like oil and natural gas. It's even worse than that, since oil and natural gas does get created, but takes a long long time to do so. Unless, magically, it is a reversible process that can turn copper back into nickel and hydrogen.
Let's say they are a huge success. Just how long, and for what prices, will I be able to buy a bag of nickel to feed into the machine?
All of these energy machines won't mean dick if they use fuel sources that are not abundant and renewable. Solar, wind, hydro, water, etc. If it does work, it has academic value only.
When I say Internet (capitalized), I am referring to it an its entirety as it exists now. I am fully aware of what it is, its actual origins, etc.
It is a lot more than just some TCP specs. All of the websites, businesses, technologies, communications, and how integrated it has become in our lives would not be possible if everyday people were not shown a compelling reason to participate.
What allowed everyday people to make a decision to get an Internet account in the first place?
Personal Computers.
Who was part of a group of companies and people that made Personal Computers a reality?
Steve Jobs.
I am not going overboard at all. Without Apple and Microsoft playing their parts I am not sure if personal computing would have become as big as it did, as fast as it did. That was their vision they were trying to make a reality.
I honestly don't see any other company having that kind of vision back then, which is essential to creating the environment that made all of this possible.
Jobs is not wholly responsible for computers being connected to the Internet.
What I am saying is more like Henry Ford was partly responsible for the car stereo and low riders.
Jobs, along with Gates and Woz, helped bring personal computers from a strange concept (that most men at the time did not believe in) only embraced by hobbyists, to an actual "thing".
Without such large numbers of people having a personal computer the Internet never would have made it outside of Universities in the first place and most likely we would still have modems and phone lines for small groups of people that need to connect up to private networks and maybe there would be something like the Internet for a few of us, but nothing like we have today.
They were major players who lead groups of people to develop and push the technology we have today. Jobs did not do it all by himself, but he was a leader of many that helped make it possible.
The reason you should be modded down, and not up, is that it is not appropriate to bring it up on the day the man dies.
Neither you or I have a great appreciation for how Apple does things, but make no mistake about it.... that man was partly responsible along with some other great men in ushering in a new age of technology.
All great men stand on the shoulders of other great men, and through the ability to benefit on their achievements make their own.
You sit here on Slashdot today, on a computer, with the Internet, and talk badly about the man on the day he dies without even realizing (or at least acknowledging) that the very same man contributed to your ability to do so in the first place.
Give respect where respect is due. You have 30+ years in computing... you should know better.
> So you can now hit your bandwidth cap faster than ever?
Well of course, all transmission systems have to have a bandwidth "cap" otherwise their frequencies would be all over the spectrum.
Oh I see, you're mis-using an engineering term you don't understand. You might as well have said "hit your LCD cap" for all the sense you made.
Are you serious?:)
First off, it is not his fault. Secondly, he did use it correctly. "Bandwidth cap" is an actual term, because it has been effectively made into one, by the industry to indicate the total transmission of data is limited. Obviously to less than what is possible in a given period.
You're applying an engineering interpretation that no reasonable person would make in the context of the conversation.
His point about latency is spot on. If you offered me a 1 Tbps connection at 250ms latency and a 1 Mbps connection at 2ms, I am thinking I would choose the latter. My greatest issue right now managing several branch offices for a client is not the amount of data I can transfer at one time (bandwidth), but how fast the packets are being sent back and forth (latency). The branch offices are oversupplied with bandwidth. Using maybe 20-25% of their connections at any one time, but there are periods of high latency that significantly affect operations. Reliable low latency connections (expensive fiber connections, etc.) are not viable right now given a double dip recession and the need to trim operational costs practically everywhere. I don't have, or know, of a single company out there making huge infrastructure investments right now. It's about maintaining (barely) what you have right now and waiting for the economies to pick back up. Only companies with bailout money, and access to corrupt politicians, and executives that just don't give a shit are acting otherwise.
In the future it will become more about latency and less about bandwidth. Was there not an article recently about a transatlantic fiber run that was expressly for the purpose of speeding up (latency) connections for trading on stock exchanges?
About it not being his fault, Marketing Douchebags are the one responsible for the massive confusion about terms. To make it easy to understand it would be like being sold gasoline in liters but your car tells you everything in terms of gallons. It also does not help that different amounts of gasoline are deliberately used to imply how fast the car can travel instead of how far it can travel.
That is it in a nutshell. I've told all my clients that try to understand just what they are getting that 1 Mbps connection allows them to download a file at 125 KB/s, which is what Firefox or IE shows the speeds in. It makes it pretty easy then for them to understand that an office of 30 people can't watch Netflix (executives working hard for the bonuses) and YouTube (regular employees hard at work) all at once on a 6 Mbps connection.
Cut the guy a break. He had a valid point and was only using terms that have been used by the industry for years.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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I don't know about you, but I kind of like not having to worry about terrorists blowing up buildings and planes. The feeling of security and safety feels so good I hardly miss all those things from before. They were called something like rights and freedoms were they not?
At times like this it is best to remember the good contributions from a man who provided so much to our industry. Thank you Steve wherever you are now
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them. Geeks would not be the new coolness, or at least in such demand, and I truly have no idea what computing would be like.
I have been with computing from the start of it and can honestly say that despite all the faults of both Microsoft and Apple, the entire industry was spawned by those two men and the groups of people they led.
Everybody else was just a 3rd party vendor.
Seriously... try to imagine an alternate reality where neither Apple or Microsoft existed. Who was going to create our industry the way that it is?
IBM? I sincerely doubt it. They would have never believed in personal computing, or that there could even be personal computing. Computers would still be AS400 mainframes to this day most likely.
My 2nd computer was an Apple II. My first was a Commodore 64.
I never cared much for Apple..... or Microsoft. Despite my disagreements that have mostly to do with privacy, hardware ownership, walled gardens, and perpetual live unpaid beta testing (Microsoft you...) the fact remains that without Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, The Woz all of us geeks would be enjoying a world that is far far less cool than it is.
Those men made technology cool. If it were not for them, there were would be near infinitely less hot blondes that needed their computer fixed. Consider that:)
I can't say I ever agreed with Steve much on his approach, but I will always be deeply awed and respectful by just how much he helped change the world. He truly was a genius at what he did.
At Stanford in 2005:
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
Both are Free Speech. Holocaust denial I can halfway meet them on, since it is a real emotional issue for Germans. It is still a basic human right for some dumbass to say he did not believe it happened. If people can deny the Earth is round, let them be delusional all they want and say what they want.
Trolling is absolutely Free Speech. I am reminded of Ghost Busters where it is said it is every New Yorker's God given right to be an asshole. It is most certainly Free Speech.
This thing in Italy is much less egregious of a violation of Free Speech because it (apparently) imposes no penalty on the poster at all. It just gives the last word to whoever the statement is about by law. It's stupid and bullshit for sure, but 1/1000th of the basic human rights violation of the two you mentioned.
It blows my mind that you would say it is not Free Speech. Of course it is. You might as well have said the Sun is going to come up purple tomorrow.
I hate to tell you this.... but your "quick math in your head" puts you ahead of most Americans.
Sure, I could get used to the metric system in a few months probably if I moved to the EU. Most Americans would not. There are quite a few people in my country that are just.... not that capable.
Just pointing out why the metric system would have a hard time catching on here. It's not the metric system. It's us.
I'm leery of your recommendation because I think we've already pushed these pretty far, in the US and elsewhere in the developed world. In the US, more than a third have a college degree. My guess is a similar number barely get by. So there doesn't seem to me a lot of room for improvement there, until K-12 is reformed so that a high school diploma means something again.
Educational reform is desperately needed. A high school diploma is meaningless when the standards required to get it have been continually lowered so that quotas can be met. By that same logic, a college degree means less now too, as well as many certifications. I looked into a MS certification that my friend took years ago and they did not even teach any command line tools at all. Most of them find out that it pretty worthless and they will learn most of what they need hands on.
More money needs to be pumped in so that we can attract teachers back. We need more teachers per students, and we also need better teachers. I know quite a few teachers, and many of them pay out of their own pocket for supplies. That is shameful.
Getting rid of tenure would also be a start. No teacher should have that, and a few of them that did were so apathetic that they made my middle school typing teacher looked like he was hopped up on meth.
Whatever the cause, reform and funding have to be part of the answer. The end result is that we rank lower and lower each year compared to other developed countries.
Similarly, we've built a lot of infrastructure. Much of that has been of the enrichment of somebody's uncle type. And the space-related stuff hasn't fared any better. Right now, the plans for a heavy launch vehicle are more likely to help make money for ATK (the maker of the Shuttle solid rocket motors) and less building useful infrastructure for space activities.
Nothing lasts forever. This you happen to be dead wrong on. The US spends 50% less GDP on infrastructure than any other developed country. Assessments of our infrastructure are alarming and shocking to say the least. We need a major and immediate country wide overhaul of our entire infrastructure. Especially, the bridges. Just look in the news about the recent catastrophic bridge failures where over a hundred people have died.
Just as we created the interstate system, we need to create a new system with advanced technology that will serve our needs in the future. Not just patchwork on existing roads and inadequate maintenance on our bridges.
As a bonus, a serious push in our infrastructure will create quite a large number of jobs. Infrastructure could also rekindle our own industrial skills and capacities that has withered away since we outsourced our pollution and needs to China and other third world countries.
Science is another thing that's hit a wall IMHO. The problem there is that since it is fairly easy to get funding from the government (either directly or through a cooperative academician), most businesses don't do their own research any more. I think that has killed off or crippled most of the famous private labs (such as Bell Labs, Xerox, and Du Pont). Why do your own research at personal risk when government can pay you to do research?
Science can never really hit a wall. We have less and less people graduating with degrees each year, and many that do leave the US. Whether privately funded, or government funded hardly makes a difference if the research is being done domestically with US scientists.
Part of the problem here, that I did not mention, is that we need serious patent reform. We are killing innovation and pushing it outside of the US at a rapid pace and have been doing so for quite some time.
Why do your own research when whatever you create is just going to be tied up in a patent war, unusable, and cannon fodder for patent trolls? It's kind of hard to get excited about actually creating something when current patent
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't posting a Slashdot article with links to your own server a form of suicide?
I was interested in the article because it would not surprise me in the least. Great innovators are often inspired by designs of the past.
Guess I will wait till tomorrow to read the article :)
You choose your entertainment, I will choose mine.
Going on a hike or camping (real camping) is one thing. That's vacation time. Reading books is also good, but I like to read a book with minimal distraction so I think ahead on when I can do that.
While I am working on a project, I have a few hours at night while I am trying to unwind. That is when I would like to watch stuff, with ZERO advertisements.
That was my real point. The only way they can get me back near $100 per month for entertainment is without advertisements of any kind. If they want advertisements, they have to pay me. Period. $1.99 per show and I will watch it with commercials. I watch a couple shows per night and offset a percentage of my food costs for the day.
'll pay, really. If netflix streamed what they have on mail request i'd stop torrenting altogether
I'll up you one.
I hate advertisements, water marks, and disruptive in-show advertisements SO MUCH, that I would pay Netflix $75-100 per month for full streaming access to everything they have, plus recent TV shows.
Does not have to be 1080p either. 720p is just fine.
Does not have to be all the TV shows either. Something like 20 shows for $14.99, 40 shows for 24.99$, etc. I get to pick them.
As long as you deliver me that content without advertisements, and in an easy consumable fashion, I will PAY MORE.
I am not interested in maintaining a huge inventory of DVDs any longer. I can rip them, but it costs me 5-7 gigs each to store them. Of course, I use RAID and NAS. My actual costs of maintaining DRM free access to my DVDs is ultimately more than $50 per month once I factor in hardware costs.
The only drawback, is that I cannot maintain perfect anonymity (cash purchases) about what I watch. However, I would give that up (which is huge to me) just to be able to access larger catalogues of movies on demand and not pay for the costs of personal storage.
New ways?
Just how much power could a single family home use?
Include 4 electric cars and a ton of electronics, and a 1000 sqft datacenter underneath the house, and you still don't get anywhere near it. Unless you start talking about advanced technology we don't even have yet like anti-gravity, I doubt we will be using the 1.6 terawatt hours.
Add some shielding and a death-ray for the neighbors dog and maybe we might start talking.
Sorry for the double reply... but I can't believe I forgot to mention this....
If Disney is so pro-consumer and pro-sane-copyright, why have they not put Snow White in the public domain? Cinderella?
At some point it is just ridiculous that they are not, and we have long since reached it.
Although that may be true, Disney is locked at the knees with more force than a super massive black hole with their content.
I have nieces and nephews and for the longest time obtaining it in the first place on DVD was near impossible.
There is a LOT of Disney content that they still refuse to release.
You have hit part of the problem already.
The industry specifically is not interested in adapting at all, because it would mean less revenue. It has to be less revenue, because you no longer have to buy the whole music album for one, you cannot get nearly as much money for advertisements, and the corporate greed-need for constant growth seems to completely disregard the fact that the consumer only has so much money they are willing to spend. They seem to think we can ultimately get to the point where we will spend as much on entertainment as we do transportation. Their dream goal is per eyeball payments like toll booths where retinal scans will automatically charge the consumer and it will be enforced by a new division of law enforcement.
ESPN is by far the worst. It is the Emperor Palpatine, the Dark Lord, Sauron of the industry. The rate increases it demands each year are so excessive, it begs a psychological study to determine what the fuck those executives are thinking.
Instead of having any measure of sanity and acceptance the industry is in complete and utter denial mode and using PACS to do through law what they cannot do through the markets.
I stopped spending quadruple my Netflix bill on Dish Network because I had a realization that 45% of all content I was flipping through was mind numbingly stupid advertisements. Channel surfing became an exercise in pain because the Dish Network box could only change channels so fast (takes time to start decoding the signal) and I was exposed to way too much noise instead of signal. It's way too disruptive to the experience as well.
I was literally paying Dish Network to sell myself as a commodity (pimping) to the content providers, and ultimately the advertising companies. WTF? Why I am doing this? How retarded could I have been for all these years not to see this?
It got worse during the last 3 years when I was one of these blind stupid consumers because I had a DVR. However, the industry did adapt to this. They started with watermarks, progressed to small indicators of the upcoming shows, to finally full on 25% moving pop-up advertisements IN-FUCKING-SHOW.
AMC? Seriously.... I get it. Breaking Bad is your cash cow. Do you have to have 30% of your screen taken up at all times advertising it?
I don't even torrent most shows anymore because they have effectively become unwatchable. Sorry, I guess I am too old already. I just can't enjoy an experience where there is tickers all over the place and information overload. Whatever happened to just watching a movie or show without interruptions, or a single 5 minute interruption in the middle to allow you go to bathroom, get a drink, etc. Advertisements used to be useful to the consumer before the wide usage of VCRs for that purpose alone.
Anybody remember the new channels before 9/11? They did not always have tickers like that. New channels used to just the news and without sidebars, holograms, and 19 billion discrete channels of information flooding you at once.
It's overkill on a massive scale.
You look at all the alternatives out there and it becomes clear that they want DRM locked down content that you "purchased" (laughable at best), and premium rental rates per title. All of the cable providers are trying to offer movies for $3.99 and on up. Sometimes nearly 65-70% of the movie ticket price. That's insanity.
Even Amazon and Block Buster are part of that game, and only Amazon has Prime. Prime is also dismally prepared to do battle with Netflix on title selection and it will never get better because content owners don't want unlimited access to huge catalogues for a fixed low monthly price. It directly competes with the ultra-premium offerings found elsewhere.
It's like having 45 stores out there selling your product for $19.99 and a single store selling it for $2.99. Wouldn't you resist and try to destroy the $2.99 priced store?
That's why adaptation is impossible. It directly conflicts with
Apparently it's actually something like 6% of the people in the US. It's just perplexing too. The credulousness required to believe most of the hoaxers theories is incredible.
Try to look at it another way.
If you were not that sophisticated and had average (or below average) intelligence and it was told, or proven, time and time and time again that all the "big", "powerful", and "smart" people, governments, and corporations were lying to you... how much of a leap is it to conclude that they would be lying about somebody/something else?
You mention credibility. Quite frankly, there is not a whole lot of it left in governments, corporations, and other organizations now.
In a way, the smartest thing they are doing is questioning the veracity of what they are being told in their lives. I find it a natural response to our environment that they would seek out conspiracy theory based explanations of why their world sucks as much as it does, when they truly lack the sophistication to do otherwise.
While I do believe we went to the moon, I also believe there is a heck of a lot of corruption, manipulation, and lies from corporations and government institutions that are supposed to be representing The People's interests, but clearly do not.
There are clearly some conspiracies at work, but it does not have to be aliens, ancient groups of men led by occult worship, etc. It is just powerful and greedy people seeking to maintain and increase their power base. That is a far more likely explanation.
It is greatly concerning that the percentage of people like this are increasing, but the only thing to counteract it is education. Specifically critical thinking skills.
Right now we are talking about faked moon landings, but what about California falling off into the Pacific Ocean and creating new beaches in Nevada? If you think it through rationally for just a minute, you will realize the energies and materials involved don't allow for such a radical event and it would affect Japan, China, South America, and large parts of Mexico. Not to mention the Mid-West. The easy immediate answer is akin to Star Trek science.... the aliens have some sort of technology that makes it just happen without affecting the surrounding environment with 10+ earthquakes and 100ft+ tidal waves.
Of course, they also completely ignore that the surface of the Earth simply cannot contain that much energy without releasing it in stages. It's like thinking that can blow up a balloon to 5,000 times its capacity without it exploding. California might disappear beneath the ocean, but it will be on a geological timescale and not within 24 hours, much less 24,000 years.
Well if it creates that much energy then it is viable. At those amounts we can start economically harvesting it from other planets and asteroids in our own system.
Of course, if that really were true, then the entire energy industry will be reduced by 99.9999%. All I would need is 3 or 4 of those machines and my weight in nickel to provide power for my family for life. Probably my grandchildren too.
So we know it is fake because these people have not been killed.
A) That is a reason to create the technology if we need more copper.
B) It won't be common or cheap if we keep using it to make more copper. It will just exchange places with copper. How much energy is produced from 1 pound of nickel? Asteroids? Really? Sounds like that would make nickel more expensive than any other metal on Earth just to get out there and bring it back. Safely, would be a bonus.
C) Why did you bring that up? I never mentioned anything about currencies.
D) An energy technology is not worth implementing if it requires large amounts of non-renewable resources at this point. We are beyond that and need to focus our efforts on technology that will focus on renewable energy systems. I never said, and most people don't say, that it needs to last as long as the Sun. Only that it does not "eat" a resource that is limited, but is just part of a larger cycle where the resource is created over and over again.
As an example, Aluminum-Gallium reactors can be refurbished and won't make either elements more rare over time. All that is required is large amounts of energy which we can get from other renewable resources, the Sun included. The Aluminum-Gallium reactors themselves are really just energy storage devices that allow you to take regular old water and get hydrogen from it to use in whatever way you want. The byproduct of that reaction is water. Overall, it is a much better energy system since none of the elements involved are actually changed into anything else.
This system is changing nickel into copper, forever removing the nickel. How can that possibly be a good idea or a sustainable system?
So yes, this is 99.9999999999% certain to be a scam.
Does not matter if it is not a scam:
claims to fuse hydrogen and nickel into copper
All that is doing is turning nickel into a non-renewable resource like oil and natural gas. It's even worse than that, since oil and natural gas does get created, but takes a long long time to do so. Unless, magically, it is a reversible process that can turn copper back into nickel and hydrogen.
Let's say they are a huge success. Just how long, and for what prices, will I be able to buy a bag of nickel to feed into the machine?
All of these energy machines won't mean dick if they use fuel sources that are not abundant and renewable. Solar, wind, hydro, water, etc. If it does work, it has academic value only.
When I say Internet (capitalized), I am referring to it an its entirety as it exists now. I am fully aware of what it is, its actual origins, etc.
It is a lot more than just some TCP specs. All of the websites, businesses, technologies, communications, and how integrated it has become in our lives would not be possible if everyday people were not shown a compelling reason to participate.
What allowed everyday people to make a decision to get an Internet account in the first place?
Personal Computers.
Who was part of a group of companies and people that made Personal Computers a reality?
Steve Jobs.
I am not going overboard at all. Without Apple and Microsoft playing their parts I am not sure if personal computing would have become as big as it did, as fast as it did. That was their vision they were trying to make a reality.
I honestly don't see any other company having that kind of vision back then, which is essential to creating the environment that made all of this possible.
Jobs is not wholly responsible for computers being connected to the Internet.
What I am saying is more like Henry Ford was partly responsible for the car stereo and low riders.
Jobs, along with Gates and Woz, helped bring personal computers from a strange concept (that most men at the time did not believe in) only embraced by hobbyists, to an actual "thing".
Without such large numbers of people having a personal computer the Internet never would have made it outside of Universities in the first place and most likely we would still have modems and phone lines for small groups of people that need to connect up to private networks and maybe there would be something like the Internet for a few of us, but nothing like we have today.
They were major players who lead groups of people to develop and push the technology we have today. Jobs did not do it all by himself, but he was a leader of many that helped make it possible.
Yet bandwidth cap has a Wikipedia page.... go figure.
The reason you should be modded down, and not up, is that it is not appropriate to bring it up on the day the man dies.
Neither you or I have a great appreciation for how Apple does things, but make no mistake about it.... that man was partly responsible along with some other great men in ushering in a new age of technology.
All great men stand on the shoulders of other great men, and through the ability to benefit on their achievements make their own.
You sit here on Slashdot today, on a computer, with the Internet, and talk badly about the man on the day he dies without even realizing (or at least acknowledging) that the very same man contributed to your ability to do so in the first place.
Give respect where respect is due. You have 30+ years in computing... you should know better.
Yet is still George Washington we remember the most at Valley Forge and not the cook who made the meals or the privates who dug the latrines.
> So you can now hit your bandwidth cap faster than ever?
Well of course, all transmission systems have to have a bandwidth "cap" otherwise their frequencies would be all over the spectrum.
Oh I see, you're mis-using an engineering term you don't understand. You might as well have said "hit your LCD cap" for all the sense you made.
Are you serious? :)
First off, it is not his fault. Secondly, he did use it correctly. "Bandwidth cap" is an actual term, because it has been effectively made into one, by the industry to indicate the total transmission of data is limited. Obviously to less than what is possible in a given period.
You're applying an engineering interpretation that no reasonable person would make in the context of the conversation.
His point about latency is spot on. If you offered me a 1 Tbps connection at 250ms latency and a 1 Mbps connection at 2ms, I am thinking I would choose the latter. My greatest issue right now managing several branch offices for a client is not the amount of data I can transfer at one time (bandwidth), but how fast the packets are being sent back and forth (latency). The branch offices are oversupplied with bandwidth. Using maybe 20-25% of their connections at any one time, but there are periods of high latency that significantly affect operations. Reliable low latency connections (expensive fiber connections, etc.) are not viable right now given a double dip recession and the need to trim operational costs practically everywhere. I don't have, or know, of a single company out there making huge infrastructure investments right now. It's about maintaining (barely) what you have right now and waiting for the economies to pick back up. Only companies with bailout money, and access to corrupt politicians, and executives that just don't give a shit are acting otherwise.
In the future it will become more about latency and less about bandwidth. Was there not an article recently about a transatlantic fiber run that was expressly for the purpose of speeding up (latency) connections for trading on stock exchanges?
About it not being his fault, Marketing Douchebags are the one responsible for the massive confusion about terms. To make it easy to understand it would be like being sold gasoline in liters but your car tells you everything in terms of gallons. It also does not help that different amounts of gasoline are deliberately used to imply how fast the car can travel instead of how far it can travel.
That is it in a nutshell. I've told all my clients that try to understand just what they are getting that 1 Mbps connection allows them to download a file at 125 KB/s, which is what Firefox or IE shows the speeds in. It makes it pretty easy then for them to understand that an office of 30 people can't watch Netflix (executives working hard for the bonuses) and YouTube (regular employees hard at work) all at once on a 6 Mbps connection.
Cut the guy a break. He had a valid point and was only using terms that have been used by the industry for years.
I don't know about you, but I kind of like not having to worry about terrorists blowing up buildings and planes. The feeling of security and safety feels so good I hardly miss all those things from before. They were called something like rights and freedoms were they not?
At times like this it is best to remember the good contributions from a man who provided so much to our industry. Thank you Steve wherever you are now
I would say helped create our industry. Both Jobs and Gates were instrumental in showing the world what was possible with computing. I sincerely doubt there would even be an Internet without them. Geeks would not be the new coolness, or at least in such demand, and I truly have no idea what computing would be like.
I have been with computing from the start of it and can honestly say that despite all the faults of both Microsoft and Apple, the entire industry was spawned by those two men and the groups of people they led.
Everybody else was just a 3rd party vendor.
Seriously... try to imagine an alternate reality where neither Apple or Microsoft existed. Who was going to create our industry the way that it is?
IBM? I sincerely doubt it. They would have never believed in personal computing, or that there could even be personal computing. Computers would still be AS400 mainframes to this day most likely.
My 2nd computer was an Apple II. My first was a Commodore 64.
I never cared much for Apple..... or Microsoft. Despite my disagreements that have mostly to do with privacy, hardware ownership, walled gardens, and perpetual live unpaid beta testing (Microsoft you...) the fact remains that without Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, The Woz all of us geeks would be enjoying a world that is far far less cool than it is.
Those men made technology cool. If it were not for them, there were would be near infinitely less hot blondes that needed their computer fixed. Consider that :)
I can't say I ever agreed with Steve much on his approach, but I will always be deeply awed and respectful by just how much he helped change the world. He truly was a genius at what he did.
At Stanford in 2005:
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
R.I.P
What!?!
Both are Free Speech. Holocaust denial I can halfway meet them on, since it is a real emotional issue for Germans. It is still a basic human right for some dumbass to say he did not believe it happened. If people can deny the Earth is round, let them be delusional all they want and say what they want.
Trolling is absolutely Free Speech. I am reminded of Ghost Busters where it is said it is every New Yorker's God given right to be an asshole. It is most certainly Free Speech.
This thing in Italy is much less egregious of a violation of Free Speech because it (apparently) imposes no penalty on the poster at all. It just gives the last word to whoever the statement is about by law. It's stupid and bullshit for sure, but 1/1000th of the basic human rights violation of the two you mentioned.
It blows my mind that you would say it is not Free Speech. Of course it is. You might as well have said the Sun is going to come up purple tomorrow.
I hate to tell you this.... but your "quick math in your head" puts you ahead of most Americans.
Sure, I could get used to the metric system in a few months probably if I moved to the EU. Most Americans would not. There are quite a few people in my country that are just.... not that capable.
Just pointing out why the metric system would have a hard time catching on here. It's not the metric system. It's us.
They definitely wouldn't be offering discounts in order to get you to shop there every week.
Your theory is pants on head retarded.
Stores offer discounts to garner customer loyalty and regular purchases.
Read that again a couple of times and tell me who is is "pants on head retarded".
First off, insults are never productive in a conversation.
Secondly, you admitted twice that I was right.
Bet you a doughnut that this is so they can learn how to prevent or cripple the custom ROMs.
You're an idiot. I say that nicely as possible. Seriously, why risk losing a doughnut with those odds? I guess if it was a totally plain one.......
-- Homer
I'm leery of your recommendation because I think we've already pushed these pretty far, in the US and elsewhere in the developed world. In the US, more than a third have a college degree. My guess is a similar number barely get by. So there doesn't seem to me a lot of room for improvement there, until K-12 is reformed so that a high school diploma means something again.
Educational reform is desperately needed. A high school diploma is meaningless when the standards required to get it have been continually lowered so that quotas can be met. By that same logic, a college degree means less now too, as well as many certifications. I looked into a MS certification that my friend took years ago and they did not even teach any command line tools at all. Most of them find out that it pretty worthless and they will learn most of what they need hands on.
More money needs to be pumped in so that we can attract teachers back. We need more teachers per students, and we also need better teachers. I know quite a few teachers, and many of them pay out of their own pocket for supplies. That is shameful.
Getting rid of tenure would also be a start. No teacher should have that, and a few of them that did were so apathetic that they made my middle school typing teacher looked like he was hopped up on meth.
Whatever the cause, reform and funding have to be part of the answer. The end result is that we rank lower and lower each year compared to other developed countries.
Similarly, we've built a lot of infrastructure. Much of that has been of the enrichment of somebody's uncle type. And the space-related stuff hasn't fared any better. Right now, the plans for a heavy launch vehicle are more likely to help make money for ATK (the maker of the Shuttle solid rocket motors) and less building useful infrastructure for space activities.
Nothing lasts forever. This you happen to be dead wrong on. The US spends 50% less GDP on infrastructure than any other developed country. Assessments of our infrastructure are alarming and shocking to say the least. We need a major and immediate country wide overhaul of our entire infrastructure. Especially, the bridges. Just look in the news about the recent catastrophic bridge failures where over a hundred people have died.
Just as we created the interstate system, we need to create a new system with advanced technology that will serve our needs in the future. Not just patchwork on existing roads and inadequate maintenance on our bridges.
As a bonus, a serious push in our infrastructure will create quite a large number of jobs. Infrastructure could also rekindle our own industrial skills and capacities that has withered away since we outsourced our pollution and needs to China and other third world countries.
Science is another thing that's hit a wall IMHO. The problem there is that since it is fairly easy to get funding from the government (either directly or through a cooperative academician), most businesses don't do their own research any more. I think that has killed off or crippled most of the famous private labs (such as Bell Labs, Xerox, and Du Pont). Why do your own research at personal risk when government can pay you to do research?
Science can never really hit a wall. We have less and less people graduating with degrees each year, and many that do leave the US. Whether privately funded, or government funded hardly makes a difference if the research is being done domestically with US scientists.
Part of the problem here, that I did not mention, is that we need serious patent reform. We are killing innovation and pushing it outside of the US at a rapid pace and have been doing so for quite some time.
Why do your own research when whatever you create is just going to be tied up in a patent war, unusable, and cannon fodder for patent trolls? It's kind of hard to get excited about actually creating something when current patent