You can still climb walls without the use of your legs.
I'm not sure it's possible. Once you release one hand to move it, you will swing on the other hand. Very few people can repeatedly pull themselves up using only one arm.
Healthy climbers *can* climb pulling themselves up on hand grips. However this still requires feet to stabilize the body while you are moving a hand. This is also very hard on arms, and generally is not recommended. One advantage of this method is that hands can use smaller holds than feet, and you can see those holds. So as far as I recall it is primarily used on short segments of the climb, with majority of the climb done using your legs.
If you don't have the use of your legs you're not going to ride a motorcycle.
The idea is that a disabled person may want to come to see the bikes even though he can't ride them.
spent 5 hours on a flight next to a woman whose blanket clearly was Catted
Would a light face mask help if you can plug it into the air vent? The mask doesn't have to be hermetic, it only needs to maintain positive pressure over your nose and mouth. You'd still be breathing some cat in if you need to leave your seat, but that's just seconds... perhaps survivable.
I have no allergies, but I might want to use such a mask myself all the time, just to protect against viruses and such. The 50% of the air is coming from outside, so it is clean, and the other 50% is filtered. It definitely makes sense if the area has local contaminants.
Terrorist should know that by hijacking a plane - all they do is create a plane full of people with NOTHING TO LOOSE and EVERYTHING TO GAIN.
Recent attempts were about destroying the airplane, not about hijacking it and then making demands. The underpants bomb has already failed by the time it was noticed. A properly detonated explosive needs only a few microseconds to change from being an innocent clay to being a cloud of hot gases - no time to react then.
And IMO the Christmas bomber was set up, for some unknown to me reason, to fail because his bomb was not likely to work. I can't imagine nobody tested such a bomb on the ground; all you need for such a test is a long rope. I'm sure they have that level of technology even in Yemen:-)
An employer can't force you to fly against your will, so it won't be actionable.
NO business is 'so important' that it needs your physical presence there.
It depends on what your job is. If you are a service technician and a customer reports a failure, you must fly there with spare parts and do the repair. Same if you are a sales guy whose job is to visit potential customers. You'd be useless if you don't travel.
Even if you are a typical cubicle-dwelling designer, now and then you and a bunch of your colleagues need to take your toys and go someplace to test or demonstrate your product. That is more likely if you are working on low volume, custom products. If you are a major part of the project your refusal to fly may cause the demo to fail, and that will kill your whole project and lead to layoffs. Are you comfortable with that?
flying is just downright unpleasant and since travel is not a 'right' anymore, I can't see how it can be forced on you by some guy in a suit.
It's true that flying is getting less fun and more harassment. It can't be forced on you. However you will be fired if your position requires you to fly and you don't fly.
I have refused to fly for business over and over again. it IS optional
On one hand, it is great that you have a job where you decide how to carry it out. On the other hand, if a person A can do $x and fly, and a person B can do $x but not to fly, guess who is more valuable to the business? Your job security is on the line.
most of the articles point out that the images are not saved and only displayed until the next person goes through
And what happens with the image of the last person to go through? There is not always a never-ending line of passengers, especially in smaller airports or at odd hours.
Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, a pocket photo camera can fix this problem for poor TSA officers. They are only more likely to use the camera if they are sitting in a "remote location" where nobody else is allowed. Even if there is a security camera, they will know what areas it is not covering (the camera will be likely in front of the officer and behind the display, so that it doesn't record the image.)
you're okay with the idea of being required to be seen naked in return for money.
As I read it, he wants to make his own, personal decision when the gets to that bridge. Employment is not an optional affair like going to a movie. If you are not employed you may be out of your house, onto the street. Now you need to compare indignity of the scanner to indignity of using bushes as your restroom.
I personally will do my best to avoid going through these scanners. Nudity is generally a taboo in the society. However I would be OK to be among nudists because nudists respect each other (if not, they don't last long in those clubs.) I have no guarantee that a TSA officer "in a remote location" respects me; in fact, all evidence to date indicates just the opposite.
The scanner may delete the image after use, but what stops the TSA officer from photographing the screen with his pocket photo camera? Even if he personally is not getting any pleasure out of it, there are plenty of people who will be, and they will gladly pay a small fee. Probably pr0n web sites that already have the payment system in place will be buying those photos. Even a $1 per photo is a huge income, considering how many are passing through the scanner every day. Photos of children will be 100x more valuable to them.
A personal pat-down is not a problem for me because it is done by someone I see right here, and I have enough control over the process, and I am 100% sure nothing gets recorded (and there is nothing to record, really.) This scanner issue is all about respect, and a pat-down is far more likely to be done professionally because you are right here, and if the TSA officer does something inappropriate the passenger will call for help and his goose is cooked. But actions of the officer behind the scanner screen are not verifiable. Perhaps it would be better to place that officer in the plain view of the passenger, and maintain scanners for men and women (with corresponding genders of TSA officers working those scanners.)
25-50% of adults (depending on country) smoke. Are all of them genetically predisposed?
There is a strong peer pressure to smoke, drink alcohol and use other drugs. It takes certain willpower to tell your friends to stop messing with you. That will make many of them your ex-friends. So most people bend to the will of the group to avoid the conflict. Only some will think for themselves; loners are most likely to do that. You decide if that ability is genetically predisposed or not.
there's no real reason for any scarcity, save for an arbitrary technical decision made in the early days of the TCP/IP Protocol
True; but that decision is so entrenched that it will take billions of dollars to switch to IPv6. And, as I believe, *most* customers will not see any benefit from doing so. Quite opposite will happen - the ISPs may start charging per host, since each host needs an IP and they are in control of the firewall (that will be in the DSL IPv6 router.) Today you can have a NAT and run whole house full of computers on one external IP.
So while I understand that, as you say, the physical links are already in place and do not need to be changed, the IPv6 transition will require massive, costly upgrades and will result in no new features for majority of home users. I leave "power users" alone - if you need a host to be on Internet, it's your decision. If you have several H.323 or SIP devices, you probably don't want a NAT. But an average home user, of which the USA has hundreds of millions, can't care less about things that you are so passionate about, and therefore will be reluctant to pay for something that only you need.
A better analogy would be, because humanity hypothetically ran out of unique postal addresses, everyone in the city shares the same address
Did you notice that in apartment buildings mailman does not deliver to each apartment? He instead dumps all packets at the router (mailboxes) on the ground floor, and subsequent delivery is done by the apartment dwellers themselves. That mailbox stand is a NAT. The mailman does not know who lives in the building, or where. He only knows his gateway by its street address. The little note "apt. #123" is for the final routing, just like a small cut on the side of the envelope, or like a TCP port number for a NAT. If you forget to write the apt. number the letter will be still delivered (and left on top of the mailbox;) but if you forget the street number the letter will be returned.
On top of that, fax had nothing to do with it. Forbidden books were duplicated on photocopiers. Fax, back then, would print on thermal paper, which is useless for books.
Upon what do you base this prediction? I have seen no evidence that the policies of the semi-authoritarian governments of either Belarus or Russia will lead to economic improvement for the average person in either country.
The average citizen of a country will see financial improvements as their government increasingly functions according to rule of law rather than rule of edict.
Those two are merging. Look at the bailouts in the USA. Will you call TARP a law or an edict? It was thought up overnight and then quickly pushed through the system, despite massive rejection by the voters. The healthcare bill also balances on a 50%-50% split.
So a common citizen, not burdened by philosophy, doesn't care what is the origin of some new regulation - is it a law that the Parliament was debating for last year, or is it an edict that the President sent to Parliament for rubberstamping. The only important question is very simple: "Does this new law help me?" If not, the recourse is the same - to vote against the people who made the bad law.
In case of Russia, I believe, the desired balance of power has already been established. Russia does better with a strong President and weak Parliament.
Lukashenko reacted by saying that anyone going to opposition protests would have their necks wrung "as one might a duck". (Link)
This, however, does not prevent him from having a reasonably good popularity among citizens. As I said elsewhere, people look after their personal interests first, and Lukashenko is well aware of that. Opposition to his rule is largely "domestic opposition from a coalition of opposition groups supported by the United States and Europe." (also from Wikipedia, same link.) The opposition may be seen as rocking the boat, and that's why there is no popular revolt over Lukashenko's heavy-handed approach toward the opposition.
If the government censors the Internet, then both nations will become Chinese-style states.
All nations drift toward Chinese style. The difference is only in speed. In the USA, for example, TSA demonstrated a few days ago who is the boss. You are posting on/. only at pleasure of the government, as it appears. You are perfectly safe, though, as long as you don't discuss certain topics of public interest.
We Westerners will not see any political improvements in both Belarus and Russia within our lifetimes.
People in Belarus and Russia will, however, see financial improvements in their life. That's what matters to them. They don't particularly care about random politicians coming out of the woodwork for a few years to rob the treasury, promote their pet projects and then be gone. Voting public usually wants stability, wealth, peace. Whoever provides that gets the vote. If the guy is good he is welcome to stick around and be responsible, in long term, for his policies. In the USA, for example, it seems to be a sport among Presidents to do as much harm as they can within their term and then run away from the wreck.
NAT barely qualifies as being connected to the outside world.
Fine, so *you* need a static IP (or several.) It's a free world, if you need something you can usually get it. Probably most people on/. need something like that because they know how to use those addresses. But most people don't, they wouldn't even notice if one day their DSL box issues them a 10.x.x.x address. Why would they worry - everything still works as it did before - their Interweb and their Skype, what else is there, after all?
I'm so glad there are such great gurus who can tell us all which of our devices "need" to be able to talk to the outside world!
Actually, all your devices are, and will be, able to talk to the outside world. The debate is about the other direction - which of consumer devices need to be addressable by the outside world.
Also, there is nothing wrong in professionals debating general needs. It's not any more wrong than cooks discussing nutritional needs of a batallion of soldiers.
It'll probably be more expensive to migrate at that point, but oh well.
Why more expensive? The Moore's law keeps ticking, and the hardware becomes cheaper - per unit of performance or per box. Also money not spent on IPv6 today will be invested into something else, hopefully bringing dividends. You always want to delay spending money on nonessential projects. When the project doesn't even offer any immediate increase in revenue the choice becomes very obvious.
The number of applications that make this assumption is not small, but it is not unmanageable.
I would say that IPv4-only apps are majority:
#include <netinet/in.h>
struct sockaddr_in { short sin_family;// e.g. AF_INET unsigned short sin_port;// e.g. htons(3490) struct in_addr sin_addr;// see struct in_addr, below char sin_zero[8];// zero this if you want to };
struct in_addr { unsigned long s_addr;// load with inet_aton() };
You need to hack the source to use in6_addr and sockaddr_in6 wherever appropriate, and change the code that processes them (such as inputs addresses, compares them, works with netmasks, etc.) I'm sure most coders never even thought of adding IPv6 support to their specialized, made to order applications. They weren't paid to add features that nobody asked for, and they never even had an IPv6 network to test the code on. In my career I had only one (1) customer specifically asking to support IPv6 - and he paid for it, and he got it. Everyone else got IPv4 only - as a business we had to be lean.
This is a lot of work, both coding and testing, and you will never see it done to a legacy software as a free patch. Software is sometimes very expensive - tens of thousands of dollars per seat. There is zero chance that this investment will be just scrapped, and you'd have to do that if your PADS Layout or SolidWorks or, $deity forbid, CST can't talk to its license server. The latest releases may, of course, fix all that, but they are never free. And the worst news is that some of *your* production software, like your beloved OrCad 10.3, is not supported any more, and you can't upgrade to the latest OrCad, jumping over six revisions, because it will break millions of things in your business process (or your bank.)
You clearly don't understand the way the Internet is supposed to work, which is as a bunch of peers, all able to communicate with each other.
That's how some people thought it should be. And Henry Ford thought that all cars must be painted black. And many people thought that Earth is the center of the Universe.
Guess what, they were wrong, for one reason or another. Internet indeed may have been envisioned as a fully connected graph, but today it is fairly clear that in most cases this is not required, and often the exact opposite is wanted. People are poor commons builders, but they are great at wall construction.
So it looks like endlessly repeating the "bunch of peers, all able to communicate with each other" mantra is nothing but appeal to authority. If you look deeper you will see that today there is very little substance in that claim. Internet technologies changed; we don't run an SMTP server on each host, we don't use 'talk' or 'finger', we don't FTP into each other's computers... we do it very differently, and in this new world full connectivity is required not any more than a dedicated FedEx airplane from every city to every other city.
you'll start seeing ClassA owners more willing to sell back their IP addresses at $1-2 each
A/8 block contains 16 million IPs. So at $2 per IP it will net about $30M. This is not a large sum for a major company like HP - especially considering that the IT will quote renumbering of all internal hosts at half of that. Add business risks connected with this renumbering, and note that you still need a good number of IP addresses for your hosts anyway.
All in all, it probably isn't worth it for a large corporation. The project offers tangible risk but very little reward. Specifically, IT managers will be carrying the risk, while the VPs will be getting rewards. So it's not going to happen - lower level managers (the risk bearers) will make sure of that.
Ummm.. How exactly do I as the author of a book make money by allowing you to write fan fiction and freely copy my work?
First of all, "copying of your work" is not involved here; fanfic writers build on top of it. So your nice story about adventures of Lagrumar and Meleanne (who, of course, got accidentally teleported onto a planet of robots) will not be touched - you wrote it, and nobody can change what you wrote.
Now consider your protagonists and the universe that you developed. As a businessman you can leave it all to yourself, and possibly write a few more novels in that setting. Chances are, it will take you a few years, and there will be some serious disconnect between the Book 1 and the Book 2 because there is nothing to bridge the gap, to keep the interest going. It is also frustrating for the reader to encounter loose ends that you never had a chance to work out ("where did Evilron go, and what prevented him from stopping Lagrumar on the Bridge of Destiny?") By the time your second book is out the mystery of the first story is largely forgotten.
So cultivation of the fan base, using whatever makes them happy, helps you too. First, you have a chance to follow up on side stories and minor protagonists that you would never do yourself. This is often the case with fanfic set in Star Wars or ST universes - filling the gaps. Most of ST fanfic, for example, is underground, unauthorized, and you take your chances when you read it - much of it is awful. If, however, you, as the author, have some influence over the writers, you can help those who can write, and you have a good chance to convince the rest of budding writers to either do something harmless instead, or to write what they can write. Instead of War and Peace, for example, they can try themselves with a short story of a lone soldier in one battle of that war.
All that adds to your customer base, increases your presence among the readers, increases the number of books set in your universes (mostly through the free labor of your fans) and makes your chances of landing another contract much better. This is only my humble proposal, of course, and I am only dealing with one specific question - how to add value to books.
It will spread through various "online libraries" (mostly owned by proponents of "copyleft" - that is, theft of author's rights).
Some of Lukyanenko's works are published here with permission:
Starting June 1, 2003, all novels will be presented here only as fragments - a quarter or a third of the total text. Short stories will be
still available in full. I'm also asking all owners of electronic libraries that are cooperating with authors to note this information and withdraw full texts of my novels, as well as all existing English translations of my works, from their sites.
If I wanted to write an open source novel and use a little wording from 7 or 17 other open source novels, what am I going to do to give credit, especially if the other open source books were already 5 levels deep?
"... And a big Thank You goes to Foo, Bar and Baz from which I borrowed a few words here and there."
So it wasn't so difficult after all. Anyone who can write a novel can easily come up with a single sentence like that. If you can't, don't write anything:-)
Yes, you can sell open source software, but only an idiot buys it without some kind of added value (like technical support). What kind of added value can an author of an ebook offer that would compel someone to buy it? None.
And that is because the open source developer shares some of his rights with the people downstream. Those guys can modify the software, look into the code and create documentation, make intelligent support decisions. This sharing of rights permits the next tier of people to make a living (by honestly working, of course.) A closed source app offers fewer possibilities for making money off of it; only the most complex commercial software (Windows) creates independent support niches, and even there people are limited to what they are told by the developer.
In the book world the author retains *all* rights. The user can only read; nothing else is permitted. This is exactly why there is no side revenue opportunities. For example, imagine the world where once you buy a book you are entitled to read and write fan fiction, and the more you buy the more is open to you, and you get higher karma (in/. terms,) and so on. Perhaps this is implemented as a web forum; or maybe as a virtual world, or a MMORPG... but there would be something that makes your investment into the story worthwhile. Otherwise it is indeed more practical to borrow a book at the library, read it and forget about it; and honestly what else can you *do* with a story today, aside from some emotional feelings while you were reading it?
There is an example of this approach already. Pavel Shumil in the course of his literary work developed a certain world (you figure it out what world it is, if you are interested.) Then he started a framework novel (called The Commodore's House (Dom Komandora, thank you, Slashcode, for sticking to 7-bit ASCII:-) This novel was then cooperatively written by the author himself and a bunch of fans, with the author overseeing the process, giving advices and otherwise making their lives interesting:-) It took 7 years, and the work was completed in 2008. Now, how much is it worth for a fan to be part of such a project? And how much is it worth for a less avid fan to be allowed to access the work in progress and submit suggestions and critique?
for most people who fall into that category, it would be more cost-effective to get a landline, or a VoIP alternative at home and avoid burning up expensive cell phone minutes
A large number of business people use their cell phones in this manner. They have desk phones too, but they travel a lot, and they must be always available. I know marketing people who are more on the road than at their desk. That's because their job is to talk to customers, not to their coworkers back at the office.
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You can still climb walls without the use of your legs.
I'm not sure it's possible. Once you release one hand to move it, you will swing on the other hand. Very few people can repeatedly pull themselves up using only one arm.
Healthy climbers *can* climb pulling themselves up on hand grips. However this still requires feet to stabilize the body while you are moving a hand. This is also very hard on arms, and generally is not recommended. One advantage of this method is that hands can use smaller holds than feet, and you can see those holds. So as far as I recall it is primarily used on short segments of the climb, with majority of the climb done using your legs.
If you don't have the use of your legs you're not going to ride a motorcycle.
The idea is that a disabled person may want to come to see the bikes even though he can't ride them.
spent 5 hours on a flight next to a woman whose blanket clearly was Catted
Would a light face mask help if you can plug it into the air vent? The mask doesn't have to be hermetic, it only needs to maintain positive pressure over your nose and mouth. You'd still be breathing some cat in if you need to leave your seat, but that's just seconds... perhaps survivable.
I have no allergies, but I might want to use such a mask myself all the time, just to protect against viruses and such. The 50% of the air is coming from outside, so it is clean, and the other 50% is filtered. It definitely makes sense if the area has local contaminants.
Terrorist should know that by hijacking a plane - all they do is create a plane full of people with NOTHING TO LOOSE and EVERYTHING TO GAIN.
Recent attempts were about destroying the airplane, not about hijacking it and then making demands. The underpants bomb has already failed by the time it was noticed. A properly detonated explosive needs only a few microseconds to change from being an innocent clay to being a cloud of hot gases - no time to react then.
And IMO the Christmas bomber was set up, for some unknown to me reason, to fail because his bomb was not likely to work. I can't imagine nobody tested such a bomb on the ground; all you need for such a test is a long rope. I'm sure they have that level of technology even in Yemen :-)
its undue duress. I bet its actionable in court.
An employer can't force you to fly against your will, so it won't be actionable.
NO business is 'so important' that it needs your physical presence there.
It depends on what your job is. If you are a service technician and a customer reports a failure, you must fly there with spare parts and do the repair. Same if you are a sales guy whose job is to visit potential customers. You'd be useless if you don't travel.
Even if you are a typical cubicle-dwelling designer, now and then you and a bunch of your colleagues need to take your toys and go someplace to test or demonstrate your product. That is more likely if you are working on low volume, custom products. If you are a major part of the project your refusal to fly may cause the demo to fail, and that will kill your whole project and lead to layoffs. Are you comfortable with that?
flying is just downright unpleasant and since travel is not a 'right' anymore, I can't see how it can be forced on you by some guy in a suit.
It's true that flying is getting less fun and more harassment. It can't be forced on you. However you will be fired if your position requires you to fly and you don't fly.
I have refused to fly for business over and over again. it IS optional
On one hand, it is great that you have a job where you decide how to carry it out. On the other hand, if a person A can do $x and fly, and a person B can do $x but not to fly, guess who is more valuable to the business? Your job security is on the line.
most of the articles point out that the images are not saved and only displayed until the next person goes through
And what happens with the image of the last person to go through? There is not always a never-ending line of passengers, especially in smaller airports or at odd hours.
Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, a pocket photo camera can fix this problem for poor TSA officers. They are only more likely to use the camera if they are sitting in a "remote location" where nobody else is allowed. Even if there is a security camera, they will know what areas it is not covering (the camera will be likely in front of the officer and behind the display, so that it doesn't record the image.)
you're okay with the idea of being required to be seen naked in return for money.
As I read it, he wants to make his own, personal decision when the gets to that bridge. Employment is not an optional affair like going to a movie. If you are not employed you may be out of your house, onto the street. Now you need to compare indignity of the scanner to indignity of using bushes as your restroom.
I personally will do my best to avoid going through these scanners. Nudity is generally a taboo in the society. However I would be OK to be among nudists because nudists respect each other (if not, they don't last long in those clubs.) I have no guarantee that a TSA officer "in a remote location" respects me; in fact, all evidence to date indicates just the opposite.
The scanner may delete the image after use, but what stops the TSA officer from photographing the screen with his pocket photo camera? Even if he personally is not getting any pleasure out of it, there are plenty of people who will be, and they will gladly pay a small fee. Probably pr0n web sites that already have the payment system in place will be buying those photos. Even a $1 per photo is a huge income, considering how many are passing through the scanner every day. Photos of children will be 100x more valuable to them.
A personal pat-down is not a problem for me because it is done by someone I see right here, and I have enough control over the process, and I am 100% sure nothing gets recorded (and there is nothing to record, really.) This scanner issue is all about respect, and a pat-down is far more likely to be done professionally because you are right here, and if the TSA officer does something inappropriate the passenger will call for help and his goose is cooked. But actions of the officer behind the scanner screen are not verifiable. Perhaps it would be better to place that officer in the plain view of the passenger, and maintain scanners for men and women (with corresponding genders of TSA officers working those scanners.)
25-50% of adults (depending on country) smoke. Are all of them genetically predisposed?
There is a strong peer pressure to smoke, drink alcohol and use other drugs. It takes certain willpower to tell your friends to stop messing with you. That will make many of them your ex-friends. So most people bend to the will of the group to avoid the conflict. Only some will think for themselves; loners are most likely to do that. You decide if that ability is genetically predisposed or not.
there's no real reason for any scarcity, save for an arbitrary technical decision made in the early days of the TCP/IP Protocol
True; but that decision is so entrenched that it will take billions of dollars to switch to IPv6. And, as I believe, *most* customers will not see any benefit from doing so. Quite opposite will happen - the ISPs may start charging per host, since each host needs an IP and they are in control of the firewall (that will be in the DSL IPv6 router.) Today you can have a NAT and run whole house full of computers on one external IP.
So while I understand that, as you say, the physical links are already in place and do not need to be changed, the IPv6 transition will require massive, costly upgrades and will result in no new features for majority of home users. I leave "power users" alone - if you need a host to be on Internet, it's your decision. If you have several H.323 or SIP devices, you probably don't want a NAT. But an average home user, of which the USA has hundreds of millions, can't care less about things that you are so passionate about, and therefore will be reluctant to pay for something that only you need.
A better analogy would be, because humanity hypothetically ran out of unique postal addresses, everyone in the city shares the same address
Did you notice that in apartment buildings mailman does not deliver to each apartment? He instead dumps all packets at the router (mailboxes) on the ground floor, and subsequent delivery is done by the apartment dwellers themselves. That mailbox stand is a NAT. The mailman does not know who lives in the building, or where. He only knows his gateway by its street address. The little note "apt. #123" is for the final routing, just like a small cut on the side of the envelope, or like a TCP port number for a NAT. If you forget to write the apt. number the letter will be still delivered (and left on top of the mailbox;) but if you forget the street number the letter will be returned.
On top of that, fax had nothing to do with it. Forbidden books were duplicated on photocopiers. Fax, back then, would print on thermal paper, which is useless for books.
Upon what do you base this prediction? I have seen no evidence that the policies of the semi-authoritarian governments of either Belarus or Russia will lead to economic improvement for the average person in either country.
Such evidence is available on the Internet.
The average citizen of a country will see financial improvements as their government increasingly functions according to rule of law rather than rule of edict.
Those two are merging. Look at the bailouts in the USA. Will you call TARP a law or an edict? It was thought up overnight and then quickly pushed through the system, despite massive rejection by the voters. The healthcare bill also balances on a 50%-50% split.
So a common citizen, not burdened by philosophy, doesn't care what is the origin of some new regulation - is it a law that the Parliament was debating for last year, or is it an edict that the President sent to Parliament for rubberstamping. The only important question is very simple: "Does this new law help me?" If not, the recourse is the same - to vote against the people who made the bad law.
In case of Russia, I believe, the desired balance of power has already been established. Russia does better with a strong President and weak Parliament.
Will they elect a mafioso?
They already did:
This, however, does not prevent him from having a reasonably good popularity among citizens. As I said elsewhere, people look after their personal interests first, and Lukashenko is well aware of that. Opposition to his rule is largely "domestic opposition from a coalition of opposition groups supported by the United States and Europe." (also from Wikipedia, same link.) The opposition may be seen as rocking the boat, and that's why there is no popular revolt over Lukashenko's heavy-handed approach toward the opposition.
If the government censors the Internet, then both nations will become Chinese-style states.
All nations drift toward Chinese style. The difference is only in speed. In the USA, for example, TSA demonstrated a few days ago who is the boss. You are posting on /. only at pleasure of the government, as it appears. You are perfectly safe, though, as long as you don't discuss certain topics of public interest.
We Westerners will not see any political improvements in both Belarus and Russia within our lifetimes.
People in Belarus and Russia will, however, see financial improvements in their life. That's what matters to them. They don't particularly care about random politicians coming out of the woodwork for a few years to rob the treasury, promote their pet projects and then be gone. Voting public usually wants stability, wealth, peace. Whoever provides that gets the vote. If the guy is good he is welcome to stick around and be responsible, in long term, for his policies. In the USA, for example, it seems to be a sport among Presidents to do as much harm as they can within their term and then run away from the wreck.
NAT barely qualifies as being connected to the outside world.
Fine, so *you* need a static IP (or several.) It's a free world, if you need something you can usually get it. Probably most people on /. need something like that because they know how to use those addresses. But most people don't, they wouldn't even notice if one day their DSL box issues them a 10.x.x.x address. Why would they worry - everything still works as it did before - their Interweb and their Skype, what else is there, after all?
I don't want to do the math, but what base would you need to be in to fit 2^128 into the space xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ??
I'm afraid it will be base 1626 if you must fit the 2^128 address into just 12 symbols. Chinese might be OK with that, though :-)
2^128 = 16^32 = 1626^12 := 10^(128*log(2)/12)
128*log(2) = 32*log(16) = 12*log(1626)
base
I'm so glad there are such great gurus who can tell us all which of our devices "need" to be able to talk to the outside world!
Actually, all your devices are, and will be, able to talk to the outside world. The debate is about the other direction - which of consumer devices need to be addressable by the outside world.
Also, there is nothing wrong in professionals debating general needs. It's not any more wrong than cooks discussing nutritional needs of a batallion of soldiers.
It'll probably be more expensive to migrate at that point, but oh well.
Why more expensive? The Moore's law keeps ticking, and the hardware becomes cheaper - per unit of performance or per box. Also money not spent on IPv6 today will be invested into something else, hopefully bringing dividends. You always want to delay spending money on nonessential projects. When the project doesn't even offer any immediate increase in revenue the choice becomes very obvious.
The number of applications that make this assumption is not small, but it is not unmanageable.
I would say that IPv4-only apps are majority:
You need to hack the source to use in6_addr and sockaddr_in6 wherever appropriate, and change the code that processes them (such as inputs addresses, compares them, works with netmasks, etc.) I'm sure most coders never even thought of adding IPv6 support to their specialized, made to order applications. They weren't paid to add features that nobody asked for, and they never even had an IPv6 network to test the code on. In my career I had only one (1) customer specifically asking to support IPv6 - and he paid for it, and he got it. Everyone else got IPv4 only - as a business we had to be lean.
This is a lot of work, both coding and testing, and you will never see it done to a legacy software as a free patch. Software is sometimes very expensive - tens of thousands of dollars per seat. There is zero chance that this investment will be just scrapped, and you'd have to do that if your PADS Layout or SolidWorks or, $deity forbid, CST can't talk to its license server. The latest releases may, of course, fix all that, but they are never free. And the worst news is that some of *your* production software, like your beloved OrCad 10.3, is not supported any more, and you can't upgrade to the latest OrCad, jumping over six revisions, because it will break millions of things in your business process (or your bank.)
You clearly don't understand the way the Internet is supposed to work, which is as a bunch of peers, all able to communicate with each other.
That's how some people thought it should be. And Henry Ford thought that all cars must be painted black. And many people thought that Earth is the center of the Universe.
Guess what, they were wrong, for one reason or another. Internet indeed may have been envisioned as a fully connected graph, but today it is fairly clear that in most cases this is not required, and often the exact opposite is wanted. People are poor commons builders, but they are great at wall construction.
So it looks like endlessly repeating the "bunch of peers, all able to communicate with each other" mantra is nothing but appeal to authority. If you look deeper you will see that today there is very little substance in that claim. Internet technologies changed; we don't run an SMTP server on each host, we don't use 'talk' or 'finger', we don't FTP into each other's computers... we do it very differently, and in this new world full connectivity is required not any more than a dedicated FedEx airplane from every city to every other city.
you'll start seeing ClassA owners more willing to sell back their IP addresses at $1-2 each
A /8 block contains 16 million IPs. So at $2 per IP it will net about $30M. This is not a large sum for a major company like HP - especially considering that the IT will quote renumbering of all internal hosts at half of that. Add business risks connected with this renumbering, and note that you still need a good number of IP addresses for your hosts anyway.
All in all, it probably isn't worth it for a large corporation. The project offers tangible risk but very little reward. Specifically, IT managers will be carrying the risk, while the VPs will be getting rewards. So it's not going to happen - lower level managers (the risk bearers) will make sure of that.
In any case the IPv6 seems to implemented in all major OS
My Polycom IP phone is IPv4 only. What do I do now? And Polycom sold millions of those.
It's just an example, of course. There are billions of IPv4 gadgets out there, and some of them cost a lot.
Ummm.. How exactly do I as the author of a book make money by allowing you to write fan fiction and freely copy my work?
First of all, "copying of your work" is not involved here; fanfic writers build on top of it. So your nice story about adventures of Lagrumar and Meleanne (who, of course, got accidentally teleported onto a planet of robots) will not be touched - you wrote it, and nobody can change what you wrote.
Now consider your protagonists and the universe that you developed. As a businessman you can leave it all to yourself, and possibly write a few more novels in that setting. Chances are, it will take you a few years, and there will be some serious disconnect between the Book 1 and the Book 2 because there is nothing to bridge the gap, to keep the interest going. It is also frustrating for the reader to encounter loose ends that you never had a chance to work out ("where did Evilron go, and what prevented him from stopping Lagrumar on the Bridge of Destiny?") By the time your second book is out the mystery of the first story is largely forgotten.
So cultivation of the fan base, using whatever makes them happy, helps you too. First, you have a chance to follow up on side stories and minor protagonists that you would never do yourself. This is often the case with fanfic set in Star Wars or ST universes - filling the gaps. Most of ST fanfic, for example, is underground, unauthorized, and you take your chances when you read it - much of it is awful. If, however, you, as the author, have some influence over the writers, you can help those who can write, and you have a good chance to convince the rest of budding writers to either do something harmless instead, or to write what they can write. Instead of War and Peace, for example, they can try themselves with a short story of a lone soldier in one battle of that war.
All that adds to your customer base, increases your presence among the readers, increases the number of books set in your universes (mostly through the free labor of your fans) and makes your chances of landing another contract much better. This is only my humble proposal, of course, and I am only dealing with one specific question - how to add value to books.
It will spread through various "online libraries" (mostly owned by proponents of "copyleft" - that is, theft of author's rights).
Some of Lukyanenko's works are published here with permission:
Starting June 1, 2003, all novels will be presented here only as fragments - a quarter or a third of the total text. Short stories will be still available in full. I'm also asking all owners of electronic libraries that are cooperating with authors to note this information and withdraw full texts of my novels, as well as all existing English translations of my works, from their sites.
If I wanted to write an open source novel and use a little wording from 7 or 17 other open source novels, what am I going to do to give credit, especially if the other open source books were already 5 levels deep?
"... And a big Thank You goes to Foo, Bar and Baz from which I borrowed a few words here and there."
So it wasn't so difficult after all. Anyone who can write a novel can easily come up with a single sentence like that. If you can't, don't write anything :-)
Yes, you can sell open source software, but only an idiot buys it without some kind of added value (like technical support). What kind of added value can an author of an ebook offer that would compel someone to buy it? None.
And that is because the open source developer shares some of his rights with the people downstream. Those guys can modify the software, look into the code and create documentation, make intelligent support decisions. This sharing of rights permits the next tier of people to make a living (by honestly working, of course.) A closed source app offers fewer possibilities for making money off of it; only the most complex commercial software (Windows) creates independent support niches, and even there people are limited to what they are told by the developer.
In the book world the author retains *all* rights. The user can only read; nothing else is permitted. This is exactly why there is no side revenue opportunities. For example, imagine the world where once you buy a book you are entitled to read and write fan fiction, and the more you buy the more is open to you, and you get higher karma (in /. terms,) and so on. Perhaps this is implemented as a web forum; or maybe as a virtual world, or a MMORPG... but there would be something that makes your investment into the story worthwhile. Otherwise it is indeed more practical to borrow a book at the library, read it and forget about it; and honestly what else can you *do* with a story today, aside from some emotional feelings while you were reading it?
There is an example of this approach already. Pavel Shumil in the course of his literary work developed a certain world (you figure it out what world it is, if you are interested.) Then he started a framework novel (called The Commodore's House (Dom Komandora, thank you, Slashcode, for sticking to 7-bit ASCII :-) This novel was then cooperatively written by the author himself and a bunch of fans, with the author overseeing the process, giving advices and otherwise making their lives interesting :-) It took 7 years, and the work was completed in 2008. Now, how much is it worth for a fan to be part of such a project? And how much is it worth for a less avid fan to be allowed to access the work in progress and submit suggestions and critique?
for most people who fall into that category, it would be more cost-effective to get a landline, or a VoIP alternative at home and avoid burning up expensive cell phone minutes
A large number of business people use their cell phones in this manner. They have desk phones too, but they travel a lot, and they must be always available. I know marketing people who are more on the road than at their desk. That's because their job is to talk to customers, not to their coworkers back at the office.