Sadly, there's no quantitative values for proposed reduced measures yet, but given the speed at which government moves it's reassuring to know the issue is this far along already.
Well, we've seen Congress demonstrate that they can act quickly if they want to. The Do-Not-Call thing went through in something like 2 days. I'd read someplace that there are more people downloading music than on the do-not-call list (admittedly not all americans,) so quick action is required:)
Even further off topic, but wasn't it a mistake to demonstrate that they could pass a bill that fast. I'd think the press would have a field day the next time something takes forever.
Over a typical 20-year life span of a solar cell, a single produced watt should cost as little as $0.20, compared with the current $4.
Ok. I guess I'm stupid. My power bill says I get charged like $.10 per kilowatt hour (kwh.) This says a target of $.20 per produced watt. Someone want to score some karma and explain why this, if it happens, will be cheaper?
I've been patiently waiting for scientists, who know what they're doing, to accidentally end life on this planet. Bring the costs down to the point where every joe six-pack can resequence DNA in his basement lab, and now were talking.
Guess I don't need to go out and buy Christmas presents. We'll all be dead by then.
Obligatory/. running gag: I, for one, welcome our new three-eyed overlords.
If you want to help businesses succeed while helping yourself succeed, try this:
Create software that helps people write business plans. Then provided a mechanism for people in the same industry to review the plan. Charge for the plan, commission for the reviews.
Most businesses fail because they or poorly planned. People start businesses with unrealistic expectations regarding revenue and expenses. They start with too little capital and they simply run out.
Too many people only write business plans if they plan to seek investors. Everyone who is starting a business should have a business plan. If they then had people in the know check their plan before they begin, fewer businesses would start, but the ones that did would stick around a lot longer.
Often this isn't because the food is so bad at the restaurant, it's because the folks running the restaurant know how to cook, but not how to do accounting and run a business.
This is true of most businesses. People start businesses because they know how to produce whatever the business produces. The reason they fail is that many of them don't know how to run a business.
While tools could be created to help people run a business, if they don't know how, they don't know how.
Also, keep in mind that most businesses fail in the planning stages before they ever open. That's not to say they don't open, just that they are so poorly planned that they cannot succeed. People regularly start businesses with a poor understanding of cash flow or unrealistic expectations of revenue or expenses. They being with too little capital to ride out initial losses and then crash and burn when the money runs out.
If you want to help small businesses, provide software that helps them write a business plan and then provide a mechanism for peer review of the plan.
Assuming their using Windows, edit each entry in their Start Menu to launch the application underneath it.
For example, say their Start>Programs menu listed Dos Prompt, Word, Excel, Windows Explorer. Change each link so that they launch Word, Excel, Windows Explorer, and Dos Prompt respectively.
At first, they'll think they're clicking wrong somehow. Then maybe they'll replace their mouse. Good for some cheap laughs.
I've watched BBC America since it premiered, and I can tell you that having it doesn't assure you Doctor Who will be shown.
They have, on occasion, used Doctor Who as filler in the middle of the night; it has never been featured prominently. When it was shown, the episode selection was both random and repetitive.
I suspect the BBC makes a great deal of money licensing their shows to PBS stations, and I suspect this is the reason for their eratic behavior regarding Doctor Who on BBC America. Given the long history of Doctor Who on PBS, I'd expect to see the new episodes from your local PBS station first. Once it starts airing in England, start requesting it during pledge drives.
If access fees don't cover the cost of the backbone, then what does?
A significant percentage of the revenue comes from hosting fees. People pay for bandwidth to access content, and content providers pay for bandwidth to provide content. ISPs are getting money from both ends of the connection and still flirt with bankruptcy
When I spoke of access fees, I meant fees paid to connect to the Internet to retrieve content. I tend to think of bandwidth to servers as hosting fees. The destinction is important because while many people will pay to access content, few if any will pay to provide it without a means of recouping the expense; thus, the need for commercialization.
You could have an Internet where hosting content is free, but the cost of access will be astonomical by comparison to today's shared model.
The internet seems to become more worthless every day, as more and more of it is hijacked by spammers and other commercialization.
While I agree about the effect spamming has had on the Internet, I cannot disagree more about commercialization. Many sites, including Slashdot, could not exist without advertising.
For that matter, do you think access fees cover the cost of the backbone? If the entire Internet were paid for by access fees, everyone's connection would easily cost double or triple what it does now.
Then there's the issue of content. Try to imagine an Internet absent any content contributed by people paid to do so. Sites that provide news, for example, have to pay for servers, admins, bandwidth, and of course news. If they couldn't sell ad space to recoup some of the costs, they wouldn't be there.
I think the Internet is actually getting better rather than worse. It just takes a long term perspective to see it. Before HTTP, my primary source for information was Usenet. Usenet was, and is still, a mess. People could come running into any conversation and stick their "ads" in you face, not paying anyone to do it. On top of that nuisance, the information started lasting less and less time, because warez content started choaking off available space on servers.
Also at that time, email was nearly completely unprotected from spam. I remember hand writing rules for Sendmail to prevent relaying and forwarding a copy to Eric (as well as every admin we got spam from). Before that, servers where wide open to relaying. The idea that people would use non-local mail servers to route mail just wasn't considered in the original design.
Now, we have choices. Information is significantly more persistent and widely available than it was on Usenet. When you participate in online discussions, you can find sites like Slashdot where the noise can be filtered out.
Spam in email is still a problem, but tools exist. Imagine every mail server being a wide-open relay, no bayesian filtering, and no blocklists.
We have tools, now, to make the experience tolerable if not enjoyable. Believe me when I tell you this is better than it was. The necessity to rise above the crap spewed onto the 'net by spammers and the generally unclued has led to the invention of better and better tools and will continue to do so.
Don't take GTA away from them, just give them a version where they get gunned down in a hail of bullets within seconds of commiting a crime.
A little conditioning goes a long way.
Re:Only fools don't learn from failure
on
The Return of Apollo?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
And I don't think anyones going to mars in one of those little tin cans. Imagine a year in that thing?
Cramped quarters would be the least of their concerns:
Getting back into space would be impossible with anything the size of the landers we used on the Moon. Anything like the Apollo hardware would be a one-way trip.
Spending a year weightless would probably be cripling without some kind of exercise.
I've read someplace that any Mars mission craft will need some sort of shielded "safe room" to protect the crew from bursts of radiation. That room alone would have to be atleast the size of an Apollo capsule. Also, while space is nearly empty, if you do hit something the damage to the hull could be massive, necessitating some sort of internal sealed room as well.
Then, of course, there's the issue of food. A year there and back would be quite a payload on its own.
Anything like the Apollo tech would make Mars impossible. Way too small.
Actually, I think he means Challenger. When the Challenger exploded during launch, it is believed that the cockpit portion of the shuttle remained intact until impacting the ocean. Had the crew had the ability to jump from altitude, who knows...
Well the last point is correct - on similar hardware. However many times when you start wanting to go fast (and by fast I mean multiple Gig interfaces, General Purpose Hardware just doesn't cut it.
I couldn't agree more. If you find support for ATM under Linux it is most likely done for the sake of doing it or to run on hardware designed to be a router. ATM only makes sense when you're shoving around LOTS of traffic. It's one thing to use PCs for routers when you're talking traffic up to a few Mbits. After that, as he said, the hardware will become the bottleneck no matter how good the software support.
If you're building your own WAN with low traffic, but want to route it using a link layer protocol, try frame-relay. I think it's easier to understand and implement.
Well the courts MAY take that argument... although legally, they shouldn't.
I agree that ignorance is no excuse, but here's some issues where challenges could be raised:
By the time you get to read a click-thru agreement, you've already made the purchase in a typically non-refundable fashion. They've accepted your money with the only license being their protection under copyright and whatever is printed on the outside of the box. Don't like what's inside, "sorry no refund, you've opened it."
When you're presented with an EULA for a software patch, their basically saying, "we'll fix your broken copy of our software if you agree to the following..." This is wrong for a few reasons: 1) There's nothing stopping them from breaking it on purpose (e.g., delibertately cutting corners in QC) so as to backdoor clauses into the contract. 2) If the patch in question involves security issues, they may be liable for damages for withholding the patch. 3) In a sense, amending the contract when patching a program, is like extorti0n. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to that nice computer of yours, would we?" 4) For a contract to be binding, each party gives something to the other. (I give you money, you give me software. You give me patch, I give you what?)
Last Christmas I worked at Best Buy, selling consoles and console games. 9/10 parents didnt know about the ESPR rating system. 5/10 were shocked that there was one, and that the game their kid wanted was rated "M" because of sex, drugs, violence, murder, life-like gore. 8/10 partents would putthe game down and not let their kid buy it. But 2/10 parents were like really....I'll get it anyway.
You took the time to tell parents about this stuff and Best Buy let you keep your job? I'm impressed. Most of these large companies strike me as too immoral to care about anything but the absurd $50 a pop to push the games.
I take the time to educate parents, when we've got rated material, where I work, but I'm management: so, no one can tell me to do otherwise.
Many colleges, especially community colleges, take significant funding from government to operate. They, in turn, establish programs and curriculum to meet what they perceive (or are told are) the needs of the community.
For example, our local community college requires that every student take a course entitled "Intro to Information Management Systems." This course, with such a lofty title, teaches students the following:
Computer Hardware - difference between hard drive and floppy drive, etc.
MS Windows
MS Word
MS Excel
MS Power Point
Internet
I asked the professor why they require everyone to take this stuff. The reason he gave is that they were asked to do so by the local business community (Chamber of Commerce and the like.)
You can blame Microsoft for infesting CS departments, but schools like to believe they provide a service to the community, and the community asks for Microsoft. Don't like it, send a letter to your local schools from your business asking them to use the tools your business uses in teaching their students.
Is this simply lazy/offensive pigeonholing, or can you spot certain gamers on sight alone?
I don't know if it works for all types of gamers, but I've been able to recognize friends who've gotten into Everquest by their sudden, prolonged absense. Does that count?
Hey, this ham radio thing is interesting: Imagine carrying on instantaneous conversations with people over great distances. Think it'll ever be as popular as Instant Messaging, IRC, or email?
it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end."
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly, there's no quantitative values for proposed reduced measures yet, but given the speed at which government moves it's reassuring to know the issue is this far along already.
:)
Well, we've seen Congress demonstrate that they can act quickly if they want to. The Do-Not-Call thing went through in something like 2 days. I'd read someplace that there are more people downloading music than on the do-not-call list (admittedly not all americans,) so quick action is required
Even further off topic, but wasn't it a mistake to demonstrate that they could pass a bill that fast. I'd think the press would have a field day the next time something takes forever.
Over a typical 20-year life span of a solar cell, a single produced watt should cost as little as $0.20, compared with the current $4.
Ok. I guess I'm stupid. My power bill says I get charged like $.10 per kilowatt hour (kwh.) This says a target of $.20 per produced watt. Someone want to score some karma and explain why this, if it happens, will be cheaper?
I've been patiently waiting for scientists, who know what they're doing, to accidentally end life on this planet. Bring the costs down to the point where every joe six-pack can resequence DNA in his basement lab, and now were talking.
/. running gag: I, for one, welcome our new three-eyed overlords.
Guess I don't need to go out and buy Christmas presents. We'll all be dead by then.
Obligatory
If you want to help businesses succeed while helping yourself succeed, try this:
Create software that helps people write business plans. Then provided a mechanism for people in the same industry to review the plan. Charge for the plan, commission for the reviews.
Most businesses fail because they or poorly planned. People start businesses with unrealistic expectations regarding revenue and expenses. They start with too little capital and they simply run out.
Too many people only write business plans if they plan to seek investors. Everyone who is starting a business should have a business plan. If they then had people in the know check their plan before they begin, fewer businesses would start, but the ones that did would stick around a lot longer.
Often this isn't because the food is so bad at the restaurant, it's because the folks running the restaurant know how to cook, but not how to do accounting and run a business.
This is true of most businesses. People start businesses because they know how to produce whatever the business produces. The reason they fail is that many of them don't know how to run a business.
While tools could be created to help people run a business, if they don't know how, they don't know how.
Also, keep in mind that most businesses fail in the planning stages before they ever open. That's not to say they don't open, just that they are so poorly planned that they cannot succeed. People regularly start businesses with a poor understanding of cash flow or unrealistic expectations of revenue or expenses. They being with too little capital to ride out initial losses and then crash and burn when the money runs out.
If you want to help small businesses, provide software that helps them write a business plan and then provide a mechanism for peer review of the plan.
Yup. That was creeping me out too.
Assuming their using Windows, edit each entry in their Start Menu to launch the application underneath it.
For example, say their Start>Programs menu listed Dos Prompt, Word, Excel, Windows Explorer. Change each link so that they launch Word, Excel, Windows Explorer, and Dos Prompt respectively.
At first, they'll think they're clicking wrong somehow. Then maybe they'll replace their mouse. Good for some cheap laughs.
I've watched BBC America since it premiered, and I can tell you that having it doesn't assure you Doctor Who will be shown.
They have, on occasion, used Doctor Who as filler in the middle of the night; it has never been featured prominently. When it was shown, the episode selection was both random and repetitive.
I suspect the BBC makes a great deal of money licensing their shows to PBS stations, and I suspect this is the reason for their eratic behavior regarding Doctor Who on BBC America. Given the long history of Doctor Who on PBS, I'd expect to see the new episodes from your local PBS station first. Once it starts airing in England, start requesting it during pledge drives.
If access fees don't cover the cost of the backbone, then what does?
A significant percentage of the revenue comes from hosting fees. People pay for bandwidth to access content, and content providers pay for bandwidth to provide content. ISPs are getting money from both ends of the connection and still flirt with bankruptcy
When I spoke of access fees, I meant fees paid to connect to the Internet to retrieve content. I tend to think of bandwidth to servers as hosting fees. The destinction is important because while many people will pay to access content, few if any will pay to provide it without a means of recouping the expense; thus, the need for commercialization.
You could have an Internet where hosting content is free, but the cost of access will be astonomical by comparison to today's shared model.
The internet seems to become more worthless every day, as more and more of it is hijacked by spammers and other commercialization.
While I agree about the effect spamming has had on the Internet, I cannot disagree more about commercialization. Many sites, including Slashdot, could not exist without advertising.
For that matter, do you think access fees cover the cost of the backbone? If the entire Internet were paid for by access fees, everyone's connection would easily cost double or triple what it does now.
Then there's the issue of content. Try to imagine an Internet absent any content contributed by people paid to do so. Sites that provide news, for example, have to pay for servers, admins, bandwidth, and of course news. If they couldn't sell ad space to recoup some of the costs, they wouldn't be there.
I think the Internet is actually getting better rather than worse. It just takes a long term perspective to see it. Before HTTP, my primary source for information was Usenet. Usenet was, and is still, a mess. People could come running into any conversation and stick their "ads" in you face, not paying anyone to do it. On top of that nuisance, the information started lasting less and less time, because warez content started choaking off available space on servers.
Also at that time, email was nearly completely unprotected from spam. I remember hand writing rules for Sendmail to prevent relaying and forwarding a copy to Eric (as well as every admin we got spam from). Before that, servers where wide open to relaying. The idea that people would use non-local mail servers to route mail just wasn't considered in the original design.
Now, we have choices. Information is significantly more persistent and widely available than it was on Usenet. When you participate in online discussions, you can find sites like Slashdot where the noise can be filtered out.
Spam in email is still a problem, but tools exist. Imagine every mail server being a wide-open relay, no bayesian filtering, and no blocklists.
We have tools, now, to make the experience tolerable if not enjoyable. Believe me when I tell you this is better than it was. The necessity to rise above the crap spewed onto the 'net by spammers and the generally unclued has led to the invention of better and better tools and will continue to do so.
How can FIFTY FREAKIN' MILLION votes for this thing be wrong?
Especially when a mere 50,996,116 votes elected Al Gore president in 2000.
I guess the courts don't always care about numbers.
Don't take GTA away from them, just give them a version where they get gunned down in a hail of bullets within seconds of commiting a crime.
A little conditioning goes a long way.
And I don't think anyones going to mars in one of those little tin cans. Imagine a year in that thing?
Cramped quarters would be the least of their concerns:
Getting back into space would be impossible with anything the size of the landers we used on the Moon. Anything like the Apollo hardware would be a one-way trip.
Spending a year weightless would probably be cripling without some kind of exercise.
I've read someplace that any Mars mission craft will need some sort of shielded "safe room" to protect the crew from bursts of radiation. That room alone would have to be atleast the size of an Apollo capsule. Also, while space is nearly empty, if you do hit something the damage to the hull could be massive, necessitating some sort of internal sealed room as well.
Then, of course, there's the issue of food. A year there and back would be quite a payload on its own.
Anything like the Apollo tech would make Mars impossible. Way too small.
um, I think you mean Columbia,
Actually, I think he means Challenger. When the Challenger exploded during launch, it is believed that the cockpit portion of the shuttle remained intact until impacting the ocean. Had the crew had the ability to jump from altitude, who knows...
who wants sticky clothing?
You'd most likely end up placing it between layers of other fabric. In which case, being sticky would aid manufacturing.
Well the last point is correct - on similar hardware. However many times when you start wanting to go fast (and by fast I mean multiple Gig interfaces, General Purpose Hardware just doesn't cut it.
I couldn't agree more. If you find support for ATM under Linux it is most likely done for the sake of doing it or to run on hardware designed to be a router. ATM only makes sense when you're shoving around LOTS of traffic. It's one thing to use PCs for routers when you're talking traffic up to a few Mbits. After that, as he said, the hardware will become the bottleneck no matter how good the software support.
If you're building your own WAN with low traffic, but want to route it using a link layer protocol, try frame-relay. I think it's easier to understand and implement.
Well the courts MAY take that argument... although legally, they shouldn't.
..." This is wrong for a few reasons: 1) There's nothing stopping them from breaking it on purpose (e.g., delibertately cutting corners in QC) so as to backdoor clauses into the contract. 2) If the patch in question involves security issues, they may be liable for damages for withholding the patch. 3) In a sense, amending the contract when patching a program, is like extorti0n. "We wouldn't want anything to happen to that nice computer of yours, would we?" 4) For a contract to be binding, each party gives something to the other. (I give you money, you give me software. You give me patch, I give you what?)
I agree that ignorance is no excuse, but here's some issues where challenges could be raised:
By the time you get to read a click-thru agreement, you've already made the purchase in a typically non-refundable fashion. They've accepted your money with the only license being their protection under copyright and whatever is printed on the outside of the box. Don't like what's inside, "sorry no refund, you've opened it."
When you're presented with an EULA for a software patch, their basically saying, "we'll fix your broken copy of our software if you agree to the following
p.s. You shall die the death of 41 million paper cuts.
Last Christmas I worked at Best Buy, selling consoles and console games. 9/10 parents didnt know about the ESPR rating system. 5/10 were shocked that there was one, and that the game their kid wanted was rated "M" because of sex, drugs, violence, murder, life-like gore. 8/10 partents would putthe game down and not let their kid buy it. But 2/10 parents were like really....I'll get it anyway.
You took the time to tell parents about this stuff and Best Buy let you keep your job? I'm impressed. Most of these large companies strike me as too immoral to care about anything but the absurd $50 a pop to push the games.
I take the time to educate parents, when we've got rated material, where I work, but I'm management: so, no one can tell me to do otherwise.
For example, our local community college requires that every student take a course entitled "Intro to Information Management Systems." This course, with such a lofty title, teaches students the following:
I asked the professor why they require everyone to take this stuff. The reason he gave is that they were asked to do so by the local business community (Chamber of Commerce and the like.)
You can blame Microsoft for infesting CS departments, but schools like to believe they provide a service to the community, and the community asks for Microsoft. Don't like it, send a letter to your local schools from your business asking them to use the tools your business uses in teaching their students.
Without computer viruses, he couldn't have saved the world.
Is this simply lazy/offensive pigeonholing, or can you spot certain gamers on sight alone?
I don't know if it works for all types of gamers, but I've been able to recognize friends who've gotten into Everquest by their sudden, prolonged absense. Does that count?
Hey, this ham radio thing is interesting: Imagine carrying on instantaneous conversations with people over great distances. Think it'll ever be as popular as Instant Messaging, IRC, or email?
it all reminds me of a teacher who said "I'm not a premillenialist, postmillenialist - I'm a pan-millenialist, as in it's all going to pan out in the end."
This guy must have been fun at parties.
It's all sunshine and lollypops from here on out, kids.
I was told to not accept candy from Anonymous Cowards.