They've been supported for a while now, at least in Mac OS X. (I qualify that because I'm not 100% sure they don't pull in the OS's trusted roots.) Point Firefox at https://www.gatwood.net/ if you want to confirm it for yourself.
I read the letter yesterday as I was getting on a plane to the 75th anniversary celebration for Foster Music Camp. I was not happy. By painting the CC as the enemy, they are supporting the chaos of incompatible one-off licensing for such uses prior to its existence. I wrote them a letter pointing out their mistakes.
I concluded by saying that I would reconsider my membership if they do not stop these baseless ad hominem attacks on organizations that do so much to improve the rights of authors, content users, and those who license content created by others. I encourage other content creators who feel similarly to do likewise. The only way they'll ever "get it" is if we members keep driving home the point that absolute control of copyright is not in anyone's best interests, including content creators.
They don't, and they don't care. This is just a further example of the way in which corporate personhood results in a fundamentally broken and inequitable legal system.
When a corporation misappropriates the secrets of hundreds of thousands of users, they get told the equivalent of "We know you stole a hundred thousand VCRs, but we're going to let you off with probation. We'll check back on you in a year, and we'd better not see a bunch of stolen VCRs when we do. But if we do, we'll check back in another year. Oh, and your punishment is that you're not allowed to steal VCRs again for twenty years."
By contrast, if an individual steals just a couple of secrets from one corporation and leaks them to the press, the police raid the person's house and confiscate the person's equipment, and the person spends time in jail and usually ends up not being able to use the Internet for 20 years.
All I ask is for the same punishment to apply to Twitter. Is that really so much to ask? Shouldn't corporations' privacy violations be punished just as severely as an individual committing a hundred thousand acts of corporate espionage? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
Sorry, I was looking at performance-per-clock and thinking performance-per-watt. I retract that part of my comment. Idle performance, though, is better on Atom (if my numbers are right), assuming you ignore the rest of the chipset. (As you're no doubt aware, the Atom chipset power consumption is still embarrassingly high, but at least it has gone down from a couple of years ago by a large margin.)
Depends on which ARM chip you're talking about. The Cortex A8, if my numbers are right, idles at about a quarter watt. The Atom idle consumption is about 0.01W, more than an order of magnitude lower. Maybe my numbers are wrong---the manufacturers really try their hardest to avoid giving numbers that are in any way comparable across product lines....
As for why there aren't any phones based on Atom, I'm guessing that's more inertia than anything else. Why bother to port your OS and apps to a different CPU family?
In terms of performance per Watt, the Core i7 family beats ARM significantly, last I checked. In terms of idle performance, the ARM tears it up, of course, coming in at a quarter watt versus about ten times that for the Core 2 Duo. The Atom, in turn, slaughters comparable ARM CPUs in idle power, with comparable performance-per-watt, but has lower total performance-per-clock, IIRC.
What does this tell us? Maximizing battery performance of a device depends on expected load. For a device that's idle most of the time (e.g. a phone), go with Atom if you don't need faster total performance, otherwise go with ARM. For a device that's expected to be doing work much of the time (e.g. a laptop), go with a C2D or something. Not only do you get better performance per watt, you also get better total performance, better compatibility (e.g. Wine instead of a full emulator stack) with existing computer-based applications, etc. I can't imagine an i7 in my phone. I similarly can't imagine an ARM in my laptop any time in the near future.
Huh. So as long as you time all your purchases correctly, you get the grace period you specified. For the rest of us, who would use a card throughout the month, the advertised grace period in the credit card fine print is what you should go by.
The original post did say "up to". Seems pretty accurate to me. Certainly at least as accurate as the weasel words in that credit card agreement....:-)
My attitude is that it's not evil to attack companies bent on destroying your company or a significant part of it. Doubly so if that company is bent on establishment of copyright without limits. This lawsuit was such a direct frontal attack on the viability of the Internet as a whole (and content sharing in particular) that Viacom *needs* to be taught a lesson to discourage other companies from attempting similar tactics in the future. There needs to be a penalty for filing this sort of suit, and not just a tiny slap on the wrist like having to pay Google's court costs. Otherwise, the next time a company like Viacom files a suit like this, it might be against a smaller company that lacks the ability to defend itself---Wikipedia, Wikileaks, etc.---and the case might set dangerous precedents that cause deep, fundamental harm to the Internet as a whole.
Sure, it would be bad if Google arbitrarily decided to block certain companies for capricious reasons. That said, Google blocks content every day. By default, porn sites, virus and phishing sites, etc. are blocked. Google blocks sites that would do harm to children (with the ability to unblock) or to the Internet as a whole (with the ability to go there anyway if you're feeling lucky). So Google blocks sites all the time, but it does so for well-understood reasons. I'm merely proposing another such well-defined, well-understood reason: blocking companies that are actively trying to destroy the Internet or some large portion thereof.
Viacom is one of those companies. Their actions may be through the court system instead of illegal means like virus and phishing sites, but they are just as dangerous. Make no mistake, Viacom would like the Internet to just go away. It's a complication of their business model that they are largely unequipped to handle. If they could, they would modify copyright law to eliminate the DMCA exemption and the fair use exemptions that have made it possible for sites like YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, CNN iReport, Slashdot, mailing lists, forums, and other user-produced content sites to exist, made personal content sharing possible, made searching and indexing possible, and so on. They are an evil and greedy company that is in the Internet's best interests like a gaping, festering laceration is in a person's best interests.
Doing no evil doesn't mean doing the minimum to defend yourself against evil companies. It means actively fighting to preserve the Internet, to protect the Internet, to defend the Internet against all who would cause it irreparable harm. If you engage in lawsuits that threaten the very foundation of the Internet, the most basic freedom of the press in the Internet age, the most basic protection of the ability of ISPs to operate in an era of perpetual copyrights, you should be banned. It's basically the Internet death penalty for the most heinous abusers. This should be reserved for companies that file audacious suits that threaten the Internet as a whole (not for any minor suit against Google)---suits to overturn safe harbor, suits to declare a patent on the basic structure of HTML or TCP/IP, suits to declare searching of news articles to not be fair use, etc. Certainly, the Internet death penalty is an extreme option that should not be taken lightly, but it should be an option.
What I'd like to see is for Google to grow some cojones when it comes to dealing with the big media conglomerates. The second Viacom tried to sue to get YouTube's safe harbor status taken away, Google should have immediately:
blocked Viacom's corporate IP range from access to all Google services, including search.
removed all Viacom properties from Google's search index, including their TV networks' pages.
mass-scrubbed all pages from third-party sites that reference Viacom properties (e.g. TV.com pages about shows on Nickelodeon).
sat back and waited for Viacom to stop being morons.
It is possible to build a voltage converter to output 12V from 5V, you know.... There's no inherent reason they can't make USB serial adapters that comply with the letter of the RS232 spec. Also a lot of PC motherboards use 5V signaling, too, and have done so for years. You just can't guarantee that you'll get +/-12V signaling these days.
BTW, the RS232 spec requires that devices signal at 12V, but requires that they detect signaling as low as 3V. If your device doesn't work correctly with USB adapters, the device is just as noncompliant as the USB adapter.
In short, I think it's time to upgrade your hardware to something that's at least spec-compliant....
Depends on how you define native. The TI XIO2213 is "native" if your definition of native is a chip that connects directly to a PCIe bus. If you are more pedantic about it, the XIO2213 is really just a PCI FireWire chip with a PCIe-to-PCI bridge part combined into a single package, and thus decidedly non-native. It's a fuzzy grey area. Either way, though, it gets the job done.
AT&T made 10% of its revenue in profit last year. If they were to spontaneously give their customers back 10% of their payments the company would be non-profit.
True, but let's put those numbers in perspective. In just a single quarter in 2009 (ending in June), AT&T (the whole company, not just the cellular part) brought in over $30 billion dollars in revenue. If your percentage is right, then we should be looking at what could be done with three billion dollars. Three billion dollars in profit rolled into more towers would build 20,000 additional cell towers, based an average cost of $150,000 apiece. The U.S. is about 3,537,441 square miles, so that's one extra cell tower for every 176 square miles across the entire United States. The maximum area a GSM tower can cover is about 1600 square miles, assuming you're not restricting the gain to cover a smaller footprint due to high population density.
Sure, I'm ignoring mountain ranges, the need for higher tower density in cities, the cost of power, the cost of maintenance, and lots of other variables, but the fact remains that if AT&T turned their entire profit into tower construction for a single fiscal quarter, we would not have cellular problems anywhere in this country. We would have 100% coverage from coast to coast.
Still confident the government can't do a better job for less money?
Not the point. The point was that it's so important that even a lot of people who can barely afford food have one, which means it's pretty darned important. And the fact that they don't have a land line makes it doubly important for them. Thus, cell phone service is a critical service that ranks right up there with power and water when it comes to the needs of our nation in the 21st century.
How does "government founded nonprofit org" belong anywhere near something as rapidly evolving as the telecom industry?
Rapidly evolving? The U.S. is at least a decade behind Europe in broadband availability, and they have... wait for it... government-owned telecom companies providing much of their infrastructure. I see no reason why cellular service would be any different than wired telecom in this regard.
The government's involvement should be limited to preventing and dismantling monopolies in the marketplace.
That's fine. Dismantle AT&T and Verizon. Now we go back to the mess we had in the 90s where every little area of the country is owned by a different company and you start paying extortionate roaming fees as soon as you travel a hundred miles in any direction. Either that or you end up with spotty coverage because you've given half the cell towers in the area to a different company. Either way, there's just no way to break up those companies that wouldn't do far more harm than good.
If we want competition on a nationwide basis, there's only one way to do that, and that's for somebody to fork over the money and build at least one more nationwide network. So as long as we're doing that anyway, it might as well be a government-owned nonprofit that sells low-cost service to dozens of MVNOs. Then, in effect, we get dozens of nationwide networks for the price of one....
Yeah that's what we need - another monopoly. Because they work so well (amtrak, the nearly-bankrupt post ffice, the govt schools, Comcast, Microsoft).
The Post Office is struggling because they're competing with UPS and FedEx on the package front and the need for first class mail has been largely eliminated by the Internet. It was doing just fine until disruptive technology made it largely unnecessary. That's really the best you can hope for when it comes to any government-run company.
Amtrak was formed to do a job that the private sector wanted out of because it lost so much money. It was pretty much inevitable that they would similarly lose money. The only way that comparison would be relevant to a government-sponsored telco would be if cell providers were losing money.:-)
Government-run schools are not even similar. A bunch of politicians *running* anything is almost always a bad idea. Government works best when it spends the money to fund creation of an independent nonprofit corporate entity that does a particular task, then steps back and leaves the day-to-day administration to businesspeople who know what they are doing.
Comcast and Microsoft are for-profit monopolies, which are completely different than nonprofit monopolies. With a nonprofit or not-for-profit monopoly, all excess revenue gets rolled into R&D or infrastructure expansion/improvement. You really can't do any job cheaper than an effectively run nonprofit monopoly (assuming similar levels of R&D spending, that is).
I'll see your Post Office and raise you TVA. That's much closer to telecom infrastructure, and they're generally doing a good job, and doing it for a heck of a lot less than the commercial power providers do.
I want CHOICE and by creating a monopoly you've taken that away
Au contraire. What I propose is the government building the tower infrastructure and leasing it in a nondiscriminatory way to any company that wants to use it to provide service. This would mean that instead of two nationwide cell networks with halfway usable coverage, you would have dozens with incredible coverage. You would have far more choice if the government provides the underlying infrastructure because monopolies would inherently have negligible advantage over smaller companies.
Put another way, the only reason monopolies are so prevalent in the telecom world is that the infrastructure costs make competition unprofitable. Change the system so that the per-customer infrastructure costs remain consistent even if companies consolidate, and you've just eliminated a major roadblock to competition.
Why is hoping there is a God that is tolerant a useful action?
Why is any hope useful? Because the alternative is despair. Without hope, life is meaningless. I guess what I meant was that we should all have faith that our religion is correct, but have hope that God will not judge us too harshly if we're wrong, simply because statistically speaking, a very large percentage of us must be, regardless of which religion is correct.
You seem to be arguing that, assuming God exists, that religious tolerance is required for people to get into heaven in some cases.
No, I'm arguing that, assuming God exists, in order to guarantee that, at minimum, *some* people get into Heaven, religious tolerance is necessary---that religious diversity is as fundamental to the survival of the *species* in the hereafter as promoting genetic diversity is to the survival of the species here on Earth.
We can't all be right, but we *can* all be wrong. All we have to do is force everyone on Earth to believe that the flying spaghetti monster is the one true god, and we're pretty much screwed (unless God either doesn't exist or has a great sense of humor)....
Therefore, the best way to maximize the probability that at least some portion of the species as a whole survives after death (in a manner of speaking) is to protect diversity, or at minimum, to not try to snuff it out. I'm not saying that the religions are wrong for trying to convert people---without that, many religions would die off and diversity would decrease---but trying to eliminate every other religion isn't likely to be very good for the species as a whole unless we happen to get it right.
And the part that no one touches is the probability of each.
How do you estimate the probability of God existing, much less preferring a particular religion? There's a reason nobody touches that; it's pretty much unfathomable....
Not all code written that way is vulnerable to injection vulnerabilities. In fact, I suspect the vast majority of production code out there already properly quotes strings by now. So you're asking the PHP team to break every piece of PHP software that uses MySQL just because a small percentage uses a function in an unsafe way? That hardly makes sense. You might as well declare fgets off-limits because a few pieces of code pass the wrong length parameter.
The purpose of providing substitution-style SQL queries is to make it easier for new code to do the right thing. The purpose is not to force code to do the right thing, and in fact, it's impossible to force code to do the right thing unless you disallow string literals in SQL query strings entirely (which would be pretty insane). Thus, even if you broke everybody's code and replaced it with a new parameterized query function, almost everyone who was too lazy to build the query correctly in the first place will still be too lazy to rewrite their code to fix it the right way, so vulnerable code will *still* be vulnerable even if you remove mysql_query entirely.
Removing mysql_query query would break backwards compatibility with *good* code and would do *nothing* to get rid of bad code. It's not the right fix.
So an atheist believes everyone is going to hell (or the equivalent)?
I guess I didn't word that clearly enough. The intended point was that, assuming God exists and cares about our beliefs, if everybody's belief is wrong, there's no advantage to believing because everybody is going to burn anyway, even to the point that God not existing (a swift end to existence upon death) would be preferable.
You assume we have souls and that there is a God and that God cares about our beliefs.
I did leave out the question of whether we have souls or not because it really doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument. There's little practical difference afterlife-wise between God not existing to grant us eternal life upon our deaths and us not having souls that live on after death. I mean ostensibly, yes, there might be some edge cases I'm not thinking of, but.... Okay, I suppose that our souls could theoretically continue to exist on a higher plane automatically without a deity, but if God existed and didn't care what we believe, the result would be the same, so again, the question of whether we have souls is orthogonal.
For the most part, I think my #1 and #5 covered those cases. If God doesn't exist, then this is all moot, and if God doesn't care about our beliefs, then this is all moot, and if we don't have souls then this is all moot. In any of those cases, allowing other religions to exist is the only rational choice.
Which is nice, in theory. In practice, there are only two cell providers in the U.S.: AT&T and Verizon, and they're both doing this. If you live in a major city, you could use Sprint/Nextel or T-Mobile, but neither of them has the infrastructure to be a viable competitor to AT&T, much less Verizon.
And this is why I keep saying that widespread telecom infrastructure can feasibly be operated only by government-founded nonprofit orgs. As soon as you have for-profit companies providing the infrastructure for critical services, you end up with a market with insufficient competition to prevent abuse. If you want ubiquitous free-market competition in telecom services, you have to take the infrastructure out of the picture.
And lest you say that cell phones aren't critical services or that you can live without a cell phone, I would point out that most homeless people I've seen in California have cell phones. It's so essential to modern society that people choose a cell phone over a roof. And although cellular data is not in the same category right now, it's only a matter of time until it is (and cellular data can't exist without cellular voice anyway, making that a moot point).
The only alternative is extreme government regulation, and although this can help fix the worst of the monopoly/duopoly problems and increase coverage areas, it rarely results in any significant amount of true competition. We need a nationalized cellular tower service that leases nationwide tower services at a low cost, and we need it twenty years ago.
Uh... coconuts are fruits. Maybe you should have picked a better example... something that's a matter of opinion instead of a clearly obvious fact.
The fact of the matter is that when we die, we'll know who is right and who is dead, but by then it will be too late to tell anyone. And that is why freedom of religion is so important. There are dozens of different groups of people, all of whom believe that they are right. They can't all be right, so we have only five possibilities:
God is forgiving and will ignore the misguided ways of some or all of the groups who were wrong.
God is not forgiving and everyone will burn except for those who chose the right religion.
God is not forgiving and everyone going forward will burn because those who chose the right religion were all snuffed out by the other groups.
God is not forgiving and everyone will burn because nobody has gotten it right yet.
God does not exist and when we die, we cease to exist.
Of those, #1 is what we should all hope and pray for, but if #2 is true, the eternal existence of future humans depends on not allowing us to devolve into #3 or #4 (depending on whether anyone has gotten it right yet---something that cannot be known for certain until we die) because if #3 or #4 occurs, #5 might as well be true; there's really no useful difference between everyone being condemned for all eternity and everyone ceasing to exist unless there is hope for an alternative (e.g. Heaven).
Sure, we might get lucky and the right religion might win out, but given the odds, I wouldn't want to bank the souls of the future of humanity on the current humans getting it right after so many millennia of getting things so badly wrong on so many occasions, from belief in a flat Earth to belief that storms are caused by an angry weather god.
Thus, within the real of logic, reason, and rational thought, the very assumption that God cares about our beliefs REQUIRES that we, in turn, allow other religions to exist. Our souls or the souls of our descendants might very well depend on it.
I think it's more likely that Slashdot posters want Zuckerburg executed too, only for different reasons. My personal feeling it death is too good for the guy who founded Facebook and caused me to waste so much of my time.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been supported for a while now, at least in Mac OS X. (I qualify that because I'm not 100% sure they don't pull in the OS's trusted roots.) Point Firefox at https://www.gatwood.net/ if you want to confirm it for yourself.
I read the letter yesterday as I was getting on a plane to the 75th anniversary celebration for Foster Music Camp. I was not happy. By painting the CC as the enemy, they are supporting the chaos of incompatible one-off licensing for such uses prior to its existence. I wrote them a letter pointing out their mistakes.
I concluded by saying that I would reconsider my membership if they do not stop these baseless ad hominem attacks on organizations that do so much to improve the rights of authors, content users, and those who license content created by others. I encourage other content creators who feel similarly to do likewise. The only way they'll ever "get it" is if we members keep driving home the point that absolute control of copyright is not in anyone's best interests, including content creators.
They don't, and they don't care. This is just a further example of the way in which corporate personhood results in a fundamentally broken and inequitable legal system.
When a corporation misappropriates the secrets of hundreds of thousands of users, they get told the equivalent of "We know you stole a hundred thousand VCRs, but we're going to let you off with probation. We'll check back on you in a year, and we'd better not see a bunch of stolen VCRs when we do. But if we do, we'll check back in another year. Oh, and your punishment is that you're not allowed to steal VCRs again for twenty years."
By contrast, if an individual steals just a couple of secrets from one corporation and leaks them to the press, the police raid the person's house and confiscate the person's equipment, and the person spends time in jail and usually ends up not being able to use the Internet for 20 years.
All I ask is for the same punishment to apply to Twitter. Is that really so much to ask? Shouldn't corporations' privacy violations be punished just as severely as an individual committing a hundred thousand acts of corporate espionage? Seems pretty straightforward to me.
20 MPH can kill a pedestrian very easily (about a 10% fatality rate). How slow do you want your limiter set?
That's what I thought.
Sorry, I was looking at performance-per-clock and thinking performance-per-watt. I retract that part of my comment. Idle performance, though, is better on Atom (if my numbers are right), assuming you ignore the rest of the chipset. (As you're no doubt aware, the Atom chipset power consumption is still embarrassingly high, but at least it has gone down from a couple of years ago by a large margin.)
Depends on which ARM chip you're talking about. The Cortex A8, if my numbers are right, idles at about a quarter watt. The Atom idle consumption is about 0.01W, more than an order of magnitude lower. Maybe my numbers are wrong---the manufacturers really try their hardest to avoid giving numbers that are in any way comparable across product lines....
As for why there aren't any phones based on Atom, I'm guessing that's more inertia than anything else. Why bother to port your OS and apps to a different CPU family?
Which isn't saying much.
In terms of performance per Watt, the Core i7 family beats ARM significantly, last I checked. In terms of idle performance, the ARM tears it up, of course, coming in at a quarter watt versus about ten times that for the Core 2 Duo. The Atom, in turn, slaughters comparable ARM CPUs in idle power, with comparable performance-per-watt, but has lower total performance-per-clock, IIRC.
What does this tell us? Maximizing battery performance of a device depends on expected load. For a device that's idle most of the time (e.g. a phone), go with Atom if you don't need faster total performance, otherwise go with ARM. For a device that's expected to be doing work much of the time (e.g. a laptop), go with a C2D or something. Not only do you get better performance per watt, you also get better total performance, better compatibility (e.g. Wine instead of a full emulator stack) with existing computer-based applications, etc. I can't imagine an i7 in my phone. I similarly can't imagine an ARM in my laptop any time in the near future.
The original post did say "up to". Seems pretty accurate to me. Certainly at least as accurate as the weasel words in that credit card agreement.... :-)
My attitude is that it's not evil to attack companies bent on destroying your company or a significant part of it. Doubly so if that company is bent on establishment of copyright without limits. This lawsuit was such a direct frontal attack on the viability of the Internet as a whole (and content sharing in particular) that Viacom *needs* to be taught a lesson to discourage other companies from attempting similar tactics in the future. There needs to be a penalty for filing this sort of suit, and not just a tiny slap on the wrist like having to pay Google's court costs. Otherwise, the next time a company like Viacom files a suit like this, it might be against a smaller company that lacks the ability to defend itself---Wikipedia, Wikileaks, etc.---and the case might set dangerous precedents that cause deep, fundamental harm to the Internet as a whole.
Sure, it would be bad if Google arbitrarily decided to block certain companies for capricious reasons. That said, Google blocks content every day. By default, porn sites, virus and phishing sites, etc. are blocked. Google blocks sites that would do harm to children (with the ability to unblock) or to the Internet as a whole (with the ability to go there anyway if you're feeling lucky). So Google blocks sites all the time, but it does so for well-understood reasons. I'm merely proposing another such well-defined, well-understood reason: blocking companies that are actively trying to destroy the Internet or some large portion thereof.
Viacom is one of those companies. Their actions may be through the court system instead of illegal means like virus and phishing sites, but they are just as dangerous. Make no mistake, Viacom would like the Internet to just go away. It's a complication of their business model that they are largely unequipped to handle. If they could, they would modify copyright law to eliminate the DMCA exemption and the fair use exemptions that have made it possible for sites like YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, CNN iReport, Slashdot, mailing lists, forums, and other user-produced content sites to exist, made personal content sharing possible, made searching and indexing possible, and so on. They are an evil and greedy company that is in the Internet's best interests like a gaping, festering laceration is in a person's best interests.
Doing no evil doesn't mean doing the minimum to defend yourself against evil companies. It means actively fighting to preserve the Internet, to protect the Internet, to defend the Internet against all who would cause it irreparable harm. If you engage in lawsuits that threaten the very foundation of the Internet, the most basic freedom of the press in the Internet age, the most basic protection of the ability of ISPs to operate in an era of perpetual copyrights, you should be banned. It's basically the Internet death penalty for the most heinous abusers. This should be reserved for companies that file audacious suits that threaten the Internet as a whole (not for any minor suit against Google)---suits to overturn safe harbor, suits to declare a patent on the basic structure of HTML or TCP/IP, suits to declare searching of news articles to not be fair use, etc. Certainly, the Internet death penalty is an extreme option that should not be taken lightly, but it should be an option.
Or flag it as a virus site. People will find the site and be horrified.
What I'd like to see is for Google to grow some cojones when it comes to dealing with the big media conglomerates. The second Viacom tried to sue to get YouTube's safe harbor status taken away, Google should have immediately:
It is possible to build a voltage converter to output 12V from 5V, you know.... There's no inherent reason they can't make USB serial adapters that comply with the letter of the RS232 spec. Also a lot of PC motherboards use 5V signaling, too, and have done so for years. You just can't guarantee that you'll get +/-12V signaling these days.
BTW, the RS232 spec requires that devices signal at 12V, but requires that they detect signaling as low as 3V. If your device doesn't work correctly with USB adapters, the device is just as noncompliant as the USB adapter.
In short, I think it's time to upgrade your hardware to something that's at least spec-compliant....
Depends on how you define native. The TI XIO2213 is "native" if your definition of native is a chip that connects directly to a PCIe bus. If you are more pedantic about it, the XIO2213 is really just a PCI FireWire chip with a PCIe-to-PCI bridge part combined into a single package, and thus decidedly non-native. It's a fuzzy grey area. Either way, though, it gets the job done.
True, but let's put those numbers in perspective. In just a single quarter in 2009 (ending in June), AT&T (the whole company, not just the cellular part) brought in over $30 billion dollars in revenue. If your percentage is right, then we should be looking at what could be done with three billion dollars. Three billion dollars in profit rolled into more towers would build 20,000 additional cell towers, based an average cost of $150,000 apiece. The U.S. is about 3,537,441 square miles, so that's one extra cell tower for every 176 square miles across the entire United States. The maximum area a GSM tower can cover is about 1600 square miles, assuming you're not restricting the gain to cover a smaller footprint due to high population density.
Sure, I'm ignoring mountain ranges, the need for higher tower density in cities, the cost of power, the cost of maintenance, and lots of other variables, but the fact remains that if AT&T turned their entire profit into tower construction for a single fiscal quarter, we would not have cellular problems anywhere in this country. We would have 100% coverage from coast to coast.
Still confident the government can't do a better job for less money?
Not the point. The point was that it's so important that even a lot of people who can barely afford food have one, which means it's pretty darned important. And the fact that they don't have a land line makes it doubly important for them. Thus, cell phone service is a critical service that ranks right up there with power and water when it comes to the needs of our nation in the 21st century.
Rapidly evolving? The U.S. is at least a decade behind Europe in broadband availability, and they have... wait for it... government-owned telecom companies providing much of their infrastructure. I see no reason why cellular service would be any different than wired telecom in this regard.
That's fine. Dismantle AT&T and Verizon. Now we go back to the mess we had in the 90s where every little area of the country is owned by a different company and you start paying extortionate roaming fees as soon as you travel a hundred miles in any direction. Either that or you end up with spotty coverage because you've given half the cell towers in the area to a different company. Either way, there's just no way to break up those companies that wouldn't do far more harm than good.
If we want competition on a nationwide basis, there's only one way to do that, and that's for somebody to fork over the money and build at least one more nationwide network. So as long as we're doing that anyway, it might as well be a government-owned nonprofit that sells low-cost service to dozens of MVNOs. Then, in effect, we get dozens of nationwide networks for the price of one....
The Post Office is struggling because they're competing with UPS and FedEx on the package front and the need for first class mail has been largely eliminated by the Internet. It was doing just fine until disruptive technology made it largely unnecessary. That's really the best you can hope for when it comes to any government-run company.
Amtrak was formed to do a job that the private sector wanted out of because it lost so much money. It was pretty much inevitable that they would similarly lose money. The only way that comparison would be relevant to a government-sponsored telco would be if cell providers were losing money. :-)
Government-run schools are not even similar. A bunch of politicians *running* anything is almost always a bad idea. Government works best when it spends the money to fund creation of an independent nonprofit corporate entity that does a particular task, then steps back and leaves the day-to-day administration to businesspeople who know what they are doing.
Comcast and Microsoft are for-profit monopolies, which are completely different than nonprofit monopolies. With a nonprofit or not-for-profit monopoly, all excess revenue gets rolled into R&D or infrastructure expansion/improvement. You really can't do any job cheaper than an effectively run nonprofit monopoly (assuming similar levels of R&D spending, that is).
I'll see your Post Office and raise you TVA. That's much closer to telecom infrastructure, and they're generally doing a good job, and doing it for a heck of a lot less than the commercial power providers do.
Au contraire. What I propose is the government building the tower infrastructure and leasing it in a nondiscriminatory way to any company that wants to use it to provide service. This would mean that instead of two nationwide cell networks with halfway usable coverage, you would have dozens with incredible coverage. You would have far more choice if the government provides the underlying infrastructure because monopolies would inherently have negligible advantage over smaller companies.
Put another way, the only reason monopolies are so prevalent in the telecom world is that the infrastructure costs make competition unprofitable. Change the system so that the per-customer infrastructure costs remain consistent even if companies consolidate, and you've just eliminated a major roadblock to competition.
Why is any hope useful? Because the alternative is despair. Without hope, life is meaningless. I guess what I meant was that we should all have faith that our religion is correct, but have hope that God will not judge us too harshly if we're wrong, simply because statistically speaking, a very large percentage of us must be, regardless of which religion is correct.
No, I'm arguing that, assuming God exists, in order to guarantee that, at minimum, *some* people get into Heaven, religious tolerance is necessary---that religious diversity is as fundamental to the survival of the *species* in the hereafter as promoting genetic diversity is to the survival of the species here on Earth.
We can't all be right, but we *can* all be wrong. All we have to do is force everyone on Earth to believe that the flying spaghetti monster is the one true god, and we're pretty much screwed (unless God either doesn't exist or has a great sense of humor)....
Therefore, the best way to maximize the probability that at least some portion of the species as a whole survives after death (in a manner of speaking) is to protect diversity, or at minimum, to not try to snuff it out. I'm not saying that the religions are wrong for trying to convert people---without that, many religions would die off and diversity would decrease---but trying to eliminate every other religion isn't likely to be very good for the species as a whole unless we happen to get it right.
How do you estimate the probability of God existing, much less preferring a particular religion? There's a reason nobody touches that; it's pretty much unfathomable....
Not all code written that way is vulnerable to injection vulnerabilities. In fact, I suspect the vast majority of production code out there already properly quotes strings by now. So you're asking the PHP team to break every piece of PHP software that uses MySQL just because a small percentage uses a function in an unsafe way? That hardly makes sense. You might as well declare fgets off-limits because a few pieces of code pass the wrong length parameter.
The purpose of providing substitution-style SQL queries is to make it easier for new code to do the right thing. The purpose is not to force code to do the right thing, and in fact, it's impossible to force code to do the right thing unless you disallow string literals in SQL query strings entirely (which would be pretty insane). Thus, even if you broke everybody's code and replaced it with a new parameterized query function, almost everyone who was too lazy to build the query correctly in the first place will still be too lazy to rewrite their code to fix it the right way, so vulnerable code will *still* be vulnerable even if you remove mysql_query entirely.
Removing mysql_query query would break backwards compatibility with *good* code and would do *nothing* to get rid of bad code. It's not the right fix.
I guess I didn't word that clearly enough. The intended point was that, assuming God exists and cares about our beliefs, if everybody's belief is wrong, there's no advantage to believing because everybody is going to burn anyway, even to the point that God not existing (a swift end to existence upon death) would be preferable.
I did leave out the question of whether we have souls or not because it really doesn't matter for the purposes of the argument. There's little practical difference afterlife-wise between God not existing to grant us eternal life upon our deaths and us not having souls that live on after death. I mean ostensibly, yes, there might be some edge cases I'm not thinking of, but.... Okay, I suppose that our souls could theoretically continue to exist on a higher plane automatically without a deity, but if God existed and didn't care what we believe, the result would be the same, so again, the question of whether we have souls is orthogonal.
For the most part, I think my #1 and #5 covered those cases. If God doesn't exist, then this is all moot, and if God doesn't care about our beliefs, then this is all moot, and if we don't have souls then this is all moot. In any of those cases, allowing other religions to exist is the only rational choice.
Which is nice, in theory. In practice, there are only two cell providers in the U.S.: AT&T and Verizon, and they're both doing this. If you live in a major city, you could use Sprint/Nextel or T-Mobile, but neither of them has the infrastructure to be a viable competitor to AT&T, much less Verizon.
And this is why I keep saying that widespread telecom infrastructure can feasibly be operated only by government-founded nonprofit orgs. As soon as you have for-profit companies providing the infrastructure for critical services, you end up with a market with insufficient competition to prevent abuse. If you want ubiquitous free-market competition in telecom services, you have to take the infrastructure out of the picture.
And lest you say that cell phones aren't critical services or that you can live without a cell phone, I would point out that most homeless people I've seen in California have cell phones. It's so essential to modern society that people choose a cell phone over a roof. And although cellular data is not in the same category right now, it's only a matter of time until it is (and cellular data can't exist without cellular voice anyway, making that a moot point).
The only alternative is extreme government regulation, and although this can help fix the worst of the monopoly/duopoly problems and increase coverage areas, it rarely results in any significant amount of true competition. We need a nationalized cellular tower service that leases nationwide tower services at a low cost, and we need it twenty years ago.
Uh... coconuts are fruits. Maybe you should have picked a better example... something that's a matter of opinion instead of a clearly obvious fact.
The fact of the matter is that when we die, we'll know who is right and who is dead, but by then it will be too late to tell anyone. And that is why freedom of religion is so important. There are dozens of different groups of people, all of whom believe that they are right. They can't all be right, so we have only five possibilities:
Of those, #1 is what we should all hope and pray for, but if #2 is true, the eternal existence of future humans depends on not allowing us to devolve into #3 or #4 (depending on whether anyone has gotten it right yet---something that cannot be known for certain until we die) because if #3 or #4 occurs, #5 might as well be true; there's really no useful difference between everyone being condemned for all eternity and everyone ceasing to exist unless there is hope for an alternative (e.g. Heaven).
Sure, we might get lucky and the right religion might win out, but given the odds, I wouldn't want to bank the souls of the future of humanity on the current humans getting it right after so many millennia of getting things so badly wrong on so many occasions, from belief in a flat Earth to belief that storms are caused by an angry weather god.
Thus, within the real of logic, reason, and rational thought, the very assumption that God cares about our beliefs REQUIRES that we, in turn, allow other religions to exist. Our souls or the souls of our descendants might very well depend on it.
He also said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
You misspelled "Pincus"... and "FarmVille".