Well the actuaries would say so. After all if you are likely to come down with something then they get to jack your rate, if not you get the "normal" anal probing price. Seriously though, you have to take into account how much is the knowledge gained worth? Will you be able to afford preventative actions if you knew you had a high risk of heart and stroke diseases? If you can't afford the gym membership or pills then the knowledge has no value to you. Similarly, someone that is homeless, spouseless, and has no earning potential doesn't have a life "worth" $999 (not in a judgemental way, just as the courts would see it if they had to reimburse long lost second cousin Bill for his traumic loss;)).
If your aggregrate life earnings (or another measure of utility) will not be increased by the changes that the info will cause you to do, then no it isn't worth it. The problem is this is a blackbox purchase, it is the typical fortune teller scenario, I have information about your future will you pay X for it, well that depends whats the info? Similarly the value of the genetic scan depends on what the result is. Now if you know you are from an unhealthy family maybe it is worth seeing if you inherited the crap in your family tree or not, after all you might put a greater value on insurance if you think there is a better chance of you needing it earlier than later due to your genetics.
As other posters have said though, the bill doesn't state what the slashdot posting says. More of along the lines of the statment that "the internet is used to spread information around terrorists organizations, used to spread their ideas etc." This is quite obviously the case. I don't think the bill is ment to call the internet a terrorist activity, but that terrorist activity can happen on the internet so the government has a need to snoop on stuff going on there, and if you don't think they are already, I got some swamp land to sell you;).
So is it propaganda if you spread info thatJews are bad because they take a knife to their one week old sons in hopes of enlarging your religions size? What if your ideas are true, just your interpretation of them is non "PC"? I think my premise that propaganda tends to be active, not a webpage sitting around someplace that you have to search for is sound. Again I hold to the idea that if you are searching out a hate group or terrorist group on the web they didn't "propagandize" you, you looked for the information yourself.
Most people only believe what they WANT to believe and most often act on their beliefs much more than on their knowledge. Probably because most people want the world to be more interesting than it is. Make up an weird fact that is plausible and people will remember it, like drinking carot juice will help with erectile issues. Hard to prove, and everyone knows carrots are good for you, so it must be true.
And propaganda is not necessarily "bad". Propaganda is a means to spread your ideas. You can be passive and hope someone goes to the library or a webpage and reads up on you or you can be active and drop fliers, knock on doors etc. Most "propaganda" on the web I wouldn't label as such. If you go to www.jihad.com you are looking for information not having it forced on you, information isn't propaganda just because a particular group wants you to know it. Heck I'd love for everyone to have a basic understanding of physics, that doesn't make it a cult, and doesn't mean I hate you if you don't agree with what I try to teach you.
I could see with something like a bit torrent or Emule, that the issue would be that your stealing has made it easier for others to steal as you are a seeder/source of the software. It probably would be far if they billed you for the cost of a legal download, plus the cost for the amount you upload. So say a 5MB song, you uploaded 50MB associated with that file, so you owe 55MB/5 or 11X legal download amount. Then on top of that there would be a tendancy for the courts to try to "punish" you for more than the cost of goods, presumably you'd be at least liable for court costs if you lost.
This is actually an interesting optimization problem. Best scenario, you steal a lot and never get caught or aquited, so you saved all the cost of legal downloads. Second best, if my idea of the courts punishment's is correct, would be steal as much as you can, but only from one record label. That way if you're caught, you only have to pay one set of lawyers. As well, since your upload bandwidth is limited and in general less than your download bandwidth, you can only bleed upload penalty at a finite rate, so any punishment for making available stealing for others, would be bounded and you'd be paying as close to the download only penalty as possible. Of course at some point the risk of getting caughtXthe cost of getting caught is higher than the cost of making a legal purchase in the first place.
Don't need security? The greatest threat to an organization is from the inside in my opinion. Users trying to install their own software and downloading crap that at best makes the company look bad and at worst leads to system exploits and law suits. Also, I think there is more computers in homes than at businesses now, I might be wrong, but its got to be close. Should MS make one complete OS for office, another for home, and another for PC? Then a bunch of levels of functionality for each one? How about the idiot that talks his buddy into adding his home laptop to the AD of the corporate network, its a given that it shouldn't be done in the first place, but should the IT manager have to guess what security features are available?
As for OpenOffice, when was the last time that you saw a job posting for an OpenOffice scripting guru, their getting there, but no one's anywhere near as close to the functionality offered by VBA and VS Office Dev SDK. On that note I've had job interviews at numerous companies that use FOSS software for their platform but develop using VS because it is better than that available (Eclipse and KDevelop are getting close in my opinion, but MS Intellisense is leaps and bounds above other implementations IMHO). If you are developing MS only, you can't beat.Net for non performance bounded software (got to love to be able to pick the language of your choice to target the same runtime), if not then you have VC++ which is still pretty good. THere actually is a good arguement that in the future runtimes will actually run better than native, because they can see all the system memory and relative priorities of apps, where as a single app can't (or at least shouldn't be poking around another apps memory space). The runtime also can do runtime optimization that native can't do.
I'm not saying MS has gotten everything right, but they have a bunch of smart people working for them, and I don't think they are the evil monopoly trying to force technology on everyone. Roll back to 2002 or so and everyone was griping about security, so that is what MS has been pushing, now people don't like it. Admittedly it would be nice if UAC was streamlined so you get all the errors in one dialog, something like "needs escalation, needs access to registry, and we think it is crazy to install" all in one. I don't know if this is possible or even desirable. I think the reason you get them one at a time is that you are authorising access to another security zone, which until that is done, you don't even have the rights to see if there is another possible security issue. Sort of like, if you don't want people to be able to run a certain type of program adhoc, then you can't verify runtime errors until they have escalated it.
P.S. I'm a UNIX admin, I like both MS and UNIX products. For the average user, MS makes sense, wide spread and easy to use. Even if Linux is as easy to use, chances are the user has grown up on MS products and can guess how a new version works better than they can relearn a new OS for work. Corporations, at least where I've worked, are cheap, and aren't about to spend time training users to use their computers, then learn how to use the apps that are installed on it, they want to leverage the knowledge their user base already has. If you are technical and don't mind spending some time figuring out how to do things, by all means go for a UNIX variant, whether Open Solaris, BSD, Linux etc.
Seriously, Vista has a higher required system spec, it has more security. Any time your doing more, whether more GUI, more levels of process security etc. there will be a performance hit. It is very very rare this won't be the case with a simple app, when you add all the complexity of an OS you are vertially garranteed it will be the case.
Nice how a Canadian researcher is looking into solutions to a mostly US problem, at least it is always US media talking about wiretaps. Perhaps if ~21% of the US budget wasn't blown on the military and God knows how much more on espionage, everyone wouldn't have to be as paranoid. My solution: if big brother gets the brillant idea to tap innocent people for no reason, big brother should invest in a gun and blow his brains out.
The answer is the same as for games: to segment the story. Exactly. It is also easier to tell where you are in a game to someone as "I'm on the moon level". As well if you want to play just for a little bit, if the game is well broken down, you can do a level and have a sense of accomplishment, not just I moved from here to there, what happened?
P.S. I hate the GTA series for this exact reason. Doing random missions in random order doesn't give me any sense of accomplishment, and makes it impossible to have a big storyline throughout the game. Instead you have little tiny missions, and it seems like a bunch of mini games crazy glued together with mediocre graphics.
But I do pay them, and still I don't have my perfect OS:)
That said Linux, MAC OS, or UNIX isn't perfect either. One might be best for one type of use, another for a different one etc. The problem is users want to do a variety of things on their workstation, so it is a pain to have an architecture/scheduler/GUI that works for the whole gambit. I think Windows comes the closest for an average user, probably Linux or UNIX for the techi that likes to hack at a lower level. By definition the people with expertise are a minority, so a UNIX like OS has a long way to go before it will dominate the desktop. Easier for server land, because by definition, server admins are techies.
Kind of like MS, they could release a "perfect" OS, and the internet would still be full of blogs of people bitching about Windows. People remember the bad and forget the good. If there computer needs a reboot once a month, that is want they remember, not the 29 days were they had 50 programs open simultaneously and still had a responsive GUI. This is where IMHO the software industry needs to change, we are always in such a rush to add new features that we risk releasing things too early.
I'm interviewing for EA right now. They say they don't use, and have no intentions in the near term to migrate to Vista. Heck DX10 couldn't even sell Vista to a game company.
To me the pics look like they were done in some 3D art work program, slight fuzziness around the edges and stuff. Not sure if these are the real images, or the design drawings.
Yeah, they try to be more efficient than just call you and see if you pick up. The software waits until someone picks up then routes it to an agent. Funny thing is some apps have a delay while they query the database for your info. So if you ever wondered why you get a "Hi... is... Bob Smith there?" its because the caller is waiting to find out who he called:) They try to load balance the system, no point calling someone when you aren't likely to have someone to answer it.
This is replacing a car with a smaller car. So now everyone goes and buys a car big enough for the family and the groceries, and another for going around town (or renting it). Wow, what a solution, I know we have to many cars what can we do, I know make people buy a small impractical car, and a bigger practical one.
Classic western stupidity (I live in Canada). Why do we insist on having our own transportation all the time? I'm interviewing for a job in Germany and have been told by multiple people that for about 30 dollars you can get flights to other countries there as long as you plan ahead. Why? Because Europe has always given a damn about mass transportation (or been to poor to own their own SUV).
It seems the farther east you go the more "green" the transportation is, more bikes, walking etc. Maybe if we got off our fat asses and stopped sitting behind our SUV's wheel drinking coffee and eating Cheetos things would get better for the environment.
Letters on there number buttons,what a stupid idea. Letters have nothing to do with numbers, I live on 0xB82 Street in London myself and never heard of such nonsense.
I suspect that it was a brillant idea from some marketting company back in the day, well we can't expect customers to remember our phone number if it doesn't have our name in it somewhere.
I'd question if this technique would be useful in a real organism in that you'd have a bunch of absorbion, and scatter that would spread your lasers frequency out just enough that you wouldn't get the resonance you want. However, assuming that could be looked after, you should be fine. When you target you look for very unique spots in the structure of the virus. Resonance frequencies shift ever so slightly, when say a part of the protein has a particular combination of amino acids, in a particular protein structure, and loosely bound to an iron atom say. Very unlikely that the same structure would appear elsewhere, so you should be fine inducing resonance at that frequency.
A way of keeping tobacco crops healthy so they can be used to make more cigarettes. Oh I feel for the tobacco companies when they lose a crop, honestly I do.
You might have something with the "bad ones already filtered out" concept. Things are spinning so fast (if you do the math 5"X7200rpmXpi is 107mph or 172kph) and the tolerences are so low that it doesn't take much to ruin the drive. With higher densities, we also have smaller read heads that have to be closer to the disk platter to get a good signal. Smaller = weaker, and closer = greater chance of a head crash, that probably has a lot to do with it. We might be approaching the physical limits of the little motors we spin the disks with. Presumably SATA drives should be able to go to 15k rpm at least (because SCSI's there already), but I'm not sure how much further we can go. Also, spinning faster isn't the real answer because it means you have to pump more energy into the drive to spin it up, increasing the energy costs, and mechanical systems are harder to get tight tolerences than electrical.
Yep they are deskstars:) When they die (shh don't tell anyone:)) I replace them with 500 GB Seagate perpendicular write drives:) Problem fixed and another happy customer, hehe. Actually it makes sense, because by the time I'm done tinkering with them (we have several programs outside of the standard image, and every computer seems to have a unique set of programs), anyways with the rate I charge, there is 150-200 worth of labor into fixing it, so why not throw an extra 100 or so and bump the drive to a nice high performance one?
Slashdot Mirror
If your aggregrate life earnings (or another measure of utility) will not be increased by the changes that the info will cause you to do, then no it isn't worth it. The problem is this is a blackbox purchase, it is the typical fortune teller scenario, I have information about your future will you pay X for it, well that depends whats the info? Similarly the value of the genetic scan depends on what the result is. Now if you know you are from an unhealthy family maybe it is worth seeing if you inherited the crap in your family tree or not, after all you might put a greater value on insurance if you think there is a better chance of you needing it earlier than later due to your genetics.
As other posters have said though, the bill doesn't state what the slashdot posting says. More of along the lines of the statment that "the internet is used to spread information around terrorists organizations, used to spread their ideas etc." This is quite obviously the case. I don't think the bill is ment to call the internet a terrorist activity, but that terrorist activity can happen on the internet so the government has a need to snoop on stuff going on there, and if you don't think they are already, I got some swamp land to sell you ;).
So is it propaganda if you spread info thatJews are bad because they take a knife to their one week old sons in hopes of enlarging your religions size? What if your ideas are true, just your interpretation of them is non "PC"? I think my premise that propaganda tends to be active, not a webpage sitting around someplace that you have to search for is sound. Again I hold to the idea that if you are searching out a hate group or terrorist group on the web they didn't "propagandize" you, you looked for the information yourself.
And propaganda is not necessarily "bad". Propaganda is a means to spread your ideas. You can be passive and hope someone goes to the library or a webpage and reads up on you or you can be active and drop fliers, knock on doors etc. Most "propaganda" on the web I wouldn't label as such. If you go to www.jihad.com you are looking for information not having it forced on you, information isn't propaganda just because a particular group wants you to know it. Heck I'd love for everyone to have a basic understanding of physics, that doesn't make it a cult, and doesn't mean I hate you if you don't agree with what I try to teach you.
I never realized Microsoft Research was that large.
This is actually an interesting optimization problem. Best scenario, you steal a lot and never get caught or aquited, so you saved all the cost of legal downloads. Second best, if my idea of the courts punishment's is correct, would be steal as much as you can, but only from one record label. That way if you're caught, you only have to pay one set of lawyers. As well, since your upload bandwidth is limited and in general less than your download bandwidth, you can only bleed upload penalty at a finite rate, so any punishment for making available stealing for others, would be bounded and you'd be paying as close to the download only penalty as possible. Of course at some point the risk of getting caughtXthe cost of getting caught is higher than the cost of making a legal purchase in the first place.
As for OpenOffice, when was the last time that you saw a job posting for an OpenOffice scripting guru, their getting there, but no one's anywhere near as close to the functionality offered by VBA and VS Office Dev SDK. On that note I've had job interviews at numerous companies that use FOSS software for their platform but develop using VS because it is better than that available (Eclipse and KDevelop are getting close in my opinion, but MS Intellisense is leaps and bounds above other implementations IMHO). If you are developing MS only, you can't beat .Net for non performance bounded software (got to love to be able to pick the language of your choice to target the same runtime), if not then you have VC++ which is still pretty good. THere actually is a good arguement that in the future runtimes will actually run better than native, because they can see all the system memory and relative priorities of apps, where as a single app can't (or at least shouldn't be poking around another apps memory space). The runtime also can do runtime optimization that native can't do.
I'm not saying MS has gotten everything right, but they have a bunch of smart people working for them, and I don't think they are the evil monopoly trying to force technology on everyone. Roll back to 2002 or so and everyone was griping about security, so that is what MS has been pushing, now people don't like it. Admittedly it would be nice if UAC was streamlined so you get all the errors in one dialog, something like "needs escalation, needs access to registry, and we think it is crazy to install" all in one. I don't know if this is possible or even desirable. I think the reason you get them one at a time is that you are authorising access to another security zone, which until that is done, you don't even have the rights to see if there is another possible security issue. Sort of like, if you don't want people to be able to run a certain type of program adhoc, then you can't verify runtime errors until they have escalated it.
P.S. I'm a UNIX admin, I like both MS and UNIX products. For the average user, MS makes sense, wide spread and easy to use. Even if Linux is as easy to use, chances are the user has grown up on MS products and can guess how a new version works better than they can relearn a new OS for work. Corporations, at least where I've worked, are cheap, and aren't about to spend time training users to use their computers, then learn how to use the apps that are installed on it, they want to leverage the knowledge their user base already has. If you are technical and don't mind spending some time figuring out how to do things, by all means go for a UNIX variant, whether Open Solaris, BSD, Linux etc.
Seriously, Vista has a higher required system spec, it has more security. Any time your doing more, whether more GUI, more levels of process security etc. there will be a performance hit. It is very very rare this won't be the case with a simple app, when you add all the complexity of an OS you are vertially garranteed it will be the case.
Nice how a Canadian researcher is looking into solutions to a mostly US problem, at least it is always US media talking about wiretaps. Perhaps if ~21% of the US budget wasn't blown on the military and God knows how much more on espionage, everyone wouldn't have to be as paranoid. My solution: if big brother gets the brillant idea to tap innocent people for no reason, big brother should invest in a gun and blow his brains out.
P.S. I hate the GTA series for this exact reason. Doing random missions in random order doesn't give me any sense of accomplishment, and makes it impossible to have a big storyline throughout the game. Instead you have little tiny missions, and it seems like a bunch of mini games crazy glued together with mediocre graphics.
That said Linux, MAC OS, or UNIX isn't perfect either. One might be best for one type of use, another for a different one etc. The problem is users want to do a variety of things on their workstation, so it is a pain to have an architecture/scheduler/GUI that works for the whole gambit. I think Windows comes the closest for an average user, probably Linux or UNIX for the techi that likes to hack at a lower level. By definition the people with expertise are a minority, so a UNIX like OS has a long way to go before it will dominate the desktop. Easier for server land, because by definition, server admins are techies.
Kind of like MS, they could release a "perfect" OS, and the internet would still be full of blogs of people bitching about Windows. People remember the bad and forget the good. If there computer needs a reboot once a month, that is want they remember, not the 29 days were they had 50 programs open simultaneously and still had a responsive GUI. This is where IMHO the software industry needs to change, we are always in such a rush to add new features that we risk releasing things too early.
I'm interviewing for EA right now. They say they don't use, and have no intentions in the near term to migrate to Vista. Heck DX10 couldn't even sell Vista to a game company.
To me the pics look like they were done in some 3D art work program, slight fuzziness around the edges and stuff. Not sure if these are the real images, or the design drawings.
Yeah, they try to be more efficient than just call you and see if you pick up. The software waits until someone picks up then routes it to an agent. Funny thing is some apps have a delay while they query the database for your info. So if you ever wondered why you get a "Hi ... is ... Bob Smith there?" its because the caller is waiting to find out who he called :) They try to load balance the system, no point calling someone when you aren't likely to have someone to answer it.
At $4.99 they probably are selling for a higher price than they originally did (~5-10 cents each). Still not a bad deal if you are a comic book fan.
Classic western stupidity (I live in Canada). Why do we insist on having our own transportation all the time? I'm interviewing for a job in Germany and have been told by multiple people that for about 30 dollars you can get flights to other countries there as long as you plan ahead. Why? Because Europe has always given a damn about mass transportation (or been to poor to own their own SUV).
It seems the farther east you go the more "green" the transportation is, more bikes, walking etc. Maybe if we got off our fat asses and stopped sitting behind our SUV's wheel drinking coffee and eating Cheetos things would get better for the environment.
I suspect that it was a brillant idea from some marketting company back in the day, well we can't expect customers to remember our phone number if it doesn't have our name in it somewhere.
P=IV, a few milliwatts(~5) at say 220V is a watt, at least in a circuit with a power factor near 1.
Are these datacentres going to be cube shaped, ala the Borg?
I'd question if this technique would be useful in a real organism in that you'd have a bunch of absorbion, and scatter that would spread your lasers frequency out just enough that you wouldn't get the resonance you want. However, assuming that could be looked after, you should be fine. When you target you look for very unique spots in the structure of the virus. Resonance frequencies shift ever so slightly, when say a part of the protein has a particular combination of amino acids, in a particular protein structure, and loosely bound to an iron atom say. Very unlikely that the same structure would appear elsewhere, so you should be fine inducing resonance at that frequency.
A way of keeping tobacco crops healthy so they can be used to make more cigarettes. Oh I feel for the tobacco companies when they lose a crop, honestly I do.
You might have something with the "bad ones already filtered out" concept. Things are spinning so fast (if you do the math 5"X7200rpmXpi is 107mph or 172kph) and the tolerences are so low that it doesn't take much to ruin the drive. With higher densities, we also have smaller read heads that have to be closer to the disk platter to get a good signal. Smaller = weaker, and closer = greater chance of a head crash, that probably has a lot to do with it. We might be approaching the physical limits of the little motors we spin the disks with. Presumably SATA drives should be able to go to 15k rpm at least (because SCSI's there already), but I'm not sure how much further we can go. Also, spinning faster isn't the real answer because it means you have to pump more energy into the drive to spin it up, increasing the energy costs, and mechanical systems are harder to get tight tolerences than electrical.
Yep they are deskstars :) When they die (shh don't tell anyone :)) I replace them with 500 GB Seagate perpendicular write drives :) Problem fixed and another happy customer, hehe. Actually it makes sense, because by the time I'm done tinkering with them (we have several programs outside of the standard image, and every computer seems to have a unique set of programs), anyways with the rate I charge, there is 150-200 worth of labor into fixing it, so why not throw an extra 100 or so and bump the drive to a nice high performance one?