We will eventually run out of IPv4 addresses, that's for certain, but for heaven's sake we've still got about a fifth to a quarter of them left, and we haven't even put on the heavy squeeze to get the ones just hanging out there.
When IP addresses start selling for $4-5 each in retail land, instead of $1-2 like now, then you'll start seeing ClassA owners more willing to sell back their IP addresses at $1-2 each. When the buy-back price eventually gets into the $3-4 range, well then you'll start to see major projects to give up ClassA blocks. When a company can make $50-60 million on that sale, and cost them $5-10 million to do the conversion, they'll bite and free up more addresses.
It won't be until IPv4 addresses start actually running out (not pretend running out, like they are now, but really pushing the limits of useability) that IPv6 will start being sold on large scales. Once that starts to happen things will start to cascade, and eventually IPv6 will be everywhere.
Worse than that, parents believe it is the Government's job to teach their kids, and the Government reinforces this as much as possible.
The truth is, the public school system is probably the single worst thing that ever happened to education in the US. If you want proof, look at how many home-schooled kids outperform public school kids in schoolastic competitions and the like. Often the parents teaching these kids don't have beyond a highschool education themselves, yet they consistantly do better than the public school system.
Also I imagine that 30% figure would be a bit lower if we didn't have to pay an average of $10,000 a kid per year for a sub-par education.
I looked at that article, about how we need to start focusing on blacks and latinos before it's too late.
What bullshit.
How about we drop the race nonsense and start focusing on educating kids, hmm? Kinda solves the problem right there, doesn't it? Man I'm a genius, I should be running the NEA!
Game Theory always looks pretty and reasonable, but when put in practice it never really works. The Prisoner's Dilemma, for example, is basically giving two suspects the option of betraying their compatriate or not. If they betray, their compatriate gets 10 years and they go free. If neither betrays the other they both go free. If both betray each other they both recieve 5 years.
So the obvious choice is to betray your partner in crime, because the most you'll get is 5 years, and you could go free if they do not betray you. However, when put into practice, about 40% of participants chose to cooperate instead of betray their partner, which means they obviously were not doing what was in their best interest.
Game Theory fails in this way over and over and over, it looks nice on paper, but in truth we are built to take advantage of cooperation, and often times that is exactly what we do.
Antibiotics kill bugs by entering the cells and altering them. Because of this the bugs that are more difficult to penetrate proliferate after their stronger but more susceptible cousins all die off.
Antiseptics, like alchohol or hydrogen peroxide or bleach physically destroy the cell walls of the bugs, there is no way to develope a resistance without developing a completely different cellular wall which, so far does not exist.
Soap even kills 99% (or close to it) of bacteria by emulsifying the lipids in the cell walls. Anti-bacterial soap is only marginally more effective.
Of course, this flies directly in the face of capitalism where companies want to sell more drugs and create targets like superbugs that require ever more powerful drugs which can then be patented and used to essentially extort the life from people and governments...
It has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with doctors not following their hippocratic oath because they feel pressured by their patients. They have not only the right, but the legal duty to tell a patient "No" if they don't need a particular medicine. If they had a spine to begin with, given that it was they who went through six years of schooling on this crap and not their whiny patients, it wouldn't be a problem.
The bottom line is, capitalism or no capitalism, one of the primary jobs of a doctor is to ensure that a patient gets only the medicine that they need. They take an oath that covers this before they start practicing medicine. Frankly, doctors who hand out prescriptions to patients who don't need them should lose the right to practice medicine.
Ah, but don't forget, "420" is exactly the same as 2x210!! And as we all know, 210 is simply 21 ten times, and there was a movie out a couple years ago about the number 21.
Anti-bacterial soap is the super-scam there, because plain old bar soap and a brisk rubbing action already kills about 99% of germs.
I still recommend using soap though. I'm sorry, but not very many people have the correct diet that cause their sweat and oils to not stink. If you don't wash you end up stinking a lot and most people don't appreciate hanging around stinky people.
Also, the "germs are good for you" is decidedly bogus, since your skin exists for the express purpose of protecting you from those bacteria.
Stacked circuits are going to have more total volume in contact with whatever medium they are using to dissipate heat than a flat circuit would. Flat = 2 dimensional, stacked = 3 dimensional. These circuits probably aren't just going to be sitting around in the air.
Look at your CPU, which is encased in material, not your motherboard which is open to the air. The big heatsink on the CPU is just dissipating the heat away from the medium that is absorbing the heat off the silicon in the first place.
It's important to note here that modern CPU's aren't flat either. They certainly LOOK flat, but the circuits are stacked hundreds of layers thick. A scanning-electron microscope view of a silicon wafer looks like a sort of futuristic city. It's pretty damned impressive.
Won't work if the proxy is whitelisting. Plus, if your security guys are any good at all they'll notice the extremely large stream of DNS packets heading to and from your computer, figure out what you are doing, and get your ass fired.
Browsing the web doesn't really seem worth getting fired over to me.
You aught to, especially if your previous "fix" was to block the website used for business purposes in the first place.
The role of IT is not to control information technology, metering it out to the users as the IT gods see fit. The role of IT is to support the business. That means facilitating their work as much as possible, and protecting them from the dangers they are unaware of.
Frankly, if I were your manager and you took that attitude toward your customers on a daily basis, I'd fire you.
IT departments don't make a company money. They either help them make more money by increasing productivity, or they help prevent them from losing money by protecting their information-related assets. If you are doing neither, you don't belong there.
... people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something.
It sounds like someone is micro-managing somewhere. Even in a big business the approval process should not take very long, at the very least you should get your approval or denial within a day. If you have to fill out a six page form that goes through twelve people before final approval, then heaven help you. Chances are the website unblock request process is the least of your worries when it comes business inefficiencies.
My company is a good example, it's huge, among the biggest in the world. But the proxy is handled locally, and the local proxy managers have the authority to approve or deny based on the business case. So long as the users have sufficient managerial approval before hand, it gets done, and in a timely manner. An email is good enough.
Worse, it's a specification issue with SMS, which predates the lessons learned from Y2K by years.
So we'll need the industry to agree to an ammendment to the spec. Until then you'll see hacks in phones like "if year = 2016, year = 2010" to bandaid it. Hopefully they remember to change it after 2010 and don't leave the hack in until 2016 rolls around.
Just nit-picking here, but the decimal number 10 and the BCD number 0001 0000 would be incorrectly written in hexadecimal as 0x10. The correct conversion, had the programmer kept better track of the formatting he was using is 0x0A. It would have been avoided with a practice like converting everything to binary before converting to hex, even if you think it's already binary. Really though he probably just needed better comments in the code.
It's basically just a result of not keeping track of your units - it's the same kind of error that destroyed a mars probe a few years back. One guy was talking inches, another guy centimeters, and nobody bothered to write down which units the numbers were for. Calculations for the landing were of by hundreds of yards and the probe smacked into the surface of the planet instead of floating down gently.
In this case, one guy is talking BCD, another guy assumed binary, and it was no big deal until 2010 rolled around and 10 suddenly became 16.
According to the US government, the crew mistakenly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter.
That's a pretty big mistake, the Airbus is only what, 10-15 times larger and a quarter or less as fast?
To be fair though, it was in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, and Iran had been blowing up civilian ships from other countries for years. The US had extended its protection to all neutral countries' civilian ships, which is why the Vincennes and Captain Trigger-Happy were moved into the area in the first place.
So, the US carrier over-reacted, but it wasn't exactly peace time either, and Iran wasn't exactly playing nice with neutral countries.
Our response to the risk of terrorist attacks is completely out of proportion to the actual risk
Even worse, the new measures are only marginally more effective than the old measures.
The only things that went wrong with the 9/11 attacks were policy issues - like what passengers/staff should do in the event of a hijacking, how the military should respond in the case of losing contact with an airplane that has changed course, and locking the cockpit for the duration of the flight.
The rest of what needed to change were behind the scenes intelligence stuff - the TSA is all for show, it does basically nothing to improve our security, as the most recent event indicates. All it does is harrass American citizens to try to make them feel safer. It's bullshit.
In reality, they would make buttloads more money on $2 @ $100 than $20 at $1000, because far more than ten times the number of people who buy at $1000 would buy at $100. With the quality and usefulness of the intel product, you could easily put the purchase rate at 1/10th the price at anywhere from 100 to 1000 times higher.
To make the most money in this situation, you basically want the lowest price that still gives you a profit and you can still keep up with demand. That's a little simplistic, but that's essentially it. That's why intel has been working so hard to get their drives down in the $400 neighborhood. The product is so superior, the closer they can get to the same price per GB as a conventional hard drive, the bigger percentage of the market their new drive takes.
Words and phrases change meaning over time. It's a fact of life. Just look at the phrase "The exception that proves the rule". People today take that to mean that an exception to a rule somehow makes it even stronger, which is nonsensical. The meaning of "proves" in that phrase was "to test". You showed something was true by proving it, but you could also show something as false by proving it. The word "prove" itself hasn't changed a whole lot, but it did not have the automatic affermative conotation it has in modern usage. I.e. if you said you proved something, it did not automatically mean you proved it true, you could just have easily proved it false. In other words, the phrase meant something like "The exception that tests the valididity of the rule". Obviously that means something much different than what people take it to mean today.
Apparently the big money-maker is not in power generation but in producing reactor-grade Uranium, which is expensive.
Thorium requires no pre-production, it can be used exactly as it is found in nature. So if the production of fissible Uranium is where all the money is made today, and you introduce a system that eliminates that function, lots of money goes away.
That's what the GP is talking about.
And it's not like some enterprising new company can come in and just start making Thorium reactors, making nuclear reactors is very, very hard and require a lot of expertise. The folks who can pay the scientists are the folks with lots of money - i.e. the folks who want to maintain the status quo.
That's my biggest beef with most software patents - the whole idea of the patent is to lay down HOW to do some revolutionary new idea. That's supposed to be the cost of getting your limited monopoly. Software patents usually only give you the what, not the how, and in my opinion should be null. How can I be violating his patent if he never describes how he does it? Or, if it's so simple that they did not need to describe how it is done, how the hell did they get a patent in the first place?
These patents should be loaded with pseudo-code to achieve the stated goals, and if someone comes along who can significantly improve the design of the pseudo-code then they should get a patent too, just like with physical inventions.
That's my opinion. I wouldn't mind software patents if they were treated the same as hardware patents, but they aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
No no, after December 21, 2012 all the addresses will be available!!
We will eventually run out of IPv4 addresses, that's for certain, but for heaven's sake we've still got about a fifth to a quarter of them left, and we haven't even put on the heavy squeeze to get the ones just hanging out there.
When IP addresses start selling for $4-5 each in retail land, instead of $1-2 like now, then you'll start seeing ClassA owners more willing to sell back their IP addresses at $1-2 each. When the buy-back price eventually gets into the $3-4 range, well then you'll start to see major projects to give up ClassA blocks. When a company can make $50-60 million on that sale, and cost them $5-10 million to do the conversion, they'll bite and free up more addresses.
It won't be until IPv4 addresses start actually running out (not pretend running out, like they are now, but really pushing the limits of useability) that IPv6 will start being sold on large scales. Once that starts to happen things will start to cascade, and eventually IPv6 will be everywhere.
Indeed, no matter that the 1970's product cost $12,000, which in todays dollars is $60,000 - or 600 times more expensive than this little $100 thing.
Moore's law indeed.
Worse than that, parents believe it is the Government's job to teach their kids, and the Government reinforces this as much as possible.
The truth is, the public school system is probably the single worst thing that ever happened to education in the US. If you want proof, look at how many home-schooled kids outperform public school kids in schoolastic competitions and the like. Often the parents teaching these kids don't have beyond a highschool education themselves, yet they consistantly do better than the public school system.
Also I imagine that 30% figure would be a bit lower if we didn't have to pay an average of $10,000 a kid per year for a sub-par education.
I looked at that article, about how we need to start focusing on blacks and latinos before it's too late.
What bullshit.
How about we drop the race nonsense and start focusing on educating kids, hmm? Kinda solves the problem right there, doesn't it? Man I'm a genius, I should be running the NEA!
Game Theory always looks pretty and reasonable, but when put in practice it never really works. The Prisoner's Dilemma, for example, is basically giving two suspects the option of betraying their compatriate or not. If they betray, their compatriate gets 10 years and they go free. If neither betrays the other they both go free. If both betray each other they both recieve 5 years.
So the obvious choice is to betray your partner in crime, because the most you'll get is 5 years, and you could go free if they do not betray you. However, when put into practice, about 40% of participants chose to cooperate instead of betray their partner, which means they obviously were not doing what was in their best interest.
Game Theory fails in this way over and over and over, it looks nice on paper, but in truth we are built to take advantage of cooperation, and often times that is exactly what we do.
Mod parent up.
Antibiotics kill bugs by entering the cells and altering them. Because of this the bugs that are more difficult to penetrate proliferate after their stronger but more susceptible cousins all die off.
Antiseptics, like alchohol or hydrogen peroxide or bleach physically destroy the cell walls of the bugs, there is no way to develope a resistance without developing a completely different cellular wall which, so far does not exist.
Soap even kills 99% (or close to it) of bacteria by emulsifying the lipids in the cell walls. Anti-bacterial soap is only marginally more effective.
Of course, this flies directly in the face of capitalism where companies want to sell more drugs and create targets like superbugs that require ever more powerful drugs which can then be patented and used to essentially extort the life from people and governments...
It has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with doctors not following their hippocratic oath because they feel pressured by their patients. They have not only the right, but the legal duty to tell a patient "No" if they don't need a particular medicine. If they had a spine to begin with, given that it was they who went through six years of schooling on this crap and not their whiny patients, it wouldn't be a problem.
The bottom line is, capitalism or no capitalism, one of the primary jobs of a doctor is to ensure that a patient gets only the medicine that they need. They take an oath that covers this before they start practicing medicine. Frankly, doctors who hand out prescriptions to patients who don't need them should lose the right to practice medicine.
Ah, but don't forget, "420" is exactly the same as 2x210!! And as we all know, 210 is simply 21 ten times, and there was a movie out a couple years ago about the number 21.
What's your point?
Anti-bacterial soap is the super-scam there, because plain old bar soap and a brisk rubbing action already kills about 99% of germs.
I still recommend using soap though. I'm sorry, but not very many people have the correct diet that cause their sweat and oils to not stink. If you don't wash you end up stinking a lot and most people don't appreciate hanging around stinky people.
Also, the "germs are good for you" is decidedly bogus, since your skin exists for the express purpose of protecting you from those bacteria.
Stacked circuits are going to have more total volume in contact with whatever medium they are using to dissipate heat than a flat circuit would. Flat = 2 dimensional, stacked = 3 dimensional. These circuits probably aren't just going to be sitting around in the air.
Look at your CPU, which is encased in material, not your motherboard which is open to the air. The big heatsink on the CPU is just dissipating the heat away from the medium that is absorbing the heat off the silicon in the first place.
It's important to note here that modern CPU's aren't flat either. They certainly LOOK flat, but the circuits are stacked hundreds of layers thick. A scanning-electron microscope view of a silicon wafer looks like a sort of futuristic city. It's pretty damned impressive.
Won't work if the proxy is whitelisting. Plus, if your security guys are any good at all they'll notice the extremely large stream of DNS packets heading to and from your computer, figure out what you are doing, and get your ass fired.
Browsing the web doesn't really seem worth getting fired over to me.
You aught to, especially if your previous "fix" was to block the website used for business purposes in the first place.
The role of IT is not to control information technology, metering it out to the users as the IT gods see fit. The role of IT is to support the business. That means facilitating their work as much as possible, and protecting them from the dangers they are unaware of.
Frankly, if I were your manager and you took that attitude toward your customers on a daily basis, I'd fire you.
IT departments don't make a company money. They either help them make more money by increasing productivity, or they help prevent them from losing money by protecting their information-related assets. If you are doing neither, you don't belong there.
... people waiting 10 days to get an approval for something.
It sounds like someone is micro-managing somewhere. Even in a big business the approval process should not take very long, at the very least you should get your approval or denial within a day. If you have to fill out a six page form that goes through twelve people before final approval, then heaven help you. Chances are the website unblock request process is the least of your worries when it comes business inefficiencies.
My company is a good example, it's huge, among the biggest in the world. But the proxy is handled locally, and the local proxy managers have the authority to approve or deny based on the business case. So long as the users have sufficient managerial approval before hand, it gets done, and in a timely manner. An email is good enough.
Worse, it's a specification issue with SMS, which predates the lessons learned from Y2K by years.
So we'll need the industry to agree to an ammendment to the spec. Until then you'll see hacks in phones like "if year = 2016, year = 2010" to bandaid it. Hopefully they remember to change it after 2010 and don't leave the hack in until 2016 rolls around.
I still don't see why they don't give a recieved timestamp, even if they still give a sent timestamp.
Just nit-picking here, but the decimal number 10 and the BCD number 0001 0000 would be incorrectly written in hexadecimal as 0x10. The correct conversion, had the programmer kept better track of the formatting he was using is 0x0A. It would have been avoided with a practice like converting everything to binary before converting to hex, even if you think it's already binary. Really though he probably just needed better comments in the code.
It's basically just a result of not keeping track of your units - it's the same kind of error that destroyed a mars probe a few years back. One guy was talking inches, another guy centimeters, and nobody bothered to write down which units the numbers were for. Calculations for the landing were of by hundreds of yards and the probe smacked into the surface of the planet instead of floating down gently.
In this case, one guy is talking BCD, another guy assumed binary, and it was no big deal until 2010 rolled around and 10 suddenly became 16.
That's not necessarily them boycotting the US, it's just a lot harder to get into the US now, which means fewer people can attend the conferences.
No doubt more people don't bother even trying these days, and I'm sure there are a few people who actually could get in but are boycotting instead.
From Wikipedia:
According to the US government, the crew mistakenly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter.
That's a pretty big mistake, the Airbus is only what, 10-15 times larger and a quarter or less as fast?
To be fair though, it was in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, and Iran had been blowing up civilian ships from other countries for years. The US had extended its protection to all neutral countries' civilian ships, which is why the Vincennes and Captain Trigger-Happy were moved into the area in the first place.
So, the US carrier over-reacted, but it wasn't exactly peace time either, and Iran wasn't exactly playing nice with neutral countries.
Our response to the risk of terrorist attacks is completely out of proportion to the actual risk
Even worse, the new measures are only marginally more effective than the old measures.
The only things that went wrong with the 9/11 attacks were policy issues - like what passengers/staff should do in the event of a hijacking, how the military should respond in the case of losing contact with an airplane that has changed course, and locking the cockpit for the duration of the flight.
The rest of what needed to change were behind the scenes intelligence stuff - the TSA is all for show, it does basically nothing to improve our security, as the most recent event indicates. All it does is harrass American citizens to try to make them feel safer. It's bullshit.
Why should we expect anything different now?
Maybe because prior to 9/11 nobody had ever flown an airplane into a building on purpose before?
Just a guess.
Dumbass.
In reality, they would make buttloads more money on $2 @ $100 than $20 at $1000, because far more than ten times the number of people who buy at $1000 would buy at $100. With the quality and usefulness of the intel product, you could easily put the purchase rate at 1/10th the price at anywhere from 100 to 1000 times higher.
To make the most money in this situation, you basically want the lowest price that still gives you a profit and you can still keep up with demand. That's a little simplistic, but that's essentially it. That's why intel has been working so hard to get their drives down in the $400 neighborhood. The product is so superior, the closer they can get to the same price per GB as a conventional hard drive, the bigger percentage of the market their new drive takes.
Words and phrases change meaning over time. It's a fact of life. Just look at the phrase "The exception that proves the rule". People today take that to mean that an exception to a rule somehow makes it even stronger, which is nonsensical. The meaning of "proves" in that phrase was "to test". You showed something was true by proving it, but you could also show something as false by proving it. The word "prove" itself hasn't changed a whole lot, but it did not have the automatic affermative conotation it has in modern usage. I.e. if you said you proved something, it did not automatically mean you proved it true, you could just have easily proved it false. In other words, the phrase meant something like "The exception that tests the valididity of the rule". Obviously that means something much different than what people take it to mean today.
Apparently the big money-maker is not in power generation but in producing reactor-grade Uranium, which is expensive.
Thorium requires no pre-production, it can be used exactly as it is found in nature. So if the production of fissible Uranium is where all the money is made today, and you introduce a system that eliminates that function, lots of money goes away.
That's what the GP is talking about.
And it's not like some enterprising new company can come in and just start making Thorium reactors, making nuclear reactors is very, very hard and require a lot of expertise. The folks who can pay the scientists are the folks with lots of money - i.e. the folks who want to maintain the status quo.
It's been pointed out before that Apple doesn't crackdown on jailbreakers
Other than occasionally pushing out updates with little purpose other than to brick jailbroken phones, you mean.
Besides that, you're right...
That's my biggest beef with most software patents - the whole idea of the patent is to lay down HOW to do some revolutionary new idea. That's supposed to be the cost of getting your limited monopoly. Software patents usually only give you the what, not the how, and in my opinion should be null. How can I be violating his patent if he never describes how he does it? Or, if it's so simple that they did not need to describe how it is done, how the hell did they get a patent in the first place?
These patents should be loaded with pseudo-code to achieve the stated goals, and if someone comes along who can significantly improve the design of the pseudo-code then they should get a patent too, just like with physical inventions.
That's my opinion. I wouldn't mind software patents if they were treated the same as hardware patents, but they aren't.