I'm fairly strong libertarian, and this is an issue that I have trouble with. From the libertarian point of view, regulation should do nothing more than provide information to the consumer. So imagine regulation that mandates standardized speed tests and required ISPs to reveal exactly how they handle network traffic.
I really would like all of the ISPs to be net neutral but then I think of the regulation required to achieve that goal, and the slippery slope out government would be on with that kind of control and I can see Ron Pauls point.
I'd even rule out Fukushima from your list. Chernobyl was basically a LARGE, totally unsecured reactor being operated by people that had no idea what they were doing. It was the equivalent of setting a bunch of 5 year olds loose in a room full of old news papers and gas cans.
Fukushima was more like a 1950's cadalac getting hit by a freight train. Could it have been upgraded and had more safety features? Yes... would they have done any good when the wrath of God was unleashed upon them? No...
In a few months we'll be hearing how all their loses in revenue as of late is due to piracy... and has nothing to do with their "Lets squeeze blood from a stone" business model.
If you want to read BOOKS, then a Kindle is your best bet. Specifically get one without the touch screen. The touch screen is neat for highlighting words and such, but you rarely need to do that, and far more often I find myself accidentally skipping entire chapters by accidentally swiping in the wrong direction. You really just need a button to turn it on, and buttons to turn pages. That's it. Anything that doesn't have e-ink is not nearly as pleasurable to read. The screen on the kindle is incredible.
If you want to read PDFs, browse the internet, or doing anything that isn't reading books, then get a tablet. In my opinion, given current technology, you need different devices for reading than you do for other activities.
Hosted Service, Software as a service, it's all just names... I believe "The Cloud" is just a larger term for all of this stuff. Yea, it's marketing, but isn't everything? I get to watch my marketing department re-label what a T1 is every 6 months. It's stupid, but that's why I'm not in marketing.
Well, "The Cloud" isn't just one service. There are thousands of businesses out there offering Cloud services. Pick a good one, and have a good contract that demands what you need.
I kind of think "The cloud" at least in corporate terms, is entering a second life now. When it first came about, it was a lot of hype and nonsense. And I saw a lot of Execs getting excited about it and moving services to it. Over the years I've seen them realize the pitfalls of the services. Poor support, major security issues, unpredictable downtime relating to hardware issues we have no way of knowing about. But now I've seen it coming into it's own with the execs realizing that it IS good for some things. Your support site? Sure! Even if your whole company goes to shit it's still up. Your billing database? NOOOO...
I'd like to see the cables to the American media that told them to ignore this story. Not a single major network has picked this up, and it's clear that our State Department is issuing bold faced lies to us.
The last hack... that resulted in us finding out they basically had no security at all. The Rootkit DRM Price fixing of CDs Everything SOE (their subsidiary) has done since they bought Verrant has been pretty evil.
I currently work for a phone company, and less than 2 years ago was part of the "number management" group. You're full of shit. Phone numbers are published by a 3rd party. Once a year we do a SQL dump of our existing customers and send that over. That's how the number gets published. Our billing system has a flag: nonpublish and it's y/n
The SQL statement involved is so fucking trivial it's ridiculous. There is NO reason at all to charge for this based on the difficulty of excluding you.
If your carrier doesn't have iPhones now, they aren't going to have them. It's just not cost effective. I was involved in some of the meetings in relations to this for a particular carrier and Apply royally screws the carriers just like they do all of their vendors and they absolutely refuse to negotiate. As a carrier you either take a loss on them just so you can claim you have them or you avoid them all together.
Being a former certified welder, and now a programmer I can tell you that: a. I was a GREAT welder. Certified in everything save underwater stuff... I got about $13/hr b. I'm not a very good programmer. I just started, don't know many languages and am always bugging my coworkers with noob questions. Now I'm salaried at $60k/yr
So, I'm not sure how much you think welders get paid. But it's not much. I'm sure there are a few (like the under water guys and the skyscraper guys) but the vast majority of us sitting in machine shops with no aircon, welding liftgates on the back of semis are not making a fortune. Welding was much more rewarding though. I got REAL things done back then. Now I constantly make changes to the same pieces of software and various managers requests. Half the time undoing whatever it was I did last week.
Get an old computer... anything will work really. You have to know someone that has one laying in their basement. Plug your drives into that. share the drives on your network. Use any general backup software and sequentially backup what you need to backup over the network. Now it will do it overnight and you really don't care how long it takes. It can even do it every night. If you want it safe from fire and such.... build a box out of 2x4s and Drywall scraps form homedepot. Make it 5 sheets thick and it'll withstand any housefire you could possibly have. If you really want to go hardcore you can pour a box out of concrete, but that'll be hard to move.
Don't worry, "Environmentalists" are already mounting legal challenges to stop modern methods of Natural Gas extraction and will force us back to coal fairly soon. The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
And if we built a few modern reactors (i.e. something less than 20years old) a lot of that waste would become a source of fuel. But we sure as hell can't build a new reactor. We have wind power!
Plutonium? Seriously? Who the hell gave you a license to post on the internet?
"the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy" http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2
John C Wright - "The Golden Age" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_%28novel_series%29
Hardly anyone I've met has read those books and they will blow your God damned mind. Usually a scifi author has some gimmick like "in the future, people can download their minds into computers" which has been done before... but Wright takes it to such an extreme. The depth of thought he put into the implications is staggering.
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I'm fairly strong libertarian, and this is an issue that I have trouble with. From the libertarian point of view, regulation should do nothing more than provide information to the consumer. So imagine regulation that mandates standardized speed tests and required ISPs to reveal exactly how they handle network traffic.
I really would like all of the ISPs to be net neutral but then I think of the regulation required to achieve that goal, and the slippery slope out government would be on with that kind of control and I can see Ron Pauls point.
OR... and I know this may sound crazy... but you could just stick with Windows 7
I'd even rule out Fukushima from your list. Chernobyl was basically a LARGE, totally unsecured reactor being operated by people that had no idea what they were doing. It was the equivalent of setting a bunch of 5 year olds loose in a room full of old news papers and gas cans.
Fukushima was more like a 1950's cadalac getting hit by a freight train. Could it have been upgraded and had more safety features? Yes... would they have done any good when the wrath of God was unleashed upon them? No...
No there's not.
In a few months we'll be hearing how all their loses in revenue as of late is due to piracy... and has nothing to do with their "Lets squeeze blood from a stone" business model.
If you want to read BOOKS, then a Kindle is your best bet. Specifically get one without the touch screen. The touch screen is neat for highlighting words and such, but you rarely need to do that, and far more often I find myself accidentally skipping entire chapters by accidentally swiping in the wrong direction. You really just need a button to turn it on, and buttons to turn pages. That's it. Anything that doesn't have e-ink is not nearly as pleasurable to read. The screen on the kindle is incredible.
If you want to read PDFs, browse the internet, or doing anything that isn't reading books, then get a tablet. In my opinion, given current technology, you need different devices for reading than you do for other activities.
Hosted Service, Software as a service, it's all just names... I believe "The Cloud" is just a larger term for all of this stuff. Yea, it's marketing, but isn't everything? I get to watch my marketing department re-label what a T1 is every 6 months. It's stupid, but that's why I'm not in marketing.
Well, "The Cloud" isn't just one service. There are thousands of businesses out there offering Cloud services. Pick a good one, and have a good contract that demands what you need.
I kind of think "The cloud" at least in corporate terms, is entering a second life now. When it first came about, it was a lot of hype and nonsense. And I saw a lot of Execs getting excited about it and moving services to it. Over the years I've seen them realize the pitfalls of the services. Poor support, major security issues, unpredictable downtime relating to hardware issues we have no way of knowing about. But now I've seen it coming into it's own with the execs realizing that it IS good for some things. Your support site? Sure! Even if your whole company goes to shit it's still up. Your billing database? NOOOO...
I'd like to see the cables to the American media that told them to ignore this story. Not a single major network has picked this up, and it's clear that our State Department is issuing bold faced lies to us.
The last hack... that resulted in us finding out they basically had no security at all.
The Rootkit DRM
Price fixing of CDs
Everything SOE (their subsidiary) has done since they bought Verrant has been pretty evil.
I currently work for a phone company, and less than 2 years ago was part of the "number management" group.
You're full of shit.
Phone numbers are published by a 3rd party. Once a year we do a SQL dump of our existing customers and send that over. That's how the number gets published. Our billing system has a flag: nonpublish and it's y/n
The SQL statement involved is so fucking trivial it's ridiculous. There is NO reason at all to charge for this based on the difficulty of excluding you.
Baking soda... not that I'm into that hippie crap... but I'm cheap so...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines
If your carrier doesn't have iPhones now, they aren't going to have them. It's just not cost effective. I was involved in some of the meetings in relations to this for a particular carrier and Apply royally screws the carriers just like they do all of their vendors and they absolutely refuse to negotiate. As a carrier you either take a loss on them just so you can claim you have them or you avoid them all together.
Oh... I dunno... I can get a kindle for under $100... The battery charger for this thing will likely cost more than that. So there's that.
Being a former certified welder, and now a programmer I can tell you that:
a. I was a GREAT welder. Certified in everything save underwater stuff... I got about $13/hr
b. I'm not a very good programmer. I just started, don't know many languages and am always bugging my coworkers with noob questions. Now I'm salaried at $60k/yr
So, I'm not sure how much you think welders get paid. But it's not much. I'm sure there are a few (like the under water guys and the skyscraper guys) but the vast majority of us sitting in machine shops with no aircon, welding liftgates on the back of semis are not making a fortune. Welding was much more rewarding though. I got REAL things done back then. Now I constantly make changes to the same pieces of software and various managers requests. Half the time undoing whatever it was I did last week.
Get an old computer... anything will work really. You have to know someone that has one laying in their basement. Plug your drives into that. share the drives on your network. Use any general backup software and sequentially backup what you need to backup over the network. Now it will do it overnight and you really don't care how long it takes. It can even do it every night. If you want it safe from fire and such.... build a box out of 2x4s and Drywall scraps form homedepot. Make it 5 sheets thick and it'll withstand any housefire you could possibly have. If you really want to go hardcore you can pour a box out of concrete, but that'll be hard to move.
is that Average income when they START playing or after they're living on disability?
Don't worry, "Environmentalists" are already mounting legal challenges to stop modern methods of Natural Gas extraction and will force us back to coal fairly soon. The worst thing for the environment always has, and always will be hippies.
And if we built a few modern reactors (i.e. something less than 20years old) a lot of that waste would become a source of fuel. But we sure as hell can't build a new reactor. We have wind power!
Plutonium? Seriously? Who the hell gave you a license to post on the internet?
"the fly ash emitted by a power plant—a by-product from burning coal for electricity—carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste&page=2
Wording they only recently changed.
Now they'll sell you "up to 20mb!" in an area fed by a single T1.
John C Wright - "The Golden Age"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_%28novel_series%29
Hardly anyone I've met has read those books and they will blow your God damned mind. Usually a scifi author has some gimmick like "in the future, people can download their minds into computers" which has been done before... but Wright takes it to such an extreme. The depth of thought he put into the implications is staggering.
Until the "Big" crash happens and the entire market goes to shit in a single day. That will never happen... oh wait...