This is a ridiculous project and will never get build. There are far cheaper and far more practical ways to get people to and from China/America.
All that being said, if they do waste lots of money building this, I'll be one of the first on it. It sounds like it would be the best train ride on earth!
Well, maybe that's true for Snowden, but it's just him. In practice, disclosure of sensitive information happens whether "constitutional rights" are respected or not, and the security controls that can be used to secure this information don't change.
Yes, but how many people work for the NSA and would commit treason for profit or evil?
Violate the constitution and now everyone that works there and cares about their country are against you as well. The point is, illegal acts raise the number of adversaries they need to deal with my orders of magnitude.
No user should be able to do anything that would lead to this result. This is not the doctors fault. He may have violated a few policies, but to blame the entire incident on him is a bit ridiculous. This was a failure of their Network/Security team.
The easiest fix would be to stop violating our constitutional rights. Snowden would have never leaked anything had the NSA been acting within the bounds of the constitution. Violate the constitution and everyone working for you that is a patriot is bound by honor to thwart you. Righteous anger is a SOB.
So I don't know if any of you live near Milwaukee... But I do... In Wisconsin an "Alderman" is the absolutely lowest elected public office there is. 3 of my neighbors have been Alderman. People just vote for whomever they know. They don't even know what their policies are... not that it matters, they have no power. An Alderman riding to work on his recumbent bike and introducing some hair brained scheme that will never even remotely be considered is about as common here as cows. How is this news?
Really? Because I could have sworn I got access to the internet over those very copper cables. If you have to go through a monopoly to get access to the internet then it is a distinction without a difference.
They're required by law to give their competitors access. That's how they get the "monopoly" as you call it in the first place. They're required to service the lines, and provide access to the homes. They're not even allowed to set the rate they charge. It's set by the FCC.
Which requires either those same copper phone lines (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner or Charter) or wireless access through AT&T, Verizon, TMobile or Sprint. Which oligopoly would you like to use today?
See above.
Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
If that were actually true then we would see hundreds of telecoms rather than the local monopolies/duopolies enjoyed by most of the country.
There aren't because it's not very profitable. In very dense areas like Austin it is. You can tell just how profitable an areas by looking at the number of ISPs in the area. If it's very dense, its a lot easier to provide service. This is why South Korea has such great service, though they only have 1 ISP that I know of and it's run by, or at least heavily regulated by their government. The reason I say "Turn of the century" there is because that's when we started moving "Data" instead of content. Prior to that you had dialup... so you were moving data over voice lines. Now pretty much everything is MUX'd into data at some point and transferred long distances that way. What the telecoms and cable companies do now is pretty much identical. The only difference is in the kind of wires they use and how they're regulated. Telecoms are heavily regulated, and cable companies are barely regulated at all.
They don't have monopolies? How not? Because you can dig or hang your wires on utility poles without applying for permits? Because AT&T/Comcast/whoeverthefuckelse won't reject these proposals and forcibly mothball them at the said permit application level? You know, monopolies don't come just from the law explicitly saying they're monopolies, but also from laws that lead to stifling of competition.
Because those telecoms are required to provide lines to their competitors at a fixed rate. That's why in high value markets like Austin there are so many competitors. AT&T is required by law to provide them service. If they refuse the other company can file a complaint with the PSC (who are not nice people, let me tell you...) and the PSC will levy heavy fines unless AT&T has a very good reason. I've only seen a denial upheld once in my 10 years in the industry, it just so happened to be with AT&T and they couldn't install because the cable was under a street and the trench was 6 feet under water waiting for the city to fix it. Even then, AT&T finally relented and install a microwave transceiver at their own expense.
Now, if AT&T owns the drop to your house, and they don't want to install fiber, you have to pay for it. That's the way it works. They aren't going to sink $10k into your property just because you "Want it" You're $40/month aint going to cover that upgrade. There are lots of benefits to switching to fiber from the telecoms side. It's cheaper to maintain in the long run, there's a lot fewer outages and future upgrades are much easier. But that initial switch to fiber from copper is insanely expensive and despite the consensuses on Slashdot, most people do not want their well manicured lawns torn up just so the geek on the corner can pirate movies faster.
...and cable lines, since you seem to be forgetting that the cable providers are also telecoms.
No they're not. Not the proper name "Telecom" A telecom is a phone company or LEC. A Cable company is a cable company. They both carry Telecommunications data now, due to the changing market but back in the day cable companies only had analog video and cable telecoms were all that could transmit "communications". If you walked into the FCC and asked if Time Warner was a Telecom, they'd say no. Telecoms are regulated, Cable companies are not. They are 2 entirely different industries, playing by different rules that now pretty much offer the same product as far as the customer (you) are concerned. But most cable companies don't have their own infrastructure. In recent years they've been building it out, but they lease a lot of it from the Telecoms still. This will change very soon however. I suspect the FCC will end up dealing with this whole issue by deregulating the telecoms so they can better compete with the cable companies. It wont be all good, but it would be a hell of a lot better than the rules their currently proposing.
You do realize that the FCC has thousands of employees. And that you just called them all dipshits, over the rules created by the FCC leadership, which was appointed and installed by various politicians...
That makes you a asshole. How about you tone down on the generalizations. I'm all for throttling the FCC, but direct the anger where it is due
Given that they're a government body, I'd say that's a fair assessment.
One, admittedly limited, blip in the 'size matters' relationship is fully sealed in-ear "canalphone" type headphones. They tend not to be terribly comfortable; but they effectively create a sealed tube, and a small one, with your eardrum on one end, the speaker cone on the other, and a tiny amount of air with nowhere to go in between.
Under those circumstances, a fairly teeny driver can beat up on your eardrum quite convincingly indeed, a great deal more effectively than a driver of similar size running in free air or partially free air conditions could.
Yes, but most sub-sonic frequencies are felt, not heard. Higher frequencies are also felt, but to a lesser extent. Long story short, you hear with more than your ear. (that rhymes!) To accurately reproduce how we hear sound, you really do have to recreate that sound in full. Of course, there's always "Just how much do you want to spend?"
Personally, I feel you should just give up on headphones. You're never going to get good bass response from them and it's relatively easy to get the rest of the frequencies. So the $20 padded Sony headphones they have at walmart are your best value. To get any real improvement over that you need to spend a couple of hundred dollars and the improvement isn't that great. There's lots of snake oil "Software" or "Sound enhancing" electronics out there... but it's all nothing more than terribly EQs and other sound processing that mangles the signal. You just can't get 30hrz through a headphone no matter how "revolutionary" their electronics are.
Speakers are an entirely different matter. It's basically impossible to make a "Good" speaker in a manufacturing plant. Speakers just don't behave the same once built. No matter how good the driver, no 2 will behave exactly the same and the environment they're used it drastically changes their performance. The factory can't take all of this into account, so you end up with something that will sound acceptable in most homes. If you want something that actually sounds great, you need to adjust box volume, padding and port length yourself. Buying $1000 speakers at a big box store is dumb. Wasting thousands of dollars on fancy cables, interconnects, gold plated whatever, will never change the quality of your music. Doing a couple of hours of research on the net and learning how to build and adjust speakers yourself will make a huge difference. Though you'll need a bottle of glue!
Right. I continue to be baffled by people that will buy crappy headphones with some random musicians name on them and think they'll in any way sound good.
In speakers, size matters. Yes, you can get big crappy sounding speakers. But the one thing you'll never get small good sounding speakers. Laws of physics and all. This is also why Bose sucks and have been conning guys that watch infomercials for decades.
If you want affordable, good sounding speakers, you have to build them yourself. Get one of versions of these: https://sites.google.com/site/...
They don't have a huge amount of bass, but I'm betting they will be the best speaker most slashdotters have ever heard. And you can put them together with wood glue, scotch tape and a soldering iron.
Since "Everywhere they go" is only the most high density neighborhoods in the biggest cities in the country where there are already dozens of ISPs, I doubt it's going to have anywhere near the effect you think it will. Googles serving a few thousand homes out of over a 1/4 of a billion people.
The one thing Google might do that they've done in other industries is push innovation. ISPs have been pretty strangled by companies like Cisco. If Google can open up the networking hardware market with open source designs it would do a lot to make broadband easier to deploy. I don't know if that's what they're up to or not, but it's the only way they're really going to affect the national market in any real way. Provided they don't outright buy a major ISP, which isn't out of the question.
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet. And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular. Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
That's assuming it's always sunny and that anyone that owned a BMW would be ok with having a carport. You need to remember, people are still buying electric cars because they're currently fashionable. Carports are not fashionable and I can't see them becoming so anytime soon.
I do like that they're using Bamboo however. People really need to start utilizing Bamboo in the west. It's an amazing material and more "green" than most of the fads we like to pretend are green over here.
Yes, but it would behave in an unnatural way. The CMB agrees with our models of the universe. If there was something un-natural it would be screwing up our measurements. The only thing we have like that is Dark Matter/Energy and I doubt the aliens communication network is THAT powerful.
Well, I'd argue it like this: The only means of interstellar communication we know of so far is Electromagnetic waves. With the number of stars in the sky, it's pretty clear that the number of intelligent civilizations out there has to be infinite. Yet the sky is not saturated with their communications. So therefor those civilizations must be using some other technology. Now if they are communicating with entangled particles, we're kind of screwed. You can't eves drop on that. But all the science has so far lead us to believe that you can't actually communicate this way.
But now we're starting to find other fields we could use. Gravity wave detectors are getting better and better. There's the higgs field. Maybe we'll find some other new and interesting ways to relay information. But our tech is advancing at an almost exponential rate now, so I think it's entirely plausible that in the next 100 years we finally figure out how advanced life transmits information long distances. It's probably in some way encrypted so we may just hear noise, but at least we'll know it's there.
You're describing any IT shop in the country where budgets aren't tight. Before the financial collapse I had a director that literally didn't have a job. He just sat in his office watching girls come in and out of the deli next door for 2years. When the layoffs hit, boy did we get to hear all about how the place would fall apart without him. It didn't.
As will all new weaponry, all the countries that don't have it/can't get it panic and agree that it's a horrible idea. They pass UN resolutions banning it, etc... all the countries that do have it refuse to sign and so nothing has changed, other than the countries that don't have it will start accusing those that do of war crimes and flouting international law which they rarely recognize anyway. When some of the countries that signed the ban finally get enough money/science to get the tech, they of course do so despite the treaty and now the countries that didn't sign use it against them to levy sanctions. Until forever, on it goes Through the circle, fast and slow.
I sincerely doubt that your promotional picture was taken on an elevated platform with four lights behind you and some looking down onto the platform.
Blah blah blah... who cares. You shouldn't be able to patent arranging some lights and positioning a camera. Just like you shouldn't be able to patent swipe to unlock or how you shave your mustache. I know! I always put my french fries on my cheeseburger before I eat it because it makes it crunchy and adds salt. Let's patent that... oh right, I can't because that would be fucking stupid.
They try, and then these companies buy them with all the hordes of cash they are making off schemes like this. This is happening precisely because people fall for it, and they make lots and lots of money.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a ridiculous project and will never get build. There are far cheaper and far more practical ways to get people to and from China/America.
All that being said, if they do waste lots of money building this, I'll be one of the first on it. It sounds like it would be the best train ride on earth!
Well, maybe that's true for Snowden, but it's just him. In practice, disclosure of sensitive information happens whether "constitutional rights" are respected or not, and the security controls that can be used to secure this information don't change.
Yes, but how many people work for the NSA and would commit treason for profit or evil?
Violate the constitution and now everyone that works there and cares about their country are against you as well. The point is, illegal acts raise the number of adversaries they need to deal with my orders of magnitude.
No user should be able to do anything that would lead to this result. This is not the doctors fault. He may have violated a few policies, but to blame the entire incident on him is a bit ridiculous. This was a failure of their Network/Security team.
The easiest fix would be to stop violating our constitutional rights. Snowden would have never leaked anything had the NSA been acting within the bounds of the constitution. Violate the constitution and everyone working for you that is a patriot is bound by honor to thwart you. Righteous anger is a SOB.
So I don't know if any of you live near Milwaukee... But I do... In Wisconsin an "Alderman" is the absolutely lowest elected public office there is. 3 of my neighbors have been Alderman. People just vote for whomever they know. They don't even know what their policies are... not that it matters, they have no power. An Alderman riding to work on his recumbent bike and introducing some hair brained scheme that will never even remotely be considered is about as common here as cows. How is this news?
Yes, but just flat out refusing to pay will land them back in court on contempt charges.
Really? Because I could have sworn I got access to the internet over those very copper cables. If you have to go through a monopoly to get access to the internet then it is a distinction without a difference.
They're required by law to give their competitors access. That's how they get the "monopoly" as you call it in the first place. They're required to service the lines, and provide access to the homes. They're not even allowed to set the rate they charge. It's set by the FCC.
Which requires either those same copper phone lines (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner or Charter) or wireless access through AT&T, Verizon, TMobile or Sprint. Which oligopoly would you like to use today?
See above.
Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
If that were actually true then we would see hundreds of telecoms rather than the local monopolies/duopolies enjoyed by most of the country.
There aren't because it's not very profitable. In very dense areas like Austin it is. You can tell just how profitable an areas by looking at the number of ISPs in the area. If it's very dense, its a lot easier to provide service. This is why South Korea has such great service, though they only have 1 ISP that I know of and it's run by, or at least heavily regulated by their government. The reason I say "Turn of the century" there is because that's when we started moving "Data" instead of content. Prior to that you had dialup... so you were moving data over voice lines. Now pretty much everything is MUX'd into data at some point and transferred long distances that way. What the telecoms and cable companies do now is pretty much identical. The only difference is in the kind of wires they use and how they're regulated. Telecoms are heavily regulated, and cable companies are barely regulated at all.
They don't have monopolies? How not? Because you can dig or hang your wires on utility poles without applying for permits? Because AT&T/Comcast/whoeverthefuckelse won't reject these proposals and forcibly mothball them at the said permit application level? You know, monopolies don't come just from the law explicitly saying they're monopolies, but also from laws that lead to stifling of competition.
Because those telecoms are required to provide lines to their competitors at a fixed rate. That's why in high value markets like Austin there are so many competitors. AT&T is required by law to provide them service. If they refuse the other company can file a complaint with the PSC (who are not nice people, let me tell you...) and the PSC will levy heavy fines unless AT&T has a very good reason. I've only seen a denial upheld once in my 10 years in the industry, it just so happened to be with AT&T and they couldn't install because the cable was under a street and the trench was 6 feet under water waiting for the city to fix it. Even then, AT&T finally relented and install a microwave transceiver at their own expense.
Now, if AT&T owns the drop to your house, and they don't want to install fiber, you have to pay for it. That's the way it works. They aren't going to sink $10k into your property just because you "Want it" You're $40/month aint going to cover that upgrade. There are lots of benefits to switching to fiber from the telecoms side. It's cheaper to maintain in the long run, there's a lot fewer outages and future upgrades are much easier. But that initial switch to fiber from copper is insanely expensive and despite the consensuses on Slashdot, most people do not want their well manicured lawns torn up just so the geek on the corner can pirate movies faster.
...and cable lines, since you seem to be forgetting that the cable providers are also telecoms.
No they're not. Not the proper name "Telecom" A telecom is a phone company or LEC. A Cable company is a cable company. They both carry Telecommunications data now, due to the changing market but back in the day cable companies only had analog video and cable telecoms were all that could transmit "communications". If you walked into the FCC and asked if Time Warner was a Telecom, they'd say no. Telecoms are regulated, Cable companies are not. They are 2 entirely different industries, playing by different rules that now pretty much offer the same product as far as the customer (you) are concerned. But most cable companies don't have their own infrastructure. In recent years they've been building it out, but they lease a lot of it from the Telecoms still. This will change very soon however. I suspect the FCC will end up dealing with this whole issue by deregulating the telecoms so they can better compete with the cable companies. It wont be all good, but it would be a hell of a lot better than the rules their currently proposing.
Where I am, you have 2 choices for internet. Comcast and AT&T
Right, and Google will NEVER put fiber where you live. There's a reason some areas have dozens of ISPs.
You do realize that the FCC has thousands of employees. And that you just called them all dipshits, over the rules created by the FCC leadership, which was appointed and installed by various politicians...
That makes you a asshole. How about you tone down on the generalizations. I'm all for throttling the FCC, but direct the anger where it is due
Given that they're a government body, I'd say that's a fair assessment.
One, admittedly limited, blip in the 'size matters' relationship is fully sealed in-ear "canalphone" type headphones. They tend not to be terribly comfortable; but they effectively create a sealed tube, and a small one, with your eardrum on one end, the speaker cone on the other, and a tiny amount of air with nowhere to go in between.
Under those circumstances, a fairly teeny driver can beat up on your eardrum quite convincingly indeed, a great deal more effectively than a driver of similar size running in free air or partially free air conditions could.
Yes, but most sub-sonic frequencies are felt, not heard. Higher frequencies are also felt, but to a lesser extent. Long story short, you hear with more than your ear. (that rhymes!) To accurately reproduce how we hear sound, you really do have to recreate that sound in full. Of course, there's always "Just how much do you want to spend?"
Personally, I feel you should just give up on headphones. You're never going to get good bass response from them and it's relatively easy to get the rest of the frequencies. So the $20 padded Sony headphones they have at walmart are your best value. To get any real improvement over that you need to spend a couple of hundred dollars and the improvement isn't that great. There's lots of snake oil "Software" or "Sound enhancing" electronics out there... but it's all nothing more than terribly EQs and other sound processing that mangles the signal. You just can't get 30hrz through a headphone no matter how "revolutionary" their electronics are.
Speakers are an entirely different matter. It's basically impossible to make a "Good" speaker in a manufacturing plant. Speakers just don't behave the same once built. No matter how good the driver, no 2 will behave exactly the same and the environment they're used it drastically changes their performance. The factory can't take all of this into account, so you end up with something that will sound acceptable in most homes. If you want something that actually sounds great, you need to adjust box volume, padding and port length yourself. Buying $1000 speakers at a big box store is dumb. Wasting thousands of dollars on fancy cables, interconnects, gold plated whatever, will never change the quality of your music. Doing a couple of hours of research on the net and learning how to build and adjust speakers yourself will make a huge difference. Though you'll need a bottle of glue!
Right. I continue to be baffled by people that will buy crappy headphones with some random musicians name on them and think they'll in any way sound good.
In speakers, size matters. Yes, you can get big crappy sounding speakers. But the one thing you'll never get small good sounding speakers. Laws of physics and all. This is also why Bose sucks and have been conning guys that watch infomercials for decades.
If you want affordable, good sounding speakers, you have to build them yourself. Get one of versions of these:
https://sites.google.com/site/...
They don't have a huge amount of bass, but I'm betting they will be the best speaker most slashdotters have ever heard. And you can put them together with wood glue, scotch tape and a soldering iron.
There is no monopoly. http://www.yelp.com/search?cfl...
Seriously people, common sense.
Since "Everywhere they go" is only the most high density neighborhoods in the biggest cities in the country where there are already dozens of ISPs, I doubt it's going to have anywhere near the effect you think it will. Googles serving a few thousand homes out of over a 1/4 of a billion people.
The one thing Google might do that they've done in other industries is push innovation. ISPs have been pretty strangled by companies like Cisco. If Google can open up the networking hardware market with open source designs it would do a lot to make broadband easier to deploy. I don't know if that's what they're up to or not, but it's the only way they're really going to affect the national market in any real way. Provided they don't outright buy a major ISP, which isn't out of the question.
Who would have thought that competition is good for progress...
This "ISPs have a monopoly they're evil!" myth is getting a bit old.
http://www.yelp.com/search?cfl...
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet. And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular. Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
That's assuming it's always sunny and that anyone that owned a BMW would be ok with having a carport. You need to remember, people are still buying electric cars because they're currently fashionable. Carports are not fashionable and I can't see them becoming so anytime soon.
I do like that they're using Bamboo however. People really need to start utilizing Bamboo in the west. It's an amazing material and more "green" than most of the fads we like to pretend are green over here.
Yes, but it would behave in an unnatural way. The CMB agrees with our models of the universe. If there was something un-natural it would be screwing up our measurements. The only thing we have like that is Dark Matter/Energy and I doubt the aliens communication network is THAT powerful.
So does this bacteria grown into a supermodel with orange hair?
Well, I'd argue it like this: The only means of interstellar communication we know of so far is Electromagnetic waves. With the number of stars in the sky, it's pretty clear that the number of intelligent civilizations out there has to be infinite. Yet the sky is not saturated with their communications. So therefor those civilizations must be using some other technology. Now if they are communicating with entangled particles, we're kind of screwed. You can't eves drop on that. But all the science has so far lead us to believe that you can't actually communicate this way.
But now we're starting to find other fields we could use. Gravity wave detectors are getting better and better. There's the higgs field. Maybe we'll find some other new and interesting ways to relay information. But our tech is advancing at an almost exponential rate now, so I think it's entirely plausible that in the next 100 years we finally figure out how advanced life transmits information long distances. It's probably in some way encrypted so we may just hear noise, but at least we'll know it's there.
You're describing any IT shop in the country where budgets aren't tight. Before the financial collapse I had a director that literally didn't have a job. He just sat in his office watching girls come in and out of the deli next door for 2years. When the layoffs hit, boy did we get to hear all about how the place would fall apart without him. It didn't.
As will all new weaponry, all the countries that don't have it/can't get it panic and agree that it's a horrible idea. They pass UN resolutions banning it, etc... all the countries that do have it refuse to sign and so nothing has changed, other than the countries that don't have it will start accusing those that do of war crimes and flouting international law which they rarely recognize anyway. When some of the countries that signed the ban finally get enough money/science to get the tech, they of course do so despite the treaty and now the countries that didn't sign use it against them to levy sanctions. Until forever, on it goes Through the circle, fast and slow.
I sincerely doubt that your promotional picture was taken on an elevated platform with four lights behind you and some looking down onto the platform.
Blah blah blah... who cares. You shouldn't be able to patent arranging some lights and positioning a camera. Just like you shouldn't be able to patent swipe to unlock or how you shave your mustache. I know! I always put my french fries on my cheeseburger before I eat it because it makes it crunchy and adds salt. Let's patent that... oh right, I can't because that would be fucking stupid.
They try, and then these companies buy them with all the hordes of cash they are making off schemes like this. This is happening precisely because people fall for it, and they make lots and lots of money.
Because you're also licensing your own money. Pick which one you want to keep.