I'm sure people who can "fix" odometers can also work out an easy way for the GPS device to not appear like it is moving as much.
Anyway, mileage tax is a stupid idea. What benefit to society do they hope to achieve?
Taxing fuel would do a similar but less braindead thing. And even then I think fuel taxes are not so good. Compare a temperate forest with an equatorial jungle.
Sure the inhabitants of the former are probably more efficient in energy consumption compared to latter. But you do lose a lot of diversity if you suddenly made energy and resources cost more in the jungle - think mass extinctions. Most of the weird and colourful creatures would die off.
A mileage tax in comparison would be creating an environment where movement is expensive. What's there to gain from that? That's even stupider.
> The other ~290 million U.S. citizens are already-covered by private or government programs
Oh yeah go look up how much medicare and medicaid _already_ costs the USA per capita. Compare it with the NHS in the UK (USD2500/person), or other countries.
And then see how much the US citizens get out of it in comparison.
From what I see, the US people are already paying a lot for health care. Not getting bang for buck though.
Yes Government services are neither free nor cheap, but the US system looks a lot more expensive for what you get.
Go ahead stick your head in the sand and keep on believing the US system is better and doesn't need fixing. I don't have to pay for it:).
It just seems a shame really. The most powerful nation in the world can certainly do a lot better than that.
But SQL injection goes all the way to the goodies whether it's Linux, OpenBSD or Windows.
Typically the webapp has keys to those locked steel cubicles where the data is stored. Since the webapp needs to read and change the data.
So whether it's OpenBSD or Linux or Windows it doesn't matter for the problem at hand.
In my experience it does matter a bit whether it's PHP with its "mysql_definitely_real_escape_string_this_time_no_really", or some thing less crap (since PHP does make it easy to do th wrong thing and hard to do the right thing).
But what matters more is whether the programmers are writing secure web apps.
Good luck telling your customers that "Who cares about your identity theft problem? Who cares that someone stole stuff from your account? It's not a big problem since we don't have to rebuild the O/S, so we don't have to wait hours to get it back up."
Uh huh.
The loss of the O/S hardly matters. The DATA does.
1) There are ZILLIONS of copies of the O/S out there, and many of them are the latest and greatest versions. There aren't zillions of copies of your data, and the few copies there may not be the latest and greatest. 2) Your data backups could be full of already corrupted data and you don't know when the corruption started because the webapp is full of holes. 3) Restoring from backups does NOTHING when the problem is secret/confidential/sensitive information has been leaked.
The rebuild time for an O/S is not a problem, so many ways of dealing with it if necessary.
1) Your taxes pay for other stuff too (look at your country's "defense" budget sometime). Heck even the UK NHS costs "only" 90 billion pounds a year which works out to 1500 pounds/person on average (USD2.5K), if you somehow assume half of the people don't pay, that makes it USD5K/year for those who pay. The US has got to screw up a lot to make it USD10K/year.
2) If you don't pay for the "poor" people, they will get medical advice or treatment LATE (or not at all). Which means they tend to end up at ER in hospitals when their condition is more expensive to treat, or just die, or end up crippled.
That means you either end up:
a) Still paying for their treatment, and paying more. b) paying for riot squads to keep them, their families and friends away from trying to get free treatment from hospitals. c) paying to clean up the resulting dead bodies (OK that's cheap, but that makes you no better than one of those crappy 3rd world nations). d) paying the other costs because contagious diseases spread better (since those who are infected avoid seeking treatment or diagnosis).
The poor aren't going to pay, they have no money.
The US healthcare system is badly broken, it should be fixed. Whether Obama actually fixes it is another question. But saying it shouldn't be changed is silly, unless you're one of those profiting from the broken system, or you really think nothing can be done to fix it (and if you think the latter - hey who else is ever going to fix it? At least Obama is making some attempt). Many of you already pay for Medicare, Social Security anyway. So why not fix stuff?
3) The other way it is broken- I've seen more than one case where the patient and the doctor both agree that physiotherapy is the best option for the patient's "frozen shoulder", but the Insurer/HMO only pays for the first few sessions, not enough to fix the problem completely. But for some reason they will pay for surgery. Maybe in the USA surgery is cheaper than physiotherapy... And maybe in the USA the present system is cheaper than all other alternatives.
I personally think Obama does actually want to change some things for the better. But hey if you guys just keep saying "No" and not bother to tell Obama what should be improved, I suspect the other people who just want to profit from "change" might get their way instead.
Lastly, I'm not from the UK, but in the UK diseases directly related to smoking were estimated to cost the NHS 5 billion pounds/year (prev estimates apparently were 1 billion), BUT the tobacco tax revenue is 10 billion pounds/year - and that's no estimate. So maybe get the smokers to pay for it. Heck legalize cannabis and tax it too... Drug money:).
"M. avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."
> Where I am now, the Internet cafes are full of non-tourists.
Same over here, but they're mostly full of young guys playing LAN games (counterstrike, left4dead, TF2, call of duty, etc), or other online games - MMORPGs, DoTA etc.
I suspect many of them have their own computers at home, they just come to play games with their friends or others. After all I do know a number of teenagers and youth who play games at cybercafes and they _all_ have PCs at home.
Many people who have TVs and DVD players at home also go out to watch movies (especially with their friends). Same goes for drinking coffee;).
In my reading of the article, I gather that there's a 60 second delay between reloads. So it's not a matter of how fast the browser is.
The flaws in the experiment are elsewhere:
1) they should load from known, fixed copies of live sites to make tests more repeatable. 2) they should do the tests more than once and also do a test with different batteries (testing the browsers in different order for new batteries).
That said, I won't be surprised if IE is actually more efficient.
> Now the Niagara (UltraSPARC-Tx) CPU isn't good for every work load out there, but if it's highly parallel then it's something that you should be looking.
If Oracle still charges per core, the Niagara approach of many core CPUs could be more expensive.
Looking at the roadmap they seem to be going fewer cores, or at least sticking with 8.
As for power consumption, I wouldn't bet on the Intel x86 always consuming more power than a SPARC for the same performance. They are a scary competitor. They keep introducing consumer grade x86 cpus that are more powerful and yet consume less power.
Can Sun/SPARC keep ahead of them? They might only be ahead in SSL/TLS. And if that becomes a big enough demand, some taiwanese/chinese company start producing cheap pcie cards to do that:). Or Intel could decide to use some transistors to do it - they have lots of transistors to play with on their chips, it's just a matter of priorities.
They do their vigilantism not for their customers but for "copyright holders". Unless maybe they don't consider people who buy books their customers?
That said, if the people who buy the Kindles are actually legally considered the owners of the Kindles then to me it's less "vigilante-like" if Amazon disables a Kindle on the owner's request, but it is vigilantism for Amazon to delete books from the owner's device.
If the books are illegal material - they should report it to the cops, or the owners so that the appropriate action can be taken.
There's one big thing you miss. The government might actually have implemented some of the patented stuff.
AFAIK the patent trolls do not build anything (if they did, the likes of IBM could easily countersue them to bankruptcy).
I daresay many inventors would be happier to give out their ideas for just a dollar if their ideas actually get implemented, than having them patented by a troll that doesn't build anything, and instead uses the patents to extort money and effectively slow down the pace of progress.
Imagine if I was the inventor of the cellphone, and someone took my idea, and actually made cellphones, and a few years later, I can actually afford a cellphone of my own.
Compared to: I'm the inventor of the cellphone, and someone patented it before I managed to (because I was stupid/naive), and a few years later nobody has any cellphones still, since the lawsuit between the patent troll and the companies wanting to build cellphones hasn't been settled yet.
There's a huge difference there. Sure I may be losing out in the first case, but the second case is far worse.
FWIW, I've got a number of ideas that I'd be happy to see implemented, the implementors can keep the rights, the $$$$ etc. Ideas are easy. Making a polished finished product is difficult.
Not sure if it'll help much. Patents tend to reward "obvious but 'novel' enough to get past the patent examiner".
If you are ahead of your time, even 20 years doesn't help you. Go ask Douglas Engelbart and his team.
The patent system does reward genuine innovation, but it rewards trolls and "inventors of the obvious" more.
The big companies cross license with each other so they can get stuff done AND they can also use that to keep out the small companies from entering their markets (the small companies are likely to infringe on something - even if it's obvious or trivial). I don't see that as a good thing.
The big companies however are still vulnerable to patent trolls, since the patent trolls don't make anything and thus won't infringe:).
So does the patent system significantly benefit society more than it costs society? In the end it just seems to be a tax on society that produces little benefit.
As for "obvious and trivial", you cannot blame the patent examiners. If innovation and technology actually progresses rapidly, their jobs will become even harder and harder - since there will be greater numbers of specialized fields where there are only a very few experts on what really is an innovation in that field. So the real problem is the system is broken.
The supposed benefit of avoiding "guilds keeping secrets to themselves" is imaginary. Things can be reverse engineered given just a sample or two. And the "Secret Guilds" just don't patent stuff they want to keep secret, or they file uselessly vague patents.
Shorter copyrights on the other hand might not be so bad. A copyright on a love song, does not prevent others from writing other love songs. Whereas patents can and do slow down innovation. A shorter copyright might motivate Microsoft even more to not release something as crap as Vista.
Lastly, if the pace of progress is supposedly getting faster and faster, plus communications, distribution and marketing has improved so much, why are the lengths of the granted monopolies getting longer and longer? It makes no sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I daresay some hackers might maintain "their" machine better than the legal owners ;).
I'm sure people who can "fix" odometers can also work out an easy way for the GPS device to not appear like it is moving as much.
Anyway, mileage tax is a stupid idea. What benefit to society do they hope to achieve?
Taxing fuel would do a similar but less braindead thing. And even then I think fuel taxes are not so good. Compare a temperate forest with an equatorial jungle.
Sure the inhabitants of the former are probably more efficient in energy consumption compared to latter. But you do lose a lot of diversity if you suddenly made energy and resources cost more in the jungle - think mass extinctions. Most of the weird and colourful creatures would die off.
A mileage tax in comparison would be creating an environment where movement is expensive. What's there to gain from that? That's even stupider.
> The other ~290 million U.S. citizens are already-covered by private or government programs
:).
Oh yeah go look up how much medicare and medicaid _already_ costs the USA per capita. Compare it with the NHS in the UK (USD2500/person), or other countries.
And then see how much the US citizens get out of it in comparison.
From what I see, the US people are already paying a lot for health care. Not getting bang for buck though.
Yes Government services are neither free nor cheap, but the US system looks a lot more expensive for what you get.
Go ahead stick your head in the sand and keep on believing the US system is better and doesn't need fixing. I don't have to pay for it
It just seems a shame really. The most powerful nation in the world can certainly do a lot better than that.
But SQL injection goes all the way to the goodies whether it's Linux, OpenBSD or Windows.
Typically the webapp has keys to those locked steel cubicles where the data is stored. Since the webapp needs to read and change the data.
So whether it's OpenBSD or Linux or Windows it doesn't matter for the problem at hand.
In my experience it does matter a bit whether it's PHP with its "mysql_definitely_real_escape_string_this_time_no_really", or some thing less crap (since PHP does make it easy to do th wrong thing and hard to do the right thing).
But what matters more is whether the programmers are writing secure web apps.
You're still missing the point totally.
Good luck telling your customers that "Who cares about your identity theft problem? Who cares that someone stole stuff from your account? It's not a big problem since we don't have to rebuild the O/S, so we don't have to wait hours to get it back up."
Uh huh.
The loss of the O/S hardly matters. The DATA does.
1) There are ZILLIONS of copies of the O/S out there, and many of them are the latest and greatest versions. There aren't zillions of copies of your data, and the few copies there may not be the latest and greatest.
2) Your data backups could be full of already corrupted data and you don't know when the corruption started because the webapp is full of holes.
3) Restoring from backups does NOTHING when the problem is secret/confidential/sensitive information has been leaked.
The rebuild time for an O/S is not a problem, so many ways of dealing with it if necessary.
1) Your taxes pay for other stuff too (look at your country's "defense" budget sometime). Heck even the UK NHS costs "only" 90 billion pounds a year which works out to 1500 pounds/person on average (USD2.5K), if you somehow assume half of the people don't pay, that makes it USD5K/year for those who pay. The US has got to screw up a lot to make it USD10K/year.
:).
2) If you don't pay for the "poor" people, they will get medical advice or treatment LATE (or not at all). Which means they tend to end up at ER in hospitals when their condition is more expensive to treat, or just die, or end up crippled.
That means you either end up:
a) Still paying for their treatment, and paying more.
b) paying for riot squads to keep them, their families and friends away from trying to get free treatment from hospitals.
c) paying to clean up the resulting dead bodies (OK that's cheap, but that makes you no better than one of those crappy 3rd world nations).
d) paying the other costs because contagious diseases spread better (since those who are infected avoid seeking treatment or diagnosis).
The poor aren't going to pay, they have no money.
The US healthcare system is badly broken, it should be fixed. Whether Obama actually fixes it is another question. But saying it shouldn't be changed is silly, unless you're one of those profiting from the broken system, or you really think nothing can be done to fix it (and if you think the latter - hey who else is ever going to fix it? At least Obama is making some attempt). Many of you already pay for Medicare, Social Security anyway. So why not fix stuff?
3) The other way it is broken- I've seen more than one case where the patient and the doctor both agree that physiotherapy is the best option for the patient's "frozen shoulder", but the Insurer/HMO only pays for the first few sessions, not enough to fix the problem completely. But for some reason they will pay for surgery. Maybe in the USA surgery is cheaper than physiotherapy... And maybe in the USA the present system is cheaper than all other alternatives.
I personally think Obama does actually want to change some things for the better. But hey if you guys just keep saying "No" and not bother to tell Obama what should be improved, I suspect the other people who just want to profit from "change" might get their way instead.
Lastly, I'm not from the UK, but in the UK diseases directly related to smoking were estimated to cost the NHS 5 billion pounds/year (prev estimates apparently were 1 billion), BUT the tobacco tax revenue is 10 billion pounds/year - and that's no estimate. So maybe get the smokers to pay for it. Heck legalize cannabis and tax it too... Drug money
How'd you get your 136GB figure?
4KB per op, 5 years, 180000 operations per second, 100000 overwrites allowed before the flash becomes unreliable.
That gives me: 4kB * 2.840184 * 10^13 total ops/ 100K writes = 1 TB. Not 136GB.
Or perhaps the SLC flash they are using allows 1M overwrites? But in another post your assumption was 100k.
What am I missing?
Well I don't tend to associate the word "defense" with Maoris.
If a bunch of tattooed Maoris come at you with their wahaikas, taiahas and kotiates, there ain't gonna be much defense involved on their part.
Uh no. Chlorine is not as effective on that bacteria, and actually that's why it and not other bacteria that tends to be there :).
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/health/15shower.html
"M. avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."
Yeah with the same toothbrush he uses to clean the toilets.
Or is that the Army approach?
The plague killed quite a lot of people.
> Where I am now, the Internet cafes are full of non-tourists.
;).
Same over here, but they're mostly full of young guys playing LAN games (counterstrike, left4dead, TF2, call of duty, etc), or other online games - MMORPGs, DoTA etc.
I suspect many of them have their own computers at home, they just come to play games with their friends or others. After all I do know a number of teenagers and youth who play games at cybercafes and they _all_ have PCs at home.
Many people who have TVs and DVD players at home also go out to watch movies (especially with their friends). Same goes for drinking coffee
So tell me which operating system isn't vulnerable to rootkits that can run the usual software that people want to run?
The popular Linux distros are vulnerable to rootkits too, and so far Macs are consistently the first to fall in the pwn2own contents.
I doubt tiny and soft would be a good selling point for that.
In my reading of the article, I gather that there's a 60 second delay between reloads. So it's not a matter of how fast the browser is.
The flaws in the experiment are elsewhere:
1) they should load from known, fixed copies of live sites to make tests more repeatable.
2) they should do the tests more than once and also do a test with different batteries (testing the browsers in different order for new batteries).
That said, I won't be surprised if IE is actually more efficient.
If anything that's only relevant for the first page load (or browser launch).
Unless the browsers that don't perform well are doing stupid stuff like reloading components they need for every page.
I doubt the developers are that stupid, and if they were it's not Microsoft's fault.
In my experience databases don't do so well in virtual machines. Unless you use something like Xen.
And if you run your DB single core, you'd probably do better running it on a powerful single core like i7 rather than a weak T2 core.
> Now the Niagara (UltraSPARC-Tx) CPU isn't good for every work load out there, but if it's highly parallel then it's something that you should be looking.
:). Or Intel could decide to use some transistors to do it - they have lots of transistors to play with on their chips, it's just a matter of priorities.
If Oracle still charges per core, the Niagara approach of many core CPUs could be more expensive.
Looking at the roadmap they seem to be going fewer cores, or at least sticking with 8.
As for power consumption, I wouldn't bet on the Intel x86 always consuming more power than a SPARC for the same performance. They are a scary competitor. They keep introducing consumer grade x86 cpus that are more powerful and yet consume less power.
Can Sun/SPARC keep ahead of them? They might only be ahead in SSL/TLS. And if that becomes a big enough demand, some taiwanese/chinese company start producing cheap pcie cards to do that
Maybe they meant it's a sneaky little peak before the long steep downhill in the roadmap.
"Peak" SPARC just like "peak oil".
Yeah Amazon show who they really care about.
They do their vigilantism not for their customers but for "copyright holders". Unless maybe they don't consider people who buy books their customers?
That said, if the people who buy the Kindles are actually legally considered the owners of the Kindles then to me it's less "vigilante-like" if Amazon disables a Kindle on the owner's request, but it is vigilantism for Amazon to delete books from the owner's device.
If the books are illegal material - they should report it to the cops, or the owners so that the appropriate action can be taken.
The free demo world of goo helped keep various kiddies occupied, without me getting into trouble for exposing them to violence and gore.
:).
And they might even have learnt something useful from the game
I don't think I'd buy the full version for myself, but I can see how some might really like it enough.
Thing is you only see the ones that didn't break (and/or that people bothered to maintain).
There's one big thing you miss. The government might actually have implemented some of the patented stuff.
AFAIK the patent trolls do not build anything (if they did, the likes of IBM could easily countersue them to bankruptcy).
I daresay many inventors would be happier to give out their ideas for just a dollar if their ideas actually get implemented, than having them patented by a troll that doesn't build anything, and instead uses the patents to extort money and effectively slow down the pace of progress.
Imagine if I was the inventor of the cellphone, and someone took my idea, and actually made cellphones, and a few years later, I can actually afford a cellphone of my own.
Compared to: I'm the inventor of the cellphone, and someone patented it before I managed to (because I was stupid/naive), and a few years later nobody has any cellphones still, since the lawsuit between the patent troll and the companies wanting to build cellphones hasn't been settled yet.
There's a huge difference there. Sure I may be losing out in the first case, but the second case is far worse.
FWIW, I've got a number of ideas that I'd be happy to see implemented, the implementors can keep the rights, the $$$$ etc. Ideas are easy. Making a polished finished product is difficult.
Is there a "cool sound" and a bright glow whenever they level up?
I doubt bosses would have a special "Promotion" room to provide such an effect for their employees.
"Staff of Justice + 2"?
Not sure if it'll help much. Patents tend to reward "obvious but 'novel' enough to get past the patent examiner".
:).
If you are ahead of your time, even 20 years doesn't help you. Go ask Douglas Engelbart and his team.
The patent system does reward genuine innovation, but it rewards trolls and "inventors of the obvious" more.
The big companies cross license with each other so they can get stuff done AND they can also use that to keep out the small companies from entering their markets (the small companies are likely to infringe on something - even if it's obvious or trivial). I don't see that as a good thing.
The big companies however are still vulnerable to patent trolls, since the patent trolls don't make anything and thus won't infringe
So does the patent system significantly benefit society more than it costs society? In the end it just seems to be a tax on society that produces little benefit.
As for "obvious and trivial", you cannot blame the patent examiners. If innovation and technology actually progresses rapidly, their jobs will become even harder and harder - since there will be greater numbers of specialized fields where there are only a very few experts on what really is an innovation in that field. So the real problem is the system is broken.
The supposed benefit of avoiding "guilds keeping secrets to themselves" is imaginary. Things can be reverse engineered given just a sample or two. And the "Secret Guilds" just don't patent stuff they want to keep secret, or they file uselessly vague patents.
Shorter copyrights on the other hand might not be so bad. A copyright on a love song, does not prevent others from writing other love songs. Whereas patents can and do slow down innovation. A shorter copyright might motivate Microsoft even more to not release something as crap as Vista.
Lastly, if the pace of progress is supposedly getting faster and faster, plus communications, distribution and marketing has improved so much, why are the lengths of the granted monopolies getting longer and longer? It makes no sense.