But if someone sends me a link to YouTube, I don't care that the same video is available elsewhere in better quality or with a better interface.
ummm... Why don't you care? Horrible-quality videos don't look decent because someone pointed you there... Annoying flash animations aren't less annoying because someone directed you there...
I just want to view the content I've been directed towards. Ergo, I need Flash to work on my browser.
A quick search for the title of that Youtube page will almost certainly find the exact same video elsewhere, in very little time, with no flash plugin.
Of course there are also YouTube downloaders that don't require Flash at all, and play the videos much faster with MPlayer, VLC, et al.
I've heard enough from the peanut gallery now... The non-stop bickering about trivialities is getting pretty damn old, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Here's a lolipop, go away little children, and let the adults talk.
Is Europe, DVB-H had been promoted for literally decades as the thing that was going to change the world... EVERYTHING was going to have a TV on it, cell phones most of all.
Fast forward to the modern day, with cell phone manufacturers having disputes with broadcasters over DVB-H fees, one just went ahead and built a full DVB-T receiver into their cell phones. It was a stunning development. Sure, it used a bit more power, but now you could watch REAL TV programs, not just the niche "mobile" broadcasts that you were supposed to want to watch on your cell phone. Of course broadcasters were put in their place by this move, and DVB-H fees have become more reasonable, and there's an effort to get real content out there. But either way, the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and people now want "real TV" on their cell phones, and a large number of them get just that these days, for a fairly small premium...
So, it's only a question of time. Give it another year, and your smart phones will receive OTA broadcasts, for free. Sure, they might also support the premium in-network TV-like data system, but nobody will want it, and the niche audience won't be large enough to support the effort. And it'll go the way of the MPEG-1 D-Frames, and the "PDA Internet", as do all poorly thought-out kludges that are only stop-gaps for temporarily resource-starved platforms that can't yet play with the big boys.
That is all. You may now return to your endless and pointless bickering about whether or not it's worthwhile to buy a subsidized cell phone...
Where is this elusive species to be found in quantity?
They're mostly to be found in those unimpressive resumes. You know the ones... very light on experience, not compellingly presented, and really poorly laid out. The ones which you (or your recruiting firm) promptly threw in the trash... That was them.
That was me 5+ years ago... Knowing more than most experts about everything from the ground up, but barely out of college, with just a bit of PC Tech experience which just didn't quite match-up with the check-list supplied to HR of any particular IT position.
In a properly managed network, you won't get a direct connection to the internet AND you won't able to run any kind of SSH tunneling software.
If I can get two unique characters between point A and point B, and I can create a data tunnel, transfer anything over it.
I know most of the proxy software i use will tear down SSH sessions established through a HTTPS proxy
A couple seconds of connection-time is good enough. A little more overhead, but the tunnel can stay up quite reliably.
i usually configure them to reject self signed certificates (as those would only provide a false sense of security).
It'll cost me a whopping $20 to get around that restriction. Not to mention plain HTTP obviously won't have any such restriction, and is more popular for tunneling anyhow.
I don't expect pharmaceutical companies will care all that much, since most antibiotics are generics these days. I doubt the market for powerful antibiotics to compete with MSRA is enough for them to bring their resources to bat.
Free Trade doesn't seem to be doing much for freedom around the world.
The Chinese populace is certainly a lot more free than they were even in the recent past, though they're still certainly in poor shape.
This single incident in India is pretty damn trivial, and India has a pretty good level of freedom for it's population. Not everyone's definition of free speech matches with the US. In most of Europe, in particular, public discussion of ongoing trials is commonly forbidden, as are statements that hurt someone's reputation, no matter how factually accurate they might be. And yet, I don't see too many people complaining most of Europe is a police state...
But the problem wasn't that we stopped enforcing anti-trust acts, it was that we deliberately -helped- the monopolies and harmed the general public with such rulings as software patents, the DMCA, etc.
Wrong. The DMCA and software patents certainly don't help matters, but that has nothing to do with the banking collapse (both of them...), the monopolization of the news media, the free reign of large corporations, etc. None of this is cause by active government interference, but rather, by the government ceding it's responsibility to regulate.
Wal-Mart is a monopoly not because of government intervention or lack of the ability to compete, Wal-Mart is simply willing to take risks and deliver what the masses want.
Wal-Mart's good PR, able to bring in shoppers with a whopping 12 cent discount was what got them into this position, but Wal-Mart is a monopoly today because its vast size has become self-sustaining. They can dictate prices and terms to their suppliers, and if they aren't happy, that disagreement may well single-handedly drive your company out of business.
The information was high quality if you wanted one group's opinion, yes.
Bull. The news media was much better at unbiased reporting in the past. Today, it's largely a token quote from both sides (no matter how factually incorrect one side's statement may be), and then back to whatever spin was desired...
There are only a few examples of propaganda you can possibly come up with, and it's a lousy comparison because such circumstances just don't exist today. There is no more Soviet Union, so we don't need the propaganda anymore. If you want to talk about modern wars, try comparing the news coverage of Vietnam and tell me we've got it so much better today...
More like an editorial, they may use strong opinions to make some people convinced it is fact, but in the end it is all an editorial.
Blatantly lying and distorting facts is NOT editorial. If it was, then you could can hide ANYTHING behind that label, with impunity.
Because of this, unworkable or plain stupid opinions are lost in the shuffle usually and only the bright ones stand out
That's completely baseless. There's nothing in existence to do this incredible job at filtering out the crap from the cream. With no filtering, it's he who yells the loudest, and that's what we see today... which explains Fox News quite succinctly.
how exactly are they accountable, any more than Iran? They weren't accountable when they got nukes, and once they did, they became even less so.
The state of Israel exists only because of funding from the US. Without those billions in funding, they will cease to exist. And their nukes? It's accepted by just about everyone that the US basically gave them the enriched uranium they needed to build nukes... just as it's an open secret that they HAVE nukes in the first place, which they've never publicly admitted to.
I ask because I don't think I could find anything non-consumable in my house (or garage, I have a Chinese motorcycle) that's not made in China.
Your 2 cars are a very significant omission from this, as they probably cost more than EVERYTHING ELSE in your home.
And as I just said to someone else, you don't notice how much the US produces because you don't buy construction equipment, turbines, locomotives, assembly-line equipment, industrial water treatment systems, Mainframes, MRI machines, industrial chemicals, mining equipment, marine equipment, etc.
Everything is made in China , they can be penalized and they won't care. They will keep doing it until we bar all Chinese products , good luck doing that.
No economist in the world will deny that China needs the US a lot more than the US needs China.
Everything is NOT made in China. China remains the #3 economy, a very large margin behind the US and Japan. The US remains the #1 manufacture in the world... almost double that of #2.
You think China makes "everything" because you see the little "Made in China" label on every $2 item you buy, and assume that's all there is to the world. You don't buy turbines, heavy construction machinery, commercial jets, etc. There are lots of Chinese business owners bemoaning the fact that "Everything is made in the USA and Japan."
While some companies do abuse H1bs it's not the cause of the decline of US scientific leadership, not even close! Einstein, Fermi, Godel et al were all foreigners! Please take the immigration debate elsewhere!
H1-B is NOT immigration, it's indentured servitude... It's share-cropping in the high-tech world. It pushes down wages dramatically, and what happens when you undermine the profit motive of an field? People stop aspiring to it as a career.
I'd be fine with opening the borders. I'm NOT at all happy with the H1-B program.
We have created a culture that loves to watch celebrities and make money.
Are you suggesting there weren't celebrities until the past couple decades, nor greedy people?
And if so, why is it that watching celebrities makes people want to go into every field, other than scientific, because we certainly don't have a lack of lawyers or MBAs...
the point he raises is still a valid one and is a valid concern
No, actually it isn't.
His concerns are the same baseless nonsense we've been seeing for decades.
"Oh no! Country X [Japan/China/Russian] is going to take over the world economically!"
"Oh no! Country X did Y in space before us."
"Oh no! Country X has a larger Z [Jet/Atom smasher/Computer/Robot] than we do!"
It's motivated by two completely different groups. One is the creeping anti-Americanism as much from our allies as our enemies, which Obama talked about early in his term, and we see here on/. on a regular basis. The other is simply easily-scared Americans, who don't have any perspective, and all they know about the world is an arbitrary fact here and there...
I learned, early on, that History is the purveyor of context and understanding our modern world, not Science. If you want some perspective, ask a historian, not a scientist, especially a poor one with a good PR man like Tyson.
There is nothing about the medium of transmission that makes radio inherently corporate, or podcasting inherently non-corporate.
Yes there is. It's called MONEY. See: "barriers to entry".
So? how does that imply a non-profit motivation? How does it mean better quality independent media, or a more community-oriented media?
It can be sustained with far less capital. It is cheap enough that damn-near anyone can participate. It can easily stay under the radar and go unnoticed by those who may be interested in stopping it. etc.
So, how do you explain the numerous other independent, community and public radio stations that don't exist to make a profit in any way?
There certainly AREN'T numerous community radio stations, unless you're counting school-based efforts in there once again.
The non-profit stations (eg. NPR) simply use the PBS model, which requires both corporate and private sponsorship (rather than traditional advertising).
It will all come full-circle, and FM radio may become the bastion of non-mainstream media with community stations and the like, while podcasts and online streaming come to epitomize corporate big media.
This is nonsensical. You might as well say postal mail will become the cheap, fast communications method, while e-mail will become the expensive, slow method...
Webcasting requires a $100 PC and ~$15/mo for an internet connection (both of which you may already have) to support a dozen or so listeners. AM/FM broadcasting requires a large antenna, relatively expensive high-power transmitter, etc.
The college radio stations your so quick to point to have the money to invest in these things because they're getting paid by students who want to get into the professional world of radio broadcasting... Once the profit goes away, the college stations have no reason to exist, and no way to pay for themselves, even with employees who will work for free.
The 2000s will be remembered as the decade of "nothing but cheap", though. Because even the "quality", brand named, products are cheap. Dropped from the same sweatshop conveyer belts than the cheap generics.
No. There are still quality products (and they, too, are rather inexpensive).
What's happened is that it's now a minority of the market, as retailers like Wal-Mart keep pushing for cheaper and cheaper products, to hell with quality. Best Buy, Target, etc. followed suit, though often not to the same extent.
Indeed, it's the retail space that has changed. When looking at Home Depot for a refrigerator, I found an Americana ("by GE") for $399 and was astounded at how poorly it was designed. Sure, it minimally worked, but there was a lot of unusable space, the shelving was bare bones, and the whole thing felt very weak. Note, this was just a short while after my last Magic Chef refrigerator (also from Home Depot) failed just out of warranty... it was also a poorly designed and built piece of crap. After this, I drove a bit further out of my way to the nearest Sears, and found a very well-built, and infinitely better designed Kenmore refrigerator for the same $399, which has lasted a long time, and still shows no signs of having any issues. The difference? Simple: Home Depot keeps pushing for cheaper and cheaper crap, which they can sell at the same prices, making more profit on every unit. Sears is pretty clearly making slightly less profit on the deal, and insisting on good-quality products.
For the same reason that most other operating systems, including most flavors of linux, requires admin rights to install software.
NO UNIX SYSTEM REQUIRES ADMIN RIGHTS TO INSTALL SOFTWARE. End of story.
Sure, the DEFAULT behavior is to install it system-wide, but with just a single flag, you can install every piece of software in any random subdirectory you want... generally $HOME/XYZ, or/usr/local/XYZ
Yeah, one directory, like... "Program files"? Every program installs to Program files by default
No, they install under Program Files\XYZ, and Program Files\Common, and in the registry, and in various folders in \Windows, etc.
The windows registry is a hierarchical system of configuration settings (with parts that are global for the machine and parts that are local to the user), and/etc is a hierarchical system of configuration settings (contained in text files)... Where's the big difference?
The registry is several times larger, requires several levels of indirection, is stored in a proprietary binary database format which can't be accessed by any application (see 'diff'), and is stored in a few very large files which are highly subject to corruption, hence every version of Windows since 98 saving 8+ copies of it.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs. [...] Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.
Quality is still crap, you have no clue what the video might be from the link, and you're left to deal with the lousy interface for video playback. In other words, almost all of them continue to apply. It's a shame you can't read.
Let's say that we make airline flights 100% terrorist proof. Then what? Simple, the terrorists move on to bombing other things.
Commercial jets are a ripe target because they're barely holding together as it is, and hundreds of people won't survive the fall...
Otherwise, a bomb that will fit in your shoe or underwear probably won't even kill the guy sitting next to you.
Can you imaging the panic that would happen if they bombed a large high school graduation?
What's to imagine? See the '96 Atlanta Olympic park bombing. See the Oklahoma City, Murrow Federal Building bombing. etc. People have small bombs going off in their driveways on a regular basis thanks to teenagers and introductory chemistry class.
If they really want to kill a bunch of people, the terrorists should start selling cheap cars...
YouTube's quality is crap (even with H.264), the interface is crap, the comments are crap, the recommendations are crap, the URL scheme is crap... Do I need to continue?
YouTube is the lowest-common-denominator... Anything you find there, can be found in vastly better quality elsewhere, in a better format, etc.
I dream of a world without YouTube, and I doubt it'll take long for it to happen.
I guess the BOLD TEXT wasn't nearly enough emphasis...
Do some reading on how much it costs to employ someone... While the salary is majority of the cost, a substantial fraction is paid out by the company directly that the employee never sees.
And last I checked, ~$150,000 was the quoted national average for a Unix Systems Administrator.
I'd be happy to tell you more about my setup. [...] I'm not exactly seeing customers knocking down my door.
The reason for the confusion is becoming much more clear... The real world is not putting a bunch of PCs in your house and promising they will keep running... I can certainly understand your situation, I did plenty of contract work for half-assed small companies years ago as well. When (or perhaps "if") you get a real job in the corporate world, you'll find that not even the pencil on your desk costs less than 25 cents/hr. Policies and procedures, management sign-offs, the realities of infrastructure and maintenance, and maintaining everything so that the second it's needed, it's going to work 100% correctly, 100% of the time, completely changes the game. It seems so simple from the outside... Reality is much different.
Slashdot Mirror
ummm... Why don't you care? Horrible-quality videos don't look decent because someone pointed you there... Annoying flash animations aren't less annoying because someone directed you there...
A quick search for the title of that Youtube page will almost certainly find the exact same video elsewhere, in very little time, with no flash plugin.
Of course there are also YouTube downloaders that don't require Flash at all, and play the videos much faster with MPlayer, VLC, et al.
I've heard enough from the peanut gallery now... The non-stop bickering about trivialities is getting pretty damn old, and it doesn't make a damn bit of difference. Here's a lolipop, go away little children, and let the adults talk.
Is Europe, DVB-H had been promoted for literally decades as the thing that was going to change the world... EVERYTHING was going to have a TV on it, cell phones most of all.
Fast forward to the modern day, with cell phone manufacturers having disputes with broadcasters over DVB-H fees, one just went ahead and built a full DVB-T receiver into their cell phones. It was a stunning development. Sure, it used a bit more power, but now you could watch REAL TV programs, not just the niche "mobile" broadcasts that you were supposed to want to watch on your cell phone. Of course broadcasters were put in their place by this move, and DVB-H fees have become more reasonable, and there's an effort to get real content out there. But either way, the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and people now want "real TV" on their cell phones, and a large number of them get just that these days, for a fairly small premium...
Of course ATSC in the US is much more complex than DVB-T in Europe, but never the less, you certainly can still find a handheld TV for under $100 http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/541548/Digital-Prism-ATSC-300-3-5/
So, it's only a question of time. Give it another year, and your smart phones will receive OTA broadcasts, for free. Sure, they might also support the premium in-network TV-like data system, but nobody will want it, and the niche audience won't be large enough to support the effort. And it'll go the way of the MPEG-1 D-Frames, and the "PDA Internet", as do all poorly thought-out kludges that are only stop-gaps for temporarily resource-starved platforms that can't yet play with the big boys.
That is all. You may now return to your endless and pointless bickering about whether or not it's worthwhile to buy a subsidized cell phone...
They're mostly to be found in those unimpressive resumes. You know the ones... very light on experience, not compellingly presented, and really poorly laid out. The ones which you (or your recruiting firm) promptly threw in the trash... That was them.
That was me 5+ years ago... Knowing more than most experts about everything from the ground up, but barely out of college, with just a bit of PC Tech experience which just didn't quite match-up with the check-list supplied to HR of any particular IT position.
What level of deception is required? Is a beggar with a sign that (incorrectly) says "Vietnam War Vet" a scammer?
How about one who just asks for money for food, but actually needs money for booze or other drugs? Beggar or thief?
If I can get two unique characters between point A and point B, and I can create a data tunnel, transfer anything over it.
A couple seconds of connection-time is good enough. A little more overhead, but the tunnel can stay up quite reliably.
It'll cost me a whopping $20 to get around that restriction. Not to mention plain HTTP obviously won't have any such restriction, and is more popular for tunneling anyhow.
I don't expect pharmaceutical companies will care all that much, since most antibiotics are generics these days. I doubt the market for powerful antibiotics to compete with MSRA is enough for them to bring their resources to bat.
The Chinese populace is certainly a lot more free than they were even in the recent past, though they're still certainly in poor shape.
This single incident in India is pretty damn trivial, and India has a pretty good level of freedom for it's population. Not everyone's definition of free speech matches with the US. In most of Europe, in particular, public discussion of ongoing trials is commonly forbidden, as are statements that hurt someone's reputation, no matter how factually accurate they might be. And yet, I don't see too many people complaining most of Europe is a police state...
Wrong. The DMCA and software patents certainly don't help matters, but that has nothing to do with the banking collapse (both of them...), the monopolization of the news media, the free reign of large corporations, etc. None of this is cause by active government interference, but rather, by the government ceding it's responsibility to regulate.
Wal-Mart's good PR, able to bring in shoppers with a whopping 12 cent discount was what got them into this position, but Wal-Mart is a monopoly today because its vast size has become self-sustaining. They can dictate prices and terms to their suppliers, and if they aren't happy, that disagreement may well single-handedly drive your company out of business.
Bull. The news media was much better at unbiased reporting in the past. Today, it's largely a token quote from both sides (no matter how factually incorrect one side's statement may be), and then back to whatever spin was desired...
There are only a few examples of propaganda you can possibly come up with, and it's a lousy comparison because such circumstances just don't exist today. There is no more Soviet Union, so we don't need the propaganda anymore. If you want to talk about modern wars, try comparing the news coverage of Vietnam and tell me we've got it so much better today...
Blatantly lying and distorting facts is NOT editorial. If it was, then you could can hide ANYTHING behind that label, with impunity.
That's completely baseless. There's nothing in existence to do this incredible job at filtering out the crap from the cream. With no filtering, it's he who yells the loudest, and that's what we see today... which explains Fox News quite succinctly.
Because it costs 6X as much?
Because the established option is quite a bit cheaper than the nearest alternative option?
Right... sorry. Big conspiracy! That's what it is!
The state of Israel exists only because of funding from the US. Without those billions in funding, they will cease to exist. And their nukes? It's accepted by just about everyone that the US basically gave them the enriched uranium they needed to build nukes... just as it's an open secret that they HAVE nukes in the first place, which they've never publicly admitted to.
Your 2 cars are a very significant omission from this, as they probably cost more than EVERYTHING ELSE in your home.
And as I just said to someone else, you don't notice how much the US produces because you don't buy construction equipment, turbines, locomotives, assembly-line equipment, industrial water treatment systems, Mainframes, MRI machines, industrial chemicals, mining equipment, marine equipment, etc.
No economist in the world will deny that China needs the US a lot more than the US needs China.
Everything is NOT made in China. China remains the #3 economy, a very large margin behind the US and Japan. The US remains the #1 manufacture in the world... almost double that of #2.
You think China makes "everything" because you see the little "Made in China" label on every $2 item you buy, and assume that's all there is to the world. You don't buy turbines, heavy construction machinery, commercial jets, etc. There are lots of Chinese business owners bemoaning the fact that "Everything is made in the USA and Japan."
H1-B is NOT immigration, it's indentured servitude... It's share-cropping in the high-tech world. It pushes down wages dramatically, and what happens when you undermine the profit motive of an field? People stop aspiring to it as a career.
I'd be fine with opening the borders. I'm NOT at all happy with the H1-B program.
Are you suggesting there weren't celebrities until the past couple decades, nor greedy people?
And if so, why is it that watching celebrities makes people want to go into every field, other than scientific, because we certainly don't have a lack of lawyers or MBAs...
No, actually it isn't.
His concerns are the same baseless nonsense we've been seeing for decades.
"Oh no! Country X [Japan/China/Russian] is going to take over the world economically!"
"Oh no! Country X did Y in space before us."
"Oh no! Country X has a larger Z [Jet/Atom smasher/Computer/Robot] than we do!"
It's motivated by two completely different groups. One is the creeping anti-Americanism as much from our allies as our enemies, which Obama talked about early in his term, and we see here on /. on a regular basis. The other is simply easily-scared Americans, who don't have any perspective, and all they know about the world is an arbitrary fact here and there...
I learned, early on, that History is the purveyor of context and understanding our modern world, not Science. If you want some perspective, ask a historian, not a scientist, especially a poor one with a good PR man like Tyson.
Yes there is. It's called MONEY. See: "barriers to entry".
It can be sustained with far less capital. It is cheap enough that damn-near anyone can participate. It can easily stay under the radar and go unnoticed by those who may be interested in stopping it. etc.
There certainly AREN'T numerous community radio stations, unless you're counting school-based efforts in there once again.
The non-profit stations (eg. NPR) simply use the PBS model, which requires both corporate and private sponsorship (rather than traditional advertising).
Life only sucks without money when you live somewhere that EVERYTHING requires money like the US.
Ask any poor Mexican subsistence farmers with a huge family how they're doing with practically no money to their name...
Being a world-famous British subject, while not an utter embarrassment, is all that is required for Knighthood today. See: Sir Elton John
I seriously doubt his theatre experience would have merited a knighthood, without his world-wide fame brought about by Star Trek: TNG.
This is nonsensical. You might as well say postal mail will become the cheap, fast communications method, while e-mail will become the expensive, slow method...
Webcasting requires a $100 PC and ~$15/mo for an internet connection (both of which you may already have) to support a dozen or so listeners.
AM/FM broadcasting requires a large antenna, relatively expensive high-power transmitter, etc.
The college radio stations your so quick to point to have the money to invest in these things because they're getting paid by students who want to get into the professional world of radio broadcasting... Once the profit goes away, the college stations have no reason to exist, and no way to pay for themselves, even with employees who will work for free.
No. There are still quality products (and they, too, are rather inexpensive).
What's happened is that it's now a minority of the market, as retailers like Wal-Mart keep pushing for cheaper and cheaper products, to hell with quality. Best Buy, Target, etc. followed suit, though often not to the same extent.
Indeed, it's the retail space that has changed. When looking at Home Depot for a refrigerator, I found an Americana ("by GE") for $399 and was astounded at how poorly it was designed. Sure, it minimally worked, but there was a lot of unusable space, the shelving was bare bones, and the whole thing felt very weak. Note, this was just a short while after my last Magic Chef refrigerator (also from Home Depot) failed just out of warranty... it was also a poorly designed and built piece of crap. After this, I drove a bit further out of my way to the nearest Sears, and found a very well-built, and infinitely better designed Kenmore refrigerator for the same $399, which has lasted a long time, and still shows no signs of having any issues. The difference? Simple: Home Depot keeps pushing for cheaper and cheaper crap, which they can sell at the same prices, making more profit on every unit. Sears is pretty clearly making slightly less profit on the deal, and insisting on good-quality products.
NO UNIX SYSTEM REQUIRES ADMIN RIGHTS TO INSTALL SOFTWARE. End of story.
Sure, the DEFAULT behavior is to install it system-wide, but with just a single flag, you can install every piece of software in any random subdirectory you want... generally $HOME/XYZ, or /usr/local/XYZ
No, they install under Program Files\XYZ, and Program Files\Common, and in the registry, and in various folders in \Windows, etc.
The registry is several times larger, requires several levels of indirection, is stored in a proprietary binary database format which can't be accessed by any application (see 'diff'), and is stored in a few very large files which are highly subject to corruption, hence every version of Windows since 98 saving 8+ copies of it.
Aren't we forgetting Li-Ion batteries?
Quality is still crap, you have no clue what the video might be from the link, and you're left to deal with the lousy interface for video playback. In other words, almost all of them continue to apply. It's a shame you can't read.
The scariest thing about all this, is that it was prophesied to a "T" on the Daily Show quite some time ago:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-june-19-2006/calvin-trillin
Commercial jets are a ripe target because they're barely holding together as it is, and hundreds of people won't survive the fall...
Otherwise, a bomb that will fit in your shoe or underwear probably won't even kill the guy sitting next to you.
What's to imagine? See the '96 Atlanta Olympic park bombing. See the Oklahoma City, Murrow Federal Building bombing. etc. People have small bombs going off in their driveways on a regular basis thanks to teenagers and introductory chemistry class.
If they really want to kill a bunch of people, the terrorists should start selling cheap cars...
YouTube's quality is crap (even with H.264), the interface is crap, the comments are crap, the recommendations are crap, the URL scheme is crap... Do I need to continue?
YouTube is the lowest-common-denominator... Anything you find there, can be found in vastly better quality elsewhere, in a better format, etc.
I dream of a world without YouTube, and I doubt it'll take long for it to happen.
I guess the BOLD TEXT wasn't nearly enough emphasis...
Do some reading on how much it costs to employ someone... While the salary is majority of the cost, a substantial fraction is paid out by the company directly that the employee never sees.
And last I checked, ~$150,000 was the quoted national average for a Unix Systems Administrator.
The reason for the confusion is becoming much more clear... The real world is not putting a bunch of PCs in your house and promising they will keep running... I can certainly understand your situation, I did plenty of contract work for half-assed small companies years ago as well. When (or perhaps "if") you get a real job in the corporate world, you'll find that not even the pencil on your desk costs less than 25 cents/hr. Policies and procedures, management sign-offs, the realities of infrastructure and maintenance, and maintaining everything so that the second it's needed, it's going to work 100% correctly, 100% of the time, completely changes the game. It seems so simple from the outside... Reality is much different.