Call me a kook, but if I wanted to save money, let's ax something really worthless like The Department of Education. It gets [b]3.3 TIMES[/b] NASA's budget, but the kids are dumber today than they were when Carter formed the DoEd thirty odd years ago!
I agreed with up until you latched onto this right-wing propaganda point...
Adjusted for inflation, public school districts are getting slightly less money than they did 30 years ago, while at the same time, the population of school-children has increased by something like 30% (varies depending on area). K-12 Public education is in a terrible state, but it very likely has a lot to do with the fact that politicians are only too happy to squeeze money from school budgets, rather than raise taxes, or cut from anywhere else that it would be more immediately noticed (rather than 20 years later).
The US can't afford a manned space program any more.
But China can?
The Iraq war has cost $3 trillion,
The most recent figures I saw put that at $1 trillion, not 3, but either way, that's a blip on the radar. Hell, the first space race took place DURING the height of the Vietnam war, which was far more expensive and difficult in every sense of the word. The trip was also occurring with brand-new technology, no knowledge of the challenges faced, etc., etc. This time around it's going to be much cheaper, and substantially less difficult (though certainly not easy).
we're headed into a recession, and it's going to take years to unwind the housing bubble.
Since WWII, there have been several recessions, but none have lasted longer than 18 months. You're suggesting this is going to be an unprecedented DEPRESSION, the first in 80 years, which seems extremely unlikely...
The next administration is going to have to focus on digging out of the hole left by the Bush administration.
This recession should be fading by the time the next president takes office. And besides that, many administrations have had to dig out of the mess caused by their predecessors, but that doesn't stop them, or more specifically, the nation, from accomplishing other goals at the same time.
You can bundle all the patches & service-packs you want into a slipstream image and install everything at the same time.
Sorry, but no. I've tried it, it DOESN'T WORK.
Service packs slipstream just fine. However, it takes endless weeks of trial-and-error to determine which hotfixes can be integrated without completely screwing things up... There are a great many that just can't be integrated, or the system will perform badly, and future attempts to update normally will fail until you've tracked down the bad actor, and removed all traces of it. It's clearly not worth the effort.
I would, instead, recommend copying all the available hotfixes and SRPs to a USB drive, so they can be installed offline, and are quite easily added to when new patches are released.
If Microsoft set every fresh Windows install to connect to only Microsoft.com on the Internet until either Microsoft.com, or the console, or some other specific named/numbered host said that Windows is "safely* patched", then this race condition would not be a problem.
...until someone found an exploit for whatever system it is that restricts connections to other sites.
Windows XP SP2 and up already enables the Windows firewall by default, and disallows any incoming connections, which is the most that can be expected.
As far as I'm concerned Windows 2K was the last usable Microsoft OS.
I happen to agree, but mainly for reasons of performance, memory footprint, and increasing levels of indirection necessary to do ANYTHING... NT4 was better (simpler, and faster), but 2000 wasn't significantly worse.
XP's activation process is infuriating, because it makes you jump through so many hoops to transfer the license from one machine to another.
You know, Windows requires a LOT of add-on software to function. I don't think throwing one more tool into the mix (to defeat XP activation) is that big of a hoop. Unlike others, I do it for practical and principle reasons, though, unlike many others... I refuse to beg Microsoft to LET ME swap a failed motherboard.
"What colour hair does the (2+four)/3 girl from the left have?"
"On the internet, only CAPTCHAs know you're a dog." Because, of course, there aren't any color-blind people on the internet...
First, hair color is a terrible test... You've got about a 24% chance of getting it right without looking...
Putting together a set of images with full extensive descriptions such as that would be prohibitive, while numbers and letters can be pretty easily automatically generated.
After all, why else would you go after the people with more money rather than the people with the most infringements.
It's merely coincidence that the people with "the most money" happen to be the people behind the service in-question...
Proving that a company's business model inherently includes/requires copyright infringement, by their own employees, is very strong evidence in court. This shows that Viacom isn't looking to fine a few people, they're looking to completely shut-down YouTube, via the courts (ala Napster).
The problem is the way we tend to envision solving the issue, which is stuck in the gasoline mindset.
Agreed...
However, I think it would make sense to swap the entire battery
Uhh... No! "Standard" batteries basically means "crappy" batteries. You get a new car after a few years, when battery technology has improved, but sorry, you have to use the old "standard" batteries to be able to fuel-up anywhere.
And do you really think a tiny gas station in the middle of nowhere is going to be able to afford to buy several hundred batteries, to keep on-hand? They need to have enough spares to service all the cars that roll in during rush hour on a busy week-end, since the time to charge the depleted batteries will be substantial.
A "microprocessor" that reports capacity is ripe for tampering. And since the cost of a new set of batteries is most of the cost of an electric car, there's a LOT of money on the line. As a matter of fact, car-swapping would probably be more of a practical solution than battery-swapping, and I'm sure everyone can imagine what kind of reservations people are going to have about that... Swapping something hidden, like batteries, just hides the fact that you're essentially trading in your car every time you stop... It simply isn't going to work.
Despite your earlier declaration, it seems you, too, are just as stuck in the gasoline mind-set as everyone else.
Consider this... The ONLY reason we HAVE gas stations is because fuel is terribly dangerous. You need a very tightly controlled environment to prevent it from causing a city block to explode... Honestly, who WANTS to drive around, looking for some filthy, high traffic gas station, with disgusting restrooms, very few food and drinks, vastly inflated prices, etc. So that they can stand outdoors, exposed to the elements, for 10 minutes, as their vehicle takes a "drink"? We do it because it's necessary, NOT because anybody likes the gas-station model.
If a large car company wanted to introduce an electric car with a 300 mile range, you'd IMMEDIATELY start hearing about deals between GM and McDonalds to split the cost (and profits) of installing recharge stations in the parking lot of every McDonalds along every major highway in the country.
I don't know about you, but I don't tend to carry much food (...or a portable toilet) with me when I drive cross-country, so I don't just stop at gas stations for 5 minutes. I'd say most people stop to eat, drink, and use the restroom about every 300 miles, anyhow. If the recharge time on an electric car (with a 300 miles range) can be just brought down to, say, 45 minutes, that model would then SAVE time (for most people) over the traditional gas station model.
However, it would come to a grinding halt if I tried to make too many P2P connections - not a matter of bandwidth, I think, just too many connections to keep track of. Then again, that old box only had 16MiB of RAM. A K6/2 would have, what... 64ish?
I would suspect a software bug.
16MB should be ample. I used a (12MHz?) x386 with just 4MBs of RAM as a router several years ago, with no such problems.
General OSes have many, many libraries in order to run any program you throw at it.
A library not being actively used by a program, has no effect on the system. "less code" on disk has no effect on anything, other than the necessary size of the disk.
Similarly, a kernel that has been stripped of unnecessary components, versus included those components and simply never utilizing them for anything, affects only the size on disk and the amount of RAM required. Stability can't possibly be affected.
You sound like the type of person who removes (non-suid/sgid) binaries from a Unix system (most commonly: the compiliers) in a vain attempt to make it more secure...
Your stripped down OpenBSD is essentially a custom version of OpenBSD for embedded use cases.
No, it really isn't. There's absolutely NOTHING about it that could possibly make it more or less stable. I simply removed unneeded binaries and associated libs to save disk space. The remaining necessary binaries and libraries are completely unmodified.
I've gotten to wondering why it's necessary to reboot these devices so frequently, like every few days.
It's cheap, fast development... Not bothering to pay attention to correctness, not watching for memory leaks, etc., etc.
It shouldn't be that way, of course. I got an old K6-2 system, underclocked it to 100MHz, removed CPU fan and replaced the PSU fan with a very slow and quiet model to make a nearly-silent 8watt system. Then installed OpenBSD on a 32MB CF card (stripped of unnecessary binaries for size, but otherwise completely normal), and have been using that for years. It will run indefinitely, without a reboot. My record for uptime so far is 5 months, and it's only that short because of power outages, and I don't feel the need for a UPS for my router...
It seems like routers, purpose-built with an embedded OS, should be the most stable devices on my network.
There's nothing about being "an embedded OS" that should make it any more or less stable.
That market is killing Dell right now. IBM left the entire consumer market completely probably because they saw what was happening.
No. Dell is killing itself. It's been perpetually mismanaged for a long time, and their policies have pushed innumerable people to competitors. After a while, people catch on to schemes like perpetually rotating sales, and don't fall for it any longer.
The first iMacs were the first computers to use USB
No. MOST (if not all) PCs sold shortly before the iMac was introduced, included a pair of USB ports on the motherboard.
At most, the marketing of the iMac served to boost the popularity of USB ports, but it remains to be seen if that would have happened, just a bit slower, without Apple.
AAC is their default music format and was invented by the people who created MP3 to be the successor to MP3.
What's the alternative? Apple isn't in the business of creating codecs, and lossy compression is hard and expensive. Before they latched onto MPEG-4, they were just buying proprietary codecs from Sorenson instead... Apple had to use something, and there's nothing in-house they could have gone for.
Besides that, Apple has a substantial vested interested in MPEG-4. They have a few patents in the pool, and the MP4 container is simply a vastly slimmed down version of MOV.
And saying that AAC was "invented by the people who created MP3" is a big stretch. AAC was standardized by MPEG, but it's actual developers don't have a lot of overlap with the developers of MP3. Similarly, the development of MP2 doesn't have much overlap with the development of MP3.
I don't know why you'd suspect a Dvorak keyboard. The # sign isn't moved at all, and it's really not close to the apostrophe at all.
For a Dvorak keyboard, you look for words spelled correctly, but which make no sense in context... Happens a LOT, since all vowels are directly adjacent.
With a credit card, VISA isn't giving you your money back. By LAW, you don't have to pay a disputed charge. You don't give them the money in the first place so they can't "give it back".
With a debit card you are unprotected. Your money is gone. IF the bank wants to give it back to you, they can. If they want to run you through the wringer and make you jump hoops, they can. And then they can say you must have authorized the charge for it to happen, and sorry, your account is now overdrawn.
This is utterly wrong. The regulations on credit cards and debit cards (or other bank wire transfers) are only slightly different. Mainly, with a debit, you are required to report it in a timely manner (no more than a week after you receive your bill).
The other differences aren't relevant here, and are similarly trivial.
But they won't provide "instant watching" to Mac and Linux users
Well, what's your solution? They use WMV DRM, and Microsoft isn't about to make a Media Player for Linux. Switching to RealPlayer or Quicktime -compatible DRM would be a worse option in most respects.
Is Netflix doomed to write their own multi-platform media player to get Win/Mac/Linux support in there, with some form of DRM companies will accept? Sounds like a LOT more work than keeping a feature (Profiles) they already have.
I think a more useful feature on this model would be to use a USB port to connect an external USB storage enclosure and turn it into a NAS as a bonus. With a Linux OS, that'd be pretty easy to configure.
Easy enough to configure, but sure to max-out the low-speed CPU in the router instantly.
Packetizing data at full 100Mbps uses serious CPU time, which this box doesn't have. And if you want any kind of security for the data, like SFTP accesses, just forget the whole thing.
If you want a SAN, grab an old computer. Don't try to force a router into a file server role.
So sending some or all of the upstream packets on the DSL link while getting all the incoming traffic on the cable link could be a win.
The last figures I read (from a non-authoritative source--potentially incorrect), a couple years ago said about 80% of consumer-level ISPs do egress filtering that blocks packets with source addresses outside their local IP range. I believe an even higher number, if not practically all, block source-routed packets, which would be the next best option...
Assuming that's correct, you're not in very good shape with multi-homing between disparate ISPs on a consumer-level connection. Something just a bit more advanced than weighted round-robin connections is probably the best you'll be able to do.
the maximum punishment for copyright infringment should be smaller than the minimum punishment for murder.
That's... incredibly arbitrary.
First off, "Murder" can have innumerable extenuating circumstances, as can most any other crime. For example, anyone who feels their life is threatened, but the circumstances weren't immediate to justify their actions, can be charged with, and convicted of murder. Things like that are primarily why high "minimum" sentences are a bad idea.
Secondly, copyright infringement isn't necessarily a victimless crime. You're bringing up absolutely trivial examples of copyright infringement, and acting as if they would inherently merit the maximum sentence, when they obviously would not.
Third, everyone SCREAMS for harsher criminal penalties for white-collar crime, right after a CEO or the like rips-off hundreds of millions of dollars from individuals. But when it's individuals ripping off companies, like this, any punishment is too strict for the public.
10 years is just the maximum possible penalty. In a few extreme cases, such as, say, the head of a large-scale commercial piracy ring, I could see it occasionally being appropriate.
I've seen cases of murderers getting less than this.
You've seen murders getting much more than that, too, however.
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No, of course not: http://www.hitler.org/artifacts/volkswagen/
I agreed with up until you latched onto this right-wing propaganda point...
Adjusted for inflation, public school districts are getting slightly less money than they did 30 years ago, while at the same time, the population of school-children has increased by something like 30% (varies depending on area). K-12 Public education is in a terrible state, but it very likely has a lot to do with the fact that politicians are only too happy to squeeze money from school budgets, rather than raise taxes, or cut from anywhere else that it would be more immediately noticed (rather than 20 years later).
But China can?
The most recent figures I saw put that at $1 trillion, not 3, but either way, that's a blip on the radar. Hell, the first space race took place DURING the height of the Vietnam war, which was far more expensive and difficult in every sense of the word. The trip was also occurring with brand-new technology, no knowledge of the challenges faced, etc., etc. This time around it's going to be much cheaper, and substantially less difficult (though certainly not easy).
Since WWII, there have been several recessions, but none have lasted longer than 18 months. You're suggesting this is going to be an unprecedented DEPRESSION, the first in 80 years, which seems extremely unlikely...
This recession should be fading by the time the next president takes office. And besides that, many administrations have had to dig out of the mess caused by their predecessors, but that doesn't stop them, or more specifically, the nation, from accomplishing other goals at the same time.
Sorry, but no. I've tried it, it DOESN'T WORK.
Service packs slipstream just fine. However, it takes endless weeks of trial-and-error to determine which hotfixes can be integrated without completely screwing things up... There are a great many that just can't be integrated, or the system will perform badly, and future attempts to update normally will fail until you've tracked down the bad actor, and removed all traces of it. It's clearly not worth the effort.
I would, instead, recommend copying all the available hotfixes and SRPs to a USB drive, so they can be installed offline, and are quite easily added to when new patches are released.
Windows XP SP2 and up already enables the Windows firewall by default, and disallows any incoming connections, which is the most that can be expected.
I happen to agree, but mainly for reasons of performance, memory footprint, and increasing levels of indirection necessary to do ANYTHING... NT4 was better (simpler, and faster), but 2000 wasn't significantly worse.
You know, Windows requires a LOT of add-on software to function. I don't think throwing one more tool into the mix (to defeat XP activation) is that big of a hoop. Unlike others, I do it for practical and principle reasons, though, unlike many others... I refuse to beg Microsoft to LET ME swap a failed motherboard.
"On the internet, only CAPTCHAs know you're a dog." Because, of course, there aren't any color-blind people on the internet...
First, hair color is a terrible test... You've got about a 24% chance of getting it right without looking...
Putting together a set of images with full extensive descriptions such as that would be prohibitive, while numbers and letters can be pretty easily automatically generated.
It's merely coincidence that the people with "the most money" happen to be the people behind the service in-question...
Proving that a company's business model inherently includes/requires copyright infringement, by their own employees, is very strong evidence in court. This shows that Viacom isn't looking to fine a few people, they're looking to completely shut-down YouTube, via the courts (ala Napster).
Agreed...
Uhh... No! "Standard" batteries basically means "crappy" batteries. You get a new car after a few years, when battery technology has improved, but sorry, you have to use the old "standard" batteries to be able to fuel-up anywhere.
And do you really think a tiny gas station in the middle of nowhere is going to be able to afford to buy several hundred batteries, to keep on-hand? They need to have enough spares to service all the cars that roll in during rush hour on a busy week-end, since the time to charge the depleted batteries will be substantial.
A "microprocessor" that reports capacity is ripe for tampering. And since the cost of a new set of batteries is most of the cost of an electric car, there's a LOT of money on the line. As a matter of fact, car-swapping would probably be more of a practical solution than battery-swapping, and I'm sure everyone can imagine what kind of reservations people are going to have about that... Swapping something hidden, like batteries, just hides the fact that you're essentially trading in your car every time you stop...
It simply isn't going to work.
Despite your earlier declaration, it seems you, too, are just as stuck in the gasoline mind-set as everyone else.
Consider this... The ONLY reason we HAVE gas stations is because fuel is terribly dangerous. You need a very tightly controlled environment to prevent it from causing a city block to explode... Honestly, who WANTS to drive around, looking for some filthy, high traffic gas station, with disgusting restrooms, very few food and drinks, vastly inflated prices, etc. So that they can stand outdoors, exposed to the elements, for 10 minutes, as their vehicle takes a "drink"? We do it because it's necessary, NOT because anybody likes the gas-station model.
If a large car company wanted to introduce an electric car with a 300 mile range, you'd IMMEDIATELY start hearing about deals between GM and McDonalds to split the cost (and profits) of installing recharge stations in the parking lot of every McDonalds along every major highway in the country.
I don't know about you, but I don't tend to carry much food (...or a portable toilet) with me when I drive cross-country, so I don't just stop at gas stations for 5 minutes. I'd say most people stop to eat, drink, and use the restroom about every 300 miles, anyhow. If the recharge time on an electric car (with a 300 miles range) can be just brought down to, say, 45 minutes, that model would then SAVE time (for most people) over the traditional gas station model.
I would suspect a software bug.
16MB should be ample. I used a (12MHz?) x386 with just 4MBs of RAM as a router several years ago, with no such problems.
A library not being actively used by a program, has no effect on the system. "less code" on disk has no effect on anything, other than the necessary size of the disk.
Similarly, a kernel that has been stripped of unnecessary components, versus included those components and simply never utilizing them for anything, affects only the size on disk and the amount of RAM required. Stability can't possibly be affected.
You sound like the type of person who removes (non-suid/sgid) binaries from a Unix system (most commonly: the compiliers) in a vain attempt to make it more secure...
No, it really isn't. There's absolutely NOTHING about it that could possibly make it more or less stable. I simply removed unneeded binaries and associated libs to save disk space. The remaining necessary binaries and libraries are completely unmodified.
It's cheap, fast development... Not bothering to pay attention to correctness, not watching for memory leaks, etc., etc.
It shouldn't be that way, of course. I got an old K6-2 system, underclocked it to 100MHz, removed CPU fan and replaced the PSU fan with a very slow and quiet model to make a nearly-silent 8watt system. Then installed OpenBSD on a 32MB CF card (stripped of unnecessary binaries for size, but otherwise completely normal), and have been using that for years. It will run indefinitely, without a reboot. My record for uptime so far is 5 months, and it's only that short because of power outages, and I don't feel the need for a UPS for my router...
There's nothing about being "an embedded OS" that should make it any more or less stable.
Let's see... Cheap residential roof-top PV panels are about 12% efficient. 12*40 would give us... 500% efficient solar panels!
High-end solar panels used by satellites are nearly 40% efficient. I'm sure NASA would love to get their hands on 1,600% efficient solar panels, too.
Next time, wait until there's a REAL article on the tech, not a completely information-free and bullshit press release.
No. Dell is killing itself. It's been perpetually mismanaged for a long time, and their policies have pushed innumerable people to competitors. After a while, people catch on to schemes like perpetually rotating sales, and don't fall for it any longer.
No. MOST (if not all) PCs sold shortly before the iMac was introduced, included a pair of USB ports on the motherboard.
At most, the marketing of the iMac served to boost the popularity of USB ports, but it remains to be seen if that would have happened, just a bit slower, without Apple.
What's the alternative? Apple isn't in the business of creating codecs, and lossy compression is hard and expensive. Before they latched onto MPEG-4, they were just buying proprietary codecs from Sorenson instead... Apple had to use something, and there's nothing in-house they could have gone for.
Besides that, Apple has a substantial vested interested in MPEG-4. They have a few patents in the pool, and the MP4 container is simply a vastly slimmed down version of MOV.
And saying that AAC was "invented by the people who created MP3" is a big stretch. AAC was standardized by MPEG, but it's actual developers don't have a lot of overlap with the developers of MP3. Similarly, the development of MP2 doesn't have much overlap with the development of MP3.
tar tf archive.tar | while read FILENAME ; do
rm "$FILENAME"
done
Yes, that would be the main drawback to Dvorak keyboards, and it's not all that bad. There are plenty of other advantages to more than make up for it.
I don't know why you'd suspect a Dvorak keyboard. The # sign isn't moved at all, and it's really not close to the apostrophe at all.
For a Dvorak keyboard, you look for words spelled correctly, but which make no sense in context... Happens a LOT, since all vowels are directly adjacent.
ie. "It's very hat outside"
I was using it (with FF3) yesterday. Perhaps you need to upgrade AVG.
This is utterly wrong. The regulations on credit cards and debit cards (or other bank wire transfers) are only slightly different. Mainly, with a debit, you are required to report it in a timely manner (no more than a week after you receive your bill).
The other differences aren't relevant here, and are similarly trivial.
Well, what's your solution? They use WMV DRM, and Microsoft isn't about to make a Media Player for Linux. Switching to RealPlayer or Quicktime -compatible DRM would be a worse option in most respects.
Is Netflix doomed to write their own multi-platform media player to get Win/Mac/Linux support in there, with some form of DRM companies will accept? Sounds like a LOT more work than keeping a feature (Profiles) they already have.
That might be a red flag, but not necessarily true.
See: Lieberman. Democratic VP candidate in 2000. Kicked out of the Democratic party circa 2006 for being too 'Republicany'. Currently an Independent.
Easy enough to configure, but sure to max-out the low-speed CPU in the router instantly.
Packetizing data at full 100Mbps uses serious CPU time, which this box doesn't have. And if you want any kind of security for the data, like SFTP accesses, just forget the whole thing.
If you want a SAN, grab an old computer. Don't try to force a router into a file server role.
The last figures I read (from a non-authoritative source--potentially incorrect), a couple years ago said about 80% of consumer-level ISPs do egress filtering that blocks packets with source addresses outside their local IP range. I believe an even higher number, if not practically all, block source-routed packets, which would be the next best option...
Assuming that's correct, you're not in very good shape with multi-homing between disparate ISPs on a consumer-level connection. Something just a bit more advanced than weighted round-robin connections is probably the best you'll be able to do.
That's... incredibly arbitrary.
First off, "Murder" can have innumerable extenuating circumstances, as can most any other crime. For example, anyone who feels their life is threatened, but the circumstances weren't immediate to justify their actions, can be charged with, and convicted of murder. Things like that are primarily why high "minimum" sentences are a bad idea.
Secondly, copyright infringement isn't necessarily a victimless crime. You're bringing up absolutely trivial examples of copyright infringement, and acting as if they would inherently merit the maximum sentence, when they obviously would not.
Third, everyone SCREAMS for harsher criminal penalties for white-collar crime, right after a CEO or the like rips-off hundreds of millions of dollars from individuals. But when it's individuals ripping off companies, like this, any punishment is too strict for the public.
10 years is just the maximum possible penalty. In a few extreme cases, such as, say, the head of a large-scale commercial piracy ring, I could see it occasionally being appropriate.
You've seen murders getting much more than that, too, however.