I'm not sure why you think those brief statements indicate that Uber drivers are employees rather than contractors. What you wrote has nothing to do with if they are contractors or employees.
>The driver's fares are set by Uber Why can't I hire a contractor where I say how much I pay? That's usually part of the contract. It's most of the point of the contract.
>Driver's have to abide by Uber's code of conduct Contractors have to conform to the requirements in the contract in order to continue the contract. That's the other half of the contract. "If you do some specific things (e.g. drive people from place to place) I will do some specific things. (e.g. pay you money)"
>Uber terminates drivers who break the code of conduct Yes, that's how contracts work. If you don't abide by the terms of the contract, the contract is voided.
>Uber sets a minimum rating that the driver must maintain I just covered this in my previous line.
>Uber provides the clients (riders) for the driver So? This is how contracts work. If I contract a company to install an OS on hardware I can then provide them with hardware to install the OS on.
>The driver must pick up any rider assigned to them. So? We've covered this already. As part of the contract they agree to pick up riders. Besides, this isn't even a requirement.
>The driver must drive the route the Uber app plots So? If I say that I want the contract to install using physical media instead of a netboot, does that make them an employee?
>Uber sends recommendations for improvement to the driver So? If I hire a contractor to maintain my yard, I can also tell them to use a string trimmer on a section that is too steep. That doesn't make them a direct employee.
While your statements are factually correct they ignore several critical pieces of information that leaves readers with the wrong impression.
The $70-$80 is for flight hours, not hours worked.
You will spend as much time commuting and on preflight and postflight tasks as you will flying.
You will be on standby for a lot of the non-working time as well, where you can do little else.
Starting at a major carrier is a mid-career job, not a start of career job. You won't get this job until you have been in the industry for 10 to 15 years.
Another semi-random note: The pilot experience requirements would not have changed the Colgan crash. The captain had 3379 hours and the first officer had 2244 hours; both were well above the proposed new minimums. I use as a basic standard for good legislation that if a new law is created in response to an incident, the incident must have been prevented if the new law had already been in effect.
Even if they remove the stickers, they will just point to the ToS that says if you open your device, you're SoL in terms of warranty. Like Apple does.
Unfortunately for the manufacturers that part of ToS is not enforcable since it violates the law. Despite having put some writing on their product and documentation and websites, they are legally required to honor that warranty.
There is a segment of the avionics industry that isn't regulated. Experimental aircraft. I speak (honestly I'm typing, but if you wanted I could read this whole comment out loud) from a position of some knowledge on this. I am a commercial pilot and a flight instructor and am also building my own experimental aircraft. (Go Velocity! - http://www.velocityaircraft.com/
A TSO'd two panel glass avionics display consisting of about 8 to 10 inch PFD (Primary Flight Display) and MFD (Multi-Functional Display) will cost you in the neighborhood of $70,000 for a certificated system. (http://www.avidyne.com/products/release-9/r9-cirrus.asp) An experimental setup with similar capabilities can be had for perhaps $15,000. (http://www.dynonavionics.com/ http://www.grtavionics.com/ )
While I may personally think that the FAA has been overly cautious about allowing unknown devices on commercial flights, I would like to point out two things:
First, their goal is to make things SAFE. Not comfortable. Not convenient. Not mobile-app-enabled. Safe. And they have done a heck of a job of that. Look at the safety record of the commercial aviation industry in the US. It's incredible. More people die on the way to or from the airport than die after they get there.
Second, if device manufacturers wanted to pony up the cash to certify their devices they could. If Apple, Samsung and Motorola really wanted to they could pay to have their devices certified. But it's easier to simply blame the FAA. There is no budget in the FAA for certifying these devices. If they spent the money on this instead of other things the accident rate would go up. What do you think is the right choice for an organization whose goal is to make aviation safe?
I know what you mean. Here I am stationed in Iraq, I've got people going out every day who are possibly going to get really killed. We find explosives, get shot at, you name it. It's all VERY real. But there are enough people who are so totally insulated from this sort of thing that the EVE Online game is vastly more important to them.
On the other hand, this should spur someone from Darfur to post about the genocide there. Or one of the congo nations where life is so horrible.
What does it say about us as a species that there is such a range of lifestyles? On one end is the people where EVE Online takeovers might be the most important thing to happen to them all year. At the other end are refugees who get killed by the thousands and would have been starving and diseased anyway.
Is this disparity good or bad? Is there any limit to how much disparity is good? Would we be better off if everybody had similar worries and we were all about the same level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
They are a huge company. It's not a problem of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's hand #27FH53 not knowing what hand #9CJ46DH is doing.
For all of the organizing principles behind this cathedral, disagreements between what one sub-organization wants and what another sub-organization wants are bound to arise.
The people actually selling product, they want to retain ALL rights. This will allow them to generate more profit with 0 additional expense.
The people making the media player portion want their software to be more useful. This requires all sorts of media to be available. So they want as much content available as possible. Preferably for free.
It takes time for the diverse needs that are in conflict to get brought up to the level of management that can arbitrate between them. And it costs money to do so; the company as a whole is better off (i.e. more profitable) if they ignore these types of conflicts until it becomes a problem.
I was in Iraq for a year as part of the United States Army. Internet access was always a little iffy, since it's expensive and the troops have a very high demand for it. There were several ways to get internet access while I was there, some of which are still around and some of which are not.
#1: US Government provided independent internet cafes. Status: Removed. Reason: Not cost effective. They decided to go with a consolidated large provider instead.
I ran one of these while I was deployed. The closest I got to 'filtering' was running a caching ad-blocking squid proxy. I did this for speed reasons, because *I* wanted to provide my Soldiers with fast internet access. (PS: f*ck doubleclick.net)
#2: US Government provided Internet Cafes. Status: Still around. This is one of the biggest and most commonly accessable internet accesses in Iraq. The US Government contracted for some massive amount of bandwidth through some satellite provider. You can't bring in your own laptop, you have to use their locked-down desktops. But I didn't see any politically motivated filtering going on, and I checked.
#3: Privately funded Internet Access. Status: Still around, but usually kept on the quiet.
Unit commanders occasionally try to stop them out of generalized fear, but I never saw one go away. It's not against any regulations. It's just expensive. ($1400/month for 128u/512d)
#4: Contractor run public Internet Cafes. Status: Still around.
If you can make money at it, someone will try to do it. Zaid (http://www.russianwolf.com/) was one that I dealt with on a regular basis. He not only provided the hardware for our cafe, but he ran several others on a for-pay basis. ($20 would let you browse for an hour) Filtering was not in place in any of his cafes. Not cost effective. Consider this my plug for him. He's a good guy.
#5: US Government 'NIPR-net' (Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) access. Status: Still around. This is what people use for official communications and internet access. This is for non-secret data only. The closest they got to filtering was publishing what unit and individual computer was browsing the internet more than anybody else on a weekly basis. This network was VERY overloaded and SLOW SLOW SLOW. But it was filtered for sexual content I think, not that I ever tried. But it was not filtered for political content.
In summary, the common methods that people use to access the internet in Iraq are not filtered for content of a political nature. What the Marines may be doing is not something I know, but I saw plenty of Marines using these other access methods that I know were not filtered. Any filtering is either a new thing or isolated to a small unit. It was not the policy of the Department of Defense to filter internet access for political content as of Feb2005 (when I was there last)
Way back when, I decided to join the Army National Guard. I thought it would be fun to have a non-comupter related 'side job'. I was a tanker (M1 series tanks). It's a lot of fun, you can learn a lot of essential skills. Unfortunately... I've been away from my job for over a year already, and I've got another 4 months in Iraq before we even start to head home.
My skills are crumbling, I'm not able to keep up on new technology, basically I feel like the world is passing me by. Be very careful before you join the military. It seems like a good idea, but remember that they can call you up for something like this. (By the way, being a linguist, or a cook, or a CS guy won't help. They will shove you into an infantry slot just because you are a warm body.)
Why should 'rich boy' and 'poor boy' have a similar house? They have a 3X difference in their incomes! If I started making 3 times what I do now, I'd live in a much better house.
I do agree with you that there are expenses that are somewhat fixed. If they both have a prescription for some drug, 'poor boy' can't take 33% as much as the rich guy; the pharmacy cannot charge them different prices. Food prices? If necessary, it's possible to buy plenty of food fairly cheap.
The problem I see is that everybody thinks that poor people should have the same posessions and experiences as rich people. I'm not going on a Australian vacation because I don't have as much money as other people. I don't eat out every night because I don't have enough money. I blame that on my lack of hard work (I'm here posting on slashdot instead of earning money) and not regressive taxes.
For the most part, prices of things necessary to living DO scale down. I could get by on a vehicle that cost 25% as much as the one I currently have (and my current vechicle is nothing fancy, a '92 GMC Sonoma). I could easily cut my food budget by 50% and still eat healthier than I do now. I could reduce my rent by 75% and still have a perfectly good place to live. And if you cut my income by 75%, I would not be paying any income taxes at all.
In summary, you are right that there are some fixed costs that you can't scale down, however almost all do scale well enough that most of the people who complain about the taxes being 'regressive' would need only scale back their unnecessary purchases. Dining out, big-screen TVs, fancy cars and cable TV are a few prime examples. Purchases like those are (in my opinion, of course) the real reason those without money in the US tend to stay without money. And before anybody gets all worked up about it, there ARE those who do scrimp and save and don't or can't make it on their own.
Yes, the US Government is unfair to some. But the vast majority gets what they pay for, no more, no less.
Your example has one huge misleading item in it. The percentage of their income that 'Rich Boy' and 'Poor Boy' pay for their cars. In your example, 'Rich Boy' pays $60k for the car and $3k for tax, which you say is 1%. That means that he earns $300k/yr, and just spent 20% of his annual income on a vehicle. So he pays 20% on the vehicle and 1% in taxes. For 'Poor Boy', he's paying $20k on his car and $1k in taxes, which you say is 5% of his income. That means he earns $20k/yr, and just spent 100% of his annual income on a vehicle. No wonder he's poor. If he spent the same percentage of his income on his vehicle (20%) that 'Rich Boy' did (which would be $4k) he'd be paying the same 1% of his income to taxes that 'Rich Boy' did.
I'm online through NSS-6 right now. I've used it for VOIP, videoconferencing, web browsing, interactive ssh, etc. The 600ms+ latency this thing has is annoying, but doesn't make it totally unusable. The pricing is high, but for even a small group of people it's affordable enough. It's better than nothing.
After a quick glance at it, the only insightful thing I can think of is that since this is just a TCP based attack, you could start doing it on any connection that is going to have ongoing TCP traffic. For example: SMTP traffic. To be more specific, let's take the example of somebody you don't like (We'll call them Mr. Spammer for now) initiates a TCP connection to you, on some random port (let's pick port 25) You watch the traffic, and once you determine that the traffic is coming from Mr. Spammer, you initiate the attack using the existing TCP connection. This would be a good tarpit for not only slowing him down, but stopping that open relay or paid-for client machine.
On the other hand, it was one I purchased recently (about 4 months ago) so perhaps it's not an issue to toatal quality, but an issue of quality right now at some plant? It was DDR memory. I've never had a problem with normal SDRAM, EDO or FPM.
Kind of funny. I didn't do too bad taking care of my teeth when I was younger. Got cavities, got them filled, etc. But in the last year or so I've started taking better care of them. I used to brush once a day, sometiems twice, and floss once a week or once a month, VERY rarely. Now I brush twice a day usually, sometimes three times a day, and I floss most days. I even do the mouthwash thing a couple of times a week.
But I hadn't done my after-luch floss/brush thing yet today, so thanks, xtermz, for reminding me.
Things like this make me feel good about the human race. Sure, we're rather argumentative, and spend most of our time fighting ourselves, but there is a chance that one day we won't. Right now we behave like a bored puppy that's been stuck inside the small kennel all of it's life. We might find something to do one of these days. We are finally figuring out how to look out the wire mesh that makes up our door, and noticing that there are other wire mesh cages out there. Whee!!! We (as a race) are growing. We're improving ourselves. We don't have very good control of our parts yet. (our "USA" part is about to launch an attack on our "Iran" part) but we *are* opening our eyes, and we *are* looking out there.
Sheesh. I am *amazed* at the amount of disinformation most of these people are posting. Yes, I know it's slashdot, but WOW. Feel free to e-mail me with any other questions if you want.
I am qualified to answer this question because my mom has Starband internet, and I often end up doing things on her computer for her. (She runs RedHat linux and windows dual-boot)
For IRC, it'll be fine if you use low-scroll rooms. but if they are fast, it'll probably be a bit hard to follow.
For command-line apps and whatnot, it's a tad annoying, since everything you do has a 1/2 delay at least. If you are used to typing without immediate feedback, it's OK.
For X apps, or VNC, it's pretty nasty. If you just have a quick change or something to do, it's doable, but you won't be wanting to do much at all over that connection.
If you consider remotely administering a server to be connecting with VNC or whatever windows has as it's new remote desktop thing, then you are going to be dissapointed for any task that takes more than about a dozen mouse clicks.
I think you are falling victim to a common fallacy, namely that there is something good or 'holy' about the law, just because it's a law. There is not.
The law in this country is supposed to be the collective ideas of the citizens on right and wrong. Ideally, if something is illegal, it's because more than half the people think it's wrong. Also, ideally, everybody that broke the law would be caught every time.
Example: There is a 2hour parking area near where I work. They have a $25 fine for violating this law. Is this what we really want? No. What we really want is to have parking available when people need to park for short periods of time to access things in the area. But that is *really* hard to enforce. So instead, we say "2 hour maximum". Even that is really hard to enforce. So we enforce it fairly infrequently, and only for gross violations. (4 hours or more, usually) but we make the fine much larger than we want, to make up for the fact that we don't catch very many violators. This has nearly the same effect as our ideal situation, where people would be punished for making the parking lot unavailable the intended users.
Most people don't think that they are doing 'wrong' things, and most people have the same ideas about 'right' and 'wrong'. (It's ingrained from early childhood, not too much you can do about it now) The laws have been written to stop behavior when it crosses from 'right' to 'wrong', taking into account the fact that enforcement is below 100%. As enforcement becomes easier, and climbs to 100%, the laws are becoming more difficult to live with, since we are now enforcing more in the 'right' category.
I dislike selective prosecution as well, for the same reasons, mostly. Very few people like selective prosecution, and the only optinion that they can give (without massive "What about the children?!?" bad feedback) is to enforce the laws more. Abolishing all laws would not (in my opinion) work well at all. I know that *I* would abuse the world if this happened. Enforcing all the laws, all the time sounds bad, but what if the laws were relaxed to the point that they don't bother most people, because they don't even want to break the law? Example: If you drive, you break the law, by rolling through stop signs, or speeding. Nobody thinks those things are bad, really. But they can *cause* bad things. Accidents. People getting hurt. I would be much happier with a traffic system where there were very few rules, but if you cause an accident, you are punished severly. Vehicle confiscated, perhaps. Jail time at the very least. But if you look both ways, and cross only when it's safe, you arn't breaking the law at every intersection, and if you drive 30MPH past the school, because you know there are no children around, it's OK. But if you mess up and kill one, you are in serious trouble. People don't care how fast other people drive. They don't. Otherwise, we'd be getting rid of NASCAR first thing. (which I think would be a damned fine thing, but that's for other reasons *grin*) What all these people care about is being safe, and not being endangered by other drivers.
But to bring this back into the large perspective, the laws were built for lax enforcement (goal: stop accidents, action:punish a percentage of people who don't stop at marked intersections) and as our enforcement level is rising, in order to reduce the strain of living under the laws, we need to relax the rules.
"If the laws were meant to be broken, then why were they passed? If they are too strict, then they should be laxed." OK, Dr. Seuss. *chuckle*
Why were they passed? I have no idea. *I* didn't pass them. I've voted against them. I do agree with you that if they are too strict then they should be 'laxed' (sic).
Who is to decide? The people, of course. That's the democratic way. We have a system where laws are enforced bye selective prosecution, and I have yet to be prosecuted for breaking a law that I am complaining about. What I *AM* complaining about is the fact that our system is based upon selective prosecution. The average person, doing average things, should NOT have to worry about the secret police knocking at their door at 2 in the morning, or getting arrested for doing the same thing that everybody does every day. I don't expect *you* could do the time for all the crimes you have commited, if they were to be prosecuted. Go ahead and try to take the moral high ground. The backlighting makes you an easy target.
The thing you don't realize is that everybody is a lawbreaker. Sure, most of the laws you break are pretty minor, and nobody seems to care. But this gives law enforcement the opportunity to track/monitor everybody, all the time. How often have you broken the speed limit, even by just one MPH? Or rolled through a stop sign. Sure, you slowed down, but you didn't come to a complete stop. I do it all the time! So do you.
In this country, we (used to) value the ability to break the law and get away with it. Some of our laws still reflect this. (the legal process, innocent until proven guilty) But more and more, it's possible to catch people who break the law, and now we are feeling the effects of having our lawbreaking being no longer easy to get away with.
We are not heading to '1984', nor to paradise. We are finding that the laws we created with the intent of people breaking them are becoming enforcable, and that the actual laws are too strict. "victimless crimes" are more enforcable than ever, and we (as a country) are finding that we don't like that.
I think what we will see in the next 10-50 years is a relaxing of our laws, and much stricter enforcement, due to increased monitoring.
I'm not a RAID hater. I run it on my home system, and 4 servers at work. But it's NOT for performance. RAID0 generally doesn't hurt performance much but RAID1 does. You have to write twice as much to disk! (and a lot of RAID cards actually don't 'mirror' they do parity for even one drive. RAID1 and RAID3 end up being the same thing. (saves on programming costs)) RAID5 ALWAYS hurts performance. Any combo-raid (10, 0+1, 15, 51) hurts performance. I hate to tell you this, but you are simply wrong. Yes, there are 10k and 15k SCSI drives, while IDE has no models over 7200. But there are MANY 7200RPM SCSI drives. Do some research sometime. Please. For your information, servers are not there just to have lots of hardware. They are there to *do* something. If your application doesn't require more than 2 drives (and at 160GB for IDE drives, that's a pretty hefty chunk of data) then who cares about the 2 drive limit? Also on those lines, who cares about external connectors when all of your drives are internal? Why pay for features that you arn't going to use? Do all of your servers have GeForce 4 4600 cards in them? What about sound cards? Why not? You want external SCSI connectors on them that you won't use, so why not add other things you won't use. The maximum curent transfer rate on IDE is 133MB/s, and SCSI is 320MB/second sounds amazing, right? Well, the drives themselves are around 55MB/second average maximum sustained transfer rate. (this is on the Seagate Cheetah X-15, the 15000RPM drive) You arn't saturating the bus with this. Yes, there is cache on the drive, and you can burst much faster, but If you ever do anything over 4MB in size, you are out of cache, and are dealing with the sustained transfer rate. On a 160GB drive, in order to ignore the sustained transfer rate, you'd need to have 40k files minimum.
I know exactly how to create and run a proper high availability server setup. I've done it multiple times. I also know how to not waste money on features and equipment that arn't needed. (which you do not) If you need the features, and you need the speed of SCSI (Yes, it *is* faster, I never said otherwise) then go for it. Spend as much as you need! But if you don't, you can save a lot of money buying IDE, or other things. (perhaps a second machine) I'd be interested to see a comparison of a single large SCSI RAID webserver with severral smaller IDE webservers. What you shoould have gotten from this whole message is that when purchasing hardware (esp. disk drives) you really need to think about what the hardware is going to do, and buy hardware based upon requirements. People who automatically go out and buy the best they can are in part responsible for many companies going broke. Before I learned this, I spent $750k on hardware at my last start-up. We never used more than 1% of the capabilities of that equipment. I could have (should have) purchased the *right* equipment, not the *best* equipment, and saved half a million dollars.
You know, I have seen lots of people say the exact same things as you. "IDE is so bad! Never use it!" "Use brand $x, it's the only REAL brand!" and overall, "Spend more money than you want to"
I'd like to respond in general to these things. #1) IDE bad SCSI good.
The most common argument I hear is because of CPU resources. Now let's think about this. We'll go with the largest drive that each interface has. SCSI: 181GB @ @1000 IDE: 160GB @ $222 That is a price difference of almost $800 for $800, you can buy yourself TWO intel 2.4GHz processors. So if you arn't already running the fastest processor out there, you'd be better off (price-wise) getting IDE and purchasing a faster processor (or two, or whatever) This result is even more valid if you have more drives. (bigger savings) Quality of the drives? In many cases, they are the exact same drive with different electronics attached to them. The quality is the same. Also, there are IDE raid cards that have their own CPU. But you can just do software raid with the faster CPU. BTW, people: RAID does NOT improve performance. It hurts it. Read some benchmarks if you don't believe. #2) ALWAYS buy the best you can afford.
I've got 4 servers that were the top of the line, most reliable hardware that are 5 years old. They are all working just fine. They cost $8k each back then. I've also got about 10 desktop computers flipped on their side, with 'server' written on them in crayon. They were about $2k each. They all still run just fine. If we had purchased all of them as desktops, I could have paid myself $24k extra. That money was wasted. Sometimes, (very seldom) it pays to buy the best. But if something is redundant anyway, get cheap! If it breaks, replace it. You've still saved the money. If it can be down, just keep it backed up, and buy cheap. You'll save money (a LOT of money) in the long term. My basic idea here is that spending more money isn't always the best thing to do. Yeah, it's a lot more fun to play with a new Sun220R than a used P450 desktop from "Mikes Computers" but with a $10k price difference, there needs to be some VERY good reason to buy the expensive stuff.
You are a professional writer, not a professional computer nerd. With computer people, we try/run linux because we can. With people that are not full-time computer geeks, if they run linux, it's because something drove them to it, either something they disliked about their previous OS, or something they wanted from linux. Why did you switch?
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't particularly mind paying (even paying the record companies!) to listen to music. What I do mind is the amount I have to pay for music I don't want. I like a few songs by dozens of bands, but they want me to pay for the full album. Not a chance. If I can pay my $21per Gb to be legal on my MP3 player, and I can play ANY music I want, and change music as I wish, I'll pay it. Gladly. But if you want to charge me, make me pay for the music, and then still call me a criminal, then f*ck you.
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I'm not sure why you think those brief statements indicate that Uber drivers are employees rather than contractors. What you wrote has nothing to do with if they are contractors or employees.
>The driver's fares are set by Uber
Why can't I hire a contractor where I say how much I pay? That's usually part of the contract. It's most of the point of the contract.
>Driver's have to abide by Uber's code of conduct
Contractors have to conform to the requirements in the contract in order to continue the contract. That's the other half of the contract. "If you do some specific things (e.g. drive people from place to place) I will do some specific things. (e.g. pay you money)"
>Uber terminates drivers who break the code of conduct
Yes, that's how contracts work. If you don't abide by the terms of the contract, the contract is voided.
>Uber sets a minimum rating that the driver must maintain
I just covered this in my previous line.
>Uber provides the clients (riders) for the driver
So? This is how contracts work. If I contract a company to install an OS on hardware I can then provide them with hardware to install the OS on.
>The driver must pick up any rider assigned to them.
So? We've covered this already. As part of the contract they agree to pick up riders. Besides, this isn't even a requirement.
>The driver must drive the route the Uber app plots
So? If I say that I want the contract to install using physical media instead of a netboot, does that make them an employee?
>Uber sends recommendations for improvement to the driver
So? If I hire a contractor to maintain my yard, I can also tell them to use a string trimmer on a section that is too steep. That doesn't make them a direct employee.
While your statements are factually correct they ignore several critical pieces of information that leaves readers with the wrong impression.
The $70-$80 is for flight hours, not hours worked.
You will spend as much time commuting and on preflight and postflight tasks as you will flying.
You will be on standby for a lot of the non-working time as well, where you can do little else.
Starting at a major carrier is a mid-career job, not a start of career job. You won't get this job until you have been in the industry for 10 to 15 years.
Another semi-random note: The pilot experience requirements would not have changed the Colgan crash. The captain had 3379 hours and the first officer had 2244 hours; both were well above the proposed new minimums. I use as a basic standard for good legislation that if a new law is created in response to an incident, the incident must have been prevented if the new law had already been in effect.
Even if they remove the stickers, they will just point to the ToS that says if you open your device, you're SoL in terms of warranty. Like Apple does.
Unfortunately for the manufacturers that part of ToS is not enforcable since it violates the law. Despite having put some writing on their product and documentation and websites, they are legally required to honor that warranty.
There is a segment of the avionics industry that isn't regulated. Experimental aircraft. I speak (honestly I'm typing, but if you wanted I could read this whole comment out loud) from a position of some knowledge on this. I am a commercial pilot and a flight instructor and am also building my own experimental aircraft. (Go Velocity! - http://www.velocityaircraft.com/
A TSO'd two panel glass avionics display consisting of about 8 to 10 inch PFD (Primary Flight Display) and MFD (Multi-Functional Display) will cost you in the neighborhood of $70,000 for a certificated system. (http://www.avidyne.com/products/release-9/r9-cirrus.asp)
An experimental setup with similar capabilities can be had for perhaps $15,000. (http://www.dynonavionics.com/ http://www.grtavionics.com/ )
While I may personally think that the FAA has been overly cautious about allowing unknown devices on commercial flights, I would like to point out two things:
First, their goal is to make things SAFE. Not comfortable. Not convenient. Not mobile-app-enabled. Safe. And they have done a heck of a job of that. Look at the safety record of the commercial aviation industry in the US. It's incredible. More people die on the way to or from the airport than die after they get there.
Second, if device manufacturers wanted to pony up the cash to certify their devices they could. If Apple, Samsung and Motorola really wanted to they could pay to have their devices certified. But it's easier to simply blame the FAA. There is no budget in the FAA for certifying these devices. If they spent the money on this instead of other things the accident rate would go up. What do you think is the right choice for an organization whose goal is to make aviation safe?
I know what you mean. Here I am stationed in Iraq, I've got people going out every day who are possibly going to get really killed. We find explosives, get shot at, you name it. It's all VERY real. But there are enough people who are so totally insulated from this sort of thing that the EVE Online game is vastly more important to them.
On the other hand, this should spur someone from Darfur to post about the genocide there. Or one of the congo nations where life is so horrible.
What does it say about us as a species that there is such a range of lifestyles? On one end is the people where EVE Online takeovers might be the most important thing to happen to them all year. At the other end are refugees who get killed by the thousands and would have been starving and diseased anyway.
Is this disparity good or bad? Is there any limit to how much disparity is good? Would we be better off if everybody had similar worries and we were all about the same level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs?
They are a huge company. It's not a problem of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it's hand #27FH53 not knowing what hand #9CJ46DH is doing.
For all of the organizing principles behind this cathedral, disagreements between what one sub-organization wants and what another sub-organization wants are bound to arise.
The people actually selling product, they want to retain ALL rights. This will allow them to generate more profit with 0 additional expense.
The people making the media player portion want their software to be more useful. This requires all sorts of media to be available. So they want as much content available as possible. Preferably for free.
It takes time for the diverse needs that are in conflict to get brought up to the level of management that can arbitrate between them. And it costs money to do so; the company as a whole is better off (i.e. more profitable) if they ignore these types of conflicts until it becomes a problem.
BTW: Hi.
I was in Iraq for a year as part of the United States Army.
Internet access was always a little iffy, since it's expensive and the troops have a very high demand for it. There were several ways to get internet access while I was there, some of which are still around and some of which are not.
#1: US Government provided independent internet cafes.
Status: Removed.
Reason: Not cost effective. They decided to go with a consolidated large provider instead.
I ran one of these while I was deployed. The closest I got to 'filtering' was running a caching ad-blocking squid proxy. I did this for speed reasons, because *I* wanted to provide my Soldiers with fast internet access. (PS: f*ck doubleclick.net)
#2: US Government provided Internet Cafes.
Status: Still around.
This is one of the biggest and most commonly accessable internet accesses in Iraq. The US Government contracted for some massive amount of bandwidth through some satellite provider. You can't bring in your own laptop, you have to use their locked-down desktops. But I didn't see any politically motivated filtering going on, and I checked.
#3: Privately funded Internet Access.
Status: Still around, but usually kept on the quiet.
Unit commanders occasionally try to stop them out of generalized fear, but I never saw one go away. It's not against any regulations. It's just expensive. ($1400/month for 128u/512d)
#4: Contractor run public Internet Cafes.
Status: Still around.
If you can make money at it, someone will try to do it. Zaid (http://www.russianwolf.com/) was one that I dealt with on a regular basis. He not only provided the hardware for our cafe, but he ran several others on a for-pay basis. ($20 would let you browse for an hour) Filtering was not in place in any of his cafes. Not cost effective. Consider this my plug for him. He's a good guy.
#5: US Government 'NIPR-net' (Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router Network) access.
Status: Still around.
This is what people use for official communications and internet access. This is for non-secret data only. The closest they got to filtering was publishing what unit and individual computer was browsing the internet more than anybody else on a weekly basis. This network was VERY overloaded and SLOW SLOW SLOW. But it was filtered for sexual content I think, not that I ever tried. But it was not filtered for political content.
In summary, the common methods that people use to access the internet in Iraq are not filtered for content of a political nature. What the Marines may be doing is not something I know, but I saw plenty of Marines using these other access methods that I know were not filtered. Any filtering is either a new thing or isolated to a small unit. It was not the policy of the Department of Defense to filter internet access for political content as of Feb2005 (when I was there last)
Way back when, I decided to join the Army National Guard. I thought it would be fun to have a non-comupter related 'side job'. I was a tanker (M1 series tanks). It's a lot of fun, you can learn a lot of essential skills. Unfortunately... I've been away from my job for over a year already, and I've got another 4 months in Iraq before we even start to head home.
My skills are crumbling, I'm not able to keep up on new technology, basically I feel like the world is passing me by. Be very careful before you join the military. It seems like a good idea, but remember that they can call you up for something like this. (By the way, being a linguist, or a cook, or a CS guy won't help. They will shove you into an infantry slot just because you are a warm body.)
I do agree with you that there are expenses that are somewhat fixed. If they both have a prescription for some drug, 'poor boy' can't take 33% as much as the rich guy; the pharmacy cannot charge them different prices. Food prices? If necessary, it's possible to buy plenty of food fairly cheap.
The problem I see is that everybody thinks that poor people should have the same posessions and experiences as rich people. I'm not going on a Australian vacation because I don't have as much money as other people. I don't eat out every night because I don't have enough money. I blame that on my lack of hard work (I'm here posting on slashdot instead of earning money) and not regressive taxes.
For the most part, prices of things necessary to living DO scale down. I could get by on a vehicle that cost 25% as much as the one I currently have (and my current vechicle is nothing fancy, a '92 GMC Sonoma). I could easily cut my food budget by 50% and still eat healthier than I do now. I could reduce my rent by 75% and still have a perfectly good place to live. And if you cut my income by 75%, I would not be paying any income taxes at all.
In summary, you are right that there are some fixed costs that you can't scale down, however almost all do scale well enough that most of the people who complain about the taxes being 'regressive' would need only scale back their unnecessary purchases. Dining out, big-screen TVs, fancy cars and cable TV are a few prime examples. Purchases like those are (in my opinion, of course) the real reason those without money in the US tend to stay without money. And before anybody gets all worked up about it, there ARE those who do scrimp and save and don't or can't make it on their own.
Yes, the US Government is unfair to some. But the vast majority gets what they pay for, no more, no less.
Your example has one huge misleading item in it.
The percentage of their income that 'Rich Boy' and 'Poor Boy' pay for their cars.
In your example, 'Rich Boy' pays $60k for the car and $3k for tax, which you say is 1%. That means that he earns $300k/yr, and just spent 20% of his annual income on a vehicle. So he pays 20% on the vehicle and 1% in taxes.
For 'Poor Boy', he's paying $20k on his car and $1k in taxes, which you say is 5% of his income. That means he earns $20k/yr, and just spent 100% of his annual income on a vehicle. No wonder he's poor.
If he spent the same percentage of his income on his vehicle (20%) that 'Rich Boy' did (which would be $4k) he'd be paying the same 1% of his income to taxes that 'Rich Boy' did.
I'm online through NSS-6 right now. I've used it for VOIP, videoconferencing, web browsing, interactive ssh, etc. The 600ms+ latency this thing has is annoying, but doesn't make it totally unusable. The pricing is high, but for even a small group of people it's affordable enough. It's better than nothing.
After a quick glance at it, the only insightful thing I can think of is that since this is just a TCP based attack, you could start doing it on any connection that is going to have ongoing TCP traffic.
For example: SMTP traffic.
To be more specific, let's take the example of somebody you don't like (We'll call them Mr. Spammer for now) initiates a TCP connection to you, on some random port (let's pick port 25) You watch the traffic, and once you determine that the traffic is coming from Mr. Spammer, you initiate the attack using the existing TCP connection.
This would be a good tarpit for not only slowing him down, but stopping that open relay or paid-for client machine.
On the other hand, it was one I purchased recently (about 4 months ago) so perhaps it's not an issue to toatal quality, but an issue of quality right now at some plant? It was DDR memory. I've never had a problem with normal SDRAM, EDO or FPM.
Kind of funny. I didn't do too bad taking care of my teeth when I was younger. Got cavities, got them filled, etc. But in the last year or so I've started taking better care of them.
I used to brush once a day, sometiems twice, and floss once a week or once a month, VERY rarely.
Now I brush twice a day usually, sometimes three times a day, and I floss most days. I even do the mouthwash thing a couple of times a week.
But I hadn't done my after-luch floss/brush thing yet today, so thanks, xtermz, for reminding me.
Things like this make me feel good about the human race. Sure, we're rather argumentative, and spend most of our time fighting ourselves, but there is a chance that one day we won't. Right now we behave like a bored puppy that's been stuck inside the small kennel all of it's life. We might find something to do one of these days. We are finally figuring out how to look out the wire mesh that makes up our door, and noticing that there are other wire mesh cages out there. Whee!!! We (as a race) are growing. We're improving ourselves. We don't have very good control of our parts yet. (our "USA" part is about to launch an attack on our "Iran" part) but we *are* opening our eyes, and we *are* looking out there.
Sheesh. I am *amazed* at the amount of disinformation most of these people are posting. Yes, I know it's slashdot, but WOW. Feel free to e-mail me with any other questions if you want.
I am qualified to answer this question because my mom has Starband internet, and I often end up doing things on her computer for her. (She runs RedHat linux and windows dual-boot)
For IRC, it'll be fine if you use low-scroll rooms. but if they are fast, it'll probably be a bit hard to follow.
For command-line apps and whatnot, it's a tad annoying, since everything you do has a 1/2 delay at least. If you are used to typing without immediate feedback, it's OK.
For X apps, or VNC, it's pretty nasty. If you just have a quick change or something to do, it's doable, but you won't be wanting to do much at all over that connection.
If you consider remotely administering a server to be connecting with VNC or whatever windows has as it's new remote desktop thing, then you are going to be dissapointed for any task that takes more than about a dozen mouse clicks.
I'm all for that, if true. Can you provide some URLs? A quick google search didn't turn up anything useful. (but I suck at picking keywords)
I think you are falling victim to a common fallacy, namely that there is something good or 'holy' about the law, just because it's a law. There is not.
The law in this country is supposed to be the collective ideas of the citizens on right and wrong. Ideally, if something is illegal, it's because more than half the people think it's wrong. Also, ideally, everybody that broke the law would be caught every time.
Example: There is a 2hour parking area near where I work. They have a $25 fine for violating this law. Is this what we really want? No. What we really want is to have parking available when people need to park for short periods of time to access things in the area. But that is *really* hard to enforce. So instead, we say "2 hour maximum". Even that is really hard to enforce. So we enforce it fairly infrequently, and only for gross violations. (4 hours or more, usually) but we make the fine much larger than we want, to make up for the fact that we don't catch very many violators. This has nearly the same effect as our ideal situation, where people would be punished for making the parking lot unavailable the intended users.
Most people don't think that they are doing 'wrong' things, and most people have the same ideas about 'right' and 'wrong'. (It's ingrained from early childhood, not too much you can do about it now) The laws have been written to stop behavior when it crosses from 'right' to 'wrong', taking into account the fact that enforcement is below 100%. As enforcement becomes easier, and climbs to 100%, the laws are becoming more difficult to live with, since we are now enforcing more in the 'right' category.
I dislike selective prosecution as well, for the same reasons, mostly. Very few people like selective prosecution, and the only optinion that they can give (without massive "What about the children?!?" bad feedback) is to enforce the laws more. Abolishing all laws would not (in my opinion) work well at all. I know that *I* would abuse the world if this happened. Enforcing all the laws, all the time sounds bad, but what if the laws were relaxed to the point that they don't bother most people, because they don't even want to break the law?
Example: If you drive, you break the law, by rolling through stop signs, or speeding. Nobody thinks those things are bad, really. But they can *cause* bad things. Accidents. People getting hurt. I would be much happier with a traffic system where there were very few rules, but if you cause an accident, you are punished severly. Vehicle confiscated, perhaps. Jail time at the very least. But if you look both ways, and cross only when it's safe, you arn't breaking the law at every intersection, and if you drive 30MPH past the school, because you know there are no children around, it's OK. But if you mess up and kill one, you are in serious trouble.
People don't care how fast other people drive. They don't. Otherwise, we'd be getting rid of NASCAR first thing. (which I think would be a damned fine thing, but that's for other reasons *grin*) What all these people care about is being safe, and not being endangered by other drivers.
But to bring this back into the large perspective, the laws were built for lax enforcement (goal: stop accidents, action:punish a percentage of people who don't stop at marked intersections) and as our enforcement level is rising, in order to reduce the strain of living under the laws, we need to relax the rules.
"If the laws were meant to be broken, then why were they passed? If they are too strict, then they should be laxed."
OK, Dr. Seuss. *chuckle*
Why were they passed? I have no idea. *I* didn't pass them. I've voted against them.
I do agree with you that if they are too strict then they should be 'laxed' (sic).
Who is to decide? The people, of course. That's the democratic way.
We have a system where laws are enforced bye selective prosecution, and I have yet to be prosecuted for breaking a law that I am complaining about. What I *AM* complaining about is the fact that our system is based upon selective prosecution. The average person, doing average things, should NOT have to worry about the secret police knocking at their door at 2 in the morning, or getting arrested for doing the same thing that everybody does every day.
I don't expect *you* could do the time for all the crimes you have commited, if they were to be prosecuted. Go ahead and try to take the moral high ground. The backlighting makes you an easy target.
The thing you don't realize is that everybody is a lawbreaker. Sure, most of the laws you break are pretty minor, and nobody seems to care. But this gives law enforcement the opportunity to track/monitor everybody, all the time. How often have you broken the speed limit, even by just one MPH? Or rolled through a stop sign. Sure, you slowed down, but you didn't come to a complete stop. I do it all the time! So do you.
In this country, we (used to) value the ability to break the law and get away with it. Some of our laws still reflect this. (the legal process, innocent until proven guilty) But more and more, it's possible to catch people who break the law, and now we are feeling the effects of having our lawbreaking being no longer easy to get away with.
We are not heading to '1984', nor to paradise. We are finding that the laws we created with the intent of people breaking them are becoming enforcable, and that the actual laws are too strict. "victimless crimes" are more enforcable than ever, and we (as a country) are finding that we don't like that.
I think what we will see in the next 10-50 years is a relaxing of our laws, and much stricter enforcement, due to increased monitoring.
I'm not a RAID hater. I run it on my home system, and 4 servers at work. But it's NOT for performance. RAID0 generally doesn't hurt performance much but RAID1 does. You have to write twice as much to disk! (and a lot of RAID cards actually don't 'mirror' they do parity for even one drive. RAID1 and RAID3 end up being the same thing. (saves on programming costs)) RAID5 ALWAYS hurts performance.
Any combo-raid (10, 0+1, 15, 51) hurts performance. I hate to tell you this, but you are simply wrong.
Yes, there are 10k and 15k SCSI drives, while IDE has no models over 7200. But there are MANY 7200RPM SCSI drives. Do some research sometime. Please.
For your information, servers are not there just to have lots of hardware. They are there to *do* something. If your application doesn't require more than 2 drives (and at 160GB for IDE drives, that's a pretty hefty chunk of data) then who cares about the 2 drive limit? Also on those lines, who cares about external connectors when all of your drives are internal? Why pay for features that you arn't going to use? Do all of your servers have GeForce 4 4600 cards in them? What about sound cards? Why not? You want external SCSI connectors on them that you won't use, so why not add other things you won't use.
The maximum curent transfer rate on IDE is 133MB/s, and SCSI is 320MB/second sounds amazing, right? Well, the drives themselves are around 55MB/second average maximum sustained transfer rate. (this is on the Seagate Cheetah X-15, the 15000RPM drive) You arn't saturating the bus with this. Yes, there is cache on the drive, and you can burst much faster, but If you ever do anything over 4MB in size, you are out of cache, and are dealing with the sustained transfer rate. On a 160GB drive, in order to ignore the sustained transfer rate, you'd need to have 40k files minimum.
I know exactly how to create and run a proper high availability server setup. I've done it multiple times. I also know how to not waste money on features and equipment that arn't needed. (which you do not) If you need the features, and you need the speed of SCSI (Yes, it *is* faster, I never said otherwise) then go for it. Spend as much as you need! But if you don't, you can save a lot of money buying IDE, or other things. (perhaps a second machine) I'd be interested to see a comparison of a single large SCSI RAID webserver with severral smaller IDE webservers.
What you shoould have gotten from this whole message is that when purchasing hardware (esp. disk drives) you really need to think about what the hardware is going to do, and buy hardware based upon requirements. People who automatically go out and buy the best they can are in part responsible for many companies going broke. Before I learned this, I spent $750k on hardware at my last start-up. We never used more than 1% of the capabilities of that equipment. I could have (should have) purchased the *right* equipment, not the *best* equipment, and saved half a million dollars.
You know, I have seen lots of people say the exact same things as you. "IDE is so bad! Never use it!" "Use brand $x, it's the only REAL brand!" and overall, "Spend more money than you want to"
I'd like to respond in general to these things.
#1) IDE bad SCSI good.
The most common argument I hear is because of CPU resources. Now let's think about this. We'll go with the largest drive that each interface has. SCSI: 181GB @ @1000 IDE: 160GB @ $222 That is a price difference of almost $800 for $800, you can buy yourself TWO intel 2.4GHz processors. So if you arn't already running the fastest processor out there, you'd be better off (price-wise) getting IDE and purchasing a faster processor (or two, or whatever) This result is even more valid if you have more drives. (bigger savings) Quality of the drives? In many cases, they are the exact same drive with different electronics attached to them. The quality is the same. Also, there are IDE raid cards that have their own CPU. But you can just do software raid with the faster CPU. BTW, people: RAID does NOT improve performance. It hurts it. Read some benchmarks if you don't believe.
#2) ALWAYS buy the best you can afford.
I've got 4 servers that were the top of the line, most reliable hardware that are 5 years old. They are all working just fine. They cost $8k each back then. I've also got about 10 desktop computers flipped on their side, with 'server' written on them in crayon. They were about $2k each. They all still run just fine. If we had purchased all of them as desktops, I could have paid myself $24k extra. That money was wasted. Sometimes, (very seldom) it pays to buy the best. But if something is redundant anyway, get cheap! If it breaks, replace it. You've still saved the money. If it can be down, just keep it backed up, and buy cheap. You'll save money (a LOT of money) in the long term.
My basic idea here is that spending more money isn't always the best thing to do. Yeah, it's a lot more fun to play with a new Sun220R than a used P450 desktop from "Mikes Computers" but with a $10k price difference, there needs to be some VERY good reason to buy the expensive stuff.
3 9s = 99.9% uptime = 8.75 hrs/Yr = 525 min/Yr. .875 hrs/Yr = 52.5 min/Yr. .0875 hrs/yr = 5.25 min/Yr. .03 seconds per year downtime.
4 9s = 99.99% uptime =
5 9s = 99.999% uptime =
9 9s = 99.9999999% uptime =
I call bullsh*t on anything that claims to have 9 9s reliability. 3 seconds every HUNDRED years.
You are a professional writer, not a professional computer nerd. With computer people, we try/run linux because we can. With people that are not full-time computer geeks, if they run linux, it's because something drove them to it, either something they disliked about their previous OS, or something they wanted from linux. Why did you switch?
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't particularly mind paying (even paying the record companies!) to listen to music. What I do mind is the amount I have to pay for music I don't want. I like a few songs by dozens of bands, but they want me to pay for the full album. Not a chance. If I can pay my $21per Gb to be legal on my MP3 player, and I can play ANY music I want, and change music as I wish, I'll pay it. Gladly. But if you want to charge me, make me pay for the music, and then still call me a criminal, then f*ck you.