I believe it was John D. Rockefeller who at one point quipped, while writing a large (by anyone else's standards) check, that in the time it took to actually give the money, he'd already made more. This is a common problem today for rich folks. While everyone's quick to say that the millionaire could give them the money and they'd spend it easily, it's actually very hard to find good ways to spend a lot of money.
Rockefeller, unlike most of our current crop of multimillionaires and billionaires, was a philanthropist. He believed that he had a responsibility to give back something to a community that had given him so much. But that's a rare viewpoint amongst the "old money", that is -- people who were born into wealth. The rich have very different ideas about money, people, relationships, etc.
I'm not saying we should storm the castle, but we do need to redistribute the wealth much more evenly than we do now -- I don't mind the fact that there are multimillionaires. That's not unreasonable, and it's not actually a whole lot of money. But when we start talking about people with hundreds of millions, or billions, in personal assets, we need to start asking ourselves why. And I think the very simple solution is to cap inheritance. In other words, earn all the money you want during your life and keep it! Spend it however you want. But once you're dead, your descendants only get a certain maximal amount - say, 10 million, even 20 million, per immediate family member, less for extended family, etc. We need to break the cycle of generational wealth, where some very small number of families accrue more and more wealth, until it becomes so concentrated that society starts to feel the effects of wealth deprivation. As to where the rest of the money goes -- same place all your taxes go.
I'm not against people earning whatever the market will pay them. I just don't like the idea of people who are born into wealth, who are handed power, and who don't ever do meaningful work, who never produce anything of value to society. Everyone should contribute; And everybody deserves similar opportunities in life. Inheritance of such large fortunes deprives people of that chance. People should be able to provide for their families, to share and share alike, but to a point. We need to reward people for their hard work, not their great-great-grandparent's hard work.
Sorry, the details are wrong on the 17% figure. Actually, only about 1% are incarcerated right now and around 3.5% on parole. Still astonishingly high, but a misquote. The 17% figure is supposed to be the rise in the incarceration rate year-by-year, which is on a sharp upward trend right now. My bad. We are, however, still #1 in the world on per capita rate of incarceration and have held that dubious distinction for almost a decade. Also, our rate increases year over year assure us that we'll retain that title for decades to come. God Bless America.:(
For a country in constant fear of terrorists hijacking their planes you take it pretty lightly when someone actually tries to make airplanes fall.
We're coming to our senses, albeit slowly. For example, our criminal justice system used to consider three things when determining whether a crime was considered; Motive, intent, and the act itself. Motive is, "why did you do it?" Intent is, "Did you think it would hurt anyone?" and the act itself, well, self-explanatory. Starting in the 1950s (surprise! Enter those nasty ruskies with their communist putzcha), we moved away from that by creating strict liability criminal laws. Receiving stolen property, for example, is a crime of strict liability. You don't have to know it was stolen. You can do everything in the world to check to make sure it wasn't stolen. Doesn't matter whether you tried to, or knew about it, or even theoretically could have known. Still guilty. Mere possession = crime.
Back then, there was the recognition that statutes like this had the potential to be abused; So only a select few laws were passed like that at first. But as time went on, and politicians came up for re-election, "getting tough on crime" was increasingly about redefining crime so that people who blundered into a situation would now be classed as criminals and thrown in jail. You might well guess this was started with a "think of the children!" argument, and you'd be right, aka statutory rape.
It quickly ballooned out of control to the point where, combined with vague wording of statutes like the federal laws regarding regarding "authorized" computer use, virtually any consumer device that uses electricity and does more than light a room could be criminal, for any reason. You can, in fact, become a convicted felon by using somebody else's pocket calculator without their permission and go to jail for several years. In California, strict liability has been used to create the infamous "Three strikes law", where, in theory, you could wind up going to jail (for life) for stealing 3 candy bars on separate occasions. Bonus round: Supreme court upheld it as lawful.
There's an increasing awareness that having approximately 17% of our population incarcerated as I write this, and a considerably higher percentage with criminal records (which are public record in our country, and are routinely used to make employment decisions), who can only ever be marginally employed, and thus quickly discover criminal activity is the only way to maintain any standard of living... is not a sustainable model. But people are reluctant to do anything about it, because of an epic society-sized scoop of the Just World phenomenon. Put simply, it's the notion that you get what you deserve. Unfortunately, most people aren't getting what they deserve -- they're getting a life sentence of destitution and poverty for any and every offense. So needless to say, the actual sentence doesn't matter much... it's only the first 90 days you'll remember or have a hard time with. After that, it's just another routine, another adjustment to life. God help you when you get out though, because nobody else will.
So no... nobody gets off light in this country. Once you're an adult, if you ever get put in the back of a squad car odds are very good life as you know it is over.
There is not a legal solution that is going to work.
We could make reporting them illegal. That should slow it down... since most of the people who do this are getting the idea from watching it in our popular media. Mind you, I don't advocate this position, but... it is a legal solution, and it would work.
As far as technical solutions... The only one is not having an aircraft with windows. You might imagine there are some problems with that plan. And due to the wide range of frequencies that lasers can operate over, there's no way to design glasses that could be used to filter them out.
Perhaps the solution is to restrict the sale and use of lasers, even though that would mean that bluray burners and other optical media, as well as home theatre projectors and a few other legitimate uses would have to be shitcanned -- or at least redesigned so extracting the laser from the assembly would be difficult or impossible without destroying the laser in the process. Most of these laser strikes are made from commodity consumer equipment... if we redesign the equipment so the lasers self-destruct upon tampering, we cut off the supply.
Are you sure? What if an Intel processor is the gateway to using Windows Vista?
Then we should put it on the list of Schedule I drugs and arrest anyone found in possession of it, and imprison anyone caught distributing it. Sure, some people who use Vista go on to lead productive lives, but for too many... especially children who don't know any better... why, I just can't even bring myself to talk about some of the things prolonged Vista use can cause.
And here I thought adversity made you get a second job at McDonald's to pay your rent because your immediate needs are so precarious that you can't afford to think about the long run
Some people would be happy with just one job; And instead are selling their medications on the street or prostituting so they can keep gas in their car, which is also their home, running on cold winter nights.
Sure poor people do get creative at stretching their dollars, but rich people get creative at finding ways to make their life more convenient, pleasurable or exotic.
... That is not what "adversity is the mother of invention" means. It means that when people get in trouble, they get creative. It doesn't mean there aren't other motivations for creativity, it just means that nothing motivates a person better than statements ending with "or die." Much of our advancement from a pre-agricultural society to present was based on scarcity of a resource. It's also the principle reason why we commit acts of violence. Desperation focuses the mind like nothing else does. That does not mean we should strive to make a society of desperate people, nor does it justify having so many desperate people so a few can live in superfluous abundance.
It seems painfully obvious to me that a society that prizes personal liberty would know that personal freedoms don't mean much to the starving, sick, or weak. All they want is to not be starving, sick, or weak. Our founding document for this country talks about "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as essential and undeniable. Why then, do we allow an increasingly smaller number of our population to actually achieve those in any meaningful capacity?
Wealth inequity is destroying our way of life. There is no justification for it: Every argument you can make for it I can just point to any of the other 19 largest countries (by GDP) and say "No. Wrong." We don't need to be paying CEOs 450 times the income of their lowest-paid worker... in Japan, it's about 23 times. Nobody's going to sit here and tell me the Japanese do not find ways to make their live more convenient, pleasurable, or exotic. They're designing fully animatronic sex dolls right now for shits and giggles... and there are not many Japanese starving to death or dying of preventable causes per capita compared to us.
Give me an example, any example, of where a multibillionaire, through the act of hoarding money, has benefited society. There aren't any. So we're left with the idea that we need to reward people with billions of dollars. Why? What service does a single person provide that can be worth so much? I can at least entertain the idea that there might be someone, amongst the nearly 7 billion currently on this planet, that may be able to provide some insight, some product, some innovation, so valuable as to justify this.
Maybe it doesn't fit into your Platonic ideal of how this should go, but if you have a better idea then float it. Unless you were suggesting that spaceflight is a waste of time compared with the problems we need to solve on this planet, which I don't think has to be a binary answer.
I don't have a Platonic ideal about anything: I believe in the production possibilities curve, and getting as close to it as possible, rather than living well inside of it as we are now due to high rates of unemployment. Every day a person doesn't work who can and wants to is a day wasted that didn't need to be, and we can't get it back. Building space yachts for the rich might employ a few thousand -- seizing the bank accounts of those rich people and using the funds to build roads and fund people's educations would employ hundreds of thousands, and result in a much-improved quality of life. And what's the point of science and technology if not that?
Semiconductors can't. They're "Devil Science", just like those others.
I know Intel's processors can get hot, but I don't consider them to be the gateway to hell and damnation. And can you see electrons in vacuum tubes? No. Can you see molecules interacting with each other in the lab? Nope. You see the result of those things. Just because the senator doesn't agree with it, or understand it, doesn't mean it's the work of He Who Must Not Be Named. I don't understand plasma physics; That does not mean I deny the existance of plasma... especially not after putting General Tso's chicken in the microwave without taking it out of the to-go container. Though I may have screamed "Jesus H Christ!" a few times while my dinner experienced an previously unseen physical effect, followed by its flaming remains being deposited into the sink along with a pair of my mother's prized oven mitts.
Flaming General Tso aside, my point is there are perfectly reasonable explanations for every conclusion reached in science. That is, afterall, the very goal and simultaniously the definition of, a scientific fact: Objective, reproducible, proof. Evidence. But, it's pretty clear evidence doesn't stick well to members of Congress... Even those who chair the oversight committee for science.
I think it's good to see that people can become rich as it motivates those who are willing to put in the time and effort to attain the same goal
This assumes they have any reasonable chance of becoming rich, or richer. Anyone who's successful will tell you one of the ingredients is being in the right place, at the right time. It's not just about hard work. Plenty of people work hard their whole lives and die penniless. Some famous guy who invented AC power and set the stage for the industrial age, Nicoli Tesla, could probably provide some additional insight as well.
"Spreading the wealth" is a dangerous position unless there's some way to motivate people to improve their situation or to ensure only those that truly need help get it (e.g. keeps the moochers and freeloaders out of the system).
People who want to be poor are like unicorns: They don't exist. I have yet to find a person who doesn't want to live comfortably, to have their medical needs looked after, food to eat, and a safe place to sleep. If they do exist, they need medical care, because there's something very, very wrong with them. Most people want to work because it carries certain rewards; But when the only reward is surviving until tomorrow, it's not surprising to find a lack of motivation, and innovation. Especially since they're told every night on TV about the lives of people who are so very much better than they are.
Spreading the wealth isn't a dangerous position. Why is it so much easier for some people to believe that there are tens of millions of lazy people, rather than a few hundred greedy ones?
It's an election year. Don't believe anything they say. Republicans this year especially have been saying the craziest crap because they know crazy people are more likely to vote than sane ones, who long ago gave up and decided the world was run by crazy people. Oh, did you just see what I did there?:( This guy has a long list of failures politically and personally (4 marriages)... I suspect he'd wear a pink tutu and sing songs from Little Mermaid if he thought he'd get more votes.
Hmm. Apparently it's a "troll" if you ask people deeper questions about personal and corporate responsibility, instead of pointing and saying "Oh look! Something new and shiny for the rich!"
If the latency figures in the article are accurate then the traffic wasn't staying in the country at all. You can get from one end of the country to the other in 35ms round trip, so even the original 30ms seems rubbish unless the circuit was DSL. The way they were making out it was a high end connection that doesn't seem likely. 180ms will easily get you too Australia and all going well will get you to San Jose from New Zealand.
Geographical separation only has a loose relation to wire length. You say 180ms will get from San Jose to New Zealand, but in the evenings, my cablemodem regularly hits 300ms times just to reach google. Oversubscription and massive buffering on a shared line are to blame; Not geographical or line distance.
We need to know more about the lines before we can say what the latency values mean, if they mean anything at all. I'm also not at all convinced that a wiretap would result in any latency: Hanging a packet sniffer off of a switch doesn't make the switch run slower in almost any scenario I can think of. Wiretapping is supposed to be something that doesn't broadcast to the target "Smile, you're on hidden camera!" If an elementary network tool can reveal a wiretap, somebody's doing something wrong. Very wrong.
Because our society is largely based on capitalist principles which uses the profit motive as an incentive to create economic growth and technological development. Being able to afford space yachts is one of the incentives that encourages this growth.
That's a lie that's told over and over again to justify massive wealth inequity. But after the first couple of million, you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention. We aren't creating multibillionaires because these people are millions of times more productive or valuable than others.
I'm going to skip the rhetoric and just ask my question as food for thought for anyone who reads this: Why are we building space ships for rich tourists, while real science languishes in the land of budget cuts and resource shortages? Why is it okay for the very wealthy to build yachts in space while poor people starve and wonder if they'll be able to afford the medication they need to stay alive? I know these aren't easy questions -- any answer I can provide seems woefully inadequate. But I think we should be asking those questions too, not just about the businesses, but their relationship to the larger society.
The Excel manager (or the closely related Powerpoint manager) has something in common with the Only-Development Matters developer, the Without-Sysadmin-The-Universe-Would-Shutdown-Now systems guy and the Nothing-Happens-When-I-Dont Sell people. Silo silliness.
You forgot to mention they all live in the I'm-A-Unique-and-Beautiful-Snowflake land, not We're-All-In-This-Together-ville. I know, the second one is a lot smaller -- it's just a town on the outskirts of the much larger land, but... I think these things matter.:D
Uhh... 802.11, not 12. Small difference. Apparently not one that a half dozen slashmods noticed either... (shakes head) Standards fall every year on this forum...
Cigarette makers are right to fear the regulations...
You should too. Everyone engages in some behavior that the majority doesn't approve of. Everyone. Smokers are just another outlier group -- but gays, atheists, occupy protesters, white supremacists... every time an election rolls around, policians scramble to find a group people can all agree to hate together to earn votes. That's democracy for you: Two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
There's reasonable legislation that protects the public interest while respecting individual liberty, and then there's shit like this. Most anti-smoking legislation has been enacted within the past 5--7 years due to a groundswell of popular support. In 5--7 years, that support will have moved on to another group to hate, but yet another precident will have been set by then. Let me give you some examples of reasonable versus extreme. Disclaimer: Most of the numbers below are from memory. This was a popular discussion to have at the time the bans went into effect, so I put considerable research time into it. But it is still just from memory. Also: I'm making no attempt here to justify subjective beliefs about whether smoking smells bad, or whether I like it or not...
Restaurants
Many jurisdictions have banned smoking in bars and restaurants. After those bans were passed, business dropped off by 10-30%. In the state I live in (Minnesota), downtown Minneapolis on a saturday night seemed like a ghost town after the ban went into effect. It hasn't fully recovered since. Contrary to popular myth, there are a lot of social smokers out there, or people who only smoke when they drink. Bars in particular suffered horribly after the bans -- because it was during a recession and many people decided to just get liquor from the store and smoke out on the back porch at a friends' place. Check the numbers if you don't believe me: Look at noise complaints in the months since the ban, keyword search 'party' or 'alcohol'. 8% spike over the same time frame the previous year (caution: numbers provided by police are typically absolute! Convert to per capita and using best available census data for precincts or it's not a valid comparison.)
It's been several years now since the bans went into effect up here. Many had argued that non-smokers would fill up the bars and restaurants, flocking to the new "clean air". They never showed up. As it turns out, "clean air" was not on the top 10 list of "Reasons To Go Drinking Tonight." Go figure. Businesses have bourne the cost of enforcing the ban, and the only public health benefit claimed was for employees. Well, we send people into coal mines and other industrial environments, telling people who take those jobs of the possible health risks: But we don't ban those environments or jobs. Why is capitalism allowed there, but not in restaurants? Food for thought.
Public Parks
Banning smoking in outdoor areas seems silly to me because standing more than a few feet away reduces the amount of smoke a person breathes to a few PPM. Second-hand smoke studies have all focused on the effects of prolonged exposure in confined areas. It can be argued a ban in crowded areas promotes public health, but not in a sparsely populated outdoor park. If there is to be a ban in public areas, it should be only in areas where people regularly assemble; There is no public health benefit from banning smoking in the great outdoors.
Near Building Entrances
Yes. Agree. People certainly should be given the option to avoid smoke; And smokers do tend to congregate near building entrances. Setting a minimum distance is a prudent measure.
In private residences
Again: Businesses suffer. It should be allowable for a building owner to prohibit smoking on the grounds, even in apartment buildings or private residences; And in fact it was never illegal to specify this condition in the tenant leasing agreements of our state. But few landlords put such agreements in place because there
Most spectrum is exactly that. Want to use some? Call your friendly local AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint.
So is ham radio, and a section of bandwidth used for emergency services that uses the same standards as wifi, even the same equipment, just moved the frequencies. Guess what: They all work fine, at higher power levels, because there's a central authority to regulate it.
Regulation doesn't mean private control; It means there are rules, and punishments if you violate those rules. You can regulate access to a public resource. It's done every day.
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'b' or 'c' or 'g'?
Up above the router high, incompatible handshake wifi.
Then my bandwidth sucked so dry, a bigger amplifier oh and my.
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'n' or 'a' 'c', god why?
Hundred dollars that's too high, to maintain compatible wifi
when my neighbor goes to buy, the next great thing to make it die
Twinkle twinkle, my wifi, how I wonder why I try...
Look, the problem isn't available bandwidth, it's the fact that it's unlicensed bandwidth. Which means part 15 of the FCC rules; "device must accept any harmful interference..." Sure, right now there's only one set of devices and one standard for that frequency range, but give it time. A bug or problem will be discovered. A new protocol will need to be released. Someone will discover some new way of squeezing out just a few more drops of speed -- and it'll be incompatible. And because it's all running on the same frequency, there will be contention. Eventually, the entire situation de-evolves into the same thing that happened with CB radios: You got truckers with kilowatt-rated amplifiers and no equipment certification; There's bleed over from one channel to the next, tons of static, and people running such ridiculously overpowered and marginally functional equipment that it makes sticking your head in a microwave look downright safe compared to sitting next to some of those rigs.
It happened with 802.11b, when we switched to g. Then n was released, and it oblitherated b and g. Then manufacturers released the "turbo" modes, which ate up even more bandwidth. And nevermind all the wireless keyboards, mice, phones, wireless gamer headsets, and home audio systems, all ALSO operating on the same frequencies, each using different encoding schemes. Pretty soon you've got hackers wiring up coax and tin cans, slapping on several watt amplifiers, raising the black flag and saying "Fuck da police!" and blasting a microwave beam 50 miles, and self-sterilizing their manhood from the near field RF...
Face it guys: We need regulated airspace. We need black vans. We need licensing, and a watchdog group so if someone doesn't play nice -- it's knock, knock, and goodbye offending equipment (and possibly neighbor). And we need to mandate sunsetting of equipment periodically to maintain inter-device compatibility and spectrum integrity.
The "wild wild west" wifi is a disaster in dense urban areas. You're lucky if you can get 20 feet from the router before the signal goes to hell in some places.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it was John D. Rockefeller who at one point quipped, while writing a large (by anyone else's standards) check, that in the time it took to actually give the money, he'd already made more. This is a common problem today for rich folks. While everyone's quick to say that the millionaire could give them the money and they'd spend it easily, it's actually very hard to find good ways to spend a lot of money.
Rockefeller, unlike most of our current crop of multimillionaires and billionaires, was a philanthropist. He believed that he had a responsibility to give back something to a community that had given him so much. But that's a rare viewpoint amongst the "old money", that is -- people who were born into wealth. The rich have very different ideas about money, people, relationships, etc.
I'm not saying we should storm the castle, but we do need to redistribute the wealth much more evenly than we do now -- I don't mind the fact that there are multimillionaires. That's not unreasonable, and it's not actually a whole lot of money. But when we start talking about people with hundreds of millions, or billions, in personal assets, we need to start asking ourselves why. And I think the very simple solution is to cap inheritance. In other words, earn all the money you want during your life and keep it! Spend it however you want. But once you're dead, your descendants only get a certain maximal amount - say, 10 million, even 20 million, per immediate family member, less for extended family, etc. We need to break the cycle of generational wealth, where some very small number of families accrue more and more wealth, until it becomes so concentrated that society starts to feel the effects of wealth deprivation. As to where the rest of the money goes -- same place all your taxes go.
I'm not against people earning whatever the market will pay them. I just don't like the idea of people who are born into wealth, who are handed power, and who don't ever do meaningful work, who never produce anything of value to society. Everyone should contribute; And everybody deserves similar opportunities in life. Inheritance of such large fortunes deprives people of that chance. People should be able to provide for their families, to share and share alike, but to a point. We need to reward people for their hard work, not their great-great-grandparent's hard work.
Sorry, the details are wrong on the 17% figure. Actually, only about 1% are incarcerated right now and around 3.5% on parole. Still astonishingly high, but a misquote. The 17% figure is supposed to be the rise in the incarceration rate year-by-year, which is on a sharp upward trend right now. My bad. We are, however, still #1 in the world on per capita rate of incarceration and have held that dubious distinction for almost a decade. Also, our rate increases year over year assure us that we'll retain that title for decades to come. God Bless America. :(
For a country in constant fear of terrorists hijacking their planes you take it pretty lightly when someone actually tries to make airplanes fall.
We're coming to our senses, albeit slowly. For example, our criminal justice system used to consider three things when determining whether a crime was considered; Motive, intent, and the act itself. Motive is, "why did you do it?" Intent is, "Did you think it would hurt anyone?" and the act itself, well, self-explanatory. Starting in the 1950s (surprise! Enter those nasty ruskies with their communist putzcha), we moved away from that by creating strict liability criminal laws. Receiving stolen property, for example, is a crime of strict liability. You don't have to know it was stolen. You can do everything in the world to check to make sure it wasn't stolen. Doesn't matter whether you tried to, or knew about it, or even theoretically could have known. Still guilty. Mere possession = crime.
Back then, there was the recognition that statutes like this had the potential to be abused; So only a select few laws were passed like that at first. But as time went on, and politicians came up for re-election, "getting tough on crime" was increasingly about redefining crime so that people who blundered into a situation would now be classed as criminals and thrown in jail. You might well guess this was started with a "think of the children!" argument, and you'd be right, aka statutory rape.
It quickly ballooned out of control to the point where, combined with vague wording of statutes like the federal laws regarding regarding "authorized" computer use, virtually any consumer device that uses electricity and does more than light a room could be criminal, for any reason. You can, in fact, become a convicted felon by using somebody else's pocket calculator without their permission and go to jail for several years. In California, strict liability has been used to create the infamous "Three strikes law", where, in theory, you could wind up going to jail (for life) for stealing 3 candy bars on separate occasions. Bonus round: Supreme court upheld it as lawful.
There's an increasing awareness that having approximately 17% of our population incarcerated as I write this, and a considerably higher percentage with criminal records (which are public record in our country, and are routinely used to make employment decisions), who can only ever be marginally employed, and thus quickly discover criminal activity is the only way to maintain any standard of living... is not a sustainable model. But people are reluctant to do anything about it, because of an epic society-sized scoop of the Just World phenomenon. Put simply, it's the notion that you get what you deserve. Unfortunately, most people aren't getting what they deserve -- they're getting a life sentence of destitution and poverty for any and every offense. So needless to say, the actual sentence doesn't matter much... it's only the first 90 days you'll remember or have a hard time with. After that, it's just another routine, another adjustment to life. God help you when you get out though, because nobody else will.
So no... nobody gets off light in this country. Once you're an adult, if you ever get put in the back of a squad car odds are very good life as you know it is over.
Must be God's will. Nobody else could be that crazy.
I think that may be a mistake in the translation. -- God
IEEE-802.11 specifies the WLAN physical protocols. Feel better soon.
There is not a legal solution that is going to work.
We could make reporting them illegal. That should slow it down... since most of the people who do this are getting the idea from watching it in our popular media. Mind you, I don't advocate this position, but... it is a legal solution, and it would work.
As far as technical solutions... The only one is not having an aircraft with windows. You might imagine there are some problems with that plan. And due to the wide range of frequencies that lasers can operate over, there's no way to design glasses that could be used to filter them out.
Perhaps the solution is to restrict the sale and use of lasers, even though that would mean that bluray burners and other optical media, as well as home theatre projectors and a few other legitimate uses would have to be shitcanned -- or at least redesigned so extracting the laser from the assembly would be difficult or impossible without destroying the laser in the process. Most of these laser strikes are made from commodity consumer equipment... if we redesign the equipment so the lasers self-destruct upon tampering, we cut off the supply.
Are you sure? What if an Intel processor is the gateway to using Windows Vista?
Then we should put it on the list of Schedule I drugs and arrest anyone found in possession of it, and imprison anyone caught distributing it. Sure, some people who use Vista go on to lead productive lives, but for too many... especially children who don't know any better... why, I just can't even bring myself to talk about some of the things prolonged Vista use can cause.
And here I thought adversity made you get a second job at McDonald's to pay your rent because your immediate needs are so precarious that you can't afford to think about the long run
Some people would be happy with just one job; And instead are selling their medications on the street or prostituting so they can keep gas in their car, which is also their home, running on cold winter nights.
Sure poor people do get creative at stretching their dollars, but rich people get creative at finding ways to make their life more convenient, pleasurable or exotic.
... That is not what "adversity is the mother of invention" means. It means that when people get in trouble, they get creative. It doesn't mean there aren't other motivations for creativity, it just means that nothing motivates a person better than statements ending with "or die." Much of our advancement from a pre-agricultural society to present was based on scarcity of a resource. It's also the principle reason why we commit acts of violence. Desperation focuses the mind like nothing else does. That does not mean we should strive to make a society of desperate people, nor does it justify having so many desperate people so a few can live in superfluous abundance.
It seems painfully obvious to me that a society that prizes personal liberty would know that personal freedoms don't mean much to the starving, sick, or weak. All they want is to not be starving, sick, or weak. Our founding document for this country talks about "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" as essential and undeniable. Why then, do we allow an increasingly smaller number of our population to actually achieve those in any meaningful capacity?
Wealth inequity is destroying our way of life. There is no justification for it: Every argument you can make for it I can just point to any of the other 19 largest countries (by GDP) and say "No. Wrong." We don't need to be paying CEOs 450 times the income of their lowest-paid worker... in Japan, it's about 23 times. Nobody's going to sit here and tell me the Japanese do not find ways to make their live more convenient, pleasurable, or exotic. They're designing fully animatronic sex dolls right now for shits and giggles... and there are not many Japanese starving to death or dying of preventable causes per capita compared to us.
Give me an example, any example, of where a multibillionaire, through the act of hoarding money, has benefited society. There aren't any. So we're left with the idea that we need to reward people with billions of dollars. Why? What service does a single person provide that can be worth so much? I can at least entertain the idea that there might be someone, amongst the nearly 7 billion currently on this planet, that may be able to provide some insight, some product, some innovation, so valuable as to justify this.
But I can't find any examples.
Maybe it doesn't fit into your Platonic ideal of how this should go, but if you have a better idea then float it. Unless you were suggesting that spaceflight is a waste of time compared with the problems we need to solve on this planet, which I don't think has to be a binary answer.
I don't have a Platonic ideal about anything: I believe in the production possibilities curve, and getting as close to it as possible, rather than living well inside of it as we are now due to high rates of unemployment. Every day a person doesn't work who can and wants to is a day wasted that didn't need to be, and we can't get it back. Building space yachts for the rich might employ a few thousand -- seizing the bank accounts of those rich people and using the funds to build roads and fund people's educations would employ hundreds of thousands, and result in a much-improved quality of life. And what's the point of science and technology if not that?
Semiconductors can't. They're "Devil Science", just like those others.
I know Intel's processors can get hot, but I don't consider them to be the gateway to hell and damnation. And can you see electrons in vacuum tubes? No. Can you see molecules interacting with each other in the lab? Nope. You see the result of those things. Just because the senator doesn't agree with it, or understand it, doesn't mean it's the work of He Who Must Not Be Named. I don't understand plasma physics; That does not mean I deny the existance of plasma... especially not after putting General Tso's chicken in the microwave without taking it out of the to-go container. Though I may have screamed "Jesus H Christ!" a few times while my dinner experienced an previously unseen physical effect, followed by its flaming remains being deposited into the sink along with a pair of my mother's prized oven mitts.
Flaming General Tso aside, my point is there are perfectly reasonable explanations for every conclusion reached in science. That is, afterall, the very goal and simultaniously the definition of, a scientific fact: Objective, reproducible, proof. Evidence. But, it's pretty clear evidence doesn't stick well to members of Congress... Even those who chair the oversight committee for science.
I think it's good to see that people can become rich as it motivates those who are willing to put in the time and effort to attain the same goal
This assumes they have any reasonable chance of becoming rich, or richer. Anyone who's successful will tell you one of the ingredients is being in the right place, at the right time. It's not just about hard work. Plenty of people work hard their whole lives and die penniless. Some famous guy who invented AC power and set the stage for the industrial age, Nicoli Tesla, could probably provide some additional insight as well.
"Spreading the wealth" is a dangerous position unless there's some way to motivate people to improve their situation or to ensure only those that truly need help get it (e.g. keeps the moochers and freeloaders out of the system).
People who want to be poor are like unicorns: They don't exist. I have yet to find a person who doesn't want to live comfortably, to have their medical needs looked after, food to eat, and a safe place to sleep. If they do exist, they need medical care, because there's something very, very wrong with them. Most people want to work because it carries certain rewards; But when the only reward is surviving until tomorrow, it's not surprising to find a lack of motivation, and innovation. Especially since they're told every night on TV about the lives of people who are so very much better than they are.
Spreading the wealth isn't a dangerous position. Why is it so much easier for some people to believe that there are tens of millions of lazy people, rather than a few hundred greedy ones?
is there even a House Committee on Science, Space and Technology?
So there can be an oversight committee, of course.
It's an election year. Don't believe anything they say. Republicans this year especially have been saying the craziest crap because they know crazy people are more likely to vote than sane ones, who long ago gave up and decided the world was run by crazy people. Oh, did you just see what I did there? :( This guy has a long list of failures politically and personally (4 marriages)... I suspect he'd wear a pink tutu and sing songs from Little Mermaid if he thought he'd get more votes.
Hmm. Apparently it's a "troll" if you ask people deeper questions about personal and corporate responsibility, instead of pointing and saying "Oh look! Something new and shiny for the rich!"
If the latency figures in the article are accurate then the traffic wasn't staying in the country at all. You can get from one end of the country to the other in 35ms round trip, so even the original 30ms seems rubbish unless the circuit was DSL. The way they were making out it was a high end connection that doesn't seem likely. 180ms will easily get you too Australia and all going well will get you to San Jose from New Zealand.
Geographical separation only has a loose relation to wire length. You say 180ms will get from San Jose to New Zealand, but in the evenings, my cablemodem regularly hits 300ms times just to reach google. Oversubscription and massive buffering on a shared line are to blame; Not geographical or line distance.
We need to know more about the lines before we can say what the latency values mean, if they mean anything at all. I'm also not at all convinced that a wiretap would result in any latency: Hanging a packet sniffer off of a switch doesn't make the switch run slower in almost any scenario I can think of. Wiretapping is supposed to be something that doesn't broadcast to the target "Smile, you're on hidden camera!" If an elementary network tool can reveal a wiretap, somebody's doing something wrong. Very wrong.
Because our society is largely based on capitalist principles which uses the profit motive as an incentive to create economic growth and technological development. Being able to afford space yachts is one of the incentives that encourages this growth.
That's a lie that's told over and over again to justify massive wealth inequity. But after the first couple of million, you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention. We aren't creating multibillionaires because these people are millions of times more productive or valuable than others.
I'm going to skip the rhetoric and just ask my question as food for thought for anyone who reads this: Why are we building space ships for rich tourists, while real science languishes in the land of budget cuts and resource shortages? Why is it okay for the very wealthy to build yachts in space while poor people starve and wonder if they'll be able to afford the medication they need to stay alive? I know these aren't easy questions -- any answer I can provide seems woefully inadequate. But I think we should be asking those questions too, not just about the businesses, but their relationship to the larger society.
The Excel manager (or the closely related Powerpoint manager) has something in common with the Only-Development Matters developer, the Without-Sysadmin-The-Universe-Would-Shutdown-Now systems guy and the Nothing-Happens-When-I-Dont Sell people. Silo silliness.
You forgot to mention they all live in the I'm-A-Unique-and-Beautiful-Snowflake land, not We're-All-In-This-Together-ville. I know, the second one is a lot smaller -- it's just a town on the outskirts of the much larger land, but... I think these things matter. :D
Excel's new slogan: "The backhoe of the financial sector."
Uhh... 802.11, not 12. Small difference. Apparently not one that a half dozen slashmods noticed either... (shakes head) Standards fall every year on this forum...
Cigarette makers are right to fear the regulations...
You should too. Everyone engages in some behavior that the majority doesn't approve of. Everyone. Smokers are just another outlier group -- but gays, atheists, occupy protesters, white supremacists... every time an election rolls around, policians scramble to find a group people can all agree to hate together to earn votes. That's democracy for you: Two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
There's reasonable legislation that protects the public interest while respecting individual liberty, and then there's shit like this. Most anti-smoking legislation has been enacted within the past 5--7 years due to a groundswell of popular support. In 5--7 years, that support will have moved on to another group to hate, but yet another precident will have been set by then. Let me give you some examples of reasonable versus extreme. Disclaimer: Most of the numbers below are from memory. This was a popular discussion to have at the time the bans went into effect, so I put considerable research time into it. But it is still just from memory. Also: I'm making no attempt here to justify subjective beliefs about whether smoking smells bad, or whether I like it or not...
Restaurants
Many jurisdictions have banned smoking in bars and restaurants. After those bans were passed, business dropped off by 10-30%. In the state I live in (Minnesota), downtown Minneapolis on a saturday night seemed like a ghost town after the ban went into effect. It hasn't fully recovered since. Contrary to popular myth, there are a lot of social smokers out there, or people who only smoke when they drink. Bars in particular suffered horribly after the bans -- because it was during a recession and many people decided to just get liquor from the store and smoke out on the back porch at a friends' place. Check the numbers if you don't believe me: Look at noise complaints in the months since the ban, keyword search 'party' or 'alcohol'. 8% spike over the same time frame the previous year (caution: numbers provided by police are typically absolute! Convert to per capita and using best available census data for precincts or it's not a valid comparison.)
It's been several years now since the bans went into effect up here. Many had argued that non-smokers would fill up the bars and restaurants, flocking to the new "clean air". They never showed up. As it turns out, "clean air" was not on the top 10 list of "Reasons To Go Drinking Tonight." Go figure. Businesses have bourne the cost of enforcing the ban, and the only public health benefit claimed was for employees. Well, we send people into coal mines and other industrial environments, telling people who take those jobs of the possible health risks: But we don't ban those environments or jobs. Why is capitalism allowed there, but not in restaurants? Food for thought.
Public Parks
Banning smoking in outdoor areas seems silly to me because standing more than a few feet away reduces the amount of smoke a person breathes to a few PPM. Second-hand smoke studies have all focused on the effects of prolonged exposure in confined areas. It can be argued a ban in crowded areas promotes public health, but not in a sparsely populated outdoor park. If there is to be a ban in public areas, it should be only in areas where people regularly assemble; There is no public health benefit from banning smoking in the great outdoors.
Near Building Entrances
Yes. Agree. People certainly should be given the option to avoid smoke; And smokers do tend to congregate near building entrances. Setting a minimum distance is a prudent measure.
In private residences
Again: Businesses suffer. It should be allowable for a building owner to prohibit smoking on the grounds, even in apartment buildings or private residences; And in fact it was never illegal to specify this condition in the tenant leasing agreements of our state. But few landlords put such agreements in place because there
Most spectrum is exactly that. Want to use some? Call your friendly local AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint.
So is ham radio, and a section of bandwidth used for emergency services that uses the same standards as wifi, even the same equipment, just moved the frequencies. Guess what: They all work fine, at higher power levels, because there's a central authority to regulate it.
Regulation doesn't mean private control; It means there are rules, and punishments if you violate those rules. You can regulate access to a public resource. It's done every day.
So... You're saying we should do nothing and the problem will sort itself out nautrally. Cool.
Well, if you consider your neighbor irradiating your manhood to be "sorting", then yes.
To the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'b' or 'c' or 'g'?
Up above the router high, incompatible handshake wifi.
Then my bandwidth sucked so dry, a bigger amplifier oh and my.
eight oh two eleven (sigh) will you 'n' or 'a' 'c', god why?
Hundred dollars that's too high, to maintain compatible wifi
when my neighbor goes to buy, the next great thing to make it die
Twinkle twinkle, my wifi, how I wonder why I try...
Look, the problem isn't available bandwidth, it's the fact that it's unlicensed bandwidth. Which means part 15 of the FCC rules; "device must accept any harmful interference..." Sure, right now there's only one set of devices and one standard for that frequency range, but give it time. A bug or problem will be discovered. A new protocol will need to be released. Someone will discover some new way of squeezing out just a few more drops of speed -- and it'll be incompatible. And because it's all running on the same frequency, there will be contention. Eventually, the entire situation de-evolves into the same thing that happened with CB radios: You got truckers with kilowatt-rated amplifiers and no equipment certification; There's bleed over from one channel to the next, tons of static, and people running such ridiculously overpowered and marginally functional equipment that it makes sticking your head in a microwave look downright safe compared to sitting next to some of those rigs.
It happened with 802.11b, when we switched to g. Then n was released, and it oblitherated b and g. Then manufacturers released the "turbo" modes, which ate up even more bandwidth. And nevermind all the wireless keyboards, mice, phones, wireless gamer headsets, and home audio systems, all ALSO operating on the same frequencies, each using different encoding schemes. Pretty soon you've got hackers wiring up coax and tin cans, slapping on several watt amplifiers, raising the black flag and saying "Fuck da police!" and blasting a microwave beam 50 miles, and self-sterilizing their manhood from the near field RF...
Face it guys: We need regulated airspace. We need black vans. We need licensing, and a watchdog group so if someone doesn't play nice -- it's knock, knock, and goodbye offending equipment (and possibly neighbor). And we need to mandate sunsetting of equipment periodically to maintain inter-device compatibility and spectrum integrity.
The "wild wild west" wifi is a disaster in dense urban areas. You're lucky if you can get 20 feet from the router before the signal goes to hell in some places.