I remodeled my house and removing the chimney (roof to basement) took two full-time guys two weeks with air chisels, and that's just *brick* and mortar, no concrete, no rebar. Even subtracting a week for the time spent removing material as well (they were tidy about it).
It's build into a corner, so presumably you only have one long wall exposed. Since the block voids are filled with rebar and concrete and the block walls are mechanically connected via the top steel plate (anchored to the blocks), I'm guessing it isn't going anywhere or jackhammerable in any reasonable length of time without the entire fucking block wondering what's going on.
We *are* talking about a (mostly) practical residential solution, not something that's supposed to be a worthy challenge for an Army demolition team.
I'll grant you a poured rebar wall with plate reinforcement would be stronger, but it'd also be a hell of a lot harder to pour that quantity of concrete in your basement; at least 8 cubic yards for the walls alone (7' x 1' thick x 25 lineal feet of wall).
Maybe on new construction, but on new construction I'd put the entire fucking vault below *and* outside the foundation. You can have into it, but you need a backhoe and about a week.
Just about every gun safe, including my cheapie, that don't have electronic dials have locking mechanical dials. Some have locking bolt retractors, too.
Sure, lockable dials are pickable (and my S&G group 2 lock's key looks fairly lame), but it's one of those additional layer/skill attributes that makes the stuff all the less desirable.
Pick a corner area of your basement. Build a concrete block room, filling the block voids with concrete and rebar. Put a roof on the block room made out of steel plate, anchored to the block walls, and add another 4" of concrete and rebar on top of this.
For the entrance, use two doors. The inside door should be a vault door (better gun safe door hung on a frame with inside release). Outside door should be steel fire/security door with steel frame and heavy locks. Outside door is just to be time consuming to get to the inside door.
This wouldn't be all that expensive, either, considering a high-end gun safe alone is $5k pretty easily.
I wonder if there's a service business in this. Most consumers on their own (hell, even knowledgable people) would have no idea what spyware they had, who made it, and where the company was behind it, let alone have the time/energy to go through the process to get $1000.
But a business organization could amass that kind of knowledge and provide that as a service. You bring in your infected PC, they ID spyware, produce evidence, and you sign over 90% of your bennies to them. They then collect bulk judgements against the spyware people, since they have the resources/organization/information to do so, and then you collect your 10%.
Admittedly it's not much money, but to have an infested machine professionally cleaned, it's not too bad to get a check in the mail for $100 instead of paying for it, especially for Jane Consumer.
Sure I did -- he's a sanctimonious Frenchman who thinks that the only foreign policy the French have ever had has been Doctors Without Borders and that the French don't have at least as much blood on their hands as any other nation.
I don't know about you, but the wristwatch spam (primarily about Rolexes) seemed to start all of the sudden and accounted for a pretty significant majority of my spam.
I find it hard to believe that the world of spam suddenly lighted on selling fake Rolex watches all at the same time. So does this mean that most of those spams were 'caused' by a single entity?
I can see whoever controls the supply of fake Rolexes farming out the spamming to multiple email senders, but it still makes sense that the whole blitz was caused by a single entity with a containerload of fake watches to get rid of.
I actually think this is a GOOD thing -- it makes me wonder if it isn't possible for law enforcement, by tracking and nailing a few key people, to actually dent the spam problem significantly.
Would we have seen 10s of thousands of deaths? Yes, hurricaines are predictable, but predictions are only useful if mass evacuations are planned/executed.
It strikes me that the reason SE Asia has so many deaths isn't so much the power of the event, it's that they have so many people living in shacks at about sea level. Which means that ANY surge of sea water will cause massive problems from flooding.
States may have some control over pharmacy formularies (ie, what drugs pharmicies can and must stock), but virtually every drug in the the US pharmacopia is involved in interstate commerce, and the Feds have total regulatory control over anything that they even THINK has crossed state lines.
Furthermore, you MUST have a DEA license (and a state license as well) to write perscriptions. I know three orthodonists and all three have told me they can't write perscriptions for narcotics as their limited DEA license doesn't include that (they can do antibiotics and local anesthetics like novocaine) -- they aren't barred by law from writing narcotic prescriptions professionally, it's just that they don't want to deal with all the DEA reporting requirements for narcotics, so they keep a much more limited license.
As an aside, the DEA has gone after a number of pain management doctors and clinics for "overperscribing" stuff like Oxycontin, MS-Contin and so forth to chronic pain sufferers (serious injuries, cancer, etc) and threatened to yank their licenses simply because the DEA believes that these people are getting "too much". Which has the great consequence that when you or I break a leg, we don't get nearly enough pain management because some DEA agent has our Doctor's license over a barrel.
Nice to know that when you get a terminal illness, some douchebag bureaucrat will be watching to make sure you don't get high.
The point is that the industry associations claim that they need (Deserve? Have already bought and paid for?) jack-booted enforcement techniques because they stand on the brink of financial ruin at the hands of college movie and music traders.
If this was even remotely true and we had gone from a situation where Hollywood was making massive profits to being bankrupt and on the verge of collapse, they might have some kind of point.
But instead, they ARE making huge profits right now and the enforcement isn't against real threats to their business viability, it's just overzealous enforcement to reinforce a business model.
Why isn't the cost side of the music industry or movie business ever addressed? Gee-whiz special effects aside, why *does* it cost $150 million to make a fucking movie? Why DOES it cost $10-20 million dollars to record a pop album? Could it be the container-loads of money they're throwing at the stars? The never-ending line of lawyers, whores, coke dealers, Escalades full of ghetto losers, and other 10 percenters who have to get paid, too?
These people spray money like a firehose and produce schlock and when they DO have an occasional financial turkey it's the fault of a bunch of college kids collecting bits of data like you and I collected baseball cards, not the inane business management of movie studios, the shitty movies they make and the ridiculous lifestyles they promote and pay for?
For example: This priority -- I can't even believe that a group of serious adults gets up in the morning with the idea that they're working to end the vast and dangerous conspiracy known as the "bong industry".
I can accept that they'd go after commercial counterfeiters and pirates of intellectual property, but given the extent of fraud and other naughtyness associated with spam (ie, selling prescription drugs), why hasn't the FBI gone after that before college kids trading bad movies they'll never watch and probably won't even have five years from now (hard disk crashes, changes in life priorities, etc), let alone wouldn't have bought or paid to see anyway (and despite the fact that the movies have probably broken even or made a profit *anyway*).
I'm sure if they actually *did* investigate spam via stings, they'd find massive tax evasion, fraud, violations of more substantive drug laws, and a bunch of otherwise legitimate corporations collecting a tidy profit by selling services needed to run a spam operation. Which is probably why they won't make the effort -- whenever big business gets involved, somehow the law doesn't seem to apply.
Oh well, at least we'll know that "college kids" and "bong makers" can be safely removed from the Bad Guy checklist.
Do any of these systems plan to have the ability to read/write both sides at the same time? Double-sided media with no cartridge is kind of limited for labeling, but it is a cheap and easy way to double storage without a lot of engineering.
I'd also think a two-sided medium could be faster than single-sided medium if you combined the surfaces together in a RAID-0 kind of striping setup.
Would it really be that much more expensive to put a R/W head on top of the drive in addition to on the bottom?
There was an interesting article on modafinil in the New Yorker a year or so ago and what was so surprising to researchers was that it apparently broke a lot of the "rules" regarding lack of sleep; extended duration on it didn't lead to psychosis the way extended periods without sleep on traditional stimulants (amphetimines, cocaine, caffeine, simply being kept awake) and there was no apparent come-down as is associated with stimulants, either -- the people who took it simply went to sleep per normal and woke up without feeling weak or sleep deprived.
I think at the time the people investigating modafinil weren't willing to go beyond a week's awake time, and had some reservations about what would happen with extended use of it, but by all indications there were none of the obvious problem associated with sleep deprivation -- the people who took it weren't sleep deprived, they just appeared to not *need* sleep.
Previous studies of sleep deprivation almost don't count with regard to modafinil, since they all rely on psychosis-inducing stimulants or merely forcing people to stay awake through environmental means.
I wonder about the long-term physological effects of modafinil use, simply from the perspective of what happens to the mind when you have more awake experiences than is normal.
For example, if you skipped sleeping for 40 hours per week, would you "age" your brain prematurely? Would you get burned out psychologically on things you found pleasurable?
There's some interesting psychological ramifications.
I can't say I've experienced any, but I might not have been a long term enough user to have experienced any.
I took it recreationally in college, 20 years ago. Freshman year it was a 4-5 times a month drug, sophomore maybe 1-2 times a month, with only maybe a dozen doses the rest of my college years.
At my peak in my freshman year, I was taking 2-3 hits of blotter (small bits of paper soaked in LSD about 1/8 the size of a stamp) maybe twice a week. The more we took the greater the dose required to really get more than a stimulant-type effect from it.
I knew a couple of habitual users who took half or quarter hits for the stimulation effect only before a night of heavy drinking. LSD makes you feel immune to liquor's psychological effects. I used to not drink as a rule when taking LSD, although once I did go to a party where the booze was free and drank so much that I could barely walk, despite not feeling drunk at all.
The effect was generally intense halucinations for about 2-3 hours and tapering off after that depending on dose, unbelievable physical energy (we often walked 10 miles in a night, in any weather), and an intense feeling of really "getting it" and achieving intense understanding which was forgotten once it wore off. A portable dictation machine affirmed the fact that we didn't actually achieve anything beyond the feeling of getting it -- insights were gibberish.
The downside was "coming down". It'd be 4 in the morning and we'd start to feel physically tired, a little bored, and mainly just wishing it was over. But sleep was hard to come by -- usually you'd doze for 4-5 hours around 5-6 AM and the next day was just shot. I think something like Xanax, Ativan or Valium would have helped. Booze and/or pot really didn't.
Eventually I grew tired of the 'coming down' part and killing the next day completely. Finding people suitable to take it with was an issue, too. Initiating someone to LSD was a risky issue, as some people tended to get a little overwhelmed by the experience. It's also a pretty serious drug to get caught with -- two people I knew casually got caught with 50 some doses and ended up doing felony jail time. And then there's the whole issue of buying it, dosage, and so on.
To this day, I have yet to experience a "flashback" or any of the other spooky tales associated with it. I don't have any real problems with focusing or anything else, and a recent MMPI test indicated that other than scoring high on the cynacism index, I don't have any obvious personality problems.
I wouldn't take it again, though. I think it was enlightening to some extent as a college student, but I think now it would just be stress inducing.
"Following the money" would be a great investigative technique, whether single-instance to get the person running a particular spam business, or, as the FBI has done with organized crime, mapping out the entire business enterprise and then taking it all down at once.
The RICO statutes used for organized crime ought to be used for spamming as well. I can only believe that banks and other financial instutions are willing agents in the spam trade, as are ISPs and other nominally legitimate businesses.
A RICO sting that took them all out and sent otherwise "savvy" businessmen from "legitimate" businesses to hard-core Federal prison, as well as fining their companies and making a big, public, awful-PR mess would go a long way towards cutting off the "air supply" that spam and spam businesses need to be viable.
If you can't get no-questions-asked merchant accounts, ISP connectivity or other things needed to run a spam business, it's going to be more expensive, more complicated and difficult to run and that means less business period, and, less *spam*.
The mystery is why none of this has happened; spam is a huge, profitable and quite openly practiced fradulent business.
I'm not even sure the old, old $100+ fees would be a deterrent. 100 domains at $100 each is only $10,000 and while not a drop in the hat is trivial in many marketing campaigns.
Back when domain squatting/hoarding was considered more of a problem (especially by deep-pocketed corporations that wanted anagram-level control over every domain its trademarks could possibly spell), I thought that the best fee-deterrent solution was to charge an exponentially higher fee for each TLD registered by a corporation or each beyond some "everyman" threshold (like maybe 5).
This way even small organizations could have a few domains registered, but any organization, even a large one, would have to think twice before mass registering hundreds of domains, since the charges would quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The bulk of userspace never knew what.com,.net, and.org meant and still don't. All they ever knew was that the web site address wasn't complete unless it ended in one of those names, and usually just.com (kind of like they had to start with www. as well). The average user doesn't know what the new TLDs are and doesn't care, since nothing's leaving the big three.
The intended purpose of expanding the namespace by adding new TLDs is both not necessary with the death of squatting and speculating as well as testy trademark holders lining up to register their names in any possible new TLDs, thus creating a scarcity in "good" 2nd level domain names in any new general purpose TLDs anyway.
And its not like there are a bunch of organizations suddenly willing to abandon 2LD in "the big three" for a new TLD in something nobody knows or understands; at best they might register their existing 2LD in the new TLD if it was 100% spot-on accurate (eg, monster.jobs, for example).
Nor are there a bunch of organizations saying "Gee, we have TLD that kind of matches our organization, maybe it's time to get on the intranets."
The only reason I can see ICANN releasing new TLDs is to raise money by selling the "management rights" to a bunch of Verisign wannabees, who if they have any brains, will just sell out to Verisign's monopoly as soon as they can.
But this strategy will only work a few more times for ICANN, because soon Verisign won't be interested in buying complete control of TLDs by proxy once the market is diluted enough.
And honestly, there's no reason it can't be. Shit, you pay $40-50 a month, minimum, in the US for cable television ($12-15 if you go with their "bare minimum" which is nothing more than local channels and a few informational/government channels).
If that's the case, you'd think that phone service would be free as well, since $40 a month is about the same price as a residential line in the US and they're not even providing any *content* -- you have to connect to some other subscriber to get your content.
I'm willing to give some cable operators the benefit of the doubt about the costs of their environments. Laying a coax plant in a city isn't a small or cheap endeavour (and in Minneapolis where I live, the pre-digital cable plant was a duplex cable -- *two* coaxes to every home). Upgrades for cable modem aren't digital cable aren't cheap, and then there's the ongoing maintenance and customer service issues.
And then there's the greed of the channels themselves, usually sold in some forced package (if you want Channel Z, you have to take 9 other channels along with it, despite the tiny ratings) that drives up the cost of providing channels.
I don't know what the economics are of a cable channel. Channel owners have themselves in a pickle with popular channels that are expensive to operate but bring in good advertising revenue but whose sale at inflated prices in packages has to cross-subsidize unpopular channels that have operating costs that can't be met by the advertising they have.
I know that movie channels were specifically intended to be commercial free, since watching movies on TV traditionally meant interruptions for commercials as well as sanitizing to meet some evangelist in Oklahoma's standard for cleanliness.
But were other channels meant to be commercial free? TBS was around from the beginning and I think it always had commercials, since it was beamed up from Atlanta largely as it ran on WTBS.
I think the *perception* was that very early cable channels were commercial free. I think the reality was that audiences were so small and the technology so new that nobody in advertising thought much of it and there wasn't a whole lot of people pay to run ads on it.
We run into self-styled "developers" and "civilian sysadmins" from time to time who insist on doing something, despite our policies dictating otherwise.
The problem is that even well-managed IT is a house of cards and it only takes a couple of instances of someone doing "the right thing" for their 5 person workgroup for the entire thing to become and unmanageable jungle.
Even then, you're often the target of their myopia -- they're pushing X because it's good for their career or some other one-off situation and they could actually care less that whole other 100-plus person departments get degraded service. I've had mangers asking about client upgrades tell me, point-black, when told that upgrades were being done "as needed based on PC age" that they "didn't give a shit about other people, they only cared about their people" -- and this was from someone who managed about 8 people.
Even when we've largely agreed with them and let them push the big red buttons, we find a lot of abandoned projects that didn't work well or caused (localized) havoc because they ignored our advice and policies.
IT policies aren't always great, but they're usually a delicate compromise between someone else's financial and accountability goals and technical viability. The result is admittedly not always pretty or rational on the surface, and such are compromises.
I'd be curious as to how many companies structure their IT in such a way that if a department or workgroup wants to call all the shots they can, but they have to either pay for it (new computers ahead of schedule? Sure, explain your loss in profitability) or lose access to other parts of the network or support.
My guess would be that the trend is consolidation and centralization, not individual choice and opportunity, since the former at least promises cost savings based on economies of scale and standard "best practices". Not calling it always the right answer, mind you.
Apple's moving much more in a consumer electronics direction than in a computing direction, but I still think it would have been interesting if Apple had bought SGI while they were developing OS X.
Both companies had a solid niche in computer graphics; SGI's in 3D visualization, and Apple's in 2D design. Apple was going to introduce a UNIX based operation system, IRIX is a UNIX based operating system. Both companies are involved in computing, but not so much in the transactional data processing side that HP/IBM/Sun are involved in, and neither one was ever in the position to make meaningful moves in that market. Both had clientelle willing to spend more on their products than the products of their more direct competitors to get either their specialized hardware or software.
I think it would have benefitted Apple by giving their products more industrial/data center credibility, in addition to general upward mobility for hardware and software, especially in the 3D visualization realm. SGI on the other hand would have gotten access to more mainstream applications (in their late 90s heydey you COULD get stuff like Photoshop for the SGI) and easier integration with a desktop-priced computer.
In the end if it was done right, I think you could have had a really cool computing environment based on a common operation system. Research departments or other entities with uniqure requirements could have been "all Apple" with desktop Macs and machine-room servers all sharing the same user interface and capable of running the same applications (think fat binaries with MIPS and PPC, instead of PPC and 68K).
It might have led to some interesting clustering concepts integrating the desktops and the big boys for shared/distributed computing, NUMA, and other stuff.
Anyway, I think there was an interesting business case for such a merger. Most Apple fans (often rudely) disgree, and think of Apple as perpetually a personal computer/consumer electroncis company when I thought they could have been and done more. Oh well, it's too late now.
Utilities are highly regulated which leads me to doubt they'd be able to move the decimal place 2 or three places on production ability and profit margin in the same direction.
I'd expect them to just sell more power at about the same margin.
There's loads of good reasons to continue using combustible fuels for some modes of transport, but, if fusion produces the ultra-plentiful-ultra-cheap power we've come to believe, transport doesn't have to burn fossil fuel-based products.
Imagine if it was cost effective to use fusion generated electricity to make ethanol, biodiesel or hydrogen. One of the problems with all those fuels is that take energy to make them. If the energy that it takes to make them is suddenly a couple of orders of magnitude less expensive, those fuels become very cost competitive or cheaper than fossil fuels. They're cleaner to burn (I think, I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong) so you gain a huge environmental win as well as the geopolitical and economic advantages of cutting fossil fuel consumption.
Even for personal mass transit, cheap enough electricity could mean free charging stations for electric cars or induction charging systems in roadways since the cost of the power and the transmission losses would be economically negligible. And then there's the idea that even if we're not using electric cars, our cars are powered by the same eco-friendly fuels refined with our cheap electricity.
Of course starting up even a commercial reactor tomorrow won't make this happen overnight, but once you have a cheap enough power source, you don't have to care (as much) about net energy losses making other more practical fuels or the losses in moving electricity around.
...and his technique/technology was suspiciously absent from the article (which spent a great deal of time talking about his past artistic background). Might have something to do with his private meeting with Sandia people about his technology.
Does anyone know what he's doing that's really any different from using a traditional 8x10 and some slow-speed, fine-grained film?
The article's brief description of the camera mentioned mirrors and the very wide depth of field of his photos (objects in sharp focus at 4k and 16k feet distances) almost would make you think he was using some kind of multiple lens simultaneous/multiple exposure (allowing the camera to be sharply focused at multiple distances but exposed as one image).
I'm not a photog, so I don't even know if that's possible, but it sounds like an intriguing idea.
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I remodeled my house and removing the chimney (roof to basement) took two full-time guys two weeks with air chisels, and that's just *brick* and mortar, no concrete, no rebar. Even subtracting a week for the time spent removing material as well (they were tidy about it).
It's build into a corner, so presumably you only have one long wall exposed. Since the block voids are filled with rebar and concrete and the block walls are mechanically connected via the top steel plate (anchored to the blocks), I'm guessing it isn't going anywhere or jackhammerable in any reasonable length of time without the entire fucking block wondering what's going on.
We *are* talking about a (mostly) practical residential solution, not something that's supposed to be a worthy challenge for an Army demolition team.
I'll grant you a poured rebar wall with plate reinforcement would be stronger, but it'd also be a hell of a lot harder to pour that quantity of concrete in your basement; at least 8 cubic yards for the walls alone (7' x 1' thick x 25 lineal feet of wall).
Maybe on new construction, but on new construction I'd put the entire fucking vault below *and* outside the foundation. You can have into it, but you need a backhoe and about a week.
Just about every gun safe, including my cheapie, that don't have electronic dials have locking mechanical dials. Some have locking bolt retractors, too.
Sure, lockable dials are pickable (and my S&G group 2 lock's key looks fairly lame), but it's one of those additional layer/skill attributes that makes the stuff all the less desirable.
Pick a corner area of your basement. Build a concrete block room, filling the block voids with concrete and rebar. Put a roof on the block room made out of steel plate, anchored to the block walls, and add another 4" of concrete and rebar on top of this.
For the entrance, use two doors. The inside door should be a vault door (better gun safe door hung on a frame with inside release). Outside door should be steel fire/security door with steel frame and heavy locks. Outside door is just to be time consuming to get to the inside door.
This wouldn't be all that expensive, either, considering a high-end gun safe alone is $5k pretty easily.
I wonder if there's a service business in this. Most consumers on their own (hell, even knowledgable people) would have no idea what spyware they had, who made it, and where the company was behind it, let alone have the time/energy to go through the process to get $1000.
But a business organization could amass that kind of knowledge and provide that as a service. You bring in your infected PC, they ID spyware, produce evidence, and you sign over 90% of your bennies to them. They then collect bulk judgements against the spyware people, since they have the resources/organization/information to do so, and then you collect your 10%.
Admittedly it's not much money, but to have an infested machine professionally cleaned, it's not too bad to get a check in the mail for $100 instead of paying for it, especially for Jane Consumer.
Sure I did -- he's a sanctimonious Frenchman who thinks that the only foreign policy the French have ever had has been Doctors Without Borders and that the French don't have at least as much blood on their hands as any other nation.
I don't know about you, but the wristwatch spam (primarily about Rolexes) seemed to start all of the sudden and accounted for a pretty significant majority of my spam.
I find it hard to believe that the world of spam suddenly lighted on selling fake Rolex watches all at the same time. So does this mean that most of those spams were 'caused' by a single entity?
I can see whoever controls the supply of fake Rolexes farming out the spamming to multiple email senders, but it still makes sense that the whole blitz was caused by a single entity with a containerload of fake watches to get rid of.
I actually think this is a GOOD thing -- it makes me wonder if it isn't possible for law enforcement, by tracking and nailing a few key people, to actually dent the spam problem significantly.
Oh yeah, that must have been the *other* France that wanted to test nukes in the South Pacific and bombed a Greenpeace boat in a New Zealand harbor.
I wonder if its the same France protecting French colonials, errm, "peacekeeping" in Ivory Coast?
And is it the same France that backed Michel Aoun's power grab during the Lebanese civil war that led to the destruction of Beruit?
This is just the beginning of a long and dirty laundry list of relatively recent French extracurricular activities.
One last joke at French expense:
Q: Why are the roads in France lined with trees?
A: So the German army can march in the shade.
Would we have seen 10s of thousands of deaths? Yes, hurricaines are predictable, but predictions are only useful if mass evacuations are planned/executed.
It strikes me that the reason SE Asia has so many deaths isn't so much the power of the event, it's that they have so many people living in shacks at about sea level. Which means that ANY surge of sea water will cause massive problems from flooding.
States may have some control over pharmacy formularies (ie, what drugs pharmicies can and must stock), but virtually every drug in the the US pharmacopia is involved in interstate commerce, and the Feds have total regulatory control over anything that they even THINK has crossed state lines.
Furthermore, you MUST have a DEA license (and a state license as well) to write perscriptions. I know three orthodonists and all three have told me they can't write perscriptions for narcotics as their limited DEA license doesn't include that (they can do antibiotics and local anesthetics like novocaine) -- they aren't barred by law from writing narcotic prescriptions professionally, it's just that they don't want to deal with all the DEA reporting requirements for narcotics, so they keep a much more limited license.
As an aside, the DEA has gone after a number of pain management doctors and clinics for "overperscribing" stuff like Oxycontin, MS-Contin and so forth to chronic pain sufferers (serious injuries, cancer, etc) and threatened to yank their licenses simply because the DEA believes that these people are getting "too much". Which has the great consequence that when you or I break a leg, we don't get nearly enough pain management because some DEA agent has our Doctor's license over a barrel.
Nice to know that when you get a terminal illness, some douchebag bureaucrat will be watching to make sure you don't get high.
The point is that the industry associations claim that they need (Deserve? Have already bought and paid for?) jack-booted enforcement techniques because they stand on the brink of financial ruin at the hands of college movie and music traders.
If this was even remotely true and we had gone from a situation where Hollywood was making massive profits to being bankrupt and on the verge of collapse, they might have some kind of point.
But instead, they ARE making huge profits right now and the enforcement isn't against real threats to their business viability, it's just overzealous enforcement to reinforce a business model.
Why isn't the cost side of the music industry or movie business ever addressed? Gee-whiz special effects aside, why *does* it cost $150 million to make a fucking movie? Why DOES it cost $10-20 million dollars to record a pop album? Could it be the container-loads of money they're throwing at the stars? The never-ending line of lawyers, whores, coke dealers, Escalades full of ghetto losers, and other 10 percenters who have to get paid, too?
These people spray money like a firehose and produce schlock and when they DO have an occasional financial turkey it's the fault of a bunch of college kids collecting bits of data like you and I collected baseball cards, not the inane business management of movie studios, the shitty movies they make and the ridiculous lifestyles they promote and pay for?
For example: This priority -- I can't even believe that a group of serious adults gets up in the morning with the idea that they're working to end the vast and dangerous conspiracy known as the "bong industry".
I can accept that they'd go after commercial counterfeiters and pirates of intellectual property, but given the extent of fraud and other naughtyness associated with spam (ie, selling prescription drugs), why hasn't the FBI gone after that before college kids trading bad movies they'll never watch and probably won't even have five years from now (hard disk crashes, changes in life priorities, etc), let alone wouldn't have bought or paid to see anyway (and despite the fact that the movies have probably broken even or made a profit *anyway*).
I'm sure if they actually *did* investigate spam via stings, they'd find massive tax evasion, fraud, violations of more substantive drug laws, and a bunch of otherwise legitimate corporations collecting a tidy profit by selling services needed to run a spam operation. Which is probably why they won't make the effort -- whenever big business gets involved, somehow the law doesn't seem to apply.
Oh well, at least we'll know that "college kids" and "bong makers" can be safely removed from the Bad Guy checklist.
Do any of these systems plan to have the ability to read/write both sides at the same time? Double-sided media with no cartridge is kind of limited for labeling, but it is a cheap and easy way to double storage without a lot of engineering.
I'd also think a two-sided medium could be faster than single-sided medium if you combined the surfaces together in a RAID-0 kind of striping setup.
Would it really be that much more expensive to put a R/W head on top of the drive in addition to on the bottom?
There was an interesting article on modafinil in the New Yorker a year or so ago and what was so surprising to researchers was that it apparently broke a lot of the "rules" regarding lack of sleep; extended duration on it didn't lead to psychosis the way extended periods without sleep on traditional stimulants (amphetimines, cocaine, caffeine, simply being kept awake) and there was no apparent come-down as is associated with stimulants, either -- the people who took it simply went to sleep per normal and woke up without feeling weak or sleep deprived.
I think at the time the people investigating modafinil weren't willing to go beyond a week's awake time, and had some reservations about what would happen with extended use of it, but by all indications there were none of the obvious problem associated with sleep deprivation -- the people who took it weren't sleep deprived, they just appeared to not *need* sleep.
Previous studies of sleep deprivation almost don't count with regard to modafinil, since they all rely on psychosis-inducing stimulants or merely forcing people to stay awake through environmental means.
I wonder about the long-term physological effects of modafinil use, simply from the perspective of what happens to the mind when you have more awake experiences than is normal.
For example, if you skipped sleeping for 40 hours per week, would you "age" your brain prematurely? Would you get burned out psychologically on things you found pleasurable?
There's some interesting psychological ramifications.
I can't say I've experienced any, but I might not have been a long term enough user to have experienced any.
I took it recreationally in college, 20 years ago. Freshman year it was a 4-5 times a month drug, sophomore maybe 1-2 times a month, with only maybe a dozen doses the rest of my college years.
At my peak in my freshman year, I was taking 2-3 hits of blotter (small bits of paper soaked in LSD about 1/8 the size of a stamp) maybe twice a week. The more we took the greater the dose required to really get more than a stimulant-type effect from it.
I knew a couple of habitual users who took half or quarter hits for the stimulation effect only before a night of heavy drinking. LSD makes you feel immune to liquor's psychological effects. I used to not drink as a rule when taking LSD, although once I did go to a party where the booze was free and drank so much that I could barely walk, despite not feeling drunk at all.
The effect was generally intense halucinations for about 2-3 hours and tapering off after that depending on dose, unbelievable physical energy (we often walked 10 miles in a night, in any weather), and an intense feeling of really "getting it" and achieving intense understanding which was forgotten once it wore off. A portable dictation machine affirmed the fact that we didn't actually achieve anything beyond the feeling of getting it -- insights were gibberish.
The downside was "coming down". It'd be 4 in the morning and we'd start to feel physically tired, a little bored, and mainly just wishing it was over. But sleep was hard to come by -- usually you'd doze for 4-5 hours around 5-6 AM and the next day was just shot. I think something like Xanax, Ativan or Valium would have helped. Booze and/or pot really didn't.
Eventually I grew tired of the 'coming down' part and killing the next day completely. Finding people suitable to take it with was an issue, too. Initiating someone to LSD was a risky issue, as some people tended to get a little overwhelmed by the experience. It's also a pretty serious drug to get caught with -- two people I knew casually got caught with 50 some doses and ended up doing felony jail time. And then there's the whole issue of buying it, dosage, and so on.
To this day, I have yet to experience a "flashback" or any of the other spooky tales associated with it. I don't have any real problems with focusing or anything else, and a recent MMPI test indicated that other than scoring high on the cynacism index, I don't have any obvious personality problems.
I wouldn't take it again, though. I think it was enlightening to some extent as a college student, but I think now it would just be stress inducing.
"Following the money" would be a great investigative technique, whether single-instance to get the person running a particular spam business, or, as the FBI has done with organized crime, mapping out the entire business enterprise and then taking it all down at once.
The RICO statutes used for organized crime ought to be used for spamming as well. I can only believe that banks and other financial instutions are willing agents in the spam trade, as are ISPs and other nominally legitimate businesses.
A RICO sting that took them all out and sent otherwise "savvy" businessmen from "legitimate" businesses to hard-core Federal prison, as well as fining their companies and making a big, public, awful-PR mess would go a long way towards cutting off the "air supply" that spam and spam businesses need to be viable.
If you can't get no-questions-asked merchant accounts, ISP connectivity or other things needed to run a spam business, it's going to be more expensive, more complicated and difficult to run and that means less business period, and, less *spam*.
The mystery is why none of this has happened; spam is a huge, profitable and quite openly practiced fradulent business.
I'm not even sure the old, old $100+ fees would be a deterrent. 100 domains at $100 each is only $10,000 and while not a drop in the hat is trivial in many marketing campaigns.
Back when domain squatting/hoarding was considered more of a problem (especially by deep-pocketed corporations that wanted anagram-level control over every domain its trademarks could possibly spell), I thought that the best fee-deterrent solution was to charge an exponentially higher fee for each TLD registered by a corporation or each beyond some "everyman" threshold (like maybe 5).
This way even small organizations could have a few domains registered, but any organization, even a large one, would have to think twice before mass registering hundreds of domains, since the charges would quickly run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The bulk of userspace never knew what .com, .net, and .org meant and still don't. All they ever knew was that the web site address wasn't complete unless it ended in one of those names, and usually just .com (kind of like they had to start with www. as well). The average user doesn't know what the new TLDs are and doesn't care, since nothing's leaving the big three.
The intended purpose of expanding the namespace by adding new TLDs is both not necessary with the death of squatting and speculating as well as testy trademark holders lining up to register their names in any possible new TLDs, thus creating a scarcity in "good" 2nd level domain names in any new general purpose TLDs anyway.
And its not like there are a bunch of organizations suddenly willing to abandon 2LD in "the big three" for a new TLD in something nobody knows or understands; at best they might register their existing 2LD in the new TLD if it was 100% spot-on accurate (eg, monster.jobs, for example).
Nor are there a bunch of organizations saying "Gee, we have TLD that kind of matches our organization, maybe it's time to get on the intranets."
The only reason I can see ICANN releasing new TLDs is to raise money by selling the "management rights" to a bunch of Verisign wannabees, who if they have any brains, will just sell out to Verisign's monopoly as soon as they can.
But this strategy will only work a few more times for ICANN, because soon Verisign won't be interested in buying complete control of TLDs by proxy once the market is diluted enough.
And honestly, there's no reason it can't be. Shit, you pay $40-50 a month, minimum, in the US for cable television ($12-15 if you go with their "bare minimum" which is nothing more than local channels and a few informational/government channels).
If that's the case, you'd think that phone service would be free as well, since $40 a month is about the same price as a residential line in the US and they're not even providing any *content* -- you have to connect to some other subscriber to get your content.
I'm willing to give some cable operators the benefit of the doubt about the costs of their environments. Laying a coax plant in a city isn't a small or cheap endeavour (and in Minneapolis where I live, the pre-digital cable plant was a duplex cable -- *two* coaxes to every home). Upgrades for cable modem aren't digital cable aren't cheap, and then there's the ongoing maintenance and customer service issues.
And then there's the greed of the channels themselves, usually sold in some forced package (if you want Channel Z, you have to take 9 other channels along with it, despite the tiny ratings) that drives up the cost of providing channels.
I don't know what the economics are of a cable channel. Channel owners have themselves in a pickle with popular channels that are expensive to operate but bring in good advertising revenue but whose sale at inflated prices in packages has to cross-subsidize unpopular channels that have operating costs that can't be met by the advertising they have.
I know that movie channels were specifically intended to be commercial free, since watching movies on TV traditionally meant interruptions for commercials as well as sanitizing to meet some evangelist in Oklahoma's standard for cleanliness.
But were other channels meant to be commercial free? TBS was around from the beginning and I think it always had commercials, since it was beamed up from Atlanta largely as it ran on WTBS.
I think the *perception* was that very early cable channels were commercial free. I think the reality was that audiences were so small and the technology so new that nobody in advertising thought much of it and there wasn't a whole lot of people pay to run ads on it.
I'll take a small step up to bat for IT here...
We run into self-styled "developers" and "civilian sysadmins" from time to time who insist on doing something, despite our policies dictating otherwise.
The problem is that even well-managed IT is a house of cards and it only takes a couple of instances of someone doing "the right thing" for their 5 person workgroup for the entire thing to become and unmanageable jungle.
Even then, you're often the target of their myopia -- they're pushing X because it's good for their career or some other one-off situation and they could actually care less that whole other 100-plus person departments get degraded service. I've had mangers asking about client upgrades tell me, point-black, when told that upgrades were being done "as needed based on PC age" that they "didn't give a shit about other people, they only cared about their people" -- and this was from someone who managed about 8 people.
Even when we've largely agreed with them and let them push the big red buttons, we find a lot of abandoned projects that didn't work well or caused (localized) havoc because they ignored our advice and policies.
IT policies aren't always great, but they're usually a delicate compromise between someone else's financial and accountability goals and technical viability. The result is admittedly not always pretty or rational on the surface, and such are compromises.
I'd be curious as to how many companies structure their IT in such a way that if a department or workgroup wants to call all the shots they can, but they have to either pay for it (new computers ahead of schedule? Sure, explain your loss in profitability) or lose access to other parts of the network or support.
My guess would be that the trend is consolidation and centralization, not individual choice and opportunity, since the former at least promises cost savings based on economies of scale and standard "best practices". Not calling it always the right answer, mind you.
Apple's moving much more in a consumer electronics direction than in a computing direction, but I still think it would have been interesting if Apple had bought SGI while they were developing OS X.
Both companies had a solid niche in computer graphics; SGI's in 3D visualization, and Apple's in 2D design. Apple was going to introduce a UNIX based operation system, IRIX is a UNIX based operating system. Both companies are involved in computing, but not so much in the transactional data processing side that HP/IBM/Sun are involved in, and neither one was ever in the position to make meaningful moves in that market. Both had clientelle willing to spend more on their products than the products of their more direct competitors to get either their specialized hardware or software.
I think it would have benefitted Apple by giving their products more industrial/data center credibility, in addition to general upward mobility for hardware and software, especially in the 3D visualization realm. SGI on the other hand would have gotten access to more mainstream applications (in their late 90s heydey you COULD get stuff like Photoshop for the SGI) and easier integration with a desktop-priced computer.
In the end if it was done right, I think you could have had a really cool computing environment based on a common operation system. Research departments or other entities with uniqure requirements could have been "all Apple" with desktop Macs and machine-room servers all sharing the same user interface and capable of running the same applications (think fat binaries with MIPS and PPC, instead of PPC and 68K).
It might have led to some interesting clustering concepts integrating the desktops and the big boys for shared/distributed computing, NUMA, and other stuff.
Anyway, I think there was an interesting business case for such a merger. Most Apple fans (often rudely) disgree, and think of Apple as perpetually a personal computer/consumer electroncis company when I thought they could have been and done more. Oh well, it's too late now.
Utilities are highly regulated which leads me to doubt they'd be able to move the decimal place 2 or three places on production ability and profit margin in the same direction.
I'd expect them to just sell more power at about the same margin.
There's loads of good reasons to continue using combustible fuels for some modes of transport, but, if fusion produces the ultra-plentiful-ultra-cheap power we've come to believe, transport doesn't have to burn fossil fuel-based products.
Imagine if it was cost effective to use fusion generated electricity to make ethanol, biodiesel or hydrogen. One of the problems with all those fuels is that take energy to make them. If the energy that it takes to make them is suddenly a couple of orders of magnitude less expensive, those fuels become very cost competitive or cheaper than fossil fuels. They're cleaner to burn (I think, I'm sure I'll be corrected if wrong) so you gain a huge environmental win as well as the geopolitical and economic advantages of cutting fossil fuel consumption.
Even for personal mass transit, cheap enough electricity could mean free charging stations for electric cars or induction charging systems in roadways since the cost of the power and the transmission losses would be economically negligible. And then there's the idea that even if we're not using electric cars, our cars are powered by the same eco-friendly fuels refined with our cheap electricity.
Of course starting up even a commercial reactor tomorrow won't make this happen overnight, but once you have a cheap enough power source, you don't have to care (as much) about net energy losses making other more practical fuels or the losses in moving electricity around.
...and his technique/technology was suspiciously absent from the article (which spent a great deal of time talking about his past artistic background). Might have something to do with his private meeting with Sandia people about his technology.
Does anyone know what he's doing that's really any different from using a traditional 8x10 and some slow-speed, fine-grained film?
The article's brief description of the camera mentioned mirrors and the very wide depth of field of his photos (objects in sharp focus at 4k and 16k feet distances) almost would make you think he was using some kind of multiple lens simultaneous/multiple exposure (allowing the camera to be sharply focused at multiple distances but exposed as one image).
I'm not a photog, so I don't even know if that's possible, but it sounds like an intriguing idea.