...is not from corrupt, ImClone-style insider trading, but from the long-term outlook for patented, exclusive medical therapies.
There's a large, general outrage at the overall cost of medical treatment and within specific socioeconomic groups HUGE outrage at the cost of perscription medicines. It's not felt (as much) by the middle class due to their generally good, employer-provided medical coverage.
However, I predict a time in the next 20 years when the cost of medical treatment across the board (doctors, hospitals, medicines, and so on) will be so high that political pressure will be brought to bear to severely regulate the costs associated with medical treatments if not to begin socializing medicine.
What's this got to do with biotech careers? Biotech right now is hot as a sector because of the promise of developing amazing new treatments that are proprietary, patentable and licensable for HUGE profits. However the money will dry up quickly if government begins to socialize medicine.
I wasn't endorsing the actual usability of the vendor utility partitions, just the idea of an OS-independent, bootable image seperate from the mass storage of the computer.
I had one time where I was able to utilize the vendor boot partition -- a needed bios update on a machine 4000 miles away done via a dialup connection to the box's remote management card -- and even that was a fluke because like you I usually delete them!
This could also be useful for initial net-based O/S installation or download. Having basic tools available in ROM could ease a lot of tasks- include a browser, an FTP client, a telnet client, and disk partitioning/formatting software, for example.
Most big-name server vendors have a way to set up a utility partition on the HD and the server BIOS can boot from it withouth the OS having anything to do with it. It'd be great to have the equivilent of a rescue system in BIOs that could be used to salvage a damaged disk-based system.
Any place I've ever been, $3 per full-length album was pretty damn good; most of the time it was $2.00 or $2.50. That's one damned expensive way of ripping MP3s and screwing Emimem over, even if you figure that the pirate (ahem) bought the damned thing used.
First of all, you never buy new CDs -- too expensive and as you point out you can't get your money back. Only buy used CDs, which halves your initial investment. The real scam part comes where most used CD places near where I live will allow you a 4-5 day return period where you can bring the used CD back for a store credit. If you're careful and the store is big (ie, large staff), you can buy, copy and return a fair number of CDs on a pretty regular basis.
It's certainly not free -- once you give them your money it's theirs, its a question of whether its a 2 or 3-for-1 bargain or not. I'm pretty sure this isn't what the RIAA is worried about, but its a nice little option for expanding your collection.
Add on another feature; plug the relay into your phone line, and when you're at home or near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless phone
You know, I've been waiting for them to come out with a cell phone that was a cordless phone when within range of its base station(s). I'm sure it would be slightly larger than today's current crop of ultratiny cellulars, but not by much.
I'm sure it would be complicated but might even be worth it to come up with some way for the base station to add the cell line automatically as a conference party when you left base station, simulating a cell-cell handoff.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Most people forget that the split between England and the U.S. was over very real philosophical differences over government power and the rights of citizens. The British don't believe in unalienable rights.
A simple rule of thumb: Citizens have rights, subjects have privileges. We believe our rights are unalienable -- they come from God. Subjects' privileges are granted by the crown and taken away by the crown as it sees fit.
dangerously unaccountable to Internet users, businesses and other key interest groups.
Any chance that Big Money, Inc. hasn't gotten what they thought they bought with ICANN and is instead deciding that its money goes a lot farther with the Government instead?
The more people who support the libraries, the better their collections get.
I wonder about this. It seems true on the surface, but...
More demand usually means that the demand follows the same curves as the rest of the demand, and all get is more demand for popular items -- more copies of Hairy Potter.
Linear expansion of catalog depth probably requires exponential expansion of demand; to get an additional non-popular item would require a lot of people to want it. Lots of people wanting lots of different items won't help since the demand will be diluted among the readers. (And they spent the money on new Hairy Potter books...)
I've met a guy who was ticketed in a state that had extensive toll roads in this very fashion. He paid the toll at gate X and again at gate Y. For some reason they kept track of the license plates and he got fined for speeding due to the difference in time between the two gates.
I've never driven a toll booth that logged anything about me, it's usually just chuck the change and go.
This same guy though also claimed to have been pulled over for speeding @ 2:30 AM in WI. The fine was $105 and had to paid on the spot in cash. He handed the cop two $100s and the cop claimed he had no change. The guy said fine, let's go to the station and get some. The cop said it was 75 miles in the wrong direction, the guy said well, what about my change? The cop scrapped the ticket and told the guy to quit driving so fast.
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Remember, the marketing manager gets paid to beat the truth so thin you can see through it. Besides, when have you ever met a marketing person prone to telling the truth about *anything*?
I play a lot of online MOHAA and trolls are as much of a problem as cheaters.
One of the most realistic ways to play MOHAA is with friendly fire on -- you have to know where you're chucking grenades and so on. However, it's nearly impossible because trolls will kill most of the team right at the spawn point. Some trolls block tight passageways or just play obnoxiously. In a full 8-user server, two trolls on one team can shift the balance of power so far its just not any fun.
Then there are cheat trolls that combine cheats with trolling behavior (noclipping under the road and killing people, for example) to be seriously obnoxious.
I don't know how you combat this, really. I think the best way would be enabling a kickban command that would kick a user from the server and then ban their IP, username, or both for a specified period of time. Banning IP blocks might be an option as well.
I know, I know, NAT, DHCP pools, etc etc will lessen the effectiveness of such techniques, but if you make it just annoying enough to troll people might stop and go back to making prank phonecalls or whatever they did before they messed with games.
Only works for sites at the same CO, as its basically a dry copper pair between sites, and AFAIK no dry pairs exist in urban areas between COs.
IIRC the original slashdot story about this was some guy in some small town using DSL as a transport mode between sites; since the whole town was on one CO this wasn't a problem.
Most books reviewed are either technology books or SF, and they seldom (ever?) reach any level of literary accomplishment.
The people writing the books don't read magazines like the Atlantic, New Republic, New Yorker, or the NYTimes Review of Books and have no idea what a real book review looks like.
That being said, the reviews here are occasionally interesting because they tend to summarize what's interesting about the book (SF plot, technical details from tech books).
I've read plenty of literary reviews that spend half their time describing the review subject's rumored anal sex experiences and how they might have influenced their writing, and that's not always helpful or insightful, either.
This is absolutely not startling at all. Most projects are started with an idea. Ideas are generated by individuals.
And are stewarded by individuals. Think of all the OSS projects and the "names" that go with them -- Sendmail, Eric Allman; Samba, Jeremy Allison; Linux, Linus Torvalds; Qmail, Dan Bernstein. Perl, Larry Wall; It goes on and on.
It's actually kind of scary to me since I wonder how many driven-by-one-man projects like this will collapse (ie, stop development or otherwise rot) without the guy that made the magic originally.
I'm encouraged by the fact that most large, popular projects are too big for one guy to actually do all the coding and usually there are people waiting in the wings who can at least add some legs to these projects.
Associatively. I think Dan Bernstein has a reputation for being outspoken about himself, his software and so on.
Qmail just inherited it.
Re-broadcasting the signal
on
What Free Cable?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.
In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.
Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.
I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...
Considering that it's simply a matter of pointing an antena at your house from a van
The tinfoil on my roof will protect me.
But seriously, point an antenna at my house to find out if I'm wathching cable? I can see checking the neighborhood branch cable's impedence to see if its within the range of what they would expect from the number of subscribers they have, but even that's a ballpark figure (neighbor buys new TV, etc etc). Please explain how they can find anything by pointing an antenna at my house.
A microphone maybe, when I curse them for shitty reception.
The unfortunate truth is that for big companies, it is cheaper to pay for damage from break-ins than it is to get good security to begin with.
This is the lesson lost on the Slashdot crowd.
Perfect security is impossible, good enough security is possible. Aim for good enough -- if you aim for perfect you will never achieve it and waste a lot of money trying.
And the obvious thing happened: The book publishing industry never sold another book, except to libraries.
When was the last time you went to the library, borrwed "War and Peace", photocopied it, bound it and *then* read it? Book copying doesn't happen because its a physical medium with dollar costs associated with duplication. It's the same reason Ford isn't pissed that Avis rents its cars -- what are you gonna do, copy it instead of buying your own?
the movie industry almost completely disappeared, except for sales to TV broadcasters.
Except that going to the movies is a totally different experience -- I don't have a 150ft screen or a room big enough to put it on in my house. Going to a movie is an experience -- out of the house, seeing a "current" film -- TV can't eliminate the experiential aspect of it or duplicate the significant physical differences of the big screen.
When people found that they could record perfectly good movies on video tape, they stopped paying for movies
Most people can't set the clock on their one VCR, let alone hook two up for dubbing. And it still begs the question as to where the source material comes from. Most people are too busy working, raising their kids, doing other stuff to bother with trying to dub movies -- they go to the rental store for $1 and rent something they feel like watching from a huge catalog of movies.
I agree with your prinicpal, but at least draw defendable analogies.
Slashdot Mirror
...is not from corrupt, ImClone-style insider trading, but from the long-term outlook for patented, exclusive medical therapies.
There's a large, general outrage at the overall cost of medical treatment and within specific socioeconomic groups HUGE outrage at the cost of perscription medicines. It's not felt (as much) by the middle class due to their generally good, employer-provided medical coverage.
However, I predict a time in the next 20 years when the cost of medical treatment across the board (doctors, hospitals, medicines, and so on) will be so high that political pressure will be brought to bear to severely regulate the costs associated with medical treatments if not to begin socializing medicine.
What's this got to do with biotech careers? Biotech right now is hot as a sector because of the promise of developing amazing new treatments that are proprietary, patentable and licensable for HUGE profits. However the money will dry up quickly if government begins to socialize medicine.
Or Britain to become a republic.
I wasn't endorsing the actual usability of the vendor utility partitions, just the idea of an OS-independent, bootable image seperate from the mass storage of the computer.
I had one time where I was able to utilize the vendor boot partition -- a needed bios update on a machine 4000 miles away done via a dialup connection to the box's remote management card -- and even that was a fluke because like you I usually delete them!
This could also be useful for initial net-based O/S installation or download. Having basic tools
available in ROM could ease a lot of tasks- include a browser, an FTP client, a telnet client, and disk partitioning/formatting software, for example.
Most big-name server vendors have a way to set up a utility partition on the HD and the server BIOS can boot from it withouth the OS having anything to do with it. It'd be great to have the equivilent of a rescue system in BIOs that could be used to salvage a damaged disk-based system.
Any place I've ever been, $3 per full-length album was pretty damn good; most of the time it was $2.00 or $2.50. That's one damned expensive way of ripping MP3s and screwing Emimem over, even if you figure that the pirate (ahem) bought the damned thing used.
First of all, you never buy new CDs -- too expensive and as you point out you can't get your money back. Only buy used CDs, which halves your initial investment. The real scam part comes where most used CD places near where I live will allow you a 4-5 day return period where you can bring the used CD back for a store credit. If you're careful and the store is big (ie, large staff), you can buy, copy and return a fair number of CDs on a pretty regular basis.
It's certainly not free -- once you give them your money it's theirs, its a question of whether its a 2 or 3-for-1 bargain or not. I'm pretty sure this isn't what the RIAA is worried about, but its a nice little option for expanding your collection.
Add on another feature; plug the relay into your phone line, and when you're at home or near it, your cell phone becomes a cordless phone
You know, I've been waiting for them to come out with a cell phone that was a cordless phone when within range of its base station(s). I'm sure it would be slightly larger than today's current crop of ultratiny cellulars, but not by much.
I'm sure it would be complicated but might even be worth it to come up with some way for the base station to add the cell line automatically as a conference party when you left base station, simulating a cell-cell handoff.
A simple rule of thumb: Citizens have rights, subjects have privileges. We believe our rights are unalienable -- they come from God. Subjects' privileges are granted by the crown and taken away by the crown as it sees fit.
dangerously unaccountable to Internet users, businesses and other key interest groups.
Any chance that Big Money, Inc. hasn't gotten what they thought they bought with ICANN and is instead deciding that its money goes a lot farther with the Government instead?
I wonder about this. It seems true on the surface, but...
Flexible return times? Potential for keeping the book? Able to loan it out to others?
I've met a guy who was ticketed in a state that had extensive toll roads in this very fashion. He paid the toll at gate X and again at gate Y. For some reason they kept track of the license plates and he got fined for speeding due to the difference in time between the two gates.
I've never driven a toll booth that logged anything about me, it's usually just chuck the change and go.
This same guy though also claimed to have been pulled over for speeding @ 2:30 AM in WI. The fine was $105 and had to paid on the spot in cash. He handed the cop two $100s and the cop claimed he had no change. The guy said fine, let's go to the station and get some. The cop said it was 75 miles in the wrong direction, the guy said well, what about my change? The cop scrapped the ticket and told the guy to quit driving so fast.
I talked to the system's marketing manager. He told me almost all of the people who got extra service were stealing it on purpose, which contradicted the installer's comments. I don't know who to believe, but I am suspicious.
Remember, the marketing manager gets paid to beat the truth so thin you can see through it. Besides, when have you ever met a marketing person prone to telling the truth about *anything*?
My 1.1ghz processor is plenty fast enough for me, and will remain so for quite some time.
Here here. I have a 2+ year old Dual PIII 650 system that is processing aplenty -- I even manage to play modern games on it without any real problem.
I play a lot of online MOHAA and trolls are as much of a problem as cheaters.
One of the most realistic ways to play MOHAA is with friendly fire on -- you have to know where you're chucking grenades and so on. However, it's nearly impossible because trolls will kill most of the team right at the spawn point. Some trolls block tight passageways or just play obnoxiously. In a full 8-user server, two trolls on one team can shift the balance of power so far its just not any fun.
Then there are cheat trolls that combine cheats with trolling behavior (noclipping under the road and killing people, for example) to be seriously obnoxious.
I don't know how you combat this, really. I think the best way would be enabling a kickban command that would kick a user from the server and then ban their IP, username, or both for a specified period of time. Banning IP blocks might be an option as well.
I know, I know, NAT, DHCP pools, etc etc will lessen the effectiveness of such techniques, but if you make it just annoying enough to troll people might stop and go back to making prank phonecalls or whatever they did before they messed with games.
I've haven't been paid since May, either, and I suspect that most people haven't been paid since May.
Oh. I bet you didn't mean bimonthly payroll...
I prefer the Internet be controlled by a couple greedy corporations that by a single greedy government with armed forces to back it up.
When the coporations control the government, isn't this just a distinction without a difference?
Only works for sites at the same CO, as its basically a dry copper pair between sites, and AFAIK no dry pairs exist in urban areas between COs.
IIRC the original slashdot story about this was some guy in some small town using DSL as a transport mode between sites; since the whole town was on one CO this wasn't a problem.
Most books reviewed are either technology books or SF, and they seldom (ever?) reach any level of literary accomplishment.
The people writing the books don't read magazines like the Atlantic, New Republic, New Yorker, or the NYTimes Review of Books and have no idea what a real book review looks like.
That being said, the reviews here are occasionally interesting because they tend to summarize what's interesting about the book (SF plot, technical details from tech books).
I've read plenty of literary reviews that spend half their time describing the review subject's rumored anal sex experiences and how they might have influenced their writing, and that's not always helpful or insightful, either.
This is absolutely not startling at all. Most projects are started with an idea. Ideas are generated by individuals.
And are stewarded by individuals. Think of all the OSS projects and the "names" that go with them -- Sendmail, Eric Allman; Samba, Jeremy Allison; Linux, Linus Torvalds; Qmail, Dan Bernstein. Perl, Larry Wall; It goes on and on.
It's actually kind of scary to me since I wonder how many driven-by-one-man projects like this will collapse (ie, stop development or otherwise rot) without the guy that made the magic originally.
I'm encouraged by the fact that most large, popular projects are too big for one guy to actually do all the coding and usually there are people waiting in the wings who can at least add some legs to these projects.
Ever watch Apocalypse Now on a 9" black-and-white?
No, but I've seen the letterbox edition on 12" B&W.
And it was still better than "Friends".
is qmail controversial ?
Associatively. I think Dan Bernstein has a reputation for being outspoken about himself, his software and so on.
Qmail just inherited it.
People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.
In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.
Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.
I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...
Considering that it's simply a matter of pointing an antena at your house from a van
The tinfoil on my roof will protect me.
But seriously, point an antenna at my house to find out if I'm wathching cable? I can see checking the neighborhood branch cable's impedence to see if its within the range of what they would expect from the number of subscribers they have, but even that's a ballpark figure (neighbor buys new TV, etc etc). Please explain how they can find anything by pointing an antenna at my house.
A microphone maybe, when I curse them for shitty reception.
The unfortunate truth is that for big companies, it is cheaper to pay for damage from break-ins than it is to get good security to begin with.
This is the lesson lost on the Slashdot crowd.
Perfect security is impossible, good enough security is possible. Aim for good enough -- if you aim for perfect you will never achieve it and waste a lot of money trying.
And the obvious thing happened: The book publishing industry never sold another book, except to libraries.
When was the last time you went to the library, borrwed "War and Peace", photocopied it, bound it and *then* read it? Book copying doesn't happen because its a physical medium with dollar costs associated with duplication. It's the same reason Ford isn't pissed that Avis rents its cars -- what are you gonna do, copy it instead of buying your own?
the movie industry almost completely disappeared, except for sales to TV broadcasters.
Except that going to the movies is a totally different experience -- I don't have a 150ft screen or a room big enough to put it on in my house. Going to a movie is an experience -- out of the house, seeing a "current" film -- TV can't eliminate the experiential aspect of it or duplicate the significant physical differences of the big screen.
When people found that they could record perfectly good movies on video tape, they stopped paying for movies
Most people can't set the clock on their one VCR, let alone hook two up for dubbing. And it still begs the question as to where the source material comes from. Most people are too busy working, raising their kids, doing other stuff to bother with trying to dub movies -- they go to the rental store for $1 and rent something they feel like watching from a huge catalog of movies.
I agree with your prinicpal, but at least draw defendable analogies.