I hear a lot of "Ooooh! Those, rotten, gosh-darned, varmint-ridden capitalists!" (in your best Yosemite Sam impression), but I have three questions.
#1) Who in the SA government granted a monopoly over their telecommunications to AT&T of all people?
#2) Why was the monopoly granted to an American company, instead of a local company?
#3) When a government grants a monopoly, isn't it supposed to simultaneously oversee and regulate it, so that rampant price-gouging and public disservice such as this does not take place?
This whole fiasco just reeks of cronyism, or bribery, or profit-taking on the behalf of the politicians and bureaucrats who owned stock in AT&T, or all of the above. I suppose if they used a local company then the likelihood of racism could have been thrown in for good measure, but the way AT&T sacked the country purely to fatten its war chest is ridiculous. The playbook on granting government monopolies is well known, and this sort of thing really shouldn't have happened.
All you have to do is what the people at OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and a number of other encryption-based OSS projects have done. Just put a disclaimer at the top of the license agreement that says "You are not allowed to download, or export this product to $CountriesTheUSHates."
That will please the government and cover your ass. It will also ensure that noone in $CountriesTheUSHates will download the software. Really. It will.
$34 for 256K DSL, $50 for 1.5 Mbs [...] Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?
Why? I'm paying $30 a month for 1.5 Mbps on a connection that's net-neutral. Of course, I live in Canada, where broadband isn't stupidly slow for too much money in the first place. Of course, were I to move to someplace like Korea, Japan, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czecheslovakia, Serbia, Poland, or a whole host of near-third-world countries that I can't spell in Central Europe, I would be able to get a broadband connection that's both cheaper and many times faster than those here. So who am I to brag?
Oh, that's easy. Because when you're not $TELCO and you're selling ADSL to end users (like we do where I work), then your company pays $TELCO for a leased line between the telephone switching central offices you want, and your datacenter where you do all your network routing. That's it. You're not paying $TELCO to provide your customers with a connection to the internet. In fact, you could be paying anyone you like for that link.
I suppose that $TELCO could say "fuck you, Google didn't pay their extortion money^W^Wrent this month, so we're going to firewall their site at the CO", but then you could take them to court for not providing to you what you pay for - an unfiltered leased line between their COs and your datacenter. Besides, I highly doubt they would go to the trouble of doing that kind of filtering at their 800,000 COs instead of their 80 gateway routers. That would cost them more money than they could ever possibly collect from sites like Youtube.
I thought that the monthly fee we pay already was to cover access... but maybe it only covers the final mile and they need to be paid twice to cover the rest of the journey.
Uh, no. It's all about finding new ways to generate revenue. As my boss explained to me: "We gotta do this too! It's [extorting Google] a great way to generate new revenue!"
As I explained to my boss: "AT&T is *saying* they *want* to do it. They're not doing it yet. And we're not exactly $telco or $cableco, so if we try to do it first, *all* our customers will just up and quit."
Somehow, generating new revenue this way is no longer a priority where I work.
All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in fifty years.
Oh, indeed. Because by then, if we don't figure out some way to stop using gasoline, we'll have none anyway. I'm sure that will be more at the forefront of our worries and prevailing dogmas than global warming.
Oh, that's easy. Because when an attacker breaks into someone's CMS (because your users most certainly do not read about security updates on software mailing lists, and there's no way in hell you even know what they're running), suddenly that attacker *does* have a login on that machine. They can now run software as the "httpd" user. This is the reason jail(8) was invented. And what do you know... they found a vulnerability in a certain version of jail.
Honestly, I don't care about terrorists. I'm worried about shithead 13 year old boys who wouldn't think once about using this for practical jokes. But hey, Slashdot is only reporting this, not making it up.
What part of "This product contains a Class 2 laser. Do not power on without enclosure" did you not understand? This has the potential for causing serious bodily harm, including but not limited to permanent blindness!
And I'm sure that if the "...for Dummies" series lost that stupid "...for Dummies" tag, it might be successful.
Perhaps, but that was something that had never been tried before. Wheras there have been hundreds if not thousands of textbooks that have tried to be cool and completely failed in doing so. So there's a bit of a precedence there.
The funny thing about commercials and TV is that teenagers decide what's cool. You can't make a product cool that isn't. Lots and lots and lots of companies try *really* hard to make that happen and fail miserably. Hell, there have been companies that made it, and then subsequently nosedived into the ground faster than you can say "Reebok".
And you know what? Math isn't cool. Hell, school isn't cool. And there isn't anything you or I or Mega Marketing Corp can do about it.
I guess that depends on how you define "proved." The fact that Polaris is always 48 degrees above the horizon as recorded one observer, while an observer 800 miles south records that Polaris is always 37 degrees above the horizon, is usually proof enough for most thinking people. In fact, Columbus used just his lattitude and a magnetic compass to navigate his way there and back. So this was a well-known fact by that time.
Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy,"
So... there's an "undocumented" (although apparently now public) back door that "only we can use". I wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to use the kill switch.
I also wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to turn *off* the kill switch and then subsequently tell it to turn on its masters.
Every time any adult tries to be cool in order to get kids to pay attention to a subject in school that they hate, they fail miserably. This is not (only) because adults simply aren't cool, but because the ploy is blazingly obvious. The funny thing about teenagers, is that they are the way they are in no small part because they've grown intellectually to the point where they can recognize lies and propaganda. This sort of thing only reinforces the idea that adults are clueless and generally to be ignored. See also: public service announcements by MC Hammer or Flava Flave.
I'd have to admit though, that she does have one important ingredient in the textbook. That she demonstrates that you can be simultaneously pretty and intellectual (and includes other examples). If she could lose the cheesy teen-mag look, I'm sure we'd see some progress.
No, the point is that the perception is that women who use math in their careers are nerdy types that are ugly. And no girl wants to be ugly. Actually, the way girls are socialized (typically by their peers during high school) is that being pretty and attracting boys is pretty much all there is to life. Some girls resist that and have better aspirations, but they're basically the nerdy outcasts.
But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
No, your observations were all wrong. Having more sex than you doesn't necessarily lead to pregnancy, having sex and not using birth control does. While being too dumb to use birth control potentially leads to more (dumb) children in the long run, being smart, using birth control until such a time that you are capable of raising children and putting them through college, leads to more successful offspring. They also coincidentally, have a better chance at survival in this world for various reasons, not the least of which is that smart people tend to avoid getting shot to death or into fatal car accidents at a young age.
This is an excellent question. It could mean that people get really smart by studying more because they're not being distracted by having sex. Or, it could mean that people are using the excess energy caused by sexual frustration to study more.
Another take on it is that people who are introverts tend to study more because they socialize less. There's an old maxim that rings true: "Sex only discriminates against the shy." Despite my own geekiness, tendencies towards becoming completely absorbed into activity X, Y, or Z for weeks at a time, less-than-perfect skin and poor fashion sense, I have absolutely no trouble at all finding dates if I just get out and try to make friends. Breaking into a social scene can be hard, but once you get your foot in the door and start to build a social network, it pretty much comes naturally from there. But it does take time, and that means less time doing activities X, Y and Z. So it's all about priorities I suppose.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
Uh, no. the stock Corvette z06 does it in 4.6 seconds.
Also, you can search on google and/or youtube for videos documenting what happens when you drag race a Tesla and a Corvette. Actually, I've seen videos on youtube of *homebuilt* electric conversions smoking Corvettes on the 1/4 mile.
There are in fact, very few production cars (and by "production" I mean cars built by Lotus, Lamborgini, and Porsche) that can do better than the Tesla on the 1/4 mile. They all cost roughly as much as a Tesla roadster, or more.
Another of your calculations is off, coincidentally. You forget that at least half of the miles you put on a car are in city driving, so your fuel costs will go up accordingly. That $5,000 gap in TCO is therefore smaller, and maybe even nonexistent.
Moreover, I'd like to see you fill your tank in your garage. Or at work. You *can* fuel up a Tesla anywhere you like. They're called electrical outlets, and they exist in far more locations than there are gas stations.
The batteries in the Tesla have a much longer lifetime than this. That's because there's some newer technology that makes Lithium-Ion batteries perform much better. Tesla expects their batteries to last for at least 100,000 miles. (http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/faqs.php, click on "how long do the batteries last").
If you're burning fossil fuels to make the electricity, which do you think is more efficient: a car which turns chemical energy directly into kinetic energy, or a car which starts by converting that same fuel first to electricty at the power plant, then transmitting it many miles, then converting it to chemical energy in the battery, then converting that back to electricity, and then using that electricity to produce kinetic energy?
Well, first of all, power plants that run on oil (or natural gas for that matter) are far more efficient than the piston engines in cars. Many of them also have a second stage that takes waste heat from the first turbines and uses it to make steam to power a second set of turbines. Your car doesn't do that.
Also, do you idle your engine when you're stopped at a red light? Electric cars don't idle. They use exactly as much energy as they need at any given moment in time to move. This alone makes the entire process more efficient.
I'm all for reducing pollution, but if electric cars are running off the power grid, aren't they _worse_ than gas cars?
Did you know that during off-peak times, your local power plant is still running? They have to do that because it takes something like 8 hours to get the thing up to steam. This is why off-peak power is a lot cheaper. If you could set your electric car to start charging at midnight, you'd be using up that power that's being generated, instead of letting it go to ground. The DOE recently released a report that says if everyone used electric cars and charged them at night, there's plenty of spare power generation for the task.
If you wanted more complete data on the efficiency of electric cars vs. gasoline cars, you can find it on Tesla Motors' website.
Especially when it comes to telescopes. Larger aperature means more light is collected for imaging, and the more light you collect the shorter your exposure times need to be. And with the limited number of telescopes in the world, multiplied by the limited number of hours actually available for observing at each one (you need a clear sky, on a night near the new moon so that the glare doesn't wash out your images), cutting your exposure times is paramount.
Larger aperature also means higher resolution images and that dimmer and dimmer objects can be observed. When you're trying to find the very first stars in the universe, only the biggest telescopes in the world will do.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear a lot of "Ooooh! Those, rotten, gosh-darned, varmint-ridden capitalists!" (in your best Yosemite Sam impression), but I have three questions.
#1) Who in the SA government granted a monopoly over their telecommunications to AT&T of all people?
#2) Why was the monopoly granted to an American company, instead of a local company?
#3) When a government grants a monopoly, isn't it supposed to simultaneously oversee and regulate it, so that rampant price-gouging and public disservice such as this does not take place?
This whole fiasco just reeks of cronyism, or bribery, or profit-taking on the behalf of the politicians and bureaucrats who owned stock in AT&T, or all of the above. I suppose if they used a local company then the likelihood of racism could have been thrown in for good measure, but the way AT&T sacked the country purely to fatten its war chest is ridiculous. The playbook on granting government monopolies is well known, and this sort of thing really shouldn't have happened.
All you have to do is what the people at OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and a number of other encryption-based OSS projects have done. Just put a disclaimer at the top of the license agreement that says "You are not allowed to download, or export this product to $CountriesTheUSHates."
That will please the government and cover your ass. It will also ensure that noone in $CountriesTheUSHates will download the software. Really. It will.
$34 for 256K DSL, $50 for 1.5 Mbs [...] Would you be willing to spend the extra bucks for network neutrality?
Why? I'm paying $30 a month for 1.5 Mbps on a connection that's net-neutral. Of course, I live in Canada, where broadband isn't stupidly slow for too much money in the first place. Of course, were I to move to someplace like Korea, Japan, the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Czecheslovakia, Serbia, Poland, or a whole host of near-third-world countries that I can't spell in Central Europe, I would be able to get a broadband connection that's both cheaper and many times faster than those here. So who am I to brag?
Oh, that's easy. Because when you're not $TELCO and you're selling ADSL to end users (like we do where I work), then your company pays $TELCO for a leased line between the telephone switching central offices you want, and your datacenter where you do all your network routing. That's it. You're not paying $TELCO to provide your customers with a connection to the internet. In fact, you could be paying anyone you like for that link.
I suppose that $TELCO could say "fuck you, Google didn't pay their extortion money^W^Wrent this month, so we're going to firewall their site at the CO", but then you could take them to court for not providing to you what you pay for - an unfiltered leased line between their COs and your datacenter. Besides, I highly doubt they would go to the trouble of doing that kind of filtering at their 800,000 COs instead of their 80 gateway routers. That would cost them more money than they could ever possibly collect from sites like Youtube.
I thought that the monthly fee we pay already was to cover access ... but maybe it only covers the final mile and they need to be paid twice to cover the rest of the journey.
Uh, no. It's all about finding new ways to generate revenue. As my boss explained to me: "We gotta do this too! It's [extorting Google] a great way to generate new revenue!"
As I explained to my boss: "AT&T is *saying* they *want* to do it. They're not doing it yet. And we're not exactly $telco or $cableco, so if we try to do it first, *all* our customers will just up and quit."
Somehow, generating new revenue this way is no longer a priority where I work.
All our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in fifty years.
Oh, indeed. Because by then, if we don't figure out some way to stop using gasoline, we'll have none anyway. I'm sure that will be more at the forefront of our worries and prevailing dogmas than global warming.
Oh, that's easy. Because when an attacker breaks into someone's CMS (because your users most certainly do not read about security updates on software mailing lists, and there's no way in hell you even know what they're running), suddenly that attacker *does* have a login on that machine. They can now run software as the "httpd" user. This is the reason jail(8) was invented. And what do you know... they found a vulnerability in a certain version of jail.
Honestly, I don't care about terrorists. I'm worried about shithead 13 year old boys who wouldn't think once about using this for practical jokes. But hey, Slashdot is only reporting this, not making it up.
What part of "This product contains a Class 2 laser. Do not power on without enclosure" did you not understand? This has the potential for causing serious bodily harm, including but not limited to permanent blindness!
And I'm sure that if the "...for Dummies" series lost that stupid "...for Dummies" tag, it might be successful.
Perhaps, but that was something that had never been tried before. Wheras there have been hundreds if not thousands of textbooks that have tried to be cool and completely failed in doing so. So there's a bit of a precedence there.
The funny thing about commercials and TV is that teenagers decide what's cool. You can't make a product cool that isn't. Lots and lots and lots of companies try *really* hard to make that happen and fail miserably. Hell, there have been companies that made it, and then subsequently nosedived into the ground faster than you can say "Reebok".
And you know what? Math isn't cool. Hell, school isn't cool. And there isn't anything you or I or Mega Marketing Corp can do about it.
I guess that depends on how you define "proved." The fact that Polaris is always 48 degrees above the horizon as recorded one observer, while an observer 800 miles south records that Polaris is always 37 degrees above the horizon, is usually proof enough for most thinking people. In fact, Columbus used just his lattitude and a magnetic compass to navigate his way there and back. So this was a well-known fact by that time.
Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy,"
So... there's an "undocumented" (although apparently now public) back door that "only we can use". I wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to use the kill switch.
I also wonder how long it will be before the enemy discovers how to turn *off* the kill switch and then subsequently tell it to turn on its masters.
Every time any adult tries to be cool in order to get kids to pay attention to a subject in school that they hate, they fail miserably. This is not (only) because adults simply aren't cool, but because the ploy is blazingly obvious. The funny thing about teenagers, is that they are the way they are in no small part because they've grown intellectually to the point where they can recognize lies and propaganda. This sort of thing only reinforces the idea that adults are clueless and generally to be ignored. See also: public service announcements by MC Hammer or Flava Flave.
I'd have to admit though, that she does have one important ingredient in the textbook. That she demonstrates that you can be simultaneously pretty and intellectual (and includes other examples). If she could lose the cheesy teen-mag look, I'm sure we'd see some progress.
No, the point is that the perception is that women who use math in their careers are nerdy types that are ugly. And no girl wants to be ugly. Actually, the way girls are socialized (typically by their peers during high school) is that being pretty and attracting boys is pretty much all there is to life. Some girls resist that and have better aspirations, but they're basically the nerdy outcasts.
But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?
No, your observations were all wrong. Having more sex than you doesn't necessarily lead to pregnancy, having sex and not using birth control does. While being too dumb to use birth control potentially leads to more (dumb) children in the long run, being smart, using birth control until such a time that you are capable of raising children and putting them through college, leads to more successful offspring. They also coincidentally, have a better chance at survival in this world for various reasons, not the least of which is that smart people tend to avoid getting shot to death or into fatal car accidents at a young age.
This is an excellent question. It could mean that people get really smart by studying more because they're not being distracted by having sex. Or, it could mean that people are using the excess energy caused by sexual frustration to study more.
Another take on it is that people who are introverts tend to study more because they socialize less. There's an old maxim that rings true: "Sex only discriminates against the shy." Despite my own geekiness, tendencies towards becoming completely absorbed into activity X, Y, or Z for weeks at a time, less-than-perfect skin and poor fashion sense, I have absolutely no trouble at all finding dates if I just get out and try to make friends. Breaking into a social scene can be hard, but once you get your foot in the door and start to build a social network, it pretty much comes naturally from there. But it does take time, and that means less time doing activities X, Y and Z. So it's all about priorities I suppose.
The 2006 Chevy Corvette Z06 costs $65,000 and does zero-60 in ~3.6 seconds.
Uh, no. the stock Corvette z06 does it in 4.6 seconds.
Also, you can search on google and/or youtube for videos documenting what happens when you drag race a Tesla and a Corvette. Actually, I've seen videos on youtube of *homebuilt* electric conversions smoking Corvettes on the 1/4 mile.
There are in fact, very few production cars (and by "production" I mean cars built by Lotus, Lamborgini, and Porsche) that can do better than the Tesla on the 1/4 mile. They all cost roughly as much as a Tesla roadster, or more.
Another of your calculations is off, coincidentally. You forget that at least half of the miles you put on a car are in city driving, so your fuel costs will go up accordingly. That $5,000 gap in TCO is therefore smaller, and maybe even nonexistent.
Moreover, I'd like to see you fill your tank in your garage. Or at work. You *can* fuel up a Tesla anywhere you like. They're called electrical outlets, and they exist in far more locations than there are gas stations.
The batteries in the Tesla have a much longer lifetime than this. That's because there's some newer technology that makes Lithium-Ion batteries perform much better. Tesla expects their batteries to last for at least 100,000 miles. (http://www.teslamotors.com/learn_more/faqs.php, click on "how long do the batteries last").
If you're burning fossil fuels to make the electricity, which do you think is more efficient: a car which turns chemical energy directly into kinetic energy, or a car which starts by converting that same fuel first to electricty at the power plant, then transmitting it many miles, then converting it to chemical energy in the battery, then converting that back to electricity, and then using that electricity to produce kinetic energy?
Well, first of all, power plants that run on oil (or natural gas for that matter) are far more efficient than the piston engines in cars. Many of them also have a second stage that takes waste heat from the first turbines and uses it to make steam to power a second set of turbines. Your car doesn't do that.
Also, do you idle your engine when you're stopped at a red light? Electric cars don't idle. They use exactly as much energy as they need at any given moment in time to move. This alone makes the entire process more efficient.
I'm all for reducing pollution, but if electric cars are running off the power grid, aren't they _worse_ than gas cars?
Did you know that during off-peak times, your local power plant is still running? They have to do that because it takes something like 8 hours to get the thing up to steam. This is why off-peak power is a lot cheaper. If you could set your electric car to start charging at midnight, you'd be using up that power that's being generated, instead of letting it go to ground. The DOE recently released a report that says if everyone used electric cars and charged them at night, there's plenty of spare power generation for the task.
If you wanted more complete data on the efficiency of electric cars vs. gasoline cars, you can find it on Tesla Motors' website.
Whereas if you get creamed by some dumbass running a red light, it's not quite as scary as you don't even know it's going to happen until it has?
Especially when it comes to telescopes. Larger aperature means more light is collected for imaging, and the more light you collect the shorter your exposure times need to be. And with the limited number of telescopes in the world, multiplied by the limited number of hours actually available for observing at each one (you need a clear sky, on a night near the new moon so that the glare doesn't wash out your images), cutting your exposure times is paramount.
Larger aperature also means higher resolution images and that dimmer and dimmer objects can be observed. When you're trying to find the very first stars in the universe, only the biggest telescopes in the world will do.
If you want to count it that way, then Keck beats the LBT, with two 10m mirrors working together as an interferometer.
Why not add the cost of building roads to the price of oil?
We do that up here in Canada. But nevermind that. We're crazy.
Yeah, I was about to say that. Sue a software company for flaws in their software? That's impossible!