The cold war is over, yet the US and Russia are still the two primary arms suppliers of the world, and IIRC, we raised a big stink over France selling bleeding edge naval technology to Russia. The "Cold War" might be over, but that's only because we haven't come up for a new name for it yet. 20 years is a blink of the eye when it comes to imperialist global war.
The Air Force has a parallel launch facility in California designed for launching polar orbit satellites. You can't launch polar orbit rockets from Johnson Space center due to large population centers immediately north and south of the launch site. They launched some sort of spy satellite into polar orbit earlier this year in mid January. In theory they could retool the CA launch center for manned spaceflight inside of a year, since that's what it was originally designed for (up until 1994?).
Depends on if you're a single male living by yourself, or sharing the line with roommates/spouse/kids. Imagine about 10-15kb/s for video game traffic, 10-30gb/mo per person for netflix, 10kb/s for pandora/mog/last.fm, ???kb/s for hulu on top of monthly youtube usage & misc web browsing. Times three (for each person). If they bumped the cap to 150gb/mo here, my roommate and I would blow through that in three weeks. I also download 3-8gb worth of games via steam a month. That's not exactly being a power user... that's going to be average use here in 3-5 years.
Your facts are suspect because it's not Southern Bell Company, it's SBC or Southwestern Bell Company. If you're going to regurgitate wikipedia, at least get your facts straight before you attempt to impersonate an Authority of the subject on the internet.
I would love to see who gave the DHS the jurisdiction and/or power to do this. Streaming live sports coverage would fall under wire-fraud, which I am pretty sure (IANAL) falls under the FBI. As I understand it, DHS is primarily immigrations and customs rolled into one budget line item. It wouldn't surprise me if this is an internal test case for expansion of powers of the department.
I've never, ever heard of commercial CDs going bad (except from scratches). All my CDs from 5th grade forward (nearly 20 years old at this point) work just fine. I found them while moving, all played fine. I borrowed a friend's CD-R and some cheap media to back up my computer in 1998, THOSE still work as well. This is after being stored in the attic of our house which regularly sees 150 degrees during the day (Dallas), and a huge range of humidity levels. I'm sure if you left them shiny side up on the windowsill for 20 years it would be a different case, but in a taped box off the ground, they're a very good long term storage medium.
Don't all sorts of apps get repealed due to them having unadvertised features (like being able to run interpeted code i.e. qbasic, etc) all the time, because they were missed during the review process? Or is Apple reviewing both the code and the compiled product now? I suppose Apple's even minimal review process is helpful to some degree, but there's large enough holes that it could (and is) easily be circumvented, it seems.
The US military isn't allowed to operate inside of US borders, IIRC. This is what the National Guard and state millitas are for, which are largely separate from the budgets and congregational wartime budget extensions (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc) are passed for. Local forces receive very little of this extended funding, from what I understand.
We've had the ability to "print our own stamps" for about 10 years now here in the US (as datamatrixes). I haven't heard of too many schemes to try and abuse this plan. The people who actually write letters these days aren't likely to try and take advantage of the system. Automating handwriting codes onto letters? What a huge waste of time. Any bulk mailing company in Sweden is already registered with the national post office; they aren't likely to risk their legitimate bulk mail discounts over paying immigrants to handwrite bogus codes.
Personally I'd love this sort of service here in the US. I can't recall how many bills I've phoned in with a debit card simply because I couldn't be bothered to buy more stamps and envelopes.
that can only run if buyers spend $1000 to upgrade last year's octo-core 5.8 GHz 16 GB computer to this year's 32-core, 7.3 GHz 128 GB computer
That might have been true three years ago, but a $700 computer (incl 22" display) bought today is roughly twice as powerful as an xbox 360. A $300 computer with a 9800gts ($100 card) will play xbox 360 ports all day long at 720p @ 30fps on the desktop. Putting a $250 video card into that i3 box will net you 1080p @ 45fps in the crop of games coming out this fall in 2011 (for a total cost of $550). Consoles are built on bleeding edge 2006 technology, which is laughable by today's standards, and console ports are becoming much more efficient on the PC.
There was an article in the last month (here?) about how less than 10% of physical music album buyers make up 70% of the market. I haven't bought an album since 1998 (the radio meets my needs) and I only recently purchased a mog subscription, which I am still weighing wether or not I get enough value for it to continue. The mog subscription, which is basically what the canadian song writers are trying to push, already exists, and is profitable costs half of the proposed canadian system.
You certainly wouldn't think about installing Windows 7 on an IBM PC XT. Each version of Windows has required a more modern computer than the last, so this is only possibly by starting with a modern PC and then installing an ancient OS. Or possibly moving a hard drive between machines.
I'm curious if there is any one machine that could run all current versions of windows. If there was one, I suspect it would some sort of Pentium Pro or Pentium 3... or Pentium M, since it is a 32 bit processor (win7 has been installed on a P3), and is old enough (1995) to possibly still have an ISA slot on the motherboard. Although it looks like a couple of nitch manufacturers still include ISA slots on them. Interesting...
Win7 64 professional full (not upgrade) is available at retail for $99 as an "oem version" from a variety of retailers, incl newegg and amazon. Despite some worry warts claiming otherwise, you can transfer the oem licence to a new computer when you retire the old one (done it, working just fine).
A lot of buisnesses founded prior to 2000 have been using the fax for 10-15 years. I worked for one company years ago that still hires temps in the summer to file and send responses to their faxes simply because in the slow season having a verifiable paper trail allows them to stick their vendors with the cost of screw ups, and also generates jobs for several long-term (12+ years) employees. If your choice is a) speed up the process and lose money converting to the new system while learning from your mistakes of integrating the new system or b) letting your old friends of 12+ years go because they aren't needed.... it's easy to ignore the modern solution.
Oh, so you want to see how we've been spending that $80 billion a year on a disproportionately minuscule staff and lack of effectiveness in world politics? You want to actually see what benefits you've gotten for your money since the end of the cold war? Look over here! Check out these neato toys! Ignore our ridiculous budget! Please don't cut our budget! We've become too accustomed to this cushy lifestyle to change!
Stimulating high-speed tissue regrowth, without it turning into a horrible mass of scar tissue and/or cancer
Yep! Until you can prove the genome of the cells used in the ink are all 100% cancer-free, count me out. However, for a burn victim whose only other treatment option is infection and a slow death, I might be willing to give it a shot.
Because cities and the state are allowed to put transponder readers at free city intersections, for starters. In addition to "toll booth" transponder readers, here are transponder readers along the toll roads that track vehicle speed and direction as well. Who knows what happens to all that data. The toll roads are worth the $1.25 the one time a month I am running late and really need to be there NOW. The $15 credit a year I put on there is well worth it.
Here in Dallas they're just money machines. Politicians see the need for new roads (especially in fast-growing Texas) and use state funds to pay for the highways, and then lease the toll-road rights (a 99 year lease!!) to private companies for a lump sum, which they can then use for other purposes. The NTTA toll company has been so successful with this State-Backed venture that they were lobbying for a multi-billion dollar 10 lane highway between Dallas and Mexico through west Texas under the same agreement framework. If you look at this map and the big fat line between San Antonio and Dallas, you can see why that appears to be such a lucrative idea. I-35 is way overcrowded 24/7, especially with freight truck traffic.
Personally I love the tollway system here in Dallas (not that I use it much, public highways are FREE so to speak). Drive on, drive off, you get a bill at the end of the month with a summary of the charges. For someone who doesn't regularly use cash, it makes my life just a little bit easier. The other alternative is keeping a transponder in your car... not really my cup of tea.
But yeah, long story short we've had the system in effect on portions of Hwy 121 now for about 6 years and it's just recently gone live on the main "Dallas Tollway" with zero issues.
Note that it was written by Timothy. You can filter out particular editors' stories, but unfortunately Timothy posts about 40% of slashdot stories these days. I sort of grin and bear it, but he's definitely the reason I spend less time on this site. There are less biased link baiters out there with equally good communities.
Kudos on being the only person to point out that during this whole volcano disrupting aircraft flight over europe thing possibly having an effect. Does anyone have any data on how volcanic activity effects local weather patterns and ground temperature? Volcanic events and solar eclipses seem to be the only things cavemen ever kept records of, so there should be some pretty good data to start with.
Wire fraud is the de-facto "internet ecommerce" law since around 1980. If it involves craigslist, ebay or amazon.com it's probably got a wire fraud charge tacked on.
Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade. They have great products, and a modest growth in sales each year, but as many have pointed out, most of the ipod/iphone sales are replacements, or selling to new (young) people just entering the market. Don't get me wrong, Apple sells fantasic products (I keep eyeing the iPad as a replacement to my dead-tree edition to the NYT), but IMO their sales will plateau soon unless the global market for Apple products expands dramatically during this global recession. Let the short term buyers drive up the price; the long game almost guarantees that after an initial run, the price will plummet back to 2009 prices. Apple is squarely in the consumer market, and I don't see them expanding in to the enterprise market in the near future (unless they release an enterprise-focused brand in the near future?). HP, Dell and the like aren't going anywhere. If you're looking for a quick buck, keep browsing biotech and Big Pharma. Technology is a mature market that's been mined out. The smart CEOs in the tech sector are going to learn from the Googles and Facebooks that one time IPOs and private investment are the right way to go. IPOs followed by split after split after split will disappear as a corporate strategy for viable companies.
They're probably (like me,) old nokia candy bar phone users. You could leave the battery dead for a week where the phone wouldn't even power on, but it would still wake up and tell you to go hop in the shower for work for another week or so. Phone clock (and more importantly, phone alarm clock) software has been stable and 100% trustworthy now for over a decade. I still have two extra (wall plug) alarm clocks for those occasions when you absolutely have to be there on time, but my phones have served me well as my primary alarm solution for the last 10 years, am i'm sure that's the case for most other people, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
The cold war is over, yet the US and Russia are still the two primary arms suppliers of the world, and IIRC, we raised a big stink over France selling bleeding edge naval technology to Russia. The "Cold War" might be over, but that's only because we haven't come up for a new name for it yet. 20 years is a blink of the eye when it comes to imperialist global war.
The Air Force has a parallel launch facility in California designed for launching polar orbit satellites. You can't launch polar orbit rockets from Johnson Space center due to large population centers immediately north and south of the launch site. They launched some sort of spy satellite into polar orbit earlier this year in mid January. In theory they could retool the CA launch center for manned spaceflight inside of a year, since that's what it was originally designed for (up until 1994?).
Depends on if you're a single male living by yourself, or sharing the line with roommates/spouse/kids. Imagine about 10-15kb/s for video game traffic, 10-30gb/mo per person for netflix, 10kb/s for pandora/mog/last.fm, ???kb/s for hulu on top of monthly youtube usage & misc web browsing. Times three (for each person). If they bumped the cap to 150gb/mo here, my roommate and I would blow through that in three weeks. I also download 3-8gb worth of games via steam a month. That's not exactly being a power user... that's going to be average use here in 3-5 years.
Your facts are suspect because it's not Southern Bell Company, it's SBC or Southwestern Bell Company. If you're going to regurgitate wikipedia, at least get your facts straight before you attempt to impersonate an Authority of the subject on the internet.
I would love to see who gave the DHS the jurisdiction and/or power to do this. Streaming live sports coverage would fall under wire-fraud, which I am pretty sure (IANAL) falls under the FBI. As I understand it, DHS is primarily immigrations and customs rolled into one budget line item. It wouldn't surprise me if this is an internal test case for expansion of powers of the department.
I've never, ever heard of commercial CDs going bad (except from scratches). All my CDs from 5th grade forward (nearly 20 years old at this point) work just fine. I found them while moving, all played fine. I borrowed a friend's CD-R and some cheap media to back up my computer in 1998, THOSE still work as well. This is after being stored in the attic of our house which regularly sees 150 degrees during the day (Dallas), and a huge range of humidity levels. I'm sure if you left them shiny side up on the windowsill for 20 years it would be a different case, but in a taped box off the ground, they're a very good long term storage medium.
Don't all sorts of apps get repealed due to them having unadvertised features (like being able to run interpeted code i.e. qbasic, etc) all the time, because they were missed during the review process? Or is Apple reviewing both the code and the compiled product now? I suppose Apple's even minimal review process is helpful to some degree, but there's large enough holes that it could (and is) easily be circumvented, it seems.
The US military isn't allowed to operate inside of US borders, IIRC. This is what the National Guard and state millitas are for, which are largely separate from the budgets and congregational wartime budget extensions (Afghanistan, Iraq, etc) are passed for. Local forces receive very little of this extended funding, from what I understand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States
We've had the ability to "print our own stamps" for about 10 years now here in the US (as datamatrixes). I haven't heard of too many schemes to try and abuse this plan. The people who actually write letters these days aren't likely to try and take advantage of the system. Automating handwriting codes onto letters? What a huge waste of time. Any bulk mailing company in Sweden is already registered with the national post office; they aren't likely to risk their legitimate bulk mail discounts over paying immigrants to handwrite bogus codes.
Personally I'd love this sort of service here in the US. I can't recall how many bills I've phoned in with a debit card simply because I couldn't be bothered to buy more stamps and envelopes.
That might have been true three years ago, but a $700 computer (incl 22" display) bought today is roughly twice as powerful as an xbox 360. A $300 computer with a 9800gts ($100 card) will play xbox 360 ports all day long at 720p @ 30fps on the desktop. Putting a $250 video card into that i3 box will net you 1080p @ 45fps in the crop of games coming out this fall in 2011 (for a total cost of $550). Consoles are built on bleeding edge 2006 technology, which is laughable by today's standards, and console ports are becoming much more efficient on the PC.
There was an article in the last month (here?) about how less than 10% of physical music album buyers make up 70% of the market. I haven't bought an album since 1998 (the radio meets my needs) and I only recently purchased a mog subscription, which I am still weighing wether or not I get enough value for it to continue. The mog subscription, which is basically what the canadian song writers are trying to push, already exists, and is profitable costs half of the proposed canadian system.
I'm curious if there is any one machine that could run all current versions of windows. If there was one, I suspect it would some sort of Pentium Pro or Pentium 3... or Pentium M, since it is a 32 bit processor (win7 has been installed on a P3), and is old enough (1995) to possibly still have an ISA slot on the motherboard. Although it looks like a couple of nitch manufacturers still include ISA slots on them. Interesting...
Win7 64 professional full (not upgrade) is available at retail for $99 as an "oem version" from a variety of retailers, incl newegg and amazon. Despite some worry warts claiming otherwise, you can transfer the oem licence to a new computer when you retire the old one (done it, working just fine).
Your link calls it a misspelling. Misspellings aren't correct grammar.
A lot of buisnesses founded prior to 2000 have been using the fax for 10-15 years. I worked for one company years ago that still hires temps in the summer to file and send responses to their faxes simply because in the slow season having a verifiable paper trail allows them to stick their vendors with the cost of screw ups, and also generates jobs for several long-term (12+ years) employees. If your choice is a) speed up the process and lose money converting to the new system while learning from your mistakes of integrating the new system or b) letting your old friends of 12+ years go because they aren't needed.... it's easy to ignore the modern solution.
Oh, so you want to see how we've been spending that $80 billion a year on a disproportionately minuscule staff and lack of effectiveness in world politics? You want to actually see what benefits you've gotten for your money since the end of the cold war? Look over here! Check out these neato toys! Ignore our ridiculous budget! Please don't cut our budget! We've become too accustomed to this cushy lifestyle to change!
Yep! Until you can prove the genome of the cells used in the ink are all 100% cancer-free, count me out. However, for a burn victim whose only other treatment option is infection and a slow death, I might be willing to give it a shot.
Because cities and the state are allowed to put transponder readers at free city intersections, for starters. In addition to "toll booth" transponder readers, here are transponder readers along the toll roads that track vehicle speed and direction as well. Who knows what happens to all that data. The toll roads are worth the $1.25 the one time a month I am running late and really need to be there NOW. The $15 credit a year I put on there is well worth it.
Here in Dallas they're just money machines. Politicians see the need for new roads (especially in fast-growing Texas) and use state funds to pay for the highways, and then lease the toll-road rights (a 99 year lease!!) to private companies for a lump sum, which they can then use for other purposes. The NTTA toll company has been so successful with this State-Backed venture that they were lobbying for a multi-billion dollar 10 lane highway between Dallas and Mexico through west Texas under the same agreement framework. If you look at this map and the big fat line between San Antonio and Dallas, you can see why that appears to be such a lucrative idea. I-35 is way overcrowded 24/7, especially with freight truck traffic.
Personally I love the tollway system here in Dallas (not that I use it much, public highways are FREE so to speak). Drive on, drive off, you get a bill at the end of the month with a summary of the charges. For someone who doesn't regularly use cash, it makes my life just a little bit easier. The other alternative is keeping a transponder in your car... not really my cup of tea.
But yeah, long story short we've had the system in effect on portions of Hwy 121 now for about 6 years and it's just recently gone live on the main "Dallas Tollway" with zero issues.
Note that it was written by Timothy. You can filter out particular editors' stories, but unfortunately Timothy posts about 40% of slashdot stories these days. I sort of grin and bear it, but he's definitely the reason I spend less time on this site. There are less biased link baiters out there with equally good communities.
Kudos on being the only person to point out that during this whole volcano disrupting aircraft flight over europe thing possibly having an effect. Does anyone have any data on how volcanic activity effects local weather patterns and ground temperature? Volcanic events and solar eclipses seem to be the only things cavemen ever kept records of, so there should be some pretty good data to start with.
Wire fraud is the de-facto "internet ecommerce" law since around 1980. If it involves craigslist, ebay or amazon.com it's probably got a wire fraud charge tacked on.
Apple has been sitting at (or around?) 4-5 billion in revenue for the better part of this last decade. They have great products, and a modest growth in sales each year, but as many have pointed out, most of the ipod/iphone sales are replacements, or selling to new (young) people just entering the market. Don't get me wrong, Apple sells fantasic products (I keep eyeing the iPad as a replacement to my dead-tree edition to the NYT), but IMO their sales will plateau soon unless the global market for Apple products expands dramatically during this global recession. Let the short term buyers drive up the price; the long game almost guarantees that after an initial run, the price will plummet back to 2009 prices. Apple is squarely in the consumer market, and I don't see them expanding in to the enterprise market in the near future (unless they release an enterprise-focused brand in the near future?). HP, Dell and the like aren't going anywhere. If you're looking for a quick buck, keep browsing biotech and Big Pharma. Technology is a mature market that's been mined out. The smart CEOs in the tech sector are going to learn from the Googles and Facebooks that one time IPOs and private investment are the right way to go. IPOs followed by split after split after split will disappear as a corporate strategy for viable companies.
They're probably (like me,) old nokia candy bar phone users. You could leave the battery dead for a week where the phone wouldn't even power on, but it would still wake up and tell you to go hop in the shower for work for another week or so. Phone clock (and more importantly, phone alarm clock) software has been stable and 100% trustworthy now for over a decade. I still have two extra (wall plug) alarm clocks for those occasions when you absolutely have to be there on time, but my phones have served me well as my primary alarm solution for the last 10 years, am i'm sure that's the case for most other people, as well.