The limitations are pretty obvious, ya know? Without access to the closed source bits of Android RIM isn't going to be able to support some parts of the Google APIs and unless they want to turn the home screen over to Android, in which case it becomes an Android device that runs RIM apps, wallpapers and home screen widgets are probably out.
Of course this throws the hybrid model of Android into sharp relief. It ain't Open Source and it sure as heck ain't Free Software.
This isn't system backup. This is archiving photos/video. It doesn't change. I keep DVD sized directories on my RAID. When one hits DVD size I create a new one and burn the last one off to a pair of blanks. It isn't a big problem. In a few years I'll probably grab the stack of DVDs and reburn to a much smaller set of BD-R as that gets cheap enough. That will ensure the media still reads and provide a fresh copy for an off site location. Repeat a decade from then with whatever removable tech replaces BD-R.
No, blame it on the price of DVD blanks. When they were a couple bucks a pop the quality was better than they are at under a quarter. But you can still buy good media if you look. Anything important I burn to two quality name brand media and make sure they are a different brand and tech (dye color). That way if one is a bad batch or the dye doesn't hold up the other copy should be OK.
And for now all of my photos are still on the RAID and the backup drive. One set of the DVDs is in a fireproof box, probably should put the other one off site but haven't done that step yet.
> What if no one takes pity on them. "Well, then they die."
Uh huh. And if that isn't the perfect example of the product of a totalitarian mind I'd like to know what is.
Civics lesson time. In our form of government all just power derives from the consent of the governed, right? So if the government is tending the sick it is BECAUSE WE THE PEOPLE want them to. So if we wise up and realize that giving the government the power of life and death over everyone to solve a problem we can solve ourselves at less expense and less risk the poor will still be tended because we do care, we just don't want the STATE doing it.
On the other hand if We The People really become the dbased, depraved creatures the Progressive enterprise is premised upon us being, we wouldn't fund charities that care for the poor, but we also wouldn't VOTE for people who take our money and piss it away on saving 'useless' people. Am I right? Catch-22 isn't it. Unless you are willing to fess up and admit your true beliefs. That We The People are worthless worms who would revert to cannibalism without the protection and guidence of YOUR vanguard of the Progressive Future, the new, the elite, the ivy league educated better people who were Born to Rule. That letting the People rule themselves is a stupid idea, the idiots would kill themselves, that those teeming masses of idiots are fit only for the harness.
The problem is bigger. Look at the early parts phasing in already. Wow, it is nice your 26 yr old can not only keep living with you because his degree in basket weaving is worthless in the Great Recession but you can keep him on your insurance. Thank you Obama! Oh, the rates went up? Those filthy bastards at the evil insurance companies and their actuarial tables. And just wait until the full effect kicks in and most employers boot everyone into the government pools because the penalty/tax is far less than the employer portion of the policies they are carrying for their employees. The system was carefully designed to cause a cascade failure leading to single payer. I do give the sons of bitches who designed it credit for being very clever evil communist bastards.
No, it is about control. Government has no hope of 'bending the cost curve' so the cost must zoom out of control. The government will ration care. Do you really believe they won't politicize those decisions in exactly the same way every other allocation of government resources is politicized? Welcome to the machine. Party members at the front of the line for transplants, enemies get cost controlled into early graves.
> This goes back to the "Do you let them die?" question. Should a hospital let someone > bleeding to death die in their Emergency Room if they have no insurance? I think except > for at republican debates the answer is "no".
Which is a filthy lie. Even RON PAUL said they shouldn't be left to die. He did correctly note that the Federal government has no authority to get involved. But that as a practicing physician before the Feds got involved he never saw a patient left to die. This is where private charity's place in society lies. There are some things the government should not, must not be allowed to do that still need be done. Progressives tend to be totalitarian though, Everything within the State, nothing without. So if the State isn't paying for the indigent's health care they die. But there used to be a vibrant world between the individual citizen and the State with it's guns and regulators. A multitude of civic, fraternal, religious, even ethnic organizations used to exist and were very active. They provided many services now absorbed by various government agencies. There could exist again.
Those also happen to be enumerated powers the Federal government rightfully possesses the power to wield along with the taxing authority to pay for them. If you don't like the way they are being used write to your Congressman or run yourself.
No, in a perfect libertarian world that would be a matter between a customer and an insurance provider. Just like insurance companies currently charge additional premiums for risky activities like smoking, scuba diving, etc. insurance covering riding a motorcycle without proper industry accepted safety gear would be priced high enough to cover the cost of writing the coverage. Buying coverage that has wearing a helmet as a condition and having an accident without one would leave you totally liable for the medical expenses but then that was a stupid choice you made and in a perfect libertarian world you have the right to be stupid.
The Right to be Wrong is what I'd call Right #0 because without that one no others are possible. Because without that one someone has to be put in charge of deciding what is Right and forcing everyone to agree.
Actually it doesn't. If you were actually literate and had actually read the Constitution you would realize a couple of things about the infamous 'general welfare' and 'necessary and proper' clauses progressives always misuse. They are syntactic sugar.
Look where they appear. The Preamble is just that, a short introductory block telling you what the document's intentions are. It isn't intended to be read as black letter law. They could have just ended the damned thing there and replaced the rest of the document with a short section setting up the initial Congress and saying they could then do whatever they thought promoted the 'General Welfare'. But they didn't, they then went into quite a bit of detail specifying exactly which powers the Federal government was to have at it's disposal to achieve the lofty aims set forth in the Preamble.
The 'necessary and proper' clause was the last item in a carefully enumerated list of powers. Congress has the power to pass any laws 'necessary and proper' to use those powers. Read the whole piece:
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
It isn't a wild card grant of unlimited power. This isn't even a new argument, all this was debated and settled in the Federalist Papers.
> That said, I really hope the law is struck down so that perhaps we can move towards an actual single player system..
Which is almost certainly what is going to happen. Kennedy won't have the balls to invoke the inseverability of the mandate and thus invalidate the whole thing. But any idiot (I assert Obama, Pelosi, et al weren't being idiots) can see the mandate doesn't pass muster. With the mandate gone and the rest of the bill intact the insurance system will quickly collapse. Even with Divine Intervention I can't see the R's mustering 60 votes in the Senate for a full repeal since every last D sees this (correctly) as a hill to die on, as it is the untold power of life and death for the State to wield forever. So if the rest is still on the books but the funding mech is unconstitutional we get single payer by default.
Obamacare was designed to fail in this way. Remember the tape Beck had of that Obama stooge saying something like, "People say this is a Trojan Horse for single payer. No it isn't, its right there."
Hope you like ambulances forming a queue outside hospitals.
No, it is actually more twisted. ESPN3 is only available for cable subscribers who have ESPN1 & ESPN2 and connect via their cable company's internet service. The cable companies are also pushing their bundle plan. I on on the fence on network neutrality but crap like this makes me want to lean towards letting the feral government bust em up just a bit. Then I realize once unleashed the monster can't be put back on the leash very easy and hesitate.
The base problem is neither telecom or cable industry is anything approaching a free market. In most towns you have the government sponsored entity telco 'competing' against the government granted monopoly cable company with token resistence from heavilly government regulated wireless and sat players, all kept on very short leashes by the FCC and the state regulating authorities. But of course those 'independent' regulators have already been mostly captured by the very industries we now want the FCC to assume even more authority over with network neutrality and rebranded fairness doctrine regs. Combine that with almost all cable content originating from one of a handful of 'providers' and the situation is even less a free market.
Exactly right. Amazing that even if the idjit submitter couldn't figure it out one would have hoped the/. editor could be bright enough. If the channel is paying the cable company to carry them it is subsidizing my bill so bring on the shopping channels.
I just want to be rid of ESPN & Co. I read somewhere that just ESPN1 costs most cable systems about $3/mo. Their cost, not what ends up on our cable bill. Don't think I have ever watched a full program on that channel. There are quite a few channels that have slowly crept up their prices to over $1/mo and still have commercials. That is utter bullcrap. If they made them ala cart most would get unchecked from most households and they would either go away, become free to view and survive on the ad revenues or go commercial free (real pay cable) and try to be worth the fee.
Even worse is the stupid tiers that were required in the days of physical filter traps but in a digital world is just subsidizing politically connected channels like Current from people wanting the couple of useful channels in the same tier.
And once freed of the perverse incentive of the revenue stream from cable operators more ad supported channels would feel more confident in offering their wares via streaming and other online outlets.
> Anyways, my question is why is there such a media gap about this protest?
Pick a reason.
1. These assholes had to have a poll to decide what they were protesting. What? No way you say? Way. They really and truly did. They were a bunch of malcontents and losers looking for a reason.
2. There are only a few hundred of em. Kinda pathetic really, as protests go. This is frickin' NYC and they can only muster a few hundred? They even had some of the females flashing their tits trying to score some of that sweet sweet media attention.
3. There isn't a story here. A few hundred smelly hippies are 'occupying' a street that can easily handle their numbers so they weren't even creating a nuisance until they provoked some police reaction.
4. These protesters are mostly hard core lefties. Don't believe me, look at their signs. With Obama's re-election ramping up he doesn't want to remind voters just who his base is and the media are all too happy to help.
> Considering the Arab Spring, protest does seem to have an affect.
Oh please. Stop. A bunch of malcontent hippie posers who set out to get into a fight with the police (yes they did, go read their own pages where they organized this stupid stunt) to generate media attention who know full well they are at zero actual risk of serious harm are nothing like the islamist revolutions happening in the middle east. Dictators shoot real bullets, the NYPD uses padded nightsticks and if really feeling threatened will break out the rubber bullets.
Those losers should go home, take a bath and put the same energy into creating a job. Note that I do not say 'get a job.' In Obama and Pelosi's economy that is pretty difficult, but a young fellow on the make can almost always hustle something that will put food on the table if they are serious. Effort almost always succeeds in America, even if ya fail a few times along the way. Then these guys will go from Takers to Makers, begin paying taxes and probably become Republicans.
Ok, I hadn't bothered to dig up real numbers. Thanks. So take a server loaded to the gills with RAM and it could easily draw more power than the CPU, especially if they are low power ones like the AMD HE parts the ram on each cpu could outdraw the processor. For that mater, if you only put 64GB in at 2W per G that is 128W, more than any CPU that has any business going into a 1U or even most 2U rack mount cases. The newest ram modules might draw a little less per GB from die shrinking but since DDR3 clocks faster it probably ends up in the same ballpark. All the attention has went into giving processors all sorts of power saving features, looks like attention needs to turn to memory now.
Just the summary has me confused. Is this a RAM replacement or a FLASH replacement tech? Or both?
I guess between green getting grant money and industry looking to lower their power bills pushing energy savings is mandatory, but I never though flash/ssd was a power hog anyway, so if it is a flash/hdd replacement that wouldn't be all that important. Now ram modules, especially high performance 'gamer' memory has heat sinks and gets plenty hot enough to matter. Especially in heavily loaded servers hosting a lot of virtuals, those puppies get loaded up on ram so I suspect would account for a fair chunk of the total power budget in a rack full.
But I wouldn't throw venture capital at em just yet. Every few months it seems we see a story about a new memory tech. Some of them, MRAM for example, do eventually surface but they can't scale up enough to compete with conventional memory so have to settle for a niche where their special properties make them viable. Again, look at MRAM. You can buy the stuff and it really works. It is sold as a drop in replacement for old EEPROM and SRAM chips in the old DIP packages. Not only low power operation, it retains memory with the power off and no need for a backup battery. But a few Mbits per chip seems to be the current limit so it isn't a threat to either flash or dram unless it can scale up a thousand fold. Kinda like the old magnetic bubble memory that was always a few years away from making hard drives obsolete back in the '80s.... until hard drive capacity per dollar grew so much faster than bubble memory could hope to catch up to and R&D died out on it, leaving it but a footnote in tech history.
This! Except forget C#, too much political and patent frenzy to get a majority to come on board that disaster. But why can't a Java app be given access to the DOM of a page? Everyone already knows Java, plenty of tools exist, most browsers already support it and it just about HAS to run faster than compiled JS even with all the (rightful in my humble opinion) abuse we have heaped on Java over the years for performance issues. In this case though we are comparing Java to JS, not native C++ code. The security implications of Java are already well known and acceptable to most people. All this casting about for a new shiny when we have a well understood, capable solution just sitting there baffles me.
Seriously, one small tweak to the HTML spec to allow loading an external Java app in place of a externally loaded JavaScript, mod the browser to expose the DOM to the applet and it's done. As good a performance as we are likely to ever see running untrusted apps in a browser, programmers can use Java which is a lot saner than JS, everybody wins. So why all this talk about reinventing the wheel? Who is set to gain? Why hasn't it happened years ago?
> Yes, there is a limit to wireless bandwith, but that isn't why it is so expensive.
Yup, that is reason #1, #2 and #3. Because without caps people would use their wireless like they use their wired Internet. Hell, most people would just ditch their wired Internet in favor of tethering. After all, in most tech savvy households every member old enough to use they Internet is already packing a smartphone. It would just make sense. Except there isn't nearly enough bandwidth for that. Pricing is nature's way of forcing people to share a finite resource. Of course if people really were willing to fork over enough money, more spectrum, towers, whatever would become available to service that demand.
> It is expensive for the same reason many wired ISPs have 5GB caps: because they can
No, again it is sorta supply and demand. So long as it was just a few netheads slurping up extreme amounts of bandwidth the ISPs were willing to ignore it because they all felt the word "UNLIMITED" in the ad copy was more important. Heck, few customers would even be able to know how much Internet they were using so fear of hitting a cap and getting billed zillions of dollars in overages would have impeded uptake of the Internet. Nobody would have watched many YouTube videos. Nobody would have let anyone else touch their PC (remember Compuserve? Who would have let the neighbor's kid plop down in front of their CI$ account? Almost nobody.), the kids would have been strictly monitored, etc. And no explosive growth. People wouldn't have become addicted. But then Netflix and Hulu threatened to saturate the net with video. In direct competition to the bundles the ISPs (now down to the cable and phone companies in most markets) were offering. The combined threat to both their network infrastructure and cash flow became greater than their fear of customer reaction to caps.
And please remember, yes the cable company sells you 10+mbps service but on the understanding your use will be bursty, not constant. They oversubscribe their outbound link 10:1 or more. And don't bitch about that being unfair. They also sell real service intended for heavy use with an SLA promising you will get every last bit per second you are paying for, try pricing it sometime.
And refuses to sign up customers in my zip code. T-Mobile: no bars. Verizon: Evil Incarnate. Sprint: Meh. AT&T: Big, Stupid, thinks they are still The Phone Company. Everyone else: Buys tower access from one of the other four.
I rarely use a cell so I'm currently on a dinky little prepaid outfit called h2o wireless. Cheap if you don't actually use a phone a lot. Throw $10 or $20 at em and the phone is live for 90 days or until you burn off the credit at $0.14/minute for voice or $0.05/text. And they sell you a SIM card you can put into whatever you want which sealed the deal for me. I have currently have mine in very small android phone. Decent PDA, better in some ways than the old Handspring Visor it replaced, not better in others. A month without worrying about the battery was the best feature of the Visor, no android device can offer that though. Heck, no device with an always on radio is going to offer that.
Seriously. I was in the local mall last month and, I shit you not, saw a big sign saying "Unlimited Voice, Text and Data*" with very small print saying "* 2GB limit on data". This word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means. Wish I could remember which outfit was doing it now but I remember pointing it out to the wife and laughing loudly enough it annoyed the weasel manning the kiosk.
Where is the police? Don't they patrol the mall? None of them bother to notice obvious, blatant fraud?
And google would learn the same lesson. Wireless Internet is fraud. Everybody hypes it, everybody advertises people watching video and doing all sorts of high bitrate stuff. But once a net goes out of beta test there isn't enough actual bandwidth available on the chunks of spectrum devoted to 3/4G to feed the screaming hordes who sign up. And until they go seriously into microcell and put nodes on every light pole there never will be... and probably not even then because our voracious desire for ever faster will have outstripped even that. So everyone slaps bandwidth caps on to stop the YouTube viewers, the video calls and all that foolishness and the network limps and groans along under the impossible load that still remains.
It is math people. There just ain't enough airspace to stuff that many bit into. Wires and fibers aren't dead yet.
Is this a shock to anyone after The Week of Windows 8 Hype? If there was a theme running through all of the stories it was this: Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block why would they have any interest in maintaining a UNIX command line layer?
Win32 (and UNIX more so) isn't going to lend itself to the sort of app store lockdown Microsoft is moving to. If you have a choice of buy Win32 apps/games at Walmart/Gamestop and Microsoft gets no taste of the action or buy everything at the App Store and give Microsoft 30%, which do you think they are going to 'nudge' you toward? And by 'nudge' I mean turn your PC into an iPhone with hard crypto locks and remove all options that do not let them rake off their 30 points.
Could you stop with the reposting of White House talking points? We aren't stupid enough to fall for that stuff. Buffet has a few advantages, one he doesn't pay himself a salary so he doesn't pay income tax. Dividends have already been taxed at the higher corporate rate so even the 15% dividends and capital gains rate is double dipping and discourages corporations from paying dividends, so instead we get the insane focus on making the stock price go up even in industries where that can only be done with smoke and mirrors or buyouts. And as for capital gains, we don't want to tax those much because we WANT savings and investment. Even when we aren't in a horrid recession we are always fretting about the low savings rate in the US. Well tax something and you get less of it.
And there is the pesky fact Buffet shovels most of his take directly into non-profit activity and thus out of sight of the tax man. So decide, will the Gates Foundation make better use of Buffet's money than Obama pissing it away on another lame crony capitalist green scam? I'm no fan of Bill Gates in general but I'd put my money on the Gates Foundation being the better steward of Buffet's stash.
> On average, millionaires pay 20.1% on their earnings.
The IRS and the AP cite slightly higher figures but I don't want to end up mired in debating which authority is more accurate. No I'm going for the argument ender. Alright hippy, before I listen to word ONE about who is and is not paying their 'fair share' you have to stop and define that word. Tell me what you really mean. What percentage of a productive person's income are you and the taker class entitled to? Numbers or you are just trying to score points with the ignorant and there aren't nearly so many here as at du or dailykos. We know Obama's father said in writing that 100% was perfectly acceptable to him and it is pretty obvious that was one of the Dreams of his Father he took up with great gusto. So where do YOU draw the line and say "no, that wouldn't be fair."
I also dual boot Win7 and Fedora on this Thinkpad and Grub is the one in the MBR. However, I haven't succeeded in getting SP1 to download and install. Until now I just figured, "That's just Windows" and didn't care since I only boot it when I'm doing the 'well does this damned site even work on Win+IE?" test and that doesn't happen often anymore.
But I have been saying for a couple of years that while before Microsoft's future vision was to make the PC into an XBox that it changed recently. Now they are clearly back to chasing Apple's taillights and thus intend to make the PC into an iPhone/iPad. Windows 8 clearly has that goal, from the look, the walled garden, App Store, no Flash and now the chains. And these won't be cool designer chains that the elite can jailbreak anyway, these willl be nasty rusty and you will need shots after handling em. Just wait until the malware gets to take over and Norton won't have the keys to even run. No boot a Linux rescue disk to fix things or even try to save the data. Microsoft Hell(tm). If they could have pulled off this stunt with Vista they would have succeeded, but the OEMs just couldn't ensure delivery of TPMs and the corporate world rebelled at the.idea since Microsoft pushed it as a sop to the content industry to protect 'the precious' so they backed off. That was a mistake on their part, because their moment is past and I don't think they can get away with it now. There are things an 800 pound gorilla can get away with that a 700 pound one can't quite manage and Microsoft is now down just a smidge in monopoly power.
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The limitations are pretty obvious, ya know? Without access to the closed source bits of Android RIM isn't going to be able to support some parts of the Google APIs and unless they want to turn the home screen over to Android, in which case it becomes an Android device that runs RIM apps, wallpapers and home screen widgets are probably out.
Of course this throws the hybrid model of Android into sharp relief. It ain't Open Source and it sure as heck ain't Free Software.
This isn't system backup. This is archiving photos/video. It doesn't change. I keep DVD sized directories on my RAID. When one hits DVD size I create a new one and burn the last one off to a pair of blanks. It isn't a big problem. In a few years I'll probably grab the stack of DVDs and reburn to a much smaller set of BD-R as that gets cheap enough. That will ensure the media still reads and provide a fresh copy for an off site location. Repeat a decade from then with whatever removable tech replaces BD-R.
No, blame it on the price of DVD blanks. When they were a couple bucks a pop the quality was better than they are at under a quarter. But you can still buy good media if you look. Anything important I burn to two quality name brand media and make sure they are a different brand and tech (dye color). That way if one is a bad batch or the dye doesn't hold up the other copy should be OK.
And for now all of my photos are still on the RAID and the backup drive. One set of the DVDs is in a fireproof box, probably should put the other one off site but haven't done that step yet.
> What if no one takes pity on them. "Well, then they die."
Uh huh. And if that isn't the perfect example of the product of a totalitarian mind I'd like to know what is.
Civics lesson time. In our form of government all just power derives from the consent of the governed, right? So if the government is tending the sick it is BECAUSE WE THE PEOPLE want them to. So if we wise up and realize that giving the government the power of life and death over everyone to solve a problem we can solve ourselves at less expense and less risk the poor will still be tended because we do care, we just don't want the STATE doing it.
On the other hand if We The People really become the dbased, depraved creatures the Progressive enterprise is premised upon us being, we wouldn't fund charities that care for the poor, but we also wouldn't VOTE for people who take our money and piss it away on saving 'useless' people. Am I right? Catch-22 isn't it. Unless you are willing to fess up and admit your true beliefs. That We The People are worthless worms who would revert to cannibalism without the protection and guidence of YOUR vanguard of the Progressive Future, the new, the elite, the ivy league educated better people who were Born to Rule. That letting the People rule themselves is a stupid idea, the idiots would kill themselves, that those teeming masses of idiots are fit only for the harness.
The problem is bigger. Look at the early parts phasing in already. Wow, it is nice your 26 yr old can not only keep living with you because his degree in basket weaving is worthless in the Great Recession but you can keep him on your insurance. Thank you Obama! Oh, the rates went up? Those filthy bastards at the evil insurance companies and their actuarial tables. And just wait until the full effect kicks in and most employers boot everyone into the government pools because the penalty/tax is far less than the employer portion of the policies they are carrying for their employees. The system was carefully designed to cause a cascade failure leading to single payer. I do give the sons of bitches who designed it credit for being very clever evil communist bastards.
> it's about insurance.
No, it is about control. Government has no hope of 'bending the cost curve' so the cost must zoom out of control. The government will ration care. Do you really believe they won't politicize those decisions in exactly the same way every other allocation of government resources is politicized? Welcome to the machine. Party members at the front of the line for transplants, enemies get cost controlled into early graves.
> This goes back to the "Do you let them die?" question. Should a hospital let someone
> bleeding to death die in their Emergency Room if they have no insurance? I think except
> for at republican debates the answer is "no".
Which is a filthy lie. Even RON PAUL said they shouldn't be left to die. He did correctly note that the Federal government has no authority to get involved. But that as a practicing physician before the Feds got involved he never saw a patient left to die. This is where private charity's place in society lies. There are some things the government should not, must not be allowed to do that still need be done. Progressives tend to be totalitarian though, Everything within the State, nothing without. So if the State isn't paying for the indigent's health care they die. But there used to be a vibrant world between the individual citizen and the State with it's guns and regulators. A multitude of civic, fraternal, religious, even ethnic organizations used to exist and were very active. They provided many services now absorbed by various government agencies. There could exist again.
Those also happen to be enumerated powers the Federal government rightfully possesses the power to wield along with the taxing authority to pay for them. If you don't like the way they are being used write to your Congressman or run yourself.
No, in a perfect libertarian world that would be a matter between a customer and an insurance provider. Just like insurance companies currently charge additional premiums for risky activities like smoking, scuba diving, etc. insurance covering riding a motorcycle without proper industry accepted safety gear would be priced high enough to cover the cost of writing the coverage. Buying coverage that has wearing a helmet as a condition and having an accident without one would leave you totally liable for the medical expenses but then that was a stupid choice you made and in a perfect libertarian world you have the right to be stupid.
The Right to be Wrong is what I'd call Right #0 because without that one no others are possible. Because without that one someone has to be put in charge of deciding what is Right and forcing everyone to agree.
Actually it doesn't. If you were actually literate and had actually read the Constitution you would realize a couple of things about the infamous 'general welfare' and 'necessary and proper' clauses progressives always misuse. They are syntactic sugar.
Look where they appear. The Preamble is just that, a short introductory block telling you what the document's intentions are. It isn't intended to be read as black letter law. They could have just ended the damned thing there and replaced the rest of the document with a short section setting up the initial Congress and saying they could then do whatever they thought promoted the 'General Welfare'. But they didn't, they then went into quite a bit of detail specifying exactly which powers the Federal government was to have at it's disposal to achieve the lofty aims set forth in the Preamble.
The 'necessary and proper' clause was the last item in a carefully enumerated list of powers. Congress has the power to pass any laws 'necessary and proper' to use those powers. Read the whole piece:
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
It isn't a wild card grant of unlimited power. This isn't even a new argument, all this was debated and settled in the Federalist Papers.
> That said, I really hope the law is struck down so that perhaps we can move towards an actual single player system..
Which is almost certainly what is going to happen. Kennedy won't have the balls to invoke the inseverability of the mandate and thus invalidate the whole thing. But any idiot (I assert Obama, Pelosi, et al weren't being idiots) can see the mandate doesn't pass muster. With the mandate gone and the rest of the bill intact the insurance system will quickly collapse. Even with Divine Intervention I can't see the R's mustering 60 votes in the Senate for a full repeal since every last D sees this (correctly) as a hill to die on, as it is the untold power of life and death for the State to wield forever. So if the rest is still on the books but the funding mech is unconstitutional we get single payer by default.
Obamacare was designed to fail in this way. Remember the tape Beck had of that Obama stooge saying something like, "People say this is a Trojan Horse for single payer. No it isn't, its right there."
Hope you like ambulances forming a queue outside hospitals.
No, it is actually more twisted. ESPN3 is only available for cable subscribers who have ESPN1 & ESPN2 and connect via their cable company's internet service. The cable companies are also pushing their bundle plan. I on on the fence on network neutrality but crap like this makes me want to lean towards letting the feral government bust em up just a bit. Then I realize once unleashed the monster can't be put back on the leash very easy and hesitate.
The base problem is neither telecom or cable industry is anything approaching a free market. In most towns you have the government sponsored entity telco 'competing' against the government granted monopoly cable company with token resistence from heavilly government regulated wireless and sat players, all kept on very short leashes by the FCC and the state regulating authorities. But of course those 'independent' regulators have already been mostly captured by the very industries we now want the FCC to assume even more authority over with network neutrality and rebranded fairness doctrine regs. Combine that with almost all cable content originating from one of a handful of 'providers' and the situation is even less a free market.
Exactly right. Amazing that even if the idjit submitter couldn't figure it out one would have hoped the /. editor could be bright enough. If the channel is paying the cable company to carry them it is subsidizing my bill so bring on the shopping channels.
I just want to be rid of ESPN & Co. I read somewhere that just ESPN1 costs most cable systems about $3/mo. Their cost, not what ends up on our cable bill. Don't think I have ever watched a full program on that channel. There are quite a few channels that have slowly crept up their prices to over $1/mo and still have commercials. That is utter bullcrap. If they made them ala cart most would get unchecked from most households and they would either go away, become free to view and survive on the ad revenues or go commercial free (real pay cable) and try to be worth the fee.
Even worse is the stupid tiers that were required in the days of physical filter traps but in a digital world is just subsidizing politically connected channels like Current from people wanting the couple of useful channels in the same tier.
And once freed of the perverse incentive of the revenue stream from cable operators more ad supported channels would feel more confident in offering their wares via streaming and other online outlets.
> Anyways, my question is why is there such a media gap about this protest?
Pick a reason.
1. These assholes had to have a poll to decide what they were protesting. What? No way you say? Way. They really and truly did. They were a bunch of malcontents and losers looking for a reason.
2. There are only a few hundred of em. Kinda pathetic really, as protests go. This is frickin' NYC and they can only muster a few hundred? They even had some of the females flashing their tits trying to score some of that sweet sweet media attention.
3. There isn't a story here. A few hundred smelly hippies are 'occupying' a street that can easily handle their numbers so they weren't even creating a nuisance until they provoked some police reaction.
4. These protesters are mostly hard core lefties. Don't believe me, look at their signs. With Obama's re-election ramping up he doesn't want to remind voters just who his base is and the media are all too happy to help.
> Considering the Arab Spring, protest does seem to have an affect.
Oh please. Stop. A bunch of malcontent hippie posers who set out to get into a fight with the police (yes they did, go read their own pages where they organized this stupid stunt) to generate media attention who know full well they are at zero actual risk of serious harm are nothing like the islamist revolutions happening in the middle east. Dictators shoot real bullets, the NYPD uses padded nightsticks and if really feeling threatened will break out the rubber bullets.
Those losers should go home, take a bath and put the same energy into creating a job. Note that I do not say 'get a job.' In Obama and Pelosi's economy that is pretty difficult, but a young fellow on the make can almost always hustle something that will put food on the table if they are serious. Effort almost always succeeds in America, even if ya fail a few times along the way. Then these guys will go from Takers to Makers, begin paying taxes and probably become Republicans.
Ok, I hadn't bothered to dig up real numbers. Thanks. So take a server loaded to the gills with RAM and it could easily draw more power than the CPU, especially if they are low power ones like the AMD HE parts the ram on each cpu could outdraw the processor. For that mater, if you only put 64GB in at 2W per G that is 128W, more than any CPU that has any business going into a 1U or even most 2U rack mount cases. The newest ram modules might draw a little less per GB from die shrinking but since DDR3 clocks faster it probably ends up in the same ballpark. All the attention has went into giving processors all sorts of power saving features, looks like attention needs to turn to memory now.
Just the summary has me confused. Is this a RAM replacement or a FLASH replacement tech? Or both?
I guess between green getting grant money and industry looking to lower their power bills pushing energy savings is mandatory, but I never though flash/ssd was a power hog anyway, so if it is a flash/hdd replacement that wouldn't be all that important. Now ram modules, especially high performance 'gamer' memory has heat sinks and gets plenty hot enough to matter. Especially in heavily loaded servers hosting a lot of virtuals, those puppies get loaded up on ram so I suspect would account for a fair chunk of the total power budget in a rack full.
But I wouldn't throw venture capital at em just yet. Every few months it seems we see a story about a new memory tech. Some of them, MRAM for example, do eventually surface but they can't scale up enough to compete with conventional memory so have to settle for a niche where their special properties make them viable. Again, look at MRAM. You can buy the stuff and it really works. It is sold as a drop in replacement for old EEPROM and SRAM chips in the old DIP packages. Not only low power operation, it retains memory with the power off and no need for a backup battery. But a few Mbits per chip seems to be the current limit so it isn't a threat to either flash or dram unless it can scale up a thousand fold. Kinda like the old magnetic bubble memory that was always a few years away from making hard drives obsolete back in the '80s.... until hard drive capacity per dollar grew so much faster than bubble memory could hope to catch up to and R&D died out on it, leaving it but a footnote in tech history.
This! Except forget C#, too much political and patent frenzy to get a majority to come on board that disaster. But why can't a Java app be given access to the DOM of a page? Everyone already knows Java, plenty of tools exist, most browsers already support it and it just about HAS to run faster than compiled JS even with all the (rightful in my humble opinion) abuse we have heaped on Java over the years for performance issues. In this case though we are comparing Java to JS, not native C++ code. The security implications of Java are already well known and acceptable to most people. All this casting about for a new shiny when we have a well understood, capable solution just sitting there baffles me.
Seriously, one small tweak to the HTML spec to allow loading an external Java app in place of a externally loaded JavaScript, mod the browser to expose the DOM to the applet and it's done. As good a performance as we are likely to ever see running untrusted apps in a browser, programmers can use Java which is a lot saner than JS, everybody wins. So why all this talk about reinventing the wheel? Who is set to gain? Why hasn't it happened years ago?
> Yes, there is a limit to wireless bandwith, but that isn't why it is so expensive.
Yup, that is reason #1, #2 and #3. Because without caps people would use their wireless like they use their wired Internet. Hell, most people would just ditch their wired Internet in favor of tethering. After all, in most tech savvy households every member old enough to use they Internet is already packing a smartphone. It would just make sense. Except there isn't nearly enough bandwidth for that. Pricing is nature's way of forcing people to share a finite resource. Of course if people really were willing to fork over enough money, more spectrum, towers, whatever would become available to service that demand.
> It is expensive for the same reason many wired ISPs have 5GB caps: because they can
No, again it is sorta supply and demand. So long as it was just a few netheads slurping up extreme amounts of bandwidth the ISPs were willing to ignore it because they all felt the word "UNLIMITED" in the ad copy was more important. Heck, few customers would even be able to know how much Internet they were using so fear of hitting a cap and getting billed zillions of dollars in overages would have impeded uptake of the Internet. Nobody would have watched many YouTube videos. Nobody would have let anyone else touch their PC (remember Compuserve? Who would have let the neighbor's kid plop down in front of their CI$ account? Almost nobody.), the kids would have been strictly monitored, etc. And no explosive growth. People wouldn't have become addicted. But then Netflix and Hulu threatened to saturate the net with video. In direct competition to the bundles the ISPs (now down to the cable and phone companies in most markets) were offering. The combined threat to both their network infrastructure and cash flow became greater than their fear of customer reaction to caps.
And please remember, yes the cable company sells you 10+mbps service but on the understanding your use will be bursty, not constant. They oversubscribe their outbound link 10:1 or more. And don't bitch about that being unfair. They also sell real service intended for heavy use with an SLA promising you will get every last bit per second you are paying for, try pricing it sometime.
And refuses to sign up customers in my zip code. T-Mobile: no bars. Verizon: Evil Incarnate. Sprint: Meh. AT&T: Big, Stupid, thinks they are still The Phone Company. Everyone else: Buys tower access from one of the other four.
I rarely use a cell so I'm currently on a dinky little prepaid outfit called h2o wireless. Cheap if you don't actually use a phone a lot. Throw $10 or $20 at em and the phone is live for 90 days or until you burn off the credit at $0.14/minute for voice or $0.05/text. And they sell you a SIM card you can put into whatever you want which sealed the deal for me. I have currently have mine in very small android phone. Decent PDA, better in some ways than the old Handspring Visor it replaced, not better in others. A month without worrying about the battery was the best feature of the Visor, no android device can offer that though. Heck, no device with an always on radio is going to offer that.
Seriously. I was in the local mall last month and, I shit you not, saw a big sign saying "Unlimited Voice, Text and Data*" with very small print saying "* 2GB limit on data". This word you keep using, I do not think it means what you think it means. Wish I could remember which outfit was doing it now but I remember pointing it out to the wife and laughing loudly enough it annoyed the weasel manning the kiosk.
Where is the police? Don't they patrol the mall? None of them bother to notice obvious, blatant fraud?
And google would learn the same lesson. Wireless Internet is fraud. Everybody hypes it, everybody advertises people watching video and doing all sorts of high bitrate stuff. But once a net goes out of beta test there isn't enough actual bandwidth available on the chunks of spectrum devoted to 3/4G to feed the screaming hordes who sign up. And until they go seriously into microcell and put nodes on every light pole there never will be... and probably not even then because our voracious desire for ever faster will have outstripped even that. So everyone slaps bandwidth caps on to stop the YouTube viewers, the video calls and all that foolishness and the network limps and groans along under the impossible load that still remains.
It is math people. There just ain't enough airspace to stuff that many bit into. Wires and fibers aren't dead yet.
Is this a shock to anyone after The Week of Windows 8 Hype? If there was a theme running through all of the stories it was this: Windows as you have known it is deprecated, a traditional Windows desktop will be available (certainly on x86, perhaps on arm) for those who are determined enough to figure out how to reenable it but don't expect it to last much longer. If Windows and native Win32 executables themselves are on the chopping block why would they have any interest in maintaining a UNIX command line layer?
Win32 (and UNIX more so) isn't going to lend itself to the sort of app store lockdown Microsoft is moving to. If you have a choice of buy Win32 apps/games at Walmart/Gamestop and Microsoft gets no taste of the action or buy everything at the App Store and give Microsoft 30%, which do you think they are going to 'nudge' you toward? And by 'nudge' I mean turn your PC into an iPhone with hard crypto locks and remove all options that do not let them rake off their 30 points.
> Warren Buffet paid about 17% on his earnings ..
Could you stop with the reposting of White House talking points? We aren't stupid enough to fall for that stuff. Buffet has a few advantages, one he doesn't pay himself a salary so he doesn't pay income tax. Dividends have already been taxed at the higher corporate rate so even the 15% dividends and capital gains rate is double dipping and discourages corporations from paying dividends, so instead we get the insane focus on making the stock price go up even in industries where that can only be done with smoke and mirrors or buyouts. And as for capital gains, we don't want to tax those much because we WANT savings and investment. Even when we aren't in a horrid recession we are always fretting about the low savings rate in the US. Well tax something and you get less of it.
And there is the pesky fact Buffet shovels most of his take directly into non-profit activity and thus out of sight of the tax man. So decide, will the Gates Foundation make better use of Buffet's money than Obama pissing it away on another lame crony capitalist green scam? I'm no fan of Bill Gates in general but I'd put my money on the Gates Foundation being the better steward of Buffet's stash.
> On average, millionaires pay 20.1% on their earnings.
The IRS and the AP cite slightly higher figures but I don't want to end up mired in debating which authority is more accurate. No I'm going for the argument ender. Alright hippy, before I listen to word ONE about who is and is not paying their 'fair share' you have to stop and define that word. Tell me what you really mean. What percentage of a productive person's income are you and the taker class entitled to? Numbers or you are just trying to score points with the ignorant and there aren't nearly so many here as at du or dailykos. We know Obama's father said in writing that 100% was perfectly acceptable to him and it is pretty obvious that was one of the Dreams of his Father he took up with great gusto. So where do YOU draw the line and say "no, that wouldn't be fair."
I also dual boot Win7 and Fedora on this Thinkpad and Grub is the one in the MBR. However, I haven't succeeded in getting SP1 to download and install. Until now I just figured, "That's just Windows" and didn't care since I only boot it when I'm doing the 'well does this damned site even work on Win+IE?" test and that doesn't happen often anymore.
But I have been saying for a couple of years that while before Microsoft's future vision was to make the PC into an XBox that it changed recently. Now they are clearly back to chasing Apple's taillights and thus intend to make the PC into an iPhone/iPad. Windows 8 clearly has that goal, from the look, the walled garden, App Store, no Flash and now the chains. And these won't be cool designer chains that the elite can jailbreak anyway, these willl be nasty rusty and you will need shots after handling em. Just wait until the malware gets to take over and Norton won't have the keys to even run. No boot a Linux rescue disk to fix things or even try to save the data. Microsoft Hell(tm). If they could have pulled off this stunt with Vista they would have succeeded, but the OEMs just couldn't ensure delivery of TPMs and the corporate world rebelled at the.idea since Microsoft pushed it as a sop to the content industry to protect 'the precious' so they backed off. That was a mistake on their part, because their moment is past and I don't think they can get away with it now. There are things an 800 pound gorilla can get away with that a 700 pound one can't quite manage and Microsoft is now down just a smidge in monopoly power.