> I'd like a computer primarily for word processing, occasional light duty coding, etc. that I can carry easily with me on multi-hour airplane flights.
Sounds like you are an idjit. Sorry, but that's just the truth. You say that and then go on to describe a high end ultraportable far beyond what currently exists or is likely to exist in the next three years. Why? You do realize the difference between the ultraportable and netbook catagories, right? I'm typing this on an ultraportable (Thinkpad x200s) and while it is under three pounds like the early netbooks it ain't on the same planet with any eeePC.
If you want long runtime you want an ARM, period. Intel will eventually get their idle power consumption down but not for several more years. You say you would accept Linux so again, ARM is what you want, as several complete distros are available.
In the end though, you need to rethink your actual use case because you are asking for contradictory things. Twelve hour runtime on a dualcore Intel CPU while staying light, i.e. no fugly extra run battery hanging out? Not in a netbook, not in an ultraportable, not at any price. But again, your stated use case doesn't need that much cpu grunt.
> It is not clear if the net book is a good idea,...
If you are a customer it is clear, customers bought the crap outta them. If you are a PC maker it was clear they were a danger and to Microsoft they are a mortal threat. Understand this difference in perspective and everything is clear.
The first attack was Microsoft insisting that netbooks run Windows by threatening the venders OEM deals on their other more profitable lines and on the other hand essentially giving XP away for less than the bundleware. Then, because the original netbooks couldn't really run XP well it gave them the excuse they were looking for to redefine the term into meaninglessness. Now a 'netbook' is any lower end notebook without an optical drive.
remember the original eeePC was aiming at a low price, small and light and basic web access. Not many 'netbooks' meet that definition.
Now look at the inbound ARM wave. Already the attacks are beginning to ensure none are something customers will like. Linux is out, I doubt any will run it. Google doesn't really count, by the time they got through with it customers lose all of it's benefits and and only have the dubious privacy invading Google features. And while we wait for Chrome to emerge from the vapor, note how even the generic Chinese crap suddenly stopped loading Linux in favor of WinCE. And while ARM should have allowed new low price points to be hit, again that isn't what seems to be the plan. Upcoming product will be expensive high powered HD video chomping stuff subsidized by cell carriers with battery life the only killer feature to try tackling the mighty Wintel duopoly. Anyone smell the fail yet?
Put out a sub kilogram machine with better than eight (real world) hours of runtime, a week of standby, and good enough computing to do web browsing and light productivity and I suspect you would find youself in original eeePC 900 territory, unable to make enough to satisfy demand the first year. But I doubt it will ever get built. A year ago I figured some generic Chinese factory with no need to worry about Microsoft would eventually make one and it would find distribution through channels that don't have a current notebook line to worry about it being canibalized. But watching how fast CE monopolized the generic machines I now see there isn't any such factory.
> It seems to me that if a person can't fix a problem on their own, and that person then asks for help > fixing the problem, they need to give up some control to the person they have asked for help from.
Close but still not quite the root of the problem here. It is a common one, a mismatch between responsibility and authority. The guy was demanding the hosting provider assume responsibility beyond the authority he was willing to give them. In the end the hosting provider claimed the matching authority to the responsibility the customer was holding them to and all hell broke loose. They should have simply closed his trouble ticket as CANTFIX when he refused them access to the information they needed to work on his problem and let him leave in a snit. A troublemaker like this customer would have been equally pissed off but the hosting provider would have gone into court (where this will almost certainly end up) with a rock solid case.
>..making it so cheap that countries wouldn't even have to think about acquiring one..
Exactly. But Negroponte is about PR and vapor, not producing actual solutions or products. It isn't a coincidence that he worked for the UN, a useless institution known for exactly the same flaws.
At his point it should be possible to build an ARM based OLPC style machine for $100 in quantity one, far less when sold by the cargo container.
And once you get past the poorest of the poor, where even basic sanitation is scarce and electricity is virtually unknown, most folks manage to wrangle a TV set. So why not build a $25 computer for them by tucking an ARM into a keyboard and using that existing TV as the output. Not as sexy as pitching a tablet that will likely never actually be built (like his last big idea) but my idea would get a computer into the hands of a billion people by this time next year if somebody ran with it.
> Quit being a lazy skeptic and man up. Become a climate scientist. I dare you.
What would be the point? You see, I actually have spent some time reading through the leaked data and email. The whole game is rigged. If you aren't known to be a warmer you don't get to peer review for the journals considered important to the climate change game. When an editor broke with the unwritten rule the warmers had the offending editor removed. Another journal allowed a few doubting papers in, the warmers are writing about organizing to not publish in, cite from and generally shun the heretical journal. In other words the science is settled, therefore dissent isn't going to be considered science.
More important, you don't need to be a climate scientist to realize these guys aren't practicing science. They suppress debate, suppress the data and the details of the models used to analyze it. Basically they are putting on their Science! priesthood robes and making pronouncements we are expected to accept without question based on their authority.
But the funny part is they aren't even claiming to be experts in most of the stuff they spew. Several papers have been blown up because they were making claims based on statistical models put together without the input of a real statistician. The Hockey Stick debacle came about because someone used math they didn't really understand... or was outright fraud. Then beyond proclaiming impending DOOM! they go beyond their area of science and push specific solutions. That is the duties of engineers, economists and politicians. Nothing in a climate science degree qualifies anyone to pick a solution out of the dozens of options available. Then they let an idiot like the Goracle be their spokesperson and he is so clueless he things the inside of the earth is millions of degrees.
No! You are only supposed to trust the work of peer reviewed climate scientists. And only known trusted warmers can peer review the climate change data. It's circular you see.
If anyone had any doubt the recent bad behavior should have dispelled it. Watching the warming side circle the wagons and attempt to shout down any disent with the same "peer reviewed science" is the gold standard, if you aren't in the peer reviewed literature you need to STFU! When the peer review process being corrupted was one of the key charges being leveled.
Besides the corruption, I tend to suspect the whole "if you aren't peer reviewed you aren't allowed to have an opinion" line of argument to be just a dressed up appeal to authority. Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender. And then they go back to the appeal to authority well and try to say anyone who isn't a degreed climatalogist you can't have an opinion. Nope, just another appeal to authority.
> One does wonder what would happen if an Iranian or Iraqi came into America and provided material means for > people to rebel, overthrow, dissent terrorise the American government?
And this kids is why you shouldn't grow up to be a marxist whore. You have to do crap like this, attempting to equate the US and Cuban system to make a case there is no real difference. Night and fricking day dude.
Perhaps you missed the President of Iran openly speaking here in the US? Not just at the UN, but at a major US University. Hell, take a look in the Middle Eastern Studies dept of most any US institution of higher education and you can find terrorist symps holding forth daily before captive audiences.
The Fracking Fundi Saudi Islamists openly operate schools in the US and teach jihad.
I don't want Nancy Pelosi in prison, I just want her removed from office. If you can't see that fundamental difference in the two political systems there just is no hope for ya.
> Maybe a book on how to achieve things?
We don't need to import that stuff, we have tenured professors like William Ayers not only writing how to manuals but actually regretting not blowing more shit up.
> Well, we do business with China and Saudi Arabia. Just Saying....
Yea. Which is why I'd like to see us get off the imported oil habit to the point we could tell the House of Saud to pound sand.
And some of us objected to MFN status for China based on their horrid human rights record. Too bad the 'progressives' formed an unholy alliance with the big transnational corporate interests on that issue.... But no we probably can't just treat China as the total pariah they would be in a more perfect world. People who say size doesn't matter are just deluding themselves.
It is instructive to note how many useful idiots keep calling to normalize relations with the sort of barbarians that lock people up for passing out cell phones.
Normalize travel and trade with these animals? Really?
Seriously, would YOU travel into such a hellhole? Do business as usual with such a morally bankrupt regime and expect them to honor contracts like civilized people?
> There are big error bars on every argument on the subject, except maybe the redneck's > digest of the executive's digest that you hear in 30s news clips.
s/redneck/Congress, the media, pop culture and everyone outside the science community/
And the scientists in support of the AGW side are all too content to remain silent and allow the discussion to proceed in a flawed assessment of the risks.
> Why are you so certain it would bring ruin ?!? You agree that less fuel and > more nuke would be better; you don't need to change society for that.
Exactly. You don't need to completely reorder society to solve the STATED problem, but you do need to do it if the goal is advancing socialism. Note that every green position given serious consideration in congress involves giving the State massive new powers such as Cap & Trade[1]. Socialism has failed every time it has been tried, bringing economic and social decline at a minimum (Western Europe) and mass graves if the road is traveled too far. Every time. So why would I want to see the US fall into ruin?
Experiment. Go into a 'green' online forum and propose we forget about cap & trade and instead push a modest oil import tax along with a hell for leather program of building nuke plants and pass it with a broad bi-partisan majority. Better use a disposable account because you will be flamed to a crisp.
> Except that if you don't force GM to produce better cars they won't have any incentive to > do so and have and will fight tooth and nails against any perceived change to their bottom line.
Here is where I detect a whiff of fascism and lack of faith in the free market from you. And from most greens. First off fsck GM. In a free market they would be dead already. If we put a tax on gas sufficient to communicate to car shoppers that gas is going to be expensive longterm and not keep jumping up and down they will buy accordingly. You really need to meditate on that point until you understand it. Verily I say unto you, Ponder it until it becomes an article of faith. Put not thy faith in Governments, the Invisible Hand exists, and unless the State meddles it always does the right thing in the end. If Government Motors doesn't build cars people want somebody will. And if we all end up driving Hondas I don't have a problem with that. Stupid companies must be allowed to die, failure has to be an option to have a free market. Death is part of the circle of life, even for corporations. More important, without death there is no _fear of death_ to motivate adaptation to change.
So no, don't 'force' GM to do what you think is the right thing, just don't save them when they fail and the market will provide.
[1] Note that Cap & Trade isn't just a Carbon Tax, it is a massive new political and economic structure, giving massive freebies to industries and specific corporations favored by the democrats and punishing enemies. Trillions of dollars will be shifted based on politics instead of economics with little actual ecological results. This is by design. Follow the money, there is a reason GE is so "Green" these days. There is a reason Lehman Brothers is salivating. There is a reason Obama & his cronies are waiting for the Carbon exchange in Chicago they are all invested in to get up and running, it is expected to make its investors rich. The Goracle has already made over.1B in the "Green" game and will make a lot more if his policy preferences are implemented.
> At a certain point you are able to say that you have enough data to conclude, but > if you wait until you have perfect data, it'll be FAR TOO LATE.
Of course you do realise you are expounding the exact same "precautionary principle" that is the heart of Henninger's WSJ article that is the topic of discussion.
What you propose would be an acceptable use of Science! if all of the Doom & Gloom(tm) came with well marked error bars. It doesn't. You never see the Goracle pronounce "If we do nothing there is a 38% chance of a runaway meltdown of the Greenland glaciers." It is always stated as a certainty of DOOM! if we don't act now! (Operators are standing by!) The fact of the matter is we don't have enough data to state much of anything with certainty on the GW topic, it is all swarming clouds of probability, and you are entirely correct that we almost certainly won't have time to acquire enough data to get even 90% certainty before it would be too late.. if we credit the more gloomy modeled scenarios enough to take them seriously. So no, it isn't settled that "We need to act now." if by act you mean follow the Goracle over the cliff with Cap & Trade, etc. We should be having a rational conversation about risks vs reward, cost/benefit, etc.
We can't guard against every risk, we have to make decisions. I can promise you that the Earth WILL be smacked by another asteroid/comet/etc sooner or later. Should we reorder our society to devote every available resource to building a defense? No. It is a question of probability and our current efforts to catalog the minor bodies in the solar system is probably the right response for now. With only a little knowledge of science and some imagination one can think up a hundred or more equally horrible possible scenarios we could avert if we spent Sagans of dollars on solutions for. But we live in a world with a limit to available resources so we have to pick our fights with Nature.
Personally, on GW I'd argue that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels makes so much sense on so many grounds (economic, political, military, ecological, etc.) we should be making every reasonable effort. Should we reorder our society in ways almost certain to bring us to ruin? No, that would be a solution worse than the problem. So if ya want a tax on imported oil to stabilize the price at levels high enough to encourage alternatives and promote domestic production I'd support it. An major push to get new nuke plants online to replace the coal we are currently burning to make most of our electricity? Count me in.
> Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the > science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes > but instead read about Nuclear power.
And we are being perfectly rational. I'm going to ask you to do something hard, accept that Conservatives and Libertarians actually sincere in their worldview and not just evil, stupid, greedy selfish bastards. We get suspicious when a proposed solution goes 180 degrees against every belief we hold True. Especially when we know we are being lied to in that first example.
Because taxes and government control AREN'T the only option, as you point out. If the policymakers proposing socialism as the solution were seperate from the scientists proclaiming impending DOOM! we would simply examine the science and it appeared sound propose different policy, i.e. build nuke plants like it was the end of the world and fund the crap out of fusion and any other alternative. If AGW is the problem then both the socialist and capitalist solution equally solve the problem and we argue the political argument of which direction purely in the political arena. But of course that isn't what happened. Almost to a man,the scientists proclaiming DOOM! are also pushing one policy solution over the other with no apparent SCIENTIFIC basis for doing so while claiming a scientific mandate for doing so. Seeing them butchering scientific objectivity for political activism on the solution it isn't a big leap of logic to begin questioning how faithful to the ways of science the same people were when determinging we were DOOMED! in the first place. And then the questioning started hitting such paydirt the Blue team started declaring "the science settled" and demands that "Deniers" be put on trial for Crimes against the Earth started being seriously discussed (as opposed to laughed at) and such.
In the end scientists should not be declaring support for ANY solution to AGW since it outside the scope of their skills. The most a climatologist can do is announce their findings on the climate, it is then the problem of other professions to propose solutions and then the duty of the political world to pick one. It is always a big red flag when experts in a narrow field suddenly start trying to leverage their acclaim in a narrow specialty to push major policy in the political realm. Why should I as a Citizen give extra weight to some climate scientist's opinion whether we should build nuke plants or attempt a total rip and replace on the industrialized world over some CNN pundit? Exactly.
Same as when Dr. Sagan and the rest of the idiots back in the 80's brought dishonor on the reputation of scientists by trying to weight in (by appeal to their authority as scientists, as Citizens they of course had the same right and duty as every other Citizen) on issues of disarmament. There is nothing in the field of astrophysics that offers any insight into the complex political, military and moral issues that drove the Cold War. But that didn't stop them from making absurd Appeals to Authority; they even had a psuedoscientific doomsday scenario for that argument as well, Nuclear Winter. It was bullcrap and beside the point. Saying loosing the nukes was a 'bad thing' was belaboring the blindingly obvious. And anyway, it wasn't like there was really a Dr. Strangelove faction calling for a first strike on EITHER side. The argument was whether MAD, unilateral disarmament or speaking truth to evil was the best course. History has ruled, Reagan won they lost. And certain people are still mad as hell their side lost.
> We might not have perfect models or understand every nuance of climate change but we > have pretty good research on the larger points.
No we don't. Global warming stopped in 1998. Show me a model from before that that predicted that while still showing a longterm warming trend. The flip of the PDO to a cool phase could very well mean this is just a downward jog on a
And we thought BDS was bad enough. The mention of Mrs. Palin's name seems to instantly polarize any conversation, so why bring her into this thread, already a certainty to become a veritable flamefest?
But since you did, lets do examine her ideas on the merits instead of ad hominim attacks on her. Seems she is saying pretty much what I have been saying here on/. for years. That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
> Because of some possible (and if so quite serious) data shenanigans, Obama should boycott > the talks entirely to send a message. i.e. Quit.
Yes. Because the reaction has been to attack the messengers, bury the whole matter and proceed on the same predetermined course. By going Obama is declaring for that faction. No other spin is possible. The only exception would be if he went and used the occasion to put his speaking skills into the service of Science by utterly flaying the whole perverted exercise, which we both know won't happen.
Global warming MAY be happening (but probably hasn't for a decade now..), AGW even MIGHT be the major cause. But with even the raw sensor data in serious doubt (ask Google about the recent review of the raw data in Darwin or the rerun of the New Zealand long term trend data from their raw data. The rot extends far beyond EAU's CRU now.) and the main actors proven by their own words to be activists instead of scientists who can say? And that is the point, nobody who hasn't got a few years to dig into data has no rational basis to decide. The experts are tainted on both sides by trillions of dollars of incentives, political/religious beliefs and the raw data is suspect. So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin. So the rational person looks for option #3 and says, so just how much would mitigation cost should we do nothing and the Warmers prove to be right?
If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach. If the warmers had truly believed the science was settled they should have put together a datadump worthy of the claims. Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations for each out along with the complete fully commented source to the models used to process it that gave the results that lead them to their frightening theory of doom. Let everyone fully examine the whole thing to the best of their abilities. That would have settled the science.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
Or take James Hansen. He is going around saying anyone who "Denies" his theory should be tried for crimes against The Earth. Were he just another crackpot pundit he could be safely ignored. Look at MSNBC's raings, we are pretty good at ignoring crackpots. The problem isn't even that Hansen wears the robes of a High Priest of Science!, hell he has the NASA patch on his robes, in the ranks of Science! that is better than a cardinal's hat. No, the problem is that the rest of the priesthood hasn't taken any action against him.
When a heretic priest comes busting into yer temple demanding everyone adopt a new set of beliefs the established church
> I quickly found a new ISP and they lost my business.
You say that like you think you were really 'showing them' by taking your business elsewhere. They were trying to get rid of you and when you left their attitude was more of "I pity the fool that signs that a**hole!"
> Voting with my dollars worked for me back in the 90s, but now, there are just less viable players > in the field, and none of them seem much better than the others.
Yes, there used to be a few 'hacker friendly' ISPs who were usually run by people like thee and me and utterly clueless about ISP economics. They went out of business. It isn't quite as bad in the broadband world but back in the dialup era it was just insane to keep a nethog once we got past the period when those heavy users were also helping bring in new customers. Do the math.
Customer 1 is a nethog. They nail up a connection pretty much 24/7/365 and push as many bits through it as they can. They pay regular price. In the dialup days that was typically $19.95/mo and you pretty much had to dedicate a modem and terminal server port to the idiot. ISP's cost one modem, port telco charge for one business line plus about 4% of a T1 for upstream. Hint, the ISP is paying more than $20/mo for the inbound phone line unless the ISP is AT&T.
Customer 2 is a normal. They connect for four or five hours per day, perhaps six or seven the first six months. You can sign up four to six of these per port. And since most of their activity is bursty the impact on your upstream is minimal.
Customer 3 is a light user. After the shiny wore off the Internet they typically do email and hit a few websites. One port will support ten or more of these people.
It should be obvious that you should want to lose Customer 1 ASAP since they cost you more money than they pay in. If you have a good mix of the second and third type you can get six to eight customers per line and not have too much fussing. AOL used to run ten to twenty customers per dialup port.
In the broadbad era the upstream is the biggest contended resource and depending on the market can be very expensive. Again, the P2P user is the one you want to gift to your competition if you can do it in a way that won't lose his friends/family or generate undue media attention.
> The problem really is ignorance. Too many people just don't understand the service that they are > buying well enough to know when they are being offered less for their money than advertised...
Agreed, but it is you who are ignorant. I admin at a public library. We have a 6MBps link delivered as four T1 circuits and we also have a 6Mbps business grade DSL that I use to push most of the http traffic through to help the load on the main link. The DSL link is pretty much what us normal people buy and is just a little over $100/mo. It is good but doesn't always deliver full capacity. If it goes out we just fail over to driving everything out the T1s. The T1 circuits cost a hell of a lot more but always deliver the goods and have a great SLA.
Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone? Really, if we could lawyer up and force AT&T to give us the 6Mbps we 'paid for' 24/7 why are we paying for the dedicated service? Because we understand the real world. And the C block we get as part of the statewide WAN is a big plus.:)
La de fracking da what you 'feel'. It is obvious you lack the facts to base an opinion on.
And as for the idiocy of somebody like Felten who should know (or at know somebody who could have clued him in before he opened his piehole in public and made an idiot of himself) I'm not sure what to say other than if this isn't proof that some people's reputations are vastly overrated then what will?
Unlike Felten, I actually worked in the ISP game back in the dialup era and actually know of what I speak. We had net hogs then and they still exist. We spent about half of our resources servicing 10-15% of our customers until we finally stopped saying 'unlimited' and put in a 250 hour per month cap to run those guys off. And they mostly did go instead of switching to the dedicated dialup service we had been offering for a couple of years but NEVER sold any of. The same rule applies in the broadband game except the hogs aren't camping on a modem 24/7. But they are still causing most of an ISP's upstream bandwidth expense plus a good chunk of their other network infrastructure buying.
The vast majority of customers, even today, don't have P2P stuff running 24/7/365, don't run servers, etc. Any ISP that could get rid of the small percentage that do that stuff could freeze their infrastructure and upstream expansion for a couple of years, even with the growth of Youtube/Hulu.
> So, unlicensed development would be a real problem.
You are correct but your point doesn't matter. It is true only because the vendors built their business model around something that should not be, nay that the US Supreme Court had already (supposedly) shot down. The world doesn't have to alter reality and everybody doesn't have to bend over to protect a business model that should have never existed.
So lets work to do away with it and force the console industry to adapt to a sane world. All it would mean is that this hardware generation would get stretched out another year or so until the next generation could be sold at a profit from day one.
> If this is done against the wishes of the console-maker, than you can claim...
What in the wide wide world of sports does the 'wishes' of the console maker matter? I have never understood how this came to be. I though we (here in the US at least) had already had this fight. Atari v Activision supposedly settled this matter. Atart couldn't decide who could or could not sell software for their system. Case closed, the Supremes had SPOKEN.
Then the video bust came and a few years later Nintendo introduced the NES and it was like nothing had ever been decided, they blessed your title or you didn't ship, and f**k the Supreme Court if they don't like it. And they got away with it and it has since been thus on the console market and now the handset market, the home video market and if the major players ever thought they could get away with it on the PC as well.
And now on the console (but especially Nintendo fanbois) and with Mac the users have been abused so long they have fscking Stockholm Syndrome or something and not only accept it they LIKE getting hosed by their vendor now.
Clue time. When I BUY a computing device off the shelf I BOUGHT it, I didn't LICENSE it and I couldn't give a good god damn what the vendor of that product WANTS me to do with it. If I want to hack it up and use the individual components in a project I'll do that. If I wanna put NetBSD on it thats exactly what I'll do and screw em if they don't like it.
> Well at least in computer science, this happens all the time.
Climate science isn't computer science. There only a few temp datasets and 'collecting' a new one isn't an option. If you want a century of records you either use an existing set or wait on i/o for about a century.
> In fact, if you think the data was biased, then you're obligated to gather it yourself in attempt > to get unbiased data. Simply having access to a biased dataset, does not magically make it unbiased.
As the leaked data now makes clear, access to the raw data would have scuttled these idiots. The data was dodgy enough it wouldn't have withstood even the most cursory review. The temp data is full of gaps they averaged over and did even worse to. One if the more referenced tree ring studies ends up being based on a grand total of twelve cores. Twelve samples!
> This is doubly frustrating, because the big allegations against Mann's 98 "hockey stick" paper > was never about the data gathering. It was about the mathematics presented about analyzing of > the data. Would have access have made it easier for McIntyre to write the 2005 paper complaining > about MBH98? Yes, but the fact is that it didn't matter. McIntyre didn't have the all data, yet > was able to still write detect the bias, write the paper, and get it accepted, shows that it > obviously wasn't a deal breaker.
Several problems with that statement. One, had source been required for publication there is a very non-zero chance the problems would have been caught in peer review. I'm not an expert but from reading about the case the flaw wasn't exactly obfuscated if you had access to the source. Second, that someone with a LOT of time managed to reverse engineer the thing and blow the whistle doesn't remove the need for science to practice full disclosure. Bad science needs to be discovered and tossed in months, not the years it took to debunk Mann. And Mann still hasn't suffered legally or professionally for either his original misconduct or the obvious coverup he aided and abetted.
If the conclusions of science are to be believable as much of the raw data and the processing it underwent needs to be published. If somebody gets a bad vibe when reading a paper we want the barriers to their sniffing around until they are satisfied to be as low as possible. If the work is really good it will withstand scrutiny and the openness will inspire confidence.
Remember, the climate scientists are making the most extraordinary claims with the most far ranging consequences ever. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not "Trust us, we are Scientists!"
> Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data.
No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private. So exactly has been being reviewed all these years? And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
Here is a hint. If he says "Trust me" he ain't no scientist he is a salesman/politician.
> Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not.
I don't know what the rules are on your world, but on mine it isn't science if the work can't be peer reviewed, published and duplicated. If you basing results on datasets that can't be released none of that is possible. Seriously, how would you peer review a paper based on data you can't look at? How did 'respected' journals publish papers that they couldn't ask another serious scientist to do a proper review of? Why is work that, even if it COULD in theory be duplicated, in fact never will (and wasn't) be given any weight in the high councils of the world's leaders?
Should a scientist use a closed dataset to help his company decide which research line to pursue? Yes. Decide where to drill for oil? Yes. Publish in the peer reviewed journals? No. Make recommendations to world leaders with trillion dollar consequences? No.
Care to name one? I have looked for one that will talk to an asterisk PBX and came up dry. Fedora 11+ packaged preferred but I'd build it from source if I had to. I found some that almost worked but something was wrong enough with each one that I uninstalled it.
> I doubt very much that most Fedora installs even have an administrator, or serve more than a home user.
So many words from someone who can't read. And they said write only devices were mythical.:)
As stated in my post avove, this isn't so much a change in Fedora as a case of Fedora being the first release with this new policykit. If this isn't stopped, flamed into oblivion, shouted down, whatever, it will end up in Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, eventually everything down to FreeBSD because this *Kit crap is infecting everybody. Or it will be individually patched out by individual package maintainers and we all know that is sub-optimal.
And yes even Fedora has users. Even if you are correct that few corporate types will be rolling F12 out to end users there are things called families. I admin my home machine but I'm not the only user. No I don't trust every person I give an account to enough to allow them to have admin rights. Remember trust in the sysadmin sense is more about trust in their skills/knowledge not whether you would loan em a hundred bux.
Under normal conditions it wouldn't work. Yum won't allow unpriviledged users to install things, those guys aren't idiots. This is a hook into the command line that triggers if you type the name of a command that isn't installed. So it would only grab the most recent version it knew of.
And anyway, when did making the command line user friendly become such a big push, I though we were supposed to consider any use of the command line a bug to be fixed by an new multi-megabyte graphical horror.:)
Of course if you can prevent the machine from downloading the updated package lists you could probably trick it.
> What I want is a package manager that will do installation to my own home directory.
Both rpm and deb can almost do that. It requires some minor things to change to make it usable.
1. An effort to raise the issue, push the advantages to it, etc.
2. You create a mini tree in your home directory, with a bin, lib, etc. Then you init an rpmdb (or the deb equiv) in that tree. And get the magic right in your login to point the environment variables at it. Then you can install packages into that tree so long as they don't do things only root can do.
3. As things stand now, to install the smallest package into that tree will require installing darned near a full distro which will have packages only root can install. So the one key feature is rpm (and dpkg) need a new switch that allows it to merge two package sets so the user tree doesn't need any package already installed on the main system.
4. Packages which are good candidates for this sort of ad-hoc install need to be checked for any root only activity that could be seperated out into a sub-package for system wide install.
5. To complete the system the update tool would need to monitor your local packages and be able to notify you of updates and then actually do the updates automagically even if you have local repos installed.
5. The graphical front ends would need to be modified to make it all just work. You would run packagekit and click on a package. If you were a mortal user it would just install it into your home directory if it could or tell you to ask an admin if it needed root. Ad icon in the package list would show eligible packages or perhaps grey out package the user lacked rights to install. A power user/admin would get prompted whether to install system-wide or locally.
6. One last touch would be some sort of system to fix duplicate installs. If a user added a package to their private set and the admin later added it the system would need to be smart enough to remove the local version to prevent two different versions from being visible at the same time. It would also help recover disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'd like a computer primarily for word processing, occasional light duty coding, etc. that I can carry easily with me on multi-hour airplane flights.
Sounds like you are an idjit. Sorry, but that's just the truth. You say that and then go on to describe a high end ultraportable far beyond what currently exists or is likely to exist in the next three years. Why? You do realize the difference between the ultraportable and netbook catagories, right? I'm typing this on an ultraportable (Thinkpad x200s) and while it is under three pounds like the early netbooks it ain't on the same planet with any eeePC.
If you want long runtime you want an ARM, period. Intel will eventually get their idle power consumption down but not for several more years. You say you would accept Linux so again, ARM is what you want, as several complete distros are available.
In the end though, you need to rethink your actual use case because you are asking for contradictory things. Twelve hour runtime on a dualcore Intel CPU while staying light, i.e. no fugly extra run battery hanging out? Not in a netbook, not in an ultraportable, not at any price. But again, your stated use case doesn't need that much cpu grunt.
> It is not clear if the net book is a good idea,...
If you are a customer it is clear, customers bought the crap outta them. If you are a PC maker it was clear they were a danger and to Microsoft they are a mortal threat. Understand this difference in perspective and everything is clear.
The first attack was Microsoft insisting that netbooks run Windows by threatening the venders OEM deals on their other more profitable lines and on the other hand essentially giving XP away for less than the bundleware. Then, because the original netbooks couldn't really run XP well it gave them the excuse they were looking for to redefine the term into meaninglessness. Now a 'netbook' is any lower end notebook without an optical drive.
remember the original eeePC was aiming at a low price, small and light and basic web access. Not many 'netbooks' meet that definition.
Now look at the inbound ARM wave. Already the attacks are beginning to ensure none are something customers will like. Linux is out, I doubt any will run it. Google doesn't really count, by the time they got through with it customers lose all of it's benefits and and only have the dubious privacy invading Google features. And while we wait for Chrome to emerge from the vapor, note how even the generic Chinese crap suddenly stopped loading Linux in favor of WinCE. And while ARM should have allowed new low price points to be hit, again that isn't what seems to be the plan. Upcoming product will be expensive high powered HD video chomping stuff subsidized by cell carriers with battery life the only killer feature to try tackling the mighty Wintel duopoly. Anyone smell the fail yet?
Put out a sub kilogram machine with better than eight (real world) hours of runtime, a week of standby, and good enough computing to do web browsing and light productivity and I suspect you would find youself in original eeePC 900 territory, unable to make enough to satisfy demand the first year. But I doubt it will ever get built. A year ago I figured some generic Chinese factory with no need to worry about Microsoft would eventually make one and it would find distribution through channels that don't have a current notebook line to worry about it being canibalized. But watching how fast CE monopolized the generic machines I now see there isn't any such factory.
> It seems to me that if a person can't fix a problem on their own, and that person then asks for help
> fixing the problem, they need to give up some control to the person they have asked for help from.
Close but still not quite the root of the problem here. It is a common one, a mismatch between responsibility and authority. The guy was demanding the hosting provider assume responsibility beyond the authority he was willing to give them. In the end the hosting provider claimed the matching authority to the responsibility the customer was holding them to and all hell broke loose. They should have simply closed his trouble ticket as CANTFIX when he refused them access to the information they needed to work on his problem and let him leave in a snit. A troublemaker like this customer would have been equally pissed off but the hosting provider would have gone into court (where this will almost certainly end up) with a rock solid case.
> ..making it so cheap that countries wouldn't even have to think about acquiring one..
Exactly. But Negroponte is about PR and vapor, not producing actual solutions or products. It isn't a coincidence that he worked for the UN, a useless institution known for exactly the same flaws.
At his point it should be possible to build an ARM based OLPC style machine for $100 in quantity one, far less when sold by the cargo container.
And once you get past the poorest of the poor, where even basic sanitation is scarce and electricity is virtually unknown, most folks manage to wrangle a TV set. So why not build a $25 computer for them by tucking an ARM into a keyboard and using that existing TV as the output. Not as sexy as pitching a tablet that will likely never actually be built (like his last big idea) but my idea would get a computer into the hands of a billion people by this time next year if somebody ran with it.
> Quit being a lazy skeptic and man up. Become a climate scientist. I dare you.
What would be the point? You see, I actually have spent some time reading through the leaked data and email. The whole game is rigged. If you aren't known to be a warmer you don't get to peer review for the journals considered important to the climate change game. When an editor broke with the unwritten rule the warmers had the offending editor removed. Another journal allowed a few doubting papers in, the warmers are writing about organizing to not publish in, cite from and generally shun the heretical journal. In other words the science is settled, therefore dissent isn't going to be considered science.
More important, you don't need to be a climate scientist to realize these guys aren't practicing science. They suppress debate, suppress the data and the details of the models used to analyze it. Basically they are putting on their Science! priesthood robes and making pronouncements we are expected to accept without question based on their authority.
But the funny part is they aren't even claiming to be experts in most of the stuff they spew. Several papers have been blown up because they were making claims based on statistical models put together without the input of a real statistician. The Hockey Stick debacle came about because someone used math they didn't really understand... or was outright fraud. Then beyond proclaiming impending DOOM! they go beyond their area of science and push specific solutions. That is the duties of engineers, economists and politicians. Nothing in a climate science degree qualifies anyone to pick a solution out of the dozens of options available. Then they let an idiot like the Goracle be their spokesperson and he is so clueless he things the inside of the earth is millions of degrees.
> And we're supposed to trust experts right?
No! You are only supposed to trust the work of peer reviewed climate scientists. And only known trusted warmers can peer review the climate change data. It's circular you see.
If anyone had any doubt the recent bad behavior should have dispelled it. Watching the warming side circle the wagons and attempt to shout down any disent with the same "peer reviewed science" is the gold standard, if you aren't in the peer reviewed literature you need to STFU! When the peer review process being corrupted was one of the key charges being leveled.
Besides the corruption, I tend to suspect the whole "if you aren't peer reviewed you aren't allowed to have an opinion" line of argument to be just a dressed up appeal to authority. Peer review is useful but should never be an argument ender. And then they go back to the appeal to authority well and try to say anyone who isn't a degreed climatalogist you can't have an opinion. Nope, just another appeal to authority.
> One does wonder what would happen if an Iranian or Iraqi came into America and provided material means for
> people to rebel, overthrow, dissent terrorise the American government?
And this kids is why you shouldn't grow up to be a marxist whore. You have to do crap like this, attempting to equate the US and Cuban system to make a case there is no real difference. Night and fricking day dude.
Perhaps you missed the President of Iran openly speaking here in the US? Not just at the UN, but at a major US University. Hell, take a look in the Middle Eastern Studies dept of most any US institution of higher education and you can find terrorist symps holding forth daily before captive audiences.
The Fracking Fundi Saudi Islamists openly operate schools in the US and teach jihad.
I don't want Nancy Pelosi in prison, I just want her removed from office. If you can't see that fundamental difference in the two political systems there just is no hope for ya.
> Maybe a book on how to achieve things?
We don't need to import that stuff, we have tenured professors like William Ayers not only writing how to manuals but actually regretting not blowing more shit up.
> Well, we do business with China and Saudi Arabia. Just Saying....
Yea. Which is why I'd like to see us get off the imported oil habit to the point we could tell the House of Saud to pound sand.
And some of us objected to MFN status for China based on their horrid human rights record. Too bad the 'progressives' formed an unholy alliance with the big transnational corporate interests on that issue.... But no we probably can't just treat China as the total pariah they would be in a more perfect world. People who say size doesn't matter are just deluding themselves.
It is instructive to note how many useful idiots keep calling to normalize relations with the sort of barbarians that lock people up for passing out cell phones.
Normalize travel and trade with these animals? Really?
Seriously, would YOU travel into such a hellhole? Do business as usual with such a morally bankrupt regime and expect them to honor contracts like civilized people?
> There are big error bars on every argument on the subject, except maybe the redneck's
> digest of the executive's digest that you hear in 30s news clips.
s/redneck/Congress, the media, pop culture and everyone outside the science community/
And the scientists in support of the AGW side are all too content to remain silent and allow the discussion to proceed in a flawed assessment of the risks.
> Why are you so certain it would bring ruin ?!? You agree that less fuel and
> more nuke would be better; you don't need to change society for that.
Exactly. You don't need to completely reorder society to solve the STATED problem, but you do need to do it if the goal is advancing socialism. Note that every green position given serious consideration in congress involves giving the State massive new powers such as Cap & Trade[1]. Socialism has failed every time it has been tried, bringing economic and social decline at a minimum (Western Europe) and mass graves if the road is traveled too far. Every time. So why would I want to see the US fall into ruin?
Experiment. Go into a 'green' online forum and propose we forget about cap & trade and instead push a modest oil import tax along with a hell for leather program of building nuke plants and pass it with a broad bi-partisan majority. Better use a disposable account because you will be flamed to a crisp.
> Except that if you don't force GM to produce better cars they won't have any incentive to
> do so and have and will fight tooth and nails against any perceived change to their bottom line.
Here is where I detect a whiff of fascism and lack of faith in the free market from you. And from most greens. First off fsck GM. In a free market they would be dead already. If we put a tax on gas sufficient to communicate to car shoppers that gas is going to be expensive longterm and not keep jumping up and down they will buy accordingly. You really need to meditate on that point until you understand it. Verily I say unto you, Ponder it until it becomes an article of faith. Put not thy faith in Governments, the Invisible Hand exists, and unless the State meddles it always does the right thing in the end. If Government Motors doesn't build cars people want somebody will. And if we all end up driving Hondas I don't have a problem with that. Stupid companies must be allowed to die, failure has to be an option to have a free market. Death is part of the circle of life, even for corporations. More important, without death there is no _fear of death_ to motivate adaptation to change.
So no, don't 'force' GM to do what you think is the right thing, just don't save them when they fail and the market will provide.
[1] Note that Cap & Trade isn't just a Carbon Tax, it is a massive new political and economic structure, giving massive freebies to industries and specific corporations favored by the democrats and punishing enemies. Trillions of dollars will be shifted based on politics instead of economics with little actual ecological results. This is by design. Follow the money, there is a reason GE is so "Green" these days. There is a reason Lehman Brothers is salivating. There is a reason Obama & his cronies are waiting for the Carbon exchange in Chicago they are all invested in to get up and running, it is expected to make its investors rich. The Goracle has already made over .1B in the "Green" game and will make a lot more if his policy preferences are implemented.
> At a certain point you are able to say that you have enough data to conclude, but
> if you wait until you have perfect data, it'll be FAR TOO LATE.
Of course you do realise you are expounding the exact same "precautionary principle" that is the heart of Henninger's WSJ article that is the topic of discussion.
What you propose would be an acceptable use of Science! if all of the Doom & Gloom(tm) came with well marked error bars. It doesn't. You never see the Goracle pronounce "If we do nothing there is a 38% chance of a runaway meltdown of the Greenland glaciers." It is always stated as a certainty of DOOM! if we don't act now! (Operators are standing by!) The fact of the matter is we don't have enough data to state much of anything with certainty on the GW topic, it is all swarming clouds of probability, and you are entirely correct that we almost certainly won't have time to acquire enough data to get even 90% certainty before it would be too late.. if we credit the more gloomy modeled scenarios enough to take them seriously. So no, it isn't settled that "We need to act now." if by act you mean follow the Goracle over the cliff with Cap & Trade, etc. We should be having a rational conversation about risks vs reward, cost/benefit, etc.
We can't guard against every risk, we have to make decisions. I can promise you that the Earth WILL be smacked by another asteroid/comet/etc sooner or later. Should we reorder our society to devote every available resource to building a defense? No. It is a question of probability and our current efforts to catalog the minor bodies in the solar system is probably the right response for now. With only a little knowledge of science and some imagination one can think up a hundred or more equally horrible possible scenarios we could avert if we spent Sagans of dollars on solutions for. But we live in a world with a limit to available resources so we have to pick our fights with Nature.
Personally, on GW I'd argue that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels makes so much sense on so many grounds (economic, political, military, ecological, etc.) we should be making every reasonable effort. Should we reorder our society in ways almost certain to bring us to ruin? No, that would be a solution worse than the problem. So if ya want a tax on imported oil to stabilize the price at levels high enough to encourage alternatives and promote domestic production I'd support it. An major push to get new nuke plants online to replace the coal we are currently burning to make most of our electricity? Count me in.
> Those who read that the solution was taxes were more likely to doubt the validity of the
> science than those conservatives who read the article with no mention of increased taxes
> but instead read about Nuclear power.
And we are being perfectly rational. I'm going to ask you to do something hard, accept that Conservatives and Libertarians actually sincere in their worldview and not just evil, stupid, greedy selfish bastards. We get suspicious when a proposed solution goes 180 degrees against every belief we hold True. Especially when we know we are being lied to in that first example.
Because taxes and government control AREN'T the only option, as you point out. If the policymakers proposing socialism as the solution were seperate from the scientists proclaiming impending DOOM! we would simply examine the science and it appeared sound propose different policy, i.e. build nuke plants like it was the end of the world and fund the crap out of fusion and any other alternative. If AGW is the problem then both the socialist and capitalist solution equally solve the problem and we argue the political argument of which direction purely in the political arena. But of course that isn't what happened. Almost to a man,the scientists proclaiming DOOM! are also pushing one policy solution over the other with no apparent SCIENTIFIC basis for doing so while claiming a scientific mandate for doing so. Seeing them butchering scientific objectivity for political activism on the solution it isn't a big leap of logic to begin questioning how faithful to the ways of science the same people were when determinging we were DOOMED! in the first place. And then the questioning started hitting such paydirt the Blue team started declaring "the science settled" and demands that "Deniers" be put on trial for Crimes against the Earth started being seriously discussed (as opposed to laughed at) and such.
In the end scientists should not be declaring support for ANY solution to AGW since it outside the scope of their skills. The most a climatologist can do is announce their findings on the climate, it is then the problem of other professions to propose solutions and then the duty of the political world to pick one. It is always a big red flag when experts in a narrow field suddenly start trying to leverage their acclaim in a narrow specialty to push major policy in the political realm. Why should I as a Citizen give extra weight to some climate scientist's opinion whether we should build nuke plants or attempt a total rip and replace on the industrialized world over some CNN pundit? Exactly.
Same as when Dr. Sagan and the rest of the idiots back in the 80's brought dishonor on the reputation of scientists by trying to weight in (by appeal to their authority as scientists, as Citizens they of course had the same right and duty as every other Citizen) on issues of disarmament. There is nothing in the field of astrophysics that offers any insight into the complex political, military and moral issues that drove the Cold War. But that didn't stop them from making absurd Appeals to Authority; they even had a psuedoscientific doomsday scenario for that argument as well, Nuclear Winter. It was bullcrap and beside the point. Saying loosing the nukes was a 'bad thing' was belaboring the blindingly obvious. And anyway, it wasn't like there was really a Dr. Strangelove faction calling for a first strike on EITHER side. The argument was whether MAD, unilateral disarmament or speaking truth to evil was the best course. History has ruled, Reagan won they lost. And certain people are still mad as hell their side lost.
> We might not have perfect models or understand every nuance of climate change but we
> have pretty good research on the larger points.
No we don't. Global warming stopped in 1998. Show me a model from before that that predicted that while still showing a longterm warming trend. The flip of the PDO to a cool phase could very well mean this is just a downward jog on a
> two words - Sarah Palin.
And we thought BDS was bad enough. The mention of Mrs. Palin's name seems to instantly polarize any conversation, so why bring her into this thread, already a certainty to become a veritable flamefest?
But since you did, lets do examine her ideas on the merits instead of ad hominim attacks on her. Seems she is saying pretty much what I have been saying here on /. for years. That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
> Because of some possible (and if so quite serious) data shenanigans, Obama should boycott
> the talks entirely to send a message. i.e. Quit.
Yes. Because the reaction has been to attack the messengers, bury the whole matter and proceed on the same predetermined course. By going Obama is declaring for that faction. No other spin is possible. The only exception would be if he went and used the occasion to put his speaking skills into the service of Science by utterly flaying the whole perverted exercise, which we both know won't happen.
Global warming MAY be happening (but probably hasn't for a decade now..), AGW even MIGHT be the major cause. But with even the raw sensor data in serious doubt (ask Google about the recent review of the raw data in Darwin or the rerun of the New Zealand long term trend data from their raw data. The rot extends far beyond EAU's CRU now.) and the main actors proven by their own words to be activists instead of scientists who can say? And that is the point, nobody who hasn't got a few years to dig into data has no rational basis to decide. The experts are tainted on both sides by trillions of dollars of incentives, political/religious beliefs and the raw data is suspect. So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin. So the rational person looks for option #3 and says, so just how much would mitigation cost should we do nothing and the Warmers prove to be right?
If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach. If the warmers had truly believed the science was settled they should have put together a datadump worthy of the claims. Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations for each out along with the complete fully commented source to the models used to process it that gave the results that lead them to their frightening theory of doom. Let everyone fully examine the whole thing to the best of their abilities. That would have settled the science.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
Or take James Hansen. He is going around saying anyone who "Denies" his theory should be tried for crimes against The Earth. Were he just another crackpot pundit he could be safely ignored. Look at MSNBC's raings, we are pretty good at ignoring crackpots. The problem isn't even that Hansen wears the robes of a High Priest of Science!, hell he has the NASA patch on his robes, in the ranks of Science! that is better than a cardinal's hat. No, the problem is that the rest of the priesthood hasn't taken any action against him.
When a heretic priest comes busting into yer temple demanding everyone adopt a new set of beliefs the established church
> I quickly found a new ISP and they lost my business.
You say that like you think you were really 'showing them' by taking your business elsewhere. They were trying to get rid of you and when you left their attitude was more of "I pity the fool that signs that a**hole!"
> Voting with my dollars worked for me back in the 90s, but now, there are just less viable players
> in the field, and none of them seem much better than the others.
Yes, there used to be a few 'hacker friendly' ISPs who were usually run by people like thee and me and utterly clueless about ISP economics. They went out of business. It isn't quite as bad in the broadband world but back in the dialup era it was just insane to keep a nethog once we got past the period when those heavy users were also helping bring in new customers. Do the math.
Customer 1 is a nethog. They nail up a connection pretty much 24/7/365 and push as many bits through it as they can. They pay regular price. In the dialup days that was typically $19.95/mo and you pretty much had to dedicate a modem and terminal server port to the idiot. ISP's cost one modem, port telco charge for one business line plus about 4% of a T1 for upstream. Hint, the ISP is paying more than $20/mo for the inbound phone line unless the ISP is AT&T.
Customer 2 is a normal. They connect for four or five hours per day, perhaps six or seven the first six months. You can sign up four to six of these per port. And since most of their activity is bursty the impact on your upstream is minimal.
Customer 3 is a light user. After the shiny wore off the Internet they typically do email and hit a few websites. One port will support ten or more of these people.
It should be obvious that you should want to lose Customer 1 ASAP since they cost you more money than they pay in. If you have a good mix of the second and third type you can get six to eight customers per line and not have too much fussing. AOL used to run ten to twenty customers per dialup port.
In the broadbad era the upstream is the biggest contended resource and depending on the market can be very expensive. Again, the P2P user is the one you want to gift to your competition if you can do it in a way that won't lose his friends/family or generate undue media attention.
> The problem really is ignorance. Too many people just don't understand the service that they are
> buying well enough to know when they are being offered less for their money than advertised...
Agreed, but it is you who are ignorant. I admin at a public library. We have a 6MBps link delivered as four T1 circuits and we also have a 6Mbps business grade DSL that I use to push most of the http traffic through to help the load on the main link. The DSL link is pretty much what us normal people buy and is just a little over $100/mo. It is good but doesn't always deliver full capacity. If it goes out we just fail over to driving everything out the T1s. The T1 circuits cost a hell of a lot more but always deliver the goods and have a great SLA.
Question, in your world why would we pay for the T1 lines? Why would anyone? Really, if we could lawyer up and force AT&T to give us the 6Mbps we 'paid for' 24/7 why are we paying for the dedicated service? Because we understand the real world. And the C block we get as part of the statewide WAN is a big plus. :)
> I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong.
La de fracking da what you 'feel'. It is obvious you lack the facts to base an opinion on.
And as for the idiocy of somebody like Felten who should know (or at know somebody who could have clued him in before he opened his piehole in public and made an idiot of himself) I'm not sure what to say other than if this isn't proof that some people's reputations are vastly overrated then what will?
Unlike Felten, I actually worked in the ISP game back in the dialup era and actually know of what I speak. We had net hogs then and they still exist. We spent about half of our resources servicing 10-15% of our customers until we finally stopped saying 'unlimited' and put in a 250 hour per month cap to run those guys off. And they mostly did go instead of switching to the dedicated dialup service we had been offering for a couple of years but NEVER sold any of. The same rule applies in the broadband game except the hogs aren't camping on a modem 24/7. But they are still causing most of an ISP's upstream bandwidth expense plus a good chunk of their other network infrastructure buying.
The vast majority of customers, even today, don't have P2P stuff running 24/7/365, don't run servers, etc. Any ISP that could get rid of the small percentage that do that stuff could freeze their infrastructure and upstream expansion for a couple of years, even with the growth of Youtube/Hulu.
> So, unlicensed development would be a real problem.
You are correct but your point doesn't matter. It is true only because the vendors built their business model around something that should not be, nay that the US Supreme Court had already (supposedly) shot down. The world doesn't have to alter reality and everybody doesn't have to bend over to protect a business model that should have never existed.
So lets work to do away with it and force the console industry to adapt to a sane world. All it would mean is that this hardware generation would get stretched out another year or so until the next generation could be sold at a profit from day one.
> If this is done against the wishes of the console-maker, than you can claim...
What in the wide wide world of sports does the 'wishes' of the console maker matter? I have never understood how this came to be. I though we (here in the US at least) had already had this fight. Atari v Activision supposedly settled this matter. Atart couldn't decide who could or could not sell software for their system. Case closed, the Supremes had SPOKEN.
Then the video bust came and a few years later Nintendo introduced the NES and it was like nothing had ever been decided, they blessed your title or you didn't ship, and f**k the Supreme Court if they don't like it. And they got away with it and it has since been thus on the console market and now the handset market, the home video market and if the major players ever thought they could get away with it on the PC as well.
And now on the console (but especially Nintendo fanbois) and with Mac the users have been abused so long they have fscking Stockholm Syndrome or something and not only accept it they LIKE getting hosed by their vendor now.
Clue time. When I BUY a computing device off the shelf I BOUGHT it, I didn't LICENSE it and I couldn't give a good god damn what the vendor of that product WANTS me to do with it. If I want to hack it up and use the individual components in a project I'll do that. If I wanna put NetBSD on it thats exactly what I'll do and screw em if they don't like it.
> Well at least in computer science, this happens all the time.
Climate science isn't computer science. There only a few temp datasets and 'collecting' a new one isn't an option. If you want a century of records you either use an existing set or wait on i/o for about a century.
> In fact, if you think the data was biased, then you're obligated to gather it yourself in attempt
> to get unbiased data. Simply having access to a biased dataset, does not magically make it unbiased.
As the leaked data now makes clear, access to the raw data would have scuttled these idiots. The data was dodgy enough it wouldn't have withstood even the most cursory review. The temp data is full of gaps they averaged over and did even worse to. One if the more referenced tree ring studies ends up being based on a grand total of twelve cores. Twelve samples!
> This is doubly frustrating, because the big allegations against Mann's 98 "hockey stick" paper
> was never about the data gathering. It was about the mathematics presented about analyzing of
> the data. Would have access have made it easier for McIntyre to write the 2005 paper complaining
> about MBH98? Yes, but the fact is that it didn't matter. McIntyre didn't have the all data, yet
> was able to still write detect the bias, write the paper, and get it accepted, shows that it
> obviously wasn't a deal breaker.
Several problems with that statement. One, had source been required for publication there is a very non-zero chance the problems would have been caught in peer review. I'm not an expert but from reading about the case the flaw wasn't exactly obfuscated if you had access to the source. Second, that someone with a LOT of time managed to reverse engineer the thing and blow the whistle doesn't remove the need for science to practice full disclosure. Bad science needs to be discovered and tossed in months, not the years it took to debunk Mann. And Mann still hasn't suffered legally or professionally for either his original misconduct or the obvious coverup he aided and abetted.
If the conclusions of science are to be believable as much of the raw data and the processing it underwent needs to be published. If somebody gets a bad vibe when reading a paper we want the barriers to their sniffing around until they are satisfied to be as low as possible. If the work is really good it will withstand scrutiny and the openness will inspire confidence.
Remember, the climate scientists are making the most extraordinary claims with the most far ranging consequences ever. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not "Trust us, we are Scientists!"
> Review and duplication does not require publishing all raw data.
No. If you were asked to peer review a paper, would YOU sign off on it without seeing the data that went into it or (usually) the program code that processed the data? Really?
Most of this global warming stuff isn't much more than the data. They take raw data and either process it and make projections or use it to feed a computer model that makes projections. The only part published is the end result which is taken on faith since there isn't much more to work with. The raw data isn't submitted as part of the publication/peer review process and apparently the actual computer code driving the models is equally private. So exactly has been being reviewed all these years? And forget duplicating the 'work.' You would basically be finding your own datasets (often with no way to even know if you are using the same data) and doing everything from scratch. Science has really fallen this far?
Here is a hint. If he says "Trust me" he ain't no scientist he is a salesman/politician.
> Seriously, you will get some scientists that are fine with using proprietary data and some who are not.
I don't know what the rules are on your world, but on mine it isn't science if the work can't be peer reviewed, published and duplicated. If you basing results on datasets that can't be released none of that is possible. Seriously, how would you peer review a paper based on data you can't look at? How did 'respected' journals publish papers that they couldn't ask another serious scientist to do a proper review of? Why is work that, even if it COULD in theory be duplicated, in fact never will (and wasn't) be given any weight in the high councils of the world's leaders?
Should a scientist use a closed dataset to help his company decide which research line to pursue? Yes. Decide where to drill for oil? Yes. Publish in the peer reviewed journals? No. Make recommendations to world leaders with trillion dollar consequences? No.
> there's no shortage of SIP clients for Linux
Care to name one? I have looked for one that will talk to an asterisk PBX and came up dry. Fedora 11+ packaged preferred but I'd build it from source if I had to. I found some that almost worked but something was wrong enough with each one that I uninstalled it.
> Ah contraire.
Oh good grief. We really are doomed then.
> Wow the FUD flies fast and furious here.
> I doubt very much that most Fedora installs even have an administrator, or serve more than a home user.
So many words from someone who can't read. And they said write only devices were mythical. :)
As stated in my post avove, this isn't so much a change in Fedora as a case of Fedora being the first release with this new policykit. If this isn't stopped, flamed into oblivion, shouted down, whatever, it will end up in Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, eventually everything down to FreeBSD because this *Kit crap is infecting everybody. Or it will be individually patched out by individual package maintainers and we all know that is sub-optimal.
And yes even Fedora has users. Even if you are correct that few corporate types will be rolling F12 out to end users there are things called families. I admin my home machine but I'm not the only user. No I don't trust every person I give an account to enough to allow them to have admin rights. Remember trust in the sysadmin sense is more about trust in their skills/knowledge not whether you would loan em a hundred bux.
> I wonder if they handle replay attacks?
Under normal conditions it wouldn't work. Yum won't allow unpriviledged users to install things, those guys aren't idiots. This is a hook into the command line that triggers if you type the name of a command that isn't installed. So it would only grab the most recent version it knew of.
And anyway, when did making the command line user friendly become such a big push, I though we were supposed to consider any use of the command line a bug to be fixed by an new multi-megabyte graphical horror. :)
Of course if you can prevent the machine from downloading the updated package lists you could probably trick it.
> What I want is a package manager that will do installation to my own home directory.
Both rpm and deb can almost do that. It requires some minor things to change to make it usable.
1. An effort to raise the issue, push the advantages to it, etc.
2. You create a mini tree in your home directory, with a bin, lib, etc. Then you init an rpmdb (or the deb equiv) in that tree. And get the magic right in your login to point the environment variables at it. Then you can install packages into that tree so long as they don't do things only root can do.
3. As things stand now, to install the smallest package into that tree will require installing darned near a full distro which will have packages only root can install. So the one key feature is rpm (and dpkg) need a new switch that allows it to merge two package sets so the user tree doesn't need any package already installed on the main system.
4. Packages which are good candidates for this sort of ad-hoc install need to be checked for any root only activity that could be seperated out into a sub-package for system wide install.
5. To complete the system the update tool would need to monitor your local packages and be able to notify you of updates and then actually do the updates automagically even if you have local repos installed.
5. The graphical front ends would need to be modified to make it all just work. You would run packagekit and click on a package. If you were a mortal user it would just install it into your home directory if it could or tell you to ask an admin if it needed root. Ad icon in the package list would show eligible packages or perhaps grey out package the user lacked rights to install. A power user/admin would get prompted whether to install system-wide or locally.
6. One last touch would be some sort of system to fix duplicate installs. If a user added a package to their private set and the admin later added it the system would need to be smart enough to remove the local version to prevent two different versions from being visible at the same time. It would also help recover disk space.