Interference is no different than any other radio transmission. The power falls off with the cube of the distance. Sure, your computer speakers buzz every time you get a cell phone call. At least, every time your phone is within three feet of the audio amplifier. Put the cell phones only twenty feet away in first class, and the signal is a hundred times weaker. Put the cell phones 100 feet away in coach, and the signal strength drops to one-hundred-thousandth of its rated power.
Sure, the cabin audio wiring could pick up the signal, but guess where that's routed? A completely isolated electrical system. The passengers would never be given armrest-access to a wire that could be used to harm the ship. The most you could do would be to screw-up the in-flight movie, which on the last few flights I've taken would be a minor blessing.
Consider the fact that cell towers are commonly located only one or two thousand feet from the end of the runway. Airport terminals have cellular service located on the property. Every plane on final approach is only a few hundred feet from a cell tower during the most critical moments of a flight, yet nobody legally bats an eyelash.
That said, you can still number me among the mob who would leap to pummel "Annoying Cell Phone Guy" on the plane. But if they're going to ban them, they should at least do so for truthful reasons, and not the bullsh!t they've been feeding us.
Do you know what the margins are like in the music retail sector? They're pathetically tiny slivers of money that come off each sale. Mom and Pop stores barely scrape by, and are under stress from every single competitor. There are big box chains that force them to keep their prices low to compete. The labels charge plenty for the wholesale cost, keeping margins thin. Supporting indie bands means keeping a really wide inventory, and that ties up a lot of money. Real estate, rent and labor costs have risen substantially. Discs are easily stolen, so even the small retailers have to go to great lengths at great expense in either hardware or labor to protect their inventory from shoplifters. Mail-order competitors sold six records for a penny, or ten discs for a dollar (anyone else a former member of the Columbia Record Club?:-) And finally, as you say, there's a large percentage of crap music out there.
But these conditions have existed for the last 40 years. Cheap competition has always been out there. Rent has always gone up. Theft deterrents cost more. And most bands the labels signed have always sucked. Despite all these problems, record stores used to turn a profit.
What changed? The tubes got fat enough to carry music. Demand dropped like a stone as people started downloading music from all sources, legit or otherwise. You might say that all the internet forces combined at the same time, but you can't deny piracy has been a slice of it. A big slice.
Excuse me? The way I read your entire post, you were supporting my position. To reiterate, I implied the only thing holding piracy back is the lack of bandwidth.
With a 1-megabit connection (far less than most people have
Yes, the fat bandwidth that most people don't have. Yet.
The MPAA isn't in as much trouble as the RIAA yet, but they're close. If they aren't able to learn from the RIAAs demise they are doomed to the same fate.
Wow, that's a pretty fair summary of my conclusion. I'm still not sure why I was so wrong, since you agreed with me on basically every point.
Our local music store did exactly that. They had lots of indie bands that came through the city stop in for a lunchtime performance or a record signing. They were in a pretty centralized location that had a lot of walk-by traffic (at least at lunchtime.) The people who worked there were cool, they knew their bands. They always had some new disc from some band I'd never heard of playing in the store. If you wanted to hear a disc, they popped it right into a CD player (behind the counter) for you. They were within walking distance of some of the best local concert venues. They specialized in hard-to-find stuff, they carried vinyl, they catered to all the special interests they possibly could. They sold DJ equipment. They sold used equipment on consignment. They did everything you suggested above and far more. They even had prices competitive with the big box retailers.
They shut their doors a couple years ago.
What you're asking for sounds great -- on the web. The simple truth is it is no longer profitable.
Like it or not, those store owners were being truthful. Piracy is killing the music industry. Not that the RIAA labels don't need to be put down like the lampreys they are, but the days of the giants are waning fast.
The real problem is the industry was entirely constructed on what is no longer a valid premise; that recording and duplicating quality music was expensive. And the labels have tried to make their money in different ways, mostly at the expense of the stupid bands who sign their livelihoods away for half a million dollars up front (you try organizing a nationwide tour for half a million $$ and see what you have left at the end.) The recording industry will soon die, and eventually the only survivors will be the indie bands singing for the love of music. They'll end up as 21st century minstrels wandering from pub to pub, settling for a meager income and drinks on the house, regardless of their talent.
There will be no more profit in the music industry. It will die, and soon. The EMI anti-DRM move is a great attempt to capitalize on the huge anti-industry sentiment, but it's not going to change the behavior of people willing to climb over DRM to copy music anyway. And EMI won't have anything special once the other RIAA members see how profitable it is to not piss off their customer base.
The only question mark remaining is: how far away is the MPAA from this scenario? Movie theaters and HDTV may be their only saviors, in that it takes enormous (by current measure) amounts of bandwidth and storage to copy a quality movie. Music is quite compressible, and too many tin-eared fans are willing to settle for crappy-but-tiny MP3 recordings. But as long as people want to share the experience of a movie on the big screen, and as long as HDTV requires a relative firehose of a network connection for high quality, AND as long as they can convince people that quality matters, they'll be able to keep making money on TV and movies.
A corporation with 10,000 WEP-only devices deployed to 2,000 field locations would love to switch to WPA, but that's not always immediately possible for financial reasons. Let's say that one device costs $2,000 dollars to replace (custom hardware,) and each field location requires the upgrade of perhaps a dozen old access points, each one costing say $500 plus the average installation labor of about $1,000 each. So that's $20 million for device costs, plus another $36 million to secure the access points. I don't care how big your company is, you don't tap $56 million from the budget without some serious planning.
When a corporation initially buys equipment, they go for whatever is available and makes sense at the time, and they plan for an expected lifetime of the equipment. When those access points were installed, WPA wasn't on the horizon and security wasn't a top issue, and they may have budgeted for an expected lifetime of 15 years. Just as the rollout of all this infrastructure is finishing up, some researcher announces WEP is cracked. Think about the manager who has to go back to the board of directors asking for an extra $56 million to replace all that brand new equipment because the encryption now has the wrong three letters. Even if the board doesn't fire the manager on the spot for being short-sighted, money for the replacement project is not going to come quickly, I tell you that.
As long as it's not 100% replaced, you're flapping in the breeze. Your only answer is to secure the network behind the access points (a good idea in any case,) secure the device's applications as best as you can, and hold your breath until the money arrives and the old gear is replaced.
It may be the cost of doing business, but it's still pretty high in some cases.
The exact structure of how the rectangular block was made into a cylinder is not known, and it should be studied further.
Actually, this was discovered over 25 years ago (I remember reading the article in Omni magazine in the early 1980s.) In the article I read, the author was a quarry owner who had invented sets of wooden arcs, joined by sticks, that looked something like this: |)=|) He placed four of these arcs around a single square block and secured them with rope, allowing the block to act as the axis of a cylinder and enabling it to be easily rolled. He then took 20 out-of-shape executives and using only a rope anchored at the top of a slope they pulled a two-ton block up a ramp in his quarry. He figured "this is so easy someone else must have thought of it first."
So he went digging through history books and came across Egyptian pyramid descriptions. Among the artifacts found inside the pyramids were some arcs that were virtually identical to the ones he had created. Previous archaeologists had labeled these as "cradles" without no comment as to what they might have been cradling.
That's dangerously close to literacy testing, used to disenfranchise the black voters during Jim Crow. Theoretically, pictures of the candidates could reduce the need to ask an election judge for assistance in voting by someone who is illiterate. And an electronic ballot could ease language issues, especially on non-candidate questions such as constitutional amendments.
But on the whole, I actually agree mostly with the top level poster in that pencil and paper are perfectly adequate to the task of recording elections. I just listed the only advantages I can think of with electronic voting booths over paper and pencil. Otherwise, electronic solutions are trouble-prone, controversial, and will always be suspect. Speed of reporting results to the news media is not guaranteed by the Constitution -- that's why it provides for two months to elapse between the election and the candidate taking office. Last minute candidate changes are similarly not guaranteed -- the secretaries of state are responsible for distributing ballots, and are typically given a month or more by statute in which to do it. The old system is not broken, and does not require electronics to fix.
The whole problem with e-voting is in transparency of the process. Does Open Source inside such a machine change that? How?
There is a little more to an electronic voting machine than simple tabulation. There's the presentation of each individual election, and the presentation of the candidates. What if the Demopublican party's candidate's picture was shown colorful and vibrant, while the Republicrat candidate's picture was washed out black and white? What if the major parties get their candidates on giant buttons, while the Yellow party's candidate is in 8-point font?
Imagine a hotly contested state where voter turnout is expected to be the deciding factor in a Senate race. If enough people turn out, it's likely the Demopublican will win; if few people show up the Republicrat will probably win. A Republicrat sympathizer sneaks in and "changes" the code so that the presidential race is displayed first, followed by the house representative, followed by the governor, then the state house, the state senate, then a dozen district judges, the mayor, the city council, the watershed manager, the dog catcher, and finally the senatorial race. On the bottom of each slate is a giant "I'm done, no more voting for me" button. By the fourth judge nobody's ever heard of, lots of people give up and stop filling out their ballots, or they repeatedly hit "next", "next", "next" until they see "done", then grab their ballot and rush off to work because they're already late. By changing the order of the slates, the Republicrat has affected the outcome of the election, yet the tabulation is 100% accurately counted.
Specifically, their children are going to grow up to be as ignorant as their parents; even if they're much smarter than mom and dad, their ignorance will interfere with them becoming valuable contributors to the scientific community. Those smart kids would end up as so much wasted resources, like having Stephen Hawking mopping floors.
And if we don't get enough of them thinking critically, we'll end up in aHarrison Bergeron future.
I'm not sure what the reference to organic foods is
about... Obviously you're not allowed to advertise a
product as something it's not.
"Obviously"? Obviously you imagined the existence of regulations where none existed. The food industry had been free to call anything they produced "organic." It wasn't until just five years ago that the United States government actually enacted a Federal standard for the production of foods labeled organic. Prior to that time, organic was a voluntary label that meant whatever the producer wanted it to mean. California growers came up with an organic certification program in the mid 1970s, but all that did was to make people equate the word "organic" with the supposed quality of California organics. And other jurisdictions and industry organizations developed their own definitions.
An entire generation of people grew up imagining the word "organic" granted some special powers of wholesomeness over their food, but it really was only a patchwork of local definitions guaranteeing nothing. Eventually enough people yelled "there ought to be a law" until there was one. So that's how an industry rating was codified into Federal regulation. The really twisted part is now that the regulations exist, there's any number of loopholes or exemptions that can be exploited and the word "organic" can still be applied.
You could have easily made the same point WITHOUT insulting anybody, and your argument would have been that much stronger.
Perhaps it would have been stronger to you, and to the adherents of whatever religious mythos you follow. But my target audience is not you, it is composed of the people who are scared sh!tless of the tyrrany of the religious right in this country (and specifically the fundamentalist Christians since Bush the Failed and the Republicans claim to be them.) I'm scared of their constant attempts to undermine our Constitution and to impose some forms of their religion or religious beliefs on all of us. These people want tax-funded vouchers for religious schools. They can't see what's wrong with posting the 10 commandments in the courthouse. They think charity, not government, soup kitchens should give starving people food because that way they get a proper "Jesus will save you" message along with their supper. The ones who run the Pentagon prayer sessions before they plan the next bombing of the towelheads in a different country, because their foreign religion makes them too violent.
Claims that "not every Christian is like that" don't cut it. It's the ordinary churchgoers who mentally blacklist their neighbors for saying the phrase "Under God" is a bad idea to have in the Pledge of Allegiance. They're the ones who say tsk-tsk if you suggest not putting up a nativity creché in the town square. They're the ones who ignore the facts of any argument simply because they come from "that atheist guy."
I am sorry you have the impression that being afraid of giant scary religions somehow weakens an argument based on the observable behavior of adherents to those same scary religions.
Regulation and control. If there was an.xxx domain, it wouldn't be long for the Christian* Firewall Network (CFN?) to spring up trying to block it everywhere, and there would be demands to block it at ISPs, etc. It wouldn't be long before legislation was passed requiring all adult content to be "moved" to this domain. (Of course, we're just thinking of the children.)
The mis-perception is that all porn would somehow magically be labeled.xxx, and people would naively think like you did: it's easy to find and easy to block.
Meanwhile, the technological reality is that such blocking would do nothing to stop porn originating from domains outside of the U.S. It also would not stop dotted decimal addresses from working. But because there would be this new "law" requiring porn to be hosted in the.xxx domain, the CFN idiots would be confused as to why their teenaged sons could still access porn even though it was supposed to be blocked, and would demand more regulations to stop this "illegal porn".
Voluntary industry classifications have almost always turned into regulations (movie and video game ratings, light truck emissions, organic foods, etc.) It's just that on the internet, that idea doesn't work worth a damn, so why encourage it?
(*Feel free to replace 'Christian' with the intolerant fundamental religious idiots of your choice.)
Thompson better tread more lightly. According to Dante, he's bound for the eighth circle of Hell with the other barrators. (Consider that murderers and sodomizers only descend as far as the seventh circle!)
Bolgia 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, guarded by devils, the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"). Their leader, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment Ciampolo, who identifies some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. (Cantos XXI through XXIII)
Something I've found useful is to learn which publishers to trust. The editors at each publishing house each have their own eye as to what they think makes a good book. Some lean more towards the scholarly, some to the "reference style", while others take a more colloquial approach. And some just publish whatever crap gets submitted.
After you've read a few, you'll start to get a feel for the kinds of books you like. You'll probably also get the taste of a few lemons. But you'll eventually find that a few publishers seem to hire authors that present the kind of information you learn best from, and you'll end up going back to them repeatedly.
Looking around my cube, I just surprised myself by learning that I have more Addison-Wesley titles than books by all other publishers combined. I have some really good titles by Apress and O'Reilly, and the rest are scattered across other publishers. And I've never cared for the "Dummies" series or the style of writing they seek out. Not that the smaller publishers don't produce good and useful books, it's just that I've found a consistently high level of quality in A-W books, which is why I've bought so many. As a plus, their bindings have proven quite durable even with the crap treatment some of my books take. (I've also learned that I could probably stand to weed out some of these really old titles, like "Programming the 8086/8088":-)
I realize I'm not answering your direct question, but I'm saying that if you have some books that have helped you well in the past, try looking at other titles by the same publisher.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship to Addison-Wesley other than as a very satisfied customer. And I really like Apress and O'Reilly, too.
I don't know: is turning these logs over to prosecute someone "evil"? Is it "evil" if that person is a music downloader? Is it "not evil" if that person is accused of murder?
Or does Google just get off by simply saying, "Well, they had a warrant, so it's not our evil?"
Just a couple nits, SQL isn't an acronym. It actually doesn't stand for anything, just three letters. Sort of like how ISO doesn't stand for anything either. And PM is an abbreviation not acronym.
Funny, ever since I learned Structured Query Language I always considered SQL to be its acronym.
I usually pronounce it "sequel", but that's only because everyone else in the industry does. If that's what the DBAs and Microsoft reps and trainers and everyone else wants to call it, it's good enough for me. I would actually be suspicious of someone claiming to be an expert in SQL but never having come across that pronunciation -- it implies they have never been to a meeting with other "experts".
Tthen again I pronounce CICS as see-eye-see-ess (picked that pronunciation up from my dad twenty years ago,) while the CICS and IBM guys around here call it "kicks". Of course, I don't claim to be a CICS expert, either.
True, I'd never trust our build cluster to a bunch of potentially unstable, home-made overclocked Franken-PCs. And even if I would, I seriously doubt management would agree with me. They'd have one of two stock answers: "we'll add another server to the cluster" or "there's no money in the budget, live with it."
No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.
However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.
Truthfully, it's mostly about adding shine to their toys. Once a gamer gets a frame rate of 72Hz on a 1920 x 1200 display, it's time to add all the detail -- reflections in the water, individual leaves on the trees, beads of sweat on the character's forehead, that sort of thing.
There are also the people who do serious work who might notice a boost in productivity: they might be able to render movie frames faster, or compile a project with 10 million lines in an hour instead of 70 minutes. Of course people in those industries are already massively parallel, but if you have a 60 person development team anxiously awaiting the next build, anything you can do to shave off a few minutes could have really quick paybacks.
I can just picture Cray sitting on his porch in Chippewa Falls with a basket of DDR2-800 DIMMs and a coil of copper tubing, plumbing together his next home computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Interference is no different than any other radio transmission. The power falls off with the cube of the distance. Sure, your computer speakers buzz every time you get a cell phone call. At least, every time your phone is within three feet of the audio amplifier. Put the cell phones only twenty feet away in first class, and the signal is a hundred times weaker. Put the cell phones 100 feet away in coach, and the signal strength drops to one-hundred-thousandth of its rated power.
Sure, the cabin audio wiring could pick up the signal, but guess where that's routed? A completely isolated electrical system. The passengers would never be given armrest-access to a wire that could be used to harm the ship. The most you could do would be to screw-up the in-flight movie, which on the last few flights I've taken would be a minor blessing.
Consider the fact that cell towers are commonly located only one or two thousand feet from the end of the runway. Airport terminals have cellular service located on the property. Every plane on final approach is only a few hundred feet from a cell tower during the most critical moments of a flight, yet nobody legally bats an eyelash.
That said, you can still number me among the mob who would leap to pummel "Annoying Cell Phone Guy" on the plane. But if they're going to ban them, they should at least do so for truthful reasons, and not the bullsh!t they've been feeding us.
But these conditions have existed for the last 40 years. Cheap competition has always been out there. Rent has always gone up. Theft deterrents cost more. And most bands the labels signed have always sucked. Despite all these problems, record stores used to turn a profit.
What changed? The tubes got fat enough to carry music. Demand dropped like a stone as people started downloading music from all sources, legit or otherwise. You might say that all the internet forces combined at the same time, but you can't deny piracy has been a slice of it. A big slice.
They shut their doors a couple years ago.
What you're asking for sounds great -- on the web. The simple truth is it is no longer profitable.
Like it or not, those store owners were being truthful. Piracy is killing the music industry. Not that the RIAA labels don't need to be put down like the lampreys they are, but the days of the giants are waning fast.
The real problem is the industry was entirely constructed on what is no longer a valid premise; that recording and duplicating quality music was expensive. And the labels have tried to make their money in different ways, mostly at the expense of the stupid bands who sign their livelihoods away for half a million dollars up front (you try organizing a nationwide tour for half a million $$ and see what you have left at the end.) The recording industry will soon die, and eventually the only survivors will be the indie bands singing for the love of music. They'll end up as 21st century minstrels wandering from pub to pub, settling for a meager income and drinks on the house, regardless of their talent.
There will be no more profit in the music industry. It will die, and soon. The EMI anti-DRM move is a great attempt to capitalize on the huge anti-industry sentiment, but it's not going to change the behavior of people willing to climb over DRM to copy music anyway. And EMI won't have anything special once the other RIAA members see how profitable it is to not piss off their customer base.
The only question mark remaining is: how far away is the MPAA from this scenario? Movie theaters and HDTV may be their only saviors, in that it takes enormous (by current measure) amounts of bandwidth and storage to copy a quality movie. Music is quite compressible, and too many tin-eared fans are willing to settle for crappy-but-tiny MP3 recordings. But as long as people want to share the experience of a movie on the big screen, and as long as HDTV requires a relative firehose of a network connection for high quality, AND as long as they can convince people that quality matters, they'll be able to keep making money on TV and movies.
Just remember the basic difference: Thailand doesn't make any money off of Youtube.
When a corporation initially buys equipment, they go for whatever is available and makes sense at the time, and they plan for an expected lifetime of the equipment. When those access points were installed, WPA wasn't on the horizon and security wasn't a top issue, and they may have budgeted for an expected lifetime of 15 years. Just as the rollout of all this infrastructure is finishing up, some researcher announces WEP is cracked. Think about the manager who has to go back to the board of directors asking for an extra $56 million to replace all that brand new equipment because the encryption now has the wrong three letters. Even if the board doesn't fire the manager on the spot for being short-sighted, money for the replacement project is not going to come quickly, I tell you that.
As long as it's not 100% replaced, you're flapping in the breeze. Your only answer is to secure the network behind the access points (a good idea in any case,) secure the device's applications as best as you can, and hold your breath until the money arrives and the old gear is replaced.
It may be the cost of doing business, but it's still pretty high in some cases.
Actually, this was discovered over 25 years ago (I remember reading the article in Omni magazine in the early 1980s.) In the article I read, the author was a quarry owner who had invented sets of wooden arcs, joined by sticks, that looked something like this: |)=|) He placed four of these arcs around a single square block and secured them with rope, allowing the block to act as the axis of a cylinder and enabling it to be easily rolled. He then took 20 out-of-shape executives and using only a rope anchored at the top of a slope they pulled a two-ton block up a ramp in his quarry. He figured "this is so easy someone else must have thought of it first."
So he went digging through history books and came across Egyptian pyramid descriptions. Among the artifacts found inside the pyramids were some arcs that were virtually identical to the ones he had created. Previous archaeologists had labeled these as "cradles" without no comment as to what they might have been cradling.
But on the whole, I actually agree mostly with the top level poster in that pencil and paper are perfectly adequate to the task of recording elections. I just listed the only advantages I can think of with electronic voting booths over paper and pencil. Otherwise, electronic solutions are trouble-prone, controversial, and will always be suspect. Speed of reporting results to the news media is not guaranteed by the Constitution -- that's why it provides for two months to elapse between the election and the candidate taking office. Last minute candidate changes are similarly not guaranteed -- the secretaries of state are responsible for distributing ballots, and are typically given a month or more by statute in which to do it. The old system is not broken, and does not require electronics to fix.
There is a little more to an electronic voting machine than simple tabulation. There's the presentation of each individual election, and the presentation of the candidates. What if the Demopublican party's candidate's picture was shown colorful and vibrant, while the Republicrat candidate's picture was washed out black and white? What if the major parties get their candidates on giant buttons, while the Yellow party's candidate is in 8-point font?
Imagine a hotly contested state where voter turnout is expected to be the deciding factor in a Senate race. If enough people turn out, it's likely the Demopublican will win; if few people show up the Republicrat will probably win. A Republicrat sympathizer sneaks in and "changes" the code so that the presidential race is displayed first, followed by the house representative, followed by the governor, then the state house, the state senate, then a dozen district judges, the mayor, the city council, the watershed manager, the dog catcher, and finally the senatorial race. On the bottom of each slate is a giant "I'm done, no more voting for me" button. By the fourth judge nobody's ever heard of, lots of people give up and stop filling out their ballots, or they repeatedly hit "next", "next", "next" until they see "done", then grab their ballot and rush off to work because they're already late. By changing the order of the slates, the Republicrat has affected the outcome of the election, yet the tabulation is 100% accurately counted.
That's why Open Source is important.
Specifically, their children are going to grow up to be as ignorant as their parents; even if they're much smarter than mom and dad, their ignorance will interfere with them becoming valuable contributors to the scientific community. Those smart kids would end up as so much wasted resources, like having Stephen Hawking mopping floors.
And if we don't get enough of them thinking critically, we'll end up in aHarrison Bergeron future.
"Obviously"? Obviously you imagined the existence of regulations where none existed. The food industry had been free to call anything they produced "organic." It wasn't until just five years ago that the United States government actually enacted a Federal standard for the production of foods labeled organic. Prior to that time, organic was a voluntary label that meant whatever the producer wanted it to mean. California growers came up with an organic certification program in the mid 1970s, but all that did was to make people equate the word "organic" with the supposed quality of California organics. And other jurisdictions and industry organizations developed their own definitions.
An entire generation of people grew up imagining the word "organic" granted some special powers of wholesomeness over their food, but it really was only a patchwork of local definitions guaranteeing nothing. Eventually enough people yelled "there ought to be a law" until there was one. So that's how an industry rating was codified into Federal regulation. The really twisted part is now that the regulations exist, there's any number of loopholes or exemptions that can be exploited and the word "organic" can still be applied.
Perhaps it would have been stronger to you, and to the adherents of whatever religious mythos you follow. But my target audience is not you, it is composed of the people who are scared sh!tless of the tyrrany of the religious right in this country (and specifically the fundamentalist Christians since Bush the Failed and the Republicans claim to be them.) I'm scared of their constant attempts to undermine our Constitution and to impose some forms of their religion or religious beliefs on all of us. These people want tax-funded vouchers for religious schools. They can't see what's wrong with posting the 10 commandments in the courthouse. They think charity, not government, soup kitchens should give starving people food because that way they get a proper "Jesus will save you" message along with their supper. The ones who run the Pentagon prayer sessions before they plan the next bombing of the towelheads in a different country, because their foreign religion makes them too violent.
Claims that "not every Christian is like that" don't cut it. It's the ordinary churchgoers who mentally blacklist their neighbors for saying the phrase "Under God" is a bad idea to have in the Pledge of Allegiance. They're the ones who say tsk-tsk if you suggest not putting up a nativity creché in the town square. They're the ones who ignore the facts of any argument simply because they come from "that atheist guy."
I am sorry you have the impression that being afraid of giant scary religions somehow weakens an argument based on the observable behavior of adherents to those same scary religions.
Regulation and control. If there was an .xxx domain, it wouldn't be long for the Christian* Firewall Network (CFN?) to spring up trying to block it everywhere, and there would be demands to block it at ISPs, etc. It wouldn't be long before legislation was passed requiring all adult content to be "moved" to this domain. (Of course, we're just thinking of the children.)
The mis-perception is that all porn would somehow magically be labeled .xxx, and people would naively think like you did: it's easy to find and easy to block.
Meanwhile, the technological reality is that such blocking would do nothing to stop porn originating from domains outside of the U.S. It also would not stop dotted decimal addresses from working. But because there would be this new "law" requiring porn to be hosted in the .xxx domain, the CFN idiots would be confused as to why their teenaged sons could still access porn even though it was supposed to be blocked, and would demand more regulations to stop this "illegal porn".
Voluntary industry classifications have almost always turned into regulations (movie and video game ratings, light truck emissions, organic foods, etc.) It's just that on the internet, that idea doesn't work worth a damn, so why encourage it?
(*Feel free to replace 'Christian' with the intolerant fundamental religious idiots of your choice.)
The Onion discovered this species a year ago.
Just like working with overseas teams. Except neither of us look like Michelle Pfeiffer OR Rutger Hauer.
According to Wikipedia:
Bolgia 5: Corrupt politicians (barrators) are immersed in a lake of boiling pitch, guarded by devils, the Malebranche ("Evil Claws"). Their leader, Malacoda ("Evil Tail"), assigns a troop to escort Virgil and Dante to the next bridge. The troop hook and torment Ciampolo, who identifies some Italian grafters and then tricks the Malebranche in order to escape back into the pitch. (Cantos XXI through XXIII)
After you've read a few, you'll start to get a feel for the kinds of books you like. You'll probably also get the taste of a few lemons. But you'll eventually find that a few publishers seem to hire authors that present the kind of information you learn best from, and you'll end up going back to them repeatedly.
Looking around my cube, I just surprised myself by learning that I have more Addison-Wesley titles than books by all other publishers combined. I have some really good titles by Apress and O'Reilly, and the rest are scattered across other publishers. And I've never cared for the "Dummies" series or the style of writing they seek out. Not that the smaller publishers don't produce good and useful books, it's just that I've found a consistently high level of quality in A-W books, which is why I've bought so many. As a plus, their bindings have proven quite durable even with the crap treatment some of my books take. (I've also learned that I could probably stand to weed out some of these really old titles, like "Programming the 8086/8088" :-)
I realize I'm not answering your direct question, but I'm saying that if you have some books that have helped you well in the past, try looking at other titles by the same publisher.
Disclaimer: I have no relationship to Addison-Wesley other than as a very satisfied customer. And I really like Apress and O'Reilly, too.
Or does Google just get off by simply saying, "Well, they had a warrant, so it's not our evil?"
Funny, ever since I learned Structured Query Language I always considered SQL to be its acronym.
I usually pronounce it "sequel", but that's only because everyone else in the industry does. If that's what the DBAs and Microsoft reps and trainers and everyone else wants to call it, it's good enough for me. I would actually be suspicious of someone claiming to be an expert in SQL but never having come across that pronunciation -- it implies they have never been to a meeting with other "experts".
Tthen again I pronounce CICS as see-eye-see-ess (picked that pronunciation up from my dad twenty years ago,) while the CICS and IBM guys around here call it "kicks". Of course, I don't claim to be a CICS expert, either.
"trickles down" is perhaps a poor choice of metaphor when you're talking about water cooling.
No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.
However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.
There are also the people who do serious work who might notice a boost in productivity: they might be able to render movie frames faster, or compile a project with 10 million lines in an hour instead of 70 minutes. Of course people in those industries are already massively parallel, but if you have a 60 person development team anxiously awaiting the next build, anything you can do to shave off a few minutes could have really quick paybacks.
I can just picture Cray sitting on his porch in Chippewa Falls with a basket of DDR2-800 DIMMs and a coil of copper tubing, plumbing together his next home computer.
Andy Warhol? I thought you were dead!
So apparently NASA and diapers have a history that goes all the way back.