A duopoly is hardly what you could call good competition.
A secondary problem is that government agencies (for example, various municipal or local governments) are also being actively blocked from providing any service at all, due to the outcry about it interfering with the free market. Attempts by some local authorities to provide network infrastructure have been blocked with legal action over this matter.
Imagine if the local government was also blocked from providing road services and it was just left to private companies to provide roads to your apartment? How would that work out? Probably ok in the middle of the city, where there might be a couple of companies willing to build roads to the dense population there, but you'd be out of luck in suburbia or rural areas.
So far it hasn't worked out for most places even for wired networks, in that in most areas you only have a choice of a single provider, who is able to gouge for maximum profit and has the ability to effectively block the entry of new-comers by tying access to supposedly common access poles up in red tape, as has been covered in previous Slashdot stories.
The resulting investment that is made by two separate companies to provide separate network physical layer infrastructure would be far better spent providing services over a common physical network.
The real problem is not net neutrality (or lack thereof), the problem is that the wonderful power of the free market is being expected to solve a problem that it fundamentally can not solve in an efficient way.
It never makes sense to have competing physical layers of network infrastructure. In the same way that it would be nonsensical to have competing road networks, or water distribution networks or electrical distribution networks in the same area, it is also stupid to try and have physical data networks competing. The physical media layer for the "last mile" (or however many it is from an exchange) should be in government hands, controlled in the same way that road and water networks are, but with any number of service providers being able to provide service from the end point, with a level playing field for the access to the physical media layer.
The services ON those networks should most definitely be privately held - and also made available on a level playing field. In the same way that whether you are a country resident or a city resident, you play the same amount of registration and fuel tax, giving you equal access to roads, you should have equal access to the internet too. If you want a parcel delivered, you have a choice of couriers available - can get FedEX ot DHL or UPS to deliver it, and they all use the same roads, with the same fixed cost for road access, competing with each other.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but i don't even understand quite what you are supposed to be trolling here... there's no reference to inches or cm in the scale of the knife.
Not quite. It's not just people down the line getting screwed. The consumer is getting screwed fairly regularly too, because invariably, that cheap product isn't equivalent to the more expensive item.
For example. I bought a set of knives - great brand, at an unbelievably low price. Turns out they aren't as big as they a look. What I thought was a normal sized serrated bread knife is actually a "muffin knife" - it's like a 2/3 size scale set of knives, which just happen to look identical the the normal full size set. Looking at the photos, you can't tell the difference.
Returning them isn't an option because I had them sent to my overseas address via my drop-shipper, so I'd have to eat the (very high) return cost.
Likewise, the $150 mesh back ergonomic office chairs I bought look great - and a bargain compared to teh $400 I last spent on a similar looking chair, but it turns out that actually the 5 castor wheel base is relatively flimsy, made of hollow plastic, with each castor arm twisting because of the way the castors don't support the weight directly under the pivot point where they afix to the arm - it's off to the side a bit.
It'd probably be fine with an average weight 70kg guy on it, but I am 193 cm 95kg (6ft4in / 210lb) and I'm sure it's not going to last more than a few months.
A planned / communist economy relies on meetings to figure out what gets made. The problem is nobody has all the information needed to plan out production, especially on a large scale.
That's why we will need benevolent AI administrators first - that can fairly and efficiently administer control of production and allocation of resources.
Given the current crap job society and the free market does at this, with CEO and top level execs getting paid 1000 x the average salary of the workers they manage, (up from 100x that it was during the 50s and 60s when America really was great and thriving) it wouldn't have to be that good to be an improvement on the status quo.
Copyright holders have fought strongly for extensions on copyright, saying that it is required in order to maintain an incentive for artists to continue making new works - which I am sure everyone here knows is currently 70+ lifetime of the artist.
Copyright is supposed to be a two sided deal though - the works are supposed to be available to the public, or they no longer are "advancing the art", since that art is now locked away and inaccessible. Furthermore, there is a real risk that it may be lost forever by the time it is finally able to enter the public domain, due to deterioration of whatever media it is on, let alone loss of compatible contemporary technology (though this is much more easily solved than deteriorating media)
It should be a requirement that in return for the extremely generous copyright terms, the copyright holders are required to put a master quality copy of their works in escrow with the government or some other neutral organization specifically tasked with maintaining these works.in good condition and in a format that would be currently playable - and in the event that the works are no longer made available to the public at a historically reasonable price, then it should be made public domain. For example if the historical average proce for some old film was something like $20, the owners would still be required to make copies available at something like that - they couldn't start suddenly demanding $1000 per view, in order to wiggle around allowing it to go into the public domain due to lack of availability.
This would then at least ensure these works remain available, the copyright holder still gets to make money off them, and most importantly, we don't have a huge hole in our cultural heritage in 100 years time when the copyright holders have been dead for 70 years, but there are now no longer any viable copies of their works.
Bitcoin has had an average growth rate of 3.8x per year. If you buy just one bitcoin today, (about $8000 worth) In just 20 years, it will be worth more than the entire world money supply of $60 Trillion, even if the rest of the economy keeps growing at the average rate of 2.5% per year!
How can that not be valuable?
Don't worry - it's not too late. email me for some bitcoins today at imasucker@bitcoins4u.com
The worst thing about the drones is that even if they are only used by state actors with legitimate targets in mind, they still won't be 100% accurate.
Errors in facial recognition will happen, or criteria will be set too broadly to ensure the target gets hit - but that well targeted killbot could just as easily get the wrong guy, which would be chalked up to "acceptable collateral damage".
If its so hard to get OCR to be more than about 98% accurate, when its analysing a high resolution scan of stationary text under nice lighting conditions, what are the chances we can get a face scanner to be 100% accurate and never get false positives when the target is running like hell and ducking under stuff? You can be sure that the bots will just be programmed to go for the strike when they get better than a 70% match, or something like that. I have no doubt these can and will be made, but they will never have the surgical strike capability that they will be marketed as having - they will be much more indiscriminate.
After a recent trip to San Francisco, I, as an Australian with a big love of quality beer, was pleasantly surprised by the large number of high quality craft beers available. I didn't have to drink Millers or Bud (or even Fosters, which we cleverly managed to fob off onto the rest of the world
- sorry about that) even once. think the bad american beer meme has to be laid to rest - they actually have some pretty tasty beverages now.
You have missed my point. Game developers do spend time and effort to make the game secure. However, security is a trade off - you want to have end to end encryption of the messages and in-memory encryption of all variables? That's going to cost you lots of extra CPU cycles and reduce your framerate. No software is hack proof - this has been demonstrated time and time again. This arsehole has boasted that he has spent 20 years doing nothing but hacking and ripping off other game players. If there are no repecussions for that, it's going to only encourage a lot more doing the same. This is not a victimless crime. It denies honest game players enjoyment of the game, it increases development costs substantially to have to devote resources to patching hackable flaws, and it most importantly deprives the game company of customers when they get dissapointed in the game and leave. I have no problem with someone hacking a single player game and giving themselves a bazillion HP and max gold - it's only affecting their own game play. What I have a problem with is when they go on to ruin the game for other players, without penalty to them whatsoever.
A car analogy: You lock your car and take reasonable precautions to secure it. If someone throws a brick through the window and steals it, you don't say "oh well - should have installed brick proof windows" - you expect that there are laws that will deter this behavior and prosecute the perps when they are caught. If someone boasted they have been tossing bricks through car windows for 20 years and living off the stolen cars, you'd expect some action to be taken against them.
So now instead of spending coding hours on adding interesting game play and content, the developers have to spend the time on making it hack proof with bank-level security. Even then, banks still get hacked - so having to add ever increasing levels of security to prevent hacks hurt the game performance and game play experience, and is still not a guarantee of success of preventing hacks. This makes the games less fun and more expensive for all players.
The guy should be sued into oblivion or possibly even serve jail time for having ripped off so many players and companies from the game experience they have paid for, and the resulting economic damage they have caused the companies when dissatisfied players abandon the games.
I have an S8 that's sitting in the drawer - because of this exact reason. It was a nightmare to try and use outlook on it. It is all but impossible to hold the phone without activating touch sensitive side areas which would open emails or trigger things I didn't want triggered. Apparently the problem goes away if you use a phone cover - but I never got round to getting one. Another annoyance is that despite it's metallic appearance, the whole phone is covered in glass, so there is no way for it to survive a drop - even though I had a quite expensive after-market screen protector on it to protect the curved glass front. The back of my phone is shattered now, as is one corner - after my cat knocked it off the bedside table - a drop of less than 1 meter.
If the TV networks didn't stuff so much advertising time into the shows, then perhaps viewers would stay tuned in. I have seen average advertising time go up from about 10 min per hour to now 25 min per hour - so 2 hour movie takes 3 1/2 hours to watch - and worse, they tend to pack the second half of the movie with more ads compared to the first half, so getting to the end of a movie takes for ever and destroys the climactic scenes with too many breaks.
I get that free to air tv has to have advertising to pay for content - but the problem is that if they have a race to the bottom for advertising rates then they will by necessity have to pad out shows even more with advertising.
If they want to survive against competition from the internet, they have to all get together and have a strictly enforced small percentage of advertising time (say, no more than 10 min per hour - including advertising for their own tv shows) and charge advertisers a higher rate for the much scarcer advertising slots, instead of trying to stuff more and more advertising time down viewers throats.
If your PC is using 400W, your fridge would only have to have cooling capacity of 400W to get rid of that heat - but it diesn't have to use 800W to do that. Moving heat, as is done in a fridge or air conditioner, takes about somewhere between 1/2 to 1/4 of the energy compared to producing it by resistive heating, depending on efficiency. Your PC is basically a big resistive heater. Your fridge would only have to use about 100 to 200 W to remove the PC waste heat, plus use a little extra power depending on how much cooler you wanted the whole setup to be compared to ambient. All of that said, it's a bad idea because you could just sell the fridge and spend the money on a better CPU and still get better performance and reliability.
I used to disable voice mail but my phone provider keeps re-enabling it. Now my voice mail informs the callers that I'm sorry I missed their call - please try later, or send me a text, and don't leave a message - because I am never going to check my voice mail.
Are you kidding me? The airline knows already knows who you are, what seat you will be sitting in, where you are going and have all your passport details. Do people really think there's any additional information the airline is going to glean from a photo of you other than confirming you are who your passport says you are?
If the government were to declare that public funded research was not copy writable, Elsevier would then simply not publish such work - they would favour works that they can hold exclusive copyright on. Since the publish or perish model holds publication in prestige journals as being so important, that would in turn mean there would be a huge disincentive for doing publicly funded research, because researchers could not get the same amount of prestige from published results. Change to this model can only come about once the wider scientific community places more importance on the quality and relevance of research, rather than where it is published.
Easily fixed - divide the battery pack and power supplies up - Simplest would be to have 2 battery packs and power controllers that each drive every second jet. Failure in one module would take out that fraction of power but still allow you enough to land safely. Much easier than trying to only land with a left engine, of a twin engine aircraft, because it would only be every second fan that was out, evenly distributed across the wings.
You could also divide it say, 6 ways, so failure in one module would take out 1/6 of your power, and you would be able to land on the remaining 5/6 power.
They said that the vehicle uses many jet engines, which is correct. You seem to think that only turbojet engines count as jet engines, when in fact they are only a subclass of jet engines.
The article most definitely did not claim they are using turbojet engines.
The Matrix. Watching that movie for the first time with no idea what it was about was fantastic - was it a hacker movie? alien invasion? spy thriller or detective movie? some kind of martial arts superhero movie? Going down the rabbit hole was great.
The made in China stuff is usually poor quality because that's what the importers are choosing to get manufactured and bring in - squeezing for the lowest price, while not having sufficient quality control, so naturally you get exactly what you are paying for.
China can make good quality stuff - and quality control can make sure it stays consistently good - but you have to pay more for good quality and that's just not what the importers are generally choosing to bring in.
No, if I recall correctly (its been 25 years) that device molecularly aligned or unaligned the molecules in the substrate which made it conductive or non-conductive. some other setting was used for cutting, which is what J.GB.T used to cut his leash and escape Terl.
The book was actually a fun read (for a 15 year old) Shame they made the movie.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when Macs has just become available with color displays and cost about as much as a new small car, I got a call that went something like this:
User: There's something wrong with my mouse.When I move it up, it goes down, and when I move it left, it goes right...
Me: You have it upside down - the cord should go away from you not towards you...
Acccording to this report,
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-million-us-homes-have-only-one-25mbps-internet-provider-or-none-at-all only 20% of houses have access to more than two providers for high speed, with much less than 20% of houses having more than two providers for lower speeds.
A duopoly is hardly what you could call good competition.
A secondary problem is that government agencies (for example, various municipal or local governments) are also being actively blocked from providing any service at all, due to the outcry about it interfering with the free market. Attempts by some local authorities to provide network infrastructure have been blocked with legal action over this matter.
Imagine if the local government was also blocked from providing road services and it was just left to private companies to provide roads to your apartment? How would that work out? Probably ok in the middle of the city, where there might be a couple of companies willing to build roads to the dense population there, but you'd be out of luck in suburbia or rural areas.
So far it hasn't worked out for most places even for wired networks, in that in most areas you only have a choice of a single provider, who is able to gouge for maximum profit and has the ability to effectively block the entry of new-comers by tying access to supposedly common access poles up in red tape, as has been covered in previous Slashdot stories.
The resulting investment that is made by two separate companies to provide separate network physical layer infrastructure would be far better spent providing services over a common physical network.
The real problem is not net neutrality (or lack thereof), the problem is that the wonderful power of the free market is being expected to solve a problem that it fundamentally can not solve in an efficient way.
It never makes sense to have competing physical layers of network infrastructure.
In the same way that it would be nonsensical to have competing road networks, or water distribution networks or electrical distribution networks in the same area, it is also stupid to try and have physical data networks competing. The physical media layer for the "last mile" (or however many it is from an exchange) should be in government hands, controlled in the same way that road and water networks are, but with any number of service providers being able to provide service from the end point, with a level playing field for the access to the physical media layer.
The services ON those networks should most definitely be privately held - and also made available on a level playing field.
In the same way that whether you are a country resident or a city resident, you play the same amount of registration and fuel tax, giving you equal access to roads, you should have equal access to the internet too.
If you want a parcel delivered, you have a choice of couriers available - can get FedEX ot DHL or UPS to deliver it, and they all use the same roads, with the same fixed cost for road access, competing with each other.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but i don't even understand quite what you are supposed to be trolling here... there's no reference to inches or cm in the scale of the knife.
Not quite. It's not just people down the line getting screwed. The consumer is getting screwed fairly regularly too, because invariably, that cheap product isn't equivalent to the more expensive item.
For example. I bought a set of knives - great brand, at an unbelievably low price.
Turns out they aren't as big as they a look. What I thought was a normal sized serrated bread knife is actually a "muffin knife" - it's like a 2/3 size scale set of knives, which just happen to look identical the the normal full size set. Looking at the photos, you can't tell the difference.
Returning them isn't an option because I had them sent to my overseas address via my drop-shipper, so I'd have to eat the (very high) return cost.
Likewise, the $150 mesh back ergonomic office chairs I bought look great - and a bargain compared to teh $400 I last spent on a similar looking chair, but it turns out that actually the 5 castor wheel base is relatively flimsy, made of hollow plastic, with each castor arm twisting because of the way the castors don't support the weight directly under the pivot point where they afix to the arm - it's off to the side a bit.
It'd probably be fine with an average weight 70kg guy on it, but I am 193 cm 95kg (6ft4in / 210lb) and I'm sure it's not going to last more than a few months.
A planned / communist economy relies on meetings to figure out what gets made. The problem is nobody has all the information needed to plan out production, especially on a large scale.
That's why we will need benevolent AI administrators first - that can fairly and efficiently administer control of production and allocation of resources.
Given the current crap job society and the free market does at this, with CEO and top level execs getting paid 1000 x the average salary of the workers they manage, (up from 100x that it was during the 50s and 60s when America really was great and thriving) it wouldn't have to be that good to be an improvement on the status quo.
Copyright holders have fought strongly for extensions on copyright, saying that it is required in order to maintain an incentive for artists to continue making new works - which I am sure everyone here knows is currently 70+ lifetime of the artist.
Copyright is supposed to be a two sided deal though - the works are supposed to be available to the public, or they no longer are "advancing the art", since that art is now locked away and inaccessible. Furthermore, there is a real risk that it may be lost forever by the time it is finally able to enter the public domain, due to deterioration of whatever media it is on, let alone loss of compatible contemporary technology (though this is much more easily solved than deteriorating media)
It should be a requirement that in return for the extremely generous copyright terms, the copyright holders are required to put a master quality copy of their works in escrow with the government or some other neutral organization specifically tasked with maintaining these works.in good condition and in a format that would be currently playable - and in the event that the works are no longer made available to the public at a historically reasonable price, then it should be made public domain. For example if the historical average proce for some old film was something like $20, the owners would still be required to make copies available at something like that - they couldn't start suddenly demanding $1000 per view, in order to wiggle around allowing it to go into the public domain due to lack of availability.
This would then at least ensure these works remain available, the copyright holder still gets to make money off them, and most importantly, we don't have a huge hole in our cultural heritage in 100 years time when the copyright holders have been dead for 70 years, but there are now no longer any viable copies of their works.
Bitcoin has had an average growth rate of 3.8x per year.
If you buy just one bitcoin today, (about $8000 worth) In just 20 years, it will be worth more than the entire world money supply of $60 Trillion, even if the rest of the economy keeps growing at the average rate of 2.5% per year!
How can that not be valuable?
Don't worry - it's not too late. email me for some bitcoins today at
imasucker@bitcoins4u.com
The worst thing about the drones is that even if they are only used by state actors with legitimate targets in mind, they still won't be 100% accurate.
Errors in facial recognition will happen, or criteria will be set too broadly to ensure the target gets hit - but that well targeted killbot could just as easily get the wrong guy, which would be chalked up to "acceptable collateral damage".
If its so hard to get OCR to be more than about 98% accurate, when its analysing a high resolution scan of stationary text under nice lighting conditions, what are the chances we can get a face scanner to be 100% accurate and never get false positives when the target is running like hell and ducking under stuff? You can be sure that the bots will just be programmed to go for the strike when they get better than a 70% match, or something like that.
I have no doubt these can and will be made, but they will never have the surgical strike capability that they will be marketed as having - they will be much more indiscriminate.
After a recent trip to San Francisco, I, as an Australian with a big love of quality beer, was pleasantly surprised by the large number of high quality craft beers available. I didn't have to drink Millers or Bud (or even Fosters, which we cleverly managed to fob off onto the rest of the world
- sorry about that) even once. think the bad american beer meme has to be laid to rest - they actually have some pretty tasty beverages now.
And yet you'll quite happily get into a plane driven by some guy you have never met before and probably won't eve see for the whole flight.
You have missed my point.
Game developers do spend time and effort to make the game secure. However, security is a trade off - you want to have end to end encryption of the messages and in-memory encryption of all variables? That's going to cost you lots of extra CPU cycles and reduce your framerate.
No software is hack proof - this has been demonstrated time and time again.
This arsehole has boasted that he has spent 20 years doing nothing but hacking and ripping off other game players. If there are no repecussions for that, it's going to only encourage a lot more doing the same.
This is not a victimless crime. It denies honest game players enjoyment of the game, it increases development costs substantially to have to devote resources to patching hackable flaws, and it most importantly deprives the game company of customers when they get dissapointed in the game and leave.
I have no problem with someone hacking a single player game and giving themselves a bazillion HP and max gold - it's only affecting their own game play. What I have a problem with is when they go on to ruin the game for other players, without penalty to them whatsoever.
A car analogy: You lock your car and take reasonable precautions to secure it. If someone throws a brick through the window and steals it, you don't say "oh well - should have installed brick proof windows" - you expect that there are laws that will deter this behavior and prosecute the perps when they are caught.
If someone boasted they have been tossing bricks through car windows for 20 years and living off the stolen cars, you'd expect some action to be taken against them.
So now instead of spending coding hours on adding interesting game play and content, the developers have to spend the time on making it hack proof with bank-level security. Even then, banks still get hacked - so having to add ever increasing levels of security to prevent hacks hurt the game performance and game play experience, and is still not a guarantee of success of preventing hacks.
This makes the games less fun and more expensive for all players.
The guy should be sued into oblivion or possibly even serve jail time for having ripped off so many players and companies from the game experience they have paid for, and the resulting economic damage they have caused the companies when dissatisfied players abandon the games.
I have an S8 that's sitting in the drawer - because of this exact reason. It was a nightmare to try and use outlook on it. It is all but impossible to hold the phone without activating touch sensitive side areas which would open emails or trigger things I didn't want triggered.
Apparently the problem goes away if you use a phone cover - but I never got round to getting one. Another annoyance is that despite it's metallic appearance, the whole phone is covered in glass, so there is no way for it to survive a drop - even though I had a quite expensive after-market screen protector on it to protect the curved glass front. The back of my phone is shattered now, as is one corner - after my cat knocked it off the bedside table - a drop of less than 1 meter.
If the TV networks didn't stuff so much advertising time into the shows, then perhaps viewers would stay tuned in.
I have seen average advertising time go up from about 10 min per hour to now 25 min per hour - so 2 hour movie takes 3 1/2 hours to watch - and worse, they tend to pack the second half of the movie with more ads compared to the first half, so getting to the end of a movie takes for ever and destroys the climactic scenes with too many breaks.
I get that free to air tv has to have advertising to pay for content - but the problem is that if they have a race to the bottom for advertising rates then they will by necessity have to pad out shows even more with advertising.
If they want to survive against competition from the internet, they have to all get together and have a strictly enforced small percentage of advertising time (say, no more than 10 min per hour - including advertising for their own tv shows) and charge advertisers a higher rate for the much scarcer advertising slots, instead of trying to stuff more and more advertising time down viewers throats.
Then they will get the eyeballs back.
If your PC is using 400W, your fridge would only have to have cooling capacity of 400W to get rid of that heat - but it diesn't have to use 800W to do that.
Moving heat, as is done in a fridge or air conditioner, takes about somewhere between 1/2 to 1/4 of the energy compared to producing it by resistive heating, depending on efficiency. Your PC is basically a big resistive heater. Your fridge would only have to use about 100 to 200 W to remove the PC waste heat, plus use a little extra power depending on how much cooler you wanted the whole setup to be compared to ambient.
All of that said, it's a bad idea because you could just sell the fridge and spend the money on a better CPU and still get better performance and reliability.
I used to disable voice mail but my phone provider keeps re-enabling it.
Now my voice mail informs the callers that I'm sorry I missed their call - please try later, or send me a text, and don't leave a message - because I am never going to check my voice mail.
Are you kidding me? The airline knows already knows who you are, what seat you will be sitting in, where you are going and have all your passport details. Do people really think there's any additional information the airline is going to glean from a photo of you other than confirming you are who your passport says you are?
If the government were to declare that public funded research was not copy writable, Elsevier would then simply not publish such work - they would favour works that they can hold exclusive copyright on.
Since the publish or perish model holds publication in prestige journals as being so important, that would in turn mean there would be a huge disincentive for doing publicly funded research, because researchers could not get the same amount of prestige from published results.
Change to this model can only come about once the wider scientific community places more importance on the quality and relevance of research, rather than where it is published.
Sounds about as accurate as most forecasts by economists.
Easily fixed - divide the battery pack and power supplies up -
Simplest would be to have 2 battery packs and power controllers that each drive every second jet.
Failure in one module would take out that fraction of power but still allow you enough to land safely.
Much easier than trying to only land with a left engine, of a twin engine aircraft, because it would only be every second fan that was out, evenly distributed across the wings.
You could also divide it say, 6 ways, so failure in one module would take out 1/6 of your power, and you would be able to land on the remaining 5/6 power.
They said that the vehicle uses many jet engines, which is correct.
You seem to think that only turbojet engines count as jet engines, when in fact they are only a subclass of jet engines.
The article most definitely did not claim they are using turbojet engines.
The Matrix.
Watching that movie for the first time with no idea what it was about was fantastic - was it a hacker movie? alien invasion? spy thriller or detective movie? some kind of martial arts superhero movie? Going down the rabbit hole was great.
A shame they never made a sequel...
The made in China stuff is usually poor quality because that's what the importers are choosing to get manufactured and bring in - squeezing for the lowest price, while not having sufficient quality control, so naturally you get exactly what you are paying for.
China can make good quality stuff - and quality control can make sure it stays consistently good - but you have to pay more for good quality and that's just not what the importers are generally choosing to bring in.
No, if I recall correctly (its been 25 years) that device molecularly aligned or unaligned the molecules in the substrate which made it conductive or non-conductive.
some other setting was used for cutting, which is what J.GB.T used to cut his leash and escape Terl.
The book was actually a fun read (for a 15 year old) Shame they made the movie.