And aside from that, how is belief in God logically better than non-belief? Neither position has ever been logically proven or disproven, despite a lot of very intelligent people arguing on both sides.
True. But that is because it is fundamentally impossible to ever prove a negative. That doesn't mean it is logical or sane to go around assuming that all of the non-disproven things exist -- much less adjust your life so as to comply with the imagined wishes of the thing that you don't even have any indication exists at all.
There is no proof that green cow-shaped aliens do not live in a cave on Mars. Do you believe it ?
There is no proof that *you* are not God. Would you recommend people believe you if you should start claiming it ?
There is no proof that all dollar-bills aren't going to spontaneously disintegrate in 51 minutes -- are you going to spend the next 50 minutes trying to exchange the ones you have for coins ?
Religion is a completely arbitrary decision to believe in SOME completely unsupported theories, while nevertheless continuing to not believe the overwhelming majority of unsupported theories. The choice as to which things you believe is completely arbitrary. Believing in the green cows on mars would make *exactly* as much sense as beliving in salvation trough Jesus.
Yes. I take it personally when my belief system is used as a synonym for stupid, ignorant or "intellectually backwards".
It's personal only inasmuch as you identify yourself with the belief-system. The belief-system *IS* stupid, ignorant and "intellectually backwards". It's still possible to believe in many parts of it without being any of those things yourself. But not to identify yourself with the *whole* of creationism or christianity without being all those things.
I'm not talking about peripheral details in the christian faith or in creationism, but the central defining points.
Species come into being trough evolution. Denying "macro-evolution" is stupid.
No human woman ever gave birth without the egg fusing with sperm. Believing otherwise with no evidence at all is stupid.
Sending everyone to hell who doesn't choose to believe (completely without evidence) in the "Godhood" of a certain person is plain evil.
Children do not, under any reasonable human system of ethics, deserve to be punished for the sins of the parents.
A God with the power to shape galaxies wouldn't have any preference for *which* particular tiny little tribe should settle some valley.
Now, one can still believe, if one wishes, that "God" pushed a button and made the big one go Bang. But I'd argue that if you don't believe that salvation is only possible true Jesus, then you're no christian. That's pretty much the central point.
True. But intelligence seems, on earth, to be enough of an advantage that once one species has it, that species has a lot of options not open to all the other ones.
Put differently, we could eradicate sharks if we really wanted to. Sharks could not eradicate humans. We live in a lot more biotopes than any sharks do, and unlike them we're atleast in principle capable of doing something to avoid or mitigate certain things that would lead to extinction for a non-intelligent species.
I find it implausible that a intelligent species will *not* end up eventually dominating a whole planet once it has evolved. In other words, the only way you could have tons of planets with no intelligent life would be to have it never evolve in the first place.
He is just saying, if you assume the world works according to rules (physics, for example) then putting up a God does not in any way help. Because explaining how God came into being is no easier than explaining how life on earth came into being.
Infact it's harder.
So you've just replaced a difficult question with an even more difficult question, which doesn't help.
Are you attempting to say that under "traditional materialistic evolution" no species can be the first to do anything ?
That doesn't work. Obviously *someone* have to be first.
It's true that it is very unlikely that any *one* species should be the first for any single property. But nevertheless *someone* has to be. It's like the lottery: The fact that you are very unlikely to win it does not mean that it is unlikely anyone will win. Nor does it mean that when someone wins that is an act of God.
There was a first photosynthesis. A first multi-cell-organism. A first oxygen-using-metabolism. A first sexual reproduction. A first symetrical body-plan. A first *whatever*.
Somewhere in our galaxy is also the *first* technological civilization. Someone *HAS* to be it. It may be unlikely that exactly we should be, but as I said, someone has to be, so even if we turn out to be it, that's no evidence of godly intervention. No more than it's proof of God if you end up winning the lottery. Both is unlikely. But both has to happen to *somebody* sooner or later.
That's sort of like asking: "Why would Homo Sapiens need the entire planet ? A small section, atmost a single continent would do."
That's stupid. It doesn't work that way.
The way it works is: In a sufficiently large population, if going somewhere is reasonably possible, someone will sooner or later do it.
If surviving and breeding there is possible, someone will sooner or later do it.
So, while 99%+ of the original humans stayed put more or less where they where born, eventually *someone* wandered a few hundred km and established themselves somewhere new. Some of these groups then died out. But others flourished, and eventually *someone* among their descendants wandered on and established themselves yet another place.
Eventually, the end-result is everywhere that humans can successfully live and breed, they do. (the same is true for any other species)
At the moment, humans are not capable of travelling to other planets (much less other suns), nor are we capable of establishing ourselves on such another planet, attain self-sufficiency and live-and-breed there.
But we're getting closer by the minute. Already we had a few short visits to the moon and a few robotic probes on a few other bodies in this solar-system. I don't see any reason humans won't live pretty much everywhere in this solar-system inside the next few hundred years.
Other stars is trickier. I don't expect to see honest plans for establishing extra-solar colonies in my lifetime. (but I consider it perfectly possible that I'll see plans to send robotic probes to other starsystems in my lifetime)
You see, if a race colonizes the nearest 5-10 ligthyears around the star where they originally developed, what is stopping *these* colonies from later-on sending out their own colonization-ships to the stars 5-10 ligthyears around their star, and so on ?
If a colonization-ship travels at 1% of C and spends 500 years to get to a star 5 ligthyears away, and then the people on it spend 100 years establishing themselves before being capable of themselves sending a similar ship, then civilization nevertheless expands at an average rate of 0.8% c
Which means in a million years the civilization will cover a sphere with a diameter around 10.000 ligthyears. In other words, completely colonizing the galaxy should take on the order of 2-4 million years. Which is a blink-of-an-eye in cosmological timescales. Even *humans* have existed for like 200.000 years this far, and life on earth has existed for aproximately 4000 million years.
There's been life on earth for ca 4000 million years.
It'd take on the order of 2-4 million years to colonize the galaxy, under quite modest assumptions.
Which should mean, it'd have happened already if someone in the galaxy had only like a few million year advantage on us.
My solution ? What if, unbelievable as that may be, we really are the first ?
Yes, it's unlikely that it'd be us. But it has to be *someone*.
Sorta like winning the lottery. It's unlikely that *you* will win. But nevertheless *someone* will.
You can only vote twice for the same option if you delete your cookies *and* get a new ip-adress. This ain't impossible (not even hard) but it's probably unlikely that very many have bothered.
Got that one rigth. One of my sons favourite activities is building a tower from legos. Large. Large as in tall. If he can get it high enough that he needs to stand on a chair to continue building, he's in heaven (and demands that pappa gets the digital camera to capture his amazing creation)
May not be hyper-techno-cool or whatever, but building towers where popular with small kids a millenium ago, and it's gonna be popular a millenium from now too. You need balance. You need coordination. You need structural integrity. You need concentration. You need patience. You need some feeling for the center of gravity. And there's a sense of achievment -- you can actually make something -- and you can make it better today than you did yesterday. All useful stuff yesterday, today and tomorrow.
So, you're saying there is no better choice, and can be no better choice, than simply selecting a disc randomly ?
It's possible it is like you say -- that each year the stats change enough that no consistent trends are recognizable. It is however also possible (I'd say likely even) that different manufacturers are different statistically over time.
You need backups anyway, that's not the point. But it makes a difference for your maintenance-costs if you experience 1% of your disc-drives dying in an anverage year or 5%.
Not thrown away, no. Given away, sure. Tons of stuff. Larger kids have a lot better idea what is "theirs", but at 3 that's simply not so, not other than the ~10 really favourite items anyway.
If you're swimming in toys you're unlikely to, especially as a young child, even manage to know what you actually posess, much less play with it or learn from it.
For example, I have a 3 year old son. Despite the fact that we basically never buy toys for him anymore he gets so many as gifts for christmas, birthday, whatever from family and friends that he's got tons more than he knows what to do with. I am positive he posesses 500 distinct toys. And we could throw away 75% of them tomorrow without him even *NOTICING* that they're gone.
Fewer higher-quality toys is, imho, always going to be the superior choice. 90% of the time you see him playing with 5% of the toys anyway, and most often those with best quality and those from which he'll learn the most.
90% of the stuff sold in toy-stores is complete and utter JUNK. One can definitely have too much of it. Even the JUNK that is nominally tech-toys.
It's not that surprising. The only mildly interesting thing I see is that high load seems to *not* increase failure-rates much, other than the first few month. They hypothesize that this may be because some drives don't handle high load -- and die early -- however those drives that survive the first ~6 months with high load are the more robust ones, and those hold up well.
Makes sense. Killing the weaker infants makes the adult population healthier.
We also do not mention in any way just how large our population is anyway.
Ok, so they didn't even mention the fact that they failed to mention that.
Still, in any statistical analysis that's just about the most important parameter. I realize Google doesn't want to say just how many disk-drives they have, but it'd still be useful to have an order-of-magnitude number for the size of the study.
I know the answer is "many". But not if it's 1000 drives, 10.000 drives or 100.000 drives. (nowhere do they say what fraction of Googles drives are included in the study either -- nor when the study was done or what vintage the discs where -- also useful data)
Why not ? Honestly, especially in dense areas there's no good reason not to have fibre-to-the-home.
My neighbourhood got fibre-to-the-home last autumn, 2 single-mode-fibres into everyones basement. 270 houses and apartments got it together, reasonably dense but all individual houses. Total cost ? $120K aproximately. That's like $500/household. In our case we got it installed for free. (infact we had 3 companies competing about delivering it for free) The catch ? Everyone who got fibre had to enter into a contract to get phone and cable-tv from the company for atleast 1 year. Since the price for this was competitive anyway there's not much downside. The neighbourhood-network is *owned* by us (NOT by the company now installing it) so after 1 year we're free to purchase service from whomever we want and have the service delivered over it.
The physical fibre can handle atleast several TB/s, but currently we've only installed equipment capable of handling 10Gbps, that's sufficient (more than!) for streaming tv (up to ~5 at a time: some people have multiple tvs) offering 2 phone-lines and 50Mbps internet. If 10Gbps gets puny in the future though, we don't need new cabling, just new tranceivers.
$500/household is not much money. If you install fibre at the time when you're installing something else anyway it's even less, there is no difference in price between coax and fibre anymore, atleast none that matters. (the cabling and equipment is somewhat more expensive, but the *work* is the expensive part anyway)
There are some places denser and easier to wire-up than the USA, sure.
But there's lots of places where there's a lot *less* density than the USA too, and which nevertheless have broadband-penetration (and bandwith) much MUCH higher than the USA.
USA has 31people/km^2 Iceland has 3. Norway has 12. Finland 15. Sweden 20. Yet all of these countries have significantly higher broadband-penetration than the USA.
More likely your strange telecoms-structure with a few dominant players and little real competition in many areas is more responsible. That and the huge differences in income in the USA. Have a look at this chart: Income-distribution
It's obvious that USA has more unequal distribution of income than just about anyone else in the developed world. (poor states dictated by a rich elite is typically even more uneven though)
Making the rich richer does not contribute to higher broadband-penetration. (since the rich had broadband already) Making the poor richer however, *does* increase broadband-penetration, because it pushes some people up to the level where they start being able to afford such things.
It's annoying though, when you're forced to not roleplay to avoid being fucked.
For example, in many games some boss shows up early and you're *supposed* to lose, he is strong enough that you'll *definitely* lose.
So, if you're smart you just kick yourself in the groin and go down early.
If you, on the other hand, play your very best, use all your buff-items, quaff all your healing, hold out for aslong as humanly possible. Then guess what ? The game "rewards" you by letting you lose anyway, only now you've wasted all those useful items for no effect whatsoever.
I *hate* that. If I can't win -- waste me in the first attack and make it obvious. (it's fine if it's merely -very-very-hard- to win. It's when it's flat-out impossible that I object)
I think it's perfectly reasonable to aks an employee to go the extra mile in an emergency. But if it's *that* important -- then the company should be willing to put action behind its words. Which in practice works best in cold hard cash.
My boss *CAN* call on me at any time. *BUT* we've agreed that whenever I'm interupted in my free time (even if it's a 2-minute-fix) I put down a minimum of 3 hours work. At overtime rates (1.5 - 3 times normal hourly wages, depending on time of day etc).
So: End-effect he *CAN* get a 10-minute fix done at 3am the nigth before saturday. No problem. But only if he considers the 10-minute fix worth about a days pay for me. If it's not that important, it'll have to wait until monday.
What I'd never accept is bosses who on the one hand insists it's an "emergency", but on the other hand balks at paying $300 or whatever to get it fixed. If that is to expensive, then obviously the "emergency" ain't so dire afterall.
Different media are infact different. Your assumption "no DRM is not going to fly in practice" is not generally valid.
Music for example. Up until very recently *all* music was sold completely without any sort of DRM, and it flew just fine. Then companies started introducing DRM of various kinds trying to make CDs "unrippable". A year ago, all of the major record-companies in Norway, for example, used some kind of DRM on their CDs.
It didn't, infact, actually fly all that well. There where *TONS* of problems. There where *TONS* of complaints. There was *NO* measurable decline in piracy whatsoever. One after one they gave it up. A month ago the last of the record-companies gave it up. They're now (all of them!) back to selling plain old unprotected CDs. Now there's talk of starting a unencumbered (plain old high-quality mp3 and flac) online music-store. Research shows that 70% of all record-company-execs believe that people would buy more music online if the music was in an unencumbered format.
I know that obnoxious "anti-piracy" measures on games have completely put me off buying PC-games. I also know that pretty much all current PC-games are widely pirated. It seems to me it's pretty much a battle lost. The main hope seems to be online games where you pay not for the game but for access to servers. If they can succeed in making online-gaming attractive for other audiences than the WoW-addicts, I think this offers a lot of hope.
The economics of the thing makes this utter bullshit.
For physical reasons, the last-mile is *always* going to be by far the most expensive part of the Internet.
Take my current town Stavanger for a start. What do you figure costs more:
Wiring up each and every one of the ~40.000 homes in the town ?
Setting up ~3 high-speed links to relevant internet-hubs in the area to provide connectivity out-of-town ?
That's rigth -- the first task costs a lot more than the second.
Now, imagine you decided you needed 10 times the bandwith (internally and externally). Which part would cost most to upgrade ? The 40.000 individual lines (each with some sorta modem on each end) or the high-speed links which will already be running over single-mode fibre where all you need to do is upgrade the equipment in each end and the repeaters every 50km.
The latter is *literally* a case of buying ~6 high-speed fibre-capable routers and ~20 repeaters capable of dealing with the same speed.
It's the same on a large scale: Connecting (say) Norway to Sweden is *much* cheaper than hooking up all of Norway internally. Connecting Europe to USA is *MUCH* cheaper than connecting all of USA internally.
Unfortunately they then fell in love with it, and completely overabused it.
Allowing "+" to add not just two numbers, but also say concatenate two strings is reasonable.
Using left-shift to mean in effect "print" is not.
That's almost as ugly as my favourite C++-wart:
How do you separate object++ from ++object when overloading functions ? Answer: You add a completely bogus "int" argument to the prefix-operator, so the compiler recognizes the two as having different signatures. Yeah ! Why "int" you ask ? No reason -- just because.
It's braindead. I agree. Way too many different, incompatible, stupid connections.
Dropping serial, parallell, ps2-keyboard, ps2-mouse and replacing them all with USB was a significant improvement.
VGA, scart, DVI, HDMI, HDCP, DisplayPort, UDI, half of them requiring audio-cabling aditionally. (not including audio in the signal is braindead. Stereo audio in CD-quality is like 3Mbps, which is completely ignorable for connections with bandwith 3-4 orders of magnitude higher than that.
I'd personally prefer just simply using 10 or the upcoming 100Gbps fibre-ethernet. This is mature, open, a reasonable extension of existing technology. It'd save lots on cabling, and it'd avoid duplication. It'd make it dirt-simple to do stuff like put your computer in the basement and have the display-keyboard-mouse somewhere else: just hook it up to the network. (keyboard and mouse can be hooked up to the displays USB-ports, these are becoming common already anyway)
Keeping usb and ethernet would give us 2 connections. Probably worthwhile because of the vastly different speed-requirements. Your mouse doesn't *need* 100Gbps -- and the cable required for that would be overly thick/clumsy. Possibly usb could be replaced with bluetooth. So -- for high bandwith: ethernet. For low-bandwith: bluetooth.
With sensible tech this would also mean any display in the house could "tune-in" to any signal-source in the house, or vice versa.
Won't happen though: MPAA will veto it. Can't have people actually openly *accessing* signals.
True. The main point of fines is to change behaviour. For that to work, the fines have to be significant enough that it *matters* to the person fined.
I have a lot of respect for the traffic-ticket system in Finland. You're fined depending on your net-worth and income-level. So a rich person speeding will get a larger fine than a poor person speeding.
Makes perfect sense. If you're on welfare, $50 is a significant amount -- probably enough to make you think twice. If you're Bill Gates, then $50 is a completely ignorable amount -- you could pay that much every hour and it'd still be ignorable.
If you're Jaako Rytsola (Finnish entrepeneur caugth driving 47mph in a 25mph zone last year) then that can mean a whopping $71.000 fine. (the fine in this case was 20-day-fines where a day-fine is defined as your disposable income, which is basically your net-income minus minimum living-costs)
For companies it's the same. If you fine Mom 'n Pop $5000 they'll take notice real quick. If you fine Microsoft $5000 it's completely down in the noise and certainly not enough to make top-management adjust behaviour (indeed top-managment may not even hear about it)
For example, if PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers (which I consider bullshit -- but then again, pretty much anything coming out of SCO is bullshit) then it'd mean that they lied.
How so? Even though PJ does state her opinions, she includes the relevant public court documents to back them up. That is not lying, deceiving or generally attempting to mislead.
They'd have been lying because PJ stated multiple times publicly (on Groklaw and elsewhere) that she is not in any way affiliated with IBM. If it turned out PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers, then that statement would have been a blatant lie.
I'm not saying this is the case. Infact I say the oposite: I consider this claim bullshit. But *IF* the claim was correct (IF PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers) *THEN* she'd have been lying.
SCO is, once again, attempting to muddy the waters in a losing battle.
Sure. Muddying waters is all they've been doing from the get go. Well, that and delaying.
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True. But that is because it is fundamentally impossible to ever prove a negative. That doesn't mean it is logical or sane to go around assuming that all of the non-disproven things exist -- much less adjust your life so as to comply with the imagined wishes of the thing that you don't even have any indication exists at all.
There is no proof that green cow-shaped aliens do not live in a cave on Mars. Do you believe it ?
There is no proof that *you* are not God. Would you recommend people believe you if you should start claiming it ?
There is no proof that all dollar-bills aren't going to spontaneously disintegrate in 51 minutes -- are you going to spend the next 50 minutes trying to exchange the ones you have for coins ?
Religion is a completely arbitrary decision to believe in SOME completely unsupported theories, while nevertheless continuing to not believe the overwhelming majority of unsupported theories. The choice as to which things you believe is completely arbitrary. Believing in the green cows on mars would make *exactly* as much sense as beliving in salvation trough Jesus.
It's personal only inasmuch as you identify yourself with the belief-system. The belief-system *IS* stupid, ignorant and "intellectually backwards". It's still possible to believe in many parts of it without being any of those things yourself. But not to identify yourself with the *whole* of creationism or christianity without being all those things.
I'm not talking about peripheral details in the christian faith or in creationism, but the central defining points.
- Species come into being trough evolution. Denying "macro-evolution" is stupid.
- No human woman ever gave birth without the egg fusing with sperm. Believing otherwise with no evidence at all is stupid.
- Sending everyone to hell who doesn't choose to believe (completely without evidence) in the "Godhood" of a certain person is plain evil.
- Children do not, under any reasonable human system of ethics, deserve to be punished for the sins of the parents.
- A God with the power to shape galaxies wouldn't have any preference for *which* particular tiny little tribe should settle some valley.
Now, one can still believe, if one wishes, that "God" pushed a button and made the big one go Bang. But I'd argue that if you don't believe that salvation is only possible true Jesus, then you're no christian. That's pretty much the central point.Put differently, we could eradicate sharks if we really wanted to. Sharks could not eradicate humans. We live in a lot more biotopes than any sharks do, and unlike them we're atleast in principle capable of doing something to avoid or mitigate certain things that would lead to extinction for a non-intelligent species.
I find it implausible that a intelligent species will *not* end up eventually dominating a whole planet once it has evolved. In other words, the only way you could have tons of planets with no intelligent life would be to have it never evolve in the first place.
He is just saying, if you assume the world works according to rules (physics, for example) then putting up a God does not in any way help. Because explaining how God came into being is no easier than explaining how life on earth came into being.
Infact it's harder.
So you've just replaced a difficult question with an even more difficult question, which doesn't help.
That doesn't work. Obviously *someone* have to be first.
It's true that it is very unlikely that any *one* species should be the first for any single property. But nevertheless *someone* has to be. It's like the lottery: The fact that you are very unlikely to win it does not mean that it is unlikely anyone will win. Nor does it mean that when someone wins that is an act of God.
There was a first photosynthesis. A first multi-cell-organism. A first oxygen-using-metabolism. A first sexual reproduction. A first symetrical body-plan. A first *whatever*.
Somewhere in our galaxy is also the *first* technological civilization. Someone *HAS* to be it. It may be unlikely that exactly we should be, but as I said, someone has to be, so even if we turn out to be it, that's no evidence of godly intervention. No more than it's proof of God if you end up winning the lottery. Both is unlikely. But both has to happen to *somebody* sooner or later.
That's stupid. It doesn't work that way.
The way it works is: In a sufficiently large population, if going somewhere is reasonably possible, someone will sooner or later do it.
If surviving and breeding there is possible, someone will sooner or later do it.
So, while 99%+ of the original humans stayed put more or less where they where born, eventually *someone* wandered a few hundred km and established themselves somewhere new. Some of these groups then died out. But others flourished, and eventually *someone* among their descendants wandered on and established themselves yet another place.
Eventually, the end-result is everywhere that humans can successfully live and breed, they do. (the same is true for any other species)
At the moment, humans are not capable of travelling to other planets (much less other suns), nor are we capable of establishing ourselves on such another planet, attain self-sufficiency and live-and-breed there.
But we're getting closer by the minute. Already we had a few short visits to the moon and a few robotic probes on a few other bodies in this solar-system. I don't see any reason humans won't live pretty much everywhere in this solar-system inside the next few hundred years.
Other stars is trickier. I don't expect to see honest plans for establishing extra-solar colonies in my lifetime. (but I consider it perfectly possible that I'll see plans to send robotic probes to other starsystems in my lifetime)
You see, if a race colonizes the nearest 5-10 ligthyears around the star where they originally developed, what is stopping *these* colonies from later-on sending out their own colonization-ships to the stars 5-10 ligthyears around their star, and so on ?
If a colonization-ship travels at 1% of C and spends 500 years to get to a star 5 ligthyears away, and then the people on it spend 100 years establishing themselves before being capable of themselves sending a similar ship, then civilization nevertheless expands at an average rate of 0.8% c
Which means in a million years the civilization will cover a sphere with a diameter around 10.000 ligthyears. In other words, completely colonizing the galaxy should take on the order of 2-4 million years. Which is a blink-of-an-eye in cosmological timescales. Even *humans* have existed for like 200.000 years this far, and life on earth has existed for aproximately 4000 million years.
- There's been life on earth for ca 4000 million years.
- It'd take on the order of 2-4 million years to colonize the galaxy, under quite modest assumptions.
Which should mean, it'd have happened already if someone in the galaxy had only like a few million year advantage on us.My solution ? What if, unbelievable as that may be, we really are the first ?
Yes, it's unlikely that it'd be us. But it has to be *someone*.
Sorta like winning the lottery. It's unlikely that *you* will win. But nevertheless *someone* will.
You can only vote twice for the same option if you delete your cookies *and* get a new ip-adress. This ain't impossible (not even hard) but it's probably unlikely that very many have bothered.
May not be hyper-techno-cool or whatever, but building towers where popular with small kids a millenium ago, and it's gonna be popular a millenium from now too. You need balance. You need coordination. You need structural integrity. You need concentration. You need patience. You need some feeling for the center of gravity. And there's a sense of achievment -- you can actually make something -- and you can make it better today than you did yesterday. All useful stuff yesterday, today and tomorrow.
You need backups anyway, that's not the point. But it makes a difference for your maintenance-costs if you experience 1% of your disc-drives dying in an anverage year or 5%.
Not thrown away, no. Given away, sure. Tons of stuff. Larger kids have a lot better idea what is "theirs", but at 3 that's simply not so, not other than the ~10 really favourite items anyway.
If you're swimming in toys you're unlikely to, especially as a young child, even manage to know what you actually posess, much less play with it or learn from it.
For example, I have a 3 year old son. Despite the fact that we basically never buy toys for him anymore he gets so many as gifts for christmas, birthday, whatever from family and friends that he's got tons more than he knows what to do with. I am positive he posesses 500 distinct toys. And we could throw away 75% of them tomorrow without him even *NOTICING* that they're gone.
Fewer higher-quality toys is, imho, always going to be the superior choice. 90% of the time you see him playing with 5% of the toys anyway, and most often those with best quality and those from which he'll learn the most.
90% of the stuff sold in toy-stores is complete and utter JUNK. One can definitely have too much of it. Even the JUNK that is nominally tech-toys.
Makes sense. Killing the weaker infants makes the adult population healthier.
Ok, so they didn't even mention the fact that they failed to mention that.
Still, in any statistical analysis that's just about the most important parameter. I realize Google doesn't want to say just how many disk-drives they have, but it'd still be useful to have an order-of-magnitude number for the size of the study.
I know the answer is "many". But not if it's 1000 drives, 10.000 drives or 100.000 drives. (nowhere do they say what fraction of Googles drives are included in the study either -- nor when the study was done or what vintage the discs where -- also useful data)
My neighbourhood got fibre-to-the-home last autumn, 2 single-mode-fibres into everyones basement. 270 houses and apartments got it together, reasonably dense but all individual houses. Total cost ? $120K aproximately. That's like $500/household. In our case we got it installed for free. (infact we had 3 companies competing about delivering it for free) The catch ? Everyone who got fibre had to enter into a contract to get phone and cable-tv from the company for atleast 1 year. Since the price for this was competitive anyway there's not much downside. The neighbourhood-network is *owned* by us (NOT by the company now installing it) so after 1 year we're free to purchase service from whomever we want and have the service delivered over it.
The physical fibre can handle atleast several TB/s, but currently we've only installed equipment capable of handling 10Gbps, that's sufficient (more than!) for streaming tv (up to ~5 at a time: some people have multiple tvs) offering 2 phone-lines and 50Mbps internet. If 10Gbps gets puny in the future though, we don't need new cabling, just new tranceivers.
$500/household is not much money. If you install fibre at the time when you're installing something else anyway it's even less, there is no difference in price between coax and fibre anymore, atleast none that matters. (the cabling and equipment is somewhat more expensive, but the *work* is the expensive part anyway)
There are some places denser and easier to wire-up than the USA, sure.
But there's lots of places where there's a lot *less* density than the USA too, and which nevertheless have broadband-penetration (and bandwith) much MUCH higher than the USA.
USA has 31people/km^2 Iceland has 3. Norway has 12. Finland 15. Sweden 20. Yet all of these countries have significantly higher broadband-penetration than the USA.
More likely your strange telecoms-structure with a few dominant players and little real competition in many areas is more responsible. That and the huge differences in income in the USA. Have a look at this chart: Income-distribution
It's obvious that USA has more unequal distribution of income than just about anyone else in the developed world. (poor states dictated by a rich elite is typically even more uneven though) Making the rich richer does not contribute to higher broadband-penetration. (since the rich had broadband already) Making the poor richer however, *does* increase broadband-penetration, because it pushes some people up to the level where they start being able to afford such things.
For example, in many games some boss shows up early and you're *supposed* to lose, he is strong enough that you'll *definitely* lose.
So, if you're smart you just kick yourself in the groin and go down early.
If you, on the other hand, play your very best, use all your buff-items, quaff all your healing, hold out for aslong as humanly possible. Then guess what ? The game "rewards" you by letting you lose anyway, only now you've wasted all those useful items for no effect whatsoever.
I *hate* that. If I can't win -- waste me in the first attack and make it obvious. (it's fine if it's merely -very-very-hard- to win. It's when it's flat-out impossible that I object)
My boss *CAN* call on me at any time. *BUT* we've agreed that whenever I'm interupted in my free time (even if it's a 2-minute-fix) I put down a minimum of 3 hours work. At overtime rates (1.5 - 3 times normal hourly wages, depending on time of day etc).
So: End-effect he *CAN* get a 10-minute fix done at 3am the nigth before saturday. No problem. But only if he considers the 10-minute fix worth about a days pay for me. If it's not that important, it'll have to wait until monday.
What I'd never accept is bosses who on the one hand insists it's an "emergency", but on the other hand balks at paying $300 or whatever to get it fixed. If that is to expensive, then obviously the "emergency" ain't so dire afterall.
Music for example. Up until very recently *all* music was sold completely without any sort of DRM, and it flew just fine. Then companies started introducing DRM of various kinds trying to make CDs "unrippable". A year ago, all of the major record-companies in Norway, for example, used some kind of DRM on their CDs.
It didn't, infact, actually fly all that well. There where *TONS* of problems. There where *TONS* of complaints. There was *NO* measurable decline in piracy whatsoever. One after one they gave it up. A month ago the last of the record-companies gave it up. They're now (all of them!) back to selling plain old unprotected CDs. Now there's talk of starting a unencumbered (plain old high-quality mp3 and flac) online music-store. Research shows that 70% of all record-company-execs believe that people would buy more music online if the music was in an unencumbered format. I know that obnoxious "anti-piracy" measures on games have completely put me off buying PC-games. I also know that pretty much all current PC-games are widely pirated. It seems to me it's pretty much a battle lost. The main hope seems to be online games where you pay not for the game but for access to servers. If they can succeed in making online-gaming attractive for other audiences than the WoW-addicts, I think this offers a lot of hope.
For physical reasons, the last-mile is *always* going to be by far the most expensive part of the Internet.
Take my current town Stavanger for a start. What do you figure costs more:
- Wiring up each and every one of the ~40.000 homes in the town ?
- Setting up ~3 high-speed links to relevant internet-hubs in the area to provide connectivity out-of-town ?
That's rigth -- the first task costs a lot more than the second.Now, imagine you decided you needed 10 times the bandwith (internally and externally). Which part would cost most to upgrade ? The 40.000 individual lines (each with some sorta modem on each end) or the high-speed links which will already be running over single-mode fibre where all you need to do is upgrade the equipment in each end and the repeaters every 50km.
The latter is *literally* a case of buying ~6 high-speed fibre-capable routers and ~20 repeaters capable of dealing with the same speed.
It's the same on a large scale: Connecting (say) Norway to Sweden is *much* cheaper than hooking up all of Norway internally. Connecting Europe to USA is *MUCH* cheaper than connecting all of USA internally.
Unfortunately they then fell in love with it, and completely overabused it.
Allowing "+" to add not just two numbers, but also say concatenate two strings is reasonable.
Using left-shift to mean in effect "print" is not.
That's almost as ugly as my favourite C++-wart:
How do you separate object++ from ++object when overloading functions ? Answer: You add a completely bogus "int" argument to the prefix-operator, so the compiler recognizes the two as having different signatures. Yeah ! Why "int" you ask ? No reason -- just because.
Dropping serial, parallell, ps2-keyboard, ps2-mouse and replacing them all with USB was a significant improvement.
VGA, scart, DVI, HDMI, HDCP, DisplayPort, UDI, half of them requiring audio-cabling aditionally. (not including audio in the signal is braindead. Stereo audio in CD-quality is like 3Mbps, which is completely ignorable for connections with bandwith 3-4 orders of magnitude higher than that.
I'd personally prefer just simply using 10 or the upcoming 100Gbps fibre-ethernet. This is mature, open, a reasonable extension of existing technology. It'd save lots on cabling, and it'd avoid duplication. It'd make it dirt-simple to do stuff like put your computer in the basement and have the display-keyboard-mouse somewhere else: just hook it up to the network. (keyboard and mouse can be hooked up to the displays USB-ports, these are becoming common already anyway)
Keeping usb and ethernet would give us 2 connections. Probably worthwhile because of the vastly different speed-requirements. Your mouse doesn't *need* 100Gbps -- and the cable required for that would be overly thick/clumsy. Possibly usb could be replaced with bluetooth. So -- for high bandwith: ethernet. For low-bandwith: bluetooth.
With sensible tech this would also mean any display in the house could "tune-in" to any signal-source in the house, or vice versa.
Won't happen though: MPAA will veto it. Can't have people actually openly *accessing* signals.
Imagine, using a online computer to conduct *polls* with *multiple-choices*. It a mind-boggling idea !
And you can send "suggestions" too, don't figure that's ever been possible before !
I have a lot of respect for the traffic-ticket system in Finland. You're fined depending on your net-worth and income-level. So a rich person speeding will get a larger fine than a poor person speeding.
Makes perfect sense. If you're on welfare, $50 is a significant amount -- probably enough to make you think twice. If you're Bill Gates, then $50 is a completely ignorable amount -- you could pay that much every hour and it'd still be ignorable.
If you're Jaako Rytsola (Finnish entrepeneur caugth driving 47mph in a 25mph zone last year) then that can mean a whopping $71.000 fine. (the fine in this case was 20-day-fines where a day-fine is defined as your disposable income, which is basically your net-income minus minimum living-costs)
For companies it's the same. If you fine Mom 'n Pop $5000 they'll take notice real quick. If you fine Microsoft $5000 it's completely down in the noise and certainly not enough to make top-management adjust behaviour (indeed top-managment may not even hear about it)
How so? Even though PJ does state her opinions, she includes the relevant public court documents to back them up. That is not lying, deceiving or generally attempting to mislead.
They'd have been lying because PJ stated multiple times publicly (on Groklaw and elsewhere) that she is not in any way affiliated with IBM. If it turned out PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers, then that statement would have been a blatant lie.
I'm not saying this is the case. Infact I say the oposite: I consider this claim bullshit. But *IF* the claim was correct (IF PJ was actually a team of IBM-lawyers) *THEN* she'd have been lying.
SCO is, once again, attempting to muddy the waters in a losing battle.
Sure. Muddying waters is all they've been doing from the get go. Well, that and delaying.