Around here, we're a technically savvy group with relatively high IQs. You can describe it as a highly viscous non-newtonian fluid containing enough long-chain polymers or waxes to prevent it from flowing freely when at rest, and most of us will get it, and the rest will be able to look it up.
Assuming you're trying to describe it to a bunch of first graders, you can also describe it as "orange silly putty", and it'll be a hell of a lot more accurate than "orange goo".
So basically, don't hold your breath on any kind of real competition occurring here. While I'm a big fan of competitive markets, I'm a big cynic on this market. On a bad day, in a bad mood, I think we should just regulate the entire thing.
There's a third option, orthogonal to the free...regulated spectrum:
Municipalize the last mile.
The physical piece of wire is the crux of the monopoly. It's also the part that's least in need of competition. If the city provides us a piece of fiber as just another utility, it's as good of a physical layer as we'll need for the foreseeable future.
The service on the wire is where we need competition, to get us away from mystery caps and bizarre pricing tiers. Once you have a fiber to the data center, you'll have scores of ISPs lining up to genuinely compete for your business.
It works in every market where it's tried, and everyone but the telcos *loves* it.
And to get back to the original point of the story: Who will fix the internet? YOU, citizen! Call up your local elected leaders, and start demanding municipal fiber! Once we have it, simple competition will make the other problems take care of themselves.
Your view of the world is very black and white. Just because I happen to disagree with you on something doesn't mean I'm one of them. Actually, I'm an outspoken critic of Wikipedia.
Science be damned! I might as well cite my next door neighbor as evidence that unicorns exist.
If the scientific consensus is that unicorns don't exist, put that in the article and cite it.
Yes, unfortunately the loons have to be given time on the stage too. The way it is now everyone cites their side, and then it's up to the reader to determine what's true. That's an undue burden on the reader. I think things would be a lot better if we could declare their side untrue, and just write things the way they are... but I don't know an objective way to make that distinction.
Like I said originally, it's the best way people have figured out. If you know a better way ("Just edit the article so it's true!" isn't a solution. That's just you fighting one side of an edit war.), please, let the world know what it is.
In the meantime, the way it is works, even if it's not optimal.
You're missing my point. What objective criteria are there to show who the nut is?
Wikipedia goes based on citations. If he can cite sources, then his information goes in. If you have other sources that contradict his (do you, and did you cite them in your edits?), then you can alter the article so that instead of stating his side as fact, his side is shown as one of two conflicting views.
If, in fact, you were deleting information that was properly cited just because you believe it was false, the community *was* doing its job.
Yes, that means that Wikipedia is a body of verifiable, but not necessarily objectively true, information. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but that's the best overall algorithm that has been worked out thus far.
The guy had a fetish for the article in question because he had some kook bias and watched it like a hawk adding in his garbage all the time. The wiki staff told me to "let the community sort it out" but a month later his garbage was still on the page and they wouldn't do anything about it and I still couldn't revert it out over three times.
How do we know that you're not the kook? How do you know, for that matter? Perhaps the community did sort it out.
I've not yet discovered the algorithm to find the bottom of that stack.
My hunch - which I am unqualified to back up - would be that the brain might link the spectral plot to frequencies if it always occurred in the same area. eg, 440Hz always triggers the same nerve, and a chord always triggers the same set of nerves. The PDA could be anywhere in your field of vision, so the brain would have to interpret the images through visual processing, which is not well suited to handling sound. Perhaps it would be possible by holding the PDA at a fixed distance and fixating on a dot in the middle, but IMO it'll be hard to get consistent signal-to-nerve mapping through the eyes.
I think it might work better having the spectrum represented as touch along some line with enough nerve density to get decent resolution - Perhaps low frequencies all the way down an arm, and then bands of high frequencies along the fingers - though you'd have to compensate for signal propagation delays down the arm. It'd also help that touch has much better temporal resolution than vision.
Prison for drug users is not a nanny state solution
It comes down to defining "nanny state".
If it means "a state which intervenes in individual matters against the free will of the individual", it is a nanny state action; the harshness is irrelevant.
If it means "a state which acts in the best interest of an individual against the individual's free will", then you're right: drug criminalization is just simple, ugly corruption.
This is called the philosophy of science, which is a branch of epistemology. As with all philosophy, it's very contingent on exactly how many things are defined, so I'm adding a lot of links to explain the terminology. This has been beat to death long before we got here, so I'm just summarizing one side of things here.
In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all.
I'm for science as much as anyone on this site, but don't you think that's a bit of an exaggeration? You can't learn ANYTHING except through the scientific method?
Actually, yes. It is a perfectly valid theory of epistemology, common to empiricalnaturalism. If knowledge is defined as "justifiedtruebelief" (a classical definition), and you hold that the scientific method is the only way to strongly fulfill the "justified" criteria, then the scientific method is the only valid means to acquire knowledge. Anything else is a conjecture.
Intuition is the means by which we pick up all those hundreds of subconscious signals that would otherwise slip by.... the scientific method uses intuition as part of its process.
Absolutely. This is called abductive reasoning. It generates a hypothesis, but not knowledge (as defined above).
using ONLY deduction, try to think of a hypothesis to test for an experiment
"I think, therefore I am.", to paraphrase Descartes. Deductive reasoning generates arguments and consequences (not hypotheses) from a set of premises and logic, and does not require experimentation (so your statement is flawed). The conclusions are only contingent on the truth of the premises and correct application of logic.
If any of this is intriguing, get a book or take a class on epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge). If not, take it on my word that there is a notable body of sane, intelligent, deep thinking people who firmly believe that what you think is an exaggeration, is firmly rooted, solid truth.
You're assuming that they're interested in helping people efficiently use their service. Based on my experiences with government employees, I'd say that many are not.
Dams stop natural sediment flow, resulting in downstream river erosion
Half-baked idea: Why don't they have a gizmo that looks like a giant pool sweep bot, running around the reservoir sucking up sediment and spitting it out downstream of the dam?
I don't dispute the ecological impact of dams, but why isn't this an easy problem to engineer around?
Having done this a while, I've found that large, flat networks actually work quite well. People often bring up all kinds of fears based on folklore from the unswitched hub days, and IMO they just don't apply any more on modern layer 3 switches.
What do you do about broadcast storms?
ACL broadcast default-deny. Broadcast generally isn't needed any more. ARP is proxied by the switch. NetBios broadcast resolution has no place on a large network. Virtually all other niches for broadcast are superseded by multicast these days. If you ever find something that simply *cannot* live without broadcast, you can define a narrow ACL entry to allow it... I've never needed to.
How do you prevent some clown from anywhere in that 100,000 machine cloud from poaching another machine's IP address (either maliciously or by an accidental typo)?
Simple port security (lock IPs to MACs, and lock MACs to ports, both with reasonable timeouts) prevents 99% of these problems. The other 1% is dealt with administratively. If you need a perfect solution, you can tie port access to DHCP or other mechanisms, but it's usually not needed.
Note that dividing into/24's isn't a solution. It just distributes the problem differently.
Subnets and routers were invented for a reason.
Yes, for routing between sites that are not reasonably part of a single flat topology. Using them as a band-aid for the hardware limitations of hubs is no longer necessary.
I would not at all be surprised if AT&T has a clause in the agreement that states Apple must be pro-active in protecting the device
Apple makes something like $18 per month for each iPhone with an active AT&T contract. I speculate that they're perfectly happy enforcing lock-in on their own, and that it won't change until someone else offers them a bigger slice of the pie.
It's not JUST the belt, no. There are other factors. That's why I went based on BTU's instead of trying to compute how efficient car AC systems really are.
... the system can be counted on to draw significantly more power than you think, probably twice as much. I wasn't really trying to do ALL the math over again,....
tl;dr version: Car AC's are about 10,000 BTU/h, and a 10,000 BTU/h air conditioner is about 1 kW.
But the car is actually assumed to be taking on much more energy from the sun than your house!
Per unit volume, yes, but the volume is much smaller than the size of room a 8200BTU/h air conditioner serves.
It is not uncommon for ordinary vehicles to have an A/C system which draws as much as five horsepower, or nearly 4kW.
This is true, but automotive AC is a very inefficient, belt-driven system that increases the rotating mass of the engine, sapping power every time you accelerate, and they don't run full time (there's a pressure switch that cuts the system in and out, necessary because the car's AC has to run at any RPM). Let's do some more math for a small car:
Car MPG, highway cruise @ 60 mph (no AC): 36 Car MPG, highway cruise @ 60 mph (AC on): 34 Fuel used per mile for AC: 1/34 - 1/36 = 1/612 gallons of gas Fuel used per hour for AC: 60 * 1/612 = 5/51 gallons Energy per gallon of gas: 36.65 kW-h Energy efficiency of a car engine: 1/3 Energy spent to power AC: 5/51 * 36.65 * 1/3 = ~1.2 kW
I think I'm being generous with the 2 mpg and 1/3 efficient estimates.
In any case, rather than try to compute from horsepower levels on a car-type AC system (which isn't really comparable), I looked up the BTU rating of car AC systems. I found that typical cars have 10,000 BTU/h systems. I figured that 8,200 was probably reasonable for a small car, especially one optimized for energy savings.
If you bump it up to your 12,000 BTU/h example, the car's range is still 87 miles at 30mph.
All this is also assuming that Nissan didn't include some AC use in their mileage estimates. While they want to pump the numbers up, they also don't want their car to be perceived as an overhyped dud, so I'd speculate they're being at least somewhat conservative on the estimate.
AC (also electric) is going to without a doubt cut down on the battery's life
Actually, not that much, unless you drive *really* slowly. The LEAF will have a 24 kW-h battery. The motor gets.24 kW-h/mile[1], and assuming you average 30 mph[2], the AC draws.75kW[3], and you use it 100% of the time, we have (x is hours drive time):
24 kW-h = 30 *.24 * x +.75 * x [algebra happens] x =~ 3.0
30mph * 3.0 hours = 90 miles, a 10% hit to overall range.
If they use the AC system as a heat pump instead of a resistive array, range on full heat will be about the same.
Just call up someone and have them bring a bit of gas to make it to the next gas station, but how are you going to move that electric car?
And then, the next gas crunch hits. Everyone's gonna be calling me up to borrow my electric vehicle, but how are you going to move that gas-powered car?
I give a decent percentage chance of this actually occurring for some reason in a closer timeframe than my mean-time-to-oops-dry-tank, which is currently measured in decades.
[1] 100 mile range / 24 kW-h battery [2] With a crappy 1 hour, 30 mile commute, where you spend good chunk of time cruising the freeway followed by some traffic lights when you get to the city [3] The amount a 8200 BTU/h window-type air conditioner pulls, which is a reasonable comparable for this size car.
If you buy a stolen ring [....] unknowingly, I'm sure the original owner could get it back as well - as it was not the seller's to sell. Same applies here...
It's not the same at all. Stealing deprives the owner of the item, and therefore when found, the item is returned to the rightful owner. The books in question were produced in violation of copyright, but they were absolutely not stolen.
they won't really have a country left to lead, let alone maintain a military to defend against anything. It still doesn't make any sense for them to use nukes
You're assuming that 1, the leaders are rational actors, and 2, that they would consider a slaughter of their people and destruction of their country to be "losing".
Those assumptions aren't necessarily valid if the leaders are insane or religious.
I partly disagree. Hard to get in to (or out of) is *exactly* the kind of thing you want in a containment breach emergency in a pathogen lab. There are just better ways to accomplish access control than putting it underground, which won't get in the way nearly so much in other kinds of emergencies.
Slashdot Mirror
what can only be described as an orange goo
Around here, we're a technically savvy group with relatively high IQs. You can describe it as a highly viscous non-newtonian fluid containing enough long-chain polymers or waxes to prevent it from flowing freely when at rest, and most of us will get it, and the rest will be able to look it up.
Assuming you're trying to describe it to a bunch of first graders, you can also describe it as "orange silly putty", and it'll be a hell of a lot more accurate than "orange goo".
Raise the bar, people.
So basically, don't hold your breath on any kind of real competition occurring here. While I'm a big fan of competitive markets, I'm a big cynic on this market. On a bad day, in a bad mood, I think we should just regulate the entire thing.
There's a third option, orthogonal to the free...regulated spectrum:
Municipalize the last mile.
The physical piece of wire is the crux of the monopoly. It's also the part that's least in need of competition. If the city provides us a piece of fiber as just another utility, it's as good of a physical layer as we'll need for the foreseeable future.
The service on the wire is where we need competition, to get us away from mystery caps and bizarre pricing tiers. Once you have a fiber to the data center, you'll have scores of ISPs lining up to genuinely compete for your business.
It works in every market where it's tried, and everyone but the telcos *loves* it.
And to get back to the original point of the story: Who will fix the internet? YOU, citizen! Call up your local elected leaders, and start demanding municipal fiber! Once we have it, simple competition will make the other problems take care of themselves.
We now have a much better handle on material science and metallurgy [etc]
Sure, but in the early 1900's, I'd bet they were putting a lot of money and man-hours into researching steam engines.
This was done as a student project.
Oh great. Another crazy wikipedia evangelist.
Your view of the world is very black and white. Just because I happen to disagree with you on something doesn't mean I'm one of them. Actually, I'm an outspoken critic of Wikipedia.
Science be damned! I might as well cite my next door neighbor as evidence that unicorns exist.
If the scientific consensus is that unicorns don't exist, put that in the article and cite it.
Yes, unfortunately the loons have to be given time on the stage too. The way it is now everyone cites their side, and then it's up to the reader to determine what's true. That's an undue burden on the reader. I think things would be a lot better if we could declare their side untrue, and just write things the way they are... but I don't know an objective way to make that distinction.
Like I said originally, it's the best way people have figured out. If you know a better way ("Just edit the article so it's true!" isn't a solution. That's just you fighting one side of an edit war.), please, let the world know what it is.
In the meantime, the way it is works, even if it's not optimal.
You're missing my point. What objective criteria are there to show who the nut is?
Wikipedia goes based on citations. If he can cite sources, then his information goes in. If you have other sources that contradict his (do you, and did you cite them in your edits?), then you can alter the article so that instead of stating his side as fact, his side is shown as one of two conflicting views.
If, in fact, you were deleting information that was properly cited just because you believe it was false, the community *was* doing its job.
Yes, that means that Wikipedia is a body of verifiable, but not necessarily objectively true, information. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that, but that's the best overall algorithm that has been worked out thus far.
Do you really believe Ellison hates Microsoft? I do not believe at this level of business feelings matter.
Do you really believe he doesn't? At his level of wealth, I don't believe that he's motivated by strictly business-oriented goals.
Keep in mind we're talking about someone who spent $200M to have a bigger boat than the MicroSoft guy.
My hosting company couldn't figure out how to close the email account without closing the my user account (same name)
The magic incantation to tech support is "Alias it to /dev/null". If that hint doesn't turn the light on, you need a new hosting company.
The guy had a fetish for the article in question because he had some kook bias and watched it like a hawk adding in his garbage all the time. The wiki staff told me to "let the community sort it out" but a month later his garbage was still on the page and they wouldn't do anything about it and I still couldn't revert it out over three times.
How do we know that you're not the kook? How do you know, for that matter? Perhaps the community did sort it out.
I've not yet discovered the algorithm to find the bottom of that stack.
My hunch - which I am unqualified to back up - would be that the brain might link the spectral plot to frequencies if it always occurred in the same area. eg, 440Hz always triggers the same nerve, and a chord always triggers the same set of nerves. The PDA could be anywhere in your field of vision, so the brain would have to interpret the images through visual processing, which is not well suited to handling sound. Perhaps it would be possible by holding the PDA at a fixed distance and fixating on a dot in the middle, but IMO it'll be hard to get consistent signal-to-nerve mapping through the eyes.
I think it might work better having the spectrum represented as touch along some line with enough nerve density to get decent resolution - Perhaps low frequencies all the way down an arm, and then bands of high frequencies along the fingers - though you'd have to compensate for signal propagation delays down the arm. It'd also help that touch has much better temporal resolution than vision.
Prison for drug users is not a nanny state solution
It comes down to defining "nanny state".
If it means "a state which intervenes in individual matters against the free will of the individual", it is a nanny state action; the harshness is irrelevant.
If it means "a state which acts in the best interest of an individual against the individual's free will", then you're right: drug criminalization is just simple, ugly corruption.
This is called the philosophy of science, which is a branch of epistemology. As with all philosophy, it's very contingent on exactly how many things are defined, so I'm adding a lot of links to explain the terminology. This has been beat to death long before we got here, so I'm just summarizing one side of things here.
In any case, knowledge unverified by scientific experimentation is not knowledge at all.
I'm for science as much as anyone on this site, but don't you think that's a bit of an exaggeration? You can't learn ANYTHING except through the scientific method?
Actually, yes. It is a perfectly valid theory of epistemology, common to empirical naturalism. If knowledge is defined as "justified true belief" (a classical definition), and you hold that the scientific method is the only way to strongly fulfill the "justified" criteria, then the scientific method is the only valid means to acquire knowledge. Anything else is a conjecture.
Intuition is the means by which we pick up all those hundreds of subconscious signals that would otherwise slip by. ... the scientific method uses intuition as part of its process.
Absolutely. This is called abductive reasoning. It generates a hypothesis, but not knowledge (as defined above).
using ONLY deduction, try to think of a hypothesis to test for an experiment
"I think, therefore I am.", to paraphrase Descartes. Deductive reasoning generates arguments and consequences (not hypotheses) from a set of premises and logic, and does not require experimentation (so your statement is flawed). The conclusions are only contingent on the truth of the premises and correct application of logic.
If any of this is intriguing, get a book or take a class on epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge). If not, take it on my word that there is a notable body of sane, intelligent, deep thinking people who firmly believe that what you think is an exaggeration, is firmly rooted, solid truth.
It's their own best interest...
You're assuming that they're interested in helping people efficiently use their service. Based on my experiences with government employees, I'd say that many are not.
Dams stop natural sediment flow, resulting in downstream river erosion
Half-baked idea: Why don't they have a gizmo that looks like a giant pool sweep bot, running around the reservoir sucking up sediment and spitting it out downstream of the dam?
I don't dispute the ecological impact of dams, but why isn't this an easy problem to engineer around?
Having done this a while, I've found that large, flat networks actually work quite well. People often bring up all kinds of fears based on folklore from the unswitched hub days, and IMO they just don't apply any more on modern layer 3 switches.
What do you do about broadcast storms?
ACL broadcast default-deny. Broadcast generally isn't needed any more. ARP is proxied by the switch. NetBios broadcast resolution has no place on a large network. Virtually all other niches for broadcast are superseded by multicast these days. If you ever find something that simply *cannot* live without broadcast, you can define a narrow ACL entry to allow it... I've never needed to.
How do you prevent some clown from anywhere in that 100,000 machine cloud from poaching another machine's IP address (either maliciously or by an accidental typo)?
Simple port security (lock IPs to MACs, and lock MACs to ports, both with reasonable timeouts) prevents 99% of these problems. The other 1% is dealt with administratively. If you need a perfect solution, you can tie port access to DHCP or other mechanisms, but it's usually not needed.
Note that dividing into /24's isn't a solution. It just distributes the problem differently.
Subnets and routers were invented for a reason.
Yes, for routing between sites that are not reasonably part of a single flat topology. Using them as a band-aid for the hardware limitations of hubs is no longer necessary.
I would not at all be surprised if AT&T has a clause in the agreement that states Apple must be pro-active in protecting the device
Apple makes something like $18 per month for each iPhone with an active AT&T contract. I speculate that they're perfectly happy enforcing lock-in on their own, and that it won't change until someone else offers them a bigger slice of the pie.
"he never ended up getting murdered" Sounds like the cops were right, he didn't need to carry a gun.
Your criteria for needing to carry a gun is to have been murdered?
which could vary dramatically
Modern ACs are in the 10-12 range. For instance, your 12,000 BTU unit draws 1.1 kW, an EER of 10.9.
As I said above, your 12,000 BTU unit would give an 87 mile range. Try reading your own sig. :)
It's not JUST the belt, no. There are other factors. That's why I went based on BTU's instead of trying to compute how efficient car AC systems really are.
tl;dr version: Car AC's are about 10,000 BTU/h, and a 10,000 BTU/h air conditioner is about 1 kW.
But the car is actually assumed to be taking on much more energy from the sun than your house!
Per unit volume, yes, but the volume is much smaller than the size of room a 8200BTU/h air conditioner serves.
It is not uncommon for ordinary vehicles to have an A/C system which draws as much as five horsepower, or nearly 4kW.
This is true, but automotive AC is a very inefficient, belt-driven system that increases the rotating mass of the engine, sapping power every time you accelerate, and they don't run full time (there's a pressure switch that cuts the system in and out, necessary because the car's AC has to run at any RPM). Let's do some more math for a small car:
Car MPG, highway cruise @ 60 mph (no AC): 36
Car MPG, highway cruise @ 60 mph (AC on): 34
Fuel used per mile for AC: 1/34 - 1/36 = 1/612 gallons of gas
Fuel used per hour for AC: 60 * 1/612 = 5/51 gallons
Energy per gallon of gas: 36.65 kW-h
Energy efficiency of a car engine: 1/3
Energy spent to power AC: 5/51 * 36.65 * 1/3 = ~1.2 kW
I think I'm being generous with the 2 mpg and 1/3 efficient estimates.
In any case, rather than try to compute from horsepower levels on a car-type AC system (which isn't really comparable), I looked up the BTU rating of car AC systems. I found that typical cars have 10,000 BTU/h systems. I figured that 8,200 was probably reasonable for a small car, especially one optimized for energy savings.
If you bump it up to your 12,000 BTU/h example, the car's range is still 87 miles at 30mph.
All this is also assuming that Nissan didn't include some AC use in their mileage estimates. While they want to pump the numbers up, they also don't want their car to be perceived as an overhyped dud, so I'd speculate they're being at least somewhat conservative on the estimate.
AC (also electric) is going to without a doubt cut down on the battery's life
Actually, not that much, unless you drive *really* slowly. The LEAF will have a 24 kW-h battery. The motor gets .24 kW-h/mile[1], and assuming you average 30 mph[2], the AC draws .75kW[3], and you use it 100% of the time, we have (x is hours drive time):
24 kW-h = 30 * .24 * x + .75 * x
[algebra happens]
x =~ 3.0
30mph * 3.0 hours = 90 miles, a 10% hit to overall range.
If they use the AC system as a heat pump instead of a resistive array, range on full heat will be about the same.
Just call up someone and have them bring a bit of gas to make it to the next gas station, but how are you going to move that electric car?
And then, the next gas crunch hits. Everyone's gonna be calling me up to borrow my electric vehicle, but how are you going to move that gas-powered car?
I give a decent percentage chance of this actually occurring for some reason in a closer timeframe than my mean-time-to-oops-dry-tank, which is currently measured in decades.
[1] 100 mile range / 24 kW-h battery
[2] With a crappy 1 hour, 30 mile commute, where you spend good chunk of time cruising the freeway followed by some traffic lights when you get to the city
[3] The amount a 8200 BTU/h window-type air conditioner pulls, which is a reasonable comparable for this size car.
It's time for the English citizens to have a civil war.
You're assuming that the majority of the populace doesn't approve of what's happening.
Stupid is predictable; predictable is learnable; learnable is usable
And that sums up why, no matter how good you make the GUI, I'm going to love the command line forever.
If you buy a stolen ring [....] unknowingly, I'm sure the original owner could get it back as well - as it was not the seller's to sell. Same applies here...
It's not the same at all. Stealing deprives the owner of the item, and therefore when found, the item is returned to the rightful owner. The books in question were produced in violation of copyright, but they were absolutely not stolen.
they won't really have a country left to lead, let alone maintain a military to defend against anything. It still doesn't make any sense for them to use nukes
You're assuming that 1, the leaders are rational actors, and 2, that they would consider a slaughter of their people and destruction of their country to be "losing".
Those assumptions aren't necessarily valid if the leaders are insane or religious.
I partly disagree. Hard to get in to (or out of) is *exactly* the kind of thing you want in a containment breach emergency in a pathogen lab. There are just better ways to accomplish access control than putting it underground, which won't get in the way nearly so much in other kinds of emergencies.