The article has an even better application of a short-range wireless system that doesn't penetrate walls -- networking for servers in the datacenter. Currently I have a 6 node VMware cluster built from discrete 1U servers with about 60 network interconnects (including intra-cluster communications, but also connections to the core network and SAN network) Ok, so all are 1Gig and it would take a fraction of that in 10Gig connections and a blade center would help too, but the cluster was built before 10Gig was cost effective.
100Gbit wireless sure would make the datacenter neater.
When dealing with semiconductors, it's likely that lower voltage means less power, but not guaranteed.
Except with high switching frequencies, higher voltage always means more waste heat.
The higher power usage of a Core i7 is a result of it having significantly more transistors than a Pentium Pro CPU. The fabrication scale and methods of the Pentium Pro CPU would use considerably more than 125W, if scaled up to match a Core i7. Vice versa, the Core i7 technology would use less than 35W, if scaled down to the number of transistors a Pentium Pro had.
Why did you cut out the part where I said that the Core i7 had more transistors to replace it with your point that the Core i7 has more transistors? But at least you didn't copy the part where I said 125W is 5 times greater than 35W! I'm surprised no one called me out on that, usually slashdotters are quick to point out typos and trivial mistakes.
In any case, my point was that lower voltage doesn't mean anything. You can't look at voltage alone to make the determination that a new technology will use less power. Maybe the new technology uses more transistors to make it faster or more reliable, so the gain from lower voltage is more than compensated for by having more transistors to power. It's completely conceivable that a new memory technology will use more transistors than an older technology if it can provide more performance or other features with those additional transistors.
If you had two identical pieces of technology, one powered by lower voltage than the other, then you might be able to make the argument that it is guaranteed to have lower power, but as soon as you start comparing different technologies, all bets are off. Lower voltage does not always mean lower power.
That doesn't really matter because you are stupid.
No you are... He/She is right. Turns out IR doesn't go through walls too well.
I thought the stupid part was for not seeing any practical use for a 3Gbit wireless network that doesn't go through walls.
My home computer is in the same room as my Wifi router. And my office computer is within line of sight of the nearest Wifi antenna. My TV, Bluray player and internet modem are all within line of sight, it would be nice to not have to wire them together so I could put the Bluray player next to the couch and have it wirelessly send video to the TV on the other side of the room, and have both able to connect to the internet modem. (ok, both the TV and Bluray player do 801.11g, but I can already buy an internet connection that's faster than that 801.11g - and I pick up interference from a lot of neighbors, I can literally see 37 other 802.11bg Wifi networks from my apartment, I'd be happy to have something with less wall penetration. I can only see 6 Wifi networks operating on 5Ghz, but that's probably more due to market penetration than lower 5Ghz wall penetration)
Infrared? Not exactly wi-fi. You'd have to be in the same room as the router for this to work. I don't see many practical applications.
Then you haven't seen how much it costs to wire an office and provide network ports.... *and* keep it neat "Why do those wires have to come down the wall, why can't they go through the floor? Because I'd have to core through 8" of concrete to do that. Well, just do it, it's only money!" (then the same thing happens next year when the cubes are moved).
If I could hang 4 or 6 of these off the ceiling to provide network coverage to a 40 person open office area, it could be a huge money (and headache) saver. Especially when the cubes are rearranged every year for "efficiency and productivity" (which in some years means squeezing more people into the same, other years it means less people with more space). Even if it means putting an antenna on top of the cube walls or overhead shelves it's still easier than running new wire.
Wifi doesn't provide enough non-overlapping channels to provide good service to many users in a small area - especially when they are copying large media files to/from the corporate fileserver. But if 4 of these could each do 3gbit (with clients load balancing across them automatically), that's already more than the 4Gbit of aggregate bandwidth that this office area has now.
Right now, my FB shows 6 online dating ads (even though I haven't been single for over 5 years)
Your significant other is on FB, right? Maybe FB knows something and is just trying to help you get a head start. Open your eyes, brother.
Funny, and that would be truly scary if true, but no, she's not on FB due to a stalking ex-. Which is probably why FB thinks I want online dating ads since I haven't said "I am in a relationship with xxxx"
I've almost never intentionally click on a FB ad since they are generally not relavant. Right now, my FB shows 6 online dating ads (even though I haven't been single for over 5 years), one ad from Wells Fargo asking me to help write a love letter to San Francisco (what!?) and one Marathon discount ad that might be relevant, but when I clicked on it, the site wanted my email address before it would even show me their site.
I use Google a lot (email and searches), and I typically click on one Google ad a day because their ads are typically quiet relevant to me. If a little creepy - I searched a Chevy Aveo mentioned in an earlier comment, and now my current Gmail ad is from Ford. Creepily relevant.
and that there is no difference between voltage and power.
I don't think you understand the site you linked to. P = I * V -- If power and Voltage are the same, why are they on different sides of the equation?
While it's true that voltage is proportional to power *if* current remains the same, you can't make a blanket statement that a new technology that runs at a lower voltage necessarily uses less power. The old Pentium Pro CPU had a TDP of around 35W with a core voltage of 3.3V, but a new Core i7 can have a TDP of 125W with a core voltage less than 1.5V. Half the voltage, 5 times the power dissipation (and a whole lot more transistors to power)
When dealing with semiconductors, it's likely that lower voltage means less power, but not guaranteed.
Then he needs to get a grip. The same to the anti Microsoft people and everyone else who's "anti" whatever. It's just so... adolescent.
Yeah, people with any sort of idealism should just give it up and go with the flow. Idealism is for adolescents. You have a philosophical problem with Apple? Just get a grip, Apple is not going to go away. You're against religion in schools? Just get a grip, religion in schools is here and is not going away. You think there's not enough religion in schools? Just get a grip, there's never going to be religion in schools and that's not going to change. If you're not satisfied with the status-quo, well, just get a grip because it's never going to change.
Imagine how much better things would be if no one had adolescent idealism and just accepted things as they are even if it goes against their personal beliefs, especially if their idealism is different than my own.
The rates carriers charge for SMS just shows how much strong, strong regulation is needed. If I were in charge, I would mandate that each carrier send a letter to every former and current customer who had pad an SMS fee, stating that the SMS fee represented price gouging because the SMS messages don't actually cost the carrier anything, as well as illegal monopolistic practices, since all the carriers colluded to raises these prices. I would then mandate that each carrier refund any and all SMS fees paid, with the amounts to be multiplied by a factor of 3 as a form of punative relief. I would further change the regulations such that if the carrier ever wanted to apply for spectrum licenses again, they'd need to multiply by a factor of 100 instead of 3.
Of course this would put the carriers out of business, but someone could buy the spectrum and infrastructure in bankruptcy court, and hopefully they'd learn a lesson.
SMS's are only "free" to the carriers in the same way that voice calls are "free" - once they've built the infrastructure, there's no incremental cost to send SMS's (or make a voice call), until the volume exceeds the capacity of the switch.
It doesn't matter if plain text SMS's ride in a control channel that would be there anyway - that control channel wouldn't be there unless the carrier put up a tower, paid for spectrum, etc. And they need to ship those SMS's to the customer who could be anywhere in the country, so that requires additional back end data infrastructure and a database to store and route SMS's. And since users expect to be able to send SMS's to people on other carriers, the carriers have to maintain SMS gateways to exchange messages. No service is perfect, so they will need to support it with customer service reps so when your grandma can't figure out how to reply to your text, she can call the carrier for help. And then there's MMS's (i.e. photo messages, sometimes messages over 160 characters in length).... these do require a data channel on both the sending and receiving end (and additional server infrastructure).
I agree that SMS's are way over priced, but you can't say that they don't cost the carriers anything. And how would you set a "reasonable" SMS fee? McDonalds sells a few cents of sugar-syrup, water, and ice in a cup for $1.29 - is that price gouging? When I go to the ball park, the same Coke costs $3.50. is that price gouging? Should all companies be forced to charge their base cost plus a reasonable markup for profit for all goods and services?
Slashdot on government surveillance: "Piss off, government! Respect my right to privacy!"
Slashdot on Google surveillance: "So what if they archived people's emails and passwords for two years, and their CEO said only criminals have something to hide? They're just a poor, innocent company! Give them more of my personal data, I say."
Yeah, it's funny how geeks on Slashdot can actually differentiate between a private company recording snippets of non-encrypted data broadcast over radio waves by the public, and a concerted effort by the government to create backdoors (and a massive new security vulnerability) to let them do intentional surveillance of citizens. It's almost as if they are two completely separate issues.
(and instead of the public complaining to the Wifi industry for letting AP's default to non-encrypted communications and complaining to web service providers for allowing passwords and other sensitive data to be sent over non SSL connections, they blame Google for capturing the data. If you're sending passwords and other sensitive data in plain text over Wifi, Google is the least of your worries, they're not going to use your captured password to hack into your online bank account).
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."
Thanks to time-dilation as you approach the speed of light, if you can maintain 1G of acceleration, it doesn't take many generations of people to go to very far-flung places. You can travel 1500 light-years to the Orion Nebula in only 30 years of ship time.. Of course 3000 years would have passed on earth by the time you get there. In just 60 years, you can travel 2 million light years. (which an observer on earth would see as 5 million years)
A 1G ship can also be thought of as a (one-way) time-machine. Step inside the ship for a big circular voyage and when you step out 30 years later, 3000 years will have passed on Earth.
It might be private IP (MPLS, Frame relay, etc). Lot's of municipalities build their own private WAN and then have a couple of Internet connections for access to the Internet. This allows you to build and deploy lots of services "On Net" securely. It's very common practice, same as mid-large enterprises.
Of course, with a $22K router (or even a $200 router), it's possible to build a secure VPN network over the public internet, letting you use cheap DSL lines for connectivity....
The only key piece of information you need to know is that they are Cisco routers; that explains everything.
Not really - Cisco may be expensive, but it doesn't need to be *that* expensive. If they really do want to get 5 - 10 years of lifetime out of them, going Cisco is not the worst choice.
You may say "Bah, just buy a Netgear and replace it when it fails", but schools and libraries often don't have the staff to do that, in 2 years their current IT Admin is not going to have any idea how the router was set up by their previous admin.
The article says that the routers were provisioned with T1 cards so they are compatible with the copper T1 lines that the libraries already use for broadband.
Why are they using T1's when DSL could give them faster service for much less cost (unless they are getting some super government T1 discount from the phone company)
I know that a T1 is in theory more reliable (in practice that varies... I've seen DSL lines run for years without a problem while the T1 right next to it has problems every time there's a big rainstorm). In theory a tech is dispatched sooner to fix a T1 line.
Sounds like the CD I received in the mail once, in a plain envelope, with no jewel case, and no padding. More accurately, what I received was shards of a CD.
In general, an unpadded CD should make to you unscathed through the USPS - I've received hundreds of Netflix DVD's through the mail in their plain paper envelopes. I've received a few scratched and unplayable disks, but not a single broken disk.
If a CD needed padding or a jewel case to prevent significant numbers of them from being damaged, Netflix would be using padded envelopes.
If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about? How to rip their disks to avoid the warning?
There must be an enormous cost associated with this - 20 seconds multiplied by every time a DVD is played sounds like a lot of wasted time, and according to ICE, it's not even supposed to deter piracy. So what's the point?
Let me guess... you're not a chemist. Because, if you were, you would know that the hydrogenation process converts unsaturated fats into saturated fats. "Trans fats" are unsaturated fats (seriously, even if you knew nothing about "trans fats", it's clearly on the first paragraph of the wikipedia article).
The problem is not "hydrogenation", it's "partial hydrogenation".
Lucky guess! I am indeed not a chemist!
The very first section of the Wikipedia article on Hydrogenation states:
Hydrogenation of unsaturated fats produces saturated fats and, in some cases, trans fats.
Surely a professional chemist like yourself can fix the Wikipedia article to make it less ambiguous. And there are plenty of otherreferences around that say that transfats from from a Hydrogenation process.
While it may be true, if somewhat pedantic, to claim that only "partially hydrogenation" creates trans fats, it seems that I'm not alone in using "hydrogenation" as a generic term to describe the process.,
And, in the end, the problem is neither "trans fats" nor saturated fats... the problem is that people have no restraint. Our bodies are made to tolerate saturated fats, because we've been having saturated fats for thousands of years (see "butter"). Of couse, if your idea of a nice afternoon is stuffing your face with fatty food, you're bound to get health problems, even if you're having fully-cis unsaturated fats. Both trans fats and saturated fats (like cholesterol) are REQUIRED for normal functioning of your cells: the problem is, again, that people have no fucking restraint.
Wait a second - you say that trans fats are REQUIRED, yet the very Wikipedia article that you told me I'm too lazy to read says "Their recommendations are based on two key facts. First, "trans fatty acids are not essential and provide no known benefit to human health",[1] whether of animal or plant origin". Did you even read the shit that you told me to read? That particular quote came from the National Academy of Sciences.
You may as well save your money because that $200 whole house surge protector isn't going to protect you from a lightning strike any better than a good quality surge protecting power strip.
Just use surge protectors where needed that have an equipment replacement guarantee - and make sure you're protecting phone lines, TV cables, etc too, not just power.
If you have something truly expensive to protect, use an online ups (not line interactive) for more isolation - a lightning strike might take out your UPS, but is less likely to reach your computer (but if it's a nearby strike, all bets are off since even your ground can be a path for a power surge).
Or, just throw caution to the wind - I spent 10 years in a lightning prone area, and never used a surge protector at all -- lightning made the lights flicker many times, but I never lost a computer, TV, or stereo (or any other device) to a lightning strike. On the other hand, I saw the aftermath of a nearby strike on a friends house - lightning hit a nearby power pole, and he said he saw sparks shooting from his outlets. He did lose his TV and stereo (which were both plugged in but powered off by a physical switch at the time).
It is one thing to bleat in the press about global warming, which is happening to every planet in the solar system, and another thing to blame global warming only on mankind. Let's ignore the one factor that makes the most sense for every every planet in our solar system, changes in the Sun. Let's cripple all of the economies of the developed world, and send our wealth to the international banksters as penance for not being "carbon-neutral". It's not as if the international banksters, or Al Gore, don't have enough of our money already.
What changes in the sun? Solar irradiance varies from around 1365.5 to around 1366.5 W/m^2 in a regular cycle. Are you saying that this.07% variation in solar irradiance is the cause of global warming?
Why does deploying new more efficient technology need to cripple economies? Even if you ignore climate change, there's still the uncomfortable fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource and while they may never truly run out, they will become increasingly expensive to extract. So maybe we're ok for 50 years, 100 years, maybe even 150 years, but it's cheaper and easier to implement efficiency changes sooner rather than later - much better to do it while energy is relatively cheap than to wait until energy prices have gone up to twice (or 10 times) what we're paying now.
It's true that significant reduction in fossil fuel use will be expensive and can't happen overnight - it will take decades, but if we never get started, we'll never get there. Imagine if the train era had never ended in this country, and cities and towns were built around the trains - public transit would be much more affordable than trying to serve sprawling suburbs.
I don't think the layperson fears "chemicals", so much as artificially produced and altered chemicals that are in our food.
It's not the chemicals (or the elements) themselves that are feared, but what they do to our body -- and the lack of disclosure about what they are doing. Look how long it took to get the trans-fat containing partially hydrogenated vegetable oil removed from our food (which wasn't even removed, but when manufacturers had to report trans-fat grams, suddenly hydrogenated oils weren't so necessary for many of their products).
So even that innocuous hydrogen that is so important to basic life can become a threat when combined with other chemicals.
Of course, the Hindenburg disaster gives another reason to fear "harmless" hydrogen. (ok ok, so maybe it was the fabric shell covered with incendiary paint that triggered the disaster, but the 200,000 cubic meters of flammable hydrogen didn't help).
It should be trivial to keep the transmitters running but to stop routing calls. All incoming calls are not getting through, all outgoing calls report "busy" or "no answer."
But my detonator sends a request to a remote server which is supposed to sign the reply using a symmetric cryptographic key whose paired key resides on the detonator. If if doesn't get a correctly signed response after trying for several minutes, the detonator explodes.
If I don't want to buy a data plan for my detonator phone, it can use text messages or DTMF phones over a voice call to contact the other computer.
You are a twit. Mobile devices are routinely used as detonators, also mobile access./data is not a 'right' but a service you purchase. What are you going to do? crowdsource your threat analysis?
What happens when the mobile device is set to explode when it loses connectivity?
Slashdot Mirror
The article has an even better application of a short-range wireless system that doesn't penetrate walls -- networking for servers in the datacenter. Currently I have a 6 node VMware cluster built from discrete 1U servers with about 60 network interconnects (including intra-cluster communications, but also connections to the core network and SAN network) Ok, so all are 1Gig and it would take a fraction of that in 10Gig connections and a blade center would help too, but the cluster was built before 10Gig was cost effective.
100Gbit wireless sure would make the datacenter neater.
When dealing with semiconductors, it's likely that lower voltage means less power, but not guaranteed.
Except with high switching frequencies, higher voltage always means more waste heat.
The higher power usage of a Core i7 is a result of it having significantly more transistors than a Pentium Pro CPU. The fabrication scale and methods of the Pentium Pro CPU would use considerably more than 125W, if scaled up to match a Core i7. Vice versa, the Core i7 technology would use less than 35W, if scaled down to the number of transistors a Pentium Pro had.
Why did you cut out the part where I said that the Core i7 had more transistors to replace it with your point that the Core i7 has more transistors? But at least you didn't copy the part where I said 125W is 5 times greater than 35W! I'm surprised no one called me out on that, usually slashdotters are quick to point out typos and trivial mistakes.
In any case, my point was that lower voltage doesn't mean anything. You can't look at voltage alone to make the determination that a new technology will use less power. Maybe the new technology uses more transistors to make it faster or more reliable, so the gain from lower voltage is more than compensated for by having more transistors to power. It's completely conceivable that a new memory technology will use more transistors than an older technology if it can provide more performance or other features with those additional transistors.
If you had two identical pieces of technology, one powered by lower voltage than the other, then you might be able to make the argument that it is guaranteed to have lower power, but as soon as you start comparing different technologies, all bets are off. Lower voltage does not always mean lower power.
That doesn't really matter because you are stupid.
No you are... He/She is right. Turns out IR doesn't go through walls too well.
I thought the stupid part was for not seeing any practical use for a 3Gbit wireless network that doesn't go through walls.
My home computer is in the same room as my Wifi router. And my office computer is within line of sight of the nearest Wifi antenna. My TV, Bluray player and internet modem are all within line of sight, it would be nice to not have to wire them together so I could put the Bluray player next to the couch and have it wirelessly send video to the TV on the other side of the room, and have both able to connect to the internet modem. (ok, both the TV and Bluray player do 801.11g, but I can already buy an internet connection that's faster than that 801.11g - and I pick up interference from a lot of neighbors, I can literally see 37 other 802.11bg Wifi networks from my apartment, I'd be happy to have something with less wall penetration. I can only see 6 Wifi networks operating on 5Ghz, but that's probably more due to market penetration than lower 5Ghz wall penetration)
Infrared? Not exactly wi-fi. You'd have to be in the same room as the router for this to work. I don't see many practical applications.
Then you haven't seen how much it costs to wire an office and provide network ports.... *and* keep it neat "Why do those wires have to come down the wall, why can't they go through the floor? Because I'd have to core through 8" of concrete to do that. Well, just do it, it's only money!" (then the same thing happens next year when the cubes are moved).
If I could hang 4 or 6 of these off the ceiling to provide network coverage to a 40 person open office area, it could be a huge money (and headache) saver. Especially when the cubes are rearranged every year for "efficiency and productivity" (which in some years means squeezing more people into the same, other years it means less people with more space). Even if it means putting an antenna on top of the cube walls or overhead shelves it's still easier than running new wire.
Wifi doesn't provide enough non-overlapping channels to provide good service to many users in a small area - especially when they are copying large media files to/from the corporate fileserver. But if 4 of these could each do 3gbit (with clients load balancing across them automatically), that's already more than the 4Gbit of aggregate bandwidth that this office area has now.
Right now, my FB shows 6 online dating ads (even though I haven't been single for over 5 years)
Your significant other is on FB, right? Maybe FB knows something and is just trying to help you get a head start. Open your eyes, brother.
Funny, and that would be truly scary if true, but no, she's not on FB due to a stalking ex-. Which is probably why FB thinks I want online dating ads since I haven't said "I am in a relationship with xxxx"
^^ Why troll? This is kinda funny...
Oftentimes when moderators don't get the joke, they mod the post down.
I've almost never intentionally click on a FB ad since they are generally not relavant. Right now, my FB shows 6 online dating ads (even though I haven't been single for over 5 years), one ad from Wells Fargo asking me to help write a love letter to San Francisco (what!?) and one Marathon discount ad that might be relevant, but when I clicked on it, the site wanted my email address before it would even show me their site.
I use Google a lot (email and searches), and I typically click on one Google ad a day because their ads are typically quiet relevant to me. If a little creepy - I searched a Chevy Aveo mentioned in an earlier comment, and now my current Gmail ad is from Ford. Creepily relevant.
I don't think you understand the site you linked to. P = I * V -- If power and Voltage are the same, why are they on different sides of the equation?
I don't think you understand how equations work.
Is there a general equation where identical variables are presented on both sides? I've never seen:
P = I^2 * R
Written as
P / I = I * R
(unless, of course, I'm solving for something)
Nerds should know Ohms law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohm's_law
and that there is no difference between voltage and power.
I don't think you understand the site you linked to. P = I * V -- If power and Voltage are the same, why are they on different sides of the equation?
While it's true that voltage is proportional to power *if* current remains the same, you can't make a blanket statement that a new technology that runs at a lower voltage necessarily uses less power. The old Pentium Pro CPU had a TDP of around 35W with a core voltage of 3.3V, but a new Core i7 can have a TDP of 125W with a core voltage less than 1.5V. Half the voltage, 5 times the power dissipation (and a whole lot more transistors to power)
When dealing with semiconductors, it's likely that lower voltage means less power, but not guaranteed.
If you are anti apple, ...
Then he needs to get a grip. The same to the anti Microsoft people and everyone else who's "anti" whatever. It's just so ... adolescent.
Yeah, people with any sort of idealism should just give it up and go with the flow. Idealism is for adolescents. You have a philosophical problem with Apple? Just get a grip, Apple is not going to go away. You're against religion in schools? Just get a grip, religion in schools is here and is not going away. You think there's not enough religion in schools? Just get a grip, there's never going to be religion in schools and that's not going to change. If you're not satisfied with the status-quo, well, just get a grip because it's never going to change.
Imagine how much better things would be if no one had adolescent idealism and just accepted things as they are even if it goes against their personal beliefs, especially if their idealism is different than my own.
https://www.google.com/voice
The rates carriers charge for SMS just shows how much strong, strong regulation is needed. If I were in charge, I would mandate that each carrier send a letter to every former and current customer who had pad an SMS fee, stating that the SMS fee represented price gouging because the SMS messages don't actually cost the carrier anything, as well as illegal monopolistic practices, since all the carriers colluded to raises these prices. I would then mandate that each carrier refund any and all SMS fees paid, with the amounts to be multiplied by a factor of 3 as a form of punative relief. I would further change the regulations such that if the carrier ever wanted to apply for spectrum licenses again, they'd need to multiply by a factor of 100 instead of 3.
Of course this would put the carriers out of business, but someone could buy the spectrum and infrastructure in bankruptcy court, and hopefully they'd learn a lesson.
SMS's are only "free" to the carriers in the same way that voice calls are "free" - once they've built the infrastructure, there's no incremental cost to send SMS's (or make a voice call), until the volume exceeds the capacity of the switch.
It doesn't matter if plain text SMS's ride in a control channel that would be there anyway - that control channel wouldn't be there unless the carrier put up a tower, paid for spectrum, etc. And they need to ship those SMS's to the customer who could be anywhere in the country, so that requires additional back end data infrastructure and a database to store and route SMS's. And since users expect to be able to send SMS's to people on other carriers, the carriers have to maintain SMS gateways to exchange messages. No service is perfect, so they will need to support it with customer service reps so when your grandma can't figure out how to reply to your text, she can call the carrier for help. And then there's MMS's (i.e. photo messages, sometimes messages over 160 characters in length).... these do require a data channel on both the sending and receiving end (and additional server infrastructure).
I agree that SMS's are way over priced, but you can't say that they don't cost the carriers anything. And how would you set a "reasonable" SMS fee? McDonalds sells a few cents of sugar-syrup, water, and ice in a cup for $1.29 - is that price gouging? When I go to the ball park, the same Coke costs $3.50. is that price gouging? Should all companies be forced to charge their base cost plus a reasonable markup for profit for all goods and services?
Slashdot on government surveillance: "Piss off, government! Respect my right to privacy!"
Slashdot on Google surveillance: "So what if they archived people's emails and passwords for two years, and their CEO said only criminals have something to hide? They're just a poor, innocent company! Give them more of my personal data, I say."
Yeah, it's funny how geeks on Slashdot can actually differentiate between a private company recording snippets of non-encrypted data broadcast over radio waves by the public, and a concerted effort by the government to create backdoors (and a massive new security vulnerability) to let them do intentional surveillance of citizens. It's almost as if they are two completely separate issues.
(and instead of the public complaining to the Wifi industry for letting AP's default to non-encrypted communications and complaining to web service providers for allowing passwords and other sensitive data to be sent over non SSL connections, they blame Google for capturing the data. If you're sending passwords and other sensitive data in plain text over Wifi, Google is the least of your worries, they're not going to use your captured password to hack into your online bank account).
An "Enterprise-type" starship is a misnomer at best. An ion drive to get to even the closest star would have to be a "generation" ship. It would take generations of people, born, liviing, dying, to reach the nearest stars.
The alternative would be some sort of 2001-type hibernation, which also would not be anything like the Enterprise.
"Beam me up Scottie, there's no intelligent life in this article."
Thanks to time-dilation as you approach the speed of light, if you can maintain 1G of acceleration, it doesn't take many generations of people to go to very far-flung places. You can travel 1500 light-years to the Orion Nebula in only 30 years of ship time.. Of course 3000 years would have passed on earth by the time you get there. In just 60 years, you can travel 2 million light years. (which an observer on earth would see as 5 million years)
A 1G ship can also be thought of as a (one-way) time-machine. Step inside the ship for a big circular voyage and when you step out 30 years later, 3000 years will have passed on Earth.
It might be private IP (MPLS, Frame relay, etc). Lot's of municipalities build their own private WAN and then have a couple of Internet connections for access to the Internet. This allows you to build and deploy lots of services "On Net" securely. It's very common practice, same as mid-large enterprises.
Of course, with a $22K router (or even a $200 router), it's possible to build a secure VPN network over the public internet, letting you use cheap DSL lines for connectivity....
The only key piece of information you need to know is that they are Cisco routers; that explains everything.
Not really - Cisco may be expensive, but it doesn't need to be *that* expensive. If they really do want to get 5 - 10 years of lifetime out of them, going Cisco is not the worst choice.
You may say "Bah, just buy a Netgear and replace it when it fails", but schools and libraries often don't have the staff to do that, in 2 years their current IT Admin is not going to have any idea how the router was set up by their previous admin.
The article says that the routers were provisioned with T1 cards so they are compatible with the copper T1 lines that the libraries already use for broadband.
Why are they using T1's when DSL could give them faster service for much less cost (unless they are getting some super government T1 discount from the phone company)
I know that a T1 is in theory more reliable (in practice that varies... I've seen DSL lines run for years without a problem while the T1 right next to it has problems every time there's a big rainstorm). In theory a tech is dispatched sooner to fix a T1 line.
Sounds like the CD I received in the mail once, in a plain envelope, with no jewel case, and no padding. More accurately, what I received was shards of a CD.
In general, an unpadded CD should make to you unscathed through the USPS - I've received hundreds of Netflix DVD's through the mail in their plain paper envelopes. I've received a few scratched and unplayable disks, but not a single broken disk.
If a CD needed padding or a jewel case to prevent significant numbers of them from being damaged, Netflix would be using padded envelopes.
If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about? How to rip their disks to avoid the warning?
There must be an enormous cost associated with this - 20 seconds multiplied by every time a DVD is played sounds like a lot of wasted time, and according to ICE, it's not even supposed to deter piracy. So what's the point?
Let me guess... you're not a chemist. Because, if you were, you would know that the hydrogenation process converts unsaturated fats into saturated fats. "Trans fats" are unsaturated fats (seriously, even if you knew nothing about "trans fats", it's clearly on the first paragraph of the wikipedia article).
The problem is not "hydrogenation", it's "partial hydrogenation".
Lucky guess! I am indeed not a chemist!
The very first section of the Wikipedia article on Hydrogenation states:
Hydrogenation of unsaturated fats produces saturated fats and, in some cases, trans fats.
Surely a professional chemist like yourself can fix the Wikipedia article to make it less ambiguous. And there are plenty of other references around that say that transfats from from a Hydrogenation process.
While it may be true, if somewhat pedantic, to claim that only "partially hydrogenation" creates trans fats, it seems that I'm not alone in using "hydrogenation" as a generic term to describe the process.,
And, in the end, the problem is neither "trans fats" nor saturated fats... the problem is that people have no restraint. Our bodies are made to tolerate saturated fats, because we've been having saturated fats for thousands of years (see "butter"). Of couse, if your idea of a nice afternoon is stuffing your face with fatty food, you're bound to get health problems, even if you're having fully-cis unsaturated fats. Both trans fats and saturated fats (like cholesterol) are REQUIRED for normal functioning of your cells: the problem is, again, that people have no fucking restraint.
Wait a second - you say that trans fats are REQUIRED, yet the very Wikipedia article that you told me I'm too lazy to read says "Their recommendations are based on two key facts. First, "trans fatty acids are not essential and provide no known benefit to human health",[1] whether of animal or plant origin". Did you even read the shit that you told me to read? That particular quote came from the National Academy of Sciences.
You may as well save your money because that $200 whole house surge protector isn't going to protect you from a lightning strike any better than a good quality surge protecting power strip.
Just use surge protectors where needed that have an equipment replacement guarantee - and make sure you're protecting phone lines, TV cables, etc too, not just power.
If you have something truly expensive to protect, use an online ups (not line interactive) for more isolation - a lightning strike might take out your UPS, but is less likely to reach your computer (but if it's a nearby strike, all bets are off since even your ground can be a path for a power surge).
Or, just throw caution to the wind - I spent 10 years in a lightning prone area, and never used a surge protector at all -- lightning made the lights flicker many times, but I never lost a computer, TV, or stereo (or any other device) to a lightning strike. On the other hand, I saw the aftermath of a nearby strike on a friends house - lightning hit a nearby power pole, and he said he saw sparks shooting from his outlets. He did lose his TV and stereo (which were both plugged in but powered off by a physical switch at the time).
It is one thing to bleat in the press about global warming, which is happening to every planet in the solar system, and another thing to blame global warming only on mankind. Let's ignore the one factor that makes the most sense for every every planet in our solar system, changes in the Sun. Let's cripple all of the economies of the developed world, and send our wealth to the international banksters as penance for not being "carbon-neutral". It's not as if the international banksters, or Al Gore, don't have enough of our money already.
What changes in the sun? Solar irradiance varies from around 1365.5 to around 1366.5 W/m^2 in a regular cycle. Are you saying that this .07% variation in solar irradiance is the cause of global warming?
Why does deploying new more efficient technology need to cripple economies? Even if you ignore climate change, there's still the uncomfortable fact that fossil fuels are a finite resource and while they may never truly run out, they will become increasingly expensive to extract. So maybe we're ok for 50 years, 100 years, maybe even 150 years, but it's cheaper and easier to implement efficiency changes sooner rather than later - much better to do it while energy is relatively cheap than to wait until energy prices have gone up to twice (or 10 times) what we're paying now.
It's true that significant reduction in fossil fuel use will be expensive and can't happen overnight - it will take decades, but if we never get started, we'll never get there. Imagine if the train era had never ended in this country, and cities and towns were built around the trains - public transit would be much more affordable than trying to serve sprawling suburbs.
I don't think the layperson fears "chemicals", so much as artificially produced and altered chemicals that are in our food.
It's not the chemicals (or the elements) themselves that are feared, but what they do to our body -- and the lack of disclosure about what they are doing. Look how long it took to get the trans-fat containing partially hydrogenated vegetable oil removed from our food (which wasn't even removed, but when manufacturers had to report trans-fat grams, suddenly hydrogenated oils weren't so necessary for many of their products).
So even that innocuous hydrogen that is so important to basic life can become a threat when combined with other chemicals.
Of course, the Hindenburg disaster gives another reason to fear "harmless" hydrogen. (ok ok, so maybe it was the fabric shell covered with incendiary paint that triggered the disaster, but the 200,000 cubic meters of flammable hydrogen didn't help).
It should be trivial to keep the transmitters running but to stop routing calls. All incoming calls are not getting through, all outgoing calls report "busy" or "no answer."
But my detonator sends a request to a remote server which is supposed to sign the reply using a symmetric cryptographic key whose paired key resides on the detonator. If if doesn't get a correctly signed response after trying for several minutes, the detonator explodes.
If I don't want to buy a data plan for my detonator phone, it can use text messages or DTMF phones over a voice call to contact the other computer.
You are a twit. Mobile devices are routinely used as detonators, also mobile access./data is not a 'right' but a service you purchase. What are you going to do? crowdsource your threat analysis?
What happens when the mobile device is set to explode when it loses connectivity?