Except reading the article, I envision the process to be something like what the article says it will and not the sensationalist and completely wrong summary.
- You set up your printer, and you're done setting up your printer. No ads will be attached to articles, because you won't get any articles.
- If you decide you want articles, you log into Yahoo! and ask for Yahoo! to monitor for certain articles and send them to your printer. You probably accept a EULA that allows ass-raping by noodly appendages riding ponies.
- Your printer starts printing out the articles you've asked for. In addition to the ads the article's authors have requested, Yahoo! inserts an ad to pay for the newsfeed service.
I know, I know, I read and comprehended the article, which is against Slashdot rules.
If the summary had been about Yahoo!'s home page, which has been showing ads to pay for the news articles for years, people would be under the impression that evil advertisers would be sneaking into their homes and tattooing ads on their fucking eyeballs.
So here's the headline that should have been:
"HP and Yahoo! offer ad-supported opt-in hardcopy news printing service for people too lazy to hit PRINT."
You can easily disable this feature. It's opt-in. Disable it by not opting in. See? Wasn't that easy?
Seriously, is the article that complicated? you have to log into Yahoo's page, ask for content, and the content will be delivered as you ask for it, and Yahoo! will add an advert so they can justify setting up the system that automatically delivers the articles to you.
Personally, I think the idea is asinine - I prefer my articles on-screen and I hate the idea of printing out everything I want to read on paper.
But no one will be sneaking into your house and making your printer print anything you don't ask for.
One possible solution: Just tell people that in a modern technological society we depend on a lot of tech to work continuously for our comfort and convenience and the delivery of our necessities, and the more interconnected and complex that technology gets, the higher the chances that someone or something can interfere with it. The more we become dependent on that technology, the higher the changes that an interruption to it could cause loss of comfort, convenience, and even reductions in necessities.
We don't need to be screamed at about specific threats, just made aware of the complexity of the infrastructure that makes it possible for each of us to live where we do.
If you live in the city and use a public utility for heat and cooking, go to the corner market every day for your daily vittles and use city-supplied tapwater, you may want to think about what happens if there's a 3 or 4 day interruption that could cause that store to run out of stuff and the tapwater to be contaminated or stop, and the utilitiues to stop working. How will you stay warm? How will you get enough food and water? Got some space in a closet? Throw a few good blankets in there. Buy some extra canned food, and keep a few gallons of water in containers that you cycle through frequently so it's fresh. That's all it really takes.
Suburbanite? Basically the same deal, except you probably have more food on hand (but are probably more remote from your water and power supply, so the chances of contamination or failure increase). Same basic advice, though.
Rural? Well, most of us get power outages all the time anyway. My house is rigged specifically to drain all the water out of the pipes if needed, and I've got a dug shallow well I can dip for water if I get thirsty. I've got backup heat, and lots of preserved food because I can stuff from the garden each fall. In the winter, I keep a few spare cans of gasoline for the truck, some extra water in the house to save the hassle of dipping the well, and my propane grill has a burner so I can cook food and heat up water if I need to.
I could also get a small generator to keep the furnace going, but it just seems silly for the 5-10 days a year we are usually without power. Of course, when those days happen in the middle of the winter and the temps get down well below freezing with a wind, I frequently reconsider that decision.:)
The point is, if you're prepared for a week of complete loss of services, you're done. It doesn't matter WHY the services go away, it only matters that you have food, water, and warmth so you can muddle through until help can be organized and sent your way. Might be a good idea to keep a good quality backpack around in case you need to make that food and water supply mobile in a hurry (flooding, incoming hurricane, etc).
As I understand it from previous articles I've read, the last minimum WAS unusually long and unusually quiet. Based on what little data mankind has, this is associated with a much stronger and longer maximum when the minimum finally ends. I think it's also well worth noting that this article appears to be based on NASA's 2006 predictions, and NOAA did a prediction in 2009 that calls for a much lighter maximum. Of course, they are all predictions. The next cycle will give us better data about what to expect after a long and extreme minimum. Or it will give us some anomalous data that will be disproved long after we're all dead. Isn't prediction fun?????
But just as important as the magnitude, we've added a lot of new stuff since the last cycle in 2001, and a lot of our newest technology (3G, 4G, the very latest high density memory, etc) is all too new to have been subjected to a real-life maximum. I think it's very reasonable to expect some disruption of electric power, almost certainly some interruption of wireless communications, and maybe some corruption of some small amount of storage is even possible though probably not likely.
No one can claim to know for sure, of course, so being prepared is always a good idea. Even if you don't want to throw more research money at it, backing up your data to multiple media, shielding your backups, and maybe keeping a few extra cans of your favorite soup or whatever you like for preserved food and particularly some fresh water on hand wouldn't hurt anything. No need to panic or run screaming for the hills, but it's inexpensive, convenient, and very rational to be prepared for a possible increase in power and communication outages over the next few years. If nothing happens, hey, you've got soup!
Plus, a little extra food and water tucked away could come in handy for a lot of other reasons. Hurricanes, snowstorms, some asshole running a 747 into a major power line by accident, temporarily out of work, or of course the impending zombie invasion (you may want to find some canned brains, just in case zombies will settle for that for a while).
It all depends. If you set the nest on fire instead of vaporizing specific hornets, the hornets might have a decent bit flight time left when they leave the nest in flames, and they'll have a WHOLE LOT of pissed-off.
Wow, I'll have to pass that along. My mother lives in the beige area in Maine, in a rural coastal community east of Bangor.
When DTV went live (or Analog TV went dead, whichever you prefer), Dish was only offering a $10-12 "network" service. It used Portland for one of the affiliates, Southern NH for one other, the remainder were "Superstations" out of New York City and Atlanta. None of the Bangor stations were represented at all.
And they could only buy the local package on top of another package that cost $25 a month and came with a bunch of stations they didn't want, so the total came to about $30-35, plus taxes.
Their web site now implies it's even better than you just said (that may vary based on area). I'm pleased to see they have a $5.99 local plan that appears it can be purchased completely a'la carte. I don't see any fine print that requires a larger purchase, but then again I don't run Flash on my work computer so I can't pretend to order it.:)
If that's true, there are a bunch of people up there who should be reaching the end of their first contract year soon who may be able to drop to $6 a month. That'll be some happy news .
And when your viewing population already had the largest antennas available, an inline booster, a rotator, and a 20-foot mast, and even then got an imperfect signal, they're just screwed.
The trouble is that the FCC wanted to auction off these frequencies to companies to raise money and to enable new services, which is all well and good.
The converter program was already controversial in terms of the amount of money it cost, and roundly criticized in rural circles because the new digital stations tend to broadcast using just enough power to reach their majority markets (the people who are largely already on cable anyway, because it's available there). Add to that the fact that digital signals just vanish below a threshold where analog is still very viewable, and you lose a lot of viewers.
But not enough to make it worthwhile to turn the transmitter power up.
If you offered them decent-speed Internet, many of them couldn't afford to take advantage of it anyway. So pipe in all the 3G you want, by the time you offer them a tethered connection at $60 a month, a lot of them would have to decide between news and food. Food wins.
Dialup would abound in areas like that, if the folks had the money to buy a computer and the $15 a month for an account, assuming anyone offered it that cheaply out in the sticks. I've offered up more than one computer, only to see it never turned on because dialup is $20-30 a month and limited to 28.8k due to overloaded phone lines, satellite is even more expensive, and Cable or DSL are a distant dream available miles away.
TV had the advantage of being free (for the consumer, at least), and faster than the delayed delivery of the newspaper.
Who has the incentive, the will, and the resources to serve this population? Who wants to use even part of the money the government made selling off the spectrum used to give the vast minority (rural elderly on fixed income) their TV back?
Most of them probably just pick up a newspaper on their weekly grocery run now and fall further out of touch on the daily news. And it's hard to justify spending a lot of money to get them back to the flashy high technology they depended on in the 1970s.
True, but if you have the Internet to get your news and weather, and Hulu to get your TV shows, you really haven't given anything up.
I bet you're also probably in an area where the newspaper is delivered daily.
Live in a rural farming area where the Internet doesn't exist and the newspaper is delivered via USPS two days late and an extra half-buck a paper, then we'll talk about how unimportant OTA TV is.
Ask around. I'm sure there's some neighbor or other who bought a converter and either discovered it didn't work for shit and went Satellite or Cable or realized that since they were already on Cable TV they don't need it anyway.
A $2 6-pack of beer will probably net you one nowadays. But if you want to make a friend, spend a few bucks extra and get the good stuff.:)
She didn't get better reception. What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed.
Then she's one of the lucky ones.
My mother spent some money on upgrading her TV instead of doing the subsidized tuner box, and went from four channels (three clear, one slightly fuzzy) down to one VERY clear channel (Public TV, with a.2 channel that shows exactly the same thing as the.1! Yay!), one that's OK and gives her the news and weather plus some sort of 24-hour teen angst.2, and one channel that is basically unviewable due to a 3-4 second breakup every ten seconds or so (in other words, not as viewable as even a fuzzy analog signal). Of course, the channel she enjoyed the most is the one she lost entirely.
Several of her neighbors spent money on the converter boxes to get nothing, where they had three or four viewable channels beforehand. You can add at least a dozen people I know to the list of "got their subsidized converters, and aren't using them".
Because in rural areas (where the Internet basically does not exist, newspapers are delivered via postal mail a day or two late, and TV is THE information lifeline for up-to-date news and weather, and the freed-up frequencies will never ever be used for anything anyway), digital TV sucks.
Satellite dishes sprung up everywhere during the conversion, though a lot of them have been taken down once people realize the "local channels" they got were 150 miles further away than the old "local channels" they used to get, and spending $30 a month to get the news and weather from 250 miles away just doesn't make sense.
Based on its measurements, an Atom chip can deliver half the performance of a Xeon processor for a sixth of the power, says SeaMicro.
A lot of this depends on what aspect of "performance" an Atom can do half the work as a Xeon for 1/6 the power. Continuing on in the same article:
SeaMicro’s Atom-based servers, though, are not for everyone. They are geared for a very specific kind of server operation–one that involves throwing out a lot of web content, says Braunstein.
So I'd say your answer is "no, no it isn't." Because that's not the kind of server this system appears to be designed for.
If you run a web server that has to retrieve a lot of stuff and render it onto web pages, you are part of this project's target market, and it may someday have a place in your server closet. If you want a massive number crunching superbeast, you probably aren't going to be happy with a beowulf cluster of Atom processors. It's just not built to do that very well.
Oblig. car analogy:
My 50MPG Diesel Jetta is very good at efficiency when hauling people or very small loads, but can't haul large loads or plow my driveway. That's what my 15MPG 8-cylinder pickup truck is for.
If I needed to haul 32 people safely, 4 of my Diesel cars would be an excellent option, as compared to the 16 trucks I'd need.
If I needed to plow my driveway or haul 1/2 ton of gravel, one truck is far more efficient than any number of Diesel cars.
The truck is a Xeon - it handles large nonspecific loads very well and is very flexible in the types of tasks it can perform, but it drinks fuel like a thirsty dog. If I used it to drive to work every day (30-mile round trip, 5 times a week), fuel for that drive would cost me more than my entire Jetta does, including fuel, maintenance, depreciation, taxes, etc.
The car is an Atom. It handles specific types of loads very efficiently, and uses far less fuel, because that's what it's purpose-built to do.
Sure, but one-off prototypes are what get kids fascinated in engineering.
The article talks of fifth-graders (in public school in the US, that translates to about 10-11 years old), at that age you're doing well to keep them interested long enough to complete a one-off and demonstrate that it works, especially in the modern world of passive consumption (TV, video games, etc) calling to them. Having them build a one-off out of Popsicle sticks, string, and duct tape that can lift a 2-pound brick will teach them a lot about material tensile strengths, reinforcement, planning, angles, etc. Most of all, it will teach them that this stuff is way cool, and they'll start experimenting. The ones who start experimenting and remain interested are the ones you choose for an engineering track.
I agree that any applied engineering track should include things like reusing available components whenever possible, emphasizing durability, thinking carefully about ongoing maintenance (eg. don't put consumable or frequently-replaced parts in inaccessible places or make them too hard to remove/repair/replace). I've purchased enough stupid shitty designs (proprietary connectors on digital cameras? In 2010? Really? Seriously?) to agree that you are correct - we need people thinking about cheap mass production, maintainability, and durability.
But an 11-year-old will be fully engaged when he/she has to build something to meet a specific goal. And that usually means a one-off. It's certainly appropriate to emphasize use of standard components (make them available) and to encourage durability in design (make it part of the goal).
By the time you reach a PHD, hopefully you've learned to make and refine designs that are reliable and based on cheaply-available components whenever possible. It's certainly a valid point, and the PHDs that stick purely to one-offs have either slept through some of the most important lessons or they were never offered by their classrooms. But for a 5th grader, you just want to get them thinking about engineering principles, and offer them enough information to explore and want to learn more.
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled. It is a fire to be kindled."
- Plutarch
At 11 years old, we don't want an engineer. We want someone who is excited about engineering and wants to learn more. We want that kid who sets the butter on fire because he just knew he could fix that radio and didn't get the whole AC/DC thing. (OK, that was me, but you get the point, and I was about 12 at the time).
And that's exactly why stories like this, while tiresome, are important.
In order to make an intelligent choice, you need to make an informed choice. The ongoing, tiresome, boring parade of stories serves to demonstrate exactly what you are buying into when you choose an iDevice. If this represents your ideal in a phone/music player/media consumption device, then these stories should be good news for you and reaffirm your choice. If it does not, you can consider it a warning.
Obviously each author has their own bias, but the facts are what you should be paying attention to. Buy anything based on iOS, and you now have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Whether you think of this as a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, and you shouldn't be swayed by the tone or approval/disapproval of the authors of individual articles, because their priorities are not yours.
Whether it represents your ideal or not, it serves as a continual reminder for those about to make a device choice. Some people like the walled garden and like to be protected from images or content they might not want to accidentally encounter. For them, this story represents all that is goodness and light - because Apple has remained true to its principles and has protected them from the threat of seeing a hand-drawn penis in a webcomic.
Neither is the Mac. But let's assume the Mac is just as durable as the 2100, and they both last your supposed three days.
You have a choice of $369 divided by three days ($123 per day) or $900 divided by three days ($300 per day).
Go through the average school year of 180 days at that rate, and the Dells will set you back $22,140.
The Mac? Keep in mind that the $900 represents a discounted price. But, assuming Apple offers the discount to all parents all year long no matter how many purchases they make, that's a cool $54,000.
Silly? Yeah. But so is overspending on something that stands a decent chance of being broken. Personally, I'd go for an MSI Wind or Asus eeePC. Longer battery life, does great on Windows or Linux, and it's light and small enough that I could put it in a pretty durable case and still have it easily portable. And about $300 for a good model.
They most certainly could, and would be well-advised to do so, since it saves everyone licensing costs. But, cost-wise, the difference between Windows and Linux is software cost. That's nothing compared to the "Mac Tax".
I run Linux Mint at home (I'm typing this very post on it, as a matter of fact).:)
Of the three choices, Mac is probably the worst. I mean no offense to Apple in this, they make a great operating system. But it doesn't take a math genius to say that giving a high school student a $900 laptop is a very poor decision when a perfectly adequate learning tool could be had for under $300, or may already be lying around the house.
But, yeah, if the school wants a consistent image to start with, it would actually be a lot cheaper for them to hire someone to make up a Linux distro custom to their school. They have loaner computers for use inside the classroom, imagine if they could buy Asus eeePC netbooks at $300 a pop. If they need 100 loaners, the difference between the $300 eeePCs and MacBooks is, wait for it, about enough to hire an entry-level IT administrator. Which they'll need no matter what anyway.
And what parent wouldn't like to hear "that old Pentium Thinkpad with 256MB RAM? Oh, heck, that'll work just fine, you don't have to spend any money. Boot the old machine to this $5 memory stick and follow the bouncing prompts."
Of course, the real reason is the kickback Apple gives to the school. It's hard to resist forcing parents to buy $900 machines when (guessing) $100 of that goes back into the school budget.
If you pollute public airspace with transmissions using a device that creates an attractive nuisance to devices that are looking for that signal, don't be surprised if devices use it.
"Unlocked door" analogies don't fucking work. Don't you get that. YOU ARE BROADCASTING AN INVITATION TO THE PUBLIC. If you didn't read the 2 cartoon pages that came with your router that warned you about that, that's your problem, not the geeks who did.
Good point, but I would submit the fact that 90% of all people who have a PC have Windows to go with it would be an excellent answer. Yes, the school could also (bad car analogy FTW!) standardize on right-hand-drive vehicles to drive in their parking lot so everyone is driving on the same side of the road, but that's ignoring an underlying standard that pretty much everyone already has a car, and it's probably a left-hand-drive here in the US.
I know standardizing will make the school admin's jobs easier, and I don't think tax dollars should be buying laptops, so as far as this program goes it makes a certain sense. Pick a standard, make the parents buy to that standard, offer in-school loaners for kids who need them.
But if they need to standardize on something it would seem to make sense to standardize on something that most people already have. If you don't already have it, you can get a basic netbook for $250 to run Windows, and a decent laptop for under $500 rather than forcing a high-school student to be responsible for a $900 machine and their parents responsible for replacing it when it gets dropped. I bet Apple won't offer the same deep discounted price of $900 on the MacBook when Little Jimmy drops his first one in December, and his second one in March.
I turn on my WiFi device, and it looks for permission to use a connection. It finds a router which is clearly broadcasting its presence in a public place.
It then asks the router (which has been configured by its owner) for permission to use the network.
The router (which has been configured by its owner) grants permission and hands out an IP address for my device's use.
What part of unauthorized could possibly apply here?
This law simply clarifies the definition of "unauthorized".
Having said that, you miss the point I was trying to make.
If I want to use your open network to sniff out your credit card number, your Facebook account credentials, snoop your open network shares over your open network, there is not a law on the books which is going to technically prevent me from doing so. I'm going to collect that information, and there's about a 99.999% chance no one will ever catch me doing so. Meanwhile, you're in your house thinking the law is somehow keeping you safe. Hint: It isn't.
You might sit in your house thinking the law protects you, but that's a dangerous sense of security. It actually encourages you to run your network "open", because you think the law protects you.
If you want the law to protect your WiFi access point from unauthorized use, then this law is exactly what you want.
It establishes clear guidelines as to what "authorized" means, makes you an active participant in protecting yourself from harm, and sets a foundation that both protects you from evildoers and allows the police to identify truly unauthorized users at the same time.
The document guarantees rights to the citizens and lays out the functions and limitations of government.
The resistance to change is intentional, and utterly vital, because otherwise a simple majority could stomp all over the rights of the minority, and the document would be shredded and rewritten every time we have an election.
The Constitution "guarantees democracy" by limiting the control of the government over the rights of its citizens. One of those limitations is the speed at which the Constitution itself can be changed.
We elect our government, and it takes a lot of our elected leaders following a deliberate process to change the underlying rules which restrain our government's actions.
The fact that it is hard to change is vital to the survival of the democracy itself.
Having said that, the original Constitution as written was written during a very different time. Technology has changed, society has changed, the very definition of a "citizen" has changed (women, people who don't own land, and black people can be full citizens now. Try to imagine that concept coming up during the Constitutional Congress - you'd have been laughed out of the room and probably spend some time in the stocks having rotten vegetables lobbed at you for such nonsense). We've updated the Constitution to fit the new ideals we want to uphold as a nation. And that's exactly as it should be.
So I think reading the Constitution is an exercise in understanding the times during which it was written to understand what the words on paper mean.
And, sometimes, updating the verbiage to reflect and even sometimes modernize the ideals behind it is more important than worship of the actual words as written. But that's why it's hard to change - updates require a deliberate and hopefully thoughtful process. It needs to change, but it needs a certain level of stability and continuity as well.
The people who made up the system were really pretty smart. They had their faults and weaknesses, but the Constitution was a good job.
an open and free information infrastructure can only help in the long run.
... until you get a bunch of people who complain loudly that no one should be allowed to use their open and free access point without permission, and try to get laws passed that (warning: bad analogy) everyone else in earshot has to cover their ears and yell "LALALALALA!" if you want to shout your credit card number onto a cell phone in a crowded train.
This law is a perfect response to the argument that no one should be allowed to access WiFi access points without the owner's express permission - it's establishing a clear permission system so the people who are asking for the protection are assured said protection.
One tweet, man, that's all I need to send. Please, man, it's been hours, and I'm hurtin' real bad. I just need a couple kilobytes, man. Please. Help a guy out?
Slashdot Mirror
Except reading the article, I envision the process to be something like what the article says it will and not the sensationalist and completely wrong summary.
- You set up your printer, and you're done setting up your printer. No ads will be attached to articles, because you won't get any articles.
- If you decide you want articles, you log into Yahoo! and ask for Yahoo! to monitor for certain articles and send them to your printer. You probably accept a EULA that allows ass-raping by noodly appendages riding ponies.
- Your printer starts printing out the articles you've asked for. In addition to the ads the article's authors have requested, Yahoo! inserts an ad to pay for the newsfeed service.
I know, I know, I read and comprehended the article, which is against Slashdot rules.
If the summary had been about Yahoo!'s home page, which has been showing ads to pay for the news articles for years, people would be under the impression that evil advertisers would be sneaking into their homes and tattooing ads on their fucking eyeballs.
So here's the headline that should have been:
"HP and Yahoo! offer ad-supported opt-in hardcopy news printing service for people too lazy to hit PRINT."
You can easily disable this feature. It's opt-in. Disable it by not opting in. See? Wasn't that easy?
Seriously, is the article that complicated? you have to log into Yahoo's page, ask for content, and the content will be delivered as you ask for it, and Yahoo! will add an advert so they can justify setting up the system that automatically delivers the articles to you.
Personally, I think the idea is asinine - I prefer my articles on-screen and I hate the idea of printing out everything I want to read on paper.
But no one will be sneaking into your house and making your printer print anything you don't ask for.
Yet.
One possible solution: Just tell people that in a modern technological society we depend on a lot of tech to work continuously for our comfort and convenience and the delivery of our necessities, and the more interconnected and complex that technology gets, the higher the chances that someone or something can interfere with it. The more we become dependent on that technology, the higher the changes that an interruption to it could cause loss of comfort, convenience, and even reductions in necessities.
We don't need to be screamed at about specific threats, just made aware of the complexity of the infrastructure that makes it possible for each of us to live where we do.
If you live in the city and use a public utility for heat and cooking, go to the corner market every day for your daily vittles and use city-supplied tapwater, you may want to think about what happens if there's a 3 or 4 day interruption that could cause that store to run out of stuff and the tapwater to be contaminated or stop, and the utilitiues to stop working. How will you stay warm? How will you get enough food and water? Got some space in a closet? Throw a few good blankets in there. Buy some extra canned food, and keep a few gallons of water in containers that you cycle through frequently so it's fresh. That's all it really takes.
Suburbanite? Basically the same deal, except you probably have more food on hand (but are probably more remote from your water and power supply, so the chances of contamination or failure increase). Same basic advice, though.
Rural? Well, most of us get power outages all the time anyway. My house is rigged specifically to drain all the water out of the pipes if needed, and I've got a dug shallow well I can dip for water if I get thirsty. I've got backup heat, and lots of preserved food because I can stuff from the garden each fall. In the winter, I keep a few spare cans of gasoline for the truck, some extra water in the house to save the hassle of dipping the well, and my propane grill has a burner so I can cook food and heat up water if I need to.
I could also get a small generator to keep the furnace going, but it just seems silly for the 5-10 days a year we are usually without power. Of course, when those days happen in the middle of the winter and the temps get down well below freezing with a wind, I frequently reconsider that decision. :)
The point is, if you're prepared for a week of complete loss of services, you're done. It doesn't matter WHY the services go away, it only matters that you have food, water, and warmth so you can muddle through until help can be organized and sent your way. Might be a good idea to keep a good quality backpack around in case you need to make that food and water supply mobile in a hurry (flooding, incoming hurricane, etc).
As I understand it from previous articles I've read, the last minimum WAS unusually long and unusually quiet. Based on what little data mankind has, this is associated with a much stronger and longer maximum when the minimum finally ends. I think it's also well worth noting that this article appears to be based on NASA's 2006 predictions, and NOAA did a prediction in 2009 that calls for a much lighter maximum. Of course, they are all predictions. The next cycle will give us better data about what to expect after a long and extreme minimum. Or it will give us some anomalous data that will be disproved long after we're all dead. Isn't prediction fun?????
But just as important as the magnitude, we've added a lot of new stuff since the last cycle in 2001, and a lot of our newest technology (3G, 4G, the very latest high density memory, etc) is all too new to have been subjected to a real-life maximum. I think it's very reasonable to expect some disruption of electric power, almost certainly some interruption of wireless communications, and maybe some corruption of some small amount of storage is even possible though probably not likely.
No one can claim to know for sure, of course, so being prepared is always a good idea. Even if you don't want to throw more research money at it, backing up your data to multiple media, shielding your backups, and maybe keeping a few extra cans of your favorite soup or whatever you like for preserved food and particularly some fresh water on hand wouldn't hurt anything. No need to panic or run screaming for the hills, but it's inexpensive, convenient, and very rational to be prepared for a possible increase in power and communication outages over the next few years. If nothing happens, hey, you've got soup!
Plus, a little extra food and water tucked away could come in handy for a lot of other reasons. Hurricanes, snowstorms, some asshole running a 747 into a major power line by accident, temporarily out of work, or of course the impending zombie invasion (you may want to find some canned brains, just in case zombies will settle for that for a while).
http://www.spaceweather.com/ is an interesting resource for further reading.
Not on the zombie invasion, though. Sorry. That's all hushed up now. Just be ready.
It all depends. If you set the nest on fire instead of vaporizing specific hornets, the hornets might have a decent bit flight time left when they leave the nest in flames, and they'll have a WHOLE LOT of pissed-off.
This is like proposing to have Stephen Hawking at the helm of reconstruction at General Motors..
Man, just think of the cool cars that would roll off the assembly line if that ever happened!
I have that one on my cubicle wall.
"An Alligator-Filled Wall Of Flame" is now part of my normal daily vocabulary.
Wow, I'll have to pass that along. My mother lives in the beige area in Maine, in a rural coastal community east of Bangor.
When DTV went live (or Analog TV went dead, whichever you prefer), Dish was only offering a $10-12 "network" service. It used Portland for one of the affiliates, Southern NH for one other, the remainder were "Superstations" out of New York City and Atlanta. None of the Bangor stations were represented at all.
And they could only buy the local package on top of another package that cost $25 a month and came with a bunch of stations they didn't want, so the total came to about $30-35, plus taxes.
Their web site now implies it's even better than you just said (that may vary based on area). I'm pleased to see they have a $5.99 local plan that appears it can be purchased completely a'la carte. I don't see any fine print that requires a larger purchase, but then again I don't run Flash on my work computer so I can't pretend to order it. :)
If that's true, there are a bunch of people up there who should be reaching the end of their first contract year soon who may be able to drop to $6 a month. That'll be some happy news .
and then finds themselves with a nice attic fire.
I think the part about being swarmed by VERY angry hornets who are on fire would rate pretty high on the suck-o-meter as well.
And when your viewing population already had the largest antennas available, an inline booster, a rotator, and a 20-foot mast, and even then got an imperfect signal, they're just screwed.
But that leads to a very serious question.
And who is going to pay for all this?
The trouble is that the FCC wanted to auction off these frequencies to companies to raise money and to enable new services, which is all well and good.
The converter program was already controversial in terms of the amount of money it cost, and roundly criticized in rural circles because the new digital stations tend to broadcast using just enough power to reach their majority markets (the people who are largely already on cable anyway, because it's available there). Add to that the fact that digital signals just vanish below a threshold where analog is still very viewable, and you lose a lot of viewers.
But not enough to make it worthwhile to turn the transmitter power up.
If you offered them decent-speed Internet, many of them couldn't afford to take advantage of it anyway. So pipe in all the 3G you want, by the time you offer them a tethered connection at $60 a month, a lot of them would have to decide between news and food. Food wins.
Dialup would abound in areas like that, if the folks had the money to buy a computer and the $15 a month for an account, assuming anyone offered it that cheaply out in the sticks. I've offered up more than one computer, only to see it never turned on because dialup is $20-30 a month and limited to 28.8k due to overloaded phone lines, satellite is even more expensive, and Cable or DSL are a distant dream available miles away.
TV had the advantage of being free (for the consumer, at least), and faster than the delayed delivery of the newspaper.
Who has the incentive, the will, and the resources to serve this population? Who wants to use even part of the money the government made selling off the spectrum used to give the vast minority (rural elderly on fixed income) their TV back?
Most of them probably just pick up a newspaper on their weekly grocery run now and fall further out of touch on the daily news. And it's hard to justify spending a lot of money to get them back to the flashy high technology they depended on in the 1970s.
True, but if you have the Internet to get your news and weather, and Hulu to get your TV shows, you really haven't given anything up.
I bet you're also probably in an area where the newspaper is delivered daily.
Live in a rural farming area where the Internet doesn't exist and the newspaper is delivered via USPS two days late and an extra half-buck a paper, then we'll talk about how unimportant OTA TV is.
Ask around. I'm sure there's some neighbor or other who bought a converter and either discovered it didn't work for shit and went Satellite or Cable or realized that since they were already on Cable TV they don't need it anyway.
A $2 6-pack of beer will probably net you one nowadays. But if you want to make a friend, spend a few bucks extra and get the good stuff. :)
She didn't get better reception. What she got was yet another box for me to put in the chain between her television and the antenna attached to the pole shed.
Then she's one of the lucky ones.
My mother spent some money on upgrading her TV instead of doing the subsidized tuner box, and went from four channels (three clear, one slightly fuzzy) down to one VERY clear channel (Public TV, with a .2 channel that shows exactly the same thing as the .1! Yay!), one that's OK and gives her the news and weather plus some sort of 24-hour teen angst .2, and one channel that is basically unviewable due to a 3-4 second breakup every ten seconds or so (in other words, not as viewable as even a fuzzy analog signal). Of course, the channel she enjoyed the most is the one she lost entirely.
Several of her neighbors spent money on the converter boxes to get nothing, where they had three or four viewable channels beforehand. You can add at least a dozen people I know to the list of "got their subsidized converters, and aren't using them".
Because in rural areas (where the Internet basically does not exist, newspapers are delivered via postal mail a day or two late, and TV is THE information lifeline for up-to-date news and weather, and the freed-up frequencies will never ever be used for anything anyway), digital TV sucks.
Satellite dishes sprung up everywhere during the conversion, though a lot of them have been taken down once people realize the "local channels" they got were 150 miles further away than the old "local channels" they used to get, and spending $30 a month to get the news and weather from 250 miles away just doesn't make sense.
From the (Wired) article:
Based on its measurements, an Atom chip can deliver half the performance of a Xeon processor for a sixth of the power, says SeaMicro.
A lot of this depends on what aspect of "performance" an Atom can do half the work as a Xeon for 1/6 the power. Continuing on in the same article:
SeaMicro’s Atom-based servers, though, are not for everyone. They are geared for a very specific kind of server operation–one that involves throwing out a lot of web content, says Braunstein.
So I'd say your answer is "no, no it isn't." Because that's not the kind of server this system appears to be designed for.
If you run a web server that has to retrieve a lot of stuff and render it onto web pages, you are part of this project's target market, and it may someday have a place in your server closet. If you want a massive number crunching superbeast, you probably aren't going to be happy with a beowulf cluster of Atom processors. It's just not built to do that very well.
Oblig. car analogy:
My 50MPG Diesel Jetta is very good at efficiency when hauling people or very small loads, but can't haul large loads or plow my driveway. That's what my 15MPG 8-cylinder pickup truck is for.
If I needed to haul 32 people safely, 4 of my Diesel cars would be an excellent option, as compared to the 16 trucks I'd need.
If I needed to plow my driveway or haul 1/2 ton of gravel, one truck is far more efficient than any number of Diesel cars.
The truck is a Xeon - it handles large nonspecific loads very well and is very flexible in the types of tasks it can perform, but it drinks fuel like a thirsty dog. If I used it to drive to work every day (30-mile round trip, 5 times a week), fuel for that drive would cost me more than my entire Jetta does, including fuel, maintenance, depreciation, taxes, etc.
The car is an Atom. It handles specific types of loads very efficiently, and uses far less fuel, because that's what it's purpose-built to do.
Sure, but one-off prototypes are what get kids fascinated in engineering.
The article talks of fifth-graders (in public school in the US, that translates to about 10-11 years old), at that age you're doing well to keep them interested long enough to complete a one-off and demonstrate that it works, especially in the modern world of passive consumption (TV, video games, etc) calling to them. Having them build a one-off out of Popsicle sticks, string, and duct tape that can lift a 2-pound brick will teach them a lot about material tensile strengths, reinforcement, planning, angles, etc. Most of all, it will teach them that this stuff is way cool, and they'll start experimenting. The ones who start experimenting and remain interested are the ones you choose for an engineering track.
I agree that any applied engineering track should include things like reusing available components whenever possible, emphasizing durability, thinking carefully about ongoing maintenance (eg. don't put consumable or frequently-replaced parts in inaccessible places or make them too hard to remove/repair/replace). I've purchased enough stupid shitty designs (proprietary connectors on digital cameras? In 2010? Really? Seriously?) to agree that you are correct - we need people thinking about cheap mass production, maintainability, and durability.
But an 11-year-old will be fully engaged when he/she has to build something to meet a specific goal. And that usually means a one-off. It's certainly appropriate to emphasize use of standard components (make them available) and to encourage durability in design (make it part of the goal).
By the time you reach a PHD, hopefully you've learned to make and refine designs that are reliable and based on cheaply-available components whenever possible. It's certainly a valid point, and the PHDs that stick purely to one-offs have either slept through some of the most important lessons or they were never offered by their classrooms. But for a 5th grader, you just want to get them thinking about engineering principles, and offer them enough information to explore and want to learn more.
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled. It is a fire to be kindled."
- Plutarch
At 11 years old, we don't want an engineer. We want someone who is excited about engineering and wants to learn more. We want that kid who sets the butter on fire because he just knew he could fix that radio and didn't get the whole AC/DC thing. (OK, that was me, but you get the point, and I was about 12 at the time).
And that's exactly why stories like this, while tiresome, are important.
In order to make an intelligent choice, you need to make an informed choice. The ongoing, tiresome, boring parade of stories serves to demonstrate exactly what you are buying into when you choose an iDevice. If this represents your ideal in a phone/music player/media consumption device, then these stories should be good news for you and reaffirm your choice. If it does not, you can consider it a warning.
Obviously each author has their own bias, but the facts are what you should be paying attention to. Buy anything based on iOS, and you now have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Whether you think of this as a good thing or a bad thing is up to you, and you shouldn't be swayed by the tone or approval/disapproval of the authors of individual articles, because their priorities are not yours.
Whether it represents your ideal or not, it serves as a continual reminder for those about to make a device choice. Some people like the walled garden and like to be protected from images or content they might not want to accidentally encounter. For them, this story represents all that is goodness and light - because Apple has remained true to its principles and has protected them from the threat of seeing a hand-drawn penis in a webcomic.
Neither is the Mac. But let's assume the Mac is just as durable as the 2100, and they both last your supposed three days.
You have a choice of $369 divided by three days ($123 per day) or $900 divided by three days ($300 per day).
Go through the average school year of 180 days at that rate, and the Dells will set you back $22,140.
The Mac? Keep in mind that the $900 represents a discounted price. But, assuming Apple offers the discount to all parents all year long no matter how many purchases they make, that's a cool $54,000.
Silly? Yeah. But so is overspending on something that stands a decent chance of being broken. Personally, I'd go for an MSI Wind or Asus eeePC. Longer battery life, does great on Windows or Linux, and it's light and small enough that I could put it in a pretty durable case and still have it easily portable. And about $300 for a good model.
They most certainly could, and would be well-advised to do so, since it saves everyone licensing costs. But, cost-wise, the difference between Windows and Linux is software cost. That's nothing compared to the "Mac Tax".
I run Linux Mint at home (I'm typing this very post on it, as a matter of fact). :)
Of the three choices, Mac is probably the worst. I mean no offense to Apple in this, they make a great operating system. But it doesn't take a math genius to say that giving a high school student a $900 laptop is a very poor decision when a perfectly adequate learning tool could be had for under $300, or may already be lying around the house.
But, yeah, if the school wants a consistent image to start with, it would actually be a lot cheaper for them to hire someone to make up a Linux distro custom to their school. They have loaner computers for use inside the classroom, imagine if they could buy Asus eeePC netbooks at $300 a pop. If they need 100 loaners, the difference between the $300 eeePCs and MacBooks is, wait for it, about enough to hire an entry-level IT administrator. Which they'll need no matter what anyway.
And what parent wouldn't like to hear "that old Pentium Thinkpad with 256MB RAM? Oh, heck, that'll work just fine, you don't have to spend any money. Boot the old machine to this $5 memory stick and follow the bouncing prompts."
Of course, the real reason is the kickback Apple gives to the school. It's hard to resist forcing parents to buy $900 machines when (guessing) $100 of that goes back into the school budget.
If you pollute public airspace with transmissions using a device that creates an attractive nuisance to devices that are looking for that signal, don't be surprised if devices use it.
"Unlocked door" analogies don't fucking work. Don't you get that. YOU ARE BROADCASTING AN INVITATION TO THE PUBLIC. If you didn't read the 2 cartoon pages that came with your router that warned you about that, that's your problem, not the geeks who did.
Good point, but I would submit the fact that 90% of all people who have a PC have Windows to go with it would be an excellent answer. Yes, the school could also (bad car analogy FTW!) standardize on right-hand-drive vehicles to drive in their parking lot so everyone is driving on the same side of the road, but that's ignoring an underlying standard that pretty much everyone already has a car, and it's probably a left-hand-drive here in the US.
I know standardizing will make the school admin's jobs easier, and I don't think tax dollars should be buying laptops, so as far as this program goes it makes a certain sense. Pick a standard, make the parents buy to that standard, offer in-school loaners for kids who need them.
But if they need to standardize on something it would seem to make sense to standardize on something that most people already have. If you don't already have it, you can get a basic netbook for $250 to run Windows, and a decent laptop for under $500 rather than forcing a high-school student to be responsible for a $900 machine and their parents responsible for replacing it when it gets dropped. I bet Apple won't offer the same deep discounted price of $900 on the MacBook when Little Jimmy drops his first one in December, and his second one in March.
I don't understand, then.
I turn on my WiFi device, and it looks for permission to use a connection. It finds a router which is clearly broadcasting its presence in a public place.
It then asks the router (which has been configured by its owner) for permission to use the network.
The router (which has been configured by its owner) grants permission and hands out an IP address for my device's use.
What part of unauthorized could possibly apply here?
This law simply clarifies the definition of "unauthorized".
Having said that, you miss the point I was trying to make.
If I want to use your open network to sniff out your credit card number, your Facebook account credentials, snoop your open network shares over your open network, there is not a law on the books which is going to technically prevent me from doing so. I'm going to collect that information, and there's about a 99.999% chance no one will ever catch me doing so. Meanwhile, you're in your house thinking the law is somehow keeping you safe. Hint: It isn't.
You might sit in your house thinking the law protects you, but that's a dangerous sense of security. It actually encourages you to run your network "open", because you think the law protects you.
If you want the law to protect your WiFi access point from unauthorized use, then this law is exactly what you want.
It establishes clear guidelines as to what "authorized" means, makes you an active participant in protecting yourself from harm, and sets a foundation that both protects you from evildoers and allows the police to identify truly unauthorized users at the same time.
The document guarantees rights to the citizens and lays out the functions and limitations of government.
The resistance to change is intentional, and utterly vital, because otherwise a simple majority could stomp all over the rights of the minority, and the document would be shredded and rewritten every time we have an election.
The Constitution "guarantees democracy" by limiting the control of the government over the rights of its citizens. One of those limitations is the speed at which the Constitution itself can be changed.
We elect our government, and it takes a lot of our elected leaders following a deliberate process to change the underlying rules which restrain our government's actions.
The fact that it is hard to change is vital to the survival of the democracy itself.
Having said that, the original Constitution as written was written during a very different time. Technology has changed, society has changed, the very definition of a "citizen" has changed (women, people who don't own land, and black people can be full citizens now. Try to imagine that concept coming up during the Constitutional Congress - you'd have been laughed out of the room and probably spend some time in the stocks having rotten vegetables lobbed at you for such nonsense). We've updated the Constitution to fit the new ideals we want to uphold as a nation. And that's exactly as it should be.
So I think reading the Constitution is an exercise in understanding the times during which it was written to understand what the words on paper mean.
And, sometimes, updating the verbiage to reflect and even sometimes modernize the ideals behind it is more important than worship of the actual words as written. But that's why it's hard to change - updates require a deliberate and hopefully thoughtful process. It needs to change, but it needs a certain level of stability and continuity as well.
The people who made up the system were really pretty smart. They had their faults and weaknesses, but the Constitution was a good job.
an open and free information infrastructure can only help in the long run.
... until you get a bunch of people who complain loudly that no one should be allowed to use their open and free access point without permission, and try to get laws passed that (warning: bad analogy) everyone else in earshot has to cover their ears and yell "LALALALALA!" if you want to shout your credit card number onto a cell phone in a crowded train.
This law is a perfect response to the argument that no one should be allowed to access WiFi access points without the owner's express permission - it's establishing a clear permission system so the people who are asking for the protection are assured said protection.
One tweet, man, that's all I need to send. Please, man, it's been hours, and I'm hurtin' real bad. I just need a couple kilobytes, man. Please. Help a guy out?