If there is one single thing that the government SHOULD be spending money on, its the defense of this country. I say, lets take a chunk of the $400 billion that was allocated for free prescription drugs and use that waste of money instead.
If you smoke enough pot, and really think about it for a few minutes, your Voltaire quote is recursive.
I'm sorry that the Ben Franklin quote offends you so much. Unfortunately, you see it a lot these days because there's a lot of personal liberties being stolen by our governments. So, a quote like this brings awareness to the issues surrounding our personal liberties... and it's important, because if we keep allowing our governments to chisel away at our god-given right to live freely as human beings, then who will be there to defend us when the final liberty is removed?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Letter to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1773.
It really amazes me that people think of stuff like this...
They did this by filling the narrow channels of a porous form of glass (called Vycor) with helium, and freezing it by cooling it down and squeezing it to more than 60 times atmospheric pressure. A disk of the helium-filled glass was then set spinning. At about 0.175 C above absolute zero, the disk suddenly started to rotate more easily - precisely what would be expected if the helium became a supersolid.
Holy crap! Who comes up with stuff like this?!?! It reminds me of the great mystery of Maple Syrup, another "who the hell comes up with this stuff" example.
"Well Bob, if I suck the sap out of this here tree, but only at a certain time of year, and then save it up until I have a lot of it, I'm gonna boil it all for a couple of days until it turns into syrup."
Obviously, ancient peoples had a lot of time on their hands, to be able to devise maple syrup. Seems like a lot of random crap. Also seems like us modern peoples have a bit too much time on our hands too, with the supersolid helium and all.
This all seems like a hoax to me, BUT... lets pretend for a moment that it is absolutely true.
If earthquake prediction became the norm, imagine the damage to local economies here in the US!
Imagine this scenario... "Earthquake, 2 months from now, Seattle area".
Ok, what do you, a business owner, do? Pack up and get out. Hell, you've got 2 months to do it.
Ok, what do you, a would-be tourist on vacation, do? Pick an alternate destination.
Ok, what do you, a local citizen, do? Panic. Perhaps pack the family and leave. Perhaps stay and stockpile supplies if your employer hasn't left yet.
I think it's very obvious that natural disaster prediction would be devastating for local and regional economies. In the big picture, as local economies start their own self-destruction, it'll have a bigger effect on the nation as a whole.
Ok, lets just call 'em "banned for now", because we all know that about once each year, one of the big TV networks roll all these commercials up into a 1 hour TV show special in which they proceed to show us these commercials.
These specials are usually dubbed with cutsie names, such as "the world's funniest commercials", or "boobs, too hot for TV"... but the ultimate irony is that they've just con'ed you into watching a WHOLE HOUR of commercials, most of which I'm sure they are compensated for.
Market droids -- start your engines, spin up your beanie propellors -- godspeed.
I think you're missing my point jackass. I'm not comparing my sites to WIKIpedia, nor am I saying that my hardware could run these sites.
The point I AM trying to make is that people overestimate the cost of hardware. My POINT is that it's probably not necessary to invest 20k in new hardware when half that amount could run this thing on MULTIPLE SERVERS at a COLO for a YEAR, EASILY!
My $99/mo server runs all of my sites (snowjournal.com and skimaps.com are only 2 of many sites on that server) and the server doesn't complain. In fact, I could handle 4x or 5x the amount of traffic I have now before I'd have to consider an upgrade. At that point, the traffic would be several million page views per month.
Now, before this turns into a "fuck-me-in-the-ass" session by a bunch of slashdotter jackasses, let me just tell you that Alexa is a piece of junk and doesn't account for the "full story" of a web site. I recently acquired skimaps.com, which was previously a "MAJOR" skiing site, but had been offline for a couple of months. SkiMaps.com has only been back online for 3 weeks. What do you expect.
I'm an independent web publisher producing 3 web sites that generate a fairly large amount of traffic. One thing that I've noticed is the surprise on people's faces when I describe details of my sites and how much they cost to operate in terms of hardware and backbone connection.
Most people are under the impression that it costs a lot of money to handle the physical requirements of high-traffic web sites. The surprise always comes when I tell them that it costs me less than $99 per month to operate the physical equipment... with 1TB allocated transfer on a REAL dedicated server at a colo.
My opinion is that most web operators either aren't resourceful enough, or simply overestimate the costs of operating a web site.
I don't know what WIKIpedia's web traffic looks like, but I tend to think that they could manage to solve their problems on much less than $20k for hardware. Perhaps they should share some info and take a few suggestions from other web operators.
Companies like UnitedColo offer really great service at unbeatable prices! For a couple hundred dollars per month, WIKI could easily go the rented/dedicated server approach rather than worry about building a custom server for the same job.
What's a geek to do when your job gets outsourced?
Become a contractor, duh.
Outsourcing is the biggest trend in the industry right now, and the big losers are going to be the "geeks" who whine about employment. Forget employment... its for sheeple anyway. The winners in this trend are the geeks who are able to sell themselves as consultants/contractors and produce real results.
You'll be better off to recognize where the industry is headed and to go along with it. Become a contractor, get a few clients, and you'll be on your way to personal freedom and job security.
Does anyone else see the inherent flaw in a US do-not-spam registry? Ok... "do not spam me, here's my address". So, the government is establishing a list of valid email addresses.
What happens when somebody pulls the FOIA to obtain the list? What happens when the list is leaked? Great... millions upon millions of valid email addresses could go for a pretty penny to spammers in china. How is this supposed to stop spam, especially when the majority of spam originates from sources foreign to the US?
I'm not defending spam -- my solution is running spamassassin on my mail server. Works perfectly.
I think that if more people would install their own spam filters, we'd reduce the spam market within the US and the amount of spam would decline as spammers would be forced out of business. As a libertarian, I think this approach would be *far* better than a government imposed "solution".
Meanwhile, weather forecasters around the world were puzzled Sunday as access to weather data over the internet crawled to a halt. A Whitehouse representative denied rumors of a terrorist attack on the weather infrastructure.
The mysterious cause of the delays in weather data are under investigation.
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. Urban Terror is an awesome q3 mod... it's practically the only thing I've been playing for the last few weeks. Big plus is that it runs on Q3Linux too.
I think Linux had FAT capabilities BEFORE microsoft patented it in 1995... don't know exactly how this should play out, but it doesn't sound *right* to me.
Ok, first of all... my opinion is that this is a really bad idea for many reasions... I despise government intervention in matters such as this, I despise taxes, and taxing the source of email won't even put a dent in spam. In fact, I think it'll boost spam because US based spammers will simply outsource their operations to China and boost China's spam economy, which is already booming.
Besides the fact that it's a bad idea, if such a tax went into effect, it wouldn't be hard to circumvent it with an alternate "email" system...
When the government taxes "email", it'll have to define email... how would one define email? "messages sent via SMTP" is a likely definition. Great, so lets say that somebody writes an email system that functions via HTTP POST in order to circumvent the tax. How then would the government define "email"? Would they then have to modify the law to include a tax on HTTP POSTing?
Though it seems like a simple, well intentioned idea, the reality is, email tax it is neither of these.
I've answered this question before, so I'll do it again... the FCC mandates that local telcos provide FREE 911 access on copper lines. Basically, if you get VoIP service, and disconnect your copper line phone, keep a copper phone plugged into the line. Even though you won't be paying for service, you'll still have a dial-tone and will still be able to dial 911.
Just to clarify... Qwest isn't first. Time Warner has been offering VoIP in the Portland, Maine area for at least a year now. TW probably has VoIP service in other areas as well.
The lack of 911 support isn't really as big of a problem as everyone is making it out to be. In a typical household, if you make the switch from copper to VoIP, you've still got a copper phone jack wired in your house.
Now try this... plug a phone into your supposedly serviceless jack. Pick it up... what do you hear? Thats right... you hear a dial tone. Keep in mind, you don't have telephone service on this line, so attempting to make a phone call will get you nowhere. So, "why is there a dial-tone", you ask? Because you can still dial 911. I believe that it's mandated by law that a serviceless phone jack still be able to provide 911 service.
Problem solved. VoIP without 911? Who cares! Keep a real phone hanging around for 911. If that's not an option, why not do it the old fashioned way and put the real local dispatch phone number on your speed dial!
Using technology, we could have a system that would still allow emergency vehicles right of way through traffic lights, while curbing abuse.
After only 5 minutes of brainstorming, I've devised this system...
1. Emergency vehicles are equipped with a GPS device and a communication medium capable of data transmission... radio, cell, etc.
2. When an emergency vehicle is activated, the vehicle would authenticate itself via the data link to a central server which can control traffic lights.
3. As the vehicle rolls, it reports its speed, location, and direction to the central control computer. The computer would then be able determine which traffic lights the vehicle is approaching and could adjust traffic patterns accordingly.
This way, we'd eliminate the direct vehicle to traffic light control that is widely open for abuse. On this system, only emergency vehicles would be able to control traffic lights through a central controlling facility. This would eliminate abuse almost entirely while allowing emergency vehicles continued control of traffic lights.
I just finished a 5 year stint as the lead engineer for a company with 2 vertical market products.
Not every vertical market is the same, but generally, a vertical market application is highly specialized. However, vertical market software is not sold in the same manner as general market software. It's not sold off the shelf. Vertical market software is sold by sales people that understand the the intimate details of the vartical market. The prevailing climate in vertical markets is that when an entity wants to make a software purchase, they contact their sales guy and prepare to spend big money. Since the customer is so focused on spending money, an OSS solution wouldn't even be noticed, even if it's just as capable as the commercial solution.
Another aspect to keep in mind are support contracts. Given the complexity of vertical market software, customer support is gold. Support contracts are king. Without commercial level "hand-holding" support, an OSS application can't compete on that level either.
Vertical markets are highly competitive, even on a regional scale. For example, the company that employed me had software to manage municipalities... government accounting, real estate tax billing, etc. There are 3 other companies in the state that were in competition. If you go OSS in a market like this, the other companies will look at your product under the hood, and implement the same features in their product, and turn around and sell it. Thats it. Basically you'll be giving away your intellectual property for nothing in return.
Your best chance, if you want to remain in the market, is to not go OSS. If you don't want to remain in the market, you should approach your competitors and try to make a deal, either to sell the client base or license the software to them. If you go OSS with the product, you're out of the market and you'll be throwing away any opportunity to cash in on your existing client base.
Slashdot Mirror
...or maybe not!
If there is one single thing that the government SHOULD be spending money on, its the defense of this country. I say, lets take a chunk of the $400 billion that was allocated for free prescription drugs and use that waste of money instead.
If you smoke enough pot, and really think about it for a few minutes, your Voltaire quote is recursive.
I'm sorry that the Ben Franklin quote offends you so much. Unfortunately, you see it a lot these days because there's a lot of personal liberties being stolen by our governments. So, a quote like this brings awareness to the issues surrounding our personal liberties... and it's important, because if we keep allowing our governments to chisel away at our god-given right to live freely as human beings, then who will be there to defend us when the final liberty is removed?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), Letter to Josiah Quincy, Sept. 11, 1773.
street lamps ... or, "telephone poles" as we know them here in the US.
Well, whats the point of creating a wireless network using telephone poles, when the fucking telephone poles already carry wires.
"Well Bob, you see, there are these things called 'wires' that run between the street lamps."
"Ok Bill, can we do stuff with these 'wires'?"
"I don't know Bob. We might have to go wireless."
Scratch your head and run, it's safer that way.
It really amazes me that people think of stuff like this...
They did this by filling the narrow channels of a porous form of glass (called Vycor) with helium, and freezing it by cooling it down and squeezing it to more than 60 times atmospheric pressure. A disk of the helium-filled glass was then set spinning. At about 0.175 C above absolute zero, the disk suddenly started to rotate more easily - precisely what would be expected if the helium became a supersolid.
Holy crap! Who comes up with stuff like this?!?! It reminds me of the great mystery of Maple Syrup, another "who the hell comes up with this stuff" example.
"Well Bob, if I suck the sap out of this here tree, but only at a certain time of year, and then save it up until I have a lot of it, I'm gonna boil it all for a couple of days until it turns into syrup."
Obviously, ancient peoples had a lot of time on their hands, to be able to devise maple syrup. Seems like a lot of random crap. Also seems like us modern peoples have a bit too much time on our hands too, with the supersolid helium and all.
This all seems like a hoax to me, BUT... lets pretend for a moment that it is absolutely true.
If earthquake prediction became the norm, imagine the damage to local economies here in the US!
Imagine this scenario...
"Earthquake, 2 months from now, Seattle area".
Ok, what do you, a business owner, do? Pack up and get out. Hell, you've got 2 months to do it.
Ok, what do you, a would-be tourist on vacation, do? Pick an alternate destination.
Ok, what do you, a local citizen, do? Panic. Perhaps pack the family and leave. Perhaps stay and stockpile supplies if your employer hasn't left yet.
I think it's very obvious that natural disaster prediction would be devastating for local and regional economies. In the big picture, as local economies start their own self-destruction, it'll have a bigger effect on the nation as a whole.
Ok, lets just call 'em "banned for now", because we all know that about once each year, one of the big TV networks roll all these commercials up into a 1 hour TV show special in which they proceed to show us these commercials.
... but the ultimate irony is that they've just con'ed you into watching a WHOLE HOUR of commercials, most of which I'm sure they are compensated for.
These specials are usually dubbed with cutsie names, such as "the world's funniest commercials", or "boobs, too hot for TV"
Market droids -- start your engines, spin up your beanie propellors -- godspeed.
I think you're missing my point jackass. I'm not comparing my sites to WIKIpedia, nor am I saying that my hardware could run these sites.
The point I AM trying to make is that people overestimate the cost of hardware. My POINT is that it's probably not necessary to invest 20k in new hardware when half that amount could run this thing on MULTIPLE SERVERS at a COLO for a YEAR, EASILY!
My $99/mo server runs all of my sites (snowjournal.com and skimaps.com are only 2 of many sites on that server) and the server doesn't complain. In fact, I could handle 4x or 5x the amount of traffic I have now before I'd have to consider an upgrade. At that point, the traffic would be several million page views per month.
Now, before this turns into a "fuck-me-in-the-ass" session by a bunch of slashdotter jackasses, let me just tell you that Alexa is a piece of junk and doesn't account for the "full story" of a web site. I recently acquired skimaps.com, which was previously a "MAJOR" skiing site, but had been offline for a couple of months. SkiMaps.com has only been back online for 3 weeks. What do you expect.
I'm an independent web publisher producing 3 web sites that generate a fairly large amount of traffic. One thing that I've noticed is the surprise on people's faces when I describe details of my sites and how much they cost to operate in terms of hardware and backbone connection.
...
Most people are under the impression that it costs a lot of money to handle the physical requirements of high-traffic web sites. The surprise always comes when I tell them that it costs me less than $99 per month to operate the physical equipment... with 1TB allocated transfer on a REAL dedicated server at a colo.
My opinion is that most web operators either aren't resourceful enough, or simply overestimate the costs of operating a web site.
I don't know what WIKIpedia's web traffic looks like, but I tend to think that they could manage to solve their problems on much less than $20k for hardware. Perhaps they should share some info and take a few suggestions from other web operators.
Companies like UnitedColo offer really great service at unbeatable prices! For a couple hundred dollars per month, WIKI could easily go the rented/dedicated server approach rather than worry about building a custom server for the same job.
My $.02
As a guy that generally likes beer, I just want to say that it's hard to get head when your glass is full of antibubbles.
Evolution has been able to do this for much longer than that... I'm using an OLD version (1.0.8), which also supports microsoft's new "invention".
What's a geek to do when your job gets outsourced?
Become a contractor, duh.
Outsourcing is the biggest trend in the industry right now, and the big losers are going to be the "geeks" who whine about employment. Forget employment... its for sheeple anyway. The winners in this trend are the geeks who are able to sell themselves as consultants/contractors and produce real results.
You'll be better off to recognize where the industry is headed and to go along with it. Become a contractor, get a few clients, and you'll be on your way to personal freedom and job security.
Does anyone else see the inherent flaw in a US do-not-spam registry? Ok... "do not spam me, here's my address". So, the government is establishing a list of valid email addresses.
What happens when somebody pulls the FOIA to obtain the list? What happens when the list is leaked? Great... millions upon millions of valid email addresses could go for a pretty penny to spammers in china. How is this supposed to stop spam, especially when the majority of spam originates from sources foreign to the US?
I'm not defending spam -- my solution is running spamassassin on my mail server. Works perfectly.
I think that if more people would install their own spam filters, we'd reduce the spam market within the US and the amount of spam would decline as spammers would be forced out of business. As a libertarian, I think this approach would be *far* better than a government imposed "solution".
Easy to boot, somewhat functional ... but there was no mention of Atheos ...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/atheos/
Meanwhile, weather forecasters around the world were puzzled Sunday as access to weather data over the internet crawled to a halt. A Whitehouse representative denied rumors of a terrorist attack on the weather infrastructure.
The mysterious cause of the delays in weather data are under investigation.
Yeah, I'm with you on this one. Urban Terror is an awesome q3 mod ... it's practically the only thing I've been playing for the last few weeks. Big plus is that it runs on Q3Linux too.
I think Linux had FAT capabilities BEFORE microsoft patented it in 1995 ... don't know exactly how this should play out, but it doesn't sound *right* to me.
Ok, first of all ... my opinion is that this is a really bad idea for many reasions ... I despise government intervention in matters such as this, I despise taxes, and taxing the source of email won't even put a dent in spam. In fact, I think it'll boost spam because US based spammers will simply outsource their operations to China and boost China's spam economy, which is already booming.
...
... how would one define email? "messages sent via SMTP" is a likely definition. Great, so lets say that somebody writes an email system that functions via HTTP POST in order to circumvent the tax. How then would the government define "email"? Would they then have to modify the law to include a tax on HTTP POSTing?
Besides the fact that it's a bad idea, if such a tax went into effect, it wouldn't be hard to circumvent it with an alternate "email" system
When the government taxes "email", it'll have to define email
Though it seems like a simple, well intentioned idea, the reality is, email tax it is neither of these.
I've answered this question before, so I'll do it again ... the FCC mandates that local telcos provide FREE 911 access on copper lines. Basically, if you get VoIP service, and disconnect your copper line phone, keep a copper phone plugged into the line. Even though you won't be paying for service, you'll still have a dial-tone and will still be able to dial 911.
Just to clarify ... Qwest isn't first. Time Warner has been offering VoIP in the Portland, Maine area for at least a year now. TW probably has VoIP service in other areas as well.
The lack of 911 support isn't really as big of a problem as everyone is making it out to be. In a typical household, if you make the switch from copper to VoIP, you've still got a copper phone jack wired in your house.
... what do you hear? Thats right... you hear a dial tone. Keep in mind, you don't have telephone service on this line, so attempting to make a phone call will get you nowhere. So, "why is there a dial-tone", you ask? Because you can still dial 911. I believe that it's mandated by law that a serviceless phone jack still be able to provide 911 service.
Now try this... plug a phone into your supposedly serviceless jack. Pick it up
Problem solved. VoIP without 911? Who cares! Keep a real phone hanging around for 911. If that's not an option, why not do it the old fashioned way and put the real local dispatch phone number on your speed dial!
There's clearly a need for a smarter system ...
...
Using technology, we could have a system that would still allow emergency vehicles right of way through traffic lights, while curbing abuse.
After only 5 minutes of brainstorming, I've devised this system
1. Emergency vehicles are equipped with a GPS device and a communication medium capable of data transmission... radio, cell, etc.
2. When an emergency vehicle is activated, the vehicle would authenticate itself via the data link to a central server which can control traffic lights.
3. As the vehicle rolls, it reports its speed, location, and direction to the central control computer. The computer would then be able determine which traffic lights the vehicle is approaching and could adjust traffic patterns accordingly.
This way, we'd eliminate the direct vehicle to traffic light control that is widely open for abuse. On this system, only emergency vehicles would be able to control traffic lights through a central controlling facility. This would eliminate abuse almost entirely while allowing emergency vehicles continued control of traffic lights.
I just finished a 5 year stint as the lead engineer for a company with 2 vertical market products.
... government accounting, real estate tax billing, etc. There are 3 other companies in the state that were in competition. If you go OSS in a market like this, the other companies will look at your product under the hood, and implement the same features in their product, and turn around and sell it. Thats it. Basically you'll be giving away your intellectual property for nothing in return.
Not every vertical market is the same, but generally, a vertical market application is highly specialized. However, vertical market software is not sold in the same manner as general market software. It's not sold off the shelf. Vertical market software is sold by sales people that understand the the intimate details of the vartical market. The prevailing climate in vertical markets is that when an entity wants to make a software purchase, they contact their sales guy and prepare to spend big money. Since the customer is so focused on spending money, an OSS solution wouldn't even be noticed, even if it's just as capable as the commercial solution.
Another aspect to keep in mind are support contracts. Given the complexity of vertical market software, customer support is gold. Support contracts are king. Without commercial level "hand-holding" support, an OSS application can't compete on that level either.
Vertical markets are highly competitive, even on a regional scale. For example, the company that employed me had software to manage municipalities
Your best chance, if you want to remain in the market, is to not go OSS. If you don't want to remain in the market, you should approach your competitors and try to make a deal, either to sell the client base or license the software to them. If you go OSS with the product, you're out of the market and you'll be throwing away any opportunity to cash in on your existing client base.
Sounds like another press release from the Ministry of Truth.
No, try this