As long as we're getting penis envy from power supplies, my IBM BladeCenter has 4 redundant hot-swappable 1600 watt power supplies. We had to run a 220 circuit just to power the damn thing because it won't take 110.
SG-1 is generic cheesy sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching it, but after about season 4 or 5 of the original SG1 you can tell that everyone involved just stopped caring. Watch some interviews with the cast and see how their answers are basically "That happened? I don't remember, I just show up to work and read what's on the script. The only reason I'm still here is because I can't find better work." The scripts are pretty bad for the last couple seasons. I heard it got a little better with Atlantis but I stopped watching years ago.
Anyone seriously bent on crime probably already carries a stack of 4-5 plates with them. Change them out at 10 mile intervals until you get where you're going. Bonus points for attaching the old plates to other cars in the area.
It seems that it's actually a lot easier to spread disinformation under a system like this.
Yes but hardware based DRM has a lot more problems with keeping the keys secure. Someone will fuck up, a key will get into the wild, and they can't go back and change all the existing devices.
It's exactly what happened with CSS and it will happen again. 256-bit AES won't help you if someone can get a valid key.
Our "right to free speech" really only means "free to speak about the government without fear of reprisal."
The point being you are still liable for what you say in public; you can't shirk responsibility for what comes out of your mouth by hiding behind free speech. In most cases an apology is enough, but some companies get a little touchy, especially when they have something to hide...
They will not regulate the net because you can't. How will they force say, VoIP providers in Canada to do anything?
You can provide some regulation of VoIP through DID assignment, and that's not a bad idea. It protects consumers by ensuring at least a basic level of service (E911, whatever.) But the FCC cannot and should not regulate the *entire* internet. And what benefit would it provide?
Hardware-based DRM has proven time and time again to be totally ineffective at stopping anyone from doing anything. By nature of being hardware based, it can't change. Because it can't change, it's a stationary target for hackers and someone *will* find a way around it in a matter of months.
It can be legislated to hell and back and it still won't make a bit of difference. I guarantee you a lot of countries have bigger problems than enforcing American patents/copyrights and have no interest in complying with any anti-circumvention laws either. Someone will crack it, the crack will get out into the wild, and it'll be like the DRM never existed.
Let them waste their money developing expensive DRM schemes that a 17 year old in Romania will break 6 months after it's released. The laws don't exist to prosecute this kind of thing in many countries, nor should they. MPAA/RIAA tired of losing money? Stop producing crap and people will buy it. But look at their members' profit/loss sheets recently, what they say in public is in polar opposite to what they tell their shareholders...
Lots of stuff got invented before patents... so I see no reason why patents are or ever were needed to encourage invention.
Dear god, I hope you're joking. The rate of innovation and invention has increased exponentially over the past 150 years, and a good part of that is because now you're assured at least a shot at marketing your idea before someone sees you and copies you exactly. The incentive for full time invention is there.
Without patents, we wouldn't have the light bulb, the telephone, the computer (transistors were a patented invention) or pretty much anything that anyone ever sunk R&D money into.
I'm not saying our patent system is perfect; hell, it sucks. But it's better than not having one
ID is not even necessarily incompatible with evolution. The only part that many ID proponents (well, not the hardcore evangelicals who believe the bible as the literal truth) really disagree with is the "life sprang from a random soup of amino acids and evolved into what it is today." If you change that to "God created microorganisms which, through his grand design, evolved into life today." The biological processes can be exactly the same, as God would have created them as well.
Most Christians who believe in ID are willing to accept that God did not *poof* humans and animals as they are today into existance. Only a few hardcore nutballs argue otherwise (mainstream Christianity considers most of Genesis to be a metaphor.) Once you get down to this level of theory, I'm about as willing to accept modern science's explanation as I am religion's, because they're guessing either way. Neither can be proven and they're just theories. IMO schools would be better off saying "We don't actually know how life started. We do know quite a lot about what happened afterward though."
The rationalization seems to be that BPL is just too "exciting" a technology to be hindered with the gravity of sound technical analysis, and that it must be deployed even if it means compromising the Commission's obligation to protect licensed spectrum users from interference.
The only ones calling it "exciting" are the ones trying to sell BPL. It's really nothing impressive. The only problem it solves is the "last mile" hurdle in rural areas. You can get cable or DSL in most other areas at comparable speeds and prices already.
BPL will never catch on because they're already behind the game. They can't realistically increase the signalling rate or the power of the signal, so it will never get better than it is. There's other stuff in the pipeline that's better on both fronts. WiMax for accessibility and fiber to the curb for speed will be the next wave, not some low speed connection that will knock out your cell phone every time you drive under a power line.
BPL was impressive 10 years ago when nobody had cable modems and WiFi was just a dream to tech junkies. It's been slow to develop, and is now last-generation tech.
You jest, but there actually is a lot of fiber run in/along oil pipelines. Yes, for monitoring stuff, but they also run carrier fiber through the same conduit. The hardest part about a long fiber run is securing the rights to bury the damn thing, and oil pipelines solve that one nicely.
This only works if the consumer is informed and knowledgable. A lot of ISPs are doing this as a way to keep bandwidth costs under control by de-prioritizing bulk traffic so that 95% of the stuff people do is really fast. Normal QoS stuff, on any corporate network I would do the same. I don't even see how this is really an issue, telcos have been doing it for years on the phone side by splitting the signalling and data at the CO.
Being a small ISP is not an incredibly profitable business, you're always being squeezed by bandwidth charges, usually supplied by a company who is a direct competitor of yours and has no incentive to give you a good deal. Without regulation the small guys would go away entirely; you can't compete with Verizon/SBC if they're not forced to give you fair market value on their network (that the public paid for yet the telcos own.)
Dell is awesome for office PCs; they're cheap, the support is reasonably good, and while they're a little underpowered, if all you run is Outlook and Excel they work fine.
Alienware's base machines aren't that pricey really, they come with cool cases and not a whole lot of crap installed. I only say them because so few OEMs are willing to put a decent graphics card in a system (95% of the machines Dell sells ship with integrated video.)
A $5 graphics chip is worth the price. It's just nice to be able to sit at the console in case you have BIOS problems, disk errors, etc. Yeah you can use a serial console but really, why bother unless you will *never* have access to the box? I use one keyboard and mouse for about 3 racks of servers, it's not hard to cascade KVMs in this way.
I'm not even talking about a GUI here. Text console is nice in case your network card dies or something. You can't *always* get into the machine.
Even if it's a controversial subject, the subsequent edits should eventually remove much of the bias. No encyclopedia is a good reference for current events (like the Iraq war; in 10 years it will be a lot less controversial, assuming we're not still there) so Wikipedia is no different in that respect (actually it may be better in some ways, as Wikipedia is a lot easier to update than a 10 year old dead tree encyclopedia.)
I think Wikipedia does at least as good a job as your "traditional" encyclopedias, but obviously nothing is without faults. The great thing that comes with the internet is that a reasonably accurate source of knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection free of charge. Should I be curious about the mitochondrial electron transport chain, I can find it immediately, and that ability eventually makes everyone more knowledgable.
IANAL, but same as any murder investigation, people are personally responsible. Anyone who knew about the plan and made no effort to stop it or report it would be guilty of conspiracy. This would be a textbook case of conspiracy, actually (in Texas at least, conspiracy is defined as an agreement between two or more parties to commit a felony.)
Is anything on slashdot *actually* funny? I mean they've been using the same lame "CowboyNeal" joke for like 10 years, I wonder if he even works for/. anymore...
Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about. The recent flap with Wikipedia was not so much a failure on their part, but simply a fake article about an obscure subject that not a whole lot of people would even know is wrong in order to correct.
I would not trust Wikipedia on obscure subjects. These subjects get less "eye traffic" and thus less people funneled to correct them, and by nature of their obscurity, less people qualified to correct them in the first place.
In any case, most college courses explicitly ban use of Wikipedia as a reference. It's just too easy to change an entry and add wrong information so all your classmates do poorly.
A pair of these ATI X1800s may cost less than a pair of 512MB GeForce GTXs, but nobody buys the 512 MB GTX for SLI, it's way too expensive. You can get 95% of the performance at 50% of the price by just buying a pair of 7800 GTs and using SLI. There is no game out there that a dual 7800 GT SLI system cannot run at any res, with full graphics turned on.
If you read any of the enthusiast sites, they back the 2x7800 GT in SLI as the best top-end rig. It basically comes down to the fact that dual 7800 GTs are so fast, you gain no noticible performance benefit from using 7800 GTXs.
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As long as we're getting penis envy from power supplies, my IBM BladeCenter has 4 redundant hot-swappable 1600 watt power supplies. We had to run a 220 circuit just to power the damn thing because it won't take 110.
SG-1 is generic cheesy sci-fi. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy watching it, but after about season 4 or 5 of the original SG1 you can tell that everyone involved just stopped caring. Watch some interviews with the cast and see how their answers are basically "That happened? I don't remember, I just show up to work and read what's on the script. The only reason I'm still here is because I can't find better work." The scripts are pretty bad for the last couple seasons. I heard it got a little better with Atlantis but I stopped watching years ago.
Anyone seriously bent on crime probably already carries a stack of 4-5 plates with them. Change them out at 10 mile intervals until you get where you're going. Bonus points for attaching the old plates to other cars in the area.
It seems that it's actually a lot easier to spread disinformation under a system like this.
Yes but hardware based DRM has a lot more problems with keeping the keys secure. Someone will fuck up, a key will get into the wild, and they can't go back and change all the existing devices.
It's exactly what happened with CSS and it will happen again. 256-bit AES won't help you if someone can get a valid key.
Our "right to free speech" really only means "free to speak about the government without fear of reprisal."
The point being you are still liable for what you say in public; you can't shirk responsibility for what comes out of your mouth by hiding behind free speech. In most cases an apology is enough, but some companies get a little touchy, especially when they have something to hide...
They will not regulate the net because you can't. How will they force say, VoIP providers in Canada to do anything?
You can provide some regulation of VoIP through DID assignment, and that's not a bad idea. It protects consumers by ensuring at least a basic level of service (E911, whatever.) But the FCC cannot and should not regulate the *entire* internet. And what benefit would it provide?
Hardware-based DRM has proven time and time again to be totally ineffective at stopping anyone from doing anything. By nature of being hardware based, it can't change. Because it can't change, it's a stationary target for hackers and someone *will* find a way around it in a matter of months.
It can be legislated to hell and back and it still won't make a bit of difference. I guarantee you a lot of countries have bigger problems than enforcing American patents/copyrights and have no interest in complying with any anti-circumvention laws either. Someone will crack it, the crack will get out into the wild, and it'll be like the DRM never existed.
Let them waste their money developing expensive DRM schemes that a 17 year old in Romania will break 6 months after it's released. The laws don't exist to prosecute this kind of thing in many countries, nor should they. MPAA/RIAA tired of losing money? Stop producing crap and people will buy it. But look at their members' profit/loss sheets recently, what they say in public is in polar opposite to what they tell their shareholders...
Lots of stuff got invented before patents ... so I see no reason why patents are or ever were needed to encourage invention.
Dear god, I hope you're joking. The rate of innovation and invention has increased exponentially over the past 150 years, and a good part of that is because now you're assured at least a shot at marketing your idea before someone sees you and copies you exactly. The incentive for full time invention is there.
Without patents, we wouldn't have the light bulb, the telephone, the computer (transistors were a patented invention) or pretty much anything that anyone ever sunk R&D money into.
I'm not saying our patent system is perfect; hell, it sucks. But it's better than not having one
I agree with you. However in most high school biology classes they are lumped together.
ID is not even necessarily incompatible with evolution. The only part that many ID proponents (well, not the hardcore evangelicals who believe the bible as the literal truth) really disagree with is the "life sprang from a random soup of amino acids and evolved into what it is today." If you change that to "God created microorganisms which, through his grand design, evolved into life today." The biological processes can be exactly the same, as God would have created them as well.
Most Christians who believe in ID are willing to accept that God did not *poof* humans and animals as they are today into existance. Only a few hardcore nutballs argue otherwise (mainstream Christianity considers most of Genesis to be a metaphor.) Once you get down to this level of theory, I'm about as willing to accept modern science's explanation as I am religion's, because they're guessing either way. Neither can be proven and they're just theories. IMO schools would be better off saying "We don't actually know how life started. We do know quite a lot about what happened afterward though."
The rationalization seems to be that BPL is just too "exciting" a technology to be hindered with the gravity of sound technical analysis, and that it must be deployed even if it means compromising the Commission's obligation to protect licensed spectrum users from interference.
The only ones calling it "exciting" are the ones trying to sell BPL. It's really nothing impressive. The only problem it solves is the "last mile" hurdle in rural areas. You can get cable or DSL in most other areas at comparable speeds and prices already.
BPL will never catch on because they're already behind the game. They can't realistically increase the signalling rate or the power of the signal, so it will never get better than it is. There's other stuff in the pipeline that's better on both fronts. WiMax for accessibility and fiber to the curb for speed will be the next wave, not some low speed connection that will knock out your cell phone every time you drive under a power line.
BPL was impressive 10 years ago when nobody had cable modems and WiFi was just a dream to tech junkies. It's been slow to develop, and is now last-generation tech.
You jest, but there actually is a lot of fiber run in/along oil pipelines. Yes, for monitoring stuff, but they also run carrier fiber through the same conduit. The hardest part about a long fiber run is securing the rights to bury the damn thing, and oil pipelines solve that one nicely.
This only works if the consumer is informed and knowledgable. A lot of ISPs are doing this as a way to keep bandwidth costs under control by de-prioritizing bulk traffic so that 95% of the stuff people do is really fast. Normal QoS stuff, on any corporate network I would do the same. I don't even see how this is really an issue, telcos have been doing it for years on the phone side by splitting the signalling and data at the CO.
Being a small ISP is not an incredibly profitable business, you're always being squeezed by bandwidth charges, usually supplied by a company who is a direct competitor of yours and has no incentive to give you a good deal. Without regulation the small guys would go away entirely; you can't compete with Verizon/SBC if they're not forced to give you fair market value on their network (that the public paid for yet the telcos own.)
Dell is awesome for office PCs; they're cheap, the support is reasonably good, and while they're a little underpowered, if all you run is Outlook and Excel they work fine.
Alienware's base machines aren't that pricey really, they come with cool cases and not a whole lot of crap installed. I only say them because so few OEMs are willing to put a decent graphics card in a system (95% of the machines Dell sells ship with integrated video.)
A $5 graphics chip is worth the price. It's just nice to be able to sit at the console in case you have BIOS problems, disk errors, etc. Yeah you can use a serial console but really, why bother unless you will *never* have access to the box? I use one keyboard and mouse for about 3 racks of servers, it's not hard to cascade KVMs in this way.
I'm not even talking about a GUI here. Text console is nice in case your network card dies or something. You can't *always* get into the machine.
Even if it's a controversial subject, the subsequent edits should eventually remove much of the bias. No encyclopedia is a good reference for current events (like the Iraq war; in 10 years it will be a lot less controversial, assuming we're not still there) so Wikipedia is no different in that respect (actually it may be better in some ways, as Wikipedia is a lot easier to update than a 10 year old dead tree encyclopedia.)
I think Wikipedia does at least as good a job as your "traditional" encyclopedias, but obviously nothing is without faults. The great thing that comes with the internet is that a reasonably accurate source of knowledge is available to anyone with an internet connection free of charge. Should I be curious about the mitochondrial electron transport chain, I can find it immediately, and that ability eventually makes everyone more knowledgable.
IANAL, but same as any murder investigation, people are personally responsible. Anyone who knew about the plan and made no effort to stop it or report it would be guilty of conspiracy. This would be a textbook case of conspiracy, actually (in Texas at least, conspiracy is defined as an agreement between two or more parties to commit a felony.)
Is anything on slashdot *actually* funny? I mean they've been using the same lame "CowboyNeal" joke for like 10 years, I wonder if he even works for /. anymore...
No. But nobody else does either.
Wikipedia is an excellent knowledge repository about subjects that a resonable amount of people give a damn about. The recent flap with Wikipedia was not so much a failure on their part, but simply a fake article about an obscure subject that not a whole lot of people would even know is wrong in order to correct.
I would not trust Wikipedia on obscure subjects. These subjects get less "eye traffic" and thus less people funneled to correct them, and by nature of their obscurity, less people qualified to correct them in the first place.
In any case, most college courses explicitly ban use of Wikipedia as a reference. It's just too easy to change an entry and add wrong information so all your classmates do poorly.
This would be true if IT infrastructure were free. It is most certainly not.
The only reason it's actually funny is because there are people who are serious about it.
A pair of these ATI X1800s may cost less than a pair of 512MB GeForce GTXs, but nobody buys the 512 MB GTX for SLI, it's way too expensive. You can get 95% of the performance at 50% of the price by just buying a pair of 7800 GTs and using SLI. There is no game out there that a dual 7800 GT SLI system cannot run at any res, with full graphics turned on.
If you read any of the enthusiast sites, they back the 2x7800 GT in SLI as the best top-end rig. It basically comes down to the fact that dual 7800 GTs are so fast, you gain no noticible performance benefit from using 7800 GTXs.
Yep, NVidia at least produces binary drivers for Linux. ATI has nothing.
Prior to their resignation, you can't know they're disgruntled. It's basically to avoid what happens in Office Space.