I mean, come on, guys, it's not that hard to set up a mail server with a web interface that allows anonymous accounts and gives everyone 1 GB of storage.
Just don't advertise it... and try to keep your number of accounts under about 100, and you're all set. Singlehandedly, you have just defeated both the most successful search engine in history, and the government of Israel.
Oh, man.. now I've got to do that... I wonder how many people would want an user@youhavenochancetosurvivemakeyourtime.com address...
And if 3D search engines work like real search engines, you'll end up drawing a picture of a Ford Explorer, and the top six sites will all be redirects to www.longurlincludingwordslikehotandpussy.com.
Frankly, I think the "attention span" is vastly overrated.
What a "short attention span" indicates to me is that A) the person can quickly determine when a piece of content is not providing them the maximum "bang for the buck," either in terms of information of entertainment; and B) the person is probably strengthening memory skills by retaining numerous discrete pieces of information rather than one continuous, and quite possibly repetitive, piece.
The older generation seems to lament the fact that the younger generation quickly becomes bored with games like jacks when video games are available - but many studies are starting to indicate that video games are simply the better choice. The average IQ of a child born in the 1940's was 100 (which was, by definition, average), with 130 considered "gifted"; today, the average 12-year-old is scoring up in the high 120s and low 130s. (My source is Newsweek, although I can't seem to find the article right now).
Seriously. Why interact with a ball and a few pieces of metal when you can play something like Everquest or Asheron's Call - improving, at once, memory, math, reflexes, and certain social skills? It's commonplace knowledge that the more a child is interacted with, the smarter (s)he will become. An online game may not be a perfect subsitute for human interaction, but it's certainly a better substitute than a rubber ball.
The expert quoted in the article was a professor of marketing, hardly the go to guy as far as neuroscience is involved
Okay, here comes some flamebait, but I think in this case it's justified: the "expert" here is just another blowhard who thinks his generation is superior to the one following it. That's not an uncommon worldview, but it is little better than any other form of bigotry, and it goes without saying that it has no place in actual science.
I mean, look at the context his "brain damage" quote appears in:
Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
"Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it," he said.
Kellaris is using "brain damaged" in conjunction with "MTV generation". It's not a medical conclusion he's reaching - it's a catch phrase. "Damn MTV kids are brain damaged...." You can almost see him shaking his cane at the living room window.
Second, Kellaris is using that stomach-turning "I'm just an old fart, but in my day" construct. Yes, Kellaris, in your day you walked to school uphill. Both ways!
Anyway, the era of the album has been eroding for quite some time. It didn't really began with the radio, which was more like a series of commercials for albums. Rather, it began with the cassette tape - and the ability to make mix tapes. It eroded further with the CD, which presented the listener the option to skip to - or over - any track he wanted. And MP3 is just about the final nail in the coffin.
Here's what it boils down to. The album is certainly a beautiful art form - as many posters have pointed out, albums are often greater than the sum of their parts - but it's not going to be the way most people take their music in the future. Which is fine. The symphony is also a beautiful art form, but most people abandoned it in favor of four-minute songs with lots of parallel fifths, variations on standard blues progressions, and 4/4 beats with the emphasis on the 3.
But there are still people who listen to symphonies - and rest assured, there will always be people who listen to albums.
Um, unless it's a piano piece, and all your piano keys sounded at the same timbre as the original musician's, and you were playing at exactly the same tempo as the original piece, and you were playing the piano in a soundproof studio into a mic positioned essentially where it was in the original recording studio, and then applying, in real-time, almost exactly the same compression and EQ and effects as the studio engineers did, and piping that through a speaker into your phone.
At that point, AT&T might be able to report back that you're playing the opening bars to "Nightswimming" but... probably not.
I used to be that way, until I found out how much a house costs and how much a lawyer and doctors charge.
Yeah, well, when your appendix explodes, or you're about to lose everything you own in some ridiculous lawsuit, the cost of a doctor or lawyer begins to seem perfectly reasonable - no matter what that cost is.
There's a vast difference between the value of those services and the value of "Ohhh... it's called 'Baby Got Back'? I always thought it was called 'I Like Big Butts'"
How could you buy it on iTunes or Napster, unless you know the name?
You know, I was thinking about this, and the real solution here is for AT&T to partner up with iTunes and/or Napster in this regard.
It'd be pretty cool to be able to tell iTunes, "I'd like to be able to buy this song..." (holding cell phone up to the radio), pay the standard $0.99, and then let iTunes pass off a nickel or so to AT&T.
But, yeah, doubling the price to hold up your phone to the radio rather than type a lyric fragment into Google is a little.. steep.
You are saying that there is no difference between doing 65 in a 55 zone or doing 180?
I don't know what made you read that into my post, but, no, I wasn't saying that.
Doing 65 in a 55 zone is not generally considered criminally negligent. An accident at that speed would likely be considered just that - an accident - and the driver would probably not be charged with a crime.
A search of Google returns 46,000 hits for Negligent Homicide. On the face of it, many, but by no means all of these, have been traffic cases, and defendants have been convicted of the charge, even when cold sober at the time of the accident.
Well, that's the face of it, I guess.
Negligent homicide is a lesser included charge to involuntary manslaughter that does not exist in every state. You can find it, for example, in Texas (link) and Arkansas (link). It appears that Texas has this lesser included because its penalties for involuntary manslaughter are unusually harsh, and lawmakers didn't necessarily want them applied to speeders.
Generally, negligent homicide statutes include a clause requiring "reckless or wanton disregard for the safety of others," and simple fatigue rarely if ever meets that burden.
The law recognizes, as I think it should, a distinction between KILLING someone, and doing something negligent that causes someone else to die.
In fact, there are at least four criminal categories of homicide:
First degree murder: A person forms a specific intent to kill someone, plans the killing, and kills the victim or has them killed. (e.g. the Thrill Kill Kult)
Second degree murder: A person who did not previously have a specific intent to kill someone flies into a rage and forms the intent to kill the victim at almost exactly the same time he does the killing.
Voluntary manslaughter: A voluntary manslaughter is similar to a second degree murder, but it can be shown that the victim adequately provoked the killer into killing him (e.g., "imperfect self defense" and arguably, the last scene in the movie Se7en).
Involuntary manslaughter: A person does not form the specific intent to kill, but does something either criminal or criminally negligent which leads to someone else's death.
Now, there are special laws which allow (generally upward) adjustments so that someone who would ordinarily fall into one category is placed in another. For example, a drunk driver who kills someone can often be convicted of a murder.
However, a sober speeder cannot; our courts almost universally recognize that as an involuntary manslaughter.
Tangent: back in the days that I worked variable shifts, I'd often be driving home on about two hours of sleep in three days, weaving all over the highway, thinking that I could drive at least twice as well if I were well-rested but a little bit drunk. But special interest pressures have made drunk driving a felony, and extremely fatigued driving, which is equally dangerous, barely a crime at all.
If you don't think fines are the solution, then what do you suggest? Gaol sentances? Might work, but who do you put in gaol?
Here's a novel solution.
Fine Microsoft, sure, but instead of making that fine payable to some country's department of justice, make it payable to a competing company.
Microsoft may not miss $100 million too terribly... but it might not be thrilled about having to fork $100 million over to, say, Red Hat. In other words, replace criminal sanctions with something more closely resembling civil liability.
Rather than distribute the fine among all Microsoft's competitors, which would render it worthless, I'd suggest picking one of its top twenty competitors out of a hat and giving them the whole chunk.
I wonder if that would solve the speeding problem, too... instead of fining you, they could just look up your religious or political affiliation, and force you to fork over $100 to the organization they suspect you would have the most distaste for;)
Yes, I see some obvious problems with this plan, but forcing Microsoft to pay Apple or Linux companies is still a fun idea to kick around.
I had always assumed that such disclaimers were necessary because there was some law that could make lawyers liable for giving bad legal advice otherwise, but if that is the case why hasn't anybody used such a law to counterattack one of these "Your parody is illegal" C&D letters?
IANAL, but I am a paralegal, and I can answer this one, although obviously this is not legal advice.
The "this is not legal advice unless you're paying me" disclaimer is there to avoid malpractice liablity. If you, as a lawyer, give someone some bad or misleading legal advice, and that person suffers financial harm, they can sue you.
It's exactly the same reason all online doctors post little more than "see your doctor immediately." If you said "I slept funny and I'm having some minor neck pain," and a doctor replied, "Ah, that's nothing, take two Asprin," and you ended up paralyzed because you hadn't fully described your symptoms... that doctor may well be liable for malpractice. And you can sue.
However, it is *not* malpractice to make a legally unfounded threat. A threat is not considered legal advice. There's a huge legal difference between saying "Put on a pink dress or I'll sue you!" and "As a lawyer, I advise you to wear a pink dress to your court appearance." The first is protected speech; the second is an actionable tort.
So in the situation where Le Louvre has to choose between seeing the Mona Lisa destroyed by a conventional water sprinkler or seeing a few hundred filthy American tourists being cooked alive by 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, which do you think they'll choose?
A simpler question: for any given non-American, given the choice between cooking a few hundred Americans alive with 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, and not doing that, which do you think they'll choose?
It's really an issue of context. I guess it really doesn't make sense to point to X and say "X is environmentally safe" with no qualifiers whatsoever.
Of course, every company does it, because that's what customers and investors need to hear... that exact meaningless sentence... "X is environmentally safe."
What the sentence actually means is that X is neither particularly toxic nor radioactive. But there are lots of things that are neither particularly toxic nor radioactive that can do massive environmental damage. Things like fishing nets, chainsaws, boiling water hoses, earthquakes, liquid nitrogen, Republican administrations...
There's no yes-or-no answer here. I recall reading that, after the Exxon Valdez flood, cleanup workers were experimenting with cleaning up the oil by spraying it with high-pressure boiling water from massive hoses... until it was determined that the water was doing more damage to the ecosystem than the oil itself.
The fact that you're employer will pay you $8/hour (for those of you who are employed) means you could be making more on your own.
Well, sure, if you own the means of production, like, for example, an enormous aluminum smelting plant, or a medical degree.
Now, I'll grant that sales stuff is part of the total picture - but if you have a T1 and eight machines hooked up to it, and you want to dedicate them to spam, you really do have the bulk of the means of production at your command. Getting paid a buck an hour to do another company's spam seems a little like getting paid $6.50 an hour to do open heart surgery because, hey, the boss owns the building and knows a lot of people with bad hearts.
It seems self-evident to me that there are about five hundred thousand companies dedicated to selling "herb@l VI@G Ra" - how hard can it really be to land a contract with one of them?:)
Wile I agree that any fish/wildlife that happen to be in the immediate vicinity of a few thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen would be frozen to death, the contamination wouldn't exactly have a long half-life.
That kind of disruption *does* have a long "half-life" - maybe not in a chemical sense, but certainly in a biological sense.
I mean, just look at what rotting wildlife does to an aquatic ecosystem. Bacteria suck oxygen out of the water as they decompose the dead plants and fish, quickly rendering it uninhabitable to anything that was there before.
Saying liquid nitrogen is "environmentally safe" because it doesn't have a long half-life is a little like saying enormous fishing nets are "environmentally safe." Sure, you can eat one without being poisoned, but believe it or not, simply killing off too many large fish can turn an acquatic ecosystem into a wasteland.
If this stuff boils in the fire it will cool even better because of the latent heat of vaporization. The vapor will help exclude oxygen, too.
And that's just great, until the building fills up with five hundred degree anoxic Sapphire steam.
See, the reason that sprinkler systems are popular is that they tend to preserve human life. Unfortunate drawback: they fry electronics.
Conversely, the reason that Halon is popular is that it tends to preserve electronics. Unfortunate drawback: it tends to kill people.
It seems that Sapphire is not the holy grail of fire prevention: a system that will save both your NOC and the geeks inside it. Somebody ought to try to come up with that. There's probably a lot of money there.
Nitrogen is environmentally safe, too, but I don't plan on drinking a glass of it.
Whoa there... are you saying liquid nitrogen is environmentally safe? Seems to me that dumping a few thousand gallons of that stuff into a river or lake would probably not be particularly good for the biosphere.
It takes a really weird definition of "environmentally safe" to apply to something that can kill just about any known form of life on Earth. Let's hope that's not the same definition they're using for this Sapphire stuff (Something like "Oh, sure, it's incredibly destructive, but it's not harmful after a couple hours")
I'm sure that's the boiling point at standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, although the page is slashdotted, so I can't verify that.
It's not difficult to raise a liquid's boiling point by pressurizing it. Cooks do it all the time: it's called a pressure cooker.
But really, there's no reason to bother with that. Cooling a processor isn't about dunking a computer in a liquid and letting the heat evenly distribute. You're gonna want to chill it, no? It's probably more relevant to talk about the liquid's freezing point than its boiling point.
Re:Not so free...
on
Paid To Spam
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A few boxen on the party-end of a T1 would be $8k/yr. each
Well, the fact that a company would happily pay you $1 an hour to send spam over an ADSL is strong evidence that, if you were delivering spam from eight machines hooked up to a T1, you could be making far, far more than $8 an hour.
I mean, if you want to be evil, why pay most of your profit to a middleman?
Sweet! Barsuk isn't on there. We can still support Death Cab for Cutie. And DeSoto's not there either - the Dismemberment Plan is fine, too.
Unfortunately, Built to Spill is out.. Jimmy Eat World is out.. R.E.M. and Radiohead are, obviously, no good. No Flaming Lips, either.
Oh well, for now I'll stick with Death and Dismemberment - and you know, there are some really awesome amateur, totally free cuts floating around the 'net if you have the patience to look.
That page is just chock-full of some absolutely irrefutable reasons that the DMCA cannot possibly be applied to, essentially, anything, without destroying every notion of fair use we hold sacred. Things I hadn't even thought of - like the fact that the DMCA would even technically make trying to crack an open source system in the course of improving it an illegal act.
Now, time to sit back and see just how intellectually dishonest the courts can be. They'll have to write some really creative stuff to put big money interests ahead of reason this time. Fortunately, they have an army of recent lawschool graduates dedicated to that very cause.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, come on, guys, it's not that hard to set up a mail server with a web interface that allows anonymous accounts and gives everyone 1 GB of storage.
Just don't advertise it... and try to keep your number of accounts under about 100, and you're all set. Singlehandedly, you have just defeated both the most successful search engine in history, and the government of Israel.
Oh, man.. now I've got to do that... I wonder how many people would want an user@youhavenochancetosurvivemakeyourtime.com address...
And if 3D search engines work like real search engines, you'll end up drawing a picture of a Ford Explorer, and the top six sites will all be redirects to www.longurlincludingwordslikehotandpussy.com.
I have to ask...why wasn't this review written in an interactive format?
...and then you have to sit there, wondering why on earth you can't read ye review!!
> read ye review
YOU CAN'T READ YE REVIEW!
Frankly, I think the "attention span" is vastly overrated.
What a "short attention span" indicates to me is that A) the person can quickly determine when a piece of content is not providing them the maximum "bang for the buck," either in terms of information of entertainment; and B) the person is probably strengthening memory skills by retaining numerous discrete pieces of information rather than one continuous, and quite possibly repetitive, piece.
The older generation seems to lament the fact that the younger generation quickly becomes bored with games like jacks when video games are available - but many studies are starting to indicate that video games are simply the better choice. The average IQ of a child born in the 1940's was 100 (which was, by definition, average), with 130 considered "gifted"; today, the average 12-year-old is scoring up in the high 120s and low 130s. (My source is Newsweek, although I can't seem to find the article right now).
Seriously. Why interact with a ball and a few pieces of metal when you can play something like Everquest or Asheron's Call - improving, at once, memory, math, reflexes, and certain social skills? It's commonplace knowledge that the more a child is interacted with, the smarter (s)he will become. An online game may not be a perfect subsitute for human interaction, but it's certainly a better substitute than a rubber ball.
The expert quoted in the article was a professor of marketing, hardly the go to guy as far as neuroscience is involved
Okay, here comes some flamebait, but I think in this case it's justified: the "expert" here is just another blowhard who thinks his generation is superior to the one following it. That's not an uncommon worldview, but it is little better than any other form of bigotry, and it goes without saying that it has no place in actual science.
I mean, look at the context his "brain damage" quote appears in:
Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
"Personally, and I believe I speak for many old farts here, I appreciate listening to music, be it an opera or a pop album, in the sequence in which the artist decided to present it," he said.
Kellaris is using "brain damaged" in conjunction with "MTV generation". It's not a medical conclusion he's reaching - it's a catch phrase. "Damn MTV kids are brain damaged...." You can almost see him shaking his cane at the living room window.
Second, Kellaris is using that stomach-turning "I'm just an old fart, but in my day" construct. Yes, Kellaris, in your day you walked to school uphill. Both ways!
Anyway, the era of the album has been eroding for quite some time. It didn't really began with the radio, which was more like a series of commercials for albums. Rather, it began with the cassette tape - and the ability to make mix tapes. It eroded further with the CD, which presented the listener the option to skip to - or over - any track he wanted. And MP3 is just about the final nail in the coffin.
Here's what it boils down to. The album is certainly a beautiful art form - as many posters have pointed out, albums are often greater than the sum of their parts - but it's not going to be the way most people take their music in the future. Which is fine. The symphony is also a beautiful art form, but most people abandoned it in favor of four-minute songs with lots of parallel fifths, variations on standard blues progressions, and 4/4 beats with the emphasis on the 3.
But there are still people who listen to symphonies - and rest assured, there will always be people who listen to albums.
Unless it's a piano piece, of course.
Um, unless it's a piano piece, and all your piano keys sounded at the same timbre as the original musician's, and you were playing at exactly the same tempo as the original piece, and you were playing the piano in a soundproof studio into a mic positioned essentially where it was in the original recording studio, and then applying, in real-time, almost exactly the same compression and EQ and effects as the studio engineers did, and piping that through a speaker into your phone.
At that point, AT&T might be able to report back that you're playing the opening bars to "Nightswimming" but... probably not.
I used to be that way, until I found out how much a house costs and how much a lawyer and doctors charge.
Yeah, well, when your appendix explodes, or you're about to lose everything you own in some ridiculous lawsuit, the cost of a doctor or lawyer begins to seem perfectly reasonable - no matter what that cost is.
There's a vast difference between the value of those services and the value of "Ohhh... it's called 'Baby Got Back'? I always thought it was called 'I Like Big Butts'"
How could you buy it on iTunes or Napster, unless you know the name?
You know, I was thinking about this, and the real solution here is for AT&T to partner up with iTunes and/or Napster in this regard.
It'd be pretty cool to be able to tell iTunes, "I'd like to be able to buy this song..." (holding cell phone up to the radio), pay the standard $0.99, and then let iTunes pass off a nickel or so to AT&T.
But, yeah, doubling the price to hold up your phone to the radio rather than type a lyric fragment into Google is a little.. steep.
You are saying that there is no difference between doing 65 in a 55 zone or doing 180?
I don't know what made you read that into my post, but, no, I wasn't saying that.
Doing 65 in a 55 zone is not generally considered criminally negligent. An accident at that speed would likely be considered just that - an accident - and the driver would probably not be charged with a crime.
A search of Google returns 46,000 hits for Negligent Homicide. On the face of it, many, but by no means all of these, have been traffic cases, and defendants have been convicted of the charge, even when cold sober at the time of the accident.
Well, that's the face of it, I guess.
Negligent homicide is a lesser included charge to involuntary manslaughter that does not exist in every state. You can find it, for example, in Texas (link) and Arkansas (link). It appears that Texas has this lesser included because its penalties for involuntary manslaughter are unusually harsh, and lawmakers didn't necessarily want them applied to speeders.
Generally, negligent homicide statutes include a clause requiring "reckless or wanton disregard for the safety of others," and simple fatigue rarely if ever meets that burden.
18 months in jail for KILLING someone.
The law recognizes, as I think it should, a distinction between KILLING someone, and doing something negligent that causes someone else to die.
In fact, there are at least four criminal categories of homicide:
First degree murder: A person forms a specific intent to kill someone, plans the killing, and kills the victim or has them killed. (e.g. the Thrill Kill Kult)
Second degree murder: A person who did not previously have a specific intent to kill someone flies into a rage and forms the intent to kill the victim at almost exactly the same time he does the killing.
Voluntary manslaughter: A voluntary manslaughter is similar to a second degree murder, but it can be shown that the victim adequately provoked the killer into killing him (e.g., "imperfect self defense" and arguably, the last scene in the movie Se7en).
Involuntary manslaughter: A person does not form the specific intent to kill, but does something either criminal or criminally negligent which leads to someone else's death.
Now, there are special laws which allow (generally upward) adjustments so that someone who would ordinarily fall into one category is placed in another. For example, a drunk driver who kills someone can often be convicted of a murder.
However, a sober speeder cannot; our courts almost universally recognize that as an involuntary manslaughter.
Tangent: back in the days that I worked variable shifts, I'd often be driving home on about two hours of sleep in three days, weaving all over the highway, thinking that I could drive at least twice as well if I were well-rested but a little bit drunk. But special interest pressures have made drunk driving a felony, and extremely fatigued driving, which is equally dangerous, barely a crime at all.
If you don't think fines are the solution, then what do you suggest? Gaol sentances? Might work, but who do you put in gaol?
;)
Here's a novel solution.
Fine Microsoft, sure, but instead of making that fine payable to some country's department of justice, make it payable to a competing company.
Microsoft may not miss $100 million too terribly... but it might not be thrilled about having to fork $100 million over to, say, Red Hat. In other words, replace criminal sanctions with something more closely resembling civil liability.
Rather than distribute the fine among all Microsoft's competitors, which would render it worthless, I'd suggest picking one of its top twenty competitors out of a hat and giving them the whole chunk.
I wonder if that would solve the speeding problem, too... instead of fining you, they could just look up your religious or political affiliation, and force you to fork over $100 to the organization they suspect you would have the most distaste for
Yes, I see some obvious problems with this plan, but forcing Microsoft to pay Apple or Linux companies is still a fun idea to kick around.
Great! Now find me a way to get my electricity via wireless and I can be totally independant!
Oh, wireless electricity isn't really that difficult... it can be acheived through a microwave beam.
The real trick is coming up with wireless electricity that doesn't fry anyone alive who wanders into the path of that beam...
I had always assumed that such disclaimers were necessary because there was some law that could make lawyers liable for giving bad legal advice otherwise, but if that is the case why hasn't anybody used such a law to counterattack one of these "Your parody is illegal" C&D letters?
IANAL, but I am a paralegal, and I can answer this one, although obviously this is not legal advice.
The "this is not legal advice unless you're paying me" disclaimer is there to avoid malpractice liablity. If you, as a lawyer, give someone some bad or misleading legal advice, and that person suffers financial harm, they can sue you.
It's exactly the same reason all online doctors post little more than "see your doctor immediately." If you said "I slept funny and I'm having some minor neck pain," and a doctor replied, "Ah, that's nothing, take two Asprin," and you ended up paralyzed because you hadn't fully described your symptoms... that doctor may well be liable for malpractice. And you can sue.
However, it is *not* malpractice to make a legally unfounded threat. A threat is not considered legal advice. There's a huge legal difference between saying "Put on a pink dress or I'll sue you!" and "As a lawyer, I advise you to wear a pink dress to your court appearance." The first is protected speech; the second is an actionable tort.
So in the situation where Le Louvre has to choose between seeing the Mona Lisa destroyed by a conventional water sprinkler or seeing a few hundred filthy American tourists being cooked alive by 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, which do you think they'll choose?
A simpler question: for any given non-American, given the choice between cooking a few hundred Americans alive with 500 degree anoxic Sapphire steam, and not doing that, which do you think they'll choose?
So... what is environmentally safe?
It's really an issue of context. I guess it really doesn't make sense to point to X and say "X is environmentally safe" with no qualifiers whatsoever.
Of course, every company does it, because that's what customers and investors need to hear... that exact meaningless sentence... "X is environmentally safe."
What the sentence actually means is that X is neither particularly toxic nor radioactive. But there are lots of things that are neither particularly toxic nor radioactive that can do massive environmental damage. Things like fishing nets, chainsaws, boiling water hoses, earthquakes, liquid nitrogen, Republican administrations...
Is water "environmentally safe"?
There's no yes-or-no answer here. I recall reading that, after the Exxon Valdez flood, cleanup workers were experimenting with cleaning up the oil by spraying it with high-pressure boiling water from massive hoses... until it was determined that the water was doing more damage to the ecosystem than the oil itself.
The fact that you're employer will pay you $8/hour (for those of you who are employed) means you could be making more on your own.
:)
Well, sure, if you own the means of production, like, for example, an enormous aluminum smelting plant, or a medical degree.
Now, I'll grant that sales stuff is part of the total picture - but if you have a T1 and eight machines hooked up to it, and you want to dedicate them to spam, you really do have the bulk of the means of production at your command. Getting paid a buck an hour to do another company's spam seems a little like getting paid $6.50 an hour to do open heart surgery because, hey, the boss owns the building and knows a lot of people with bad hearts.
It seems self-evident to me that there are about five hundred thousand companies dedicated to selling "herb@l VI@G Ra" - how hard can it really be to land a contract with one of them?
Wile I agree that any fish/wildlife that happen to be in the immediate vicinity of a few thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen would be frozen to death, the contamination wouldn't exactly have a long half-life.
That kind of disruption *does* have a long "half-life" - maybe not in a chemical sense, but certainly in a biological sense.
I mean, just look at what rotting wildlife does to an aquatic ecosystem. Bacteria suck oxygen out of the water as they decompose the dead plants and fish, quickly rendering it uninhabitable to anything that was there before.
Saying liquid nitrogen is "environmentally safe" because it doesn't have a long half-life is a little like saying enormous fishing nets are "environmentally safe." Sure, you can eat one without being poisoned, but believe it or not, simply killing off too many large fish can turn an acquatic ecosystem into a wasteland.
If this stuff boils in the fire it will cool even better because of the latent heat of vaporization. The vapor will help exclude oxygen, too.
And that's just great, until the building fills up with five hundred degree anoxic Sapphire steam.
See, the reason that sprinkler systems are popular is that they tend to preserve human life. Unfortunate drawback: they fry electronics.
Conversely, the reason that Halon is popular is that it tends to preserve electronics. Unfortunate drawback: it tends to kill people.
It seems that Sapphire is not the holy grail of fire prevention: a system that will save both your NOC and the geeks inside it. Somebody ought to try to come up with that. There's probably a lot of money there.
Nitrogen is environmentally safe, too, but I don't plan on drinking a glass of it.
Whoa there... are you saying liquid nitrogen is environmentally safe? Seems to me that dumping a few thousand gallons of that stuff into a river or lake would probably not be particularly good for the biosphere.
It takes a really weird definition of "environmentally safe" to apply to something that can kill just about any known form of life on Earth. Let's hope that's not the same definition they're using for this Sapphire stuff (Something like "Oh, sure, it's incredibly destructive, but it's not harmful after a couple hours")
this stuff has a boiling point of 49.2C (120.6F)
I'm sure that's the boiling point at standard atmospheric pressure at sea level, although the page is slashdotted, so I can't verify that.
It's not difficult to raise a liquid's boiling point by pressurizing it. Cooks do it all the time: it's called a pressure cooker.
But really, there's no reason to bother with that. Cooling a processor isn't about dunking a computer in a liquid and letting the heat evenly distribute. You're gonna want to chill it, no? It's probably more relevant to talk about the liquid's freezing point than its boiling point.
A few boxen on the party-end of a T1 would be $8k/yr. each
Well, the fact that a company would happily pay you $1 an hour to send spam over an ADSL is strong evidence that, if you were delivering spam from eight machines hooked up to a T1, you could be making far, far more than $8 an hour.
I mean, if you want to be evil, why pay most of your profit to a middleman?
Sweet! Barsuk isn't on there. We can still support Death Cab for Cutie. And DeSoto's not there either - the Dismemberment Plan is fine, too.
Unfortunately, Built to Spill is out.. Jimmy Eat World is out.. R.E.M. and Radiohead are, obviously, no good. No Flaming Lips, either.
Oh well, for now I'll stick with Death and Dismemberment - and you know, there are some really awesome amateur, totally free cuts floating around the 'net if you have the patience to look.
That page is just chock-full of some absolutely irrefutable reasons that the DMCA cannot possibly be applied to, essentially, anything, without destroying every notion of fair use we hold sacred. Things I hadn't even thought of - like the fact that the DMCA would even technically make trying to crack an open source system in the course of improving it an illegal act.
Now, time to sit back and see just how intellectually dishonest the courts can be. They'll have to write some really creative stuff to put big money interests ahead of reason this time. Fortunately, they have an army of recent lawschool graduates dedicated to that very cause.