Re:Two orders of magnitude! ?
on
Got (Buffer) Bloat?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Most network throughput is at least 80-90% efficient already, so it won't get much faster. It will make it more responsive though, which is good if you're browsing the web, playing an online game or something else interactive.
I assume this is under load though, because on ping there's not much to be saved. On local sites I have 8-12 ms ping, on slashdot I have 140-150 ms. Since the theoretical round trip in a straight line at light speed is some 110 ms, there's not even room for a 50 ms drop. A lot of weirdness can happen under load though if stuff gets buffered up various places.
You may want to check this chart. Source is RIAA, so take with some grains of salt. Also note that this is dollars, not volume so both price and units shipped will affect it.
The point is that if you don't push new music through radio and other broadcast media people won't know about the new music.
If you don't think Spotify and the rest are pushing new music, you can't have used them. Remember, their goal is to have you hooked on as much music as possible that you'd have to buy lots of CDs to replace - particularly music that you don't already own on CD. Not as in sales-pushy, but they most definitively want to be the place you find new music.
Plus as many others have pointed out, the music sucks balls anyway. Who wants to listen to 90 year old "rock stars" cough up a lung, or pre-pubescent teenagers sing about the "angst" of a life they haven't even begun to live yet, or stupid "look at me being a gangsta is so cool but all my friends are dead or in jail" crap. They can keep it.
Every generation thinks THEIR music is perfect, the last and the next generation is junk. Those that grew up with rock&roll will love it until they die. And Justin Bieber is no worse than New Kids on the Block was in the 80s, we just like to forget. Same as that I used to like trance in the 90s, probably because it was all cool and electronic like. Eventually most people just freeze up in some form, this is the music you like and will always like. Come 2050 you'll be sitting in a retirement home humming old songs from the 1990s or whatever. And whatever it is teens listen to then, you won't like it.
Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on. You might find a channel that's reasonably close but that's it, it's no replacement for owning the song. Spotify lets you play any song directly, save playlists, take the songs offline etc. and is much closer to having a huge mp3 collection on a network drive, owning it isn't that important anymore. Instead of buying CDs or on iTunes to play, people skip the "buy" step and play from Spotify.
To them Spotify is a huge double-edged sword. On the one side, it brings many pirates to a legal streaming service. On the other side, it brings a lot of profitable buyers to a not so profitable streaming service. But if they make Spotify worse then people will go back to P2P, probably in even greater numbers than before. Not that I think they can stop the move to digital downloads anyway, fewer and fewer use a CD player anymore. Delivering it on CD is just a very impractical temporary medium until you can get it ripped.
Maybe if you don't understand why the rest of the world likes it, the problem is with you not them. People here have mental blind spots the size of Arizona when it comes to flaws and limitations in open source products. I got an iPhone, I'm sure there's many things it can't do but the things it does do work well. That there's a few things it can't do, well my car is also not a boat. Unlike open source which is a crappy car and trying to make up for it by being a crappy boat too.
I don't even know why I bother to write this, the parent is arguing on the same level as the "freetard" trolls, yet that gets a +5, Insightful. The inbreeding on this site is just getting heavier each year, everyone pats themselves on the shoulder while open source isn't going anywhere or even going away. And then trot out the same old rhetoric that open source can never die. No, but it can be abandoned like I did. Because I got tired of all the problems that everybody keeps denying exist and aren't getting fixed - which I'm sure someone is about to put on my shoulders that I should fix personally. Well, I did get what I paid for - which is why after 3.5 years of Linux as my primary desktop I went and bought a Windows 7 license. I didn't start drinking the Windows koolaid - I stopped drinking the Linux koolaid.
Well, if you say "I don't like it" but there's always people that complain "Hey, you can't do that" even though the license says they can. It's a bit of a gray area where you move from expressing your dislike into trying to conjure up some after-the-fact moral limitations or obligations that aren't actually in the license. Between for-profit companies and unscrupulous individuals you can be fairly sure your license will be exploited to the fullest, and you sound rather naive when you complain that it is. If you don't like them doing something, you should probably get it in the license that they can't.
Even if FreeBSD just manages to keep up with Linux I for one am glad its around. Remember Open Source is about choice. BSDs provide one more. One that is far better than Hurd, Haiku etc. at the moment.
Reality is that the user probably doesn't want FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD, there's choice but not in a good sense. What the user wants is probably one system where everything works. I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken. That kind of thing is just a lot of effort and wasted time for little or no gain. That Linus has managed to keep the kernel from fragmenting I think has only been a strength for Linux over the BSD kernel. Too bad the user space isn't nearly that united. That said it's better with fragmentation than stagnation...
Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux?
on
FreeBSD 8.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well if you're going to put it this way, it's probably better to ask why OpenOffice isn't a good enough alternative to MS Office and why Linux gaming is so lackluster.
The answer is money. Oh, business customers pay well to have their servers supported so the kernel, network stack, server software, databases etc. is in tip top shape. But the desktop? Very little. Of course open source isn't all about the money, but there's the stuff everyone want to do and there's the drab stuff no one really wants to do. Microsoft and Apple pays people to do a *lot* of boring shit, so do the application developers out there. Ubuntu and friends not so much, least not on the desktop side.
Small money adds up, Angry Birds have now grossed $50m on $1 sales. But most people in the open source community would be violently opposed to a "if you like it, pay a buck" attitude. The software is free/Free/gratis, you pay for service & support. Except I've never wanted nor needed any kind of service or support for Angry Birds and if I did I'd probably declare the game broken and move on. I'm not saying you would be a multimillionaire out of it, but it would help if developers could make a living writing desktop apps. Or at least pizza and beer money. But neither the system nor the attitude is in place.
There ARE no alternatives. That is why when I hear people say the "MPAA/RIAA/government/etc cannot shut us down we will just do it this other way" I cringe. They can block the Internet and communication. How effective they are at it depends on how much effort they want to put into it. Don't think for a minute it can't happen where you live if they get desperate enough.
It's much easier to shut down communication than it is to block just unwanted communication. Cut the Internet routers, the cell phone/landline centrals, send army squads to shut down anyone running a wireless network and you'll pretty soon be back in the stone age.
The downside is, so will the rest of society. Even if you tried whitelisting "good" communication you'd throw the country into total chaos. That may not matter much if the country is already in chaos and civil war, but it can't last. How many companies would go completely to hell if they were cut off from their hosted servers? Very many. And it's not just the online stores that'd be fucked, very many businesses work with other businesses over encrypted Internet connections. Things would go to hell very, very fast.
I think that in peacetime the worst you would get is something like China - bad, but not like Libya right now. If all else fails, there's always sneakernet with USB drives, it might not be fast enough for a resistance movement but for entertainment I'm sure it'd work.
Most of the Apple "news" tends to be advertisements. Like this story.
And yet pretty much every tech site feel a need to post what is essentially free slashvertisements for Apple, otherwise people think they're out of touch with current trends. Of course slashdot being full of IT people and engineers hate all that branding, advertising, marketing and so on but you can't deny that the free publicity is a huge, huge business asset. Dell or HP or Acer releasing a new laptop model gets a meh on a few computer sites, that's all..
SpaceX Dragon: $300-$400m (est.) per flight (...) The SpaceX Dragon isn't significantly cheaper than the shuttle, and is again, far less capable than the Shuttle, and is still an unproven design
At least for the cargo operations, SpaceX will deliver 12 flights for 1.6 billion. That works out to about $133m per flight. And it is tested so they have a working rocket and a working capsule. How reliable they are can be questioned, but the design works.
Personally, I find it impressive but annoying. I'm already driven nuts by people talking on cell phones all day, and I don't want to hear and endless stream of command instructions, either
I doubt you will, voice communication is much slower, error prone and most people would rather type all day than talk all day.
I think the advantage is more if you can replace the whole system with a voice command like a train ticket "one adult from [station] to [station], please" and it'll pop up the (hopefully) right thing, if not you can try again or dig through the selection like today. Hell, I'd be pretty happy for an elevator that'd understand what floor I wanted to go to. I guess some of this exists but at least not cheap and working well enough for me to run into it.
That's because your glasses have to cheat a little, which gets obvious when you look up close. Many people have better than 20/20 vision, some exceptional subjects down to 20/8 - meaning they can read from 20 feet what a normal person can read from 8 feet. They have no problem with close objects - not more than everyone else, anyway - they just see everything sharper. Just imagine it like turning the focus on binoculars, they just have another notch where they see even finer details the rest of us can't.
You're right.. you'd have to put them at their highest orbit, robotically. It would be about 600km altitude and last centuries.. or until it collided with something else:)
12). How long will orbital debris remain in Earth orbit? The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit. Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 1,000 km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a century or more.
I think the best figure I got is here. Symphonic music peak: 120 - 137dB
So from absolute quiet to a full symphonic peak 96 dB isn't quite enough. 24 bit = 140 dB should be plenty though. It's a bit like HDTV though, if you take the absolute eye threshold and huge screens, 1080p really isn't enough. But I seriously doubt people would be able to tell the difference between that and a 4k image. But if we have the space - which we do have for audio at least - I wouldn't mind 96/24 being available for the consumer. It's not like they gain much by NOT giving it to us.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -- Winston Churchill
It's not very hard to find flaws with democracy. The trouble is finding something that has less flaws. Most people act in their own interest, and if not then in the interest of their friends, family or some other group they belong to - I don't necessarily mean organized groups but that pot smokers have an obvious self-interest in legalizing pot. Very often when people protect others it's to protect themselves, they actually hate your free speech but they'll protect it to save their own free speech. The moment it's a right they don't care about, they don't mind taking it from everybody else. Very few genuinely act in the best interest of other people, particularly if it would make themselves worse off than before. So either you need everyone to defend their own interests - directly or representative, leading to some form of democracy - or to find one or more of these exceptional people and create a rule where some decide for everyone.
And even if you could, the second part is what would give them the power and authority to execute their rule? If you say "consent of the governed" you are back at democracy, which we just assumed will not realize their own good. This is ruling against the consent of the governed either by heritage, divine right, military might or something like that. And this is what it comes down to, even if you know what's best for the people the oppression you would have to commit to go through with it is a greater harm than the good you would do. It doesn't matter that you're "right", taking away their freedom to choose is a greater violation than letting them make the wrong choices.
All that being said, not all democracies are equal. Not all elections are free and fair, not all countries have a free press, free political association, free speech and real political choice. All else is pointless if the government does as the government wills almost regardless of what the voters said. Being a democracy in name doesn't mean it is in practice, even old East Germany called itself Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Democracy, suuure. So even in a "democratic" country it could take a revolution to have true democracy.
And even a true democracy is of course to guarantee that the majority won't just trample all the civil rights and abuse the minorities. There you have to simply hope that all the minorities can find common ground and have basic civil rights laws passed, perhaps in a constitution but even those are subject to change. It's not really possible or desirable to create laws that are immutable, after all "the people" are those living right now not long dead founding fathers. Ultimately what laws should be valid now is our choice, not theirs.
People need search engines. You can bitch about it all you want, but unless there's a different company that can squash SEOs better than Google, they'll still own the market. And looking at hitslink they have a very stable 85% of the market. Unless you're seriously suggesting it's so bad that people will not search the Internet at all?
Facebook's valuation is a real mystery to me. It's valued at $50 billion. It has 500 million users, which looks like a lot, but that puts it's worth at $100 per user. Do you think you are worth $100 to facebook?
Not personally, because my account is practically a zombie. But on the other hand I know many people that I think are worth far more, that spend lots of time there watching targetted ads. If you don't think that's good business, you must have missed Google.
Facebook got a ton of metainformation about you from say social groups. Ads for sports equipment to sports club members? Oh yes. Fan of Oprah? Oh look, an ad for a book she just commented about. All that matters is how closely they can match you up without creeping you out.
You seem to think a WinXP to Win7 transition is close at hand. In fact last year Microsoft extended the XP downgrade rights to be at least as long as Win7 is for sale in the OEM channel, which will be two years after the release of Win8, whenever that is going to be. Many large corporations are happy on XP and have no intention of rolling out anything else until they absolutely have to. 55% still run XP, and that's including all the home users that typically switch earlier. I would guess 70-90% of businesses still run XP. Microsoft may kill support but corporations will use firewalls, anti-virus and e-mail scanners to block threats and continue using it.
Microsoft blew it a bit on the XP - Vista gap, with Vista not being very compelling either. It may be 2001 tech but corporations have now beaten all the kinks out of the system, instead of keeping them on an upgrade threadmill everyone standardized on XP. Users know it, there's a huge pool of cheap and experienced admins that know it, the whole ecosystem is cheap.
I never bothered to post here because all I had was Norwegian sources, but here in Norway there's been two major blows to OpenOffice adaption. Both the county and region that used to push it the hardest has announced plans to migrate back to MS Office, taking with it 4000 and 20000 users back to Microsoft. When the total public sector is some 800000 people and already 90%+ Microsoft, it's creeping back up towards 100% not down. And if you can't do without MS Office, you can't do without Windows. Linux on the public desktop seems just further and further away at this point.
As far as I know H-bombs are made using a traditional atom bomb as trigger. Use the H-bomb as trigger to the antimatter bomb, I figure a multi-megaton blast will mix matter and anti-matter and set off a ton of reactions at the same time. I'm guessing gigaton range...
Well, you make a point but, shouldn't a server be replaced when it gets old enough anyway? Wouldn't it be nice to have a server up for 3 years of reliability? At this point, who really cares if a reboot would cause a failure? You have backups, plan to replace the aging hardware.
You care because it's 2:30 in the morning, your manager is yelling at you because the all important end-of-quarter stuff is due in the morning, the server is full of one day's production data that isn't backed up yet and even though you have money in the budget you don't have a hot server with the exact same software/patch level/configuration ready to dump your backups into?
Very few systems are so critical they can't have some planned downtime. Unplanned downtime on the other hand can be extremely costly, and the only thing that matters is fixing it ASAP, save no expense. You can afford new hardware, what you can't afford is the time to install/setup that hardware.
Oh please, we're talking about work here not taking requests or asking for favors. People are paid to do as you say. While it might not be the military with "Sir, yes, sir!" you are often giving instructions to people - you tell them what to do. You should do so politely, but it's not asking. Not if you want to stay employed anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Most network throughput is at least 80-90% efficient already, so it won't get much faster. It will make it more responsive though, which is good if you're browsing the web, playing an online game or something else interactive.
I assume this is under load though, because on ping there's not much to be saved. On local sites I have 8-12 ms ping, on slashdot I have 140-150 ms. Since the theoretical round trip in a straight line at light speed is some 110 ms, there's not even room for a 50 ms drop. A lot of weirdness can happen under load though if stuff gets buffered up various places.
You may want to check this chart. Source is RIAA, so take with some grains of salt. Also note that this is dollars, not volume so both price and units shipped will affect it.
The point is that if you don't push new music through radio and other broadcast media people won't know about the new music.
If you don't think Spotify and the rest are pushing new music, you can't have used them. Remember, their goal is to have you hooked on as much music as possible that you'd have to buy lots of CDs to replace - particularly music that you don't already own on CD. Not as in sales-pushy, but they most definitively want to be the place you find new music.
Plus as many others have pointed out, the music sucks balls anyway. Who wants to listen to 90 year old "rock stars" cough up a lung, or pre-pubescent teenagers sing about the "angst" of a life they haven't even begun to live yet, or stupid "look at me being a gangsta is so cool but all my friends are dead or in jail" crap. They can keep it.
Every generation thinks THEIR music is perfect, the last and the next generation is junk. Those that grew up with rock&roll will love it until they die. And Justin Bieber is no worse than New Kids on the Block was in the 80s, we just like to forget. Same as that I used to like trance in the 90s, probably because it was all cool and electronic like. Eventually most people just freeze up in some form, this is the music you like and will always like. Come 2050 you'll be sitting in a retirement home humming old songs from the 1990s or whatever. And whatever it is teens listen to then, you won't like it.
Radio doesn't play the music you want to hear when you want, there's no way to skip songs you're tired of and so on. You might find a channel that's reasonably close but that's it, it's no replacement for owning the song. Spotify lets you play any song directly, save playlists, take the songs offline etc. and is much closer to having a huge mp3 collection on a network drive, owning it isn't that important anymore. Instead of buying CDs or on iTunes to play, people skip the "buy" step and play from Spotify.
To them Spotify is a huge double-edged sword. On the one side, it brings many pirates to a legal streaming service. On the other side, it brings a lot of profitable buyers to a not so profitable streaming service. But if they make Spotify worse then people will go back to P2P, probably in even greater numbers than before. Not that I think they can stop the move to digital downloads anyway, fewer and fewer use a CD player anymore. Delivering it on CD is just a very impractical temporary medium until you can get it ripped.
Maybe if you don't understand why the rest of the world likes it, the problem is with you not them. People here have mental blind spots the size of Arizona when it comes to flaws and limitations in open source products. I got an iPhone, I'm sure there's many things it can't do but the things it does do work well. That there's a few things it can't do, well my car is also not a boat. Unlike open source which is a crappy car and trying to make up for it by being a crappy boat too.
I don't even know why I bother to write this, the parent is arguing on the same level as the "freetard" trolls, yet that gets a +5, Insightful. The inbreeding on this site is just getting heavier each year, everyone pats themselves on the shoulder while open source isn't going anywhere or even going away. And then trot out the same old rhetoric that open source can never die. No, but it can be abandoned like I did. Because I got tired of all the problems that everybody keeps denying exist and aren't getting fixed - which I'm sure someone is about to put on my shoulders that I should fix personally. Well, I did get what I paid for - which is why after 3.5 years of Linux as my primary desktop I went and bought a Windows 7 license. I didn't start drinking the Windows koolaid - I stopped drinking the Linux koolaid.
Well, if you say "I don't like it" but there's always people that complain "Hey, you can't do that" even though the license says they can. It's a bit of a gray area where you move from expressing your dislike into trying to conjure up some after-the-fact moral limitations or obligations that aren't actually in the license. Between for-profit companies and unscrupulous individuals you can be fairly sure your license will be exploited to the fullest, and you sound rather naive when you complain that it is. If you don't like them doing something, you should probably get it in the license that they can't.
Even if FreeBSD just manages to keep up with Linux I for one am glad its around. Remember Open Source is about choice. BSDs provide one more. One that is far better than Hurd, Haiku etc. at the moment.
Reality is that the user probably doesn't want FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD, there's choice but not in a good sense. What the user wants is probably one system where everything works. I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken. That kind of thing is just a lot of effort and wasted time for little or no gain. That Linus has managed to keep the kernel from fragmenting I think has only been a strength for Linux over the BSD kernel. Too bad the user space isn't nearly that united. That said it's better with fragmentation than stagnation...
Well if you're going to put it this way, it's probably better to ask why OpenOffice isn't a good enough alternative to MS Office and why Linux gaming is so lackluster.
The answer is money. Oh, business customers pay well to have their servers supported so the kernel, network stack, server software, databases etc. is in tip top shape. But the desktop? Very little. Of course open source isn't all about the money, but there's the stuff everyone want to do and there's the drab stuff no one really wants to do. Microsoft and Apple pays people to do a *lot* of boring shit, so do the application developers out there. Ubuntu and friends not so much, least not on the desktop side.
Small money adds up, Angry Birds have now grossed $50m on $1 sales. But most people in the open source community would be violently opposed to a "if you like it, pay a buck" attitude. The software is free/Free/gratis, you pay for service & support. Except I've never wanted nor needed any kind of service or support for Angry Birds and if I did I'd probably declare the game broken and move on. I'm not saying you would be a multimillionaire out of it, but it would help if developers could make a living writing desktop apps. Or at least pizza and beer money. But neither the system nor the attitude is in place.
There ARE no alternatives. That is why when I hear people say the "MPAA/RIAA/government/etc cannot shut us down we will just do it this other way" I cringe. They can block the Internet and communication. How effective they are at it depends on how much effort they want to put into it. Don't think for a minute it can't happen where you live if they get desperate enough.
It's much easier to shut down communication than it is to block just unwanted communication. Cut the Internet routers, the cell phone/landline centrals, send army squads to shut down anyone running a wireless network and you'll pretty soon be back in the stone age.
The downside is, so will the rest of society. Even if you tried whitelisting "good" communication you'd throw the country into total chaos. That may not matter much if the country is already in chaos and civil war, but it can't last. How many companies would go completely to hell if they were cut off from their hosted servers? Very many. And it's not just the online stores that'd be fucked, very many businesses work with other businesses over encrypted Internet connections. Things would go to hell very, very fast.
I think that in peacetime the worst you would get is something like China - bad, but not like Libya right now. If all else fails, there's always sneakernet with USB drives, it might not be fast enough for a resistance movement but for entertainment I'm sure it'd work.
Most of the Apple "news" tends to be advertisements. Like this story.
And yet pretty much every tech site feel a need to post what is essentially free slashvertisements for Apple, otherwise people think they're out of touch with current trends. Of course slashdot being full of IT people and engineers hate all that branding, advertising, marketing and so on but you can't deny that the free publicity is a huge, huge business asset. Dell or HP or Acer releasing a new laptop model gets a meh on a few computer sites, that's all..
SpaceX Dragon: $300-$400m (est.) per flight (...) The SpaceX Dragon isn't significantly cheaper than the shuttle, and is again, far less capable than the Shuttle, and is still an unproven design
At least for the cargo operations, SpaceX will deliver 12 flights for 1.6 billion. That works out to about $133m per flight. And it is tested so they have a working rocket and a working capsule. How reliable they are can be questioned, but the design works.
Personally, I find it impressive but annoying. I'm already driven nuts by people talking on cell phones all day, and I don't want to hear and endless stream of command instructions, either
I doubt you will, voice communication is much slower, error prone and most people would rather type all day than talk all day.
I think the advantage is more if you can replace the whole system with a voice command like a train ticket "one adult from [station] to [station], please" and it'll pop up the (hopefully) right thing, if not you can try again or dig through the selection like today. Hell, I'd be pretty happy for an elevator that'd understand what floor I wanted to go to. I guess some of this exists but at least not cheap and working well enough for me to run into it.
That's because your glasses have to cheat a little, which gets obvious when you look up close. Many people have better than 20/20 vision, some exceptional subjects down to 20/8 - meaning they can read from 20 feet what a normal person can read from 8 feet. They have no problem with close objects - not more than everyone else, anyway - they just see everything sharper. Just imagine it like turning the focus on binoculars, they just have another notch where they see even finer details the rest of us can't.
You're right.. you'd have to put them at their highest orbit, robotically. It would be about 600km altitude and last centuries.. or until it collided with something else :)
NASA disagrees:
12). How long will orbital debris remain in Earth orbit?
The higher the altitude, the longer the orbital debris will typically remain in Earth orbit. Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. At altitudes of 800 km, the time for orbital decay is often measured in decades. Above 1,000 km, orbital debris will normally continue circling the Earth for a century or more.
I think the best figure I got is here. Symphonic music peak: 120 - 137dB
So from absolute quiet to a full symphonic peak 96 dB isn't quite enough. 24 bit = 140 dB should be plenty though. It's a bit like HDTV though, if you take the absolute eye threshold and huge screens, 1080p really isn't enough. But I seriously doubt people would be able to tell the difference between that and a 4k image. But if we have the space - which we do have for audio at least - I wouldn't mind 96/24 being available for the consumer. It's not like they gain much by NOT giving it to us.
In Winston Churchill's defense he also said:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -- Winston Churchill
It's not very hard to find flaws with democracy. The trouble is finding something that has less flaws. Most people act in their own interest, and if not then in the interest of their friends, family or some other group they belong to - I don't necessarily mean organized groups but that pot smokers have an obvious self-interest in legalizing pot. Very often when people protect others it's to protect themselves, they actually hate your free speech but they'll protect it to save their own free speech. The moment it's a right they don't care about, they don't mind taking it from everybody else. Very few genuinely act in the best interest of other people, particularly if it would make themselves worse off than before. So either you need everyone to defend their own interests - directly or representative, leading to some form of democracy - or to find one or more of these exceptional people and create a rule where some decide for everyone.
And even if you could, the second part is what would give them the power and authority to execute their rule? If you say "consent of the governed" you are back at democracy, which we just assumed will not realize their own good. This is ruling against the consent of the governed either by heritage, divine right, military might or something like that. And this is what it comes down to, even if you know what's best for the people the oppression you would have to commit to go through with it is a greater harm than the good you would do. It doesn't matter that you're "right", taking away their freedom to choose is a greater violation than letting them make the wrong choices.
All that being said, not all democracies are equal. Not all elections are free and fair, not all countries have a free press, free political association, free speech and real political choice. All else is pointless if the government does as the government wills almost regardless of what the voters said. Being a democracy in name doesn't mean it is in practice, even old East Germany called itself Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Democracy, suuure. So even in a "democratic" country it could take a revolution to have true democracy.
And even a true democracy is of course to guarantee that the majority won't just trample all the civil rights and abuse the minorities. There you have to simply hope that all the minorities can find common ground and have basic civil rights laws passed, perhaps in a constitution but even those are subject to change. It's not really possible or desirable to create laws that are immutable, after all "the people" are those living right now not long dead founding fathers. Ultimately what laws should be valid now is our choice, not theirs.
People need search engines. You can bitch about it all you want, but unless there's a different company that can squash SEOs better than Google, they'll still own the market. And looking at hitslink they have a very stable 85% of the market. Unless you're seriously suggesting it's so bad that people will not search the Internet at all?
Facebook's valuation is a real mystery to me. It's valued at $50 billion. It has 500 million users, which looks like a lot, but that puts it's worth at $100 per user. Do you think you are worth $100 to facebook?
Not personally, because my account is practically a zombie. But on the other hand I know many people that I think are worth far more, that spend lots of time there watching targetted ads. If you don't think that's good business, you must have missed Google.
Facebook got a ton of metainformation about you from say social groups. Ads for sports equipment to sports club members? Oh yes. Fan of Oprah? Oh look, an ad for a book she just commented about. All that matters is how closely they can match you up without creeping you out.
You seem to think a WinXP to Win7 transition is close at hand. In fact last year Microsoft extended the XP downgrade rights to be at least as long as Win7 is for sale in the OEM channel, which will be two years after the release of Win8, whenever that is going to be. Many large corporations are happy on XP and have no intention of rolling out anything else until they absolutely have to. 55% still run XP, and that's including all the home users that typically switch earlier. I would guess 70-90% of businesses still run XP. Microsoft may kill support but corporations will use firewalls, anti-virus and e-mail scanners to block threats and continue using it.
Microsoft blew it a bit on the XP - Vista gap, with Vista not being very compelling either. It may be 2001 tech but corporations have now beaten all the kinks out of the system, instead of keeping them on an upgrade threadmill everyone standardized on XP. Users know it, there's a huge pool of cheap and experienced admins that know it, the whole ecosystem is cheap.
I never bothered to post here because all I had was Norwegian sources, but here in Norway there's been two major blows to OpenOffice adaption. Both the county and region that used to push it the hardest has announced plans to migrate back to MS Office, taking with it 4000 and 20000 users back to Microsoft. When the total public sector is some 800000 people and already 90%+ Microsoft, it's creeping back up towards 100% not down. And if you can't do without MS Office, you can't do without Windows. Linux on the public desktop seems just further and further away at this point.
As far as I know H-bombs are made using a traditional atom bomb as trigger. Use the H-bomb as trigger to the antimatter bomb, I figure a multi-megaton blast will mix matter and anti-matter and set off a ton of reactions at the same time. I'm guessing gigaton range...
Well, you make a point but, shouldn't a server be replaced when it gets old enough anyway? Wouldn't it be nice to have a server up for 3 years of reliability? At this point, who really cares if a reboot would cause a failure? You have backups, plan to replace the aging hardware.
You care because it's 2:30 in the morning, your manager is yelling at you because the all important end-of-quarter stuff is due in the morning, the server is full of one day's production data that isn't backed up yet and even though you have money in the budget you don't have a hot server with the exact same software/patch level/configuration ready to dump your backups into?
Very few systems are so critical they can't have some planned downtime. Unplanned downtime on the other hand can be extremely costly, and the only thing that matters is fixing it ASAP, save no expense. You can afford new hardware, what you can't afford is the time to install/setup that hardware.
Oh please, we're talking about work here not taking requests or asking for favors. People are paid to do as you say. While it might not be the military with "Sir, yes, sir!" you are often giving instructions to people - you tell them what to do. You should do so politely, but it's not asking. Not if you want to stay employed anyway.
As long as DRM is effective enough to keep the "pirates" in the minority it will be worthwhile.
<bush>Mission accomplished!</bush>