If you can point to a study that measures the total cost spent on car-based transportation, including pollution, and compares that the amount collected in taxes I'd love to read it.
You'll never find one because studies are only done if the result will benefit somebody.
Such a study would be inconclusive at best, because you can't put a price on the economic benefits provided by cars and the trucking industry (which, as far as I can tell, get lumped into the numbers when people discuss the polution caused by cars) aren't measureable due to the fact that they've been so far integrated into our economy for nearly 100 years. There's nothing to compare against. An inconclusive study wouldn't benefit any activists for either side of any argument, so nobody will fund it.
You're thinking of software not a laptop. Show me software that's going to give these kids (who, if you're lucky, speak one of a hundred different languages) a lesson in anything, and I'll think this is a good idea. Still, it's the software giving the lesson, not the laptop, just like it's the teacher giving the lesson, not the blackboard.
You know what would be great... Send these kids a bunch of speak-and-spells and build them a library instead. Those things are way cheaper than $100. Hell, they could probably teach the older kids to build them for the younger kids for pennies on the dollar... (that last part was a joke, BTW)
but I run into tons of opposition when I hype this to my friends. Yes, all my friends are very progressive and I thought they would jump on the possibility of bringing low cost education to poor countries
Your friends understand that a laptop isn't education any more than a chalkboard is education.
You want to turn people on to this project? Come up with a killer app for these boxes. Until there is one, we'd be better off buying books.
He needs to take freshman inrto to economics then. By limiting the supply to near nil for people who have money, what does he think is going to happen to the monitary value of the laptops? And once they have an inflated value, you can bet these kids will be selling their laptop instead of using it.
Instead of trying to create a social stigma, he should just make them as widely available as possible. He's a smart guy, so he must understand that. So one must wonder what his motives really are.
It's not a matter of what you think. It's the hard data, and it's not only happening in the US. A large portion of the Catholics in Brazil have been converting, for example. It's a consequence of the Catholic church's alienation of the youth just about everywhere over the last two decades. People hunger to believe in something, and the evangelical faith is giving them just that in a fun, easily accessable fashion. Not only that, but the first of the people who were teenagers when this all started are starting to hit their 30's now, and are starting to understand the importance of voting. Gay marriage may have been a rallying point, but those people are still out there, and it's not like there won't be something new to rally around every two years.
You know when Rick Santorum hates Intelligent Design, it is dead. After the Bush clan leaves office, we will never hear about it again.
You wish.
All those millions of evangelical christians are just going to dissappear just because their man-in-high-places succumbs to term limits? You must be either blind or stupid if you think that's the case. Bush's numbers aren't down because people opposed to the war and his other policies like him less now... They disapproved of him already. His numbers are down because he nominated a Supreme Court justice that wasn't a christian fundamentalist. Those people who are unhappy with Bush and are bringing his numbers down are going to vote for somebody that is more the way you don't like, not less. They're not going to suddenly vote for a liberal democrat. Religion is a powerful force in people's lives, and the numbers of evangelical christians (you know, the ones pushing this crap?) are growing. Didn't you learn anything in the last round of US elections? No? Neither have the media or the minority party. They're all in for a huge-ass shock come the 2006 elections.
It's fine that you're a moderate (sane) christian. Many of us are; perhaps even most of us for now. Take a look at history and tell me how many times over the last 4000 years the moderates have have been the dominant force over fundamentalists. As a species, we're notoriously bad at learning from history, so given the odds, I'd enjoy your freedoms and peacetime while you still have it.
He was using the word "subsidy" in the same way that polititians use the words "spending cut". (You know... only an 8% increase when you expected a 12% increase is a 33% cut). He's got this big nebulous number that nobody can actually calculate drilled into his head by European governments and environmental groups that is supposedly the cost of cars environmental impact. Conveniently left out of the equation are the economic benefits, so when people like the parent poster do their voodoo math, the cost on society of driving is higher than the taxes regardless of how conservative number they pull out of their asses. They use that reasoning to justify their belief that taxes should be used to discourage driving. In reality, the cost of discouraging personal transportation in an effective way is probably signifigantly higher than the costs of dealing with it.
Man, I wish I hadn't posted in this thread, so I could moderate your comment.
You are the only poster so far who seems to have any understanding... Or at least the only one that doesn't let their understanding get clouded by their childish desire to "have root" even if they don't really need it.
With root access comes responsibility... and I don't mean that like the way they use it in a Spider Man comic book. It's not that you need to exercise caution, ethics, and good judgement lest you become evil; If you have root and something goes wrong, you are responsible. Even if you weren't the one that broke it. Root is a blame magnet. Period. End of story. Unless they're paying you the sysadmin's salary too, you should not want to have root access on any shared system.
Also, people who can't grasp the concept that sudo access to chmod is exactly the same thing as complete root access should have their *nix geek license revoked.
Unless you need to set the clock, signal a process you don't own, or listen on a well-known port numbered 1024 or lower (if it's not a well-known port, you don't need to use a low number. I don't care how much you insist. You don't have a good reason. I'm not listening anymore...), you do not need to be root. Yes, you can do every single other thing you need to do as a user without root. It's not even inconvienient. One must wonder how these people would have survived before PCs...
I'll give you that you need root to set the date and time, but your system should do that for you with NTP, so it's not that you don't need root for that, but that you shouldn't have to do it...
But for your other examples... You do not need root to upgrade your compilers. You do not need to install things in/bin unless you're the system administrator. If you develop software that can only be run out of a particular directory, please post your name and address in a response to this comment so that those of us who have been forced to use such software in the past can come beat the living snot out of you.
If you're a developer, you should probably have your own machine, which you would have root access to, but save for setting the time, you don't need root for any of the tasks you've described. Your license to call yourself knowledgeable is hereby revoked.
Even if you do have root, unless you expect the users of your software to have root access as well, you shouldn't be using your root access, or you'll end up wondering why your users have problems that you don't see on your development system.
The guys driving the trucks probably know when they're wiring up your area. If you really want to know, you could stop and ask them when you see them stringing up the orange wire. The guy who ran the fiber to my house from the pole said they're rolling it out very quickly because they want to start pushing their television services. If you live within 40 miles of a city, and you have Verizon in your area, you'll probably have it by the end of 2006. If the next town over has it already, you'll probably have it in a few months.
BTW, my install finished. It's faster than advertised downtream, but I can't seem to get more than 1.7Mbit upstream. Still way faster than cable. I also got the business package for the static IPs and no blocked port 25, and there was a secret added benefit. Unlike Verizon business DSL, business Fios has no PPPoE.
Get this instead. 2Mbit upstream. Though I can't tell you if it works completely as advertised, because the installer out on the pole won't be done with my house for another hour...
The profit margins are probably so high at this point, that you could play 24 hours a day, and they'd still be making money on you. Bandwidth isn't all that expensive, and servers are a fixed cost. With a population as high as they have, and bandwidth, and server costs so low, they would have to be operating at insane levels of inefficiency to not have a 90%+ profit margin on subscription fees.
This means that Blizzard decided that the gameplay experience for their rule-abideing customers was worth more than the quarter of a million dollars a month in subscription fees that they will lose from this. Either they really care about the player community, they're only killing off a token number of accounts to make it look like they care, or they're fairly confident these 18k accounts will just get re-opened under a different name tomorrow.
essential adj.
1. Constituting or being part of the essence of something; inherent.
2. Basic or indispensable; necessary: essential ingredients. Synonyms indispensable.
Is HD essential for games? If you go by the actual dictionary definition of essential, no.
Want to use the marketing definition instead (hell, the article seems to, so why not?)? HD games are not ever close to new. Games have exceeded the resolution available on even the best televisions available today over a decade ago on the PC. PCs were capable of the total output quality package available in a device like the 360 over two years ago (though for a high price). Am I saying you should get a gaming PC? No. I'm saying that the existance of HD content didn't make NTSC resolution gaming obsolete when it came out. That's yesterday's news. We already have the answer. All the comments you've made are moot points; even if we disregard that the average TV size is 28", and the average TV age is 5 years so most people won't even have HD sets until at least 5 years after larger HD sets become afordable.
I bought it at CompUSA. It was $15 after a $15 "instant rebate" off the sale price. It's a P-330WC. Looking at their website, it doesn't seem to be on sale at the moment, but I'm not sure if they offer their in-store deals on the web anyway.
The scripts they use in the UI don't do very good input checking, so you can put `&& <your favorite linux shell command>` in a variety of input boxes, and the command will be run. On the log searching page, you can even get output from your command. It's also considerably smaller than any Linksys device.
I also like D-Link stuff, but it's not very hackable. A lot of time you don't need to hack though; you just need the advertised functionality.
I'm having a hard time imagining that you couldn't, considering that the fully built version fits on a CD with room to spare, and objects are usually within the same order of magnitude in size as compressed source code.
Of course it's ok. Access to the internet at whatever price and speed you want isn't some god-granted right. As long as there is competition in your area, and the proivers don't conspire amongst each other to keep prices high, the companies that provide the service should be able to charge whatever they want for service, even if they used to charge you less.
Also, that combination you describe isn't all that special. The download speed is average, and the upstream just plain sucks. The statistics say you probably have an equivalent alternative from a competitor, and if you don't then your prices should be regulated locally. You have to remember, most ISPs aren't monopolies. (Then again, most people in this country live in or near a large city...)
Here in Montreal Canada I'm paying $45 for buisness class DSL that comes with unlimmited transfer, 8 ips, and no filtering.
Wait, so you already have two (or more) tiered access in your country, and the world hasn't ended? Why did you jump into this conversation?
I agree, regulation is a necessity when the provider has a legislated monopoly. For internet access though, most providers *don't* have a monopoly in most areas of the US (where most is defined as population coverage, not land area coverage), so regulation doesn't really matter. Check this out. $59.95 a month, no usage restrictions, no up-front costs, business quality customer service (I have yet to wait on hold to talk to an actual person... Though I've only called twice so far), and upstream bandwidth that would make your DSL line cry. The government didn't set those prices, competition from cable did, and that will soon be available to most of the US east coast.
Either single means something different than I've thought all these years, or you've got the wrong person listed as 'idiot'.
Oh, wait I just checked my dictionary. It means what I thought it meant.
There is more than one medium for transporting bits on and off your premisis for the majority of the population of western nations, and typically they're all owned by different companies. As long as this is true, it's not the regulations that are keeping the prices where they are.
The whole point is moot anyway, because all of the ISPs owned by a parent company which also owns the wire (or wireless transport as the case may be...) already provide a multi-tierd service, and the price charged to residential users gets you a service that is pretty shitty for anything but web surfing and downloading.
Extra? Well that would depend on how much less they're spending on other services because they use their internet connection for that stuff now instead. If you're relying more on your internet connection, it's certainly worth the extra money for the assurances you're getting from a quality connection. It would also depend on what other options they have. If a business line is their only other option (not likely.. you saw my whole list, right? Were you just trolling when you picked one option and ignored the others.) than yes, otherwise, no.
Where do you live? Seriously? Aside from the *hundreds* of dialup providers that are available in pretty much every area that has electricity (and some areas that *don't* have electricity) there are plenty of ways to get internet access with a variety of last mile signaling technologies, speeds, and pricing structures. Have DSL? You can probably get whatever ISP you want if you read the fine print. No DSL in your area? How about ISDN. If there's an ATM in your area, your CO probably has ISDN capability. Anybody can get a T1 or a fractional T1. Prices are even reasonable these days... Maybe there's a cable procider in your area... Some places are starting to have FTTP connectivity. Bi-directional sattelite is available. Not to mention that for a little bit more money, even the companies that are notoriously the worst providers have a business tier of service on which you can do whatever the hell you want. For $100 rather than the usual $39, both Verizon and SBC have a business DSL line that is the same speed as the consumer version, but with no port blocking or traffic shaping, and a block of static IPs.
Oh, wait, you want the best service, *and* the lowest price. Well feel free to join the rest of us here in the real world whenever you're ready.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can point to a study that measures the total cost spent on car-based transportation, including pollution, and compares that the amount collected in taxes I'd love to read it.
You'll never find one because studies are only done if the result will benefit somebody.
Such a study would be inconclusive at best, because you can't put a price on the economic benefits provided by cars and the trucking industry (which, as far as I can tell, get lumped into the numbers when people discuss the polution caused by cars) aren't measureable due to the fact that they've been so far integrated into our economy for nearly 100 years. There's nothing to compare against. An inconclusive study wouldn't benefit any activists for either side of any argument, so nobody will fund it.
You're thinking of software not a laptop. Show me software that's going to give these kids (who, if you're lucky, speak one of a hundred different languages) a lesson in anything, and I'll think this is a good idea. Still, it's the software giving the lesson, not the laptop, just like it's the teacher giving the lesson, not the blackboard.
Replying to myself, but what the hell...
You know what would be great... Send these kids a bunch of speak-and-spells and build them a library instead. Those things are way cheaper than $100. Hell, they could probably teach the older kids to build them for the younger kids for pennies on the dollar... (that last part was a joke, BTW)
but I run into tons of opposition when I hype this to my friends. Yes, all my friends are very progressive and I thought they would jump on the possibility of bringing low cost education to poor countries
Your friends understand that a laptop isn't education any more than a chalkboard is education.
You want to turn people on to this project? Come up with a killer app for these boxes. Until there is one, we'd be better off buying books.
He needs to take freshman inrto to economics then. By limiting the supply to near nil for people who have money, what does he think is going to happen to the monitary value of the laptops? And once they have an inflated value, you can bet these kids will be selling their laptop instead of using it.
Instead of trying to create a social stigma, he should just make them as widely available as possible. He's a smart guy, so he must understand that. So one must wonder what his motives really are.
No, I don't think that is the case.
It's not a matter of what you think. It's the hard data, and it's not only happening in the US. A large portion of the Catholics in Brazil have been converting, for example. It's a consequence of the Catholic church's alienation of the youth just about everywhere over the last two decades. People hunger to believe in something, and the evangelical faith is giving them just that in a fun, easily accessable fashion. Not only that, but the first of the people who were teenagers when this all started are starting to hit their 30's now, and are starting to understand the importance of voting. Gay marriage may have been a rallying point, but those people are still out there, and it's not like there won't be something new to rally around every two years.
You know when Rick Santorum hates Intelligent Design, it is dead. After the Bush clan leaves office, we will never hear about it again.
You wish.
All those millions of evangelical christians are just going to dissappear just because their man-in-high-places succumbs to term limits? You must be either blind or stupid if you think that's the case. Bush's numbers aren't down because people opposed to the war and his other policies like him less now... They disapproved of him already. His numbers are down because he nominated a Supreme Court justice that wasn't a christian fundamentalist. Those people who are unhappy with Bush and are bringing his numbers down are going to vote for somebody that is more the way you don't like, not less. They're not going to suddenly vote for a liberal democrat. Religion is a powerful force in people's lives, and the numbers of evangelical christians (you know, the ones pushing this crap?) are growing. Didn't you learn anything in the last round of US elections? No? Neither have the media or the minority party. They're all in for a huge-ass shock come the 2006 elections.
It's fine that you're a moderate (sane) christian. Many of us are; perhaps even most of us for now. Take a look at history and tell me how many times over the last 4000 years the moderates have have been the dominant force over fundamentalists. As a species, we're notoriously bad at learning from history, so given the odds, I'd enjoy your freedoms and peacetime while you still have it.
Don't be silly. Slashdotters aren't very "consistent" in their desire for the US to respect other countries.
That's because we're all individuals with a wide variety of differing opinions; not some collective subconsious.
Free floggings for people who lump slashdot posters into one big group when summarizing opinions!
He was using the word "subsidy" in the same way that polititians use the words "spending cut". (You know... only an 8% increase when you expected a 12% increase is a 33% cut). He's got this big nebulous number that nobody can actually calculate drilled into his head by European governments and environmental groups that is supposedly the cost of cars environmental impact. Conveniently left out of the equation are the economic benefits, so when people like the parent poster do their voodoo math, the cost on society of driving is higher than the taxes regardless of how conservative number they pull out of their asses. They use that reasoning to justify their belief that taxes should be used to discourage driving. In reality, the cost of discouraging personal transportation in an effective way is probably signifigantly higher than the costs of dealing with it.
Man, I wish I hadn't posted in this thread, so I could moderate your comment.
You are the only poster so far who seems to have any understanding... Or at least the only one that doesn't let their understanding get clouded by their childish desire to "have root" even if they don't really need it.
With root access comes responsibility... and I don't mean that like the way they use it in a Spider Man comic book. It's not that you need to exercise caution, ethics, and good judgement lest you become evil; If you have root and something goes wrong, you are responsible. Even if you weren't the one that broke it. Root is a blame magnet. Period. End of story. Unless they're paying you the sysadmin's salary too, you should not want to have root access on any shared system.
Also, people who can't grasp the concept that sudo access to chmod is exactly the same thing as complete root access should have their *nix geek license revoked.
Unless you need to set the clock, signal a process you don't own, or listen on a well-known port numbered 1024 or lower (if it's not a well-known port, you don't need to use a low number. I don't care how much you insist. You don't have a good reason. I'm not listening anymore...), you do not need to be root. Yes, you can do every single other thing you need to do as a user without root. It's not even inconvienient. One must wonder how these people would have survived before PCs...
I'll give you that you need root to set the date and time, but your system should do that for you with NTP, so it's not that you don't need root for that, but that you shouldn't have to do it...
/bin unless you're the system administrator. If you develop software that can only be run out of a particular directory, please post your name and address in a response to this comment so that those of us who have been forced to use such software in the past can come beat the living snot out of you.
But for your other examples... You do not need root to upgrade your compilers. You do not need to install things in
If you're a developer, you should probably have your own machine, which you would have root access to, but save for setting the time, you don't need root for any of the tasks you've described. Your license to call yourself knowledgeable is hereby revoked.
Even if you do have root, unless you expect the users of your software to have root access as well, you shouldn't be using your root access, or you'll end up wondering why your users have problems that you don't see on your development system.
The guys driving the trucks probably know when they're wiring up your area. If you really want to know, you could stop and ask them when you see them stringing up the orange wire. The guy who ran the fiber to my house from the pole said they're rolling it out very quickly because they want to start pushing their television services. If you live within 40 miles of a city, and you have Verizon in your area, you'll probably have it by the end of 2006. If the next town over has it already, you'll probably have it in a few months.
BTW, my install finished. It's faster than advertised downtream, but I can't seem to get more than 1.7Mbit upstream. Still way faster than cable. I also got the business package for the static IPs and no blocked port 25, and there was a secret added benefit. Unlike Verizon business DSL, business Fios has no PPPoE.
Putting a 'K' in front of all the names must be cute in the same way that efficient german sex is hot, right? Either way I guess I don't get it.
Get this instead. 2Mbit upstream. Though I can't tell you if it works completely as advertised, because the installer out on the pole won't be done with my house for another hour...
I doubt it.
The profit margins are probably so high at this point, that you could play 24 hours a day, and they'd still be making money on you. Bandwidth isn't all that expensive, and servers are a fixed cost. With a population as high as they have, and bandwidth, and server costs so low, they would have to be operating at insane levels of inefficiency to not have a 90%+ profit margin on subscription fees.
This means that Blizzard decided that the gameplay experience for their rule-abideing customers was worth more than the quarter of a million dollars a month in subscription fees that they will lose from this. Either they really care about the player community, they're only killing off a token number of accounts to make it look like they care, or they're fairly confident these 18k accounts will just get re-opened under a different name tomorrow.
Is HD essential for games? If you go by the actual dictionary definition of essential, no.
Want to use the marketing definition instead (hell, the article seems to, so why not?)? HD games are not ever close to new. Games have exceeded the resolution available on even the best televisions available today over a decade ago on the PC. PCs were capable of the total output quality package available in a device like the 360 over two years ago (though for a high price). Am I saying you should get a gaming PC? No. I'm saying that the existance of HD content didn't make NTSC resolution gaming obsolete when it came out. That's yesterday's news. We already have the answer. All the comments you've made are moot points; even if we disregard that the average TV size is 28", and the average TV age is 5 years so most people won't even have HD sets until at least 5 years after larger HD sets become afordable.
I bought it at CompUSA. It was $15 after a $15 "instant rebate" off the sale price. It's a P-330WC. Looking at their website, it doesn't seem to be on sale at the moment, but I'm not sure if they offer their in-store deals on the web anyway.
p roduct_code=329138&pfp=BROWSE
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?
The scripts they use in the UI don't do very good input checking, so you can put `&& <your favorite linux shell command>` in a variety of input boxes, and the command will be run. On the log searching page, you can even get output from your command. It's also considerably smaller than any Linksys device.
I also like D-Link stuff, but it's not very hackable. A lot of time you don't need to hack though; you just need the advertised functionality.
I'm having a hard time imagining that you couldn't, considering that the fully built version fits on a CD with room to spare, and objects are usually within the same order of magnitude in size as compressed source code.
There are also lots of TLAs that aren't security related.
Maybe he/she works for HUD, where they have records that need to stay private, but none of them spy on anybody...
Of course it's ok. Access to the internet at whatever price and speed you want isn't some god-granted right. As long as there is competition in your area, and the proivers don't conspire amongst each other to keep prices high, the companies that provide the service should be able to charge whatever they want for service, even if they used to charge you less.
Also, that combination you describe isn't all that special. The download speed is average, and the upstream just plain sucks. The statistics say you probably have an equivalent alternative from a competitor, and if you don't then your prices should be regulated locally. You have to remember, most ISPs aren't monopolies. (Then again, most people in this country live in or near a large city...)
Here in Montreal Canada I'm paying $45 for buisness class DSL that comes with unlimmited transfer, 8 ips, and no filtering.
Wait, so you already have two (or more) tiered access in your country, and the world hasn't ended? Why did you jump into this conversation?
I agree, regulation is a necessity when the provider has a legislated monopoly. For internet access though, most providers *don't* have a monopoly in most areas of the US (where most is defined as population coverage, not land area coverage), so regulation doesn't really matter. Check this out. $59.95 a month, no usage restrictions, no up-front costs, business quality customer service (I have yet to wait on hold to talk to an actual person... Though I've only called twice so far), and upstream bandwidth that would make your DSL line cry. The government didn't set those prices, competition from cable did, and that will soon be available to most of the US east coast.
Either single means something different than I've thought all these years, or you've got the wrong person listed as 'idiot'.
Oh, wait I just checked my dictionary. It means what I thought it meant.
There is more than one medium for transporting bits on and off your premisis for the majority of the population of western nations, and typically they're all owned by different companies. As long as this is true, it's not the regulations that are keeping the prices where they are.
The whole point is moot anyway, because all of the ISPs owned by a parent company which also owns the wire (or wireless transport as the case may be...) already provide a multi-tierd service, and the price charged to residential users gets you a service that is pretty shitty for anything but web surfing and downloading.
Extra? Well that would depend on how much less they're spending on other services because they use their internet connection for that stuff now instead. If you're relying more on your internet connection, it's certainly worth the extra money for the assurances you're getting from a quality connection. It would also depend on what other options they have. If a business line is their only other option (not likely.. you saw my whole list, right? Were you just trolling when you picked one option and ignored the others.) than yes, otherwise, no.
Where do you live? Seriously? Aside from the *hundreds* of dialup providers that are available in pretty much every area that has electricity (and some areas that *don't* have electricity) there are plenty of ways to get internet access with a variety of last mile signaling technologies, speeds, and pricing structures. Have DSL? You can probably get whatever ISP you want if you read the fine print. No DSL in your area? How about ISDN. If there's an ATM in your area, your CO probably has ISDN capability. Anybody can get a T1 or a fractional T1. Prices are even reasonable these days... Maybe there's a cable procider in your area... Some places are starting to have FTTP connectivity. Bi-directional sattelite is available. Not to mention that for a little bit more money, even the companies that are notoriously the worst providers have a business tier of service on which you can do whatever the hell you want. For $100 rather than the usual $39, both Verizon and SBC have a business DSL line that is the same speed as the consumer version, but with no port blocking or traffic shaping, and a block of static IPs.
Oh, wait, you want the best service, *and* the lowest price. Well feel free to join the rest of us here in the real world whenever you're ready.