Is the IP selling constant bandwidth, or peak bandwidth? I'd argue that if you have a business account, it's constant bandwidth. But when they sell residential accounts, what you buy is peak bandwidth.
Buying a car that easily goes 100 m.p.h. doesn't mean you've bought the right to constantly go 100 m.p.h. - even though you've paid taxes and registration on the car and taxes on the fuel that helped build the roads.
Most residential bandwidth users don't care about constant bandwidth. All they want is peak to be there when they require it. And all most drivers require from their 100 m.p.h.-capable engine is quick acceleration on the on-ramp, or to avoid a hazard. In selling you that, there's no ethical requirement that you also be provided the option of running what you've bought constantly at the peak capacity.
If you want that, you need an arrangement with a race track... or a business-class Internet account.
We're about to cancel our Sirius car subscription. We'll still get it in the house via our Dish package. There are a few good channels, but they miss some of the obvious stuff. For instance, Sirius has never had a channel that reflects current taste in jazz - the sort of stuff that get's good reviews from jazz journalists at AllAboutJazz or Downbeat. All they've had for jazz is the "smooth" and "classic" stuff that any real listener either doesn't listen to (smooth), or already has in her collection (classic).
Their rock genre stuff has always been largely lame, with the "college" and "alternative" stations not nearly so explorative as real college alternative stations - unlistenably lame really. There was one good free-form rock station, Sirius Disorder, which got killed in the merger - although they're giving it's main DJ an afternoon show now on the otherwise-bland "The Loft" from XM. We'll see if she gets to use her own playlist though.
Little Steven's Underground Garage is great, if you want a channel where every song is three minutes with a backbeat. I say that not cynically. When it the mood for that, it's perfect. But most of the rest of the rock stations are bad pop hits from name-your-decade. The blues channel doesn't have the depth that a real blues collector would take you to in his living room - again, it's the pop version. They gave up on "world music" - just as well, but why not a serious African channel?
And if they really wanted to get a serious group of listeners, they'd program for readers of Signal to Noise - that is, to those exploring the edges of current musical artforms. It might be a small audience, but if they programmed for it, they'd own it - unlike the majority of the Sirius/XM channels where the content's as stupid as what Clear Channel pumps out, only suitable for background noise, not focused devotion.
The majority of wealth (~70%) is owned by under 5% of the population
This may not be true after the recent stock market crash. But assuming it is, what does that bring them? Much of that wealth is still in stocks, whose ownership translates to very little power, since annual meetings are generally rigged so that the board rather than the stockholders determines the outcome. Much of the rest is in real estate. How has that worked out lately? If you start looking at the wealth of the top 0.5%, then you're looking at real wealth. But the other 4.5 out of the top 5% - not so much.
In the context of longevity, they are among those with health insurance, to be sure. That affords them appointments in which doctors spend an average of 7 minutes with them, and only a minute or two of that listening. Could this be why, statistically, having an annual checkup increases health outcomes not at all?
What's exciting about resveratrol and drugs based on its properties is that we may finally have something that's generally good for people, that's either over the counter, or at least something they can simply demand their doctor prescribe. And since there is the natural food extract for competition (not to mention red wine), the patented derivatives sure to come to market will have to be reasonably affordable to compete with that. Plus, of course, Obama's national healthcare will make them free for all of us - because it's much cheaper than treating the diseases that occur when not taking these.
A friend's vet told her her beloved cat needed to be killed because it had "advanced cancer." So she spent days on the Net searching on her cat's symptoms. She came across the suggestion that it could be a gluten allergy, fed the cat a gluten-free diet, and now six months later the cat is entirely healthy.
So... go to the doctor first if it seems serious. But you're a damn fool if you accept a diagnosis or treatment without first doing your own research. Misdiagnosis - by doctors - is one of the leading causes of death.
Also, a current HDTV will have superior colour &/ contrast (often artificially boosted)
It's that artificial boost that gets to me. In the same way, I can't stand listening to hi-fi with a "loudness" boost on. I've only watched other people's HD, so maybe I could tweak an HD system to where I'd like it better than my SD CRT TV, with its digital Dish feed (which aside from very slight compression artifacts is crystal clean). Sitting ten feet from that TV, with sound going through a good stereo amplifier, makes for decent entertainment.
Not only do the flatscreen TVs have overly-artificial color and contrast boosts, but the color gamut can be annoying. Yes, the CRT gamut is limited compared to reality. But the plasma screens in particular end up showing colors that just plain don't exist in our natural world. I'd rather have to add to the scene, using my imagination, than subtract from it.
They can be built without anger or recklessness... and they can be made invulnerable to... "scenario fulfillment."
Okay:
A. You can build me an angry robot?
B. You can build me a robot with such perfect programming that it never qualifies as "reckless"? And with such perfect engineering that component failure doesn't result in "reckless" behavior?
C. You can program it to be ready to react to situations that are unanticipated, and thus that you didn't program it for?
Okay, A is silly, B is hubris on the part of the programmers and engineers, and C is back to silly again, if a more subtle silliness than A. Machines necessarily embody the expectancies of the designers at ever level of design. And every attempt to engineer "expert systems" over the last few decades has run up against even the best programmed systems being less capable of dealing well with truly novel situations than human beings are. So this is going to be better than a person in precisely the area that every other computational device is worse?
If that can be done, the primary argument for manned space exploration fails, too.
How about setting up a simple script that periodically polls a remote site - say a web page under your control? If it can't reach it, or it reaches it and gets a default response, no action's taken. If on the other hand the page returns an innocuous looking kill code, a small program is run that disables the BIOS? On the server side, you'd be mailed the IP your stolen laptop connected from, which might give you some location info.
Therefore [consciousness is] an emerging property of a very complex system that can reflect on itself.
He claims (very complex system) + (can reflect on itself) => consciousness.
What does "reflect" mean here? One way we commonly us it: "If I can reflect on myself, I am conscious." Certainly that can't be what he means since it would be circular - being able to reflect simply is being conscious, so does not explain consciousness.
Perhaps he means "reflect" in some simpler, non-conscious way. We could picture a video camera focusing on a mirror showing the video camera. No consciousness there, right, even with a very good camera? Now let's make the camera part of a very complex system - say we hook it up to the Internet, whose complexity equals all the devices and interconnections currently attached (but presumably not the human beings sitting at those devices, since that again brings in consciousness, which is what we're trying to explain).
Is your webcam conscious if it's focused on a mirror showing itself? Or more properly put, does it make the consciousness of the Internet emerge? Or is this just the wrong sort of "reflection," with the wrong sort being any sort which isn't conscious to begin with?
Face it. He's explained nothing. Consciousness can't be done with mirrors, no matter how complex a thing you put in front of them. If the consciousness isn't already there, no mirror can make it emerge.
The only way to go against spam is to simultaneously pursue every avenue. Yes, each solution is flawed, and can be gotten around. But the real question is, if we pursue all of them, aggressively, what will that do to spammers?
Think of it like disease. Rarely is one disease guaranteed to kill all of a species. But if you can load dozens of serious diseases onto the species, you have a fair chance of wiping it out. Spammers are the species. Anti-spam measures are disease vectors aimed at them.
Holding back on introducing some disease to spammers, on the logic that it alone won't solve our problem (namely, that their species lives), totally defies pragmatic logic. It's yet another instance of holding out for an ideal solution preventing us from advancing on a practical problem in real time, while we wait as members of the cargo cult of perfection.
That checklist of reasons proposed spam measures will "fail" - funny unless you're clueless enough to believe the world works that way.
The number of Obama stories since Nov. 11 was 946, compared with McCain's 786. Both had hard-fought primary campaigns, but Obama's battle with Hillary Rodham Clinton was longer, and the numbers reflect that. McCain clinched the GOP nomination on March 4, three months before Obama won his.
Wouldn't the three months of additional primary battles account for the difference of 160 articles? Since there's primary coverage every day, it should at least account for 90 of them. Also, if you're talking about a level playing field, McCain went into this with a tremendous advantage in terms of past favorable coverage. He has been about the most covered, and best-liked by the press, senator for at least a decade. Obama was not starting with that positive press advantage, while McCain was mostly running on that "maverick" brand which a friendly press had established for him - and which was in many respects, which the press failed to illuminate since they rarely cast doubt on their own creations, more myth than fact.
It also appeared to be McCain's own strategy during the later Democratic primaries to lie low and avoid getting headlines, while Obama and Clinton blasted each other. If he'd cut a higher profile, he'd have made himself more of a target for them, and they wouldn't have concentrated so fully on damaging each other. It would have been nice if the Post had focused on McCain more during that period, from a Democrat's POV.
Sprint's press release speaks several times of a trial peering arrangement, each time asserting "that Cogent did not meet the minimum traffic exchange criteria agreed to by both parties." Okay, what it comes down to is What were those criteria? Sprint alleges they weren't met. But if they were, was that sufficient to move from the trial peering contract to a full peering contract?
Cogent moves a lot of data. They're certainly a peer to Sprint in that sense. And peering between the largest players - which these days includes Cogent - has always been free.
We know Cogent's competitors hate them because they're charging a fair price, rather than a ridiculously inflated one, for bandwidth. Sprint is the latest of them to try to freeze Cogent out - to eject them from the oligopoly.
So what where the criteria? Were they vague enough that Cogent could view the peering contract as binding, while Sprint thinks they have an out? That will probably require settlement in court. Meanwhile, only a fool would take Sprint at their word that the "criteria weren't met" - short of Sprint sharing the contract and the data with us.
The plan is to bring these in at $200. If they can keep the weight down - the main reason I love my 701 4G is it's so easy to carry around that I've quite using my Zaurus clamshell - and sell it that cheap, who cares that you need to wipe Windows off of it?
A single major advantage: It's Debian-based, but more current, better honed. I haven't run SUSE, but deb package management is far better than Red Hat's rpm, and that can be a huge advantage.
A disadvantage: There are some Debian-specific errors that Ubuntu has inherited. The installation routine for the server version, for instance, uses its own partitioner rather than one of the standard *fdisk variants. That partitioner doesn't write partitions on the cylinder boundaries with certain HP raid controllers, despite that HP certifies servers with them for Debian, and Debian and Ubuntu both list those servers as suitable. The result isn't obvious until your partitions go bye-bye when a write expects the partition boundary not to come before the cylinder boundary.
And then there was the OpenSSL bug where a Debian maintainer removed the randomizer. So there are weaknesses in Debian, but do they compare with rpm hell, or with the many adventures with Red Hat's aggressive patching of its kernels? If you're running Red Hat and compile your own generic kernels, that's not a problem. With Red Hat you really should. With Ubuntu I haven't yet had a problem running their kernel versions.
Our world's economic system is about to go through some large-scale changes. On that there's broad agreement. About as broad as the previous agreement that home prices could go up forever. But let's accept for argument that this prediction could be right.
One way to go would be back to the Middle Ages. Rich people could hire private armies - we've got the rich people and the private armies in place for this. They could employ serfs who work for credit rather than cash - the banking system having been left to collapse. This is basically the libertarian dream - every propertied man or woman for him- or herself. In this case we can expect to see treaties between the principalities in which property rights to software - as to everything else - are absolute. This would be consonant with the dream of the writer here.
There are many other roads available, though, based on equality and freedom rather than wealth and serfdom. We don't have such good models for these roads - obviously the Marxist schemes suck. But there's one particularly bright spot, a product of social evolution rather than someone's unworkable academic scheme: open source itself.
No wonder than that this guy directly attacks open source. We're on the central front of the war for the future.
Learn some handyman/craft skills (carpentry, plumbing, drywall, auto repair)
Lord knows there are plenty of carpentry, plumbing and drywall jobs available in the housing boom, not. Construction spending is down by 50% in Vermont, which never was part of the boom (or the subprime mess for that matter). I shudder to think how many jobs are lost in construction in the boom states. Plus, at least in the boom states, most of the drywall jobs have been held by illegal immigrants.
Auto repair, on the other hand, will see increasing demand as people stop buying new cars - and there's already a shortage of mechanics. Just be ready, if setting up your own business, to spend heavily on the computer systems required to service current cars. It's not the sort of thing you can do anymore with just a spare garage and a few hundred bucks worth of tools.
Okay, you're pitching a software project to me. You've taken a week to study the initial project outline. You come back with a firm promise to solve the design problems in a very precise way. You state that you will stick firmly to your proposed design come hell or high water - that any later inputs from me, my staff, my clients who will be using the software will not be taken into consideration. Your deliberations on design are finished. Your word on what you'll do is a sacred contract, accepting no further input, no revision.
I'd tell you to take a flying hike.
So political solutions are supposed to be amenable to a week's study (about all any one of the many issues a campaign issuing position papers can afford per issue), and contractual lockdown to every last detail of the first draft proposal of a solution?
Isn't that how the Iraq war was planned? Didn't we only start making progress once revisions to the original concept were accepted?
On the attempt to ban books: If you go to the first link in the linked article, you'll find plenty of links onwards about Palin's attempt to ban books. Even the Wall Street Journal reports it as fact.
On my claim that "if you know small towns with drug problems, you know the patrons of the bars are also the patrons of the meth labs"... well, you know, some things we learn from experience, not from somebody else writing it up. I have been in bars in small towns in the Northwest (and elsewhere) until closing time. After about midnight, most of the patrons of those establishments are also part of the drug scene. Often the people on the other side of the bar are too. Palin admits she used to be a pot smoker. She's not innocent of this stuff. Yet she fired the police chief for wanting to close the bars before 5 a.m.
There's also a strong correlation between serious drug use and communities with a strong evangelical presence. I could google up national statistics which show that (they're there, surveys done and articles written), but hell I've lived in those places too. If you've lived there, and spent some nights in the bars, you know this.
Perhaps to her small credit, Palin backed down from firing the librarian. She went ahead, however, with firing the police chief. There had been a bunch of serious drunken driving bashups. The bars in Wasilla are open until 5 a.m. The chief proposed the closing time be moved to 2 a.m. The bar owners where friends and backers of Palin.
The chief sued for unlawful termination. It went to the Alaska Supreme Court. They threw it out on the basis that in Alaska a mayor can fire a police chief at pleasure, without any requirement for justification.
At first, this may seem unconnected to tech policy - unlike Palin's desire for censorship. But consider how much of the Net is devoted to selling drugs. The Wasilla area is the meth capital of Alaska. Now, if you know small towns with drug problems, you know the patrons of the bars are also the patrons of the meth labs. How else do you expect them to stay up drinking until 5 a.m., before they go off to crash their trucks? Palin's in good with these country folks.
So for the Net under Palin, bottom line: less porn, more drugs.
What did you partition with? The partitioner that Debian uses, and Ubuntu uses on its "server" install creates partitions with bad boundaries on some hardware - particularly some HP RAID devices. I've lost a system from this. The workaround is to do your partitioning first running a bootable disk and a standard partitioner like good old fdisk, which has no such problem.
This is with recent kernels. It's not a kernel problem. It's that Debian incorporates a buggy, non-standard partitioner into its installation routines that isn't compatible with some hardware. This is true even with hardware that both Debian and HP claim are compatible. But it often takes some weeks before you suffer massive losses from it.
Unfortunately, we're not cool enough to run on your OS yet. We really wish we had a version of Photosynth that worked cross platform, but for now it only runs on Windows.
Trust us, as soon as we have a Mac version ready, it will be up and available on our site.
Christ, they can't even do the standard browser ID string parsing ans see I'm running Linux? Fscking idiots.
As long as Apple makes clear that Apple doesn't intend its software to run on Psystar's hardware, Apple hasn't staked its reputation on how its software runs on Psystar's hardware.
When a Apple application fails on a Psystar rig, what does the user do? Go to the Internet. A quick bit of Googling will reveal whether it's (1) also a problem on Apple's hardware, or (2) Psystar-specific. If (1) then the Psystar gear has introduced no new problem for Apple's rep. If (2) then the only rep at risk is Psystar's - which Psystar can deal with by (a) providing their own product support and a quick fix, or (b) growing a user community to do that. If Psystar manages neither, then its rep suffers, and its sales follow. On the other hand, if it manages one or both, then it acquires a good rep, and Apple gains a larger hardware base to sell to.
So it's critical to Apple that it represent that its software may well not run on Psystar. But shutting down Psystar is against Apple's interests. The only way Apple's reputation is involved is in how such anti-competitive actions, when not even rationally self-serving, engender disgust among potential customers.
Why don't all mail readers which display html simply do what Slashdot does - show the real site linked to in brackets next to whatever text is in the link, like "cnn.com [http://somewhere.de]" - perhaps with highlighting when both look like urls, but they don't match? That would kill so many phishing attempts.
You don't go from being a happy-go-lucky normal individual to a suicidal person overnight
You don't, but people do. For example, those with bipolar disorder can. Sometimes at the first full onset of the negative swing.
Look, adults can't have sex with teens. Leaving out the grey area of an 18-year-old bopping a 15-year-old, we can most of us agree that for a 40-year-old to bop the 15-year-old is wrong, and seriously punishable, largely because of the psychological harm it can lead to. So leaving out the grey area of an 18-year-old psychologically harassing a 15-year-old, when a 40-year-old psychologically harasses a 15-year-old, even to the point of suicide, why not have penalties at least as severe as if the 40-year-old had seduced the 15-year-old, and given her AIDS?
Free speech does not protect criminal speech. It doesn't protect extortionists or blackmailers. It doesn't protect those who commit financial fraud. And it shouldn't protect adults who seduce or bully children.
MIT Technology Licensing Office... was the only part of the university that turned a profit.
Not true. The well-endowed Ivies mainly function as large, tax-exempt hedge funds. That's why Harvard has stopped charging tuition for most of its students. The advantages to a hedge fund of its size from being untaxed are far greater than the tuition revenues being foregone. Basically, the Ivies have become huge investment funds, running educational charities on the side as a way to enhance their status and gain a tax advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the IP selling constant bandwidth, or peak bandwidth? I'd argue that if you have a business account, it's constant bandwidth. But when they sell residential accounts, what you buy is peak bandwidth.
Buying a car that easily goes 100 m.p.h. doesn't mean you've bought the right to constantly go 100 m.p.h. - even though you've paid taxes and registration on the car and taxes on the fuel that helped build the roads.
Most residential bandwidth users don't care about constant bandwidth. All they want is peak to be there when they require it. And all most drivers require from their 100 m.p.h.-capable engine is quick acceleration on the on-ramp, or to avoid a hazard. In selling you that, there's no ethical requirement that you also be provided the option of running what you've bought constantly at the peak capacity.
If you want that, you need an arrangement with a race track ... or a business-class Internet account.
We're about to cancel our Sirius car subscription. We'll still get it in the house via our Dish package. There are a few good channels, but they miss some of the obvious stuff. For instance, Sirius has never had a channel that reflects current taste in jazz - the sort of stuff that get's good reviews from jazz journalists at AllAboutJazz or Downbeat. All they've had for jazz is the "smooth" and "classic" stuff that any real listener either doesn't listen to (smooth), or already has in her collection (classic).
Their rock genre stuff has always been largely lame, with the "college" and "alternative" stations not nearly so explorative as real college alternative stations - unlistenably lame really. There was one good free-form rock station, Sirius Disorder, which got killed in the merger - although they're giving it's main DJ an afternoon show now on the otherwise-bland "The Loft" from XM. We'll see if she gets to use her own playlist though.
Little Steven's Underground Garage is great, if you want a channel where every song is three minutes with a backbeat. I say that not cynically. When it the mood for that, it's perfect. But most of the rest of the rock stations are bad pop hits from name-your-decade. The blues channel doesn't have the depth that a real blues collector would take you to in his living room - again, it's the pop version. They gave up on "world music" - just as well, but why not a serious African channel?
And if they really wanted to get a serious group of listeners, they'd program for readers of Signal to Noise - that is, to those exploring the edges of current musical artforms. It might be a small audience, but if they programmed for it, they'd own it - unlike the majority of the Sirius/XM channels where the content's as stupid as what Clear Channel pumps out, only suitable for background noise, not focused devotion.
This may not be true after the recent stock market crash. But assuming it is, what does that bring them? Much of that wealth is still in stocks, whose ownership translates to very little power, since annual meetings are generally rigged so that the board rather than the stockholders determines the outcome. Much of the rest is in real estate. How has that worked out lately? If you start looking at the wealth of the top 0.5%, then you're looking at real wealth. But the other 4.5 out of the top 5% - not so much.
In the context of longevity, they are among those with health insurance, to be sure. That affords them appointments in which doctors spend an average of 7 minutes with them, and only a minute or two of that listening. Could this be why, statistically, having an annual checkup increases health outcomes not at all?
What's exciting about resveratrol and drugs based on its properties is that we may finally have something that's generally good for people, that's either over the counter, or at least something they can simply demand their doctor prescribe. And since there is the natural food extract for competition (not to mention red wine), the patented derivatives sure to come to market will have to be reasonably affordable to compete with that. Plus, of course, Obama's national healthcare will make them free for all of us - because it's much cheaper than treating the diseases that occur when not taking these.
A friend's vet told her her beloved cat needed to be killed because it had "advanced cancer." So she spent days on the Net searching on her cat's symptoms. She came across the suggestion that it could be a gluten allergy, fed the cat a gluten-free diet, and now six months later the cat is entirely healthy.
So ... go to the doctor first if it seems serious. But you're a damn fool if you accept a diagnosis or treatment without first doing your own research. Misdiagnosis - by doctors - is one of the leading causes of death.
It's that artificial boost that gets to me. In the same way, I can't stand listening to hi-fi with a "loudness" boost on. I've only watched other people's HD, so maybe I could tweak an HD system to where I'd like it better than my SD CRT TV, with its digital Dish feed (which aside from very slight compression artifacts is crystal clean). Sitting ten feet from that TV, with sound going through a good stereo amplifier, makes for decent entertainment.
Not only do the flatscreen TVs have overly-artificial color and contrast boosts, but the color gamut can be annoying. Yes, the CRT gamut is limited compared to reality. But the plasma screens in particular end up showing colors that just plain don't exist in our natural world. I'd rather have to add to the scene, using my imagination, than subtract from it.
Okay:
A. You can build me an angry robot?
B. You can build me a robot with such perfect programming that it never qualifies as "reckless"? And with such perfect engineering that component failure doesn't result in "reckless" behavior?
C. You can program it to be ready to react to situations that are unanticipated, and thus that you didn't program it for?
Okay, A is silly, B is hubris on the part of the programmers and engineers, and C is back to silly again, if a more subtle silliness than A. Machines necessarily embody the expectancies of the designers at ever level of design. And every attempt to engineer "expert systems" over the last few decades has run up against even the best programmed systems being less capable of dealing well with truly novel situations than human beings are. So this is going to be better than a person in precisely the area that every other computational device is worse?
If that can be done, the primary argument for manned space exploration fails, too.
How about setting up a simple script that periodically polls a remote site - say a web page under your control? If it can't reach it, or it reaches it and gets a default response, no action's taken. If on the other hand the page returns an innocuous looking kill code, a small program is run that disables the BIOS? On the server side, you'd be mailed the IP your stolen laptop connected from, which might give you some location info.
He claims (very complex system) + (can reflect on itself) => consciousness.
What does "reflect" mean here? One way we commonly us it: "If I can reflect on myself, I am conscious." Certainly that can't be what he means since it would be circular - being able to reflect simply is being conscious, so does not explain consciousness.
Perhaps he means "reflect" in some simpler, non-conscious way. We could picture a video camera focusing on a mirror showing the video camera. No consciousness there, right, even with a very good camera? Now let's make the camera part of a very complex system - say we hook it up to the Internet, whose complexity equals all the devices and interconnections currently attached (but presumably not the human beings sitting at those devices, since that again brings in consciousness, which is what we're trying to explain).
Is your webcam conscious if it's focused on a mirror showing itself? Or more properly put, does it make the consciousness of the Internet emerge? Or is this just the wrong sort of "reflection," with the wrong sort being any sort which isn't conscious to begin with?
Face it. He's explained nothing. Consciousness can't be done with mirrors, no matter how complex a thing you put in front of them. If the consciousness isn't already there, no mirror can make it emerge.
The only way to go against spam is to simultaneously pursue every avenue. Yes, each solution is flawed, and can be gotten around. But the real question is, if we pursue all of them, aggressively, what will that do to spammers?
Think of it like disease. Rarely is one disease guaranteed to kill all of a species. But if you can load dozens of serious diseases onto the species, you have a fair chance of wiping it out. Spammers are the species. Anti-spam measures are disease vectors aimed at them.
Holding back on introducing some disease to spammers, on the logic that it alone won't solve our problem (namely, that their species lives), totally defies pragmatic logic. It's yet another instance of holding out for an ideal solution preventing us from advancing on a practical problem in real time, while we wait as members of the cargo cult of perfection.
That checklist of reasons proposed spam measures will "fail" - funny unless you're clueless enough to believe the world works that way.
Wouldn't the three months of additional primary battles account for the difference of 160 articles? Since there's primary coverage every day, it should at least account for 90 of them. Also, if you're talking about a level playing field, McCain went into this with a tremendous advantage in terms of past favorable coverage. He has been about the most covered, and best-liked by the press, senator for at least a decade. Obama was not starting with that positive press advantage, while McCain was mostly running on that "maverick" brand which a friendly press had established for him - and which was in many respects, which the press failed to illuminate since they rarely cast doubt on their own creations, more myth than fact.
It also appeared to be McCain's own strategy during the later Democratic primaries to lie low and avoid getting headlines, while Obama and Clinton blasted each other. If he'd cut a higher profile, he'd have made himself more of a target for them, and they wouldn't have concentrated so fully on damaging each other. It would have been nice if the Post had focused on McCain more during that period, from a Democrat's POV.
Sprint's press release speaks several times of a trial peering arrangement, each time asserting "that Cogent did not meet the minimum traffic exchange criteria agreed to by both parties." Okay, what it comes down to is What were those criteria? Sprint alleges they weren't met. But if they were, was that sufficient to move from the trial peering contract to a full peering contract?
Cogent moves a lot of data. They're certainly a peer to Sprint in that sense. And peering between the largest players - which these days includes Cogent - has always been free.
We know Cogent's competitors hate them because they're charging a fair price, rather than a ridiculously inflated one, for bandwidth. Sprint is the latest of them to try to freeze Cogent out - to eject them from the oligopoly.
So what where the criteria? Were they vague enough that Cogent could view the peering contract as binding, while Sprint thinks they have an out? That will probably require settlement in court. Meanwhile, only a fool would take Sprint at their word that the "criteria weren't met" - short of Sprint sharing the contract and the data with us.
The plan is to bring these in at $200. If they can keep the weight down - the main reason I love my 701 4G is it's so easy to carry around that I've quite using my Zaurus clamshell - and sell it that cheap, who cares that you need to wipe Windows off of it?
The Eee wireless works fine if you get the customized kernel from here. It handles WPA very well.
A single major advantage: It's Debian-based, but more current, better honed. I haven't run SUSE, but deb package management is far better than Red Hat's rpm, and that can be a huge advantage.
A disadvantage: There are some Debian-specific errors that Ubuntu has inherited. The installation routine for the server version, for instance, uses its own partitioner rather than one of the standard *fdisk variants. That partitioner doesn't write partitions on the cylinder boundaries with certain HP raid controllers, despite that HP certifies servers with them for Debian, and Debian and Ubuntu both list those servers as suitable. The result isn't obvious until your partitions go bye-bye when a write expects the partition boundary not to come before the cylinder boundary.
And then there was the OpenSSL bug where a Debian maintainer removed the randomizer. So there are weaknesses in Debian, but do they compare with rpm hell, or with the many adventures with Red Hat's aggressive patching of its kernels? If you're running Red Hat and compile your own generic kernels, that's not a problem. With Red Hat you really should. With Ubuntu I haven't yet had a problem running their kernel versions.
Our world's economic system is about to go through some large-scale changes. On that there's broad agreement. About as broad as the previous agreement that home prices could go up forever. But let's accept for argument that this prediction could be right.
One way to go would be back to the Middle Ages. Rich people could hire private armies - we've got the rich people and the private armies in place for this. They could employ serfs who work for credit rather than cash - the banking system having been left to collapse. This is basically the libertarian dream - every propertied man or woman for him- or herself. In this case we can expect to see treaties between the principalities in which property rights to software - as to everything else - are absolute. This would be consonant with the dream of the writer here.
There are many other roads available, though, based on equality and freedom rather than wealth and serfdom. We don't have such good models for these roads - obviously the Marxist schemes suck. But there's one particularly bright spot, a product of social evolution rather than someone's unworkable academic scheme: open source itself.
No wonder than that this guy directly attacks open source. We're on the central front of the war for the future.
Lord knows there are plenty of carpentry, plumbing and drywall jobs available in the housing boom, not. Construction spending is down by 50% in Vermont, which never was part of the boom (or the subprime mess for that matter). I shudder to think how many jobs are lost in construction in the boom states. Plus, at least in the boom states, most of the drywall jobs have been held by illegal immigrants.
Auto repair, on the other hand, will see increasing demand as people stop buying new cars - and there's already a shortage of mechanics. Just be ready, if setting up your own business, to spend heavily on the computer systems required to service current cars. It's not the sort of thing you can do anymore with just a spare garage and a few hundred bucks worth of tools.
Okay, you're pitching a software project to me. You've taken a week to study the initial project outline. You come back with a firm promise to solve the design problems in a very precise way. You state that you will stick firmly to your proposed design come hell or high water - that any later inputs from me, my staff, my clients who will be using the software will not be taken into consideration. Your deliberations on design are finished. Your word on what you'll do is a sacred contract, accepting no further input, no revision.
I'd tell you to take a flying hike.
So political solutions are supposed to be amenable to a week's study (about all any one of the many issues a campaign issuing position papers can afford per issue), and contractual lockdown to every last detail of the first draft proposal of a solution?
Isn't that how the Iraq war was planned? Didn't we only start making progress once revisions to the original concept were accepted?
On the attempt to ban books: If you go to the first link in the linked article, you'll find plenty of links onwards about Palin's attempt to ban books. Even the Wall Street Journal reports it as fact.
On my claim that "if you know small towns with drug problems, you know the patrons of the bars are also the patrons of the meth labs" ... well, you know, some things we learn from experience, not from somebody else writing it up. I have been in bars in small towns in the Northwest (and elsewhere) until closing time. After about midnight, most of the patrons of those establishments are also part of the drug scene. Often the people on the other side of the bar are too. Palin admits she used to be a pot smoker. She's not innocent of this stuff. Yet she fired the police chief for wanting to close the bars before 5 a.m.
There's also a strong correlation between serious drug use and communities with a strong evangelical presence. I could google up national statistics which show that (they're there, surveys done and articles written), but hell I've lived in those places too. If you've lived there, and spent some nights in the bars, you know this.
Okay, as mayor she tried to fire the town librarian (went so far as to give her a letter announcing she was fired) for not banning books from the library that people Palin knew found offensive. Can we look forward to a Net with all the offensive stuff removed, or else?
Perhaps to her small credit, Palin backed down from firing the librarian. She went ahead, however, with firing the police chief. There had been a bunch of serious drunken driving bashups. The bars in Wasilla are open until 5 a.m. The chief proposed the closing time be moved to 2 a.m. The bar owners where friends and backers of Palin.
The chief sued for unlawful termination. It went to the Alaska Supreme Court. They threw it out on the basis that in Alaska a mayor can fire a police chief at pleasure, without any requirement for justification.
At first, this may seem unconnected to tech policy - unlike Palin's desire for censorship. But consider how much of the Net is devoted to selling drugs. The Wasilla area is the meth capital of Alaska. Now, if you know small towns with drug problems, you know the patrons of the bars are also the patrons of the meth labs. How else do you expect them to stay up drinking until 5 a.m., before they go off to crash their trucks? Palin's in good with these country folks.
So for the Net under Palin, bottom line: less porn, more drugs.
What did you partition with? The partitioner that Debian uses, and Ubuntu uses on its "server" install creates partitions with bad boundaries on some hardware - particularly some HP RAID devices. I've lost a system from this. The workaround is to do your partitioning first running a bootable disk and a standard partitioner like good old fdisk, which has no such problem.
This is with recent kernels. It's not a kernel problem. It's that Debian incorporates a buggy, non-standard partitioner into its installation routines that isn't compatible with some hardware. This is true even with hardware that both Debian and HP claim are compatible. But it often takes some weeks before you suffer massive losses from it.
Christ, they can't even do the standard browser ID string parsing ans see I'm running Linux? Fscking idiots.
As long as Apple makes clear that Apple doesn't intend its software to run on Psystar's hardware, Apple hasn't staked its reputation on how its software runs on Psystar's hardware.
When a Apple application fails on a Psystar rig, what does the user do? Go to the Internet. A quick bit of Googling will reveal whether it's (1) also a problem on Apple's hardware, or (2) Psystar-specific. If (1) then the Psystar gear has introduced no new problem for Apple's rep. If (2) then the only rep at risk is Psystar's - which Psystar can deal with by (a) providing their own product support and a quick fix, or (b) growing a user community to do that. If Psystar manages neither, then its rep suffers, and its sales follow. On the other hand, if it manages one or both, then it acquires a good rep, and Apple gains a larger hardware base to sell to.
So it's critical to Apple that it represent that its software may well not run on Psystar. But shutting down Psystar is against Apple's interests. The only way Apple's reputation is involved is in how such anti-competitive actions, when not even rationally self-serving, engender disgust among potential customers.
Why don't all mail readers which display html simply do what Slashdot does - show the real site linked to in brackets next to whatever text is in the link, like "cnn.com [http://somewhere.de]" - perhaps with highlighting when both look like urls, but they don't match? That would kill so many phishing attempts.
You don't, but people do. For example, those with bipolar disorder can. Sometimes at the first full onset of the negative swing.
Look, adults can't have sex with teens. Leaving out the grey area of an 18-year-old bopping a 15-year-old, we can most of us agree that for a 40-year-old to bop the 15-year-old is wrong, and seriously punishable, largely because of the psychological harm it can lead to. So leaving out the grey area of an 18-year-old psychologically harassing a 15-year-old, when a 40-year-old psychologically harasses a 15-year-old, even to the point of suicide, why not have penalties at least as severe as if the 40-year-old had seduced the 15-year-old, and given her AIDS?
Free speech does not protect criminal speech. It doesn't protect extortionists or blackmailers. It doesn't protect those who commit financial fraud. And it shouldn't protect adults who seduce or bully children.
Not true. The well-endowed Ivies mainly function as large, tax-exempt hedge funds. That's why Harvard has stopped charging tuition for most of its students. The advantages to a hedge fund of its size from being untaxed are far greater than the tuition revenues being foregone. Basically, the Ivies have become huge investment funds, running educational charities on the side as a way to enhance their status and gain a tax advantage.