Only 7% of accidents have anything at all to do with speeding. It's a damned near insignificant number.
The other *93%* of accidents are caused by shit driving which can't be monitored by speed cameras or wireless street lights.
The accident rate in the UK was falling steadily *until* the police and local government started installing thousands of speed cameras everywhere. It is no longer falling because now shit driving is OK as long as you don't go 5mph over the bloody limit.
I break the speed limit *every* single day but I don't drive dangerously. Speeding and dangerous driving are *not* the same thing.
Both are control freaks, the irony being that the Labour party is supposed to be the left wing power to the people party with the Conservatives traditionally being the right wing fascists.
They are truly Orwellian politicians, 2 + 2 = 5, "New Labour" is left wing.
The average train speed 80 years ago using steam locomotives was faster than what we have today using Diesel and electrics in the UK. In fact, the Mallard regularly did London to Edinburgh at 126mph. We can only dream of speeds like that these days. Today the track determines the top speed and what we have now is apparently crap.
Like the X prize but with ever increasing goals. It'll encourage companies to find low cost ways to meet the goals.
Start small with half a dozen prizes very similar to the X prize for companies who can get manned and reusable craft into space twice in 2 weeks. 1st gets 100 million, second 75 million, 3rd 25 million, 4th 10 million, 5th 5 million, 6th 2 million. This seeds the market with a bunch of small efficient companies who now have a load of money and expertise to start on the bigger challenges.
1st 100% commercial company to orbit Earth with manned craft. 2nd gets 50 million 3rd gets 20 million
1st 100% commercial company to orbit the moon....
1st 100% commercial company to land on the moon and return. 2nd... 3rd...
1st 100% commercial company to build a permanently manned settlement on the moon. Make this one bigger, say half a billion.
etc etc.
And then you have a commercial space economy without the need for NASA and a 17 billion dollar per year budget. The government doesn't run the airlines, it doesn't run the ship lines, cars or busses why oh why does it insist on monopolising space?
For businesses, the cost of primary storage isn't the problem. The problem is in getting the data backed up and offsite to a secure location within a reasonable amount of time.
At the moment, just in capital terms, the cost of a backup infrastructure to cope works out at around $40 per gigabyte once you have included the needed network infrastructure, libraries, tape drives, tape media and that's assuming you can use incremental backups, for RDBM systems which you can't back up incrementally it is closer to $150 per gigabyte.
So you're going to have to spend between $40,000 and $150,000 to back up your $1000 1TB of space.
Or you buy 2 of them and spend 8 months trying to synchronise your 1TB of data over your ADSL line.
1: Linear increase in administrative effort with increasing numbers of clients. It has to be installed, configured and managed on each client system. Samba only has to be installed and configured once on the server.
2: UID mapping to Windows accounts is an extra layer of administration. NFS uses integers to define the user ID, Windows uses some weird hashing function.
3: Security: IP based security and UID numbering don't work particularly well with Windows networks, you don't really want your NFS clients on DHCP and you need to be able to guarantee that users can't modify UID mappings.
I've been there and done the Windows NFS thing and Samba is easily the better option.
"Thus the containment itself can produce a big explosion. Still, it's more like an industrial boiler exploding than a nuclear bomb. The only radiation is from any radioactive material that gets ejected. (Usually not much, and cleanup isn't too large of an issue.)"
Excuse me, but WTF? The only reactor I'm aware of having a melt down is Chernobyl and that was a fucking *huge* issue.
And swipe access to some of the internal doors. If you haven't swiped in at the entrance you can't get through the internal doors, it's a kind of login system. It may well be used for time monitoring but it's main purpose is security, they also use it to produce a checklist of employees who are in the building in the event of a disaster like a fire.
The British Nationality Act 1948, We became "Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies". Then again in 1981 it was buggered about with to stop all the undesireables from immigrating and those with the right of abode became "British Citizens".
We're still subjects, but "British Subject" includes those with right of abode *and also* those from the colonies who don't have the automatic right of abode in the UK.
It's all a bit of a fudge and not much of a benefit with the current bunch of control freaks in power.
My current Casio digital is the best watch I've owned. It's accurate to within a second, after 3 years, it's still on it's 1st battery and I wear it in the shower, it has a fantastic backlight and large easy to read white on black digits. It doesn't have a USB drive, it doesn't have a video phone, it doesn't have a calculator, it doesn't really do anything except just work as a watch since I got it.
Oh, it's a Casio Futurist Illuminator. Quality bit of kit.
4 billion possible addresses on IP4. Are anything like 4 billion devices on the Internet? Or is it closer to 250 million worldwide? Just 6% or so are used.
You see, it doesn't actually matter what you *need* or even what you might be able to make use of when there's a land grab like IP addresses, or names, what matters is what you can get. Corporations, governments, ISPs, device manufacturers will grab the maximum number they possibly can in the offchance that some VP in accounting will want an IP address for each cent in the corporate bank account. So instead of making use of 5% of the IP addresses they own, they'll make use of 0.000000000whatever1% of the addresses they own instead.
All drugs. Fine, put a warning on the packet, these drugs will kill you, but FFS legalise them!
All the police and courts are doing is creating false scarcity which in a market economy simply pushes up the price, which in turn encourages suppliers. How long has the War On Drugs been going on? Decades. Since before I was born and they're still patently losing.
We are having to deal with the effects of the high price of drugs; Muggings, prostitution, burglaries, car jacking, gang warfare etc.
Just legalise the bloody stuff, regulate the quality and stick some tax on it to pay for rehabilitation.
Science is the wrong reason for going to the moon or mars. There. It's said. The right reason is profit. That's it, money...
Do you think that America was discovered and colonised for the sake of science? No, it was the promise of gold, spices, jewels and land which the various kings and queens of Europe wanted to exploit.
Who are the kings and queens of the 21st century? Multinational corporations. They have to be given a reason to finance expeditions to the moon/mars/whatever. For a start this means that there has to be something out there which they can make money off of.
With massive loans to pay off once you have finished your degree, you are going to need a big salary to pay off what's essentially like a mortgage on top of your rent/existing mortgage and other living expenses. That makes you expensive.
China for instance getting a degree is based on academic qualifications and not an ability to pay, the students don't even have to pay for accomodation, the tuition fees are paid by the government. This means when they have completed their chosen education they don't have a huge loan to pay off.
In India also, tuition fees are negligible compared to the US (e.g. $140 per annum) even when you take the difference in graduate salary into account.
There is some irony in the fact that in both China and India they are looking to try to adopt a more US styled education system which I suspect will eventually reduce the cost differences between US and Indian/Chinese graduates.
Glad you went to the trouble of writing an email obfuscator in javascript. I simply typed mine into the gimp and saved it as a png.
They don't scan web pages manually and if someone can't be bothered to type my address into their mail client their message couldn't have been worth reading.
Make money at it. The market's been there for years, the Sun Java thin client system was an oxymoronic attempt to capture it... Java... Thin... There's a laugh.
It isn't going to be massively profitable until *wireless* thin clients are feasible and internet connectivity is better. Who wants cat 5 trailed about their house?
Say a small silent server acting as a wireless router +web proxy/mail/fileserver makes a VPN over DSL back to home base for systems management. Customers lease a server and a number of wireless thin clients; basically just a screen, keyboard and mouse which boot off the server. The apps run off the local server but are managed centrally, including services like file backups.
Customer time required to administer the system? Almost zero. Cost? Say 20/month basic and +10/month for each additonal client beyond the 1st till the capital cost of the system is recouped and then 10/month/client for standard support. Then of course, the server is yours, not the customers so there's potential for making use of idle time.
"the ability to learn languages is a trait that can not easily be tuaght"
I do agree with this 100% though not because people can't learn languages, but because the teachers and methodology simply aren't very good. 3 years at school taught me less about Italian than 6 months in the country talking to people on a daily basis.
The other thing is I think you missed the title of my post. You can phone a translator. You know, on a mobile phone.
"Learning to dabble in a language is one thing; learning a language with the level of detail and intimacy required to talk about medical affairs, or to interrogate a prisoner of war or quickly find out critical information from a panicked civilian -- these are, I'm afraid, a bit harder than asking your way to a good restaurant."
I'm sorry, but where on earth did you get the impression that you could do the above with something which is almost certainly less reliable than babelfish on a PDA? You do have a particularly violently pink view of technology.
There are telephone translation services.
on
PDA Speech Translator
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So all you need is a mobile phone. You phone up the number for the language you need translated to, tell the translator what you want to say and hand the phone over to the person you want to talk to. Quite expensive per minute, but cheaper than a PDA and very very handy in an emergency.
Course, you could learn another language, it isn't remotely as difficult as school makes it out to be. English is one of the more difficult languages to learn. If you learn, one of Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese you should be able to pick the others up fairly quickly. English is based on a Germanic language with a lot of the French and Roman influences chucked in on top, it's a real mishmash.
Anything which reduces or limits the breeding ability of a species will naturally reduce within the population. It's called evolution. It'll just take a few generations. After all, we can't even kill bloody bacteria now.
You might be surprised at the number of HR systems which are easily accessible and have no additional security beyond the trivial. It's an additional cost you see.
As a systems and database admin I've had query and update access to employment records, salary information all the way up to the CEO in the HR databases at several companies, it's only my personal ethic which has stopped me looking. In fact, I was almost fired at one company after pointing out fairly forcefully that their HR system was insecure.
I used to work in a water board lab. They would sample every watercourse they looked after over the period of a week. You had to pay to get access to the results but they were publicly available.
I'm sure that the passengers will be gutted that the driver won't be able to take his favourite corners flat out at 90mph.
And the parent got modded up as interesting. Says quite a bit about the value of moderators. Either that or "Fuckwitted" should be a moderation option.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 7% of accidents have anything at all to do with speeding. It's a damned near insignificant number.
The other *93%* of accidents are caused by shit driving which can't be monitored by speed cameras or wireless street lights.
The accident rate in the UK was falling steadily *until* the police and local government started installing thousands of speed cameras everywhere. It is no longer falling because now shit driving is OK as long as you don't go 5mph over the bloody limit.
I break the speed limit *every* single day but I don't drive dangerously. Speeding and dangerous driving are *not* the same thing.
Both are control freaks, the irony being that the Labour party is supposed to be the left wing power to the people party with the Conservatives traditionally being the right wing fascists.
They are truly Orwellian politicians, 2 + 2 = 5, "New Labour" is left wing.
The average train speed 80 years ago using steam locomotives was faster than what we have today using Diesel and electrics in the UK. In fact, the Mallard regularly did London to Edinburgh at 126mph. We can only dream of speeds like that these days. Today the track determines the top speed and what we have now is apparently crap.
Like the X prize but with ever increasing goals. It'll encourage companies to find low cost ways to meet the goals.
...
... ...
Start small with half a dozen prizes very similar to the X prize for companies who can get manned and reusable craft into space twice in 2 weeks. 1st gets 100 million, second 75 million, 3rd 25 million, 4th 10 million, 5th 5 million, 6th 2 million. This seeds the market with a bunch of small efficient companies who now have a load of money and expertise to start on the bigger challenges.
1st 100% commercial company to orbit Earth with manned craft.
2nd gets 50 million
3rd gets 20 million
1st 100% commercial company to orbit the moon.
1st 100% commercial company to land on the moon and return.
2nd
3rd
1st 100% commercial company to build a permanently manned settlement on the moon. Make this one bigger, say half a billion.
etc etc.
And then you have a commercial space economy without the need for NASA and a 17 billion dollar per year budget. The government doesn't run the airlines, it doesn't run the ship lines, cars or busses why oh why does it insist on monopolising space?
For businesses, the cost of primary storage isn't the problem. The problem is in getting the data backed up and offsite to a secure location within a reasonable amount of time.
At the moment, just in capital terms, the cost of a backup infrastructure to cope works out at around $40 per gigabyte once you have included the needed network infrastructure, libraries, tape drives, tape media and that's assuming you can use incremental backups, for RDBM systems which you can't back up incrementally it is closer to $150 per gigabyte.
So you're going to have to spend between $40,000 and $150,000 to back up your $1000 1TB of space.
Or you buy 2 of them and spend 8 months trying to synchronise your 1TB of data over your ADSL line.
NFS on Windows clients is a poor proposition.
1: Linear increase in administrative effort with increasing numbers of clients. It has to be installed, configured and managed on each client system. Samba only has to be installed and configured once on the server.
2: UID mapping to Windows accounts is an extra layer of administration. NFS uses integers to define the user ID, Windows uses some weird hashing function.
3: Security: IP based security and UID numbering don't work particularly well with Windows networks, you don't really want your NFS clients on DHCP and you need to be able to guarantee that users can't modify UID mappings.
I've been there and done the Windows NFS thing and Samba is easily the better option.
"Thus the containment itself can produce a big explosion. Still, it's more like an industrial boiler exploding than a nuclear bomb. The only radiation is from any radioactive material that gets ejected. (Usually not much, and cleanup isn't too large of an issue.)"
Excuse me, but WTF? The only reactor I'm aware of having a melt down is Chernobyl and that was a fucking *huge* issue.
And swipe access to some of the internal doors. If you haven't swiped in at the entrance you can't get through the internal doors, it's a kind of login system. It may well be used for time monitoring but it's main purpose is security, they also use it to produce a checklist of employees who are in the building in the event of a disaster like a fire.
The British Nationality Act 1948, We became "Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies". Then again in 1981 it was buggered about with to stop all the undesireables from immigrating and those with the right of abode became "British Citizens".
We're still subjects, but "British Subject" includes those with right of abode *and also* those from the colonies who don't have the automatic right of abode in the UK.
It's all a bit of a fudge and not much of a benefit with the current bunch of control freaks in power.
No brainer.
My current Casio digital is the best watch I've owned. It's accurate to within a second, after 3 years, it's still on it's 1st battery and I wear it in the shower, it has a fantastic backlight and large easy to read white on black digits. It doesn't have a USB drive, it doesn't have a video phone, it doesn't have a calculator, it doesn't really do anything except just work as a watch since I got it.
Oh, it's a Casio Futurist Illuminator. Quality bit of kit.
4 billion possible addresses on IP4. Are anything like 4 billion devices on the Internet? Or is it closer to 250 million worldwide? Just 6% or so are used.
You see, it doesn't actually matter what you *need* or even what you might be able to make use of when there's a land grab like IP addresses, or names, what matters is what you can get. Corporations, governments, ISPs, device manufacturers will grab the maximum number they possibly can in the offchance that some VP in accounting will want an IP address for each cent in the corporate bank account. So instead of making use of 5% of the IP addresses they own, they'll make use of 0.000000000whatever1% of the addresses they own instead.
All drugs. Fine, put a warning on the packet, these drugs will kill you, but FFS legalise them!
All the police and courts are doing is creating false scarcity which in a market economy simply pushes up the price, which in turn encourages suppliers. How long has the War On Drugs been going on? Decades. Since before I was born and they're still patently losing.
We are having to deal with the effects of the high price of drugs; Muggings, prostitution, burglaries, car jacking, gang warfare etc.
Just legalise the bloody stuff, regulate the quality and stick some tax on it to pay for rehabilitation.
Science is the wrong reason for going to the moon or mars. There. It's said. The right reason is profit. That's it, money...
Do you think that America was discovered and colonised for the sake of science? No, it was the promise of gold, spices, jewels and land which the various kings and queens of Europe wanted to exploit.
Who are the kings and queens of the 21st century? Multinational corporations. They have to be given a reason to finance expeditions to the moon/mars/whatever. For a start this means that there has to be something out there which they can make money off of.
With massive loans to pay off once you have finished your degree, you are going to need a big salary to pay off what's essentially like a mortgage on top of your rent/existing mortgage and other living expenses. That makes you expensive.
China for instance getting a degree is based on academic qualifications and not an ability to pay, the students don't even have to pay for accomodation, the tuition fees are paid by the government. This means when they have completed their chosen education they don't have a huge loan to pay off.
In India also, tuition fees are negligible compared to the US (e.g. $140 per annum) even when you take the difference in graduate salary into account.
There is some irony in the fact that in both China and India they are looking to try to adopt a more US styled education system which I suspect will eventually reduce the cost differences between US and Indian/Chinese graduates.
Glad you went to the trouble of writing an email obfuscator in javascript. I simply typed mine into the gimp and saved it as a png.
They don't scan web pages manually and if someone can't be bothered to type my address into their mail client their message couldn't have been worth reading.
Make money at it. The market's been there for years, the Sun Java thin client system was an oxymoronic attempt to capture it... Java... Thin... There's a laugh.
It isn't going to be massively profitable until *wireless* thin clients are feasible and internet connectivity is better. Who wants cat 5 trailed about their house?
Say a small silent server acting as a wireless router +web proxy/mail/fileserver makes a VPN over DSL back to home base for systems management. Customers lease a server and a number of wireless thin clients; basically just a screen, keyboard and mouse which boot off the server. The apps run off the local server but are managed centrally, including services like file backups.
Customer time required to administer the system? Almost zero. Cost? Say 20/month basic and +10/month for each additonal client beyond the 1st till the capital cost of the system is recouped and then 10/month/client for standard support. Then of course, the server is yours, not the customers so there's potential for making use of idle time.
Utility computing.
"the ability to learn languages is a trait that can not easily be tuaght"
I do agree with this 100% though not because people can't learn languages, but because the teachers and methodology simply aren't very good. 3 years at school taught me less about Italian than 6 months in the country talking to people on a daily basis.
The other thing is I think you missed the title of my post. You can phone a translator. You know, on a mobile phone.
"Learning to dabble in a language is one thing; learning a language with the level of detail and intimacy required to talk about medical affairs, or to interrogate a prisoner of war or quickly find out critical information from a panicked civilian -- these are, I'm afraid, a bit harder than asking your way to a good restaurant."
I'm sorry, but where on earth did you get the impression that you could do the above with something which is almost certainly less reliable than babelfish on a PDA? You do have a particularly violently pink view of technology.
So all you need is a mobile phone. You phone up the number for the language you need translated to, tell the translator what you want to say and hand the phone over to the person you want to talk to. Quite expensive per minute, but cheaper than a PDA and very very handy in an emergency.
Course, you could learn another language, it isn't remotely as difficult as school makes it out to be. English is one of the more difficult languages to learn. If you learn, one of Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese you should be able to pick the others up fairly quickly. English is based on a Germanic language with a lot of the French and Roman influences chucked in on top, it's a real mishmash.
Keep in mind that there are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. We aren't going to run out anytime soon.
Anything which reduces or limits the breeding ability of a species will naturally reduce within the population. It's called evolution. It'll just take a few generations. After all, we can't even kill bloody bacteria now.
How about we just catch and eat the carp?
You might be surprised at the number of HR systems which are easily accessible and have no additional security beyond the trivial. It's an additional cost you see.
As a systems and database admin I've had query and update access to employment records, salary information all the way up to the CEO in the HR databases at several companies, it's only my personal ethic which has stopped me looking. In fact, I was almost fired at one company after pointing out fairly forcefully that their HR system was insecure.
British adverts are also fairly conservative. Continental European ads onthe other hand are comparatively racy.
I used to work in a water board lab. They would sample every watercourse they looked after over the period of a week. You had to pay to get access to the results but they were publicly available.
I'm sure that the passengers will be gutted that the driver won't be able to take his favourite corners flat out at 90mph.
And the parent got modded up as interesting. Says quite a bit about the value of moderators. Either that or "Fuckwitted" should be a moderation option.