It's not going to 'run out' - but the cheap-to-extract oil, the stuff that just bubbles up or needs a little pumping, will be gone. There will still be oil further down and in less accessible places, but it'll cost a lot more to get at. $200/barrel will look like a luxury.
Amusing, but not surprising. The government of the UAE knows that the oil won't last forever. Right now they are rich almost beyond human comprehension, but it won't last. So they are using that oil money while they have it to try to kick-start other economic sectors with lavish projects, hopeing to become a future financial hub, tourist destination and resort for those of great wealth who seek privacy.
This is also why they don't (usually) enforce their strict Islamic law on tourists - they know it would be bad for their reputation if they kept imprisoning visitors for kissing in public, and scare off future business.
If you don't want to pay taxes, then you can always go an live in the woods somewhere. Just don't come crying back to us about the lack of paved roads. Better take a gun too and lay a few landmines around your house, you wouldn't want to have to rely on the evil tax-funded police to keep someone from robbing you.
In the meantime, where is all that oil money going? For King Abdullah to spend US$135 billion on lavish gifts for the people of Saudi Arabia in order to keep them from rebelling against a government that routinely imprisons protestors for years without charge or trial and has an open ambition of global domination. Private research may get us where we want to be eventually, but if throwing money at the problem can speed things up it seems like a good idea.
Oil prices have a knock-on effect. Higher petrol and diesel prices means higher cost of shifting materials around, which raises the cost of all manufacturing industries. It also means fewer long-distance journeys, impacting tourism. Higher delivery costs impacting retail. The economy runs on cheap oil - it is the resource that enables every other industry to function. Unless it is used much more efficiently or a substitute becomes a viable replacement, it's still better to throw money to the greedy cartel than to trigger a new recession in order to spite them.
Works for lightbulbs. Dispite the popular ramblings of the internet, neither the EU nor US have actually banned incandescent bulbs - they just set efficiency standards high enough that no incandescent can achieve them.
For QoS to work, it has to be applied at the point of contention where packets would be dropped. That's the modem, not the router - so no matter what you do in the router, it isn't going to work if the modem is a seperate piece of hardware. This is the case with just about all cable ISPs, though not for (A)DSL.
There is a dirty hack you can do with rate limiting to apply QoS at the router, but it is very ugly and means sacrificing a small amount of capacity even under ideal conditions.
It's hard to know the internal content even if you do have the keys, or perform a MITM attack on an unauthenticated connection. The amount of memory and processing time requirered means you can't do it in a stateless filter - and when filtering a hundred-gigabit connection at an ISP, stateless is all you get. It's only possible to intercept and decode a few streams at a time, which is very handy for obeying wiretap warrents but not a lot of use for mass filtering.
I have yet to see a home router that supports a proper QoS system. It's not even possible for a router using a seperate cable modem, as congestion happens there. So Rogers statement is "We're not breaking it, and if you do this simple impossible task it will prove so."
If the free upload sites had to handle that volume of data, they wouldn't be free very long. No, there are only two things that can distribute the amount of data it takes to keep WoW going: P2P, or a CDN. Blizzard chosen P2P for business reasons - setting up a VPN or contracting with another company to use theirs are both expensive options, while P2P is much lower in cost.
Time online is a good indicator. A major expense for a gold farmer is subscription cost, so he'll want to work them all to maximum profit. That means characters being operated for as many hours as possible a day, even if it means very long working hours or operating in shifts. If the game operator sees a character is active for twenty hours a day, seven days a week, then it's a fair bet it's being used by more than one person.
Another indicator, and one which would detect money laundering too, would be the transfer of vast amounts of in-game currency from one account to another. MMORPG money has a rubbish exchange rate - that's why people like to buy it with real cash, a little real money goes a very long way in game - so to launder any significent amount of real money would take a truely ridiculous amount of game-money being transfers. If you see someone moving more money in a week than most players would in a year, something funny is going on.
The only way a launderer would avoid that is the same way they can in the real world - lots and lots of small transactions, between members of two organisations. But this is impractical for any sizeable sum of money.
The sheer *amount* of virtual currency would raise suspicion. If you're routinely tradeing the equivilent of tens of thousands of dollars in real money at grey market rates, the administrators will notice. They'd probably assume you were running a gold-farming operation.
Possible, but it seems more likely they just won't catch on. To be of any value, a currency needs to be either backed by something of intrinsic value (Precious metals have their use here) or have some organisation of sufficient economic power backing it (Typically a government). Cryptocurrencies have neither of these, which leads to a problem: You can't pay your taxes in bitcoins.
It's great for throwing together something that mostly-works, and doing so very quickly. I wouldn't use it for anything that's at all performance-sensitive, or even just very big. It's somewhere in between true scripting languages and 'real' application programming languages.
So something like the Google censorship issue: The company bosses don't *want* to comply with the laws of an oppressive country, but that's the only way to do business with a very lucrative market, and their first duty is to the shareholders.
By what metric? Total accounts? Accounts accessed in the last month? Volume of mail?
The first metric isn't much good, because a lot of those will be the leftovers of customers who long ago fled the service. Accounts accessed recently is better.
The anti-porn types are upset because they see this as legitimising porn. They would like to see it banned altogether, and this seems like a form of approval.
I don't think it'll be that big a help - it'll let you block the reputable porn sites easily enough, but those already pose little problem as they are easily identified. It's all the ones that promote themselves with spamming, aggressive advertising and search engine abuse that you need to keep filtered, and they arn't going to move to.xxx. Even if it were somehow possible to force them off.com, they'd just set up in the country-codes instead.
Everyone, really. The anti-porn crusaders hate.xxx because they view it as legitimising pornography - creating somewhere for it is akin to approval. The pornography industry hates the idea because they fear it could be the first step in creeping censorship, forcing them into an online ghetto. The only people who support.xxx are those at ICM Registry, who stand to make many millions of dollars off it.
I suspect the chances of getting shot on the way to or from school are higher - and the chances of getting hit by a car on the same journey a lot higher still.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not going to 'run out' - but the cheap-to-extract oil, the stuff that just bubbles up or needs a little pumping, will be gone. There will still be oil further down and in less accessible places, but it'll cost a lot more to get at. $200/barrel will look like a luxury.
Hmm... maybe you you use one of those containers designed to make cube melons?
Amusingly, built with oil money.
Amusing, but not surprising. The government of the UAE knows that the oil won't last forever. Right now they are rich almost beyond human comprehension, but it won't last. So they are using that oil money while they have it to try to kick-start other economic sectors with lavish projects, hopeing to become a future financial hub, tourist destination and resort for those of great wealth who seek privacy.
This is also why they don't (usually) enforce their strict Islamic law on tourists - they know it would be bad for their reputation if they kept imprisoning visitors for kissing in public, and scare off future business.
If you don't want to pay taxes, then you can always go an live in the woods somewhere. Just don't come crying back to us about the lack of paved roads. Better take a gun too and lay a few landmines around your house, you wouldn't want to have to rely on the evil tax-funded police to keep someone from robbing you.
In the meantime, where is all that oil money going? For King Abdullah to spend US$135 billion on lavish gifts for the people of Saudi Arabia in order to keep them from rebelling against a government that routinely imprisons protestors for years without charge or trial and has an open ambition of global domination. Private research may get us where we want to be eventually, but if throwing money at the problem can speed things up it seems like a good idea.
Amish?
Oil prices have a knock-on effect. Higher petrol and diesel prices means higher cost of shifting materials around, which raises the cost of all manufacturing industries. It also means fewer long-distance journeys, impacting tourism. Higher delivery costs impacting retail. The economy runs on cheap oil - it is the resource that enables every other industry to function. Unless it is used much more efficiently or a substitute becomes a viable replacement, it's still better to throw money to the greedy cartel than to trigger a new recession in order to spite them.
Exceptions for delivery, I assume.
Perhaps there can be an incentive to make commercial deliveries at low-traffic hours, like midnight-6am.
Works for lightbulbs. Dispite the popular ramblings of the internet, neither the EU nor US have actually banned incandescent bulbs - they just set efficiency standards high enough that no incandescent can achieve them.
For QoS to work, it has to be applied at the point of contention where packets would be dropped. That's the modem, not the router - so no matter what you do in the router, it isn't going to work if the modem is a seperate piece of hardware. This is the case with just about all cable ISPs, though not for (A)DSL.
There is a dirty hack you can do with rate limiting to apply QoS at the router, but it is very ugly and means sacrificing a small amount of capacity even under ideal conditions.
It's hard to know the internal content even if you do have the keys, or perform a MITM attack on an unauthenticated connection. The amount of memory and processing time requirered means you can't do it in a stateless filter - and when filtering a hundred-gigabit connection at an ISP, stateless is all you get. It's only possible to intercept and decode a few streams at a time, which is very handy for obeying wiretap warrents but not a lot of use for mass filtering.
I have yet to see a home router that supports a proper QoS system. It's not even possible for a router using a seperate cable modem, as congestion happens there. So Rogers statement is "We're not breaking it, and if you do this simple impossible task it will prove so."
If the free upload sites had to handle that volume of data, they wouldn't be free very long. No, there are only two things that can distribute the amount of data it takes to keep WoW going: P2P, or a CDN. Blizzard chosen P2P for business reasons - setting up a VPN or contracting with another company to use theirs are both expensive options, while P2P is much lower in cost.
Time online is a good indicator. A major expense for a gold farmer is subscription cost, so he'll want to work them all to maximum profit. That means characters being operated for as many hours as possible a day, even if it means very long working hours or operating in shifts. If the game operator sees a character is active for twenty hours a day, seven days a week, then it's a fair bet it's being used by more than one person.
Another indicator, and one which would detect money laundering too, would be the transfer of vast amounts of in-game currency from one account to another. MMORPG money has a rubbish exchange rate - that's why people like to buy it with real cash, a little real money goes a very long way in game - so to launder any significent amount of real money would take a truely ridiculous amount of game-money being transfers. If you see someone moving more money in a week than most players would in a year, something funny is going on.
The only way a launderer would avoid that is the same way they can in the real world - lots and lots of small transactions, between members of two organisations. But this is impractical for any sizeable sum of money.
The sheer *amount* of virtual currency would raise suspicion. If you're routinely tradeing the equivilent of tens of thousands of dollars in real money at grey market rates, the administrators will notice. They'd probably assume you were running a gold-farming operation.
Possible, but it seems more likely they just won't catch on. To be of any value, a currency needs to be either backed by something of intrinsic value (Precious metals have their use here) or have some organisation of sufficient economic power backing it (Typically a government). Cryptocurrencies have neither of these, which leads to a problem: You can't pay your taxes in bitcoins.
Several things, actually... all of them small programs.
It's great for throwing together something that mostly-works, and doing so very quickly. I wouldn't use it for anything that's at all performance-sensitive, or even just very big. It's somewhere in between true scripting languages and 'real' application programming languages.
So something like the Google censorship issue: The company bosses don't *want* to comply with the laws of an oppressive country, but that's the only way to do business with a very lucrative market, and their first duty is to the shareholders.
By what metric? Total accounts? Accounts accessed in the last month? Volume of mail? The first metric isn't much good, because a lot of those will be the leftovers of customers who long ago fled the service. Accounts accessed recently is better.
The anti-porn types are upset because they see this as legitimising porn. They would like to see it banned altogether, and this seems like a form of approval.
I don't think it'll be that big a help - it'll let you block the reputable porn sites easily enough, but those already pose little problem as they are easily identified. It's all the ones that promote themselves with spamming, aggressive advertising and search engine abuse that you need to keep filtered, and they arn't going to move to .xxx. Even if it were somehow possible to force them off .com, they'd just set up in the country-codes instead.
Everyone, really. The anti-porn crusaders hate .xxx because they view it as legitimising pornography - creating somewhere for it is akin to approval. The pornography industry hates the idea because they fear it could be the first step in creeping censorship, forcing them into an online ghetto. The only people who support .xxx are those at ICM Registry, who stand to make many millions of dollars off it.
Not so long as IPv4 is in use. Due to the use of vhosts, that would also block a significent number of non-.xxx sites.
I suspect the chances of getting shot on the way to or from school are higher - and the chances of getting hit by a car on the same journey a lot higher still.