Canada has a much lower population density, but it's far cheaper to lay fiber to 95% of the Canadian population than to 95% of the American population, because the average distance between two random Canadians is far less the average distance between two Americans.
Countries like the US/Britain/France/Germany, which are more evenly populated will simply require much more fiber/area for a given broadband penetration than countries like Canada/Australia/Brazil, which have huge clumps of people and vast areas of sparse population.
Yes, that's the problem. Unfortunately I don't see a way to solve it, do you? Plutonium is pretty awesome stuff, and I don't think manufacturing it at 500 places around the world is such a great idea. Nuclear proliferation isn't a technical problem, but it is a problem.
We can solve the problem by designing bigger and better weapons. A century ago, nitroglycerin manufacturing was once an international political issue. Today, we really couldn't care less if some country wants to play with dynamite. Once nuclear weapons no longer instill the greatest fears, the uranium industry can start operating without the detrimental extra-market forces.
Paying huge sums of money all the time to musicians is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
By what logic? Using that argument you could claim:
Reaching audiences of hundreds of millions of listeners is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
or
Paying huge sums of money all the time to musicians is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
Are the services of man who entertains a million people more valuable than those of the man who entertains ten? This is true of all other service industries; why is music different?
for explaining why the brain seeks out morality, but says nothing of why any given action is moral or not.
What is the difference between actions that are "morally good" and actions that are "useful for highly social animals to express in densely populated communities"?
Don't kill. Don't steal. Love thy neighbor. Suppress nonconformists. These are beneficial traits for social creatures.
They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
M-Audio, Turtle Beach, E-MU, off the top of my head. I'm neither a musician or an audiophile, nor have I purchased a soundcard in 6 years.
What I don't understand is why Creative even still exists. Onboard audio has long been sufficient for games/mp3s, and anyone who is serious about audio for recording/mixing/audiophile/etc, is not going to bother with what Creative offers. They are the Monster Cable of the sound card market. Saying they are the only player in the space just means you either work for or exclusively patronize Best Buy and simply haven't seen the rest of the industry.
My first thought when I heard about this was rather similar. That is "why did they send the notices to the university, if they knew the exact students?".
Java is in no way shape or form an analogy to COBOL. It's a fast, maintainable, highly portable language that's used to write a huge amount of new software today.
Your predjudice is baseless. The reasons behind the existence of both languages have a great deal of overlap.
No language, no matter how "fast, maintainable, [or] highly portable language", can prevent an enterprise app from becoming a total maintenance nightmare after 20 years of feature creep. That's why it's analogous to COBOL. A few decades from now, extensive and current Java experience will command some nice consulting fees. I also predict Ruby/Python knowledge to become about as useful Pascal.
Declining popularity? I remember recent studies showing that Swing is the most used UI toolkit, I believe Java is the most used language for corporate and commercial web applications, and Java programmers are in higher demand than ever. What makes you think it's declining in popularity? Maybe it's lost its "cool" factor to Ruby and Python, but not popularity
My crystal ball says: Java -> COBOL Ruby/Python -> Pascal
There truly is a massive amount of business infrastructure being produced in Java right now that will last decades.
Has anyone noticed that they aren't dumping Windows at all? They just want to use Bootcamp to cut down on total hardware costs and standardize on a single hardware platform. All they are actually dumping is beige-box PC hardware. They still plan to run Windows and Windows apps just like they did before.
If you are worried about productivity loss, well, I often use webmail so I can stay at work longer. Really, it's not hard to imagine that allowing people to use light net access for personal communication means that they do not have to physically leave work to do these things. It's a bonus for all.
This is where the smart company compromises. A few workstations scattered about that are designated for random personal uses like email will go a long way to bridging the compliance/convenience gap.
Its the same thing with people thinking Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons will encourage kids into witchcraft.
Or MTV or Elvis or the Beatles or JRR Tolkien or William Powell or Jazz or Margaret Sanger or DH Lawrence or Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau or Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc, etc, etc.
Your children really will grow up in the same world you did, populated with the same idiots. So will your grandkids.
I can drive perfectly well while using a phone or eating because i know how to read the early signs of stupid people.
So can my mother. I'm clear of at fault accidents for over 5 years, and i've only been driving for 8.
A poor driver avoids "at fault accidents"
A good driver avoids accidents.
The defense of "the other guy came from nowhere and hit me" is only useful for determining who pays. In reality, it's bullshit. The "other guy" came from somewhere. Just because the law doesn't fault you for not avoiding the accident doesn't mean you had no options at the time. Maybe if you hung up the phone, stopped shoving food in your hole, and drove with a little more attention than the absolute legally required minimum, you wouldn't be involved in as many accidents. Unfortunately, that won't happen until you adopt a more mature and responsible attitude towards wielding a lethal weapon.
From the GP:3) Leak Back: Managers fear developers, in their zeal to promote open source, will incorporate company's code into open source for 'benefitting' others. Much like SCO claimed. Developers are not fools.
Developers are not legal experts either. "Who retains what rights to which code" can become a sufficiently complicated question without bringing the umpteen F/OSS licenses out there into the mix. If the developers can duplicate what already exists in F/OSSland for less money than the legal team can unravel the rights, then staying proprietary is the right decision.
Along the lines of #1, most folk I meet are fearful of the license issues in terms of "do we owe royalties or something?"
Exactly. The trouble is that answering their question can cost more than what incorporating F/OSS will save.
Someone saying "if we can put a man on the moon, we surely should be able to do X" is a certain sign that this someone does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
What is even funnier is the fact that right now, we can't readily put a man on the moon. However, back when we could put a man on the moon, we could also readily verify the age of everyone on the internet.
Sure you can say "gut the Teachers' Union", but that simply isn't a practicable solution - it simply isn't going to happen, not in the real world.
That's exactly what 11,000 air traffic controllers were thinking back in 1981.
At least California has a governor that's packing enough brass to make this practicable, assuming he wants to gamble essentially all of his political capital on this move.
-What do you see? Can you see anything? -Nothing to see here, move along.... -Wait... there are markings. It's some form of Bushism, I can't read it. -There are few who can. The language is the that of Diebold, which I will not utter here. -Diebold? -In the common tongue it reads "The dead have risen and they are voting Republican!"
Seriously, are rings and planets around gas giants good places to setup shop for the outer solar system? I mean Titan alone can provide billions of tons of methane.
A billion tons of methane isn't that useful without 6 billion tons of oxygen to burn it.
I work at a mid-size university and we outsource student email services to a state run provider. From my experience as both an IT admin and a student, I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway......rather resorting to using their own personal accounts with hotmail, google, etc...
Students will rely on whichever email system is more useful to them. If you do not provide a superior level of client compatibility, accessibility, reliability, and usability, then students will resort to using their existing address. Your mention of a "state-run provider" is making me assume that it is distinctly worse than even the second-tier free email providers, given my experience with government IT.
University-provided email usage will vary greatly from school to school. Those schools that provide useful tie-ins with other school directories and services will see more student use. The 200+ year-old universities that offer email for life are more likely to exist in a few decades than a 10-year old startup. At some colleges, students may the prestige of their school's domain in their address.
In this age, there is not much point in a school going halfway with an email system...either offer something reasonably close to the state-of-the-art or outsource it to someone who does. If you do neither, it won't get used. Even mandating the use of the school email doesn't work. You end up with professors collecting their students' gmail/hotmail/etc addresses at the beginning of the semester and having a TA type all those addresses into a mailing list.
Slashdot Mirror
Population density doesn't matter. The Gini coefficient of the population distribution does.
t /94116main_usa_nightm.jpg
Consider US vs Canada http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/images/conten
Canada has a much lower population density, but it's far cheaper to lay fiber to 95% of the Canadian population than to 95% of the American population, because the average distance between two random Canadians is far less the average distance between two Americans.
Countries like the US/Britain/France/Germany, which are more evenly populated will simply require much more fiber/area for a given broadband penetration than countries like Canada/Australia/Brazil, which have huge clumps of people and vast areas of sparse population.
Yes, that's the problem. Unfortunately I don't see a way to solve it, do you? Plutonium is pretty awesome stuff, and I don't think manufacturing it at 500 places around the world is such a great idea. Nuclear proliferation isn't a technical problem, but it is a problem.
:-/
We can solve the problem by designing bigger and better weapons. A century ago, nitroglycerin manufacturing was once an international political issue. Today, we really couldn't care less if some country wants to play with dynamite. Once nuclear weapons no longer instill the greatest fears, the uranium industry can start operating without the detrimental extra-market forces.
That's what we call the "peace dividend"
Paying huge sums of money all the time to musicians is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
By what logic? Using that argument you could claim:
Reaching audiences of hundreds of millions of listeners is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
or
Paying huge sums of money all the time to musicians is a weird phenomenon of the past 50 years that is not the norm and will correct it's self.
Are the services of man who entertains a million people more valuable than those of the man who entertains ten? This is true of all other service industries; why is music different?
for explaining why the brain seeks out morality, but says nothing of why any given action is moral or not.
What is the difference between actions that are "morally good" and actions that are "useful for highly social animals to express in densely populated communities"?
Don't kill. Don't steal. Love thy neighbor. Suppress nonconformists. These are beneficial traits for social creatures.
There are still DOS, Win3.1/95/98/ME/NT and 2K systems out in great numbers.
Do you really think anyone still running DOS/Win3.1/95/98/ME/NT is the type of user that buys aftermarket add-on cards to install in their computer?
They're only the "leader" because they have no significant competition in the after-market add-on card market. Just try and name two other sound card manufacturers.
M-Audio, Turtle Beach, E-MU, off the top of my head. I'm neither a musician or an audiophile, nor have I purchased a soundcard in 6 years.
What I don't understand is why Creative even still exists. Onboard audio has long been sufficient for games/mp3s, and anyone who is serious about audio for recording/mixing/audiophile/etc, is not going to bother with what Creative offers. They are the Monster Cable of the sound card market. Saying they are the only player in the space just means you either work for or exclusively patronize Best Buy and simply haven't seen the rest of the industry.
My first thought when I heard about this was rather similar. That is "why did they send the notices to the university, if they knew the exact students?".
Rule #1. Sue the guy with the money.
Where are you getting your numbers?
r o-agriculture-grains-corn-production
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/pie/agr_gra_cor_p
Considering that the energy cost alone is quite a bit more than that, even next door to a power plant, that's quite an accomplishment.
Even the government could turn a profit filling your car's tank with air for $3 a pop.
The catch is, they need to fill your tank 290 times to get the pressure up.
Hell, with those numbers, I'd wager even Carly could turn a profit.
Seriously, how many brilliant inventions have we heard of lately, and how many of those vanish just days after being announced?
What about the far greater number of brillant inventions that vanish before we ever hear about them in the first place?!?!
If you are going to play the paranoid lunatic, aim high. There is no market for half-assed tin-hattery.
Java is in no way shape or form an analogy to COBOL. It's a fast, maintainable, highly portable language that's used to write a huge amount of new software today.
Your predjudice is baseless. The reasons behind the existence of both languages have a great deal of overlap.
No language, no matter how "fast, maintainable, [or] highly portable language", can prevent an enterprise app from becoming a total maintenance nightmare after 20 years of feature creep. That's why it's analogous to COBOL. A few decades from now, extensive and current Java experience will command some nice consulting fees. I also predict Ruby/Python knowledge to become about as useful Pascal.
Declining popularity? I remember recent studies showing that Swing is the most used UI toolkit, I believe Java is the most used language for corporate and commercial web applications, and Java programmers are in higher demand than ever. What makes you think it's declining in popularity? Maybe it's lost its "cool" factor to Ruby and Python, but not popularity
My crystal ball says:
Java -> COBOL
Ruby/Python -> Pascal
There truly is a massive amount of business infrastructure being produced in Java right now that will last decades.
...and remember:
"Money can't buy happiness, but it sure makes unhappiness a whole lot easier"
Well, art does have a well known liberal bias.
So does Slashdot.
Has anyone noticed that they aren't dumping Windows at all? They just want to use Bootcamp to cut down on total hardware costs and standardize on a single hardware platform. All they are actually dumping is beige-box PC hardware. They still plan to run Windows and Windows apps just like they did before.
If you are worried about productivity loss, well, I often use webmail so I can stay at work longer. Really, it's not hard to imagine that allowing people to use light net access for personal communication means that they do not have to physically leave work to do these things. It's a bonus for all.
This is where the smart company compromises. A few workstations scattered about that are designated for random personal uses like email will go a long way to bridging the compliance/convenience gap.
Its the same thing with people thinking Harry Potter or Dungeons and Dragons will encourage kids into witchcraft.
Or MTV or Elvis or the Beatles or JRR Tolkien or William Powell or Jazz or Margaret Sanger or DH Lawrence or Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau or Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc, etc, etc.
Your children really will grow up in the same world you did, populated with the same idiots. So will your grandkids.
Those few extra milliseconds can and often do mean the difference between life and death.
Perhaps you would be happier with hobby a little less lethal?
I can drive perfectly well while using a phone or eating because i know how to read the early signs of stupid people.
So can my mother. I'm clear of at fault accidents for over 5 years, and i've only been driving for 8.
A poor driver avoids "at fault accidents"
A good driver avoids accidents.
The defense of "the other guy came from nowhere and hit me" is only useful for determining who pays. In reality, it's bullshit. The "other guy" came from somewhere. Just because the law doesn't fault you for not avoiding the accident doesn't mean you had no options at the time. Maybe if you hung up the phone, stopped shoving food in your hole, and drove with a little more attention than the absolute legally required minimum, you wouldn't be involved in as many accidents. Unfortunately, that won't happen until you adopt a more mature and responsible attitude towards wielding a lethal weapon.
From the GP:3) Leak Back: Managers fear developers, in their zeal to promote open source, will incorporate company's code into open source for 'benefitting' others. Much like SCO claimed. Developers are not fools.
Developers are not legal experts either. "Who retains what rights to which code" can become a sufficiently complicated question without bringing the umpteen F/OSS licenses out there into the mix. If the developers can duplicate what already exists in F/OSSland for less money than the legal team can unravel the rights, then staying proprietary is the right decision.
Along the lines of #1, most folk I meet are fearful of the license issues in terms of "do we owe royalties or something?"
Exactly. The trouble is that answering their question can cost more than what incorporating F/OSS will save.
If we can put a man on the moon, we can verify age on the Internet
Apparently Mr Blumenthal is implying we can't put a man on the moon if we can't verify age on the internet.
Someone saying "if we can put a man on the moon, we surely should be able to do X" is a certain sign that this someone does not have the faintest idea of what he is talking about.
What is even funnier is the fact that right now, we can't readily put a man on the moon. However, back when we could put a man on the moon, we could also readily verify the age of everyone on the internet.
Sure you can say "gut the Teachers' Union", but that simply isn't a practicable solution - it simply isn't going to happen, not in the real world.
That's exactly what 11,000 air traffic controllers were thinking back in 1981.
At least California has a governor that's packing enough brass to make this practicable, assuming he wants to gamble essentially all of his political capital on this move.
de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est
...
-What do you see? Can you see anything?
-Nothing to see here, move along.
-Wait... there are markings. It's some form of Bushism, I can't read it.
-There are few who can. The language is the that of Diebold, which I will not utter here.
-Diebold?
-In the common tongue it reads "The dead have risen and they are voting Republican!"
Seriously, are rings and planets around gas giants good places to setup shop for the outer solar system? I mean Titan alone can provide billions of tons of methane.
A billion tons of methane isn't that useful without 6 billion tons of oxygen to burn it.
I work at a mid-size university and we outsource student email services to a state run provider. From my experience as both an IT admin and a student, I find that most student's don't use their campus provided email anyway......rather resorting to using their own personal accounts with hotmail, google, etc...
Students will rely on whichever email system is more useful to them. If you do not provide a superior level of client compatibility, accessibility, reliability, and usability, then students will resort to using their existing address. Your mention of a "state-run provider" is making me assume that it is distinctly worse than even the second-tier free email providers, given my experience with government IT.
University-provided email usage will vary greatly from school to school. Those schools that provide useful tie-ins with other school directories and services will see more student use. The 200+ year-old universities that offer email for life are more likely to exist in a few decades than a 10-year old startup. At some colleges, students may the prestige of their school's domain in their address.
In this age, there is not much point in a school going halfway with an email system...either offer something reasonably close to the state-of-the-art or outsource it to someone who does. If you do neither, it won't get used. Even mandating the use of the school email doesn't work. You end up with professors collecting their students' gmail/hotmail/etc addresses at the beginning of the semester and having a TA type all those addresses into a mailing list.