How is using the number of gold atoms that happen to be lying around on the planet anything but an artificial imposition of value? If we tie the number of bit coins generated to say the number of hair follicles that are shed from a particular polar bear (also a natural phenomenon), does that make anything any better? When are people going to wake up and realizes that their commodities (especially goods that are primarily valued as a luxury good, like gold) are valuated by the same system that valuates currency and are therefore also volatile?
Maybe, just maybe, since domestic oil production really has been increasing, the party line you are regurgitating is make believe pretend and you should stop taking everything you hear from conservative talk radio as gospel? You do know that Glenn Beck is not a real news source, right?
Sandy Bridge is the first time in a long time that Intel was remotely competitive with an AMD chip at the same price point. Many of us assume this bears some relation to the fact that early indicators put AMD's Bulldozer architecture on top of Intel's top end systems, so it is possible that we're going to see a role reversal because Intel needs to be more competitive in the mid-range market to keep in the game. This is, of course, all speculation, but it isn't hard to go back to pre-sandy bridge and see that the price/performance ratio on mainline consumer Intel chips prior to this year just plain sucked compared to AMD.
I use my iPhone really a lot (it is work issued and called all day), and I find that usually once every couple of days I fail to actually answer an incoming call because I can't actually get it to react correctly. Some of the time, I can't get the answer slider to move across, some of the time I have some frozen screen up that doesn't let me interact with the phone (I personally love it when the GUI for a phone call is up, only it is not live so I can't touch anything on it. I assume this has something to do with the background image for the call coming up without the actual interactive widgets being there). I also randomly have apps (including preinstalled apps like google maps) close without explanation and random freezes besides. I used to think it was because I was using an old beat up 3g with old-ish firmware, but my company recently replaced it with an iPhone 4 with updated firmware and very few installed apps and it has more or less the same problems (without dying pixels on the screen and a mostly dead battery that is not really end user replaceable, which is why the phone got swapped). I don't have a ton of experience using an Android to make a comparison, but I can't imagine that what I have should be the target of anyone's aspirations. I just can't figure out how they can put so much hardware into a phone and have it still be a substantially worse phone than the tiny Samsung dumb flip phone that I got for free with contract years ago.
I also happen to have a highly developed prefrontal cortex that allows me to make complex decisions about behavioral patterns as they relate to my (and humanity's) well-being. I think that trumps a couple of teeth as an evolutionary trait that defines my species.
Where you ranch has very little to do with energy waste or pollution. Cattle produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases irrespective of where you put them, among other things. More importantly, you have to feed a cow a lot more energy than you can possibly get back out of its meat. Whatever problems you cause by harvesting crops are automatically worse for farming because you have to farm more to feed the cows than you would have to feed people directly, even if the cows themselves created no pollution or energy drain at all.
Don't get me wrong, I am not currently a practicing vegetarian or vegan, mostly due to how difficult it is to pull off (you have to spend much more time worrying about your meals. There aren't exactly a lot of easy to pick up/prepare, cheap vegetarian choices at either fast food restaurants or in the frozen food isle). But I at least don't fool myself into believing that my choice is anything but selfish.
Or, as I temporarily put on my vegetarian's advocate hat, just eat the grain and then some other non-meat sustenance and not kill any animals or contribute to the extra energy waste and pollution inherent in raising animals to eat.
I can't figure out why these articles don't even make a casual reference to the fact that they are being posted on Slashdot, where we have a system that already fulfills all of the requirements for this "project".
Your analogies fail on any connection without a bandwidth cap. As long as I am not using that bandwidth at the time, there is no cost to me for letting somebody else use my wifi. I don't have to refill my router's gas tank.
You use a firewall to segregate your internal network from the access point, like you really should be doing if you want your internal network secure anyway. One of the biggest rules to securing any network is to control network access. How can you do that when you are spraying your data all over the block, where anybody can listen in for an arbitrary amount of time without you knowing and try to break your encryption? If you think your wireless network running on a $50 consumer-grade router is secure, you are probably wrong.
"Unexpected demand" is marketing-speak for "some piece of our service has a bug preventing it from scaling appropriately but we'd rather talk about how awesome and cool and popular we are".
We have a broadcasting SSID here that has been active for ~4 months. We have employees with android phones. Our wireless MAC is not in that database. Something here is fishy.
That's funny, I thought I replied to a comment that quoted
coded up in a month
As its point of contention, and not one that claimed that all of the workload for the game in its entirety was less than 160 hours. Art assets do take time, as does level design.
My point was that the code itself (and the mechanic design portion of the ripoff of a game) would not be hard, and it is specifically because Angry birds was nowhere near written "from scratch". They got to leverage a physics system that controls almost all of the moving portions of the game and APIs to ease all of the rest.
For the record, I am a programmer, so I doubt I'm the guy usually pushing for unreasonable timetables on software releases.
Sure, it took more than a month to write overall, but since a substantial portion of that work was done Erin Catto of Box2d, it probably didn't take Rovio a month to write.
Or, you know, they could just use a freely licensed physics library (Box2d) to do a majority of the hard stuff and give no credit for it. Some of us do recognize the amount of work it takes to make a game using somebody else's engine to rip off somebody else's relatively simple flash game idea, and have figured out that it wasn't very much. A month actually seems like a gross overestimate on the amount of time it took to do the programming.
Let's try this. I work at an ISP, so I see a lot of trash consumer grade routers fail day in and day out. They start doing all sorts of crazy things when they fry. The closest they get to compromising people's networks when they are acting as a NAT gateway is when they start randomly acting like a dumb switch, which means that they spill some LAN traffic out onto our network, which isn't a big deal. Their internet connection doesn't work, and theoretically somebody sitting someplace on the same network segment with a packet sniffer could notice and connect in to their network, but the chances of that happening are rather low, and are zero in any network that uses something like PPPoE.
On a network where all devices have public addresses, I think it is plausible that the trash quality consumer router would just start allowing all traffic to pass through, regardless of firewall rules. I've now just changed my worst case from letting people that are 0 routing hops away from me maybe get in if they happen to be watching with a packet sniffer to giving people full access to all devices on my network. And the best part is, my internet connection could still be working, so I might not even notice for a while, since I don't run external vulnerability scans on my home connection.
In a well maintained network with routing devices of reasonable quality, this is a non-issue. But how many residential ISP subscribers have that? Home users are as likely to accidentally turn the firewall completely off as anything else. The worst they are going to probably pull off with a NAT gateway is DMZing one device on their network and giving people access to that. And they sure aren't going to pay more than about $50 for the device that they are going to entrust with all of their network security.
I can't afford $1000+ for a new TV, $400+ for a Blu-Ray player (even a PS3)
Not that it probably solves your problem, but you can get a 42" 1080p led-backlit lcd screen for sub $500, and a blu-ray player costs sub $100 (even a PS3 slim retails for less than the $400 you quoted).
Frequently it is either the drive head hitting the edge of its available movement space because it misses track 0 and keeps going, or the needle itself making contact with the platter. If the needle hits platter, it ends up ruining data wherever it lands, which could explain the 1% data loss.
If your IT department is so understaffed they can't provide basic support for a service they set up, you have a funding problem that doesn't originate in your IT department. You don't fix the funding problem by inviting multi-million dollar lawsuits. And yes, I realize that your hypothetical involves a bad solution with a high cost, but maybe that's the route they have to go because they don't have the manpower to implement a good solution?
If your IT department works like you've described, the smart money is on the problem coming from someplace above them, even you see a significant number of poor sys admins at the bottom. They are probably there because somebody didn't want to spend the money on a more qualified candidate.
The important thing to note in this hypothetical story about a Series of Unfortunate Events(tm) is that the several step process of creating a security hole can be even more complicated that what he's stated, but since it can happen over the course of years, it isn't as unlikely as it sounds. It could be 9 months after install where you aren't paying much attention to your smoothly running server anymore that some co-worker who also wants to go behind his IT department decides that your server is under-utilized and puts his (let's say also good intentioned) file server on there with a tunnel to the outside, and then another 7 months after that when your package manager automatically downloads and installs a botched update to his previously secure application that lets the black hat get in.
Slashdot Mirror
How is using the number of gold atoms that happen to be lying around on the planet anything but an artificial imposition of value? If we tie the number of bit coins generated to say the number of hair follicles that are shed from a particular polar bear (also a natural phenomenon), does that make anything any better? When are people going to wake up and realizes that their commodities (especially goods that are primarily valued as a luxury good, like gold) are valuated by the same system that valuates currency and are therefore also volatile?
Do you wear sensors on your mouth for the trumpet and trombone to change buzz frequencies so that you can play more than like 7 notes?
Maybe, just maybe, since domestic oil production really has been increasing, the party line you are regurgitating is make believe pretend and you should stop taking everything you hear from conservative talk radio as gospel? You do know that Glenn Beck is not a real news source, right?
Sandy Bridge is the first time in a long time that Intel was remotely competitive with an AMD chip at the same price point. Many of us assume this bears some relation to the fact that early indicators put AMD's Bulldozer architecture on top of Intel's top end systems, so it is possible that we're going to see a role reversal because Intel needs to be more competitive in the mid-range market to keep in the game. This is, of course, all speculation, but it isn't hard to go back to pre-sandy bridge and see that the price/performance ratio on mainline consumer Intel chips prior to this year just plain sucked compared to AMD.
I use my iPhone really a lot (it is work issued and called all day), and I find that usually once every couple of days I fail to actually answer an incoming call because I can't actually get it to react correctly. Some of the time, I can't get the answer slider to move across, some of the time I have some frozen screen up that doesn't let me interact with the phone (I personally love it when the GUI for a phone call is up, only it is not live so I can't touch anything on it. I assume this has something to do with the background image for the call coming up without the actual interactive widgets being there). I also randomly have apps (including preinstalled apps like google maps) close without explanation and random freezes besides. I used to think it was because I was using an old beat up 3g with old-ish firmware, but my company recently replaced it with an iPhone 4 with updated firmware and very few installed apps and it has more or less the same problems (without dying pixels on the screen and a mostly dead battery that is not really end user replaceable, which is why the phone got swapped). I don't have a ton of experience using an Android to make a comparison, but I can't imagine that what I have should be the target of anyone's aspirations. I just can't figure out how they can put so much hardware into a phone and have it still be a substantially worse phone than the tiny Samsung dumb flip phone that I got for free with contract years ago.
I also happen to have a highly developed prefrontal cortex that allows me to make complex decisions about behavioral patterns as they relate to my (and humanity's) well-being. I think that trumps a couple of teeth as an evolutionary trait that defines my species.
Where you ranch has very little to do with energy waste or pollution. Cattle produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases irrespective of where you put them, among other things. More importantly, you have to feed a cow a lot more energy than you can possibly get back out of its meat. Whatever problems you cause by harvesting crops are automatically worse for farming because you have to farm more to feed the cows than you would have to feed people directly, even if the cows themselves created no pollution or energy drain at all.
Don't get me wrong, I am not currently a practicing vegetarian or vegan, mostly due to how difficult it is to pull off (you have to spend much more time worrying about your meals. There aren't exactly a lot of easy to pick up/prepare, cheap vegetarian choices at either fast food restaurants or in the frozen food isle). But I at least don't fool myself into believing that my choice is anything but selfish.
+1 Funsightful.
Or, as I temporarily put on my vegetarian's advocate hat, just eat the grain and then some other non-meat sustenance and not kill any animals or contribute to the extra energy waste and pollution inherent in raising animals to eat.
They legally have to.
I can't figure out why these articles don't even make a casual reference to the fact that they are being posted on Slashdot, where we have a system that already fulfills all of the requirements for this "project".
Your analogies fail on any connection without a bandwidth cap. As long as I am not using that bandwidth at the time, there is no cost to me for letting somebody else use my wifi. I don't have to refill my router's gas tank.
You use a firewall to segregate your internal network from the access point, like you really should be doing if you want your internal network secure anyway. One of the biggest rules to securing any network is to control network access. How can you do that when you are spraying your data all over the block, where anybody can listen in for an arbitrary amount of time without you knowing and try to break your encryption? If you think your wireless network running on a $50 consumer-grade router is secure, you are probably wrong.
"Unexpected demand" is marketing-speak for "some piece of our service has a bug preventing it from scaling appropriately but we'd rather talk about how awesome and cool and popular we are".
We have a broadcasting SSID here that has been active for ~4 months. We have employees with android phones. Our wireless MAC is not in that database. Something here is fishy.
coded up in a month
As its point of contention, and not one that claimed that all of the workload for the game in its entirety was less than 160 hours. Art assets do take time, as does level design.
My point was that the code itself (and the mechanic design portion of the ripoff of a game) would not be hard, and it is specifically because Angry birds was nowhere near written "from scratch". They got to leverage a physics system that controls almost all of the moving portions of the game and APIs to ease all of the rest.
For the record, I am a programmer, so I doubt I'm the guy usually pushing for unreasonable timetables on software releases.
Sure, it took more than a month to write overall, but since a substantial portion of that work was done Erin Catto of Box2d, it probably didn't take Rovio a month to write.
Or, you know, they could just use a freely licensed physics library (Box2d) to do a majority of the hard stuff and give no credit for it. Some of us do recognize the amount of work it takes to make a game using somebody else's engine to rip off somebody else's relatively simple flash game idea, and have figured out that it wasn't very much. A month actually seems like a gross overestimate on the amount of time it took to do the programming.
Let's try this. I work at an ISP, so I see a lot of trash consumer grade routers fail day in and day out. They start doing all sorts of crazy things when they fry. The closest they get to compromising people's networks when they are acting as a NAT gateway is when they start randomly acting like a dumb switch, which means that they spill some LAN traffic out onto our network, which isn't a big deal. Their internet connection doesn't work, and theoretically somebody sitting someplace on the same network segment with a packet sniffer could notice and connect in to their network, but the chances of that happening are rather low, and are zero in any network that uses something like PPPoE.
On a network where all devices have public addresses, I think it is plausible that the trash quality consumer router would just start allowing all traffic to pass through, regardless of firewall rules. I've now just changed my worst case from letting people that are 0 routing hops away from me maybe get in if they happen to be watching with a packet sniffer to giving people full access to all devices on my network. And the best part is, my internet connection could still be working, so I might not even notice for a while, since I don't run external vulnerability scans on my home connection.
In a well maintained network with routing devices of reasonable quality, this is a non-issue. But how many residential ISP subscribers have that? Home users are as likely to accidentally turn the firewall completely off as anything else. The worst they are going to probably pull off with a NAT gateway is DMZing one device on their network and giving people access to that. And they sure aren't going to pay more than about $50 for the device that they are going to entrust with all of their network security.
I can't afford $1000+ for a new TV, $400+ for a Blu-Ray player (even a PS3)
Not that it probably solves your problem, but you can get a 42" 1080p led-backlit lcd screen for sub $500, and a blu-ray player costs sub $100 (even a PS3 slim retails for less than the $400 you quoted).
Hi Microsoft shill?
Frequently it is either the drive head hitting the edge of its available movement space because it misses track 0 and keeps going, or the needle itself making contact with the platter. If the needle hits platter, it ends up ruining data wherever it lands, which could explain the 1% data loss.
Now I have to re-write my malware to some use other browser that may or may not be installed on the machine like Firefox.
If your IT department is so understaffed they can't provide basic support for a service they set up, you have a funding problem that doesn't originate in your IT department. You don't fix the funding problem by inviting multi-million dollar lawsuits. And yes, I realize that your hypothetical involves a bad solution with a high cost, but maybe that's the route they have to go because they don't have the manpower to implement a good solution?
If your IT department works like you've described, the smart money is on the problem coming from someplace above them, even you see a significant number of poor sys admins at the bottom. They are probably there because somebody didn't want to spend the money on a more qualified candidate.
The important thing to note in this hypothetical story about a Series of Unfortunate Events(tm) is that the several step process of creating a security hole can be even more complicated that what he's stated, but since it can happen over the course of years, it isn't as unlikely as it sounds. It could be 9 months after install where you aren't paying much attention to your smoothly running server anymore that some co-worker who also wants to go behind his IT department decides that your server is under-utilized and puts his (let's say also good intentioned) file server on there with a tunnel to the outside, and then another 7 months after that when your package manager automatically downloads and installs a botched update to his previously secure application that lets the black hat get in.