. So I perused through a few of the related pages. I kept coming across things like the following:
a) Badly formed references - for example Reference 62. Upon careful review they are NOT quoting a specific part of a WHO document printed by Harvard, but rather they are quoting part of a SELF PUBLISHED un-recognized journal published by a Mr. Charles Geshekter - a HISTORY professor.
b) Statements which say exactly the opposite or something comletely different than what the actual reference provides evidence of. For example the following quote from a Charles Geshekter article: "The latest study shows that an HIV-negative woman converts to positive on average only after one thousand unprotected contacts with a positive man, and a negative man becomes positive on average only after eight thousand contacts with a positive woman.(3)" The actual reference was a study about sex WITH A CONDOM. Not unprotected sex as inferred.
I also keep coming across websites by "Dr"'s who's education is a "B.A. in Comparative Religion" and "M.A. in Humanities"... .
. But wait. If patenting *business methods* is okay, why don't we strike back by patenting all the known business methods that haven't been patentented by everyone else yet?
SERIOUSLY. The FSF should try to patent many of the key things that McDonalds, Chrysler, Disney, and NBC do, and start fucking *everyone else* over. .
. Stand back for a moment and ponder the following: What kind of person would keep thousands of images, which are never going to be edited or manipulted again, which are simply records of your travels and life - in the form of RAW bmp files?
Nobody. Absolutely nobody. Yes maybe if you're intending to do things with them sometime in the next 6 months, you should shoot and keep raw or very high quality versions. But if it's all for posterity and "maybe's", perhaps it's time to do some encoding.
Please do NOT tell me you're storing tons and tons of raw uncompressed video that you are unlikely to ever edit or retouch ever again. Yes, maybe you'll have to choose your compression format carefully, just in case you decide to edit/splice something different together some other day in life, and perhaps you'll have to use high bitrates.
But there's no way in hell I'm keeping around GB sized 30 minute home videos for the rest of eternity that could easily be converted into high quality xvids with keyframes every 30 frames. .
. > The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface OH MY GOD! Lists of things in a few specific categories arranged in a rectangular grid! Who in the world could have ever though of something so....
. Imagine if you built something, you spent a ton of personal effort, say two man years into creating it, and it was utterly "destroyed" and rendered useless by "just words" and "social misbehaviour" by people who are "just assholes".
Have you been hurt?
Let's take a better example. Imagine someone used words to convince your son or daughter to do something awful. Did they hurt you? Are they responsible for any of your suffering?
Wait, wait. I seem to recall that there are in fact many laws written that will get people put in jail for "just words".
PS: You are a retarded fucking cockmaster moron. .
MMmmm. The BIG headline on CBC news right now is that the liberals may force the parliament may sit through the entire summer to pass the same sex marriage legislation.
Of course, if they're spending the entire summer doing that, maybe they won't have time for anything else...
> The US soldiers where poorly trained for the mission,
Where did you get that from? Did you read the detailed account near the end? It's clear they acted *exactly* as trained and operated the point exactly as specified.
The only thing that went wrong was the Italian driver was distracted and/or panicked and didn't stop immediately upon illumination. The driver had something like 5 seconds to hit the brakes. He didn't, and so they were fired upon. (There was 40 meters between the alert line and the warning line, and they were travelling 40+ mph, and it took another few seconds after it crossed the warning line before they shot at the car).
Now what the report really shows is the US Military isn't providing enough supporting gear to set up a temporary checkpoint/blocking-point. The fact that some Iraqi's that night had to jam on their brakes as soon as the light/laser hit their car is not a good sign. Why don't they lay a few heavy ropes across the road and a movable self-lit stop sign way ahead of the blocking point to provide way way early warning to people to stop and turn around? etc etc.
The military really needs a few things tossed in their hummer's to help them set up more effective and safer checkpoints. Something that allows them to *really* pour on the fire should a car reach a certain point, but never results in innocents driving that close. There are way too many incidents of civilians not realizing what was going on in time, and on the opposing hand military troops not having enough stopping firepower to stop the VBIED before it gets to their position. (I'm thinking of one video I've seen where a dump truck VBIED late at night approached a position under a bridge - the 40mm machine gun (shoots grenade type rounds) just could *not* stop the dump truck. They could have used a *lot* more room to open fire and disable the vehicle, rather than the 50-80 meters that they had.
Of course it's simply an unfortunate fact of life that a fast moving vehicle can cover a *lot* of ground really quickly.
They also should be providing a page of information to *anyone* who comes into the country. The Iraqi's all know what the spotlight and laser mean because they've learnt it the hard way, by reading about it or hearing about it in their paper after someone else died. But the Italian agents should have been handed big-ass printouts saying "if illuminted, stop immediately or you will be shot".
Oh, and as usual the f'n command structure couldn't / didn't pass on the required information. The blocking point was maintained WAY WAY longer than necessary due to a breakdown in communications. They were there to block the road while a VIP convoy was passing, and they were never told that the convoy had passed and finished long before the incident.
. I'm not American, I'm Canadian, and I'm saying you are a great example of the total idiocy that *many* people in all countries of this world display. (Including a few co-workers of mine.)
You've been watching way too much TV - it's rare that there's "absolute proof". Are you asking for every single person in the world to carry around running video camera's 24 hours a day? That's the only way you can expect "absolute proof"?
When it comes right down to it, you end up with 10 witnesses for the defence - and 3 witnesses for the "procecution". What you see in the document is the testimony. Solider A says that person B did this, person C said that, etc etc.
As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.
But nooooo, you need "absolute proof". And the fact that something bad happened can't possibly be because one excited Italian secret agent hurrying to get his biggest triumph in years to the airport while talking on the phone while listening to a conversation in the back seat - made a mistake. Nooo, it's big ass conspiracy, the entire US Army was out to get them, all the soldiers at the checkpoint were out to committ cold blooded murder.
Get a fucking clue.
(Don't get me wrong. There are other situations where someone did something clearly wrong, and for some reason the US Military justice system totally failed to do the right thing. The shooting of the wounded prisoner in Fallujah is one example. And American's aren't alone in having bad apples in their ranks or young guys who make really bad/stupid mistakes. But that doesn't mean that there's *always* something rotten going on.)
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke
It's *possible* that the missile shield won't hit a single fucking incoming target, and will be a GIGANTIC waste of money. .
Same thing with us and a pair of 6 channel SATA LSI cards. For 6 months after we bought them they didn't have support for any of the 1 year old Linux distro's we were running, and you HAD to go into BIOS to rebuild a drive - which meant 10 hours downtime for the system. Fucking insane. Was only fixed a couple months ago.
Not only that, but the controllers are regularly dropping drives for no reason. LSI blames the drive manufacturers and won't do an RMA, saying the drive manufacturer utilities don't pick up all possible errors and that there is no clear problem with the controller, while most of the drives rebuild and test fine. We're ready to toss them in these cards in the fucking bit bucket and do software raid.
No it won't. This stuff is near-IR, just beyond visible. What you're talking about is way way way further away from the visible spectrum, and requires much more expensive technology to see.
[Interviewer] What is in your opinion the biggest difference between the Scene when you joined it and how it is today ? .... [BanDiDo] We have lost a lot of the alure and the little secrecy we had. I fear the Scene is far too open and few pay enough heed to the real dangers of what we do.
We've seen similar things with a pair of LSI-Logic 150-6's that we've got. One is a lot less reliable than the other, but both still drop a drive at random and have to be rebuilt. The most twitchy one is now running a striped set a lot more stable, but it's stupid not being able to run the RAID-5 we bought it for. We've now RMA'd two maxtor HDDs from that array, so possibly they were contributing - but it's frustrating finding a drive dropped, rebuilding, and finding that everything is ok again - and doing that week after week.
And of course LSI won't take it back unless they see some *definitive* problem, and their line is "manufacturer hard drive utilities don't always reveal all transient problems".
What was worse was that it wasn't until Suse 9.1 or 9.2 that LSI had a full suite of drivers and tools for use from within a running instance of Linux - back when we had Suse 9.0 a drive dropped meant that you had to take the system down to the bios to do the rebuild. No utility was available to do it while the system was live! All the while they claim "linux/Suse compatible". Phhssssshhtt.
Good thing we've got the *pair* of systems running as a HA set.
A lot cheaper than the $10-30,000 commercial options, but requires WAYYYY too much babying by the admin. Took forever for the admin to learn all the config and to get the HA set up as well. Not sure if we're ahead or not.
If you read the article, you'd realize that the sole source for his Secret Service intel was from the one agent that was admonished/punished a month or so ago for doing highly sensitive things on his mobile device - compromising the data and allowing it all to get into the hands of this one hacker.
> Therefore, only those with salaries at a higher order of magnetude will still live comfortably.
So you're saying it's physically impossible for all human beings in the world to live have an equally acceptable standard of living? The only way to have a good job and lots of personal belongings for the common man in a western country is to have tons of poor people in the rest of the world?
I don't know, the house I bought wasn't "coded" or built in China or India, the Car I bought wasn't "coded" or built in China or India. The food I buy isn't "coded" or built in China. The telecom service I use. The Entertainment Programs I watch. etc etc etc.
It's all made here in North America.
Sure, lots of cheap $10 and $100 things are made in China.
BIG FUCKING DEAL.
You are probably right, ALL people in the world won't be able to have the same high standard of living that Americans have right now. We'll have to settle for something in-between. Oh I don't know, something like what the Spanish or Canadians have. Oddly enough not owning a 5 tonne SUV doesn't seem to make the Europeans think that they've got a "poorer standard of living" compared to Americans.
What the fuck is it with Americans and their "I need a gun to shoot intruders in my home" crap. No where else in the whole fucking world do people say shit like this.
Do you know how infrequently people come across intruders in their home, intruders who are actually intending to murder/harm the owner? And of those that own guns, do you know how FEW manage to get to their gun? And do you know how many have their shitty cheap gun misfire and jam, then having enraged the intruder get the shit beat out of them? Or actually shoot *someone else* they mistook for an intruder? Like their kids getting home late or their husband sneaking back into the house at 2am?
Now compare all of the above to the number of kids and owners that shoot one another accidentally, the number that shoot one another because a gun is so handy and easy to pick up when angry, and the number of people shot because there are so many fucking guns that every single God damned 7-11 robber and car-jacker packs heat and is stupid enough to use it.
. Where in federal laws does it say that life has to be perfectly fair? To individuals or corporations? On what LEGAL grounds is crap like this brought to court?
The federal and state and city goverments do LOTS of things that "aren't fair" because it's good for the people (as a whole), and the judgement of what's best for all is up to the governmental body that was elected by the people.
Town/City Fire Departments Police Departments/Organizations The Military Roads
...and in other countries or here and there:
electrical grids electrical power generation telephones port authorities car insurance health care airlines etc etc
Yes, some of these do make sense to allow corporations or individuals to operate - in countries that are big enough to have competitive airlines. And some just make sense for specific circumstances, such as private fire departments at oil refineries. And some others are still under fierce debate and country-by-country experimentation as to "what's best" - aka healthcare.
And now we've decided that broadband connectivity is one that needs to be done in certain cases by society collectively through the governmental mechanisms. Much like how rural areas were brought telephones and power. I'm sure someday we'll privatize it 100% again, once the hard lifting is done and it's become a commodity in *all* areas.
Only in the USA would corporations complain about shit like this. In any other country, we'd tell them to go fuck themselves, they're lucky we allow them to exist. .
Since they are either acrylic, urethane, or silicone based - would a tiny hyper-sharp tin needle slowly being extruded by crystal stresses at a rate of 0.1mm/year be able to push their way right through them?
The whiskers that form, do tin atoms migrate from the base to the top, or do tin atoms get extruded and form it from the bottom. If the latter, I might expect them to force their way through a coating.
Yup. And when you purchase a $30,000 vendor solution, your risk drops to near zero. When you build it yourself, you assume all the risk. What risk you say? Risk of costing you WAY MORE time than you expected to make it work.
Six months ago I and a few engineers were chomping at the bit to build a $3000 highly-available NFS server solution - two Athlon 2500 linux boxes each with 5 200GB HDDs running RAID-5 and Gig-E, dual mirrored boot drives. That's 1200 - 1600 GB of storage for $3000, instead of spending
I mean, everyone's doing it right, so it can't be hard to get working nicely? And it's TONS cheaper than a pair of similarly sized commercial rack-mount $15,000 to $60,000 systems.
Well guess how much support you get from some dumbass consumer grade SATA RAID-5 card vendors when the cards (both of them in both systems) act flakey as hell and repeatedly "drop" a drive or two every week only to rebuild them without complaint?
Jack shit.
Not only that, but our linux sysadmin took months learning every feature of the cards and setting up the array and setting up the HA-NFS solution. Don't get me wrong, a large part of the reason it took months was because building and tearing down terrabyte arrays is slow as molasses (we're talking about a full day just to rebuild one "dropped" 200 GB drive), but MOSTLY because our sysadmins were already overworked and just didn't have the time for it.
Oh, guess what? You discover that your RAID Card vendor's support for all the different variants of linux? DOES NOT INCLUDE the ability to rebuild drives while the OS is running and the array is in degraded mode. If a drive drops out your only option is to boot into the BIOS and wait 12 hours for it to rebuild a drive. It was only 6 months AFTER we bought the raid cards that they shipped an upgraded SUSE driver.
So, here's what we learned:
1) If you don't have a low-pay sysadmin with tons of spare time to work out bugs and hassle the vendors for support/replacements, you increase your risk.
2) If your company hasn't built this exact same solution once before using the exact bits of hardware and software that you intend to use, expect tons of unexpected hickup, which increases your risk yet again.
If you have the worst bits of both 1 and 2, you could luck out and be fine, or you could get seriously fucked when your boss asks you 4 months latter where the fuck the HA-NAS solution is.
Not only that, but with PC's having razor thin margins, very few vendors are going to start adding $40 multi-card readers in all PCs.
I've got tons more friends who react with disgust at the idea of trading in their USB keys for SD cards. They're all afraid of loosing the tiny little things. They even think that instead of putting SD readers in all PCs, that all electronic devices should instead use USB keys!!! Bloody morons, they'd rather have a huge clunky camera or mp3 player than go with a superior product.
Shame everyone doesn't include a little hinged plastic case for their memory cards like I initially got my CF card in - which is great for holding a tiny SD card and making it easier to handle/transport without loosing it. It completely solves the "looks pretty fragile" excuse.
I *wish* with all my heart that USB keys would go away and I could just use my SD card in not only my camera and mp3 player, but in ANY PC. It's idiotic to have to carry around a card reader when I'm on vacation or travelling.
> What's the incentive for the government to push for something like this?
To serve the public's common interest - which is to save us all a bunch of fucking money!!!
Seriously, the power of software is that you only need to produce 1 working copy and then you can give it to an infinite number of people for near zero cost.
But nooooo, we've gotta pay for sales and marketing and pretty boxcovers and wholesale and retail markup at the local store and 10 different companies to implement the same damn thing.
I really am sorry, but society should be employing you to do something *ELSE* productive, instead of doing what you are now.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I need cookies turned on to look at pictures of their cars?
Fuck VW.
.
So I perused through a few of the related pages. I kept coming across things like the following:
a) Badly formed references - for example Reference 62. Upon careful review they are NOT quoting a specific part of a WHO document printed by Harvard, but rather they are quoting part of a SELF PUBLISHED un-recognized journal published by a Mr. Charles Geshekter - a HISTORY professor.
b) Statements which say exactly the opposite or something comletely different than what the actual reference provides evidence of. For example the following quote from a Charles Geshekter article: "The latest study shows that an HIV-negative woman converts to positive on average only after one thousand unprotected contacts with a positive man, and a negative man becomes positive on average only after eight thousand contacts with a positive woman.(3)" The actual reference was a study about sex WITH A CONDOM. Not unprotected sex as inferred.
I also keep coming across websites by "Dr"'s who's education is a "B.A. in Comparative Religion" and "M.A. in Humanities"...
.
.
But wait. If patenting *business methods* is okay, why don't we strike back by patenting all the known business methods that haven't been patentented by everyone else yet?
SERIOUSLY. The FSF should try to patent many of the key things that McDonalds, Chrysler, Disney, and NBC do, and start fucking *everyone else* over.
.
.
Stand back for a moment and ponder the following: What kind of person would keep thousands of images, which are never going to be edited or manipulted again, which are simply records of your travels and life - in the form of RAW bmp files?
Nobody. Absolutely nobody. Yes maybe if you're intending to do things with them sometime in the next 6 months, you should shoot and keep raw or very high quality versions. But if it's all for posterity and "maybe's", perhaps it's time to do some encoding.
Please do NOT tell me you're storing tons and tons of raw uncompressed video that you are unlikely to ever edit or retouch ever again. Yes, maybe you'll have to choose your compression format carefully, just in case you decide to edit/splice something different together some other day in life, and perhaps you'll have to use high bitrates.
But there's no way in hell I'm keeping around GB sized 30 minute home videos for the rest of eternity that could easily be converted into high quality xvids with keyframes every 30 frames.
.
> The iTunes interface seems to be almost a ditto copy of their interface
OH MY GOD! Lists of things in a few specific categories arranged in a rectangular grid! Who in the world could have ever though of something so
.
.
Imagine if you built something, you spent a ton of personal effort, say two man years into creating it, and it was utterly "destroyed" and rendered useless by "just words" and "social misbehaviour" by people who are "just assholes".
Have you been hurt?
Let's take a better example. Imagine someone used words to convince your son or daughter to do something awful. Did they hurt you? Are they responsible for any of your suffering?
Wait, wait. I seem to recall that there are in fact many laws written that will get people put in jail for "just words".
PS: You are a retarded fucking cockmaster moron.
.
MMmmm. The BIG headline on CBC news right now is that the liberals may force the parliament may sit through the entire summer to pass the same sex marriage legislation.
Of course, if they're spending the entire summer doing that, maybe they won't have time for anything else...
.
No no no. We need to give the nutters something to worry and fret about.
I propose we call them "The Internet Cabal", or "The Cabal" for short.
.
> The US soldiers where poorly trained for the mission,
Where did you get that from? Did you read the detailed account near the end? It's clear they acted *exactly* as trained and operated the point exactly as specified.
The only thing that went wrong was the Italian driver was distracted and/or panicked and didn't stop immediately upon illumination. The driver had something like 5 seconds to hit the brakes. He didn't, and so they were fired upon. (There was 40 meters between the alert line and the warning line, and they were travelling 40+ mph, and it took another few seconds after it crossed the warning line before they shot at the car).
Now what the report really shows is the US Military isn't providing enough supporting gear to set up a temporary checkpoint/blocking-point. The fact that some Iraqi's that night had to jam on their brakes as soon as the light/laser hit their car is not a good sign. Why don't they lay a few heavy ropes across the road and a movable self-lit stop sign way ahead of the blocking point to provide way way early warning to people to stop and turn around? etc etc.
The military really needs a few things tossed in their hummer's to help them set up more effective and safer checkpoints. Something that allows them to *really* pour on the fire should a car reach a certain point, but never results in innocents driving that close. There are way too many incidents of civilians not realizing what was going on in time, and on the opposing hand military troops not having enough stopping firepower to stop the VBIED before it gets to their position. (I'm thinking of one video I've seen where a dump truck VBIED late at night approached a position under a bridge - the 40mm machine gun (shoots grenade type rounds) just could *not* stop the dump truck. They could have used a *lot* more room to open fire and disable the vehicle, rather than the 50-80 meters that they had.
Of course it's simply an unfortunate fact of life that a fast moving vehicle can cover a *lot* of ground really quickly.
They also should be providing a page of information to *anyone* who comes into the country. The Iraqi's all know what the spotlight and laser mean because they've learnt it the hard way, by reading about it or hearing about it in their paper after someone else died. But the Italian agents should have been handed big-ass printouts saying "if illuminted, stop immediately or you will be shot".
Oh, and as usual the f'n command structure couldn't / didn't pass on the required information. The blocking point was maintained WAY WAY longer than necessary due to a breakdown in communications. They were there to block the road while a VIP convoy was passing, and they were never told that the convoy had passed and finished long before the incident.
They didn't need to be there any more.
Now that's irony.
.
.
I'm not American, I'm Canadian, and I'm saying you are a great example of the total idiocy that *many* people in all countries of this world display. (Including a few co-workers of mine.)
You've been watching way too much TV - it's rare that there's "absolute proof". Are you asking for every single person in the world to carry around running video camera's 24 hours a day? That's the only way you can expect "absolute proof"?
When it comes right down to it, you end up with 10 witnesses for the defence - and 3 witnesses for the "procecution". What you see in the document is the testimony. Solider A says that person B did this, person C said that, etc etc.
As far as I am concerned, with 1 of the 3 Italian witnesses being a virulent anti-American/anti-war zealot, and the other 2 having TONS of reasons to cover up their own stupidity and non-performance of their job, I believe the other 10 witnesses.
But nooooo, you need "absolute proof". And the fact that something bad happened can't possibly be because one excited Italian secret agent hurrying to get his biggest triumph in years to the airport while talking on the phone while listening to a conversation in the back seat - made a mistake. Nooo, it's big ass conspiracy, the entire US Army was out to get them, all the soldiers at the checkpoint were out to committ cold blooded murder.
Get a fucking clue.
(Don't get me wrong. There are other situations where someone did something clearly wrong, and for some reason the US Military justice system totally failed to do the right thing. The shooting of the wounded prisoner in Fallujah is one example. And American's aren't alone in having bad apples in their ranks or young guys who make really bad/stupid mistakes. But that doesn't mean that there's *always* something rotten going on.)
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke
It's *possible* that the missile shield won't hit a single fucking incoming target, and will be a GIGANTIC waste of money.
.
Same thing with us and a pair of 6 channel SATA LSI cards. For 6 months after we bought them they didn't have support for any of the 1 year old Linux distro's we were running, and you HAD to go into BIOS to rebuild a drive - which meant 10 hours downtime for the system. Fucking insane. Was only fixed a couple months ago.
Not only that, but the controllers are regularly dropping drives for no reason. LSI blames the drive manufacturers and won't do an RMA, saying the drive manufacturer utilities don't pick up all possible errors and that there is no clear problem with the controller, while most of the drives rebuild and test fine. We're ready to toss them in these cards in the fucking bit bucket and do software raid.
No it won't. This stuff is near-IR, just beyond visible. What you're talking about is way way way further away from the visible spectrum, and requires much more expensive technology to see.
Now *this* is an interesting quote:
....
[Interviewer] What is in your opinion the biggest difference between the Scene when you joined it and how it is today ?
[BanDiDo] We have lost a lot of the alure and the little secrecy we had. I fear the Scene is far too open and few pay enough heed to the real dangers of what we do.
We've seen similar things with a pair of LSI-Logic 150-6's that we've got. One is a lot less reliable than the other, but both still drop a drive at random and have to be rebuilt. The most twitchy one is now running a striped set a lot more stable, but it's stupid not being able to run the RAID-5 we bought it for. We've now RMA'd two maxtor HDDs from that array, so possibly they were contributing - but it's frustrating finding a drive dropped, rebuilding, and finding that everything is ok again - and doing that week after week.
And of course LSI won't take it back unless they see some *definitive* problem, and their line is "manufacturer hard drive utilities don't always reveal all transient problems".
What was worse was that it wasn't until Suse 9.1 or 9.2 that LSI had a full suite of drivers and tools for use from within a running instance of Linux - back when we had Suse 9.0 a drive dropped meant that you had to take the system down to the bios to do the rebuild. No utility was available to do it while the system was live! All the while they claim "linux/Suse compatible". Phhssssshhtt.
Good thing we've got the *pair* of systems running as a HA set.
A lot cheaper than the $10-30,000 commercial options, but requires WAYYYY too much babying by the admin. Took forever for the admin to learn all the config and to get the HA set up as well. Not sure if we're ahead or not.
No, he got hard core stuff.
If you read the article, you'd realize that the sole source for his Secret Service intel was from the one agent that was admonished/punished a month or so ago for doing highly sensitive things on his mobile device - compromising the data and allowing it all to get into the hands of this one hacker.
> Therefore, only those with salaries at a higher order of magnetude will still live comfortably.
So you're saying it's physically impossible for all human beings in the world to live have an equally acceptable standard of living? The only way to have a good job and lots of personal belongings for the common man in a western country is to have tons of poor people in the rest of the world?
I don't know, the house I bought wasn't "coded" or built in China or India, the Car I bought wasn't "coded" or built in China or India. The food I buy isn't "coded" or built in China. The telecom service I use. The Entertainment Programs I watch. etc etc etc.
It's all made here in North America.
Sure, lots of cheap $10 and $100 things are made in China.
BIG FUCKING DEAL.
You are probably right, ALL people in the world won't be able to have the same high standard of living that Americans have right now. We'll have to settle for something in-between. Oh I don't know, something like what the Spanish or Canadians have. Oddly enough not owning a 5 tonne SUV doesn't seem to make the Europeans think that they've got a "poorer standard of living" compared to Americans.
.
:)
I don't possibly see how that could survive a constitutional challenge.
At least in Canada - where we have a half decent Constitution.
.
. ...(continued - my bad)
There is no one, absolutely *no one* in Canada or Europe **depending** on their gun to protect them from the fucking boogey-men.
[/RANT]
.
.
[RANT]
What the fuck is it with Americans and their "I need a gun to shoot intruders in my home" crap. No where else in the whole fucking world do people say shit like this.
Do you know how infrequently people come across intruders in their home, intruders who are actually intending to murder/harm the owner? And of those that own guns, do you know how FEW manage to get to their gun? And do you know how many have their shitty cheap gun misfire and jam, then having enraged the intruder get the shit beat out of them? Or actually shoot *someone else* they mistook for an intruder? Like their kids getting home late or their husband sneaking back into the house at 2am?
Now compare all of the above to the number of kids and owners that shoot one another accidentally, the number that shoot one another because a gun is so handy and easy to pick up when angry, and the number of people shot because there are so many fucking guns that every single God damned 7-11 robber and car-jacker packs heat and is stupid enough to use it.
[/RANT]
Where in federal laws does it say that life has to be perfectly fair? To individuals or corporations? On what LEGAL grounds is crap like this brought to court?
The federal and state and city goverments do LOTS of things that "aren't fair" because it's good for the people (as a whole), and the judgement of what's best for all is up to the governmental body that was elected by the people.
Town/City Fire Departments
Police Departments/Organizations
The Military
Roads
electrical grids
electrical power generation
telephones
port authorities
car insurance
health care
airlines
etc etc
Yes, some of these do make sense to allow corporations or individuals to operate - in countries that are big enough to have competitive airlines. And some just make sense for specific circumstances, such as private fire departments at oil refineries. And some others are still under fierce debate and country-by-country experimentation as to "what's best" - aka healthcare.
And now we've decided that broadband connectivity is one that needs to be done in certain cases by society collectively through the governmental mechanisms. Much like how rural areas were brought telephones and power. I'm sure someday we'll privatize it 100% again, once the hard lifting is done and it's become a commodity in *all* areas.
Only in the USA would corporations complain about shit like this. In any other country, we'd tell them to go fuck themselves, they're lucky we allow them to exist.
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Since they are either acrylic, urethane, or silicone based - would a tiny hyper-sharp tin needle slowly being extruded by crystal stresses at a rate of 0.1mm/year be able to push their way right through them?
The whiskers that form, do tin atoms migrate from the base to the top, or do tin atoms get extruded and form it from the bottom. If the latter, I might expect them to force their way through a coating.
Just guessing out of my ass here.
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> Time is money.
Yup. And when you purchase a $30,000 vendor solution, your risk drops to near zero. When you build it yourself, you assume all the risk. What risk you say? Risk of costing you WAY MORE time than you expected to make it work.
Six months ago I and a few engineers were chomping at the bit to build a $3000 highly-available NFS server solution - two Athlon 2500 linux boxes each with 5 200GB HDDs running RAID-5 and Gig-E, dual mirrored boot drives. That's 1200 - 1600 GB of storage for $3000, instead of spending
I mean, everyone's doing it right, so it can't be hard to get working nicely? And it's TONS cheaper than a pair of similarly sized commercial rack-mount $15,000 to $60,000 systems.
Well guess how much support you get from some dumbass consumer grade SATA RAID-5 card vendors when the cards (both of them in both systems) act flakey as hell and repeatedly "drop" a drive or two every week only to rebuild them without complaint?
Jack shit.
Not only that, but our linux sysadmin took months learning every feature of the cards and setting up the array and setting up the HA-NFS solution. Don't get me wrong, a large part of the reason it took months was because building and tearing down terrabyte arrays is slow as molasses (we're talking about a full day just to rebuild one "dropped" 200 GB drive), but MOSTLY because our sysadmins were already overworked and just didn't have the time for it.
Oh, guess what? You discover that your RAID Card vendor's support for all the different variants of linux? DOES NOT INCLUDE the ability to rebuild drives while the OS is running and the array is in degraded mode. If a drive drops out your only option is to boot into the BIOS and wait 12 hours for it to rebuild a drive. It was only 6 months AFTER we bought the raid cards that they shipped an upgraded SUSE driver.
So, here's what we learned:
1) If you don't have a low-pay sysadmin with tons of spare time to work out bugs and hassle the vendors for support/replacements, you increase your risk.
2) If your company hasn't built this exact same solution once before using the exact bits of hardware and software that you intend to use, expect tons of unexpected hickup, which increases your risk yet again.
If you have the worst bits of both 1 and 2, you could luck out and be fine, or you could get seriously fucked when your boss asks you 4 months latter where the fuck the HA-NAS solution is.
Not only that, but with PC's having razor thin margins, very few vendors are going to start adding $40 multi-card readers in all PCs.
I've got tons more friends who react with disgust at the idea of trading in their USB keys for SD cards. They're all afraid of loosing the tiny little things. They even think that instead of putting SD readers in all PCs, that all electronic devices should instead use USB keys!!! Bloody morons, they'd rather have a huge clunky camera or mp3 player than go with a superior product.
Shame everyone doesn't include a little hinged plastic case for their memory cards like I initially got my CF card in - which is great for holding a tiny SD card and making it easier to handle/transport without loosing it. It completely solves the "looks pretty fragile" excuse.
I *wish* with all my heart that USB keys would go away and I could just use my SD card in not only my camera and mp3 player, but in ANY PC. It's idiotic to have to carry around a card reader when I'm on vacation or travelling.
But I don't see it happening.
Forgot to answer this simple question
> What's the incentive for the government to push for something like this?
To serve the public's common interest - which is to save us all a bunch of fucking money!!!
Seriously, the power of software is that you only need to produce 1 working copy and then you can give it to an infinite number of people for near zero cost.
But nooooo, we've gotta pay for sales and marketing and pretty boxcovers and wholesale and retail markup at the local store and 10 different companies to implement the same damn thing.
I really am sorry, but society should be employing you to do something *ELSE* productive, instead of doing what you are now.