And I've always wondered, why not just bring the moon crew up and back on a Shuttle? You could orbit their landing vehicle and rocket to get there and back with 2 other smaller rockets, meet up with them with the shuttle (probably not easy), assemble the vehicle and staff it with the astronauts. Then fly to the moon, land, come back leave the new ship in orbit and use the shuttle to return to earth. Subsequent trips only require a refueling of the ferry ship. It might even be faster because you can pack a lot more fuel if you do it in steps. I don't know anything about zero gravity or anything like that, but I think this would be the way to go to the moon. Is there a reason they always use 1 rocket with everything on it?
O.K., boss, this LTX-27 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo moon landings. Yeah, the astronauts broadcast around the world from a soundstage at Norton Airforce Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems....But the key meeting took place July 3rd, 1958, when the Air Force brought the space visitor to the White House for an interview with President Eisenhower. And Ike said, "Hey, look, give us your technology, we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
Hmm, interesting. Why doesn't the music industry provide an online database of music bits, and if you have the CD but it gets damaged, you can read off what you can, then replace the bits with stuff from their archive (not unlike in Jurassic Park, where they replaced the missing "dino-dna" with frog DNA.)
There's also National Public Radio, which has been doing this with radio for decades. It's listener supported. Basically, they could have a WiFi fun drive, wherein they get the thing going and it pops a webpage up on people's screen before they can use the internet. It asks for a donation and a login. Once they make a donation, they don't have to see the screen until next year (members). People who haven't donated might have the screen pop up every 10 hours or so of use, and they can just dismiss it. Then, during the fund drive, they have to look at the screen for 5 minutes an hour or something.
The page would also be a nice personalized community portal, not unlike Public Radio has. I think something like this would be great; the quality of public radio is amazing, and I think they could do the same thing with Internet Access. People need to stop thinking like money grubbing babies. It's NOT all about money. Warren Buffett just gave away all of his money, so will Bill Gates. There are a lot of people who volunteer time or give money to support the community projects. If you aren't one of them, you should try it. It feels good, and I swear it comes back to you 10x.
Next time you're getting drunk in the bar, save $10 and send it to public radio or the EFF or the ACLU or something like that. Well-managed non-profits do A LOT in this world, and any money they make they give back to their communities.
Actually janitors are middle class. So is someone who makes $200,000 a year. A janitor in America with a job is probably in the top 98 percent of the world income wise.
One of the curious results of certain class societies (or societies that are generally perceived to be based on class distinctions) is that people belonging to different social classes have different views on the class system as a whole, thus different forms of class consciousness. Typically, in English society, the results would be:
Upper class people, e.g. aristocrats, traditionally refer merely to The Lower Classes, without making any distinction between people who are not aristocrats, i.e. they operate in a two-class model.
Working class people, similarly, traditionally refer merely to 'toffs', i.e. anyone who isn't working class, and also operate in a two-class system, but a different one from Upper Class people.
Middle Class people, in contrast, see themselves as separate from the Upper Class and Working Class, perhaps on the same bases as people who claim to belong to each, but in addition, draw distinctions between the Upper Middle and Lower Middle classes (or even introduce the notion of Middle Middle Class, for anyone they feel doesn't fall into any of the other categories), i.e. they operate from a 4- or 5-class perspective.
(plagarized from wikipedia's article on class consciousness.
Also, try Prosper.com where you can lend money to other people. I know a few people who are making bank on this site. You go in with other people buying notes, sort of like an online consumer loan auction. Each month, when the borrower makes a monthly payment, you get a portion of it based on the initial investment. Plus there's groups and tons of other stuff. There's a lot of high quality borrowers on there now, also.
You need to use a hedge strategy. First, hedge your loan with a fixed income investment that will give you the same income as you pay interest. You will have to invest a little more than your student loan balance. The nice thing is that it will keep compounding so you'll be making interest on the interest and when the student loan is paid off, you'll still be making interest.
Any money you have left, spread it around.
Keep a pure cash emergency fund with enough to cover 2 months of bills PLUS your car insurance deductible (make that as high as you can).
Consider buying a home. Although the housing market has topped out in a lot of places, it also doesn't look to be going down any time soon. The money you spend each month in rent could be going toward building equity in a home. Choose something with rental potential so when you leave school, you have immediate rental income to cover the mortgage payment, plus a little for yourself.
Inflation has been creeping up therefore it may not be wise to keep a lot of cash around. You need the emergency fund of course. Assets are what you want to have during inflation, because they stay at a fixed value relative to the dollar, and are therefore inflation protected. T-bills are ok, but you have to wait for a good day to buy them. The yields are not much higher than a savings account, so unless you have like $10M, it's probably not worth the hassle.
Keep in mind that if you DON'T have debt, you will be "making" money just by not paying interest. Student loans are good loans, however, with very low interest and they don't report to the credit agencies until you are 60 days late (pay on time anyway!). They will also always defer you if you have a car accident or other such hardship. Any other debt you have such as car loan and credit debt should be paid as soon as possible. There's no point in sitting around with 10000 in cash earning 4% when you have 10000 in debt on the other side costing you 20%. That's a net loss of 16%;)
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
Our President's English is often bested by my Mexican-American gardener (apparently he had to learn English to become a citizen). I give you this point.
I think that because of the inelasticity of demand in public utility type services such as power, water, garbage and phone (not yet), the government needs to on occasion break up monopolies. It's not that big of a deal, they have done it many times. The companies make money hand over fist, grow and merge into a huge powerful monolith, then the government breaks them up and forces them to lose money for a while. It's all factored in to your costs. And of course, the lawyers are the big winners! (Will it ever be any other way in America?) I think the phone company monopolies are far worse than Microsoft for this country, however, and they tried to break them up.
On that note, having real fast networking to everyone would probably solve the Microsoft problem by itself, what with Googlenet, Microsoft's security "woes", etc.
A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.
Hmm. Maybe this is Google's idea with all the dark fibre and POP space and trailers they are buying up... Centralize storage, and in an amazingly large way (like they did with Gmail). It would be easy for them to achieve. Firstly, by having a regional presence everywhere, you are only pretty much a LAN connection away from your data, so the speed is good. Then, with their decentralized model, it would be backed up in pieces all over the world. And if you move, or you're out of town, you'll just connect to new nearest POP and your data is copied over the first time so you get the high speed again. FURTHERMORE, because most people only use 1-10% of their current hard drive space (do a quick look), it would be fine to promise everyone 100, 200, even 1000GB and still be able to deliver. And of course, those of us who have a nice big drive and are willing to lend out a few GB can get some $$ in return for running a small service in the background. They could probably even rate content by frequency, thus you can choose what pay scale you want to get paid at and in turn choose the wear and tear on your disks.
And of course, if you're going to be doing new media consumer stuff with your storage (such as movies and music), Google will make sure you've paid for all of it, thus making money from Big Publish.
And of course, everyone will have much more pocket money to spend because we won't be giving it all to Microsoft so we can spend more money shopping online, and Google's checkout function is most convenient.
People will still be able to buy normal computers, but most people will be able to do everything they need with a Google-compatible "terminal" (web browser, local cache, network connection). There'll be one in your office, one in the kids' room, one in the kitchen, one in the garage and one connected to your home media centre. Once they enter the home automation market, the world will never be the same. Imagine, you can Google for your car keys.
Yeah quite! Good luck finding a server willing to give you 2.5GBps!
Well, you'll have the other subscribers in France with 1.2GBps upstream each......
Flash memory is like $30/GB and it's possible to have more than one computer with a RAID that would enable you to saturate one of these lines inexpensively (even today).
Also, it's more than likely that this is a type of FDDI or some other ring topology so you would be sharing that total bandwidth with your neighbors. It doesn't have to be, though.
It goes to show how far behind we are in America, because we spend all our money on wars and big business. (Oops. The last time I made that comment someone told me the network situation here in America was fine, and that they were fine with their Comcast 6mbps. Sorry, it may seem fast up in Utah but that is snail slow with respect to the rest of the civilized first world..) Maybe if we put 500 billion towards fibre, we could have a communcations revolution. Of course, MPAA and RIAA probably wouldn't like that;)
The Colt revolver was the great equalizer of the 1800s, making the average person just as deadly as those who had the time to practice swordsmanship. Computer cameras like these license plate readers and public webcams will be the great equalizer of the 2000s. I relish the equalization of power these will bring.
'course, it's mostly illegal to have a handgun nowadays.
Why aren't there more sensors in computer hardware. You'd think it'd be pretty easy to put a bunch of thermometers in every computer component and have a 1-2 hour running log of temps stored in a flash chip on the mobo (or an add in daugherboard powered by disk connector). Then if there was a failure, you could read the flash chip and display a graph of the last hour of use, see that the hard drive temp skyrocketed and then the computer exploded. Sort of like a "black box" for computers. Hell, you could even archive the last few Mbits of network traffic in the raw and the core dump. With flash down to around $30/GB (retail), why hasn't anyone done this?
You call up and after writing down their name you say,
"Hey, I just cancelled my service and there was some kind of cancellation charge and I want it removed."
They'll say:
"Let me check your account......................ok, it looks like you were still under contract so that's why they were charging the cancellation charge."
You say:
"Uh, I don't think I ever had a CONTRACT with your company, . Can you fax me a copy of the contract I signed?" (the idea is to turn the word contract into a mental picture of an actual legal contract)
They'll say:
"Can I put you on hold for a moment"
"Sure, ".
Then they go to their boss, because they hit a spot in the system that it doesn't have an answer for (they use computerized help desk software). At this point, they will either introduce you to their boss or the boss will pick up, usually saying something like:
" this is how may I help you."
"Yeah, I was just talking to and he said there was some type of cancellation charge on my account and he said it was for some contract I signed. I need you to fax me a copy of the contract and I want the charge removed." (Say it fast and don't let them interrupt you. Notice you are stretching the truth without lying, just taking further the mental picture of a SIGNED, LEGAL CONTRACT making it seem like maybe the greenhorn junior call center employee may have made a mistake.)
There will be a long pause as the supervisor's mind races, thinking "Who is this guy, is this a secret shopper? I can't get him a copy of the contract because there is no contract, hmm, but he doesn't seem like the kindof guy who'll understand something like that."
He's a go getter though, so he's going to go drop an account correction form into HIS supervisors' mailbox. They have monthly allowances for authorized reversals of charges. You just qualified. He'll say:
"One moment please and I'll locate that contract........" *hold*
He'll come back, with his usual lie:
"Ok, well, I talked to accounting and this is a normal charge. By using our service you are subject to an agreement, which was clearly stated in your (new user package, etc.). We don't normally reverse this charge but we value you as a customer and we're sorry for the misunderstanding. We'd like to keep you on so I'd like to offer you "X" months of free service, would that help?"
You reply:
"If it's all the same, I'd like the cancellation charge removed and my account cancelled."
"Ok, sir, I'm sorry to hear that." *clickity click* "I've gone ahead and put your account in for cancellation and I've removed the cancellation charge from your account, is there anything else I can help you with today sir?"
"No, thanks . Is there any kind of confirmation number or ticket number?"
"I'm sorry, we don't give those out."
"Ok, well, that's all I need, thanks a lot for helping me out, I really appreciate it."
You know, it goes to show how outdated and underspec'd the power grid is in this country. We get outages every year due to overdemand.
Re:Plan 9 is cool
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 3, Informative
The whole OS is mainly designed to run across multiple computers on a network. It abstracts everything into a file, way more than unix. It's designed for large scale environments and not single user stuff.
Also, there is a PDF detailing the Fossil archival server and Venti FS.
We can't. Well, I mean, "we" can, but "we" as in the Royal Large Oil Producing Corporations We cannot. If you commute more than a mile to work, you can't either. Until we revamp the inner city (which has been happening), most of America will grind to a halt if a lot of oil stops flowing. Plus, if we're totally not involved, there's nothing stopping China or Russia or even the EU from stepping in and taking over.
The best thing we can do is pump all the oil out as fast as possible so when it's gone, no one cares about the middle east anymore. Other than the Suez canal. No one really cares about the regional bickering between two totally idiotic religions. No one fucking cares about the Jews and their holy land! No one fucking cares about the Islamics and their holy land.
Ok. Maybe Jews and Islamics do.
I do find some facts interesting: There are almost as many islamic people as christians (over 1.5 billion) whereas there are only about 15 MILLION Jews. Additionally, New York City is approximately 11.9% Jewish (the largest ethnic group there) and almost 7% of the GLOBAL Jewish population lives in New York City. I always try to remember that when I'm watching the news and asking myself "Why do we care about Israel again?" Now, before people start thinking of things the wrong way, I'm just clarifying. I personally, for the longest time, thought that Jewish people made up a large portion of the world population. I never was really much interested in religion, so I never looked at the statistics for the world population. I always assumed that there were a lot more Jewish people because they are always in movies, books, etc., and always in the news because of Israel, etc.
I feel sorry for them, because they lost so many of their own in the Holocaust. They do deserve a chance as a culture. Of course, most people try to do that in America, not over in some other country in an extremely hostile environment. It's just their teachings say that that's their land, so they have to go there or something. I'm glad I'm not a member of any religion that makes me go to the middle east! And the Arabs have plenty of other land to move to. Except of course that Israel/Palestine is like the California of the middle East, with beautiful beaches, palm and orange trees, etc. So everyone wants to live there....
If you look at the history of the region, you'll see that they were from around where Israel is today. Arabs and Jews and Christians lived together peacefully. Then they were driven out of the middle east by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and (briefly) Sassanian rules. Then they wandered around Europe looking for someone to help them take it back. Then they found England (after WWI) and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was signed stating that Palestine was a "jewish natural home" and Britain was placed in charge of the area (the Palestine Mandate). In 1948 after the war, Britain moved out and Israel was born. According to the UN partition plan, it was pretty much equally divided between the Arabs and the Jews. The Arabs didn't want the state formed of course. But the plan was never implemented by the British government so it became a sort of king of the hill battle for the land. Which is still going on today. Maybe one day the UN will go back and reimplement the plan.
It's funny how history sets itself up for prophecy.
Another way to put it is this: Democracy is not a spectator's sport. I wish I had the funds to post that on billboards across the country in the weeks leading up to an election.
Why not take an hour this weekend and put together a website with a proposal, donation button and some sticker prices. Put up some content and a YRO RSS feed, Post it to YRO next week, you'll probably get enough to put up a few billboards. Or a few thousand stickers.
I like Bush a little bit sometimes, but I think he's in WAAAY over his head and has been since day one. He's not the first president to be a Jesus lover (they've all been protestants except maybe Kennedy), he's not the first president to misuse his powers for personal gain (Nixon); there's been many times in the past when presidents have enacted War and Emergency powers to increase the power of the executive branch. There's been plenty of coverups, media-driven mastrivoika, fake attacks on ships to start a war, secrecy, phone taps, etc. It's always been going on here.
I just don't want to know about it. I want to feel like the leader up there is doing some good. When the leader speaks, I want to hear some intelligent explaination for their actions. I do not want to hear some drunk frat boy failed businessman cum politician tell me that "I did it because I wanted to". I want to feel like the leader will stand up for what's right, even if he's surrounded by a bunch of people who own/owned and run/ran the top Energy, Military Contractor, Medical, Drug and other industrial companies that want to make a quick buck on a good war.
I don't want the leader to send my friends off to war for no reason. And when they die, I want an apology.
Bush, although a charming, Jesus-loving Nascar fan, has Failed. Like his father before him, his legacy will be a terrorist attack and another Vietnam. Oh, and a conservative supreme court, which might be a good thing. MIGHT. I can't wait to see the chicken hawks tossed out with the trash in `08 and maybe we have the opportunity to fix some things in our country:
Failing outdated electricity infrastructure Network connectivity that gets blown away by KOREA Snail-like space program Big business controlling politics (not likely to change anytime soon, unless we vote LIB heh) America's image in other countries (I have to travel as a canadian...) Economic stability (by balancing the budget, since China isn't going to keep buying our debt forever, not with their real estate market skyrocketing) Joining international treaties to reduce polution Solving the oil problem with innovation, conversation and other peaceful means Abandoning failed "wars" on "ideas" (Drugs, Fear, Poverty, etc.)
Hopefully someone will take the reins and get this country (and this world) on the right track for the 21st century, towards a better life for everyone in the world.
The problem is that it's against the law in many STATES to forment revolution on the government.
Obviously you can challenge this in court by preemptively suing the government before you attempt the revolt. Might actually be effective, actually. This is probably something the ACLU or EFF would want to tackle. That's why I donate to them (ACLU, EFF, Impeach Bush).
Think about all the money you spend on Starbucks or Coke or organic vegtables or whatever it is you consume. I figure I spend $20 a week on starbucks. Surely I can afford $10/month to assure my personal freedoms. So I give $120 per year to each organization. I know there are plenty of other people on here (slashdot) who have also. If you haven't, just do it. It's fast, and don't be all paranoid about them having your credit card number... you can send cash;)
I think a common prank would develop whereby you'd pull out the charging cord of people's cars during the night so they run out of charge on the way to work the next morning.
Thus allowing my patent for "locking power panel with armored cable" to pay off dramatically. Thanks!
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And I've always wondered, why not just bring the moon crew up and back on a Shuttle? You could orbit their landing vehicle and rocket to get there and back with 2 other smaller rockets, meet up with them with the shuttle (probably not easy), assemble the vehicle and staff it with the astronauts. Then fly to the moon, land, come back leave the new ship in orbit and use the shuttle to return to earth. Subsequent trips only require a refueling of the ferry ship. It might even be faster because you can pack a lot more fuel if you do it in steps. I don't know anything about zero gravity or anything like that, but I think this would be the way to go to the moon. Is there a reason they always use 1 rocket with everything on it?
Yeah, I can just see the subdivision names now:
Lunarcrest, Moongate, Crater Hills, and my personal favorite, Terravista Moongates at Crater Hills
O.K., boss, this LTX-27 concealable mike is part of the same system that NASA used when they faked the Apollo moon landings. Yeah, the astronauts broadcast around the world from a soundstage at Norton Airforce Base in San Bernadino, California. So it worked for them, shouldn't give us too many problems.. ..But the key meeting took place July 3rd, 1958, when the Air Force brought the space visitor to the White House for an interview with President Eisenhower. And Ike said, "Hey, look, give us your technology, we'll give you all the cow lips you want."
Hmm, interesting. Why doesn't the music industry provide an online database of music bits, and if you have the CD but it gets damaged, you can read off what you can, then replace the bits with stuff from their archive (not unlike in Jurassic Park, where they replaced the missing "dino-dna" with frog DNA.)
Oh wait, this is the music industry.
I'd like to illustrate the first successful design (patent pending) of this technology:
l ll lll
l ll lll
l ll lll
l ll lll -- Barcode
. -- Earth
If all goes well, we could have it in mass-production by early spring of `45.
There's also National Public Radio, which has been doing this with radio for decades. It's listener supported. Basically, they could have a WiFi fun drive, wherein they get the thing going and it pops a webpage up on people's screen before they can use the internet. It asks for a donation and a login. Once they make a donation, they don't have to see the screen until next year (members). People who haven't donated might have the screen pop up every 10 hours or so of use, and they can just dismiss it. Then, during the fund drive, they have to look at the screen for 5 minutes an hour or something.
The page would also be a nice personalized community portal, not unlike Public Radio has. I think something like this would be great; the quality of public radio is amazing, and I think they could do the same thing with Internet Access. People need to stop thinking like money grubbing babies. It's NOT all about money. Warren Buffett just gave away all of his money, so will Bill Gates. There are a lot of people who volunteer time or give money to support the community projects. If you aren't one of them, you should try it. It feels good, and I swear it comes back to you 10x.
Next time you're getting drunk in the bar, save $10 and send it to public radio or the EFF or the ACLU or something like that. Well-managed non-profits do A LOT in this world, and any money they make they give back to their communities.
Actually janitors are middle class. So is someone who makes $200,000 a year. A janitor in America with a job is probably in the top 98 percent of the world income wise.
One of the curious results of certain class societies (or societies that are generally perceived to be based on class distinctions) is that people belonging to different social classes have different views on the class system as a whole, thus different forms of class consciousness. Typically, in English society, the results would be:
Upper class people, e.g. aristocrats, traditionally refer merely to The Lower Classes, without making any distinction between people who are not aristocrats, i.e. they operate in a two-class model.
Working class people, similarly, traditionally refer merely to 'toffs', i.e. anyone who isn't working class, and also operate in a two-class system, but a different one from Upper Class people.
Middle Class people, in contrast, see themselves as separate from the Upper Class and Working Class, perhaps on the same bases as people who claim to belong to each, but in addition, draw distinctions between the Upper Middle and Lower Middle classes (or even introduce the notion of Middle Middle Class, for anyone they feel doesn't fall into any of the other categories), i.e. they operate from a 4- or 5-class perspective.
(plagarized from wikipedia's article on class consciousness.
See the Social class entry over at Wikipedia.
Also, try Prosper.com where you can lend money to other people. I know a few people who are making bank on this site. You go in with other people buying notes, sort of like an online consumer loan auction. Each month, when the borrower makes a monthly payment, you get a portion of it based on the initial investment. Plus there's groups and tons of other stuff. There's a lot of high quality borrowers on there now, also.
You need to use a hedge strategy. First, hedge your loan with a fixed income investment that will give you the same income as you pay interest. You will have to invest a little more than your student loan balance. The nice thing is that it will keep compounding so you'll be making interest on the interest and when the student loan is paid off, you'll still be making interest.
;)
Any money you have left, spread it around.
Keep a pure cash emergency fund with enough to cover 2 months of bills PLUS your car insurance deductible (make that as high as you can).
Consider buying a home. Although the housing market has topped out in a lot of places, it also doesn't look to be going down any time soon. The money you spend each month in rent could be going toward building equity in a home. Choose something with rental potential so when you leave school, you have immediate rental income to cover the mortgage payment, plus a little for yourself.
Inflation has been creeping up therefore it may not be wise to keep a lot of cash around. You need the emergency fund of course. Assets are what you want to have during inflation, because they stay at a fixed value relative to the dollar, and are therefore inflation protected. T-bills are ok, but you have to wait for a good day to buy them. The yields are not much higher than a savings account, so unless you have like $10M, it's probably not worth the hassle.
Keep in mind that if you DON'T have debt, you will be "making" money just by not paying interest. Student loans are good loans, however, with very low interest and they don't report to the credit agencies until you are 60 days late (pay on time anyway!). They will also always defer you if you have a car accident or other such hardship. Any other debt you have such as car loan and credit debt should be paid as soon as possible. There's no point in sitting around with 10000 in cash earning 4% when you have 10000 in debt on the other side costing you 20%. That's a net loss of 16%
Ok, so I'm gloating a little bit.
Yeah, but try to buy a real beer there.
You, sir, are a pessimist.
One of my European friends put it best. America is an interesting blend of first and third world. The sad thing is, most of us never travel and don't realize just how third world we're becoming. The rest of the world really is moving along in leaps and bounds, and we have already been left in its technological dust. But don't tell anybody...they'll label you as "unpatriotic."
Our President's English is often bested by my Mexican-American gardener (apparently he had to learn English to become a citizen). I give you this point.
I think that because of the inelasticity of demand in public utility type services such as power, water, garbage and phone (not yet), the government needs to on occasion break up monopolies. It's not that big of a deal, they have done it many times. The companies make money hand over fist, grow and merge into a huge powerful monolith, then the government breaks them up and forces them to lose money for a while. It's all factored in to your costs. And of course, the lawyers are the big winners! (Will it ever be any other way in America?) I think the phone company monopolies are far worse than Microsoft for this country, however, and they tried to break them up.
On that note, having real fast networking to everyone would probably solve the Microsoft problem by itself, what with Googlenet, Microsoft's security "woes", etc.
A more likely scenario would be a company like Google offering 50-100GB of storage, and you'll log onto it with every PC you use to get your music, videos, everything. Thinking about a 80mb down/40mb up in terms of "it's like a 6mb down 0.375Mb up only faster" is wrong. If French telecom can manage to deliver 50% of that bandwidth "to the jack" this is going to be HUGE. The key hear again is UPLOAD.
Hmm. Maybe this is Google's idea with all the dark fibre and POP space and trailers they are buying up... Centralize storage, and in an amazingly large way (like they did with Gmail). It would be easy for them to achieve. Firstly, by having a regional presence everywhere, you are only pretty much a LAN connection away from your data, so the speed is good. Then, with their decentralized model, it would be backed up in pieces all over the world. And if you move, or you're out of town, you'll just connect to new nearest POP and your data is copied over the first time so you get the high speed again. FURTHERMORE, because most people only use 1-10% of their current hard drive space (do a quick look), it would be fine to promise everyone 100, 200, even 1000GB and still be able to deliver. And of course, those of us who have a nice big drive and are willing to lend out a few GB can get some $$ in return for running a small service in the background. They could probably even rate content by frequency, thus you can choose what pay scale you want to get paid at and in turn choose the wear and tear on your disks.
And of course, if you're going to be doing new media consumer stuff with your storage (such as movies and music), Google will make sure you've paid for all of it, thus making money from Big Publish.
And of course, everyone will have much more pocket money to spend because we won't be giving it all to Microsoft so we can spend more money shopping online, and Google's checkout function is most convenient.
People will still be able to buy normal computers, but most people will be able to do everything they need with a Google-compatible "terminal" (web browser, local cache, network connection). There'll be one in your office, one in the kids' room, one in the kitchen, one in the garage and one connected to your home media centre. Once they enter the home automation market, the world will never be the same. Imagine, you can Google for your car keys.
--Robert X. Cringley (just kidding)
Yeah quite! Good luck finding a server willing to give you 2.5GBps!
;)
Well, you'll have the other subscribers in France with 1.2GBps upstream each......
Flash memory is like $30/GB and it's possible to have more than one computer with a RAID that would enable you to saturate one of these lines inexpensively (even today).
Also, it's more than likely that this is a type of FDDI or some other ring topology so you would be sharing that total bandwidth with your neighbors. It doesn't have to be, though.
It goes to show how far behind we are in America, because we spend all our money on wars and big business. (Oops. The last time I made that comment someone told me the network situation here in America was fine, and that they were fine with their Comcast 6mbps. Sorry, it may seem fast up in Utah but that is snail slow with respect to the rest of the civilized first world..) Maybe if we put 500 billion towards fibre, we could have a communcations revolution. Of course, MPAA and RIAA probably wouldn't like that
'course, it's mostly illegal to have a handgun nowadays.
Why aren't there more sensors in computer hardware. You'd think it'd be pretty easy to put a bunch of thermometers in every computer component and have a 1-2 hour running log of temps stored in a flash chip on the mobo (or an add in daugherboard powered by disk connector). Then if there was a failure, you could read the flash chip and display a graph of the last hour of use, see that the hard drive temp skyrocketed and then the computer exploded. Sort of like a "black box" for computers. Hell, you could even archive the last few Mbits of network traffic in the raw and the core dump. With flash down to around $30/GB (retail), why hasn't anyone done this?
This is how it SHOULD sound when you call:
You call up and after writing down their name you say,
"Hey, I just cancelled my service and there was some kind of cancellation charge and I want it removed."
They'll say:
"Let me check your account......................ok, it looks like you were still under contract so that's why they were charging the cancellation charge."
You say:
"Uh, I don't think I ever had a CONTRACT with your company, . Can you fax me a copy of the contract I signed?"
(the idea is to turn the word contract into a mental picture of an actual legal contract)
They'll say:
"Can I put you on hold for a moment"
"Sure, ".
Then they go to their boss, because they hit a spot in the system that it doesn't have an answer for (they use computerized help desk software). At this point, they will either introduce you to their boss or the boss will pick up, usually saying something like:
" this is how may I help you."
"Yeah, I was just talking to and he said there was some type of cancellation charge on my account and
he said it was for some contract I signed. I need you to fax me a copy of the contract and I want the charge removed." (Say it fast and don't let them interrupt you. Notice you are stretching the truth without lying, just taking further the mental picture of a SIGNED, LEGAL CONTRACT making it seem like maybe the greenhorn junior call center employee may have made a mistake.)
There will be a long pause as the supervisor's mind races, thinking "Who is this guy, is this a secret shopper? I can't get him a copy of the contract because there is no contract, hmm, but he doesn't seem like the kindof guy who'll understand something like that."
He's a go getter though, so he's going to go drop an account correction form into HIS supervisors' mailbox. They have monthly allowances for authorized reversals of charges. You just qualified. He'll say:
"One moment please and I'll locate that contract........" *hold*
He'll come back, with his usual lie:
"Ok, well, I talked to accounting and this is a normal charge. By using our service you are subject to an agreement, which was clearly stated in your (new user package, etc.). We don't normally reverse this charge but we value you as a customer and we're sorry for the misunderstanding. We'd like to keep you on so I'd like to offer you "X" months of free service, would that help?"
You reply:
"If it's all the same, I'd like the cancellation charge removed and my account cancelled."
"Ok, sir, I'm sorry to hear that." *clickity click* "I've gone ahead and put your account in for cancellation and I've removed the cancellation charge from your account, is there anything else I can help you with today sir?"
"No, thanks . Is there any kind of confirmation number or ticket number?"
"I'm sorry, we don't give those out."
"Ok, well, that's all I need, thanks a lot for helping me out, I really appreciate it."
"No problem, and thank you for calling "
"bye" *click*
You know, it goes to show how outdated and underspec'd the power grid is in this country. We get outages every year due to overdemand.
The whole OS is mainly designed to run across multiple computers on a network. It abstracts everything into a file, way more than unix. It's designed for large scale environments and not single user stuff.
Also, there is a PDF detailing the Fossil archival server and Venti FS.
It's totally cool.
We can't. Well, I mean, "we" can, but "we" as in the Royal Large Oil Producing Corporations We cannot. If you commute more than a mile to work, you can't either. Until we revamp the inner city (which has been happening), most of America will grind to a halt if a lot of oil stops flowing. Plus, if we're totally not involved, there's nothing stopping China or Russia or even the EU from stepping in and taking over.
The best thing we can do is pump all the oil out as fast as possible so when it's gone, no one cares about the middle east anymore. Other than the Suez canal. No one really cares about the regional bickering between two totally idiotic religions. No one fucking cares about the Jews and their holy land! No one fucking cares about the Islamics and their holy land.
Ok. Maybe Jews and Islamics do.
I do find some facts interesting: There are almost as many islamic people as christians (over 1.5 billion) whereas there are only about 15 MILLION Jews. Additionally, New York City is approximately 11.9% Jewish (the largest ethnic group there) and almost 7% of the GLOBAL Jewish population lives in New York City. I always try to remember that when I'm watching the news and asking myself "Why do we care about Israel again?" Now, before people start thinking of things the wrong way, I'm just clarifying. I personally, for the longest time, thought that Jewish people made up a large portion of the world population. I never was really much interested in religion, so I never looked at the statistics for the world population. I always assumed that there were a lot more Jewish people because they are always in movies, books, etc., and always in the news because of Israel, etc.
I feel sorry for them, because they lost so many of their own in the Holocaust. They do deserve a chance as a culture. Of course, most people try to do that in America, not over in some other country in an extremely hostile environment. It's just their teachings say that that's their land, so they have to go there or something. I'm glad I'm not a member of any religion that makes me go to the middle east! And the Arabs have plenty of other land to move to. Except of course that Israel/Palestine is like the California of the middle East, with beautiful beaches, palm and orange trees, etc. So everyone wants to live there....
If you look at the history of the region, you'll see that they were from around where Israel is today. Arabs and Jews and Christians lived together peacefully. Then they were driven out of the middle east by the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and (briefly) Sassanian rules. Then they wandered around Europe looking for someone to help them take it back. Then they found England (after WWI) and the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was signed stating that Palestine was a "jewish natural home" and Britain was placed in charge of the area (the Palestine Mandate). In 1948 after the war, Britain moved out and Israel was born. According to the UN partition plan, it was pretty much equally divided between the Arabs and the Jews. The Arabs didn't want the state formed of course. But the plan was never implemented by the British government so it became a sort of king of the hill battle for the land. Which is still going on today. Maybe one day the UN will go back and reimplement the plan.
It's funny how history sets itself up for prophecy.
Another way to put it is this: Democracy is not a spectator's sport. I wish I had the funds to post that on billboards across the country in the weeks leading up to an election.
Why not take an hour this weekend and put together a website with a proposal, donation button and some sticker prices. Put up some content and a YRO RSS feed, Post it to YRO next week, you'll probably get enough to put up a few billboards. Or a few thousand stickers.
I like Bush a little bit sometimes, but I think he's in WAAAY over his head and has been since day one. He's not the first president to be a Jesus lover (they've all been protestants except maybe Kennedy), he's not the first president to misuse his powers for personal gain (Nixon); there's been many times in the past when presidents have enacted War and Emergency powers to increase the power of the executive branch. There's been plenty of coverups, media-driven mastrivoika, fake attacks on ships to start a war, secrecy, phone taps, etc. It's always been going on here.
I just don't want to know about it. I want to feel like the leader up there is doing some good. When the leader speaks, I want to hear some intelligent explaination for their actions. I do not want to hear some drunk frat boy failed businessman cum politician tell me that "I did it because I wanted to". I want to feel like the leader will stand up for what's right, even if he's surrounded by a bunch of people who own/owned and run/ran the top Energy, Military Contractor, Medical, Drug and other industrial companies that want to make a quick buck on a good war.
I don't want the leader to send my friends off to war for no reason. And when they die, I want an apology.
Bush, although a charming, Jesus-loving Nascar fan, has Failed. Like his father before him, his legacy will be a terrorist attack and another Vietnam. Oh, and a conservative supreme court, which might be a good thing. MIGHT. I can't wait to see the chicken hawks tossed out with the trash in `08 and maybe we have the opportunity to fix some things in our country:
Failing outdated electricity infrastructure
Network connectivity that gets blown away by KOREA
Snail-like space program
Big business controlling politics (not likely to change anytime soon, unless we vote LIB heh)
America's image in other countries (I have to travel as a canadian...)
Economic stability (by balancing the budget, since China isn't going to keep buying our debt forever, not with their real estate market skyrocketing)
Joining international treaties to reduce polution
Solving the oil problem with innovation, conversation and other peaceful means
Abandoning failed "wars" on "ideas" (Drugs, Fear, Poverty, etc.)
Hopefully someone will take the reins and get this country (and this world) on the right track for the 21st century, towards a better life for everyone in the world.
The problem is that it's against the law in many STATES to forment revolution on the government.
;)
Obviously you can challenge this in court by preemptively suing the government before you attempt the revolt. Might actually be effective, actually. This is probably something the ACLU or EFF would want to tackle. That's why I donate to them (ACLU, EFF, Impeach Bush).
Think about all the money you spend on Starbucks or Coke or organic vegtables or whatever it is you consume. I figure I spend $20 a week on starbucks. Surely I can afford $10/month to assure my personal freedoms. So I give $120 per year to each organization. I know there are plenty of other people on here (slashdot) who have also. If you haven't, just do it. It's fast, and don't be all paranoid about them having your credit card number... you can send cash
Thus allowing my patent for "locking power panel with armored cable" to pay off dramatically. Thanks!