Maybe you missed the bit where I talked about funding research. And I don't know were you got your taxation quote from but 'accumulated losses' are 100% deductible from any future profits before you pay any tax.
There is more free, clean energy in hot rocks 3-5km below the surface than all coal, oil and nuclear fuel combined. It cost nothing to extract other than the initial capital investment, and produces no harmful by-products other than the electricity that you an I take for granted in this modern age.
A bit more research money toward the economic construction of geothermal plants would see us free of fossil and nuclear fuel for the foreseeable future, and that is many, many generations of our species.
The biggest problem with the driverless Komatsu's on the mine sites are the ruts they cause on the dirt mine 'roads'. When you have 18 tippers weighing 500+ ton rolling on the exact same pair of tyre treads once a minute 24x7, the ruts get gouged pretty deep, pretty quick. A human driver will do his or her best to avoid ruts as he or she drives around every small (and large!) rock pile on the road as it makes for a smoother ride, especially when all you want to do is get it from the bottom of the pit to the top as many times as directed for your 8 hour shift.
Sadly this is what many will do, including myself. I don't want to break the law or support piracy, but I am mad keen on checking out the game after spending hours on the creature creator.
Thus I have ordered my copy of the game, yet the torrent is currently running. I wont ever run out of account activations but I'll be damned if I am letting a game install what is essentially Malware on my PC.
Like all surveys that want to portray a 'shocking' result, it all comes down to the wording of the questions. It is very easy to get a respondent to tick yes on a question that asks "do you log in to other people's accounts" by first baiting them with a whole bunch of rubbish like "do you help others with their IT issues" and so on.
Without the actual survey, the results are, in my opinion, just as good as made up.
I came to post this exact same viewpoint. Not everyone can drive a car safely. It's a privilege, not a right, hence the ability of the State to suspend or cancel your licence if you fail at being a good road citizen.
The Tripods Series is a great Sci-Fi read for that age. It's a vaguely Orwellian world of the future, ruled by aliens with man in controlled virtual slavery. Kids try to break free of control and rescue man, etc, etc....
When the Tripods Came/White Mountains/City of Gold and Lead/Pool of Fire.
I'm pretty sure the books are labelled in sequence order
No seriously, that is the name of it. I have one, it cost about $800 and it is just pure awesome. I sit in it four hours every day and it is as comfortable and practical as any chair could possibly be.
I have a 10Mb/10Mb (Ethernet) connection that can pull down stuff from fast servers (abc.net.au podcasts for example) at 1MB/s, and my highest daily record was 9.7 GB in a day. If I leave a shared torrent running 24Hrs at full speed, I can serve up about 16GB in a day. I seriously, seriously doubt you could do 60GB down in a day unless it was one hella big file coming from somewhere local, but even so, 60GB is more like one week rather than three, and it is still more than anyone could possibly need.
Uploads are free, downloads only count towards limits, so feel free to share your kid with the rest of the world. ISPs are offering a connection which they calculate you will use a certain percentage of at constant speed, and the rest for occasional burst. What you may not know is that most places outside the US, ISPs have to pay carriers for data.
And I'll asume you don't live in a country where plans are speed/data capped. Here you don't get to choose either, you get to choose from a range of plans that suit your usage.
The bandwidth is how much of the digital broadband you are allowed to use. It comes in a wild number of varieties from the age old 64kbps ISDN to the OC-x series fibre operating at many GB/s. Most consumers are happy with the 1Mbps ADSL, most power users (you and me) want our ADSL2+ @ >10Mbps, and Universities and Governments want their 155Mbps and above.
The data transfer limits are a measure of how much you utilise your bandwidth over a given time, that is why the slower speeds (256kbps mum & dad connections) get a paltry 1GB before hitting the 'cap' (either shaping back to 64k, or paying for 'overs') while higher bandwidth plans get more data (up to 60GB a month on some plans here in Aus). The overall utilisation is within the business model the ISP set of say a 5-8% utilisation, they make some money while you enjoy your fast connection and you mum can still get her email once a day.
Ramp your bandwidth up to 10Mbps and put the same utilisation on it, you get 30-50GB a month, and hence you pay more. Now pump this to 100% or even 80% utilisation when you can pull 10GB a day... Here's where the problems start. Our obsession with bandwidth has far out grown the ISPs capacity to suck all that data from their backhaul carrier (Telstra, NTT, AT&T, etc. - the big boys with the global networks).
So while I am all for speedy internet for all, you gotta realise that you can't use it like you used to with P2P running all the time and expect the low end users to pay for your excess consumption. Bandwidth limits are what once to spread the load, but now you will find that as ISPs are more and more relying on data limits instead as technology pushes the connections faster and faster and human nature presses our desire to have/offer the fastest connection.
What the hell could you possibly be doing with more than 60GB a month anyway?
Not so, most of the backscatter is sent to snckjwe@mydomain.com which is either quietly dropped if you have smart filters that look for mailer-daemon@ etc as the sender, or passed to your 'no one by that name' catch all mailbox. Some mail systems will in fact be terribly misconfigured for backscatter, but then how is that different from what we have today?
The worst email storm I got was when some spammer decided to use my domain as the sender of all his junk and send all hi junk twice. I do have SPF entries in my DNS so ANYTHING that would encourage others to actually USE this system is a GOOD THING.
Now if there were just a few simple packages available that would give us the one-click (tm) ability to add SPF filtering to Sendmail/Postfix/Qmail/etc, and MS Exchange 5.5/2000, then I would guess that 50% or more of the domain spoofing spam would cease. That can only be good, as I only get UCE from real domains that I can't check for authenticity, from spammers who bother to follow RFCs and send twice after postgrey (greylist filtering) blocks them first time around.
Given the level of effort you put in to maintain a healthy weight, I doubt you will ever have weight problems of the obese kind (and I commend you on that). It still stands however that the basic premise for most people in 'that' Generation is that nothing is their fault. I hate people who can't accept responsibility. Do you see me posting as AC? No, I own up to where I put my words.
I don't have any medical problems and I rarely, if ever, eat take-away. When I do it would be fish-and-chips, and not the drowned in batter and fried variety. I know what's good for me, and I have a fair idea how much energy I require. I'm 183cm (6') and 69kg (150lb) so trust me, in 20 years, I will not be fatter that you.
Every time I see a news story that is 'blah blah 40% of the population is obese' I often wonder where these people are. I don't see them where I live, work and play. The paper keeps telling me they are out there though. Maybe I just don't see that side of the population to have this 'experience' you speak of. Either way, I still believe in what I said/say.
Dude, it is a simple as that. Eat what you need, not what you want.
The parent to your comment is more right than wrong. Fat people need to stop passing the blame for their 'condition'. Hell, most of the time just being overweight is the lead cause of degrading health - e.g. Diabetes.
"You obviously don't know a thing about the subject." You obviously don't like being told it is your fault.
Maybe I should have said that we agreed to fund a $12,000 infrastructure refit to run 400 Cat 5 points up the risers. The original provider had the foresight to use optical, but alas, the contract states that they own said fibres (regardless of how many are dark) right up to the optical-to-ethernet/POTS boxes in the comms cabinets on each floor.
I live in a building where the developers contracted in a "triple-play" provider. Phone, internet and television are all provided by the one company, and poorly at that. We have zero competition to choose from, and only last week at the body corporate meeting did we (the resident owners who bothered to turn up) manage to reach an agreement that the monopoly situation was of no benefit to the residents nor the owners.
Sadly, this is true. Farmers moved to the instance farming model a long time ago. Outdoor farming was too obvious and got them regularly interrupted and/or banned. Now a dedicated team of 10 'players' can play the game all day, quite enjoyably, going from one instance to the next and selling off the loot without arousing any suspicion. If I was a low society person in China, I'd jump at this for a job given the other options. Consider also that the hourly limit the Chinese government imposes on on-line gaming doesn't apply on EU/US servers, and even people who just want to play the game (quite a lot) are starting to sell their (excess) gold. And if you don't already know, they (the companies that sell the gold in bulk) have people lining up for 'work'.
Also, don't confuse the retailer (such as P4H) with the farming teams (who can actually be quite nice people). P4H (et al) buy their gold from a wholesaler, who in turn buy it from the farm teams (and account thieves), then sell it to buyers however they can. Compromised account gold and farmed gold are all the same after it has changed hands twice, as far as the retailer cares anyway.
That doesn't work simply due to the massive amount of key input data the server needs to process. Even WoW struggles with it's paltry couple of k/s to each player. And they are mostly only hitting one to three keys every 2.5 seconds.
Think about it this way.
10,000 players on a realm. 1 input per player per second, plus movement data, opponent data, and environment data (surrounding units, etc. say 10). Each player needing to be updated, on average, with only 10 other players inputs / movements. Lets just say one byte (a whole eight bits) per each of the above on line 2.
( 1 + 1 + 1 + 10 ) x 10 x 10,000
That is about 1.25 MB / sec going in and out of the server, not counting in game mail, auctions, loot, etc. with numbers I just totally made up. In terms of network speed, that is 10Mbit/s of saturated pipe. There are something like 150 realms for WoW and it gets laggy at times, sure, but it copes pretty well imho.
How much input do you give your dude in Tekken in 1 sec? If you play like me, probably enough to give yourself a blister on you thumb after 2 hours. And you only have one other opponent. Multiply that sort of input to the processor out and you will see just why you can't have a 'skill' requirement client side.
What do you think it's going to take to crack Blizzard's deathlock on the Massive genre?
As per the subject line, World of Starcraft.
Well, not exactly that, but it would be good. The only thing I see breaking the MMO market now is something that gamers love (FPS), rolled in to the same detailed and compelling game we return to day after day (MMORPG). What I see is an FPS come RPG title based in a world that thrives on people banding together to achieve goals, but leaves the door open for PvP combat a-la the WoW style PvP servers.
The key factor would of course be the ability of the developer to work out some sort of faction / race / class based system with the familiar leveling / gearing requirment, and rolling in an FPS front end. Three way battles like those in Starcraft would be awesome, as the current Horde vs. Alliance system in WoW is getting a bit tired.
I still play WoW nearly 20 hours a week, down from over 40 to sometimes 60 a week last year, but would jump straight in to World of Starcraft if it were to miraculously appear in the above stated incarnation.
So maybe with the current state of the Apple nVidia driver the Apple configurator should have a bit more of a brain and reject configurations that have the lowest end GFX card and more than 2GB of RAM, or flag it to the customer as a poor choice. Fair one, but that wasn't what I was getting at.
If I had the cash to buy a Mac Pro, I'd pay a couple a hundred bucks extra for an x1900 gfx card if I was going to be gaming on it. It's an upgrade in price, sure, but not in the context you mention. It's an upgrade to a faster and more capable device, like buying a car with a higher capacity engine (as opposed to no engine at all since you like to make comparisons that are totally inapropriate). You are not comparing like for like. A T-shirt with one arm is like a HDD with half a platter as opposed to one in place of two. I.e. both are useless.
People who penny pinch on purchases generally get stung by it, and you're right, it shouldn't happen, but it does. Pay the extra for the piece of mind, and you probably won't know that it was the right decision. Penny pinch and have issues, you'll know about it, and you'll want to scream bloody murder. I hear slashdot is a good place to start screaming too.
Be real, not cynical. That is so typical of the this community.
PS, Mac Pro - "consumer electronics" ?! Oh please...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you missed the bit where I talked about funding research. And I don't know were you got your taxation quote from but 'accumulated losses' are 100% deductible from any future profits before you pay any tax.
There is more free, clean energy in hot rocks 3-5km below the surface than all coal, oil and nuclear fuel combined. It cost nothing to extract other than the initial capital investment, and produces no harmful by-products other than the electricity that you an I take for granted in this modern age.
A bit more research money toward the economic construction of geothermal plants would see us free of fossil and nuclear fuel for the foreseeable future, and that is many, many generations of our species.
The biggest problem with the driverless Komatsu's on the mine sites are the ruts they cause on the dirt mine 'roads'. When you have 18 tippers weighing 500+ ton rolling on the exact same pair of tyre treads once a minute 24x7, the ruts get gouged pretty deep, pretty quick. A human driver will do his or her best to avoid ruts as he or she drives around every small (and large!) rock pile on the road as it makes for a smoother ride, especially when all you want to do is get it from the bottom of the pit to the top as many times as directed for your 8 hour shift.
Sadly this is what many will do, including myself. I don't want to break the law or support piracy, but I am mad keen on checking out the game after spending hours on the creature creator.
Thus I have ordered my copy of the game, yet the torrent is currently running. I wont ever run out of account activations but I'll be damned if I am letting a game install what is essentially Malware on my PC.
Your a geek, shop online like the rest of us
http://www.cheapgames.com.au/spore-pc-p-2032.html - A$74.95
If you are dumb enough to fall for one of the oldest fraud methods in existence, you deserve to lose you money, but not your freedom.
I remember that episode; pure gold. That was exactly what prompted my original reply.
Like all surveys that want to portray a 'shocking' result, it all comes down to the wording of the questions. It is very easy to get a respondent to tick yes on a question that asks "do you log in to other people's accounts" by first baiting them with a whole bunch of rubbish like "do you help others with their IT issues" and so on.
Without the actual survey, the results are, in my opinion, just as good as made up.
I came to post this exact same viewpoint. Not everyone can drive a car safely. It's a privilege, not a right, hence the ability of the State to suspend or cancel your licence if you fail at being a good road citizen.
The Tripods Series is a great Sci-Fi read for that age. It's a vaguely Orwellian world of the future, ruled by aliens with man in controlled virtual slavery. Kids try to break free of control and rescue man, etc, etc....
When the Tripods Came/White Mountains/City of Gold and Lead/Pool of Fire.
I'm pretty sure the books are labelled in sequence order
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=the+pool+of+fire&x=0&y=0
No seriously, that is the name of it. I have one, it cost about $800 and it is just pure awesome. I sit in it four hours every day and it is as comfortable and practical as any chair could possibly be.
http://www.formway.com/Products/Life.html
I have a 10Mb/10Mb (Ethernet) connection that can pull down stuff from fast servers (abc.net.au podcasts for example) at 1MB/s, and my highest daily record was 9.7 GB in a day. If I leave a shared torrent running 24Hrs at full speed, I can serve up about 16GB in a day. I seriously, seriously doubt you could do 60GB down in a day unless it was one hella big file coming from somewhere local, but even so, 60GB is more like one week rather than three, and it is still more than anyone could possibly need.
Uploads are free, downloads only count towards limits, so feel free to share your kid with the rest of the world. ISPs are offering a connection which they calculate you will use a certain percentage of at constant speed, and the rest for occasional burst. What you may not know is that most places outside the US, ISPs have to pay carriers for data.
And I'll asume you don't live in a country where plans are speed/data capped. Here you don't get to choose either, you get to choose from a range of plans that suit your usage.
The bandwidth is how much of the digital broadband you are allowed to use. It comes in a wild number of varieties from the age old 64kbps ISDN to the OC-x series fibre operating at many GB/s. Most consumers are happy with the 1Mbps ADSL, most power users (you and me) want our ADSL2+ @ >10Mbps, and Universities and Governments want their 155Mbps and above.
The data transfer limits are a measure of how much you utilise your bandwidth over a given time, that is why the slower speeds (256kbps mum & dad connections) get a paltry 1GB before hitting the 'cap' (either shaping back to 64k, or paying for 'overs') while higher bandwidth plans get more data (up to 60GB a month on some plans here in Aus). The overall utilisation is within the business model the ISP set of say a 5-8% utilisation, they make some money while you enjoy your fast connection and you mum can still get her email once a day.
Ramp your bandwidth up to 10Mbps and put the same utilisation on it, you get 30-50GB a month, and hence you pay more. Now pump this to 100% or even 80% utilisation when you can pull 10GB a day... Here's where the problems start. Our obsession with bandwidth has far out grown the ISPs capacity to suck all that data from their backhaul carrier (Telstra, NTT, AT&T, etc. - the big boys with the global networks).
So while I am all for speedy internet for all, you gotta realise that you can't use it like you used to with P2P running all the time and expect the low end users to pay for your excess consumption. Bandwidth limits are what once to spread the load, but now you will find that as ISPs are more and more relying on data limits instead as technology pushes the connections faster and faster and human nature presses our desire to have/offer the fastest connection.
What the hell could you possibly be doing with more than 60GB a month anyway?
www.harveycartel.org/metanet/n.html
N is the BEST implementation of modern technology using retro inspiration and kick-arse physics.
Two thumbs up.
Not so, most of the backscatter is sent to snckjwe@mydomain.com which is either quietly dropped if you have smart filters that look for mailer-daemon@ etc as the sender, or passed to your 'no one by that name' catch all mailbox. Some mail systems will in fact be terribly misconfigured for backscatter, but then how is that different from what we have today?
The worst email storm I got was when some spammer decided to use my domain as the sender of all his junk and send all hi junk twice. I do have SPF entries in my DNS so ANYTHING that would encourage others to actually USE this system is a GOOD THING.
Now if there were just a few simple packages available that would give us the one-click (tm) ability to add SPF filtering to Sendmail/Postfix/Qmail/etc, and MS Exchange 5.5/2000, then I would guess that 50% or more of the domain spoofing spam would cease. That can only be good, as I only get UCE from real domains that I can't check for authenticity, from spammers who bother to follow RFCs and send twice after postgrey (greylist filtering) blocks them first time around.
Skinny, yes; 18, no, almost double that.
Given the level of effort you put in to maintain a healthy weight, I doubt you will ever have weight problems of the obese kind (and I commend you on that). It still stands however that the basic premise for most people in 'that' Generation is that nothing is their fault. I hate people who can't accept responsibility. Do you see me posting as AC? No, I own up to where I put my words.
I don't have any medical problems and I rarely, if ever, eat take-away. When I do it would be fish-and-chips, and not the drowned in batter and fried variety. I know what's good for me, and I have a fair idea how much energy I require. I'm 183cm (6') and 69kg (150lb) so trust me, in 20 years, I will not be fatter that you.
Every time I see a news story that is 'blah blah 40% of the population is obese' I often wonder where these people are. I don't see them where I live, work and play. The paper keeps telling me they are out there though. Maybe I just don't see that side of the population to have this 'experience' you speak of. Either way, I still believe in what I said/say.
Dude, it is a simple as that. Eat what you need, not what you want.
The parent to your comment is more right than wrong. Fat people need to stop passing the blame for their 'condition'. Hell, most of the time just being overweight is the lead cause of degrading health - e.g. Diabetes.
"You obviously don't know a thing about the subject."
You obviously don't like being told it is your fault.
hehe.
Maybe I should have said that we agreed to fund a $12,000 infrastructure refit to run 400 Cat 5 points up the risers. The original provider had the foresight to use optical, but alas, the contract states that they own said fibres (regardless of how many are dark) right up to the optical-to-ethernet/POTS boxes in the comms cabinets on each floor.
I live in a building where the developers contracted in a "triple-play" provider. Phone, internet and television are all provided by the one company, and poorly at that. We have zero competition to choose from, and only last week at the body corporate meeting did we (the resident owners who bothered to turn up) manage to reach an agreement that the monopoly situation was of no benefit to the residents nor the owners.
Sadly, this is true. Farmers moved to the instance farming model a long time ago. Outdoor farming was too obvious and got them regularly interrupted and/or banned. Now a dedicated team of 10 'players' can play the game all day, quite enjoyably, going from one instance to the next and selling off the loot without arousing any suspicion. If I was a low society person in China, I'd jump at this for a job given the other options. Consider also that the hourly limit the Chinese government imposes on on-line gaming doesn't apply on EU/US servers, and even people who just want to play the game (quite a lot) are starting to sell their (excess) gold. And if you don't already know, they (the companies that sell the gold in bulk) have people lining up for 'work'.
Also, don't confuse the retailer (such as P4H) with the farming teams (who can actually be quite nice people). P4H (et al) buy their gold from a wholesaler, who in turn buy it from the farm teams (and account thieves), then sell it to buyers however they can. Compromised account gold and farmed gold are all the same after it has changed hands twice, as far as the retailer cares anyway.
That doesn't work simply due to the massive amount of key input data the server needs to process. Even WoW struggles with it's paltry couple of k/s to each player. And they are mostly only hitting one to three keys every 2.5 seconds.
Think about it this way.
10,000 players on a realm.
1 input per player per second, plus movement data, opponent data, and environment data (surrounding units, etc. say 10).
Each player needing to be updated, on average, with only 10 other players inputs / movements.
Lets just say one byte (a whole eight bits) per each of the above on line 2.
( 1 + 1 + 1 + 10 ) x 10 x 10,000
That is about 1.25 MB / sec going in and out of the server, not counting in game mail, auctions, loot, etc. with numbers I just totally made up. In terms of network speed, that is 10Mbit/s of saturated pipe. There are something like 150 realms for WoW and it gets laggy at times, sure, but it copes pretty well imho.
How much input do you give your dude in Tekken in 1 sec? If you play like me, probably enough to give yourself a blister on you thumb after 2 hours. And you only have one other opponent. Multiply that sort of input to the processor out and you will see just why you can't have a 'skill' requirement client side.
What do you think it's going to take to crack Blizzard's deathlock on the Massive genre?
As per the subject line, World of Starcraft.
Well, not exactly that, but it would be good. The only thing I see breaking the MMO market now is something that gamers love (FPS), rolled in to the same detailed and compelling game we return to day after day (MMORPG). What I see is an FPS come RPG title based in a world that thrives on people banding together to achieve goals, but leaves the door open for PvP combat a-la the WoW style PvP servers.
The key factor would of course be the ability of the developer to work out some sort of faction / race / class based system with the familiar leveling / gearing requirment, and rolling in an FPS front end. Three way battles like those in Starcraft would be awesome, as the current Horde vs. Alliance system in WoW is getting a bit tired.
I still play WoW nearly 20 hours a week, down from over 40 to sometimes 60 a week last year, but would jump straight in to World of Starcraft if it were to miraculously appear in the above stated incarnation.
Oops, that's what you get for not previewing...
Car reference should be STi WRX and EVO... meh. Let's see who's trolling...
So maybe with the current state of the Apple nVidia driver the Apple configurator should have a bit more of a brain and reject configurations that have the lowest end GFX card and more than 2GB of RAM, or flag it to the customer as a poor choice. Fair one, but that wasn't what I was getting at.
If I had the cash to buy a Mac Pro, I'd pay a couple a hundred bucks extra for an x1900 gfx card if I was going to be gaming on it. It's an upgrade in price, sure, but not in the context you mention. It's an upgrade to a faster and more capable device, like buying a car with a higher capacity engine (as opposed to no engine at all since you like to make comparisons that are totally inapropriate). You are not comparing like for like. A T-shirt with one arm is like a HDD with half a platter as opposed to one in place of two. I.e. both are useless.
People who penny pinch on purchases generally get stung by it, and you're right, it shouldn't happen, but it does.
Pay the extra for the piece of mind, and you probably won't know that it was the right decision.
Penny pinch and have issues, you'll know about it, and you'll want to scream bloody murder. I hear slashdot is a good place to start screaming too.
Be real, not cynical. That is so typical of the this community.
PS, Mac Pro - "consumer electronics" ?! Oh please...