All thatI can remember about Steven Spielberg's past was that he was filming a movie in China, I forget the movie's name, and a helicopter stunt ended in horror when 4 or 5 of China's best actors in history got decapitated by the chopper's blades. Anyone here know the name of the movie and can post it for me? Thanks. Yahoo isn't being too cooperative in shedding more light on Spielburg's crooked past.
You've managed to totally confuse reality with fantasy. Set the wayback machine to 1983, Sherman.
In 1983, Twilight Zone: The Movie was released. It featured four "episode" pieces, each shot by a different director. One, "Kick the can", was shot by Steven Spielberg. Another, directed by John Landis and starring Vic Morrow, suffered a fatal helicopter accident that killed Morrow and two Chinese-American children also acting in that scene (Morrow and one of the children were decapitated by the helicopter, while the other child was crushed by the helicopter landing on top of her) (look here for a short article on the accident.
I wonder what kind of link goes from the small router on the plane to the internet? Satellite most likely, although there are some terrestrial aircomm systems throughout Europe that could provide slow but cheap access.
As I recall, last year, Boeing announced that they were testing some new technologies to allow plane-based network connections. As I recall the announcement, they were looking at using a phased array antenna to contact a satellite system. United and several other Star Alliance carriers were in the intial test group. I recall discussing this with some of the crew on a United bird coming back from Hawaii after we had an in-flight medical about 6 rows up from me - we were thinking in-flight telemedicine applications, along with some local-storage VOD stuff. We came up with some pretty spiffy ideas, based on a local VOD server and converting the LCD seatback screens into a web-based delivery system.
Re:Star Trek Generations.
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Space Diving
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· Score: 1
Is it just me, or was this ripped straight from the book Star Trek Generations? You know when Kirk goes through his whole adventuring phase and does the space diving?
Young punk.
I can think of at least one gaming/scifi cite from the late 70s, early 80s, when GDW's original Traveller game borrowed the concept as an emergency escape system, then modified it into a space-based equivalent of paratroops.
More like finding a house and going to take a look at it. I just want to find a little bit about it. How it was constructed. Are they using brick or stone, gravel driveway or paved, fence or no fence. Same analogy, are they using linux or bsd(or whatever), webserver or no webserver, ssh or not...
And while you're at it, rattling all the doors and windows to see if everything's locked. Oh yeah - and let's not forget to check those common hiding places for a spare key. You use a Schlage lock? Cool - I've got a Schlage master key.
You may think that this is stupid, but as I said in the post above, I'm just interested in what theyre running. I said in my post above that I sometimes scan on my university network. Here's two examples where port scanning has either benefited me or someone else.
No, it isn't stupid. It's blind. You are (deliberately?) ignoring the malicious uses of portscanning, which far outweigh the useful ones simply in magnitude of effect.
Example: In the past 11 days, I've had 30 unique machines scan my laptop (at home). Of that count, 1 was a telnet connect attempt, 5 were TCP port probes, 3 were OS fingerprints, 2 were attempts to connect to the SubSeven trojan horse, one was an attempt by a known remailer to connect to a mailserver I run on another box so he can use me as a relay point, 6 were RPC connect attempts, 1 proxy port probe, 2 PCAnywhere connect attempts, 8 people tried to connect to a non-existent FTP server, and 3 people tried to connect to a non-existent DNS server. Mostly harmless, but some real jerks in there. And that's in an 11 day window.
As you might guess, I don't like deliberate portscanners. My network is MY NETWORK. It's here for my convenience, not yours, and I don't particularly appreciate you poking around on my boxes.
Besides the already-mentioned falatious assumption that the new plant will pollute more than the existing plant, there's also the falatious statement that the stacks from the new plant will disrupt the scenic coast, which hurts tourism.
This completely blows off the by-no-means-minor point that the _new_ stacks will be shorter and have less impact than the _existing_ stacks, which already have had as much impact as they're going to. IOW, the new plant + shorter stacks will have _less_ impact on tourism than the existing plant already does.
So, you need to factor in the following to your equation:
$increased tourist utility from new design + $lower pollution impact + $lower health impact
Or would the good people of Morro Bay like to poney up 2-3x, and get a nice, clean, fuel cell power plant instead with no stacks? No? they're not willing to pay for a clean solution, prefering to export the power-generation issue somewhere else? Please note that one stated preference was to have the town buy the plant, run it for ~20 years to pay for the purchase, then shut it down and bulldoze the site. Exporting the pollution problem to some other locale.
Most of the comments posted so far has been pretty far off base. There are actually several reasons stated for the stage 3 alert called yesterday:
A large number of generators have been running flat out since this summer, and need maintenance. Most of the generators in CA have pretty much been running non-stop since early this summer, and need necessary maintenance work. The result is that ~11,000 MW of capacity was offline yesterday. Given that the (potential) shortfall was ~500 MW, that's a big hit.
Prices in CA aren't competitive, driving a lot of power out of state. Most CA power distributors (remember, generators and distributors are generally separated now) buy their power under short-term agreements (nobody had the foresight to sign long-term deals, locking in prices). The CA rate top-end is around $250/MW, which is significantly below the rates available out of state. The result? A lot of power gets exported at the same time there's a shortage in CA.
Older generators and rampant NIMBYism. Most generators in CA are older plants (20+ years). There's been a widespread attack of NIMBYism since then, preventing construction of new plants. San Jose, for example, just gave the finger to a new ~650MW plant next to the new Cisco campus. Similarly, there's a town on the central coast whose name completely escapes me who is vigorously fighting a plan by the local PP owner to remove the existing (BIG) plant, and replace it with a smaller,lower-profile plant. The locals have decided they want it replaced with a bare lot. Another 500MW of capacity lost.
Server farms are bigger power consumers. A given office space converted to server farm space will consume ~4x as much power.
Now, if you think this is bad, wait until next week. There's a cold front due in.
OBTW-- For those who think the Christmas lights are the big villain - think again. The alert was called at 5:15PM, before the lights went on.
Speaking as a consultant who winds up going into companies that have done just that, the biggest problem I've seen with an outlook/exchange setup is that it's a great way to introduce big, honking security and virus holes into your already-safe, -stable, and -defended system. Usually the conversation goes something like this:
Day one:
[it guy] So, you have current antiviral software, and you understand our connection policies, right?
[me] Yep. Any of this you want to see for yourself, or is my word good?
[it guy] Nah, you're ok.
Day 20:
[me] So, how bad did you guys get hit by that new virus?
[it guy] Not too bad - only about {# corresponding to 8% of the company}.
[me] Ok. You do realize that you're the biggest point of vulnerability on my network, too. We use straight up SMTP/POP/IMAP, both for portability and 'cause it's safer.
[it guy] Yeah, I wish we could too. Then I could let folks use pretty much whatever mailreader they were comfortable with. But {corporate, marketing} won't let us - they think it's much cooler to stay with Microsoft's "integrated" stuff. Mostly it's just a pain to deal with on a continuing basis.
Every client in the last year, it's been pretty much the same story.
I believe this movement (towards tele-operated aircraft) is to reduce casualties of highly trained persons (doesn't it cost several million dollars to train a fighter pilot?), and to reduce the hassle of having to retrieve downed pilots behind enemy lines.
There's another couple of points here, too:
A teleoperated plan can be flown essentially around the clock, running continuous missions as fast as it can be serviced, and as long as there's someone sufficiently networked into the ground control station to run the system. Pilots wear out, and pretty much drop after enough hours of combat flight time.
One point I noticed in there was that these things are designed to be packed into a container with remote testing leads for up to 10 years. Which means you can stick a squadron or two of them (and supporting munitions) in a prepo site, and set them up on whatever convenient airstrip you have at hand. Fly in the control crews to the mate-up with the rest of the MEB/whatever, and you've got operative strike capability. Somewhat easier than self-deploying a fighter squadron plus it's associated logistics.
That was the basis of it, but the situtation was more complex. The Russians were willing to move troops into Japan, and this scared the Americans. The alternitive to a landing was several more months of intense bombings that would have killed far more people, and left Japan far worse off.
There were, in fact, a number of other issues involved. One of the primary ones was that for the first time, the US Army (and Marines, but they would have primarily been leading-edge landing troops, not "drive down the rest of the island and clear to the far shore" follow-ons) would have been facing a full Imperial Field Army. Until that point, US troops had never faced more than ~ 1-1 1/2 IJA corps in combat, or approximately 120,000 men. The Field Army deployed in Japan numbered something over 1 million men. Worth noting is that there was a second such army in China, which we didn't even want to touch.
Second, there was a great concern that, in the way we were attacking Japan, we were "building up their immunity", and making it more difficult for the Japanese government to end the war and surrender. One of the prevaling thoughts at the time (amongst the military, at least) was that the shock of something like this might jump past that "surrender immunity", and get to the desired result without flattening the entire society.
Finally, there was a significant speed issue. We wanted to avoid a divided Japan, as we had with Germany.
Before you rail about how unfair the WIPO process is, you might want to take notice of the SMALL fact that the guy who originally registered those domain names never bothered to talk to WIPO or the administrative panel, even to the extent of just sending an email saying "hey, these are parody sites". In the absence of any other information, the only interpretation available to the panel is that submitted by Guinness.
In short, the guy basically handed the sites to Guinness by not bothering to defend himself. It's called a default judgement.
The only reason to hack something is the find its vulnerabilities. The people who create software have every right to protect their IP by lobbying for laws that keep others from trying to figure out how the software works. It's just like ASCAP protecting artists by making sure any sheet music or tablature is authorized by the copyright holder
Y'know, by that same logic, nobody (except Ford) would have had any right to track the mildly interesting fact that Ford Pinto's have a tendancy to explode when you rear-end them.
I really hope you, and others, realize that this kind of legislation moves bugs and exploits from "annoying problems that are fixed through software patches" into the realm of "annoying problems that are fixed through consumer liability suits". I, for one, don't like the idea of having to carry a couple hundred million $ worth of liability insurance because I've released something.
Or, to put this in a slightly different form, "It's always in the last place you look."
Statistically, the argument is crap. As other posters have pointed out, even working with the "40% of the entire human populace ever is alive right now" argument, you still don't know if you're dealing with a total population of 20 billion, 20 trillion, or what. I'd have to work the math, but the "fifty fifty" argument only works if those are the only two possible outcomes. In reality, there's a [undefined large] number of possible outcomes. By that argument, there are only a statistically small set of cases where our current populace is likely to be the ending populace, or largely coherent with the ending populace.
That being said, putting all our eggs in one basket is silly. Wagons ho! Time to get offplanet in a permanent way.
Ok, to start with, the US Navy had nothing to do with the capture of the Enigma machine, sadly it seems you have subscribed to history dictated by Hollywood. The U571 movie was nothing but fiction; the Enigma machine was actually captured by the Royal Navy in 1941 before the US was in the war. So America never actually had their hands on this particular machine, I think there is a edition of the rare version of this Enigma in the NSA museum though.
You should probably go re-read your naval history. The naval enigma machine that the story in U-571 is based on was, in fact, captured by the RN in 1941. That much is correct. However, in 1944, the USS Guadalcanal battle group captured the U-505, including its code books and naval enigma. The U-505 is currently on display in front of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Not sure where the U-505's engima wound up, but if I had to guess, it's probably at the NSA museum.
Just to point something out, part of the reason people like flat rates (and why Metcalf is wrong, btw), is that (esp. for higher-bandwidth users) people prefer to buy "in bulk" rather than on an "as used" basis. For example - do you buy a roll of toilet paper every time you run out? No - you buy a package, or go to Costco/etc. and buy a large package that will last you for a long time.
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
Well, to take the metering argument a step further, why did you buy a car? You should take a taxi, or a limo, and only pay for those transportation resources you use.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
Not really. If I send a lot of mail, I can use bulk mail rates, which are significantly cheaper than one-stamp-per-letter. If I use a lot of long distance (say I'm a company), then I can get a better deal from the phone company by agreeing to a floor for my usage block. Gas, electricity - same deal. Think a company like Cisco buys electricity the same way you do? Wrong.
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources.
And you have failed to look at market behavior. Except in very strange circumstances, volume purchases have a tendancy to drive down per-unit pricing. Even in metered-service environments.
Here's another way to look at "limited flat rate" systems. If I get flat rate 56K dialup with a "no more than 16 hours out of 24" scheme, I'm effectively bulk-buying 16 hours/day of dialup. If you charge $2/hour for strictly metered dialup, and I pay $30/month for my "unlimited" dailup, I'm paying $0.0625/hour for my time, with a guaranteed min/max buy of 480 hours/month. Same kind of math works out for ISDN/DSL/Cable Modem/etc. If it made economic sense to offer strictly metered systems for "bulk" environments, some ISP probably would. How many do? Not many. By my guaranteeing to purchase X amount of resource, I'm also guaranteeing X amount of cashflow to the service provider, which means he can count on X amount of usage from me, and plan (and build) accordingly. With a strictly metered plan, he doesn't know what I'm going to do, and can't build accordingly.
One other observation. Most advocates of strictly-metered access seem (to me) to either (a) not pay for their access (someone else provides it for them), or (b) use only very limited amounts of access - in which case they're on the "I'm being cheated by subsidizing someone else" part of the spectrum. Advocates of strictly flat-rate are in that part of the spectrum where they're (by the original argument) using enough resources that they're being subsidized by someone else. Either that, or they're using enough resources that it makes economic sense to bulk-purchase, and get into economies of scale. If you're not using many resources, though, economies of scale aren't available, are they?
I'm going to skip the stuff, and go straight to the high end.
My own personal VoIP PBX for the house. Probably one of the 3Com NBX-100 rigs. With some adapter units. I wanna throw one in my laptop bag, and have a local (SF Bay Area) extension next time I have to go to Russia, or Brazil, or wherever. Beats hell out of a cell phone.
A used C-141, and about $30m to refit it. New wing skins, new avionics, fix up all the tired wing spars/etc., and put a good set of commercial turbofans on it. One of those new Boeing phased array aircraft links. Turn the front half into an executive jet, and I've still got a drive-in 2 car garage in back. Take that, Larry!
A working Moller M-400.
A Roton, or...
The entire Russian Typhoon fleet (suitably disarmed) fitted with turbogenerators, 4 of those nifty gigawatt-grade lasers they're building over at LLNL for the NIF, $20 million in VC funding, and those two guys down at Edwards who are playing with laser-lift technology. $100/lb to orbit, here we come.
The $200K I need to quake-proof my house, and a pair of 2kw fuel cells, so I can give PG&E the big finger (works great when the San Andreas lets go, too - the only residential 'net connection that's still up for about 50 miles).
Well, I can't speak to AZ, but I can give you my experiences from the Bay Area. We were early adapters (2 years now and counting), and at this point, I'm a lot more willing to give Covad credit than I will Northpoint. We run one of each. The Northpoint line has averaged about a day of downtime (that I'm aware of - haven't seen the little blips) over those 2 years - 3/4 of that coming in two outages, both their fault (one was 10 days before they could bother to get to the CO). Covad's record is much better,IMHO, with an average of about 45 minutes/month of downtime.
The big measure for me, though, is service/support during outages. There, Covad wins hands down. Northpoint has been unable to find their ass with both hands, a flashlight, a map, and a guide. Telling me they needed to call PacBell to arrange a physical line test the day after the PacBell tech had just done that (and their escalation people had made the request to PacBell, too) was the real clincher - I had to read their test results back to their tech over the phone.
In contrast, the one time I had to escalate with Covad, they were prompt, courteous, and got the problem solved very quickly thereafter. Oh yeah - and they were clueful, the entire time.
I can't give you direct experience with PacBell's DSL service, but my understanding is that it's underprovisioned, poorly maintained, and just not worth the hassle. Install times are much slower than for CLECs, and they're a wholly hellish group to deal with. Take a look at the continuing horror stories in ba.internet as an example - that's been pretty much the tone on PB-DSL for the last 2 years. If you're on SBC, you can expect exactly the same - PB is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SBC, and they operate from the same page.
No, the Afghanis got a lot of their helo kills at low altitude. Look at loss rates before and after the hard deck went into effect. After the Sov's put a hard deck on their operations, perforce a lot of the kills moved above that hard deck.
One question on your model jet airplane. Just how much payload were you planning to put into it?
If it cruised along at say 50 feet above the ground at 150 miles an hour, there is no way it could be tracked and intercepted automatically, much less by a hand-held missile.
You might want to discuss that with a few of the helo pilots the Soviets lost in Afghanistan. The Afghanis got most of the their helo kills at altitudes under 1000 feet, usually in low-altitude attack paths.
That, btw, is the reason the Sov's wound up putting a "4000 ft AGL" hard floor on attack helos - they just lost too many down low.
Oh yeah - and remember, the technology has just gotten better since then.
Wouldn't it be fun for a trouble maker (or another country) to broadcast phony positions? Geeze, there weren't 500 planes in my airspace a minute ago. Maybe they'll have to sign the data (shouldn't be too hard to keep everyone's public key:).
At least I'm not the only person to see this kind of problem. Why DoS Yahoo, when with this kind of technology, a laptop, and a decent radio transmitter, you can DoS attack LAX, O'Hare, JFK, or Dulles. Think air traffic delays are bad now? One hit against something like this, and (courtesy of the delay effects that spill from hub to hub acros the country) you could effectively choke air traffic to ~20% of current capacity.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a REALLY STUPID IDEA?
that INS needs to sponsor some H1Bs for foreign, skilled paperwork-pushers.:)
My wife used to work for the INS until about a year ago. They literally push more paper around than you might realize - even for a government bureaucracy. About 4 years ago, shortly after we met, I pushed the idea of shifting to a paperless office metaphor to them - their management looked at me like I'd just flown in from Mars. As another example, the IRS debuted these cool, touchscreen kiosks a few years ago to answer simple/standard questions, and dispense forms. INS? "Oh, no, what we do is far too complicated for that."
Fire, hell. Someone needs to set a small bomb off in there. Technologically, they're in the 1970s.
This is the coolest thing I've heard about this month! I just called the 800 number on that page, and the guy I talked to said that the target price is $7-10K.
You missed part of their speil. The "$7-10K" price is the _introductory_ price. Once they get a decent demand volume built up, they plan to drop the price by about 50%.
This would also be a *big* win, anywhere that storms have a nasty habit of knocking down power lines.
Or, with suitable shock-mounting, anywhere there's an earthquake fault. Makes a nice way to not have to worry about PG&E getting the power lines up - I'm my own generation facility. Given that we're remodelling my partner's office (where the servers live) this winter, we may have to drop one of these in. And I'm _definitely_ including one when we do my house.
Just looked around on Yahoo, and you should be able to use Asiana, who claims that they can ticket you from Boston to Khabarovsk (probably connecting flights, but...). Call 'em and check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
You've managed to totally confuse reality with fantasy. Set the wayback machine to 1983, Sherman.
In 1983, Twilight Zone: The Movie was released. It featured four "episode" pieces, each shot by a different director. One, "Kick the can", was shot by Steven Spielberg. Another, directed by John Landis and starring Vic Morrow, suffered a fatal helicopter accident that killed Morrow and two Chinese-American children also acting in that scene (Morrow and one of the children were decapitated by the helicopter, while the other child was crushed by the helicopter landing on top of her) (look here for a short article on the accident.
As I recall, last year, Boeing announced that they were testing some new technologies to allow plane-based network connections. As I recall the announcement, they were looking at using a phased array antenna to contact a satellite system. United and several other Star Alliance carriers were in the intial test group. I recall discussing this with some of the crew on a United bird coming back from Hawaii after we had an in-flight medical about 6 rows up from me - we were thinking in-flight telemedicine applications, along with some local-storage VOD stuff. We came up with some pretty spiffy ideas, based on a local VOD server and converting the LCD seatback screens into a web-based delivery system.
Young punk.
I can think of at least one gaming/scifi cite from the late 70s, early 80s, when GDW's original Traveller game borrowed the concept as an emergency escape system, then modified it into a space-based equivalent of paratroops.
Math isn't your strong suite, is it?
150,000mph / 60 = 2500 mp minute
2500 mpm / 60 = 41.66 mps
BTW - that 150,000 mph figure - is that supposed to be peak velocity, or something else?
And while you're at it, rattling all the doors and windows to see if everything's locked. Oh yeah - and let's not forget to check those common hiding places for a spare key. You use a Schlage lock? Cool - I've got a Schlage master key.
You may think that this is stupid, but as I said in the post above, I'm just interested in what theyre running. I said in my post above that I sometimes scan on my university network. Here's two examples where port scanning has either benefited me or someone else.
No, it isn't stupid. It's blind. You are (deliberately?) ignoring the malicious uses of portscanning, which far outweigh the useful ones simply in magnitude of effect.
Example: In the past 11 days, I've had 30 unique machines scan my laptop (at home). Of that count, 1 was a telnet connect attempt, 5 were TCP port probes, 3 were OS fingerprints, 2 were attempts to connect to the SubSeven trojan horse, one was an attempt by a known remailer to connect to a mailserver I run on another box so he can use me as a relay point, 6 were RPC connect attempts, 1 proxy port probe, 2 PCAnywhere connect attempts, 8 people tried to connect to a non-existent FTP server, and 3 people tried to connect to a non-existent DNS server. Mostly harmless, but some real jerks in there. And that's in an 11 day window.
As you might guess, I don't like deliberate portscanners. My network is MY NETWORK. It's here for my convenience, not yours, and I don't particularly appreciate you poking around on my boxes.
This completely blows off the by-no-means-minor point that the _new_ stacks will be shorter and have less impact than the _existing_ stacks, which already have had as much impact as they're going to. IOW, the new plant + shorter stacks will have _less_ impact on tourism than the existing plant already does.
So, you need to factor in the following to your equation:
$increased tourist utility from new design + $lower pollution impact + $lower health impact
Or would the good people of Morro Bay like to poney up 2-3x, and get a nice, clean, fuel cell power plant instead with no stacks? No? they're not willing to pay for a clean solution, prefering to export the power-generation issue somewhere else? Please note that one stated preference was to have the town buy the plant, run it for ~20 years to pay for the purchase, then shut it down and bulldoze the site. Exporting the pollution problem to some other locale.
Yeah, NIMBY.
- A large number of generators have been running flat out since this summer, and need maintenance. Most of the generators in CA have pretty much been running non-stop since early this summer, and need necessary maintenance work. The result is that ~11,000 MW of capacity was offline yesterday. Given that the (potential) shortfall was ~500 MW, that's a big hit.
- Prices in CA aren't competitive, driving a lot of power out of state. Most CA power distributors (remember, generators and distributors are generally separated now) buy their power under short-term agreements (nobody had the foresight to sign long-term deals, locking in prices). The CA rate top-end is around $250/MW, which is significantly below the rates available out of state. The result? A lot of power gets exported at the same time there's a shortage in CA.
- Older generators and rampant NIMBYism. Most generators in CA are older plants (20+ years). There's been a widespread attack of NIMBYism since then, preventing construction of new plants. San Jose, for example, just gave the finger to a new ~650MW plant next to the new Cisco campus. Similarly, there's a town on the central coast whose name completely escapes me who is vigorously fighting a plan by the local PP owner to remove the existing (BIG) plant, and replace it with a smaller,lower-profile plant. The locals have decided they want it replaced with a bare lot. Another 500MW of capacity lost.
- Server farms are bigger power consumers. A given office space converted to server farm space will consume ~4x as much power.
Now, if you think this is bad, wait until next week. There's a cold front due in.OBTW-- For those who think the Christmas lights are the big villain - think again. The alert was called at 5:15PM, before the lights went on.
Day one:
[it guy] So, you have current antiviral software, and you understand our connection policies, right?
[me] Yep. Any of this you want to see for yourself, or is my word good?
[it guy] Nah, you're ok.
Day 20:
[me] So, how bad did you guys get hit by that new virus?
[it guy] Not too bad - only about {# corresponding to 8% of the company}.
[me] Ok. You do realize that you're the biggest point of vulnerability on my network, too. We use straight up SMTP/POP/IMAP, both for portability and 'cause it's safer.
[it guy] Yeah, I wish we could too. Then I could let folks use pretty much whatever mailreader they were comfortable with. But {corporate, marketing} won't let us - they think it's much cooler to stay with Microsoft's "integrated" stuff. Mostly it's just a pain to deal with on a continuing basis.
Every client in the last year, it's been pretty much the same story.
There's another couple of points here, too:
There were, in fact, a number of other issues involved. One of the primary ones was that for the first time, the US Army (and Marines, but they would have primarily been leading-edge landing troops, not "drive down the rest of the island and clear to the far shore" follow-ons) would have been facing a full Imperial Field Army. Until that point, US troops had never faced more than ~ 1-1 1/2 IJA corps in combat, or approximately 120,000 men. The Field Army deployed in Japan numbered something over 1 million men. Worth noting is that there was a second such army in China, which we didn't even want to touch.
Second, there was a great concern that, in the way we were attacking Japan, we were "building up their immunity", and making it more difficult for the Japanese government to end the war and surrender. One of the prevaling thoughts at the time (amongst the military, at least) was that the shock of something like this might jump past that "surrender immunity", and get to the desired result without flattening the entire society.
Finally, there was a significant speed issue. We wanted to avoid a divided Japan, as we had with Germany.
In short, the guy basically handed the sites to Guinness by not bothering to defend himself. It's called a default judgement.
Y'know, by that same logic, nobody (except Ford) would have had any right to track the mildly interesting fact that Ford Pinto's have a tendancy to explode when you rear-end them.
I really hope you, and others, realize that this kind of legislation moves bugs and exploits from "annoying problems that are fixed through software patches" into the realm of "annoying problems that are fixed through consumer liability suits". I, for one, don't like the idea of having to carry a couple hundred million $ worth of liability insurance because I've released something.
Ooooh.
Aahhh.
Must be a really slow news day for something like this to make it. C'mon, guys. If you don't have good post material, leave it at that.
Statistically, the argument is crap. As other posters have pointed out, even working with the "40% of the entire human populace ever is alive right now" argument, you still don't know if you're dealing with a total population of 20 billion, 20 trillion, or what. I'd have to work the math, but the "fifty fifty" argument only works if those are the only two possible outcomes. In reality, there's a [undefined large] number of possible outcomes. By that argument, there are only a statistically small set of cases where our current populace is likely to be the ending populace, or largely coherent with the ending populace.
That being said, putting all our eggs in one basket is silly. Wagons ho! Time to get offplanet in a permanent way.
You should probably go re-read your naval history. The naval enigma machine that the story in U-571 is based on was, in fact, captured by the RN in 1941. That much is correct. However, in 1944, the USS Guadalcanal battle group captured the U-505, including its code books and naval enigma. The U-505 is currently on display in front of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Not sure where the U-505's engima wound up, but if I had to guess, it's probably at the NSA museum.
"Users love low flat rates". Gee, what a shock. People like free almost anything but herpes. Of course they want it for free. I'd like my car to cost $50, too. So what?
Well, to take the metering argument a step further, why did you buy a car? You should take a taxi, or a limo, and only pay for those transportation resources you use.
"...metering would fly in the face of hundreds of years of history..." like metered mail (or stamps), pay by minute for long-distance telephone calls, and that is in the communications arena alone. We still have metered gas, electricity, and so on. Sounds like history is on the metering.
Not really. If I send a lot of mail, I can use bulk mail rates, which are significantly cheaper than one-stamp-per-letter. If I use a lot of long distance (say I'm a company), then I can get a better deal from the phone company by agreeing to a floor for my usage block. Gas, electricity - same deal. Think a company like Cisco buys electricity the same way you do? Wrong.
Aside from the huge problems above, this guy fails to look at what drives economies: limited resources.
And you have failed to look at market behavior. Except in very strange circumstances, volume purchases have a tendancy to drive down per-unit pricing. Even in metered-service environments.
Here's another way to look at "limited flat rate" systems. If I get flat rate 56K dialup with a "no more than 16 hours out of 24" scheme, I'm effectively bulk-buying 16 hours/day of dialup. If you charge $2/hour for strictly metered dialup, and I pay $30/month for my "unlimited" dailup, I'm paying $0.0625/hour for my time, with a guaranteed min/max buy of 480 hours/month. Same kind of math works out for ISDN/DSL/Cable Modem/etc. If it made economic sense to offer strictly metered systems for "bulk" environments, some ISP probably would. How many do? Not many. By my guaranteeing to purchase X amount of resource, I'm also guaranteeing X amount of cashflow to the service provider, which means he can count on X amount of usage from me, and plan (and build) accordingly. With a strictly metered plan, he doesn't know what I'm going to do, and can't build accordingly.
One other observation. Most advocates of strictly-metered access seem (to me) to either (a) not pay for their access (someone else provides it for them), or (b) use only very limited amounts of access - in which case they're on the "I'm being cheated by subsidizing someone else" part of the spectrum. Advocates of strictly flat-rate are in that part of the spectrum where they're (by the original argument) using enough resources that they're being subsidized by someone else. Either that, or they're using enough resources that it makes economic sense to bulk-purchase, and get into economies of scale. If you're not using many resources, though, economies of scale aren't available, are they?
That's easy. How about buying a house to put the BMW into before you're 30.
If you can't afford a house, buy a $50K car as a consolation present. Welcome to Silicon Valley.
The big measure for me, though, is service/support during outages. There, Covad wins hands down. Northpoint has been unable to find their ass with both hands, a flashlight, a map, and a guide. Telling me they needed to call PacBell to arrange a physical line test the day after the PacBell tech had just done that (and their escalation people had made the request to PacBell, too) was the real clincher - I had to read their test results back to their tech over the phone.
In contrast, the one time I had to escalate with Covad, they were prompt, courteous, and got the problem solved very quickly thereafter. Oh yeah - and they were clueful, the entire time.
I can't give you direct experience with PacBell's DSL service, but my understanding is that it's underprovisioned, poorly maintained, and just not worth the hassle. Install times are much slower than for CLECs, and they're a wholly hellish group to deal with. Take a look at the continuing horror stories in ba.internet as an example - that's been pretty much the tone on PB-DSL for the last 2 years. If you're on SBC, you can expect exactly the same - PB is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SBC, and they operate from the same page.
One question on your model jet airplane. Just how much payload were you planning to put into it?
You might want to discuss that with a few of the helo pilots the Soviets lost in Afghanistan. The Afghanis got most of the their helo kills at altitudes under 1000 feet, usually in low-altitude attack paths.
That, btw, is the reason the Sov's wound up putting a "4000 ft AGL" hard floor on attack helos - they just lost too many down low.
Oh yeah - and remember, the technology has just gotten better since then.
At least I'm not the only person to see this kind of problem. Why DoS Yahoo, when with this kind of technology, a laptop, and a decent radio transmitter, you can DoS attack LAX, O'Hare, JFK, or Dulles. Think air traffic delays are bad now? One hit against something like this, and (courtesy of the delay effects that spill from hub to hub acros the country) you could effectively choke air traffic to ~20% of current capacity.
Is it just me, or does this sound like a REALLY STUPID IDEA?
Fire, hell. Someone needs to set a small bomb off in there. Technologically, they're in the 1970s.
You missed part of their speil. The "$7-10K" price is the _introductory_ price. Once they get a decent demand volume built up, they plan to drop the price by about 50%.
This would also be a *big* win, anywhere that storms have a nasty habit of knocking down power lines. Or, with suitable shock-mounting, anywhere there's an earthquake fault. Makes a nice way to not have to worry about PG&E getting the power lines up - I'm my own generation facility. Given that we're remodelling my partner's office (where the servers live) this winter, we may have to drop one of these in. And I'm _definitely_ including one when we do my house.
Just looked around on Yahoo, and you should be able to use Asiana, who claims that they can ticket you from Boston to Khabarovsk (probably connecting flights, but...). Call 'em and check it out.