Paying for it yourself. Instead of having insurance companies dictate to the doctor that they will see their patients for $25, so that the doctors turn around and charge uninsured patients $85 to make up the difference.
Is insurance a "protection racket"? Pay us or go broke because of your scary high medical bills that are scary high because we make them that way! It certainly is no gun-to-the-head, but they're causing damage to you if you turn them down.
Since this seems to be the thread that's NOT about "buy a console", "play console roms", or "hide the sausage" I'll add my recommendations here:
Competitive PC games: 1) Fighters: Get MUGEN (and its infinite supply of custom characters/stages/mods/etc) There are Linux and Windows ports and clones of various levels of actually working-ness. I think the WinMUGEN port is probably the best supported. In modern times, pretty much the only PC fighters are Japanese, some of them have translations out there but might be tough to get legally (play-asia, paletweb, a few other sites exist for imports). 2) Sports: Looks like people still make multiplayer football/soccer/etc games for the PC. These are all going to be Windows games (might work in Wine) 3) Puzzle Games: Frozen Bubble and a billion others out there have competitive modes.
Co-operative PC games (because rubbing it in when you win is likely to mean you'll be rubbing one out on your own tonight): 1) Puzzle games: even if you can't find a co-operative tetris clone, there's always Shoulder Surfer Solitaire... if you can stand it;) 2) Shoot-em-ups: almost all work with gamepads. A lot of them DO have two player co-op modes, but most of the freely available ones are single player. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/gr_e.html has a two-player gamepad mode. I've successfully built this guy's C games on Linux with a few Makefile tweaks, haven't tried porting the games he wrote in D.
Trust me, that was the first thing they thought of, then the CEO came in and said "Why are you ordering more equipment when we have half of our machines sitting there and doing nothing? We could be doing twice the work/traffic/whatever without paying more money!"
Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
a single semiconductor chip providing for a video input connection from a camera and a video output connection to a monitor of decompressed data, and a transmit channel and a receive channel of compressed data;
an interface connected to the chip for external connection to a separate frame memory dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and that provides for interim storage of incoming and outgoing video data; and
a video compressor/decompressor disposed fully within the chip and connected to compress video information received from said video input connection for output on said transmit channel, and connected to decompress video information received from said receive channel for output on said video output connection;
wherein, said compression of video information is by spatial de-correlation of intraframe information and temporal decorrelation of interframe information, and said transmit and receive channels have communication channel bit rates reduced by quantization and variable length coding
So. Based on that, how does one compress video using a single chip (the patent has absolutely NOTHING about its implementation)? Being able to show that might make it actually look like the company actually invented something, instead, rendered to its most basic element, the patent says "anything that does stuff using only one chip plus DRAM" which is something an 8 year old could come up with, without even knowing what DRAM means.
The patent office has long since slid past allowing "crap" to churning out patents of "pure unadulterated bullshit".
Agreed. Not only that, but they need to stop hiding behind the word "disruptive", since the only thing that someone can determine in advance that would be "disruptive" to the network is a DoS attack. Everything else they call "disruptive" is just making things up as they go.
We haven't blocked any specific p2p applications. BitTorrent packets may have been indefinitely delayed, however
Well, they cut off torrents, but that could have been from any number of applications: utorrent, azureus, World of Warcraft, etc. So clearly, they're not lying at all.
Why would I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring people and setting up the facilities to create a product that is probably not going to make me enough money to cover said expenses?
What the hell does that have to do with whether you have open source drivers or not?
There is nothing stopping those ISPs from installing their own routing centres, even within Bell's infrastructure whereby the only must lease the lines, not the other stuff
There's nothing stopping me from forging my own parts from scratch and assembling a pickup truck myself, but that would not excuse Ford from delivering a Pinto when I ordered a F-150.
I'm not sure how this happens either. We recently let a certificate lapse on a domain we stopped using and gave up on. For the 6 months before it expired I got emails from the certifying company up to one every 2 weeks or so at the end. Actually, it's pretty easy. See, Jim punched in his email address back when we first got the certificate, so we'd been getting the notices at jim@example.com. Things were fine for a while, but then Jim moved on to another company. Fortunately, we had another Jim, so we just gave the email account to him when the first Jim left, and things were fine.
Last month Jim turned in his two weeks' notice.
By the way, we've got an entry level opening some of you might be interested in, just need a PhD, 10 years experience in C#, salary starts at $45k. Oh, and you have to be named Jim. Just send your resumes to jack@example.com...
the system needed in a car could be significantly smaller
It could be, but you have to remember that there is next to zero insulation in your car. The metal and glass frame is sucking in heat from the outside quite fast, if a unit is too weak, it'd never keep up.
"One ton" of air conditioning power is 12,000 BTU/hr, which wiki (sorry, too lazy to do the math myself) claims is 3517 watts (not counting the inefficiency in converting electrical watts to actual heat transfer, meaning actual power required to get one ton of AC is higher). Central AC seems to average about 3 tons, based on the prevalence of that number in example calculations like this one.
Based on these numbers, your window unit is significantly weaker than a car AC system.
It seems to me that actually what we're talking about here is that content providers with deeper pockets will serve content faster to Virgin subscribers.
How deep do the pockets go? If they accept it for Virgin, how long before Comcast wants to stick its hand in their pockets? AT&T? Qwest? BT? AOL? The other 500000 ISPs? They might come out ahead for a little while, but at some point, they'll be missing the way things used to be.
Some of you people need to get over yourselves. You're not important enough for the government to care about. As the marginal cost of watching any individual person approaches zero, so does the amount of "importance" required to justify the ever-decreasing expense.
I perceive that there will soon be a huge market for IR-shielding devices for your home. Why would I want one of those? After all, if I shielded my roof, how would the feds see the giant middle finger-shaped resistor I put in the attic?
Only when twisted inappropriately. While the grandparent is wrong about "inalienable rights" in the Constitution, the great-grandparent poster is wrong about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights giving "specific rights to citizens of the US", they do no such thing: the first lays out the powers of the federal government, and restrictions on those powers, the second lays out further restrictions on those powers. The rights exist separately from the Constitution and its amendments.
I thought the net neutrality was about content providers being shoved in the slow lane unless they pay up too. So if fancy media site X doesn't pay your ISP, there movies get put in the same bit bucket with the bit-torrent downloads.
That's exactly what this CEO is talking about: "deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers". I wonder how long before "paying for priority data to your customers" becomes "paying for any data to your customers", especially if enough companies decide not to play the game. Alternatively, how long before enough youtubes and itunes type places sign up that the "priority channel" gets soaked (as if they're going to spend a dollar/euro/pound of this on upgrading) and nothing gets through?
one drives at proper speed one does not have that problem.
Does not have what problem? Mayors and/or cops setting yellow lights to turn red before it is physically possible to come to a complete stop from the posted speed limit? One cannot repeal the laws of physics, so it is clear whose regulations are in the wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
And what would you replace it with?
Paying for it yourself. Instead of having insurance companies dictate to the doctor that they will see their patients for $25, so that the doctors turn around and charge uninsured patients $85 to make up the difference.
Is insurance a "protection racket"? Pay us or go broke because of your scary high medical bills that are scary high because we make them that way! It certainly is no gun-to-the-head, but they're causing damage to you if you turn them down.
Since this seems to be the thread that's NOT about "buy a console", "play console roms", or "hide the sausage" I'll add my recommendations here:
;)
Competitive PC games:
1) Fighters: Get MUGEN (and its infinite supply of custom characters/stages/mods/etc) There are Linux and Windows ports and clones of various levels of actually working-ness. I think the WinMUGEN port is probably the best supported. In modern times, pretty much the only PC fighters are Japanese, some of them have translations out there but might be tough to get legally (play-asia, paletweb, a few other sites exist for imports).
2) Sports: Looks like people still make multiplayer football/soccer/etc games for the PC. These are all going to be Windows games (might work in Wine)
3) Puzzle Games: Frozen Bubble and a billion others out there have competitive modes.
Co-operative PC games (because rubbing it in when you win is likely to mean you'll be rubbing one out on your own tonight):
1) Puzzle games: even if you can't find a co-operative tetris clone, there's always Shoulder Surfer Solitaire... if you can stand it
2) Shoot-em-ups: almost all work with gamepads. A lot of them DO have two player co-op modes, but most of the freely available ones are single player. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/gr_e.html has a two-player gamepad mode. I've successfully built this guy's C games on Linux with a few Makefile tweaks, haven't tried porting the games he wrote in D.
Trust me, that was the first thing they thought of, then the CEO came in and said "Why are you ordering more equipment when we have half of our machines sitting there and doing nothing? We could be doing twice the work/traffic/whatever without paying more money!"
Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
The laws of demand in a open marketplace say that $3 gas is not possible
I'm paying $3/gallon so you're going to need to explain what the hell you're on about.
Also, Diesel here has been more expensive than gasoline for years now.
How much of that $3.50 is tax?
You don't have a 4th Amendment right to cross the US border
Fourth amendment has nothing to do with my right to be in the United States, having demonstrated my citizenship.
These days with the patent office handing out patents like candy, you don't even have to do that. For instance, in the firehose there's been this story for a while http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=631632 "Flip Video Camera Maker Sued For Patent Infringeme" Regarding this patent: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5781788.PN.&OS=PN/5781788&RS=PN/5781788
So without further ado, Claim #1 of the patent:So. Based on that, how does one compress video using a single chip (the patent has absolutely NOTHING about its implementation)? Being able to show that might make it actually look like the company actually invented something, instead, rendered to its most basic element, the patent says "anything that does stuff using only one chip plus DRAM" which is something an 8 year old could come up with, without even knowing what DRAM means.
The patent office has long since slid past allowing "crap" to churning out patents of "pure unadulterated bullshit".
Thanks for the correction
Agreed. Not only that, but they need to stop hiding behind the word "disruptive", since the only thing that someone can determine in advance that would be "disruptive" to the network is a DoS attack. Everything else they call "disruptive" is just making things up as they go.
We haven't blocked any specific p2p applications. BitTorrent packets may have been indefinitely delayed, however
Well, they cut off torrents, but that could have been from any number of applications: utorrent, azureus, World of Warcraft, etc. So clearly, they're not lying at all.
Why would I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring people and setting up the facilities to create a product that is probably not going to make me enough money to cover said expenses?
What the hell does that have to do with whether you have open source drivers or not?
So you like being ripped off by Rogers. Not surprising.
At least they're not lying to their subscribers, unlike Bell. He's making an informed decision, instead of being defrauded like everyone else.
There is nothing stopping those ISPs from installing their own routing centres, even within Bell's infrastructure whereby the only must lease the lines, not the other stuff
There's nothing stopping me from forging my own parts from scratch and assembling a pickup truck myself, but that would not excuse Ford from delivering a Pinto when I ordered a F-150.
the government can spy on me all they want
Ah thanks, I was tired of paying my taxes. You want the government to waste taxpayer money? You can pay my share too.
Last month Jim turned in his two weeks' notice.
By the way, we've got an entry level opening some of you might be interested in, just need a PhD, 10 years experience in C#, salary starts at $45k. Oh, and you have to be named Jim. Just send your resumes to jack@example.com...
the system needed in a car could be significantly smaller
It could be, but you have to remember that there is next to zero insulation in your car. The metal and glass frame is sucking in heat from the outside quite fast, if a unit is too weak, it'd never keep up.
Google isn't helping a lot here (I've been looking for 15 minutes or so) but I found this posting (ignore the guy who wants "colder freon") from 1995 stating that car ACs are 3 to 4 tons http://www.yarchive.net/ac/humidity_removal.html which is in line with what my father told me when I was a little kid. Ebay says "The average factory installed auto A/C unit is rated at 1-3/4 ton." http://reviews.ebay.com/Frequently-Asked-Auto-A-C-Questions-Part-2_W0QQugidZ10000000000932442
"One ton" of air conditioning power is 12,000 BTU/hr, which wiki (sorry, too lazy to do the math myself) claims is 3517 watts (not counting the inefficiency in converting electrical watts to actual heat transfer, meaning actual power required to get one ton of AC is higher). Central AC seems to average about 3 tons, based on the prevalence of that number in example calculations like this one.
Based on these numbers, your window unit is significantly weaker than a car AC system.
I don't understand why modern cars get such lousy mileage.
Air conditioning, for one thing.
It seems to me that actually what we're talking about here is that content providers with deeper pockets will serve content faster to Virgin subscribers.
How deep do the pockets go? If they accept it for Virgin, how long before Comcast wants to stick its hand in their pockets? AT&T? Qwest? BT? AOL? The other 500000 ISPs? They might come out ahead for a little while, but at some point, they'll be missing the way things used to be.
That sure in heck sounds like something the government would put out.
Except for the meritocracy part, that implies the people in charge have some sort of qualification for being in charge.
So too, does the cost of doing it wrong.
people posting facts
Only when twisted inappropriately. While the grandparent is wrong about "inalienable rights" in the Constitution, the great-grandparent poster is wrong about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights giving "specific rights to citizens of the US", they do no such thing: the first lays out the powers of the federal government, and restrictions on those powers, the second lays out further restrictions on those powers. The rights exist separately from the Constitution and its amendments.
I thought the net neutrality was about content providers being shoved in the slow lane unless they pay up too. So if fancy media site X doesn't pay your ISP, there movies get put in the same bit bucket with the bit-torrent downloads.
That's exactly what this CEO is talking about: "deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers". I wonder how long before "paying for priority data to your customers" becomes "paying for any data to your customers", especially if enough companies decide not to play the game. Alternatively, how long before enough youtubes and itunes type places sign up that the "priority channel" gets soaked (as if they're going to spend a dollar/euro/pound of this on upgrading) and nothing gets through?
one drives at proper speed one does not have that problem.
Does not have what problem? Mayors and/or cops setting yellow lights to turn red before it is physically possible to come to a complete stop from the posted speed limit? One cannot repeal the laws of physics, so it is clear whose regulations are in the wrong.