Here in the US it's like the third world, except the third bloody world generally has better cellphone service than the US.
I live in Tanzania, which is pretty certainly "third world," and mobile phone service here is MUCH better than in the US. You purchase an unlocked, sim-free phone of your choice (big simple US$40 phillips phones available, fancy new US$600 nokia 6680s available) and then buy a prepaid simcard for about $6. Caller always pays, calls are about 40 US cents a minute and SMS about 10 US cents. You have to get way out in the bush before coverage drops much.
I was in the US last summer, at it was horrible! Just to buy a simcard cost $50 (from T-mobile, other providers wanted more). Thankfully my phone from Tanzania was triband, so it worked okay. I bought $10 worth of prepaid minutes, which lasts me two months in Tanzania, but I received a couple calls from family back in home and suddenly I was out of minutes. I went to another town to visit relatives and found that, in a town of 100,000 people, T-mobile had no coverage. Why do Americans put up with these overpriced, low-quality carriers, with ridiculous monthly plans, restrictive contracts, and very limited coverage?
Furthermore, it doesn't sound like it handles incoming calls, so really what you have is a flat fee for unlimited outgoing calls.
Most mobile network providers that I've used don't charge you for incoming calls, and all offered a prepaid plan with no monthly charge. On the other hand, I've never seen a provider that gave you free calls within network.
Creat a black and white bitmap, with both x and y dimensions prime (so there are only two possible ways to display it). Certainly if I were looking at a string of ones and zeroes that I thought was a message with length equal to the product of two primes, displaying it as a black and white bitmap is one of the first things I'd try. Once you have this bitmap, you can write on it and try to explain how to decode the other things you have included with it, which could have colour or be vector based or whatever.
Bang per netblock, yes, but not bang per legitimate user. The cost of blocking isn't in the number of blocks of IPs you have to block, it's in the number of non-zombies that can't get through. You should concentrate on blocking ISPs with relatively few users, a large percentage of which of are zombies, since this gets you the most benefit per lost customer.
* Has a strong Windows emulation layer so that the apps can't really tell it's not on a Windows machine and at least run the MS Office suite
Not going to happen. There are so many undocumented features and tricks in the Windows API that it's nearly impossible to emulate it. Wine has been trying since win95 came out and still only supports a small fraction of programs. Even if such an emulation layer did work, things would be so fugly and violate the interface guidelines (e.g. menubar in the wrong place) so much that Steve would never let it out the door. And if he did, MS would just release a new Office (free if necessary, with an incompatible document format) and break it again.
Linux supports: cris s390 v850 frv ia64 h8300 m32r ppc64 NetBSD supports: ns32k vax Both support: i386 amd64 ppc sparc sparc64 alpha mips hppa m68k sh sh64 arm
Note however that NetBSD maintains a full software distribution for all its architectures, whereas few Linux distributions support the more obscure kernel-supported architectures with the result that they have little working software available.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat. They already are.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed. Vmware will run on a mac. Classic will run *much* slower. What do I need vmware for?
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect. Well, not entirely, PowerPC had some advantages for these applications, which was why many of their users chose Macs.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X. Wine is a long way away from being able to run all Windows software.
If you were right the USSR would have beaten us in the arms race. The USSR took your position that the research should be done by the government. They didn't beat us because our private companies (like lockheed) outperformed their lame attempts at development and production. They were generally better at "fundamental", groundbreaking research, at trying to solve problems that had never been solved before. They thus got the first satellite into space, the first humann into space, and the first space station into space. This is the area where government-funded research excells, at the initial high risk gamble to create something that may or may not work. Once the groundbreaking is done, however, corporations are much more efficient at incremental and evolutionary improvement. The USSR tried to continue their space programme through the same strict government planning and production with which they had started it, and immediately fell behind. Once the initial concepts had been proven, the USA gave the contracts for improving its programme to corporations, which were able to work much more efficiently.
And for every government funded research success that you mention, billions of dollars were wasted supporting untold numbers of spectacularly failed projects. This is necessary, and is exactly why corporations are bad at fundamental research. There is no way of knowing which projects are possible and which aren't until you try. This is too big a risk for any corporation to take, so nobody does. It is necessary for the government to take this risk in order to find which ideas are viable so that private corporations can then build on and improve these ideas.
See NASA and the nationalized space industry. Woopee, we got velcro. And communication satellites.
If it hurts legitimate businesses, hopefully those businesses will stop using ISPs who perpetuate spam, driving those ISPs to either clean up their act or shut down.
Very rarely do consumers and businesses have much choice in what ISP they use. An ISP which can't access many US sites is still better than no ISP at all, so the spam-perpetuating ISPs won't lose much money, while the users suffer from less connectivity. Meanwhile, the spammers just find another open relay.
Suppose human had downs syndrome or some other disability and as a result were less intelligent than we would consider human, or even less intelligent than some animals, but could still live without life support. Would it be okay to remove that human's heart? Consensus is no, the person is human regardless of their intelligence.
I agree with you in general, that most of the "ethical" concerns about genetic engineering are much ado about nothing, but it's not as clear cut as you suggest.
Well stated, and I agree completely. So move. There are plenty of better places in the world to live than America, where living standards are higher, politics are more sane, and the overall culture is more tolerant and less ignorant. So leave America now. I left four years ago, and I certainly don't regret it.
Move. Now. The US is going downhill, the religious nuts are taking over, there is little effort to maintain the intellectualism that made America successful to begin with, there's a huge trade deficit, and the entrenched corporations and CEOs make the whole system inefficient and almost impossible to change. There are plenty of better places to live in the world than America, and many of these are set to overtake the US technologically, economically, and politically. There is pretty much no reason for an intelligent person to stay in the US if they have the choice. So stop whining and move.
Because XPC's are a lot bigger, noisier, arguably uglier, and in many cases more expensive than a Mac Mini. Not to say they aren't better for a lot of applications (I own an XPC, and I don't own a Mac Mini).
Bacteria can be observed to mutate and evolve to adapt to their environment under laboratory conditions. On a larger scale, when industrialisation first occurred in Britain, populations of wild moths were observed to evolve to contain a far greater percentage of darker-coloured moths (previously a very rare mutation) because darker moths were more likely to survive as they could camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees.
Now, neither of these proves anything about whether or not evolution occurred in the past, and whether it was the reason humans developed. That theory is merely a fairly direct extrapolation from the above examples, and without any fossil evidence to the contrary it has gained credebility as a fairly likely explanation of how things actually happened.
Do you own a bank or something? The calls you describe would both have cost at least $20 each, even if your provider gives you fairly decent rates. Do you really have nothing better to spend your money on?
And if they are spamming/breaking into NASA/trading child porn?
Assuming you live in a developed country, you can just assemble some logs and evidence on them and then take it to the police along with any data you can gather about the user and their machine. (Or just go talk to the user and threaten to tell the police.) Probably best to put a note in the SSID like YourConnectionIsBeingMonitored and hope they get the hint.
Really, though, there aren't that many people in the world who spam, enjoy child porn, or have the ability to hack NASA. Most of your users would probably just be freeloaders who like not having to pay for internet. In fact, given the fairly short range of wireless access points (mine barely reaches two rooms away), it's unlikely you'd have many users at all. My point is that if you do, it's not the end of the world, and generally a better solution than dealing with the limitations of dragging a big ethernet cable around with you, as the great-grandparent post suggested.
Whats wrong with letting the world access your network? Use SSH/SSL etc to keep your connections secure. If somebody wants internet access, why not provide a public service to them? Wouldn't you like it if someone else did the same for you? If they start using too much bandwidth you can always you can politely ask them to stop, and if that fails, blackmail them with all the pr0n they've been downloading.
Debian is pretty trivial to install on a Mac these days. Pretty much all of debian main is available for ppc from apt. You can apt-get things and they Just Work. On OSX, to get most software you have to futz around with fink and then wait for things to compile like a gentoo user or something. That and most packages require porting to work on OSX, whereas they will usually compile fine on any Linux architecture. Everything is in the same place as it is under x86 Linux, no dealing with netinfo and dynlib and other OSX weirdness. Overall I greatly prefer Linux on my iBook to OSX and I'm thinking about trashing my OSX partition entirely.
Exactly! Why are don't all the US slashdotters complaining about not getting the latest gadgets just move to Japan or South Korea? Plus, you get faster, cheaper broadband, a nicer, cleaner country, a better education system if you ever have kids, and a government that isn't headed by a warmongering monkey! This really seems like the best answer to me.
I have a mobile phone and pay absolutely no monthly fee. Unlimited incoming calls, outgoing calls around $0.40 US a minute local and $2 US a minute international, with the result that I usually spend about $10 a month on prepaid cards. I have yet to see a VoIP plan that would save me money.
Note: If the rates seem odd, it's because I live in Tanzania.
They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
If they refused to abide by the law of the Chinese government, China would simply block google (as they have in the past). Then no one (not using a proxy) in China would have access to google at all. They are helping their "fellow man" more by allowing people in China limited access to google, so that they can at least access non-political information and things that the government forgot to censor. The planet is less of "total shithole" now that Chinese have at least some access to google than it was when google was blocked.
If you bought a single layer drive before dual-layer ones were available, this lets you save $90. Otherwise there's no point, I agree (aside from hack value).
Firefox is designed for Linux AND Windows. It has been the goal of the project to provide equivalent levels of support for both systems since it was called Phoenix.
IMHO, they should worry more about security with the Linux version than the Windows one, as anybody using Windows has pretty clearly shown that they don't care much about security anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in the US it's like the third world, except the third bloody world generally has better cellphone service than the US.
I live in Tanzania, which is pretty certainly "third world," and mobile phone service here is MUCH better than in the US. You purchase an unlocked, sim-free phone of your choice (big simple US$40 phillips phones available, fancy new US$600 nokia 6680s available) and then buy a prepaid simcard for about $6. Caller always pays, calls are about 40 US cents a minute and SMS about 10 US cents. You have to get way out in the bush before coverage drops much.
I was in the US last summer, at it was horrible! Just to buy a simcard cost $50 (from T-mobile, other providers wanted more). Thankfully my phone from Tanzania was triband, so it worked okay. I bought $10 worth of prepaid minutes, which lasts me two months in Tanzania, but I received a couple calls from family back in home and suddenly I was out of minutes. I went to another town to visit relatives and found that, in a town of 100,000 people, T-mobile had no coverage. Why do Americans put up with these overpriced, low-quality carriers, with ridiculous monthly plans, restrictive contracts, and very limited coverage?
Furthermore, it doesn't sound like it handles incoming calls, so really what you have is a flat fee for unlimited outgoing calls.
Most mobile network providers that I've used don't charge you for incoming calls, and all offered a prepaid plan with no monthly charge. On the other hand, I've never seen a provider that gave you free calls within network.
Creat a black and white bitmap, with both x and y dimensions prime (so there are only two possible ways to display it). Certainly if I were looking at a string of ones and zeroes that I thought was a message with length equal to the product of two primes, displaying it as a black and white bitmap is one of the first things I'd try. Once you have this bitmap, you can write on it and try to explain how to decode the other things you have included with it, which could have colour or be vector based or whatever.
Bang per netblock, yes, but not bang per legitimate user. The cost of blocking isn't in the number of blocks of IPs you have to block, it's in the number of non-zombies that can't get through. You should concentrate on blocking ISPs with relatively few users, a large percentage of which of are zombies, since this gets you the most benefit per lost customer.
* Has a strong Windows emulation layer so that the apps can't really tell it's not on a Windows machine and at least run the MS Office suite
Not going to happen. There are so many undocumented features and tricks in the Windows API that it's nearly impossible to emulate it. Wine has been trying since win95 came out and still only supports a small fraction of programs. Even if such an emulation layer did work, things would be so fugly and violate the interface guidelines (e.g. menubar in the wrong place) so much that Steve would never let it out the door. And if he did, MS would just release a new Office (free if necessary, with an incompatible document format) and break it again.
Linux supports: cris s390 v850 frv ia64 h8300 m32r ppc64
NetBSD supports: ns32k vax
Both support: i386 amd64 ppc sparc sparc64 alpha mips hppa m68k sh sh64 arm
Note however that NetBSD maintains a full software distribution for all its architectures, whereas few Linux distributions support the more obscure kernel-supported architectures with the result that they have little working software available.
These PowerPC apps just run
With a substantial performance hit, intolerable for CPU-heavy graphics and video applications.
More likely than not, all Linux apps will be recompilable for Mac. No sweat.
They already are.
Virtual PC will run *much* faster. No more cpu emulation is needed.
Vmware will run on a mac.
Classic will run *much* slower. What do I need vmware for?
Plus, all the big name apps will run just as fast. Adobe, Macromedia (same company now). Not to mention the Apple Pro apps, Video stuff, etc. That stuff will be perfect.
Well, not entirely, PowerPC had some advantages for these applications, which was why many of their users chose Macs.
WINE will run on a Mac. This is *HUGE*. Imagine running any Windows software, at native speeds, with OpenGL support, on Mac OS X.
Wine is a long way away from being able to run all Windows software.
If you were right the USSR would have beaten us in the arms race. The USSR took your position that the research should be done by the government. They didn't beat us because our private companies (like lockheed) outperformed their lame attempts at development and production.
They were generally better at "fundamental", groundbreaking research, at trying to solve problems that had never been solved before. They thus got the first satellite into space, the first humann into space, and the first space station into space. This is the area where government-funded research excells, at the initial high risk gamble to create something that may or may not work. Once the groundbreaking is done, however, corporations are much more efficient at incremental and evolutionary improvement. The USSR tried to continue their space programme through the same strict government planning and production with which they had started it, and immediately fell behind. Once the initial concepts had been proven, the USA gave the contracts for improving its programme to corporations, which were able to work much more efficiently.
And for every government funded research success that you mention, billions of dollars were wasted supporting untold numbers of spectacularly failed projects.
This is necessary, and is exactly why corporations are bad at fundamental research. There is no way of knowing which projects are possible and which aren't until you try. This is too big a risk for any corporation to take, so nobody does. It is necessary for the government to take this risk in order to find which ideas are viable so that private corporations can then build on and improve these ideas.
See NASA and the nationalized space industry. Woopee, we got velcro.
And communication satellites.
If it hurts legitimate businesses, hopefully those businesses will stop using ISPs who perpetuate spam, driving those ISPs to either clean up their act or shut down.
Very rarely do consumers and businesses have much choice in what ISP they use. An ISP which can't access many US sites is still better than no ISP at all, so the spam-perpetuating ISPs won't lose much money, while the users suffer from less connectivity. Meanwhile, the spammers just find another open relay.
Suppose human had downs syndrome or some other disability and as a result were less intelligent than we would consider human, or even less intelligent than some animals, but could still live without life support. Would it be okay to remove that human's heart? Consensus is no, the person is human regardless of their intelligence.
I agree with you in general, that most of the "ethical" concerns about genetic engineering are much ado about nothing, but it's not as clear cut as you suggest.
Well stated, and I agree completely. So move. There are plenty of better places in the world to live than America, where living standards are higher, politics are more sane, and the overall culture is more tolerant and less ignorant. So leave America now. I left four years ago, and I certainly don't regret it.
Actually, if he was British you might be wrong, but Slashdot covers their hacks too, so you both have somewhat flawed arguments.
Move. Now. The US is going downhill, the religious nuts are taking over, there is little effort to maintain the intellectualism that made America successful to begin with, there's a huge trade deficit, and the entrenched corporations and CEOs make the whole system inefficient and almost impossible to change. There are plenty of better places to live in the world than America, and many of these are set to overtake the US technologically, economically, and politically. There is pretty much no reason for an intelligent person to stay in the US if they have the choice. So stop whining and move.
Why not just buy a Shuttle XPC instead?
Because XPC's are a lot bigger, noisier, arguably uglier, and in many cases more expensive than a Mac Mini. Not to say they aren't better for a lot of applications (I own an XPC, and I don't own a Mac Mini).
Bacteria can be observed to mutate and evolve to adapt to their environment under laboratory conditions. On a larger scale, when industrialisation first occurred in Britain, populations of wild moths were observed to evolve to contain a far greater percentage of darker-coloured moths (previously a very rare mutation) because darker moths were more likely to survive as they could camouflage themselves against soot-blackened trees.
Now, neither of these proves anything about whether or not evolution occurred in the past, and whether it was the reason humans developed. That theory is merely a fairly direct extrapolation from the above examples, and without any fossil evidence to the contrary it has gained credebility as a fairly likely explanation of how things actually happened.
Do you own a bank or something? The calls you describe would both have cost at least $20 each, even if your provider gives you fairly decent rates. Do you really have nothing better to spend your money on?
And if they are spamming/breaking into NASA/trading child porn?
Assuming you live in a developed country, you can just assemble some logs and evidence on them and then take it to the police along with any data you can gather about the user and their machine. (Or just go talk to the user and threaten to tell the police.) Probably best to put a note in the SSID like YourConnectionIsBeingMonitored and hope they get the hint.
Really, though, there aren't that many people in the world who spam, enjoy child porn, or have the ability to hack NASA. Most of your users would probably just be freeloaders who like not having to pay for internet. In fact, given the fairly short range of wireless access points (mine barely reaches two rooms away), it's unlikely you'd have many users at all. My point is that if you do, it's not the end of the world, and generally a better solution than dealing with the limitations of dragging a big ethernet cable around with you, as the great-grandparent post suggested.
Whats wrong with letting the world access your network? Use SSH/SSL etc to keep your connections secure. If somebody wants internet access, why not provide a public service to them? Wouldn't you like it if someone else did the same for you? If they start using too much bandwidth you can always you can politely ask them to stop, and if that fails, blackmail them with all the pr0n they've been downloading.
Debian is pretty trivial to install on a Mac these days. Pretty much all of debian main is available for ppc from apt. You can apt-get things and they Just Work. On OSX, to get most software you have to futz around with fink and then wait for things to compile like a gentoo user or something. That and most packages require porting to work on OSX, whereas they will usually compile fine on any Linux architecture. Everything is in the same place as it is under x86 Linux, no dealing with netinfo and dynlib and other OSX weirdness. Overall I greatly prefer Linux on my iBook to OSX and I'm thinking about trashing my OSX partition entirely.
Exactly! Why are don't all the US slashdotters complaining about not getting the latest gadgets just move to Japan or South Korea? Plus, you get faster, cheaper broadband, a nicer, cleaner country, a better education system if you ever have kids, and a government that isn't headed by a warmongering monkey! This really seems like the best answer to me.
I have a mobile phone and pay absolutely no monthly fee. Unlimited incoming calls, outgoing calls around $0.40 US a minute local and $2 US a minute international, with the result that I usually spend about $10 a month on prepaid cards. I have yet to see a VoIP plan that would save me money.
Note: If the rates seem odd, it's because I live in Tanzania.
They *could* refuse to do business with these goons, but they'd rather fuck over their fellow man so they can make a few more bucks.
If they refused to abide by the law of the Chinese government, China would simply block google (as they have in the past). Then no one (not using a proxy) in China would have access to google at all. They are helping their "fellow man" more by allowing people in China limited access to google, so that they can at least access non-political information and things that the government forgot to censor. The planet is less of "total shithole" now that Chinese have at least some access to google than it was when google was blocked.
If you bought a single layer drive before dual-layer ones were available, this lets you save $90. Otherwise there's no point, I agree (aside from hack value).
Firefox is designed for Linux AND Windows. It has been the goal of the project to provide equivalent levels of support for both systems since it was called Phoenix.
IMHO, they should worry more about security with the Linux version than the Windows one, as anybody using Windows has pretty clearly shown that they don't care much about security anyway.