My response was specific to the MDD-owning GP. I wasn't trying to explain Apple's choices, and personally, I'm not happy with their moving away from Firewire at all.
In the unlikely circumstances that it's true (see other comments), at worst you'll be able to use the MDD's USB ports, only file transfers will be slow.
Now, that said, a USB2 PCI card costs around $30 - from an office supply store like Staples or Office Depot, bet you can get it for half that or better elsewhere. The cards are generic (there's essentially one way to implement USB2 over PCI, and yes, they're compatable with Macs) and OS X supports it, since later Jaguar versions. I know this - I have a Beige G3 with a generic Belkin USB2 card, and it works great.
I don't think the rumour mills predicted anything like this for today's announcement. Generally the focus was on a cellphone that runs iTunes, which may be a nice idea, but, well, it hardly justified Apple's tagline "1,000 songs in your pocket changed everything. Here we go again". A safe, easily transportable, hydrogen system beats all of that hands down.
If this is really what Jonathan Ives, Avie Tevanian, et al, have been working on over the last few years, then I'm impressed. But will they call it the iPellet?
Speaking for myself, I don't think all corporations should lose their privileges to make money, unless what they're doing is clearly hurting others. One way to hurt others is to claim ownership of ideas, and sue others for having the same ideas. That's what patents are, in essense, a way of getting in first and saying "I thought of it before you therefore I should own the whole thing".
You can compare it to a car, in many ways. Imagine the GPL as the engine of the vehicle, and a programmer as the steering wheel. Now, imagine you drive your car a certain route, at, say, 44mph, while a bus coming in the other direction from 20 miles away is travelling at 60mph (the speed limit is 45mph, obviously.) If the bus driver, despite taking a completely different route, gets there first, should he have the right to fine you for arriving at the same place? It's unfair just as it is before you factor in the fact that the guy not only tried to own the idea of getting to the place you went to, but actually broke the law, endangering other road travellers and even his own passengers, in the process.
With patents, we're forced to ride the bus, no matter how incompetently it's driven and despite the fact that it's only supplied in a form unusable to us (being, as it is, driven from a location 20mph away), because the driver managed to get to the location we wanted to go to first. Why shouldn't we be able to drive our cars, safely, to the same destination? Especially if we never knew about the bus driver's route there in the first place?
Now, with what's being proposed, the GPL would essentially punish the bus driver for trying to monopolise something that's both necessary and trivial. The bus driver would be unable to drive his own car, because in order to do so, he'd have use a steering wheel (hire a programmer) to turn the car and use an engine (the GPL), and the GPL would forbid him from doing so, and even if he tried, the programmer would refuse, as a matter of principle and legality, to disobey the GPL in that way. Ultimately, he'd be forced to walk home every day, or drive his bus home which would cost him a fortune, and in time would be unable to profit from his "discovery".
To be in favour of patents is to be in favour of maniacs driving at 60mph in 45mph zones forcing us to be their passengers if we want to go where we want to go. That's not right.
It's not difficult to come up with more mature technologies that have gone by the wayside, indeed, in many ways we've gone backwards. I recall CUSeeMe clients being available for the Commodore Amiga. About the only major complaint anyone had with them was that they required the attrocious and bloated "MUI" user interface system installed. That was in the mid-nineties.
Now we've progressed so far we're standardized upon an entirely new and unnecessary protocol that doesn't even work transparently through, either directly or in proxiable form, NAT, and appears to exist only because of the brain dead meme that's common amongst programmers right now that everything has to look like the web. Voice over IP and Instant Messaging? It'd be so much easier if it looked like HTTP over UDP. Yeah, that's the ticket, that'll make it much easier to implement! And let's make all of our data look like HTML as well, we can create "XML" and store everything like that, I mean, it'll be a zilliontrilliongillion times easier to parse than TAB DELIMITED FILES.
What are they? Nuts? Why does everything have to look like something COMPLETELY UNRELATED? Why can't we just, say, design a sane streaming protocol which includes destination host information and stuff? What are they going to reinvent next? Maybe JPEG should be replaced by numbers stored as XML... yeah, make it like this:
I mean, that'd make MUCH MORE SENSE than storing it in an efficient binary form that actually resembles the data. Because, like, people can read it in VI. Except they can't because there's too many FUCKING TAGS for it to be readable. What happens when you combine the inefficiency of ASCII text with the readability of binary? XML, that's what.
Anyway, better quit this rant before some mods me flameworthy.
The point is, we seem to be unwilling at the moment to build on intelligently designed technologies often simply because someone has declared it "obsolete" because they want to re-invent the wheel. SIP? Someone's been SIPping the kool-aid if you ask me. We know what needs to be done, but for some reason encapsulating HTTP in a UDP packet is more exciting. Let's choose appropriate technologies for every situation, rather than trying to shoe-horn whatever's trendy today.
Readers who are interested in my replacement to SIP, called DuplexStreams, can contribute to my SourceForge project.
Nope, not remotely like either of those plans. I'm amazed anyone would think they're similar or that the "only difference" is the cost of calling a mobile from a landline.
Remember the full sentence, including the part you snipped, is this:
For about $60 (including taxes), a mobile phone subscription in the US generally includes about 500 minutes (albiet with calls charged by the minute, not the second, and with you charged for listening to the other end ring, albeit only if the call is ultimately connected - this probably means that a comparable UK tariff would be 300-400 anytime minutes), unlimited nights and weekends, and (increasingly) unlimited in-network mobile to mobile calling.
I typically use around 500-1,000 nights and weekends every month, in addition to around 300 regular minutes. On Three's tariff, I'd be paying much, much, more than $60 (the cheapest, from what I can see, would be their "60GPB Video Talk&Text 1300" plan)
I think the entire issue is overblown. What people fail to remember is that Microsoft's products have supported non-proprietary formats for a long time.
For example, in the latest version of Word, I can save my document as HTML or as plain text. Not to mention that with excellent repackages of free software as shareware like PDF997, one can convert any printable document into PDF without any problems whatsoever.
This is clearly just grandstanding by Massachusetts, which, one has to remember is typical of the anti-business liberal agenda, whether it's electing people like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, or throwing the property of the East India Tea Company in the river.
Alas, that's not true. T-Mobile charges 5c per incoming SMS. Cingular charges 10c. AT&T Wireless, until they were absorbed, were pretty much the only major US operator that didn't charge for incoming SMS messages. Cingular doesn't charge AT&T customers who are still on old AT&T plans for incoming messages, but those who have certainly are charged.
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Re:Easy solution to phone spam...
Re:Easy solution to phone spam... (Score:2)
by Dr_LHA (30754) Neutral on 2005-09-05 11:13 (#13483199)
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Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc, need to start charging sensibly
Out of that list, only Verizon charge for an incoming SMS. They used to charge 2c a SMS, but have now upped it to 10c. No other cell phone company does this as far as I know.
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Re:Easy solution to phone spam... (Score:)
by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-09-05 11:19
( Last Journal: 2005-09-05 1:05 )
Alas, that's not true. T-Mobile charges 5c per incoming SMS. Cingular charges 10c. AT&T Wireless, until they were absorbed, were pretty much the only major US operator that didn't charge for incoming SMS messages. Cingular doesn't charge AT&T customers who are still on old AT&T plans for incoming messages, but those who have certainly are charged.
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Alas, that's not true. T-Mobile charges 5c per incoming SMS. Cingular charges 10c. AT&T Wireless, until they were absorbed, were pretty much the only major US operator that didn't charge for incoming SMS messages. Cingular doesn't charge AT&T customers who are still on old AT&T plans for incoming messages, but those who have certainly are charged.
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I'm British, and I've moved to the US. Here's my take:
For about $60 (including taxes), a mobile phone subscription in the US generally includes about 500 minutes (albiet with calls charged by the minute, not the second, and with you charged for listening to the other end ring, albeit only if the call is ultimately connected - this probably means that a comparable UK tariff would be 300-400 anytime minutes), unlimited nights and weekends, and (increasingly) unlimited in-network mobile to mobile calling. Calls that get diverted to voicemail are not charged for, either to the phone owner or the caller. Just as in the UK, a mobile on such a tariff can be used anywhere in the country and all minutes can be used to call anywhere in the country. Though, in this case, the country has five times the population and 100 times the square footage. That's generally the type of tariff most Americans subscribe to.
There's a lot of experimenting with prepay here, and interestingly one direction they're going down is simply replicating these types of tariff as prepay tariffs rather than only offering pay-as-you-go. Despite a lot of interest in making it work, the "mobile pays" model really kills pay-as-you-go at the moment.
To me, having gotten used to it, I have to say I'd rather have the American tariff than the (current) UK tariffs I've seen. It's essentially worry-free, I can completely - without impacting anyone else - replace my landline with a mobile phone (because friends and family are not hit with absurdly high charges when they call me, and because there are more minutes in my tariff than I can use in practice: it's almost an unmetered connection, especially when the social calls, the calls that go on for hours, are generally on the weekends anyway.) I don't feel like I could do that in the UK because you just don't get enough minutes, and because anyone calling you is going to have to pay through the nose to talk to you.
The downside is that a lot of US employers expect you to give them your mobile number and (and this infuriates me) will call it in preference to your home number. The other downside is that pay-as-you-go, while available, just isn't terribly practical: the bar for getting mobile service is a little higher than it is in the UK.
This is about text messages, as I understand it, so the whole debate about "caller pays" concerning landline interconnect charges isn't really that relevent.
From the standpoint of a mobile operator, the "costs" applied to text messages are really to do with equipment, not bandwidth. It costs a phone company as much, if not more, to support text messaging on a landline than it does on a mobile (because mobiles already have the hardware built in, whereas landline text messaging - which is virtually non-existant in the US, sending is possible if awkward, and receiving just doesn't happen)
Really, Verizon can stop this from being a major problem for their customers by just not charging for incoming messages. Given customers cannot block unwanted incoming messages (they can block all messages, including those they want, but not easily), as they can incoming calls, it's always been an absurdity that the receiver pays for those messages. Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc, need to start charging sensibly, and adopt the basic attitude that if someone cannot reasonably control something from happening, there's no way in which they should be charged for it.
The Cato Institute, the pseudo-academic side of the Libertarian Party, regularly denies that Global Warming exists and has even funded groups such as the (evil) junkscience.com to discredit mainstream science. Why would an economics body want to discredit science? At a guess (and an intelligent guess, given Cato's usual assertion as to why people promote the "myth" of global warming) because the only way in which we can deal with it is to get everyone using less energy, and to try to switch over much of our usage from fossil fuels to alternatives. And that, my friend, will require a certain amount of government intervention, because nobody's come up with a free-market solution.
The LP website doesn't mention Katrina. Neither does Cato's website. My guess is that their position is that New Orleans is a ridiculous Liberal Myth.
After 9/11, it was 3 days before the president visited the site.
After the levee broke this week, it took 3 days before the president visited the site.
Are you shitting me?
The President hasn't "visited the site". He's flown over it.
After 9/11, after 3 days (in which time Bill Clinton had flown in from New Zealand and gotten to New York City and done his visit a day before Bush had), Bush actually stood on a pile of rubble and made a speech to applauding locals.
After Frances, he flew in and helped his brother distribute water and ice (a photoshoot, to be sure) in Fort Pierce. Many locals were just glad of the water.
The man cannot visit New Orleans. He cannot go to the Convention Center and distribute food and water. There aren't enough secret servicemen in the country to ensure his safety in that environment. People were willing to buy the myth of Bush the Leader in 2001. The victims of this latest tragedy cannot feel the same way.
Although he was harshly criticized both times, there's another thing to consider... in the hours and days immediately following the disaster, shouldn't he let the local officials do their jobs instead of giving them the additional burden of dealing with presidential security?
First, don't lie. He wasn't "harshly criticised" for visiting either. He was criticised for his lack of response to 9/11, arriving well after Bill Clinton who wasn't even in the FUCKING COUNTRY when Atta and his fellow religious wackos attacked. But that's the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.
Secondly, you help by offering help. If you see someone in the street suffering a heart attack, you don't wait to see if they have a defibulator. Nobody has proposed that the President should have gone to LA, and take direct charge of the situation. But that doesn't mean there's nothing the President could have done.
The President, at the very least, should have ensured the resources necessary were on stand-by. They weren't on Sunday when it was know that this was going to be a serious storm. They weren't on Monday when the storm hit and the first wave of catastrophic damage hit LA, Mississippi, and Alabama. They weren't on Tuesday, when Katrina's rain finally caused the levies to break. They weren't on Wednesday when the scale of the disaster became obvious to everyone.
We need a new President. LA needs a new governor. I'd say New Orleans needs a new mayor, but frankly it's too late for that. FEMA's Director should also quit or be fired. If any of these people have any decency, they'll finish the job, as best as they can, and then do the honourable thing.
That's complete rubbish. Benchmarking PostgreSQL does not in any way help you find out why MySQL is slow.
If you're trying to find out why MySQL is slow, you need to work with MySQL. To stretch your analogy, this would be like a DA deciding that in order to find a murder suspect, it should investigate an entirely unrelated drug deal.
I'm curious to know if this means the death of Star Office.
Star Office is a proprietary fork of OpenOffice.org; unless the OOo people are requesting any contributors to the "official version" of OOo assign copyrights to Sun (which I don't see any evidence of), it's not easy to see how Sun will be able to create updated versions of Star Office built from updated versions of OOo.
To be sarcastic, well, in that case, what's the fuss? Katrina, as I recall, didn't hit New Orleans at all (there were some strong gusts that caused a little bit of damage here and there, but it wasn't in the center of the storm, so there can't possibly be any kind of disaster there. Right?
The problem right now is that by Sunday afternoon it was obvious that there was going to be a serious problem in that area of the country. Even if National Guard troops weren't going to be sent there right away, you'd have wanted them on standby, ready to send. I know this in part because I checked NOAA that day, was absolutely horrified to see a storm that was an extremely strong category 5 (so strong that if there was a category 6, based upon the usual 20mph steps that separate the other categories, this would have been a cat 6), and posted a JE.
You don't have to be a liberal to know that Louisiana had to be prepared for the worst then then or even earlier. A new meme that's spreading in right wing blogs is that the mayor should have started evacuating the city on (Saturday/Sunday) using fleets of schoolbusses that are, today, sitting in water. There are logistical problems with that "solution", obviously. Some of it's a matter of getting fuel, drivers, and places to go. Some of it is that, as you and I as people that have lived through this before (you said in another post you live in Florida, I live in Stuart - Frances made landfall 15 miles south of here, Jeanne made landfall here) know, a huge proportion of the public simply wouldn't have left. They'd have wanted to stay behind or stay close so that they can get back to their homes as quickly as possible once the danger subsided. But, the point is, operational planning (ie getting the resources mobilized) for this disaster should have started last weekend. Not on Wednesday. And creating the plans for this disaster should, of course, been done a long time ago.
So the five days comment is perfectly reasonable.
I compare LA to FL last year and see a massive difference both in scale and in preparedness. I appreciate the scale means they can't be that easily compared, but at the same time, I sincerely believe the LA horrors were more easily predictable than anything that happened here. The LA "scenario" was always going to be the same regardless of how you looked at it. Levies would be breached. The lower part of the city would flood. If you were very unlucky, there'd be a full scale hurricane occuring at the time of the breach. If you were increadibly unlucky, most residents would be at home at the time of the breach. Neither of these scenarios actually came to pass, which is why it baffles me that the country is unable to secure a mostly evacuated city and ensure those that are left, who are in a handful of centralized locations, receive the food, water, hygene, and care they need.
Nope. The President is in charge of the Executive part of the Federal Government, which includes FEMA, the armed forces, etc. FEMA is a critical part of any disaster recovery operation.
They didn't do a bad job last year (people got upset, naturally), but on the other hand it just wasn't this bad.
A year ago after Hurricane Charley, the president was accused of responding too quickly, allegedly to curry favor with Florida voters.
I don't think he was accused of any such thing, but that said, it's an interesting contrast, isn't it? Two months before an election, he's right there from the get-go, promising help to anyone who wants it in his Brother's swing state.
Ten months after the election, however, with no more elections for him to win, he plays the guitar, makes a few (non-relevent) speeches, and acts, essentially, as if nothing's happening. At some point on Tuesday afternoon, after the floods have started, and 36 hours after the hurricane actually hit, he announces he's cutting short his vacation. But he didn't actually get back to work until Wednesday afternoon.
And remember, while the floods may have only started on Tuesday morning, the Hurricane itself did immense damage, leaving hundreds of thousands of people across three states without power, in seriously damaged, often to the point of uninhabitability, homes. The hurricane itself - not its rains that caused the levies to break - caused astonishing amounts of distruction on Monday, more so than anything that hit Florida (and I live in Florida, in Stuart as it happens, where two of last year's hurricanes hit) - that's all been kind of pushed aside as we concentrate on looking at New Orleans.
And, you'll forgive me, but at least on Wednesday, the feeling I got from the White House was that gas prices were the primary concern of everyone there.
I'm sorry if this sounds like partisan bitching to you, but, well, call it constructive criticism if it hurts.
You build near the coast because historically that's where the trade is. The closer you are to a port, the closer you are to the big trade routes.
This is why New Orleans is where it is. It was perfectly located to take on large amounts of the shipping around the gulf. The fact that it was below sea level was seen as an engineering challenge.
As for why technological hubs are built in big cities, which in turn are often in vulnerable locations, that's where all the people are, and those locations also often contain the most technologically savy people, given they frequently contain - thanks to economies of scale - the institutions of learning and the most wealthy employers.
You have absolutely NO REASON to believe that Apple was after this patent for defensive reasons. As others have pointed out, Apple has a history on using whatever legal means it can lay hands on to stifle competition. This varies from the great look and feel lawsuits of the eighties and nineties, the whole "spring loaded folders" flap, to modern attacks on machines that breached "design patents" (essentially, patents covering the look of a device) from PC manufacturers.
Apple is not one of the "We only file patents defensively" good guys. They've made their bed, let them lie in it, and let them ask themselves if the world they've created for Creative is the one they intended, or even see as fair.
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My response was specific to the MDD-owning GP. I wasn't trying to explain Apple's choices, and personally, I'm not happy with their moving away from Firewire at all.
Now, that said, a USB2 PCI card costs around $30 - from an office supply store like Staples or Office Depot, bet you can get it for half that or better elsewhere. The cards are generic (there's essentially one way to implement USB2 over PCI, and yes, they're compatable with Macs) and OS X supports it, since later Jaguar versions. I know this - I have a Beige G3 with a generic Belkin USB2 card, and it works great.
If this is really what Jonathan Ives, Avie Tevanian, et al, have been working on over the last few years, then I'm impressed. But will they call it the iPellet?
You can compare it to a car, in many ways. Imagine the GPL as the engine of the vehicle, and a programmer as the steering wheel. Now, imagine you drive your car a certain route, at, say, 44mph, while a bus coming in the other direction from 20 miles away is travelling at 60mph (the speed limit is 45mph, obviously.) If the bus driver, despite taking a completely different route, gets there first, should he have the right to fine you for arriving at the same place? It's unfair just as it is before you factor in the fact that the guy not only tried to own the idea of getting to the place you went to, but actually broke the law, endangering other road travellers and even his own passengers, in the process.
With patents, we're forced to ride the bus, no matter how incompetently it's driven and despite the fact that it's only supplied in a form unusable to us (being, as it is, driven from a location 20mph away), because the driver managed to get to the location we wanted to go to first. Why shouldn't we be able to drive our cars, safely, to the same destination? Especially if we never knew about the bus driver's route there in the first place?
Now, with what's being proposed, the GPL would essentially punish the bus driver for trying to monopolise something that's both necessary and trivial. The bus driver would be unable to drive his own car, because in order to do so, he'd have use a steering wheel (hire a programmer) to turn the car and use an engine (the GPL), and the GPL would forbid him from doing so, and even if he tried, the programmer would refuse, as a matter of principle and legality, to disobey the GPL in that way. Ultimately, he'd be forced to walk home every day, or drive his bus home which would cost him a fortune, and in time would be unable to profit from his "discovery".
To be in favour of patents is to be in favour of maniacs driving at 60mph in 45mph zones forcing us to be their passengers if we want to go where we want to go. That's not right.
Now we've progressed so far we're standardized upon an entirely new and unnecessary protocol that doesn't even work transparently through, either directly or in proxiable form, NAT, and appears to exist only because of the brain dead meme that's common amongst programmers right now that everything has to look like the web. Voice over IP and Instant Messaging? It'd be so much easier if it looked like HTTP over UDP. Yeah, that's the ticket, that'll make it much easier to implement! And let's make all of our data look like HTML as well, we can create "XML" and store everything like that, I mean, it'll be a zilliontrilliongillion times easier to parse than TAB DELIMITED FILES.
What are they? Nuts? Why does everything have to look like something COMPLETELY UNRELATED? Why can't we just, say, design a sane streaming protocol which includes destination host information and stuff? What are they going to reinvent next? Maybe JPEG should be replaced by numbers stored as XML... yeah, make it like this:
I mean, that'd make MUCH MORE SENSE than storing it in an efficient binary form that actually resembles the data. Because, like, people can read it in VI. Except they can't because there's too many FUCKING TAGS for it to be readable. What happens when you combine the inefficiency of ASCII text with the readability of binary? XML, that's what.Anyway, better quit this rant before some mods me flameworthy.
The point is, we seem to be unwilling at the moment to build on intelligently designed technologies often simply because someone has declared it "obsolete" because they want to re-invent the wheel. SIP? Someone's been SIPping the kool-aid if you ask me. We know what needs to be done, but for some reason encapsulating HTTP in a UDP packet is more exciting. Let's choose appropriate technologies for every situation, rather than trying to shoe-horn whatever's trendy today.
Readers who are interested in my replacement to SIP, called DuplexStreams, can contribute to my SourceForge project.
Remember the full sentence, including the part you snipped, is this:
I typically use around 500-1,000 nights and weekends every month, in addition to around 300 regular minutes. On Three's tariff, I'd be paying much, much, more than $60 (the cheapest, from what I can see, would be their "60GPB Video Talk&Text 1300" plan)For example, in the latest version of Word, I can save my document as HTML or as plain text. Not to mention that with excellent repackages of free software as shareware like PDF997, one can convert any printable document into PDF without any problems whatsoever.
This is clearly just grandstanding by Massachusetts, which, one has to remember is typical of the anti-business liberal agenda, whether it's electing people like Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, or throwing the property of the East India Tea Company in the river.
Or is combing my bill calculating expenses and putting together a report considered fun these days?
Fuck 'em. If they want to call me, they should call me at home.
Don't know? Give up? Ok, ok:
Fission Chips!
Geddit? Geddit?! That one's hysterical.
On a different note: Slow Down Cowboy! Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment. It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator. Re:Easy solution to phone spam... Re:Easy solution to phone spam... (Score:2) by Dr_LHA (30754) Neutral on 2005-09-05 11:13 (#13483199) ( http://slashdot.org/ ) Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc, need to start charging sensibly Out of that list, only Verizon charge for an incoming SMS. They used to charge 2c a SMS, but have now upped it to 10c. No other cell phone company does this as far as I know. [ Reply to This ] Preview Comment Re:Easy solution to phone spam... (Score:) by squiggleslash (241428) on 2005-09-05 11:19 ( Last Journal: 2005-09-05 1:05 ) Alas, that's not true. T-Mobile charges 5c per incoming SMS. Cingular charges 10c. AT&T Wireless, until they were absorbed, were pretty much the only major US operator that didn't charge for incoming SMS messages. Cingular doesn't charge AT&T customers who are still on old AT&T plans for incoming messages, but those who have certainly are charged. -- RIAA vs MPAA, Copyrights vs Patents, etc [slashdot.org] [ Reply to This ] Post Comment Name squiggleslash [ Log Out ] Subject Comment Alas, that's not true. T-Mobile charges 5c per incoming SMS. Cingular charges 10c. AT&T Wireless, until they were absorbed, were pretty much the only major US operator that didn't charge for incoming SMS messages. Cingular doesn't charge AT&T customers who are still on old AT&T plans for incoming messages, but those who have certainly are charged. (Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!) No Karma Bonus No Subscriber Bonus Post Anonymously Allowed HTML
For about $60 (including taxes), a mobile phone subscription in the US generally includes about 500 minutes (albiet with calls charged by the minute, not the second, and with you charged for listening to the other end ring, albeit only if the call is ultimately connected - this probably means that a comparable UK tariff would be 300-400 anytime minutes), unlimited nights and weekends, and (increasingly) unlimited in-network mobile to mobile calling. Calls that get diverted to voicemail are not charged for, either to the phone owner or the caller. Just as in the UK, a mobile on such a tariff can be used anywhere in the country and all minutes can be used to call anywhere in the country. Though, in this case, the country has five times the population and 100 times the square footage. That's generally the type of tariff most Americans subscribe to.
There's a lot of experimenting with prepay here, and interestingly one direction they're going down is simply replicating these types of tariff as prepay tariffs rather than only offering pay-as-you-go. Despite a lot of interest in making it work, the "mobile pays" model really kills pay-as-you-go at the moment.
To me, having gotten used to it, I have to say I'd rather have the American tariff than the (current) UK tariffs I've seen. It's essentially worry-free, I can completely - without impacting anyone else - replace my landline with a mobile phone (because friends and family are not hit with absurdly high charges when they call me, and because there are more minutes in my tariff than I can use in practice: it's almost an unmetered connection, especially when the social calls, the calls that go on for hours, are generally on the weekends anyway.) I don't feel like I could do that in the UK because you just don't get enough minutes, and because anyone calling you is going to have to pay through the nose to talk to you.
The downside is that a lot of US employers expect you to give them your mobile number and (and this infuriates me) will call it in preference to your home number. The other downside is that pay-as-you-go, while available, just isn't terribly practical: the bar for getting mobile service is a little higher than it is in the UK.
From the standpoint of a mobile operator, the "costs" applied to text messages are really to do with equipment, not bandwidth. It costs a phone company as much, if not more, to support text messaging on a landline than it does on a mobile (because mobiles already have the hardware built in, whereas landline text messaging - which is virtually non-existant in the US, sending is possible if awkward, and receiving just doesn't happen)
Really, Verizon can stop this from being a major problem for their customers by just not charging for incoming messages. Given customers cannot block unwanted incoming messages (they can block all messages, including those they want, but not easily), as they can incoming calls, it's always been an absurdity that the receiver pays for those messages. Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc, need to start charging sensibly, and adopt the basic attitude that if someone cannot reasonably control something from happening, there's no way in which they should be charged for it.
The LP website doesn't mention Katrina. Neither does Cato's website. My guess is that their position is that New Orleans is a ridiculous Liberal Myth.
Though I didn't agree with the man on many issues, I do have to say I admire him for his professionalism and integrity.
So essentially God has a sense of humour?
The President hasn't "visited the site". He's flown over it.
After 9/11, after 3 days (in which time Bill Clinton had flown in from New Zealand and gotten to New York City and done his visit a day before Bush had), Bush actually stood on a pile of rubble and made a speech to applauding locals.
After Frances, he flew in and helped his brother distribute water and ice (a photoshoot, to be sure) in Fort Pierce. Many locals were just glad of the water.
The man cannot visit New Orleans. He cannot go to the Convention Center and distribute food and water. There aren't enough secret servicemen in the country to ensure his safety in that environment. People were willing to buy the myth of Bush the Leader in 2001. The victims of this latest tragedy cannot feel the same way.
First, don't lie. He wasn't "harshly criticised" for visiting either. He was criticised for his lack of response to 9/11, arriving well after Bill Clinton who wasn't even in the FUCKING COUNTRY when Atta and his fellow religious wackos attacked. But that's the exact opposite of what you're suggesting.Secondly, you help by offering help. If you see someone in the street suffering a heart attack, you don't wait to see if they have a defibulator. Nobody has proposed that the President should have gone to LA, and take direct charge of the situation. But that doesn't mean there's nothing the President could have done.
The President, at the very least, should have ensured the resources necessary were on stand-by. They weren't on Sunday when it was know that this was going to be a serious storm. They weren't on Monday when the storm hit and the first wave of catastrophic damage hit LA, Mississippi, and Alabama. They weren't on Tuesday, when Katrina's rain finally caused the levies to break. They weren't on Wednesday when the scale of the disaster became obvious to everyone.
We need a new President. LA needs a new governor. I'd say New Orleans needs a new mayor, but frankly it's too late for that. FEMA's Director should also quit or be fired. If any of these people have any decency, they'll finish the job, as best as they can, and then do the honourable thing.
There is no excuse for what just happened.
If you're trying to find out why MySQL is slow, you need to work with MySQL. To stretch your analogy, this would be like a DA deciding that in order to find a murder suspect, it should investigate an entirely unrelated drug deal.
Star Office is a proprietary fork of OpenOffice.org; unless the OOo people are requesting any contributors to the "official version" of OOo assign copyrights to Sun (which I don't see any evidence of), it's not easy to see how Sun will be able to create updated versions of Star Office built from updated versions of OOo.
Give me one good reason why I shouldn't foe you.
The problem right now is that by Sunday afternoon it was obvious that there was going to be a serious problem in that area of the country. Even if National Guard troops weren't going to be sent there right away, you'd have wanted them on standby, ready to send. I know this in part because I checked NOAA that day, was absolutely horrified to see a storm that was an extremely strong category 5 (so strong that if there was a category 6, based upon the usual 20mph steps that separate the other categories, this would have been a cat 6), and posted a JE.
You don't have to be a liberal to know that Louisiana had to be prepared for the worst then then or even earlier. A new meme that's spreading in right wing blogs is that the mayor should have started evacuating the city on (Saturday/Sunday) using fleets of schoolbusses that are, today, sitting in water. There are logistical problems with that "solution", obviously. Some of it's a matter of getting fuel, drivers, and places to go. Some of it is that, as you and I as people that have lived through this before (you said in another post you live in Florida, I live in Stuart - Frances made landfall 15 miles south of here, Jeanne made landfall here) know, a huge proportion of the public simply wouldn't have left. They'd have wanted to stay behind or stay close so that they can get back to their homes as quickly as possible once the danger subsided. But, the point is, operational planning (ie getting the resources mobilized) for this disaster should have started last weekend. Not on Wednesday. And creating the plans for this disaster should, of course, been done a long time ago.
So the five days comment is perfectly reasonable.
I compare LA to FL last year and see a massive difference both in scale and in preparedness. I appreciate the scale means they can't be that easily compared, but at the same time, I sincerely believe the LA horrors were more easily predictable than anything that happened here. The LA "scenario" was always going to be the same regardless of how you looked at it. Levies would be breached. The lower part of the city would flood. If you were very unlucky, there'd be a full scale hurricane occuring at the time of the breach. If you were increadibly unlucky, most residents would be at home at the time of the breach. Neither of these scenarios actually came to pass, which is why it baffles me that the country is unable to secure a mostly evacuated city and ensure those that are left, who are in a handful of centralized locations, receive the food, water, hygene, and care they need.
They didn't do a bad job last year (people got upset, naturally), but on the other hand it just wasn't this bad.
Ten months after the election, however, with no more elections for him to win, he plays the guitar, makes a few (non-relevent) speeches, and acts, essentially, as if nothing's happening. At some point on Tuesday afternoon, after the floods have started, and 36 hours after the hurricane actually hit, he announces he's cutting short his vacation. But he didn't actually get back to work until Wednesday afternoon.
And remember, while the floods may have only started on Tuesday morning, the Hurricane itself did immense damage, leaving hundreds of thousands of people across three states without power, in seriously damaged, often to the point of uninhabitability, homes. The hurricane itself - not its rains that caused the levies to break - caused astonishing amounts of distruction on Monday, more so than anything that hit Florida (and I live in Florida, in Stuart as it happens, where two of last year's hurricanes hit) - that's all been kind of pushed aside as we concentrate on looking at New Orleans.
And, you'll forgive me, but at least on Wednesday, the feeling I got from the White House was that gas prices were the primary concern of everyone there.
I'm sorry if this sounds like partisan bitching to you, but, well, call it constructive criticism if it hurts.
This is why New Orleans is where it is. It was perfectly located to take on large amounts of the shipping around the gulf. The fact that it was below sea level was seen as an engineering challenge.
As for why technological hubs are built in big cities, which in turn are often in vulnerable locations, that's where all the people are, and those locations also often contain the most technologically savy people, given they frequently contain - thanks to economies of scale - the institutions of learning and the most wealthy employers.
Apple is not one of the "We only file patents defensively" good guys. They've made their bed, let them lie in it, and let them ask themselves if the world they've created for Creative is the one they intended, or even see as fair.