IFrame refresh hacks are not "asynchronous" because the user can see them happening, just by watching the browser load icon.
That's not quite what being asynchronous means. Asynchronous means not sitting idly by waiting for a (remote procedure/http) call to finish. For example; while you're loading one thing, you might be sorting a table of data (even if the javascript isn't even on the page, check out the handy sort table bookmarklet).
It's OK for the user to know things are going on in the background; for example, when you press the Print button in Microsoft Word, it doesn't make you wait for the print job to finish, it continues in the background. You won't get your hardcopies any sooner (so you might still have to wait for that job to finish to do the next thing you have to do), but the program isn't stuck waiting for the call to finish.
The Gmail interface is actually not such a good example of asynchronisity. It makes you wait while it's sending mail, for example..
An (I)frame refresh hack might be slightly more visible, but if you can still use the application (i.e. its javascript functionality), it's still asynchronous.
Your examples don't rise to the level of the out-and-out open bribery in the ITU example.
Though.. that wasn't about ITU, but about local officials, right? The reverse situation from how ICANN, right now, is wholly bribeable and corrupt, whereas the local officials (i.e. the ccTLDs) already are doing a good job of not being corrupt, and if they were, you'd just get a domain name in a different TLD..
The thing is, I have separate chargers for my PDA, phone, laptop, MP3 player, etc.
What you want is either a) a standardized charge(r) (like, 5V, 1A - which isn't likely to please everyone) b) some way of hooking up some sort of energy cell in series, so you can get whatever voltage you like in 1.2-1.5V steps
AA batteries do the latter. Problem is, they don't pack much of a punch, even the NiMh ones (which you need to charge, incidentally). Li-Ion cells pack 3.6V, which is a tad much for some applications; they certainly can't be put into an AA format and replace regular AA batteries. So, if you have to let go of the AA format anyway, you might as well go fuel cell, which shows promise for an even greater energy density than Li-Ion.
And once you have a standardized fuel cell and fuel (although you can rely on Sony to introduce some ill-fated incompatible alternative, like with Atrac3 and BlueRay), you might as well plug them into laptops.
But any hack worth his salt would argue he's not disclosing anything at all, since he MUST assume the information provided to him, all quite anonymously of course, was, is, or will be provided to other hacks as well, which means it's the anonymous source doing the publishing, really.
Whatever became of that MI5 chap leaking secrets from France?
Also, D-Notices are technically voluntary. In all likelihood, ElReg doesn't even receive them.
There's also corruption in how internet lines are run. From ILECs ruining business, to governments playing games with licenses to lay fiber, etc. All of which has nothing to do with the IANA functions.
"The Poster" is "The Writer". He says so himself (pushing his own scoop?), also his account links to a.com domain strangely similar to the name in the byline..
i would much rather have the united states in control than some beurocratic UN organization that's been proven it has members that can be bought.
Again with the "corrupt UN" replies.. Can you folks find me some newsarticles about rampant corruption at the ITU? No? Gee.. Now, which organization is running the international phone numbering plan, again? And organized the WSIS?
The fine hacks at The Register probably aren't subject to the Official Secrets Act, not being "a member of the security and intelligence services" or "a person notified that he is subject to the provisions of this subsection". Also, publishing this information isn't likely to be considered "damaging" w.r.t. the defence of the nation, etc. Official Secrets Act.
In fact, in the UK, journalists regularly get away with publishing "secret" information - just not when they're the BBC (due mostly to their lapdog governor, who should've said "fuck you, here's the complaint department's PO box" during the whole "sexed up intelligence" ordeal - which it turns out the Beeb was in the right about anyway. Note though how they never got slapped with any Official Secrets charges, or even a suggestion thereof.)
Now, slander and libel, those are areas where UK hacks have something to fear from the law - the libel laws are, simply put, draconian. Even so, the Tabloids are still printing absolute idiocy, so those libel laws apply more to lesser folk.
I have this hunch that a letter is printed out on paper, and therefore has a whopping big "gummint of the US of A" letterhead. And that an HTML transcript of it might contain typos.
Actually, the EU guidelines - at least in the case of Telecom and Postal services, which I'm most familiar with - do account for granting a single company a regulated monopoly-like market to provide "universal access" service. I.e. France Telecom got to keep the fixed lines (instead of them being auctioned off, for example - like what happened to gsm frequencies), but only in return for them provisioning non-profitable fixed lines to remote regions - though they are allowed to suck up those extra costs by charging a bit more than necessary to the profit-generating subscribers. Likewise, there is a postal monopoly on regular letters, but parcels are open for competition. The flipside is that parcels don't have to be brought to your doorstep, whereas letters have to be schlept up mountains, etc.
I'd be no more weirded out by carrying arount methanol cells to power stuff than by carrying regular batteries (you know, those contain flesh-eating acids!). Or by the amount of places where you can buy 5-20% solutions of ethanol, just to ingest.
Fuel cells, if properly standardized, would be a great replacement for regular batteries and most rechargables. Perhaps not for laptops, because the battery in there is really more of a backup scheme than anything else - as soon as you see a power outlet you want to plug the thing in anyway; but for things like cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, PDAs (to the extent those aren't actually one device), etc.
I disagree. I assume you specifically mean that you can't prove the non-existence of a physical object, right? Perhaps you mean something more specific than what you stated.
No he doesn't. It is impossible to prove a negative. It's a basic tenet of science. You can't prove a drug is safe (i.e. has no ill effect - a negative) but you can prove it is effective against for example cancer (i.e. it was found to kill cancer cells in a significant amount of trials - a positive). Anything you do not observe, or deduce, might just be because of your faulty observations or deductions. But, if you observe something, you might be on to something. If it's repeatable, odds are your experiments bear some predictive weight towards future situations.
This also holds for theoretical work (deductions, proofs); there might always be some axiom you overlooked.
There's a reason why in criminal trials you have to prove guilt, not innocence. Innocence is a negative, and as such, it can't be proven.
catalysts? acids? expensive? the definition of a catalyst is that they do not get transformed in an reaction but simply speed it up. In this case it rather sounds as if the acids are a simple consumed reactant.
A catalyst not being used up is all good and well, but it doesn't do you very much good in the cheap department if you can't easily get that catalyst to stay where the reaction is taking place; i.e. if there's no way to get the catalyst out of the resultant biodiesel and into a fresh batch of vegetable oil, it's not getting consumed, but it's getting siphoned off (via the endproduct) none the less.
(P.S. All Satanists are really Christians. You do realise this, don't you?)
I'd say a belief in God or Satan is pretty unrelated to a belief in Jesus of Nazareth as Christ. I have a hunch there are a few people (*cough* Jews *cough*) that might agree with me on this one.
(Actually it's not a paper BY the UN, but anyway..) For future reference, "the UN" won't be running no DNS servers, nor will the security council or even UNESCO or whatever UN agency you might have in mind - in fact, the ITU is the best (actuall, only UN-)candidate. Note how they've also kept the international country code scheme operative quite independently of any corporate bullshit. Also note that we're not talking about rocket science here, just the "IANA" responsibilities, which are pretty lightweight; most DNS root-servers are already outside of the US, and they aren't run by ICANN, nor in the majority of cases even by Verisign. Actually, ICANN doesn't do a whole lot at all. It's just there.
On the plus side, no units in the article were compared to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once. That's progress, I suppose.
Well, they meant to say "like the kind of 100W light bulb commonly used in the Library of Congress", but being a paper, there's limits on the amounts of words you can use in one article (far less than a millionth of a LoC, you'll be surprised to hear!)
The only thing I can think of is the compact disc.
The CD was a collaboration with Philips (which has its share of flops, like CD-i, DCC, and pretty much all of its home/personal computer outings), and Matshushita A.K.A. Panasonic. Also, the DVD is a joint Sony/Philips standard, as is S/PDIF.
Sony's Walkman, HandyCam and PlayStation(s) were anything but a flop, though..
Read the article. He's responding directly to Google, Yahoo and Vonage starting up VOIP. His broadband customers are already paying for broadband. Google, Yahoo and Vonage are already paying for their bandwidth, so he's already getting paid twice. And now he wants a cut of the VOIP revenue because his fixed lines "can't compete" (never mind he got those fixed lines, as well as the broadband infrastructure, and the permission to put them down, with enormous government subsidies, partly in the form of monopoly rights -- I guess that'll be the fourth way he wants to get paid).
The guy's a dick.
Luckily, Google and Yahoo are such huge enterprises, that they'll sue his ass for all he's worth if he tried to go through with it.
In the new agreement, there are clauses that state that Level3 can again try to charge Cogent if their traffic amount is grossly over that of Level3's. So, while this is definitely an improvement, it doesn't rid all potential future problems.
Though you have to wonder how they determine whose traffic is bigger. Surely, if a level3 customer is downloading from a cogent customer, the reverse is also true. If a connection is cut off, there will 2 unsatisfied customers, one on each end of the connection.
Of course, level3 has more customers than cogent. So if level3 cuts off cogent, a lesser proportion of level3 customers will get pissed off than cogent customers. So it's just a matter of which party has the deepest pockets, and who's the biggest bully.
Plus, the small screens don't exactly do justice to most of the things you are watching.
I find the Archos AV700's 7" screen quite bearable. Should be great for commuting to work in trains. Much like those portable DVD players (though I suspect those are mostly in use by kids in the backseats of cars).
Apparently, Nokia's corporate culture still finds delayed rollouts to be just fine, as we've seen from the N90 and N91... which is odd, since Nokia's profit margins have been eroding since 2004, due to lack of available products in the face of increased competetion from Motorola, et al.
In 2004, they posted 11% lower Net profits compared to 2003. However, for 2005, the profit guidance was just raised.
Motorola is only a big competitor to Nokia in the US (mostly due to supporting CDMA, and their own 'standard' iDen). In other parts of the world it has much more to fear from Samsung, SonyEricsson and Siemens/Benq (not that any of those are posting stellar profits).
So, these people realise their on a sinking ship and get out, taking a job with another company. Apparently, conditions are bad enough that once one guy got the idea, everybody sees fit to join him. Probably they forsaw the product never getting finished, the company being unable to attract new hires, and tanking. So then the company gets in trouble, isn't able to get people to fill the positions left vacant, and who's to blame? Of course, the people who saw it all coming and got out of there; and the company that hired them..
Would I be wrong in thinking these engineers probably warned management multiple times that they weren't happy, that their employer should be doing a better job, that they should be getting the sort of facilities they now have at yahoo? And would I be wrong in thinking their employer just shrugged and said "meh", since what do these engineersy, non-MBA type people know? In other words, that they're a really shitty employer? I think the fact they're sueing their barely ex-employees almost proves it.
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IFrame refresh hacks are not "asynchronous" because the user can see them happening, just by watching the browser load icon.
That's not quite what being asynchronous means. Asynchronous means not sitting idly by waiting for a (remote procedure/http) call to finish. For example; while you're loading one thing, you might be sorting a table of data (even if the javascript isn't even on the page, check out the handy sort table bookmarklet).
It's OK for the user to know things are going on in the background; for example, when you press the Print button in Microsoft Word, it doesn't make you wait for the print job to finish, it continues in the background. You won't get your hardcopies any sooner (so you might still have to wait for that job to finish to do the next thing you have to do), but the program isn't stuck waiting for the call to finish.
The Gmail interface is actually not such a good example of asynchronisity. It makes you wait while it's sending mail, for example..
An (I)frame refresh hack might be slightly more visible, but if you can still use the application (i.e. its javascript functionality), it's still asynchronous.
Your examples don't rise to the level of the out-and-out open bribery in the ITU example.
Though.. that wasn't about ITU, but about local officials, right? The reverse situation from how ICANN, right now, is wholly bribeable and corrupt, whereas the local officials (i.e. the ccTLDs) already are doing a good job of not being corrupt, and if they were, you'd just get a domain name in a different TLD..
The thing is, I have separate chargers for my PDA, phone, laptop, MP3 player, etc.
What you want is either
a) a standardized charge(r) (like, 5V, 1A - which isn't likely to please everyone)
b) some way of hooking up some sort of energy cell in series, so you can get whatever voltage you like in 1.2-1.5V steps
AA batteries do the latter. Problem is, they don't pack much of a punch, even the NiMh ones (which you need to charge, incidentally). Li-Ion cells pack 3.6V, which is a tad much for some applications; they certainly can't be put into an AA format and replace regular AA batteries. So, if you have to let go of the AA format anyway, you might as well go fuel cell, which shows promise for an even greater energy density than Li-Ion.
And once you have a standardized fuel cell and fuel (although you can rely on Sony to introduce some ill-fated incompatible alternative, like with Atrac3 and BlueRay), you might as well plug them into laptops.
But any hack worth his salt would argue he's not disclosing anything at all, since he MUST assume the information provided to him, all quite anonymously of course, was, is, or will be provided to other hacks as well, which means it's the anonymous source doing the publishing, really.
Whatever became of that MI5 chap leaking secrets from France?
Also, D-Notices are technically voluntary. In all likelihood, ElReg doesn't even receive them.
There's also corruption in how internet lines are run. From ILECs ruining business, to governments playing games with licenses to lay fiber, etc. All of which has nothing to do with the IANA functions.
"The Poster" is "The Writer". He says so himself (pushing his own scoop?), also his account links to a .com domain strangely similar to the name in the byline..
i would much rather have the united states in control than some beurocratic UN organization that's been proven it has members that can be bought.
Again with the "corrupt UN" replies.. Can you folks find me some newsarticles about rampant corruption at the ITU? No? Gee.. Now, which organization is running the international phone numbering plan, again? And organized the WSIS?
The fine hacks at The Register probably aren't subject to the Official Secrets Act, not being "a member of the security and intelligence services" or "a person notified that he is subject to the provisions of this subsection". Also, publishing this information isn't likely to be considered "damaging" w.r.t. the defence of the nation, etc. Official Secrets Act.
In fact, in the UK, journalists regularly get away with publishing "secret" information - just not when they're the BBC (due mostly to their lapdog governor, who should've said "fuck you, here's the complaint department's PO box" during the whole "sexed up intelligence" ordeal - which it turns out the Beeb was in the right about anyway. Note though how they never got slapped with any Official Secrets charges, or even a suggestion thereof.)
Now, slander and libel, those are areas where UK hacks have something to fear from the law - the libel laws are, simply put, draconian. Even so, the Tabloids are still printing absolute idiocy, so those libel laws apply more to lesser folk.
I have this hunch that a letter is printed out on paper, and therefore has a whopping big "gummint of the US of A" letterhead. And that an HTML transcript of it might contain typos.
Actually, the EU guidelines - at least in the case of Telecom and Postal services, which I'm most familiar with - do account for granting a single company a regulated monopoly-like market to provide "universal access" service. I.e. France Telecom got to keep the fixed lines (instead of them being auctioned off, for example - like what happened to gsm frequencies), but only in return for them provisioning non-profitable fixed lines to remote regions - though they are allowed to suck up those extra costs by charging a bit more than necessary to the profit-generating subscribers.
Likewise, there is a postal monopoly on regular letters, but parcels are open for competition. The flipside is that parcels don't have to be brought to your doorstep, whereas letters have to be schlept up mountains, etc.
But they're not wearing full pirate regalia!
I'd be no more weirded out by carrying arount methanol cells to power stuff than by carrying regular batteries (you know, those contain flesh-eating acids!). Or by the amount of places where you can buy 5-20% solutions of ethanol, just to ingest.
Fuel cells, if properly standardized, would be a great replacement for regular batteries and most rechargables. Perhaps not for laptops, because the battery in there is really more of a backup scheme than anything else - as soon as you see a power outlet you want to plug the thing in anyway; but for things like cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, PDAs (to the extent those aren't actually one device), etc.
It is impossible to prove a negative.
I disagree. I assume you specifically mean that you can't prove the non-existence of a physical object, right? Perhaps you mean something more specific than what you stated.
No he doesn't. It is impossible to prove a negative. It's a basic tenet of science. You can't prove a drug is safe (i.e. has no ill effect - a negative) but you can prove it is effective against for example cancer (i.e. it was found to kill cancer cells in a significant amount of trials - a positive). Anything you do not observe, or deduce, might just be because of your faulty observations or deductions. But, if you observe something, you might be on to something. If it's repeatable, odds are your experiments bear some predictive weight towards future situations.
This also holds for theoretical work (deductions, proofs); there might always be some axiom you overlooked.
There's a reason why in criminal trials you have to prove guilt, not innocence. Innocence is a negative, and as such, it can't be proven.
catalysts? acids? expensive? the definition of a catalyst is that they do not get transformed in an reaction but simply speed it up. In this case it rather sounds as if the acids are a simple consumed reactant.
A catalyst not being used up is all good and well, but it doesn't do you very much good in the cheap department if you can't easily get that catalyst to stay where the reaction is taking place; i.e. if there's no way to get the catalyst out of the resultant biodiesel and into a fresh batch of vegetable oil, it's not getting consumed, but it's getting siphoned off (via the endproduct) none the less.
(P.S. All Satanists are really Christians. You do realise this, don't you?)
I'd say a belief in God or Satan is pretty unrelated to a belief in Jesus of Nazareth as Christ. I have a hunch there are a few people (*cough* Jews *cough*) that might agree with me on this one.
(Actually it's not a paper BY the UN, but anyway..) For future reference, "the UN" won't be running no DNS servers, nor will the security council or even UNESCO or whatever UN agency you might have in mind - in fact, the ITU is the best (actuall, only UN-)candidate. Note how they've also kept the international country code scheme operative quite independently of any corporate bullshit. Also note that we're not talking about rocket science here, just the "IANA" responsibilities, which are pretty lightweight; most DNS root-servers are already outside of the US, and they aren't run by ICANN, nor in the majority of cases even by Verisign. Actually, ICANN doesn't do a whole lot at all. It's just there.
On the plus side, no units in the article were compared to a football field or a the Library of Congress, for once. That's progress, I suppose.
Well, they meant to say "like the kind of 100W light bulb commonly used in the Library of Congress", but being a paper, there's limits on the amounts of words you can use in one article (far less than a millionth of a LoC, you'll be surprised to hear!)
The only thing I can think of is the compact disc.
The CD was a collaboration with Philips (which has its share of flops, like CD-i, DCC, and pretty much all of its home/personal computer outings), and Matshushita A.K.A. Panasonic. Also, the DVD is a joint Sony/Philips standard, as is S/PDIF.
Sony's Walkman, HandyCam and PlayStation(s) were anything but a flop, though..
Read the article. He's responding directly to Google, Yahoo and Vonage starting up VOIP. His broadband customers are already paying for broadband. Google, Yahoo and Vonage are already paying for their bandwidth, so he's already getting paid twice. And now he wants a cut of the VOIP revenue because his fixed lines "can't compete" (never mind he got those fixed lines, as well as the broadband infrastructure, and the permission to put them down, with enormous government subsidies, partly in the form of monopoly rights -- I guess that'll be the fourth way he wants to get paid).
The guy's a dick.
Luckily, Google and Yahoo are such huge enterprises, that they'll sue his ass for all he's worth if he tried to go through with it.
In the new agreement, there are clauses that state that Level3 can again try to charge Cogent if their traffic amount is grossly over that of Level3's. So, while this is definitely an improvement, it doesn't rid all potential future problems.
Though you have to wonder how they determine whose traffic is bigger. Surely, if a level3 customer is downloading from a cogent customer, the reverse is also true. If a connection is cut off, there will 2 unsatisfied customers, one on each end of the connection.
Of course, level3 has more customers than cogent. So if level3 cuts off cogent, a lesser proportion of level3 customers will get pissed off than cogent customers. So it's just a matter of which party has the deepest pockets, and who's the biggest bully.
A strand the thickness of a human hair has the strength of a steel girder, but weighs around 0.00001% as much.
;-)
Any particular reason they don't they make buildings out of these carbon strands instead of with steel girders?
The little piglet that tried found that the unusually low weight made his house much too easy to blow over by the big bad wolf.
Going down, 69 style? Sound like a good day at the office to me.
Plus, the small screens don't exactly do justice to most of the things you are watching.
I find the Archos AV700's 7" screen quite bearable. Should be great for commuting to work in trains. Much like those portable DVD players (though I suspect those are mostly in use by kids in the backseats of cars).
Apparently, Nokia's corporate culture still finds delayed rollouts to be just fine, as we've seen from the N90 and N91... which is odd, since Nokia's profit margins have been eroding since 2004, due to lack of available products in the face of increased competetion from Motorola, et al.
In 2004, they posted 11% lower Net profits compared to 2003. However, for 2005, the profit guidance was just raised.
Motorola is only a big competitor to Nokia in the US (mostly due to supporting CDMA, and their own 'standard' iDen). In other parts of the world it has much more to fear from Samsung, SonyEricsson and Siemens/Benq (not that any of those are posting stellar profits).
So, these people realise their on a sinking ship and get out, taking a job with another company. Apparently, conditions are bad enough that once one guy got the idea, everybody sees fit to join him. Probably they forsaw the product never getting finished, the company being unable to attract new hires, and tanking. So then the company gets in trouble, isn't able to get people to fill the positions left vacant, and who's to blame? Of course, the people who saw it all coming and got out of there; and the company that hired them..
Would I be wrong in thinking these engineers probably warned management multiple times that they weren't happy, that their employer should be doing a better job, that they should be getting the sort of facilities they now have at yahoo? And would I be wrong in thinking their employer just shrugged and said "meh", since what do these engineersy, non-MBA type people know? In other words, that they're a really shitty employer? I think the fact they're sueing their barely ex-employees almost proves it.