You could always... not use Facebook. What they don't have, they can't use.
Single most insightful comment in the entire discussion. You win.
Seriously. The people posting every detail of their sad little lives to Facebook don't care about their privacy, pretty
much by definition. This doesn't so much involve getting the horse back in the barn, as Lady Godiva complaining that the horse's
hair tickles.
There are many items that may benefit from web-access that don't need full/open access.
"Need"?
This has nothing to do with "need". People buy internet enabled phones to, y'know, use the internet. Not to play in a very
pretty garden with very high walls.
I'm happy to give up full freedom on my phone in exchange for it NEVER failing to do what I need it to do.
Same here - Thus I have a $19.95 "dumb" phone that always works for its single purpose - Making phone calls (I'll admit I've
used it as an alarm clock a few times, too, but sure as hell didn't pay extra for that functionality - And it doesn't refuse to
let me set it for before 7am because the manufacturer likes to sleep in). If, however, I wanted internet access from it,
I'd feel pretty pissed off that I couldn't get to a third of the internet because some CEO has a bug up his butt about interpreted code.
But if you choose Microsoft Windows, you are also dependent on Microsoft. How is this any different?
Because the underlying issue has nothing to do with Windows vs Macs vs Linux, or Microsoft vs Apple vs... um... Linux, or Steve (B) vs Steve (J) vs Linus.
And Macromedia (seriously - Fuck Adobe) doesn't even enter this particular game, except as the ball tossed around by the real players.
The underlying issue involves control, nothing else. More importantly, who has it over what I can run on my hardware. Apple bluntly tells us
what we can run. Microsoft "only" wants to tell us what we can't run. And Linux just hands us the keys and asks us not to wake it up if we get
in after 2am.
I think you meant that as humor, right? But in case not...
and makes anybody who must work in the server room less comfortable when compared to allowing waste heat to warm the main areas
You work in Siberia, perhaps? The hot side of even a small server room, nevermind a data center, stays well over 100F. Not exactly comfy
for most humans.
Temperature lost through seepage from solid objects is going to be minimal, at best, unless they are made of large sections of aluminum or copper.
Or, say, row after row of heavy-gauge steel boxes?
See why there is a debate?
Because most people can't accept that not all geographies have the same exterior conditions, and just want to mindlessly obey The Standard dictated from On High by the gods of HVAC? If you consider the "waste" heat valuable, you may want to contain it for use in the nearby area. If you need to run the AC even in normal office space 24/7/365, you probably don't really care where the heat goes, but wasted cold air amounts to a sin.
Depending on how your facility is ducted, it might not cost much to try both options and measure the results.
Call me naive, but... Why not do both at once?
Cold air goes in from the bottom (or one side), through the rack, and hot air goes out the top (or the other side). I realize that
companies don't really care about such minutiae, but that would allow the mere humans that occasionally need to service all those
expensive racks to experience a temperature other than 40F or 120F.
Or, hey, how about just cooling the damned things with intelligently ducted outside air and cutting the electric bill by a third?
He was told "you are not looking after our FiberWAN network anymore, someone else is. Hand over the keys so that your successor can do their job". He used to be properly authorised because it was his job to look after the network.
"Mr Jones, you no longer fly this space shuttle. Hand the keys over to Bob the janitor. Bob, take 'er up!".
Quite seriously, I would call a city-wide WAN (particularly on the scale of SF) considerably more complex than
flying the space shuttle. Even a highly competent network engineer might take months to map the whole thing out starting
with nothing but a handful of router passwords.
Being told "give Bob access" and "GTFO" very much count as mutually exclusive instructions.
In his shoes, I probably would have just turned over the passwords and walked out, laughing in the knowledge that I'd get a call in a week
begging me to fix the smoking ruins of their network at any price. I can, however, appreciate the sense of misplaced possession in wanting
to defend "his" network; I would say that most admins feel somewhat protective of the networks they maintain.
Childs just took it too far. But, so did the city in pressing criminal charges against him.
Snapshots are not a substitute for off-site backups. Think fire, theft, flood, filesystem or disk controller
corruption. Do you rsync those snapshots to an off-site system?
You'll probably never see this because I took so long to reply, but...
Not the snapshots, but by "mirror" I didn't mean RAID-1, I meant a separate machine, in a separate building (garage).
I figure, if both my house and my garage completely burn to the ground at the same time, I'll have a whole lot more to worry
about than whether or not I still have my collection of slackware ISOs going back to V1.0.
I did, once upon a time, have "good" offsite backups, in the form of DVDs I'd drop off at my parents house every now and
then. But offline storage technology (in a price range suitable for home users) simply has not kept up with drive capacity.
I still do that with my truly irreplaceable content (personal records, code I've written, and assorted tidbits I most likely
couldn't just re-download or re-rip), but that only accounts for less than one percent of my total disk usage.
Jobs simultaneously drags the android through the mud while claiming a moral high ground for the
iphone. what's Google going to do? Trying to defend pornography will be an uphill battle going to a
place "where we don't want to go".
I dunno... In Google's shoes, I'd respond to this with a one (and a half) sentence press release, something to the
effect of "44% of all internet searches look for porn, and 97% of all households have searched for
porn-related terms more than once. Android - For people who value freedom"
How did you not realize they're doing it with non-SSD hard drives as well?
They've been almost the same price for more than 2 years. It's 100% price
fixing all around.
I like a good conspiracy as much as the next guy, but I seriously have to wonder
if mere (lack of) market pressure has kept HDD prices from falling over the past
year or two.
As you point out, you can get a 1TB drive for $70. A terabyte. At the
risk of pulling a "640k", very few typical users would even know how to
begin filling 1TB. You have a few academic and corporate users who need that much
(or much, much more), but they tend to have far larger budgets and buy more
based on superstition than reality; case in point, SCSI still exists and commands
a premium - Meanwhile, my home fileserver has 6x the (raw) capacity, gives better
performance, and has more redundancy (fully mirrored with live daily snapshots, rather than RAID5 with "backups" in the form of crappy ol' tapes that took all night
to create and literally failed about a third of the times we tried to recover something
from them), than my last employer's NAS - For about a quarter of the total price. On
the other
end of the demand curve, you have home users, who have exactly one use for such
high-capacity drives - Storing media files (I won't get into the issue of a legit
home media server vs piracy). Personally, I own a LOT of CDs (in the thousands),
rip them losslessly, and they still weigh in at under half a terabyte. Even ripping
entire DVDs, you can fit 100-200 per terabyte.
Compare that with SSDs... Yes, SSDs have some serious advantages (and a few
disadvantages) over HDDs. But the average user really does feel the pinch
of the affordable sizes (32MB for under $100), and can't afford to blow two grand
on a terabyte.
So, personally I don't see so much demand for larger cheap HDDs as to put
pressure on manufacturers to lower the prices. At the same time, everyone
would love to see larger, cheaper SSDs, so seeing the prices go up as the manufacturers
deliberately cut capacity... that I'll call unkosher.
There's a difference between price collusion in a mature market
like LCDs versus a lack of capacity in a new market like SSDs.
Perhaps you misspoke, perhaps I misunderstood, but doesn't forcing prices down by
conspiring to "pull[ed] back on production and investment in new facilities"
look very, very similar to merely fixing the prices in a mature market?
They have the capacity, but would rather make more per unit. So they make
fewer units to push the supply/demand curve back into more favorable
territory. Collusion by any other name would smell as sweet.
Why look at facts when you can just say "I'll never trust again".
You quoted the single most damning part of TFA! The facts in this
case explicitly say that they could make more and bring prices crashing down, but
have agreed not to solely to keep prices high. I trust, alright - Trust that
the semiconductor industry rivals the RIAA in dirty underhanded tricks
designed to maximally screw their customers (and even each other, when any
one player momentarily gains enough of an upper hand to get away with it) in
the name of profit.
occasion) for the sake of profit
You may be surprised to learn that the Earth is a sphere. If you move far enough from the West to the East,
you end up in the West again. It's kind of like Asteroids.
C'mon, I only wrote two sentences. You couldn't bother to read them both?
"...and then only after going halfway around the planet over Northern Europe and Russia?"
I always thought the wind (on a global scale) moves from the West to the East.
Wouldn't the ash from an Icelandic volcano reach Alaska long before St. John, and then only
after going halfway around the planet over Northern Europe and Russia?
Legislator: Duh, say what? I don't write no contradictory laws.
DA: See you in court!
If only...
Unfortunately, as happens far too often, the legislators themselves don't go to jail for BS like this. Instead,
we have random Joes just trying to do their jobs who now have to choose which of two laws to break.
and everything to do with the fact that he was *redistributing their data* without consent.
Just as a point of clarification - Does FaceBook claim to own the copyright to information entered by the users
of their site?
If not, the strongest claim FB could make would seem to boil down to theft of service ("stealing" their bandwidth
via his spider). And the very fact that they have a robots file defines what they consider fair game in
that regard (if they allow Google and Yahoo etc to do it, tough to say "no" to some random academic doing research).
If so... A lot of people who think nothing of uploading pictures of themselves in a drunken gang-bang on the
beach might not feel the same way if Facebook claim the right to use that picture, complete with names, as the
cover/poster for their new book/movie.
Now, A lot of people have said that he probably can't afford to take this to court even though in the right... Except,
he doesn't need to. FB did nothing but threaten, with what most people seem to consider very little on which to
base their claims. Solution? Release the data and force them to prove their case. And even if they somehow
pull off a Chewbacca... They couldn't undo the release itself, so still lose.
I think my garden shed, which is too far away from the house to make running cables worth the
effort, is going to get two holes in the roof today.
I thought something like that at first, too... Then fortunately pondered the implications before getting out the
hole-saw.
Why does your garden shed have a roof in the first place? Mine keeps out the elements, rain in particular. Rain, which
has the most amazing ability to work its way into the smallest of cracks, trickle along studs, and drip into exactly the thing
in your shed that you would most like to remain dry.
If you look at devices intended to go in holes in the roof (like skylights), you'll see that they have a fairly wide
skirt around them, which allows you to properly apply flashing to them. I've never seen a 2L bottle with a six inch skirt around
it. And silicone sealant doesn't hold up so well outside, either - Or rather, you can get a version that does, which they make
inconveniently opaque to prevent UV fron breaking it down.:)
That said, I have seen devices purpose-made in a similar form-factor - Basically a 6 to 12" hemisphere on top for collecting light,
a proper skirt to allow flashing, and a frosted cylinder or cone that goes on the inside of the building. I have no idea if they
make them out of solid plastic, or fill a thin shell with some fluid, but that shouldn't really matter (just that it has a refractive index
significantly higher than air).
Right you are! All of the handset makers using Android would just love to cater to a couple of thousand nerds who would
rather spend an hour looking for a free solution than spend 5 minutes and 99 cents downloading a commercial one
First, I would consider that an insightful (if sarcastic) comment. And Apple has done well with understanding that.
That said, you've totally missed the point. Google doesn't give a shit if Namco, or even Verizon, can make a buck on their
phone. Google only cares that Google can make a buck on their phones, and so far in their history, they have done so
precisely by catering to their most valuable nonmonetary resource - "a couple of thousand nerds who would
rather spend an hour looking for a free solution", or better yet, write their own and thus make the product more valuable
to both geeks and non-geeks alike.
No. Just some people, who need to learn to let off the damned brake and use roads for their intended
purpose - Driving
Also, I didn't mean you specifically as the intended "target" of my vitriol - I directed that at the
asshats who look at a smoothly flowing road and cry "waaaah, we need a way to make them go slower!
Think of the kiiiiiids!". You should take this personally only if you see yourself as Mr.
Justice, personally enforcing the speed limits by pissing off every other driver on the road.
Some highlights from experiences with people like you
Bzzzt, thanks for playing "flog the strawman". I haven't gotten into an accident in 15 years because I drive
safely. Not "slowly", the two don't show up as synonyms in the dictionary for a reason. Yes,
I live to get between points A and B as quickly as possible. I also like to get there alive.
In your deluded world that's my fault for failing to break the law to accommodate the clinically
insane idiot who wanted to go twice the speed limit.
Ever heard the phrase "passive aggressive"? First of all, just because the law says to go 25mph on a broad
straight road doesn't make it "right". And second, I don't refer to people going the speed limit - More to
people going under the speed limit, or who actively block attempts to pass them. You want to go
10mph under? Have fun, your choice and I honestly don't care in the least. If, however, you swerve toward
the center or speed up when I go to pass you, God help us both because I will choose to sideswipe
you at a net speed difference of 5-10mph rather than hit a car head-on at a net difference of 90mph.
I agree: TFA is retarded, making the roads harder to drive on is not going to make them safer
So why the hate? We basically agree on that - I just happen to want to go faster than you.
But your attitude of *Well fuck you if you merely want to drive at the speed limit, I didn't buy
this overpowered penis substitute for nothing* is even worse.
Lovin' the ad hominem twist to your strawman daquiri.
No, not "fuck you if you merely want to drive at the speed limit". Fuck you if you want to force
me to do the same, whether as per my original quote from you, or as a town/city/state traffic planner who
gets turned on by the thought of every roundabout and curve and speedbump and unlabeled intersection
they can throw at us.
only a few people need to go at a sane speed and it forces those behind them to slow down too.
"Sane" varies based on the skill and reflexes of the driver. We tend to make fun of "granny" on the road because
old people really do drive slower and more poorly than younger drivers. They have much worse vision and
much slower reflexes.
of course then they try to overtake in stupid situations
The definition of "stupid situation" also varies based on skill and reflexes... As well as with "commitment", which
I can't stress enough - When overtaking, floor it, don't mosey along on the wrong side of the road for five minutes.
So yeah, you want to see even more "stupid" accidents, make the worst drivers feel uncomfortable on the road in exactly the
manner described by TFA, and watch everyone else on the road start frothing at the mouth and trying to pass passing on
(artificially imposed) blind corners. If you want to actually have fewer accidents - Make the damned roads
actually safer (straight, wide, large setback), not visually confusing and tricky to navigate.
You can call me an "idiot" if it makes you feel better (despite having no accidents in 15 years); You still need to come to
terms with the fact that I will drive on the same roads as you (and granny, and your kids, and farmer's markets, etc).
So really, your call - Make it so I can't see your kids from 20 feet away, or give me a fair chance to avoid enforcing Darwin
on your gene pool.
Who would have thought that by reducing a driver's visibility, the driver would go slower to give
themselves time to react to surprises?
The Brits have also use "traffic calming" measures such as these for quite a while. And in one sense (making
people slow down), they do work.
As for the intended purpose - Such measures have one really great big glaring flaw. They don't specifically
improve safety by getting people to slow down; they work by actually making the road more dangerous.
So yeah, take away visibility, add obstructions, and narrow the road, and I'll drive slower - But little Billy playing in
the road around an artificially-imposed blind curve will still get splattered, because some genius at the
DOT decided to add a goddamned blind curve to a residential street!
I know we all like to impose our morality on the rest of the world, but hey, for a change, try this one - Make the
roads wider, more straight, and with a larger building setback - And let us step on the gas for
a change. And keep your damned kids out of the road if you want their insides to stay inside.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured?
Um, no.
I can assure you, as a mostly-colorblind person, that it has no resemblance whatsoever to those other
issues.
I have a defect. One that, while it doesn't cause me all that many problems (and even gives a cute
excuse for why I suck at fashion, when the real answer consists of nothing more than "Don't give a damn"), I
would certainly "fix" in a heartbeat.
And for those of you asking how far we "should" go with this - Yes, I'll also take the UV/IR vision, the
cat-like reflexes, and the prehensile tail in a heartbeat as well. But to make you feel better, I couldn't care
less about the blonde hair, blue eyes, and "healthy" pallor.
I consider it the height of obscenity that the FDA officially considers "normalcy" not a condition to remedy. Fuck
normalcy, give me my wings!
The Constitution explicitly says that the census is conducted in a manner determined by law, i.e., Title 13. What
part of this do you not understand?
"The actual Enumeration shall be made... in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
Let's start with the definition of the word "enumeration" - "to ascertain the number of : count". That part about "determined
by law" doesn't say what they will collect, the sentence explicitly specifies that by the word "enumeration".
So yes, I.2.3 allows later discretion in how to conduct this COUNT. The government might send people door to door, it might
delegate the task to individual towns, it might do it by mail, it might do it over the internet. But "it", in all those cases,
has the same meaning, "count the people".
The constitution doesn't allow discretion in what to collect, only how.
I do have to admit, you have better legal cites than I do (IANAL, obviously). Regardless, I answered "2", and if they
send someone around (and can actually find my house - Really quite difficult to see from the road, and amusingly enough,
TomToms put my address about a mile away from its actual location), they'll get no more information from me (though I
suppose they could guess my age and race, meeting in person). And if I get the first fine to stick in 40 years, well
then, so it goes.
No-one wanted to "round up arabs" since that would have been stupid and done nothing.
Wow, excellent grammar and spelling, for an 8 year old!;)
Seriously, do you remember the post-9/11 anti-Arab/anti-Islamic fervor that swept the US? Even
otherwise-rational, compassionate people advocated some rather unpleasant measures.
Now, most of that has died down, almost a decade later. But if you don't seriously believe far too many
people still want to round up and deport (or even kill) "them"... Well, I wouldn't recommend wearing a hajib in
public in a few entire states.
Except that the constitution has this clause that you seem to miss that says they conduct the census "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct." And Title 13 allows them to collect such statistics. So basically you're wrong.
On your second point - Constitution trumps Title 13.
On your first point, we'll have to leave the interpretation of that up to the courts. Oh, wait - Already done,
in response to this exact issue:
"Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by congress,
possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen."
(05/26/1894, Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479)
It is in your own best interest to let the local and national govt. know as much about the people they represent as possible.
Ahahahahahahaahahaaa.
Heh. >snrrrrrrk<
>ahem<
Just - No. I have never, in my entire life, found anything but a clear inverse relationship between "government information
about me" and "my interests".
They use my gender to threaten me for opposing the SSA. They use my age to dictate when I can drive, when I can drink, when I can
die in a pissing match between old men, and when I can retire. They use my address to decide how much I have to pay for my
neighbors' brats to go to their daily socialized babysitting. They use my race to deny me access to various funds because,
regardless of my situation, people of my skin color haven't suffered enough in the past 200 years. They use my phone number
to piss me off at dinner time every election season.
The one bit of information they have the authority to collect, an "enumeration" of the citizenry, I will gladly answer so my state
can have the right number of asshats I've never met hanging out in DC strip clubs while deciding how to slice us up and serve us to
their corporate owners. The rest of it, they can charge me my $100 (which hasn't happened since 1970, when the courts overturned
exactly such a fine) and go pound sand.
No it doesnt. An application for your local grocery customer loyalty program usually
asks more questions. Even the registration form for most home appliances asks for more.
Key difference - Both of those count as strictly voluntary, of which the former carries
no penalties for simply lying, and no one actually fills out the latter (if it breaks in a
week, take it back to the store regardless of the stupid note in the box saying very clearly
not to take it back to the store; and if it lasts a week, it will last pretty much forever).
Slashdot Mirror
You could always ... not use Facebook. What they don't have, they can't use.
Single most insightful comment in the entire discussion. You win.
Seriously. The people posting every detail of their sad little lives to Facebook don't care about their privacy, pretty much by definition. This doesn't so much involve getting the horse back in the barn, as Lady Godiva complaining that the horse's hair tickles.
There are many items that may benefit from web-access that don't need full/open access.
"Need"?
This has nothing to do with "need". People buy internet enabled phones to, y'know, use the internet. Not to play in a very pretty garden with very high walls.
I'm happy to give up full freedom on my phone in exchange for it NEVER failing to do what I need it to do.
Same here - Thus I have a $19.95 "dumb" phone that always works for its single purpose - Making phone calls (I'll admit I've used it as an alarm clock a few times, too, but sure as hell didn't pay extra for that functionality - And it doesn't refuse to let me set it for before 7am because the manufacturer likes to sleep in). If, however, I wanted internet access from it, I'd feel pretty pissed off that I couldn't get to a third of the internet because some CEO has a bug up his butt about interpreted code.
But if you choose Microsoft Windows, you are also dependent on Microsoft. How is this any different?
Because the underlying issue has nothing to do with Windows vs Macs vs Linux, or Microsoft vs Apple vs... um... Linux, or Steve (B) vs Steve (J) vs Linus.
And Macromedia (seriously - Fuck Adobe) doesn't even enter this particular game, except as the ball tossed around by the real players.
The underlying issue involves control, nothing else. More importantly, who has it over what I can run on my hardware. Apple bluntly tells us what we can run. Microsoft "only" wants to tell us what we can't run. And Linux just hands us the keys and asks us not to wake it up if we get in after 2am.
Personally, I'll take "choice" every time. YMMV.
I think you meant that as humor, right? But in case not...
and makes anybody who must work in the server room less comfortable when compared to allowing waste heat to warm the main areas
You work in Siberia, perhaps? The hot side of even a small server room, nevermind a data center, stays well over 100F. Not exactly comfy for most humans.
Temperature lost through seepage from solid objects is going to be minimal, at best, unless they are made of large sections of aluminum or copper.
Or, say, row after row of heavy-gauge steel boxes?
See why there is a debate?
Because most people can't accept that not all geographies have the same exterior conditions, and just want to mindlessly obey The Standard dictated from On High by the gods of HVAC? If you consider the "waste" heat valuable, you may want to contain it for use in the nearby area. If you need to run the AC even in normal office space 24/7/365, you probably don't really care where the heat goes, but wasted cold air amounts to a sin.
Depending on how your facility is ducted, it might not cost much to try both options and measure the results.
Call me naive, but... Why not do both at once?
Cold air goes in from the bottom (or one side), through the rack, and hot air goes out the top (or the other side). I realize that companies don't really care about such minutiae, but that would allow the mere humans that occasionally need to service all those expensive racks to experience a temperature other than 40F or 120F.
Or, hey, how about just cooling the damned things with intelligently ducted outside air and cutting the electric bill by a third?
He was told "you are not looking after our FiberWAN network anymore, someone else is. Hand over the keys so that your successor can do their job". He used to be properly authorised because it was his job to look after the network.
"Mr Jones, you no longer fly this space shuttle. Hand the keys over to Bob the janitor. Bob, take 'er up!".
Quite seriously, I would call a city-wide WAN (particularly on the scale of SF) considerably more complex than flying the space shuttle. Even a highly competent network engineer might take months to map the whole thing out starting with nothing but a handful of router passwords.
Being told "give Bob access" and "GTFO" very much count as mutually exclusive instructions.
In his shoes, I probably would have just turned over the passwords and walked out, laughing in the knowledge that I'd get a call in a week begging me to fix the smoking ruins of their network at any price. I can, however, appreciate the sense of misplaced possession in wanting to defend "his" network; I would say that most admins feel somewhat protective of the networks they maintain.
Childs just took it too far. But, so did the city in pressing criminal charges against him.
Snapshots are not a substitute for off-site backups. Think fire, theft, flood, filesystem or disk controller corruption. Do you rsync those snapshots to an off-site system?
You'll probably never see this because I took so long to reply, but...
Not the snapshots, but by "mirror" I didn't mean RAID-1, I meant a separate machine, in a separate building (garage).
I figure, if both my house and my garage completely burn to the ground at the same time, I'll have a whole lot more to worry about than whether or not I still have my collection of slackware ISOs going back to V1.0.
I did, once upon a time, have "good" offsite backups, in the form of DVDs I'd drop off at my parents house every now and then. But offline storage technology (in a price range suitable for home users) simply has not kept up with drive capacity. I still do that with my truly irreplaceable content (personal records, code I've written, and assorted tidbits I most likely couldn't just re-download or re-rip), but that only accounts for less than one percent of my total disk usage.
Jobs simultaneously drags the android through the mud while claiming a moral high ground for the iphone. what's Google going to do? Trying to defend pornography will be an uphill battle going to a place "where we don't want to go".
I dunno... In Google's shoes, I'd respond to this with a one (and a half) sentence press release, something to the effect of "44% of all internet searches look for porn, and 97% of all households have searched for porn-related terms more than once. Android - For people who value freedom"
How did you not realize they're doing it with non-SSD hard drives as well? They've been almost the same price for more than 2 years. It's 100% price fixing all around.
I like a good conspiracy as much as the next guy, but I seriously have to wonder if mere (lack of) market pressure has kept HDD prices from falling over the past year or two.
As you point out, you can get a 1TB drive for $70. A terabyte. At the risk of pulling a "640k", very few typical users would even know how to begin filling 1TB. You have a few academic and corporate users who need that much (or much, much more), but they tend to have far larger budgets and buy more based on superstition than reality; case in point, SCSI still exists and commands a premium - Meanwhile, my home fileserver has 6x the (raw) capacity, gives better performance, and has more redundancy (fully mirrored with live daily snapshots, rather than RAID5 with "backups" in the form of crappy ol' tapes that took all night to create and literally failed about a third of the times we tried to recover something from them), than my last employer's NAS - For about a quarter of the total price. On the other end of the demand curve, you have home users, who have exactly one use for such high-capacity drives - Storing media files (I won't get into the issue of a legit home media server vs piracy). Personally, I own a LOT of CDs (in the thousands), rip them losslessly, and they still weigh in at under half a terabyte. Even ripping entire DVDs, you can fit 100-200 per terabyte.
Compare that with SSDs... Yes, SSDs have some serious advantages (and a few disadvantages) over HDDs. But the average user really does feel the pinch of the affordable sizes (32MB for under $100), and can't afford to blow two grand on a terabyte.
So, personally I don't see so much demand for larger cheap HDDs as to put pressure on manufacturers to lower the prices. At the same time, everyone would love to see larger, cheaper SSDs, so seeing the prices go up as the manufacturers deliberately cut capacity... that I'll call unkosher.
There's a difference between price collusion in a mature market like LCDs versus a lack of capacity in a new market like SSDs.
Perhaps you misspoke, perhaps I misunderstood, but doesn't forcing prices down by conspiring to "pull[ed] back on production and investment in new facilities" look very, very similar to merely fixing the prices in a mature market?
They have the capacity, but would rather make more per unit. So they make fewer units to push the supply/demand curve back into more favorable territory. Collusion by any other name would smell as sweet.
Why look at facts when you can just say "I'll never trust again".
You quoted the single most damning part of TFA! The facts in this case explicitly say that they could make more and bring prices crashing down, but have agreed not to solely to keep prices high. I trust, alright - Trust that the semiconductor industry rivals the RIAA in dirty underhanded tricks designed to maximally screw their customers (and even each other, when any one player momentarily gains enough of an upper hand to get away with it) in the name of profit. occasion) for the sake of profit
You may be surprised to learn that the Earth is a sphere. If you move far enough from the West to the East, you end up in the West again. It's kind of like Asteroids.
C'mon, I only wrote two sentences. You couldn't bother to read them both?
"...and then only after going halfway around the planet over Northern Europe and Russia?"
I always thought the wind (on a global scale) moves from the West to the East.
Wouldn't the ash from an Icelandic volcano reach Alaska long before St. John, and then only after going halfway around the planet over Northern Europe and Russia?
Legislator: Duh, say what? I don't write no contradictory laws.
DA: See you in court!
If only...
Unfortunately, as happens far too often, the legislators themselves don't go to jail for BS like this. Instead, we have random Joes just trying to do their jobs who now have to choose which of two laws to break.
(+5 insightful, but I wanted to comment as well).
and everything to do with the fact that he was *redistributing their data* without consent.
Just as a point of clarification - Does FaceBook claim to own the copyright to information entered by the users of their site?
If not, the strongest claim FB could make would seem to boil down to theft of service ("stealing" their bandwidth via his spider). And the very fact that they have a robots file defines what they consider fair game in that regard (if they allow Google and Yahoo etc to do it, tough to say "no" to some random academic doing research).
If so... A lot of people who think nothing of uploading pictures of themselves in a drunken gang-bang on the beach might not feel the same way if Facebook claim the right to use that picture, complete with names, as the cover/poster for their new book/movie.
Now, A lot of people have said that he probably can't afford to take this to court even though in the right... Except, he doesn't need to. FB did nothing but threaten, with what most people seem to consider very little on which to base their claims. Solution? Release the data and force them to prove their case. And even if they somehow pull off a Chewbacca... They couldn't undo the release itself, so still lose.
I think my garden shed, which is too far away from the house to make running cables worth the effort, is going to get two holes in the roof today.
:)
I thought something like that at first, too... Then fortunately pondered the implications before getting out the hole-saw.
Why does your garden shed have a roof in the first place? Mine keeps out the elements, rain in particular. Rain, which has the most amazing ability to work its way into the smallest of cracks, trickle along studs, and drip into exactly the thing in your shed that you would most like to remain dry.
If you look at devices intended to go in holes in the roof (like skylights), you'll see that they have a fairly wide skirt around them, which allows you to properly apply flashing to them. I've never seen a 2L bottle with a six inch skirt around it. And silicone sealant doesn't hold up so well outside, either - Or rather, you can get a version that does, which they make inconveniently opaque to prevent UV fron breaking it down.
That said, I have seen devices purpose-made in a similar form-factor - Basically a 6 to 12" hemisphere on top for collecting light, a proper skirt to allow flashing, and a frosted cylinder or cone that goes on the inside of the building. I have no idea if they make them out of solid plastic, or fill a thin shell with some fluid, but that shouldn't really matter (just that it has a refractive index significantly higher than air).
Right you are! All of the handset makers using Android would just love to cater to a couple of thousand nerds who would rather spend an hour looking for a free solution than spend 5 minutes and 99 cents downloading a commercial one
First, I would consider that an insightful (if sarcastic) comment. And Apple has done well with understanding that.
That said, you've totally missed the point. Google doesn't give a shit if Namco, or even Verizon, can make a buck on their phone. Google only cares that Google can make a buck on their phones, and so far in their history, they have done so precisely by catering to their most valuable nonmonetary resource - "a couple of thousand nerds who would rather spend an hour looking for a free solution", or better yet, write their own and thus make the product more valuable to both geeks and non-geeks alike.
Ah so it's everyone elses fault.
No. Just some people, who need to learn to let off the damned brake and use roads for their intended purpose - Driving
Also, I didn't mean you specifically as the intended "target" of my vitriol - I directed that at the asshats who look at a smoothly flowing road and cry "waaaah, we need a way to make them go slower! Think of the kiiiiiids!". You should take this personally only if you see yourself as Mr. Justice, personally enforcing the speed limits by pissing off every other driver on the road.
Some highlights from experiences with people like you
Bzzzt, thanks for playing "flog the strawman". I haven't gotten into an accident in 15 years because I drive safely. Not "slowly", the two don't show up as synonyms in the dictionary for a reason. Yes, I live to get between points A and B as quickly as possible. I also like to get there alive.
In your deluded world that's my fault for failing to break the law to accommodate the clinically insane idiot who wanted to go twice the speed limit.
Ever heard the phrase "passive aggressive"? First of all, just because the law says to go 25mph on a broad straight road doesn't make it "right". And second, I don't refer to people going the speed limit - More to people going under the speed limit, or who actively block attempts to pass them. You want to go 10mph under? Have fun, your choice and I honestly don't care in the least. If, however, you swerve toward the center or speed up when I go to pass you, God help us both because I will choose to sideswipe you at a net speed difference of 5-10mph rather than hit a car head-on at a net difference of 90mph.
I agree: TFA is retarded, making the roads harder to drive on is not going to make them safer
So why the hate? We basically agree on that - I just happen to want to go faster than you.
But your attitude of *Well fuck you if you merely want to drive at the speed limit, I didn't buy this overpowered penis substitute for nothing* is even worse.
Lovin' the ad hominem twist to your strawman daquiri.
No, not "fuck you if you merely want to drive at the speed limit". Fuck you if you want to force me to do the same, whether as per my original quote from you, or as a town/city/state traffic planner who gets turned on by the thought of every roundabout and curve and speedbump and unlabeled intersection they can throw at us.
only a few people need to go at a sane speed and it forces those behind them to slow down too.
"Sane" varies based on the skill and reflexes of the driver. We tend to make fun of "granny" on the road because old people really do drive slower and more poorly than younger drivers. They have much worse vision and much slower reflexes.
of course then they try to overtake in stupid situations
The definition of "stupid situation" also varies based on skill and reflexes... As well as with "commitment", which I can't stress enough - When overtaking, floor it, don't mosey along on the wrong side of the road for five minutes.
So yeah, you want to see even more "stupid" accidents, make the worst drivers feel uncomfortable on the road in exactly the manner described by TFA, and watch everyone else on the road start frothing at the mouth and trying to pass passing on (artificially imposed) blind corners. If you want to actually have fewer accidents - Make the damned roads actually safer (straight, wide, large setback), not visually confusing and tricky to navigate.
You can call me an "idiot" if it makes you feel better (despite having no accidents in 15 years); You still need to come to terms with the fact that I will drive on the same roads as you (and granny, and your kids, and farmer's markets, etc). So really, your call - Make it so I can't see your kids from 20 feet away, or give me a fair chance to avoid enforcing Darwin on your gene pool.
Who would have thought that by reducing a driver's visibility, the driver would go slower to give themselves time to react to surprises?
The Brits have also use "traffic calming" measures such as these for quite a while. And in one sense (making people slow down), they do work.
As for the intended purpose - Such measures have one really great big glaring flaw. They don't specifically improve safety by getting people to slow down; they work by actually making the road more dangerous.
So yeah, take away visibility, add obstructions, and narrow the road, and I'll drive slower - But little Billy playing in the road around an artificially-imposed blind curve will still get splattered, because some genius at the DOT decided to add a goddamned blind curve to a residential street!
I know we all like to impose our morality on the rest of the world, but hey, for a change, try this one - Make the roads wider, more straight, and with a larger building setback - And let us step on the gas for a change. And keep your damned kids out of the road if you want their insides to stay inside.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured?
Um, no.
I can assure you, as a mostly-colorblind person, that it has no resemblance whatsoever to those other issues.
I have a defect. One that, while it doesn't cause me all that many problems (and even gives a cute excuse for why I suck at fashion, when the real answer consists of nothing more than "Don't give a damn"), I would certainly "fix" in a heartbeat.
And for those of you asking how far we "should" go with this - Yes, I'll also take the UV/IR vision, the cat-like reflexes, and the prehensile tail in a heartbeat as well. But to make you feel better, I couldn't care less about the blonde hair, blue eyes, and "healthy" pallor.
I consider it the height of obscenity that the FDA officially considers "normalcy" not a condition to remedy. Fuck normalcy, give me my wings!
The Constitution explicitly says that the census is conducted in a manner determined by law, i.e., Title 13. What part of this do you not understand?
... in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
"The actual Enumeration shall be made
Let's start with the definition of the word "enumeration" - "to ascertain the number of : count". That part about "determined by law" doesn't say what they will collect, the sentence explicitly specifies that by the word "enumeration".
So yes, I.2.3 allows later discretion in how to conduct this COUNT. The government might send people door to door, it might delegate the task to individual towns, it might do it by mail, it might do it over the internet. But "it", in all those cases, has the same meaning, "count the people".
The constitution doesn't allow discretion in what to collect, only how.
I do have to admit, you have better legal cites than I do (IANAL, obviously). Regardless, I answered "2", and if they send someone around (and can actually find my house - Really quite difficult to see from the road, and amusingly enough, TomToms put my address about a mile away from its actual location), they'll get no more information from me (though I suppose they could guess my age and race, meeting in person). And if I get the first fine to stick in 40 years, well then, so it goes.
No-one wanted to "round up arabs" since that would have been stupid and done nothing.
;)
Wow, excellent grammar and spelling, for an 8 year old!
Seriously, do you remember the post-9/11 anti-Arab/anti-Islamic fervor that swept the US? Even otherwise-rational, compassionate people advocated some rather unpleasant measures.
Now, most of that has died down, almost a decade later. But if you don't seriously believe far too many people still want to round up and deport (or even kill) "them"... Well, I wouldn't recommend wearing a hajib in public in a few entire states.
Except that the constitution has this clause that you seem to miss that says they conduct the census "in such Manner as they shall by Law direct." And Title 13 allows them to collect such statistics. So basically you're wrong.
On your second point - Constitution trumps Title 13.
On your first point, we'll have to leave the interpretation of that up to the courts. Oh, wait - Already done, in response to this exact issue:
"Neither branch of the legislative department, still less any merely administrative body, established by congress, possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen." (05/26/1894, Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479)
"So basically you're wrong."
It is in your own best interest to let the local and national govt. know as much about the people they represent as possible.
Ahahahahahahaahahaaa.
Heh. >snrrrrrrk<
>ahem<
Just - No. I have never, in my entire life, found anything but a clear inverse relationship between "government information about me" and "my interests".
They use my gender to threaten me for opposing the SSA. They use my age to dictate when I can drive, when I can drink, when I can die in a pissing match between old men, and when I can retire. They use my address to decide how much I have to pay for my neighbors' brats to go to their daily socialized babysitting. They use my race to deny me access to various funds because, regardless of my situation, people of my skin color haven't suffered enough in the past 200 years. They use my phone number to piss me off at dinner time every election season.
The one bit of information they have the authority to collect, an "enumeration" of the citizenry, I will gladly answer so my state can have the right number of asshats I've never met hanging out in DC strip clubs while deciding how to slice us up and serve us to their corporate owners. The rest of it, they can charge me my $100 (which hasn't happened since 1970, when the courts overturned exactly such a fine) and go pound sand.
No it doesnt. An application for your local grocery customer loyalty program usually asks more questions. Even the registration form for most home appliances asks for more.
Key difference - Both of those count as strictly voluntary, of which the former carries no penalties for simply lying, and no one actually fills out the latter (if it breaks in a week, take it back to the store regardless of the stupid note in the box saying very clearly not to take it back to the store; and if it lasts a week, it will last pretty much forever).