Because, of course, terrorists are using unencrypted
email to plan their misdeeds.
Some do. The stupid ones that keep getting caught do.
The rest (including the successful ones) either don't
use email at all, or they use all the best privacy-protecting
tools available.
Re:At least *we* could try to get it right...
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 1
What exactly are you smoking? So I've got an embedded pc thing, all it
has for storage or memory is flash.
That counts as a relatively unusual situation and you know it. Don't
play naive.
Yes, we may understand that, fundamentally, you can use battery-backed RAM
as storage and HDDs as virtual memory... But we make can say that fully understanding
what we say and the difference between the two. When Joe Average conflates RAM and HDD,
he does so because he has no grasp of the difference, not because he understands
the difference so thoroughly that he can look beyond that and speak of the similarities.
Yes, people get confused at talk about ram as if it was a hard drive
And for that reason, we of all people need to use care in how we
refer to such things. The FP clearly didn't mean to refer to something used as
RAM, it meant to refer to storage. And not in the flash "memory" sense, in the
"big HDD" sense.
At least *we* could try to get it right...
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 0
digital video recorders with terabytes of memory
To think, we often wonder how Joe Average can manage to screw up
such a basic concept, and now we get it in a Slashdot FP???
C'mon, guys - Memory != Storage. Write it 100 times.
Can someone please explain to me why you are willing to pay astronomical monthly fees
for Netflix on a recurring basis and you might not even get your #1 choices? I just don't
understand how the business model survives.
Because first, I watch more than "three or four movies a month". I watch almost
no (live) television, preferring to wait until most series come out on DVD - No
commercials that way, sometimes a few extras, deleted scenes, and if I really want,
I can watch the whole season in one or two nights.
Second, at a mere 1 DVD every other day (NetFlix's infamous throttling has
gotten a bit better over time, I can actually get a turnaround now of perhaps
20 per month, two every three days), I pay about the same price per
disk (if not less!) as you do at the kiosk, making that "astronomical"
fee of $16.99/mo not really all that bad. Compared to my cable TV bill,
almost 5x higher and I watch it less, I'd hardly call Netflix all
that expensive.
Third, I won't say I don't like any "mainstream" movies, but fewer than a dozen
Hollywood hits come out per year that I have the least interest in seeing
(and usually only one or two per year that I really want to see).
Your Kiosk contains nothing else but those top-24 blockbusters
of the year. Instead, I mostly prefer imports, such as old Brittish
comedy series (not just MP and its derivatives, either - Red Dward,
Young Ones, and so on). Even Blockbuster doesn't carry most of what I
watch, but NetFlix has it all.
And finally, even having the kiosk somewhere you go every day, you still
need to actually stop and use it. I get home, and at least every other
day I have a DVD waiting in my mailbox.
I just don't understand how the business model survives.
I'll second that, but direct it toward any brick-n-mortar stores,
or even those Kiosks you personally favor. I don't get why NetFlix
hasn't completely driven the rest of them out of business yet.
Though in fairness, I suspect your own movie-watching habits more
closely match the mainstream than mine do... You watch only a few
movies a month, mostly recent Hollywood hits, and don't plan what
you want to watch in advance (perhaps that morning with the SO, but
not usually longer than that). For that demographic, NetFlix does
indeed cost somewhat more (though still a hell of a lot less
than even one rentals per week at BB), choice means nothing, and
even the inconvenience of needing to go out to get a movie occurs
infrequently enough not to annoy you.
Because the mind of an over-50 is likely superior to that of a drink-addled
undergrad, at first there was uncertainty about whether older users would find
the Facebook-led social-networking phenomena attractive.
I've passed my [drink]-addled college years and haven't passed 50 yet, but I have
to say, FP author, you've managed to write a summary that insults pretty much
everybody! Kudos!
That said, clearly the presense of these older folks on the
ego-aggregator networks demonstrates that some of them still do
have drink-addled minds.
A recent study showed that nearly one third of Facebook users are aged
between 35 and 54
Statistics abuse time - That also means that a third of facebook users
have ages between 35 and 84! Quick, re-write the FP title,
the Octogenarian Invasion has begun!
One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses
that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency
can build enough energy to disrupt the shell.
And we could call it "Viruses to destroy record players
by". Oops, I mean sharks.
They worked hard to get here first, and they want to
make their money off of it before others crack it also.
Well deserved in my opinion.
And we all know how well that will work...
"Hey, we have this great new idea that appeals primarily(1)
to pirates. Let's sell it, because they'd never just
pirate our ripping software!"
Anyway, this gives us proof-of-concept. I'd guess we'll have
a FOSS version within a month, now that all the cryptogeeks
know a solution exists.
1 - Yes, plenty of us use "access control
circumvention technology" to rip CDs and DVDs we
actually own to our home media servers. If you think
we "ethical rippers" make up even a tiny fraction
of the target market for such programs, however, I
have a bridge for sale on the cheap...
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles
into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous
editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
Because Trivipedia serves a different purpose than Wikipedia.
If I want to know what character slept with the protagonist's sister
in the third year of a webcomic, I'd check Trivipedia. If I want an
overall plot synopsis and a quick rundown of main characters, with
a real-world history of the comic and some info about the author
(possibly including a link to a page specific to the author rather
than the comic), that belongs on Wikipedia.
Wiki has a huge edge over dead-tree encyclopedias ONLY in the
quality of its "non-notable" content. If I want to know about Joseph
Stalin, I can pick up the Brittanica. If I want to know about Stephen
Colbert, I check Wiki.
Let's see now... Joel and the original cast, or some random schmuck who
owns the rights to Joel's creation? Tough call.
I never "hated" Mike like some did, because he just filled
a role. But I think we can almost all agree that Joel
made the show (literally and figuratively), a fact
supported by its demise once he left.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily,
but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is
not good. It can run both ways.
One flaw with that...
Wiki has evolved into a useful resource for looking up information - Not always
the authoritative source, but if I don't recognize a concept, I'll usually check
Wiki first.
Now, in the long run, every article should evolve into something well-written
and fully referenced. In the short term, even a two-sentence summary of something
only briefly popular does a world more good than nothing. Yeah, what amounts to a
promotional blurb for a minor webcomic doesn't exactly qualify as high-quality reference
material - But as opposed to a blank page?
In the loooooooong term, humanity itself fails the "notability"
requirement. Unless Wiki evolves into a math and physics oriented
reference, calling "WWII" notable and "Full Frontal Nerdity" not, amounts
to nothing less than purely subjective discrimination.
He is just showing the world that they are building their revenues on monopoly
Except, Apple doesn't have a monopoly. In anything.
They have a music player like a dozen others (except more expensive). They have a
phone/player like half a dozen others (except more expensive). They have a PC like
a hundred others (I won't say it lest I start a flamewar).
And they have an OS. Not a bad OS, mind you, but since it only (officially)
runs on their version of a PC, they've rather severely limited their customer
base with that one...
So... Apple has its flaws, but you can't count "monopolist" among them.
you need to know that anything shrinkwrapped on your shelves is direct from the
manufacturer or was inspected by your staff to verify it was pristine before shrinkwrapping.
You also need to know that you can trust your employees for that to hold any water. When
you specialize in low prices (seriously though, do these massively-overpriced stores only
prey on people who've never actually seen that newfangled intarweb thang?) by paying your staff a
pittance, you can't trust your staff, period. They have nothing to lose (they know most stores won't
press charges for internal affairs due to the PR).
Solution? Open everything (over a certain "willing to eat the cost" value right
at the counter. If possible, test it out (obviously not possible for a HDD, and for
electronics, I would advise against opening the static bag until ready to install). That
way, you not only know you have the desired product, you can ask the clerk to throw away
the massive amounts of packaging for a tiny object.
The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range
and frequency response the human ear is capable of.
I agree completely with everything else you said, but one peeve on this
part...
CDs can theoretically exceed the human dynamic range by a good 16-20db. The
problem arises in that humans can annoyingly hear sounds a few orders of magnitude
lower than we "should" have the ability to.
As for frequency response, that depends on whether you consider the skin a "hearing"
organ. Very few humans, and only young ones at that, can hear over 22050Hz;
On the low end, though, we can "sense" sounds down to below 1Hz, we just don't use our
ears for that particular task.
None of that, however, has anything to do with the flaws of vinyl-vs-CDs. In
every measureable way, CDs beat vinyl hands-down. For low frequency, CDs can
encode true DC. For high frequency, a stylus has a mass greater than zero
(so much greater, in fact, that even the best-of-the-best can barely push
15Hz, insidee the standard human hearing range). And as for compression,
that has far more to do with the engineer's mood than with the final form
factor.
So I'm going to put on my wizard hat and rub the ol' crystal
ball, and tell you how I see computing in the future.
Oddly enough, I agree with most of what you said except
the power requirements...
Although we do indeed now have 1KW PSUs, the average draw has
finally started to go back down. Yeah, you can load a quad-core
box with dual-SLI 8800s, and push 600W idle, but most people
don't. Now that the era of P4s has finally ended, nice
efficient dual-core CPUs now throttle themselves back to match
the load. We can already realistically replace HDDs with flash
in most desktop machines (though still at quite a price premium).
20-50W LCDs have almost entirely replaced 150-300W CRTs.
So I see the power draw fragmenting even more... Gamers will indeed
have 5KW rigs, while Grandma will have a modest 50W "appliance", and
the "how low can you go" crowd will consider a whole Watt
shamelessly wasteful.
Yeah, locking people out of the voting process because they
fall below some standard you set makes for a great defence of democracy.
We live in a republic, not a democracy, precisely because
the Founding Fathers recognized the masses as complete idiots and didn't
want "for the children" arguments to carry every election.
Of course, they had it right, but failed to recognize the power of
hundreds of millions of emotional monkeys all voting on the same hotbutton
issues.
Where would I find one of these major-cc-backed "gift cards" for loading
"Where" does not matter so much as "what".
The key distinction in requiring a SS# seems to involve whether or not third-parties
can issue non-refund credits to the card. Obviously, this has nothing
to do with "security" or "terrorism", and everything to do with
offshore gambling (ie, if you have no way to cash out, you probably won't play).
Currently, I know of two "major" cards that you can still (or at least, could five
or six months ago) get anonymously - Amex gift cards, and the "Vanilla Visa Gift Card".
At least CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid (I expect you have at least one
of those chains in your area) carry both of those. One warning, though - The
store may require more from you than the card itself does. I've had trouble
at CVS, for example, with buying a simple low-value (something like $60) money
order - They wanted an ID, I didn't feel inclined to provide one (call me a
privacy freak if you will). Since the clerk had already printed it, the manager
"settled" for my signing the money order in his presence (not a problem, I don't
mind making up names on the spot).
and you cannot get one of those things without entering Social Security numbers and everything.
Yes, actually, you can.
I have one (several, actually, over the past few years) that I use for low-value
internet purchases from "questionable" sites (*cough*AllOfMP3*cough*), where I want to
either cap the maximum amount they could potentially screw me out of to whatever I have
on the card (I usually get them in $100 increments), or avoid easy (short of subpoenaing
my ISP) traceability back to me.
You just go into a store, pay cash, and give a fake name. I have yet to produce ID or a SS# to
buy or use one.
Perhaps the problem involves what your friend tried to get - You don't want a "prepaid" CC,
which works just like a real CC except you pay up-front; you want a visa/mc/whatever "gift card".
Works exactly the same, minus the need to give any sort of personal information (they do require
some sort of name, but only because all cards have a field for it; and for online purchases,
you can't get carded to verify the name).
And no free speech for their employees either! I mean, that's what you meant right?
Nice try.
Actual live human employees, in their role as such, already have significantly
weaker free speech rights than their legal-fictional nonhuman employers.
The first amendment doesn't apply to employers. People can and have found themselves
suddenly unemployed for blogging about mundane issues at work (or even for blogging
about non-work issues where they "scared" a coworker with their ideas); political
bumper stickers; ranting about their boss or their job to the "wrong" person; sending
"unapproved" emails from work, even on work-related topics that later prove embarassing;
and I could go on.
Don't play obtuse - When a human in marketing "speaks" about the company, they do so
on behalf of the company. The human, working somewhere else, would not have made
even remotely similar statements. Thus I have no inconsistancy in wishing to limit
the former while promoting the latter.
Do you think corporations ought to have the same First Amendment rights as citizens?
Sure - Just as soon as they take on all the biological frailties of humans - In particular, the
finite lifespan, the ability to suffer as a result of imprisonment, and the hope for and fear of
the future for their childrens' sakes (rather than for the quarterly balance sheet's sake).
As soon as they have all of that, they can have free speech.
Nonono, don't blame the country, blame the asshats who push for idiocy like this.
Try:
Fioroni, who only defend retards for the familial resemblance, molests dead sheep;
Ricardo Levi takes sloppy seconds while snorting lines of coke off the penises
of 8YO boys. And they both smell funny. And... Uhhh... I dunno, something about
watching too many American mafia movies if I could find the right phrasing to make
it insulting but not just a racist joke, and some sort of insult to the pope for good
measure.
could someone explain to me what right she had to use the song in the video?
I have to suspect you as a troll, but since you phrased it so politely...
The song played in the backround. In Real Life. The baby danced to it. The
whole sickening glurge-factor aside (I agree, "for the kids" has no more meaning
for "us" than it does for "them"), "documentary" falls well within the bounds of
"fair use". And even if it didn't, the scene still happened. You can argue with
the law, you can't argue with reality.
So, what right does she have to the song? The same right you or I or anyone has to
their own lives, to our own culture, and to hell with the law if someone
can twist it to say otherwise. I can tell you my day sucked, and Hoover can go pound
sand.
our only real skills are memorization, problem domain reduction, patience, discipline, and critical thought
I would agree with that completely. Anyone who focuses on specific skills such as language-X or web-platform-Y just
doesn't "get" it.
However, at least two of those "skills", critical thought and problem domain reduction (I like that term - Your own
phrasing, or the newest buzzword for the same ol' idea?), not everyone has the capacity to learn.
Not a matter of dedication or intelligence, I've known plenty of dedicated, intelligent people who simply can't grasp
the idea that my job consists of nothing more than reducing big, seemingly-intractable problems down to a set of
small, easily-solved ones (much less do the same). No amount of education (or at least, no amount of time in our current education
system) can remedy that.
Once I come to that conclusion, I can't help but wonder if I even want to be so rare.
Agreed completely... It often disturbs me how little critical thought most people put
into everyday tasks. Even the absolutely basic "does this make sense in its own context"
slips past unasked.
People fight over politics, without noticing that the elephants and asses do the same exact
things. People fight over imaginary lines on a map. People fight over which fictional group
of "warriors" will win at the stadium this week, as though it matters in some way.
People beg the government to save them from a 0.001% chance of death at the hand of flashy "bad
people", while daily facing almost the exact same risk of death or serious injury merely getting
in their car and driving to work.
The single biggest cost for most people is housing. Housing cannot be offshored,
and the housing market is actually depressed compared to last year.
Which only affects you if you want to buy or sell a house now - Not actually a
large percentage of the population at any given time. For renting, only
what the landlords believe the worth of their properties matters.
The house sales market has plummetted, mostly because people would rather
stay in what they have now than sell below cost, even if it would save them money
in the long-term. On the flip side of that, although what sell does so way
below asking, the (initial) asking prices remain high. As a result, rental
prices have basically remained at their bubble-peak level, and will simply stay
flat until the housing market catches up.
Until they make it possible to rewrite as many times as you
can on a traditional hard drive, why would you need one so big?
Decent wear-levelling algorithms accomplished that at the interface
level almost 20 years ago. On top of that, modern flash usually
has some degree of on-chip healing capability (remapping failed blocks
from a small pool of reserved good ones).
Virtually all of the traditional objections to flash no longer
apply. They last longer than HDDs, they can read/write faster
(at a bulk level - Each individual block still takes longer,
but unlike HDDs you can basically read/write every block in
the device at once), and many of them now "look" like plain
ol' ATA devices, meaning you can simply use them as drop-in
replacements for traditional HDDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, of course, terrorists are using unencrypted email to plan their misdeeds.
Some do. The stupid ones that keep getting caught do.
The rest (including the successful ones) either don't use email at all, or they use all the best privacy-protecting tools available.
What exactly are you smoking? So I've got an embedded pc thing, all it has for storage or memory is flash.
That counts as a relatively unusual situation and you know it. Don't play naive.
Yes, we may understand that, fundamentally, you can use battery-backed RAM as storage and HDDs as virtual memory... But we make can say that fully understanding what we say and the difference between the two. When Joe Average conflates RAM and HDD, he does so because he has no grasp of the difference, not because he understands the difference so thoroughly that he can look beyond that and speak of the similarities.
Yes, people get confused at talk about ram as if it was a hard drive
And for that reason, we of all people need to use care in how we refer to such things. The FP clearly didn't mean to refer to something used as RAM, it meant to refer to storage. And not in the flash "memory" sense, in the "big HDD" sense.
digital video recorders with terabytes of memory
To think, we often wonder how Joe Average can manage to screw up such a basic concept, and now we get it in a Slashdot FP???
C'mon, guys - Memory != Storage. Write it 100 times.
Can someone please explain to me why you are willing to pay astronomical monthly fees for Netflix on a recurring basis and you might not even get your #1 choices? I just don't understand how the business model survives.
Because first, I watch more than "three or four movies a month". I watch almost no (live) television, preferring to wait until most series come out on DVD - No commercials that way, sometimes a few extras, deleted scenes, and if I really want, I can watch the whole season in one or two nights.
Second, at a mere 1 DVD every other day (NetFlix's infamous throttling has gotten a bit better over time, I can actually get a turnaround now of perhaps 20 per month, two every three days), I pay about the same price per disk (if not less!) as you do at the kiosk, making that "astronomical" fee of $16.99/mo not really all that bad. Compared to my cable TV bill, almost 5x higher and I watch it less, I'd hardly call Netflix all that expensive.
Third, I won't say I don't like any "mainstream" movies, but fewer than a dozen Hollywood hits come out per year that I have the least interest in seeing (and usually only one or two per year that I really want to see). Your Kiosk contains nothing else but those top-24 blockbusters of the year. Instead, I mostly prefer imports, such as old Brittish comedy series (not just MP and its derivatives, either - Red Dward, Young Ones, and so on). Even Blockbuster doesn't carry most of what I watch, but NetFlix has it all.
And finally, even having the kiosk somewhere you go every day, you still need to actually stop and use it. I get home, and at least every other day I have a DVD waiting in my mailbox.
I just don't understand how the business model survives.
I'll second that, but direct it toward any brick-n-mortar stores, or even those Kiosks you personally favor. I don't get why NetFlix hasn't completely driven the rest of them out of business yet.
Though in fairness, I suspect your own movie-watching habits more closely match the mainstream than mine do... You watch only a few movies a month, mostly recent Hollywood hits, and don't plan what you want to watch in advance (perhaps that morning with the SO, but not usually longer than that). For that demographic, NetFlix does indeed cost somewhat more (though still a hell of a lot less than even one rentals per week at BB), choice means nothing, and even the inconvenience of needing to go out to get a movie occurs infrequently enough not to annoy you.
Because the mind of an over-50 is likely superior to that of a drink-addled undergrad, at first there was uncertainty about whether older users would find the Facebook-led social-networking phenomena attractive.
I've passed my [drink]-addled college years and haven't passed 50 yet, but I have to say, FP author, you've managed to write a summary that insults pretty much everybody! Kudos!
That said, clearly the presense of these older folks on the ego-aggregator networks demonstrates that some of them still do have drink-addled minds.
A recent study showed that nearly one third of Facebook users are aged between 35 and 54
Statistics abuse time - That also means that a third of facebook users have ages between 35 and 84! Quick, re-write the FP title, the Octogenarian Invasion has begun!
One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency can build enough energy to disrupt the shell.
And we could call it "Viruses to destroy record players by". Oops, I mean sharks.
If the nude textures were already on the disc,
Of course they already exist on the disc... Mattel just hid them under the ordinary textures using one-time pad encryption.
We just need to find the decryption key that restores them to their original AO-rated glory.
They worked hard to get here first, and they want to make their money off of it before others crack it also. Well deserved in my opinion.
And we all know how well that will work...
"Hey, we have this great new idea that appeals primarily(1) to pirates. Let's sell it, because they'd never just pirate our ripping software!"
Anyway, this gives us proof-of-concept. I'd guess we'll have a FOSS version within a month, now that all the cryptogeeks know a solution exists.
1 - Yes, plenty of us use "access control circumvention technology" to rip CDs and DVDs we actually own to our home media servers. If you think we "ethical rippers" make up even a tiny fraction of the target market for such programs, however, I have a bridge for sale on the cheap...
Why don't they just move all the non-notable articles into a Trivipedia? Wouldn't that make both overzealous editors and fancruft-fans etc happy?
Because Trivipedia serves a different purpose than Wikipedia.
If I want to know what character slept with the protagonist's sister in the third year of a webcomic, I'd check Trivipedia. If I want an overall plot synopsis and a quick rundown of main characters, with a real-world history of the comic and some info about the author (possibly including a link to a page specific to the author rather than the comic), that belongs on Wikipedia.
Wiki has a huge edge over dead-tree encyclopedias ONLY in the quality of its "non-notable" content. If I want to know about Joseph Stalin, I can pick up the Brittanica. If I want to know about Stephen Colbert, I check Wiki.
Unfortunately it's in separate projects
Let's see now... Joel and the original cast, or some random schmuck who owns the rights to Joel's creation? Tough call.
I never "hated" Mike like some did, because he just filled a role. But I think we can almost all agree that Joel made the show (literally and figuratively), a fact supported by its demise once he left.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good. It can run both ways.
One flaw with that...
Wiki has evolved into a useful resource for looking up information - Not always the authoritative source, but if I don't recognize a concept, I'll usually check Wiki first.
Now, in the long run, every article should evolve into something well-written and fully referenced. In the short term, even a two-sentence summary of something only briefly popular does a world more good than nothing. Yeah, what amounts to a promotional blurb for a minor webcomic doesn't exactly qualify as high-quality reference material - But as opposed to a blank page?
In the loooooooong term, humanity itself fails the "notability" requirement. Unless Wiki evolves into a math and physics oriented reference, calling "WWII" notable and "Full Frontal Nerdity" not, amounts to nothing less than purely subjective discrimination.
He is just showing the world that they are building their revenues on monopoly
Except, Apple doesn't have a monopoly. In anything.
They have a music player like a dozen others (except more expensive). They have a phone/player like half a dozen others (except more expensive). They have a PC like a hundred others (I won't say it lest I start a flamewar).
And they have an OS. Not a bad OS, mind you, but since it only (officially) runs on their version of a PC, they've rather severely limited their customer base with that one...
So... Apple has its flaws, but you can't count "monopolist" among them.
you need to know that anything shrinkwrapped on your shelves is direct from the manufacturer or was inspected by your staff to verify it was pristine before shrinkwrapping.
You also need to know that you can trust your employees for that to hold any water. When you specialize in low prices (seriously though, do these massively-overpriced stores only prey on people who've never actually seen that newfangled intarweb thang?) by paying your staff a pittance, you can't trust your staff, period. They have nothing to lose (they know most stores won't press charges for internal affairs due to the PR).
Solution? Open everything (over a certain "willing to eat the cost" value right at the counter. If possible, test it out (obviously not possible for a HDD, and for electronics, I would advise against opening the static bag until ready to install). That way, you not only know you have the desired product, you can ask the clerk to throw away the massive amounts of packaging for a tiny object.
The Redbook standard is a tad short of the maximum theoretical dynamic range and frequency response the human ear is capable of.
I agree completely with everything else you said, but one peeve on this part...
CDs can theoretically exceed the human dynamic range by a good 16-20db. The problem arises in that humans can annoyingly hear sounds a few orders of magnitude lower than we "should" have the ability to.
As for frequency response, that depends on whether you consider the skin a "hearing" organ. Very few humans, and only young ones at that, can hear over 22050Hz; On the low end, though, we can "sense" sounds down to below 1Hz, we just don't use our ears for that particular task.
None of that, however, has anything to do with the flaws of vinyl-vs-CDs. In every measureable way, CDs beat vinyl hands-down. For low frequency, CDs can encode true DC. For high frequency, a stylus has a mass greater than zero (so much greater, in fact, that even the best-of-the-best can barely push 15Hz, insidee the standard human hearing range). And as for compression, that has far more to do with the engineer's mood than with the final form factor.
So I'm going to put on my wizard hat and rub the ol' crystal ball, and tell you how I see computing in the future.
Oddly enough, I agree with most of what you said except the power requirements...
Although we do indeed now have 1KW PSUs, the average draw has finally started to go back down. Yeah, you can load a quad-core box with dual-SLI 8800s, and push 600W idle, but most people don't. Now that the era of P4s has finally ended, nice efficient dual-core CPUs now throttle themselves back to match the load. We can already realistically replace HDDs with flash in most desktop machines (though still at quite a price premium). 20-50W LCDs have almost entirely replaced 150-300W CRTs.
So I see the power draw fragmenting even more... Gamers will indeed have 5KW rigs, while Grandma will have a modest 50W "appliance", and the "how low can you go" crowd will consider a whole Watt shamelessly wasteful.
Everything else, though, I'd call spot-on.
Yeah, locking people out of the voting process because they fall below some standard you set makes for a great defence of democracy.
We live in a republic, not a democracy, precisely because the Founding Fathers recognized the masses as complete idiots and didn't want "for the children" arguments to carry every election.
Of course, they had it right, but failed to recognize the power of hundreds of millions of emotional monkeys all voting on the same hotbutton issues.
Where would I find one of these major-cc-backed "gift cards" for loading
"Where" does not matter so much as "what".
The key distinction in requiring a SS# seems to involve whether or not third-parties can issue non-refund credits to the card. Obviously, this has nothing to do with "security" or "terrorism", and everything to do with offshore gambling (ie, if you have no way to cash out, you probably won't play).
Currently, I know of two "major" cards that you can still (or at least, could five or six months ago) get anonymously - Amex gift cards, and the "Vanilla Visa Gift Card".
At least CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid (I expect you have at least one of those chains in your area) carry both of those. One warning, though - The store may require more from you than the card itself does. I've had trouble at CVS, for example, with buying a simple low-value (something like $60) money order - They wanted an ID, I didn't feel inclined to provide one (call me a privacy freak if you will). Since the clerk had already printed it, the manager "settled" for my signing the money order in his presence (not a problem, I don't mind making up names on the spot).
and you cannot get one of those things without entering Social Security numbers and everything.
Yes, actually, you can.
I have one (several, actually, over the past few years) that I use for low-value internet purchases from "questionable" sites (*cough*AllOfMP3*cough*), where I want to either cap the maximum amount they could potentially screw me out of to whatever I have on the card (I usually get them in $100 increments), or avoid easy (short of subpoenaing my ISP) traceability back to me.
You just go into a store, pay cash, and give a fake name. I have yet to produce ID or a SS# to buy or use one.
Perhaps the problem involves what your friend tried to get - You don't want a "prepaid" CC, which works just like a real CC except you pay up-front; you want a visa/mc/whatever "gift card". Works exactly the same, minus the need to give any sort of personal information (they do require some sort of name, but only because all cards have a field for it; and for online purchases, you can't get carded to verify the name).
And no free speech for their employees either! I mean, that's what you meant right?
Nice try.
Actual live human employees, in their role as such, already have significantly weaker free speech rights than their legal-fictional nonhuman employers.
The first amendment doesn't apply to employers. People can and have found themselves suddenly unemployed for blogging about mundane issues at work (or even for blogging about non-work issues where they "scared" a coworker with their ideas); political bumper stickers; ranting about their boss or their job to the "wrong" person; sending "unapproved" emails from work, even on work-related topics that later prove embarassing; and I could go on.
Don't play obtuse - When a human in marketing "speaks" about the company, they do so on behalf of the company. The human, working somewhere else, would not have made even remotely similar statements. Thus I have no inconsistancy in wishing to limit the former while promoting the latter.
Do you think corporations ought to have the same First Amendment rights as citizens?
Sure - Just as soon as they take on all the biological frailties of humans - In particular, the finite lifespan, the ability to suffer as a result of imprisonment, and the hope for and fear of the future for their childrens' sakes (rather than for the quarterly balance sheet's sake).
As soon as they have all of that, they can have free speech.
Until then - No cookie for them!
Italy sucks! Regulate that.
Nonono, don't blame the country, blame the asshats who push for idiocy like this.
Try:
Fioroni, who only defend retards for the familial resemblance, molests dead sheep; Ricardo Levi takes sloppy seconds while snorting lines of coke off the penises of 8YO boys. And they both smell funny. And... Uhhh... I dunno, something about watching too many American mafia movies if I could find the right phrasing to make it insulting but not just a racist joke, and some sort of insult to the pope for good measure.
Oh hell. Lost it there.
Doodie!
could someone explain to me what right she had to use the song in the video?
I have to suspect you as a troll, but since you phrased it so politely...
The song played in the backround. In Real Life. The baby danced to it. The whole sickening glurge-factor aside (I agree, "for the kids" has no more meaning for "us" than it does for "them"), "documentary" falls well within the bounds of "fair use". And even if it didn't, the scene still happened. You can argue with the law, you can't argue with reality.
So, what right does she have to the song? The same right you or I or anyone has to their own lives, to our own culture, and to hell with the law if someone can twist it to say otherwise. I can tell you my day sucked, and Hoover can go pound sand.
our only real skills are memorization, problem domain reduction, patience, discipline, and critical thought
I would agree with that completely. Anyone who focuses on specific skills such as language-X or web-platform-Y just doesn't "get" it.
However, at least two of those "skills", critical thought and problem domain reduction (I like that term - Your own phrasing, or the newest buzzword for the same ol' idea?), not everyone has the capacity to learn.
Not a matter of dedication or intelligence, I've known plenty of dedicated, intelligent people who simply can't grasp the idea that my job consists of nothing more than reducing big, seemingly-intractable problems down to a set of small, easily-solved ones (much less do the same). No amount of education (or at least, no amount of time in our current education system) can remedy that.
Once I come to that conclusion, I can't help but wonder if I even want to be so rare.
Agreed completely... It often disturbs me how little critical thought most people put into everyday tasks. Even the absolutely basic "does this make sense in its own context" slips past unasked.
People fight over politics, without noticing that the elephants and asses do the same exact things. People fight over imaginary lines on a map. People fight over which fictional group of "warriors" will win at the stadium this week, as though it matters in some way. People beg the government to save them from a 0.001% chance of death at the hand of flashy "bad people", while daily facing almost the exact same risk of death or serious injury merely getting in their car and driving to work.
We, as a species, have problems.
The single biggest cost for most people is housing. Housing cannot be offshored, and the housing market is actually depressed compared to last year.
Which only affects you if you want to buy or sell a house now - Not actually a large percentage of the population at any given time. For renting, only what the landlords believe the worth of their properties matters.
The house sales market has plummetted, mostly because people would rather stay in what they have now than sell below cost, even if it would save them money in the long-term. On the flip side of that, although what sell does so way below asking, the (initial) asking prices remain high. As a result, rental prices have basically remained at their bubble-peak level, and will simply stay flat until the housing market catches up.
Until they make it possible to rewrite as many times as you can on a traditional hard drive, why would you need one so big?
Decent wear-levelling algorithms accomplished that at the interface level almost 20 years ago. On top of that, modern flash usually has some degree of on-chip healing capability (remapping failed blocks from a small pool of reserved good ones).
Virtually all of the traditional objections to flash no longer apply. They last longer than HDDs, they can read/write faster (at a bulk level - Each individual block still takes longer, but unlike HDDs you can basically read/write every block in the device at once), and many of them now "look" like plain ol' ATA devices, meaning you can simply use them as drop-in replacements for traditional HDDs.