While I admire this fella's initiative, wouldn't it just have been easier to buy a small form factor computer? We use Compaq Deskpro EN SFF systems where I work. They're roughly the size of a small pizza box, only twice as thick.
Do what I did. I dropped Ameritech and went wireless all the way last year. Rates are pretty reasonable and the service is far more flexible. Plus you don't have to deal with their incompetence.
Depends. I have a 19" monitor and Diablo II looked like crap on my system. It was all blocky and ugly. Bumping it to a higher resolution would have smoothed some of that out (by making it smaller) and maybe even allowed me to see more of my surroundings at once.
I tried playing multiplayer a couple of times with some friends, and with 2 people on the screen at the same time there isn't a lot of room to maneuver. Granted, you don't have to stay on the screen together, but it makes it easier to play if you can tell when your partners are in trouble.
Now if they'd get with the modern era and put in a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 mode, we'd be in business.
Wow, do I know that feeling. I got hooked on Thief and Half-Life when they first came out in a big way. I'd go to work, come home, play till midnite, sleep till 5:00 AM, go to work, and so on. Then I quit my job (for professional reasons). I played non-stop (except for food, sleep, and mother nature) until I had beaten both games (And I went through Thief on each of the three difficulty settings too!). Then and only then did I finally re-write my resume and start looking for work again.
I recently bought the eagerly anticipated Thief II many months after it's release, and I've only managed to have time to play through the first couple missions. And I've still never finished Ultima IX, (or 7 or 8 for that matter). It's too hard to find the time to finish it before the next shiny thing catches my attention.
Oddly enough, Diablo II wasn't that compelling for me. Sure, I beat it. But then I quit. There wasn't enough depth to hold my attention past beating it the first time, even in the areas of character development. Of course, I'd also been playing Ultima Online for awhile before that, so by comparison Diablo II was pretty dull.
Yes, but who owns UUNet? MCI-Worldcom. And if I'm not mistaken (I haven't worked at UUNet for almost a year now, though I do keep in touch) UUNet was being dissolved as a separate division becase MCI-Worldcom wanted to consolidate themselves into one large company rather than a collection of easy-to-break-up-and-sell smaller companies.
You overlooked redundancy... Hollywood, for the most part, produces unique things.
Sure they do. And I shit gold bricks.:-)
I seem to recall a couple years ago there was a movie called Volcano and another called Dante's Peak. The premise of both were that a previously dormant volcano becomes active and threatens a town, and the seismic researcher teams up with some hottie to save the day.
Then there was the whole Deep Impact/Armageddon summer, where we were bombarded by movies and TV shows about space rocks pummelling the earth and the end of humanity.
Then we had Independence Day, followed by Wild Wild West (Independence Day in the old west). Let's see...Scream came out, then I Know What You Did Last Summer. Then Scream 2, then I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Then Halloween-something-or other. All of which were takeoffs on Friday the 13th parts 1-9 and Halloween 1-3. We've got Star Trek I-VI plus a few more for good measure. Not to mention an endless stream of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Stephen Segal movies, James Bond movies and animated Disney feel-good flicks.
Does anyone else notice a trend here? Hollywood not only does not produce unique things (for the most part), but it's existence is due entirely to the fact that someone can come up with a reasonably entertaining formula and repackage it 100 times with different actors and settings(OK, Die Hard was good, so now we have Die Hard at an airport, on a plane, on a boat, on a bus, on an oil derrick...ad nauseum). Granted, there are independent films and Merchant Ivory productions, but they can hardly be equated with Hollywood now can they?
With regards to duplication between porn sites, this sub-thread was about why the Porn industry makes more money than Hollywood. But if you really wanna know, don't go to big commercial sites. Stick to the amateurs sites and you'll see very little duplication. Or so I "read in a study." (nudge nudge wink wink)
True, but I'd wonder if there are anymore hardcore fans of porn who spend thousands of dollars per year on it than there are hardcore fans of hollywood that spend thousands of dollars a year on it?
Buying tickets to see the same movie several times, buying the book about the movie, buying the movie when it comes out on DVD, buying all the trade rags/movie mags to see what new movies are coming out, etc...
If you look at publicly traded companies that own or run porn pay sites, they've been hit as hard as the rest of the tech sector. New Frontier Media (NASDAQ: NOOF) which runs iGallery.net (which in turn runs tits.com , pussy.com, etc.) went from $12 a share in April 2000 to around $2 a share today. Private Media (NASDAQ: PRVT), a major European porn publishing company which runs its own sites as well as has licensing deals with US net companies, went from $12.5 a share in April 2000 to around $6 a share today. Rick's Cabaret (NASDAQ: RICK), a Texas-based strip club company that runs several large sites, went from $5.50 a share in April to $2.25 a share today.
I think that this is flawed logic. When there is a serious market downturn everybody takes a hit. When the dot-com-er's are blamed for the downturn then those companies who are affiliated with the Internet will also take a steep downturn. It doesn't matter if you were making coffins, this economic downturn would have seriously lowered your stock price as compared to a year ago.
What you really should be comparing are the revenue figures for those same publicly traded companies.
First of all, I think you're on shaky ground when you make the arguement that an increase in the availability of child pornography online doesn't lead to a corresponding increase in the creation of child pornography. Name me one market that, when the demand for its product rises dramatically, doesn't respond with increased supply.
Well, you've got yourself all backwards on this point. Increased availability of child pornography online is the same as increased supply, not increased demand. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the number of child pornographers and consumers of said child pornography haven't changed much since the advent of the Internet. They just have a more effective way of sharing it now. Whereas before they were meeting in dark alleys or sending stuff through the mail (I seem to recall the local postmaster's office being involved in several busts a year before the Internet came along), now they don't have to leave home.
Interesting thought though...now that it's out there on the net we are hearing about more busts. I wonder if the Internet doesn't increase availability and therefore make targets more visible and therefore easier to catch for law enforcement?
The problem with that logic is that pedophiles will always want more. (That's the nature of addiction).
OK, let me preface this by saying that I'm all-out against kiddie-porn. I am absolutely in no way condoning it.
I think that you're making an awful big assumption to say that pedophiles are addicted (to sex, or sex with kids, or kiddie porn, or whatever). It could just be a simple preference. Just because I prefer my porn to include women who are blonde and have large breats doesn't mean that I'm addicted to blondes with large breasts. I just happen to like it better that way.
the California- based Marital and Sexuality Centre found that 75 per cent of those who enjoy adult Internet sites don't tell anyone about it.
This just wouldn't go past my bullshit filter. How can they know that 75% of pr0n surfers don't tell anyone about it, if they don't tell anyone about it ? If I say "No, I don't do xyzzy" then they can't turn around and say "Of all those who said No, we have found that 75% are liars."
This is about the fifth post that I've seen that said this. Are we really this dense when it comes to surveys? What they are saying is this:
When asked in an anonymous survey, 75% responded that they don't tell people that they enjoy online porn sites.
There's a big difference between telling your wife, co-workers, minister, kids, or whoever and checking a box on an anonymous survey form.
Sex-for-pay sites grew from 230 to 1,100 during the same period.
Since you brought it up, did anybody else think that the ratio of Sex-for-free vs. Sex-for-pay sites was way out of whack? They claimed something like 200 times the number of free sites than pay sites. And I haven't seen an actual free site in years. On the other hand, I feel like I must've seen more than 1100 pay sites in my day. There's something darn curious about those numbers...
IIRC, pornography makes more money than Hollywood, yet while 9 out of 10 people will admit to see a movie, only 1 out of 10 will admit to watching pornography.
That's because Hollywood is pretty much limited to TV and movies for revenue streams, and setting up movie companies, theatres, and TV stations is expensive business. To be successful in Hollywood generally requires extensive distribution networks and large amounts of up-front financing to retain the big names. When paying for a plot, people demand (to a degree) more quality.
Pornography is a little different. For one, there's more of it. Anyone with a camcorder and a couple VCR's can make pornographic movies. Anyone with a camera can take sexually explicit photos. Beyond that there's magazines, strip clubs, etc.
All you need is a web site and you've got worldwide distribution capability. Your talent doesn't demand multi-million dollar paychecks because people don't demand "the big names" as much as they do in Hollywood. You don't need talented and thoughtful script writers. For most people as long as there's nudity and sex it's good porn.
So compared to the porn industry, Hollywood is nothing. Hollywood has higher overhead and more limited distribution models than does the porn industry. Porn has it easy...no wonder it makes more money.
That being said...Yes, a large number of Americans are ashamed of sex. But no, I don't think that porn afficionados spend more money that Hollywood afficionados. There's just more people interested in porn (it's a survival instinct).
I wonder though... if they were to buy a big chunk of the internet, could they do the same thing? "If your traffic passes through our routers, we will sniff it and steal anything we like!"??
If they did, everyone and their mother would just route around their "chunk".
It would be so much less burden on the transatlantic links, and all the routers between me and/. if i could get the info from whoever has just read it in my town, or even street. You could solve all the bandwidth problems by sharing it out.
Sure you could, right up until you figure in all the traffic overhead necessary to determine whether or not a more local source has cached the article, which source of the cached article is closer to your current location, whether or not the data has been tampered with, and then finally transfer it to you. OK, sure, it's let's traffic on the transatlantic cables, but it doesn't make your access any faster.
And why are we discussing bandwidth issues when the topic is routing tables?
The reason that kids gang up on and bully other kids is....
That is what they are genetically programmed to do when they hit puberty! Yes folks, that's right. We are all victims of our genetic code...genetic code that is a holdover from the ancient hunter-gatherer societies of the past. In the past, these sort of aggressive, gang/tribe-building excercises would have served to strengthen individuals and tie together bands of men who would later in their life depend on that strength and those bonds for their very lives.
Behaviour of this sort is not only common among young males of nearly every species of mammal on the planet, it's standard. These behaviours are evolutionarily designed to sort out who the alpha males will be and who will be a part of the pack/tribe. Granted, we don't need these behaviours any more now that we live in a nice, modern, non-physically demanding (relative to our past) society. But you can't breed out a couple million years worth of evolutionary programming in 200 years. Especially when technological innovation is reducing the need for adaptation and thereby lessening the role of evolution in our species. Now the people whose behaviours are counter-productive don't die off (normally) and they can still introduce those behaviours into the next generation. Uh-oh!
Not that genetics is totally to blame for their behaviour...environment plays a part. Let's face it, the kind of pseudo-violent role determination that took place among adolescent males in ancient times is pretty much frowned on in today's environment. Ok, actually it's outright illegal most of the time. So what happens to these biological urges? You've got 2 options: You can express/channel a violent urge through violent/physical action (fighting, rough sports, etc), or you can repress it until it builds up to the point that you explode into physical/violent super-expression. There's no other way about it. BTW, I know this because when I was about 13 years old I tried to suppress those urges. I eventually popped and almost killed my father, after which my family very quickly found ways for me to channel those urges and that energy. I'm a normal, happy, healthy member of society nowadays.
But I digress...the point is, parents aren't involved enough with their children to know when these needs aren't being met. Parents don't know enough about children and teenagers and the reasons for their behaviours to be able to deal with this situation. Society is doing absolutely nothing to validate these feelings or urges in adolescent boys, let alone provide an outlet for them. Parents, teachers and legislators are obsessed with looking for the environmental source of the behaviour, and it's just not in the environment. The source of the behaviour is in the adolescent's nature. It's only brought out by the environment that we currently live in. Violent entertainment, school bullies, suicides, and mass shootings aren't the problem. They are merely the symptoms or effects of the problem. Until such time as this society realizes that they're looking at this backwards, they will not find a solution.
What the hell does 384K mean??? I mean, seriously. Try using the full abbreviation. Is it 384 KBps or 384 Kbps? There is a difference, by a factor of eight.
An analogue 56K modem is 56Kbits per second (in theory). A lot of cable and DSL modem providers advertise in KBytes per second. Some in Mbits per second. Ignorant users all too often think that it's MBytes because they simply see an Mb abbreviation and don't realize that an upper-case B is a Byte and a lower-case b is a bit.
As you can tell, this annoys the living shit out of me because even the other technical people that I work with don't seem to be able to tell the difference. You'd think in a forum about "News for Nerds" someone would get it.
Anyway...
When Windows reports my download speeds it tells me in KBps. I regularly use 300-400 KBps of bandwidth on downloads (usually limited by the server that I connect to). If I'm not mistaken, this roughly amounts to 2.4-3.2 Mbits per second. Upload is a bit harder to track. Just know that it's considerably slower. I've probably never seen more than 56 KBps outgoing on my system.
This is on Time Warner's RoadRunner service in Columbus, Ohio. Actually I live on the very outskirts of a Columbus suburb surrounded by cornfields, so my neighborhood utilization is probably lower than most. I hear a lot of complaints from people who live in the downtown and OSU campus area that RoadRunner is too slow so they had to switch to DSL. But it varies by neighborhood, and DT/Campus is pretty densely populated with tech-savvy people.
While I agree that it's important for people to have the widest possible exposure to a variety of different ways of thinking, I think that it's ridiculous to even consider trying to mandate it. Let's face it, some people just don't want to improve themselves. Others are too lazy. But here's the kicker: the people who get the widest exposure to new ideas, the people who are the most well-rounded intellectually and socially will be the ones most likely to be sucessful. The "me media" doesn't change that at all. And so Darwin is still going to favor "new thinkers."
Moderation systems like Slashdot uses are useful in that they do not "censor" ideas that are less popular but that they draw more attention to the ideas that more interesting, insgihtful, funny, whatever. I still read posts scored 1, just not every last one of them. I do read all posts scored at 2 or higher. But Slashdot's system I think may be a little different in that it severely limits the amount of moderation that any one individual can do. I think that's a Good Thing. More importantly, it's all voluntary. I can read messages scored at -1 if I want to.
I read about this very subject 4 or 5 years ago when the "push revolution" was beginning. The concern then was that Internet use would become passive (no more browsing) and that we would constantly be provided with information that we found interesting, relevant, or idealogically reasonable and that we wouldn't be provided with anything conflicting. It hasn't happened yet, and "push" technology is dead. I don't think that it's ever going to happen.
What we are really talking about is narrowcasting, and I think that it is a Good Thing as long as it is an option that is controlled by the user. As long as broadcasting is still an option and browsing is still an option users will not be able to accidentally paint themselves into a single idealogy.
Take for example (again) Slashdot. I'm constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas from it just by browsing it daily. I see hundreds of messages on each topic, and never have they all taken the same stance. There are always naysayers and yaysayers, and many degrees in between. And I'm exposed to their thinking (for better or worse) regularly.
Now I think back 100 years before the widespread growth of communications technology. Or maybe 200 years. We (most of us) would have grown up in some small town or village or on a farm, for all intents and purposes isolated from almost all other people who were not also farmers (or lived in the same village/town). We would have lived isolated from new ideas. We wouldn't have any way of hearing about a breakthrough in the invention of a combustion engine. But it still happened.
So even if we are still isolated intellectually (which I think requires a ridiculous amount of passivity on the part of everybody) innovation will find a way. Someone somewhere will continue to come up with new ideas and new technology. I mean, let's face it: we're human beings. It's what we do.
One outcome of this is that when the big fish eats the little fish it shouldn't lay people off- let the process happen by attrition. The ones who don't want to stay are the ones who couldn't cut the mustard anyway..
You forgot about all the people who stay because they are essentially worthless as employees and they know that they'll never get another job making as much money as they do now if they jump ship. In my experience (going through my 3rd buyout/takeover now) the most knowledgeable and hardest working employees leave because the new regime comes in with an "it's our company and we know what's best for it" attitude that ends up shitting all over the current employees. Those most capable of finding work elsewhere (aka, those most valuable to the company) end up doing so, leaving the new company with a dreid-up husk of the company that once was. The people who end up sticking around are usually those who can least afford to jump ship (the least valuable employees, those with golden handcuff clauses, etc).
It's a rare day when a big company takes over a smaller company and keeps it's product and vision intact.
What I'd like to see is very simple benchmarks, convincing to the average consumer, and displayed at the beginning of the computer ad section in Best Buy and CompUSA. Introduce it with the new core, preferably. If buyers even THINK that AMD is faster, they're alot more likely to forget their reservations and follow their wallet, which is where AMD shines. AMD's complete absence from the TV ad arena, while a prudent choice, is confirming the public's suspicions that AMD has something to hide or be ashamed of.
Why on earth would resellers want to do that? The Athlon systems cost less. If consumers buy more Athlon-based PC's, then the reseller doesn't have such large sales figures. The more expensive a system is, the more profit you can milk from an identical markup percentage. A reseller has no financial incentive to encourage customers to buy Athlons.
Not the mention the fact that there still aren't a whole lot of consumer-targetted Athlon PC's from the big vendors who sell to Joe Doorknob. If HP has a product line of 6 consumer PC's, only 2 of them (at most) will be non-Intel.
This is so fucking confusing even to someone who is fairly technical - can you imagine Joe User's reaction to this? Makes code signing pretty much useless.
Please...Joe User is a moron to begin with. He always clicks "ACCEPT" to everything anyways because he thinks that nobody would bother writing it if it didn't do what it's supposed to. Alternatively, Joe User may be so paranoid on a regular basis that he never installs anything because he's afraid that he'd break it and then not be able to undo it. Either way, it's a wash.
Of course, this is probably not too good for Verisign, as they now look like dumbasses, and have probably pissed off MS to boot.
As opposed to previously having looked like dumbasses and pissed of thousands of people who are trying to register expired domain names or get their DNS info in the root servers changed?
It's just more of the same incompetence if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
While I admire this fella's initiative, wouldn't it just have been easier to buy a small form factor computer? We use Compaq Deskpro EN SFF systems where I work. They're roughly the size of a small pizza box, only twice as thick.
although hackers is one of my favorite movies
Well, that certainly goes a long way towards explaining your statement about Takedown.
Do what I did. I dropped Ameritech and went wireless all the way last year. Rates are pretty reasonable and the service is far more flexible. Plus you don't have to deal with their incompetence.
Depends. I have a 19" monitor and Diablo II looked like crap on my system. It was all blocky and ugly. Bumping it to a higher resolution would have smoothed some of that out (by making it smaller) and maybe even allowed me to see more of my surroundings at once.
I tried playing multiplayer a couple of times with some friends, and with 2 people on the screen at the same time there isn't a lot of room to maneuver. Granted, you don't have to stay on the screen together, but it makes it easier to play if you can tell when your partners are in trouble.
Now if they'd get with the modern era and put in a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 mode, we'd be in business.
Wow, do I know that feeling. I got hooked on Thief and Half-Life when they first came out in a big way. I'd go to work, come home, play till midnite, sleep till 5:00 AM, go to work, and so on. Then I quit my job (for professional reasons). I played non-stop (except for food, sleep, and mother nature) until I had beaten both games (And I went through Thief on each of the three difficulty settings too!). Then and only then did I finally re-write my resume and start looking for work again.
I recently bought the eagerly anticipated Thief II many months after it's release, and I've only managed to have time to play through the first couple missions. And I've still never finished Ultima IX, (or 7 or 8 for that matter). It's too hard to find the time to finish it before the next shiny thing catches my attention.
Oddly enough, Diablo II wasn't that compelling for me. Sure, I beat it. But then I quit. There wasn't enough depth to hold my attention past beating it the first time, even in the areas of character development. Of course, I'd also been playing Ultima Online for awhile before that, so by comparison Diablo II was pretty dull.
Yes, but who owns UUNet? MCI-Worldcom. And if I'm not mistaken (I haven't worked at UUNet for almost a year now, though I do keep in touch) UUNet was being dissolved as a separate division becase MCI-Worldcom wanted to consolidate themselves into one large company rather than a collection of easy-to-break-up-and-sell smaller companies.
You overlooked redundancy... Hollywood, for the most part, produces unique things.
:-)
Sure they do. And I shit gold bricks.
I seem to recall a couple years ago there was a movie called Volcano and another called Dante's Peak. The premise of both were that a previously dormant volcano becomes active and threatens a town, and the seismic researcher teams up with some hottie to save the day.
Then there was the whole Deep Impact/Armageddon summer, where we were bombarded by movies and TV shows about space rocks pummelling the earth and the end of humanity.
Then we had Independence Day, followed by Wild Wild West (Independence Day in the old west). Let's see...Scream came out, then I Know What You Did Last Summer. Then Scream 2, then I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Then Halloween-something-or other. All of which were takeoffs on Friday the 13th parts 1-9 and Halloween 1-3. We've got Star Trek I-VI plus a few more for good measure. Not to mention an endless stream of Jean-Claude Van Damme and Stephen Segal movies, James Bond movies and animated Disney feel-good flicks.
Does anyone else notice a trend here? Hollywood not only does not produce unique things (for the most part), but it's existence is due entirely to the fact that someone can come up with a reasonably entertaining formula and repackage it 100 times with different actors and settings(OK, Die Hard was good, so now we have Die Hard at an airport, on a plane, on a boat, on a bus, on an oil derrick...ad nauseum). Granted, there are independent films and Merchant Ivory productions, but they can hardly be equated with Hollywood now can they?
With regards to duplication between porn sites, this sub-thread was about why the Porn industry makes more money than Hollywood. But if you really wanna know, don't go to big commercial sites. Stick to the amateurs sites and you'll see very little duplication. Or so I "read in a study." (nudge nudge wink wink)
True, but I'd wonder if there are anymore hardcore fans of porn who spend thousands of dollars per year on it than there are hardcore fans of hollywood that spend thousands of dollars a year on it?
Buying tickets to see the same movie several times, buying the book about the movie, buying the movie when it comes out on DVD, buying all the trade rags/movie mags to see what new movies are coming out, etc...
It just occurred to me though that when they say free, they may be thinkng free as in speech and not free as in beer.
Now we really need some help!
If you look at publicly traded companies that own or run porn pay sites, they've been hit as hard as the rest of the tech sector. New Frontier Media (NASDAQ: NOOF) which runs iGallery.net (which in turn runs tits.com , pussy.com, etc.) went from $12 a share in April 2000 to around $2 a share today. Private Media (NASDAQ: PRVT), a major European porn publishing company which runs its own sites as well as has licensing deals with US net companies, went from $12.5 a share in April 2000 to around $6 a share today. Rick's Cabaret (NASDAQ: RICK), a Texas-based strip club company that runs several large sites, went from $5.50 a share in April to $2.25 a share today.
I think that this is flawed logic. When there is a serious market downturn everybody takes a hit. When the dot-com-er's are blamed for the downturn then those companies who are affiliated with the Internet will also take a steep downturn. It doesn't matter if you were making coffins, this economic downturn would have seriously lowered your stock price as compared to a year ago.
What you really should be comparing are the revenue figures for those same publicly traded companies.
First of all, I think you're on shaky ground when you make the arguement that an increase in the availability of child pornography online doesn't lead to a corresponding increase in the creation of child pornography. Name me one market that, when the demand for its product rises dramatically, doesn't respond with increased supply.
Well, you've got yourself all backwards on this point. Increased availability of child pornography online is the same as increased supply, not increased demand. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the number of child pornographers and consumers of said child pornography haven't changed much since the advent of the Internet. They just have a more effective way of sharing it now. Whereas before they were meeting in dark alleys or sending stuff through the mail (I seem to recall the local postmaster's office being involved in several busts a year before the Internet came along), now they don't have to leave home.
Interesting thought though...now that it's out there on the net we are hearing about more busts. I wonder if the Internet doesn't increase availability and therefore make targets more visible and therefore easier to catch for law enforcement?
The problem with that logic is that pedophiles will always want more. (That's the nature of addiction).
OK, let me preface this by saying that I'm all-out against kiddie-porn. I am absolutely in no way condoning it.
I think that you're making an awful big assumption to say that pedophiles are addicted (to sex, or sex with kids, or kiddie porn, or whatever). It could just be a simple preference. Just because I prefer my porn to include women who are blonde and have large breats doesn't mean that I'm addicted to blondes with large breasts. I just happen to like it better that way.
the California- based Marital and Sexuality Centre found that 75 per cent of those who enjoy adult Internet sites don't tell anyone about it.
This just wouldn't go past my bullshit filter. How can they know that 75% of pr0n surfers don't tell anyone about it, if they don't tell anyone about it ? If I say "No, I don't do xyzzy" then they can't turn around and say "Of all those who said No, we have found that 75% are liars."
This is about the fifth post that I've seen that said this. Are we really this dense when it comes to surveys? What they are saying is this:
When asked in an anonymous survey, 75% responded that they don't tell people that they enjoy online porn sites.
There's a big difference between telling your wife, co-workers, minister, kids, or whoever and checking a box on an anonymous survey form.
Sex-for-pay sites grew from 230 to 1,100 during the same period.
Since you brought it up, did anybody else think that the ratio of Sex-for-free vs. Sex-for-pay sites was way out of whack? They claimed something like 200 times the number of free sites than pay sites. And I haven't seen an actual free site in years. On the other hand, I feel like I must've seen more than 1100 pay sites in my day. There's something darn curious about those numbers...
IIRC, pornography makes more money than Hollywood, yet while 9 out of 10 people will admit to see a movie, only 1 out of 10 will admit to watching pornography.
That's because Hollywood is pretty much limited to TV and movies for revenue streams, and setting up movie companies, theatres, and TV stations is expensive business. To be successful in Hollywood generally requires extensive distribution networks and large amounts of up-front financing to retain the big names. When paying for a plot, people demand (to a degree) more quality.
Pornography is a little different. For one, there's more of it. Anyone with a camcorder and a couple VCR's can make pornographic movies. Anyone with a camera can take sexually explicit photos. Beyond that there's magazines, strip clubs, etc.
All you need is a web site and you've got worldwide distribution capability. Your talent doesn't demand multi-million dollar paychecks because people don't demand "the big names" as much as they do in Hollywood. You don't need talented and thoughtful script writers. For most people as long as there's nudity and sex it's good porn.
So compared to the porn industry, Hollywood is nothing. Hollywood has higher overhead and more limited distribution models than does the porn industry. Porn has it easy...no wonder it makes more money.
That being said...Yes, a large number of Americans are ashamed of sex. But no, I don't think that porn afficionados spend more money that Hollywood afficionados. There's just more people interested in porn (it's a survival instinct).
I wonder though... if they were to buy a big chunk of the internet, could they do the same thing? "If your traffic passes through our routers, we will sniff it and steal anything we like!"??
If they did, everyone and their mother would just route around their "chunk".
It would be so much less burden on the transatlantic links, and all the routers between me and /. if i could get the info from whoever has just read it in my town, or even street. You could solve all the bandwidth problems by sharing it out.
Sure you could, right up until you figure in all the traffic overhead necessary to determine whether or not a more local source has cached the article, which source of the cached article is closer to your current location, whether or not the data has been tampered with, and then finally transfer it to you. OK, sure, it's let's traffic on the transatlantic cables, but it doesn't make your access any faster.
And why are we discussing bandwidth issues when the topic is routing tables?
The reason that kids gang up on and bully other kids is....
That is what they are genetically programmed to do when they hit puberty! Yes folks, that's right. We are all victims of our genetic code...genetic code that is a holdover from the ancient hunter-gatherer societies of the past. In the past, these sort of aggressive, gang/tribe-building excercises would have served to strengthen individuals and tie together bands of men who would later in their life depend on that strength and those bonds for their very lives.
Behaviour of this sort is not only common among young males of nearly every species of mammal on the planet, it's standard. These behaviours are evolutionarily designed to sort out who the alpha males will be and who will be a part of the pack/tribe. Granted, we don't need these behaviours any more now that we live in a nice, modern, non-physically demanding (relative to our past) society. But you can't breed out a couple million years worth of evolutionary programming in 200 years. Especially when technological innovation is reducing the need for adaptation and thereby lessening the role of evolution in our species. Now the people whose behaviours are counter-productive don't die off (normally) and they can still introduce those behaviours into the next generation. Uh-oh!
Not that genetics is totally to blame for their behaviour...environment plays a part. Let's face it, the kind of pseudo-violent role determination that took place among adolescent males in ancient times is pretty much frowned on in today's environment. Ok, actually it's outright illegal most of the time. So what happens to these biological urges? You've got 2 options: You can express/channel a violent urge through violent/physical action (fighting, rough sports, etc), or you can repress it until it builds up to the point that you explode into physical/violent super-expression. There's no other way about it. BTW, I know this because when I was about 13 years old I tried to suppress those urges. I eventually popped and almost killed my father, after which my family very quickly found ways for me to channel those urges and that energy. I'm a normal, happy, healthy member of society nowadays.
But I digress...the point is, parents aren't involved enough with their children to know when these needs aren't being met. Parents don't know enough about children and teenagers and the reasons for their behaviours to be able to deal with this situation. Society is doing absolutely nothing to validate these feelings or urges in adolescent boys, let alone provide an outlet for them. Parents, teachers and legislators are obsessed with looking for the environmental source of the behaviour, and it's just not in the environment. The source of the behaviour is in the adolescent's nature. It's only brought out by the environment that we currently live in. Violent entertainment, school bullies, suicides, and mass shootings aren't the problem. They are merely the symptoms or effects of the problem. Until such time as this society realizes that they're looking at this backwards, they will not find a solution.
What the hell does 384K mean??? I mean, seriously. Try using the full abbreviation. Is it 384 KBps or 384 Kbps? There is a difference, by a factor of eight.
An analogue 56K modem is 56Kbits per second (in theory). A lot of cable and DSL modem providers advertise in KBytes per second. Some in Mbits per second. Ignorant users all too often think that it's MBytes because they simply see an Mb abbreviation and don't realize that an upper-case B is a Byte and a lower-case b is a bit.
As you can tell, this annoys the living shit out of me because even the other technical people that I work with don't seem to be able to tell the difference. You'd think in a forum about "News for Nerds" someone would get it.
Anyway...
When Windows reports my download speeds it tells me in KBps. I regularly use 300-400 KBps of bandwidth on downloads (usually limited by the server that I connect to). If I'm not mistaken, this roughly amounts to 2.4-3.2 Mbits per second. Upload is a bit harder to track. Just know that it's considerably slower. I've probably never seen more than 56 KBps outgoing on my system.
This is on Time Warner's RoadRunner service in Columbus, Ohio. Actually I live on the very outskirts of a Columbus suburb surrounded by cornfields, so my neighborhood utilization is probably lower than most. I hear a lot of complaints from people who live in the downtown and OSU campus area that RoadRunner is too slow so they had to switch to DSL. But it varies by neighborhood, and DT/Campus is pretty densely populated with tech-savvy people.
While I agree that it's important for people to have the widest possible exposure to a variety of different ways of thinking, I think that it's ridiculous to even consider trying to mandate it. Let's face it, some people just don't want to improve themselves. Others are too lazy. But here's the kicker: the people who get the widest exposure to new ideas, the people who are the most well-rounded intellectually and socially will be the ones most likely to be sucessful. The "me media" doesn't change that at all. And so Darwin is still going to favor "new thinkers."
Moderation systems like Slashdot uses are useful in that they do not "censor" ideas that are less popular but that they draw more attention to the ideas that more interesting, insgihtful, funny, whatever. I still read posts scored 1, just not every last one of them. I do read all posts scored at 2 or higher. But Slashdot's system I think may be a little different in that it severely limits the amount of moderation that any one individual can do. I think that's a Good Thing. More importantly, it's all voluntary. I can read messages scored at -1 if I want to.
I read about this very subject 4 or 5 years ago when the "push revolution" was beginning. The concern then was that Internet use would become passive (no more browsing) and that we would constantly be provided with information that we found interesting, relevant, or idealogically reasonable and that we wouldn't be provided with anything conflicting. It hasn't happened yet, and "push" technology is dead. I don't think that it's ever going to happen.
What we are really talking about is narrowcasting, and I think that it is a Good Thing as long as it is an option that is controlled by the user. As long as broadcasting is still an option and browsing is still an option users will not be able to accidentally paint themselves into a single idealogy.
Take for example (again) Slashdot. I'm constantly learning and being exposed to new ideas from it just by browsing it daily. I see hundreds of messages on each topic, and never have they all taken the same stance. There are always naysayers and yaysayers, and many degrees in between. And I'm exposed to their thinking (for better or worse) regularly.
Now I think back 100 years before the widespread growth of communications technology. Or maybe 200 years. We (most of us) would have grown up in some small town or village or on a farm, for all intents and purposes isolated from almost all other people who were not also farmers (or lived in the same village/town). We would have lived isolated from new ideas. We wouldn't have any way of hearing about a breakthrough in the invention of a combustion engine. But it still happened.
So even if we are still isolated intellectually (which I think requires a ridiculous amount of passivity on the part of everybody) innovation will find a way. Someone somewhere will continue to come up with new ideas and new technology. I mean, let's face it: we're human beings. It's what we do.
One outcome of this is that when the big fish eats the little fish it shouldn't lay people off- let the process happen by attrition. The ones who don't want to stay are the ones who couldn't cut the mustard anyway..
You forgot about all the people who stay because they are essentially worthless as employees and they know that they'll never get another job making as much money as they do now if they jump ship. In my experience (going through my 3rd buyout/takeover now) the most knowledgeable and hardest working employees leave because the new regime comes in with an "it's our company and we know what's best for it" attitude that ends up shitting all over the current employees. Those most capable of finding work elsewhere (aka, those most valuable to the company) end up doing so, leaving the new company with a dreid-up husk of the company that once was. The people who end up sticking around are usually those who can least afford to jump ship (the least valuable employees, those with golden handcuff clauses, etc).
It's a rare day when a big company takes over a smaller company and keeps it's product and vision intact.
Intel will make the first true 64 bit architecture from scratch
Really? Shit. Somebody better tell Sun, MIPS, DEC/Compaq, Motorola, IBM...
What I'd like to see is very simple benchmarks, convincing to the average consumer, and displayed at the beginning of the computer ad section in Best Buy and CompUSA. Introduce it with the new core, preferably. If buyers even THINK that AMD is faster, they're alot more likely to forget their reservations and follow their wallet, which is where AMD shines. AMD's complete absence from the TV ad arena, while a prudent choice, is confirming the public's suspicions that AMD has something to hide or be ashamed of.
Why on earth would resellers want to do that? The Athlon systems cost less. If consumers buy more Athlon-based PC's, then the reseller doesn't have such large sales figures. The more expensive a system is, the more profit you can milk from an identical markup percentage. A reseller has no financial incentive to encourage customers to buy Athlons.
Not the mention the fact that there still aren't a whole lot of consumer-targetted Athlon PC's from the big vendors who sell to Joe Doorknob. If HP has a product line of 6 consumer PC's, only 2 of them (at most) will be non-Intel.
This is so fucking confusing even to someone who is fairly technical - can you imagine Joe User's reaction to this? Makes code signing pretty much useless.
Please...Joe User is a moron to begin with. He always clicks "ACCEPT" to everything anyways because he thinks that nobody would bother writing it if it didn't do what it's supposed to. Alternatively, Joe User may be so paranoid on a regular basis that he never installs anything because he's afraid that he'd break it and then not be able to undo it. Either way, it's a wash.
Of course, this is probably not too good for Verisign, as they now look like dumbasses, and have probably pissed off MS to boot.
As opposed to previously having looked like dumbasses and pissed of thousands of people who are trying to register expired domain names or get their DNS info in the root servers changed?
It's just more of the same incompetence if you ask me.