The point is, it's none of their fucking business. Why should I have to be pro-active in asserting my right to privacy (assuming I've got that right to assert?) If I want to call Aunt Tille in Tulsa to wish her a happy birthday, why is that the government's business? More to the point, if I decide to donate to an organization that the government doesn't like (assuming they're not involved in illegal activity), again, not their business.
The fourth amendment to the Constitution is taking as big a beating (if not bigger) as the first these days. We might find evidence of illegal/terroristic activity, but to date that's never been a very convincing argument for invading Americans' privacy (at least without at least the APPEARANCE of due process. Pesty thing, that whole 'due process' thing. Fortunately, we've been able to get around it so long as the people we're holding without trial are brown.) The whole point of the fourth amendment is that the government must make its case to a neutral party before it invades someone's privacy. If my choices are between living in a state that performs such fascist behaviors (such as spying on whoever the fuck it wants in the name of 'national security') or rolling the dice that I or someone I know might conceivably die in a terrorist attack, I'll take the latter every time. As I understand it, the odds of that happening are roughly the same as winning the Powerball. It's not a huge risk; it's definitely not worth doing the terrorists' work for them, which is what we're doing by stripping away the civil rights of law-abiding Americans. We can't even look at the results to determine if the benefits of these actions are worth it, because the government won't tell us what they've found. "Trust us, it's working, after all, we haven't had an attack since 9/11, have we?" (Someone needs to educate the average American about the concept of 'correlation != 'causation'.)
Re:Good old RubyOnRails
on
Advanced Rails
·
· Score: 0, Troll
and we got to charge ESPN half as much as we would have for development of a PHP solution.
You say that like it's a GOOD thing. Did the hours you didn't charge to ESPN get filled with other work? Did ESPN guarantee future work?
If the answer to either question is 'no', then it's a negative.
IMHO rapid development isn't always a good thing. Once your clients start to expect this level of rapidity, if you run into a problem on a project (such as feature creep or changing specs) they're less tolerant of delays and become more difficult to manage. Unless you have a client that understands these kinds of issues (and these are hunted to extinction) it causes problems. You end up rushing through the additional requirements and end up with buggy code.
Pad your hours, people. If everyone does it then we all make more money. We can follow the lead of the oil industry; it works for those greedy bastards, why can't it work for us?
They do when it starts to show up on the balance shee... erm, when it makes their bonuses smaller.
"Why are we spending all this money on support?!? Don't you guys know how to make a perfect product? SPEND LESS MONEY!"
This leads to middle management making decisions to meet that demand. I'd assert that decreasing support costs is more important than meeting customer expectations from a financial point of view. Lying to peopl... I mean Marketing is cheaper than support.
Maybe the first two, because it's safe to assume a certain level of competence w/r/t driving a car. They make you get a license to drive, so you have to PROVE at some point you know how to start it.
1) DNS changes should happen very rarely. For every call that is generated by a DNS problem, there are 1000 calls about someone forgetting their password. 2) This should happen even less often than DNS changes. 3) IT probably sent out several broadcast emails warning the users that a particular machine is being shut down, and if that will cause a problem, IT should be notified so they can react accordingly. If they did not, it's because past experience has told them that nobody will pay attention to that email, because nobody knows what servers they actually use. The best way to figure out who uses a resource is to break it and listen to who complains.
The issue is that when I call up the help desk and tell them the problem, the idiots won't listen because they assume you're an idiot luser, and force you to go through a checksheet before doing anything. This regimented idiocy is what ties up the helpdesk lines.
1) The checksheet is there because either a) some management douchebag heard from one of his golf buddies that they helped speed things up, and he was tired of having to wait 20 minutes on hold to complain about how his mailbox quota was full, or b) because 90% of the problems can be identified with the same 6 questions (eg "Have you restarted your machine", "Have you gotten notifications that you need to change your password", "What error message did you get" (and if they don't know, they need to hang up and go find out), "Are you able to open pages in Internet Explorer", and so forth.) 2) If you think you have a clue, and you don't actually work in IT, then you are part of the problem. You aren't seeing the whole picture; you can't possibly. 3) The three issues you describe represent about 1% of all the calls that the help desk takes. 4) The reason the 'idiots' won't listen is because 999 times out of 1000, the person on the other end of the line IS an idiot luser, and they have to kiss their ass and tell them it smells like roses. What they *really* should be able to do is point out the actions the user took to CREATE the problem in the first place. I've worked the help desk at Fortune 500 companies, and on more than one occasion I was reprimanded for telling the user how they created the problem and how to avoid it in the future.
IT is rarely actually able to do anything about your issue beyond telling you how to avoid it and/or fix it temporarily. Your hostile attitude towards IT is a bigger part of the problem than anything else. When was the last time you said to a help desk worker "Hi, I'm having a problem with x y z, could you please help me out with it" instead of "x y z is broken AGAIN! Why can't you fix it!" You wouldn't call someone in Accounting or Marketing with an issue and immediately start off the call attacking them because you couldn't speak to them RIGHT NOW. There isn't a single other department in most companies where people from other departments get to tell them what's important instead of that department making decisions regarding their core responsibilities. (In other words, you wouldn't call Accounting and tell them they need to process your expense report RIGHT NOW, when there's 150 ahead of yours. I suppose you could call, but they'd probably just let you know that they'll get to it as soon as possible. Your next call wouldn't be to the CFO complaining about how they won't process your expense report.)
I personally think the help desk should be eliminated in favor of a voicemail type system where you leave a message and the issue is addressed according to the order the messages were received in and/or the severity of the issue (said severity to be determined by IT, NOT some self-important egomaniac user.) Only after the help desk rep has had a chance to review the problem and determine what additional information is needed (if any) or what the source of the problem is should the user be called back.
The IT department had enough problems with people writing their passwords and usernames on yellow post-it notes stuck on their monitors.
If people were allowed to copy databases on their work laptops, would they take care of these systems or would they end up losing company records?
There is one very simple step that can solve these two issues (and their consequences). Make either one a terminable offense, and MAKE IT STICK. Put a line in the employee handbook that says "Violation of these two policies (without management approval) will result in automatic termination for cause." Then make an example of the next moron that does it.
Of course, then you have Management letting people do whatever they want, but that makes it THEIR problem, not IT's problem. (As it is right now, it's really the fault of the managers who allow their employees to do these things, but IT is inevitably blamed because 'passwords are hard to remember'. Anyone who manages to find their way out of bed in the morning can memorize an 8 character sequence.)
If there's an IT issue, I first need to sit on hold for an hour to get through to the help desk, and once they realize it's a major issue, I may have to wait hours or a day before I see anyone in person.
That's because your IT department is understaffed. If you want that fixed, go to upper management with a list of your experiences and request that the situation be corrected. If upper management doesn't fix the staffing issue, then the fault lies with THEM when you're on hold for an hour.
Most IT workers work as hard as is physically possible and they still will never meet the demands from business. Ever wonder why IT folks are surly? It's because they're burnt out from overwork and lack of management support.
Holy $deity, please tell me you aren't a product of a college or university.
I think you mean this:
"The best places to find closed-minded individuals are the colleges and universities. They're so closed-minded that they think they're the only place left for the open-minded."
Clearly you weren't an English major. Actually, I take that back; majoring in English is kind of like not going to college at all. Or it may be even worse, you could be a Marketing major with that level of dumb.
Do you think this administration gives a flying fuck whether or not evidence is admissible in court?
Once the government started holding people indefinitely without trial, the whole concept of admissibility went right out the fucking window. Prisoners in Gitmo don't even have the right to know what the evidence against them is at all, much less whether or not it's admissible in a court of law. (Hell, they don't even have access to lawyers to tell them whether or not the evidence is admissible.)
Concern for this sort of infrastructure and its potential for abuse isn't tinfoil-hat paranoia, the abuse can and has happened. (If you haven't been paying attention, google 'warrant less wiretapping' for further information.)
The checks-and-balances part of the Constitution has been slaughtered in the name of 'protecting our citizens from the terrsts' and 'national security'. While the latter is nothing new, the former is a recent development.
Trusting this government (or any likely future one) with this kind of potential for abuse is kind of like putting a junkie in a room with a kilo of heroin and his 'works', and telling him only to shoot up if the withdrawal symptoms become impossible to bear. It doesn't matter IF they abuse the system, the problem is that they ARE the system, and will do whatever they feel is necessary to protect the system, and therefore themselves (and the multinational corporations that pull their strings.) Even when they DO get called on something that's obviously an abuse of the system (if not black-letter-law illegal) they stamp their feet, throw a tantrum, and refuse to do ANYTHING until the multinationals get immunity for their self-serving rape of their customers' privacy rights.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you can convince a judge that I'm obviously engaged in illegal activity, wiretap away. Until then, get the fuck off my phone lines. While I understand the need for expedience in an emergency situation, there is no reason for these lines to be active at all until there's a signed warrant. If you think that's too much bureaucracy or an unnecessary burden on law enforcement, go find another country, because this one requires it by Constitutional order. The only way we can avoid a police state (well, a more obvious one) is to not allow this sort of shit to go unquestioned.
Reducing usage lowers energy demand, therefore requiring less fuel use to meet demand. Power plant managers aren't going to burn fuel they don't have to.
What tangible difference has been made to the situation by "using less bullets" metaphorically speaking?
You've got two left that you can use on the next guy. You don't have to buy as many for the next job, so the bullet factory doesn't have to make so many, which cuts down on resource use. True, it doesn't seem like a lot to you, but when it scales up, it's significant.
I don't understand how you can say that a 3% worldwide energy usage reduction would be negligible. Do you know how much power that is? The United States by itself consumes over 29,000 TWh/year. (That's terawatt-hours.) Three percent of that is 870 TWh or 870,000 kWh. That represents 1.16 megatons of CO2 that wouldn't be released into the environment.
I think you're looking for the 'magic bullet' here. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor/pun.) There isn't any. There's no one thing or set of things that we as a society can do that will 'fix' the problem. What we can do, is reduce the problem to manageable levels. It's a process, not a destination.
If I have a magazine with 15 bullets, and I decide to only fire 13 into my target, the target is still freaking dead.
Yes, but you've used fewer bullets to do the job. Fewer bullets is what we're going for here, metaphorically speaking.
I think what the OP is trying to say is that when you're using many kW of electricity every month, knocking off a few doesn't make that much of a difference in ratio to what you're going to use anyway.
What does the ratio have to do with it? Less energy is still less energy, whether it's.005% less or 20% less. It all counts.
These machines are usually designed with raw power capability in mind. Reducing their power footprint would be stupid.
You seem to be saying that computing power is directly related to electricity usage. It's just not true. CPUs are much more efficient than they used to be, in part because these data centers are spending a bloody fortune on electricity, and have demanded a greater level of computational power for the same or less electricity. The chip makers have responded. Another big consumer of electrical power in a data center is hard drive spindle motors; as HDs have become larger, the physical number of drives required for a given application has become smaller. ISTR that AMD made big inroads into Intel's server chip market a few years ago because their chips were so much more efficient than Intel's at the time, which translates into direct electricity savings from the chips and indirect savings from less heat generated, therefore requiring less cooling.
Home usage is different: you don't need an 800W PSU to check your email.
You do have a point about that. However, I have kilowatts' worth of PSUs in my home rack setup and it consumes 300W most of the time. Just because you have an 800W power supply doesn't mean it's using 800W all the time.
But compared to data centers and internet-routing hubs, home usage is a relatively small amount, and, in my opinion, not worth the cost of trying to reduce its footprint.
Maybe it's not about the cost; maybe it's about saving energy. The financial aspect of saving energy should be secondary, IMHO.
Besides, how much does it cost to turn off a monitor? Or to set your computer to sleep when idle? Nothing, and they both save significant amounts of power. No, turning off a monitor doesn't fix the global issue, but it reduces the scope of the problem.
Using a few watts less on your gaming rig is not going to make any difference to your "carbon footprint" or your electricity bill.
That just isn't true. The generation of electricity still releases CO2 into the atmosphere; less electricity generated = less CO2. Not to mention that your electricity bill is (generally) directly proportional to how much energy you use, so if you use less energy, your bill is lower.
What you're saying is that if I have 20 marbles in a bag, and take two out, I still have 20 marbles in the bag. It's just not true.
All these little steps add up over the long run. Reducing your energy consumption by 3% might not seem like a huge difference, but if millions of people do it, it makes a difference. I recently measured how much power my computer rack uses, and found that I could cut usage by 25% through a few simple steps (like making sure the CRT I sometimes use on my firewall is powered down, setting the drives in my system to spin down after a certian amount of idle time, etc.) The whole thing (three computers, two monitors, various networking bits, laser printer) consumes 300 watts at idle. That 100 watts I save from shutting off the monitor adds up to 584 kW/h each year (if it's off 16 hours each day), which in my state keeps 7,475 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and saves me $97 in electricity annually. From only shutting off a monitor!
The shit adds up. Throwing your hands in the air because there's no one thing you can do that's a magic bullet for the energy problem is cynical and lazy.
Please re-read the GP. I only have one viable choice other than Comcast, and most people don't even have that. Unless you live next door to your DSLAM, none of those options are comparable in terms of speed or latency.
The reason I expect there to be one flat fee regardless of how much I use is THAT WAS HOW IT WAS REPRESENTED TO ME. If Comcast said to me when I went to buy their product "Oh, and we'll cap your service if we think you're using too much, and we'll kill the traffic we don't like, blah blah" then that would be different.
The phone and electric companies make all of these terms available up front. Would I expect to pay the same amount for electricity that the big box store down the street does? Of course not. Nor would I expect to, since that isn't how it was sold to me. Would I expect to pay the same phone bill as my neighbor who uses the phone five times as much? Not if the terms of my phone service said otherwise.
Comcast doesn't tell its customers what the terms are, it merely reserves the right to do whatever the fuck it wants to with your traffic. They should be held accountable for their false advertising, and be required to disclose what their practices are regarding 'overuse', so their customers can make informed decisions about their usage.
The other problem is that I am 99% sure that Comcast wouldn't lower rates for the light users, it would keep them the same and hike up rates for users they arbitrarily define as 'heavy'. And since they have no competition to speak of, they will do so.
You're assuming that the average consumer has a choice. Personally the only option on that list that's viable for me is FiOS, as I live too far from the DSLAM for anything faster than dialup speeds over DSL, already have a cell phone contract (and I'm not buying another one just for broadband until they let me go month-to-month), find the latency in a dish hookup unacceptable (as well as the 56k upload speed), and can't work remotely over a dialup connection.
A competitive environment requires competition. Broadband providers don't really have that problem in most of the country. Even my electric utility has more competition than my broadband provider.
If Comcast has over-promised their bandwidth through their marketing, then that's their fucking problem, not mine. They can either live up to the claims of their advertising (full speed must be available at some point, "actual speeds vary" means that you might not get full speed all the time, but it at least needs to be POSSIBLE, unlimited access needs to be truly unlimited and not capped at some arbitrary level that they won't even tell us about) or they can give me my money back.
We wouldn't accept this sort of nonsense from any other utility. Imagine making a phone call to your Aunt Tillie on her birthday, only to have your phone company disconnect you in mid-call for 'overuse'. Imagine your electric company cutting off your power because you've got more refrigerators than they think you should have. Imagine your cable tv service shutting off your box because you've watched too much TV!
The broadband providers dug themselves into this hole, I sure as hell am not helping them out of there. They've got enough zeros on their balance sheets to be able to afford a solution.
in other words, Americans as a whole need to learn what the internet does, and take a fresh look at how our freedoms are being shit on by the US government. we must demand the same digital freedoms and privacy protection that we have in non-digital media and more.
I disagree. The more ignorant the general (moronic) public remains of how the internet works, and the more our lives come to depend on internet access, the better. Why? Because then, after years of retrograde progression, the smart people will have an advantage over the willfully ignorant.
Take this situation, for example. Those With Money have decided they don't want people to know a particular set of information. They've either decided that attacking the DNS entry for the domain was the Right Way To Do It, meaning they're complete imbeciles, or that attacking the DNS entry was all that was necessary to keep Joe Sixpack from being able to read it for himself on his computer tv web screen.
Either way, the smart people will then have access to information that puts them at some sort of advantage, because they can work around the attack.
Now if we can just figure out some way to keep those morons from voting...
It's not all about money, you twit. Some of us give a shit about how it sounds and will pay a premium for quality. Just because your ears can't hear the difference (or your brain can't tell), doesn't mean mine can't.
Go listen to Insane Clown Posse or whatever it is you retards listen to.
It might be as valuable in terms of practicality and being a nice place to live, but if the median housing price drops in my neighborhood/community/market, then I'd have to price the house lower in order to be able to sell it. Supply and demand, simple as that. When supply is up (lots of houses on the market for 6+ months) and demand is down, prices drop. Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
In terms of dollars and cents, this hurts the value of my house. Simple economics.
Notice that music didn't move to Music DVDs. It went straight to digital.
Leaving aside that a CD is digital, as has been pointed out, I think what you're meaning is that there was no intermediate format between CD and mp3. There were two:
Some albums were also issued in 5.1, which could be played in any DVD player without the need for a player that could do SACD and/or DVD-Audio.
The problem was that 1) nobody had or has ever heard of these formats, because of the utter failure of the publishers to promote the formats, and 2) nobody gives a crap about quality. (Most people can't tell the difference between an mp3 ripped at 128 vs one ripped at 320, or the difference between 480p and 1080i/p.) By the time the players came down in price to around $100 to $200, the format was dead.
I have a player that can use both formats. The sound is fantastic, even on older recordings such as Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours". But you need a player that can read the format, a 5.1 system that's properly set up (I can't tell you how many times I've seen all five speakers just piled in a corner because the owners were so fucking stupid) and speakers good enough to handle the improved sound. Equipment from Wal-Mart won't be good enough for it, so it's dead. TVs are much more of a commodity item, so there's a chance for the economies of scale to allow for improved quality to be available on a wide scale.
Personally, I have enough work without taking that on. If they can't pay for our services as a result of their own mistakes, well, I just don't see how that's my problem. If all I were doing for a living was support like that, it would end in homicide/suicide.
Oh, and believing in concepts such as empathy and solidarity.
If we didn't live in a society where all that matters about you is the size of your bank account, I would agree. But, since we do, I find myself in the position of not being able to afford the time to help someone who only wants to be spoon-fed the information that they need and then immediately and actively forgets it, so I have to go through the whole thing again. I have literally had someone say to me "Oh, I don't have to know that" when I tried to help them with a technical issue. What the hell do you say to that attitude? Eventually you get sick of beating your head against the wall.
You can't save everyone. If I saw a car accident and was able to help, I wouldn't even think about it, I'd just do it. The difference is that there I had an opportunity to DEFINITELY help with a problem someone was having, and I believe that if you CAN help someone, it's your obligation to do it. People who refuse to take responsibility for their own privacy can't be helped. I'm not unaware of the pain that people who suffer from identity theft suffer; however, cleaning up after the mess that was of their OWN doing does them (and everyone) a disservice. Sometimes you do indeed need to be cruel to be kind.
Oh, yes, if you're getting paid to do it, then you've got a professional obligation to do your best for it. But if it's just some random relative/friend, then that's different.
Slashdot Mirror
As a client or as an employer?
The point is, it's none of their fucking business. Why should I have to be pro-active in asserting my right to privacy (assuming I've got that right to assert?) If I want to call Aunt Tille in Tulsa to wish her a happy birthday, why is that the government's business? More to the point, if I decide to donate to an organization that the government doesn't like (assuming they're not involved in illegal activity), again, not their business.
The fourth amendment to the Constitution is taking as big a beating (if not bigger) as the first these days. We might find evidence of illegal/terroristic activity, but to date that's never been a very convincing argument for invading Americans' privacy (at least without at least the APPEARANCE of due process. Pesty thing, that whole 'due process' thing. Fortunately, we've been able to get around it so long as the people we're holding without trial are brown.) The whole point of the fourth amendment is that the government must make its case to a neutral party before it invades someone's privacy. If my choices are between living in a state that performs such fascist behaviors (such as spying on whoever the fuck it wants in the name of 'national security') or rolling the dice that I or someone I know might conceivably die in a terrorist attack, I'll take the latter every time. As I understand it, the odds of that happening are roughly the same as winning the Powerball. It's not a huge risk; it's definitely not worth doing the terrorists' work for them, which is what we're doing by stripping away the civil rights of law-abiding Americans. We can't even look at the results to determine if the benefits of these actions are worth it, because the government won't tell us what they've found. "Trust us, it's working, after all, we haven't had an attack since 9/11, have we?" (Someone needs to educate the average American about the concept of 'correlation != 'causation'.)
If the answer to either question is 'no', then it's a negative.
IMHO rapid development isn't always a good thing. Once your clients start to expect this level of rapidity, if you run into a problem on a project (such as feature creep or changing specs) they're less tolerant of delays and become more difficult to manage. Unless you have a client that understands these kinds of issues (and these are hunted to extinction) it causes problems. You end up rushing through the additional requirements and end up with buggy code.
Pad your hours, people. If everyone does it then we all make more money. We can follow the lead of the oil industry; it works for those greedy bastards, why can't it work for us?
They do when it starts to show up on the balance shee... erm, when it makes their bonuses smaller.
"Why are we spending all this money on support?!? Don't you guys know how to make a perfect product? SPEND LESS MONEY!"
This leads to middle management making decisions to meet that demand. I'd assert that decreasing support costs is more important than meeting customer expectations from a financial point of view. Lying to peopl... I mean Marketing is cheaper than support.
Maybe the first two, because it's safe to assume a certain level of competence w/r/t driving a car. They make you get a license to drive, so you have to PROVE at some point you know how to start it.
1) DNS changes should happen very rarely. For every call that is generated by a DNS problem, there are 1000 calls about someone forgetting their password.
2) This should happen even less often than DNS changes.
3) IT probably sent out several broadcast emails warning the users that a particular machine is being shut down, and if that will cause a problem, IT should be notified so they can react accordingly. If they did not, it's because past experience has told them that nobody will pay attention to that email, because nobody knows what servers they actually use. The best way to figure out who uses a resource is to break it and listen to who complains.
1) The checksheet is there because either a) some management douchebag heard from one of his golf buddies that they helped speed things up, and he was tired of having to wait 20 minutes on hold to complain about how his mailbox quota was full, or b) because 90% of the problems can be identified with the same 6 questions (eg "Have you restarted your machine", "Have you gotten notifications that you need to change your password", "What error message did you get" (and if they don't know, they need to hang up and go find out), "Are you able to open pages in Internet Explorer", and so forth.)
2) If you think you have a clue, and you don't actually work in IT, then you are part of the problem. You aren't seeing the whole picture; you can't possibly.
3) The three issues you describe represent about 1% of all the calls that the help desk takes.
4) The reason the 'idiots' won't listen is because 999 times out of 1000, the person on the other end of the line IS an idiot luser, and they have to kiss their ass and tell them it smells like roses. What they *really* should be able to do is point out the actions the user took to CREATE the problem in the first place. I've worked the help desk at Fortune 500 companies, and on more than one occasion I was reprimanded for telling the user how they created the problem and how to avoid it in the future.
IT is rarely actually able to do anything about your issue beyond telling you how to avoid it and/or fix it temporarily. Your hostile attitude towards IT is a bigger part of the problem than anything else. When was the last time you said to a help desk worker "Hi, I'm having a problem with x y z, could you please help me out with it" instead of "x y z is broken AGAIN! Why can't you fix it!" You wouldn't call someone in Accounting or Marketing with an issue and immediately start off the call attacking them because you couldn't speak to them RIGHT NOW. There isn't a single other department in most companies where people from other departments get to tell them what's important instead of that department making decisions regarding their core responsibilities. (In other words, you wouldn't call Accounting and tell them they need to process your expense report RIGHT NOW, when there's 150 ahead of yours. I suppose you could call, but they'd probably just let you know that they'll get to it as soon as possible. Your next call wouldn't be to the CFO complaining about how they won't process your expense report.)
I personally think the help desk should be eliminated in favor of a voicemail type system where you leave a message and the issue is addressed according to the order the messages were received in and/or the severity of the issue (said severity to be determined by IT, NOT some self-important egomaniac user.) Only after the help desk rep has had a chance to review the problem and determine what additional information is needed (if any) or what the source of the problem is should the user be called back.
(I will let you in on a dirty little secret,
Of course, then you have Management letting people do whatever they want, but that makes it THEIR problem, not IT's problem. (As it is right now, it's really the fault of the managers who allow their employees to do these things, but IT is inevitably blamed because 'passwords are hard to remember'. Anyone who manages to find their way out of bed in the morning can memorize an 8 character sequence.)
Most IT workers work as hard as is physically possible and they still will never meet the demands from business. Ever wonder why IT folks are surly? It's because they're burnt out from overwork and lack of management support.
Holy $deity, please tell me you aren't a product of a college or university.
I think you mean this:
"The best places to find closed-minded individuals are the colleges and universities. They're so closed-minded that they think they're the only place left for the open-minded."
Clearly you weren't an English major. Actually, I take that back; majoring in English is kind of like not going to college at all. Or it may be even worse, you could be a Marketing major with that level of dumb.
You're not serious.
Do you think this administration gives a flying fuck whether or not evidence is admissible in court?
Once the government started holding people indefinitely without trial, the whole concept of admissibility went right out the fucking window. Prisoners in Gitmo don't even have the right to know what the evidence against them is at all, much less whether or not it's admissible in a court of law. (Hell, they don't even have access to lawyers to tell them whether or not the evidence is admissible.)
Concern for this sort of infrastructure and its potential for abuse isn't tinfoil-hat paranoia, the abuse can and has happened. (If you haven't been paying attention, google 'warrant less wiretapping' for further information.)
The checks-and-balances part of the Constitution has been slaughtered in the name of 'protecting our citizens from the terrsts' and 'national security'. While the latter is nothing new, the former is a recent development.
Trusting this government (or any likely future one) with this kind of potential for abuse is kind of like putting a junkie in a room with a kilo of heroin and his 'works', and telling him only to shoot up if the withdrawal symptoms become impossible to bear. It doesn't matter IF they abuse the system, the problem is that they ARE the system, and will do whatever they feel is necessary to protect the system, and therefore themselves (and the multinational corporations that pull their strings.) Even when they DO get called on something that's obviously an abuse of the system (if not black-letter-law illegal) they stamp their feet, throw a tantrum, and refuse to do ANYTHING until the multinationals get immunity for their self-serving rape of their customers' privacy rights.
I've said it before, I'll say it again: If you can convince a judge that I'm obviously engaged in illegal activity, wiretap away. Until then, get the fuck off my phone lines. While I understand the need for expedience in an emergency situation, there is no reason for these lines to be active at all until there's a signed warrant. If you think that's too much bureaucracy or an unnecessary burden on law enforcement, go find another country, because this one requires it by Constitutional order. The only way we can avoid a police state (well, a more obvious one) is to not allow this sort of shit to go unquestioned.
Uh, what?
Reducing usage lowers energy demand, therefore requiring less fuel use to meet demand. Power plant managers aren't going to burn fuel they don't have to.
I don't understand how you can say that a 3% worldwide energy usage reduction would be negligible. Do you know how much power that is? The United States by itself consumes over 29,000 TWh/year. (That's terawatt-hours.) Three percent of that is 870 TWh or 870,000 kWh. That represents 1.16 megatons of CO2 that wouldn't be released into the environment.
I think you're looking for the 'magic bullet' here. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor/pun.) There isn't any. There's no one thing or set of things that we as a society can do that will 'fix' the problem. What we can do, is reduce the problem to manageable levels. It's a process, not a destination.
Besides, how much does it cost to turn off a monitor? Or to set your computer to sleep when idle? Nothing, and they both save significant amounts of power. No, turning off a monitor doesn't fix the global issue, but it reduces the scope of the problem.
What you're saying is that if I have 20 marbles in a bag, and take two out, I still have 20 marbles in the bag. It's just not true.
All these little steps add up over the long run. Reducing your energy consumption by 3% might not seem like a huge difference, but if millions of people do it, it makes a difference. I recently measured how much power my computer rack uses, and found that I could cut usage by 25% through a few simple steps (like making sure the CRT I sometimes use on my firewall is powered down, setting the drives in my system to spin down after a certian amount of idle time, etc.) The whole thing (three computers, two monitors, various networking bits, laser printer) consumes 300 watts at idle. That 100 watts I save from shutting off the monitor adds up to 584 kW/h each year (if it's off 16 hours each day), which in my state keeps 7,475 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere, and saves me $97 in electricity annually. From only shutting off a monitor!
The shit adds up. Throwing your hands in the air because there's no one thing you can do that's a magic bullet for the energy problem is cynical and lazy.
Please re-read the GP. I only have one viable choice other than Comcast, and most people don't even have that. Unless you live next door to your DSLAM, none of those options are comparable in terms of speed or latency.
The reason I expect there to be one flat fee regardless of how much I use is THAT WAS HOW IT WAS REPRESENTED TO ME. If Comcast said to me when I went to buy their product "Oh, and we'll cap your service if we think you're using too much, and we'll kill the traffic we don't like, blah blah" then that would be different.
The phone and electric companies make all of these terms available up front. Would I expect to pay the same amount for electricity that the big box store down the street does? Of course not. Nor would I expect to, since that isn't how it was sold to me. Would I expect to pay the same phone bill as my neighbor who uses the phone five times as much? Not if the terms of my phone service said otherwise.
Comcast doesn't tell its customers what the terms are, it merely reserves the right to do whatever the fuck it wants to with your traffic. They should be held accountable for their false advertising, and be required to disclose what their practices are regarding 'overuse', so their customers can make informed decisions about their usage.
The other problem is that I am 99% sure that Comcast wouldn't lower rates for the light users, it would keep them the same and hike up rates for users they arbitrarily define as 'heavy'. And since they have no competition to speak of, they will do so.
You're assuming that the average consumer has a choice. Personally the only option on that list that's viable for me is FiOS, as I live too far from the DSLAM for anything faster than dialup speeds over DSL, already have a cell phone contract (and I'm not buying another one just for broadband until they let me go month-to-month), find the latency in a dish hookup unacceptable (as well as the 56k upload speed), and can't work remotely over a dialup connection.
A competitive environment requires competition. Broadband providers don't really have that problem in most of the country. Even my electric utility has more competition than my broadband provider.
If Comcast has over-promised their bandwidth through their marketing, then that's their fucking problem, not mine. They can either live up to the claims of their advertising (full speed must be available at some point, "actual speeds vary" means that you might not get full speed all the time, but it at least needs to be POSSIBLE, unlimited access needs to be truly unlimited and not capped at some arbitrary level that they won't even tell us about) or they can give me my money back.
We wouldn't accept this sort of nonsense from any other utility. Imagine making a phone call to your Aunt Tillie on her birthday, only to have your phone company disconnect you in mid-call for 'overuse'. Imagine your electric company cutting off your power because you've got more refrigerators than they think you should have. Imagine your cable tv service shutting off your box because you've watched too much TV!
The broadband providers dug themselves into this hole, I sure as hell am not helping them out of there. They've got enough zeros on their balance sheets to be able to afford a solution.
I disagree. The more ignorant the general (moronic) public remains of how the internet works, and the more our lives come to depend on internet access, the better. Why? Because then, after years of retrograde progression, the smart people will have an advantage over the willfully ignorant.
Take this situation, for example. Those With Money have decided they don't want people to know a particular set of information. They've either decided that attacking the DNS entry for the domain was the Right Way To Do It, meaning they're complete imbeciles, or that attacking the DNS entry was all that was necessary to keep Joe Sixpack from being able to read it for himself on his computer tv web screen.
Either way, the smart people will then have access to information that puts them at some sort of advantage, because they can work around the attack.
Now if we can just figure out some way to keep those morons from voting...
Because they sound good. Better than 5.1 audio.
It's not all about money, you twit. Some of us give a shit about how it sounds and will pay a premium for quality. Just because your ears can't hear the difference (or your brain can't tell), doesn't mean mine can't.
Go listen to Insane Clown Posse or whatever it is you retards listen to.
It might be as valuable in terms of practicality and being a nice place to live, but if the median housing price drops in my neighborhood/community/market, then I'd have to price the house lower in order to be able to sell it. Supply and demand, simple as that. When supply is up (lots of houses on the market for 6+ months) and demand is down, prices drop. Something is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it.
In terms of dollars and cents, this hurts the value of my house. Simple economics.
SACD
and
DVD-Audio.
Some albums were also issued in 5.1, which could be played in any DVD player without the need for a player that could do SACD and/or DVD-Audio.
The problem was that 1) nobody had or has ever heard of these formats, because of the utter failure of the publishers to promote the formats, and 2) nobody gives a crap about quality. (Most people can't tell the difference between an mp3 ripped at 128 vs one ripped at 320, or the difference between 480p and 1080i/p.) By the time the players came down in price to around $100 to $200, the format was dead.
I have a player that can use both formats. The sound is fantastic, even on older recordings such as Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours". But you need a player that can read the format, a 5.1 system that's properly set up (I can't tell you how many times I've seen all five speakers just piled in a corner because the owners were so fucking stupid) and speakers good enough to handle the improved sound. Equipment from Wal-Mart won't be good enough for it, so it's dead. TVs are much more of a commodity item, so there's a chance for the economies of scale to allow for improved quality to be available on a wide scale.
Personally, I have enough work without taking that on. If they can't pay for our services as a result of their own mistakes, well, I just don't see how that's my problem. If all I were doing for a living was support like that, it would end in homicide/suicide.
You can't save everyone. If I saw a car accident and was able to help, I wouldn't even think about it, I'd just do it. The difference is that there I had an opportunity to DEFINITELY help with a problem someone was having, and I believe that if you CAN help someone, it's your obligation to do it. People who refuse to take responsibility for their own privacy can't be helped. I'm not unaware of the pain that people who suffer from identity theft suffer; however, cleaning up after the mess that was of their OWN doing does them (and everyone) a disservice. Sometimes you do indeed need to be cruel to be kind.
Oh, yes, if you're getting paid to do it, then you've got a professional obligation to do your best for it. But if it's just some random relative/friend, then that's different.
Yes. Would you like some Advil? That looks painful.