In word: no. If anyone is paying, it's the bulk mailers who are subsidizing the cost of your first class postage...
In a word, yes. I don't use first-class postage often enough to put up with the additional $2.9 billion on the deficit and a pension bailout brewing at $5 billion a year. Let them raise it to 40 or 50 cents, and raise AOL's rates accordingly.
The low-carbohydrate angle is really just a trendy hook that sucks people in. And I think that's what the parent article suggests -- low-carbohydrate diets achieve much of their benefits in a very traditional way (when you're on the Atkins diet, you don't eat as much).
It seems to go well beyond simply drawing people in, or you'd have a lot more people abandoning it after a week of eating hamburgers without the bun. I think the hook is that many people can manage their hunger better on low-carb diets, so they eat less without feeling as hungry.
If that's true, it's unfair to dismiss it as a "trendy hook". It's the core of the diet's success-- normal high-carb low-calorie diets are a recipe for hunger, because the body immediately responds by trying to get rid of them. And if you're not Lance Armstrong, you're even worse off, because your body gets rid of them by dumping them into fat.
The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.
Congress recently approved a deal that will help keep postal rates from rising until 2006; this involves some fancy accounting which increases the Federal deficit and insures that we underfund the Postal pension plan (read: taxpayer bailout in a few years). So in a sense, you (the taxpayer) are helping to pay for AOL's advertising (and believe you me, the bandwidth cost of 100 spams is much less than the postage on a single CD.)
So I'd say that there is a valid complaint to be made here.
That depends. Does AOL make you pay shipping and handling for those CDs? No? Then it's not spam.
In a sense, we all pay for those CDs. The taxpayer, that is.
You should read this article. The latest "bailout" of the postal service means that we're going to increase the Federal Deficit and perhaps wind up with a massive pension crisis in a few years, all because Congress can't abide raising rates on bulk mailers like AOL.
I am the opposite of an expert, but I've heard so many conflicting explanations that all seem to be arguing different angles. So let me summarize what I understand of Atkins, et al, and you can tell me how you disagree with it.
The theory goes that carbohydrates (starches and sugars) are easily (quickly) converted to glucose. This causes an overabundance of glucose in the blood, and an insulin spike. The insulin spike reduces the blood glucose levels by causing the excess glucose to be stored as fat.
The argument goes that the insulin spike eventually results in hunger, as the glucose level is reduced. So shortly after you eat a heavy dose of carb calories, you find yourself craving more, and a lot of those calories have gone into fat storage. Atkins & co. say that by avoiding these easily-converted-to-Glucose substances (carbohydrates), you reduce insulin spikes and their aftereffects.
I also understand that there's an additional effect touted by these diets: your body converts fat into Ketones, which do not burn as efficiently as Glocose. Some of them are flushed right out of your body without being consumed.
Is this summary incorrect? I've heard many refutations of the Atkins theory, but they rarely meet his arguments dead on. Even the "meta-study" mentioned above misses the point-- that low-carb diets often work where "normal" diets fail, because they control appetite. I personally have tried the Atkins diet, and though I would never repeat the experience, I have to admit that I did steadily lose weight for a while without being hungry. Of course, I craved carbs more than anything in the world and could barely run a mile...
Why would you need a balanced connection for a digital stream? Aren't errors handled with checksums and retransmissions?
Most digital audio interfaces are one-way, so no retransmissions. There is error correction, but it can only do so much in the face of heavy interference.
4% given advanced medical care. Approximately 10-20% of the cases so far require the aid of a mechanical respirator. If SARS spread sufficiently that we ran out of respirators, I assume the mortality rate would be higher.
However for the UK (and maybe other EU) countries it is a general rule that mobile number begin with 07xxx.
This is only an issue in the UK because you have to pay extra to call a cellphone. In the US this isn't the case; a phone is a phone-- knowing whether it's mobile or landline is academic (and sometimes it's convenient to be able to pretend that you're in an office using a real phone rather than out at a restaurant.)
Also, from what I understand, in Europe you can pay different per-minute charges calling people on different mobile networks. Without any more info in the prefix, is there any way to tell how much you're being charged for a particular call?
The reason it is grounded isn't due to its ancient design, the Concorde still runs fine.
I would suggest that the design and the economics of flying the thing go hand in hand. It has a very small passenger complement, requires extra-long runways and loads of fuel.
A newer design might have solved some of these problems. The Sonic Cruiser, which now looks like it won't ever be built, seated more than twice as many people.
Sometimes you just hit on a design that gets almost everything so right the cost of replacing it just doesn't justify the benefits that would be gained.
If I sign a 4 year maintanaince contract with Pedros lawn care, I have to keep paying even if I move and the new owners dont want them running around the yard spraying pesticide.
The same goes with many other maintanaince/support contracts. Dont like it? Do business with someone else.
Most reasonable contracts have escape clauses that kick in if you move, or some such. Very few businesses can convince customers to sign a contract that potentially leaves them paying bills and getting nothing in return. People will, as you suggest, push that nonsense away and head over to the competition.
The fact that Microsoft can get away with this is a testament to the lack of options most businesses feel they have.
read it carefully and make sure you're permitted to do so.
And if you don't like the terms, suck it up. MS has a monopoly on the desktop, especially in terms of business software. They can put any damned thing they want into their licenses, because most businesses have nowhere else to go.
This story simply helps to illustrate the difference between having a monopoly and abusing one.
...then it'll finally own the only decent way to navigate microsoft's own website
That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that Microsoft wanted to compete with Google. Microsoft's web-search engines (across all of their sites) are just awful. Head over to MSDN and try to find something fairly specific; you will invariably get something like 47,083 results sorted (as best I can tell) by the number of times they contain the letter "t". Run the same search on Google and most of the top results will be relevant info-- and Google is doing a much bigger job, indexing the whole web.
The same thing goes for other MS-owned sites-- Slate, for instance, which sports an embarrassingly useless search engine (I can only assume it's based on MS technology, because it seems to display the same unwillingness to hunt down relevant links.) Before MS seriously attempts to dominate this particular area, they'd better bring their search technology up to spec.
I suspect the Iraqis have little need of GPS--their military probably knows their country pretty well and they don't have much in the way of smart weapons.
On the contrary. The Iraqis' biggest weakness in the first Gulf War was their inability to navigate through the open desert. There's very little in the way of navigation aids out there, so it doesn't matter how well you know the country.
GPS is their ticket off of the roads, allowing them to do what we did-- go right through the unposted desert. My question is how much this signal will be degraded, and whether it will seriously hinder efforts at desert navigation.
Eternal copyrights will move a larger chunk of that money to publishers.
I don't believe in eternal copyrights, which are, after all, unconstitutional (in theory.) I see paid renewals as a simple revival of the old registration requirements. Copyright holders should be required to make some token demonstration that they feel their copyrights are worth continuing, so we don't wind up with the current situation-- where 98% of old copyrighted materials are more or less abandoned by their publishers, but still can't pass into the public domain because of blanket copyright law.
If you have a secure channel in the first place (which you need to exchange pads with OTP), then why not just send the data you want to communicate through that channel and do away with encryption altogether?
Because that secure channel might not be available when you want to transmit. An armed courier could be considered a relatively secure channel for transmitting messages, but when you really needed to transmit a message quickly it might not be fast enough. So you'd send your OTP through the secure channel, and use that to create another secure channel on-demand.
Empirical evidence suggests that the end points of a communication are just as vulnerable to compromise as the communication channel. If your message is decrypted and displayed on a non TEMPEST compliant display, then all your security was for naught.
Same goes for any type of cryptosystem. None are absolutely unbreakable, and the parent poster didn't claim that.
The problem with the one-time pad is that it is completely impractical. Empirical evidence shows that it one-time pads are actually LESS secure than other encryption schemes.
Depends how the one-time pad is distributed. Quantum-entangled particles can be used to distribute OTPs that are (at least theoretically) impossible to intercept.
Could that last be converted now? They said that it could not have been converted in time to save Columbia, but what about over the course of a few years?
From what I've read, they never got around to adding life support and doing manned test-flights. Even if it could be converted, it might be easier and safer to use/build more Soyuz craft for manned flight and unmanned rockets (Arianespace, other Russian heavy lifters) for cargo.
Too bad it's not a good way to respond. Consolidated publishing will simply pass the cost of renewal to the reading public
Maybe because it came from Steve Forbes, you're assuming that the costs will be high. They needn't be much more than the cost of registering the item in a database. Maybe $10 every ten years, or less.
I don't see this bankrupting the reading public. Any work that sells more than a dozen copies is hardly going to be significantly over-priced because of this.
It wasn't always this way; this is a major embarrasment and an abomination of the current (illegitimate) regime.
You need a new party, then, because this one seems to have permanently jumped the shark. Whatever's going on now with the Bush administration, and with the War on Terror/War on Drugs is probably not a temporary phenomenon. If more Republicans translated their misgivings into outright approbation rather than irritable tolerance, perhaps things would change.
I believe in states rights, and even local rights, having the power to decide such things. The traditional republicans would as well. Abortions could be illegal in San Fransisco or New Haven, but not legal in Tyler, TX.
Tell it to the Republican party, which today pushed through a Federal ban on late-term abortions. Everybody has a different opinion on this issue, but the one unifying element of Republican dogma (I thought) was that abortion is a State interest, not an issue of Interstate Commerce. Again, this is more than just a temporary issue relating to the current administration; it's endemic to the modern Republican party.
If it is in the best interests of the Nation to get Washington out of the business sector (or just limit it as much as possible without allowing monopolies), I will vote for that, even if it isn't in my best interests.
I agree. If that's the case. And it hasn't been demonstrated to be so.
I don't see the connection as being absolute, but I do believe that if a certain community wants more tax dollars to go to education, they're entitled to it. I don't believe that a blanket program would serve the entire country. Diving decisions up into local and state matters tends to get more decisive outcomes, and can allow everyone to be more happy.
Education should be a priority that should be provided equally to a broad range of people regardless of their individual (or local community) wealth; without the guarantee of equality in education, there can be no promise of equality in future wealth. This results in a permanent underclass, and that is antithetical to the ideals of American democracy.
Now, while I personally don't think the Federal gov't need fund education, I do think it should be more than a local (town/county) issue decision. The ugly fact of the matter is that county and town-funded education falls down badly in poorer jurisdictions, and our entire nation suffers for it.
The one exception I would make in the Federal/State debate is to provide a Federal standard for teaching certifications. There's no reason that a teacher educated and certified in Oregon should be limited to teaching in Oregon by arcane and redundant requirements. A single, substantial standard for certification would create a nation-wide job market for teachers, and thereby make the profession enormously more attractive to would-be teachers. The best thing about this is that it significantly increase the desirability of a teaching post, without requiring the gov't to fund salary increases.
But back to the Republicans, I respect what you think about the issue, but the fact remains that the real Republican party is happy to collect enormous quantities of Federal tax, which it then redistributes back to local education in enormously stupid ways. If it's politically impossible to convince D.C. to give these funds back, then we should at least spend them intelligently (No Child Left Behind, my ass.)
Money that would be going to kids is not going to corporations, it simply wouldn't go into the economy (since the corporations are the backbone). We need them, like it or not, for jobs, goods, services, etc.
Actually, corporations are the least of the problem. At least they do produce tangible revenue that (normally) benefits the public, and a corporate tax cut can be linked to some sort of desirable type of investment/spending. The issue I would take with the current policy is that tax cuts are being frittered a
Obviously there would have to be some sort of complex system evolved specifically for the purpose of transmitting and receiving "thoughts" in some sort of network-independent format. Sort of the same way that speech works, but with a lot more bandwidth and material.
Alternatively, some people could have even more highly evolved neural centers that are capable of decoding the neural gibberish from another mind.
I don't really believe in any of this; rather I'm suggesting it as the way a form of telepathy might be implemented, someday in the distant future when we develop the technology.
Resource shortages should be addressed by the price mechanism of the free market (unlike pollution, there's no externality here to be compensated for.)
The price mechanism of the free market does a terrible job of pricing many limited resources. Take oil, for instance; the price of a barrel of oil is seldom much higher than what it costs to find it, pump it, and store/deliver it. Occasionally the producers will stockpile or artificially adjust output in near-term planning, but rarely will they do this with any intention of covering long-term future shortages.
What'll happen with oil and other limited resources is that the price will stay extraordinarily low up until the moment that the shortages actually start to become obvious. If we don't do some pre-planning before we reach that point, we might have some bad times. Let's avoid that possibility by planning ahead.
There are a few things that are being recycled sucessfully - corrugated cardboard and aluminum. However most of the rest is driven by politics rather than sound science and economics.
There's currently plenty of space for landfills, and there's currently no particular shortage of raw materials. Fast forward a few decades and things might not be so convenient, at least not everywhere.
Pushing recycling now advances the state of the art. Even if the process is inefficient now, it will eventually become cleaner and cheaper, in the same way that paper recycling has. So part of every dollar we put towards recycling can be considered an investment in future technology.
Maybe I should have put "garbage collect" into quotes. What I meant was that I want the system to remove the files from the disk when their reference count reaches zero. Not literal RAM garbage collection, just an analogy.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing like a complex, time-consuming technical implementation to solve a problem that a little bit of editorial competence might otherwise solve :)
Of course, my current theory is that the editors simply dupe those articles which they believe are really, really important.
In a word, yes. I don't use first-class postage often enough to put up with the additional $2.9 billion on the deficit and a pension bailout brewing at $5 billion a year. Let them raise it to 40 or 50 cents, and raise AOL's rates accordingly.
It seems to go well beyond simply drawing people in, or you'd have a lot more people abandoning it after a week of eating hamburgers without the bun. I think the hook is that many people can manage their hunger better on low-carb diets, so they eat less without feeling as hungry.
If that's true, it's unfair to dismiss it as a "trendy hook". It's the core of the diet's success-- normal high-carb low-calorie diets are a recipe for hunger, because the body immediately responds by trying to get rid of them. And if you're not Lance Armstrong, you're even worse off, because your body gets rid of them by dumping them into fat.
Congress recently approved a deal that will help keep postal rates from rising until 2006; this involves some fancy accounting which increases the Federal deficit and insures that we underfund the Postal pension plan (read: taxpayer bailout in a few years). So in a sense, you (the taxpayer) are helping to pay for AOL's advertising (and believe you me, the bandwidth cost of 100 spams is much less than the postage on a single CD.)
So I'd say that there is a valid complaint to be made here.
In a sense, we all pay for those CDs. The taxpayer, that is.
You should read this article. The latest "bailout" of the postal service means that we're going to increase the Federal Deficit and perhaps wind up with a massive pension crisis in a few years, all because Congress can't abide raising rates on bulk mailers like AOL.
The theory goes that carbohydrates (starches and sugars) are easily (quickly) converted to glucose. This causes an overabundance of glucose in the blood, and an insulin spike. The insulin spike reduces the blood glucose levels by causing the excess glucose to be stored as fat.
The argument goes that the insulin spike eventually results in hunger, as the glucose level is reduced. So shortly after you eat a heavy dose of carb calories, you find yourself craving more, and a lot of those calories have gone into fat storage. Atkins & co. say that by avoiding these easily-converted-to-Glucose substances (carbohydrates), you reduce insulin spikes and their aftereffects.
I also understand that there's an additional effect touted by these diets: your body converts fat into Ketones, which do not burn as efficiently as Glocose. Some of them are flushed right out of your body without being consumed.
Is this summary incorrect? I've heard many refutations of the Atkins theory, but they rarely meet his arguments dead on. Even the "meta-study" mentioned above misses the point-- that low-carb diets often work where "normal" diets fail, because they control appetite. I personally have tried the Atkins diet, and though I would never repeat the experience, I have to admit that I did steadily lose weight for a while without being hungry. Of course, I craved carbs more than anything in the world and could barely run a mile...
Most digital audio interfaces are one-way, so no retransmissions. There is error correction, but it can only do so much in the face of heavy interference.
4% given advanced medical care. Approximately 10-20% of the cases so far require the aid of a mechanical respirator. If SARS spread sufficiently that we ran out of respirators, I assume the mortality rate would be higher.
This is only an issue in the UK because you have to pay extra to call a cellphone. In the US this isn't the case; a phone is a phone-- knowing whether it's mobile or landline is academic (and sometimes it's convenient to be able to pretend that you're in an office using a real phone rather than out at a restaurant.)
Also, from what I understand, in Europe you can pay different per-minute charges calling people on different mobile networks. Without any more info in the prefix, is there any way to tell how much you're being charged for a particular call?
I would suggest that the design and the economics of flying the thing go hand in hand. It has a very small passenger complement, requires extra-long runways and loads of fuel.
A newer design might have solved some of these problems. The Sonic Cruiser, which now looks like it won't ever be built, seated more than twice as many people.
Well, it's only almost perfect...
Most reasonable contracts have escape clauses that kick in if you move, or some such. Very few businesses can convince customers to sign a contract that potentially leaves them paying bills and getting nothing in return. People will, as you suggest, push that nonsense away and head over to the competition.
The fact that Microsoft can get away with this is a testament to the lack of options most businesses feel they have.
And if you don't like the terms, suck it up. MS has a monopoly on the desktop, especially in terms of business software. They can put any damned thing they want into their licenses, because most businesses have nowhere else to go.
This story simply helps to illustrate the difference between having a monopoly and abusing one.
That's the first thing I thought of when I saw that Microsoft wanted to compete with Google. Microsoft's web-search engines (across all of their sites) are just awful. Head over to MSDN and try to find something fairly specific; you will invariably get something like 47,083 results sorted (as best I can tell) by the number of times they contain the letter "t". Run the same search on Google and most of the top results will be relevant info-- and Google is doing a much bigger job, indexing the whole web.
The same thing goes for other MS-owned sites-- Slate, for instance, which sports an embarrassingly useless search engine (I can only assume it's based on MS technology, because it seems to display the same unwillingness to hunt down relevant links.) Before MS seriously attempts to dominate this particular area, they'd better bring their search technology up to spec.
On the contrary. The Iraqis' biggest weakness in the first Gulf War was their inability to navigate through the open desert. There's very little in the way of navigation aids out there, so it doesn't matter how well you know the country.
GPS is their ticket off of the roads, allowing them to do what we did-- go right through the unposted desert. My question is how much this signal will be degraded, and whether it will seriously hinder efforts at desert navigation.
I don't believe in eternal copyrights, which are, after all, unconstitutional (in theory.) I see paid renewals as a simple revival of the old registration requirements. Copyright holders should be required to make some token demonstration that they feel their copyrights are worth continuing, so we don't wind up with the current situation-- where 98% of old copyrighted materials are more or less abandoned by their publishers, but still can't pass into the public domain because of blanket copyright law.
Because that secure channel might not be available when you want to transmit. An armed courier could be considered a relatively secure channel for transmitting messages, but when you really needed to transmit a message quickly it might not be fast enough. So you'd send your OTP through the secure channel, and use that to create another secure channel on-demand.
Empirical evidence suggests that the end points of a communication are just as vulnerable to compromise as the communication channel. If your message is decrypted and displayed on a non TEMPEST compliant display, then all your security was for naught.
Same goes for any type of cryptosystem. None are absolutely unbreakable, and the parent poster didn't claim that.
Depends how the one-time pad is distributed. Quantum-entangled particles can be used to distribute OTPs that are (at least theoretically) impossible to intercept.
From what I've read, they never got around to adding life support and doing manned test-flights. Even if it could be converted, it might be easier and safer to use/build more Soyuz craft for manned flight and unmanned rockets (Arianespace, other Russian heavy lifters) for cargo.
Maybe because it came from Steve Forbes, you're assuming that the costs will be high. They needn't be much more than the cost of registering the item in a database. Maybe $10 every ten years, or less.
I don't see this bankrupting the reading public. Any work that sells more than a dozen copies is hardly going to be significantly over-priced because of this.
You need a new party, then, because this one seems to have permanently jumped the shark. Whatever's going on now with the Bush administration, and with the War on Terror/War on Drugs is probably not a temporary phenomenon. If more Republicans translated their misgivings into outright approbation rather than irritable tolerance, perhaps things would change.
I believe in states rights, and even local rights, having the power to decide such things. The traditional republicans would as well. Abortions could be illegal in San Fransisco or New Haven, but not legal in Tyler, TX.
Tell it to the Republican party, which today pushed through a Federal ban on late-term abortions. Everybody has a different opinion on this issue, but the one unifying element of Republican dogma (I thought) was that abortion is a State interest, not an issue of Interstate Commerce. Again, this is more than just a temporary issue relating to the current administration; it's endemic to the modern Republican party.
If it is in the best interests of the Nation to get Washington out of the business sector (or just limit it as much as possible without allowing monopolies), I will vote for that, even if it isn't in my best interests.
I agree. If that's the case. And it hasn't been demonstrated to be so.
I don't see the connection as being absolute, but I do believe that if a certain community wants more tax dollars to go to education, they're entitled to it. I don't believe that a blanket program would serve the entire country. Diving decisions up into local and state matters tends to get more decisive outcomes, and can allow everyone to be more happy.
Education should be a priority that should be provided equally to a broad range of people regardless of their individual (or local community) wealth; without the guarantee of equality in education, there can be no promise of equality in future wealth. This results in a permanent underclass, and that is antithetical to the ideals of American democracy.
Now, while I personally don't think the Federal gov't need fund education, I do think it should be more than a local (town/county) issue decision. The ugly fact of the matter is that county and town-funded education falls down badly in poorer jurisdictions, and our entire nation suffers for it.
The one exception I would make in the Federal/State debate is to provide a Federal standard for teaching certifications. There's no reason that a teacher educated and certified in Oregon should be limited to teaching in Oregon by arcane and redundant requirements. A single, substantial standard for certification would create a nation-wide job market for teachers, and thereby make the profession enormously more attractive to would-be teachers. The best thing about this is that it significantly increase the desirability of a teaching post, without requiring the gov't to fund salary increases.
But back to the Republicans, I respect what you think about the issue, but the fact remains that the real Republican party is happy to collect enormous quantities of Federal tax, which it then redistributes back to local education in enormously stupid ways. If it's politically impossible to convince D.C. to give these funds back, then we should at least spend them intelligently (No Child Left Behind, my ass.)
Money that would be going to kids is not going to corporations, it simply wouldn't go into the economy (since the corporations are the backbone). We need them, like it or not, for jobs, goods, services, etc.
Actually, corporations are the least of the problem. At least they do produce tangible revenue that (normally) benefits the public, and a corporate tax cut can be linked to some sort of desirable type of investment/spending. The issue I would take with the current policy is that tax cuts are being frittered a
Alternatively, some people could have even more highly evolved neural centers that are capable of decoding the neural gibberish from another mind.
I don't really believe in any of this; rather I'm suggesting it as the way a form of telepathy might be implemented, someday in the distant future when we develop the technology.
The price mechanism of the free market does a terrible job of pricing many limited resources. Take oil, for instance; the price of a barrel of oil is seldom much higher than what it costs to find it, pump it, and store/deliver it. Occasionally the producers will stockpile or artificially adjust output in near-term planning, but rarely will they do this with any intention of covering long-term future shortages.
What'll happen with oil and other limited resources is that the price will stay extraordinarily low up until the moment that the shortages actually start to become obvious. If we don't do some pre-planning before we reach that point, we might have some bad times. Let's avoid that possibility by planning ahead.
There's currently plenty of space for landfills, and there's currently no particular shortage of raw materials. Fast forward a few decades and things might not be so convenient, at least not everywhere.
Pushing recycling now advances the state of the art. Even if the process is inefficient now, it will eventually become cleaner and cheaper, in the same way that paper recycling has. So part of every dollar we put towards recycling can be considered an investment in future technology.
Maybe I should have put "garbage collect" into quotes. What I meant was that I want the system to remove the files from the disk when their reference count reaches zero. Not literal RAM garbage collection, just an analogy.