OK, you're crazy. Or you didn't read the great grandparent post. Here's the relevant portion:
Generally, though, in a market with a currency backed by something other than fiat/force
This, always, in currency/economic discussions means the gold standard. Also check the g'g'parent's site - the second link on the page is about the gold standard.
Anyone remember Friendster? It was MySpace before MySpace existed. Then the founder tried to intrusively control how people related to each other. Result?: Friendster died, and MySpace, amongst a host of impersonators, but one that wasn't so intrusive (at least socially, nevermind MySpace's instrusive assault on your sense of web aesthetics) catapulted into popularity. Read all about it in detail.
Did you actually, you know, read the article you linked to? Because any mention of Friendster dying because of intrusive control over relationships is noteable by it's absence.
Well then relocate your servers to Antigua.
It's not the server location that matters - the goverment could care less about the servers. It's about where than bank accounts and persons of the operators are located. (And even if these are located outside the boundaries of the US... You can still be stopped at the banking 'border'.)
SL is not a "free society," it's a simulated world which is operated by an American entity, and which uses virtual currency that is openly exchangable for the real thing. As such, it needs to abide by the law or it puts its entire operation at legal risk.
And that's the key - until fairly recently the Linden's were extremely reluctant to interfere inside that simulated world. Their attitude was that they were not a goverment and not a regulatory agency (beyond, occasionally, enforcing the EULA/TOS). Will they now take a larger and more direct hand in the Grid?
However, I suspect this action is being taken not because of legal risks - but to clean up the Grid so as to make it more attractive to mainstream individuals and companies.
I get amused by the people that claim WoW is "inferior" because of its friendly environment and no-penalty PvP. Well it's not, that is actually what makes it superior to most people, and is the reason they have 9 million players. Most people aren't hardcore, they don't want a game that punishes them for failure, they don't want to have to deal with keeping up with those who make a game in to a life and so on.
Precisely. Posters like the OP seem to have missed the fact that high penalty non consensual PvP nearly destroyed UO - once the non PvP zone was introduced, the PvP zones became a virtual wasteland.
Somebody with enough brain to not credit the tinfoil hat nonsense that NASA somehow overdesigns their craft and make performance claims only a fraction of that actually built.
Are they all sharing one data center in SF? If so, why don't they have co-locations in other cities?
Because co-locations are expensive.
Because mirroring content and adding dynamic DNS adds considerable complexity. I.E. more things that can break (The former is a real headache for high traffic/dynamic sites.)
Because maintenance at co-locations can be a bit of a headache.
With this type of equipment, if for some reason you lose power and the generator doesn't start before the flywheel runs down, you're dead. There's no way to start the thing without external power. Unless you buy the optional Black Start feature [pageprocessor.nl], which has an extra battery pack for starting the Diesel.
This is why (US) submarine Diesels use compressed air for starting...
If some other encyclopedia wants to be king, then they have to increase their page rank. The other encyclopedias will have to create communities and create reasons for people to link to them, in order for them to increase their popularity on google.
The funny thing is - I see Wikipedia linked on the web extremely rarely. I don't think that really explains Wikipedia's high page rank.
OTOH, Wikipedia is almost perfectly designed to spam Google. It's full of keywords, and linked keywords, and every page has a well formed title... And there are multiple exact mirrors on the web linked back to the parent on each and every page.
Dude, it's the paradigm that sucks, not Alexa per se. Consider Nielsen ratings: would you or any self-respecting Slashdotter actually be so foolish as to agree to be a "Nielsen family"?
Yes, I would.
[Snippage "I'm so superior to everyone else chestbeating by the OP"]
I'm quietly of the suspicion that national and especially online advertising is only a fraction as profitable as corporations think it is. I suspect if someone could do a truly objective cost-benefit analysis of mass advertising, like car commercials on TV
This is one reason that I actually like Amazon's recommendation system. I can provide information about what I like and don't like, and the site will then suggest items that I may be interested in based on that. If it suggests something that I'm not interested in, I can click "not interested" and it never presents that item to me again.
The more I use Amazon's recommendation system (and I've been using it ever since it came out), the less and less I like it.
If you are interested in multiple things, it's pretty useless as the recommendations are largely based on what you bought the most of or bought most recently.
When I buy books on (for example) food and cooking - I buy heavy stuff. Classic authors, sociology, psychology, serious history, good books on specific regional cuisines... But what does Amazon serve me up in the way of recommendations? Emeril... Racheal Ray... And other lightweight flavors of the month.
And then if I click on 'not interested' (in the lightweights) it merely moves the nearly endless spew of cheap crap cookbooks further up the recommendation list, and eventually stops recommending food and cooking books altogether.
Related to the above - the recommendation system is completely brain dead when it comes to multiple editions of the same book. I collect McPhee and Petroski - but despite the fact I rated them 5 stars, I've also had to check 'not interested' on so many versions of their books that Amazon no longer recommends them to me, or tells me when a new one is coming out!
When did rate the duplicates highly, they so choked my recommendation that literally none of the first 150 recommendations on my list was anything but connected to those two authors!
Your rant might be impressive Taco - if it contained at it's core an argument stronger than "the cool kids won't let us play with them!".
In that vein, had I (a Firefox user since way back) been in charge of Alexa, I wouldn't have worried or hurried to get a Firefox version out. It wasn't until fairly recently that Firefox numbered a significant portion of the overall internet userbase. The same things goes with your arguement about some random website outscoring Slashdot - Slashgeeks are an infitesmal slice of internet demographics.
It's amusing that for all the Slashdot Hivemind complains about the big game companies and their endless sequels... Folks can't seem to wait for the latest installment of the Zelda or Mario franchises.
So its understandable that we will start enforcing our concept of morality on others right off the bat?
Why not? Shipping the computers in the first place is enforcing our concept of social structures and economic opportunity. (As well as the project enforcing it's biases and political views by refusing to sell them to schools within the US.)
However, there is no need for manned flight to other planets anymore: probes do a much better job more easily, at a fraction of the cost, and a probe's survivability is much less of an issue.
Let's put it this way: What the two rovers currently on Mars have accomplished _together_ in three years could be accomplished by a single human geologist in about three weeks. Probes have a very, very long way to go before they can do a job as good as human - let alone better.
I say forget about hauling big stuff over to Mars. The only folks who care are prez Bush, for demagogic purposes, and people who think watching a Neil Armstrong type character utter some silly piece of wisdom when setting foot on a planet is the pinnacle of human space exploration.
Your arguement sounds awfully weak if you have to cap it by defining those who disagree with your assumptions as idiots.
Feh - kids these days and the airs they put on. Had I gone to college, first year mechanical engineers would have been doing their drawings ink-on-paper (or mylar), and any calculations required would have been done on a slipstick or pocket calculator. About the time I would have gotten my Masters, a 10 megabyte drive would have been considered a luxury.
The important of cracking Enigma cannot ever be overstated.
Actually, it can be (and often is) overstated. The fascination with Enigma, among both the general public and the historians, often obscures (or fails to mention at all) the fact that the codebreaking effort was but one portion of the overall electronic intelligence effort. Especially in the Battle of the Atlantic where Huff-Duff and more conventional technques (like traffic analysis) yielded vast amounts of vital intelligence data.
Even with decrypted ciphertext, it always took considerable analysis to break the code(s) the messages used in the text for further security. (In the Atlantic the Allies, for example, never got a break like 'AF is short of fresh water'.)
AFAIK, the doctrine of first sale applies to the consumer/end user, it does not apply to the reseller or distributor. The companies in question are arguing that the eBay sellers, who seem to always have a stock of the materials on hand, have crossed the line from end user/consumer to reseller/distributor.
Are you kidding me? I can't WAIT for a world with no stores. No more surly sales clerks, no more snake-oil sales clerks, no more presumption of criminality (papers! Ve need your papers upon exit!), I could go on and on.
Yep. And no more "I need x right now - I'll simply hop down to the store and get one" either.
I don't see anywhere in TFA that specifies this is the cause of complete hard drive failure. It is, however, a very credible mechanism for the slow increase in bad sectors that is typical of many hard drives. (You young un's may not have heard of this, or seen it, as the hardware/software conspires to hide it from you now-a-days.) I have seen this eventually lead to failure (I.E. unuseability) of a drive.
Since (I would assume) a given manufacturer would tend to use the same materials across a broad span of drive models, this could also be a reasonable explanation for why some manufacturers have reps for 'bad drives'.
The article summary is somewhat misleading - the US and the EU decided a couple of years ago to work together and talks have been ongoing since then. The only real news here is that they are about to reach agreement.
I suspect the EU may be pressing for agreement to help smokescreen the fact that Galileo is badly behind schedule.
Slashdot Mirror
This, always, in currency/economic discussions means the gold standard. Also check the g'g'parent's site - the second link on the page is about the gold standard.
It's quite clear he is a gold bug.
Did you actually, you know, read the article you linked to? Because any mention of Friendster dying because of intrusive control over relationships is noteable by it's absence.
It's not the server location that matters - the goverment could care less about the servers. It's about where than bank accounts and persons of the operators are located. (And even if these are located outside the boundaries of the US... You can still be stopped at the banking 'border'.)
And that's the key - until fairly recently the Linden's were extremely reluctant to interfere inside that simulated world. Their attitude was that they were not a goverment and not a regulatory agency (beyond, occasionally, enforcing the EULA/TOS). Will they now take a larger and more direct hand in the Grid?
However, I suspect this action is being taken not because of legal risks - but to clean up the Grid so as to make it more attractive to mainstream individuals and companies.
"Popular" != "Superior".
Precisely. Posters like the OP seem to have missed the fact that high penalty non consensual PvP nearly destroyed UO - once the non PvP zone was introduced, the PvP zones became a virtual wasteland.
Somebody with enough brain to not credit the tinfoil hat nonsense that NASA somehow overdesigns their craft and make performance claims only a fraction of that actually built.
This is why (US) submarine Diesels use compressed air for starting...
The funny thing is - I see Wikipedia linked on the web extremely rarely. I don't think that really explains Wikipedia's high page rank.
OTOH, Wikipedia is almost perfectly designed to spam Google. It's full of keywords, and linked keywords, and every page has a well formed title... And there are multiple exact mirrors on the web linked back to the parent on each and every page .
Yes, I would.
[Snippage "I'm so superior to everyone else chestbeating by the OP"]
You might be surprised.
The more I use Amazon's recommendation system (and I've been using it ever since it came out), the less and less I like it.
And then if I click on 'not interested' (in the lightweights) it merely moves the nearly endless spew of cheap crap cookbooks further up the recommendation list, and eventually stops recommending food and cooking books altogether.
When did rate the duplicates highly, they so choked my recommendation that literally none of the first 150 recommendations on my list was anything but connected to those two authors!
Your rant might be impressive Taco - if it contained at it's core an argument stronger than "the cool kids won't let us play with them!".
In that vein, had I (a Firefox user since way back) been in charge of Alexa, I wouldn't have worried or hurried to get a Firefox version out. It wasn't until fairly recently that Firefox numbered a significant portion of the overall internet userbase. The same things goes with your arguement about some random website outscoring Slashdot - Slashgeeks are an infitesmal slice of internet demographics.
It's amusing that for all the Slashdot Hivemind complains about the big game companies and their endless sequels... Folks can't seem to wait for the latest installment of the Zelda or Mario franchises.
No. The internet was meant to allow scientists to share information and computational resources.
Why not? Shipping the computers in the first place is enforcing our concept of social structures and economic opportunity. (As well as the project enforcing it's biases and political views by refusing to sell them to schools within the US.)
Here's a free clue for you: The surface gravity of Mars is considerably less than the surface gravity of Earth.
Let's put it this way: What the two rovers currently on Mars have accomplished _together_ in three years could be accomplished by a single human geologist in about three weeks. Probes have a very, very long way to go before they can do a job as good as human - let alone better.
Your arguement sounds awfully weak if you have to cap it by defining those who disagree with your assumptions as idiots.
Feh - kids these days and the airs they put on. Had I gone to college, first year mechanical engineers would have been doing their drawings ink-on-paper (or mylar), and any calculations required would have been done on a slipstick or pocket calculator. About the time I would have gotten my Masters, a 10 megabyte drive would have been considered a luxury.
:-) :-)
Now get off of my lawn!
Actually, it can be (and often is) overstated. The fascination with Enigma, among both the general public and the historians, often obscures (or fails to mention at all) the fact that the codebreaking effort was but one portion of the overall electronic intelligence effort. Especially in the Battle of the Atlantic where Huff-Duff and more conventional technques (like traffic analysis) yielded vast amounts of vital intelligence data.
Even with decrypted ciphertext, it always took considerable analysis to break the code(s) the messages used in the text for further security. (In the Atlantic the Allies, for example, never got a break like 'AF is short of fresh water'.)
AFAIK, the doctrine of first sale applies to the consumer/end user, it does not apply to the reseller or distributor. The companies in question are arguing that the eBay sellers, who seem to always have a stock of the materials on hand, have crossed the line from end user/consumer to reseller/distributor.
Yep. And no more "I need x right now - I'll simply hop down to the store and get one" either.
I don't see anywhere in TFA that specifies this is the cause of complete hard drive failure. It is, however, a very credible mechanism for the slow increase in bad sectors that is typical of many hard drives. (You young un's may not have heard of this, or seen it, as the hardware/software conspires to hide it from you now-a-days.) I have seen this eventually lead to failure (I.E. unuseability) of a drive.
Since (I would assume) a given manufacturer would tend to use the same materials across a broad span of drive models, this could also be a reasonable explanation for why some manufacturers have reps for 'bad drives'.
So are these drone aircraft.
Why is this insightful? F-15's can also be used for 'innappropriate purposes', yet you don't call for civilian overrides for them.
Tinfoil hats FTW I guess.
The article summary is somewhat misleading - the US and the EU decided a couple of years ago to work together and talks have been ongoing since then. The only real news here is that they are about to reach agreement.
I suspect the EU may be pressing for agreement to help smokescreen the fact that Galileo is badly behind schedule.