No? then she deserves to be sued. You can't bad mouth people and spread false information about them without being able to prove it
Actually, in the US you can spread unproven information and the the burden is on the plaintiff to prove that the facts in question are false (not merely unsupported) as part of their libel/slander claim:
How to prove libel There are several ways a person must go about proving that libel has taken place. For example, in the United States, first, the person must prove that the statement was false.
Maybe that's more a problem with analysts extrapolating incredible conclusions from small isolated bits of data... also known as anecdotes. Anyone basing buying decisions on facebook posts deserves to get burned.... SEC doesn't need to get involved here.
Exactly backwards, it's not about those basing buying decisions on these bits, it's about those that didn't have access to them and are operating as a market disadvantage. The publication requirement is basically say that you can't give anyone a leg up on every one else by giving information to a selective audience, you have to give it to everyone.
A company the size of Netflix can certainly afford to set up a system where the CEO can automatically crosspost to his FB page along with a public blog. That's all the SEC requires (âoenon-exclusionary methodâ) to comply with the selective communication rules.
For example, I never agreed to sacrifice my right to travel freely in exchange for airport feel-ups and highway checkpoints (actions which, coincidentally, do not actually make anyone safer).
Not really apt comparison in the context of free software, given that no one is mandating that you give up any of your rights if you don't chose to run Windows or OSX.
If only they would do this for their own attempts to regulate the Internet (think SOPA, PIPA and DMCA), the Internet would be much better off than it is today.
You mean by not passing SOPA and PIPA? I mean, 2/3 is a pretty good average...
Nope. The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it. No matter how silly the pension agreed by some chicken shit politician who thought they could kick the can down the road to someone else.
So instead of enacting Bush's tax cuts as normal legislation, Congress should have entered into a 'contract' to set those rates with taxpayers and that way no future Congress could ever raise those taxes again? Or write a contract with oil companies to give them access to some oil field and never impose any new environmental regulations on them. Or give Blackwater a 100 year contract to defend US embassies abroad with no oversight.... [ Feel free to substitute whatever other policy you oppose that has, at some point recently, passed or could have passed through Congress. The specifics are illustrative only. ]
I don't know who taught you Civics but that's not how a representative government works, no legislature can bind a future legislature except by going through the supermajority process of getting an amendment passed. Otherwise, it defeats the power of voters to repeal policies that they no longer support and replace them with new ones. You wouldn't allow your political opponents the power to entrench their legislation in such an irreversible way, why should you think that you can do so for your own?
You should really come down to the meth highway and get a nice taste of REAL America
Actually 75% of Americans now live in urbanized areas. It's the quaint rural farmer and his meth-cook son that are increasingly non-representative of the REAL Americaâ
remember they can hold up to 5 days without charge in most places
-5 Factually Incorrect.
The Supreme Court has said that you are entitled a probable cause hearing in front of a judge no more than 48 hours after arrest, and even then as promptly as reasonably possible.
Where an arrested individual does not receive a probable cause determination within 48 hours, the calculus changes. In such a case, the arrested individual does not bear the burden of proving an unreasonable delay. Rather, the burden shifts to the government to demonstrate the existence of a bona fide emergency or other extraordinary circumstance. The fact that in a particular case it may take longer than 48 hours to consolidate pretrial proceedings does not qualify as an extraordinary circumstance. Nor, for that matter, do intervening weekends. A jurisdiction that chooses to offer combined proceedings must do so as soon as is reasonably feasible, but in no event later than 48 hours after arrest.
Now, it's quite possible that Windows 7 is not secure enough for your needs and 8 doesn't improve upon that significantly, but I'm skeptical that 8 is a step backwards in security.
This reminded me of The Underhanded C Contest -- where the goal is to introduce malicious-acting but innocent-looking bugs that, even upon discovery as bugs, could be passed of as programming errors and not intentional backdoors. This should be required reading for anyone reading potentially-hostile code that's trying to pass an audit.
Surely Huawei has a large enough networking codebase to put enough of these in that Oz won't find them, and even if they do find them all -- how do you prove that a bug with an unintended leak/security concern was malicious?
Yeah, well... they don't do that. They keep buying overpriced cable, ridiculous cell phone plans, Nickelback, lies by politicians, McRibs, etc.
They don't do that because most people don't need arrogant commenters who think they know better and want to dictate what they buy. What do you think such a condescending attitude accomplishes?
And FWIW, personally I like the McRib, I think my politicians are doing a alright (B/B-) job and I'm quite happy that I can buy a cell phone that would be in the top 500 supercomputers in 1993 with a WWAN faster than LANs of the time (remember 100baseT came out only in 1995). I don't know how you decided that this is "overpriced" but it looks like a fucking steal to me.
You aren't moving the decision from one group of stupid people to another group of stupid people.
That's precisely what they are doing: moving the decision on whether to buy a large soda from the (stupid) consumers and making it by the (stupid) Board of Health.
Every obese person on the planet KNOWS they are fat because they consume too many calories. But the vast majority don't know the typical sugar-sweetened beverage contains 10-15kcal per ounce
It does say so right on the can/bottle, but nevertheless, I would be most happy to support your proposal for an updated label that more clearly highlights this fact.
and that merely cutting a portion of their SSB consumption would lead to weight loss without a substantial change in lifestyle.
I'm not sure that you can support this contention without also quantifying the pleasure that consumers get from drinking these beverages. It's not enough to look only at the negative results and then conclude that one should do less of the activity any more than it is just look at the positive results to the exclusion of the negative ones.
But data in a diversified stack requires much more effort to keep in sync -- often with inconsistent results. iTunes keeps music playlists and media purchases updated automatically between devices. OSX/iMessage or GoogleVoice/Android keep your SMS synced between devices so you can send and receive from the same address across your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone.
Sure sync can be done on a diversified stack with generic protocols, and Sysadmins are expected to be able to handle such tasks, but consumers are not. The tech world is not just for Sysadmins any more.
Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.
Or public health officials have been tricked into thinking it's more important for people to be healthy than to eat satisfying junk food and are exploiting flaws in human psychology regarding the correlation between physical appearance and mental state (we are biased towards believing that attractive people are happier).
That's the problem with the "people are stupid" line of argumentation that's prevalent in the nanny state -- it doesn't really explain why we should prefer moving decision-making from one group of stupid people to another group of stupid people.
I would much rather have a variety of operating systems or platforms which use common protocols and formats so that I can switch between them. Technology evolves, operating systems change. Locking one's self into one platform at the exclusion of others is not a good idea. At least not for the consumer, it just makes it harder to switch when the existing platform falls to provide the quality demanded
I think you are confusing platform lock (the ability to migrate data from one platform to another) with platform interoperation (running multiple platforms at the same time). Those are quite different things -- migration involves a looking at the data a solid blob to move form one place to another, interoperation is largely about synchronization. Consumers absolutely want the former, but usually can't be bothered for the latter.
For example, Chrome stores bookmarks in HTML making them very easy to migrate from platform to platform -- if I decide to go back to Firefox, I will have no problem migrating. On the other hand, I would not for a second tolerate the giant pain in the ass necessary to run Chrome on my laptop and Firefox on my desktop and try to keep them in sync. This is not a dig on Firefox either.
Basically, the concern that you have ("locking one's self into one platform") is totally orthogonal to the point made in the article ("running everything on one platform has marked advantages in terms of consistency and sync").
I hate to break it to you, but those are clearly Schuko plugs, not NEMA plugs. You can note the extra ground along the sides of the sockets (actually, a safer design that NEMA).
Hate to let facts get in the way of a good insult, but those are stupid Germans, not stupid Americans. Which makes it funnier that you might link it, because (like everywhere else) we have no shortage of idiots here...
We'll use European cars that already get that sort of milage! Not sure if Americans know, but cars in the US are stupidly large for no good reason. Might help the fuel bills to get a smaller, more practical car. Oh yeah, some people in the US are stupidly large, for no good reason either. Might help food bills...
Tell you what, you can put those "more practical" Europoean cars at the dealerships right next to the "stupidly large" cars that are there now. We'll even mandate that each car will have affixed a sticker that details the predicted impact to one's fuel bills. Heck, we can even subsidize that small car and penalize the ones that don't meet efficiency targets.
Then we'll let the car buyer decide whether the double-extra cost of the larger vehicle, both from increased base cost and penalties, is worth it and my bet is still on the larger car because that's where the consumer preference lies. That's the bottom line -- that you are at variance with what people actually want to buy and the "fight" to sell more smaller vehicles is a fight against those desires.
[ Note, FWIW, when I had a car, I drove a small sedan because that's where my preference lay. I would pay no heed to belittling condescension that called my choice stupid irrespective of whether I drove that or a SUV. ]
[ Note2, There are a lot of neat smaller cars (Ford Fusion, VW Golf) that American consumers will buy. I assure you, however, none of them were sold on those cars by someone calling larger cars "stupid" or by insulting consumers. Instead, they actually made a positive contribution by designing a small car that consumers like. ]
Nice strawman. Murder or attempted murder requires mens rea. Most people who do this are not trying to kill anyone. They're just being idiots.
Reckless endangerment, sure. Attempted murder? Good luck getting that to stick. You'd be laughed out of court.
Well, at least in California, the malice required can be implied by reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"):
(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought. [ Snip some abortion boilerplate ] Such malice may be express or implied. It is express when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature. It is implied, when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.
That is shown when, as here, the defendant for a base, antisocial motive and with wanton disregard for human life, does an act that involves a high degree of probability that it will result in death. By his own admissions defendant's conduct demonstrates that he was not averse to endangering life for the sake of the sexual pleasure it gave him. Only a person with an "abandoned and malignant heart" could value the attainment of that pleasure more highly than human life.
There's also the difference between punishing someone directly and "punishing" them by imposing a penalty on someone else that happens to have a negative effect on them. If a parent with young children does something truly terrible and goes to jail, society is not punishing the children that have to go without a parent even though the children sadly suffer (probably them most) as a consequence. If that was the breadwinner of the family, they will suffer even more acutely.
In the case of joint property, spouses agree to share in each other's fortune and misfortune alike. If they don't want that arrangement, they don't have to enter into it. If you marry someone who imposes large torts on others by their own stupid and unjustifiable behavior, you will suffer the consequences.
Awesome tool, glad to see an integrated and thoughtful approach to power management on a large scale.
I think I noted that if you can sleep the machines a lot then it doesn't make sense to upgrade since the duty cycle is pretty light. On the other hand, if you are running 10 hours a day then you save $2 per machine per week, not $2/machine/year as you said.
I work at a non-profit charity and many of our machines are donations from various companies. Many of these machines are 10 years old! (Granted 10 year old machines are at least 1.8GHz P4's now days) As long as I can get 512MB ram on XP or 1GB for Win 7, these machines perform common tasks such as web browsing and document writing just fine, though extra ram helps a lot if running antivirus.
I understand that capital availability is a tough spot in non-for-profits but please consider buying a Kill-A-Watt and evaluating whether this strategy is costing you more money in power bills than it would be to buy a more modern efficient machine.
For light-duty machines that you can ensure are put to sleep when not in use, this almost never helps. On the other hand, for labs that run 10 hours a day, saving 200W by switching from a old 300W desktop to a modern 100W one saves you 1KWH = $.50 a day and so a $300 investment pays off in 2 years.
This is the same "problem" that faces airline companies, taxi drivers, power companies, cell network operators. Consumers pay for these services by usage and so total revenue is proportional to average use but the costs are heavily skewed towards capital costs and so are proportional to the peak load that you can service. In that case, there's a fundamental tradeoff -- either we have to degrade service when demand hits the 95th percentile (just as an example) or we have to figure out a way to pay for the extra capital investment that's not needed 95% of the time.
There's a few alternatives you can do:
(1) Overprovision and soak it up into the price structure for all consumers. This is what most power companies do -- they build enough power generating capacity for peak load and then charge a bit more per KWH to make up for the increased outlay.
(2) Overprovision and charge extra at peak. This is the airline solution -- they always have service available but under contention the last few seats are exorbitantly expensive. Essentially those that need peak service are paying to leave a few seats open all the time in case they need them.
(3) Don't overprovision: this is the taxi solution. This means that service degrades significantly under peak demand -- anyone trying to get a cab home on a Saturday night in a major city has experienced this. Those that do get a cab pay the usual fare, everyone else waits around a while. This is also the solution that California has routinely deployed for their inability to provide peak power during heat spells -- same price for everyone but rolling blackouts for the unlucky few.
That's it -- there aren't any clean answers when you are making compromises between peak availability and average efficiency. You've either got to pay for the extra capacity when you don't need it or else you have to suffer when you don't have the capacity when you do need it.
All true, and even more, the Carrier Strike Force can protect an entire contingent of Marines aboard landing ships from air/sea/sub attacks while they move into position to attack ground forces. Without the carrier, those transports would be shredded by even a small contingent of 1970s era attack jets.
This was the whole battle-of-Britain thing -- you can't invade someone by sea if you don't control the coastal airspace.
Our expectations of privacy from government intrusion aren't set by specific technical processes; they are set by the 4th amendment.
You are saying that the 4A protects us where we have a reasonable expectation of privacy but then that REP is set by the contours of the 4A. That's circular.
Here's a good overview of the way the Supreme Court has expanded and operationalized the test for REP:
The Fourth Amendment protects reasonable expectations of privacy, but the Supreme Court has refused to provide a consistent explanation for what makes an expectation of privacy reasonable. The Court's refusal has disappointed scholars and frustrated students for four decades. This article explains why the Supreme Court cannot provide an answer: No one test can accurately and consistently distinguish less troublesome police practices that do not require Fourth Amendment oversight from more troublesome police practices that are reasonable only if the police have a warrant or compelling circumstances. Instead of endorsing one single approach, the Supreme Court uses four different tests at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
No? then she deserves to be sued. You can't bad mouth people and spread false information about them without being able to prove it
Actually, in the US you can spread unproven information and the the burden is on the plaintiff to prove that the facts in question are false (not merely unsupported) as part of their libel/slander claim:
Maybe that's more a problem with analysts extrapolating incredible conclusions from small isolated bits of data... also known as anecdotes. Anyone basing buying decisions on facebook posts deserves to get burned.... SEC doesn't need to get involved here.
Exactly backwards, it's not about those basing buying decisions on these bits, it's about those that didn't have access to them and are operating as a market disadvantage. The publication requirement is basically say that you can't give anyone a leg up on every one else by giving information to a selective audience, you have to give it to everyone.
A company the size of Netflix can certainly afford to set up a system where the CEO can automatically crosspost to his FB page along with a public blog. That's all the SEC requires (âoenon-exclusionary methodâ) to comply with the selective communication rules.
For example, I never agreed to sacrifice my right to travel freely in exchange for airport feel-ups and highway checkpoints (actions which, coincidentally, do not actually make anyone safer).
Not really apt comparison in the context of free software, given that no one is mandating that you give up any of your rights if you don't chose to run Windows or OSX.
If only they would do this for their own attempts to regulate the Internet (think SOPA, PIPA and DMCA), the Internet would be much better off than it is today.
You mean by not passing SOPA and PIPA? I mean, 2/3 is a pretty good average ...
Most people don't really care about being free. They'd rather be safe and feel secure even if it's only an illusion.
Isn't the freedom to chose safety itself an exercise of choice?
Nope. The Civics lesson is that when the government enters into a contract with an individual that it cannot then decide later on that it doesn't liked the contract and legislate to undo it. No matter how silly the pension agreed by some chicken shit politician who thought they could kick the can down the road to someone else.
So instead of enacting Bush's tax cuts as normal legislation, Congress should have entered into a 'contract' to set those rates with taxpayers and that way no future Congress could ever raise those taxes again? Or write a contract with oil companies to give them access to some oil field and never impose any new environmental regulations on them. Or give Blackwater a 100 year contract to defend US embassies abroad with no oversight .... [ Feel free to substitute whatever other policy you oppose that has, at some point recently, passed or could have passed through Congress. The specifics are illustrative only. ]
I don't know who taught you Civics but that's not how a representative government works, no legislature can bind a future legislature except by going through the supermajority process of getting an amendment passed. Otherwise, it defeats the power of voters to repeal policies that they no longer support and replace them with new ones. You wouldn't allow your political opponents the power to entrench their legislation in such an irreversible way, why should you think that you can do so for your own?
You should really come down to the meth highway and get a nice taste of REAL America
Actually 75% of Americans now live in urbanized areas. It's the quaint rural farmer and his meth-cook son that are increasingly non-representative of the REAL Americaâ
remember they can hold up to 5 days without charge in most places
-5 Factually Incorrect.
The Supreme Court has said that you are entitled a probable cause hearing in front of a judge no more than 48 hours after arrest, and even then as promptly as reasonably possible.
See http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/89-1817.ZO.html
And he was right, because global oil production peaked in 2008 and we are extracting less now than we did in that year.
Hmm, what else happened in 2008 that might explain why demand for oil dropped significantly around that time?
Citation needed.
Now, it's quite possible that Windows 7 is not secure enough for your needs and 8 doesn't improve upon that significantly, but I'm skeptical that 8 is a step backwards in security.
This reminded me of The Underhanded C Contest -- where the goal is to introduce malicious-acting but innocent-looking bugs that, even upon discovery as bugs, could be passed of as programming errors and not intentional backdoors. This should be required reading for anyone reading potentially-hostile code that's trying to pass an audit.
Surely Huawei has a large enough networking codebase to put enough of these in that Oz won't find them, and even if they do find them all -- how do you prove that a bug with an unintended leak/security concern was malicious?
Yeah, well... they don't do that. They keep buying overpriced cable, ridiculous cell phone plans, Nickelback, lies by politicians, McRibs, etc.
They don't do that because most people don't need arrogant commenters who think they know better and want to dictate what they buy. What do you think such a condescending attitude accomplishes?
And FWIW, personally I like the McRib, I think my politicians are doing a alright (B/B-) job and I'm quite happy that I can buy a cell phone that would be in the top 500 supercomputers in 1993 with a WWAN faster than LANs of the time (remember 100baseT came out only in 1995). I don't know how you decided that this is "overpriced" but it looks like a fucking steal to me.
Nickelback sucks though, no argument there.
You aren't moving the decision from one group of stupid people to another group of stupid people.
That's precisely what they are doing: moving the decision on whether to buy a large soda from the (stupid) consumers and making it by the (stupid) Board of Health.
Every obese person on the planet KNOWS they are fat because they consume too many calories. But the vast majority don't know the typical sugar-sweetened beverage contains 10-15kcal per ounce
It does say so right on the can/bottle, but nevertheless, I would be most happy to support your proposal for an updated label that more clearly highlights this fact.
and that merely cutting a portion of their SSB consumption would lead to weight loss without a substantial change in lifestyle.
I'm not sure that you can support this contention without also quantifying the pleasure that consumers get from drinking these beverages. It's not enough to look only at the negative results and then conclude that one should do less of the activity any more than it is just look at the positive results to the exclusion of the negative ones.
But data in a diversified stack requires much more effort to keep in sync -- often with inconsistent results. iTunes keeps music playlists and media purchases updated automatically between devices. OSX/iMessage or GoogleVoice/Android keep your SMS synced between devices so you can send and receive from the same address across your desktop/laptop/tablet/phone.
Sure sync can be done on a diversified stack with generic protocols, and Sysadmins are expected to be able to handle such tasks, but consumers are not. The tech world is not just for Sysadmins any more.
Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.
Or public health officials have been tricked into thinking it's more important for people to be healthy than to eat satisfying junk food and are exploiting flaws in human psychology regarding the correlation between physical appearance and mental state (we are biased towards believing that attractive people are happier).
That's the problem with the "people are stupid" line of argumentation that's prevalent in the nanny state -- it doesn't really explain why we should prefer moving decision-making from one group of stupid people to another group of stupid people.
I would much rather have a variety of operating systems or platforms which use common protocols and formats so that I can switch between them. Technology evolves, operating systems change. Locking one's self into one platform at the exclusion of others is not a good idea. At least not for the consumer, it just makes it harder to switch when the existing platform falls to provide the quality demanded
I think you are confusing platform lock (the ability to migrate data from one platform to another) with platform interoperation (running multiple platforms at the same time). Those are quite different things -- migration involves a looking at the data a solid blob to move form one place to another, interoperation is largely about synchronization. Consumers absolutely want the former, but usually can't be bothered for the latter.
For example, Chrome stores bookmarks in HTML making them very easy to migrate from platform to platform -- if I decide to go back to Firefox, I will have no problem migrating. On the other hand, I would not for a second tolerate the giant pain in the ass necessary to run Chrome on my laptop and Firefox on my desktop and try to keep them in sync. This is not a dig on Firefox either.
Basically, the concern that you have ("locking one's self into one platform") is totally orthogonal to the point made in the article ("running everything on one platform has marked advantages in terms of consistency and sync").
Photo linked with the caption "Stupid Americans"
I hate to break it to you, but those are clearly Schuko plugs, not NEMA plugs. You can note the extra ground along the sides of the sockets (actually, a safer design that NEMA).
Hate to let facts get in the way of a good insult, but those are stupid Germans, not stupid Americans. Which makes it funnier that you might link it, because (like everywhere else) we have no shortage of idiots here ...
We'll use European cars that already get that sort of milage! Not sure if Americans know, but cars in the US are stupidly large for no good reason. Might help the fuel bills to get a smaller, more practical car. Oh yeah, some people in the US are stupidly large, for no good reason either. Might help food bills...
Tell you what, you can put those "more practical" Europoean cars at the dealerships right next to the "stupidly large" cars that are there now. We'll even mandate that each car will have affixed a sticker that details the predicted impact to one's fuel bills. Heck, we can even subsidize that small car and penalize the ones that don't meet efficiency targets.
Then we'll let the car buyer decide whether the double-extra cost of the larger vehicle, both from increased base cost and penalties, is worth it and my bet is still on the larger car because that's where the consumer preference lies. That's the bottom line -- that you are at variance with what people actually want to buy and the "fight" to sell more smaller vehicles is a fight against those desires.
[ Note, FWIW, when I had a car, I drove a small sedan because that's where my preference lay. I would pay no heed to belittling condescension that called my choice stupid irrespective of whether I drove that or a SUV. ]
[ Note2, There are a lot of neat smaller cars (Ford Fusion, VW Golf) that American consumers will buy. I assure you, however, none of them were sold on those cars by someone calling larger cars "stupid" or by insulting consumers. Instead, they actually made a positive contribution by designing a small car that consumers like. ]
Nice strawman. Murder or attempted murder requires mens rea. Most people who do this are not trying to kill anyone. They're just being idiots.
Reckless endangerment, sure. Attempted murder? Good luck getting that to stick. You'd be laughed out of court.
Well, at least in California, the malice required can be implied by reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (described as an "abandoned and malignant heart"):
(a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.
[ Snip some abortion boilerplate ]
Such malice may be express or implied. It is express when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature. It is implied, when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.
The Supreme Court of California explained it thus People v. Thomas, 41 Cal. 2d 470 - Cal: Supreme Court 1953
That is shown when, as here, the defendant for a base, antisocial motive and with wanton disregard for human life, does an act that involves a high degree of probability that it will result in death. By his own admissions defendant's conduct demonstrates that he was not averse to endangering life for the sake of the sexual pleasure it gave him. Only a person with an "abandoned and malignant heart" could value the attainment of that pleasure more highly than human life.
There's also the difference between punishing someone directly and "punishing" them by imposing a penalty on someone else that happens to have a negative effect on them. If a parent with young children does something truly terrible and goes to jail, society is not punishing the children that have to go without a parent even though the children sadly suffer (probably them most) as a consequence. If that was the breadwinner of the family, they will suffer even more acutely.
In the case of joint property, spouses agree to share in each other's fortune and misfortune alike. If they don't want that arrangement, they don't have to enter into it. If you marry someone who imposes large torts on others by their own stupid and unjustifiable behavior, you will suffer the consequences.
Awesome tool, glad to see an integrated and thoughtful approach to power management on a large scale.
I think I noted that if you can sleep the machines a lot then it doesn't make sense to upgrade since the duty cycle is pretty light. On the other hand, if you are running 10 hours a day then you save $2 per machine per week, not $2/machine/year as you said.
I work at a non-profit charity and many of our machines are donations from various companies. Many of these machines are 10 years old! (Granted 10 year old machines are at least 1.8GHz P4's now days) As long as I can get 512MB ram on XP or 1GB for Win 7, these machines perform common tasks such as web browsing and document writing just fine, though extra ram helps a lot if running antivirus.
I understand that capital availability is a tough spot in non-for-profits but please consider buying a Kill-A-Watt and evaluating whether this strategy is costing you more money in power bills than it would be to buy a more modern efficient machine.
For light-duty machines that you can ensure are put to sleep when not in use, this almost never helps. On the other hand, for labs that run 10 hours a day, saving 200W by switching from a old 300W desktop to a modern 100W one saves you 1KWH = $.50 a day and so a $300 investment pays off in 2 years.
This is the same "problem" that faces airline companies, taxi drivers, power companies, cell network operators. Consumers pay for these services by usage and so total revenue is proportional to average use but the costs are heavily skewed towards capital costs and so are proportional to the peak load that you can service. In that case, there's a fundamental tradeoff -- either we have to degrade service when demand hits the 95th percentile (just as an example) or we have to figure out a way to pay for the extra capital investment that's not needed 95% of the time.
There's a few alternatives you can do:
(1) Overprovision and soak it up into the price structure for all consumers. This is what most power companies do -- they build enough power generating capacity for peak load and then charge a bit more per KWH to make up for the increased outlay.
(2) Overprovision and charge extra at peak. This is the airline solution -- they always have service available but under contention the last few seats are exorbitantly expensive. Essentially those that need peak service are paying to leave a few seats open all the time in case they need them.
(3) Don't overprovision: this is the taxi solution. This means that service degrades significantly under peak demand -- anyone trying to get a cab home on a Saturday night in a major city has experienced this. Those that do get a cab pay the usual fare, everyone else waits around a while. This is also the solution that California has routinely deployed for their inability to provide peak power during heat spells -- same price for everyone but rolling blackouts for the unlucky few.
That's it -- there aren't any clean answers when you are making compromises between peak availability and average efficiency. You've either got to pay for the extra capacity when you don't need it or else you have to suffer when you don't have the capacity when you do need it.
All true, and even more, the Carrier Strike Force can protect an entire contingent of Marines aboard landing ships from air/sea/sub attacks while they move into position to attack ground forces. Without the carrier, those transports would be shredded by even a small contingent of 1970s era attack jets.
This was the whole battle-of-Britain thing -- you can't invade someone by sea if you don't control the coastal airspace.
Our expectations of privacy from government intrusion aren't set by specific technical processes; they are set by the 4th amendment.
You are saying that the 4A protects us where we have a reasonable expectation of privacy but then that REP is set by the contours of the 4A. That's circular.
Here's a good overview of the way the Supreme Court has expanded and operationalized the test for REP:
The Fourth Amendment protects reasonable expectations of privacy, but the Supreme Court has refused to provide a consistent explanation for what makes an expectation of privacy reasonable. The Court's refusal has disappointed scholars and frustrated students for four decades. This article explains why the Supreme Court cannot provide an answer: No one test can accurately and consistently distinguish less troublesome police practices that do not require Fourth Amendment oversight from more troublesome police practices that are reasonable only if the police have a warrant or compelling circumstances. Instead of endorsing one single approach, the Supreme Court uses four different tests at the same time.