But really I don't see the difference between diluted Christians/Jews/Muslims/Buddhists/Hinduists and Scientologists.
The difference between a religion and a cult is not particularly clear, but as a rule of thumb, normal religions don't cut people off from the world and cults do. I suspect that a lot of religions started out as cults and then went through a crucial stage of reconnecting with the world, which smoothed off some of the loopiness, but it seems that a majority of cults don't do that and instead collapse inwards (sometimes with attendant tragedy, alas). What's curious about Scientology is that they've been stuck at the stage between opening out and collapsing for quite a while and it's not clear which way the collective will of the faithful is going to go: if they open up (so becoming less obnoxious to everyone else) then they'll become a regular religion, but if they keep closed then they'll eventually implode.
It's up to them to pick which path to take. The rest of us can't take it for them; we can just force them to choose. (Now that they don't fill my letterbox with paper spam, I'm militantly indifferent as to what that choice is; they're not my religion.)
My concern with any outsourcing is that the company hiring the outsourcers have a contract that protects your data with severe civil liabilities for the outsourcing provider if there is compromise. These can be fines that are agreed on which not just cover the cost of paying for customers ID theft protection, but compensation for sullying of a good name.
You are aware that that will be an expensive contract? It'll be expensive because you'll be paying for them to buy insurance to cover the cost of that penalty. Now, here's the question: is it better to carry some of that insurance cost directly yourself instead, given that there are probably cheap steps you can take to cut premiums...?
Cloud computing often means running some operating system image on someone else's hardware. If the application on that image is dealing with sensitive data, it must decrypt it at some point. Once that happens, it is vulnerable to being data mined by the cloud provider.
It's not vulnerable if it isn't actually decrypted (some apps just shuffle the sensitive data around, they don't look inside it). Of course, this does mean that the encryption would have to be done on a per-field basis, but that's definitely practical (real deployed SaaS providers do just that).
And you're assuming the cloud provider wants to see the data. They don't: they make more money from not looking, and value their reputations. (In fact, they might even not understand what is valuable about the data in the first place. That's fairly common of the difference between provider and customer...) You still need to watch out for the unscrupulous, but that was ever so: no freaking change.
Actually it does, if I sign a contract with a client that certain exchange of data is not allowed to be seen by a third party, or the transfer thereof then it does raise a problem.
Well... I've been working on doing just that, and it's not something that happens automatically. You'll have to talk to the client of course, and explain that the data is going to be properly encrypted during transfer and storage, and that it will only be unsealed when actually required for processing. You'll also need to be very clear about what's going on; no flim-flam. But most clients who won't trust encryption to protect their data also won't trust you to handle it for them: they'll just keep it in house and swallow the costs (probably while complaining about it; don't ask for consistency there!)
BTW, I've seen the complaint about privacy of data a few times and it virtually never originates from end-users at companies; it's their technical management who care about it. Time and time again, the users (and their immediate managers) just want to get their work done rapidly and cheaply. When the CIO and the rest of IT keep saying "no way", the users start to find ways to route around the problem. That can lead to all sorts of problems, I'm sure you appreciate that, but the worst overall is that users start to hate IT as a bunch of people who prevent them from working. If that describes your organization, then know that you'll always be first up against the wall when the cuts come. Better to find ways to say "yes, and how can we make that even better?" and that helps to spread the ownership of the burden of compliance to all who should care.
God, that last sentence is vile and enterprisey! I mean this: stop blocking users and help instead, and you'll be able to persuade them to stop handing the data to random foreign websites. Try to do it through officious bureaucracy and meanness and you'll never engage with the most important security measure of the lot: users who won't be tricked easily and won't take silly risks. But you only get that help from them with your job if you're prepared to offer them what they believe to be help with theirs. Quid pro quo.
I think you've nailed it. I have yet to run into a single person who could answer the question "What is the definition of the cloud?" without me being able to unravel their answer with the phrase "Yes, but we've been doing that since the internet started." It's just a fancy buzzword for people with nothing of substance to say.
Well, base level clouds are "colo plus virtualization" really. There are higher-level clouds too, where it's not the base system that's being resold, but rather types of application based on top. There's not a huge difference at the technical level from what went before, that's true, but at the level of administration and payment there's lots of differences, and that makes quite a lot of difference in practice. (It's non-linear, just like there's not much difference between the internet and things that were happening before on bulletin boards, except for what happens when you scale things up a lot.)
Clouds have traction because they let companies avoid building their own datacenters (which is otherwise expensive, and doubly so if you don't do the job well). If you don't need at least a rack's worth of computing and storage, you're not part of the core market for a Cloud. And one of the nicest things about them is really that charging is fine-grained; why buy a whole year of colo (or even a whole month) when you only need a few hours?
The Cloud represents problems especially where some countries and or companies have strong data protection laws.
It doesn't actually. I can and do get my computation and storage (from Amazon as it happens) located in countries where such laws hold quite easily enough (I pay a small premium - about 10% last time I looked - but I don't mind) and I know that there are other companies that resell this (with the location guarantee) as higher-level services. Now, if your prospective provider won't offer you the same level of service, I suggest you don't use them. Maybe you should also tell them why you're not going to trade with them; it might encourage them to take your concerns seriously if they know why they're not getting your trade.
On the basis of the stories coming out, I suspect NASA shouldn't even be in the rowing-boat launch business. Don't get me wrong. They do amazing things with the things they put up there, but they just seem unable to get a grip of launch costs. So it should be someone else's job, someone else (or even many someones) who can keep costs down so that NASA money can be spent on the bits that really inspire everyone.
The big difference is that in Objective-C, the dispatch table is an associative array (C++ unordered_map, Java HashMap, Python dict) from strings to function pointers, not a plain array (C++ vector, Java ArrayList, Python list).
There are a whole bunch of tricks used (e.g., the map is actually from interned strings, which makes it far quicker to do the check) yet it has the flexibility to do things like dynamic dispatch and at a speed that isn't too horrible. Clever compromise (and has much in common with the way dynamic languages manage method invocations). And one of the cleverest things about it is that only method calls are routed through this: nobody even pretends that normal function calls need the overhead of fancy dispatch.
If their data sets are that big that they are working on, writing out interim results and reading those back in is going to really hurt.
They're a supercomputing centre, so yes, the data sets are that big. And the users like taking copies of them and moving them around; there are even reasons for doing this that aren't linked to recovering from a crash (such as being able to rerun a simulation from part way through, rather than having to wade through the whole lot from the beginning).
So far, software patents are still not enforcible in EUrope.
That's wrong and it is possible to get and enforce a software patent in the EU. But the "non-obviousness" bar is much higher, which makes them a lot less objectionable. In many ways, the problem with software patents in the US is that it is so easy to infringe them by accident...
How about this: Cell phone companies are no longer permitted to own cell phone towers. Instead, we have
(1) Stores selling cell phones. (2) Service companies offering cell phone contracts. (3) Cellular Service Providers (CSPs) that provide cellular service to phones, by billing the service companies (2)
It sounds like a good workable plan that encourages competition and supports the overall economy. It is therefore totally unlikely to happen and probably will be alleged to be Un-American by Fox News, and you're to be vilified for suggesting it.
I dont disagree but I was expressing concern as to what constituted "deliberate ignorance". [...] I hope that in this case the court found that the ISP was particularly deliberate rather than just the easiest to prosecute.
I imagine that's part of why this went to a jury trial.
Letting you know right now, Hungary is smaller than Indiana in size, and has 4M more people. Why does nobody get that it's much easier to cover a much smaller country???
What's broadband like in Indianapolis? If you skip delivering to the boondocks, you should be able to get something reasonable that covers most people without much trouble. But do your providers do this for real? Or are you just making up excuses for not doing something about it?
Yup, America... whee. Moving into a Dark Age faster every year on every front and in every sector.
You guys have the world's most fucked up regulation of the private sector, largely because of the long-term failure of your political class. You can see this over and over; both the current healthcare problems and the "broadband" provision debacle are instances of the wider problem. Given that, is it any wonder that you're getting screwed over by your private sector's modern-day robber barons? And I suspect that fixing the problems will be a very painful process. But that's what happens when politics ends up in hoc to one very specific special interest group; the already rich and powerful. (By comparison, here in the UK we have a different problem: the bureaucracy is too powerful and too metropolitan.)
Interestingly, your current Administration looks to be the most inclined to fix these problems for a long time (at least since the Carter era, and possibly longer; I'm not that good on US domestic history that far back). Pity that Congress doesn't look to be aligned here, so things are unlikely to move much.
Thus having racks and racks of basic RAIDs on cheap disks and paying a few on-site monkeys to replace parts is more cost effective then going to a more stable/tested enterprise storage vendor.
Maybe. But you get to worry about what happens when shit happens and you get multiple simultaneous failures. Yes, this really does happen. I've seen the strain of rebuilding a RAID-6 cause several disks in the array fail at once. What's more, the silly fools who owned the data in there had decided to not keep backups - "after all, it's ultra-reliable RAID-6!" - so they lost over 5 years of irreplaceable scientific data. We weren't very sympathetic.
Given this sort of thing does happen, a big fat RAID isn't the solution to all your storage problems. You need backups as well as redundancy. Alas, backups are fairly expensive, especially as data sizes go up. (I'm not sure in general why this is so; I know for one particular enterprise system, but that's got some kind-of embarrassing aspects, so I'm not going to generalize...)
We don't have evidence either way on partial g. There's also no real consensus on the outcome, so we've really got the next round of lunar flights to look forward on that front.
Mod parent up. Though theoretically we could build a spinning orbital station to do the testing too. No idea if going to the moon is cheaper.
I have a hard time believing Disney will allow 'PG-13+' animation to come from one of their properties - it's too close to the core.
I think you're underestimating the power of money. It's probably a safe bet though that such animations won't be done under the 'Disney' brand. (But that's a common thing with big corporations, actually makes marketing sense, and even isn't particularly evil in itself.)
Most people have gigabit at the desktop now, its been standard for the last few years on desktop PCs
That doesn't mean anything if you've not got a gigabit switch at the other end. And even if you've got that fancy switch, if your connection to the outside world is like most peoples', you'll only be able to use that bandwidth locally. Great for LAN parties, but not much point otherwise.
Very cool, thanks! I was really impressed until you said "1GHz ethernet". That seems... unlikely =D
He was probably mixing up his terms when referring to gigabit ether. It's not the fastest thing on the block, but it's still pretty nippy (and definitely beats what most people have deployed to desktop level) and the faster options (notably Infiniband) tend to only be used in specialist applications like tightly-coupled supercomputers.
Another thing is that alcohol will not make you forget driving under influence is a bad idea. It slows your thinking, it doesn't change what knowledge or morals you might have
You are aware that alcohol inhibits judgement abilities at even quite low doses? It's not that the drunkard doesn't know that they shouldn't drive in that state - they have the information in their memories - but rather that they think that the rules don't apply to them this time. Memory and judgement are quite different functions of the brain.
If you're going to go drinking, leave the car keys at home (or in the office or some other safe location) while you're still sober.
So is changing the radio station. Why not impose 15+ year prison sentences for anyone at fault in any accident with a fatality, regardless of cause? Each accident could then be treated as a homicide, and forensics would choose which party is the murderer.
That's not that bad an idea, but it doesn't look like society is ready to do that yet. In the meantime, the issue with texting is that it is immensely distracting (this has been found experimentally) and definitely makes it unsafe to mix with an inherently dangerous activity like driving. Don't do it. The Utah law is just the legislative way of saying just that, but if you need a law to tell you to follow common sense, you deserve exactly what you get.
The problem with intoxication is in many ways worse, since most intoxicants both slow your reactions and reduce your ability to use your judgement well. That's a lethal combo in a motor vehicle. However texting seems to be more distracting, more likely to push awareness of the road ahead completely out of your mind. I've no idea if drunken attention is better than totally diverted attention when it comes to driving, but I'd rather not drive with either about.
"Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon. Yeah, attempts like the victory at Marathon in 490BC...
Hmm. [Emphasis mine]. Are you claiming that RFC1149 was written back in about 500BC or before? That would have involved someone predicting not just the Internet about 2500 years before it happened, but also the RFC process and that there would be a 1148 preceding ones. Impressive, but unlikely.
(Has anyone managed an SSL handshake by avian carriers yet?)
I disagree. I've seen the wasteland of shit that is US terrestrial TV. Even the PBS channel system is mostly very poor. CNN's OK for a while, but it persistently lacks real intellectual depth so it palls rapidly. It's not just the US either. German and Italian TV is also not good, and Polish was funny but for the wrong reasons (they had dubbed a single heavy male voice over a programme with several young women making out, which is just plain wrong and yet hilarious). Swedish TV is mostly worthy and dull, like a snazzed up PBS. I've not spent enough time with French, Spanish, Canadian, Japanese, South Korean or Singaporean TV to be able to comment fairly on them. (Heck, I've seen rather a lot of hotels over the past few years...)
Note that Fox News is the worst I've seen for sheer dishonesty. The equivalent in the UK (Sky News, owned by the same company) is much better, probably because they've got to compete directly with the BBC.
The Met Office even charges people who (voluntarily) submit their data in the event that they need to access it in the future...
Why not just submit data with systematic errors in it, and start a campaign to persuade others to do so too? If they won't at least let you have a discount (or build up an account towards the occasional free access) then why should they get to access the service you provide for free?
Slashdot Mirror
But really I don't see the difference between diluted Christians/Jews/Muslims/Buddhists/Hinduists and Scientologists.
The difference between a religion and a cult is not particularly clear, but as a rule of thumb, normal religions don't cut people off from the world and cults do. I suspect that a lot of religions started out as cults and then went through a crucial stage of reconnecting with the world, which smoothed off some of the loopiness, but it seems that a majority of cults don't do that and instead collapse inwards (sometimes with attendant tragedy, alas). What's curious about Scientology is that they've been stuck at the stage between opening out and collapsing for quite a while and it's not clear which way the collective will of the faithful is going to go: if they open up (so becoming less obnoxious to everyone else) then they'll become a regular religion, but if they keep closed then they'll eventually implode.
It's up to them to pick which path to take. The rest of us can't take it for them; we can just force them to choose. (Now that they don't fill my letterbox with paper spam, I'm militantly indifferent as to what that choice is; they're not my religion.)
My concern with any outsourcing is that the company hiring the outsourcers have a contract that protects your data with severe civil liabilities for the outsourcing provider if there is compromise. These can be fines that are agreed on which not just cover the cost of paying for customers ID theft protection, but compensation for sullying of a good name.
You are aware that that will be an expensive contract? It'll be expensive because you'll be paying for them to buy insurance to cover the cost of that penalty. Now, here's the question: is it better to carry some of that insurance cost directly yourself instead, given that there are probably cheap steps you can take to cut premiums...?
Cloud computing often means running some operating system image on someone else's hardware. If the application on that image is dealing with sensitive data, it must decrypt it at some point. Once that happens, it is vulnerable to being data mined by the cloud provider.
It's not vulnerable if it isn't actually decrypted (some apps just shuffle the sensitive data around, they don't look inside it). Of course, this does mean that the encryption would have to be done on a per-field basis, but that's definitely practical (real deployed SaaS providers do just that).
And you're assuming the cloud provider wants to see the data. They don't: they make more money from not looking, and value their reputations. (In fact, they might even not understand what is valuable about the data in the first place. That's fairly common of the difference between provider and customer...) You still need to watch out for the unscrupulous, but that was ever so: no freaking change.
Actually it does, if I sign a contract with a client that certain exchange of data is not allowed to be seen by a third party, or the transfer thereof then it does raise a problem.
Well... I've been working on doing just that, and it's not something that happens automatically. You'll have to talk to the client of course, and explain that the data is going to be properly encrypted during transfer and storage, and that it will only be unsealed when actually required for processing. You'll also need to be very clear about what's going on; no flim-flam. But most clients who won't trust encryption to protect their data also won't trust you to handle it for them: they'll just keep it in house and swallow the costs (probably while complaining about it; don't ask for consistency there!)
BTW, I've seen the complaint about privacy of data a few times and it virtually never originates from end-users at companies; it's their technical management who care about it. Time and time again, the users (and their immediate managers) just want to get their work done rapidly and cheaply. When the CIO and the rest of IT keep saying "no way", the users start to find ways to route around the problem. That can lead to all sorts of problems, I'm sure you appreciate that, but the worst overall is that users start to hate IT as a bunch of people who prevent them from working. If that describes your organization, then know that you'll always be first up against the wall when the cuts come. Better to find ways to say "yes, and how can we make that even better?" and that helps to spread the ownership of the burden of compliance to all who should care.
God, that last sentence is vile and enterprisey! I mean this: stop blocking users and help instead, and you'll be able to persuade them to stop handing the data to random foreign websites. Try to do it through officious bureaucracy and meanness and you'll never engage with the most important security measure of the lot: users who won't be tricked easily and won't take silly risks. But you only get that help from them with your job if you're prepared to offer them what they believe to be help with theirs. Quid pro quo.
I think you've nailed it. I have yet to run into a single person who could answer the question "What is the definition of the cloud?" without me being able to unravel their answer with the phrase "Yes, but we've been doing that since the internet started." It's just a fancy buzzword for people with nothing of substance to say.
Well, base level clouds are "colo plus virtualization" really. There are higher-level clouds too, where it's not the base system that's being resold, but rather types of application based on top. There's not a huge difference at the technical level from what went before, that's true, but at the level of administration and payment there's lots of differences, and that makes quite a lot of difference in practice. (It's non-linear, just like there's not much difference between the internet and things that were happening before on bulletin boards, except for what happens when you scale things up a lot.)
Clouds have traction because they let companies avoid building their own datacenters (which is otherwise expensive, and doubly so if you don't do the job well). If you don't need at least a rack's worth of computing and storage, you're not part of the core market for a Cloud. And one of the nicest things about them is really that charging is fine-grained; why buy a whole year of colo (or even a whole month) when you only need a few hours?
The Cloud represents problems especially where some countries and or companies have strong data protection laws.
It doesn't actually. I can and do get my computation and storage (from Amazon as it happens) located in countries where such laws hold quite easily enough (I pay a small premium - about 10% last time I looked - but I don't mind) and I know that there are other companies that resell this (with the location guarantee) as higher-level services. Now, if your prospective provider won't offer you the same level of service, I suggest you don't use them. Maybe you should also tell them why you're not going to trade with them; it might encourage them to take your concerns seriously if they know why they're not getting your trade.
Should NASA be in the space launch business?
On the basis of the stories coming out, I suspect NASA shouldn't even be in the rowing-boat launch business. Don't get me wrong. They do amazing things with the things they put up there, but they just seem unable to get a grip of launch costs. So it should be someone else's job, someone else (or even many someones) who can keep costs down so that NASA money can be spent on the bits that really inspire everyone.
The big difference is that in Objective-C, the dispatch table is an associative array (C++ unordered_map, Java HashMap, Python dict) from strings to function pointers, not a plain array (C++ vector, Java ArrayList, Python list).
There are a whole bunch of tricks used (e.g., the map is actually from interned strings, which makes it far quicker to do the check) yet it has the flexibility to do things like dynamic dispatch and at a speed that isn't too horrible. Clever compromise (and has much in common with the way dynamic languages manage method invocations). And one of the cleverest things about it is that only method calls are routed through this: nobody even pretends that normal function calls need the overhead of fancy dispatch.
If their data sets are that big that they are working on, writing out interim results and reading those back in is going to really hurt.
They're a supercomputing centre, so yes, the data sets are that big. And the users like taking copies of them and moving them around; there are even reasons for doing this that aren't linked to recovering from a crash (such as being able to rerun a simulation from part way through, rather than having to wade through the whole lot from the beginning).
That's Sith Lord Mandelson to you, peasant!
Also known as the eminence noir.
So far, software patents are still not enforcible in EUrope.
That's wrong and it is possible to get and enforce a software patent in the EU. But the "non-obviousness" bar is much higher, which makes them a lot less objectionable. In many ways, the problem with software patents in the US is that it is so easy to infringe them by accident...
How about this: Cell phone companies are no longer permitted to own cell phone towers. Instead, we have
(1) Stores selling cell phones.
(2) Service companies offering cell phone contracts.
(3) Cellular Service Providers (CSPs) that provide cellular service to phones, by billing the service companies (2)
It sounds like a good workable plan that encourages competition and supports the overall economy. It is therefore totally unlikely to happen and probably will be alleged to be Un-American by Fox News, and you're to be vilified for suggesting it.
I dont disagree but I was expressing concern as to what constituted "deliberate ignorance".
[...]
I hope that in this case the court found that the ISP was particularly deliberate rather than just the easiest to prosecute.
I imagine that's part of why this went to a jury trial.
Letting you know right now, Hungary is smaller than Indiana in size, and has 4M more people. Why does nobody get that it's much easier to cover a much smaller country???
What's broadband like in Indianapolis? If you skip delivering to the boondocks, you should be able to get something reasonable that covers most people without much trouble. But do your providers do this for real? Or are you just making up excuses for not doing something about it?
Yup, America... whee. Moving into a Dark Age faster every year on every front and in every sector.
You guys have the world's most fucked up regulation of the private sector, largely because of the long-term failure of your political class. You can see this over and over; both the current healthcare problems and the "broadband" provision debacle are instances of the wider problem. Given that, is it any wonder that you're getting screwed over by your private sector's modern-day robber barons? And I suspect that fixing the problems will be a very painful process. But that's what happens when politics ends up in hoc to one very specific special interest group; the already rich and powerful. (By comparison, here in the UK we have a different problem: the bureaucracy is too powerful and too metropolitan.)
Interestingly, your current Administration looks to be the most inclined to fix these problems for a long time (at least since the Carter era, and possibly longer; I'm not that good on US domestic history that far back). Pity that Congress doesn't look to be aligned here, so things are unlikely to move much.
Thus having racks and racks of basic RAIDs on cheap disks and paying a few on-site monkeys to replace parts is more cost effective then going to a more stable/tested enterprise storage vendor.
Maybe. But you get to worry about what happens when shit happens and you get multiple simultaneous failures. Yes, this really does happen. I've seen the strain of rebuilding a RAID-6 cause several disks in the array fail at once. What's more, the silly fools who owned the data in there had decided to not keep backups - "after all, it's ultra-reliable RAID-6!" - so they lost over 5 years of irreplaceable scientific data. We weren't very sympathetic.
Given this sort of thing does happen, a big fat RAID isn't the solution to all your storage problems. You need backups as well as redundancy. Alas, backups are fairly expensive, especially as data sizes go up. (I'm not sure in general why this is so; I know for one particular enterprise system, but that's got some kind-of embarrassing aspects, so I'm not going to generalize...)
We don't have evidence either way on partial g. There's also no real consensus on the outcome, so we've really got the next round of lunar flights to look forward on that front.
Mod parent up. Though theoretically we could build a spinning orbital station to do the testing too. No idea if going to the moon is cheaper.
I have a hard time believing Disney will allow 'PG-13+' animation to come from one of their properties - it's too close to the core.
I think you're underestimating the power of money. It's probably a safe bet though that such animations won't be done under the 'Disney' brand. (But that's a common thing with big corporations, actually makes marketing sense, and even isn't particularly evil in itself.)
Most people have gigabit at the desktop now, its been standard for the last few years on desktop PCs
That doesn't mean anything if you've not got a gigabit switch at the other end. And even if you've got that fancy switch, if your connection to the outside world is like most peoples', you'll only be able to use that bandwidth locally. Great for LAN parties, but not much point otherwise.
Very cool, thanks! I was really impressed until you said "1GHz ethernet". That seems... unlikely =D
He was probably mixing up his terms when referring to gigabit ether. It's not the fastest thing on the block, but it's still pretty nippy (and definitely beats what most people have deployed to desktop level) and the faster options (notably Infiniband) tend to only be used in specialist applications like tightly-coupled supercomputers.
Another thing is that alcohol will not make you forget driving under influence is a bad idea. It slows your thinking, it doesn't change what knowledge or morals you might have
You are aware that alcohol inhibits judgement abilities at even quite low doses? It's not that the drunkard doesn't know that they shouldn't drive in that state - they have the information in their memories - but rather that they think that the rules don't apply to them this time. Memory and judgement are quite different functions of the brain.
If you're going to go drinking, leave the car keys at home (or in the office or some other safe location) while you're still sober.
So is changing the radio station. Why not impose 15+ year prison sentences for anyone at fault in any accident with a fatality, regardless of cause? Each accident could then be treated as a homicide, and forensics would choose which party is the murderer.
That's not that bad an idea, but it doesn't look like society is ready to do that yet. In the meantime, the issue with texting is that it is immensely distracting (this has been found experimentally) and definitely makes it unsafe to mix with an inherently dangerous activity like driving. Don't do it. The Utah law is just the legislative way of saying just that, but if you need a law to tell you to follow common sense, you deserve exactly what you get.
The problem with intoxication is in many ways worse, since most intoxicants both slow your reactions and reduce your ability to use your judgement well. That's a lethal combo in a motor vehicle. However texting seems to be more distracting, more likely to push awareness of the road ahead completely out of your mind. I've no idea if drunken attention is better than totally diverted attention when it comes to driving, but I'd rather not drive with either about.
"Since David Waitzman wrote his tongue-in-cheek Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, there have been occasional attempts to actually transmit information via pigeon.
Yeah, attempts like the victory at Marathon in 490BC...
Hmm. [Emphasis mine]. Are you claiming that RFC1149 was written back in about 500BC or before? That would have involved someone predicting not just the Internet about 2500 years before it happened, but also the RFC process and that there would be a 1148 preceding ones. Impressive, but unlikely.
(Has anyone managed an SSL handshake by avian carriers yet?)
TV licensing shouldn't exist at all.
I disagree. I've seen the wasteland of shit that is US terrestrial TV. Even the PBS channel system is mostly very poor. CNN's OK for a while, but it persistently lacks real intellectual depth so it palls rapidly. It's not just the US either. German and Italian TV is also not good, and Polish was funny but for the wrong reasons (they had dubbed a single heavy male voice over a programme with several young women making out, which is just plain wrong and yet hilarious). Swedish TV is mostly worthy and dull, like a snazzed up PBS. I've not spent enough time with French, Spanish, Canadian, Japanese, South Korean or Singaporean TV to be able to comment fairly on them. (Heck, I've seen rather a lot of hotels over the past few years...)
Note that Fox News is the worst I've seen for sheer dishonesty. The equivalent in the UK (Sky News, owned by the same company) is much better, probably because they've got to compete directly with the BBC.
The Met Office even charges people who (voluntarily) submit their data in the event that they need to access it in the future...
Why not just submit data with systematic errors in it, and start a campaign to persuade others to do so too? If they won't at least let you have a discount (or build up an account towards the occasional free access) then why should they get to access the service you provide for free?