Vonage and other VoIP providers are profiting from a disruptive technology. With some 15% of Americans now using VoIP (and growing), you had better believe the big phone companies are going to react to that kind of competitive pressure by offering similar price structuring (if not the same technology). Me? I'm going to buy the hell out of Vonage on opening day to take advantage of all the speculating idiots. And I'm going to sell it within the week. It's not that Vonage is a bad company, or unprofitable, but they do not have the resources to maintain market cap when the big boys move to reclaim their customer base.
Also, don't forget Skype. Same service. $0 cost if you're calling someone else on Skype.
Stickers don't "prevent" tampering. They also aren't a very good indicator - I've been defeating them since I was 15 using a hairdryer.
I can give you all sorts of advice on how to secure a system. The best advice is to have a competent security person evaluate their individual needs. I can easily tell you how to build a fort-knox style system, but it may cost your business more money in lost productivity than it saves by preventing corporate espionage.
Oh, and most biometric scanners are defeatable. Nothing beats a good 20 character alphanumeric password that is changed weekly.
Please learn what a straw man argument is. You might want to also learn about the other logical arguments, since you proceeded to use false predication and ad hominem.
(My anecdote about the nasal passages of gerbils - that is an actual line item in the 1996 budget inserted as a rider which would have allocated $260,000 to Illinois State. A straw man assumes a fictional situation. At least you could learn to use a term properly before using it.)
The point of my post - which you quickly moved to ignore so you could join the phillistine chorus of "straw man" is that Bush hasn't cut funding for scientific research at all. Actual dollar figures are still rising. The point the original author (who, unlike you, actually has some credibility) makes is that the Bush Administration is not increasing funding to keep pace with GDP output. What the original author doesn't go on to discuss is the Bush Administration has reallocated the distribution of Federal Grant money away from pure research, and towards applied sciences.
As a taxpayer, I feel I have the right to see my money going towards practical research with near-term realization, not abstractions of pure research. That is the government's "shareholder responsibility" - which you claim doesn't exist.
It is largely a reflection of rising educational standards around the world, so it's a comparative decline. In real terms, no single country can even come close to matching the US in the total scientific investment by government, corporations and foundations.
So what this guy is saying is that America's lead in science isn't because America is slipping, but because the rest of the world is catching up. Am I supposed to be alarmed by this?
As for the Bush bashing, it's weak and tenuous at best. More of the same "Bush is anti-science" bullshit coming from the Iron Rice Bowl crowd. I'm sorry they can't get their federal funding handouts to investigate the nasal passages of gerbils during ejaculation, but I think - and most reasonable people agree - that funding the war against terrorism takes precedent to the ability of masturbating rodents to breathe.
He can object all he wants. Who cares? He can't stop it. Some conservatives have made the assertion that a.XXX domain would just expand the number of x-rated websites out there. True. But, with people registering.xxx, all I have to do to protect my kid from casual browsing is to replace *.xxx with the ip address for something more wholesome, like the pleasant and uplifting sites of the Mainstream Media. That's alot easier than creatively filtering any domain with words that might be sexual in them.
IMHO, the bigger an employer, the more strongly the Bill of Rights should apply to them too.
The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to safeguard certain specific rights from abuse by a potentially tyrannical federal government. You have the right, indeed the initiative to change employers when you deem their policies to be restrictive or intrusive. There is only one Federal Government, and you don't have much choice in that.
Your comments are very revealing of something more sinister - a nanny state mentality. That is to say that instead of taking responsibility for yourself on a personal level, you defer to large corporations and the government for guidance on what your rights are. You may do this even though you consciously abhor the idea. A person isn't truly free until they first feel that they are free, then protect that freedom. Your answer betrays the notion that you're not free, and you need some government, corporation, or pseudo government to make you such. Snap out of it man!
I paid $32 for Defender at Lowes Hardware in the early 80's. That was two weeks allowance. $25 would have left me enough for a two liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of doritos.
No, the Bill of Rights specifically prohibits Congress from passing any law which abriges the right of the people to peacably assemble, and to do so to redress grievences with the government. Free association is a natural right, not guaranteed by law, but guaranteed by the fact that it's a natural right. Try checking lesser bodies of laws for protection on that, like your State constitution.
Windows Vista (if it comes out on schedule and isn't delayed again) will conntain exciting new features like windows transparencies (available on KDE for a few years now) and icons that are like small snapshots of the files contents (available on KDE and Gnome for more than a few years now). And behold, IE7 will feature tabbed browsing (available on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera for so long I can't even remember).
Sorry guys. I don't seen the need to upgrade my WindowXP box, nor do I see a need to stop advocating KDE or Gnome running on Linux.
The world was once widely believed to be flat. The funny thing about science is that it's not based in fact, but in consensus. The very system of peer review ensures that only popular beliefs are accepted as facts.
When dissent is stifled, truth is the victim. And when you allege that scientists are above reproach, you sentence all of society to a technocratic oligarchy.
If the research is crap it'll probably be rejected through the peer review process before publication.
Yeah, after about 10 years. That's how long it took for scientists to get the Molina-Rowland thesis. There are people trying to make public policy on this now.
I dare you to find a prominant political figure that hasn't taken money from oil companies. That's not the point. The point is, where did Barton get his funding. One persons bias doesn't exhonerate anothers.
If a study came out tomorrow that said cigarette smokers were 20% less likely to catch cold or flu, then it was revealed the next day that the study authors received money from 'big tobacco', would anyone blink?
Scientists aren't above bribery. If someone is publishing data and has an axe to grind, thats one thing. If someone is publishing data that is correlary to how much money their getting from someone with an axe to grind, that is another.
Public policy should be based on facts. So before scrubbing some clown, ask yourself: Did they follow the money? Or did they grind their own axe?
Earnings have less to do with stock prices than earnings growth. You may look at GOOG's P/E ratio and think "holy crap, they're trading at 119 times earnings," but that does not a bubble make. Smart traders look at future earnings, and they determine future earnings based on past earnings trends. Google has shown a phenomenal ability to grow their earnings, and to grow them at an increasing rate. Investors bank on their ability to continue to grow earnings. That is why in an SEC filing, businesses like google talk about trends in revenue not in terms of absolute dollars, but in terms of rates.
Now, does that mean you should go out and buy google? Hell no. Look at the trends. Google debuted at about $95. In two months, it grew by 100%. It took about seven months to see that kind of growth in share price again. That tells you that this stock may be too hot to handle; it's rich. Speculators have driven the price up, and alot of those speculators are going to stop looking at stock trends and start looking at google's first quarter filing for 2005. They're going to pay attention to this snippet:
Our business has grown rapidly since inception, resulting in substantially increased revenues, and we expect that our business will continue to grow. However, our revenue growth rate has generally declined over time, and we expect it will continue to do so as a result of increasing competition and the inevitable decline in growth rates as our revenues increase to higher levels. Consequently, we believe that our equential quarterly revenue growth rate in the first quarter of 2005 will not be sustainable in future periods.
They'll see that, and they'll start selling off. The speculators will be joined by the pros, who will probably sell about half their portfolio to make money on the stock price, and then sit on the rest until google stabilizes (which will probably happen around $100/share (PE 40)). Then they'll take their money, and buy more google shares, because Google will be increasing revenue, just not an an increasing rate. Google will still make money.
Any truly renewable energy source, ethanol included, is at worst CO2 neutral.
Wrong. Plants utilize a combination of carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxine, and carbon sequestered in nutrients in the soil. Overall, you're adding more carbon to the atmosphere. However, it's still better than getting 100% formerly sequestered carbon from petroleum, and making it 100% atmospheric CO2.
The problem has nothing to do with the efficiency of the production method. Corn is fermented, then the mash is distilled. Both steps require heat. That heat is provided by electrical warmers (because as any decent chemistry teacher or moonshiner will tell you, you don't want open flame around your distillery). Those electrical warmers are fed by power plants that are burning coal, oil, and natural gas. If you were to use solar power (not even solar->electric, but redirect solar thermal energy onto large water tanks), that's result in a drastic efficiency improvement.
To add to ethanol's lustre, corn fixates atmospheric nitrogen. So while there would be some small net increases in CO2, there'd be a small net decrease in NO2 over time.
However, we could stop worrying about CO2 altogether if we concentrated on zero/low emission technologies like wind, geothermal, tidal, solar, nuclear, yadda yadda yadda.
The implementation is actually just a CSS hack. What I would like to see is an html/xml markup that can be put into your source code, and which is part of the html standard. This is a very cool *idea* mind you, but something a little more practical would be an easier way to implement this on the fly.
Ethanol is a renewable energy resource, but that does not make it environmentally friendly. Moreso than petroleum, perhaps, but combustion of ethanol still produces carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is still one of the major alleged culprits of global warming.
A truly eco-friendly economy is going to require massive investments in solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear sources of power production, and hydrogen - not carbon - should become the storage medium for our energy needs. We also need to focus tightly on energy efficiency, with new semiconductor technologies, more efficient appliances, and properly insulated homes and buildings.
Now, regardless of your politics, the only serious proposal above board is the proposals made by the Bush administration towards those very same ends. Its congress - Republicans and Democrats - that are holding up the show. Bitch at your congressman today.
J Robert Oppenheimer was interviewed years later, and he talked about how everyone reacted differently. Some people cheered, others began to cry, but most stood in stunned silence over the aftermath of the detonation. Oppenheimer himself was very disturbed, recalling the Hindu scripture which states "I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
In one of his memoirs, Richard Feynman recalled learning from John Von Neumann the notion that you are not responsible for the world you're in. That sustained him during the Manhatten Project years, but after he returned to civilian life as an instructor for Cornell, he went into a nihilistic type of depression:
"I can't understand it anymore, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began thinking, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th Street?... All those buildings, all smashed -and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't undersand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless." "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feinman", p 136
The best quote comes from Kenneth T. Bainbridge on the morning of the Trinity test. After congratulating project leader Oppenheimer on the spectacular success of the project, he then stated "Now we are all sons of bitches."
I'm not suprised slashdot got this wrong. The New York Times reported on this issue over a year ago. Plames cover was believed to have been blown when Aldrich Ames sold NOC lists to the Russians in 1994. Three years later, the CIA recalled her. She hasn't been undercover for years.
Lets see, you incorrectly attributed to Adam Smith the belief that government monopolies are beneficial to the free market. You then cited him as the author of "The Tragedy of the Commons", which he wasn't. Now you throw insults about, and challenge my knowledge of economics? I've no time for your ill concieved stupidity.
And if you followed the Sperling link, you can compare Chicago Il directly to either St. Louis or Kansas City, MO.
Good info, though. The point to the original poster is that sweeping generalizations - particularly those based in nonsensical political hackery - are useless. It's cheaper to film in Missourri because the cost of doing business is lower. It has nothing to do with who gets welfare, or which way a state votes.
I'm incensed by the notion that the Sci-Fi channel is anything approaching true science fiction. These cheesy creature-feature marathons and medieval fantasy based shows might draw in a few viewers, but sci-fi is lucky to break a 2.5 ratings share. The article hits it on the head - sci-fi is driven by demographics and marketing, not by any commitment to the genre. In fact, you can get as much scifi off Sci-Fi as on. If not for a few key brands (Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1/Atlantis) they wouldn't even be on my TV.
So, poor people are homophobic, and too stupid to murder their own babies when its for their own good. Congratulations! That is the most retarded and ignorant statement I've read on/. today!
Lets compare Missouri to neighboring Blue State Illinois. MO's unemployment rate: 5.6%, just above the national average. Il: 5.8%. Mean average anual salary in Missouri is $34,130. Il: $38,360. You might think that $4,230 means something until you factor in the cost of living, which is 93.6% for MO compared to 112% for Il. That means it's 18.4% cheaper to live in Missouri than in next-door Illinois - a blue State. While we're on the subject, health costs are lower in Mo compared to Il (105.8, 112.3, 100 = baseline).
Seems to me that Illinois is a poorer state. And they voted for Kerry.
As to this notion that welfare helps poor people, go into any southern urban area and speak to families that are trying to get ahead on public assistance. Welfare laws are structured in a way that keeps the poor down. Want to own property? You won't get welfare in 44 out of 50 states. Trying to get an education? Most welfare programs won't pay for anything more than vocational training, so you can get a nice manufacturing job that pays a 'living wage'. Got children? WIC will pay for food, but it won't pay for diapers, day care, or baby clothes. So you'll have ignorant fat naked babies. Oh, I forgot. You were supposed to abort them.
Seriously. Get a clue. Don't spout such ignorant sweeping generalizations as this.
Slashdot Mirror
Vonage and other VoIP providers are profiting from a disruptive technology. With some 15% of Americans now using VoIP (and growing), you had better believe the big phone companies are going to react to that kind of competitive pressure by offering similar price structuring (if not the same technology). Me? I'm going to buy the hell out of Vonage on opening day to take advantage of all the speculating idiots. And I'm going to sell it within the week. It's not that Vonage is a bad company, or unprofitable, but they do not have the resources to maintain market cap when the big boys move to reclaim their customer base.
Also, don't forget Skype. Same service. $0 cost if you're calling someone else on Skype.
Stickers don't "prevent" tampering. They also aren't a very good indicator - I've been defeating them since I was 15 using a hairdryer.
I can give you all sorts of advice on how to secure a system. The best advice is to have a competent security person evaluate their individual needs. I can easily tell you how to build a fort-knox style system, but it may cost your business more money in lost productivity than it saves by preventing corporate espionage.
Oh, and most biometric scanners are defeatable. Nothing beats a good 20 character alphanumeric password that is changed weekly.
Please learn what a straw man argument is. You might want to also learn about the other logical arguments, since you proceeded to use false predication and ad hominem.
(My anecdote about the nasal passages of gerbils - that is an actual line item in the 1996 budget inserted as a rider which would have allocated $260,000 to Illinois State. A straw man assumes a fictional situation. At least you could learn to use a term properly before using it.)
The point of my post - which you quickly moved to ignore so you could join the phillistine chorus of "straw man" is that Bush hasn't cut funding for scientific research at all. Actual dollar figures are still rising. The point the original author (who, unlike you, actually has some credibility) makes is that the Bush Administration is not increasing funding to keep pace with GDP output. What the original author doesn't go on to discuss is the Bush Administration has reallocated the distribution of Federal Grant money away from pure research, and towards applied sciences.
As a taxpayer, I feel I have the right to see my money going towards practical research with near-term realization, not abstractions of pure research. That is the government's "shareholder responsibility" - which you claim doesn't exist.
So what this guy is saying is that America's lead in science isn't because America is slipping, but because the rest of the world is catching up. Am I supposed to be alarmed by this?
As for the Bush bashing, it's weak and tenuous at best. More of the same "Bush is anti-science" bullshit coming from the Iron Rice Bowl crowd. I'm sorry they can't get their federal funding handouts to investigate the nasal passages of gerbils during ejaculation, but I think - and most reasonable people agree - that funding the war against terrorism takes precedent to the ability of masturbating rodents to breathe.
He can object all he wants. Who cares? He can't stop it. Some conservatives have made the assertion that a .XXX domain would just expand the number of x-rated websites out there. True. But, with people registering .xxx, all I have to do to protect my kid from casual browsing is to replace *.xxx with the ip address for something more wholesome, like the pleasant and uplifting sites of the Mainstream Media. That's alot easier than creatively filtering any domain with words that might be sexual in them.
The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to safeguard certain specific rights from abuse by a potentially tyrannical federal government. You have the right, indeed the initiative to change employers when you deem their policies to be restrictive or intrusive. There is only one Federal Government, and you don't have much choice in that.
Your comments are very revealing of something more sinister - a nanny state mentality. That is to say that instead of taking responsibility for yourself on a personal level, you defer to large corporations and the government for guidance on what your rights are. You may do this even though you consciously abhor the idea. A person isn't truly free until they first feel that they are free, then protect that freedom. Your answer betrays the notion that you're not free, and you need some government, corporation, or pseudo government to make you such. Snap out of it man!
$25?
I paid $32 for Defender at Lowes Hardware in the early 80's. That was two weeks allowance. $25 would have left me enough for a two liter of Mountain Dew and a bag of doritos.
No, the Bill of Rights specifically prohibits Congress from passing any law which abriges the right of the people to peacably assemble, and to do so to redress grievences with the government. Free association is a natural right, not guaranteed by law, but guaranteed by the fact that it's a natural right. Try checking lesser bodies of laws for protection on that, like your State constitution.
1984 is a big blur of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers. I remember 1994 though. I got laid for the first time. w00t!
Windows Vista (if it comes out on schedule and isn't delayed again) will conntain exciting new features like windows transparencies (available on KDE for a few years now) and icons that are like small snapshots of the files contents (available on KDE and Gnome for more than a few years now). And behold, IE7 will feature tabbed browsing (available on Mozilla/Firefox/Opera for so long I can't even remember).
Sorry guys. I don't seen the need to upgrade my WindowXP box, nor do I see a need to stop advocating KDE or Gnome running on Linux.
The world was once widely believed to be flat. The funny thing about science is that it's not based in fact, but in consensus. The very system of peer review ensures that only popular beliefs are accepted as facts.
When dissent is stifled, truth is the victim. And when you allege that scientists are above reproach, you sentence all of society to a technocratic oligarchy.
Yeah, after about 10 years. That's how long it took for scientists to get the Molina-Rowland thesis. There are people trying to make public policy on this now.
I dare you to find a prominant political figure that hasn't taken money from oil companies. That's not the point. The point is, where did Barton get his funding. One persons bias doesn't exhonerate anothers.
If a study came out tomorrow that said cigarette smokers were 20% less likely to catch cold or flu, then it was revealed the next day that the study authors received money from 'big tobacco', would anyone blink?
Scientists aren't above bribery. If someone is publishing data and has an axe to grind, thats one thing. If someone is publishing data that is correlary to how much money their getting from someone with an axe to grind, that is another.
Public policy should be based on facts. So before scrubbing some clown, ask yourself: Did they follow the money? Or did they grind their own axe?
Now, does that mean you should go out and buy google? Hell no. Look at the trends. Google debuted at about $95. In two months, it grew by 100%. It took about seven months to see that kind of growth in share price again. That tells you that this stock may be too hot to handle; it's rich. Speculators have driven the price up, and alot of those speculators are going to stop looking at stock trends and start looking at google's first quarter filing for 2005. They're going to pay attention to this snippet:
They'll see that, and they'll start selling off. The speculators will be joined by the pros, who will probably sell about half their portfolio to make money on the stock price, and then sit on the rest until google stabilizes (which will probably happen around $100/share (PE 40)). Then they'll take their money, and buy more google shares, because Google will be increasing revenue, just not an an increasing rate. Google will still make money.
Wrong. Plants utilize a combination of carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxine, and carbon sequestered in nutrients in the soil. Overall, you're adding more carbon to the atmosphere. However, it's still better than getting 100% formerly sequestered carbon from petroleum, and making it 100% atmospheric CO2.
The problem has nothing to do with the efficiency of the production method. Corn is fermented, then the mash is distilled. Both steps require heat. That heat is provided by electrical warmers (because as any decent chemistry teacher or moonshiner will tell you, you don't want open flame around your distillery). Those electrical warmers are fed by power plants that are burning coal, oil, and natural gas. If you were to use solar power (not even solar->electric, but redirect solar thermal energy onto large water tanks), that's result in a drastic efficiency improvement.
To add to ethanol's lustre, corn fixates atmospheric nitrogen. So while there would be some small net increases in CO2, there'd be a small net decrease in NO2 over time.
However, we could stop worrying about CO2 altogether if we concentrated on zero/low emission technologies like wind, geothermal, tidal, solar, nuclear, yadda yadda yadda.
I never made that or any analogous argument. Don't attribute comments to me that I didn't make.
The implementation is actually just a CSS hack. What I would like to see is an html/xml markup that can be put into your source code, and which is part of the html standard. This is a very cool *idea* mind you, but something a little more practical would be an easier way to implement this on the fly.
Ethanol is a renewable energy resource, but that does not make it environmentally friendly. Moreso than petroleum, perhaps, but combustion of ethanol still produces carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is still one of the major alleged culprits of global warming.
A truly eco-friendly economy is going to require massive investments in solar, tidal, geothermal, and nuclear sources of power production, and hydrogen - not carbon - should become the storage medium for our energy needs. We also need to focus tightly on energy efficiency, with new semiconductor technologies, more efficient appliances, and properly insulated homes and buildings.
Now, regardless of your politics, the only serious proposal above board is the proposals made by the Bush administration towards those very same ends. Its congress - Republicans and Democrats - that are holding up the show. Bitch at your congressman today.
In one of his memoirs, Richard Feynman recalled learning from John Von Neumann the notion that you are not responsible for the world you're in. That sustained him during the Manhatten Project years, but after he returned to civilian life as an instructor for Cornell, he went into a nihilistic type of depression:
The best quote comes from Kenneth T. Bainbridge on the morning of the Trinity test. After congratulating project leader Oppenheimer on the spectacular success of the project, he then stated "Now we are all sons of bitches."
I'm not suprised slashdot got this wrong. The New York Times reported on this issue over a year ago. Plames cover was believed to have been blown when Aldrich Ames sold NOC lists to the Russians in 1994. Three years later, the CIA recalled her. She hasn't been undercover for years.
Lets see, you incorrectly attributed to Adam Smith the belief that government monopolies are beneficial to the free market. You then cited him as the author of "The Tragedy of the Commons", which he wasn't. Now you throw insults about, and challenge my knowledge of economics? I've no time for your ill concieved stupidity.
*plonk*
But a 5% edge is still an edge.
And if you followed the Sperling link, you can compare Chicago Il directly to either St. Louis or Kansas City, MO.
Good info, though. The point to the original poster is that sweeping generalizations - particularly those based in nonsensical political hackery - are useless. It's cheaper to film in Missourri because the cost of doing business is lower. It has nothing to do with who gets welfare, or which way a state votes.
I'm incensed by the notion that the Sci-Fi channel is anything approaching true science fiction. These cheesy creature-feature marathons and medieval fantasy based shows might draw in a few viewers, but sci-fi is lucky to break a 2.5 ratings share. The article hits it on the head - sci-fi is driven by demographics and marketing, not by any commitment to the genre. In fact, you can get as much scifi off Sci-Fi as on. If not for a few key brands (Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1/Atlantis) they wouldn't even be on my TV.
So, poor people are homophobic, and too stupid to murder their own babies when its for their own good. Congratulations! That is the most retarded and ignorant statement I've read on /. today!
Lets compare Missouri to neighboring Blue State Illinois. MO's unemployment rate: 5.6%, just above the national average. Il: 5.8%. Mean average anual salary in Missouri is $34,130. Il: $38,360. You might think that $4,230 means something until you factor in the cost of living, which is 93.6% for MO compared to 112% for Il. That means it's 18.4% cheaper to live in Missouri than in next-door Illinois - a blue State. While we're on the subject, health costs are lower in Mo compared to Il (105.8, 112.3, 100 = baseline).
Seems to me that Illinois is a poorer state. And they voted for Kerry.
As to this notion that welfare helps poor people, go into any southern urban area and speak to families that are trying to get ahead on public assistance. Welfare laws are structured in a way that keeps the poor down. Want to own property? You won't get welfare in 44 out of 50 states. Trying to get an education? Most welfare programs won't pay for anything more than vocational training, so you can get a nice manufacturing job that pays a 'living wage'. Got children? WIC will pay for food, but it won't pay for diapers, day care, or baby clothes. So you'll have ignorant fat naked babies. Oh, I forgot. You were supposed to abort them.
Seriously. Get a clue. Don't spout such ignorant sweeping generalizations as this.
Sources: Sperling, US Government Bureau of Labor Statistics,