Hurrah! An actual answer! Thanks Suidae, I really appreciate that you took the time to post this (rather than launching into a smug tirade that doesn't actually answer the question).;-)
OK, now I'm trolling (a little), but I get so tired of sneering armchair scientists telling me that of course there are benefits, and if I can't see them, then they can't bothered explaining. You're not helping win the hearts and minds of Joe Taxpayer, guys.
Why unfortunately? I know that compared to the NSA or the defence budget, it's just noise, and the pursuit of knowledge is great and all. However, I'm just an ignorant taxpayer, so (accepting that I'll get modded as a troll) can anyone explain what material benefits we've got out of the accelerators that we've already built, and what we expect to get out of this one?
Everything with [the Acer] brand name turns to crap
That's unfair! There's nothing wrong with my Travelmate 507, apart from the faded keys, jerky touchpad, cracking hinges, heavy weight, crappy video card, noisy hard drive, crackly sound, fragile modem socket, erratic parallel port, blocky display, overheating CPU, short battery life, sluggish system speed, minimal upgradability, and the lack of WinME/Win2K/WinXP support for all of the wierd hardware in it.
</sarcasm> (OK, OK, but it was cheap, the CD reads burned discs very well, and it runs Linux better than it runs the bundled Win98SE)
Ack! Gaa! Look at the prices! $500 for a glove, $1000 for a wireless version. And that's the budget glove! The good one is $3950/$4450 for the tethered/wireless versions.
You have got to wonder exactly who they are selling these devices to. University research departments, probably.;)
That said, this is a really informative post. Thanks for it, I'm thinking good karma thoughts your way.
It does at least ensure that they will get light users, so their usage figures will make them more inclined to go to flat rate.
Contrast with a couple of broadband fixed line ISPs in Australia and the UK, that are howling in outrage that people are actually using their bandwidth, and have introduced daily and monthy usage caps. Want to bet that your ISP won't follow suit if too many people actually start using their cables and DSL to leech serious amounts of data?
Unmetered suffers from chicken and egg. Until you have low prices, you won't get high takeup and therefore a sustainable base of "average" users. Until you have "average" users, you take a real beating on the service.
At least paying by the packet should ensure that (once the network snafu's are worked out) the prices will drop quickly to get numbers up, and they will go unmetered eventually, at which point you and I can jump onboard and realise the dream of being connected 24/7. Aaaaah, nice.
GPRS is something that will be kept in the WAP bracket of niche user base until telcos finally realise that people will use it if they can afford it
Consider the first wave of GPRS as an extended beta test; they have to keep numbers down until they iron out the bugs in the system.
Plus, there's only so many people that will use it up anyway. It's not a case of "divide the price by 10, get ten times as many customers". I'm sure someone with a real (snigger) economics degree has worked out this price point to maximise initial profit while minimising the network exposure to a flood of users.
as it expands, it also becomes diffuse, and there would be no giant explosion
A poster elsewhere suggests that the core walls would be nicely irradiated. I was picturing a venting of superheated plasma scouring the walls and sending the whole lot up into the atmosphere, much like a burning tank sending up DUP dust, or indeed like Chernobyl.
It's just that I've worked in the fission industry and know how much non-worst-case designing and plain old finger crossing goes on. Fission reactors are very safe, but it's impossible to build a completely safe one. I was just wondering what the worst case was for fusion.
On the other hand, maybe I've just been watching too much Star Trek, with its "Warp Core breach imminent" mantra.;)
Fusion plants will be giagantic, complex, expensive pieces of equipment
Hmm. I'm just picturing a scenario where the entire power for New York or Washington (or, hell, both) comes from one huge great monster fusion station. Protected by a cadre of geriatric minimum wage security guards.
Hmm, again. 100 million degrees. Liquid or gas cooled. Let's just suppose that your coolant stopped flowing, through happenstance or sabotage. How do you scram a fusion reactor?
No, I think that I'll keep asking my elected representative fund wind, solar, wave and hydro, thanks all the same.
Speak for yourself. I'm very good at estimating timescales. "This project will never be finished" is my favourite, and I've yet to work for a company that's proved me wrong.
I thought so, but some of the rises are (proportionately) sharp, and they're not universal. It doesn't quite match a flurry of new, nekkid machines. Still, with IIS, who knows?;)
with time, support, and encouragement, a baby grows up into a respected adult
Er, that's actually what I meant.;)
By the way, thanks to the moderator who modded me down as redundant, moving me even further down the sorted-by-score list and making it likely that I'll get another redundant.:p
This is the best way to protect America's valuable creative works
Yup. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I actually like to pay for quality content - even though I no longer have to. Also I like to leech, watch and discard bad content, because I know that deep down, it bothers some weasel in an expensive suit who's actually convinced himself that if my only choice was to have paid for it I would have done so.
Perhaps the biggest mistake we make is to watch, rent and buy appalingly shoddy and cynical movies and albums. If we only supported good content, maybe we'd get our message across. At the moment, all we're saying is that we're big dumb walking wallets who will spend a fixed amount of money on the least-bad content offered to us.
So, the next time you go to the movies and there's nothing good on, consider seeing nothing. It'll cleanse your soul.
You wonder if someone will go to jail for selling his old VCR
The DMCA already has provision for mandatory copy control on video devices, and has special allowances for selling used older devices. The idea is to hide the fact that you're fucked until all of your devices are compliant.
I don't see how you can put this without it sounding a little alarmist. Disney wants you to purchase a new TV, DVD, VCR/TiVo and cable decoder... that they will then control.
Every time you place a DVD or VCR that you own or have rented in the devices that you bought, Disney will decide whether you are allowed to watch it, and how many times. Disney will decide whether you may tape shows to watch later, and how many times you can watch them, or when they will become unwatchable, or even if you can watch them at all.
They will assume that you are a thief, and they will stop you from watching anything that you cannot absolutely prove that you have paid for. If there is any doubt, your screen will go blank, and you will have no right of reply, or opportunity to prove your innocence.
And the best part is that they will make you pay for the new hardware that will enable this.
It only applies to marketing of financial services, there's no mention of how this will be enforced, whether it will be enforced on European companies marketing outside of Europe, or non-European companies marketing inside Europe, plus it still has to actually go to the European Parliament. At the moment, it's just a recommended draft bill, and it can be amended again before being passed.
The whole point of college to do all the things that you can't do in Real Life. Going on 72 hour drinking binges, waving "save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" placards, and most of all, screwing like a rabid weasel on heat. That's what it's always been about, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been, doesn't remember, or has a personality short circuit (and is probably wearing sandals and a knitted waistcoat).
This isn't a frivilous post, I just take a dim view of being condemned for "wasting" a college education. Let's see, I was such a wasted slacker at college that I barely passed the exams, but scamming my professors stood me in good stead for scamming my employers until I actually learned some useful skills. You can't be taught those kind of "life skills". Now, here I am ten years later, with the degree I wanted, a good job, the academia that I couldn't regurgitate on demand in an exam is actually coming back to me, and I have absolutely no regrets over missed opportunities.
You get one chance at life. Working your nuts off at college will get you a better degree and an early start on your career, but you have the rest of your life to work on your career, which is coincidentally the same amount of time you have to regret your missed opportunities. Ten years after graduating, your career will probably be the same either way, but one way you have pleasant memories of drunken orgies with hot chicks, and the other you have a lot of memories of hunching over a book.
College is about improvement. To my mind, hedonism is a goal, not something to be frowned on. We always hope that our children will have more than we had: I sincerely hope that I can provide my kids an opportunity to spend four years naked, vomiting and not giving a damn.
...that this is an "undocumented feature" of WinXP hardware product verification. >>>;-) <<<
Number of IIS exploitable servers going back UP?
on
Netcraft Survey Updated
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
What's with that? The end of month figures for vulnerable IIS systems show an increase in cross site scripting, accessible admin pages and viewable script source. Any guesses?
Is it just that they're more visible? Or is it a whole bunch of sysadmins formatting, re-installing, then selectively patching for the last three exploits that they can remember? Wierd.
This sounds to me like the ravings of a fanatic who can't justify his position rationally, therefore he attacks the person instead of the argument
Quite. And yet... it's strangely compelling. Although I'd like to apply a cattle prod to the gonads instead of paying to keep them in prison. I'd put together a cogent argument for this, but the plain fact is that there isn't one, and the punishment is itself morally reprehensible. But that doesn't mean it's not right.
It's a tough call, but at some point it's best to acknowledge that all legal systems are a formalisation of mob rule, and that if you get so tied up in the process and the philosophy that you forget that laws have to be popular, then you end up with an legal system that disenfranchises the potentially law abiding and creates a culture of casual criminality.
I accept that there's arguments against this, but let's also remember that many States still criminalise no-victim acts between consentual adults. Tell you what, let's swap "fellatio between consenting adults" for "viewing kiddie porn" and call it even.
I don't think [comic books with minors in "compromising situation" are] illegal in Japan/ul>
Age of consent in Japan is 14.
What about similar comic books produced in the US? Is there a precedent? I'm sure it would apply to computerized pron
Actually, the precedent is draconian. Comics were demonised back in the 1950's in the same way that the 'net is now, and it was decided that This Must Stop. If you want a laugh, read the original text of the Comics Code Authority and then have a look at the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund that it necessitated.
Go read all the negative reactions in the 'How was the first episode of Enterprise?' Ask Slashdot to a few minutes of pokey nipples, then tell me North America isn't sexually repressed
Uh, there's a difference between being sexually suppressed, and criticising a show for putting in a gratuitous and shoddy sub soft core porn scene. I like Star Trek. I like (decent) porn. But I have time for both, I don't need them diluted by being amalgamated.
What happens when kids can't get onto adult websites
They'll go to P2P services and find them stuffed full of beastality, rape and kiddie porn, that they can share anonymously.
<sarcasm>On the bright side, as there's no traffic figures or weblogs, we can pretend they're not doing it. So that's all right then. </sarcasm>
I personally think that you have to admit to yourself that kids are going to find porn. Deal with that, and realise that it might as well be soft core stuff from ethical servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Hurrah! An actual answer! Thanks Suidae, I really appreciate that you took the time to post this (rather than launching into a smug tirade that doesn't actually answer the question). ;-)
OK, now I'm trolling (a little), but I get so tired of sneering armchair scientists telling me that of course there are benefits, and if I can't see them, then they can't bothered explaining. You're not helping win the hearts and minds of Joe Taxpayer, guys.
Thanks again, Suidae.
- can anyone explain what material benefits
Not all benefits are materialNo material benefits then? Thanks.
What a long way to go to say "No material benefits.". ;)
Why unfortunately? I know that compared to the NSA or the defence budget, it's just noise, and the pursuit of knowledge is great and all. However, I'm just an ignorant taxpayer, so (accepting that I'll get modded as a troll) can anyone explain what material benefits we've got out of the accelerators that we've already built, and what we expect to get out of this one?
It's a big lump of swirly glowy stuff held in a magnetic bottle. That's close enough in Trek technobabble terms. ;)
That's unfair! There's nothing wrong with my Travelmate 507, apart from the faded keys, jerky touchpad, cracking hinges, heavy weight, crappy video card, noisy hard drive, crackly sound, fragile modem socket, erratic parallel port, blocky display, overheating CPU, short battery life, sluggish system speed, minimal upgradability, and the lack of WinME/Win2K/WinXP support for all of the wierd hardware in it.
</sarcasm> (OK, OK, but it was cheap, the CD reads burned discs very well, and it runs Linux better than it runs the bundled Win98SE)
Ack! Gaa! Look at the prices! $500 for a glove, $1000 for a wireless version. And that's the budget glove! The good one is $3950/$4450 for the tethered/wireless versions.
You have got to wonder exactly who they are selling these devices to. University research departments, probably. ;)
That said, this is a really informative post. Thanks for it, I'm thinking good karma thoughts your way.
It does at least ensure that they will get light users, so their usage figures will make them more inclined to go to flat rate.
Contrast with a couple of broadband fixed line ISPs in Australia and the UK, that are howling in outrage that people are actually using their bandwidth, and have introduced daily and monthy usage caps. Want to bet that your ISP won't follow suit if too many people actually start using their cables and DSL to leech serious amounts of data?
Unmetered suffers from chicken and egg. Until you have low prices, you won't get high takeup and therefore a sustainable base of "average" users. Until you have "average" users, you take a real beating on the service.
At least paying by the packet should ensure that (once the network snafu's are worked out) the prices will drop quickly to get numbers up, and they will go unmetered eventually, at which point you and I can jump onboard and realise the dream of being connected 24/7. Aaaaah, nice.
Consider the first wave of GPRS as an extended beta test; they have to keep numbers down until they iron out the bugs in the system.
Plus, there's only so many people that will use it up anyway. It's not a case of "divide the price by 10, get ten times as many customers". I'm sure someone with a real (snigger) economics degree has worked out this price point to maximise initial profit while minimising the network exposure to a flood of users.
A poster elsewhere suggests that the core walls would be nicely irradiated. I was picturing a venting of superheated plasma scouring the walls and sending the whole lot up into the atmosphere, much like a burning tank sending up DUP dust, or indeed like Chernobyl.
It's just that I've worked in the fission industry and know how much non-worst-case designing and plain old finger crossing goes on. Fission reactors are very safe, but it's impossible to build a completely safe one. I was just wondering what the worst case was for fusion.
On the other hand, maybe I've just been watching too much Star Trek, with its "Warp Core breach imminent" mantra. ;)
Hmm. I'm just picturing a scenario where the entire power for New York or Washington (or, hell, both) comes from one huge great monster fusion station. Protected by a cadre of geriatric minimum wage security guards.
Hmm, again. 100 million degrees. Liquid or gas cooled. Let's just suppose that your coolant stopped flowing, through happenstance or sabotage. How do you scram a fusion reactor?
No, I think that I'll keep asking my elected representative fund wind, solar, wave and hydro, thanks all the same.
- Predicting timelines is best left to engineers
Just not software engineers!Speak for yourself. I'm very good at estimating timescales. "This project will never be finished" is my favourite, and I've yet to work for a company that's proved me wrong.
I thought so, but some of the rises are (proportionately) sharp, and they're not universal. It doesn't quite match a flurry of new, nekkid machines. Still, with IIS, who knows? ;)
Er, that's actually what I meant. ;)
By the way, thanks to the moderator who modded me down as redundant, moving me even further down the sorted-by-score list and making it likely that I'll get another redundant. :p
Yup. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I actually like to pay for quality content - even though I no longer have to. Also I like to leech, watch and discard bad content, because I know that deep down, it bothers some weasel in an expensive suit who's actually convinced himself that if my only choice was to have paid for it I would have done so.
Perhaps the biggest mistake we make is to watch, rent and buy appalingly shoddy and cynical movies and albums. If we only supported good content, maybe we'd get our message across. At the moment, all we're saying is that we're big dumb walking wallets who will spend a fixed amount of money on the least-bad content offered to us.
So, the next time you go to the movies and there's nothing good on, consider seeing nothing. It'll cleanse your soul.
The DMCA already has provision for mandatory copy control on video devices, and has special allowances for selling used older devices. The idea is to hide the fact that you're fucked until all of your devices are compliant.
I don't see how you can put this without it sounding a little alarmist. Disney wants you to purchase a new TV, DVD, VCR/TiVo and cable decoder... that they will then control.
Every time you place a DVD or VCR that you own or have rented in the devices that you bought, Disney will decide whether you are allowed to watch it, and how many times. Disney will decide whether you may tape shows to watch later, and how many times you can watch them, or when they will become unwatchable, or even if you can watch them at all.
They will assume that you are a thief, and they will stop you from watching anything that you cannot absolutely prove that you have paid for. If there is any doubt, your screen will go blank, and you will have no right of reply, or opportunity to prove your innocence.
And the best part is that they will make you pay for the new hardware that will enable this.
It only applies to marketing of financial services, there's no mention of how this will be enforced, whether it will be enforced on European companies marketing outside of Europe, or non-European companies marketing inside Europe, plus it still has to actually go to the European Parliament. At the moment, it's just a recommended draft bill, and it can be amended again before being passed.
Baby steps...
The whole point of college to do all the things that you can't do in Real Life. Going on 72 hour drinking binges, waving "save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" placards, and most of all, screwing like a rabid weasel on heat. That's what it's always been about, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't been, doesn't remember, or has a personality short circuit (and is probably wearing sandals and a knitted waistcoat).
This isn't a frivilous post, I just take a dim view of being condemned for "wasting" a college education. Let's see, I was such a wasted slacker at college that I barely passed the exams, but scamming my professors stood me in good stead for scamming my employers until I actually learned some useful skills. You can't be taught those kind of "life skills". Now, here I am ten years later, with the degree I wanted, a good job, the academia that I couldn't regurgitate on demand in an exam is actually coming back to me, and I have absolutely no regrets over missed opportunities.
You get one chance at life. Working your nuts off at college will get you a better degree and an early start on your career, but you have the rest of your life to work on your career, which is coincidentally the same amount of time you have to regret your missed opportunities. Ten years after graduating, your career will probably be the same either way, but one way you have pleasant memories of drunken orgies with hot chicks, and the other you have a lot of memories of hunching over a book.
College is about improvement. To my mind, hedonism is a goal, not something to be frowned on. We always hope that our children will have more than we had: I sincerely hope that I can provide my kids an opportunity to spend four years naked, vomiting and not giving a damn.
...that this is an "undocumented feature" of WinXP hardware product verification. >>> ;-) <<<
What's with that? The end of month figures for vulnerable IIS systems show an increase in cross site scripting, accessible admin pages and viewable script source. Any guesses?
Is it just that they're more visible? Or is it a whole bunch of sysadmins formatting, re-installing, then selectively patching for the last three exploits that they can remember? Wierd.
Quite. And yet... it's strangely compelling. Although I'd like to apply a cattle prod to the gonads instead of paying to keep them in prison. I'd put together a cogent argument for this, but the plain fact is that there isn't one, and the punishment is itself morally reprehensible. But that doesn't mean it's not right.
It's a tough call, but at some point it's best to acknowledge that all legal systems are a formalisation of mob rule, and that if you get so tied up in the process and the philosophy that you forget that laws have to be popular, then you end up with an legal system that disenfranchises the potentially law abiding and creates a culture of casual criminality.
I accept that there's arguments against this, but let's also remember that many States still criminalise no-victim acts between consentual adults. Tell you what, let's swap "fellatio between consenting adults" for "viewing kiddie porn" and call it even.
Age of consent in Japan is 14.
Actually, the precedent is draconian. Comics were demonised back in the 1950's in the same way that the 'net is now, and it was decided that This Must Stop. If you want a laugh, read the original text of the Comics Code Authority and then have a look at the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund that it necessitated.
Uh, there's a difference between being sexually suppressed, and criticising a show for putting in a gratuitous and shoddy sub soft core porn scene. I like Star Trek. I like (decent) porn. But I have time for both, I don't need them diluted by being amalgamated.
Funny comment, but not insightful.
They'll go to P2P services and find them stuffed full of beastality, rape and kiddie porn, that they can share anonymously.
<sarcasm>On the bright side, as there's no traffic figures or weblogs, we can pretend they're not doing it. So that's all right then. </sarcasm>
I personally think that you have to admit to yourself that kids are going to find porn. Deal with that, and realise that it might as well be soft core stuff from ethical servers.