I would like to see governments regulating the Broadband internet service a little more tightly, and maybe even the local govt. providing such access, but I would hate to move to the type of setup that electricity utilities have here in the Southeast, where each company is a government regulated monopoly. There is no competition, and since the govt. regulates what prices they can charge, the service is about as poor as can be. I wouldn't like this, however something needs to be done about a lot of phone companies who are providing broadband because they are doing the normal phone company thing: sticking it to the customers because at this time they are the only ones who can provide it. The following story will show my personal experience with this:
When I first accepted my job here in Atlanta, GA (actually Lawrenceville, a suburb) I visited apartment complexes to determine where I would live. One of the most important factors in my decision was whether or not the apartments offered high speed internet access, of any kind. To my delight, the lady at one of the nicer complexes pulled out a brochure from BellSouth FastAccess about their DSL connections, and informed me that each apartment was "pre-wired for DSL with fiber phone lines!" The brochure had all of this great hype about how you didn't have to have a second phone line, etc, and showed the price of $45/month and a $50 connection fee, DSL modem included! As you can imagine, I was excited about such a nice connection to the net and so that along with the other amenities led me to the decision to live there. Well, when I actually moved in and started setting up my utilities, I was told that in order to get my DSL connection I would have to pay a $250 installation fee, even though the brochure said nothing about that. Well as you can imagine, as a computer literate person I argued that I could easily install whatever DSL modem they brought me and I could plug it into the wall and get my connection working, but they were adamant that I had to get a professional installation. I called about 10 times and spent about 12 hours total on the phone with different types of employees of Bellsouth, and all said that my apartment wasn't ready for DSL, that I needed the prof. installation. This didn't make any sense to me because when we learned about DSL in school we were told that DSL is just a protocol that comes over your 2 wire home phone line and "piggybacks" over the signal, not interrupting phone conversations, and this was not at all something that needed anything more than a phone line... Anyway, long story short, I finally gave in and the installer came to my house with "DSL modem" in hand. It turned out to be a 10/100 Ethernet NIC and the professional install was needed because he had to splice two lines together to make 1 ethernet cable that ran from the network hub in the complex to a phone outlet that I specified (limiting my mobility) where he installed a RJ-45 jack so I could plug my computer into the Ethernet Network. In my opinion I was lied to by not only the apartment complex (pre-wired) but also BellSouth (advertised DSL, installed ethernet.) It took them a month after doing the install to get the access working because apparently they didn't have the network routers in place to support my neighborhood, so after $300 and having billy bob come and install my "DSL" connection and tell me all about "that dad burn internet," I still had nothing. Eventually I did get access though, and it really is very fast and convenient, but it sure isn't the low cost DSL connection advertised.
My point: phone companies are bastards like other utility companies, so I'd like to see the government step up regulation, but I'd hate it to become the same thing as the electricity market.
Re:Bunch of Hype is all it is, as usual
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 1
First of all I said nothing about thinking. Second of all this organization is our enemy and has been for a while. I don't really give a shit about changing their minds. When someone is your enemy, the best way to eliminate the problem is to eliminate them, and that is what we should do.
Bunch of Hype is all it is, as usual
on
A New Kind of War
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· Score: 2
OK, well there's two issues here: what are we going to do about Bin Laden and the Taliban, and what are we going to do about future terrorism.
Taliban: they are stacking up some 25000 troops for a possible attack on Pakistan, or to resist an invasion by the US. That is an army folks, no new war here, if they attack, we fight back, and it's a war just like the others. We will send in our planes and our choppers and our cruise missles, and eventually our tanks and troops. Its warfare like we all witnessed on live TV during the gulf war.
Future Terrorism: Bush and others are calling for the collaboration of intelligence agencies from around the world to prevent future terrorism and hunt down all terrorists. This is the new kind of war, and it really is just a reincarnation of the old west with outlaws and bounty hunters, now on a worldwide scale. Instead of getting leads and slowly acting on them and not stepping on anyone's toes (other countries',) investigators are going to have no political lines to worry about and they will be able to pursue terrorists wherever they may go.
All in all, if you're wondering what kind of war we're going to have because of the attacks, rest assured, our military is going to go in and kick some major ass just like we did with Iraq, but this time we will finish the job. In addition, we will wage war on anyone else who attempts, encourages, or harbors terrorism.
I said very clearly that we don't always do the right things. The principle is the important thing, the law, as it was intended, is just. The problem is how individuals carry out the law, as in the situations you describe. We're not perfect, nobody is, and terrible things happen here, but we try, we have good intentions, and we're the best thing going if you look around the world.
America is the land of the free, with liberty, and justice for all. If we take away this liberty to "prevent further terrorism," we will take away America, and we will be left with a shell of what we used to be. This country isn't perfect, we don't always do everything right, but our principles are some of the most pure in the world, and if we change those so that we can protect ourselves, we will kill ourselves, and there will be no America.
PPC at 2 GHz, I'd love to see a comparison test with one of those and a 2Ghz P4, it would be laughable. Looks like I'm going to be getting back into the world of apple when my present comp goes obsolete. Anybody know any good links to some info about using OS X (for the regular stuff, email, web browsing, HTML editing, playing games, text editing, etc)?
On the other hand, there is a congressman trying to use this moment for political gain by criticizing Bush and Guliani at every moment, so let him know that he's not doing the right thing: martin.meehan@mail.house.gov
I would suggest the GameCube. Nintendo has always produced the best system, they always have the best game play, the most fun games, and the highest quality graphics. Don't get an Xbox... imagine playing your favorite football game when you get "system error, please reboot...."
Yahoo has an article but right now it's only about 1 sentence long and just says that a plane hit the world trade center. I'm sure they'll post some good links though. I can't get to any of the other sites, all too busy.
A full body suit that you would strap on before you loaded up something like 'knockout kings.' Every time you get punched you feel a hit wherever you got punched. Just imagine how fun it would be to tweak your own games then...
"Here (insert person-who's-been-pissing-you-off's name here), try playing Mech Warrior with this suit on..."
We used to play Oregon Trail and Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Those were some fun games, not much violence, except when you got to go hunting on OT, that sure was fun. Anyone else spend all their money on ammo? Yeah I was a disturbed child for sure...
Re:eBay is and old idea on new Tech, not so with N
on
eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 2
Where did you get those stats? Define infringing and non-infringing. Since when is making a backup of your music in digital format the wrong thing to do? It would be different if people were distributing copied CD's (physically), but these are just music files on a computer, nothing wrong with that.
eBay is and old idea on new Tech, not so with Nap
on
eBay Beats DMCA
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· Score: 0, Redundant
The reason the judge ruled this way in this case as opposed to the way the judge ruled in the Napster case is simple: eBay is online auctions, and auctions have been around forever. People understand how they work and they are comfortable making decisions about them. On the other hand, Napster, P2P, and mp3's are all relatively new technologies that judges don't know the first thing about, and are not comfortable with at all. Auctions have just as much control over who gets what as P2P does (and that's very little) and so the two services really should be treated similarly, but it won't happen.
Talk about invasion of privacy! The real problem with this remote breathalizer is that if you go to the bar and have a drink or two you might pop up as drunk, but your blood level would be well below the limit. Then the cops get to pull you over and have fun hassling you just because you had a drink after work... I don't like it.
I went to the ST site and could not get a single video to play... I kept getting the "page cannot be found" message. Did anyone else have this problem?
Best of all, though, it tells a lot of people that there is a decent alternative to Microsoft software.
Has anyone seen that IBM commercial advertising business servers running Linux? I thought it was pretty funny, but I'm sure most people see it and say to themselves "Linux, huh?" Oh well, it's still a good laugh, especially when the cop says "what's a server?"
I come from a computer engineering background so I would love to see fundamentally sound software that is clean, efficient, and fast. On the other hand, compilers are very good at optimizations these days, and processors even have methods of reorganizing instructions to gain speed, so one can argue how necessary it is for code to be perfect. I would like to see "beautiful" code, but I don't really think there would be much performance improvement.
The articles I've seen on this aren't very detailed as to how the technology actually increases speed, but I would have to guess that the new material allows for less logical gate latency which then allows for faster chip operation. Anyone know if I'm close?
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to see governments regulating the Broadband internet service a little more tightly, and maybe even the local govt. providing such access, but I would hate to move to the type of setup that electricity utilities have here in the Southeast, where each company is a government regulated monopoly. There is no competition, and since the govt. regulates what prices they can charge, the service is about as poor as can be. I wouldn't like this, however something needs to be done about a lot of phone companies who are providing broadband because they are doing the normal phone company thing: sticking it to the customers because at this time they are the only ones who can provide it. The following story will show my personal experience with this:
When I first accepted my job here in Atlanta, GA (actually Lawrenceville, a suburb) I visited apartment complexes to determine where I would live. One of the most important factors in my decision was whether or not the apartments offered high speed internet access, of any kind. To my delight, the lady at one of the nicer complexes pulled out a brochure from BellSouth FastAccess about their DSL connections, and informed me that each apartment was "pre-wired for DSL with fiber phone lines!" The brochure had all of this great hype about how you didn't have to have a second phone line, etc, and showed the price of $45/month and a $50 connection fee, DSL modem included! As you can imagine, I was excited about such a nice connection to the net and so that along with the other amenities led me to the decision to live there. Well, when I actually moved in and started setting up my utilities, I was told that in order to get my DSL connection I would have to pay a $250 installation fee, even though the brochure said nothing about that. Well as you can imagine, as a computer literate person I argued that I could easily install whatever DSL modem they brought me and I could plug it into the wall and get my connection working, but they were adamant that I had to get a professional installation. I called about 10 times and spent about 12 hours total on the phone with different types of employees of Bellsouth, and all said that my apartment wasn't ready for DSL, that I needed the prof. installation. This didn't make any sense to me because when we learned about DSL in school we were told that DSL is just a protocol that comes over your 2 wire home phone line and "piggybacks" over the signal, not interrupting phone conversations, and this was not at all something that needed anything more than a phone line... Anyway, long story short, I finally gave in and the installer came to my house with "DSL modem" in hand. It turned out to be a 10/100 Ethernet NIC and the professional install was needed because he had to splice two lines together to make 1 ethernet cable that ran from the network hub in the complex to a phone outlet that I specified (limiting my mobility) where he installed a RJ-45 jack so I could plug my computer into the Ethernet Network. In my opinion I was lied to by not only the apartment complex (pre-wired) but also BellSouth (advertised DSL, installed ethernet.) It took them a month after doing the install to get the access working because apparently they didn't have the network routers in place to support my neighborhood, so after $300 and having billy bob come and install my "DSL" connection and tell me all about "that dad burn internet," I still had nothing. Eventually I did get access though, and it really is very fast and convenient, but it sure isn't the low cost DSL connection advertised.
My point: phone companies are bastards like other utility companies, so I'd like to see the government step up regulation, but I'd hate it to become the same thing as the electricity market.
First of all I said nothing about thinking. Second of all this organization is our enemy and has been for a while. I don't really give a shit about changing their minds. When someone is your enemy, the best way to eliminate the problem is to eliminate them, and that is what we should do.
OK, well there's two issues here: what are we going to do about Bin Laden and the Taliban, and what are we going to do about future terrorism.
Taliban: they are stacking up some 25000 troops for a possible attack on Pakistan, or to resist an invasion by the US. That is an army folks, no new war here, if they attack, we fight back, and it's a war just like the others. We will send in our planes and our choppers and our cruise missles, and eventually our tanks and troops. Its warfare like we all witnessed on live TV during the gulf war.
Future Terrorism: Bush and others are calling for the collaboration of intelligence agencies from around the world to prevent future terrorism and hunt down all terrorists. This is the new kind of war, and it really is just a reincarnation of the old west with outlaws and bounty hunters, now on a worldwide scale. Instead of getting leads and slowly acting on them and not stepping on anyone's toes (other countries',) investigators are going to have no political lines to worry about and they will be able to pursue terrorists wherever they may go.
All in all, if you're wondering what kind of war we're going to have because of the attacks, rest assured, our military is going to go in and kick some major ass just like we did with Iraq, but this time we will finish the job. In addition, we will wage war on anyone else who attempts, encourages, or harbors terrorism.
You're right about that, people don't administrate well.
So the patches MS sent out didn't stop this new one? I thought they said they had solved that type of problem... I just love MS.
I said very clearly that we don't always do the right things. The principle is the important thing, the law, as it was intended, is just. The problem is how individuals carry out the law, as in the situations you describe. We're not perfect, nobody is, and terrible things happen here, but we try, we have good intentions, and we're the best thing going if you look around the world.
America is the land of the free, with liberty, and justice for all. If we take away this liberty to "prevent further terrorism," we will take away America, and we will be left with a shell of what we used to be. This country isn't perfect, we don't always do everything right, but our principles are some of the most pure in the world, and if we change those so that we can protect ourselves, we will kill ourselves, and there will be no America.
PPC at 2 GHz, I'd love to see a comparison test with one of those and a 2Ghz P4, it would be laughable. Looks like I'm going to be getting back into the world of apple when my present comp goes obsolete. Anybody know any good links to some info about using OS X (for the regular stuff, email, web browsing, HTML editing, playing games, text editing, etc)?
And the horses that rode in on you
Excuse me for the lack of content in this post but:
This guy is really smart.
I agree, you guys kick ass.
On the other hand, there is a congressman trying to use this moment for political gain by criticizing Bush and Guliani at every moment, so let him know that he's not doing the right thing: martin.meehan@mail.house.gov
I would suggest the GameCube. Nintendo has always produced the best system, they always have the best game play, the most fun games, and the highest quality graphics. Don't get an Xbox... imagine playing your favorite football game when you get "system error, please reboot...."
I don't think it's right for people to invade my privacy, this is a tragedy but it's no excuse to let the government read my private info.
Yahoo has an article but right now it's only about 1 sentence long and just says that a plane hit the world trade center. I'm sure they'll post some good links though. I can't get to any of the other sites, all too busy.
A full body suit that you would strap on before you loaded up something like 'knockout kings.' Every time you get punched you feel a hit wherever you got punched. Just imagine how fun it would be to tweak your own games then...
"Here (insert person-who's-been-pissing-you-off's name here), try playing Mech Warrior with this suit on..."
We used to play Oregon Trail and Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? Those were some fun games, not much violence, except when you got to go hunting on OT, that sure was fun. Anyone else spend all their money on ammo? Yeah I was a disturbed child for sure...
Where did you get those stats? Define infringing and non-infringing. Since when is making a backup of your music in digital format the wrong thing to do? It would be different if people were distributing copied CD's (physically), but these are just music files on a computer, nothing wrong with that.
The reason the judge ruled this way in this case as opposed to the way the judge ruled in the Napster case is simple: eBay is online auctions, and auctions have been around forever. People understand how they work and they are comfortable making decisions about them. On the other hand, Napster, P2P, and mp3's are all relatively new technologies that judges don't know the first thing about, and are not comfortable with at all. Auctions have just as much control over who gets what as P2P does (and that's very little) and so the two services really should be treated similarly, but it won't happen.
Talk about invasion of privacy! The real problem with this remote breathalizer is that if you go to the bar and have a drink or two you might pop up as drunk, but your blood level would be well below the limit. Then the cops get to pull you over and have fun hassling you just because you had a drink after work... I don't like it.
I went to the ST site and could not get a single video to play... I kept getting the "page cannot be found" message. Did anyone else have this problem?
Best of all, though, it tells a lot of people that there is a decent alternative to Microsoft software.
Has anyone seen that IBM commercial advertising business servers running Linux? I thought it was pretty funny, but I'm sure most people see it and say to themselves "Linux, huh?" Oh well, it's still a good laugh, especially when the cop says "what's a server?"
I agree with you, but that sort of situation is more rare than one would think.
I come from a computer engineering background so I would love to see fundamentally sound software that is clean, efficient, and fast. On the other hand, compilers are very good at optimizations these days, and processors even have methods of reorganizing instructions to gain speed, so one can argue how necessary it is for code to be perfect. I would like to see "beautiful" code, but I don't really think there would be much performance improvement.
Make a vehicle for spying on Americans and pass it off as a fire fighting device... how clever
The articles I've seen on this aren't very detailed as to how the technology actually increases speed, but I would have to guess that the new material allows for less logical gate latency which then allows for faster chip operation. Anyone know if I'm close?