You realize the V.A.T. is in place of sales tax, not in addition to it, right? And that to the end consumer it looks basically identical? And that taxing the difference between input and output costs is actually more economically forgiving to struggling businesses than taxing everything overall, despite losses?
Features like "Block Zones" should be useful for avoiding construction or high-traffic areas. You should never have to use a functionality feature to overcome gross programming mistakes.
It's not a complex computer system. It's a map. It's a map that finds out where you are, where you want to go, and routes you. It's basically A*++. Why should you have to read a manual for that? That's like requiring reading a manual for a microwave oven. If your microwave, or GPS, requires a manual, it's broken crap and you should fix it before trying to sell it.
Not really as hilarious as that, but I live about three blocks from a highway on-ramp. For some reason, the GPS unit, about half of the time, will route me 5 blocks down, over a bridge, and 5 blocks back, just to avoid going on one of those initial 3 blocks. For the life of me, I can't figure out what it thinks it's doing. But I've definitely learned not to trust it.
Also, *never* choose "shortest" route. That way lies madness, and driving across people's lawns.
To be fair, the Xbox was actually pretty good, and the 360 earned its place in gaming by being great. The Zune is probably *currently* profitable, as it's just one of many brands of passably successful MP3 players, though nothing will make up for those initial media buys. You'll notice MSN & Microsoft Virtual Earth are just websites now, and Plays-4-Sure + Web TV are dead.
People already use overhead wires to move goods from parts of large warehouses to other parts. It's really just a question of how far can you go before the system becomes inefficient.
I used to have a daily commute from Sunnyvale to San Rafael for a badly underpaid night job. If you circle from 101 over the golden gate bridge north, to the Richmond bridge on 580, and down again on 580 -> 880 to Sunnyvale, you have a full circle that has no tolls. If you choose your highway and time of day carefully, that can be a 2 hour loop total.
That having been said, there are alternatives to driving into the city (which is hugely overpopulated with cars already). There is BART. There is the ferry. There is telecommuting. Anything that can be done to get cars out of SF is a benefit to everyone.
Bridge tolls are pretty common in the US for bridges above a certain size. If it takes more than 30 seconds to drive over it, there is probably a toll associated with it.
Toll roads are more common on the east coast and drop off as you get west. Massachusetts is glued together by an absolutely essential toll road (90). But Los Angeles had a failed experiment with toll roads several years back, going nearly unused and costing the state millions.
Ostensibly these are about upkeep and paying off initial bonds. But frequently they go to the general transportation fund. I-90 paid itself off several years ago, but with the transportation department being in such debt over the Big Dig they haven't removed any tolls.
Lots of US systems link up with EZ-Pass, especially here in the Northeast.
That having been said, there isn't that much incentive for a nation-wide system, especially when the technology remains proprietary. If we don't have competition between the systems, we're going to get massively gouged. Similarly, while it would be nice to have nation-wide standards, the benefits for me as a Northeasterner of anything west of New York being on the same system are incredibly minimal.
+ their overseers, maintaining the booths they sit in, maintaining their break room, administrative costs WRT taxes and payments.
Usually the cost per employee calculation is 2-3x... 1$ goes to the employee themselves, 2$ goes to location, benefits, tools, admin overhead, taxes, etc. The toll collectors probably get 50k per year, but cost the state something like 100k.
For the record, in Modern Warfare 2, the terrorists are a group of people who gun down people in the middle of an airport with automatic guns. In real life, this guy blew himself up outside the terminal.
But frames are a proven, time-tested, and widely-loved way of building information superhighways. Next, Slashdot stories will be separated into little themed cities, with content rings connecting them.
I feel like the whitespace isn't the problem, so much as clarifying the relationship between the heirchy of information. The "Share this Story, This story has X comments, etc" all should be grouped and pulled together, and either indented to match the story or aligned to show their relationship to eachother. The whitespace will hopefully be wiggle room to work with to clarify those relationships.
The "Karma - Excellent" whitespace is a bit excessive, though.
AOL's free service can connect through their existing network, using the AOL software they're comfortable with. They don't have to change software. They're just using the same software to connect through the DSL they already pay for.
The problem with all of this, is that *talent* is still expensive. You can get a guy to hold a cellphone for a music video, but you can't get a trained steadycam operator to film an on-foot chase scene without paying him 50 an hour. You can spend 20 hours making a music track yourself in Garage Band that everyone hates, or you can pay a group of musicians a few grand to use their stuff. You can hire all of your friends for free to act in your movie, but your friends are really not actors. Even if your friends ARE actors, they're wrong for the parts and will just muck it all up.
Face it, good entertainment still needs budgets and organization. Not to mention a 2 hour movie requiring something like 2 weeks of full-time editing alone. The barrier to entry isn't one of technological costs (like indie music) but people costs, like staging public spectacles. And unlike music, that barrier to entry isn't getting lower. Add in that any one person doing their job poorly can completely screw up a movie, and there are hundreds of people making movies, and big, professional houses seem secure.
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
And we've known since 1988 ish that we had to migrate to IPv6, and that the migration will get more expensive the longer we put it off. If knowledge of the need for IPv6 migration was a person, it would be old enough to buy lottery tickets.
A lot of software is already IPv6 compatible. All major operating systems, for example, have been IPv6 compatible for some time. And if you presume a normal 5-year lifespan for routing hardware, that could be entirely upgraded by 2015. Retail software should be easy to switch over, with much of it already having done so. The most recent DOCSIS is IPv6 compatible, and will just naturally rotate in with the atrociously short lifespan of modern DSL routers.
And "trillions and trillions of dollars?" Please. If you're talking about custom in-house software that presume IPv4, you're talking about a routing stack that can have localized changes to it. You could probably also create virtual networking components that help interface between the IPv6 world and the IPv4 application.
It's a problem. There is an obvious best solution. This obvious best solution is just going to get more and more expensive as time goes on. Stop whining about the costs, and plan your software and hardware acquisitions with IPv6 compatibility in mind, or deal with having to shell out a hell of a lot more when the IPv6 switch finally gets flipped.
As a result, there won't be any serious pushes into IPv6 until organizations can clearly quantify the damages that will be done from dragging their feet further....Or business organizations can figure out how to whip up a paranoid frenzy, and then sell the services to replace ipv4.
Anyone who watches Red Dwarf for the plot is missing the point. It's like watching Twilight for the sex. All that can really get out of a pre-screener like this are a few good jokes, which should hopefully convince the potential viewer to tune in anyway.
Movies have dealt with this for years. It's called Some-Of-Your-Audience-Sees-It-Before-The-Rest. Movies are still good movies. Red Dwarf will survive.
To be fair, the prior versions of HTML were all pretty bad. By HTML 4 the kinks were pretty much ironed out, but with some kruft that XHTML stripped out.
HTML 5 is a major undertaking to rewrite how HTML works in a radically different way. That does mean that nobody will agree. That's the nature of technology as it matures. At first it's terrible, and has frequent updates and releases. Later, as it matures, the updates are slower and more thought out.
The choir may be the WC3 over here at MIT. The FSF putting a stamp of approval on WebM helps allay one of the big hurdles for making it the HTML 5 video standard: questions of quality. While the average consumer may not care, if WebM gets baked into the standard, that would have a large effect on how we get video on the web (and how free it is).
While I rely extensively on online backup, they're not 100%. The backup speeds are slow, with the latest backups usually lagging about 4 months behind. They're a great backup of last resort, but they need to solve the upstream problem before they can really replace local backups.
That having been said, Crashplan will also automatically backup to local storage, in addition to online.
The same realistically could be said of credit cards, though. You can clone them pretty easily, and once a swipe has gone through you no longer know what is approved.
For each i-device user, you could generate 100,000 random codes on the server. When validating the transaction, you only validate against the first code on the stack, before popping it off. You could also require part of the transaction to be validated via SMS code to that particular phone, and a short user secret code. Now you know that the user knows the password, has the initial password database you sent out, and has the account's phone. Even successful spoofing would show up to the user as texted attempts to use their phone.
If a bank would have loaned them money, Goldman Sachs wouldn't have needed a bailout. The problem is they were a huge, badly mismanaged risk that had nowhere else to turn for help.
What grandparent is saying is that institutions will take much higher risks than they otherwise should if they know there is a public group willing to absorb the risk.
Also, the loan to Goldman came from the Federal Government, not the Federal Bank. The two are separate institutions. The Fed Gov is most definitely not a bank.
Slashdot Mirror
You realize the V.A.T. is in place of sales tax, not in addition to it, right? And that to the end consumer it looks basically identical? And that taxing the difference between input and output costs is actually more economically forgiving to struggling businesses than taxing everything overall, despite losses?
Out of curiosity, how often does your power go out? I'm mostly an urban guy, and we get about 1 day of blackout per year, if that.
Features like "Block Zones" should be useful for avoiding construction or high-traffic areas. You should never have to use a functionality feature to overcome gross programming mistakes.
It's not a complex computer system. It's a map. It's a map that finds out where you are, where you want to go, and routes you. It's basically A*++. Why should you have to read a manual for that? That's like requiring reading a manual for a microwave oven. If your microwave, or GPS, requires a manual, it's broken crap and you should fix it before trying to sell it.
Not really as hilarious as that, but I live about three blocks from a highway on-ramp. For some reason, the GPS unit, about half of the time, will route me 5 blocks down, over a bridge, and 5 blocks back, just to avoid going on one of those initial 3 blocks. For the life of me, I can't figure out what it thinks it's doing. But I've definitely learned not to trust it.
Also, *never* choose "shortest" route. That way lies madness, and driving across people's lawns.
To be fair, the Xbox was actually pretty good, and the 360 earned its place in gaming by being great. The Zune is probably *currently* profitable, as it's just one of many brands of passably successful MP3 players, though nothing will make up for those initial media buys. You'll notice MSN & Microsoft Virtual Earth are just websites now, and Plays-4-Sure + Web TV are dead.
You could blanket the top of New York City with goods moving through the sky VIA wire a lot more cheaply than you could build more roads or rails.
People already use overhead wires to move goods from parts of large warehouses to other parts. It's really just a question of how far can you go before the system becomes inefficient.
I used to have a daily commute from Sunnyvale to San Rafael for a badly underpaid night job. If you circle from 101 over the golden gate bridge north, to the Richmond bridge on 580, and down again on 580 -> 880 to Sunnyvale, you have a full circle that has no tolls. If you choose your highway and time of day carefully, that can be a 2 hour loop total.
That having been said, there are alternatives to driving into the city (which is hugely overpopulated with cars already). There is BART. There is the ferry. There is telecommuting. Anything that can be done to get cars out of SF is a benefit to everyone.
Bridge tolls are pretty common in the US for bridges above a certain size. If it takes more than 30 seconds to drive over it, there is probably a toll associated with it.
Toll roads are more common on the east coast and drop off as you get west. Massachusetts is glued together by an absolutely essential toll road (90). But Los Angeles had a failed experiment with toll roads several years back, going nearly unused and costing the state millions.
Ostensibly these are about upkeep and paying off initial bonds. But frequently they go to the general transportation fund. I-90 paid itself off several years ago, but with the transportation department being in such debt over the Big Dig they haven't removed any tolls.
Lots of US systems link up with EZ-Pass, especially here in the Northeast.
That having been said, there isn't that much incentive for a nation-wide system, especially when the technology remains proprietary. If we don't have competition between the systems, we're going to get massively gouged. Similarly, while it would be nice to have nation-wide standards, the benefits for me as a Northeasterner of anything west of New York being on the same system are incredibly minimal.
+ their overseers, maintaining the booths they sit in, maintaining their break room, administrative costs WRT taxes and payments.
Usually the cost per employee calculation is 2-3x... 1$ goes to the employee themselves, 2$ goes to location, benefits, tools, admin overhead, taxes, etc. The toll collectors probably get 50k per year, but cost the state something like 100k.
For the record, in Modern Warfare 2, the terrorists are a group of people who gun down people in the middle of an airport with automatic guns. In real life, this guy blew himself up outside the terminal.
Obviously, very similar.
But frames are a proven, time-tested, and widely-loved way of building information superhighways. Next, Slashdot stories will be separated into little themed cities, with content rings connecting them.
Don't worry, everyone will just find the topmost rated first comment, and comment under that.
I feel like the whitespace isn't the problem, so much as clarifying the relationship between the heirchy of information. The "Share this Story, This story has X comments, etc" all should be grouped and pulled together, and either indented to match the story or aligned to show their relationship to eachother. The whitespace will hopefully be wiggle room to work with to clarify those relationships.
The "Karma - Excellent" whitespace is a bit excessive, though.
AOL's free service can connect through their existing network, using the AOL software they're comfortable with. They don't have to change software. They're just using the same software to connect through the DSL they already pay for.
The problem with all of this, is that *talent* is still expensive. You can get a guy to hold a cellphone for a music video, but you can't get a trained steadycam operator to film an on-foot chase scene without paying him 50 an hour. You can spend 20 hours making a music track yourself in Garage Band that everyone hates, or you can pay a group of musicians a few grand to use their stuff. You can hire all of your friends for free to act in your movie, but your friends are really not actors. Even if your friends ARE actors, they're wrong for the parts and will just muck it all up.
Face it, good entertainment still needs budgets and organization. Not to mention a 2 hour movie requiring something like 2 weeks of full-time editing alone. The barrier to entry isn't one of technological costs (like indie music) but people costs, like staging public spectacles. And unlike music, that barrier to entry isn't getting lower. Add in that any one person doing their job poorly can completely screw up a movie, and there are hundreds of people making movies, and big, professional houses seem secure.
People on slahsdot talk about IPv6 migration like it is simple - it is NOT. There are a lot more devices than your local router, and a lot more pieces of software then your desktop OS, that have to support IPv6 before it can be migrated. Companies have decades worth of software with hundreds upon hundreds of millions of lines of code, all assuming an IP is 4 bytes.
And we've known since 1988 ish that we had to migrate to IPv6, and that the migration will get more expensive the longer we put it off. If knowledge of the need for IPv6 migration was a person, it would be old enough to buy lottery tickets.
A lot of software is already IPv6 compatible. All major operating systems, for example, have been IPv6 compatible for some time. And if you presume a normal 5-year lifespan for routing hardware, that could be entirely upgraded by 2015. Retail software should be easy to switch over, with much of it already having done so. The most recent DOCSIS is IPv6 compatible, and will just naturally rotate in with the atrociously short lifespan of modern DSL routers.
And "trillions and trillions of dollars?" Please. If you're talking about custom in-house software that presume IPv4, you're talking about a routing stack that can have localized changes to it. You could probably also create virtual networking components that help interface between the IPv6 world and the IPv4 application.
It's a problem. There is an obvious best solution. This obvious best solution is just going to get more and more expensive as time goes on. Stop whining about the costs, and plan your software and hardware acquisitions with IPv6 compatibility in mind, or deal with having to shell out a hell of a lot more when the IPv6 switch finally gets flipped.
As a result, there won't be any serious pushes into IPv6 until organizations can clearly quantify the damages that will be done from dragging their feet further. ...Or business organizations can figure out how to whip up a paranoid frenzy, and then sell the services to replace ipv4.
Anyone who watches Red Dwarf for the plot is missing the point. It's like watching Twilight for the sex. All that can really get out of a pre-screener like this are a few good jokes, which should hopefully convince the potential viewer to tune in anyway.
Movies have dealt with this for years. It's called Some-Of-Your-Audience-Sees-It-Before-The-Rest. Movies are still good movies. Red Dwarf will survive.
To be fair, the prior versions of HTML were all pretty bad. By HTML 4 the kinks were pretty much ironed out, but with some kruft that XHTML stripped out.
HTML 5 is a major undertaking to rewrite how HTML works in a radically different way. That does mean that nobody will agree. That's the nature of technology as it matures. At first it's terrible, and has frequent updates and releases. Later, as it matures, the updates are slower and more thought out.
The choir may be the WC3 over here at MIT. The FSF putting a stamp of approval on WebM helps allay one of the big hurdles for making it the HTML 5 video standard: questions of quality. While the average consumer may not care, if WebM gets baked into the standard, that would have a large effect on how we get video on the web (and how free it is).
While I rely extensively on online backup, they're not 100%. The backup speeds are slow, with the latest backups usually lagging about 4 months behind. They're a great backup of last resort, but they need to solve the upstream problem before they can really replace local backups.
That having been said, Crashplan will also automatically backup to local storage, in addition to online.
The same realistically could be said of credit cards, though. You can clone them pretty easily, and once a swipe has gone through you no longer know what is approved.
For each i-device user, you could generate 100,000 random codes on the server. When validating the transaction, you only validate against the first code on the stack, before popping it off. You could also require part of the transaction to be validated via SMS code to that particular phone, and a short user secret code. Now you know that the user knows the password, has the initial password database you sent out, and has the account's phone. Even successful spoofing would show up to the user as texted attempts to use their phone.
If a bank would have loaned them money, Goldman Sachs wouldn't have needed a bailout. The problem is they were a huge, badly mismanaged risk that had nowhere else to turn for help.
What grandparent is saying is that institutions will take much higher risks than they otherwise should if they know there is a public group willing to absorb the risk.
Also, the loan to Goldman came from the Federal Government, not the Federal Bank. The two are separate institutions. The Fed Gov is most definitely not a bank.