I lived on a street once, down in Florida, that had a dozen houses. It was across the street from a new subdivision. Our street did NOT have cable service, either TV or Internet. The subdivision did. I lived on the corner, and the main junction box was across the street from me, MAYBE 40 feet from my house. The cable company refused to run cable to our house, saying that most people on our street already had satellite dishes, it wasn't profitable. No, I couldn't pay for it, they just refused to do it at all. They can do that.
The electric companies CANNOT REFUSE to run you power. They can bill you the tariffed rate, which was set by the gov't, but if you are willing to pay it is ILLEGAL for them to refuse to run the lines. Ditto with telephone service or any tariffed variation like a T-1 line.
Yes, but just to clarify, your speed-up wasn't because AT&T's faster DNS. It was because all those other Comcast wankers were still offline and calling tech support. For a few glorious moments, the Comcast tubes were unclogged.
For the same reason we use Aegis destroyers against pirates off of Somalia - we use what we have. We don't keep any 18th century sloops around in case we need to go against fishing boats...
Hmmm...someone needs to update the AI in FreeCiv. The bots routinely refuse to upgrade caravels even when they have much higher tech.
If they're going to throw out the tree ring data, throw it ALL out, not just the part you don't like. If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960. Grafting on thermometer data because it fits your desired conclusion is bad science, pure and simple.
Well, the "shuffle" feature on CD players introduced back in the 80s broke their hearts first. I'm just pointing it out.:-)
And while they are exceptions, not many albums are produced with 40-piece orchestras.
I've seen more than a few musicians (a couple, personal friends) who have built acoustically engineered sound rooms in their homes. And computers can replace 99% of the expensive equipment, other than instruments. Heck. Most of that expensive audio equipment is nothing more than specialized computers. All the digital stuff, anyway.
And while I certainly don't begrudge costs like studio musicians, engineers and techs, we're still talking several orders of magnitude cheaper than movie production.
I've argued this for years. CDs and their predecessors are collections of individual performances, with a few exceptions. The music industry has made an entire business model on selling an expensive set based on the saleability of a single unit. That is, they sell albums based on people wanting just one or two songs.
Movies are not like that. As much as people like to joke that much coming out of Hollywood has 5 minutes of entertainment lost in 2+ hours of bad acting, poor dialog and non-existent plot, no one is really interested in seeing just trailers.
Add to that the perceived value by the audience. I can go to the store to but a DVD of a 2+ hour performance, or a CD of a dozen 2+ minute performances for about the same price. Why does a movie that cost $100 million to produce cost the same as a music CD that maybe cost $10 million (or $1 million, or less)? The movie industry isn't going broke, so the music industry must have INCREDIBLE profit margins and is screwing over the consumer like nobody's business!
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies. A song or album can be credibly done by an INDIVIDUAL, or maybe a band and a few extra people to produce. Ten people, tops, unless they're padding it. No sets to build, to props to make, etc.
The whole music industry argument that the movie industry is just like them and "next is just FUD.
It isn't that Windows can't run on it, it is that there are only 5 or 6 companies in the world that could afford the per-core pricing on Microsoft's products at that level.
No lay person could possibly understand what you do because you're just so much smarter than they are? Or is it that you spent 40 years poring over data day and night? Are you THAT smart? Give me a break. Anyone who has the hubris to think that their work can only be understood by those in their field is just aching to be smacked down by some un-educated smarty. Look, its attitudes like yours that make the rest of us 'non-scientists' think you're an idiot. Give people some credit, we're not all morons.
Then let me clarify for him. Experts in a field, especially scientists, spend years if not DECADES studying their subject matter. The average layperson doesn't. They aren't necessarily SMARTER, just BETTER EDUCATED BY FAR in their field. The letters after their name are usually a good indicator of the minimum number of YEARS they have spent pursuing knowledge and understanding in their field.
They use words that mean specific things, and they all know what they mean as opposed to just guessing from common usage.
The best example is anti-evolutionists saying "Evolution is just a theory." They're thinking the word theory means guess, and that isn't even close. Merriam-Webster defines theory as:
1. the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another;... 5. a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena
Neither mean ANYTHING close to what the layperson thinks theory means, by their usage, but is exactly what a scientist means.
The same goes for terms used in climate science. There are going to be several that don't mean what people think they mean. Nor are laypeople going to understand statistical methods, standard deviation, normalization of data or any other legitimate data analysis technique. All they see is "YOU MANIPULATED THE DATA!"
I've worked with computers for over 25 years, in programming, networking and security. I have a degree, several certificates, a few published articles and decades of experience to my name. I sometimes help family or friends with problems with their PCs and I almost ALWAYS get "the kid down at Best Buy said to try X -- why don't you do X?" Usually it is step 1 or 2 in troubleshooting and something I examined and discarded 15 steps back but to be polite I not only have to explain that I did that, but WHY it won't work and wasn't appropriate in the first place. Then explain every step I've done along the way to where I am now and when I fix it.
I ENJOY doing that when I know the person is INTERESTED and going to LEARN something, but many just get defensive and say "well, Betty's son works with computers after school and HE said..." Followed by a lecture on how I should take advice from someone with 1/10th my experience and no direct knowledge of the problem, other than a brief chat over the phone with someone who is clueless. It is the equivalent of a degreed and certified mechanical engineer taking advice on building a bridge from the neighbor's kid because he has an erector set.
Which brings me back to the original discussion. The general public is the equivalent of kids with erector sets clamoring about how the degreed, tested and certified mechanical engineers with decades of experience are all doing it wrong. If they really want to participate in the process, they need to put in serious study on the scientific process, data analysis, data collection and the subject at hand. YEARS, probably. No, a quick check on Wikipedia and arguing with the guys down at the bar doesn't cut it. A degree in the field would.
However, this is not "alike". We make fun of white politicians--and their wives, at times--without reference to their race. That's not the same as dehumanizing Michelle Obama for being black.
George Bush was frequently referred to as "redneck" and "cracker", which are white-specific terms. I also heard "that honkey motherfucker" a couple times and "that white boy", but only coming from black people.
What is wrong with gigabytes? Translations can be stored as compressed TEXT with . The whole text-to-speech and speech recognition are separate issues.
And gigabytes was an example of cheapness of storage. Terabytes are a couple hundred $$ now. My point is storage is cheap.
But, why do computers have to solve it? Just damn well PREtranslate EVERYTHING and store it all in a lookup table. I mean, hire a crapload of people who are fluent in both languages and sit them down to translate newspapers, novels, speeches, and anything else they can get a hold of. Eventually, you'll have a database that covers the vast majority of all conversations in the target language. Anything it DOESN'T know it tries algorithmic translation and feeds to to a series of human translators for validation. That phrase is then entered into the database for future use.
A few terabytes of storage cost a couple hundred dollars now. The database to handle it isn't difficult, either.
Whenever anyone brings up machine translation there is always someone on Slashdot brings up this particular example, like it is some litmus test or something.
I hate to say it, but I solved this one personally a few minutes after first seeing the problem. I noticed my computer had gigabytes of drive space, and I had a friend that was fluent in both Russian and English. I asked him to translate the phrase for me, the whipped up a perl script to give the correct translation.
Considering computers are so good at simple table lookups, just have HUMANS do the hard stuff and store it in a table. The easy stuff, such as simple sentences and common stuff, can be done by computer.
Whatever happened to that project where Google was getting professional translations from the U.N. and building a database?
Help me out. Where can I download the source code to OS X and all the software components for a working Mac? Sure, I can buy Apple's official version of the OS on their official hardware, but where can I install it on my OWN hardware because I have the source?
Apple is a bunch of tight assed control freaks. They build good stuff, but you must run it THEIR way on THEIR systems.
Google builds good stuff, and they sell it on their systems or partners' systems, and you can STILL run in on anything you can make it work on, since they provide the source code.
Flying domestically, yes. Leaving the country will require you to declare to Customs any amount over $10,000 in cash or negotiable instruments. I'm not sure what happens if you declare it. I've never had the opportunity to fly internationally with $10,000+ before.:-)
Not in this case. I was working on a cell network and it was 100% VoIP inside, outside and upside down. All the handsets had IPs as well as phone numbers. The link to the LEA was an IPsec tunnel from a Juniper VPN Concentrator to an IPSec-enabled endpoint at the LEA's office. PSTN has nothing to do with it. No, you CAN'T wardial it because it isn't a phone switch.
Well, the company's lawyers got the FBI to sign off on the voice buffering bit, and yes it was mostly a capacity issue. Whether that'll change in the future is up to whether or not the gov't decides to pay for it. I think that was the main argument. "You want HOW MUCH DATA buffered? Excuse us while we break out the BIG calculator to prepare you a quote."
No, we weren't interpreting data. Raw XML was passed over for control and signal data, and voice was sent as a raw codec stream. The codec was from Qualcom, and we did have to assist in making sure the FBI could receive and decode it properly. Only the FBI needed the help because they wrote their own code. All the other LEOs used off the shelf software from Qualcom.
For a while, I had a laptop that could inject requests into the stream -- bypassing the warrant step -- create an arbitrary IPsec tunnel and feed a raw stream of XML+voice to any IP of my choosing. I used to work at the hotel at night debugging call data. We had a microcell network set up in one of the suites.
Not really. That stuff is a firehose, and few jurisdictions are capable of handling anything like it. CALEA is for small town police depts as well as the FBI. Warrants are entered by the PD clerk, which are submitted to the CALEA system. The system is separate from accounting and everything else, so no one who isn't authorized has access to the info.
The system then flags a number and whenever a call is made to or from that number, it is duplicated inside the switch and a stream sent to the CALEA system. This includes busy signals, party line calls, SMS, etc.
The CALEA system establishes a secure tunnel (IPSec) inside the telco network to an IPSec gateway. We were working with Juniper boxes at the time. From there, the tunnels are broken out to the various law enforcement offices that have open warrants. One goes to the FBI, one to NYPD, etc. The entire internal network was GbE for the nodes and 10 GbE for trunks. Again, good luck DDoSing that.
Tunnels to the various LEOs varied in size depending on the size of the department and how many active warrants they had. A minimum of 1.54 Mbps, IIRC. Pipes to the FBI in Quantico, LAPD, NYPD and a couple others were larger by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
I lived on a street once, down in Florida, that had a dozen houses. It was across the street from a new subdivision. Our street did NOT have cable service, either TV or Internet. The subdivision did. I lived on the corner, and the main junction box was across the street from me, MAYBE 40 feet from my house. The cable company refused to run cable to our house, saying that most people on our street already had satellite dishes, it wasn't profitable. No, I couldn't pay for it, they just refused to do it at all. They can do that.
The electric companies CANNOT REFUSE to run you power. They can bill you the tariffed rate, which was set by the gov't, but if you are willing to pay it is ILLEGAL for them to refuse to run the lines. Ditto with telephone service or any tariffed variation like a T-1 line.
That is the difference we're talking about.
http://www.google.com/search?q=tariffed+service
I'll save 'em the full $34.
Go here: https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm
Yes, but just to clarify, your speed-up wasn't because AT&T's faster DNS. It was because all those other Comcast wankers were still offline and calling tech support. For a few glorious moments, the Comcast tubes were unclogged.
Not the election, just the candidates. ALL of 'em, except Sarah Palin. I don't think she has enough active braincells to be a fraud.
For the same reason we use Aegis destroyers against pirates off of Somalia - we use what we have. We don't keep any 18th century sloops around in case we need to go against fishing boats...
Hmmm...someone needs to update the AI in FreeCiv. The bots routinely refuse to upgrade caravels even when they have much higher tech.
Can you point me to a first run theater in the western 'burbs that ISN'T overpriced? I'm in DuPage County and haven't found one, yet.
#2 doesn't hold water, scientifically.
If they're going to throw out the tree ring data, throw it ALL out, not just the part you don't like. If it is valid before 1960, it is valid after 1960. Grafting on thermometer data because it fits your desired conclusion is bad science, pure and simple.
Muvico in Rosemont, IL.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=rosemont,+il+theater&sll=42.016142,-87.871399&sspn=0.037241,0.110378&gl=us&g=Rosemont,+IL&ie=UTF8&hq=theater&hnear=Rosemont,+IL&ll=41.996434,-87.867451&spn=0.018626,0.055189&z=14&iwloc=B&cid=16195052917625124963
People are already starting to comment in the reviews on Google Maps...
In related news, Hammond's stock dropped 17% today.
Well, the "shuffle" feature on CD players introduced back in the 80s broke their hearts first. I'm just pointing it out. :-)
And while they are exceptions, not many albums are produced with 40-piece orchestras.
I've seen more than a few musicians (a couple, personal friends) who have built acoustically engineered sound rooms in their homes. And computers can replace 99% of the expensive equipment, other than instruments. Heck. Most of that expensive audio equipment is nothing more than specialized computers. All the digital stuff, anyway.
And while I certainly don't begrudge costs like studio musicians, engineers and techs, we're still talking several orders of magnitude cheaper than movie production.
I've argued this for years. CDs and their predecessors are collections of individual performances, with a few exceptions. The music industry has made an entire business model on selling an expensive set based on the saleability of a single unit. That is, they sell albums based on people wanting just one or two songs.
Movies are not like that. As much as people like to joke that much coming out of Hollywood has 5 minutes of entertainment lost in 2+ hours of bad acting, poor dialog and non-existent plot, no one is really interested in seeing just trailers.
Add to that the perceived value by the audience. I can go to the store to but a DVD of a 2+ hour performance, or a CD of a dozen 2+ minute performances for about the same price. Why does a movie that cost $100 million to produce cost the same as a music CD that maybe cost $10 million (or $1 million, or less)? The movie industry isn't going broke, so the music industry must have INCREDIBLE profit margins and is screwing over the consumer like nobody's business!
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies. A song or album can be credibly done by an INDIVIDUAL, or maybe a band and a few extra people to produce. Ten people, tops, unless they're padding it. No sets to build, to props to make, etc.
The whole music industry argument that the movie industry is just like them and "next is just FUD.
I'm guessing H.M. is dead, right? Wasn't this a scene out of Hannibal Lecter? Excuse me while I dig up a good chianti and some fava beans.
It isn't that Windows can't run on it, it is that there are only 5 or 6 companies in the world that could afford the per-core pricing on Microsoft's products at that level.
Read the fine print on your cell contract. Those people simply signed away their rights to privacy regarding things like the GPS info, etc.
Warrants aren't needed.
No lay person could possibly understand what you do because you're just so much smarter than they are? Or is it that you spent 40 years poring over data day and night? Are you THAT smart? Give me a break. Anyone who has the hubris to think that their work can only be understood by those in their field is just aching to be smacked down by some un-educated smarty. Look, its attitudes like yours that make the rest of us 'non-scientists' think you're an idiot. Give people some credit, we're not all morons.
Then let me clarify for him. Experts in a field, especially scientists, spend years if not DECADES studying their subject matter. The average layperson doesn't. They aren't necessarily SMARTER, just BETTER EDUCATED BY FAR in their field. The letters after their name are usually a good indicator of the minimum number of YEARS they have spent pursuing knowledge and understanding in their field.
They use words that mean specific things, and they all know what they mean as opposed to just guessing from common usage.
The best example is anti-evolutionists saying "Evolution is just a theory." They're thinking the word theory means guess, and that isn't even close. Merriam-Webster defines theory as:
1. the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another; ...
5. a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena
Neither mean ANYTHING close to what the layperson thinks theory means, by their usage, but is exactly what a scientist means.
The same goes for terms used in climate science. There are going to be several that don't mean what people think they mean. Nor are laypeople going to understand statistical methods, standard deviation, normalization of data or any other legitimate data analysis technique. All they see is "YOU MANIPULATED THE DATA!"
I've worked with computers for over 25 years, in programming, networking and security. I have a degree, several certificates, a few published articles and decades of experience to my name. I sometimes help family or friends with problems with their PCs and I almost ALWAYS get "the kid down at Best Buy said to try X -- why don't you do X?" Usually it is step 1 or 2 in troubleshooting and something I examined and discarded 15 steps back but to be polite I not only have to explain that I did that, but WHY it won't work and wasn't appropriate in the first place. Then explain every step I've done along the way to where I am now and when I fix it.
I ENJOY doing that when I know the person is INTERESTED and going to LEARN something, but many just get defensive and say "well, Betty's son works with computers after school and HE said..." Followed by a lecture on how I should take advice from someone with 1/10th my experience and no direct knowledge of the problem, other than a brief chat over the phone with someone who is clueless. It is the equivalent of a degreed and certified mechanical engineer taking advice on building a bridge from the neighbor's kid because he has an erector set.
Which brings me back to the original discussion. The general public is the equivalent of kids with erector sets clamoring about how the degreed, tested and certified mechanical engineers with decades of experience are all doing it wrong. If they really want to participate in the process, they need to put in serious study on the scientific process, data analysis, data collection and the subject at hand. YEARS, probably. No, a quick check on Wikipedia and arguing with the guys down at the bar doesn't cut it. A degree in the field would.
However, this is not "alike". We make fun of white politicians--and their wives, at times--without reference to their race. That's not the same as dehumanizing Michelle Obama for being black.
George Bush was frequently referred to as "redneck" and "cracker", which are white-specific terms. I also heard "that honkey motherfucker" a couple times and "that white boy", but only coming from black people.
How again wasn't referencing their race?
Someone needs to do a casemod and slap it in a teapot.
What is wrong with gigabytes? Translations can be stored as compressed TEXT with . The whole text-to-speech and speech recognition are separate issues.
And gigabytes was an example of cheapness of storage. Terabytes are a couple hundred $$ now. My point is storage is cheap.
Yes.
But, why do computers have to solve it? Just damn well PREtranslate EVERYTHING and store it all in a lookup table. I mean, hire a crapload of people who are fluent in both languages and sit them down to translate newspapers, novels, speeches, and anything else they can get a hold of. Eventually, you'll have a database that covers the vast majority of all conversations in the target language. Anything it DOESN'T know it tries algorithmic translation and feeds to to a series of human translators for validation. That phrase is then entered into the database for future use.
A few terabytes of storage cost a couple hundred dollars now. The database to handle it isn't difficult, either.
Whenever anyone brings up machine translation there is always someone on Slashdot brings up this particular example, like it is some litmus test or something.
I hate to say it, but I solved this one personally a few minutes after first seeing the problem. I noticed my computer had gigabytes of drive space, and I had a friend that was fluent in both Russian and English. I asked him to translate the phrase for me, the whipped up a perl script to give the correct translation.
Considering computers are so good at simple table lookups, just have HUMANS do the hard stuff and store it in a table. The easy stuff, such as simple sentences and common stuff, can be done by computer.
Whatever happened to that project where Google was getting professional translations from the U.N. and building a database?
Help me out. Where can I download the source code to OS X and all the software components for a working Mac? Sure, I can buy Apple's official version of the OS on their official hardware, but where can I install it on my OWN hardware because I have the source?
Apple is a bunch of tight assed control freaks. They build good stuff, but you must run it THEIR way on THEIR systems.
Google builds good stuff, and they sell it on their systems or partners' systems, and you can STILL run in on anything you can make it work on, since they provide the source code.
So, yes -- Google good, Apple bad.
Flying domestically, yes. Leaving the country will require you to declare to Customs any amount over $10,000 in cash or negotiable instruments. I'm not sure what happens if you declare it. I've never had the opportunity to fly internationally with $10,000+ before. :-)
Not in this case. I was working on a cell network and it was 100% VoIP inside, outside and upside down. All the handsets had IPs as well as phone numbers. The link to the LEA was an IPsec tunnel from a Juniper VPN Concentrator to an IPSec-enabled endpoint at the LEA's office. PSTN has nothing to do with it. No, you CAN'T wardial it because it isn't a phone switch.
Well, the company's lawyers got the FBI to sign off on the voice buffering bit, and yes it was mostly a capacity issue. Whether that'll change in the future is up to whether or not the gov't decides to pay for it. I think that was the main argument. "You want HOW MUCH DATA buffered? Excuse us while we break out the BIG calculator to prepare you a quote."
No, we weren't interpreting data. Raw XML was passed over for control and signal data, and voice was sent as a raw codec stream. The codec was from Qualcom, and we did have to assist in making sure the FBI could receive and decode it properly. Only the FBI needed the help because they wrote their own code. All the other LEOs used off the shelf software from Qualcom.
For a while, I had a laptop that could inject requests into the stream -- bypassing the warrant step -- create an arbitrary IPsec tunnel and feed a raw stream of XML+voice to any IP of my choosing. I used to work at the hotel at night debugging call data. We had a microcell network set up in one of the suites.
Educational stuff.
Not really. That stuff is a firehose, and few jurisdictions are capable of handling anything like it. CALEA is for small town police depts as well as the FBI. Warrants are entered by the PD clerk, which are submitted to the CALEA system. The system is separate from accounting and everything else, so no one who isn't authorized has access to the info.
The system then flags a number and whenever a call is made to or from that number, it is duplicated inside the switch and a stream sent to the CALEA system. This includes busy signals, party line calls, SMS, etc.
The CALEA system establishes a secure tunnel (IPSec) inside the telco network to an IPSec gateway. We were working with Juniper boxes at the time. From there, the tunnels are broken out to the various law enforcement offices that have open warrants. One goes to the FBI, one to NYPD, etc. The entire internal network was GbE for the nodes and 10 GbE for trunks. Again, good luck DDoSing that.
Tunnels to the various LEOs varied in size depending on the size of the department and how many active warrants they had. A minimum of 1.54 Mbps, IIRC. Pipes to the FBI in Quantico, LAPD, NYPD and a couple others were larger by default.