Anyone that gets billed for "thousands of dollars" by T-mobile is a fucking idiot. They have an online near-real-time account statement that shows all your calls and fees. If you're too goddamn lazy to check your account once in awhile to see if you are getting financially sodomized, then you deserve exactly what you get.
If your online statement starts showing unusual activity or fees, SHUT THE DAMNED PHONE OFF until you can figure out what the problem is!
I'm also getting pretty sick of all the cheap fucks around here whining about per-message SMS fees. THERE ARE NO FEES if you just buy the damned unlimited messaging plan for about ten bucks a month. Anyone that gets an SMS bill for hundreds of dollars is too stupid to live.
I started with line-numbered basic on a TI994A. To this day, I don't think I have ever seen a simpler and more perfect beginner's manual than the one included with that machine. I was programming sprite animation with conditionals and loops within hours of opening the manual. Since the TI994A didn't have a C compiler available, I moved on to the assembler, which it DID have. Never got very good with it but it definitely taught me the low-level nuts & bolts of computing. After an eventual transition to x86 hardware, I learned a little C++ to help me manage my servers but backslid to Perl for day-to-day GUI web stuff.
Considering how much of computing has shifted to the client-server model lately, I don't think starting out with simple html & cgi would be inappropriate. For a 2nd or 3rd project, I highly recommend giving the kids some thumbnail images of fruit and having them build a CGI slot machine. That's how I learned Perl. It's a great base project to build on too, and you can teach them version naming conventions along the way. Once they master the basic mechanism, you can add flat-file I/O to keep track of winnings and results, and then finally convert the whole thing over to a simple MySQL database with the images stored as blobs. (OK, that last bit might be a little over the top for first-week noobs:)
Materials? We're talking about web development here, which should be a pure SERVICE. If you bill for any kind of materials, you are considered a retailer/reseller and have to deal with specific sales tax, B&O tax, recycling & disposal fees, storage and transport laws etc related to physical goods in cities and states that have them. Also, very few people live in neighborhoods zoned for business so you can only do limited services when working out of your home. You generally can't warehouse materials without running afoul of local zoning ordinances.
Make the customer buy their own materials or have them pay you for them separately as an nontaxable reimbursement. If someone needs to buy software or hardware to do the job, YOU buy it and bill them for using it by the hour - that's "time and equipment" and it's how you bill when you are a pure service contractor. You get to amortize the price of the equipment over one or more years and you don't have to deal with most of the stuff that physical contractors have to put up with.
Many teachers are drowning apathy because they're powerless to deal with shithead kids and their shithead "me-first" baby-boomer parents who are too busy with their careers and reliving their youth to get off their asses and take responsibility for their shithead kids' actions as well as teaching their kids to be responsible for their own actions.
What the fuck are you talking about, moron? My boomer contemporaries and I are all in our 50's and 60's now. This is not our pack of shitheads laying waste to polite society. We raised our brats and pushed them out the door into the cold, hard light of day a generation ago. These are our GRANDKIDS. They're not our problem.
AOL repeered with Cogent something like a year ago. They were the last holdout and once that happened, Cogent was no longer paying anyone for transit and were therefore a full tier-1. Regardless of their peering status, they own and operate the second largest capacity network in the world. Traceroutes over the last couple of years would seem to indicate that they are servicing a fairly large number of eyeball networks in Europe these days as well as content networks all over the world. They are now sitting at the grownup's table and are no longer just a "discount" provider.
FWIW, I'm in the Seattle 'burbs and just got Verizon FIOS 20/20. The router claims that it's connected to the CO at 251mbps and the techs I talked to said the system and the fiber drops were capable of 1gbps. I got the impression they would have to install different switches though.
FTFA: This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of carbohydrates as in plants.
Well, hydrogen is nice and all, but I can see an equally compelling reason to work on generating carbohydrates (preferably edible) with this method instead. Especially in places with no plants where having a food source would be awesome - places like long-range manned space flights, as-yet-un-terraformed planets like Mars, and god-forsaken hell-holes like the middle east and the Sahara.
"Soylent green is...well, it's sunlight and carbon dioxide...and 1.2 volts"
The reason is simple. Bandwidth costs money. If you don't constrain the amount of bandwidth people use implicitly (by prohibiting bandwidth hogging behavior such as P2P) or explicitly (by throttling), the only way to ensure that a user does not cost the ISP more than he pays per month is to charge by the bit.
Bullshit bullshit BULLSHIT!!!
Bandwidth costs are trivial compared to what consumers get stuck paying for internet access. At ISP-sized commitments (gigabits per second), you can buy Verizon for under $15 per megabit. Cogent can be had for $7. Hurricane Electric for $5 if you're willing to go completely IPV6. Remember that the top ISPs (Verizon, AOL, ATT) are Tier-1 bandwidth providers themselves with 100% peering to each other so most of the time, they pay ZERO for transit thru outside networks.
The "problem" has nothing to do with p2p or any other network edge use. It's massive collusion, corruption, and corporate greed among the providers to ass-rape every one of us for every last dime. I know for a fact that there's more than enough fiber in place in this country to give every household a couple of megabits of dedicated, non-shared bandwidth. It was partly there 20 years ago when I was working as a contract lineman and PERSONALLY PLACED over 9000 miles of it myself. That was first-generation cable with low fiber counts; nothing like the tens-of-thousands of miles of enormous capacity cable that's been placed since then. internet bandwidth scarcity, like telephone "long distance" service has been a myth perpetuated by the incumbent telcos since it ceased to exist for all practical purposes several decades ago
Who stays in their house for more than 5 years. In 5 years, most people moving up or moving on.
Hell, I've been in the same *datacenter* longer than that. I've been in my current house for 17 years. I've had the same guitar amp for over 30. "Most people" do NOT completely reinvent themselves every few years. If you buy quality in the first place, you don't need to MOVE up, you start there.
To my knowledge, 3-phase is rarely used in US households.
In most of the 20+ US states I've lived in, a typical single-family residential building gets 220-240 single phase with a 200 amp main breaker. Electric dryers usually get a 220-240v 30 amp outlet. Electric ranges and water heaters often get 50 or 60 amp outlets or direct connections. A 100 amp 220-240v dedicated "car connector" in the garage or carport would be expensive (00 gauge wire and a pricey proprietary connector of some kind) but very doable.
It always strikes me as optimistic when I see estimated power outputs and supposedly how many homes that would power.
It strikes me as completely fraudulent when I see a non-constant used as an example of a constant metric. I can think of a few things that I'd rather see used.
IIRC, one "horsepower" is something like 735 watts, so a megawatt is...let's see...carry the two...about 1360 horsepower.
So...one of these tubes is the rough equivalent of three C5 Corvettes running wide open or in audio terms, 1/3 of a Rolling Stones concert.
The website is remarkably information-free. "Basic software" doesn't tell me a damned thing. I'm all about x86 pizzabox servers and CentOS. I don't know anything about these mini-platforms or ARM processors to start with. Does it come with a compiler or does all development have to be done externally? Does it have any shell tools? Does it have a Perl interpreter? SSH? Is there any graphical internet stuff at all yet for the platform (browser, ftp, email?) or is this an entirely new "ground up" environment.
I'd love to have a Linux phone just on principle, but I don't want to have to build the whole damned thing from scratch.
Corrosion (i.e. oxidization) is not the primary problem. Copper oxidizes too. The radically different expansion rates between copper/brass/steel and aluminum wire are a much bigger issue because that's what allows the oxidization to occur on the current-transferring surfaces of connection points. Aluminum wire (plated or not) joined to wall outlet connectors made of a more dense metal will leave a gap at the connection when it cools much faster than the outlet connectors. That allows the oxidization to build up in the gap over time, raising the resistance enough to cause a fire in extreme cases.
The only way to successfully incorporate aluminum in an electrical system is to make EVERY piece of the system aluminum or to weld/solder all bi-metal connections so the expansion differential cannot cause a gap.
FWIW, T-1 in the greater Seattle area = $250 to $350.
Not relevant anyway. Verizon is a fully-peered tier-1 backbone provider and they own a gazillion miles of local loop and fiber. I'd venture to say that they basically pay NO ONE outside the parent organization for bandwidth in the geographical regions in which they compete.
The vast majority of their non-wireless bandwidth expenses are going to be labor and equipment costs.
And exactly HOW, pray tell, did you come to believe in this alleged "soul" of which you speak? Did some unseen deity impart the absolute proof of it's existence to you while sitting in a Starbucks? Did it come to you in a magical dream? Or more likely, was it spoon-fed to you as "truth" at a young, impressionable age by some person or group of persons who's job it is to make sure their followers create MORE followers to keep the cash flowing when they pass around the collection plate on Sunday?
Since your entire argument hinges on the absolute right of this alleged "soul" to survive and that human interference in it's development is unacceptable, how do you explain the 50% of all conceptions that end up being spontaneously aborted by the mother, who I presume is human? If they had "souls", who exactly burns in your "hell" for the crime of a nonviable fetus?
I'm going to assume that you will now trot out the usual "god's will" fall-back argument as a rebuttal, however by doing so, you exclude nonviable fetuses from your "inalienable right to life" rule. Since this particular discussion involves fetuses in a petri dish, which by definition are unviable until they are implanted in a host, you lose the argument completely. Check and mate.
See how I did that? I learned from the best pretzel-logic artists on earth - I went to catholic school.
As a general rule, long term storage of pretty much anything means keeping it away from oxygen, water, and sunlight as much as possible. I have audio tapes from the 50s that still work fine because I stored them in a fairly air-tight Coleman ice chest. (an antique model - steel with a plastic liner, insulated with fiberglass)
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone that gets billed for "thousands of dollars" by T-mobile is a fucking idiot. They have an online near-real-time account statement that shows all your calls and fees. If you're too goddamn lazy to check your account once in awhile to see if you are getting financially sodomized, then you deserve exactly what you get.
If your online statement starts showing unusual activity or fees, SHUT THE DAMNED PHONE OFF until you can figure out what the problem is!
I'm also getting pretty sick of all the cheap fucks around here whining about per-message SMS fees. THERE ARE NO FEES if you just buy the damned unlimited messaging plan for about ten bucks a month. Anyone that gets an SMS bill for hundreds of dollars is too stupid to live.
Citation needed
I started with line-numbered basic on a TI994A. To this day, I don't think I have ever seen a simpler and more perfect beginner's manual than the one included with that machine. I was programming sprite animation with conditionals and loops within hours of opening the manual. Since the TI994A didn't have a C compiler available, I moved on to the assembler, which it DID have. Never got very good with it but it definitely taught me the low-level nuts & bolts of computing. After an eventual transition to x86 hardware, I learned a little C++ to help me manage my servers but backslid to Perl for day-to-day GUI web stuff.
Considering how much of computing has shifted to the client-server model lately, I don't think starting out with simple html & cgi would be inappropriate. For a 2nd or 3rd project, I highly recommend giving the kids some thumbnail images of fruit and having them build a CGI slot machine. That's how I learned Perl. It's a great base project to build on too, and you can teach them version naming conventions along the way. Once they master the basic mechanism, you can add flat-file I/O to keep track of winnings and results, and then finally convert the whole thing over to a simple MySQL database with the images stored as blobs. (OK, that last bit might be a little over the top for first-week noobs :)
Materials? We're talking about web development here, which should be a pure SERVICE. If you bill for any kind of materials, you are considered a retailer/reseller and have to deal with specific sales tax, B&O tax, recycling & disposal fees, storage and transport laws etc related to physical goods in cities and states that have them. Also, very few people live in neighborhoods zoned for business so you can only do limited services when working out of your home. You generally can't warehouse materials without running afoul of local zoning ordinances.
Make the customer buy their own materials or have them pay you for them separately as an nontaxable reimbursement. If someone needs to buy software or hardware to do the job, YOU buy it and bill them for using it by the hour - that's "time and equipment" and it's how you bill when you are a pure service contractor. You get to amortize the price of the equipment over one or more years and you don't have to deal with most of the stuff that physical contractors have to put up with.
Many teachers are drowning apathy because they're powerless to deal with shithead kids and their shithead "me-first" baby-boomer parents who are too busy with their careers and reliving their youth to get off their asses and take responsibility for their shithead kids' actions as well as teaching their kids to be responsible for their own actions.
What the fuck are you talking about, moron? My boomer contemporaries and I are all in our 50's and 60's now. This is not our pack of shitheads laying waste to polite society. We raised our brats and pushed them out the door into the cold, hard light of day a generation ago. These are our GRANDKIDS. They're not our problem.
Amateur radio is MORE important than the internet, sorry to say...
I'll bet your house smells like old people
AOL repeered with Cogent something like a year ago. They were the last holdout and once that happened, Cogent was no longer paying anyone for transit and were therefore a full tier-1. Regardless of their peering status, they own and operate the second largest capacity network in the world. Traceroutes over the last couple of years would seem to indicate that they are servicing a fairly large number of eyeball networks in Europe these days as well as content networks all over the world. They are now sitting at the grownup's table and are no longer just a "discount" provider.
Cogent runs the second largest tier-1 backbone on the planet and it is widely used by the adult industry. The headline should read:
Sprint cockpunches own customers by disconnecting them from porn.
/I run a few dozen porn servers on Cogent links
//Sprint can suck my balls
Unbridled corporate douchebaggetry
FWIW, I'm in the Seattle 'burbs and just got Verizon FIOS 20/20. The router claims that it's connected to the CO at 251mbps and the techs I talked to said the system and the fiber drops were capable of 1gbps. I got the impression they would have to install different switches though.
FTFA: This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of carbohydrates as in plants.
Well, hydrogen is nice and all, but I can see an equally compelling reason to work on generating carbohydrates (preferably edible) with this method instead. Especially in places with no plants where having a food source would be awesome - places like long-range manned space flights, as-yet-un-terraformed planets like Mars, and god-forsaken hell-holes like the middle east and the Sahara.
"Soylent green is...well, it's sunlight and carbon dioxide...and 1.2 volts"
Probably $1.40. That's what I made working at the snack bar of a drive-in theater.
/old
/knows line-numbered basic
The color reminds me of Venture Industries' Helper robot.
The reason is simple. Bandwidth costs money. If you don't constrain the amount of bandwidth people use implicitly (by prohibiting bandwidth hogging behavior such as P2P) or explicitly (by throttling), the only way to ensure that a user does not cost the ISP more than he pays per month is to charge by the bit.
Bullshit bullshit BULLSHIT!!!
Bandwidth costs are trivial compared to what consumers get stuck paying for internet access. At ISP-sized commitments (gigabits per second), you can buy Verizon for under $15 per megabit. Cogent can be had for $7. Hurricane Electric for $5 if you're willing to go completely IPV6. Remember that the top ISPs (Verizon, AOL, ATT) are Tier-1 bandwidth providers themselves with 100% peering to each other so most of the time, they pay ZERO for transit thru outside networks.
The "problem" has nothing to do with p2p or any other network edge use. It's massive collusion, corruption, and corporate greed among the providers to ass-rape every one of us for every last dime. I know for a fact that there's more than enough fiber in place in this country to give every household a couple of megabits of dedicated, non-shared bandwidth. It was partly there 20 years ago when I was working as a contract lineman and PERSONALLY PLACED over 9000 miles of it myself. That was first-generation cable with low fiber counts; nothing like the tens-of-thousands of miles of enormous capacity cable that's been placed since then. internet bandwidth scarcity, like telephone "long distance" service has been a myth perpetuated by the incumbent telcos since it ceased to exist for all practical purposes several decades ago
Who stays in their house for more than 5 years. In 5 years, most people moving up or moving on.
Hell, I've been in the same *datacenter* longer than that. I've been in my current house for 17 years. I've had the same guitar amp for over 30. "Most people" do NOT completely reinvent themselves every few years. If you buy quality in the first place, you don't need to MOVE up, you start there.
To my knowledge, 3-phase is rarely used in US households.
In most of the 20+ US states I've lived in, a typical single-family residential building gets 220-240 single phase with a 200 amp main breaker. Electric dryers usually get a 220-240v 30 amp outlet. Electric ranges and water heaters often get 50 or 60 amp outlets or direct connections. A 100 amp 220-240v dedicated "car connector" in the garage or carport would be expensive (00 gauge wire and a pricey proprietary connector of some kind) but very doable.
It always strikes me as optimistic when I see estimated power outputs and supposedly how many homes that would power.
It strikes me as completely fraudulent when I see a non-constant used as an example of a constant metric. I can think of a few things that I'd rather see used.
IIRC, one "horsepower" is something like 735 watts, so a megawatt is...let's see...carry the two...about 1360 horsepower.
So...one of these tubes is the rough equivalent of three C5 Corvettes running wide open or in audio terms, 1/3 of a Rolling Stones concert.
There is no corner of this or any other universe where "intercourse" is considered a verb.
Ha Ha
/nelson
The website is remarkably information-free. "Basic software" doesn't tell me a damned thing. I'm all about x86 pizzabox servers and CentOS. I don't know anything about these mini-platforms or ARM processors to start with. Does it come with a compiler or does all development have to be done externally? Does it have any shell tools? Does it have a Perl interpreter? SSH? Is there any graphical internet stuff at all yet for the platform (browser, ftp, email?) or is this an entirely new "ground up" environment.
I'd love to have a Linux phone just on principle, but I don't want to have to build the whole damned thing from scratch.
Corrosion (i.e. oxidization) is not the primary problem. Copper oxidizes too. The radically different expansion rates between copper/brass/steel and aluminum wire are a much bigger issue because that's what allows the oxidization to occur on the current-transferring surfaces of connection points. Aluminum wire (plated or not) joined to wall outlet connectors made of a more dense metal will leave a gap at the connection when it cools much faster than the outlet connectors. That allows the oxidization to build up in the gap over time, raising the resistance enough to cause a fire in extreme cases.
The only way to successfully incorporate aluminum in an electrical system is to make EVERY piece of the system aluminum or to weld/solder all bi-metal connections so the expansion differential cannot cause a gap.
FWIW, T-1 in the greater Seattle area = $250 to $350.
Not relevant anyway. Verizon is a fully-peered tier-1 backbone provider and they own a gazillion miles of local loop and fiber. I'd venture to say that they basically pay NO ONE outside the parent organization for bandwidth in the geographical regions in which they compete.
The vast majority of their non-wireless bandwidth expenses are going to be labor and equipment costs.
And exactly HOW, pray tell, did you come to believe in this alleged "soul" of which you speak? Did some unseen deity impart the absolute proof of it's existence to you while sitting in a Starbucks? Did it come to you in a magical dream? Or more likely, was it spoon-fed to you as "truth" at a young, impressionable age by some person or group of persons who's job it is to make sure their followers create MORE followers to keep the cash flowing when they pass around the collection plate on Sunday?
Since your entire argument hinges on the absolute right of this alleged "soul" to survive and that human interference in it's development is unacceptable, how do you explain the 50% of all conceptions that end up being spontaneously aborted by the mother, who I presume is human? If they had "souls", who exactly burns in your "hell" for the crime of a nonviable fetus?
I'm going to assume that you will now trot out the usual "god's will" fall-back argument as a rebuttal, however by doing so, you exclude nonviable fetuses from your "inalienable right to life" rule. Since this particular discussion involves fetuses in a petri dish, which by definition are unviable until they are implanted in a host, you lose the argument completely. Check and mate.
See how I did that? I learned from the best pretzel-logic artists on earth - I went to catholic school.
As a general rule, long term storage of pretty much anything means keeping it away from oxygen, water, and sunlight as much as possible. I have audio tapes from the 50s that still work fine because I stored them in a fairly air-tight Coleman ice chest. (an antique model - steel with a plastic liner, insulated with fiberglass)
You didn't even need a scanner. The frequencies of analog were right in the middle of the UHF TV band. You just needed an old TV with a UHF tuner.