It's hard for people to be really angry at their government if they are delivering double digit growth.
Well, as long as the growth in things like skyscrapers isn't coming at the expense of clean air, clean rivers and living plants and animals. Otherwise, you end up building a very large very dead pile of asphalt where quality of life is approximately zero.
Dying en masse tends to make people a bit angry. But if the dying comes after the economic boom and not during, then it's all good, I guess.
To quote Lenin again: A capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang him with if he can make profit on it. Chinese are offering companies a quick profit in exchange for information they can strangulate them with later on.
To be fair, a capitalist will also do exactly the same thing to another capitalist. This sort of abusive behavior is exactly how companies such as Standard Oil gave 'monopolist' a bad name in the early 20th Century (or Microsoft in the early 21st).
The unlearned might wonder precisely what the difference is between Chinese communism - where an apparently free-market structure is governed by a tiny controlling minority of bureaucrats called 'party members' - and American-style winner-take-all oligarchic capitalism - where an apparently free-market structure is also governed by a tiny controlling minority of bureaucrats called 'board members'.
The difference is of course as stark as night and day. The Chinese system is evil oppressive tyrannical socialism, and the American system is heroic freedom-loving red-blooded cynical opportunism. When we play to win, for keeps, by dumping product on the market, squeezing out rivals, and making anti-competitive lock-in agreements, why, we're just doing it out of the sheer overflowing goodness of our hearts! But when they do it, it's just plain unneighbourly.
Put gold-plated solar collectors in the desert and produce huge amounts of thermal power.
Your grasp of thermodynamics intrigues me. I was wondering why all those spacecraft were covered with gold foil to keep solar heat out, while their power cells were dull black.. Evidently NASA has been doing it wrong for decades. Thanks to you, I now realise that the black bits are the heat reflectors and the shiny gold bits are the heat absorbers!
I confidently look forward to you cornering the global solar-electric power market with this kind of revolutionary outside-the-box thinking.
They don't care about all those users, they just want money from Java-users. They don't care if they loose or piss off the smaller users, the really big enterprise users can't switch in 10 years time anyway. That is where the money is, usually banks and other big companies/institutions.
On the other hand, pissing off large banks seems a little like stealing from the Mob.
You'll get enough cash to set you up nicely for your entire distressingly short life.
Evidence is that they actually have talented coders and can put out good stuff when they have to.
*cough*
Internet Explorer 8's monthly vulnerabilities - how many years now after security became officially Job One? - would tend to suggest that actually, no, even when their life and data is on they line they can't code their way out of a paper bag.
Otherwise IE is evidence of deliberate malice on the part of Microsoft, and I'd prefer not to assign that if sheer incompetence is the simpler answer.
You are in a blog of little catty comments, all alike.
O hai! It is dark. U may be nommed by a basement cat.
>CATALOGUE
In your catch-all you see a catalyst, a catastrophe theorist, a category (of all non-categorisable categories), a caterpillar, a catapault, and a cat's whisker radio.
Indeed. It's results that matter, not expense. Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing, they're obviously still doing it wrong when it's 2010 and there are still new buffer overflows discovered each month in Internet Explorer.
URIs that are stably findable (by DHT-like search processes, or maybe just google search) and are a function of the official name and version identification of a verified piece of content will be of growing importance going forward.
Stable URIs certainly will be important for the future of the Net, but sadly, the last 20 years have shown to me that just becomes something is a vitally important piece of infrastructure without which everything will fall apart, doesn't mean it will ever actually get deployed.
We're still waiting for a non-spoofable email address protocol, for example, even though SPF has been out since 2004.
I start to despair for the human race. We know exactly what we need to do, and still can't agree to do it.
Blackwater, in their capacity as a GOVERNMENT contractor, all of their "police powers" coming from the government
I rather think Blackwater/XE's "police powers" come more directly from Colt and ArmaLite.
Ultimately, "government" is nothing more or less than a mixture of fear and respect, with the fear coming from the credible threat of force and the respect coming from doing things that other people with respect want done. The first is often measured in bullets and the second in dollars and votes - but increasingly in dollars.
In other words, if a person points either a gun or a suitcase full of cash at you and says "I' would like to suggest that I'm the boss of you", and you agree, that _makes_ them the government of you, regardless of what any piece of paper says. The "official" US Government just happens to be the people with currently the biggest suitcase full of cash and ammo, and employs people who work hard to keep it that way - but there are plenty of other players out there, inside and outside the USA, who would like to redefine that contract.
The worry is that if we start devolving too many guns and bullets to private players like Xe, things might get really hairy if the USA's big suitcase starts to wobble. If you have one big player, everyone keeps a bit of order. If you have two or more trying to renegotiate at the speed of lead... that's when the bartender ducks behind the bar and chairs get broken.
-"Hey, I have a great idea, let's hijack a couple of jet planes with 200 passengers each and crash them into a skyscraper!" -"Great idea! But, wait, what excuse shall we use for it?" -"Hmmm, I'm not quite sure... How about religion?" -"Well, maybe. OK, unless someone gets a better idea, we will justify it through religion"
I don't understand why a lot of people in the West keep assuming that suicide attacks require religion, or are somehow illogical, or both.
Warfighters are always aware that they are putting themselves in harm's way to achieve wider objectives for a social group they care about. There is always a chance of death even on the safest mission; some conventional missions have such slim odds that they may as well be suicide runs. And yet we don't endlessly hand-wring about what strange psychopathic deviance causes a person to enlist in infantry or become a Marine. Instead, whenever one of our armed services dies, we give them full honours and use words like 'sacrifice' and 'gave their life for their country'.
And of course our war fiction is full of examples of last-ditch suicide attacks by conventional soldiers who are out-gunned, dying, have one last grenade, etc. It's not like we're not aware of the concept and at a visceral level, agree.
And let's not talk about MAD, because that was a planetary-scale suicide pact. (Which relied on both sides *not* being suicidal, but nevertheless, required a similar amount of determination to cause harm to oneself just to make a political/military point.)
Suicide attacking merely takes this up a notch. It's a perfectly valid, cold-bloodedly logical, tactic for assymetrical warfare if you are trying to maximise gains for your group in a situation where all other hope has failed and you are otherwise utterly out-maneuvered and yet continue to fight.
It only requires that you have a cause other than yourself that you are willing to sacrifice everything for. That doesn't have to be religion - it could be family, country, ideology.
tl;dr: suicide attacks have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with military tactics in extreme situations.
A tunnel bored directly between London and New York would be even faster and require less cooling. Only two points intersecting the center would be competitive with my Earth Chord Trading Tunnels!
Net effect is when you ask for something that has been cached on there, you get it locally, rather than from one of their server farms. Keeps their bandwidth costs down, our bandwidth costs down, and increases speed.
Isn't that exactly how HTTP is supposed to work, with pervasive caching?
I wish we hadn't broken HTTP with AJAX, or rather, that we had a cache-happy protocol like HTTP but slightly smarter - based on things smaller than pages, like status updates and paragraphs, all neatly checksummed and version stamped, so it could do all the social networking pub/sub stuff but cache it persistently forever. And that everyone's ISP, workplace and home had big caching servers and it would all just work and be magic.
500? 150? Hate to break the news to ya, but I'm in one of the "test markets" for the "new" caps, and guess what? It is 36Gb for residential and 76Gb for business so you can say goodbye to things like Netflix, because with caps THAT low, good luck watching movies on the net.
Welcome to New Zealand, as it's been for the last ten years. I now have a 20GB monthly transfer cap for my 10mbps Telstra cable (up from 5GB originally), which I just exceeded this month by running the Lord of the Rings Online downloader - it said it would pull down 7GB, but actually pulled closer to 16. Oops.
In my opinion, the sooner the USA gets transfer caps comparable with the rest of the world, the better off we'll all be because US-written software will stop assuming that everyone on broadband has unlimited transfer and will start becoming smarter about when and how it sends packets.
Yes, movies and TV really don't work well over IP with that kind of transfer limit. But perhaps the problem is not 'my ISP is evil' but 'video over IP is very wasteful and there really ISN'T enough capacity to go around if everyone uses it wastefully'.
Back in the 1980s, we had 300 baud acoustic couplers and were thankful for it, you kids get off my lawn, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard for people to be really angry at their government if they are delivering double digit growth.
Well, as long as the growth in things like skyscrapers isn't coming at the expense of clean air, clean rivers and living plants and animals. Otherwise, you end up building a very large very dead pile of asphalt where quality of life is approximately zero.
Dying en masse tends to make people a bit angry. But if the dying comes after the economic boom and not during, then it's all good, I guess.
To quote Lenin again: A capitalist will sell you the rope you will hang him with if he can make profit on it. Chinese are offering companies a quick profit in exchange for information they can strangulate them with later on.
To be fair, a capitalist will also do exactly the same thing to another capitalist. This sort of abusive behavior is exactly how companies such as Standard Oil gave 'monopolist' a bad name in the early 20th Century (or Microsoft in the early 21st).
The unlearned might wonder precisely what the difference is between Chinese communism - where an apparently free-market structure is governed by a tiny controlling minority of bureaucrats called 'party members' - and American-style winner-take-all oligarchic capitalism - where an apparently free-market structure is also governed by a tiny controlling minority of bureaucrats called 'board members'.
The difference is of course as stark as night and day. The Chinese system is evil oppressive tyrannical socialism, and the American system is heroic freedom-loving red-blooded cynical opportunism. When we play to win, for keeps, by dumping product on the market, squeezing out rivals, and making anti-competitive lock-in agreements, why, we're just doing it out of the sheer overflowing goodness of our hearts! But when they do it, it's just plain unneighbourly.
Hope that's cleared that up.
Put gold-plated solar collectors in the desert and produce huge amounts of thermal power.
Your grasp of thermodynamics intrigues me. I was wondering why all those spacecraft were covered with gold foil to keep solar heat out, while their power cells were dull black.. Evidently NASA has been doing it wrong for decades. Thanks to you, I now realise that the black bits are the heat reflectors and the shiny gold bits are the heat absorbers!
I confidently look forward to you cornering the global solar-electric power market with this kind of revolutionary outside-the-box thinking.
because, in reality, that's what we are: mobile protein-catalyst-containing vessicles.
And, since 1945, nuclear vessicles.
People are unpredictable and do unpredictable things, both individually and in groups. If you can do better a Nobel prize awaits you.
In fact, a Nobel Prize in Economics may await you even if you can't do better, and your model is hopelessly unrealistic, not used, not needed, and not original.
It's basic game theory. If you can make a profit out of something that will kill you, you might as well.
I am not sure what game you are playing but your strategy intrigues me and I would like to be your opponent.
Btw, can I buy a gun from you? For, um, hunting. Yes, a large surcharge would be fine. Thanks!
They don't care about all those users, they just want money from Java-users. They don't care if they loose or piss off the smaller users, the really big enterprise users can't switch in 10 years time anyway. That is where the money is, usually banks and other big companies/institutions.
On the other hand, pissing off large banks seems a little like stealing from the Mob.
You'll get enough cash to set you up nicely for your entire distressingly short life.
Evidence is that they actually have talented coders and can put out good stuff when they have to.
*cough*
Internet Explorer 8's monthly vulnerabilities - how many years now after security became officially Job One? - would tend to suggest that actually, no, even when their life and data is on they line they can't code their way out of a paper bag.
Otherwise IE is evidence of deliberate malice on the part of Microsoft, and I'd prefer not to assign that if sheer incompetence is the simpler answer.
and blogs filled with catty little comments
You are in a blog of little catty comments, all alike.
O hai! It is dark. U may be nommed by a basement cat.
>CATALOGUE
In your catch-all you see a catalyst, a catastrophe theorist, a category (of all non-categorisable categories), a caterpillar, a catapault, and a cat's whisker radio.
>CATERWAUL
Facebook: updated.
But a "50,000,030 year old black hole" doesn't have quite the same ring.
While true, I am sure, both of the above comments reflect your own biases.
Sadly, when it comes to security, reality has a well-known anti-Microsoft bias.
Indeed. It's results that matter, not expense. Whatever it is that Microsoft is doing, they're obviously still doing it wrong when it's 2010 and there are still new buffer overflows discovered each month in Internet Explorer.
Grab the .swf, Jeff
Google *.ru, Stu
Just use DeCSS, Tess
There must be
50 ways to get a movie
URIs that are stably findable (by DHT-like search processes, or maybe just google search) and are a function of the official name and version identification of a verified piece of content will be of growing importance going forward.
Stable URIs certainly will be important for the future of the Net, but sadly, the last 20 years have shown to me that just becomes something is a vitally important piece of infrastructure without which everything will fall apart, doesn't mean it will ever actually get deployed.
We're still waiting for a non-spoofable email address protocol, for example, even though SPF has been out since 2004.
I start to despair for the human race. We know exactly what we need to do, and still can't agree to do it.
Blackwater, in their capacity as a GOVERNMENT contractor, all of their "police powers" coming from the government
I rather think Blackwater/XE's "police powers" come more directly from Colt and ArmaLite.
Ultimately, "government" is nothing more or less than a mixture of fear and respect, with the fear coming from the credible threat of force and the respect coming from doing things that other people with respect want done. The first is often measured in bullets and the second in dollars and votes - but increasingly in dollars.
In other words, if a person points either a gun or a suitcase full of cash at you and says "I' would like to suggest that I'm the boss of you", and you agree, that _makes_ them the government of you, regardless of what any piece of paper says. The "official" US Government just happens to be the people with currently the biggest suitcase full of cash and ammo, and employs people who work hard to keep it that way - but there are plenty of other players out there, inside and outside the USA, who would like to redefine that contract.
The worry is that if we start devolving too many guns and bullets to private players like Xe, things might get really hairy if the USA's big suitcase starts to wobble. If you have one big player, everyone keeps a bit of order. If you have two or more trying to renegotiate at the speed of lead... that's when the bartender ducks behind the bar and chairs get broken.
Cue movie rights bargaining for "Crimson Tide II" in three, two, one...
[DrTinyEvilCat]
This matter falls within my purrview.
[/DrTinyEvilCat]
Why is it that the US government is run by evil geniuses one day and incompetent government workers the next?
Union demarcation rules. They have a strict rotation.
Plus, you can harvest a handy Alzheimer's cure from their brains so you can extend your reign of hydro-terror indefinitely.
BRB, just lost another three wranglers.
the Quake kids have grown up and are now playing the stock market, and these are their 'gaming rigs'.
Do they come with lots of blue neon and a front panel which looks like Optimus Prime?
-"Hey, I have a great idea, let's hijack a couple of jet planes with 200 passengers each and crash them into a skyscraper!"
-"Great idea! But, wait, what excuse shall we use for it?"
-"Hmmm, I'm not quite sure... How about religion?"
-"Well, maybe. OK, unless someone gets a better idea, we will justify it through religion"
I don't understand why a lot of people in the West keep assuming that suicide attacks require religion, or are somehow illogical, or both.
Warfighters are always aware that they are putting themselves in harm's way to achieve wider objectives for a social group they care about. There is always a chance of death even on the safest mission; some conventional missions have such slim odds that they may as well be suicide runs. And yet we don't endlessly hand-wring about what strange psychopathic deviance causes a person to enlist in infantry or become a Marine. Instead, whenever one of our armed services dies, we give them full honours and use words like 'sacrifice' and 'gave their life for their country'.
And of course our war fiction is full of examples of last-ditch suicide attacks by conventional soldiers who are out-gunned, dying, have one last grenade, etc. It's not like we're not aware of the concept and at a visceral level, agree.
And let's not talk about MAD, because that was a planetary-scale suicide pact. (Which relied on both sides *not* being suicidal, but nevertheless, required a similar amount of determination to cause harm to oneself just to make a political/military point.)
Suicide attacking merely takes this up a notch. It's a perfectly valid, cold-bloodedly logical, tactic for assymetrical warfare if you are trying to maximise gains for your group in a situation where all other hope has failed and you are otherwise utterly out-maneuvered and yet continue to fight.
It only requires that you have a cause other than yourself that you are willing to sacrifice everything for. That doesn't have to be religion - it could be family, country, ideology.
tl;dr: suicide attacks have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with military tactics in extreme situations.
A tunnel bored directly between London and New York would be even faster and require less cooling. Only two points intersecting the center would be competitive with my Earth Chord Trading Tunnels!
Your idea intrigues me and I would like to subscribe to your burrito delivery service.
All the dark fiber in the world won't help solve the Last Mile problem.
Both of which would make great Stephen King novel titles.
Net effect is when you ask for something that has been cached on there, you get it locally, rather than from one of their server farms. Keeps their bandwidth costs down, our bandwidth costs down, and increases speed.
Isn't that exactly how HTTP is supposed to work, with pervasive caching?
I wish we hadn't broken HTTP with AJAX, or rather, that we had a cache-happy protocol like HTTP but slightly smarter - based on things smaller than pages, like status updates and paragraphs, all neatly checksummed and version stamped, so it could do all the social networking pub/sub stuff but cache it persistently forever. And that everyone's ISP, workplace and home had big caching servers and it would all just work and be magic.
I also wish for a Technicolor pony.
500? 150? Hate to break the news to ya, but I'm in one of the "test markets" for the "new" caps, and guess what? It is 36Gb for residential and 76Gb for business so you can say goodbye to things like Netflix, because with caps THAT low, good luck watching movies on the net.
Welcome to New Zealand, as it's been for the last ten years. I now have a 20GB monthly transfer cap for my 10mbps Telstra cable (up from 5GB originally), which I just exceeded this month by running the Lord of the Rings Online downloader - it said it would pull down 7GB, but actually pulled closer to 16. Oops.
In my opinion, the sooner the USA gets transfer caps comparable with the rest of the world, the better off we'll all be because US-written software will stop assuming that everyone on broadband has unlimited transfer and will start becoming smarter about when and how it sends packets.
Yes, movies and TV really don't work well over IP with that kind of transfer limit. But perhaps the problem is not 'my ISP is evil' but 'video over IP is very wasteful and there really ISN'T enough capacity to go around if everyone uses it wastefully'.
Back in the 1980s, we had 300 baud acoustic couplers and were thankful for it, you kids get off my lawn, etc.