I'm only 30, so I don't consider myself old just yet, but I must say that I found the game "Flat Out" to be just totally unnecessary. While racing games are good fun, I just can't how an obstacle course where the object is to fling the driver through the windshield could be anything but disturbing. What is up with people these days? Are they so desensitized that the only way to entice them to play a video game is with things like this?
Deathrace - You killed pedestrians and got a little onscreen crosses for each kill. Made in 1976 - nothing new here.
Of course to those of us who grok operating environments and who don't grok executives and consultants see said executives as fools and their reasons as invalid.
Which is proably why they'll never listen, and since they maek the decisions you're stuck with those decisions.
The key to selling anything (including a move to OSS) is to understand what the other person needs and to explain why your idea / product will meet those needs.
I've seen many people with good ideas unsuccessfully try to implement them because they lacked the skills to sell them. They assumed that everyone shared their POV and, if they didn't, they were by definition idiots that were too dumb to understand.
That biggest hurdle to wider OSS adoption is often not MS but the OSS community - or as Pogo said "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Inkjet printers are a scam, played on a public that doesn't know any better.
They're doing it with laser printers, too. $25 for a USB cable and $65 for toner.
The people responsible for this greed will pay one day.
It isn't greed but simple economics. Manufacturers have cut prices to the point where printers are low margin products. This happens because consumers buy the printer based on it's price, not its total cost of ownership or cost per printed page.
Since manufacturers can't seem to sell expensive printers with cheap cartridges, they try to make up for the low profit of the printers by selling high profit ink.
If the profits from ink start to go away, a number will exit the printer market, leaving us with less choice. Cheap, low margin ink and printers is not a market most manufacturers want to be in; if such a market develops my guess it will result in printers that print poorly and have little if no support from the manufacturers.
As for the cable, it's the same economic model - and people often go for tech $25 cable because:
They don't know better; or, The time and effort required to find a cheaper cable exceeds the value of any cost savings to them.
The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love."
Now you know why the Penguin is Linux's mascot. It is reliable, unshakable, self-sacrificing (think of all those selfless developers working night and day around the world), extreme heroism (ok, that might be taking it a little too far...)
and doomed to exist only in isolation on an island, where only a few heart souls seek it out?
Japan DID offer a conditional surrender. The codition was that Japan would be able to keep the emperor.
Along with:
- the Japanese get to disarm own troops - no war crimes trials - limited occupation
All terms clearly unacceptable to the Allies - since the Potsdam Declaration was pretty clear.
Also note these were the terms the Japanese wanted after the first bomb - so any earlier ones would be equally unacceptable; even if their offer was clear and unambiguous.
They may have not believed that US had enough uranium for a second bomb. If so, they were proven wrong in that belief.
ut how does it feel -after all pride and duty- to be part of the nation that fired up such a "baby" at first?
Not bad at all - remember:
The Japanese started the war with us via strike they hoped would prevent the US from challenging them in the Pacific - unfortunately for them they were wrong.
They had ample opportunity to surrender before that - and after the first bomb, but chose not to. It should have been clear to their leadership that there was no way they would win the war.
While the damage was horrific, fewer died than would have if we decided to blockade them and continue to use regular weapons to force a surrender, invading if needed.
A better question is:
Would Japan and Germany have given as liberal surrender terms and as benign an occupation as they experienced under the Allies?
I think the Chineses, Phillipinos, Indo-Chinese, Poles, French, Dutch, et. al. might be able to shed some light on what a German / Japanese victory might have been like.
5. Getting around pricematch policies by ordering slightly different (yet identical in all features) models from the manufacturer. i.e. a HP PSC 950 and HP PSC 950xi. Perhaps not illegal, but a shady, shady practice that lets retail stores ignore their price match policies for many items.
Price match policies do not exist tet the customer a better deal, they exist to
1)induce customers to buy because they belive the transaction cost (i.e. time and money spent looking for the best price) will be too high
2)send a signal to other stores that you will not start a price war by lowering prices since you would have to price match all your own sales - so as long as they don't lower prices, you won't.
Way back when international dialing was real expensive, companies offered dial back services - you called a number, left the number to call, they connected and then called you back - all via landline.
Vonage and other Voip providers could do something similar - they could enable remote three way calling - you call your Voip # from a cell phone, enter an access could and get a dialout line - which you use to call overseas at the going rate. The down side is then Voip becomes a target for peopel to gain access and dialout for "free."
Finally, if you are outside the US but call to NA alot, Vonage works fine on non-US broadband, giving you a US phone number overseas. The down side is that you need a US credit card to charge the service fee; my guess i steh reason Vonage doesn't offer a pre-pay plan is to avoid hassles with overseas PTT's.
Since I'm a Vonage subscriber with a SIP box at home, could I call home with my laptop? I realize I could make a laptop-to-PC call home, but it will never fly unless my wife can pick up the regular phone.
Why not just add Vonage's softphone? Then you can call a landline; don't know if you can call you're own Vonage number.
OTOH, some hotels that offer internet access include free long distance in the mix - such as Marriott.
Remember their press release announcing a trademark on the frowning face and that they'd be licensing it?
It was a joke, but a brilliant one - check out their site; their "demotivation" slogans and posters are classic.
One of my favorites:
Meetings - None of us are as dumb as all of us.
(Could be the/. motto)
Of course, as an AFU'r, I do believe emoticons are for those who lack the skills to express themselves with words and the intelligence to understand what others have written.
And that's exactly my point - the State of California does not honor the right to contract.
Contract law is laid down by the states - what you can and cannot do in a contract is defined by those laws and contracts enforced by applying state laws. State laws vary by state - so it's not so much they don't honor them but they enforce them within the bounds of state law. Companies, by incorporating or doing business in the state, agree to abide by those laws.
A contract is a meeting of the minds - we agree on what the bounds and responsibilities are of each party. If a company is not in a business when you sign a non-compete, but enters it after you have started work, did the contract include that? Neither of you considered companies in that field a competitor, so is it reasonable to exclude them from employment based on changes that occur after the contract signing? You can write a broad contract, but the provisions may not hold up in court.
The Baby Bells keep their uptime greater than 5 nines typically.
99.999%
Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.
Reliability is why I have land line.
Cost is why I have VIOP - I have a line overseas, so I can call there as if it were a local call. Show me a land line that gives unlimited calling to and from an overseas country of my choice for $24 and I'll switch.
It was immoral. They should have been demonstrated on a landmark like Mount Fuji or on a military base, not in the middle of a city against civilians.
Hiroshima was a military target - it housed the Japanese Army's southern command, and was a staging area for troop deployments.
You don't want a city hit, keep your military and industry elsewhere.
Given that Japan didn't surrender after the first bomb and its devastation, a demo would likely not impress them very much. We were already destroying their cities and it was clear it was not a matter of, but when, Japan was defeated. Given the choices of invasion with massive casualties, a blockade of Japan and letting them slowly starve and be bombed into oblivion whle their troops fight on elswehere, or tryng to end it quickly, it's not hard to see why the bomb was used as it was. A fundemental calculus of war is that you maximze enemy caualties and minimize your own. Or, "Life sucks, and then I make you die."
1. If all your doing is distroing Linux, it's ahrd to compete on anything but price. Give it away for free, and hope you get enough servcie contracts to make money - but you can't charge more than Red Hat or you'll lose busienss; and that the percentage of people who buy servcie contracts is small so you need a large user base to keep any significant number of vendors in the black.
2. He used the term "Hare Krishnia" to describe those that think making money off of OSS is bad and take potshots at those who do- not as a general indictement of OSS developers. He also point sout when he asks them have they contributed to OSS the answer generally is no.
3. He point sout there are people who do it for free for the passion thay have for OSS; and that only a handful of developers are good enough to really write great code - such as those that maintain the Linux kernel.
His model is to develop and support applications for business, do real QA and make sure things work so a businss has a solution - not something they must compile and modify to get some sembelance of a working system. Not an unuasula way to make money - offer a service and be good at it.
He goes on to say he sees more top-down OSS adoption than the old bottom - up sneak it in approach of the past. Soemthing that portends good things for OSS.
It would be nice if/. editors actually read the article to see if the teaser was in keeping with the actual text; then again why change now.
In technology. I don't want to be forever held behind someone less skilled over seniority and office politics. Unions are great in unskilled and semiskilled fields, but not in fast moving ones.
This is a myth. Unions do not force seniority like that, they absolutly allow for promotions and pay raises based on merit. Show me a single Union whose policy enforces senority over all other things.
Take a look at the airline pilot's unions - seniority is paramount - you can have a 1000 hours more than the person in the left seat, but if you hired on at a later date, you're in the right seat.
When two airlines merge, it can take years to merge the seniority lists - to the point that even if the planes say Airline A, only pilots who worked for acquired airline B are allowed to fly it.
Pilot's unions did great things for their members - excellant pay, great benefits (how about retiring with a million dollar pension buyout?) - and while regulation ensured profitability, the airlines were happy to go along. Now, with low cost, non-union 401k vs defined benefit pensions airlines on the scene, life is a lot harder.
For example, cell companies offer free in-system minutes to encourage friends & family to recruit new customers -- a nice little viral marketing ploy and something that, I'm sure, reduces stress in friends & family cell phone conversations. But it also creates an opportunity because those free in-system minutes are worth something if they can be somehow converted to out-of-system calls. Hence the motivations for this little hack.
Actually, they like getting an upfront fee in exchange for use of the network - the marginal cost of the minutes you spend talking for "free" to friends and family (n network) is negligable- they have teh capacity and it costs nothing to go form 70% to 99 % use. even if the use exceeds capacity they just drop or do not complete calls. The real cost is the large fixed cost of maintaining a network - leasng a tower costs the same wether or not it carries any calls. So giving you those minutes in exchange for an upfront fee is a good deal for them - any long distance is gravy. of ocurse, they've convinced customers that minutes should be sold by the batch - so they get some incremental income and are not likely to give that up - even if MetroPCS sells unlimited minutes for a fixed fee.
So, people seriously think that a book-sized router with an antenna 4" long will broadcast over 30 miles while sitting next to your computer???
As the OP pointed out, he said it work anywhere - given the average understanding of electronics by most users, and especially those that pay to have a home network setup; it's not surprising that the user though he meant "anywhere." The problem is often that people who are familiar with technology assume others have the same basic understanding as they do; and then get frustrated when users expect things that "they said it would do that."
I refuse to beleive that any 'normal' person would honestly beleive that. If someone was that dumb, they would starve to death because they don't understand the connection between hunger and eating. Seriously- who is that stupid??
If technological stupidity and eating were interelated tehre's be a lot fewer slashdot users - everyone is stupid about some aspect of technology. (though I'd wager the average slashdot reader has less of a chance of passing on their genes than mising a meal)
but how do you make someone understand the signal won't reach 30 miles? i tried the radio station analogy - if you go 100 miles away, you get different radio stations. he blew up and said that i told him it would work anywhere.
i'd meant anywhere in the house.
Which is what you should have made clear to teh customer when you installed it. You know it won't work 30 miles away, I know it won't; but someone who pays to have a newtowrk setup *probably* doesn't realize it won't work 30 miles away.
Part of teh problem is we assume people understand the basics when often they don't.
Voting (in many states. In 14, including mine, Nevada, one is forever forbidden from voting. In Florida, another such state, I believe it is case law that a juvenile convicted of a felony loses the right the vote before he or she gains it - he or she is barred by law from ever gaining the right to vote - cruel, unusual and unconstitutional but still considered the law).
Actually, it is perfectly constitutional - first of all, it is not "cruel and unusual"; it's and, not or in the 7th;
plus the 14th amendment lets voting rights be curtailed because "for participation in rebellion , or other crime,".
Putting the system in a secure computer room with a heavy door and lock.
Really, what else do you need? In commercial applications companies can afford to lock up systems thus making this pointless. I assume this is really geared towards home "hobbiest" types. And by hobbiests I mean those partaking in illegal activities.
Physical security is just as important, and let me point out that data loss prevention is yet another form of security. This is a silly idea, and will only be bought by those who think it's 'kewl' and have money to burn. Of course, my question is: do they *give* you a new drive when the last one dies?
As a number of people have pointed out, government agencies and the military are more likely purchasers, since this technology would ensure destruction of the data.
Physical security is important, but:
1. You still have to worry about the inside job, so this would act as a last line of defense from someone trying to steal information. It's really not that different from putting epoxy in USB ports to prevent thumb drives from being used or disabling the ability for speaker phones to act as a microphone.
2.In some cases, quick destruction is vital, such as when a facility is in danger of being overun. Using such drives in field equipment would mean the equipment is useless if it falls into enemy hands. Pulling from a machine and then taking apart a disk drive so you can completely destroy the platters is time consuming even in a normal situation, I'd hate to have to rely on it for really sensitive information is in danger of imminent capture.
Sure there is the risk of accidental activation - that's why you have remote backups as well as weigh the risk vs the danger of the information being compromised.
Obviously you have no clue. The U-2 may have been a spy plane, but anyone can tell you that the EP-3 is just a maritime patrol aircraft [defenselink.mil]. Besides, it's over 40 years old. If it was a secret spy plane, I don't think you'd be able to google so much information on the subject.
Don't you just love it when an AC without a clue says someonelse needs one?
The EP-3 is the elextronic surveillence version of the P-3 (the US's land based MPA). It is used to intercept ellectonic transmissions (amongst other things) for analysis by the US. While it is overt (it's hard to hide an EP-3 flying over international waters), so is the U-2 (although the U-2 flies high so it's a lot harder to intercept). If you limit spying to covert operations, then it may not be spying but it still was (probably) on on intel mission (or else we would have sent a regular P-3) and not the much rarer EP-3.
The freerider problem only applies to public goods that are excludable and rival. The Internet is neither excludable nor rival, and therefore is not a public good. And since it is not a public good, the freerider problem does not apply to it.
Actually, the case yo u define - the web as having jointness of supply (i.e.) anyone's consumtion does not limit the others, and non-excludability are exactly the case of public goods where the freerider problem exists.
If the marginal cost of the next page view is zero then the price should go to zero, but no one will provide the good at the price. Ads provide the payment for views, if that goes away the incentive to produce the good vanishes as well.
In addition, since teh web is not excludable free riders are difficult to exclude - since you cannot reliably identify who will view as and who will not.
therefore, free riders are a very real issue in terms of keeping web content "free" to end users.
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
Unfortunately, history has shown it is difficult to get people to innovate and produce goods if they are forced to provide them for free.
It may lead to new ways to serve up content - such as embedding text in graphics with ads so that you have to serve up teh graphic in order to read the text; spammers already try that to avoid pattern recognition on text messages; or plasing the desired content in pop-ups so taht if you block pop-ups you get neither ads nor content.
Tambourine man....(buffering)...(buffering)....play a song...(buffering)...(buffering)...for me. I'm not slee...(buffering)...(buffering)...py and there is no...(buffering)...(buffering)...place I'm going to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm only 30, so I don't consider myself old just yet, but I must say that I found the game "Flat Out" to be just totally unnecessary. While racing games are good fun, I just can't how an obstacle course where the object is to fling the driver through the windshield could be anything but disturbing. What is up with people these days? Are they so desensitized that the only way to entice them to play a video game is with things like this?
Deathrace - You killed pedestrians and got a little onscreen crosses for each kill. Made in 1976 - nothing new here.
BUT, before all of Slashdot flies off the handle on this "story"
Too late - that occurs right after fp.
Of course to those of us who grok operating environments and who don't grok executives and consultants see said executives as fools and their reasons as invalid.
Which is proably why they'll never listen, and since they maek the decisions you're stuck with those decisions.
The key to selling anything (including a move to OSS) is to understand what the other person needs and to explain why your idea / product will meet those needs.
I've seen many people with good ideas unsuccessfully try to implement them because they lacked the skills to sell them. They assumed that everyone shared their POV and, if they didn't, they were by definition idiots that were too dumb to understand.
That biggest hurdle to wider OSS adoption is often not MS but the OSS community - or as Pogo said "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Inkjet printers are a scam, played on a public that doesn't know any better.
They're doing it with laser printers, too. $25 for a USB cable and $65 for toner.
The people responsible for this greed will pay one day.
It isn't greed but simple economics. Manufacturers have cut prices to the point where printers are low margin products. This happens because consumers buy the printer based on it's price, not its total cost of ownership or cost per printed page.
Since manufacturers can't seem to sell expensive printers with cheap cartridges, they try to make up for the low profit of the printers by selling high profit ink.
If the profits from ink start to go away, a number will exit the printer market, leaving us with less choice. Cheap, low margin ink and printers is not a market most manufacturers want to be in; if such a market develops my guess it will result in printers that print poorly and have little if no support from the manufacturers.
As for the cable, it's the same economic model - and people often go for tech $25 cable because:
They don't know better; or,
The time and effort required to find a cheaper cable exceeds the value of any cost savings to them.
The Penguins are a miraculous species, capable of extreme heroism, self-sacrifice, sorrow and unshakable love."
Now you know why the Penguin is Linux's mascot. It is reliable, unshakable, self-sacrificing (think of all those selfless developers working night and day around the world), extreme heroism (ok, that might be taking it a little too far...)
and doomed to exist only in isolation on an island, where only a few heart souls seek it out?
Japan DID offer a conditional surrender. The codition was that Japan would be able to keep the emperor.
Along with:
- the Japanese get to disarm own troops
- no war crimes trials
- limited occupation
All terms clearly unacceptable to the Allies - since the Potsdam Declaration was pretty clear.
Also note these were the terms the Japanese wanted after the first bomb - so any earlier ones would be equally unacceptable; even if their offer was clear and unambiguous.
They may have not believed that US had enough uranium for a second bomb. If so, they were proven wrong in that belief.
ut how does it feel -after all pride and duty- to be part of the nation that fired up such a "baby" at first?
Not bad at all - remember:
The Japanese started the war with us via strike they hoped would prevent the US from challenging them in the Pacific - unfortunately for them they were wrong.
They had ample opportunity to surrender before that - and after the first bomb, but chose not to. It should have been clear to their leadership that there was no way they would win the war.
While the damage was horrific, fewer died than would have if we decided to blockade them and continue to use regular weapons to force a surrender, invading if needed.
A better question is:
Would Japan and Germany have given as liberal surrender terms and as benign an occupation as they experienced under the Allies?
I think the Chineses, Phillipinos, Indo-Chinese, Poles, French, Dutch, et. al. might be able to shed some light on what a German / Japanese victory might have been like.
5. Getting around pricematch policies by ordering slightly different (yet identical in all features) models from the manufacturer. i.e. a HP PSC 950 and HP PSC 950xi. Perhaps not illegal, but a shady, shady practice that lets retail stores ignore their price match policies for many items.
Price match policies do not exist tet the customer a better deal, they exist to
1)induce customers to buy because they belive the transaction cost (i.e. time and money spent looking for the best price) will be too high
2)send a signal to other stores that you will not start a price war by lowering prices since you would have to price match all your own sales - so as long as they don't lower prices, you won't.
Way back when international dialing was real expensive, companies offered dial back services - you called a number, left the number to call, they connected and then called you back - all via landline.
Vonage and other Voip providers could do something similar - they could enable remote three way calling - you call your Voip # from a cell phone, enter an access could and get a dialout line - which you use to call overseas at the going rate. The down side is then Voip becomes a target for peopel to gain access and dialout for "free."
Finally, if you are outside the US but call to NA alot, Vonage works fine on non-US broadband, giving you a US phone number overseas. The down side is that you need a US credit card to charge the service fee; my guess i steh reason Vonage doesn't offer a pre-pay plan is to avoid hassles with overseas PTT's.
Since I'm a Vonage subscriber with a SIP box at home, could I call home with my laptop? I realize I could make a laptop-to-PC call home, but it will never fly unless my wife can pick up the regular phone.
Why not just add Vonage's softphone? Then you can call a landline; don't know if you can call you're own Vonage number.
OTOH, some hotels that offer internet access include free long distance in the mix - such as Marriott.
Remember their press release announcing a trademark on the frowning face and that they'd be licensing it?
/. motto)
It was a joke, but a brilliant one - check out their site; their "demotivation" slogans and posters are classic.
One of my favorites:
Meetings - None of us are as dumb as all of us.
(Could be the
Of course, as an AFU'r, I do believe emoticons are for those who lack the skills to express themselves with words and the intelligence to understand what others have written.
And that's exactly my point - the State of California does not honor the right to contract.
Contract law is laid down by the states - what you can and cannot do in a contract is defined by those laws and contracts enforced by applying state laws. State laws vary by state - so it's not so much they don't honor them but they enforce them within the bounds of state law. Companies, by incorporating or doing business in the state, agree to abide by those laws.
A contract is a meeting of the minds - we agree on what the bounds and responsibilities are of each party. If a company is not in a business when you sign a non-compete, but enters it after you have started work, did the contract include that? Neither of you considered companies in that field a competitor, so is it reasonable to exclude them from employment based on changes that occur after the contract signing? You can write a broad contract, but the provisions may not hold up in court.
The Baby Bells keep their uptime greater than 5 nines typically.
99.999%
Show me VoIP that does 99.99% and then I'll consider switching.
Reliability is why I have land line.
Cost is why I have VIOP - I have a line overseas, so I can call there as if it were a local call. Show me a land line that gives unlimited calling to and from an overseas country of my choice for $24 and I'll switch.
In my case. cost trumps reliability.
It was immoral. They should have been demonstrated on a landmark like Mount Fuji or on a military base, not in the middle of a city against civilians.
Hiroshima was a military target - it housed the Japanese Army's southern command, and was a staging area for troop deployments.
You don't want a city hit, keep your military and industry elsewhere.
Given that Japan didn't surrender after the first bomb and its devastation, a demo would likely not impress them very much. We were already destroying their cities and it was clear it was not a matter of, but when, Japan was defeated. Given the choices of invasion with massive casualties, a blockade of Japan and letting them slowly starve and be bombed into oblivion whle their troops fight on elswehere, or tryng to end it quickly, it's not hard to see why the bomb was used as it was. A fundemental calculus of war is that you maximze enemy caualties and minimize your own. Or, "Life sucks, and then I make you die."
His points were:
/. editors actually read the article to see if the teaser was in keeping with the actual text; then again why change now.
1. If all your doing is distroing Linux, it's ahrd to compete on anything but price. Give it away for free, and hope you get enough servcie contracts to make money - but you can't charge more than Red Hat or you'll lose busienss; and that the percentage of people who buy servcie contracts is small so you need a large user base to keep any significant number of vendors in the black.
2. He used the term "Hare Krishnia" to describe those that think making money off of OSS is bad and take potshots at those who do- not as a general indictement of OSS developers. He also point sout when he asks them have they contributed to OSS the answer generally is no.
3. He point sout there are people who do it for free for the passion thay have for OSS; and that only a handful of developers are good enough to really write great code - such as those that maintain the Linux kernel.
His model is to develop and support applications for business, do real QA and make sure things work so a businss has a solution - not something they must compile and modify to get some sembelance of a working system. Not an unuasula way to make money - offer a service and be good at it.
He goes on to say he sees more top-down OSS adoption than the old bottom - up sneak it in approach of the past. Soemthing that portends good things for OSS.
It would be nice if
In technology. I don't want to be forever held behind someone less skilled over seniority and office politics. Unions are great in unskilled and semiskilled fields, but not in fast moving ones.
This is a myth. Unions do not force seniority like that, they absolutly allow for promotions and pay raises based on merit. Show me a single Union whose policy enforces senority over all other things.
Take a look at the airline pilot's unions - seniority is paramount - you can have a 1000 hours more than the person in the left seat, but if you hired on at a later date, you're in the right seat.
When two airlines merge, it can take years to merge the seniority lists - to the point that even if the planes say Airline A, only pilots who worked for acquired airline B are allowed to fly it.
Pilot's unions did great things for their members - excellant pay, great benefits (how about retiring with a million dollar pension buyout?) - and while regulation ensured profitability, the airlines were happy to go along. Now, with low cost, non-union 401k vs defined benefit pensions airlines on the scene, life is a lot harder.
lost like so much of it's other content.
Hmm, us [sic] unsophisticated Americans use "its" - is this one of those British things?
Yes, it is...
For example, cell companies offer free in-system minutes to encourage friends & family to recruit new customers -- a nice little viral marketing ploy and something that, I'm sure, reduces stress in friends & family cell phone conversations. But it also creates an opportunity because those free in-system minutes are worth something if they can be somehow converted to out-of-system calls. Hence the motivations for this little hack.
Actually, they like getting an upfront fee in exchange for use of the network - the marginal cost of the minutes you spend talking for "free" to friends and family (n network) is negligable- they have teh capacity and it costs nothing to go form 70% to 99 % use. even if the use exceeds capacity they just drop or do not complete calls. The real cost is the large fixed cost of maintaining a network - leasng a tower costs the same wether or not it carries any calls. So giving you those minutes in exchange for an upfront fee is a good deal for them - any long distance is gravy. of ocurse, they've convinced customers that minutes should be sold by the batch - so they get some incremental income and are not likely to give that up - even if MetroPCS sells unlimited minutes for a fixed fee.
So, people seriously think that a book-sized router with an antenna 4" long will broadcast over 30 miles while sitting next to your computer???
As the OP pointed out, he said it work anywhere - given the average understanding of electronics by most users, and especially those that pay to have a home network setup; it's not surprising that the user though he meant "anywhere." The problem is often that people who are familiar with technology assume others have the same basic understanding as they do; and then get frustrated when users expect things that "they said it would do that."
I refuse to beleive that any 'normal' person would honestly beleive that. If someone was that dumb, they would starve to death because they don't understand the connection between hunger and eating. Seriously- who is that stupid??
If technological stupidity and eating were interelated tehre's be a lot fewer slashdot users - everyone is stupid about some aspect of technology. (though I'd wager the average slashdot reader has less of a chance of passing on their genes than mising a meal)
Router story sniped..
but how do you make someone understand the signal won't reach 30 miles? i tried the radio station analogy - if you go 100 miles away, you get different radio stations. he blew up and said that i told him it would work anywhere.
i'd meant anywhere in the house.
Which is what you should have made clear to teh customer when you installed it. You know it won't work 30 miles away, I know it won't; but someone who pays to have a newtowrk setup *probably* doesn't realize it won't work 30 miles away.
Part of teh problem is we assume people understand the basics when often they don't.
Voting (in many states. In 14, including mine, Nevada, one is forever forbidden from voting. In Florida, another such state, I believe it is case law that a juvenile convicted of a felony loses the right the vote before he or she gains it - he or she is barred by law from ever gaining the right to vote - cruel, unusual and unconstitutional but still considered the law).
Actually, it is perfectly constitutional - first of all, it is not "cruel and unusual"; it's and, not or in the 7th;
plus the 14th amendment lets voting rights be curtailed because "for participation in rebellion , or other crime,".
Putting the system in a secure computer room with a heavy door and lock.
Really, what else do you need? In commercial applications companies can afford to lock up systems thus making this pointless. I assume this is really geared towards home "hobbiest" types. And by hobbiests I mean those partaking in illegal activities.
Physical security is just as important, and let me point out that data loss prevention is yet another form of security. This is a silly idea, and will only be bought by those who think it's 'kewl' and have money to burn. Of course, my question is: do they *give* you a new drive when the last one dies?
As a number of people have pointed out, government agencies and the military are more likely purchasers, since this technology would ensure destruction of the data.
Physical security is important, but:
1. You still have to worry about the inside job, so this would act as a last line of defense from someone trying to steal information. It's really not that different from putting epoxy in USB ports to prevent thumb drives from being used or disabling the ability for speaker phones to act as a microphone.
2.In some cases, quick destruction is vital, such as when a facility is in danger of being overun. Using such drives in field equipment would mean the equipment is useless if it falls into enemy hands. Pulling from a machine and then taking apart a disk drive so you can completely destroy the platters is time consuming even in a normal situation, I'd hate to have to rely on it for really sensitive information is in danger of imminent capture.
Sure there is the risk of accidental activation - that's why you have remote backups as well as weigh the risk vs the danger of the information being compromised.
Obviously you have no clue. The U-2 may have been a spy plane, but anyone can tell you that the EP-3 is just a maritime patrol aircraft [defenselink.mil]. Besides, it's over 40 years old. If it was a secret spy plane, I don't think you'd be able to google so much information on the subject.
Don't you just love it when an AC without a clue says someonelse needs one?
The EP-3 is the elextronic surveillence version of the P-3 (the US's land based MPA). It is used to intercept ellectonic transmissions (amongst other things) for analysis by the US. While it is overt (it's hard to hide an EP-3 flying over international waters), so is the U-2 (although the U-2 flies high so it's a lot harder to intercept). If you limit spying to covert operations, then it may not be spying but it still was (probably) on on intel mission (or else we would have sent a regular P-3) and not the much rarer EP-3.
The freerider problem only applies to public goods that are excludable and rival. The Internet is neither excludable nor rival, and therefore is not a public good. And since it is not a public good, the freerider problem does not apply to it.
Actually, the case yo u define - the web as having jointness of supply (i.e.) anyone's consumtion does not limit the others, and non-excludability are exactly the case of public goods where the freerider problem exists.
If the marginal cost of the next page view is zero then the price should go to zero, but no one will provide the good at the price. Ads provide the payment for views, if that goes away the incentive to produce the good vanishes as well.
In addition, since teh web is not excludable free riders are difficult to exclude - since you cannot reliably identify who will view as and who will not.
therefore, free riders are a very real issue in terms of keeping web content "free" to end users.
Blocking ads won't end free content on the Web. It will lead to innovation and new opportunities.
Unfortunately, history has shown it is difficult to get people to innovate and produce goods if they are forced to provide them for free.
It may lead to new ways to serve up content - such as embedding text in graphics with ads so that you have to serve up teh graphic in order to read the text; spammers already try that to avoid pattern recognition on text messages; or plasing the desired content in pop-ups so taht if you block pop-ups you get neither ads nor content.
Tambourine man....(buffering)...(buffering)....play a song...(buffering)...(buffering)...for me. I'm not slee...(buffering)...(buffering)...py and there is no...(buffering)...(buffering)...place I'm going to.
If it made sense, it wouldn'r be Dylan.