Anyway, I live in one of the minor million-plus cities of Japan near Tokyo, and I just want to note that you can have a high-tech, high-quality lifestyle without destroying your environment. Whenever I hear a story like this, I think about running into quail the morning, almost literally. They are sometimes foraging within a few feet of the gate, and they figure people are basically harmless to about 3 meters. There's a little river two stations up, and it's heavily populated with half-meter carp. I walked about half a kilometer along it the other day, and there were almost always fish visible, and sometimes scores of fish. It's a matter of priorities, I think--but I was annoyed a couple of years ago when they cut down a pretty large bamboo grove and built a bunch of houses there...
Not sure of all of the reasons, but I feel like good mass transit is a big chunk of it. Heavy recycling probably helps, though they recently increased the garbage collection taxes quite a bit.
But Lehrer is a quitter. Not sure of the latest, but he was certainly alive during the early parts of Dubya's reign of miserable failure, and not a peep out of him.
Too bad/. is so boring these days... I'd have had a couple of juicy comments if anyone was still reading it, but these days I rarely stop by. Case in point: I searched this supposedly mature discussion for funny. Not so much.
Anyway, anything that annoys spammers is a-okay by me. There's a Shanghai outfit that hosts most of the twisty spam I see these days.
Are you really sure you need that particular job that badly?
For what little it's worth, I once encountered a similar moral dilemma, and I gave notice immediately. I haven't regretted it--and I'm pretty sure his business went down the tubes, too. At least I never heard of it again.
Actually, I work in support of a prominent research lab. I could answer almost all of your questions--but then I'd probably be expected to kill you. Some fraction of that response is a joke. What fraction of your life would you like to wager on it?
Substantively, I live in a dense urban region. Actually, I live in what is regarded as a suburban part of that region. I am almost always within range of several wireless networks or routers. When I travel to my office, I sometimes monitor the network access points as I travel, and it is very rare that I am completely out of range of a conventional wireless device. These devices are all capable of acting as wireless routers to each other--but they are generally configured not to do so. In addition, there are cellular phone networks that completely cover the region and which could be configured to help support the data communications network (though they are currently priced and marketed in a way that would mostly make that unattractive--though my packets are currently reaching you through a related wireless option that is obviously priced within my means).
Then again, our apparent disagreement about the reality may be because you live in the States or some other relatively primitive country. Perhaps your wireless connectivity resources are limited, whereas I'm currently residing in an advanced and civilized country, thus giving me a distorted view of reality.
Actually, I do speak a fair bit of Japanese, but his description did not bring any kotowaza (folk sayings) or yojijukugo (four-character slogans) to mind. He did remind me of kaizen, but his explanation went rather beyond that idea, which is often translated as 'continuous improvement'.
That is not true. BitTorrent automatically optimizes the distribution pattern for maximum efficiency, and the efficiency automatically increases as the number of copies increases. That is precisely because the closest peers will respond most quickly and thereby succeed in transmitting the most data.
An alternative way to consider it is if you were trying to design an optimum local caching strategy to minimize distant transfers. Bit torrents essentially make every copy into a local cache. How can you get higher than 100%?
Your version of the history of FM does not agree with my sources--but I acknowledge that they were little interested in TV per se. My research was more focused on the use of patents to prevent the use of FM technologies because they were satisfied with the existing AM business model.
We need to tackle the spam problem as the economic issue it is. We should work to make sure that the spammers can't make any money from their spamming activities. We're evolving in that direction now, but it would have been a lot better if SMTP had included some real economic modeling there...
Rather a poor joke, but I blame Al Gore, even though I admire and respect him. He kept telling them not to worry about money--he'd worry about that part for them. Okay, so it led to faster progress that way, but they still should have kept (economic) reality in mind.
Actually, the way I imagine it is that there would be a pool of movies available locally, perhaps within a large urban wireless network. When you wanted a new movie, you would (perhaps automatically) delete some older movie (that you hadn't watched in a long time) from your disk, and download it from other people who already had copies of that movie. However, before you deleted your old movies, they would have already been copied somewhere else. (It would also be beneficial to have a regional metric of movie 'value' that was related to scarcity, so rare movies would become less likely to be deleted completely.)
I don't understand the excessive focus on BitTorrent, but this is more of a barter situation. We can both be downloading the same file from various other sources and from each other, and both of us (and the rest of the network) are all benefiting at the same time. The long-distance data traffic is automatically reduced, because the local connections are faster precisely because they are local.
One case in point is the Ubuntu distributions, where their servers basically go nuts when a major release goes out. If they did this with a BitTorrent default, everyone would be better off.
I have been paying attention, I am not new here, but I was trying to be polite. Also, I believe that in the long-term, you can't win against reality. For example, FM did become popular displaced AM in many applications.
I actually think the ultimate solutions call for local accounting and a lot of resource sharing. Essentially your computer may request shared resources, but the neighboring computers should 'compare notes' before deciding how much help to give. If you've been playing fair, for example, by helping with the caching and redistribution of their files and email, then they'll give you normal cooperation. If you're a leech, always asking but giving back little, then you'll get low priority and relatively little service. If you're extra generous, for example by providing extra caching storage or a long-distance network connection, then the neighbors (the neighboring computers) will also keep track of that and be beholden to you (as represented by your computer) and they will be obliged to give you extra help in return.
The technologies themselves and the technical possibilities inherent in those technologies are not going to go away.
I'm going to pretend that you're being humorous rather than a purely non-constructive arse with a tired wit. However, because I don't have much of sense of humor, I'm not going to waste a lot of time on you. Nor am I going to waste any time defending my geek credentials.
Much of the problem is the so-called last mile. This is precisely where wireless networks could address much of the bandwidth constraints. In conjunction with active local caching and BitTorrent or similar protocols, the entire situation can be changed and improved. Perhaps a concrete example is the best approach for your stiff head. Consider the situation where a lot of network traffic is consumed with video such as the Daily Show. Imagine that you do the initial distribution with BitTorrent, effectively caching the local copies for the relatively brief period of high interest. Most obviously, you greatly reduce long-distance network traffic from the central location, but with the local use of wireless networks, a great deal of the traffic will be completely off the wired network, since it will be distributed within dense urban hubs. They could still have their DRM (several mechanisms already exist)--and even date the files for expiration (though I believe that would be an extension into the area of BitTorrent-like protocols).
Actually, one of the new technologies we need is variable-power wireless networks (with more range than BlueTooth). By scaling down the transmission power as the node density goes up, you can effectively maintain local bandwidth as a constant. The total power consumption does increase, but that's because you have more nodes, but the main constraint on efficiency is how effectively you can cache the data. Interestingly enough, time-limited video is especially suitable for distributed caching.
Put up the "foe" or shut up--and we all know you aren't going to shut up.
My "problem" with morons like you is that I see no reason to repeat the truth. Trueth stands on its own merits. You didn't get it the first 47 times you ran across it, so I think it would be crazy to expect you to understand it just because I repeated the truth for the 48th time. The only thing crazier is your hope that repeating the lies will somehow make them true.
I was a heavy user of GBS for a while. Very nice tool, but they never did fix very problematic bugs in the bookmark syncing part of it. I almost immediately gave up on the windows syncing, and I had fairly quickly stopped using the cookie-syncing part when I discovered the cookies were breeding like coat hangers in a closet. Essentially there was too much state information that wasn't been tracked but which was needed to make things work properly, especially for the bookmarks.
As noted by many others, Foxmarks does a good job of the bookmark part of syncing. The heuristics are kind of flawed, but it's never caused the kinds of bookmark disasters that were frequent with GBS.
The last feature of GBS that I abandoned was the password syncing. This was an extremely useful capability and (AFaIK) unique to GBS. I'm not sure it was working correctly, but rather it may have had some of the same problems as the bookmark syncing, but less severe, perhaps because of the absence of dividers or more consistency in the way different versions handled the passwords. However, this may have been the security-related problem that caused Google to abandon the idea. The security model was actually very good (if I understand it properly). The encryption and decryption were handled on the client side, and Google's servers actually had no access to the data, just storing the encrypted files. You were the sole owner of your security key--and many people then proceeded to lose it and then complained to Google about the 'lost' data. (I think Google should have tried to set up some kind of key escrow service, but I don't blame them for steering clear of that difficult business.)
Tell you what. Please take a couple of actual history courses and read a couple of books. And as a special favor, please designate me a foe. One can never have too many imbeciles as foes.
What a fuckwad. No, I only read the first few words, so congratulations on wasting your time. Looked like about 30 lines, so it must have taken 2 or 3 hours, right?
Case one: 9/11 was preventable, but Dubya failed to prevent it.
Case two: 9/11 was not preventable, and then we're all doomed.
By the way, how many times have you repeated all of those dittohead lies? You seem to have them down pretty pat, but why can't you believe them yet? After all, if you were so sure, you wouldn't need to keep ranting, would you?
Maybe one more rep will do it, right?
Actually, I regard you as a typical rightwing lunatic and would be distinctly honored if you designated me a foe. The only part that makes me wonder is what you personally get out of seeing America get so screwed over by Dubya's miserable failures. Is it just the thrill of defeat you love?
You certainly don't need my help to represent yourself as an idiot.
However, I would be honored if you would designate me as a foe. I'd explain why, but the explanation is too complicated for an idiot above a certain caliber.
Boy, this topic touches a nerve. Dubya's residual neo-GOP in Texas just disenfranchised me this year. They think voting is a sacred boon, whereas I was just some kind of idiot who thought it was a sacred right, and even something of a public duty.
I was born in Texas, and have an honorable discharge from the military. I even graduated from a university in Harris County. I've never been charged as a felon--but I don't live in America now. Until this year they've mostly allowed me to vote, but they are extra desperate this time around, so the representative of the Secretary of State's Office told me I can't vote.
Anyone know a good lawyer for this sort of thing? I really wouldn't mind sticking it to them, and hard. However, I think it's basically a case of you can't fight city hall. Dubya has the gold, so he made the rules.
Come on and tell the truth. Have you [ptbarnett] *EVER* actually been asked to participate in an exit poll? Of course, you could claim you have--but you've already told us that you're a liar, so I still wouldn't believe you.
Me? I believe in mathematics. It works very well.
In fact, it is quite possible to make appropriate mathematical allowances for voters who do choose not to answer or who choose to lie. The only way you could beat mathematics is by getting a large number of the randomly selected participants to lie with you--and it has to be systematic, too, or the liars' effects would mostly cancel each other out. Of course, in that case the pollsters would find out about the conspiracy and again make the appropriate adjustments. If they could collect sufficient information about the size of the conspiracy, it would actually improve the accuracy of their mathematical results. Of course that would depend on whether or not the conspirators are as stupid as you [ptbarnett] sound (based on the sample of one post).
Actually, the real problem with professional pollsters is that they can deliver any results you are paying them to deliver. However, that doesn't apply in the case of exit polling because in that case you would be paying them to adjust the exit polls to match the vote tampering. Not saying they won't get around to that in the future, but right now there are only two ways that the exit polls could significantly deviate from the actual results. One is that the exit pollsters are extremely lucky, on the order of winning a whole string of lotteries. The other way would be if the math is broken--but I've already stipulated that I believe in the math.
What you [ptbarnett] actually mean is that figures don't lie, but liars figure. Or maybe not, since you've already told us that you're a liar, and anything else you say becomes dubious.
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Hundreds of thousands of PCs using Vista? I had no idea Liechtenstein was so large.
Server is already /.ed?
Anyway, I live in one of the minor million-plus cities of Japan near Tokyo, and I just want to note that you can have a high-tech, high-quality lifestyle without destroying your environment. Whenever I hear a story like this, I think about running into quail the morning, almost literally. They are sometimes foraging within a few feet of the gate, and they figure people are basically harmless to about 3 meters. There's a little river two stations up, and it's heavily populated with half-meter carp. I walked about half a kilometer along it the other day, and there were almost always fish visible, and sometimes scores of fish. It's a matter of priorities, I think--but I was annoyed a couple of years ago when they cut down a pretty large bamboo grove and built a bunch of houses there...
Not sure of all of the reasons, but I feel like good mass transit is a big chunk of it. Heavy recycling probably helps, though they recently increased the garbage collection taxes quite a bit.
But Lehrer is a quitter. Not sure of the latest, but he was certainly alive during the early parts of Dubya's reign of miserable failure, and not a peep out of him.
Too bad /. is so boring these days... I'd have had a couple of juicy comments if anyone was still reading it, but these days I rarely stop by. Case in point: I searched this supposedly mature discussion for funny. Not so much.
Anyway, anything that annoys spammers is a-okay by me. There's a Shanghai outfit that hosts most of the twisty spam I see these days.
Are you really sure you need that particular job that badly?
For what little it's worth, I once encountered a similar moral dilemma, and I gave notice immediately. I haven't regretted it--and I'm pretty sure his business went down the tubes, too. At least I never heard of it again.
Actually, I work in support of a prominent research lab. I could answer almost all of your questions--but then I'd probably be expected to kill you. Some fraction of that response is a joke. What fraction of your life would you like to wager on it?
Substantively, I live in a dense urban region. Actually, I live in what is regarded as a suburban part of that region. I am almost always within range of several wireless networks or routers. When I travel to my office, I sometimes monitor the network access points as I travel, and it is very rare that I am completely out of range of a conventional wireless device. These devices are all capable of acting as wireless routers to each other--but they are generally configured not to do so. In addition, there are cellular phone networks that completely cover the region and which could be configured to help support the data communications network (though they are currently priced and marketed in a way that would mostly make that unattractive--though my packets are currently reaching you through a related wireless option that is obviously priced within my means).
Then again, our apparent disagreement about the reality may be because you live in the States or some other relatively primitive country. Perhaps your wireless connectivity resources are limited, whereas I'm currently residing in an advanced and civilized country, thus giving me a distorted view of reality.
No, that is not the translation.
Actually, I do speak a fair bit of Japanese, but his description did not bring any kotowaza (folk sayings) or yojijukugo (four-character slogans) to mind. He did remind me of kaizen, but his explanation went rather beyond that idea, which is often translated as 'continuous improvement'.
That is not true. BitTorrent automatically optimizes the distribution pattern for maximum efficiency, and the efficiency automatically increases as the number of copies increases. That is precisely because the closest peers will respond most quickly and thereby succeed in transmitting the most data.
An alternative way to consider it is if you were trying to design an optimum local caching strategy to minimize distant transfers. Bit torrents essentially make every copy into a local cache. How can you get higher than 100%?
I try to avoid such ambiguities...
The "they" who were little interested in TV were the people who were writing about the history of FM radio.
Your version of the history of FM does not agree with my sources--but I acknowledge that they were little interested in TV per se. My research was more focused on the use of patents to prevent the use of FM technologies because they were satisfied with the existing AM business model.
We need to tackle the spam problem as the economic issue it is. We should work to make sure that the spammers can't make any money from their spamming activities. We're evolving in that direction now, but it would have been a lot better if SMTP had included some real economic modeling there...
Rather a poor joke, but I blame Al Gore, even though I admire and respect him. He kept telling them not to worry about money--he'd worry about that part for them. Okay, so it led to faster progress that way, but they still should have kept (economic) reality in mind.
Actually, the way I imagine it is that there would be a pool of movies available locally, perhaps within a large urban wireless network. When you wanted a new movie, you would (perhaps automatically) delete some older movie (that you hadn't watched in a long time) from your disk, and download it from other people who already had copies of that movie. However, before you deleted your old movies, they would have already been copied somewhere else. (It would also be beneficial to have a regional metric of movie 'value' that was related to scarcity, so rare movies would become less likely to be deleted completely.)
I don't understand the excessive focus on BitTorrent, but this is more of a barter situation. We can both be downloading the same file from various other sources and from each other, and both of us (and the rest of the network) are all benefiting at the same time. The long-distance data traffic is automatically reduced, because the local connections are faster precisely because they are local.
One case in point is the Ubuntu distributions, where their servers basically go nuts when a major release goes out. If they did this with a BitTorrent default, everyone would be better off.
I have been paying attention, I am not new here, but I was trying to be polite. Also, I believe that in the long-term, you can't win against reality. For example, FM did become popular displaced AM in many applications.
I actually think the ultimate solutions call for local accounting and a lot of resource sharing. Essentially your computer may request shared resources, but the neighboring computers should 'compare notes' before deciding how much help to give. If you've been playing fair, for example, by helping with the caching and redistribution of their files and email, then they'll give you normal cooperation. If you're a leech, always asking but giving back little, then you'll get low priority and relatively little service. If you're extra generous, for example by providing extra caching storage or a long-distance network connection, then the neighbors (the neighboring computers) will also keep track of that and be beholden to you (as represented by your computer) and they will be obliged to give you extra help in return.
The technologies themselves and the technical possibilities inherent in those technologies are not going to go away.
I'm going to pretend that you're being humorous rather than a purely non-constructive arse with a tired wit. However, because I don't have much of sense of humor, I'm not going to waste a lot of time on you. Nor am I going to waste any time defending my geek credentials.
Much of the problem is the so-called last mile. This is precisely where wireless networks could address much of the bandwidth constraints. In conjunction with active local caching and BitTorrent or similar protocols, the entire situation can be changed and improved. Perhaps a concrete example is the best approach for your stiff head. Consider the situation where a lot of network traffic is consumed with video such as the Daily Show. Imagine that you do the initial distribution with BitTorrent, effectively caching the local copies for the relatively brief period of high interest. Most obviously, you greatly reduce long-distance network traffic from the central location, but with the local use of wireless networks, a great deal of the traffic will be completely off the wired network, since it will be distributed within dense urban hubs. They could still have their DRM (several mechanisms already exist)--and even date the files for expiration (though I believe that would be an extension into the area of BitTorrent-like protocols).
Actually, one of the new technologies we need is variable-power wireless networks (with more range than BlueTooth). By scaling down the transmission power as the node density goes up, you can effectively maintain local bandwidth as a constant. The total power consumption does increase, but that's because you have more nodes, but the main constraint on efficiency is how effectively you can cache the data. Interestingly enough, time-limited video is especially suitable for distributed caching.
Put up the "foe" or shut up--and we all know you aren't going to shut up.
My "problem" with morons like you is that I see no reason to repeat the truth. Trueth stands on its own merits. You didn't get it the first 47 times you ran across it, so I think it would be crazy to expect you to understand it just because I repeated the truth for the 48th time. The only thing crazier is your hope that repeating the lies will somehow make them true.
I was a heavy user of GBS for a while. Very nice tool, but they never did fix very problematic bugs in the bookmark syncing part of it. I almost immediately gave up on the windows syncing, and I had fairly quickly stopped using the cookie-syncing part when I discovered the cookies were breeding like coat hangers in a closet. Essentially there was too much state information that wasn't been tracked but which was needed to make things work properly, especially for the bookmarks.
As noted by many others, Foxmarks does a good job of the bookmark part of syncing. The heuristics are kind of flawed, but it's never caused the kinds of bookmark disasters that were frequent with GBS.
The last feature of GBS that I abandoned was the password syncing. This was an extremely useful capability and (AFaIK) unique to GBS. I'm not sure it was working correctly, but rather it may have had some of the same problems as the bookmark syncing, but less severe, perhaps because of the absence of dividers or more consistency in the way different versions handled the passwords. However, this may have been the security-related problem that caused Google to abandon the idea. The security model was actually very good (if I understand it properly). The encryption and decryption were handled on the client side, and Google's servers actually had no access to the data, just storing the encrypted files. You were the sole owner of your security key--and many people then proceeded to lose it and then complained to Google about the 'lost' data. (I think Google should have tried to set up some kind of key escrow service, but I don't blame them for steering clear of that difficult business.)
So much stupidity, so little time.
Tell you what. Please take a couple of actual history courses and read a couple of books. And as a special favor, please designate me a foe. One can never have too many imbeciles as foes.
What a fuckwad. No, I only read the first few words, so congratulations on wasting your time. Looked like about 30 lines, so it must have taken 2 or 3 hours, right?
Case one: 9/11 was preventable, but Dubya failed to prevent it.
Case two: 9/11 was not preventable, and then we're all doomed.
By the way, how many times have you repeated all of those dittohead lies? You seem to have them down pretty pat, but why can't you believe them yet? After all, if you were so sure, you wouldn't need to keep ranting, would you?
Maybe one more rep will do it, right?
Actually, I regard you as a typical rightwing lunatic and would be distinctly honored if you designated me a foe. The only part that makes me wonder is what you personally get out of seeing America get so screwed over by Dubya's miserable failures. Is it just the thrill of defeat you love?
You certainly don't need my help to represent yourself as an idiot.
However, I would be honored if you would designate me as a foe. I'd explain why, but the explanation is too complicated for an idiot above a certain caliber.
Gosh, I wish I could get you into a poker game. Oh wait. I'm sure it's too late and you're bankrupt. Do drop us a line when you find work, right?
Boy, this topic touches a nerve. Dubya's residual neo-GOP in Texas just disenfranchised me this year. They think voting is a sacred boon, whereas I was just some kind of idiot who thought it was a sacred right, and even something of a public duty.
I was born in Texas, and have an honorable discharge from the military. I even graduated from a university in Harris County. I've never been charged as a felon--but I don't live in America now. Until this year they've mostly allowed me to vote, but they are extra desperate this time around, so the representative of the Secretary of State's Office told me I can't vote.
Anyone know a good lawyer for this sort of thing? I really wouldn't mind sticking it to them, and hard. However, I think it's basically a case of you can't fight city hall. Dubya has the gold, so he made the rules.
Come on and tell the truth. Have you [ptbarnett] *EVER* actually been asked to participate in an exit poll? Of course, you could claim you have--but you've already told us that you're a liar, so I still wouldn't believe you.
Me? I believe in mathematics. It works very well.
In fact, it is quite possible to make appropriate mathematical allowances for voters who do choose not to answer or who choose to lie. The only way you could beat mathematics is by getting a large number of the randomly selected participants to lie with you--and it has to be systematic, too, or the liars' effects would mostly cancel each other out. Of course, in that case the pollsters would find out about the conspiracy and again make the appropriate adjustments. If they could collect sufficient information about the size of the conspiracy, it would actually improve the accuracy of their mathematical results. Of course that would depend on whether or not the conspirators are as stupid as you [ptbarnett] sound (based on the sample of one post).
Actually, the real problem with professional pollsters is that they can deliver any results you are paying them to deliver. However, that doesn't apply in the case of exit polling because in that case you would be paying them to adjust the exit polls to match the vote tampering. Not saying they won't get around to that in the future, but right now there are only two ways that the exit polls could significantly deviate from the actual results. One is that the exit pollsters are extremely lucky, on the order of winning a whole string of lotteries. The other way would be if the math is broken--but I've already stipulated that I believe in the math.
What you [ptbarnett] actually mean is that figures don't lie, but liars figure. Or maybe not, since you've already told us that you're a liar, and anything else you say becomes dubious.
I thought he was joking, but you really are impressively clueless.
I bet you still think the anti-Saddam war was a great idea. Not great enough for you to participate, but almost that great, right?