YEAH NO I AM AT THE MOVIES WHAT? NO, WE'RE IN THAT NEW FILM, YEAH IT'S GREAT (really shouting) HANG ON I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU YEAH THE GUY DIES AT THE END I'VE SEEN IT
This is due to the difference in income status between the rich and the poor in the US. The rich need the valuable infrastructure. The poor just need to live.
Absolute rubbish. The US is far from the Paris depicted in "Les Miserables", where the poor have to steal to live. These people are doing it because they think it will put them on the fast track to make them rich. Having an LCD television or supporting a drug habit is not "needing to live".
To think I almost cried at the plight of the "poor" in America after reading your post. NOT. I live in the REAL 3rd world, and I see REAL poverty every day.
God damn it I need another 25 pin to 9 pin adaptor, AND I need a gender bender! I wish those manufacturers would standardize... oh wait
Yeah I remember playing with jumpers and dip switches to avoid IRQ conflicts. Damn I am too old. Funnily enough, cyberspace was a lot quieter back then. The punks couldn't afford it. Looking at the present economy, they won't be able to afford it again soon.
I submit that all monopolies abuse their position sooner or later. What are you going to do about it? Especially when (looking innocently at the telcos) they own the politicians.
What's hurting Microsoft is pervasive management incompetence. This is the kind of thing that can happen when the money comes in too easily for too long.
It's a corporation thing - when managers start surrounding themselves with their pals and ass kissing flatterers instead of the right people for the job. This cancer eats at all companies from the inside, and it's just human nature. There are ways to deal with THAT kind of thing, but no one has the balls to do it.
Heh, reminds me of that cop that filed assault charges on a prisoner that farted next to him. Biological attack indeed. Taking things out of context and going to the extreme seems to be the fashion nowadays anyway.
because with the government there is accountablity, responsilibty, a paper trail, transparency
You have obviously never been fucked over by government. This means you are a) not rich and/or b) have never been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The government's JOB is to screw you. How else do you think they make money?
I think some politicians have seen too many episodes of CSI or NCIS where you have one person who "just hacks" into everything in minutes
Not to mention the bandwidth involved in searching several thousand megabytes multiplied by several million people, all at the same time. And they say "Bittorrent" is the cause of all bandwidth problems?
It's not in the government's best interest to solve violent crime. They WANT you to be afraid and lock your doors at night. It makes you nice and docile and grateful that the government is there to "protect" you - not that they will. So governments around the world make token efforts at catching real criminals, and usually give them a slap on the wrist before letting them go again - unless they are REALLY bad.
Besides, it's much easier to do data mining to find "child pornographers" since most of them won't fight back, or throw the book at school teachers who expose a class full of kids to porn pop up ads, or jail 18 year olds as pedophiles for sleeping with 17 year olds. It's easy to turn the screws and make an example of weaklings.
However this perversion of justice, the rampant abuse in the name of "child porn" and "terrorism" WILL bite the governments in the ass one day. Revolutions happen - they're a part of history, from ancient China to present times. Keep it up, governments, one day you will push the masses too far.
The mere fact that you are asking this question tells me you lack any kind of professional integrity.
Cool! I pressed my right mouse button and hit left Ctrl-Shift-Enter and typed in my birthday on your post, and managed to play that pong game you coded! Well done!!!
What about nuclear energy? That's two "energy sources".
"and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs."
Congratulations, I see you managed to read an entire line of text. Try a little harder and perhaps you can manage the second line next time.
In case you're still reading, one could argue that even nuclear isotopes can eventually be traced back to the fusion happening inside the sun, but that was long enough ago to perhaps consider nuclear to be a "second" power source, which is why I mentioned it as such.
It is not an energy source - it is an energy storage medium, little different than a battery.
The same as fossil fuels. The only "energy source" is the sun, that moves the wind and powers the waves and makes the plants grow and eventually turn into the mush we call petroleum, and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs.
The smart bit is if you manage to find a way to harness a huge amount of a non-portable energy source - like sun in the desert or waves in the ocean - energy that is really available in excess, and use THAT energy to make smaller, PORTABLE forms of energy that lets us move about.
Either way our current society will end when petroleum becomes really scarce. There's no way we can maintain a world where everyone has a car. As you pointed out, the inefficiencies just won't allow it. Trains will be coming back in style in a BIG way, and there will HAVE to be changes to our town planning. History teaches us that probably quite a bit of people will have to die before we accept this as a society though.
Nah, it's just that the negligible cost associated with producing each additional stream of packets of information really turns the internet into a socialized information utopia. See, I pay for my internet connection. You pay for yours. That should be it.
But the telcos are the ones really cashing in, as they have been ever since the first telegraph line. They have the capacity. The fiber is laid, and our monthly fees more than cover the depreciation and maintenance. They just don't want to give full access to you because they're a monopoly and they CAN charge whatever they want and make you think bandwidth is a scarce resource. After all they need to buy all those politicians to get their hands on every single communications medium out there, and to outlaw ones they couldn't possibly monopolize.
So they gouge you by charging an arm and a leg for those extra Mb/s, forcing you to look for revenue to cover this additional cost. But then you get greedy and say "well if I can cover my cost, I might as well make a profit too". Well you're welcome to try. I'm part of your cost of doing business, and I'm subsidized by the uninitiated. If you don't like it, block me. I'm sure there are others that provide the same service. Google is not that hard to use.
Sorry to be so frank, but that's the way it is - for now. When someone comes up with an "internet" where you HAVE to watch the ads, expect usage to disappear or expect something new to happen. People don't LIKE watching ads. First there was over the air TV, where you had no choice but to watch what was broadcast. Then came cable, where you had more choice as to what types of programming you wanted. Now there's the internet. Why should I pay $50 a month for 170 channels I don't want, when I can just download the episodes of my favorite show and watch it when I want instead of when the network feels like broadcasting? People want what they want and ONLY that.
Do you come to slashdot for the ads, or to engage in pseudo-intellectual arguments? Did you click on all the ads here?
It is when I buy it for my clinic. Syringes, 15, I sell them to you for $1.50. Suture, around $1.75 each pack last time I bought, and I sell them to you for $15. That's what happens when I have to pay between $20k and $60k a year (depending on the specialty and how many times I have been sued) in malpractice insurance premiums before covering other, simpler costs like "rent". You can thank the "jackpot justice" players and ambulance chasing lawyers for that.
Oh, I guess you could buy your own sutures for $1.75 but no, "This item is restricted for sale only to or by order of a physician". Sorry.
Of course be careful at hospitals, they sometimes rip you off in illegal ways, like charging you for a whole box of medication when all they gave you was one pill. Always check your bill. I do.
You are taking the site's bandwidth - something which actually costs money, and are not willing to 'suffer' through a slight delay to make sure the site you obviously like so much (hence visit) stays profitable, or even able to pay for its own bandwidth costs. You cheap bastard.
Whatever arrangement a site may have with an ad agency, and whatever "business model" the site owner may think he has, I haven't agreed to it. Sure, bandwidth costs money. However the site owner expects to make a profit from ad revenue, at the expense of my time. I never consented to donate my time in exchange for cash for some "greedy bastard".
Not looking at ads, going to make a sandwich during tv commercials or even turning the tv off is NOT a crime! It's no different on the internet. If I have software that blocks ads, I have every right to use it.
Skin isn't just the rigid layer of dead cells covered in keratin that you're used to seeing. Lots of interesting things happen under the basement membrane in the "extra-cellular matrix". Cells aren't just glued to each other but rather they produce and surround themselves with different proteins - some for rigidity and others to allow flexibility and elasticity.
This matrix becomes more fluid at higher temperatures as the proteins unwind and change shape with the heat. The theory is that if you have two pieces of matrix close enough to each other and increase the temperature, some of the proteins from either side of the wound will entangle with the opposite side, and remain entangled when the temperature is lowered again, kind of like velcro on a molecular level. The trick is to provide just enough temperature to get the proteins to entangle with each other, without putting so much temperature that they end up destroyed.
Anyway surgeons have known about cauterization for a long time. It helps fix all those little mistakes (oops who put that artery there...). There's nothing more fun than watching a bleeder turn into a brown and black bubbling mess of protein goo - but goo that no longer bleeds.
It would be interesting to know how this "new" technique holds up under different conditions - sepsis, metabolic disorders like diabetes, etc. And of course how much trouble is the patient in if ever there's a dehiscence? At least with sutures, the other sutures are there to keep the wound reasonably closed...
To instantly send the cost of that $7500 surgery to $15,000. After all, SOMEONE has to finance, maintain and insure that $300,000 laser machine because a $2 package of 3-0 nylon monofilament just won't do nowadays. Hey do we still have the machine that goes "bing"?
"Customers... will be offered a free upgrade... as long as they purchase"
The complete ignorance of the majority of people where money is concerned is what has us in this whole financial crisis. It's NOT FREE IF YOU HAVE TO PAY SOMETHING, DAMMIT. At best this is a "membership" or "subscription" deal that has lots of strings attached to make sure it's very easy for you NOT to get your upgrades (like say losing the original receipt or not registering within 21 days (from TFA)), and forces you to pay an undetermined amount for the rest of your life to the manufacturer.
Reading the fine print you will probably find out that they can change the price or cancel the plan whenever they want without notice. And of course what guarantee do you have that your "replacement" will be a competitive model?
Slashdot Mirror
YEAH NO I AM AT THE MOVIES WHAT? NO, WE'RE IN THAT NEW FILM, YEAH IT'S GREAT (really shouting) HANG ON I CAN BARELY HEAR YOU YEAH THE GUY DIES AT THE END I'VE SEEN IT
please god no
This is due to the difference in income status between the rich and the poor in the US. The rich need the valuable infrastructure. The poor just need to live.
Absolute rubbish. The US is far from the Paris depicted in "Les Miserables", where the poor have to steal to live. These people are doing it because they think it will put them on the fast track to make them rich. Having an LCD television or supporting a drug habit is not "needing to live".
To think I almost cried at the plight of the "poor" in America after reading your post. NOT. I live in the REAL 3rd world, and I see REAL poverty every day.
They makes those by the billion every year^H^H^H^H^H week.
Fix'd.
God damn it I need another 25 pin to 9 pin adaptor, AND I need a gender bender! I wish those manufacturers would standardize... oh wait
Yeah I remember playing with jumpers and dip switches to avoid IRQ conflicts. Damn I am too old. Funnily enough, cyberspace was a lot quieter back then. The punks couldn't afford it. Looking at the present economy, they won't be able to afford it again soon.
I submit that all monopolies abuse their position sooner or later. What are you going to do about it? Especially when (looking innocently at the telcos) they own the politicians.
What's hurting Microsoft is pervasive management incompetence. This is the kind of thing that can happen when the money comes in too easily for too long.
It's a corporation thing - when managers start surrounding themselves with their pals and ass kissing flatterers instead of the right people for the job. This cancer eats at all companies from the inside, and it's just human nature. There are ways to deal with THAT kind of thing, but no one has the balls to do it.
I'm pretty sure the airport can generate anger,fear, and frustration in most people.
Especially if that airport is Atlanta.
AFAIK, there's no biometric scans of the 9/11 terrorists
AFAIK the TSA has not caught a SINGLE terrorist. Even the "shoe bomb" guy made it onto the plane, and was stopped by his fellow passengers.
Heh, reminds me of that cop that filed assault charges on a prisoner that farted next to him. Biological attack indeed. Taking things out of context and going to the extreme seems to be the fashion nowadays anyway.
because with the government there is accountablity, responsilibty, a paper trail, transparency
You have obviously never been fucked over by government. This means you are a) not rich and/or b) have never been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The government's JOB is to screw you. How else do you think they make money?
I think some politicians have seen too many episodes of CSI or NCIS where you have one person who "just hacks" into everything in minutes
Not to mention the bandwidth involved in searching several thousand megabytes multiplied by several million people, all at the same time. And they say "Bittorrent" is the cause of all bandwidth problems?
It's not in the government's best interest to solve violent crime. They WANT you to be afraid and lock your doors at night. It makes you nice and docile and grateful that the government is there to "protect" you - not that they will. So governments around the world make token efforts at catching real criminals, and usually give them a slap on the wrist before letting them go again - unless they are REALLY bad.
Besides, it's much easier to do data mining to find "child pornographers" since most of them won't fight back, or throw the book at school teachers who expose a class full of kids to porn pop up ads, or jail 18 year olds as pedophiles for sleeping with 17 year olds. It's easy to turn the screws and make an example of weaklings.
However this perversion of justice, the rampant abuse in the name of "child porn" and "terrorism" WILL bite the governments in the ass one day. Revolutions happen - they're a part of history, from ancient China to present times. Keep it up, governments, one day you will push the masses too far.
who the hell is Redo, where is start, and what does he want anyway?
Anthill inside!
The mere fact that you are asking this question tells me you lack any kind of professional integrity.
Cool! I pressed my right mouse button and hit left Ctrl-Shift-Enter and typed in my birthday on your post, and managed to play that pong game you coded! Well done!!!
"and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs."
Congratulations, I see you managed to read an entire line of text. Try a little harder and perhaps you can manage the second line next time.
In case you're still reading, one could argue that even nuclear isotopes can eventually be traced back to the fusion happening inside the sun, but that was long enough ago to perhaps consider nuclear to be a "second" power source, which is why I mentioned it as such.
It is not an energy source - it is an energy storage medium, little different than a battery.
The same as fossil fuels. The only "energy source" is the sun, that moves the wind and powers the waves and makes the plants grow and eventually turn into the mush we call petroleum, and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs.
The smart bit is if you manage to find a way to harness a huge amount of a non-portable energy source - like sun in the desert or waves in the ocean - energy that is really available in excess, and use THAT energy to make smaller, PORTABLE forms of energy that lets us move about.
Either way our current society will end when petroleum becomes really scarce. There's no way we can maintain a world where everyone has a car. As you pointed out, the inefficiencies just won't allow it. Trains will be coming back in style in a BIG way, and there will HAVE to be changes to our town planning. History teaches us that probably quite a bit of people will have to die before we accept this as a society though.
The phrase "self-centered prick" comes to mind.
Nah, it's just that the negligible cost associated with producing each additional stream of packets of information really turns the internet into a socialized information utopia. See, I pay for my internet connection. You pay for yours. That should be it.
But the telcos are the ones really cashing in, as they have been ever since the first telegraph line. They have the capacity. The fiber is laid, and our monthly fees more than cover the depreciation and maintenance. They just don't want to give full access to you because they're a monopoly and they CAN charge whatever they want and make you think bandwidth is a scarce resource. After all they need to buy all those politicians to get their hands on every single communications medium out there, and to outlaw ones they couldn't possibly monopolize.
So they gouge you by charging an arm and a leg for those extra Mb/s, forcing you to look for revenue to cover this additional cost. But then you get greedy and say "well if I can cover my cost, I might as well make a profit too". Well you're welcome to try. I'm part of your cost of doing business, and I'm subsidized by the uninitiated. If you don't like it, block me. I'm sure there are others that provide the same service. Google is not that hard to use.
Sorry to be so frank, but that's the way it is - for now. When someone comes up with an "internet" where you HAVE to watch the ads, expect usage to disappear or expect something new to happen. People don't LIKE watching ads. First there was over the air TV, where you had no choice but to watch what was broadcast. Then came cable, where you had more choice as to what types of programming you wanted. Now there's the internet. Why should I pay $50 a month for 170 channels I don't want, when I can just download the episodes of my favorite show and watch it when I want instead of when the network feels like broadcasting? People want what they want and ONLY that.
Do you come to slashdot for the ads, or to engage in pseudo-intellectual arguments? Did you click on all the ads here?
Nothing is anywhere near as cheap as $2.
It is when I buy it for my clinic. Syringes, 15, I sell them to you for $1.50. Suture, around $1.75 each pack last time I bought, and I sell them to you for $15. That's what happens when I have to pay between $20k and $60k a year (depending on the specialty and how many times I have been sued) in malpractice insurance premiums before covering other, simpler costs like "rent". You can thank the "jackpot justice" players and ambulance chasing lawyers for that.
Oh, I guess you could buy your own sutures for $1.75 but no, "This item is restricted for sale only to or by order of a physician". Sorry.
Of course be careful at hospitals, they sometimes rip you off in illegal ways, like charging you for a whole box of medication when all they gave you was one pill. Always check your bill. I do.
No one says they can't try to make a buck, and there's nothing really dishonest here.
Of course, expect your "replacement" to be the bottom of the barrel, and expect your fees to go up. I'm sure it's all in that fine print somewhere.
Then again, you could keep your money and do something with it in the meantime. It's your choice.
You are taking the site's bandwidth - something which actually costs money, and are not willing to 'suffer' through a slight delay to make sure the site you obviously like so much (hence visit) stays profitable, or even able to pay for its own bandwidth costs. You cheap bastard.
Whatever arrangement a site may have with an ad agency, and whatever "business model" the site owner may think he has, I haven't agreed to it. Sure, bandwidth costs money. However the site owner expects to make a profit from ad revenue, at the expense of my time. I never consented to donate my time in exchange for cash for some "greedy bastard".
Not looking at ads, going to make a sandwich during tv commercials or even turning the tv off is NOT a crime! It's no different on the internet. If I have software that blocks ads, I have every right to use it.
I'm pretty sure I've operated with you before....
Ah, a voice from the "other" side of the "blood-brain barrier"!
Remember that one way or the other, ALL patients eventually stop bleeding...
You anesthesiologists always want to rush things. No wonder it's always your fault.
Second, since when does a skin melt?
Skin isn't just the rigid layer of dead cells covered in keratin that you're used to seeing. Lots of interesting things happen under the basement membrane in the "extra-cellular matrix". Cells aren't just glued to each other but rather they produce and surround themselves with different proteins - some for rigidity and others to allow flexibility and elasticity.
This matrix becomes more fluid at higher temperatures as the proteins unwind and change shape with the heat. The theory is that if you have two pieces of matrix close enough to each other and increase the temperature, some of the proteins from either side of the wound will entangle with the opposite side, and remain entangled when the temperature is lowered again, kind of like velcro on a molecular level. The trick is to provide just enough temperature to get the proteins to entangle with each other, without putting so much temperature that they end up destroyed.
Anyway surgeons have known about cauterization for a long time. It helps fix all those little mistakes (oops who put that artery there...). There's nothing more fun than watching a bleeder turn into a brown and black bubbling mess of protein goo - but goo that no longer bleeds.
It would be interesting to know how this "new" technique holds up under different conditions - sepsis, metabolic disorders like diabetes, etc. And of course how much trouble is the patient in if ever there's a dehiscence? At least with sutures, the other sutures are there to keep the wound reasonably closed...
To instantly send the cost of that $7500 surgery to $15,000. After all, SOMEONE has to finance, maintain and insure that $300,000 laser machine because a $2 package of 3-0 nylon monofilament just won't do nowadays. Hey do we still have the machine that goes "bing"?
"Customers ... will be offered a free upgrade ... as long as they purchase"
The complete ignorance of the majority of people where money is concerned is what has us in this whole financial crisis. It's NOT FREE IF YOU HAVE TO PAY SOMETHING, DAMMIT. At best this is a "membership" or "subscription" deal that has lots of strings attached to make sure it's very easy for you NOT to get your upgrades (like say losing the original receipt or not registering within 21 days (from TFA)), and forces you to pay an undetermined amount for the rest of your life to the manufacturer.
Reading the fine print you will probably find out that they can change the price or cancel the plan whenever they want without notice. And of course what guarantee do you have that your "replacement" will be a competitive model?
Unfortunately, only government can really fix that.
I'm sorry, it seems you have used the words "government" and "fix" in the same sentence in a nonsensical manner...
What needs to be fixed IS the government, which can't fix anything - unless it's any excess money you might have.