I think they just decided that Scientology wasn't a religion, but a business cum Ponzi scheme in clerical collars.
Also I think what they prohibited wasn't the practice of Scientology per se, but the Church of Scientology as an organization. That the CoS believes you can't practice the 'religion' without them is kind of a separate issue. But if you want to sit in your house and think Scientology thoughts in Germany, I think you'd be protected. They just take a dim view of the whole converting-others-and-fleecing-them bit. Historically, even religiously tolerant societies have had different reactions to aggressive proselyting.
It is a bit arbitrary, since I could think of a few other religions that aren't a ton better, but you have to admit the CoS is particularly bald-faced.
> Seriously, ISO should drop all other work and start thinking about some vaguely coherent and transparent voting procedures.
Well, if their current voting procedures are flawed and prone to manipulation by parties with an obvious interest in the outcome, then nothing they produce can really be trusted to be the best practice. Since it undermines everything they do as a standards body, I'd say fixing their voting procedures to eliminate the appearance of impropriety ought to be their top priority.
... And a fighter jet is really just a pile of aluminum sheet-metal scraps; why the hell does it cost so much?
It's mostly in the construction. In a parallel bus, if the various wires inside the cable aren't all of the same length and twisted properly, you'll get problems. Same if the shielding is bad, or if the connections between the wires and the pins aren't great. And of course, if you make the wires with thin, heavily-adulterated copper to begin with, it's all downhill from there.
A plant that's producing cables with an emphasis solely on cost-per-unit probably isn't going to be as attentive to minute details, like the number of turns put into various pairs, or maintaining a consistent temperature in the solder when the pins are being attached (too cold and you get bad joints and whiskers). They're almost certainly not going to be breaking out a time-domain reflectometer to test them against the spec before packaging -- you're probably lucky if they even bother to slap a continuity tester on and make sure all the pins are connected. Quality control isn't necessarily cheap, and at least in my experience it seems to be the first thing to go.
Like any other product, at the very high end there are probably SCSI cables that are more snake oil than anything really different, but there's a vast difference between 'good' cables and bargain-bin/generic ones. Admittedly, sometimes with the cheap ones you get lucky (I'm not going to lie, I have a few sitting around from desperation purchases of one sort or another), but it's always a gamble. You pay for consistency.
I think you're close to the point, but there's a strong issue of cost involved.
In many situations, you can make a solid business case for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In many businesses, the mainframes ain't broke, and nobody's in a hurry to fix them. Yes, IBM charges rather phenomenally for support when your machines start to get long in the tooth -- but they have a relatively straightforward upgrade path (to new mainframes) that's cheaper for many people than moving to commodity systems would be.
After all, the people who run mainframes aren't going to buy a bunch of whitebox machines and just cross their fingers and hope they work -- they want support and reliability and equivalent featuresets. By the time you take commodity systems and make them and make them perform like a mainframe, and then make them as reliable as a mainframe, and then you add on the cost of support and maintenance equivalent to what you get with a mainframe... suddenly you're talking about a sizable pile of dough. Factor in the cost of porting lots of legacy applications, or finding replacement for modern packages that don't have 100% equivalents on commodity hardware (such things do exist), and in retraining or replacing staff who have decades of experience in your mainframe platform and how it functions in your business, and the case for buying the newest z/Series or midrange is clear.
I think most people would be surprised how much stuff that they count on being on-time and correct but don't think about -- things like their bank statements, phone bills, etc. -- are handled on large systems. And not necessarily creaky old 'legacy' ones, either, but bright shiny new ones.
I don't know if this is a serious question or not, but one assumes that the lasers will operate in completely sealed environments (e.g. inside an IC package) or over optical fibers if they need to traverse free space. I think the intra-package situation is probably more common; you could communicate from one core to another on the same die using a laser rather than a wired interconnect and hopefully have less interference/RF/capacitance issues to deal with. This also makes sense given what I know about modern types of laser diodes (especially Vertical Cavity ones) -- they can be created on silicon wafers through similar processes to the way transistors are laid down.
I can't think of any good reason why you'd just be aiming a laser through the empty space inside a PC's case.
> Indeed. The best evidence of this is that there's still no iTunes for Linux, even though there are more Linux users than Mac users nowadays.
Perhaps when you include servers, but every study I've ever seen has shown OS X at around 6-7% and Linux at around 1-2% of client machines.
To be honest I'd be pretty comfortable with it the other way around: when Apple was in a real bind, they embraced open source and open standards, but now that they're doing a little better it's back to sealed boxes and proprietary stacks.
Well, although it's really odd for me to be arguing in favor of any religion, I think the New Testament sort of has that issue covered. There's actually kind of a whole section on it, the "Epistle to the Hebrews" (generally just cited as "Hebrews" or "Heb."). It basically summarizes God's New Deal. Sacrifices and that stuff in Deuteronomy is out, Jesus is in, and God is going to handle punishing people in the hereafter from now on so you don't have to. Depending on which translation/version you read, it's pretty blunt:
Heb. 8:6-13 KJV
But now hath [God] obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no place have been sought for the second. For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued not in my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.
Basically, that crazy stuff in Deuteronomy, that's all part of the Old Covenant -- "that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt" -- and no longer applies. It doesn't go so far as to say that God made an error, rather the fault was with the Hebrews. But because God's just a nice guy, he's giving everyone a great big do-over with some more relaxed rules.
Anyway, that's the religion. The history of it is more complicated, but my understanding is that it's thought to have been written by an anonymous, erudite follower of Paul, basically in response to a lot of confusion (aka "heresy") over the relationship between the new Christian teachings and the older Hebrew/Jewish ones, sometime around 100 CE. The intended audience would have been Jewish-Christian converts facing persecution for their religion, and who might have been considering apostasy. (cf. WP) It was added to the canon sometime in the 4th Century (though wrongly attributed to Paul) and has pretty much been The Final Word on the topic pretty much ever since.
> Ultimately, however, Google depends on quality web sites, because without it, a search engine would be pointless. So it's a beautiful equilibrium where one can only exist if the other does as well.
This seems to be assuming that "quality web sites" are all or even mostly ad-driven. I'm just not sure that this is the case.
The Internet had a lot of content on it before advertising took off as a business model, and even if advertising revenue collapsed tomorrow (as it's predicted to do every so often by various people, not that I put any credence in it), there would still be a lot of content left. Sure, you'd lose the for-profit "blogosphere", and probably quite a bit of news would retreat behind paywalls, and community sites like Slashdot would have to pass the hat to users more aggressively to stay in business. But there's an awful lot of the WWW that's put up and paid for without ads. Lots of corporate sites, political sites, personal pages, quasi-philanthropic efforts like Wikipedia... still more than enough to require a good search engine.
The Internet created and gave birth to search engines because there was a demand for search. After starting with search, Google then got into advertising, and a whole lot of sites got spawned as a result. Google-as-search preceded Google-as-advertising; those sites who depend on Google for advertising revenue would be good to remember that. They need Google far more than Google needs them.
Those are Old Testament quotes; they're mostly all superceded by the New one.
Now I'm not one, generally, to defend any religion over any other. I think they're all fairly stupid, because I think the whole concept of faith -- intentional, willing arationality -- is tantamount to poking your own eyes out with a stick. But it's really not hard to see that there are many greater... challenges, to put it nicely... taking the violence out of Islam's texts than out of the mainstream Christian canon, especially when it's the Old Testament that's being quoted.
At least with the OT/NT, you have the advantage of the warm fuzzy, love-your-neighbor, Jesusy parts coming after, and thus superceding, all the crazy old-school OT stuff. There are still some NT parts you need to perform mental gymnastics to defang, but at least Deuteronomy is covered.
The Koran is a lot more difficult. Rather than have the nice parts come at the end, a lot of them are at the beginning, apparently superceded by parts that seem (on a superficial level, anyway) to encourage violence. Most people can see the issue here: it's relatively easy to read the Koran and come up with a pretty nasty set of rules; it's harder and requires more study and interpretation to come up with one that's moderate. So if you're looking to either denigrate Islam, or recruit a bunch of terrorists, it's not difficult to find violent passages, and the counterarguments against them are complex and nuanced. (It's not as easy as just claiming the supercession of basically everything in the Old Testament with the New, as a Christian can when confronted with a ridiculous instruction like the "kill your brother" one from Deuteronomy 13:7-12.)
It seems to me that there are actually a lot of parallels between the Muslim and Jewish systems, in terms of both lacking central authorities to answer matters of dogma, and instead relying on individual scholars. The fact that very violent modern interpretations of Jewish scripture are relatively rare, despite the text itself having some rather questionable commands in it (like Deuteronomy), is evidence enough to me that you can successfully maintain a relevant modern religion with a really ancient and scary holy text, if you try hard enough. The problem is just getting people to try.
> You know this is the richest nation in the world we're arguing about, right?
I must have missed that segue. I thought we were talking about a nation that's up to its collective eyeballs in debt and still burning hard currency like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
> and says that Catholics are apostates (non-believers).
Politics aside, isn't that pretty much SOP for most religions? I mean, if they agreed with each other, they probably wouldn't be separate. Any time you have two distinct religious groups, both of whom claim to be descended from the same original founder or have the same mandate, chances are they're going to be accusing each other of some type of heresy or apostasy.
The Vatican, along with most of the other major churches, typically doesn't rail against other Christian sects mostly because (IMO, anyway) they prefer to take a more understated, confident approach. However, their official doctrine is pretty clear on the points where they split. E.g., I believe the official position of the Eastern Orthodox Church to this day is that the "filioque clause" (part of the Nicene Creed) according to the Roman Catholic church is heretical, and the Catholic position is vice versa. You can find similar bones of contention between basically all of the various Christian denominations.
> And secondly, doesn't the same logic apply to all sorts of other things like living on the bottom of the ocean, growing wheat in Antarctica and diving into volcanoes?
Yes, it does. But space travel occupies a sort of "sweet spot" -- it's almost universally viewed as cooler and more worthy of funding and effort than the other things you mentioned (at least in the U.S.), and it's also within the realm of possibility at our current technological level, yet challenging.
It's envelope-pushing for the sake of envelope-pushing, just like many other things in human history have been.
Personally I think it would be nice if we also spent lots of money pushing the boundaries of human capability in other arenas as well (exploring the deep ocean or drilling into the planet's mantle are two obvious choices which have received only sporadic funding), but it's comparatively easy to get the public excited about space, and that translates into a willingness to expend tax dollars on it. Drilling boreholes is decidedly less sexy. [Insert mandatory borehole humor here.]
I suspect that the number of websites running on home servers which also had a high enough profile to make it into the database when they were defaced, is quite small.
Although I think administrators are to blame, I don't think it's a "home user" versus "professional" problem. (And seriously, do you really think there aren't tons of script kiddies running pirated copies of IIS? Just because you want to use it doesn't mean you have to pay for it.) I think a lot of the blame probably lies with crummy web-based administration tools. Without regular updates, those things can be an easy remote root, which is why a lot of experienced admins won't touch them and instead use SSH (which with pubkey auth is pretty secure). However, a lot of low-cost vhosting facilities push webmin tools to users who don't know any better, and the combination of poor tools plus inexperience is deadly.
Another device that comes to mind -- although I can't remember firmly enough exactly when it came out to argue that it was "first" -- was the Pontis MPlayer3. It was definitely one of the first ones that I remember seeing, and from the archived press releases I can find, I think it came out in the Summer (Jul-Aug, maybe a bit earlier) of 1998. The German company that produced it limped along for a long time afterwards, producing some Linux-based devices in fact, although they now seem to have been subsumed by 'Arcus Audio' which makes non-portable gear.
I always thought that the Pontis was a good design and deserved more success than it got, but it was an example of a bet on other technology that failed to pay off. The design didn't have any internal memory, and depended entirely on MMC cards for storage. At the time that meant 16 or, if you could find them, 32MB cards. (Data transfer through the serial port, no less.) Although the price on Flash memory eventually did come down to dirt-cheap levels, it took a lot longer than some of the rosy predictions Pontis made, and when really big cards did arrive, they came in the form of cripped SD cards rather than MMC... and the Pontis wouldn't use SD cards.
I still have one of them kicking around somewhere. They had their strengths: the physical design was nice (no moving parts!), they ran a long time on two AA batteries, and the controls were simple enough to use without looking at the display, even if you were wearing gloves. The iPod could take a few lessons from it, frankly, particularly on that last measure. But it's all but useless now: although the cards it used were regular MMCs, they used a weird proprietary filesystem on the cards, and they can't be read or written to without the special reader and software.
It'll be interesting to see how long those cards hold their data for; years from now I wonder if I'll be able to stick some batteries in it and groan at my questionable taste in late-90s pop.
The answer is because they have immunity. I think the GP assumed that you knew this, since virtually all public officials have personal immunity from civil suits when acting in the performance of their duties in the U.S., outside of some fairly narrowly-defined exceptions. He was more getting into the issue of why public officials have immunity -- it's because the solution to a misbehaving politician isn't supposed to be a lawsuit, it's voting them out the next time they're up for reelection.
Since lawsuits could be used by a powerful minority to effectively hamstring the government, producing potentially very undemocratic outcomes, there's always been a strong tendency towards limiting their use (the other big example would be the blanket prohibition on suing the government itself, except where the government itself allows it, via sovereign immunity).
However, it stinks at times like these, when you want an authority to go to to punish actions for a registrar (an d I know some registrars have been shut down, but for more egregious actions).
That's a terrible idea. If such an 'authority' existed, it would be far more likely to be on eNom's side than users'. The Internet only exists in anything approaching the form we've gotten used to because there's so little centralized control, particularly over content.
I think you're making a rather strained assumption, namely that technology will always overpower individuals' attempts to retain or preserve their privacy using the same sort of technologies that destroys them in the first place. And I don't think there's any evidence for that. There will always be ways to hide things you don't want others to know about; in fact I'd argue that technology offers a lot more ways of living out your fantasies without anyone (who knows you in real life) knowing, than in some hypothetical Luddite world.
Privacy isn't going away, it's just changing. The only people who are going to "lose" any privacy are those who are too inflexible to move with the change and use the technology to preserve their privacy. It's the people who think that just because they don't see any big honking TV cameras with lights, that what they're doing or saying won't end up on the evening news or YouTube. That might have been a good assumption once, but it's not good now. However, technology also gives you lots of ways to shoot your mouth off anonymously, if you wish. The name of the game is choosing the appropriate venue in light of the technology.
I don't really think this is a new or unique situation. When people started moving in from rural areas into the cities, they inevitably faced a loss of some assumed privacies. If you live in a house in the middle of the woods, you can walk around in your back yard in your birthday suit and be pretty confident that nobody's going to see you. You can't stand on your balcony in a highrise and be confident of the same thing. People adapted; their ideas of where it was safe to assume that they have privacy changed. And life moved on, perhaps even arguably for the better (if you're an urbanite, anyway). In return for living in the city, a whole lot of things that wouldn't have been possible to do without attracting a lot of attention or censure in a small town are now possible.
I see that as being a fairly good example of what's happening to the world in general as it becomes more connected and incorporates more information technology. Some old ideas of 'privacy' will become less than relevant, but to new generations who grow up in that environment, it will have entirely new definitions. They will never assume that you can get your mail in your underwear without the world watching, but they'll never know that it wasn't always considered intrusive to 'out' someone's real name online.
The only risk in all this is that, as the technology develops, we might allow untrustworthy people too much access to it -- in the form of wiretap or anti-encryption laws, for instance -- that will hamper the creation of new private spaces even as old ones are rendered obsolete and irrelevant by technology. That strikes me as a real danger and one that we have to be vigilant about. No amount of security is worth turning over the keys to what will increasingly be huge portions of our lives to authorities, however innocuous or beneficent they may seem today.
they should move first class to the back of the plane and then all the rich fucks might have to see how crappy the rest of the plan is.... I suspect the reason they're flying First Class is because they know exactly how crappy the rest of the plane is...
While of course it's a bit unfeasible to have everyone downloading 6Mb/s streams from the other side of the world, constantly, I think you're making an error in jumping from "video on demand" to "Internet video."
VoD movies, in HD, is quite feasible with current-generation technologies. You could basically have a big media server sitting at the cable/telco headend, or even down at the neighborhood level. It'd have a few dozen TB of content on it, and basically act like a local cache -- it would refill or get unknown content over a small number of backhaul links while serving lots of downstream customers. When you wanted to see a movie, it would probably only have to come from that machine, not the other side of the world (for the vast, vast majority of content).
The connection into your house would only have to be (HD stream bandwidth)*(no. of receivers you pay for). And of course, the streams would be heavily compressed -- as MP3s have shown, most people don't really care that much about quality as long as the product is recognizable.
You press a button, the movie starts. From the end-user's perspective, that's all that would matter.
All that said, I'm not willing to write off physical media just yet, but for different reasons. I don't think they're a better deal for the consumer, but the movie studios will keep them around because they know they can make more money selling a physical product to people who want the very newest releases. It's a form of price discrimination: you can only wring so much out of an all-you-can-eat subscription service, which is where I think HD content will end up in the mass market. But if you sell a $30 shiny plastic disc for a while before you put it on the service, you can extract more revenue from a relatively small sub-population of consumers. So it makes good business sense to keep them around even if they're unpopular compared to alternatives. (And their usefulness for computer data storage will keep the mechanisms and discs in production for a while, anyway.)
Well, I would think it's probably dealt with in a lot of basic business textbooks, but I don't have any handy to refer you to at the moment. If your situation is related to supply chain (which covers a lot), "The Management of Business Logistics" by Coyle (Amazon here, although I'm sure you can pick up old editions for next to nothing) is fairly decent. I'm not sure how specifically it's going to address your particular situation, but at least the introductory chapter or two ought to be worth reading.
This is incorrect. Horizontal monopolies -- dominating most of the business in a particular sector (e.g. Standard Oil, Microsoft) can run you afoul of the law if the monopoly position is used to restrain trade.[^1] Vertical monopolies -- owning a small piece of many different sectors in order to control the entire supply chain for a particular end product -- has never really been frowned upon except in very specific instances.[^2]
It was considered a reasonably good business practice until fairly recently (I'd say prior to the 1970s but you could debate this) to own as much of your critical supply chain as you practically could, and to this end you saw companies like Goodyear running rubber plantations, Alcoa (an aluminum producer) operating power plants, IBM operating chip fabs, etc.
The decline of vertically-integrated enterprises is more about flexibility and maturity of markets than regulation. You don't see Dell running its own fabs or turning out its own microprocessors, and you don't see Intel manufacturing finished computers and sending out salespeople and maintenance techs to end users, the way IBM used to. Both companies are intensely focused on what they perceive to be their 'core competency' (that the phrase itself has become a managementspeak cliche is a testament to how pervasive the idea has become) while leaving the rest to outside suppliers and vendors. This allows them to be more flexible than traditional vertically-integrated companies,[^3] but it requires the market to be relatively mature: if there wasn't a plethora of hardware manufacturers in Asia willing and capable of turning out Dell products, Dell wouldn't be able to operate the way they do.
Nobody -- besides perhaps the shareholders -- is keeping Dell from owning and operating its own chip fabs, assembly factories, or trucking networks, from owning the entire supply chain from sand and oil wells to tech support. They don't play in any of those sectors because there's no need to: I suspect there's a pretty long line of companies who want to be Dell's chip supplier, assembler, or shipper of choice. (And those suppliers have their own suppliers, eventually going all the way back to the silica or oil or whatever.) As evidenced by Dell's market share compared to IBM's (and IBM's subsequent reorganizations away from a traditionally vertically-integrated company), there seems to be merit to the whole scheme, at least from a business perspective.
[1] Having a monopoly by itself isn't sufficient, you have to have the position and abuse it; this is per some early 20th century U.S. Steel case that I can't find at the moment.
[2] You get to a vertical monopoly (as opposed to just integration) when by controlling the full supply chain you can eliminate other players in the market for the end good by driving costs down to the point where they can't compete; however since you don't fully control any single aspect of the supply chain, you have to maintain this level of performance in order to maintain the monopoly position -- you can't just rest on your laurels once it's accomplished, as you can with a horizontal monopoly. If you slack off and try to increase costs, your un-integrated competitors can reappear (subject to re-entry costs). For this reason, vertical monopolies aren't regulated to the same extent horizontal monopolies are, and some people would argue they're actually good for consumers in some situations.
[3] I think that you could argue that at the same time companies have become less focused on vertical integration as a path to success, many companies have started creeping out horizontally and looking for the other kind of monopoly. The intense specialization that modern business practice extols seems like it inevitably encourages monopolization of niche markets; vertical integration seems to encourage more competition. (Since companies with massive investments in a huge in-house supply chain want to wring profit out of it in any way possible, even if it means manufacturing some
Why not let the counterweight do work as well? Suppose you have a contraption with two equal mass carts, into which you can place a driving mass. When the heavier cart reaches the bottom, you simply take the mass out and place it in the cart at the top. The machine then functions much like an hourglass, and has a certain symmetry to it that I would call attractive. Yeah that would work pretty well. I kinda suspect that most of these movements have been used in mechanical clocks in times past. In fact now that I'm thinking about it, I think I've seen a clock that was 'rewound' by moving plate weights from one counterweight stack to another (one stack would fall, the other would rise, when one got near the bottom, you'd move the weights).
There are probably some clocks around that have been in continuous or nearly-continuous operation for hundreds of years; any of them would probably provide good design ideas.
From Google's POV, owning the pipes make perfect sense. Politics - they don't get screwed if net neutrality goes away. It's an end-run around all those eyeing their profit enviously. You own the pipes, you get to see what goes through them. I'd be dieing for data like that. This is called a vertical monopoly. It's really no different than railroads in the 19th century owning a portion of a coal mine in order to ensure they had adequate fuel and weren't entirely dependent on an outside supplier. For reasons that I'm not sure of, but I think basically boil down to flexibility, vertical monopolies have fallen out of favor in most sectors (e.g. transportation) in recent years, in favor of security-through-diversity rather than security-through-ownership. For example, lately many businesses that ran their own delivery services (example I'm aware of, a large regional bread bakery) are outsourcing them in order to focus on their 'core competency' (baking bread) while leaving the delivery to a company that specializes in that.
The difference is, I think, that security through diversification and outsourcing requires a fairly mature business environment with many players to choose from. If you're the bakery who's considering eliminating your delivery department and going with an outside vendor for that purpose, you'd want to make sure there were many choices of delivery services, so that you're not tied too closely to one. If lots of choices and diversity don't exist, it might make sense to keep it in-house. Since Internet services are a relatively immature business environment, and a large content-provider like Google has few backbone providers to choose from, it makes sense that they're looking to secure their position by bringing things in-house.
What's ironic is that the one thing that the telcos absolutely oppose -- network neutrality enforced by legislation -- would probably remove much of Google's incentive to build out backbone capacity. If the telcos were forced to provide nondiscriminatory service, suddenly there's no risk for Google of being extorted. With the disappearance of that risk also goes the impetus to be their own backbone provider. (I think there are historical parallels in the early 20th century with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act and its accompanying regulation of goods transport, although the waters are muddied by the power that the transportation and industry cartels held in the ICC and in government.)
property tax is just on land, not on the various other things you own Yeah, tell that to my Personal Property tax bill. If you're in a locale that doesn't tax vehicles and other high-value items of personal property, consider yourself lucky. Most places have them; some tax specific items (vehicles, boats, RVs), while others just set a minimum dollar value for taxation and go after all durable goods beyond that point, generally with exceptions granted for non-durable and household goods.
I've lived in states where property taxes were aggressively enforced by municipalities on such varied things as artwork, out-of-state or un-plated vehicles (even if it was never registered or driven on public roads), even office furniture and equipment. In the U.S., sometimes they're administered -- and therefore vary -- at the state level, in other areas it's devolved down to the city/town/county level.
Some states (Florida that I'm aware of specifically) had/have an "intangible personal property" tax, specifically on things like stocks, bonds, bearer notes, money market funds, pretty much anything that's worth anything. Florida's was recently repealed, but it's not like the concept is totally foreign or anything.
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> Now you get the absolute dog's nadgers on a plate for nowt.
Wait, Wireshark will give you real-time quotes of the dog-testicles-to-newts exchange ratio? I've been waiting for that feature for years!
I think they just decided that Scientology wasn't a religion, but a business cum Ponzi scheme in clerical collars.
Also I think what they prohibited wasn't the practice of Scientology per se, but the Church of Scientology as an organization. That the CoS believes you can't practice the 'religion' without them is kind of a separate issue. But if you want to sit in your house and think Scientology thoughts in Germany, I think you'd be protected. They just take a dim view of the whole converting-others-and-fleecing-them bit. Historically, even religiously tolerant societies have had different reactions to aggressive proselyting.
It is a bit arbitrary, since I could think of a few other religions that aren't a ton better, but you have to admit the CoS is particularly bald-faced.
> Seriously, ISO should drop all other work and start thinking about some vaguely coherent and transparent voting procedures.
Well, if their current voting procedures are flawed and prone to manipulation by parties with an obvious interest in the outcome, then nothing they produce can really be trusted to be the best practice. Since it undermines everything they do as a standards body, I'd say fixing their voting procedures to eliminate the appearance of impropriety ought to be their top priority.
... And a fighter jet is really just a pile of aluminum sheet-metal scraps; why the hell does it cost so much?
It's mostly in the construction. In a parallel bus, if the various wires inside the cable aren't all of the same length and twisted properly, you'll get problems. Same if the shielding is bad, or if the connections between the wires and the pins aren't great. And of course, if you make the wires with thin, heavily-adulterated copper to begin with, it's all downhill from there.
A plant that's producing cables with an emphasis solely on cost-per-unit probably isn't going to be as attentive to minute details, like the number of turns put into various pairs, or maintaining a consistent temperature in the solder when the pins are being attached (too cold and you get bad joints and whiskers). They're almost certainly not going to be breaking out a time-domain reflectometer to test them against the spec before packaging -- you're probably lucky if they even bother to slap a continuity tester on and make sure all the pins are connected. Quality control isn't necessarily cheap, and at least in my experience it seems to be the first thing to go.
Like any other product, at the very high end there are probably SCSI cables that are more snake oil than anything really different, but there's a vast difference between 'good' cables and bargain-bin/generic ones. Admittedly, sometimes with the cheap ones you get lucky (I'm not going to lie, I have a few sitting around from desperation purchases of one sort or another), but it's always a gamble. You pay for consistency.
I think you're close to the point, but there's a strong issue of cost involved.
... suddenly you're talking about a sizable pile of dough. Factor in the cost of porting lots of legacy applications, or finding replacement for modern packages that don't have 100% equivalents on commodity hardware (such things do exist), and in retraining or replacing staff who have decades of experience in your mainframe platform and how it functions in your business, and the case for buying the newest z/Series or midrange is clear.
In many situations, you can make a solid business case for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In many businesses, the mainframes ain't broke, and nobody's in a hurry to fix them. Yes, IBM charges rather phenomenally for support when your machines start to get long in the tooth -- but they have a relatively straightforward upgrade path (to new mainframes) that's cheaper for many people than moving to commodity systems would be.
After all, the people who run mainframes aren't going to buy a bunch of whitebox machines and just cross their fingers and hope they work -- they want support and reliability and equivalent featuresets. By the time you take commodity systems and make them and make them perform like a mainframe, and then make them as reliable as a mainframe, and then you add on the cost of support and maintenance equivalent to what you get with a mainframe
I think most people would be surprised how much stuff that they count on being on-time and correct but don't think about -- things like their bank statements, phone bills, etc. -- are handled on large systems. And not necessarily creaky old 'legacy' ones, either, but bright shiny new ones.
I don't know if this is a serious question or not, but one assumes that the lasers will operate in completely sealed environments (e.g. inside an IC package) or over optical fibers if they need to traverse free space. I think the intra-package situation is probably more common; you could communicate from one core to another on the same die using a laser rather than a wired interconnect and hopefully have less interference/RF/capacitance issues to deal with. This also makes sense given what I know about modern types of laser diodes (especially Vertical Cavity ones) -- they can be created on silicon wafers through similar processes to the way transistors are laid down.
I can't think of any good reason why you'd just be aiming a laser through the empty space inside a PC's case.
> Indeed. The best evidence of this is that there's still no iTunes for Linux, even though there are more Linux users than Mac users nowadays.
Perhaps when you include servers, but every study I've ever seen has shown OS X at around 6-7% and Linux at around 1-2% of client machines.
To be honest I'd be pretty comfortable with it the other way around: when Apple was in a real bind, they embraced open source and open standards, but now that they're doing a little better it's back to sealed boxes and proprietary stacks.
Heb. 8:6-13 KJV
Basically, that crazy stuff in Deuteronomy, that's all part of the Old Covenant -- "that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt" -- and no longer applies. It doesn't go so far as to say that God made an error, rather the fault was with the Hebrews. But because God's just a nice guy, he's giving everyone a great big do-over with some more relaxed rules.
Anyway, that's the religion. The history of it is more complicated, but my understanding is that it's thought to have been written by an anonymous, erudite follower of Paul, basically in response to a lot of confusion (aka "heresy") over the relationship between the new Christian teachings and the older Hebrew/Jewish ones, sometime around 100 CE. The intended audience would have been Jewish-Christian converts facing persecution for their religion, and who might have been considering apostasy. (cf. WP) It was added to the canon sometime in the 4th Century (though wrongly attributed to Paul) and has pretty much been The Final Word on the topic pretty much ever since.
> Ultimately, however, Google depends on quality web sites, because without it, a search engine would be pointless. So it's a beautiful equilibrium where one can only exist if the other does as well.
... still more than enough to require a good search engine.
This seems to be assuming that "quality web sites" are all or even mostly ad-driven. I'm just not sure that this is the case.
The Internet had a lot of content on it before advertising took off as a business model, and even if advertising revenue collapsed tomorrow (as it's predicted to do every so often by various people, not that I put any credence in it), there would still be a lot of content left. Sure, you'd lose the for-profit "blogosphere", and probably quite a bit of news would retreat behind paywalls, and community sites like Slashdot would have to pass the hat to users more aggressively to stay in business. But there's an awful lot of the WWW that's put up and paid for without ads. Lots of corporate sites, political sites, personal pages, quasi-philanthropic efforts like Wikipedia
The Internet created and gave birth to search engines because there was a demand for search. After starting with search, Google then got into advertising, and a whole lot of sites got spawned as a result. Google-as-search preceded Google-as-advertising; those sites who depend on Google for advertising revenue would be good to remember that. They need Google far more than Google needs them.
Those are Old Testament quotes; they're mostly all superceded by the New one.
... challenges, to put it nicely ... taking the violence out of Islam's texts than out of the mainstream Christian canon, especially when it's the Old Testament that's being quoted.
Now I'm not one, generally, to defend any religion over any other. I think they're all fairly stupid, because I think the whole concept of faith -- intentional, willing arationality -- is tantamount to poking your own eyes out with a stick. But it's really not hard to see that there are many greater
At least with the OT/NT, you have the advantage of the warm fuzzy, love-your-neighbor, Jesusy parts coming after, and thus superceding, all the crazy old-school OT stuff. There are still some NT parts you need to perform mental gymnastics to defang, but at least Deuteronomy is covered.
The Koran is a lot more difficult. Rather than have the nice parts come at the end, a lot of them are at the beginning, apparently superceded by parts that seem (on a superficial level, anyway) to encourage violence. Most people can see the issue here: it's relatively easy to read the Koran and come up with a pretty nasty set of rules; it's harder and requires more study and interpretation to come up with one that's moderate. So if you're looking to either denigrate Islam, or recruit a bunch of terrorists, it's not difficult to find violent passages, and the counterarguments against them are complex and nuanced. (It's not as easy as just claiming the supercession of basically everything in the Old Testament with the New, as a Christian can when confronted with a ridiculous instruction like the "kill your brother" one from Deuteronomy 13:7-12.)
It seems to me that there are actually a lot of parallels between the Muslim and Jewish systems, in terms of both lacking central authorities to answer matters of dogma, and instead relying on individual scholars. The fact that very violent modern interpretations of Jewish scripture are relatively rare, despite the text itself having some rather questionable commands in it (like Deuteronomy), is evidence enough to me that you can successfully maintain a relevant modern religion with a really ancient and scary holy text, if you try hard enough. The problem is just getting people to try.
> You know this is the richest nation in the world we're arguing about, right?
I must have missed that segue. I thought we were talking about a nation that's up to its collective eyeballs in debt and still burning hard currency like a drunken sailor on shore leave.
> and says that Catholics are apostates (non-believers).
Politics aside, isn't that pretty much SOP for most religions? I mean, if they agreed with each other, they probably wouldn't be separate. Any time you have two distinct religious groups, both of whom claim to be descended from the same original founder or have the same mandate, chances are they're going to be accusing each other of some type of heresy or apostasy.
The Vatican, along with most of the other major churches, typically doesn't rail against other Christian sects mostly because (IMO, anyway) they prefer to take a more understated, confident approach. However, their official doctrine is pretty clear on the points where they split. E.g., I believe the official position of the Eastern Orthodox Church to this day is that the "filioque clause" (part of the Nicene Creed) according to the Roman Catholic church is heretical, and the Catholic position is vice versa. You can find similar bones of contention between basically all of the various Christian denominations.
> And secondly, doesn't the same logic apply to all sorts of other things like living on the bottom of the ocean, growing wheat in Antarctica and diving into volcanoes?
Yes, it does. But space travel occupies a sort of "sweet spot" -- it's almost universally viewed as cooler and more worthy of funding and effort than the other things you mentioned (at least in the U.S.), and it's also within the realm of possibility at our current technological level, yet challenging.
It's envelope-pushing for the sake of envelope-pushing, just like many other things in human history have been.
Personally I think it would be nice if we also spent lots of money pushing the boundaries of human capability in other arenas as well (exploring the deep ocean or drilling into the planet's mantle are two obvious choices which have received only sporadic funding), but it's comparatively easy to get the public excited about space, and that translates into a willingness to expend tax dollars on it. Drilling boreholes is decidedly less sexy. [Insert mandatory borehole humor here.]
I suspect that the number of websites running on home servers which also had a high enough profile to make it into the database when they were defaced, is quite small.
Although I think administrators are to blame, I don't think it's a "home user" versus "professional" problem. (And seriously, do you really think there aren't tons of script kiddies running pirated copies of IIS? Just because you want to use it doesn't mean you have to pay for it.) I think a lot of the blame probably lies with crummy web-based administration tools. Without regular updates, those things can be an easy remote root, which is why a lot of experienced admins won't touch them and instead use SSH (which with pubkey auth is pretty secure). However, a lot of low-cost vhosting facilities push webmin tools to users who don't know any better, and the combination of poor tools plus inexperience is deadly.
Another device that comes to mind -- although I can't remember firmly enough exactly when it came out to argue that it was "first" -- was the Pontis MPlayer3. It was definitely one of the first ones that I remember seeing, and from the archived press releases I can find, I think it came out in the Summer (Jul-Aug, maybe a bit earlier) of 1998. The German company that produced it limped along for a long time afterwards, producing some Linux-based devices in fact, although they now seem to have been subsumed by 'Arcus Audio' which makes non-portable gear.
... and the Pontis wouldn't use SD cards.
I always thought that the Pontis was a good design and deserved more success than it got, but it was an example of a bet on other technology that failed to pay off. The design didn't have any internal memory, and depended entirely on MMC cards for storage. At the time that meant 16 or, if you could find them, 32MB cards. (Data transfer through the serial port, no less.) Although the price on Flash memory eventually did come down to dirt-cheap levels, it took a lot longer than some of the rosy predictions Pontis made, and when really big cards did arrive, they came in the form of cripped SD cards rather than MMC
I still have one of them kicking around somewhere. They had their strengths: the physical design was nice (no moving parts!), they ran a long time on two AA batteries, and the controls were simple enough to use without looking at the display, even if you were wearing gloves. The iPod could take a few lessons from it, frankly, particularly on that last measure. But it's all but useless now: although the cards it used were regular MMCs, they used a weird proprietary filesystem on the cards, and they can't be read or written to without the special reader and software.
It'll be interesting to see how long those cards hold their data for; years from now I wonder if I'll be able to stick some batteries in it and groan at my questionable taste in late-90s pop.
The answer is because they have immunity. I think the GP assumed that you knew this, since virtually all public officials have personal immunity from civil suits when acting in the performance of their duties in the U.S., outside of some fairly narrowly-defined exceptions. He was more getting into the issue of why public officials have immunity -- it's because the solution to a misbehaving politician isn't supposed to be a lawsuit, it's voting them out the next time they're up for reelection.
Since lawsuits could be used by a powerful minority to effectively hamstring the government, producing potentially very undemocratic outcomes, there's always been a strong tendency towards limiting their use (the other big example would be the blanket prohibition on suing the government itself, except where the government itself allows it, via sovereign immunity).
That's a terrible idea. If such an 'authority' existed, it would be far more likely to be on eNom's side than users'. The Internet only exists in anything approaching the form we've gotten used to because there's so little centralized control, particularly over content.
I think you're making a rather strained assumption, namely that technology will always overpower individuals' attempts to retain or preserve their privacy using the same sort of technologies that destroys them in the first place. And I don't think there's any evidence for that. There will always be ways to hide things you don't want others to know about; in fact I'd argue that technology offers a lot more ways of living out your fantasies without anyone (who knows you in real life) knowing, than in some hypothetical Luddite world.
Privacy isn't going away, it's just changing. The only people who are going to "lose" any privacy are those who are too inflexible to move with the change and use the technology to preserve their privacy. It's the people who think that just because they don't see any big honking TV cameras with lights, that what they're doing or saying won't end up on the evening news or YouTube. That might have been a good assumption once, but it's not good now. However, technology also gives you lots of ways to shoot your mouth off anonymously, if you wish. The name of the game is choosing the appropriate venue in light of the technology.
I don't really think this is a new or unique situation. When people started moving in from rural areas into the cities, they inevitably faced a loss of some assumed privacies. If you live in a house in the middle of the woods, you can walk around in your back yard in your birthday suit and be pretty confident that nobody's going to see you. You can't stand on your balcony in a highrise and be confident of the same thing. People adapted; their ideas of where it was safe to assume that they have privacy changed. And life moved on, perhaps even arguably for the better (if you're an urbanite, anyway). In return for living in the city, a whole lot of things that wouldn't have been possible to do without attracting a lot of attention or censure in a small town are now possible.
I see that as being a fairly good example of what's happening to the world in general as it becomes more connected and incorporates more information technology. Some old ideas of 'privacy' will become less than relevant, but to new generations who grow up in that environment, it will have entirely new definitions. They will never assume that you can get your mail in your underwear without the world watching, but they'll never know that it wasn't always considered intrusive to 'out' someone's real name online.
The only risk in all this is that, as the technology develops, we might allow untrustworthy people too much access to it -- in the form of wiretap or anti-encryption laws, for instance -- that will hamper the creation of new private spaces even as old ones are rendered obsolete and irrelevant by technology. That strikes me as a real danger and one that we have to be vigilant about. No amount of security is worth turning over the keys to what will increasingly be huge portions of our lives to authorities, however innocuous or beneficent they may seem today.
While of course it's a bit unfeasible to have everyone downloading 6Mb/s streams from the other side of the world, constantly, I think you're making an error in jumping from "video on demand" to "Internet video."
VoD movies, in HD, is quite feasible with current-generation technologies. You could basically have a big media server sitting at the cable/telco headend, or even down at the neighborhood level. It'd have a few dozen TB of content on it, and basically act like a local cache -- it would refill or get unknown content over a small number of backhaul links while serving lots of downstream customers. When you wanted to see a movie, it would probably only have to come from that machine, not the other side of the world (for the vast, vast majority of content).
The connection into your house would only have to be (HD stream bandwidth)*(no. of receivers you pay for). And of course, the streams would be heavily compressed -- as MP3s have shown, most people don't really care that much about quality as long as the product is recognizable.
You press a button, the movie starts. From the end-user's perspective, that's all that would matter.
All that said, I'm not willing to write off physical media just yet, but for different reasons. I don't think they're a better deal for the consumer, but the movie studios will keep them around because they know they can make more money selling a physical product to people who want the very newest releases. It's a form of price discrimination: you can only wring so much out of an all-you-can-eat subscription service, which is where I think HD content will end up in the mass market. But if you sell a $30 shiny plastic disc for a while before you put it on the service, you can extract more revenue from a relatively small sub-population of consumers. So it makes good business sense to keep them around even if they're unpopular compared to alternatives. (And their usefulness for computer data storage will keep the mechanisms and discs in production for a while, anyway.)
Well, I would think it's probably dealt with in a lot of basic business textbooks, but I don't have any handy to refer you to at the moment. If your situation is related to supply chain (which covers a lot), "The Management of Business Logistics" by Coyle (Amazon here, although I'm sure you can pick up old editions for next to nothing) is fairly decent. I'm not sure how specifically it's going to address your particular situation, but at least the introductory chapter or two ought to be worth reading.
This is incorrect. Horizontal monopolies -- dominating most of the business in a particular sector (e.g. Standard Oil, Microsoft) can run you afoul of the law if the monopoly position is used to restrain trade.[^1] Vertical monopolies -- owning a small piece of many different sectors in order to control the entire supply chain for a particular end product -- has never really been frowned upon except in very specific instances.[^2]
It was considered a reasonably good business practice until fairly recently (I'd say prior to the 1970s but you could debate this) to own as much of your critical supply chain as you practically could, and to this end you saw companies like Goodyear running rubber plantations, Alcoa (an aluminum producer) operating power plants, IBM operating chip fabs, etc.
The decline of vertically-integrated enterprises is more about flexibility and maturity of markets than regulation. You don't see Dell running its own fabs or turning out its own microprocessors, and you don't see Intel manufacturing finished computers and sending out salespeople and maintenance techs to end users, the way IBM used to. Both companies are intensely focused on what they perceive to be their 'core competency' (that the phrase itself has become a managementspeak cliche is a testament to how pervasive the idea has become) while leaving the rest to outside suppliers and vendors. This allows them to be more flexible than traditional vertically-integrated companies,[^3] but it requires the market to be relatively mature: if there wasn't a plethora of hardware manufacturers in Asia willing and capable of turning out Dell products, Dell wouldn't be able to operate the way they do.
Nobody -- besides perhaps the shareholders -- is keeping Dell from owning and operating its own chip fabs, assembly factories, or trucking networks, from owning the entire supply chain from sand and oil wells to tech support. They don't play in any of those sectors because there's no need to: I suspect there's a pretty long line of companies who want to be Dell's chip supplier, assembler, or shipper of choice. (And those suppliers have their own suppliers, eventually going all the way back to the silica or oil or whatever.) As evidenced by Dell's market share compared to IBM's (and IBM's subsequent reorganizations away from a traditionally vertically-integrated company), there seems to be merit to the whole scheme, at least from a business perspective.
[1] Having a monopoly by itself isn't sufficient, you have to have the position and abuse it; this is per some early 20th century U.S. Steel case that I can't find at the moment.
[2] You get to a vertical monopoly (as opposed to just integration) when by controlling the full supply chain you can eliminate other players in the market for the end good by driving costs down to the point where they can't compete; however since you don't fully control any single aspect of the supply chain, you have to maintain this level of performance in order to maintain the monopoly position -- you can't just rest on your laurels once it's accomplished, as you can with a horizontal monopoly. If you slack off and try to increase costs, your un-integrated competitors can reappear (subject to re-entry costs). For this reason, vertical monopolies aren't regulated to the same extent horizontal monopolies are, and some people would argue they're actually good for consumers in some situations.
[3] I think that you could argue that at the same time companies have become less focused on vertical integration as a path to success, many companies have started creeping out horizontally and looking for the other kind of monopoly. The intense specialization that modern business practice extols seems like it inevitably encourages monopolization of niche markets; vertical integration seems to encourage more competition. (Since companies with massive investments in a huge in-house supply chain want to wring profit out of it in any way possible, even if it means manufacturing some
There are probably some clocks around that have been in continuous or nearly-continuous operation for hundreds of years; any of them would probably provide good design ideas.
The difference is, I think, that security through diversification and outsourcing requires a fairly mature business environment with many players to choose from. If you're the bakery who's considering eliminating your delivery department and going with an outside vendor for that purpose, you'd want to make sure there were many choices of delivery services, so that you're not tied too closely to one. If lots of choices and diversity don't exist, it might make sense to keep it in-house. Since Internet services are a relatively immature business environment, and a large content-provider like Google has few backbone providers to choose from, it makes sense that they're looking to secure their position by bringing things in-house.
What's ironic is that the one thing that the telcos absolutely oppose -- network neutrality enforced by legislation -- would probably remove much of Google's incentive to build out backbone capacity. If the telcos were forced to provide nondiscriminatory service, suddenly there's no risk for Google of being extorted. With the disappearance of that risk also goes the impetus to be their own backbone provider. (I think there are historical parallels in the early 20th century with the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act and its accompanying regulation of goods transport, although the waters are muddied by the power that the transportation and industry cartels held in the ICC and in government.)
I've lived in states where property taxes were aggressively enforced by municipalities on such varied things as artwork, out-of-state or un-plated vehicles (even if it was never registered or driven on public roads), even office furniture and equipment. In the U.S., sometimes they're administered -- and therefore vary -- at the state level, in other areas it's devolved down to the city/town/county level.
Some states (Florida that I'm aware of specifically) had/have an "intangible personal property" tax, specifically on things like stocks, bonds, bearer notes, money market funds, pretty much anything that's worth anything. Florida's was recently repealed, but it's not like the concept is totally foreign or anything.