I think you could, if the ISO supported multiple tracks / sessions. I mostly use Toast's disc image format, not ISOs, because I only ever keep images for my own use and generally just temporary storage, and it handles these things just fine.
This isn't one of those CDs with anything really exotic going on where they've messed with the Red Book spec (at least that I have heard of), basically it's just an audio CD with a data track, and on that data track is the rootkit installer, set up so that it autoruns when the disc is inserted (unless of course you have autorun disabled, as you should). So there's no immediate reason why I can see why you couldn't copy it using a regular imaging program -- unless the rootkit has already installed itself on your system and prevents such programs from accessing the drive, that is.
I'm pretty sure that there is a $50 limit on credit card purchases made without a signature, that you make just by swiping the card through a reader.
A lot of gas stations I've been to have signs that say you need to reset the pump and reswipe every fifty dollars (which can mean several times, if you're filling the tank on a large truck or RV), or alternately can come inside and pay there and do it in one shot. I think the difference is that by going inside, you leave your card and have to sign the slip to pay, while outside you just swipe.
That's the best theory I had for it anyway: the CC companies would prefer that people not be able to spend hundreds of dollars without any sort of authentication (even though the signature checking is pretty minimal these days anyway). Maybe they think it cuts down on fraud.
Sadly, I burned most of my mod points yesterday, but I just wanted to voice my agreement with your post.
It's very easy on the surface to draw a parallel between radical Islam and the militant Irish republicans, but to do so is shortsighted. The biggest difference is that while the IRA (and its various offshoots) had a concrete political goal which their attacks were designed to further, radical Islam does not. The ultimate aim of Islamist attacks is orders of magnitude greater in scope than anything the IRA -- with their relatively narrow-minded political ambitions -- ever contemplated. Also, while the IRA had a command structure which could be targeted directly, and a political wing which could be negotiated with, radical Islam is decentralized and vaporous; negotiation or compromise with one group will not win concessions from another, because they do not necessarily share any common goal other than wanting to kill us.
The only paradigm I think might be useful to keep in mind comes from my discussions with traditional law enforcement officers who spent their early careers combating traditional organized crime syndicates, and were later confronted (perhaps confounded is the better word) by the rise of modern street gangs, which do not have an overarching command structure, and thus no head to cut off. Although their methods may sometimes be similar, and people in both may fall under the general classification of "criminal," the enforcement mechanisms useful against one may not be useful against another. Likewise, what works against one kind of "terrorist" may be completely inappropriate against another, and the enforcement methods that were useful at protecting us against politically-motivated, loosely state-based non-suicide terrorism might be completely impotent against stateless, religiously-motivated suicide attackers. In the same way that new criminal laws were made in the 1980s and 1990s to combat gang violence in the U.S., other governments may want to reconsider their existing anti-terrorism policies and legislation in light of today's threats.
I agree absolutely. Which is why, if Joe Sevenpack wants to reuse my code which I spent months writing, he's going to either use whatever license I want, or rewrite the functionality which my code offers himself. That's his option, I'm not forcing him to use anything of mine, merely offering it up under certain conditions. If he's agreeable to those conditions he can use the code without even having to ask -- if he doesn't, his loss.
In my opinion the major difference between the GPL and BSD license philosophies is that one focuses on the right of the code originator to determine how their work can be reused, while the other focuses on the rights of the reuser to make any kind of derivative work that they want. While there might be certain situations where I could be convinced that it would be in an author's best interest to use a BSD-style license in order to reach a wider audience than a GPL one might, these seem to be more the exception than a rule.
A person who is that far above the mean level of intelligence is never going to have a "normal" childhood; trying to force one on them is almost unspeakable cruelty, since the end result will at the very best be them realizing later that a great amount of their life was wasted, and at worst will be tragedy if they decide to kill or injure themselves or others.
I think people are missing an important point: what would have happened to this kid if he wasn't allowed to move as quickly as his mind would take him through school.
IMO a really intelligent person who's held back by society on account of their chronological age and forced to waste years of their life, surrounded by people who aren't nearly their intellectual equals, working on a curriculum that they could do in their sleep, and generally fostering a brooding hatred of mankind, is far more dangerous than if they were allowed to fully occupy themselves on whatever they wanted.
What would you rather have: this kid sitting around reading about super-string theory and flying cars while doted on by his parents / professors / society at large, or sitting in a classroom someplace thinking about how best to build a fuel-air explosive out of household materials and punish the school and society that has kept him back?
If the kid really is as intelligent as a lot of people seem to think he is -- and I haven't met him so I can't say, but obviously he's got a few people convinced if they're going to let him start university -- keeping him in a normal curriculum would have been only slightly more humane than just giving him a frontal lobotomy.
Yes, by letting him blow through what should have been his "childhood," he'll probably be doomed to a life of social ineptitude and will always be something of an oddity, at least for the next 20 years or so. The alternative, however, would not only destroy any potential he might have for contributing usefully to society, but also involves a not insubstantial risk of having him decide to take his frustration out on the people around him.
I guess I'm not understanding you. Are you seriously arguing that any one of Erdos, Pascal, Euler, Neumann, or Maclauren were "insignificant"? I can't imagine that was your point but I'm not sure how else to interpret your comment.
Sure, there were lots of child prodigies that probably burned out by the time they were 15 and never really did any of the things that people thought they would do when they were younger, but there do seem to be a fairly high percentage of great scientific minds who were obviously way above-average from a very early age.
That's pretty funny, because I'm reading my Gmail account right now using Lynx, which despite its many capabilities doesn't do ActiveX.
The only thing GMail requires is JavaScript and cookie support, and even that isn't required, you just get a "For a better Gmail experience, use a fully supported browser" message at the top of the screen.
To quote from their help page:
To take advantage of all Gmail has to offer, sign in to your account
from a fully-supported browser. The following browsers will give you
access to all of Gmail's features (each is available for free
download):
* Microsoft IE 5.5+ (download:Windows)
* Netscape 7.1+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Mozilla 1.4+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Mozilla Firefox 0.8+ (download: Windows Mac Linux)
* Safari 1.2.1+ (download: Mac)
If you don't have access to a fully supported browser, you can still
sign in to Gmail with almost any other browser.
For the price per MB of solid-state storage, you could make a double- or even quadruple-redundant RAID array, and probably buy yourself a nice set of noise-cancelling headphones...
Frankly I think the noise complaint is probably not going to be a big issue among most people, given that for example there is more ambient noise in my home just from the street outside, and in my office from the air handling / HVAC system, than is ever made by any of my computers' hard drives. You'd have to get that environmental 'noise floor' down very low for HD noise to become an issue. If your home or office is really that quiet, it's impressive. Pretty far from average though, I'd say. Especially since most computers have fairly noisy air-cooling systems anyway.
Unless perhaps there are some extremely noisy drives that I'm just not aware of -- the most recent one I've bought was a 120GB PATA model a year or so ago and I certainly can't hear whether it's spinning or not when my computer's case is closed. The last time I remember thinking a hard disk drive was noisy was in regards to an external one that sat under my Macintosh Classic II, and it held a whopping 20MB.:)
You have a good point, although I disagree with your conclusion. Let me play the devil's advocate for a minute:
Looking back just at some recent history, the U.S. has a tendency to come out pretty well out of these huge, global conflicts. Sure perhaps two isn't enough to make a pattern but it might be enough to cause people in the U.S. leadership, particularly neo-cons, to not back down if the rest of the world (or some other power) decided to play chicken.
You seem to assume that the U.S. would let the other guy win if push came to shove, and I'm not sure that's realistic. U.S. foreign policy -- and to be honest, American culture in general -- has never emphasized "live to fight another day." In fact one might argue that recently, it has been much the other way around. The United States is like a 900-pound gorilla, or a large bear: slow to respond, not particularly perceptive, but very destructive when it gets going.
Obvious example: The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 in a very public and spectacular -- but in the end numerically insignificant -- way, and responded by picking a couple countries that it wasn't particularly fond of and invading them, at enormous expense and very little gain. Why? Because a whole lot of Americans wanted to see somebody, somewhere, get the living shit bombed out of them on CNN, and there were marginal excuses for Afghanistan (supporting terrorism) and Iraq (WMDs). Really, they were just convenient: it is and was a Spanish-American War for the 21st Century.
By bringing up the war I am in no way implying that the U.S. would go so far as to bomb France (or anyplace else) over the Internet; just that there is very little evidence to suggest that America would fold in a contest of wills with some other nation, even if it appeared to everyone else that it would be the saner thing to do.
I'm not sure that if I were some other country, even one as big as China, and certainly not one as frankly insignificant as France, that I would go tweaking the U.S. Government and the American people by demanding that it turn over control of one of its crown jewels, the Internet.
Actually, my point is in agreement with yours -- the post that mine was in response to was so ambiguous I thought he was supporting the US position and that's what I was agreeing to, but later he made it clear that he was actually supporting the European/U.N. one (however he was more than a little rude about it and the post is rotting away at -1, Troll, as it should).
Most of the industrialized world would be harmed by the Internet becoming fragmented, but only a small percentage of the American net-using public would notice, and our financial systems would mostly remain intact. I think the rest of the world would immediately find themselves in a great deal of trouble.
This is especially true when you consider that the rest of the world holds an awful lot of U.S. government-backed debt that would suddenly be a lot less liquid without access to U.S. funds markets. If you look at the balance of money, there is a lot more foreign capital tied up in the United States than there is U.S. money abroad; people start to get very upset when they can't access or withdraw their money anymore. A government that disconnected itself from the 'States might find itself suddenly very unpopular with some of its most powerful citizens.
Although it's a very extreme scenario, I can imagine a situation in the future where the Internet becomes a "strategic" asset and a country which is perceived as threatening the integrity of the network would end up with it's accounts frozen, a sort of economic "nuclear option."
I have a strong feeling this is a troll, but whatever.
You do know that China decoupled from the dollar because of U.S. pressure to do so, right?
China's yuan was tied to the dollar so that the U.S. couldn't do exactly what it did -- devalue their currency (the USD) to make U.S. exports cheaper, while making imports more expensive. For example, a "weak" dollar relative to the Euro makes it more expensive for US citizens to buy French wine and travel to Europe, but makes Florida orange juice less expensive to Europeans, and makes the US a more attractive tourist destination. This is elementary macroeconomics.
The Chinese central bank and government, realizing that their economy is intimately dependent on exports TO the U.S., had their currency pegged to the dollar, so that if the dollar fell the yuan would fall along with it, so that Chinese imports would not become more expensive. So when the dollar fell, imports to the US from countries other than China (which had unpegged currencies) got more expensive, but Chinese ones didn't. Thus total Chinese marketshare of imports actually grew -- not what a lot of US lawmakers wanted to see.
As a result there was a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric for a few months, and a few people started publicly bringing up the topic of a special tariff against Chinese imports (or particular goods of which a majority come from China or are important to China) until the Chinese announced that they would decouple the yuan from the Dollar. This allows China's trade balance with the U.S. to be more easily affected by American policy, and IMO was something of a political loss for the Chinese -- although some would say it was a crutch they didn't need anyway at this point.
But I think that you, like a lot of people, misunderstand (or take too literally) what a "weak" currency means -- it isn't necessarily bad, and especially for a country with a large current account deficit some weakening is acceptable if it reduces imports and increases exports.
Correction -- yeah, yeah should have used preview:
"I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S."
should read:
"I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of all the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S."
Obviously, if you picked a particular place in the network (say Seoul, S.K., or anywhere outside of the U.S.) the majority of the traffic is probably local. My statement was meant to refer to the sum of ALL traffic on the global network, over some time interval. Otherwise it is rather trivially provable to be false.
You're probably going to get flamed for it, but that was pretty much the best five sentence summary of the situation and resulting U.S. position that I've heard in a while. Glad somebody said it.
The bottom-line issue is that the rest of the world wants the U.S. in their internet, a lot more than the U.S. -- generally speaking -- cares about being able to access the rest of the world. Think about the average user in the 'States (which is not the same as the average Slashdot user, so spare me your "but *I* access foreign content all the time" whining): if the rest of the world went black, there are quite a few people that wouldn't notice. They're using a U.S. ISP to access a U.S. backbone to get U.S.-created content off of a U.S.-based server. Although I've never seen a statistic, I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S.
The rest of the world and the U.N. can talk all they want about getting control of the internet and IP address allocation and everything else, but at the end of the day they are going to have to deal with the fact that if the United States Government and the people of the U.S. collectively say "from my cold, dead hands, Europe" they are clearly in the less advantageous negotiating position.
If you misappropriate (steal, bribe, etc.) a trade secret, the owner of that trade secret can turn around and sue you, and win an injunction against you to prevent you from using it to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, or force you to pay them royalties.
A third-party who acquired the secret once the "cat was out of the bag" but was not involved in the original misappropriation would be scot-free, but you couldn't just break into the Coca-Cola vault, steal the secret recipe, and start churning out Joe's Cola and expect not to get hammered in court for it.
This is the #1 reason why pharmaceutical patents -- those things that hippies really love to hate -- are critical to not just our economic but also physical well-being. If patents weren't allowed on "recipe" type things, which is all most drugs are, then there would be a big incentive for companies to keep their formulations secret, and only let them out to people who've signed miles of NDAs or carry a small piece of remote-detonating Semtex in their brain stem or something.
Patents may seem like a terrible idea because they give someone a monopoly for 15 or 20 years, but afterwards are free; their alternative is give companies a reason to keep their inventions and developments locked up in vaults forever, like Coca-Cola is.
They want to switch to Intel processors because they're perceived as being more powerful and cheaper, and also consume less power. I think it originated out of a general feeling on Apple's part that IBM wasn't putting enough time and money into the development of new PPC chips, and particularly into optimizing them for portable / low-power use (which was probably true: IBM has a use for the desktop versions in its servers but not really for the low-power ones, so they might have gotten lazy). Basically, Apple wasn't getting what they wanted from IBM -- whom they switched to when Motorola didn't perform back a few years ago -- and dumped the architecture in favor of Intel. There was some speculation that they wouldn't actually go to x86, but instead to one of the other Intel architectures, but this didn't last very long (and probably wouldn't have been very smart). By adopting x86 they get to ride on the coattails of all the development done by Intel, get the chips cheaper, but still sell them in a branded box that they can make a safe profit margin on.
Running the Mac OS on commodity hardware has always been anathema to Apple, and was never part of the equation. Apple doesn't make a huge amount of money on OS software-only sales (and in fact until this TPM thing didn't even have copy-protection or serialization on it's install CDs!) and it's expected that the hardware sales will always subsidize the OS development, and in return the OS draws customers to the platform. So expect Apple to be very vicious about stamping out any attempts to break their TPM protection and run OS X on commodity boxes; if that became widespread it could kill them overnight.
While I agree with your point completely, I think he was saying that the premium one pays for an Apple box versus a comparatively equipped non-Apple custom one is around $200. Of course that's pure speculation given that Apple hasn't released an x86 box yet, but it's not a completely ridiculous figure.
I don't think he was comparing a $1200 or $1600 Apple box to a $200 grey-case TigerDirect special, which is what it sounds like you thought he was comparing. I think he was saying that a $1000 Apple box would probably have the same specs as a $1000 Brand-X one. Perhaps I'm just misreading your comment.
Anyway, I do agree though that the premium for Apple hardware is almost always realized in the increased build quality -- they're superior to any mass-market computer I've seen (granted I've never really looked at those high-end Alienware ones, maybe they're the same).
If there was no "analog loophole" you'd only be able to use the cable company's DVR with your digital cable service.
Sounds like the cable company's dream come true, to me. No pesky VCRs that take cheap media and produce recordings that never expire, instead just a continuous stream of rental income from consumers whose store of videos only last as long as they're allowed to and disappear completely if they don't pay their monthly DVR bill.
A digital-only world is EXACTLY the type of future that the content providers would like to see, and it's exactly why I really wonder if 10 years from now I'm going to think wistfully back to the heady days of analog television, when I could plug my 20-year-old Brand-X television and VCR into my cable jack and for $20 a month get 80 channels of service, mine to timeshift to my heart's content.
As other people have said, nature abhors a vacuum. Capitalism does as well. As long as there is a demand for information -- regardless of it's eventual output format -- there will be a place for reporters and journalists.
The problem the print reporters are having are the same that many musical artists are having: the difficulty of separating their particular skill, which there will always be a demand for, from the existing distribution networks, which are becoming obsolete. Just because newspapers go away doesn't mean that there won't be journalists anymore, even professional ones, just that the way they get paid right now isn't going to stay the same.
That's not to say that the transition will be smooth, or that there won't be a whole lot of very painful convulsions in the industry, or that the journalism market of the future will support nearly as many people as it does now. I think it's fair to say in fact that it will not; but one has to distance themselves from the reporters as people and realize that this isn't necessarily bad, it's just a change of how business gets done and how the information gets to the people.
Journalism is, at the end of the day, storytelling. It's just a very niche brand of storytelling where the story that's being told is identical (or as nearly so as can be) to something that actually happened, or produces a perception that it is. That's a skill that transcends media: if the newspaper conglomerates went belly-up tomorrow, people in Des Moines would still want to know what's going on inside the Beltway in D.C., and eventually the market will figure out a way to deliver that information to them. It remains to be seen whether people are interested enough in having their news from a "professional" reporter to pay for it, as opposed to getting it from an amateur blogger or observer for free.
I think some people definitely will want to pay for that stamp of provenance, and will support a small number of professional, trained journalists and reporters. Others will be willing to pay for the service of combing the blogs and other non-professional contributions and aggregating it together in a way that suits their perspectives (and yes, biases). This is what the market demands, this is what the market will get.
The newspapers are dying because they're centered around delivering a service that a substantial portion of the public no longer wants: physical papers. However the public obviously does have a hunger for information. When the papers die and the root source of a lot of that information dries up, I think you will see that a lot of journalists who are now looking at a very bleak future see opportunities open up in unexpected places.
I agree with your points, and just thought I'd add my thoughts.
I think Apple used -- for a fairly short period, right around the OS 9 to X transition -- the name "OS X" to refer to the new product by itself. I think there was even a logo that was just those letters. I haven't seen it in a while though. But it's been totally purged and I can't find any trace of it now. It's all "Mac OS X."
My theory is that somebody in the marketing department finally wised up to the fact that their product's name IS NOT "OS X" but the "Mac OS" and they are currently selling version 10, represented by a roman numeral X. Therefore everything on their site right now is "Mac OS X"... this is pretty important because if the public gets the name of the product burned into their heads as "OS X" alone, then it'll be really difficult for them to ever sell a "Mac OS 12". Instead they'll have to go with "Mac OS X II" ('oh-ess-ecks-two'). Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you could, if the ISO supported multiple tracks / sessions. I mostly use Toast's disc image format, not ISOs, because I only ever keep images for my own use and generally just temporary storage, and it handles these things just fine.
This isn't one of those CDs with anything really exotic going on where they've messed with the Red Book spec (at least that I have heard of), basically it's just an audio CD with a data track, and on that data track is the rootkit installer, set up so that it autoruns when the disc is inserted (unless of course you have autorun disabled, as you should). So there's no immediate reason why I can see why you couldn't copy it using a regular imaging program -- unless the rootkit has already installed itself on your system and prevents such programs from accessing the drive, that is.
I'm pretty sure that there is a $50 limit on credit card purchases made without a signature, that you make just by swiping the card through a reader.
A lot of gas stations I've been to have signs that say you need to reset the pump and reswipe every fifty dollars (which can mean several times, if you're filling the tank on a large truck or RV), or alternately can come inside and pay there and do it in one shot. I think the difference is that by going inside, you leave your card and have to sign the slip to pay, while outside you just swipe.
That's the best theory I had for it anyway: the CC companies would prefer that people not be able to spend hundreds of dollars without any sort of authentication (even though the signature checking is pretty minimal these days anyway). Maybe they think it cuts down on fraud.
Sadly, I burned most of my mod points yesterday, but I just wanted to voice my agreement with your post.
It's very easy on the surface to draw a parallel between radical Islam and the militant Irish republicans, but to do so is shortsighted. The biggest difference is that while the IRA (and its various offshoots) had a concrete political goal which their attacks were designed to further, radical Islam does not. The ultimate aim of Islamist attacks is orders of magnitude greater in scope than anything the IRA -- with their relatively narrow-minded political ambitions -- ever contemplated. Also, while the IRA had a command structure which could be targeted directly, and a political wing which could be negotiated with, radical Islam is decentralized and vaporous; negotiation or compromise with one group will not win concessions from another, because they do not necessarily share any common goal other than wanting to kill us.
The only paradigm I think might be useful to keep in mind comes from my discussions with traditional law enforcement officers who spent their early careers combating traditional organized crime syndicates, and were later confronted (perhaps confounded is the better word) by the rise of modern street gangs, which do not have an overarching command structure, and thus no head to cut off. Although their methods may sometimes be similar, and people in both may fall under the general classification of "criminal," the enforcement mechanisms useful against one may not be useful against another. Likewise, what works against one kind of "terrorist" may be completely inappropriate against another, and the enforcement methods that were useful at protecting us against politically-motivated, loosely state-based non-suicide terrorism might be completely impotent against stateless, religiously-motivated suicide attackers. In the same way that new criminal laws were made in the 1980s and 1990s to combat gang violence in the U.S., other governments may want to reconsider their existing anti-terrorism policies and legislation in light of today's threats.
I agree absolutely. Which is why, if Joe Sevenpack wants to reuse my code which I spent months writing, he's going to either use whatever license I want, or rewrite the functionality which my code offers himself. That's his option, I'm not forcing him to use anything of mine, merely offering it up under certain conditions. If he's agreeable to those conditions he can use the code without even having to ask -- if he doesn't, his loss.
In my opinion the major difference between the GPL and BSD license philosophies is that one focuses on the right of the code originator to determine how their work can be reused, while the other focuses on the rights of the reuser to make any kind of derivative work that they want. While there might be certain situations where I could be convinced that it would be in an author's best interest to use a BSD-style license in order to reach a wider audience than a GPL one might, these seem to be more the exception than a rule.
Exactly.
A person who is that far above the mean level of intelligence is never going to have a "normal" childhood; trying to force one on them is almost unspeakable cruelty, since the end result will at the very best be them realizing later that a great amount of their life was wasted, and at worst will be tragedy if they decide to kill or injure themselves or others.
I think people are missing an important point: what would have happened to this kid if he wasn't allowed to move as quickly as his mind would take him through school.
IMO a really intelligent person who's held back by society on account of their chronological age and forced to waste years of their life, surrounded by people who aren't nearly their intellectual equals, working on a curriculum that they could do in their sleep, and generally fostering a brooding hatred of mankind, is far more dangerous than if they were allowed to fully occupy themselves on whatever they wanted.
What would you rather have: this kid sitting around reading about super-string theory and flying cars while doted on by his parents / professors / society at large, or sitting in a classroom someplace thinking about how best to build a fuel-air explosive out of household materials and punish the school and society that has kept him back?
If the kid really is as intelligent as a lot of people seem to think he is -- and I haven't met him so I can't say, but obviously he's got a few people convinced if they're going to let him start university -- keeping him in a normal curriculum would have been only slightly more humane than just giving him a frontal lobotomy.
Yes, by letting him blow through what should have been his "childhood," he'll probably be doomed to a life of social ineptitude and will always be something of an oddity, at least for the next 20 years or so. The alternative, however, would not only destroy any potential he might have for contributing usefully to society, but also involves a not insubstantial risk of having him decide to take his frustration out on the people around him.
since they rarely if ever amount to anything other than an average person... just faster.
And in other news, your AMD Athlon64 3000 is no better than my Intel 8080, because it just does the same thing, only faster.
I guess I'm not understanding you. Are you seriously arguing that any one of Erdos, Pascal, Euler, Neumann, or Maclauren were "insignificant"? I can't imagine that was your point but I'm not sure how else to interpret your comment.
Sure, there were lots of child prodigies that probably burned out by the time they were 15 and never really did any of the things that people thought they would do when they were younger, but there do seem to be a fairly high percentage of great scientific minds who were obviously way above-average from a very early age.
The only thing GMail requires is JavaScript and cookie support, and even that isn't required, you just get a "For a better Gmail experience, use a fully supported browser" message at the top of the screen.
To quote from their help page:
For the price per MB of solid-state storage, you could make a double- or even quadruple-redundant RAID array, and probably buy yourself a nice set of noise-cancelling headphones...
:)
Frankly I think the noise complaint is probably not going to be a big issue among most people, given that for example there is more ambient noise in my home just from the street outside, and in my office from the air handling / HVAC system, than is ever made by any of my computers' hard drives. You'd have to get that environmental 'noise floor' down very low for HD noise to become an issue. If your home or office is really that quiet, it's impressive. Pretty far from average though, I'd say. Especially since most computers have fairly noisy air-cooling systems anyway.
Unless perhaps there are some extremely noisy drives that I'm just not aware of -- the most recent one I've bought was a 120GB PATA model a year or so ago and I certainly can't hear whether it's spinning or not when my computer's case is closed. The last time I remember thinking a hard disk drive was noisy was in regards to an external one that sat under my Macintosh Classic II, and it held a whopping 20MB.
You have a good point, although I disagree with your conclusion. Let me play the devil's advocate for a minute:
Looking back just at some recent history, the U.S. has a tendency to come out pretty well out of these huge, global conflicts. Sure perhaps two isn't enough to make a pattern but it might be enough to cause people in the U.S. leadership, particularly neo-cons, to not back down if the rest of the world (or some other power) decided to play chicken.
You seem to assume that the U.S. would let the other guy win if push came to shove, and I'm not sure that's realistic. U.S. foreign policy -- and to be honest, American culture in general -- has never emphasized "live to fight another day." In fact one might argue that recently, it has been much the other way around. The United States is like a 900-pound gorilla, or a large bear: slow to respond, not particularly perceptive, but very destructive when it gets going.
Obvious example: The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 in a very public and spectacular -- but in the end numerically insignificant -- way, and responded by picking a couple countries that it wasn't particularly fond of and invading them, at enormous expense and very little gain. Why? Because a whole lot of Americans wanted to see somebody, somewhere, get the living shit bombed out of them on CNN, and there were marginal excuses for Afghanistan (supporting terrorism) and Iraq (WMDs). Really, they were just convenient: it is and was a Spanish-American War for the 21st Century.
By bringing up the war I am in no way implying that the U.S. would go so far as to bomb France (or anyplace else) over the Internet; just that there is very little evidence to suggest that America would fold in a contest of wills with some other nation, even if it appeared to everyone else that it would be the saner thing to do.
I'm not sure that if I were some other country, even one as big as China, and certainly not one as frankly insignificant as France, that I would go tweaking the U.S. Government and the American people by demanding that it turn over control of one of its crown jewels, the Internet.
Actually, my point is in agreement with yours -- the post that mine was in response to was so ambiguous I thought he was supporting the US position and that's what I was agreeing to, but later he made it clear that he was actually supporting the European/U.N. one (however he was more than a little rude about it and the post is rotting away at -1, Troll, as it should).
Most of the industrialized world would be harmed by the Internet becoming fragmented, but only a small percentage of the American net-using public would notice, and our financial systems would mostly remain intact. I think the rest of the world would immediately find themselves in a great deal of trouble.
This is especially true when you consider that the rest of the world holds an awful lot of U.S. government-backed debt that would suddenly be a lot less liquid without access to U.S. funds markets. If you look at the balance of money, there is a lot more foreign capital tied up in the United States than there is U.S. money abroad; people start to get very upset when they can't access or withdraw their money anymore. A government that disconnected itself from the 'States might find itself suddenly very unpopular with some of its most powerful citizens.
Although it's a very extreme scenario, I can imagine a situation in the future where the Internet becomes a "strategic" asset and a country which is perceived as threatening the integrity of the network would end up with it's accounts frozen, a sort of economic "nuclear option."
I have a strong feeling this is a troll, but whatever.
You do know that China decoupled from the dollar because of U.S. pressure to do so, right?
China's yuan was tied to the dollar so that the U.S. couldn't do exactly what it did -- devalue their currency (the USD) to make U.S. exports cheaper, while making imports more expensive. For example, a "weak" dollar relative to the Euro makes it more expensive for US citizens to buy French wine and travel to Europe, but makes Florida orange juice less expensive to Europeans, and makes the US a more attractive tourist destination. This is elementary macroeconomics.
The Chinese central bank and government, realizing that their economy is intimately dependent on exports TO the U.S., had their currency pegged to the dollar, so that if the dollar fell the yuan would fall along with it, so that Chinese imports would not become more expensive. So when the dollar fell, imports to the US from countries other than China (which had unpegged currencies) got more expensive, but Chinese ones didn't. Thus total Chinese marketshare of imports actually grew -- not what a lot of US lawmakers wanted to see.
As a result there was a lot of anti-Chinese rhetoric for a few months, and a few people started publicly bringing up the topic of a special tariff against Chinese imports (or particular goods of which a majority come from China or are important to China) until the Chinese announced that they would decouple the yuan from the Dollar. This allows China's trade balance with the U.S. to be more easily affected by American policy, and IMO was something of a political loss for the Chinese -- although some would say it was a crutch they didn't need anyway at this point.
But I think that you, like a lot of people, misunderstand (or take too literally) what a "weak" currency means -- it isn't necessarily bad, and especially for a country with a large current account deficit some weakening is acceptable if it reduces imports and increases exports.
The rest of your B.S. I will ignore.
Correction -- yeah, yeah should have used preview:
"I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S."
should read:
"I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of all the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S."
Obviously, if you picked a particular place in the network (say Seoul, S.K., or anywhere outside of the U.S.) the majority of the traffic is probably local. My statement was meant to refer to the sum of ALL traffic on the global network, over some time interval. Otherwise it is rather trivially provable to be false.
You're probably going to get flamed for it, but that was pretty much the best five sentence summary of the situation and resulting U.S. position that I've heard in a while. Glad somebody said it.
The bottom-line issue is that the rest of the world wants the U.S. in their internet, a lot more than the U.S. -- generally speaking -- cares about being able to access the rest of the world. Think about the average user in the 'States (which is not the same as the average Slashdot user, so spare me your "but *I* access foreign content all the time" whining): if the rest of the world went black, there are quite a few people that wouldn't notice. They're using a U.S. ISP to access a U.S. backbone to get U.S.-created content off of a U.S.-based server. Although I've never seen a statistic, I'm willing to bet that a fairly high percentage of the packets transmitted over any part of the Internet in a day, both originate and end in the U.S.
The rest of the world and the U.N. can talk all they want about getting control of the internet and IP address allocation and everything else, but at the end of the day they are going to have to deal with the fact that if the United States Government and the people of the U.S. collectively say "from my cold, dead hands, Europe" they are clearly in the less advantageous negotiating position.
You are dangerously incorrect.
Read this and then feel free to comment: http://nsi.org/Library/Espionage/usta.htm
If you misappropriate (steal, bribe, etc.) a trade secret, the owner of that trade secret can turn around and sue you, and win an injunction against you to prevent you from using it to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, or force you to pay them royalties.
A third-party who acquired the secret once the "cat was out of the bag" but was not involved in the original misappropriation would be scot-free, but you couldn't just break into the Coca-Cola vault, steal the secret recipe, and start churning out Joe's Cola and expect not to get hammered in court for it.
You're more right than you know.
This is the #1 reason why pharmaceutical patents -- those things that hippies really love to hate -- are critical to not just our economic but also physical well-being. If patents weren't allowed on "recipe" type things, which is all most drugs are, then there would be a big incentive for companies to keep their formulations secret, and only let them out to people who've signed miles of NDAs or carry a small piece of remote-detonating Semtex in their brain stem or something.
Patents may seem like a terrible idea because they give someone a monopoly for 15 or 20 years, but afterwards are free; their alternative is give companies a reason to keep their inventions and developments locked up in vaults forever, like Coca-Cola is.
They want to switch to Intel processors because they're perceived as being more powerful and cheaper, and also consume less power. I think it originated out of a general feeling on Apple's part that IBM wasn't putting enough time and money into the development of new PPC chips, and particularly into optimizing them for portable / low-power use (which was probably true: IBM has a use for the desktop versions in its servers but not really for the low-power ones, so they might have gotten lazy). Basically, Apple wasn't getting what they wanted from IBM -- whom they switched to when Motorola didn't perform back a few years ago -- and dumped the architecture in favor of Intel. There was some speculation that they wouldn't actually go to x86, but instead to one of the other Intel architectures, but this didn't last very long (and probably wouldn't have been very smart). By adopting x86 they get to ride on the coattails of all the development done by Intel, get the chips cheaper, but still sell them in a branded box that they can make a safe profit margin on.
Running the Mac OS on commodity hardware has always been anathema to Apple, and was never part of the equation. Apple doesn't make a huge amount of money on OS software-only sales (and in fact until this TPM thing didn't even have copy-protection or serialization on it's install CDs!) and it's expected that the hardware sales will always subsidize the OS development, and in return the OS draws customers to the platform. So expect Apple to be very vicious about stamping out any attempts to break their TPM protection and run OS X on commodity boxes; if that became widespread it could kill them overnight.
While I agree with your point completely, I think he was saying that the premium one pays for an Apple box versus a comparatively equipped non-Apple custom one is around $200. Of course that's pure speculation given that Apple hasn't released an x86 box yet, but it's not a completely ridiculous figure.
I don't think he was comparing a $1200 or $1600 Apple box to a $200 grey-case TigerDirect special, which is what it sounds like you thought he was comparing. I think he was saying that a $1000 Apple box would probably have the same specs as a $1000 Brand-X one. Perhaps I'm just misreading your comment.
Anyway, I do agree though that the premium for Apple hardware is almost always realized in the increased build quality -- they're superior to any mass-market computer I've seen (granted I've never really looked at those high-end Alienware ones, maybe they're the same).
So basically like Kuro5hin, just without the politics or inane trolling..?
Really, I think it would be more appropriate for the 21st of December.
If there was no "analog loophole" you'd only be able to use the cable company's DVR with your digital cable service.
Sounds like the cable company's dream come true, to me. No pesky VCRs that take cheap media and produce recordings that never expire, instead just a continuous stream of rental income from consumers whose store of videos only last as long as they're allowed to and disappear completely if they don't pay their monthly DVR bill.
A digital-only world is EXACTLY the type of future that the content providers would like to see, and it's exactly why I really wonder if 10 years from now I'm going to think wistfully back to the heady days of analog television, when I could plug my 20-year-old Brand-X television and VCR into my cable jack and for $20 a month get 80 channels of service, mine to timeshift to my heart's content.
As other people have said, nature abhors a vacuum. Capitalism does as well. As long as there is a demand for information -- regardless of it's eventual output format -- there will be a place for reporters and journalists.
The problem the print reporters are having are the same that many musical artists are having: the difficulty of separating their particular skill, which there will always be a demand for, from the existing distribution networks, which are becoming obsolete. Just because newspapers go away doesn't mean that there won't be journalists anymore, even professional ones, just that the way they get paid right now isn't going to stay the same.
That's not to say that the transition will be smooth, or that there won't be a whole lot of very painful convulsions in the industry, or that the journalism market of the future will support nearly as many people as it does now. I think it's fair to say in fact that it will not; but one has to distance themselves from the reporters as people and realize that this isn't necessarily bad, it's just a change of how business gets done and how the information gets to the people.
Journalism is, at the end of the day, storytelling. It's just a very niche brand of storytelling where the story that's being told is identical (or as nearly so as can be) to something that actually happened, or produces a perception that it is. That's a skill that transcends media: if the newspaper conglomerates went belly-up tomorrow, people in Des Moines would still want to know what's going on inside the Beltway in D.C., and eventually the market will figure out a way to deliver that information to them. It remains to be seen whether people are interested enough in having their news from a "professional" reporter to pay for it, as opposed to getting it from an amateur blogger or observer for free.
I think some people definitely will want to pay for that stamp of provenance, and will support a small number of professional, trained journalists and reporters. Others will be willing to pay for the service of combing the blogs and other non-professional contributions and aggregating it together in a way that suits their perspectives (and yes, biases). This is what the market demands, this is what the market will get.
The newspapers are dying because they're centered around delivering a service that a substantial portion of the public no longer wants: physical papers. However the public obviously does have a hunger for information. When the papers die and the root source of a lot of that information dries up, I think you will see that a lot of journalists who are now looking at a very bleak future see opportunities open up in unexpected places.
I agree with your points, and just thought I'd add my thoughts.
... this is pretty important because if the public gets the name of the product burned into their heads as "OS X" alone, then it'll be really difficult for them to ever sell a "Mac OS 12". Instead they'll have to go with "Mac OS X II" ('oh-ess-ecks-two'). Ugh.
I think Apple used -- for a fairly short period, right around the OS 9 to X transition -- the name "OS X" to refer to the new product by itself. I think there was even a logo that was just those letters. I haven't seen it in a while though. But it's been totally purged and I can't find any trace of it now. It's all "Mac OS X."
My theory is that somebody in the marketing department finally wised up to the fact that their product's name IS NOT "OS X" but the "Mac OS" and they are currently selling version 10, represented by a roman numeral X. Therefore everything on their site right now is "Mac OS X"
In Microsoft's case what has North Korea really gained by Microsoft bludgeoning them? Not much.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, just confused: did I miss something, or did you mean South Korea?
I wasn't aware that there was a significant installed base of Windows in the DPRK.... although it would put new meaning to the term "vendor lock-in."