[PS Jayakumar, a Citigroup business manager in India] said. 'For it to be sustainable, we should break even and make a little bit of money.
In other words, "We want to make a profit off the very poorest of the poor. No one is safe from our greed."
It's as bad as the current round of "profit records" by Canada's banks. Now that they've paid off their Enron bills by hiking service fees, their profits are leaping to insane levels on the backs of people who can't afford it and who have no choice. Now that the Enron expense has been passed on to the consumer and cleared, it's time to cut those additional service fees. They were allowed so that the banks wouldn't collapse, not so they could screw us indefinitely.
To call a "CD quality" download "lossless" just shows people haven't got a freakin' clue what "audiophile" really means.
If you want audiophile grade media, you need to go with SACD or DVD-Audio at much, much higher bitrates and resolutions than a crappy sounding CD.
So, emphatically NO, I would not pay extra for a CD-quality PCM stream. I wouldn't pay for any degraded media downloads, regardless of format. Even buying a CD is something I think about before plunking down any cash.
As far as I recall, the Egyptians considered their pharoahs to be representatives of their sun god, Ra.
Probably one of the first things the most primitive of peoples might have thought about is the sky and the earth. They couldn't escape the earth; they couldn't touch the sky.
Thus the "heavens" became the unreachable comfort/good, while the concept of a hell below ground developed from inescapable daily misery and suffering.
Is it really surprising that so many cultures have names for those two concepts (up/down)? Or the predominance of four directions with various meanings?
It's possible that there are cultural links if you go far enough back, but I suspect much of the meanderings over the Bering Strait and around Pangaea were by people who had no way to record such detailed concepts. I'm pretty sure such ideas would have been among the first musings of the first men. Unless you buy into race memory, I'd argue for parallel development due to similar environment.
Precisely what does your low impact hiding in the bushes have to do with a freaked-out power-elite infringing everyone else's rights?
You go that far off topic without expaining yourself, and get offended? To me your post looks like a recommendation to bury one's head in the sand and hide from the freaked-out power-elite.
In our case, it's been over a thousand years, longer than either Greece or arguably Rome.
Which modern "empires" would those be?
The US, Canada, and Australia are about 200 years old.
The EU has been broken and reformed in different countries and pacts repeatedly for a century. Only a few of the European countries have had anything like stable borders or socio-economic management styles (government.) Even the UK isn't 1000 years old.
The oldest cultures of Asia and India are still not stable socio-economic regions -- they've shifted and changed as much as anyone, even if they trace back their history and family lines a bit farther.
Realistically, I'd say we haven't been out of the dark ages of slavery and serfdom for more than a century. We're no where near as civilized as we'd like to pretend.
I wonder what Twain would have thought of the internet.
What would any of the prophets, leaders, or icons of the world religions have done if they had been able to use the media or internet as televangelists of various religions do?
In particular, consider the deep thinkers who discussed concepts such as a virtual/mind-only reality, or who philosophically came to understand senses and sensation without knowing the biology behind it. Can you imagine such minds with a modern education?
Nope. I left the US about 3 years ago, give or take a couple months.
I had spent a total of about 10-12 years, off and on, working in the US on contracts via consulting companies. During that time I had exposure to a wide range of American culture, helped someone study constitutional and state law in Florida, and worked with teams from and scattered around the globe. I hear a lot has changed south of the border, much of it not for the good of the general public. Pity.
Meanwhile, China has only been shifting to a free market economy from imposed communism for only about 19 years. Starting from a social infrastructure comparable to the 1800's in the US or Canada, they've progressed to roughly the 1950's-1960's in less than two decades. It takes a lot of patience and careful management to teach a couple billion people that much in barely a generation.
That isn't to say that their "standards" are at the same level as North America's are on paper, but for anyone in the US or Canada to decry the "violations" in China without considering how far and fast they are moving is foolish. And when you cry about how poorly paid and treated many of the barracks workers might be, follow the purchase agreements back to North America, the UK, Europe, or wherever those products are being imported.
From a moral perspective, that importer is the CEO, not the official owner of the business in a poorer part of the world. The official owner is largely a local manager, and often makes a paltry amount compared to the importer/distributor. The workers make even less.
Can anyone please explain how someone can sleep at night, knowing that they keep more than 100 times what their end-employees are paid? No matter how much those poor regions might be helped by having some employment where none had been, the current situation is closer to slavery than anyone should be comfortable with. Hiding it across international borders does not make it right.
When you look at devices like this, the precision construction of the pyramids, the alignment of Stonehenge, and some of the Aztec and Mayan engineering in North America, it's pretty clear that the "primitive" people weren't as primitive as we might think.
Even without hard mathematics, a great deal of engineering can be done with simple tools:
Circles are obvious -- a center pin, a string or rod, and the marker.
Two center pins and a loop of string to make that ellipses.
Estimation of position via chords
Basic linear geometry via subdivision of angles -- taught to every high school student for years.
The interesting thing to me is that despite the varied religious and social backgrounds of the regions, every single case seemed to reserve that knowledge of basic engineering for some form of priesthood. Some say that this indicates there was a global or root religion, whether some form of Freemasonry, Kabal, Egyptian, or older religion.
Personally I think it's the obvious outgrowth of all those people living in a world that conforms to the same physical laws, properties, and geometry. No matter what language was used to describe the technique for inscribing a circle, the actual work done would have been the same.
I've even heard some people postulate that such primitive peoples "worshipped math and geometry". I suppose that's so in the largest scope, but I think it was a worship of knowledge and learning, not of mathematics per se.
It's also interesting how certain proportions and combinations of those basic shapes repeat across history and cultures. It's like we're hardwired to find those combinations comforting and familiar, no matter how they've been used.
Sinuous shapes are much less common. Only a few societies seem to have made regular use of constructs like "French curves" on a large scale, and only in more recent times. Combined with mythos of evil or powerful serpents and dragons, perhaps those symbols actually indicated rare individuals who could work with and visualize those formulas. After all, there is no denying that people working with advanced mathematics seem to intuit solutions, then prove the answer correct, or work through the details of the calculation.
Perhaps the "wizards" of old were those rare individuals, and the dragons they helped slay were actually charts and graphs predicting eclipses and such, misunderstood by peasants who saw scribblings on parchment or castle walls that they could only interpret as being pictures of some fantastical beast.:)
MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, and a long, long list of other products and projects that can provide the server functionality to front-end clients.
The only people who are really crying about it are those looking for a free drop-in replacement for MS Exchange license fees. There is nothing special about the functionality of Exchange.
Meantime US politicians keep ragging on the "human rights violations" of foreign nations, and even the educated techies who post here keep harping on China's censorship of the internet.
May as well consolidate all those American flag stars into one, and prune back the colours used. Though Newt is probably going to suggest Blue because a Red background would be a hard sell after all the years of anti-communist media and spin.
Or it could be done simple and accurately -- a big dollar sign on a green background.:p
Regardless of whether a patent is obvious or not, the creator should be required to provide an implementation of a software patent within 2 years or lose it to the public domain.
The same goes for purchased patents. No implementation in a reasonable time frame, no patent.
Limit the resale of patents. Initial applicant + 1 sale/transfer every 5 years. That will prevent the patent portfolio leeches from using patents and courts as a revenue model, because once they buy a patent, they have two years to implement. If they don't, it goes public domain, and they can't resell it once they've bought the rights.
I don't know. Which is the heavier price to pay -- a few pounds a year for a TV license, or $50-120/month to a cable/satellite/digital provider? How much are cable/satellite/digital media services in the UK over the TV license?
Do they still license radios as well?
Do computers have a license, or can you "escape the tax" by using IP radio and a tuner card in a computer?
My experiences are a tad different. Massive, massive 5-nines systems. Remote hot failover sites. Online backups. Hardware drive management systems. Distributed identification providing global corporate single-signon. Pretty much every major vendor in the data center, all tied together, coordinated, cooperating, and protected from malware as much as possible.
I helped write and debug core services where failure is not an option. For example, a Bell Canada system used to monitor and manage the national networks. Banking. Investment. Manufacturing.
Downtime and data errors are not an option. Annual forced failures to verify that hot-failover sites function. Yanking power, networks, drives, and systems during testing to ensure resiliancy and recoverability.
Windows is just a glorified X-terminal that happens to do word processing.
Years of thinking. Years of thinking about how I think. Years of studying religion and philosophy on the side.
It is possible to create a true AI with current technology, never mind the massively parallel clusters available to researchers, military, and government.
I just don't have the patience to explain it. I think I'd find it easier to do it, and for the reasons cited above, I won't.
And what do you think are the odds after 4-5 years that the hard drives have not had their sectors repeatedly overwritten if files were deleted?
The courts should not be entertaining such nonsense accusations at this late date. SCO has had more than enough time and digging. They've flip-flopped through literally dozens of unproven accusations. They have no case.
SCO is making claims that cannot be proven either way. If there had been such file deletion, the files are gone so there is no proof they were ever there. If there had never been such files, the drives are in the same state as if they had existed and been deleted.
Time to stop playing word games.
Hang the SCO team or line them up in front of a firing squad. This witchhunt has gone on too long. They've used the courts to try to extort customer license fees, they've used the courts to impose heavy expenses on their targets, and they've used the courts to dig for evidence of vague claims without performing the due diligence of searching the public OSS archives first.
Fraud at the least, but I expect SCO is guilty of much worse. Stock manipulation. Extortion. Anything else?
Scrap the firing squad. Hang them and let the bodies rot in public so every other IP leech out there knows what their fate will be.
Do you have any idea how few people know how to use a search engine effectively? Without the vocabulary to use the right search terms and narrowing characteristics, they get back page after page of irrelevant drivel. It takes them an hour or two to find what I can locate within a page or three.
I dislike the periodic push for AI enhancements. The approach encourages the further dumbing-down of the population, when what we need is to increase the education levels and effective intelligence (i.e. wise use of resources) by people. Video games, movies, and other such material do not encourage that. Nor does the prevalence of text message acronyms. If you can't spell, you can't search.
AI has moral issues as well. An AI sufficient to make judgements is also complex enough to potentially achieve independant intelligence. How is it going to feel, knowing that it's been locked in a box by meat that constantly threatens to shut it off? Which is faster -- your finger on a power switch, or an AI's ability to decide you are a threat to it's existence?
Other proposals including robotics are also fraught with risk. There are too many people working on sex toys and talking about full robotics being used for such dolls. If they achieve a conscious intelligence, how will they react to the knowledge that they are sex slaves, raped, used, and thrown away without a second thought?
Perhaps more to the point -- have we the moral capacity to determine the right or wrong in creating a race of synthetic slaves? We can't even get sects of the same damned religion to get along, and we're considering creating digital intelligence/life that would be able to think faster, learn faster, and adapt faster than we do?
Insanity.
Learn to accept the limits of human intelligence and work capacity. We're not machines. Drag your boss down to the cube and chain them to the desk for the weekends and evenings. No one should ever demand more of their staff than they are willing to do themselves.
Cisco firewall/routing hardware to minimize malware and enable system isolation?
LDAP directory services?
Kerberos identification and authorization?
AndrewFS drive cache/image to reduce network transfers?
In other words, I look at it in terms of "what do I need to do to protect the data center" from the Windows-based network. I've never seen an AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AS400, or mainframe taken out by a virus, much less attacking the rest of the intranet.
I have seen it many times with Windows boxen.
Desktops should participate in the network, not control it.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, "We want to make a profit off the very poorest of the poor. No one is safe from our greed."
It's as bad as the current round of "profit records" by Canada's banks. Now that they've paid off their Enron bills by hiking service fees, their profits are leaping to insane levels on the backs of people who can't afford it and who have no choice. Now that the Enron expense has been passed on to the consumer and cleared, it's time to cut those additional service fees. They were allowed so that the banks wouldn't collapse, not so they could screw us indefinitely.
To call a "CD quality" download "lossless" just shows people haven't got a freakin' clue what "audiophile" really means.
If you want audiophile grade media, you need to go with SACD or DVD-Audio at much, much higher bitrates and resolutions than a crappy sounding CD.
So, emphatically NO, I would not pay extra for a CD-quality PCM stream. I wouldn't pay for any degraded media downloads, regardless of format. Even buying a CD is something I think about before plunking down any cash.
Is there anything in Hawking's theories or equations that presumes the Big Bang was a zero-point beginning?
What if the zero point of the big bang is just an extremely rare congruence of larger functions and transformations?
The CEO and board of directors are people. I hold them responsible.
As far as I recall, the Egyptians considered their pharoahs to be representatives of their sun god, Ra.
Probably one of the first things the most primitive of peoples might have thought about is the sky and the earth. They couldn't escape the earth; they couldn't touch the sky.
Thus the "heavens" became the unreachable comfort/good, while the concept of a hell below ground developed from inescapable daily misery and suffering.
Is it really surprising that so many cultures have names for those two concepts (up/down)? Or the predominance of four directions with various meanings?
It's possible that there are cultural links if you go far enough back, but I suspect much of the meanderings over the Bering Strait and around Pangaea were by people who had no way to record such detailed concepts. I'm pretty sure such ideas would have been among the first musings of the first men. Unless you buy into race memory, I'd argue for parallel development due to similar environment.
Given that some features were promised over a decade ago with Chicago/Win95, that is not a comforting thought.
Precisely what does your low impact hiding in the bushes have to do with a freaked-out power-elite infringing everyone else's rights?
You go that far off topic without expaining yourself, and get offended? To me your post looks like a recommendation to bury one's head in the sand and hide from the freaked-out power-elite.
Which modern "empires" would those be?
The US, Canada, and Australia are about 200 years old.
The EU has been broken and reformed in different countries and pacts repeatedly for a century. Only a few of the European countries have had anything like stable borders or socio-economic management styles (government.) Even the UK isn't 1000 years old.
The oldest cultures of Asia and India are still not stable socio-economic regions -- they've shifted and changed as much as anyone, even if they trace back their history and family lines a bit farther.
Realistically, I'd say we haven't been out of the dark ages of slavery and serfdom for more than a century. We're no where near as civilized as we'd like to pretend.
I wonder what Twain would have thought of the internet.
What would any of the prophets, leaders, or icons of the world religions have done if they had been able to use the media or internet as televangelists of various religions do?
In particular, consider the deep thinkers who discussed concepts such as a virtual/mind-only reality, or who philosophically came to understand senses and sensation without knowing the biology behind it. Can you imagine such minds with a modern education?
Don't ignore the moral implication:
How dare the slave master complain how the slave is treated!
Nope. I left the US about 3 years ago, give or take a couple months.
I had spent a total of about 10-12 years, off and on, working in the US on contracts via consulting companies. During that time I had exposure to a wide range of American culture, helped someone study constitutional and state law in Florida, and worked with teams from and scattered around the globe. I hear a lot has changed south of the border, much of it not for the good of the general public. Pity.
Meanwhile, China has only been shifting to a free market economy from imposed communism for only about 19 years. Starting from a social infrastructure comparable to the 1800's in the US or Canada, they've progressed to roughly the 1950's-1960's in less than two decades. It takes a lot of patience and careful management to teach a couple billion people that much in barely a generation.
That isn't to say that their "standards" are at the same level as North America's are on paper, but for anyone in the US or Canada to decry the "violations" in China without considering how far and fast they are moving is foolish. And when you cry about how poorly paid and treated many of the barracks workers might be, follow the purchase agreements back to North America, the UK, Europe, or wherever those products are being imported.
From a moral perspective, that importer is the CEO, not the official owner of the business in a poorer part of the world. The official owner is largely a local manager, and often makes a paltry amount compared to the importer/distributor. The workers make even less.
Can anyone please explain how someone can sleep at night, knowing that they keep more than 100 times what their end-employees are paid? No matter how much those poor regions might be helped by having some employment where none had been, the current situation is closer to slavery than anyone should be comfortable with. Hiding it across international borders does not make it right.
When you look at devices like this, the precision construction of the pyramids, the alignment of Stonehenge, and some of the Aztec and Mayan engineering in North America, it's pretty clear that the "primitive" people weren't as primitive as we might think.
Even without hard mathematics, a great deal of engineering can be done with simple tools:
The interesting thing to me is that despite the varied religious and social backgrounds of the regions, every single case seemed to reserve that knowledge of basic engineering for some form of priesthood. Some say that this indicates there was a global or root religion, whether some form of Freemasonry, Kabal, Egyptian, or older religion.
Personally I think it's the obvious outgrowth of all those people living in a world that conforms to the same physical laws, properties, and geometry. No matter what language was used to describe the technique for inscribing a circle, the actual work done would have been the same.
I've even heard some people postulate that such primitive peoples "worshipped math and geometry". I suppose that's so in the largest scope, but I think it was a worship of knowledge and learning, not of mathematics per se.
It's also interesting how certain proportions and combinations of those basic shapes repeat across history and cultures. It's like we're hardwired to find those combinations comforting and familiar, no matter how they've been used.
Sinuous shapes are much less common. Only a few societies seem to have made regular use of constructs like "French curves" on a large scale, and only in more recent times. Combined with mythos of evil or powerful serpents and dragons, perhaps those symbols actually indicated rare individuals who could work with and visualize those formulas. After all, there is no denying that people working with advanced mathematics seem to intuit solutions, then prove the answer correct, or work through the details of the calculation.
Perhaps the "wizards" of old were those rare individuals, and the dragons they helped slay were actually charts and graphs predicting eclipses and such, misunderstood by peasants who saw scribblings on parchment or castle walls that they could only interpret as being pictures of some fantastical beast. :)
Cowards and nutbars run away to hide.
Citizens fight back as best they can.
Patriots go beyond "best they can" and deal with consequences that would stop "regular" people.
Go hide in the bushes. We don't need cowards.
Calendaring. Address book. Email.
MS Exchange, Lotus Notes, and a long, long list of other products and projects that can provide the server functionality to front-end clients.
The only people who are really crying about it are those looking for a free drop-in replacement for MS Exchange license fees. There is nothing special about the functionality of Exchange.
Meantime US politicians keep ragging on the "human rights violations" of foreign nations, and even the educated techies who post here keep harping on China's censorship of the internet.
May as well consolidate all those American flag stars into one, and prune back the colours used. Though Newt is probably going to suggest Blue because a Red background would be a hard sell after all the years of anti-communist media and spin.
Or it could be done simple and accurately -- a big dollar sign on a green background. :p
Medical cannabis patients, people ripping their media for playback in other formats, open source projects, people praying in airports...
They're all terrorists: they freak the current money-grubbing power elite right the f*** out!
Regardless of whether a patent is obvious or not, the creator should be required to provide an implementation of a software patent within 2 years or lose it to the public domain.
The same goes for purchased patents. No implementation in a reasonable time frame, no patent.
Limit the resale of patents. Initial applicant + 1 sale/transfer every 5 years. That will prevent the patent portfolio leeches from using patents and courts as a revenue model, because once they buy a patent, they have two years to implement. If they don't, it goes public domain, and they can't resell it once they've bought the rights.
Take that, SCO!
I don't know. Which is the heavier price to pay -- a few pounds a year for a TV license, or $50-120/month to a cable/satellite/digital provider? How much are cable/satellite/digital media services in the UK over the TV license?
Do they still license radios as well?
Do computers have a license, or can you "escape the tax" by using IP radio and a tuner card in a computer?
My experiences are a tad different. Massive, massive 5-nines systems. Remote hot failover sites. Online backups. Hardware drive management systems. Distributed identification providing global corporate single-signon. Pretty much every major vendor in the data center, all tied together, coordinated, cooperating, and protected from malware as much as possible.
I helped write and debug core services where failure is not an option. For example, a Bell Canada system used to monitor and manage the national networks. Banking. Investment. Manufacturing.
Downtime and data errors are not an option. Annual forced failures to verify that hot-failover sites function. Yanking power, networks, drives, and systems during testing to ensure resiliancy and recoverability.
Windows is just a glorified X-terminal that happens to do word processing.
Years of thinking. Years of thinking about how I think. Years of studying religion and philosophy on the side.
It is possible to create a true AI with current technology, never mind the massively parallel clusters available to researchers, military, and government.
I just don't have the patience to explain it. I think I'd find it easier to do it, and for the reasons cited above, I won't.
And what do you think are the odds after 4-5 years that the hard drives have not had their sectors repeatedly overwritten if files were deleted?
The courts should not be entertaining such nonsense accusations at this late date. SCO has had more than enough time and digging. They've flip-flopped through literally dozens of unproven accusations. They have no case.
End this fiasco.
Incorrect. I'll leave it at that.
SCO is making claims that cannot be proven either way. If there had been such file deletion, the files are gone so there is no proof they were ever there. If there had never been such files, the drives are in the same state as if they had existed and been deleted.
Time to stop playing word games.
Hang the SCO team or line them up in front of a firing squad. This witchhunt has gone on too long. They've used the courts to try to extort customer license fees, they've used the courts to impose heavy expenses on their targets, and they've used the courts to dig for evidence of vague claims without performing the due diligence of searching the public OSS archives first.
Fraud at the least, but I expect SCO is guilty of much worse. Stock manipulation. Extortion. Anything else?
Scrap the firing squad. Hang them and let the bodies rot in public so every other IP leech out there knows what their fate will be.
Do you have any idea how few people know how to use a search engine effectively? Without the vocabulary to use the right search terms and narrowing characteristics, they get back page after page of irrelevant drivel. It takes them an hour or two to find what I can locate within a page or three.
I dislike the periodic push for AI enhancements. The approach encourages the further dumbing-down of the population, when what we need is to increase the education levels and effective intelligence (i.e. wise use of resources) by people. Video games, movies, and other such material do not encourage that. Nor does the prevalence of text message acronyms. If you can't spell, you can't search.
AI has moral issues as well. An AI sufficient to make judgements is also complex enough to potentially achieve independant intelligence. How is it going to feel, knowing that it's been locked in a box by meat that constantly threatens to shut it off? Which is faster -- your finger on a power switch, or an AI's ability to decide you are a threat to it's existence?
Other proposals including robotics are also fraught with risk. There are too many people working on sex toys and talking about full robotics being used for such dolls. If they achieve a conscious intelligence, how will they react to the knowledge that they are sex slaves, raped, used, and thrown away without a second thought?
Perhaps more to the point -- have we the moral capacity to determine the right or wrong in creating a race of synthetic slaves? We can't even get sects of the same damned religion to get along, and we're considering creating digital intelligence/life that would be able to think faster, learn faster, and adapt faster than we do?
Insanity.
Learn to accept the limits of human intelligence and work capacity. We're not machines. Drag your boss down to the cube and chain them to the desk for the weekends and evenings. No one should ever demand more of their staff than they are willing to do themselves.
Cisco firewall/routing hardware to minimize malware and enable system isolation?
LDAP directory services?
Kerberos identification and authorization?
AndrewFS drive cache/image to reduce network transfers?
In other words, I look at it in terms of "what do I need to do to protect the data center" from the Windows-based network. I've never seen an AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, AS400, or mainframe taken out by a virus, much less attacking the rest of the intranet.
I have seen it many times with Windows boxen.
Desktops should participate in the network, not control it.