No, it's not harder to get an HP printer, I can go to any of 1000 stores near me and pick one up quite easily, as can any number of new-computer buying people.
While I agree that this was definately a spin intended to make HP look dumb and Dell look innocent, I do agree that it does make it slightly harder to get an HP printer... especially in this era of mega stores and one-stop-shopping. In the article, HP says Dell only makes up 2 days/year (or 0.5%) of its printer sales... but I wonder what percentage of printers purchased from Dell (the former #1 reseller of PC's) are HP's, and what percentage of purchases from Dell include printers.
This forces you to keep a stock of ink on hand in case you run out. So odds are you'll have at least one extra ink cartridge when you decide to toss the old printer in favor of a new one. Guess what? You've just bought something you're not going to use!
It's the same idea as debit cards (not the ones linked to your bank account, but like "Disney Dollars" or "D&B cards"). Odds are that you will never extingush the amount on those cards, and just get rid of it while it still has some "value" to it. After 60 days or whatever of non-use, the card expires, and the company gets that value. It's not much, but over thousands of customers, it adds up nicely. (Yes, you can replenish some of these cards, but the idea is still the same).
I just got through trying to crack some riddles, so my brain is rather toasted, but this situation is not QUITE like the prepay debit cards.. because although Dell gets you to buy something you wouldn't otherwise buy, and therefore makes some profit they wouldn't otherwise make, they actually have to give you the cartridge, so their profits aren't so substantial.
With the prepay card people, they take your money and don't give you anything unless you *use* the card.. which they assume most people won't do entirely.
But, I suppose you're right for the end user: it sucks both way, and unless you can purchase something much cheaper through an inconvenient avenue (online in this case), then it doesn't make sense to purchase that way. If you *can* get it cheaper, then if you save $10 on each $40 cartridge, and use 20 cartridges over the life of the printer, but have 2 cartridges left when you heave it into the dumpster, you still saved a boat-load of money... even though you accidentaly allowed the seller to profit unnecessarily on the last two cartridges.
But anyway, it seems like printer makers always either sell really expensive printers with cheap cartridges, or (more often now) sell extrodinarily cheapo printers and expensive cartridges. (In fact I often see Lexmark, Dell's possible partner in this, seems to be selling their Z-series at incredibly low prices..) That way, I guess they probably get themselves in the market (even at a loss) looking really inexpensive.. but then make a ton of money on cartridges. Can they REALLY cost $40 to make, market, and sell??
According to the Cnet article, they are going straight to the FCC because congress is log-jammed and about to adjurn for break. The senate is off from 8/5 - 9/2 and the house from 7/29 - 9/3. Then they both are planning to adjurn for the year on 10/4.
They just know they introduced their bills way too late and don't want to wait.
I don't know of ANY DSL providor that garauntees 1.5Mbit (you probably meant mbit). All of the ads that I see say "up to 1.5mbps".
I think your confusing MB/Mb with Mbit/mbit:
MB = Mega Byte Mb = Mega bit
They get confused a lot. Most people *I've* seen, say "Mbps"; "mbps" might get listed if the advertiser isn't paying attention to detail or doesn't know what the heck they're talking about...
Overlapping zones will certainly be another issue, though.
Actually, if you watch their online demo, it says that overlaps are fine.. they don't cause interferience and the authentication server makes sure that only your modules can get on your canopy network. Not quite sure how they do that though.
Is it standard practice at Slashdot not to read the entirety of the parent post? Feels like it today.
No, I did in fact read your message several times. I think you might have misunderstood my 1-2 minute reference. That's how long I estimate that it would take to do ALL those steps, including quickly scanning the message to see if it was a subscribed to service, finding the unsubscribe information and either going to the web page and doing whatever is necessary, or replying to the message and typing out a brief "I'm not interested in your product(s); please take me off your list and never send me any more e-mail, and do not ever give or sell my e-mail address away to anyone other companies, subsidaries, affiliates, or other such entities. I hate spam and try my best never buy from anyone who sends it." - Although I suppose unsubscribe messages that are honored are usually handled through automation, it always seems best to actually say what I want to happen.
Granted that about 1/3 the SPAM I get I identify as porn advertisements and the such and delete it without opening it, those take about 2-10 seconds each.. so that would be 1.5-7.5 cents each. Say each one of the employees in my company gets one of those per day (of course it's not as evenly distributed as that..). Say 4.5 cents each on average.. that's $45/day for our 1000 or so employees just on deleting those pesky little spam messages. Over our 260 or so business days per year, that's $11,700. Hmm.. suddenly that's not so cheap.
[Even if you say it only takes 1 second to read a subject and delete the message, that still comes out to $3900/year using the above figures.]
Oh, and you say I just need to opt-out once? Since there is no honored opt-out-from-everything-for-all-time list like there is for telemarketers, just because I opt out of your service doesn't mean I don't have to opt out of every other spammers list.. again assuming they honor opt-outs.
Of course everyone still has to go through their traditional paper junk mail, and that still costs our company money, but the bulk of the expense is still on the SENDER who has to pay 25 cents/item (or whatever the bulk rate is), rather than on the receiver who just pays the above calculated amount. Having the sender pay more helps keep unwanted mailings fewer in number, and at least targetted at their audience. I think I recall you mentioning further up the thread supporting email postage, which might diminish the amount of total trash spam, but would also hamper legitamate business significantly.
If you truly go through the trouble of reading the message and determining that you aren't interested, and file a removal request, then there is at least some allocation of resources on your part that is your decision, not mine.
That's exactly the point. I'm saying I want my email system to be used only for my legitamate business that your unsolicited bulk email doesn't qualify as, and so I don't want you or the other 1000 spammers sending me junk, forcing me to go through it and opt-out to each sender.
From your previous message:
Okay, so set a list of who is *allowed* to send in the first place. Don't wanna do that? Fine.
The world would just be a better place if everyone used a good old OPT-IN model. Get a list of who you're allowed to send mail to. Don't want to do that? Fine, don't send any unsolicited advertisements.
Umm.. note that they're asking for prototypes, not the real thing...
From the web page:
As longtime slashdot readers, we know perfectly well that the mere 1,750 people (and counting) on Viridian List can't possibly build a global computer operating system fully suitable for human rights orgs. Therefore, what we want from you is a Viridian Imaginary Product. It's the graphic screenshot of such a system. Imagine what that device might look like, and what it might do.
Unsolicited bulk email? Sure. Genuine nuisance? Only if you're into over-generalizations.
No, Unsolicited Bulk Email is always a bad thing... even if all spammers honored opt-outs like you described. When I'm at work and I get spam, it takes time to:
Download the message from the mail server
Open the message and determine if it is a legitamate service
Reply to the SPAM and say I'm not interested
Delete the message.
That process takes about 1-2 minutes for each SPAM message received. I get paid about 45 cents/minute, so that means that for each SPAM message I receive it costs my company 45-91 cents (per message per user).. still assuming an ideal opt-out world (which doesn't exist)..
It might be virtually free for you to send me unsolicited junk mail, but it costs my company and others like it TONS of money in wasted time to receive them.
That's why OPT-IN with a required confirmation is the only ethical way to mass mail.
As I understand it, data can still be recoverable using advanced (read "very expensive") methods because some magnetic residue is left of the device even after the bits are changed. For example, typically the data tracks on a disk are wider than the data stream that is written to it.. and because there's some imprecision in the writing of data, there may be some area outside the actual stream that gets data written to it.. allowing the possibility that it can be at least partially recovered even after more data is written to it. So according to the theory, if you took the drive apart and looked at the platters very closely (or recalibrated the drive heads), you'd be able to access those parts of the disk.
Supposedly even data written to RAM can be recovered under certain unusual circumstances even after a power off.
Tapes have a similar issue, and it is quite possible for people to recover stuff off of audio tapes. I heard recently that sometime soon someone is going to take another crack at the Nixon Watergate tapes... no one has tried to recover data from them since around 1970, so perhaps the recovery techniques or technology has improved enough to allow something to be learned!
I don't know that much about data recovery, but I bet you could find some info if you googled a bit.
Well... with a little bit of adaption, it sounds like you could make this into a GOOD idea. How about changing from anonymous IM one-to-one communications to one-to-many communications like a chat room. That way people could ask questions during a lecture without interupting the teacher, allowing the teacher to answer the question at the appropriate time. It wouldn't mean that a student couldn't yell out.. "Wait, I didn't get that!" but would allow for multiple questions to be asked at the same time and prevent questions from disrupting the flow of a lecture.
Of course this type of thing wouldn't work in a conversational discussion between teachers and pupils, as it would be silly to e-chat with other people in the same room with you.. although even that type of discussion might be useful if you had some sort of distance learning opportunity (which seems increadibly rare in anything but higher ed).
A lot of folks are noticing this, but technology implimentation often runs backwards. Instead of asking "This is what technology can do for us, where can we do this?" we should be asking "It would be really nice to do this, is there a particular technology that would enable us to do it?" Of course some of the first is necessary because *sometimes* we don't even consider of a particular model of action until someone tells us we can do it with some technology... but generally in my experiences the majority of decision making should be done based on needs assessment.
Did you even read what this guy was trying to say? He was saying that even in those schools that have laptops for every student, they aren't learning anything even preparing for the job market. Just putting computers in the classroom doesn't do anything. You have to let the students use them and teach them to do things with them
Yes, I did even read what he was trying to say. He said that they saturated the school with computers but didn't have a good way to tie the computer use to the curriculum, so the computers were either unused or used in a distracting way.. either way a waste of that school district's money.
My point is that not only are the school districts throwing their money away, but their doing in in the wrong districts. Not only do they need to figure out how to integrate computers into the curriculum *effectively*, they need to figure out how to do it in underserved communities that can't afford to charge $1,500 to the parents of each child.
Using the business model as a starting place is not really valid. Kids are not office workers, they are kids.
I don't think that's a very good conclusion. The point of having models is that they can be applicable across different situations where the details might be somewhat different. I work in Healthcare IT management, and several years ago just as the PDA boom started, there was a similar discussion on the merits of using the devices in the workplace. There were some folks that thought they would just be used for games and distract people from their jobs, and there were some gadget-adicts that thought it would revolutionize their work environment and they'd use their PDA for everything. But as we first began to seriously investigate usefulness in my organization we saw some significant areas of usefulness and some areas that it would just be a waste of resources. You might think that doctors are pretty smart and tech savy users, but generally they're not! Except for some rare (and generally young) exceptions, if you hand a PDA to a doctor, give him/her an afternoon of training and expect him/her to go off and use the PDA, it won't happen. Even in the case of highly trained doctors, we needed to work up to it by giving some to the tech-savy first who would use them highly productively and evangelise the products to their peers, and we loaded their PDA with reference programs (drug interactions, etc) they need to refer to daily anyway. And on top of that it needs to be increadibly easy to use and synchronize. After working on this a couple years, we're begining to see some productivity improvements and hope that as the technology becomes more trusted the improvements will increase more rapidly.
So I think the corporate environment CAN be used as a model for academia -- even high schools and under. The model won't result in any quick-fix programs, but can result in more directed evaluation of the pros and cons of the technology in the environment and hurdles that will need to be overcome to get the desired results.
My highschool started purchasing laptops for the students (and increasing tuition by fifteen hundred dollars) the year after I graduated. My sister's still there though and she tells me the laptops do nothing but help students not pay attention. The class sits, computers open, not listening because they're talking on AIM and someone will post the notes online anyway. Every once in a while they'll do a "research" project online that involves little more than cutting and pasting from online encyclopedias.
See... the thing about this is it doesn't address the digital divide in America. Computers and other technology are important for our young people not only as a tool to perform a specific school-related task, but also as an opportunity to overcome barriers in access to technology for our nations poor, non-white, and female students. A failure to expose our children to computers causes them to have greater difficulty adapting to the technology demands put on our adult workforce.
So some say that it is the responsibility of parents to provide opportunities for their children to learn how to use computers. But that assumes that parents can afford to buy computers or access to them. When that's not the case, we need other organizations, such as schools, libraries and "boys and girls clubs" to step in and provide services.
Becoming comfortable with using computers certainly is not the cure-all for all the woes of poverty or education. Simply filling an underfunded and poorly performing school with computers won't achieve anything useful as long as there are no funds or appropriately skilled personnel to develop effective teaching plans that use the technology. And computer training certainly isn't a replacement for learning how to read, write, think critically, research, and so on. But if our schools and communities are leaving major portions of our country's underpriviledged or underserved children unprepared for the work force and for college, then they are not performing the service for which they are intended, and need to work hard in developing new curriculum using computers.
a server colocation farm. how cool would it be if you site was hosted from... space.
Not only cool.. how's that for an offsite data storage location? Not many companies can boast that their data will survive full-scale thermonuclear war... but if you use the server collocation farm on the moon, when the war is over and only the cockroaches and styrofoam are left, your data is STILL safe!
Reminds me of the lunar base I designed when I was about 9 years old for a school project. Too bad I didn't have the backing of NASA or the ESA back then.
So you're implying that you DO have the backing of NASA or the ESA for all of the lunar bases you're designing now?
Of course... obviously any serious scientist knows that only high quality insightful scientific ideas get presented and discussed on Slashdot.
For all you other non-philologers out there:
From Dictionary.com:
Dystopian adj. Of or relating to an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
THAT will be cool... 120 gig HD on about 5 CD's...
Yeah, especially if they could somehow stick the red and blue lasers in the same unit so that future CD drives could use either types of discs. The thing that sucks about advancement is it keeps making things obsolete so dang fast. What the heck am I supposed to do with all my 33s???
Philips is developing blue laser technology for use as a digital video recorder, but with removable media. See it here. It sounds like they want to continue to use a hard drive like in TiVo for short term storage, but then have a built-in (re)writable media for removable storate built on optical blue laser technology. Seems like a pretty neat idea to me, but I doubt this particular techology will stick.. too costly to impliment, and all the momentum is moving towards DVD.
Yeah, that will take you to their front page, but if you wanted to listen to field recordings of North American frog sounds, wouldn't it make more sense to start looking for that on search engines or frog sites or nature sites, which might in turn take you to NPR's web site? What would lead you to NPR specifically? Nothing much at all, and that's the whole point of the structure of the web: it allows easy cross-site linking to interesting content.
So we'll/. NPR and thus demonstrate to them that linking really *is* harmless, right?
We will demonstrate that the only way the masses can find worthwhile content on the web is by linking to it. And requiring prior authorization for such a thing is too cumbersome and just plain silly. How else could I authoritatively tell you about NPR's linking policy without linking to it?
It's not that they don't want people to link.. they provide a pretty straight-forward online request form. It looks to me that they just want to control WHO links to their page. Or perhaps they'd automatically authorize anyone and just want statistics. Either way, they'll probably claim that the policy enforces "quality control" and not "censorship". I'm a huge NPR fan, but I still think this is a pretty dumb policy.
The US Government hasn't bothered to use this spectrum because it is too "difficult"... I read that as "too expensive to be worth the investment"... so how could that possibly filter down to be financially viable for any residencial customer other than Bill Gates??
For any halfway decent sys/net admin this isn't new info. However the New York Times did an excellent write-up of password issues in December that slashdot covered. It's written for non-tech people, but is pretty thorough and accurate.
Wow! From the reference to Page 28 of the court's finding:
Microsoft has raised serious questions about the validity of its trademark...
Wouldn't that be FUNNY if Microsoft lost its "Windows" trademark name because it tries to bully a small company into obeying its will. Ha! This made my day...
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree that this was definately a spin intended to make HP look dumb and Dell look innocent, I do agree that it does make it slightly harder to get an HP printer... especially in this era of mega stores and one-stop-shopping. In the article, HP says Dell only makes up 2 days/year (or 0.5%) of its printer sales... but I wonder what percentage of printers purchased from Dell (the former #1 reseller of PC's) are HP's, and what percentage of purchases from Dell include printers.
Any ideas?
I just got through trying to crack some riddles, so my brain is rather toasted, but this situation is not QUITE like the prepay debit cards.. because although Dell gets you to buy something you wouldn't otherwise buy, and therefore makes some profit they wouldn't otherwise make, they actually have to give you the cartridge, so their profits aren't so substantial.
With the prepay card people, they take your money and don't give you anything unless you *use* the card.. which they assume most people won't do entirely.
But, I suppose you're right for the end user: it sucks both way, and unless you can purchase something much cheaper through an inconvenient avenue (online in this case), then it doesn't make sense to purchase that way. If you *can* get it cheaper, then if you save $10 on each $40 cartridge, and use 20 cartridges over the life of the printer, but have 2 cartridges left when you heave it into the dumpster, you still saved a boat-load of money... even though you accidentaly allowed the seller to profit unnecessarily on the last two cartridges.
But anyway, it seems like printer makers always either sell really expensive printers with cheap cartridges, or (more often now) sell extrodinarily cheapo printers and expensive cartridges. (In fact I often see Lexmark, Dell's possible partner in this, seems to be selling their Z-series at incredibly low prices..) That way, I guess they probably get themselves in the market (even at a loss) looking really inexpensive.. but then make a ton of money on cartridges. Can they REALLY cost $40 to make, market, and sell??
They just know they introduced their bills way too late and don't want to wait.
I think your confusing MB/Mb with Mbit/mbit:
MB = Mega Byte
Mb = Mega bit
They get confused a lot. Most people *I've* seen, say "Mbps"; "mbps" might get listed if the advertiser isn't paying attention to detail or doesn't know what the heck they're talking about...
Actually, if you watch their online demo, it says that overlaps are fine.. they don't cause interferience and the authentication server makes sure that only your modules can get on your canopy network. Not quite sure how they do that though.
No, I did in fact read your message several times. I think you might have misunderstood my 1-2 minute reference. That's how long I estimate that it would take to do ALL those steps, including quickly scanning the message to see if it was a subscribed to service, finding the unsubscribe information and either going to the web page and doing whatever is necessary, or replying to the message and typing out a brief "I'm not interested in your product(s); please take me off your list and never send me any more e-mail, and do not ever give or sell my e-mail address away to anyone other companies, subsidaries, affiliates, or other such entities. I hate spam and try my best never buy from anyone who sends it." - Although I suppose unsubscribe messages that are honored are usually handled through automation, it always seems best to actually say what I want to happen.
Granted that about 1/3 the SPAM I get I identify as porn advertisements and the such and delete it without opening it, those take about 2-10 seconds each.. so that would be 1.5-7.5 cents each. Say each one of the employees in my company gets one of those per day (of course it's not as evenly distributed as that..). Say 4.5 cents each on average.. that's $45/day for our 1000 or so employees just on deleting those pesky little spam messages. Over our 260 or so business days per year, that's $11,700. Hmm.. suddenly that's not so cheap.
[Even if you say it only takes 1 second to read a subject and delete the message, that still comes out to $3900/year using the above figures.]
Oh, and you say I just need to opt-out once? Since there is no honored opt-out-from-everything-for-all-time list like there is for telemarketers, just because I opt out of your service doesn't mean I don't have to opt out of every other spammers list.. again assuming they honor opt-outs.
Of course everyone still has to go through their traditional paper junk mail, and that still costs our company money, but the bulk of the expense is still on the SENDER who has to pay 25 cents/item (or whatever the bulk rate is), rather than on the receiver who just pays the above calculated amount. Having the sender pay more helps keep unwanted mailings fewer in number, and at least targetted at their audience. I think I recall you mentioning further up the thread supporting email postage, which might diminish the amount of total trash spam, but would also hamper legitamate business significantly.
If you truly go through the trouble of reading the message and determining that you aren't interested, and file a removal request, then there is at least some allocation of resources on your part that is your decision, not mine.
That's exactly the point. I'm saying I want my email system to be used only for my legitamate business that your unsolicited bulk email doesn't qualify as, and so I don't want you or the other 1000 spammers sending me junk, forcing me to go through it and opt-out to each sender.
From your previous message:
Okay, so set a list of who is *allowed* to send in the first place. Don't wanna do that? Fine.
The world would just be a better place if everyone used a good old OPT-IN model. Get a list of who you're allowed to send mail to. Don't want to do that? Fine, don't send any unsolicited advertisements.
From the web page:
No, Unsolicited Bulk Email is always a bad thing... even if all spammers honored opt-outs like you described. When I'm at work and I get spam, it takes time to:
That process takes about 1-2 minutes for each SPAM message received. I get paid about 45 cents/minute, so that means that for each SPAM message I receive it costs my company 45-91 cents (per message per user).. still assuming an ideal opt-out world (which doesn't exist)..
It might be virtually free for you to send me unsolicited junk mail, but it costs my company and others like it TONS of money in wasted time to receive them.
That's why OPT-IN with a required confirmation is the only ethical way to mass mail.
As I understand it, data can still be recoverable using advanced (read "very expensive") methods because some magnetic residue is left of the device even after the bits are changed. For example, typically the data tracks on a disk are wider than the data stream that is written to it.. and because there's some imprecision in the writing of data, there may be some area outside the actual stream that gets data written to it.. allowing the possibility that it can be at least partially recovered even after more data is written to it. So according to the theory, if you took the drive apart and looked at the platters very closely (or recalibrated the drive heads), you'd be able to access those parts of the disk.
Supposedly even data written to RAM can be recovered under certain unusual circumstances even after a power off.
Tapes have a similar issue, and it is quite possible for people to recover stuff off of audio tapes. I heard recently that sometime soon someone is going to take another crack at the Nixon Watergate tapes... no one has tried to recover data from them since around 1970, so perhaps the recovery techniques or technology has improved enough to allow something to be learned!
I don't know that much about data recovery, but I bet you could find some info if you googled a bit.
Hey, someone posted the "original"..
mod it up!
Of course this type of thing wouldn't work in a conversational discussion between teachers and pupils, as it would be silly to e-chat with other people in the same room with you.. although even that type of discussion might be useful if you had some sort of distance learning opportunity (which seems increadibly rare in anything but higher ed).
A lot of folks are noticing this, but technology implimentation often runs backwards. Instead of asking "This is what technology can do for us, where can we do this?" we should be asking "It would be really nice to do this, is there a particular technology that would enable us to do it?" Of course some of the first is necessary because *sometimes* we don't even consider of a particular model of action until someone tells us we can do it with some technology... but generally in my experiences the majority of decision making should be done based on needs assessment.
Yes, I did even read what he was trying to say. He said that they saturated the school with computers but didn't have a good way to tie the computer use to the curriculum, so the computers were either unused or used in a distracting way.. either way a waste of that school district's money.
My point is that not only are the school districts throwing their money away, but their doing in in the wrong districts. Not only do they need to figure out how to integrate computers into the curriculum *effectively*, they need to figure out how to do it in underserved communities that can't afford to charge $1,500 to the parents of each child.
I don't think that's a very good conclusion. The point of having models is that they can be applicable across different situations where the details might be somewhat different. I work in Healthcare IT management, and several years ago just as the PDA boom started, there was a similar discussion on the merits of using the devices in the workplace. There were some folks that thought they would just be used for games and distract people from their jobs, and there were some gadget-adicts that thought it would revolutionize their work environment and they'd use their PDA for everything. But as we first began to seriously investigate usefulness in my organization we saw some significant areas of usefulness and some areas that it would just be a waste of resources. You might think that doctors are pretty smart and tech savy users, but generally they're not! Except for some rare (and generally young) exceptions, if you hand a PDA to a doctor, give him/her an afternoon of training and expect him/her to go off and use the PDA, it won't happen. Even in the case of highly trained doctors, we needed to work up to it by giving some to the tech-savy first who would use them highly productively and evangelise the products to their peers, and we loaded their PDA with reference programs (drug interactions, etc) they need to refer to daily anyway. And on top of that it needs to be increadibly easy to use and synchronize. After working on this a couple years, we're begining to see some productivity improvements and hope that as the technology becomes more trusted the improvements will increase more rapidly.
So I think the corporate environment CAN be used as a model for academia -- even high schools and under. The model won't result in any quick-fix programs, but can result in more directed evaluation of the pros and cons of the technology in the environment and hurdles that will need to be overcome to get the desired results.
See... the thing about this is it doesn't address the digital divide in America. Computers and other technology are important for our young people not only as a tool to perform a specific school-related task, but also as an opportunity to overcome barriers in access to technology for our nations poor, non-white, and female students. A failure to expose our children to computers causes them to have greater difficulty adapting to the technology demands put on our adult workforce.
So some say that it is the responsibility of parents to provide opportunities for their children to learn how to use computers. But that assumes that parents can afford to buy computers or access to them. When that's not the case, we need other organizations, such as schools, libraries and "boys and girls clubs" to step in and provide services.
Becoming comfortable with using computers certainly is not the cure-all for all the woes of poverty or education. Simply filling an underfunded and poorly performing school with computers won't achieve anything useful as long as there are no funds or appropriately skilled personnel to develop effective teaching plans that use the technology. And computer training certainly isn't a replacement for learning how to read, write, think critically, research, and so on. But if our schools and communities are leaving major portions of our country's underpriviledged or underserved children unprepared for the work force and for college, then they are not performing the service for which they are intended, and need to work hard in developing new curriculum using computers.
Not only cool.. how's that for an offsite data storage location? Not many companies can boast that their data will survive full-scale thermonuclear war... but if you use the server collocation farm on the moon, when the war is over and only the cockroaches and styrofoam are left, your data is STILL safe!
So you're implying that you DO have the backing of NASA or the ESA for all of the lunar bases you're designing now?
Of course... obviously any serious scientist knows that only high quality insightful scientific ideas get presented and discussed on Slashdot.
From Dictionary.com:
Dystopian adj. Of or relating to an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.
Yeah, especially if they could somehow stick the red and blue lasers in the same unit so that future CD drives could use either types of discs. The thing that sucks about advancement is it keeps making things obsolete so dang fast. What the heck am I supposed to do with all my 33s???
Philips is developing blue laser technology for use as a digital video recorder, but with removable media. See it here. It sounds like they want to continue to use a hard drive like in TiVo for short term storage, but then have a built-in (re)writable media for removable storate built on optical blue laser technology. Seems like a pretty neat idea to me, but I doubt this particular techology will stick.. too costly to impliment, and all the momentum is moving towards DVD.
We will demonstrate that the only way the masses can find worthwhile content on the web is by linking to it. And requiring prior authorization for such a thing is too cumbersome and just plain silly. How else could I authoritatively tell you about NPR's linking policy without linking to it?
The US Government hasn't bothered to use this spectrum because it is too "difficult"... I read that as "too expensive to be worth the investment"... so how could that possibly filter down to be financially viable for any residencial customer other than Bill Gates??
Wouldn't that be FUNNY if Microsoft lost its "Windows" trademark name because it tries to bully a small company into obeying its will. Ha! This made my day...