I have often thought that when we finally get to the point where everyone is wired we should make some serious campaign reform. Creating a website is pretty cheap and we should restrict a candidate's campaign communication medium to a publicly offered website that the candidate or his staff can maintain. This would ensure a level playing field for all candidates and take much of the power away from the major corporations. Running a campaign wouldn't cost anything more than time to set up your website and the application fee so a candidate would not be obligated to seek funding for election and could spend time actually figuring out what his constituency's priorities were. Do you want to know who your canidatates are and what their positions are? Go to http://campaign.gov
Of course restricting a candidates campaign medium would take a constitutional amendment but when the time is right that shouldn't be a problem. People were able to ratify a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. Once the critical mass is there on the internet it shouldn't be a problem coordinating an amendment movement.
Cat
Re:Especially scarey with this administration
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 2
time to get back to the basics - reading, writing, and arithmetic - with at least basic science and maybe the odd historical overview course. (And know I didn't accidentally leave out Computer Science - there's lots of places to learn that later on)
Circuit switched networks are dying because the telcos are killing them. Standard LD telephony is still a cash cow but the telcos were spoiled with huge margins that no other business had. With such huge margins they got into the habit of wasting their money. Having worked at a major global telco I got to witness this insanity first hand. This telco was making a billion a year in ld in the US but decided to quit selling it and marketing it in order to pursue internet technology. So now they have lost billions of dollars in investment and let their main revenue stream atrophy mainly because "the internet is sexy". Yes, I actually had a marketing exec explain it to me in those terms.
Many of the customers that this telco has are small businesses who simply want detailed long distance bills in order to keep track of client calls for their own billing purposes. They don't care if their call is routed over IP or over a switched network. All they want is detailed billing and call completion and they are still willing to pay for it.
The telco executives bought into their own hype, failed to understand what a reasonable profit margin looked like and got a big bite in the ass from the reality of business.
what about this?
"More recently, Gerhard Rempe and colleagues at the University of Konstanz in Germany have effectively measured the actual motion of the particles in the "two slit" experiment without interfering with them."
From http://www.gsreport.com/articles/art000136.html
I had a similar idea but using particle entanglement as the transmission medium. I know the technology isn't there(and may never be) but bear with me a moment. Let's say you manufacture phones that have one million halves of entangled particles, preferably entangled molecules. If every eight particles is entangled with 8 particles on a different phone you can have 131,000 separate connections. Each of those phones would also have 131,000 unique connections. It doesn't take much to make a peer to peer phone network with such a setup.
The problem is that if such a communication device becomes feasible, will the manufacturers make them? Surely they would prefer a centralized model where the other half of the entangled particle resides in a network switching device so they can charge for switching.
OK now take this a bit further and you can make wireless network cards with unlimited range, keyed to a handful of other network cards. Next thing you know there is a growing peer to peer network whose infrastructure is virtually impossible to disrupt. Private networks can be created whose communications are impossible to intercept.
Actually most of the hacking being done has nothing to do with illegal reception, whatever you mean by that. Most hacks are for things like increasing storage space, running web servers, making email interfaces, ugrading memory, etc...
Normally I wouldn't respond to such a troll but this kind of misinformation needs to be stopped. It is what leads to things like the DMCA.
Kids still recite the pledge of allegiance in public school and there is no ban on saying god bless america on public property. This is misinformation spread by the christian right in order to push their agenda of propping up their religion with public money. Funny how they don't have a problem with lying when it suits their purpose, like pushing to have their ten commandments posted in every school, or forcing kids to hear christian prayers in school.
My son goes to public school and recites the pledge every day. It would be nice if they restored the pledge to its original pre McCarthyism form. This is supposed to be, after all, a secular government.
There is no conflict with a custodial bureacracy overseeing the day-to-day administration of national defense and infrastructure and planning ahead. Certainly national energy policy falls within the parameters you define, why cannot long term energy policy fall within those parameters as well? I submit that it can(as can other things within the parameters you defined). Unfortunately our leaders and the average Joe are simply too myopic to consider the future.
This is the main reason I am against things like drilling for oil in Alaska. Shouldn't we be saving some of our finite resources for our grandchildren? Drilling in Alaska shows a complete lack of planning for the future generations at best, a complete disregard for them at worst.
It would be nice if the U.S. started making some long term goals. I think one of the biggest problems the government has is its band-aid approach to everything. We should be setting long term goals. Where should we be 20 years from now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now? Much of who you are derives from the direction you take and the goals you set. How do you view someone who has no long term goals and no clear direction?
Normally I wouldn't raise an eyebrow at this development but since I am a comcast customer I have direct experience with their shenanigans. The quality of serivce is poor, they require windows or mac, they don't even want to hear linux. They dropped usenet for a while, have hinted at blocking VPN unless you pay more, they have also made noise about people using NAT in their own homes. And to top it all off they advertise being able to download your "internet music and video faster".
As soon as I have a broadband alternative I'm giving comcast the boot. They only reason I deal with them now is the fact that they are a monopoly in my area.
They stole space from a hard drive I purchased to make the reserved space area. They did this a year ago. This space is reserved out of the box on the newer machines, but they took it from the older ones(mine included). I think I lost about 10 hours.Cat
Well I had a problem with it long before they started doing it. Why? Because they took some of the space I paid for away from me. I had a 14 hour unit and upgraded it by adding harddrive space. Then with an upgrade( I think it was 2.0), Tivo reserved some of the disk space I had previously to push their video. At the time there was no explanation, they just took it.
Funny how people forget about them taking the space away in the first place and we get comments like, "it doesn't take up any space allocated to the user". Well it was allocated to me at one point. That's the thanks I get for being a customer, they steal my space and push crap I don't want on me.
I wonder how long it will be before they start disabling old Tivos to force users to get series two machines.
I never really liked sim city or understood the appeal. Sim earth and sim ant were a lot of fun. I wish they would release a new DVD version of Sim Earth. IIRC, it had this neat terraform section of the game where you could try to terraform Mars or Venus. That was fun.
So this is like saying if I didn't like the long distance service that came with my phone, I shouldn't be able to switch to another provider? Or I should only use sony media with my sony products? Or maybe I should only be allowed to go to the car dealer to get parts for my car. I'm sorry but if I don't like the way a piece of software works and it is because of the crappy server it is pointing to, I see no moral problem with giving my money or attention to someone else who will supply what it is I want.
The funny thing is that this is the essence capitalism and free market enterprise systems. Something the corporate barons tends to use as an excuse for their behavior.
I've pushed hard to have Linux put on my client's mainframe. The mainframe has superior storage management and security so it's the best place to keep massive amounts of data(massive to the PC mindset). My client has a need to have certain reports available forever and the reports in question are about 40 gig in size for the first year. This has been expected to grow quite a bit in the next few years to something like 100 to 200 Gig a year. Since the reports for the most part will not be accessed often, it makes no sense to build an NT box just to serve up these reports when they're requested(a Linux box on a server machine is out of the question in this shop--politics).
The users will request their report on the Linux ghost box and the Linux system will request the file from MVS which likely will reside on cart, I mean tape. The tape subsystems are extremely fast and the hardware is already budgeted and in use. The NT folks wanted all sorts of money for a new server, OS, etc.. it just wasn't worth it.
The hardest part is selling the idea, I mentioned it to the manager I report to and he said, "What's Linux?" I'm not kidding. This IT manager had never even heard of Linux. I found that the best way to make sure it happened was to go ahead and just make a prototype. Systems programming on the mainframe side were enthusiastic about loading it and got it going in short order(they want to screw the NT people anyway). It not only works but retrieval from archive is seamless and quick. Security is easy to handle because the users are already defined in RACF with certain rights, we just need to add those datasets to their IDs. After we're done there should be no more manual intervention(which supposedly was needed with the NT solution)
Other groups at the client site are now aware of what we are doing and would like to publish their own reports on the intranet from the mainframe without having to go through the hassle of dealing with the NT groups. Since departments in this company are not charged for their mainframe usage but are charged for any NT servers they need, it's a no brainer for management-- once you show them it works. You often have to lead these people by the hand. You also need to engage systems programming. Those guys have all sorts of neat soultions to problem but they are terrible when it comes to marketing their solutions.
Ever play one of the games created by ID? Sure it's just a game, but there's a shitload of physics in that tight, solid code. Take a look at the way a grenade arcs and bounces, this simulates reality almost perfectly. The human brain is excellent at picking up on inconsistencies between the game model and reality and I have never heard anyone complain about the physics being off (of course some of the special abilities are made up but that falls under artistic license). You have to know your newtonian physics pretty well to get it to look that realistic. So, does he know his physics? Obviously he does. He also knows a great deal about testing and hardware and learns very fast.
Cat
If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
Slashdot Mirror
I have often thought that when we finally get to the point where everyone is wired we should make some serious campaign reform. Creating a website is pretty cheap and we should restrict a candidate's campaign communication medium to a publicly offered website that the candidate or his staff can maintain. This would ensure a level playing field for all candidates and take much of the power away from the major corporations. Running a campaign wouldn't cost anything more than time to set up your website and the application fee so a candidate would not be obligated to seek funding for election and could spend time actually figuring out what his constituency's priorities were. Do you want to know who your canidatates are and what their positions are? Go to http://campaign.gov
Of course restricting a candidates campaign medium would take a constitutional amendment but when the time is right that shouldn't be a problem. People were able to ratify a constitutional amendment banning alcohol. Once the critical mass is there on the internet it shouldn't be a problem coordinating an amendment movement.
Cat
Cat
Pedro Morales?
Actually, I didn't know who this guy was that everyone was talking about. I had to figure it out based on everyone else's comments.
Tivo rocks.
No, Evolution was observed long before this.
http://talkorigins.org
Circuit switched networks are dying because the telcos are killing them. Standard LD telephony is still a cash cow but the telcos were spoiled with huge margins that no other business had. With such huge margins they got into the habit of wasting their money. Having worked at a major global telco I got to witness this insanity first hand. This telco was making a billion a year in ld in the US but decided to quit selling it and marketing it in order to pursue internet technology. So now they have lost billions of dollars in investment and let their main revenue stream atrophy mainly because "the internet is sexy". Yes, I actually had a marketing exec explain it to me in those terms.
Many of the customers that this telco has are small businesses who simply want detailed long distance bills in order to keep track of client calls for their own billing purposes. They don't care if their call is routed over IP or over a switched network. All they want is detailed billing and call completion and they are still willing to pay for it.
The telco executives bought into their own hype, failed to understand what a reasonable profit margin looked like and got a big bite in the ass from the reality of business.
Cat
what about this? "More recently, Gerhard Rempe and colleagues at the University of Konstanz in Germany have effectively measured the actual motion of the particles in the "two slit" experiment without interfering with them." From http://www.gsreport.com/articles/art000136.html
I had a similar idea but using particle entanglement as the transmission medium. I know the technology isn't there(and may never be) but bear with me a moment. Let's say you manufacture phones that have one million halves of entangled particles, preferably entangled molecules. If every eight particles is entangled with 8 particles on a different phone you can have 131,000 separate connections. Each of those phones would also have 131,000 unique connections. It doesn't take much to make a peer to peer phone network with such a setup.
The problem is that if such a communication device becomes feasible, will the manufacturers make them? Surely they would prefer a centralized model where the other half of the entangled particle resides in a network switching device so they can charge for switching.
OK now take this a bit further and you can make wireless network cards with unlimited range, keyed to a handful of other network cards. Next thing you know there is a growing peer to peer network whose infrastructure is virtually impossible to disrupt. Private networks can be created whose communications are impossible to intercept.
Cat
yes. In fact those were the first hacks.
Actually most of the hacking being done has nothing to do with illegal reception, whatever you mean by that. Most hacks are for things like increasing storage space, running web servers, making email interfaces, ugrading memory, etc...
Normally I wouldn't respond to such a troll but this kind of misinformation needs to be stopped. It is what leads to things like the DMCA.
Cat
If my daughter sees the hello kitty laptop I won't hear the end of it untill I make one for her too.
Kids still recite the pledge of allegiance in public school and there is no ban on saying god bless america on public property. This is misinformation spread by the christian right in order to push their agenda of propping up their religion with public money. Funny how they don't have a problem with lying when it suits their purpose, like pushing to have their ten commandments posted in every school, or forcing kids to hear christian prayers in school.
My son goes to public school and recites the pledge every day. It would be nice if they restored the pledge to its original pre McCarthyism form. This is supposed to be, after all, a secular government.
Cat
There is no conflict with a custodial bureacracy overseeing the day-to-day administration of national defense and infrastructure and planning ahead. Certainly national energy policy falls within the parameters you define, why cannot long term energy policy fall within those parameters as well? I submit that it can(as can other things within the parameters you defined). Unfortunately our leaders and the average Joe are simply too myopic to consider the future.
This is the main reason I am against things like drilling for oil in Alaska. Shouldn't we be saving some of our finite resources for our grandchildren? Drilling in Alaska shows a complete lack of planning for the future generations at best, a complete disregard for them at worst.
Cat
It would be nice if the U.S. started making some long term goals. I think one of the biggest problems the government has is its band-aid approach to everything. We should be setting long term goals. Where should we be 20 years from now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now? Much of who you are derives from the direction you take and the goals you set. How do you view someone who has no long term goals and no clear direction?
Cat
Normally I wouldn't raise an eyebrow at this development but since I am a comcast customer I have direct experience with their shenanigans. The quality of serivce is poor, they require windows or mac, they don't even want to hear linux. They dropped usenet for a while, have hinted at blocking VPN unless you pay more, they have also made noise about people using NAT in their own homes. And to top it all off they advertise being able to download your "internet music and video faster".
As soon as I have a broadband alternative I'm giving comcast the boot. They only reason I deal with them now is the fact that they are a monopoly in my area.
Cat
No, I added the drive and when they pushed the update for 2.0 they took 12 hours of my new space for "reserved" space. That's theft.
I bought the extra space I installed on my Tivo and Tivo took 12 hours of it away during the 2.0 upgrade.
Well you are missing the fact that they stole the space from many units, including mine, about a year ago.
I paid for the extra space and they stole 12 hours of it.
Cat
They stole space from a hard drive I purchased to make the reserved space area. They did this a year ago. This space is reserved out of the box on the newer machines, but they took it from the older ones(mine included). I think I lost about 10 hours.Cat
Well I had a problem with it long before they started doing it. Why? Because they took some of the space I paid for away from me. I had a 14 hour unit and upgraded it by adding harddrive space. Then with an upgrade( I think it was 2.0), Tivo reserved some of the disk space I had previously to push their video. At the time there was no explanation, they just took it.
Funny how people forget about them taking the space away in the first place and we get comments like, "it doesn't take up any space allocated to the user". Well it was allocated to me at one point. That's the thanks I get for being a customer, they steal my space and push crap I don't want on me.
I wonder how long it will be before they start disabling old Tivos to force users to get series two machines.
Cat
I never really liked sim city or understood the appeal. Sim earth and sim ant were a lot of fun. I wish they would release a new DVD version of Sim Earth. IIRC, it had this neat terraform section of the game where you could try to terraform Mars or Venus. That was fun.
Is the RIAA membership fee.
So this is like saying if I didn't like the long distance service that came with my phone, I shouldn't be able to switch to another provider? Or I should only use sony media with my sony products? Or maybe I should only be allowed to go to the car dealer to get parts for my car. I'm sorry but if I don't like the way a piece of software works and it is because of the crappy server it is pointing to, I see no moral problem with giving my money or attention to someone else who will supply what it is I want.
The funny thing is that this is the essence capitalism and free market enterprise systems. Something the corporate barons tends to use as an excuse for their behavior.
Cat
I've pushed hard to have Linux put on my client's mainframe. The mainframe has superior storage management and security so it's the best place to keep massive amounts of data(massive to the PC mindset). My client has a need to have certain reports available forever and the reports in question are about 40 gig in size for the first year. This has been expected to grow quite a bit in the next few years to something like 100 to 200 Gig a year. Since the reports for the most part will not be accessed often, it makes no sense to build an NT box just to serve up these reports when they're requested(a Linux box on a server machine is out of the question in this shop--politics).
The users will request their report on the Linux ghost box and the Linux system will request the file from MVS which likely will reside on cart, I mean tape. The tape subsystems are extremely fast and the hardware is already budgeted and in use. The NT folks wanted all sorts of money for a new server, OS, etc.. it just wasn't worth it.
The hardest part is selling the idea, I mentioned it to the manager I report to and he said, "What's Linux?" I'm not kidding. This IT manager had never even heard of Linux. I found that the best way to make sure it happened was to go ahead and just make a prototype. Systems programming on the mainframe side were enthusiastic about loading it and got it going in short order(they want to screw the NT people anyway). It not only works but retrieval from archive is seamless and quick. Security is easy to handle because the users are already defined in RACF with certain rights, we just need to add those datasets to their IDs. After we're done there should be no more manual intervention(which supposedly was needed with the NT solution)
Other groups at the client site are now aware of what we are doing and would like to publish their own reports on the intranet from the mainframe without having to go through the hassle of dealing with the NT groups. Since departments in this company are not charged for their mainframe usage but are charged for any NT servers they need, it's a no brainer for management-- once you show them it works. You often have to lead these people by the hand. You also need to engage systems programming. Those guys have all sorts of neat soultions to problem but they are terrible when it comes to marketing their solutions.
Ever play one of the games created by ID? Sure it's just a game, but there's a shitload of physics in that tight, solid code. Take a look at the way a grenade arcs and bounces, this simulates reality almost perfectly. The human brain is excellent at picking up on inconsistencies between the game model and reality and I have never heard anyone complain about the physics being off (of course some of the special abilities are made up but that falls under artistic license). You have to know your newtonian physics pretty well to get it to look that realistic. So, does he know his physics? Obviously he does. He also knows a great deal about testing and hardware and learns very fast.
Cat
If your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.