The delay in integration is because spectrum and construction costs for wireless broadband are still high enough to allow it to compete economically with wired alternatives. Wireless broadband has been and still is a product for people more concerned with ubiquity and convenience than cost or bandwidth.
Once you've invested in the wireless network, I think the running costs are much lower than a wired network. The legacy copper wired network becomes a liability, not an asset.
A similar service in Hong Kong: Vodafone's home broadband, which uses a router that connects to the HSPA 3G network, combining a 4 port ethernet router, Wifi, an IP phone line. It's specifically NOT mobile, locked to a particular cell, but on paper seems good deal. HK$148/month for unlimited usage (about US$19), supposedly 7 MB/s. Just been introduced so no idea how it actually performs.
How would your device help your kid after she got on the wrong bus? Will you intercept it in your Batmobile?
I dunno, maybe he'd just like to know where the kid actually is when they aren't at their bus stop when the bus they're supposed to be on drives away without them stepping off of it.
So after logging into his spy monitor he sees a moving dot on a road. Then what? He still doesn't know what happened. He still has to call the school. He's panicking even more by now, and from the original post, he seems very ready to jump to the worst possible conclusions on the least evidence.
Your kid will hate you for this should you ever try to do it.
Yeah, kids hate it when you give them cellphones
Who's talking about cellphones? He said a GPS tracker, "placed on her". She'll feel like a tagged animal or a convict; when her friends find out they'll certainly make her feel that way.
I have an 11-year-old daughter. If I was worried about her getting on the wrong bus, I'd spnd half an hour talking to her about what to do. I might go along with her and talk to the driver myself and make sure he could be trusted him to help. I wouldn't tell her I'm going to inject a GPS tracker/strap it on her ankle or whatever. If she's old enough to go to school by herself, she can handle this without calling in SWAT.
And as with all these "Ask Slashdot", I wonder if any of it is true, or if the whole scenario was crafted to hit hot buttons. "A Linux based solution"? WTF?
nd doesn't solve the problem of what happens to your daughter when she's standing around in a strange neighborhood.
The solution to that is tell the kid DON'T GET OFF THE BUS IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. A school bus driver is not going to dump toddlers on a street corner, worst case she rides back to the depot and gets another bus or waits till you can pick her up. The driver has a radio or cell phone and will let the school know, and they'll tell you. No need for surgical implants.
How would your device help your kid after she got on the wrong bus? Will you intercept it in your Batmobile? Worst case she spends an hour sitting on a bus till it gets back to the terminal and she gets the right one, or you pick her up. Doesn't warrant surgical implantation. School bus drivers do know how to handle kids who get the wrong bus.
Your kid will hate you for this should you ever try to do it. And I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do a lot of explaining to child welfare agencies.
and we get the same thing when we try to watch stuff on the BBC website.
I'm not in the UK, I can't watch BBC either. But I can understand the networks themselvwes doing it for full episodes, they didn't use Youtube before anyway, it's the news and review sites that are also often using Hulu now for clips, instead of the unlimited sites thay used before.
For full episodes, I can find better sources than Hulu.
In any case, the Hulu web experience is pretty good,
For Americans. The rest of the world can fuck off.
Wouldn't be a real problem, except that sites that used to have world-wide compatible embedded video, such as using Youtube, have replaced it with US-only Hulu. It's very annoying to see all those video preview boxes with "Piss off foreigner" messages on them when I'm reading some media related article.
Somebody in the procurement department either (a) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that erroneously states that they need won't work with Linux, and therefore has to be excluded from the procurement process. or (b) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that correctly states that they need won't work with Linux,
Regardless, they are required to put it out for tender. Even if they think only one company is capable of supplying a service, it has to go thruogh an open specification and bidding process. Deciding on the vendor for a multi-millon dollar contract on the basis of a memo from some IT guy is not good government. It creates a huge incentive for corruption.
I guess the point of it all is, RPGs seem to have taken most of the luster out of certain types of fiction for me, so I wasn't able to finish them (the Wheel of Time books) up, I think I read the first 5 and part of 6. It just seemed kind of, I dunno, limp to me I guess.
I don't Play RPGs and I couldn't read more than a few pages of Jordan. It's because he's boring. And the backstory of RPGs may well be interesting, but it's not literature.
I don't read a lot of fantasy, but pick up some by : Michael Moorcock, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe (not really fantasy, but his "The Book of the New Sun" series is pretty good), Fritz Leiber. All quite different in approach. I don't go for the multi-volume fantasy quest to save the world, except for Tolkien which I read when I was 12, but I'm sure there's some good stuff around in that subgenre. Certainly much better than Jordan. Don't write off a whole genre because one popular writer is tedious. I mean, Tom Clancy hasn't written anything worth the time to read it in decades, yet still sells on his reputation, same reason I guess: comfort; familiar characters and situations endlessly repeated, like a daytime soap. But there are dozens of thriller writers who sell 1/10th as many books but who can write much better.
You have to trust every single application vendor separately anyway, even if you have repositories. If you think there's more than the remotest of changes, just because someone's building it for you, I have a bridge to sell you. No one actually audits that code before it's build, signed and pushed into the repository.
Yes. But if an app has been downloaded hundreds or thousands of times, and no one has noticed any malware, it's a good bet it's safe -- on Sourceforge et. al. there is a reporting mechanism, you can post comments which go live immediately; on a proprietor's site you have no idea if the site has been hacked or unmaintained for years or what if anything they do if malware is reported.
As one example, to install software, I can go on the web, find the primary site for it, make sure it passes malware tests, and install it. On Linux, there's a repository (as I understand, never figured that part out). That may be a technologically superior option, but that means I have to trust the repository buildier.
Yes. Your Windows method: you have to trust every single application vendor separately. Linux system: you trust one repository, which you can check out the reputation of if you're concerned. I fail to see why this is a problem, it sounds simpler and safer to me.
By the way, many "repositories" also host Windows code; I get a lot of Windows apps from Sourceforge.
Take caesarean sections, for example. In the US, 31% of births are by caesarian section. That right there is 31% of the future population who would not exist in more primitive times, and who carry genetics that make it at least more likely than average that they themselves will not be able to give birth without modern medical assistance. You can't tell me that doesn't change the overall makeup of a population in terms of its ability to deal with that specific problem.
I'm a fairly tall person, and my wife is rather short. And when she was pregnant, the baby was overdue by more than a week. At that point the baby was very healthy, but very large (9 lbs). After about 14 hours of labour there was no other option to get it out than Caesarean. Our daughter is extremely healthy and strong. I don't think you can make a case that the population has been weakened by assisting her birth. Now 12, she will soon be taller than her mother, and should not have any problems when and if she eventually has a family.
So I doubt your blithe assertion that 31% of the population are genetically inferior -- or even inferior in the ability to give birth -- because of this mollycoddling has any basis in reality.
bonus things that can go wrong, like GPS deciding that you're on a frontage road or freaking out when I go to the track.
Yeah, obviously all those things you thought of in 30 seconds of hearing the idea never crossed their minds. They're all idiots and are promoting a system that will cause the entire traffic system to crash/go into deadlock.
enforced compliance to an arbitrary standard at my expense
Yes, how idiotic to pretend that it's a safety measure. Everyone knows that the faster you go the safer everyone is, because you spend less time on the road, and that every driver should be able to decide how fast to drive, which side of the road to drive on, and anyone who wants to tell you otherwise is obviously a Commie.
That's not the problem. The problem is that GPS is not, in general, accurate enough to determine if you're travelling on the freeway itself or the frontage road.
With tens of thousands of cars having the same problem, if it existed, it would be solved pretty quickly.
It would not be installed overnight in everyone's car without testing. This is not a Microsoft mandatory update.
Finally, I never said the breaks would go on, but at freeway speeds losing your acceleration can cause a surprisingly rapid speed drop,
At which point the governor would not be limiting your power any more. Besides, it is not a redline where your car blows up when you reach a certain speed, you get warnings first and with any sanity a gradual reduction in power if you persist.
Cutting fuel is the same thing as putting on the brakes - both can cause you to lose control, especially if the roads are slick or icy.
FFS, do you imagine that the government would mandate technology that would crash your car if you went over the speed limit? Do you think they wouldn't test it under all road conditions? "Cutting" fuel does not mean "Cutting off". And who said it would work by interfering with the fuel flow anyway? Cars have had speed governors for decades (heard of cruise control?)
Drivers who have to make up lame reasons and invent fantastic scenarios (what if I was being chased by terrorists/escaping from a bushfire/volcanic eruption/herd of wildebeest) to explain why they should be allowed to break the law when they want to (regardless of anyone else's safety) are exactly the people who should be pulled up by this.
at mechanical device is going to stop the text message, "body #4, save image, A.Jolie clone."
Why would anyone bother, when you can spend all day surfing free porn sites with professional models, some of who really do look like Jolie? Or you can cruise the "fakes" sites where people have Photoshopped her head onto various appropriate (or inappropriate) bodies. All in much higher resolution and lighting than a low-res microwave image.
specifically what if I'm on the freeway and the GPS thinks I'm on the frontage road? I'll drop ~50% speed right there.
No it won't. Even in the worst case, IT DOES NOT PUT ON THE BRAKES, it reduces engine power. So you slow down, gradually. And have plenty of time to either 1) Turn it off 2) flash your indicators 3) move to a slower lane. And if it was a GPS problem, you'd expect ALL the cars to be equally affected.
Though a GPS location that didn't have freeways accurately mapped would be a rather surprising oversight.
Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"
I've done a lot of layout of books written by academics. All of them used Word. But NONE of them had a clue what "Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates...". Most of them couldn't tell the difference between a straight or a typographic quote. Or between Arial or Times. So whoever wrote the summary was just trying to provoke controversy by making it "new Microsoft features" versus "Free software", and then watching the predictable flame war.
Obviously some academics are interested in typography -- mathematicians, linguists -- and they have tools they've developed to do their job. Just because Word, after about 20 years, has finally decided to support some basic typographical features won't make much of a difference. Those using Word won't understand or notice them, as most Word users don't use 98% of its features now (though they still insist on having the latest version). A lot of Word users start a new page by hitting enter until they roll the page, for instance.
It's not that they can't handle a high volume of complaints. It's that they can't handle ANYTHING.
Have you ever tried to reach a human being through yahoo? Good luck.
True. I have a Yahoo account, $20 a year. I've had a few issues over the years and sent queries in. All I get back are cut and paste from FAQs that I've already read. I've pointed out they didn't answer my question, asked again. A week later, another copy of the same fucking FAQ. And recently I've tried to contact them about a problem with a Yahoo Auction posting, two weeks later not a response at all. And looking at their web pages, no direct email contact, and no phone or snail mail address. Seems you have to get some firearms and take people hostage before you can get a response that isn't a copy of a FAQ..
Slashdot Mirror
This wireless broadband service in Hong Kong:( http://www.smartone-vodafone.com/jsp/mobile/home_broadband/english/faq.jsp )is US$19/month for unlimited usage, slightly cheaper than standard ADSL services, and higher (claimed) speed.
Once you've invested in the wireless network, I think the running costs are much lower than a wired network. The legacy copper wired network becomes a liability, not an asset.
A similar service in Hong Kong: Vodafone's home broadband, which uses a router that connects to the HSPA 3G network, combining a 4 port ethernet router, Wifi, an IP phone line. It's specifically NOT mobile, locked to a particular cell, but on paper seems good deal. HK$148/month for unlimited usage (about US$19), supposedly 7 MB/s. Just been introduced so no idea how it actually performs.
Obviously it's not irony. Since the device is black, it's "ebony".
I'm not sticking my nose in someone's family life. HE ASKED FOR OPINIONS. So I gave my personal fucking opinion, as a father.
And that's where I get off, asshole.
I dunno, maybe he'd just like to know where the kid actually is when they aren't at their bus stop when the bus they're supposed to be on drives away without them stepping off of it.
So after logging into his spy monitor he sees a moving dot on a road. Then what? He still doesn't know what happened. He still has to call the school. He's panicking even more by now, and from the original post, he seems very ready to jump to the worst possible conclusions on the least evidence.
Your kid will hate you for this should you ever try to do it.
Yeah, kids hate it when you give them cellphones
Who's talking about cellphones? He said a GPS tracker, "placed on her". She'll feel like a tagged animal or a convict; when her friends find out they'll certainly make her feel that way.
I have an 11-year-old daughter. If I was worried about her getting on the wrong bus, I'd spnd half an hour talking to her about what to do. I might go along with her and talk to the driver myself and make sure he could be trusted him to help. I wouldn't tell her I'm going to inject a GPS tracker/strap it on her ankle or whatever. If she's old enough to go to school by herself, she can handle this without calling in SWAT.
And as with all these "Ask Slashdot", I wonder if any of it is true, or if the whole scenario was crafted to hit hot buttons. "A Linux based solution"? WTF?
The solution to that is tell the kid DON'T GET OFF THE BUS IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. A school bus driver is not going to dump toddlers on a street corner, worst case she rides back to the depot and gets another bus or waits till you can pick her up. The driver has a radio or cell phone and will let the school know, and they'll tell you. No need for surgical implants.
Your kid will hate you for this should you ever try to do it. And I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do a lot of explaining to child welfare agencies.
Sure, for full episodes. I'm talking about clips, which are arguably news, or advertising the show istelf. A lot of those are Hulu now as well.
I'm not in the UK, I can't watch BBC either. But I can understand the networks themselvwes doing it for full episodes, they didn't use Youtube before anyway, it's the news and review sites that are also often using Hulu now for clips, instead of the unlimited sites thay used before.
For full episodes, I can find better sources than Hulu.
For Americans. The rest of the world can fuck off.
Wouldn't be a real problem, except that sites that used to have world-wide compatible embedded video, such as using Youtube, have replaced it with US-only Hulu. It's very annoying to see all those video preview boxes with "Piss off foreigner" messages on them when I'm reading some media related article.
Somebody in the procurement department either
(a) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that erroneously states that they need won't work with Linux, and therefore has to be excluded from the procurement process.
or
(b) Has a report from someone in their IT Department that correctly states that they need won't work with Linux,
Regardless, they are required to put it out for tender. Even if they think only one company is capable of supplying a service, it has to go thruogh an open specification and bidding process. Deciding on the vendor for a multi-millon dollar contract on the basis of a memo from some IT guy is not good government. It creates a huge incentive for corruption.
I don't Play RPGs and I couldn't read more than a few pages of Jordan. It's because he's boring. And the backstory of RPGs may well be interesting, but it's not literature.
I don't read a lot of fantasy, but pick up some by : Michael Moorcock, Ursula Le Guin, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe (not really fantasy, but his "The Book of the New Sun" series is pretty good), Fritz Leiber. All quite different in approach. I don't go for the multi-volume fantasy quest to save the world, except for Tolkien which I read when I was 12, but I'm sure there's some good stuff around in that subgenre. Certainly much better than Jordan. Don't write off a whole genre because one popular writer is tedious. I mean, Tom Clancy hasn't written anything worth the time to read it in decades, yet still sells on his reputation, same reason I guess: comfort; familiar characters and situations endlessly repeated, like a daytime soap. But there are dozens of thriller writers who sell 1/10th as many books but who can write much better.
Yes. But if an app has been downloaded hundreds or thousands of times, and no one has noticed any malware, it's a good bet it's safe -- on Sourceforge et. al. there is a reporting mechanism, you can post comments which go live immediately; on a proprietor's site you have no idea if the site has been hacked or unmaintained for years or what if anything they do if malware is reported.
Yes. Your Windows method: you have to trust every single application vendor separately. Linux system: you trust one repository, which you can check out the reputation of if you're concerned. I fail to see why this is a problem, it sounds simpler and safer to me.
By the way, many "repositories" also host Windows code; I get a lot of Windows apps from Sourceforge.
I'm a fairly tall person, and my wife is rather short. And when she was pregnant, the baby was overdue by more than a week. At that point the baby was very healthy, but very large (9 lbs). After about 14 hours of labour there was no other option to get it out than Caesarean. Our daughter is extremely healthy and strong. I don't think you can make a case that the population has been weakened by assisting her birth. Now 12, she will soon be taller than her mother, and should not have any problems when and if she eventually has a family.
So I doubt your blithe assertion that 31% of the population are genetically inferior -- or even inferior in the ability to give birth -- because of this mollycoddling has any basis in reality.
Yeah, obviously all those things you thought of in 30 seconds of hearing the idea never crossed their minds. They're all idiots and are promoting a system that will cause the entire traffic system to crash/go into deadlock.
enforced compliance to an arbitrary standard at my expense
Yes, how idiotic to pretend that it's a safety measure. Everyone knows that the faster you go the safer everyone is, because you spend less time on the road, and that every driver should be able to decide how fast to drive, which side of the road to drive on, and anyone who wants to tell you otherwise is obviously a Commie.
With tens of thousands of cars having the same problem, if it existed, it would be solved pretty quickly.
It would not be installed overnight in everyone's car without testing. This is not a Microsoft mandatory update.
At which point the governor would not be limiting your power any more. Besides, it is not a redline where your car blows up when you reach a certain speed, you get warnings first and with any sanity a gradual reduction in power if you persist.
FFS, do you imagine that the government would mandate technology that would crash your car if you went over the speed limit? Do you think they wouldn't test it under all road conditions? "Cutting" fuel does not mean "Cutting off". And who said it would work by interfering with the fuel flow anyway? Cars have had speed governors for decades (heard of cruise control?)
Drivers who have to make up lame reasons and invent fantastic scenarios (what if I was being chased by terrorists/escaping from a bushfire/volcanic eruption/herd of wildebeest) to explain why they should be allowed to break the law when they want to (regardless of anyone else's safety) are exactly the people who should be pulled up by this.
Why would anyone bother, when you can spend all day surfing free porn sites with professional models, some of who really do look like Jolie? Or you can cruise the "fakes" sites where people have Photoshopped her head onto various appropriate (or inappropriate) bodies. All in much higher resolution and lighting than a low-res microwave image.
I suspect more peoepl are killed in traffic accidents speeding to hospitals than lives saved by taking a couple of extra minutes.
Need to outrun someone chasing you.
Need to quickly pass some vehicle for safety reasons.
How about dropping back instead. Seems a bit safer, if less macho.
Duel was a great movie, though, wasn't it?
No it won't. Even in the worst case, IT DOES NOT PUT ON THE BRAKES, it reduces engine power. So you slow down, gradually. And have plenty of time to either 1) Turn it off 2) flash your indicators 3) move to a slower lane. And if it was a GPS problem, you'd expect ALL the cars to be equally affected.
Though a GPS location that didn't have freeways accurately mapped would be a rather surprising oversight.
I've done a lot of layout of books written by academics. All of them used Word. But NONE of them had a clue what "Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates...". Most of them couldn't tell the difference between a straight or a typographic quote. Or between Arial or Times. So whoever wrote the summary was just trying to provoke controversy by making it "new Microsoft features" versus "Free software", and then watching the predictable flame war.
Obviously some academics are interested in typography -- mathematicians, linguists -- and they have tools they've developed to do their job. Just because Word, after about 20 years, has finally decided to support some basic typographical features won't make much of a difference. Those using Word won't understand or notice them, as most Word users don't use 98% of its features now (though they still insist on having the latest version). A lot of Word users start a new page by hitting enter until they roll the page, for instance.
True. I have a Yahoo account, $20 a year. I've had a few issues over the years and sent queries in. All I get back are cut and paste from FAQs that I've already read. I've pointed out they didn't answer my question, asked again. A week later, another copy of the same fucking FAQ. And recently I've tried to contact them about a problem with a Yahoo Auction posting, two weeks later not a response at all. And looking at their web pages, no direct email contact, and no phone or snail mail address. Seems you have to get some firearms and take people hostage before you can get a response that isn't a copy of a FAQ..
NASA