Let me ask you something. Why go through all the trouble to design, build, and debug a digital camera wielding box of bolts with a D-Link wireless Internet gateway jammed up its rear just so homebound people can visit the library, when existing technology known as "scanners" and "permanent storage" could store and make available every book in that library on the Internet? Not only that, there would be no queue to use the freaking robot, and the robot wouldn't be running over human library browsers' toes. Oh, "scanners" and "permanent storage" aren't experimental technologies either. Hmm!!!
Why doesn't Amazon.com have scanned pages of all the books they sell? Maybe because it'll take a dozen years and millions of dollars to scan in all those pages? Maybe because the authors don't want scanned images of their books online in the first place? Maybe because having a full book in digital form doesn't fall under fair use rules?
Yeah, it'd be fantastic to have every book online, available at any time, not low definition images of pages. But I suspect it'll be cheaper to buy a robot that can fill queued requests during the night, rather than scan in every single book that's available. Once there's a central repository of books where every library could reference requests, then you won't need the robot, but until copyright laws change and all the books are online, the robot is probably the cheaper solution.
Why is it important to stress that the robot receives orders through the Internet?
If you read the article (which is only two paragraphs long, is it too much to ask people to read a two paragraph article?), you find it was designed to be used by people who cannot physically access the library. The robot finds the books, opens the books, flips through pages and sends the images back over the internet to the person who for some reason is housebound. That person can then request the book be sent to them. So yeah, the internet plays an important role here.
That's interesting. I love browsing for books... walking along the racks just looking at the titles and picking out those which sound interesting. Only problem, you're walking with your head tilted, which gets sore after a few minutes.
It'd be cool to have the robot walk along and you'd see the image rotated 90 degrees, and the tiles scrolling by. Heck it'd be nice to get that on a video at the end of the aisle so you wouldn't have to go into the crowded aisle itself.
Libraries are where RFID tags will really shine. The robot wouldn't need a camera, just run run along the shelf with a sensor until it picks up the right tag. As for placing a book in the wrong place, smart bookshelves that read the RFID and record all the books that are there, and report any that are out of place.
I'm a tech monkey for a big-10 university and I personally support 60+ machines...we still have to trudge through about 3 levels of "esclation" until we get to either a technically competent person
Hmm... I would have assumed that a "big-10 university" would have enterprise level support. A quick call to the rep to get the repair guy onsite... not go through the common support line along with all the small mom & pop shops.
Let's see:
"Are you sure you want to delete this file?"
Or:
"Sure are you would enjoy this file to remove?"
Yes. Yes it does matter.
No, it doesn't. Users are going to click "YES" anyway, without reading the warning, then call you later to say they're missing a file and need it restored from tape.
This is not correct. Humans can and do evolve resistance by combining their immune systems, through sex.
Right, humans, as a species, has evolved. A Human, an individual, does not. Either they are born with the genetic combination that gives them defenses, or they are not. Humanity may eventually evolve to be immune to HIV, but individuals do not evolve, they die. That's Darwin for you... only the strong survive, or genetically speaking, those that have received the genetic combination from their parents. A human infected with ebola cannot "evolve" an immunity; if they happen to be immune, thanks to a combination of genes from the parents (who both died because neither was immune separately), they'll live to pass on their genes... which may or may not get lost in the genetic shuffle at conception.
It works because parasites need to evolve to attack hosts, not the other way around. This is exactly the same as software parasites.
Parasites need to evolve not to attack a host, but to remain undetected and also not to kill the host. Parasites can all too easily infect humans; in fact most diseases have been transferred to humans from non-human hosts; AIDS, SARS, bubonic plague, anthrax. These have not evolved so to speak, because they all kill the human host. When you think about it, the only parasite to truly succeed is the mitochondria.
The primary goal of survival is the replication of the genes. The body, be it the cellualar material of a virus or the human body, has one function, to protect the DNA and to enable the DNA to be replicated. For a virus in a human host, the goal would be to do anything to the human host to keep the human host alive and functioning and to promote the replication of it's own DNA. A parasite doesn't want to make the host sick or use all the hosts resources; if the host dies, that's an evolutionary dead end; so the virus should do everything it can to keep the host alive, and if it can help keeping the host healty and reproducing (thus transferring to a new host through sexual contact) then it's fully evolved to take advantage of the human body. Mitochondria (according to some) is a virus which has done just that.
Software viruses, however, are acting just like introduced viruses, not evolved viruses. Ditto with spam. They are replicating wildly in the host, without regard to the welfare of the hosts. At some point, as with ebola, it will kill the host.
This problem won't go away through wishful thinking - we need to understand what is actually going on. Heck, this discussion is moot: if my theory is correct, self-modifying defensive systems will happen exactly as the parasites have evolved: because this is what happens in natural systems.
The analogy doesn't work, because individual hosts don't evolve. Hosts die when introduced to new parasites or diseases... like smallpox in the new world, or the ebola virus. Humans can't naturally "evolve" resistance to the disease. The ones that don't die have some genetic immunity, and it is the continuation and spread of those genes through future generations that immunity is "evolved".
The Internet can "evolve" only because we can force changes into it. It's a thoroughly unnatural system, sorta like genetic engineering.
Anyway, maybe we should just let the parasites kill this host. And kill the Internet 2 host as well since it's built on the same fundamentals. That will, as extinctions in the past, allow others with built in immunity room to grow and flourish. Build a new core of protocols that naturally defends/prevents spam. That's what evolution is about.
I am fairly confident that the relevant market would be defined as advertising in search engines. Hence, a monopolist could raise the price for this advertisement.
If what you're saing is correct, then why hasn't Google itself, with 76% of the market, been targeted by the FTC? Why wasn't Yahoo! slammed when it was the only search engine worth mentioning?
It doesn't matter if MS/Google was the most popular search engine with 91% of people using it as their primary search engine. It doesn't matter if MS/Google raised the prices on advertising on MS/Google so only the richest companies could afford advertising (which may actually be a blessing). That's not part of the antitrust laws. As long as they do not
1. Prevent other search engines from operating
2. Prevent advertisers from advertising with other search engines
3. Prevent people from using other search engines
4. Create conditions where competitors cannot enter the arena
then there's no violation of the anti-trust laws.
#4 is the key here. Remember, Google came out of nowhere and shot to the top in a matter of months. It became the most popular not because it had the best advertisers, or because it had huge amounts of capital to work with, but because the technology worked. It can happen again. It is already happening. If advertisers get fed up with MS/Google, or users get tired of linking to MS sponsored sites, they will switch, and a new top engine will emerge.
According to this site, Google powers 76% of all search results, and MSN 15% (numbers seem to be for August 2003). I cannot see the FTC or European Commission approve this merger. This merger would eliminate the only serious competitor to Google on the search engine market.
Why should the FTC care about search engines? Yeah, a combination would result in the most used search engine... so what? We're not forced to use Google or MSN. We don't pay any money to use either. There's no monopoly when users have a choice, and all the choices are free. So there's no need to protect the consumer, is there? As long as Microsoft doesn't buy Google, then make Google the ONLY search engine IE will access, then it's a non-issue. As long as MS doesn't make MS (owned or influenced) sites the ONLY results that show up, then who cares? And if they do, then people get frustrated and switch back to Altavista or Infoseek.
Hmmm... I don't suppose the store is going to leave these outside overnight? I could use a few touch screen LCDs around my apartment, would make a nice front end for my MP3 Jukebox...
I wonder how they count film too, as film is not digital medium did they MPEG2 it a la DVD, or take the raw footage from the cameras (as long as it wasn't a direct analog to analog transfer)... and what about photographs - did they count them and if so at the molecular level of the photo paper?
I only glanced through the numbers, but couldn't find any place that said "for our purposes pictures are considered HxV resolution". For film (studio movies), they did say each frame was considered a picture and that sound contained a lot of data, but well again, I don't know how they sampled it.
Maybe they just used "a picture is worth 1000 words". Hmm... no, at 5 characters an average word, that's only 5K per picture, way too low.
if you're talking about data and film, then microfilm and microfiche is probably what is meant.
That's what I thought when I saw the "film"... which is why I read further, didn't seem possible that so much had been archived to microfilm/fiche in a single year. But no, they were indeed talking about the movie industry and all the movies they distribute.
We know this goes on, it happens in every industry. Of course reviewers get pre-release models, tweaked games, extra features... that's why you never trust a review from a professional reviewer. Seriously, how many people read movie reviews before deciding to watch a movie or not? How many go, even if reviewers pan the movie, because their friends said it was ok? I can't be the only one who waits a few months before buying a new product, checking usenet to see what others say about it.
Really, buying something the day it comes out based on what you've read from reviewers is like... installing MS Service Packs the day they're released. Well, maybe not quite, since you can always bring the product back to the store and get a refund if you don't like it. Too bad you can't do that with service packs...
I wonder how much of that was duplicate data. How many copies of the Matrix are floating around online? Did they count FTP mirror sites as separate data?
The blurb said 92% was stored on magnetic media; curious about the rest, I looked glanced around the article. Surprisingly a large part, 7%, is FILM! The reason film comprised such a large percentage is that each film reel is duplicated thousands of times to be sent to theaters around the world.
So if they're counting duplicates in film, I'd guess they'd count duplicates in magnetic media.
Estes made an Enterprise model rocket (do a google image search and you'll see it). It looked pretty cool. I didn't think it would fly very well, and I was right. It didn't make it to Mach 5... it didn't make it off the launch pad. Well, the hull did, but the disc and both nacells broke off just after launch.
Was anyone else dumb enough to launch it?
They made a KBC as well... I think that one actually flew pretty well.
How do you know which car in the intersection, out of dozens, is the one with the device?
Is it difficult to pick out which car is approaching with its headlights on? Even at a 1/4 mile you can pick out one set of headlights and follow that car until it reaches you. IR's no different, just you can't see it by the naked eye.
The devices are set to work at 1500 feet from the light; you could focus a IR-triggered, traffic-light mounted camera, but that could easily be defeated by triggering the sensor at different distances each time you use it. So instead you have a sensor on the light which triggers a set of video cameras located on a few street lights down the road, each to record 3 seconds of video. Sooner or later you're going to see the same vehicle appear in the pictures; and when you see it 20 times in a month, you have probable cause to pull the car over and check it out.
Expensive, perhaps, but with a $4000 fine for each offense, that should cover all the hardware and labor...
Once you prepare for war, you've already started the war.
So... by purchasing plastic and duct tape, I'm starting a war against terrorists? Cool, I didn't think individuals could declare war. I'm gonna also buy some anti-castro posters and stock up on Cohibas and start a war on Cuba! And to prepare for war against China, I'm gonna prepare and buy a English-Chinese dictionary and start a major international crisis.
Isn't is amazing how the aliens who built stonehenge carved pictures on it knowing only modern man would be able to view them once he had discovered lasers.
You missed the last bit- the pictures depict how to create an interstellar communicator to contact the aliens to let them know we've reached a level of technology where they can start trade with us...
Yes, but it was a 2nd line. I was talking about the primary line, which was completely unused for phone calls but required for DSL. The DSL was billed from separately, so the telco was charging me for the priviledge of having a line connected to the house. With all applicable taxes. And the long distance; you can't have a local line with no long distance service; maybe a second line, but the primary line requires it according to them. I tried to sneak it through after getting slammed and cancelling the long distance, but it eventually got rerouted back to the telco.
Getting disconnected, I've had to call back, get another tech and tell them I'm moving and need it disconnected. It's like changing your name. You tell people you changed your name because you got married and it's no problem. You tell them you changed your name because you just felt like it, and you're under suspicion for being on the lam. I'm certainly not the only one who's experienced this kind of crap, which is why I started my rant saying those who haven't are lucky.
It's always worked. Even when the power goes out, I can pick up a hard-wired phone and get dialtone.
That's a federal regulation that they maintain power. It's not the goodwill of the phone company to do so.
So, in a nutshell, telcos produce a superior quality service that does what it's supposed to do virtually all the time and for a good price. What is to hate?
You must be lucky. I get slammed by long distance companies once every two years or so... even when I make NO long distance calls. Hell, I don't make ANY calls on my land line; the only reason I keep it is for DSL. But I'm still required to pay $30 a month for local service, and $15 a month for long distance. That's making and receiving NO calls mind you. Which is why I eventually gave DSL and got rid of the land line.
Have you ever tried to cancel a land line? The only way to get one cancelled is to tell them you're moving. They won't cancel a land line just because you want them to.
Some days my car should be red. Some days blue. Some days a nice mauve. Then polka dots that change colors. How about flames that really flicker? Can't imagine flames on my wagon, but why not? Checkerboard? Heck, you can actually play checkers! Or chess. Or Othello. Backgammon. Hah, you can even play tetris. I can have my phone number flash on the side when I pass a cute girl (oh wait, I drive a wagon). I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them. There's a world of possibilities here!
Guess it really sucks to be you. Here you can buy beer from the age of 16, and you're not sent into imperialistic wars, only to die in a cold trench, long from home and without any beer.
Hey, there's no draft in the US. You only get sent to possibly die if you've volunteered.
No, I couldn't (legally) drink when I was 18, but I wasn't at any risk of getting sent to war.
Doesn't anybody know that elephants are non-standard units?
Ah, you missed the "Elephant Standard" war back in the early 90's. Microsoft was pushing the African elephant standard, while Cisco/Novell/most everyone else wanted the Asian Elephant on the grounds that they were smaller, more intelligent, and smelled better. Well, there were the fringe mac users who wanted the Wooly Mammoth, but we finally got most of them on board the Asian Elephant standard.
It was a black time in computing history... hackers leaving dead african elephant heads on the steps of Microsoft's campus, mahouts rioting outside Microsoft offices worldwide. It was a rough time for all of us. There was never a resolution, however; the downturn in the economy pushed everything aside for the time being. But once the economy picks up again, I fear it will continue where it left off...
Sorry, pal. You're a VP. I'm an engineer. I've had an email address since 1988, and I was using ed to write homework papers formatted with roff in 3rd grade on an ancient Unix system. You do not know how the Internet works.
And apparently you don't either. By sharing files, she allowed the Kazaa to publish her location and the files available. By sharing files, she immediately removed the cloak of anonimity.
That's how the "internet" works, and Oppenheim is correct, nycfashiongirl is mistaken if she though her nick would keep her anonymous.
My MP3s sit behind a firewall. There's no link to those files on the internet, no way for the RIAA to find them without hacking through my firewall and into my system. If I share files with my friends through an encrypted VPN, there's no way for the RIAA to know I've shared those files. If the RIAA were snooping in on that VPN traffic, then yes, that would be illegal because there's no reasonable cause for the RIAA to be sniffing my private communications. That is what nycfashiongirl is trying to claim, and that is truly shallow. If you can't see the difference between the two examples, then you don't know how the internet works.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me ask you something. Why go through all the trouble to design, build, and debug a digital camera wielding box of bolts with a D-Link wireless Internet gateway jammed up its rear just so homebound people can visit the library, when existing technology known as "scanners" and "permanent storage" could store and make available every book in that library on the Internet? Not only that, there would be no queue to use the freaking robot, and the robot wouldn't be running over human library browsers' toes. Oh, "scanners" and "permanent storage" aren't experimental technologies either. Hmm!!!
Why doesn't Amazon.com have scanned pages of all the books they sell? Maybe because it'll take a dozen years and millions of dollars to scan in all those pages? Maybe because the authors don't want scanned images of their books online in the first place? Maybe because having a full book in digital form doesn't fall under fair use rules?
Yeah, it'd be fantastic to have every book online, available at any time, not low definition images of pages. But I suspect it'll be cheaper to buy a robot that can fill queued requests during the night, rather than scan in every single book that's available. Once there's a central repository of books where every library could reference requests, then you won't need the robot, but until copyright laws change and all the books are online, the robot is probably the cheaper solution.
Why is it important to stress that the robot receives orders through the Internet?
If you read the article (which is only two paragraphs long, is it too much to ask people to read a two paragraph article?), you find it was designed to be used by people who cannot physically access the library. The robot finds the books, opens the books, flips through pages and sends the images back over the internet to the person who for some reason is housebound. That person can then request the book be sent to them. So yeah, the internet plays an important role here.
That's interesting. I love browsing for books... walking along the racks just looking at the titles and picking out those which sound interesting. Only problem, you're walking with your head tilted, which gets sore after a few minutes.
It'd be cool to have the robot walk along and you'd see the image rotated 90 degrees, and the tiles scrolling by. Heck it'd be nice to get that on a video at the end of the aisle so you wouldn't have to go into the crowded aisle itself.
Libraries are where RFID tags will really shine. The robot wouldn't need a camera, just run run along the shelf with a sensor until it picks up the right tag. As for placing a book in the wrong place, smart bookshelves that read the RFID and record all the books that are there, and report any that are out of place.
I'm a tech monkey for a big-10 university and I personally support 60+ machines...we still have to trudge through about 3 levels of "esclation" until we get to either a technically competent person
Hmm... I would have assumed that a "big-10 university" would have enterprise level support. A quick call to the rep to get the repair guy onsite... not go through the common support line along with all the small mom & pop shops.
Let's see: "Are you sure you want to delete this file?" Or: "Sure are you would enjoy this file to remove?" Yes. Yes it does matter.
No, it doesn't. Users are going to click "YES" anyway, without reading the warning, then call you later to say they're missing a file and need it restored from tape.
This is not correct. Humans can and do evolve resistance by combining their immune systems, through sex.
Right, humans, as a species, has evolved. A Human, an individual, does not. Either they are born with the genetic combination that gives them defenses, or they are not. Humanity may eventually evolve to be immune to HIV, but individuals do not evolve, they die. That's Darwin for you... only the strong survive, or genetically speaking, those that have received the genetic combination from their parents. A human infected with ebola cannot "evolve" an immunity; if they happen to be immune, thanks to a combination of genes from the parents (who both died because neither was immune separately), they'll live to pass on their genes... which may or may not get lost in the genetic shuffle at conception.
It works because parasites need to evolve to attack hosts, not the other way around. This is exactly the same as software parasites.
Parasites need to evolve not to attack a host, but to remain undetected and also not to kill the host. Parasites can all too easily infect humans; in fact most diseases have been transferred to humans from non-human hosts; AIDS, SARS, bubonic plague, anthrax. These have not evolved so to speak, because they all kill the human host. When you think about it, the only parasite to truly succeed is the mitochondria.
The primary goal of survival is the replication of the genes. The body, be it the cellualar material of a virus or the human body, has one function, to protect the DNA and to enable the DNA to be replicated. For a virus in a human host, the goal would be to do anything to the human host to keep the human host alive and functioning and to promote the replication of it's own DNA. A parasite doesn't want to make the host sick or use all the hosts resources; if the host dies, that's an evolutionary dead end; so the virus should do everything it can to keep the host alive, and if it can help keeping the host healty and reproducing (thus transferring to a new host through sexual contact) then it's fully evolved to take advantage of the human body. Mitochondria (according to some) is a virus which has done just that.
Software viruses, however, are acting just like introduced viruses, not evolved viruses. Ditto with spam. They are replicating wildly in the host, without regard to the welfare of the hosts. At some point, as with ebola, it will kill the host.
This problem won't go away through wishful thinking - we need to understand what is actually going on. Heck, this discussion is moot: if my theory is correct, self-modifying defensive systems will happen exactly as the parasites have evolved: because this is what happens in natural systems.
The analogy doesn't work, because individual hosts don't evolve. Hosts die when introduced to new parasites or diseases... like smallpox in the new world, or the ebola virus. Humans can't naturally "evolve" resistance to the disease. The ones that don't die have some genetic immunity, and it is the continuation and spread of those genes through future generations that immunity is "evolved".
The Internet can "evolve" only because we can force changes into it. It's a thoroughly unnatural system, sorta like genetic engineering.
Anyway, maybe we should just let the parasites kill this host. And kill the Internet 2 host as well since it's built on the same fundamentals. That will, as extinctions in the past, allow others with built in immunity room to grow and flourish. Build a new core of protocols that naturally defends/prevents spam. That's what evolution is about.
I am fairly confident that the relevant market would be defined as advertising in search engines. Hence, a monopolist could raise the price for this advertisement.
If what you're saing is correct, then why hasn't Google itself, with 76% of the market, been targeted by the FTC? Why wasn't Yahoo! slammed when it was the only search engine worth mentioning?
It doesn't matter if MS/Google was the most popular search engine with 91% of people using it as their primary search engine. It doesn't matter if MS/Google raised the prices on advertising on MS/Google so only the richest companies could afford advertising (which may actually be a blessing). That's not part of the antitrust laws. As long as they do not
1. Prevent other search engines from operating
2. Prevent advertisers from advertising with other search engines
3. Prevent people from using other search engines
4. Create conditions where competitors cannot enter the arena
then there's no violation of the anti-trust laws.
#4 is the key here. Remember, Google came out of nowhere and shot to the top in a matter of months. It became the most popular not because it had the best advertisers, or because it had huge amounts of capital to work with, but because the technology worked. It can happen again. It is already happening. If advertisers get fed up with MS/Google, or users get tired of linking to MS sponsored sites, they will switch, and a new top engine will emerge.
According to this site, Google powers 76% of all search results, and MSN 15% (numbers seem to be for August 2003). I cannot see the FTC or European Commission approve this merger. This merger would eliminate the only serious competitor to Google on the search engine market.
Why should the FTC care about search engines? Yeah, a combination would result in the most used search engine... so what? We're not forced to use Google or MSN. We don't pay any money to use either. There's no monopoly when users have a choice, and all the choices are free. So there's no need to protect the consumer, is there? As long as Microsoft doesn't buy Google, then make Google the ONLY search engine IE will access, then it's a non-issue. As long as MS doesn't make MS (owned or influenced) sites the ONLY results that show up, then who cares? And if they do, then people get frustrated and switch back to Altavista or Infoseek.
Hmmm... I don't suppose the store is going to leave these outside overnight? I could use a few touch screen LCDs around my apartment, would make a nice front end for my MP3 Jukebox...
I wonder how they count film too, as film is not digital medium did they MPEG2 it a la DVD, or take the raw footage from the cameras (as long as it wasn't a direct analog to analog transfer)... and what about photographs - did they count them and if so at the molecular level of the photo paper?
I only glanced through the numbers, but couldn't find any place that said "for our purposes pictures are considered HxV resolution". For film (studio movies), they did say each frame was considered a picture and that sound contained a lot of data, but well again, I don't know how they sampled it.
Maybe they just used "a picture is worth 1000 words". Hmm... no, at 5 characters an average word, that's only 5K per picture, way too low.
if you're talking about data and film, then microfilm and microfiche is probably what is meant.
That's what I thought when I saw the "film"... which is why I read further, didn't seem possible that so much had been archived to microfilm/fiche in a single year. But no, they were indeed talking about the movie industry and all the movies they distribute.
We know this goes on, it happens in every industry. Of course reviewers get pre-release models, tweaked games, extra features... that's why you never trust a review from a professional reviewer. Seriously, how many people read movie reviews before deciding to watch a movie or not? How many go, even if reviewers pan the movie, because their friends said it was ok? I can't be the only one who waits a few months before buying a new product, checking usenet to see what others say about it.
Really, buying something the day it comes out based on what you've read from reviewers is like... installing MS Service Packs the day they're released. Well, maybe not quite, since you can always bring the product back to the store and get a refund if you don't like it. Too bad you can't do that with service packs...
I wonder how much of that was duplicate data. How many copies of the Matrix are floating around online? Did they count FTP mirror sites as separate data?
The blurb said 92% was stored on magnetic media; curious about the rest, I looked glanced around the article. Surprisingly a large part, 7%, is FILM! The reason film comprised such a large percentage is that each film reel is duplicated thousands of times to be sent to theaters around the world.
So if they're counting duplicates in film, I'd guess they'd count duplicates in magnetic media.
Estes made an Enterprise model rocket (do a google image search and you'll see it). It looked pretty cool. I didn't think it would fly very well, and I was right. It didn't make it to Mach 5... it didn't make it off the launch pad. Well, the hull did, but the disc and both nacells broke off just after launch.
Was anyone else dumb enough to launch it?
They made a KBC as well... I think that one actually flew pretty well.
How do you know which car in the intersection, out of dozens, is the one with the device?
Is it difficult to pick out which car is approaching with its headlights on? Even at a 1/4 mile you can pick out one set of headlights and follow that car until it reaches you. IR's no different, just you can't see it by the naked eye.
The devices are set to work at 1500 feet from the light; you could focus a IR-triggered, traffic-light mounted camera, but that could easily be defeated by triggering the sensor at different distances each time you use it. So instead you have a sensor on the light which triggers a set of video cameras located on a few street lights down the road, each to record 3 seconds of video. Sooner or later you're going to see the same vehicle appear in the pictures; and when you see it 20 times in a month, you have probable cause to pull the car over and check it out.
Expensive, perhaps, but with a $4000 fine for each offense, that should cover all the hardware and labor...
Once you prepare for war, you've already started the war.
So... by purchasing plastic and duct tape, I'm starting a war against terrorists? Cool, I didn't think individuals could declare war. I'm gonna also buy some anti-castro posters and stock up on Cohibas and start a war on Cuba! And to prepare for war against China, I'm gonna prepare and buy a English-Chinese dictionary and start a major international crisis.
Hey, it's possible under chaos theory...
Isn't is amazing how the aliens who built stonehenge carved pictures on it knowing only modern man would be able to view them once he had discovered lasers.
You missed the last bit- the pictures depict how to create an interstellar communicator to contact the aliens to let them know we've reached a level of technology where they can start trade with us...
Yes, but it was a 2nd line. I was talking about the primary line, which was completely unused for phone calls but required for DSL. The DSL was billed from separately, so the telco was charging me for the priviledge of having a line connected to the house. With all applicable taxes. And the long distance; you can't have a local line with no long distance service; maybe a second line, but the primary line requires it according to them. I tried to sneak it through after getting slammed and cancelling the long distance, but it eventually got rerouted back to the telco.
Getting disconnected, I've had to call back, get another tech and tell them I'm moving and need it disconnected. It's like changing your name. You tell people you changed your name because you got married and it's no problem. You tell them you changed your name because you just felt like it, and you're under suspicion for being on the lam. I'm certainly not the only one who's experienced this kind of crap, which is why I started my rant saying those who haven't are lucky.
It's always worked. Even when the power goes out, I can pick up a hard-wired phone and get dialtone.
That's a federal regulation that they maintain power. It's not the goodwill of the phone company to do so.
So, in a nutshell, telcos produce a superior quality service that does what it's supposed to do virtually all the time and for a good price. What is to hate?
You must be lucky. I get slammed by long distance companies once every two years or so... even when I make NO long distance calls. Hell, I don't make ANY calls on my land line; the only reason I keep it is for DSL. But I'm still required to pay $30 a month for local service, and $15 a month for long distance. That's making and receiving NO calls mind you. Which is why I eventually gave DSL and got rid of the land line.
Have you ever tried to cancel a land line? The only way to get one cancelled is to tell them you're moving. They won't cancel a land line just because you want them to.
Telcos just plain suck.
heh heh... guess i forgot to write 'after i've finally passed them..."
Some days my car should be red. Some days blue. Some days a nice mauve. Then polka dots that change colors. How about flames that really flicker? Can't imagine flames on my wagon, but why not? Checkerboard? Heck, you can actually play checkers! Or chess. Or Othello. Backgammon. Hah, you can even play tetris. I can have my phone number flash on the side when I pass a cute girl (oh wait, I drive a wagon). I can have messages flash on the back telling that moron driving 30 in a 50 what I think of them. There's a world of possibilities here!
Guess it really sucks to be you. Here you can buy beer from the age of 16, and you're not sent into imperialistic wars, only to die in a cold trench, long from home and without any beer.
Hey, there's no draft in the US. You only get sent to possibly die if you've volunteered.
No, I couldn't (legally) drink when I was 18, but I wasn't at any risk of getting sent to war.
Doesn't anybody know that elephants are non-standard units?
Ah, you missed the "Elephant Standard" war back in the early 90's. Microsoft was pushing the African elephant standard, while Cisco/Novell/most everyone else wanted the Asian Elephant on the grounds that they were smaller, more intelligent, and smelled better. Well, there were the fringe mac users who wanted the Wooly Mammoth, but we finally got most of them on board the Asian Elephant standard.
It was a black time in computing history... hackers leaving dead african elephant heads on the steps of Microsoft's campus, mahouts rioting outside Microsoft offices worldwide. It was a rough time for all of us. There was never a resolution, however; the downturn in the economy pushed everything aside for the time being. But once the economy picks up again, I fear it will continue where it left off...
Sorry, pal. You're a VP. I'm an engineer. I've had an email address since 1988, and I was using ed to write homework papers formatted with roff in 3rd grade on an ancient Unix system. You do not know how the Internet works.
And apparently you don't either. By sharing files, she allowed the Kazaa to publish her location and the files available. By sharing files, she immediately removed the cloak of anonimity.
That's how the "internet" works, and Oppenheim is correct, nycfashiongirl is mistaken if she though her nick would keep her anonymous.
My MP3s sit behind a firewall. There's no link to those files on the internet, no way for the RIAA to find them without hacking through my firewall and into my system. If I share files with my friends through an encrypted VPN, there's no way for the RIAA to know I've shared those files. If the RIAA were snooping in on that VPN traffic, then yes, that would be illegal because there's no reasonable cause for the RIAA to be sniffing my private communications. That is what nycfashiongirl is trying to claim, and that is truly shallow. If you can't see the difference between the two examples, then you don't know how the internet works.