So, if you are willing to pay $5 for a widget, you will bid that only within the last 30 seconds of the auction. If you aren't guaranteed that it's the last 30 seconds of the auction, then you won't bid $5. You'd rather see someone else get it for $3 than have more than 30 seconds between your bid and the end of the auction.
Yup.
And the reason is that if I put in $5 from the start I'd bid it up to $3.50. Then the other guy would up his bid to $4, then my proxy bid would kick it up to $4.50. Maybe I might win at that point, or the other guy would outbid my $5 proxy bid. At best I get it for $4.50 - or the other guy gets it for $5.50 or whatever.
With sniping, however, my bid for $5 goes in at the last second. The bid goes up to $3.50 with me winning. Chances are the other guy doesn't understand proxy bidding and only put in $3 when his limit was really $5. I win the item for $3.50 - and pay a dollar less than I would have otherwise.
If the first guy put in a proxy bid of >$5 I lose either way. By sniping I'm betting that others don't know what they are doing and put in a bid lower than they are willing to pay. Usually this is true, so as a buyer I get a better deal. The 5-minute extension wouldn't bother me - most people don't log in for the last 5 mins of the auction.
And I'm not worried about missing my snipe. First, most sniping software syncs time with ebay to prevent this. Second, I can always put in my snipe at t-5 min with most of the benefit of t-30sec. Third, if I lose the auction there is probably 100 others just like it to bid on - and chances are my sniping software will just switch to the next auction automatically...
If people used proxy bidding correctly sniping wouldn't work at all. Most people don't, so sniping works fine. I live in the real world, so I use strategies that maximize my advantage against others. If I were at an open house I likewise might not point it out if I noticed that the dirty table in the corner that is part of the sale is a $1M antique. That's just the competitive nature of the market.
And this doesn't even go into the benefits of auction grouping in sniping software. If I have 100 auctions to choose from closing at 10 min intervals, why would I stay up around the clock entering my max bid every 10 mins to see if I could get one? I can't put in 100 proxy bids lest I win them all and only need one.
If the lenses were good enough though, you'd only need a few for the whole earth. At that altitude you see nearly half the planet all at once, and the 5000 miles of side-to-side distance is nothing compared to the distance just getting from the satellite down to the earth.
It would also be hard to hit with ASATs in one sense - you'd need a big rocket to get a weapon up there. For LEO an ASAT really can be suborbital - but if you want to get up to geosync even a ballistic shot is going to need a lot more fuel. On the other hand, you're a sitting duck in geosync - but then again you could maneuver a fair amount and still be in the same basic place. You don't care if your orbit drifts a little since you dont' have a bazillion fixed ground stations trying to talk to you like with communications satellites.
Agreed - unfortunately sniping is a necessary mechanism due to the less-than-perfect market that ebay represents. It avoids putting others into a psychological bidding war against you - and since most people don't understand proxy bidding sniping basically means not giving most of your opponents a chance to bid against you. Also - sniping works better when you can group auctions - if you want 512MB of RAM and don't care which of 500 auctions you win, why put bids on only one when you might spend less bidding on another?
The proxy bidding system isn't a bad concept, but it has its weaknesses. Most are psychological in nature, and since I can't count on the psychology of my opponents I maximize my advantage...
I'm not sure what in particular concerns you regarding women's rights here - probably abortion. If you won't vote for anybody solely based on that one issue, well then not much can bee done. As far as church/state goes - I can't imagine that a libertarian would be big on integrating religion with the national government (establishment clause and all that).
However, the thing I really object to in your post is the suggest that these are all Ron Paul is about. I'm sorry - regardless of your your position on libertarianism or a few particular issues, you have to admit that Ron Paul's platform is fundamentally different from just about everybody else in the running. He would push for major change in comparison to what has been done in the past.
You can certainly debate whether this change would be good or bad, but you can't dismiss him as a typical politician who disagrees with you in two areas...
Big Pharma is corrupt as all heck. They don't "research new drugs," they research how to make minor changes to existing drugs so they can re-patient.
I for one am happy that they do that (although they do come up with quite a few completely new drugs as well). Do you want only ONE drug in any particular class?
In theory every antibiotic since penicillian is a me-too drug - why do we need more than one? Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor - who needs anything after the first?
However, the "me-too" drugs have several important benefits. They create competition which keeps down cost. They provide multiple treatment options for doctors. Patients don't uniformly respond to drugs in accordance with what the statistics say - while a particular drug might work better for most patients, perhaps it doesn't work so well for a few in particular. It is good to give doctors options. And then let's consider allergies - some people have them to particular drugs in a class, and options mean they can still be treated instead of going back to the dark ages.
I for one am tired of hearing complaints over "me-too" drugs. If they're so useless don't take them - just take the first one that came out. Then the "me too" drug won't cost you a dime - patented or not. And yet you'll still benefit from price competition.
What exactly is it about "me too" drugs that bothers people so much? Do you complain when you go to the shoe outlet that there is more than one model of sneaker available to purchase? Think of all the money that could have gone into bicycle research if those companies hadn't spent all that money desigining more than one pair of shoes - as if what the consumer wants to buy mattered!
industry spent 18% of its $13 billion for R&D on basic research, or $2.3 billion in gross costs... Taxpayers also paid for all $18 billion in NIH funds, as well as for R&D funds in the Department of Defense and other public budgets. Most of that money went for basic research to discover breakthrough drugs... public money also supports more than 5000 clinical trials (Bassand, Martin, Ryden et al. 2002).
So they paid 2.3 billion (tax subsidized), and we kicked in 18 billion. Then they get to charge us for access to the drugs for which we paid 95% of the basic research costs.
I'm not sure that is a completely accurate comparison. First, you're only looking at basic research costs - which are one of the smallest costs in drug development (though obviously the source of most of the innovation). Why do you think that only 18% of drug R&D went to it? Most of the cost of drug development is in clinical trials. You mention only that the government spends lots of money on that, but you have no indication as to the relative share, or what kinds of trials they are funding.
I'm actually fine with having the NIH keep patent rights to drug candidates that it develops and pay for the trials itself to put freely-licensable drugs on the market (which would be generics from day one). However, I suspect that the cost to taxpayers of this approach is a lot higher than some are claiming. Right now the NIH does the "interesting" part of drug development (well, a good part of it anyway), but leaves the tedious and expensive parts to industry. That's fine, but you can't expect industry to do that for free.
The biggest issue I have with government control is that it tends to be overreaching. If a bunch of pharma companies all have clinical trials going a doctor can choose to participate or not in any trials he thinks will benefit his patients the most. I'm sure that if government were running the show the doctor MIGHT get a chance to opt out, but if he participated they would dictate what drugs he'd be testing. After all, we can't have doctors opting to test wart removers when the acne lobby is so strong. One might hope that this would lead to the most important drugs being prioritized, but "most important" usually translates to "most politically important" when the government is involved.
A little competition never hurts - the status quo should be maintained while opening up competition from publicly-funded medicine. An accounting of costs should be provided so that taxpayers can decide if the money is well-spent. The government should also consider opportunities to have the NIH fund and contract out drug development to pharma instead of just selling the patents to the molecules they come up with. That would keep the drug generic, but would allow the NIH to focus its work on basic research. Whatever makes the most sense economically...
Then put a limit on number sent per hour for free or something like that.
And when you do an SMS chat it is typically in place of a phone call. I still submit that the phone call consumes more bandwidth - even in the non-voice control channels (which everybody always points to SMS consuming lots of). I'm not an expert on the cell phone protocols, but at the very least there is call setup and tear-down, and I'm sure there is an occasional bit of chatter on the control channel to keep things going - or any time a phone changes cell towers.
I just think of how many times I make a voice call to check on where somebody is at a particular time - about 2-3 SMS messages would accomplish the same goal with probably far less cost to the phone network. However, I still make the voice call since it is cheaper.
Yeah - that would be just about every plan offered by just about every US carrier. It is hard to find a plan that doesn't include unlimited voice between phones on the same network.
However, those plans rarely include any SMS messages at all by default. Why should that cost MORE? My sending an SMS prevents me from making a voice call. So it would save the phone companies money if they allowed me to send SMS. I'm not going to pay 15 cents for an SMS when I can just send the same message via voice for free...
Why don't these SDCCH channels clog up from voice traffic? On my plan I can call same-network numbers for free. These calls MUST use at least as much traffic as an SMS message - probably more (sure - 99.9% of the data is on a different channel - but even 0.1% of a voice call is a lot more bandwidth than an SMS). And yet all those "free" phone calls don't kill the network.
Sure, the true marginal cost isn't quite zero, but it is probably way less than a cent...
Yes, but if I called a friend 100 times instead of sending 100 SMS messages to them it would be free to me. Yet, this would consume all the control bandwidth of SMS as well as a ton of voice bandwidth.
Should SMS be completely free - possibly not. However, it should certainly be cheaper than voice (a voice call uses far more control bandwidth than a single SMS message - or even a few of them). Right now it is FAR more expensive. It is just marketing.
That's why most sane manufacturers don't do direct retail unless they want to make it a core competency.
Most major manufacturers just ship a million units to a distributor, who adds a markup and then handles the mess of putting items in stores/homes/etc.
I'm not quite sure why the OLPC initiative doesn't just retail its laptops via a distributor. It would be less fuss for them, and more revenue which means lower laptop prices which means more laptops in the hands of kids. All they need to do is sell 10k laptops to a distributor (for a little more than what they sell to 3rd world nations) and then focus on giving laptops to kids. Then when the distributor runs out they can place another order. Basically they just treat the distributor as "just another country" to give laptops to, except they can charge a higher price if they feel the moral obligation to do so. They'll sell more laptops this way, with less distraction, and more money going to their core mission...
You are completely correct. When you tell your browser to trust a root certificate - that means exactly what it sounds like it means. Whoever has the signing keys to that root cert can make your browser think that any site is legit for any domain name.
Many companies install their own root certs so that they can sign their own intranet ssl certs (rather than pay for a ton of them for every little web-based app they install). That gives those same companies the ability to man-in-the-middle any web connection from one of their browers.
Nothing new here - if somebody can get you to install stuff on your computer they can generally do whatever they want with it if they are unscrupulous.
I probably wouldn't mind the new discussion system so much if it weren't so broken on konqueror.
I'm sorry - I shouldn't need to use a specific web browser to view a particular website. Especially when my browser is one of the first to have been acid2 compliant...
I really question whether health care in those nations is really any better than in the US - for the people in the US who get it at all.
It depends on what you're measuring. If you measure average health of all citizens of course the US would come out lower - it deliberately makes care unavailable to a segment of the population.
What I care about is which system is better for people like me - not rich but employed in a useful profession. Sure, I care about people who don't work at all, and charity exists for that purpose. However, what I do object to is taking money from my pay to increase the level of care for people who pay no taxes, and at the same time decreasing the care that I get.
I suspect that if you looked at the health care provided to US citizens making more than $45k per year and compared that to the rest of the world the US would come out very high if not on top. Look at incomes of $60k or more and it would be even higher. I'm not interested on stats on all insured persons - there are some really lousy insurance plans out there. Lots of people of lower income have "health insurance" but I hesitate to call it that. It is just a token benefit for their employers to claim on their job ads.
I don't think that most middle class workers object to care for the poor. However, they do object to paying the same or more to pay for care for the poor, and seeing their own care go down as a result. Care for the top segment of society has to at least stay the same or improve for such a system to be acceptable to the folks who actually pay the taxes...
Actually - only 50% wrong. As the other poster indicated some states require both parties to consent to recording. Pennsylvania is among them - I looked it up. It is illegal to record a conversation there without the consent of all parties involved. However, in most states it is legal as long as at least one party consents.
How about posting a song written by an independant artist who could then sue the RIAA for copyright infringement and facilitation of copying by virtue of running insecure software on their website?
Hmm - accellerating a paper plane to 250 mph in probably 0.1 seconds might not be too good for it staying in one piece...
You'd need to be very gradual about the acceleration. That means some kind of guidance system (even if it is just a wire) and propulsion that lasts for at least a few seconds.
FYI - I tested this out and it works fine. To grow the array I just:
1. Failed and removed a drive. 2. Replaced the drive with a bigger one. 3. Added the drive to the array and waited for it to rebuild. 4. Repeated 1-3 for all drives in the array. 5. Used mdadm --grow -z max/dev/md# to grow the array to the full size of the new drives. 6. Used pvresize to make LVM use the full size of the array. 7. Used lvresize to grow any desired logical volumes on the array. 8. Used resize2fs to grow the filesystem to the new size of the logical volume.
In theory all of these steps can be done on a running system assuming your hardware can handle hot-swapping. Or you can reboot in-between as often as you'd like to. However, I'm not sure if steps 6-8 handles a power-failure gracefully. I believe that steps 1-5 all do, and step 6-7 are fast. Step 8 might or might not be risky since it is slower and I don't know how well it handles interruptions. Might not hurt to do that one with the filesystem unmounted.
This is honestly the first time I've ever heard someone try to call atheism.. the lack of belief in a deity.. a religion.
Well, it isn't exactly a topic of daily conversation for most people, but:
atheism [ey-thee-iz-uhm] noun 1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
(from dictionary.com)
Atheism isn't usually defined as the lack of a belief in a deity. That would be agnosticism. It is the belief that there is no deity. That is essentially a religious position.
For example, with regard to your hair color I have no particular belief as to whether it is blue or brown or green orange with yellow polka-dots. To say "I don't believe your eyes are blue" isn't quite the same as saying "I believe your eyes are not blue."
And that is why atheism is considered by many to be a religious position. It makes a statement of doctrine to which its followers adhere - absent any physical evidence in support of their view (to my knowledge nobody has managed to prove or disprove scientifically the existence of a deity). It is often associated with positions on morality as well (which aren't completely uniform, but you won't find any general class of religion that has completely uniform positions on moral issues).
It isn't intended as an insult or anything. Just a classification...
Hmm - I'm not sure what the best approach is. A simple one would be to just split those 500GB drives into two partitions - one that matched the old drive and a new one with the extra space. Then when you replace drives in the RAID you wouldn't use the whole drive but just the first half of each. In the end you have 3 250GB partitions unused and those could be made into a new array. No space is wasted as the numbers work out the same whether you have 2 arrays of 250GB drives or 1 array of 500GB drives.
What I'm not sure about is whether you can replace all the drives at once with bigger versions of themselves. You could almost certainly swap out the drives 1-for-1 allowing for rebuilding and initially mdadm would just use the first half of each. I'd have to do a little research to find out if you could then extend them all.
If you want to test it out that shouldn't be too hard. Create 3 10MB files and attach them to loopback devices. Form them into a RAID. Then one-by-one swap them out for 20MB files. Then try to resize the array. Should go fast at the small size and if it works it should work fine with real drives. In theory you can do the whole thing with a filesystem mounted on them the whole time...
Sure you can mine it - natural gas extraction is usually classified as mining. Sure, it doesn't come from nowhere, and is in limited supply - but that is true of ANYTHING - even dirt to a far lesser degree.
The real question is how much is left underground and how long will it take to deplete this.
The problem is that the US government subsidizes the price of helium which makes it dirt cheap. Since it is dirt cheap it is "wasted." How big a problem this is depends largely on whether we'll run out anytime soon.
I also haven't seen any stats on how fast it is produced. Sure - the half-life of uranium is long, but there is a LOT of it underground. So at some rate helium can be extrated with no net-loss to the earth. There are also more exotic ways of making it (it is EVERYWHERE in space - just without much density, and any alpha-emitter releases it).
If there really is a crisis then the simplest solution is a tariff on the sale of helium - that will encourage EVERYBODY to find alternatives, and where there are none the cost will at least ration the demand somewhat.
Actually, RAID-Z has one big limitation - it isn't growable (while linux software RAID actually is growable). Otherwise I'm a big fan of ZFS and would love to see it reliable on linux. I think that the layer-breaks in this case give you new capabilities you couldn't get without them (I'm not just talking one-command filesystem setup - I'm talking about copy-on-write and better snapshotting and redundancy support and other things that need to cross layer bounderies unless you want to waste a lot of space).
ZFS supports adding additional RAID-Zs to a storage pool - but the last time I checked you couldn't resize/shape a single RAID-Z array.
Here is an illustrative scenario:
1. I have three 250GB drives on two systems - one FreeBSD (ZFS) and one linux (mdadm+LVM+ext3). I put them in a RAID-5 on the linux system, and a RAID-Z on the FreeBSD system. On both I have 500GB of storage with single-redundancy. I can partition this space into as many filesystems as I'd like with either approach.
2. I buy three more 250GB drives. On FreeBSD I have to create a new RAID-Z giving me 500GB of additional storage (1TB total). On linux I can reshape the existing RAID-5, giving me 1.25TB of total storage (all 750GB of extra space is usable). You can't add new drives to a RAID-Z, but you can add them to a linux RAID-5. You could also put them in a separate RAID and add them to the LVM group and have the same total space as RAID-Z in that way.
Don't get me wrong - I like ZFS and would consider using it. Linux should be pursuing it (obviously there are licensing issues to work out here) and not snubbing it. And I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't reshape a RAID-Z. It is a limitation though.
Even if MRIs used high-temp superconductors they'd probably still need liquid helium. A few issues:
First, most if not all high-temp superconductors are ceramics, which are hard to make into coils of wire. So that's why they don't get used much in magnets.
Second, superconductivity is inhibited by magnetic fields - the lower the temperature the more field you can sustain. So even if you could barely get by with LN2 you still end up using He in magnets...
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So, if you are willing to pay $5 for a widget, you will bid that only within the last 30 seconds of the auction. If you aren't guaranteed that it's the last 30 seconds of the auction, then you won't bid $5. You'd rather see someone else get it for $3 than have more than 30 seconds between your bid and the end of the auction.
Yup.
And the reason is that if I put in $5 from the start I'd bid it up to $3.50. Then the other guy would up his bid to $4, then my proxy bid would kick it up to $4.50. Maybe I might win at that point, or the other guy would outbid my $5 proxy bid. At best I get it for $4.50 - or the other guy gets it for $5.50 or whatever.
With sniping, however, my bid for $5 goes in at the last second. The bid goes up to $3.50 with me winning. Chances are the other guy doesn't understand proxy bidding and only put in $3 when his limit was really $5. I win the item for $3.50 - and pay a dollar less than I would have otherwise.
If the first guy put in a proxy bid of >$5 I lose either way. By sniping I'm betting that others don't know what they are doing and put in a bid lower than they are willing to pay. Usually this is true, so as a buyer I get a better deal. The 5-minute extension wouldn't bother me - most people don't log in for the last 5 mins of the auction.
And I'm not worried about missing my snipe. First, most sniping software syncs time with ebay to prevent this. Second, I can always put in my snipe at t-5 min with most of the benefit of t-30sec. Third, if I lose the auction there is probably 100 others just like it to bid on - and chances are my sniping software will just switch to the next auction automatically...
If people used proxy bidding correctly sniping wouldn't work at all. Most people don't, so sniping works fine. I live in the real world, so I use strategies that maximize my advantage against others. If I were at an open house I likewise might not point it out if I noticed that the dirty table in the corner that is part of the sale is a $1M antique. That's just the competitive nature of the market.
And this doesn't even go into the benefits of auction grouping in sniping software. If I have 100 auctions to choose from closing at 10 min intervals, why would I stay up around the clock entering my max bid every 10 mins to see if I could get one? I can't put in 100 proxy bids lest I win them all and only need one.
If the lenses were good enough though, you'd only need a few for the whole earth. At that altitude you see nearly half the planet all at once, and the 5000 miles of side-to-side distance is nothing compared to the distance just getting from the satellite down to the earth.
It would also be hard to hit with ASATs in one sense - you'd need a big rocket to get a weapon up there. For LEO an ASAT really can be suborbital - but if you want to get up to geosync even a ballistic shot is going to need a lot more fuel. On the other hand, you're a sitting duck in geosync - but then again you could maneuver a fair amount and still be in the same basic place. You don't care if your orbit drifts a little since you dont' have a bazillion fixed ground stations trying to talk to you like with communications satellites.
Agreed - unfortunately sniping is a necessary mechanism due to the less-than-perfect market that ebay represents. It avoids putting others into a psychological bidding war against you - and since most people don't understand proxy bidding sniping basically means not giving most of your opponents a chance to bid against you. Also - sniping works better when you can group auctions - if you want 512MB of RAM and don't care which of 500 auctions you win, why put bids on only one when you might spend less bidding on another?
The proxy bidding system isn't a bad concept, but it has its weaknesses. Most are psychological in nature, and since I can't count on the psychology of my opponents I maximize my advantage...
I'm not sure what in particular concerns you regarding women's rights here - probably abortion. If you won't vote for anybody solely based on that one issue, well then not much can bee done. As far as church/state goes - I can't imagine that a libertarian would be big on integrating religion with the national government (establishment clause and all that).
However, the thing I really object to in your post is the suggest that these are all Ron Paul is about. I'm sorry - regardless of your your position on libertarianism or a few particular issues, you have to admit that Ron Paul's platform is fundamentally different from just about everybody else in the running. He would push for major change in comparison to what has been done in the past.
You can certainly debate whether this change would be good or bad, but you can't dismiss him as a typical politician who disagrees with you in two areas...
Big Pharma is corrupt as all heck. They don't "research new drugs," they research how to make minor changes to existing drugs so they can re-patient.
I for one am happy that they do that (although they do come up with quite a few completely new drugs as well). Do you want only ONE drug in any particular class?
In theory every antibiotic since penicillian is a me-too drug - why do we need more than one? Lipitor, Zocor, Crestor - who needs anything after the first?
However, the "me-too" drugs have several important benefits. They create competition which keeps down cost. They provide multiple treatment options for doctors. Patients don't uniformly respond to drugs in accordance with what the statistics say - while a particular drug might work better for most patients, perhaps it doesn't work so well for a few in particular. It is good to give doctors options. And then let's consider allergies - some people have them to particular drugs in a class, and options mean they can still be treated instead of going back to the dark ages.
I for one am tired of hearing complaints over "me-too" drugs. If they're so useless don't take them - just take the first one that came out. Then the "me too" drug won't cost you a dime - patented or not. And yet you'll still benefit from price competition.
What exactly is it about "me too" drugs that bothers people so much? Do you complain when you go to the shoe outlet that there is more than one model of sneaker available to purchase? Think of all the money that could have gone into bicycle research if those companies hadn't spent all that money desigining more than one pair of shoes - as if what the consumer wants to buy mattered!
I'm not sure that is a completely accurate comparison. First, you're only looking at basic research costs - which are one of the smallest costs in drug development (though obviously the source of most of the innovation). Why do you think that only 18% of drug R&D went to it? Most of the cost of drug development is in clinical trials. You mention only that the government spends lots of money on that, but you have no indication as to the relative share, or what kinds of trials they are funding.
I'm actually fine with having the NIH keep patent rights to drug candidates that it develops and pay for the trials itself to put freely-licensable drugs on the market (which would be generics from day one). However, I suspect that the cost to taxpayers of this approach is a lot higher than some are claiming. Right now the NIH does the "interesting" part of drug development (well, a good part of it anyway), but leaves the tedious and expensive parts to industry. That's fine, but you can't expect industry to do that for free.
The biggest issue I have with government control is that it tends to be overreaching. If a bunch of pharma companies all have clinical trials going a doctor can choose to participate or not in any trials he thinks will benefit his patients the most. I'm sure that if government were running the show the doctor MIGHT get a chance to opt out, but if he participated they would dictate what drugs he'd be testing. After all, we can't have doctors opting to test wart removers when the acne lobby is so strong. One might hope that this would lead to the most important drugs being prioritized, but "most important" usually translates to "most politically important" when the government is involved.
A little competition never hurts - the status quo should be maintained while opening up competition from publicly-funded medicine. An accounting of costs should be provided so that taxpayers can decide if the money is well-spent. The government should also consider opportunities to have the NIH fund and contract out drug development to pharma instead of just selling the patents to the molecules they come up with. That would keep the drug generic, but would allow the NIH to focus its work on basic research. Whatever makes the most sense economically...
Then put a limit on number sent per hour for free or something like that.
And when you do an SMS chat it is typically in place of a phone call. I still submit that the phone call consumes more bandwidth - even in the non-voice control channels (which everybody always points to SMS consuming lots of). I'm not an expert on the cell phone protocols, but at the very least there is call setup and tear-down, and I'm sure there is an occasional bit of chatter on the control channel to keep things going - or any time a phone changes cell towers.
I just think of how many times I make a voice call to check on where somebody is at a particular time - about 2-3 SMS messages would accomplish the same goal with probably far less cost to the phone network. However, I still make the voice call since it is cheaper.
It means you've paid for unlimited voice plan.
Yeah - that would be just about every plan offered by just about every US carrier. It is hard to find a plan that doesn't include unlimited voice between phones on the same network.
However, those plans rarely include any SMS messages at all by default. Why should that cost MORE? My sending an SMS prevents me from making a voice call. So it would save the phone companies money if they allowed me to send SMS. I'm not going to pay 15 cents for an SMS when I can just send the same message via voice for free...
Why don't these SDCCH channels clog up from voice traffic? On my plan I can call same-network numbers for free. These calls MUST use at least as much traffic as an SMS message - probably more (sure - 99.9% of the data is on a different channel - but even 0.1% of a voice call is a lot more bandwidth than an SMS). And yet all those "free" phone calls don't kill the network.
Sure, the true marginal cost isn't quite zero, but it is probably way less than a cent...
Yes, but if I called a friend 100 times instead of sending 100 SMS messages to them it would be free to me. Yet, this would consume all the control bandwidth of SMS as well as a ton of voice bandwidth.
Should SMS be completely free - possibly not. However, it should certainly be cheaper than voice (a voice call uses far more control bandwidth than a single SMS message - or even a few of them). Right now it is FAR more expensive. It is just marketing.
That's why most sane manufacturers don't do direct retail unless they want to make it a core competency.
Most major manufacturers just ship a million units to a distributor, who adds a markup and then handles the mess of putting items in stores/homes/etc.
I'm not quite sure why the OLPC initiative doesn't just retail its laptops via a distributor. It would be less fuss for them, and more revenue which means lower laptop prices which means more laptops in the hands of kids. All they need to do is sell 10k laptops to a distributor (for a little more than what they sell to 3rd world nations) and then focus on giving laptops to kids. Then when the distributor runs out they can place another order. Basically they just treat the distributor as "just another country" to give laptops to, except they can charge a higher price if they feel the moral obligation to do so. They'll sell more laptops this way, with less distraction, and more money going to their core mission...
You are completely correct. When you tell your browser to trust a root certificate - that means exactly what it sounds like it means. Whoever has the signing keys to that root cert can make your browser think that any site is legit for any domain name.
Many companies install their own root certs so that they can sign their own intranet ssl certs (rather than pay for a ton of them for every little web-based app they install). That gives those same companies the ability to man-in-the-middle any web connection from one of their browers.
Nothing new here - if somebody can get you to install stuff on your computer they can generally do whatever they want with it if they are unscrupulous.
I probably wouldn't mind the new discussion system so much if it weren't so broken on konqueror.
I'm sorry - I shouldn't need to use a specific web browser to view a particular website. Especially when my browser is one of the first to have been acid2 compliant...
I really question whether health care in those nations is really any better than in the US - for the people in the US who get it at all.
It depends on what you're measuring. If you measure average health of all citizens of course the US would come out lower - it deliberately makes care unavailable to a segment of the population.
What I care about is which system is better for people like me - not rich but employed in a useful profession. Sure, I care about people who don't work at all, and charity exists for that purpose. However, what I do object to is taking money from my pay to increase the level of care for people who pay no taxes, and at the same time decreasing the care that I get.
I suspect that if you looked at the health care provided to US citizens making more than $45k per year and compared that to the rest of the world the US would come out very high if not on top. Look at incomes of $60k or more and it would be even higher. I'm not interested on stats on all insured persons - there are some really lousy insurance plans out there. Lots of people of lower income have "health insurance" but I hesitate to call it that. It is just a token benefit for their employers to claim on their job ads.
I don't think that most middle class workers object to care for the poor. However, they do object to paying the same or more to pay for care for the poor, and seeing their own care go down as a result. Care for the top segment of society has to at least stay the same or improve for such a system to be acceptable to the folks who actually pay the taxes...
Actually - only 50% wrong. As the other poster indicated some states require both parties to consent to recording. Pennsylvania is among them - I looked it up. It is illegal to record a conversation there without the consent of all parties involved. However, in most states it is legal as long as at least one party consents.
How about posting a song written by an independant artist who could then sue the RIAA for copyright infringement and facilitation of copying by virtue of running insecure software on their website?
Hmm - accellerating a paper plane to 250 mph in probably 0.1 seconds might not be too good for it staying in one piece...
You'd need to be very gradual about the acceleration. That means some kind of guidance system (even if it is just a wire) and propulsion that lasts for at least a few seconds.
FYI - I tested this out and it works fine. To grow the array I just:
/dev/md# to grow the array to the full size of the new drives.
1. Failed and removed a drive.
2. Replaced the drive with a bigger one.
3. Added the drive to the array and waited for it to rebuild.
4. Repeated 1-3 for all drives in the array.
5. Used mdadm --grow -z max
6. Used pvresize to make LVM use the full size of the array.
7. Used lvresize to grow any desired logical volumes on the array.
8. Used resize2fs to grow the filesystem to the new size of the logical volume.
In theory all of these steps can be done on a running system assuming your hardware can handle hot-swapping. Or you can reboot in-between as often as you'd like to. However, I'm not sure if steps 6-8 handles a power-failure gracefully. I believe that steps 1-5 all do, and step 6-7 are fast. Step 8 might or might not be risky since it is slower and I don't know how well it handles interruptions. Might not hurt to do that one with the filesystem unmounted.
This is honestly the first time I've ever heard someone try to call atheism.. the lack of belief in a deity.. a religion.
Well, it isn't exactly a topic of daily conversation for most people, but:
atheism [ey-thee-iz-uhm]
noun
1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God.
2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.
(from dictionary.com)
Atheism isn't usually defined as the lack of a belief in a deity. That would be agnosticism. It is the belief that there is no deity. That is essentially a religious position.
For example, with regard to your hair color I have no particular belief as to whether it is blue or brown or green orange with yellow polka-dots. To say "I don't believe your eyes are blue" isn't quite the same as saying "I believe your eyes are not blue."
And that is why atheism is considered by many to be a religious position. It makes a statement of doctrine to which its followers adhere - absent any physical evidence in support of their view (to my knowledge nobody has managed to prove or disprove scientifically the existence of a deity). It is often associated with positions on morality as well (which aren't completely uniform, but you won't find any general class of religion that has completely uniform positions on moral issues).
It isn't intended as an insult or anything. Just a classification...
You don't even need vmware - just try it with loopback files. Vmware will of course work also.
Hmm - I'm not sure what the best approach is. A simple one would be to just split those 500GB drives into two partitions - one that matched the old drive and a new one with the extra space. Then when you replace drives in the RAID you wouldn't use the whole drive but just the first half of each. In the end you have 3 250GB partitions unused and those could be made into a new array. No space is wasted as the numbers work out the same whether you have 2 arrays of 250GB drives or 1 array of 500GB drives.
What I'm not sure about is whether you can replace all the drives at once with bigger versions of themselves. You could almost certainly swap out the drives 1-for-1 allowing for rebuilding and initially mdadm would just use the first half of each. I'd have to do a little research to find out if you could then extend them all.
If you want to test it out that shouldn't be too hard. Create 3 10MB files and attach them to loopback devices. Form them into a RAID. Then one-by-one swap them out for 20MB files. Then try to resize the array. Should go fast at the small size and if it works it should work fine with real drives. In theory you can do the whole thing with a filesystem mounted on them the whole time...
Unless said astronomers are in NASA. There they use standard units like lbs/m^2.
Sure you can mine it - natural gas extraction is usually classified as mining. Sure, it doesn't come from nowhere, and is in limited supply - but that is true of ANYTHING - even dirt to a far lesser degree.
The real question is how much is left underground and how long will it take to deplete this.
The problem is that the US government subsidizes the price of helium which makes it dirt cheap. Since it is dirt cheap it is "wasted." How big a problem this is depends largely on whether we'll run out anytime soon.
I also haven't seen any stats on how fast it is produced. Sure - the half-life of uranium is long, but there is a LOT of it underground. So at some rate helium can be extrated with no net-loss to the earth. There are also more exotic ways of making it (it is EVERYWHERE in space - just without much density, and any alpha-emitter releases it).
If there really is a crisis then the simplest solution is a tariff on the sale of helium - that will encourage EVERYBODY to find alternatives, and where there are none the cost will at least ration the demand somewhat.
It is really no different from fossil fuels.
Actually, RAID-Z has one big limitation - it isn't growable (while linux software RAID actually is growable). Otherwise I'm a big fan of ZFS and would love to see it reliable on linux. I think that the layer-breaks in this case give you new capabilities you couldn't get without them (I'm not just talking one-command filesystem setup - I'm talking about copy-on-write and better snapshotting and redundancy support and other things that need to cross layer bounderies unless you want to waste a lot of space).
ZFS supports adding additional RAID-Zs to a storage pool - but the last time I checked you couldn't resize/shape a single RAID-Z array.
Here is an illustrative scenario:
1. I have three 250GB drives on two systems - one FreeBSD (ZFS) and one linux (mdadm+LVM+ext3). I put them in a RAID-5 on the linux system, and a RAID-Z on the FreeBSD system. On both I have 500GB of storage with single-redundancy. I can partition this space into as many filesystems as I'd like with either approach.
2. I buy three more 250GB drives. On FreeBSD I have to create a new RAID-Z giving me 500GB of additional storage (1TB total). On linux I can reshape the existing RAID-5, giving me 1.25TB of total storage (all 750GB of extra space is usable). You can't add new drives to a RAID-Z, but you can add them to a linux RAID-5. You could also put them in a separate RAID and add them to the LVM group and have the same total space as RAID-Z in that way.
Don't get me wrong - I like ZFS and would consider using it. Linux should be pursuing it (obviously there are licensing issues to work out here) and not snubbing it. And I don't see any technical reason why you couldn't reshape a RAID-Z. It is a limitation though.
Even if MRIs used high-temp superconductors they'd probably still need liquid helium. A few issues:
First, most if not all high-temp superconductors are ceramics, which are hard to make into coils of wire. So that's why they don't get used much in magnets.
Second, superconductivity is inhibited by magnetic fields - the lower the temperature the more field you can sustain. So even if you could barely get by with LN2 you still end up using He in magnets...