Can you imagine speech recognition becoming so common it gets built into every computer?
It would be worthwhile paying for a 1U slot in a colocation facility, just to have a machine that has no purpose whatsoever, except to randomly scream out at the highest volume on it's sound card "SHUTDOWN NOW!" to the other machines...
I predict that if you are right, and "Stock ticker" commercials end up in vogue, it won't matter anyway, because most of the people watching the television programs won't be able to read the ads, since they'll be illiterate.
Because it's not possible to simply travel to "California" in a "wagon", and dump 1000 8 foot lengths of ceramic-coated rebar out the back of your "wagon" and destroy most most of the industrial capacity of a nation.
An aircraft smacking into a sky-scraper is *nothing* compared to the damage that can be done by anoyone who can get to "California".
It's not "NAFA"'s fault. It's an issue of maintaining control over your citizenry, while covering your ass.
The "West" hasn't been won because the people in the "East" are covering their asses, and no Horace Greely is going to talk them into not covering their asses.
-
Imagine if the DC-X had gone forward: they would not have been able to control eventual private ownership of the vehicles, or the launch and landing sites for privately owned vehicles, as a security choke-point.
They would not have been able to prevent people from landing in the crater Aristarchus, and declaring a new state there, through the simple expedient of requiring a runway be built to land and relaunch the vehicle, or the need for the vehicle to have atmosphere on launch/landing, as the X-33 requires.
To a person with food allergies, "natural" and "free of genetically modified organisms" means "free of unexpected allergens, other than those normally found in ingredients listed on the label".
I know people who have ended up in the hospital over some of the proteins expressed in genetically modified soy beans (~1/3 of all soy grown in the U.S. has been modified).
Lack of such labelling means "take your chances, and keep the Benadryl, Prednisone, and Epi-Pen handy, because otherwise, you might die from eating this".
When they start doing allergy testing by protein, and start food-labelling by protein, and start enforcing a manufacture switch of label when an ingredient switch occurs (and none of that "sugar and/or corn syrup" or "corn and/or peanut oil" bullshit), I guess it will be OK to have genetically modified foods all over the place.
Until then, though, it really sucks to have genetically modified foods containing proteins not found in their unmodified counterparts, masquerading as safe for people with food allergies to consume, when they are, in fact, not safe.
The labelling and allergy testing infrastructure just isn't there to support widespread modification of foods, yet. Until it is, it's like playing Russian Roulette with your customer's lives.
You provide a "Genetically modified foods" analogy. That analogy is flawed:
``Some jelly bottles now say "free of genetically modified organisms". That's nice, considering genetically modified organisms aren't necessarily any worse or better than natural ones -- just different.''
Obviously, you have no food allergies.
For someone with food allergies, it's hard enough to avoid dangerous proteins merely by reading product labels: manufacturers often change formulations based on market prices for various ingredients, and occasionally "forget" to change the labelling until they run out of their stock of (now) inaccurate labels.
Consider how much worse this situation is, when people are introducing foreign proteins into foods which are "known safe" from foods which are the cause of someone's allergies.
I guess it would be convenient if these people would just die, right?
Contact any professional allergist; ask them about things like soy allergies and corn allergies, and whether or not the number of patients with these allergies have increase, decreased, or stayed the same, over the past 10 years.
The people who control the trademark will not allow you to replace the default installer, and still call the code FreeBSD, unless you donate the installer back to the project, and it gets accepted into the source tree in place of the default installer. Which makes sense, since the people who control the trademark are primarily there fore the sales of CDROMs which use the trademark.
When confronted, they give a nice runaround about how you can put your installer on a different CDROM, as long as you distribute their installer on CDROM #1, or add an option in their installer to invoke your installer, after you get part way into their installer, but both those options ignore the fact that what you're trying to do is avoid their installer entirely.
"No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions."
?
Where the heck do you guys live... in the universe where "Spock" has a beard?
You are acting like each packet has to be printed out on a thermal printer, examined by an elderly man wearing pincnes glasses, and then typed in by hand on an old teletype.
It doesn't cost dick-all extra to route extra packets; the Cisco Catalyst doesn't even take more electricity as the packet load goes up.
Routing packets is an automatic function; it's nothing like the mess at the U.S. Post Office, even if that's the analogy they are teaching in public schools these days. It's all handled by hardware.
"What irony. The costs of running an ISP are much more comprable that of a water company than a cable TV company. The cost to a water provider is proportional to the amount of water you use, hence their pricing model. The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?"
Please prove this.
The bandwidth is not "consumed". After I send a packet, the same amount of bandwidth is still there.
I think what you are trying to say is that the people who the ISP pays for bandwidth charge on the basis of usage, just as the ISP does.
At the top of this pyramid you've built, though, there are fixed costs for infrastructure.
If you are claiming that the ISP is screwing consumers because the NSP's are screwing the ISPs, that's a little believable.
But then you try and apply it to a telecommunications giant like AT&T, which already owns it's own infrastructure, and can get non-limited peering arrangements through benefit of having such a huge network to use as leverage in the other direction (if anything, the only people AT&T might have to pay to peer is UUNet, and probably not them -- I'd like to see financial statements).
"OK, you can suck anything you want off the internet - only one catch, no uploading!"
Uploading to *where*? You're not allowed to run a server at your hose, if you have a cable modem from AT&T/Comcast.
Cable modems and ADSL are high-speed downlinks... and that's all. They exist to push content at you, just like cable TV.
Do the math. The uplink speed is 1.5 times the necessary speed to handle *just the *ACK traffic* for the download speed you have.
These people have a business model: they run a fire hose into your house, and it's your job to drink from the fire hose.
There is not enough bandwidth up to upload anything, let alone establish a peering relationship with, say, your mother's house so that you can make a video telephone call at a full screen, full frame rate, or even upload digital pictures of your children to an ISP managed server in a reasonable time, so that your mother can download them from her own "mostly one-way" pipe.
"Pipe vs. water. I'll hook up a real nice, fat data pipe to your house for a small, one-time fee. However, if you happen to want data to flow through that pipe, its going to cost you extra."
That's because you have a monopoly on endpointing me. Luckily, there is legislation which requires AT&T to open up their infrastructure to other ISPs, to remove that monopoly.
"The dotcom crash happened because nobody actually had a way to make money."
Oh bullpuckey. The dotcom crash came because there were people who thought they could enter into the V.C. community just because they had money, and make the same level of returns as K.P.C.B. or the Netscape IPO, and they all had so many $ in their eyes that they though "selling eyeballs" was a viable business model.
And if you don't think this is still going on, you're a fool: why do you think AT&T is offering $20/month to the end of the year, with free installation"? It's because they are not really selliing cable plant, so much as they are selling an amortized future revenue stream to Comcast. They are pushing very hard in a loss-leader to get their apparent value up for the sale to Comcast to push their sale price up. Comcast is betting the other side, that people will take the price hike in the shorts like good little consumers, and not change providers, even after the window closes on other ISPs being permitted to, but not having infrastructure in place to, provide endpointing to their customer base at a lower rate.
In other words, AT&T is rediscounting paper on billable contracts, at some expectation value, and that's all.
I really like packet switched networks: it makes it nearly impossible to bill based on the source/detination pair for each packet. Screws the phone company, though, whose recenue model is based on determining virtual circuit end-points, setup and teardown charges for the circuit, and how long it stays up.
Sucks to be the guy who sells pipe, in a world where people want to buy water, doesn't it?
"I transfer more or less 5MB a day thru my crappy 56k dialup. Do you know how much that costs me per month? About $100. Even if my connection idles i still get to pay $100. Do you think that's fair?"
I think you are outside the US, because your costs are about 3 times the average US costs, and about 5 times the US costs, if you shop around for your dialup provider.
With a 56K dialup costing $100/month, you are obviously not in the U.S., which is where AT&T/Comcast is located. Flat rate local telephone service is US$18/month, and flat rate dialup Internet service for 56K is, to pick the high end, $20/month.
So unless you are amortizing what you paid for your computer into it, you would, if you never used your voice line for anything but dialup, you are paying, at most, US$38/month for unlimited dialup.
If you use your telephone for voice calls, you have to amortize it, and the Internet costs go down. Likewise, there are a number of national ISP's who have US$10/month unlimited dialup.
Basically, this means that you are more likely paying US$19/month for Internet service over a voice line that is half the time used for voice calls.
"You obviously use your connection a LOT and you see that it isn't your best interest if they start charging by the meg."
Surprise! I use dialup, too, which is one of the reasons I know that your costs are exagerated for the market we're discussing (I'm in the Silicon Valley, where you can not get high speed Internet service t save your life, unless your apartment complex is across the street from the LATE).
Telcos do *NOT* have to make money; at best, they can make 3-6%, or whatever the PUC defines as "fair". This is because they are a legal monopoly, and in return for that monopoly, they give up certain rights, such as the right to "charge what the market will bear" (which in a monopoly, is "all your money").
Charging by the meg is stupid; it's not like they are paying to create the content on Yahoo or eBay or wherever.
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
If they want to provide some useful content, let them charge for that. If I elect to look at it, which I likely won't.
If I'm going to pay them per meg, then they can damn well pay the content providers per meg (e.g. where's the kickback for Slashdot?).
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over... oh well... if you don't like it, stay out of the pipe business, or buy into a water company.
I worked in the same IBM facility as one of his kids; their cubicle was 20 feet away from mine. We all followed the case very closely, and we were pretty uniformly outraged; and being an engineering department, we did not simply adopt the outrage of the family blindly, we looked at the information for ourselves, rather than operating on hearsay.
Are you maybe that FBI dufus who perjured himself on the stand, and then later retracted his testimony, which anyone can see by examining the public records of the court proceedings?
If so, your behaviour really reflects poorly on your organization.
I guess that's like losing a chess championship, and then yelling "Best two out of three! Best two out of three!".
The leadership of the U.S. has changed 8 times since 1970, when Nixon was in office.
If, in fact, this is his motivation, he's fighting against an administration that's been out of power for a quarter of a century, and whose leadership, even if he could legitimately blame them, is already dead.
Wen Ho Lee was not a spy. He was railroaded for political reasons, and released with a presidential apology, after those reasons were no longer important.
I find that it's frquently the case that naturalized citizens are more profoundly loyal to their country than those born to citizenship.
If you are going to post something stupid, at least do us the courtesy of making it appear factual.
I was also interested in EROS; unfortunately, at the time, it had a non-commercial-use license, and so I never did anything more than grab it and get it up and running on a single system.
Now that he's going with an MPL-style license, I guess he might be able to get more people interested. Unfortunately, like the GPL, there only room for one product in that ecological niche at a time, and Linux is already there.
While capabilities are an interesting approach, I don't think this really has any bearing on the Microsoft certification, unless the intent of mentioning EROS was to make fun of the certification?
Slashdot Mirror
Speech recognition... hee hee hee...
Can you imagine speech recognition becoming so common it gets built into every computer?
It would be worthwhile paying for a 1U slot in a colocation facility, just to have a machine that has no purpose whatsoever, except to randomly scream out at the highest volume on it's sound card "SHUTDOWN NOW!" to the other machines...
-- Terry
I predict that if you are right, and "Stock ticker" commercials end up in vogue, it won't matter anyway, because most of the people watching the television programs won't be able to read the ads, since they'll be illiterate.
-- Terry
Why the "West" Wasn't Won:
Because it's not possible to simply travel to "California" in a "wagon", and dump 1000 8 foot lengths of ceramic-coated rebar out the back of your "wagon" and destroy most most of the industrial capacity of a nation.
An aircraft smacking into a sky-scraper is *nothing* compared to the damage that can be done by anoyone who can get to "California".
It's not "NAFA"'s fault. It's an issue of maintaining control over your citizenry, while covering your ass.
The "West" hasn't been won because the people in the "East" are covering their asses, and no Horace Greely is going to talk them into not covering their asses.
-
Imagine if the DC-X had gone forward: they would not have been able to control eventual private ownership of the vehicles, or the launch and landing sites for privately owned vehicles, as a security choke-point.
They would not have been able to prevent people from landing in the crater Aristarchus, and declaring a new state there, through the simple expedient of requiring a runway be built to land and relaunch the vehicle, or the need for the vehicle to have atmosphere on launch/landing, as the X-33 requires.
It's all for your own short-term good.
-- Terry
"Generic news for the m asses"
3 8516219_yetmoresurgery300.jpg
You have to love the BBC. The surgery picture is a generic picture: http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38516000/jpg/_
It could just as easily be for a news story entitled "Descending colon transplants from hyenas 'on the Horizon'"...
-- Terry
This was inevitable.
It was bound to happen, as soon as they got the face recognition software up an running...
-- Terry
What about other things they might see?
I'm pretty sure there will be a blue police box, for example...
-- Terry
It *IS* a selling point.
To a person with food allergies, "natural" and "free of genetically modified organisms" means "free of unexpected allergens, other than those normally found in ingredients listed on the label".
I know people who have ended up in the hospital over some of the proteins expressed in genetically modified soy beans (~1/3 of all soy grown in the U.S. has been modified).
Lack of such labelling means "take your chances, and keep the Benadryl, Prednisone, and Epi-Pen handy, because otherwise, you might die from eating this".
When they start doing allergy testing by protein, and start food-labelling by protein, and start enforcing a manufacture switch of label when an ingredient switch occurs (and none of that "sugar and/or corn syrup" or "corn and/or peanut oil" bullshit), I guess it will be OK to have genetically modified foods all over the place.
Until then, though, it really sucks to have genetically modified foods containing proteins not found in their unmodified counterparts, masquerading as safe for people with food allergies to consume, when they are, in fact, not safe.
The labelling and allergy testing infrastructure just isn't there to support widespread modification of foods, yet. Until it is, it's like playing Russian Roulette with your customer's lives.
-- Terry
You provide a "Genetically modified foods" analogy. That analogy is flawed:
``Some jelly bottles now say "free of genetically modified organisms". That's nice, considering genetically modified organisms aren't necessarily any worse or better than natural ones -- just different.''
Obviously, you have no food allergies.
For someone with food allergies, it's hard enough to avoid dangerous proteins merely by reading product labels: manufacturers often change formulations based on market prices for various ingredients, and occasionally "forget" to change the labelling until they run out of their stock of (now) inaccurate labels.
Consider how much worse this situation is, when people are introducing foreign proteins into foods which are "known safe" from foods which are the cause of someone's allergies.
I guess it would be convenient if these people would just die, right?
Contact any professional allergist; ask them about things like soy allergies and corn allergies, and whether or not the number of patients with these allergies have increase, decreased, or stayed the same, over the past 10 years.
-- Terry
That's not going to happen.
The people who control the trademark will not allow you to replace the default installer, and still call the code FreeBSD, unless you donate the installer back to the project, and it gets accepted into the source tree in place of the default installer. Which makes sense, since the people who control the trademark are primarily there fore the sales of CDROMs which use the trademark.
When confronted, they give a nice runaround about how you can put your installer on a different CDROM, as long as you distribute their installer on CDROM #1, or add an option in their installer to invoke your installer, after you get part way into their installer, but both those options ignore the fact that what you're trying to do is avoid their installer entirely.
-- Terry
"No it's not. Cable TV is sending out the same amount of data to you all the time, whether you use it or not. It's not packet data, it goes to every customer at the same time. The transmission costs are minimal compaired to packet data where each user's data is seperate and needs to be routed bith directions."
?
Where the heck do you guys live... in the universe where "Spock" has a beard?
You are acting like each packet has to be printed out on a thermal printer, examined by an elderly man wearing pincnes glasses, and then typed in by hand on an old teletype.
It doesn't cost dick-all extra to route extra packets; the Cisco Catalyst doesn't even take more electricity as the packet load goes up.
Routing packets is an automatic function; it's nothing like the mess at the U.S. Post Office, even if that's the analogy they are teaching in public schools these days. It's all handled by hardware.
-- Terry
"What irony. The costs of running an ISP are much more comprable that of a water company than a cable TV company. The cost to a water provider is proportional to the amount of water you use, hence their pricing model. The cost to an ISP is proportional to the amount of bandwidth you use, so why shouldn't they charge accordingly?"
Please prove this.
The bandwidth is not "consumed". After I send a packet, the same amount of bandwidth is still there.
I think what you are trying to say is that the people who the ISP pays for bandwidth charge on the basis of usage, just as the ISP does.
At the top of this pyramid you've built, though, there are fixed costs for infrastructure.
If you are claiming that the ISP is screwing consumers because the NSP's are screwing the ISPs, that's a little believable.
But then you try and apply it to a telecommunications giant like AT&T, which already owns it's own infrastructure, and can get non-limited peering arrangements through benefit of having such a huge network to use as leverage in the other direction (if anything, the only people AT&T might have to pay to peer is UUNet, and probably not them -- I'd like to see financial statements).
-- Terry
"OK, you can suck anything you want off the internet - only one catch, no uploading!"
Uploading to *where*? You're not allowed to run a server at your hose, if you have a cable modem from AT&T/Comcast.
Cable modems and ADSL are high-speed downlinks... and that's all. They exist to push content at you, just like cable TV.
Do the math. The uplink speed is 1.5 times the necessary speed to handle *just the *ACK traffic* for the download speed you have.
These people have a business model: they run a fire hose into your house, and it's your job to drink from the fire hose.
There is not enough bandwidth up to upload anything, let alone establish a peering relationship with, say, your mother's house so that you can make a video telephone call at a full screen, full frame rate, or even upload digital pictures of your children to an ISP managed server in a reasonable time, so that your mother can download them from her own "mostly one-way" pipe.
"Pipe vs. water. I'll hook up a real nice, fat data pipe to your house for a small, one-time fee. However, if you happen to want data to flow through that pipe, its going to cost you extra."
That's because you have a monopoly on endpointing me. Luckily, there is legislation which requires AT&T to open up their infrastructure to other ISPs, to remove that monopoly.
"The dotcom crash happened because nobody actually had a way to make money."
Oh bullpuckey. The dotcom crash came because there were people who thought they could enter into the V.C. community just because they had money, and make the same level of returns as K.P.C.B. or the Netscape IPO, and they all had so many $ in their eyes that they though "selling eyeballs" was a viable business model.
And if you don't think this is still going on, you're a fool: why do you think AT&T is offering $20/month to the end of the year, with free installation"? It's because they are not really selliing cable plant, so much as they are selling an amortized future revenue stream to Comcast. They are pushing very hard in a loss-leader to get their apparent value up for the sale to Comcast to push their sale price up. Comcast is betting the other side, that people will take the price hike in the shorts like good little consumers, and not change providers, even after the window closes on other ISPs being permitted to, but not having infrastructure in place to, provide endpointing to their customer base at a lower rate.
In other words, AT&T is rediscounting paper on billable contracts, at some expectation value, and that's all.
I really like packet switched networks: it makes it nearly impossible to bill based on the source/detination pair for each packet. Screws the phone company, though, whose recenue model is based on determining virtual circuit end-points, setup and teardown charges for the circuit, and how long it stays up.
Sucks to be the guy who sells pipe, in a world where people want to buy water, doesn't it?
-- Terry
"I transfer more or less 5MB a day thru my crappy 56k dialup. Do you know how much that costs me per month? About $100. Even if my connection idles i still get to pay $100. Do you think that's fair?"
I think you are outside the US, because your costs are about 3 times the average US costs, and about 5 times the US costs, if you shop around for your dialup provider.
With a 56K dialup costing $100/month, you are obviously not in the U.S., which is where AT&T/Comcast is located. Flat rate local telephone service is US$18/month, and flat rate dialup Internet service for 56K is, to pick the high end, $20/month.
So unless you are amortizing what you paid for your computer into it, you would, if you never used your voice line for anything but dialup, you are paying, at most, US$38/month for unlimited dialup.
If you use your telephone for voice calls, you have to amortize it, and the Internet costs go down. Likewise, there are a number of national ISP's who have US$10/month unlimited dialup.
Basically, this means that you are more likely paying US$19/month for Internet service over a voice line that is half the time used for voice calls.
"You obviously use your connection a LOT and you see that it isn't your best interest if they start charging by the meg."
Surprise! I use dialup, too, which is one of the reasons I know that your costs are exagerated for the market we're discussing (I'm in the Silicon Valley, where you can not get high speed Internet service t save your life, unless your apartment complex is across the street from the LATE).
-- Terry
Telcos do *NOT* have to make money; at best, they can make 3-6%, or whatever the PUC defines as "fair". This is because they are a legal monopoly, and in return for that monopoly, they give up certain rights, such as the right to "charge what the market will bear" (which in a monopoly, is "all your money").
-- Terry
Charging by the meg is stupid; it's not like they are paying to create the content on Yahoo or eBay or wherever.
It's like cable TV: you pay a flat rate, and you get a pipe "yay big" in size, down which content flows from someone else.
Or like the federal highway commission charging you based on the number of miles you drive.
If they want to provide some useful content, let them charge for that. If I elect to look at it, which I likely won't.
If I'm going to pay them per meg, then they can damn well pay the content providers per meg (e.g. where's the kickback for Slashdot?).
Sucks to be the guy who sells the pipe once, instead of the water company, who gets to sell the water over and over... oh well... if you don't like it, stay out of the pipe business, or buy into a water company.
-- Terry
They are different crooks than they were 32 years ago, and they are crooks from the opposition party of the crooks who were in power 4 years ago.
If Fischer is justified in U.S.-bashing as if he were mad from syphilis contracted from a chess groupie, he ought to at least bash the right crooks.
NB: your "Bush was head of the CIA" argument is really bogus: that was George Bush Sr., not George Bush Jr.
-- Terry
You are an idiot.
I worked in the same IBM facility as one of his kids; their cubicle was 20 feet away from mine. We all followed the case very closely, and we were pretty uniformly outraged; and being an engineering department, we did not simply adopt the outrage of the family blindly, we looked at the information for ourselves, rather than operating on hearsay.
Are you maybe that FBI dufus who perjured himself on the stand, and then later retracted his testimony, which anyone can see by examining the public records of the court proceedings?
If so, your behaviour really reflects poorly on your organization.
-- Terry
So your claim is that Al Quaeda waited for a Republican Administration, before they decided that they didn't like the U.S., right?
-- Terry
The best application for the new technology is probably Grafitti.
That way, when you tag something, you can spray this on top of it, and they will never be able to paint over your grafitti.
-- Terry
I guess that's like losing a chess championship, and then yelling "Best two out of three! Best two out of three!".
The leadership of the U.S. has changed 8 times since 1970, when Nixon was in office.
If, in fact, this is his motivation, he's fighting against an administration that's been out of power for a quarter of a century, and whose leadership, even if he could legitimately blame them, is already dead.
Perhaps his time would be better spent elsewhere?
-- Terry
In fact, he's a U.S. Citizen, and has been since 1974. He was only born in Taiwan. The accusations, however, related to China.
-- Terry
Wen Ho Lee was not a spy. He was railroaded for political reasons, and released with a presidential apology, after those reasons were no longer important.
I find that it's frquently the case that naturalized citizens are more profoundly loyal to their country than those born to citizenship.
If you are going to post something stupid, at least do us the courtesy of making it appear factual.
-- Terry
I was also interested in EROS; unfortunately, at the time, it had a non-commercial-use license, and so I never did anything more than grab it and get it up and running on a single system.
Now that he's going with an MPL-style license, I guess he might be able to get more people interested. Unfortunately, like the GPL, there only room for one product in that ecological niche at a time, and Linux is already there.
While capabilities are an interesting approach, I don't think this really has any bearing on the Microsoft certification, unless the intent of mentioning EROS was to make fun of the certification?
-- Terry
Yeah, that's the way out of a recession... more taxes. Ask me for more of what I already don't have.
People already pay taxes on online purchases; they're just collected indirectly thorugh UPS.
-- Terry
1300 useful items attached to his body by various means... that's got to make him popular with the opposite sex, don't you think?!?
Oh... 1301.
-- Terry