This is very interesting to know. I was seriously just about to pay off one of my credit cards (to the tune of 10k) when I read this story. I usually pay about a grand, and was just going to do an online payment for the whole thing. I'm thinking it might be better to split my payment between a couple of different online payments and mailing in a check. I think they let me do three online payments in a billing cycle, so I could do three online and mail in a check for the rest.
Or, do I want to just pay the whole thing off to see if I get screwed like this, too?
This whole thing seems ridiculous to me. Ever since 9/11, the government has just consolidated more and more power, and for what? How many terrorists have actually been charged for 9/11. ONE? One guy, and the case against him isn't even that compelling. How many OTHER terrorists have been charged (let alone convicted) for 9/11? ZERO? Have my billions and billions of tax dollars done a single thing? I think not.
Sure, Bush makes a big deal time and again about how we foiled some plot here and there. When has there been a credible threat since 9/11? Tell me, how many times has there been specific information that an attack was imminent since 9/11? ZERO? That's what I thought.
What is really the damn shame in all of this is that we're going to cut off our noses to spite our faces in 2008. When Hillary the Socio-fascist runs for President, we'll put her in office just because Bush is an idiot, but we'll even worse off. The government would have already taken all of our personal freedom, and her government would be well-poised to take what freedoms are left and put us under the control of foreign governments.
It's a shame, but I feel like our country died on 9/11... the terrorists got exactly what they wanted, and they are out there laughing their collective asses off as we speak.
Yes, serious financial shenanigans. It's called getting billions in government tax breaks at our expense to do a half-assed, incomplete job rolling out a few new fibers here and there and leave them dark.
I used to live in Radnor Township just outside Philadelphia, and verizon spent an entire summer ripping up my neighborhood to install fiber everywhere. That was 4 years ago, and that fiber is still dark. Verizon has told me that they have no plans of ever lighting it up.
WEll, don't get me _too_ wrong. Used towers are okay to use, but you have to thoroughly inspect them and make sure that they are safe. Most people get rid of towers for logistical reasons, but there are those who get rid of towers that were taken down because they were unsafe.
In today's litigious society, if your tower can, when laid flat on the ground from its mounting point, extend beyond your property line, you just have to ensure you can demonstrate due diligence, which is very expensive.
Erecting a tower is serious business. You have to know what you are doing, and know it well. It's not a simple matter of throwing it up and climbing it. You WILL kill yourself if you do not know what you are doing. You MUST have your tower installation inspected, and in many cases, you must get a building permit to put one up and have a civil engineer sign off on your pad and guy wire plan. You must also have a registered PE inspect and/or tension your guy wires if you are to be able to obtain liability insurance on your tower. If you do not do these things, and something happens, YOU ARE SCREWED. Towers are heavy, fragile, and wimpy. If your tower falls and kills someone, you're looking at a manslaughter charge unless you can demonstrate due diligence.
Do you remember kindergarten physics? Remember the machine called the lever? A 60-foot lever has a tremendous mechanical advantage. 20lbs of wind force at the top has 1200 lb-ft of torque at the bottom unless you are guyed properly. It's not uncommon to see wind forces of 100lbs or more during severe storms.
When I needed a tower for my 40-meter 4 element beam, I managed to search around local hamfests and other classifieds. I ran across a guy who was moving and wanted to just give away his 140-foot tower. Used towers are INCREDIBLY cheap due to the high costs of removal and transportation. If you are flexible, willing to rent a vehicle that can haul one, and expend the effort, you can get a tower for free almost any time.
More to the point, I think the idea here is to put AC/DC conversion OUTSIDE the server room. It is a tremendous waste of energy to use air conditioning to cool hundreds upon hundreds of horribly inefficient PC power supplies when it would be far far more efficient to convert to DC in bulk, cool the AC/DC supply with forced air instead of A/C, and then bring the DC into the server room.
Yes, there are problems with DC transmission over long distances, but to go from outside of a room to inside a room is not that big of a deal.
It says so in TFA, for cryin' out loud. The kneejerk reaction of the left-wing idiots is to blame Bush for everything. This has been around for 25 years and it was the brain child of the LEFT, not BUSH.
The lawsuit would be the least of their worries. I would be far more afraid of spending time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison... although I don't think Comcast, even considering they are partly owned by Microsoft, would be THAT stupid..
Could you please cite a credible, peer-reviewed study that supports your claim? Do you have ANY data to back this up? Have you done any homework to substantiate it? Or, are you just making off-the-cuff anecdotal and speculative remarks?
Everything you see on electronics shelves today is exactly the same thing, although different brands are packaged in different VISUAL packages. There are only a few companies, for example, that make LCD panels: Samsung, Sharp, and Panasonic, let's say. Samsung makes the LCD panels that go into umpteen different brands of monitors and TVs, and Samsung gets this kind of market penetration not just by selling a panel, but by also providing a reference design that makes the "manufacturer" of the TV or Monitor able to turn around and get to market within about 60 days of purchasing the design and panels. All the "manufacturer" has to do is come up with the chassis and button layout, and a remote control maybe, and they're done.
This is the same for things like DVD players - where one company might make an incredibly mass-produced all-in-one DVD SoC, and sell it for $0.60 with a reference design to any tom, dick, or harry who wants to sell a DVD player for $19 at Best Buy.
All the big brands really do is charge more for their name and maybe a better warranty insurance policy, and massively buggy software that is the result of them trying to restrict or restrain the native features of the device they are selling.
When it all boils down, though, if you look at two 37" LCD TVs with the same native resolution and same features, you can bet they are identical except for the plastic case. They may even run the same software that was packaged with the reference design, in which case you should just buy on price.
I heard on the radio this morning that many companies have found that outsourcing to India isn't working. Gee, I wonder why? They would not say it is a competency problem, but rather danced around it as much as they could. Of course, it is a competency problem.
The discussion they had was actually fairly encouraging, to the extent that it could be in light of my extreme skepticism. Nonetheless, the entire panel thought that jobs would start to come back over the next few years. I'll believe it when I see it.
Cars are also used to listen to MPAA content without paying for it!!! There MUST be an immediate tax on cars to compensate artists (hah, we all know it's the publisher who gets all of the money) for this stolen music!!
So, what we've learned about TCO studies in the last couple years is that they are absolutely meaningless. Whomever pays for the study gets to dictate the results of said study, plain and simple.
Microsoft is wanting to put luxury (meaning not necessary) software on my phone, to let me make "free" (nothing is free, remember?) calls from my cell phone, so long as I am near a WiFi hotspot, that is tied into microsoft's network (assuredly at another cost)?
How, exactly, is this better than me just flipping open my Cingular phone, from anywhere within reach of their network, dialing any number in the country I want, and not paying a extra dime for it over my plan cost?
Corn starch has the same property... If you mix it with water, it'll be a gooey paste when it's not moving, but you can pick it up and roll it into a ball, and as long as you keep rolling it, it'll firm up... as soon as it stops moving, it turns back into goo...
This article is purely ridiculous. There is no way in hell we could hope to even identify a discrete electron, let alone manipulate its spin. We know of electrons as being in clouds, clouds of a probablistic nature. We know where the electrons are LIKELY to be, but we can't know where an electron IS. You can give an atom a kick of energy that exceeds the first ionization energy of the atom and strip off a RANDOM electron, but that's the end of it.
Electrons in this probablistic cloud also change their spins and exchange energy all the time, so even if you could change the spin of one, it would just change again almost immediately..
This is the kind of crap that startups would come up with - lots of big scientific words that VCs didn't understand, mixed in with almost insane notions of a technological leap.
In 1999, you could walk into a VC's office talking about how you would "apply a modified fourier process to faraday's law to stochastically manipulate the probablistic properties of non-ionized electrons to gain a quantum leap in bit densities, resulting in a 1000 fold increase in syncronous dynamic bit densities in a RAM chip" and walk out with $2million in cash, with which you would proceed first to the local LL-Bean store for some sandals and then to the BMW dealership. The, all you'd have to do is pay yourself $100k/year to pretend to do research, and then when it's all dried up, disappear to some tropical island.
That is only true for express services. If you pay for 3 day select, it doesn't matter if you live across the street from the shipper and next door to the UPS facility. You are not getting your package for 3 days. Ground, however, is moved as quickly as possible because it is a fixed-transit operation. If your package makes it to the depot before the truck leaves, and there's room on the truck, it's going on that truck. This is how UPS can know to +/- 1 day exactly when your ground package will be there.
Fedex, however, DOES sit on ground packages until their scheduled delivery. I had a ground package crom CA->PA managed to get on an airplane somehow. It sat in the Horsham sort facility for 5 days waiting to be delivered.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should the moral equivalent not apply also to LAWS?
SLAPP = Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation
Lawsuit
Law
What's the difference, morally, in this case?
That's good... at least slashdot will be safe from this law!
This is very interesting to know. I was seriously just about to pay off one of my credit cards (to the tune of 10k) when I read this story. I usually pay about a grand, and was just going to do an online payment for the whole thing. I'm thinking it might be better to split my payment between a couple of different online payments and mailing in a check. I think they let me do three online payments in a billing cycle, so I could do three online and mail in a check for the rest.
Or, do I want to just pay the whole thing off to see if I get screwed like this, too?
This whole thing seems ridiculous to me. Ever since 9/11, the government has just consolidated more and more power, and for what? How many terrorists have actually been charged for 9/11. ONE? One guy, and the case against him isn't even that compelling. How many OTHER terrorists have been charged (let alone convicted) for 9/11? ZERO? Have my billions and billions of tax dollars done a single thing? I think not.
Sure, Bush makes a big deal time and again about how we foiled some plot here and there. When has there been a credible threat since 9/11? Tell me, how many times has there been specific information that an attack was imminent since 9/11? ZERO? That's what I thought.
What is really the damn shame in all of this is that we're going to cut off our noses to spite our faces in 2008. When Hillary the Socio-fascist runs for President, we'll put her in office just because Bush is an idiot, but we'll even worse off. The government would have already taken all of our personal freedom, and her government would be well-poised to take what freedoms are left and put us under the control of foreign governments.
It's a shame, but I feel like our country died on 9/11... the terrorists got exactly what they wanted, and they are out there laughing their collective asses off as we speak.
Socio-communists would call this cheating. Libertarians and Republicans simply call this free market capitalism.
Yes, serious financial shenanigans. It's called getting billions in government tax breaks at our expense to do a half-assed, incomplete job rolling out a few new fibers here and there and leave them dark.
I used to live in Radnor Township just outside Philadelphia, and verizon spent an entire summer ripping up my neighborhood to install fiber everywhere. That was 4 years ago, and that fiber is still dark. Verizon has told me that they have no plans of ever lighting it up.
WEll, don't get me _too_ wrong. Used towers are okay to use, but you have to thoroughly inspect them and make sure that they are safe. Most people get rid of towers for logistical reasons, but there are those who get rid of towers that were taken down because they were unsafe.
In today's litigious society, if your tower can, when laid flat on the ground from its mounting point, extend beyond your property line, you just have to ensure you can demonstrate due diligence, which is very expensive.
Erecting a tower is serious business. You have to know what you are doing, and know it well. It's not a simple matter of throwing it up and climbing it. You WILL kill yourself if you do not know what you are doing. You MUST have your tower installation inspected, and in many cases, you must get a building permit to put one up and have a civil engineer sign off on your pad and guy wire plan. You must also have a registered PE inspect and/or tension your guy wires if you are to be able to obtain liability insurance on your tower. If you do not do these things, and something happens, YOU ARE SCREWED. Towers are heavy, fragile, and wimpy. If your tower falls and kills someone, you're looking at a manslaughter charge unless you can demonstrate due diligence.
Do you remember kindergarten physics? Remember the machine called the lever? A 60-foot lever has a tremendous mechanical advantage. 20lbs of wind force at the top has 1200 lb-ft of torque at the bottom unless you are guyed properly. It's not uncommon to see wind forces of 100lbs or more during severe storms.
Putting up a tower is no joke.
When I needed a tower for my 40-meter 4 element beam, I managed to search around local hamfests and other classifieds. I ran across a guy who was moving and wanted to just give away his 140-foot tower. Used towers are INCREDIBLY cheap due to the high costs of removal and transportation. If you are flexible, willing to rent a vehicle that can haul one, and expend the effort, you can get a tower for free almost any time.
More to the point, I think the idea here is to put AC/DC conversion OUTSIDE the server room. It is a tremendous waste of energy to use air conditioning to cool hundreds upon hundreds of horribly inefficient PC power supplies when it would be far far more efficient to convert to DC in bulk, cool the AC/DC supply with forced air instead of A/C, and then bring the DC into the server room.
Yes, there are problems with DC transmission over long distances, but to go from outside of a room to inside a room is not that big of a deal.
It says so in TFA, for cryin' out loud. The kneejerk reaction of the left-wing idiots is to blame Bush for everything. This has been around for 25 years and it was the brain child of the LEFT, not BUSH.
Who is the bigger dork here? Me for laughing at it, or you for writing it?
The lawsuit would be the least of their worries. I would be far more afraid of spending time in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison... although I don't think Comcast, even considering they are partly owned by Microsoft, would be THAT stupid..
Could you please cite a credible, peer-reviewed study that supports your claim? Do you have ANY data to back this up? Have you done any homework to substantiate it? Or, are you just making off-the-cuff anecdotal and speculative remarks?
because it'll be too busy BLOWING CHUNKS...
Everything you see on electronics shelves today is exactly the same thing, although different brands are packaged in different VISUAL packages. There are only a few companies, for example, that make LCD panels: Samsung, Sharp, and Panasonic, let's say. Samsung makes the LCD panels that go into umpteen different brands of monitors and TVs, and Samsung gets this kind of market penetration not just by selling a panel, but by also providing a reference design that makes the "manufacturer" of the TV or Monitor able to turn around and get to market within about 60 days of purchasing the design and panels. All the "manufacturer" has to do is come up with the chassis and button layout, and a remote control maybe, and they're done.
This is the same for things like DVD players - where one company might make an incredibly mass-produced all-in-one DVD SoC, and sell it for $0.60 with a reference design to any tom, dick, or harry who wants to sell a DVD player for $19 at Best Buy.
All the big brands really do is charge more for their name and maybe a better warranty insurance policy, and massively buggy software that is the result of them trying to restrict or restrain the native features of the device they are selling.
When it all boils down, though, if you look at two 37" LCD TVs with the same native resolution and same features, you can bet they are identical except for the plastic case. They may even run the same software that was packaged with the reference design, in which case you should just buy on price.
I heard on the radio this morning that many companies have found that outsourcing to India isn't working. Gee, I wonder why? They would not say it is a competency problem, but rather danced around it as much as they could. Of course, it is a competency problem.
The discussion they had was actually fairly encouraging, to the extent that it could be in light of my extreme skepticism. Nonetheless, the entire panel thought that jobs would start to come back over the next few years. I'll believe it when I see it.
I think you are indeed an optimist here.
Cars are also used to listen to MPAA content without paying for it!!! There MUST be an immediate tax on cars to compensate artists (hah, we all know it's the publisher who gets all of the money) for this stolen music!!
I almost laughed when I read your post. That is, until I realized how painfully true it is.
So, what we've learned about TCO studies in the last couple years is that they are absolutely meaningless. Whomever pays for the study gets to dictate the results of said study, plain and simple.
Microsoft is wanting to put luxury (meaning not necessary) software on my phone, to let me make "free" (nothing is free, remember?) calls from my cell phone, so long as I am near a WiFi hotspot, that is tied into microsoft's network (assuredly at another cost)?
How, exactly, is this better than me just flipping open my Cingular phone, from anywhere within reach of their network, dialing any number in the country I want, and not paying a extra dime for it over my plan cost?
The ToiletMP3 would have been #1... because that's precisely where 99.9% of modern music belongs...
Corn starch has the same property... If you mix it with water, it'll be a gooey paste when it's not moving, but you can pick it up and roll it into a ball, and as long as you keep rolling it, it'll firm up... as soon as it stops moving, it turns back into goo...
This article is purely ridiculous. There is no way in hell we could hope to even identify a discrete electron, let alone manipulate its spin. We know of electrons as being in clouds, clouds of a probablistic nature. We know where the electrons are LIKELY to be, but we can't know where an electron IS. You can give an atom a kick of energy that exceeds the first ionization energy of the atom and strip off a RANDOM electron, but that's the end of it.
Electrons in this probablistic cloud also change their spins and exchange energy all the time, so even if you could change the spin of one, it would just change again almost immediately..
This is the kind of crap that startups would come up with - lots of big scientific words that VCs didn't understand, mixed in with almost insane notions of a technological leap.
In 1999, you could walk into a VC's office talking about how you would "apply a modified fourier process to faraday's law to stochastically manipulate the probablistic properties of non-ionized electrons to gain a quantum leap in bit densities, resulting in a 1000 fold increase in syncronous dynamic bit densities in a RAM chip" and walk out with $2million in cash, with which you would proceed first to the local LL-Bean store for some sandals and then to the BMW dealership. The, all you'd have to do is pay yourself $100k/year to pretend to do research, and then when it's all dried up, disappear to some tropical island.
Looks like we have it all over again lately.
That is only true for express services. If you pay for 3 day select, it doesn't matter if you live across the street from the shipper and next door to the UPS facility. You are not getting your package for 3 days. Ground, however, is moved as quickly as possible because it is a fixed-transit operation. If your package makes it to the depot before the truck leaves, and there's room on the truck, it's going on that truck. This is how UPS can know to +/- 1 day exactly when your ground package will be there.
Fedex, however, DOES sit on ground packages until their scheduled delivery. I had a ground package crom CA->PA managed to get on an airplane somehow. It sat in the Horsham sort facility for 5 days waiting to be delivered.