You're not going to get a reply that way. Here, let me try:
We're going to sync with our outside web service using a simple SOAP client,
A SOAP client? Interesting!
written in whatever language you prefer, and setting the time. (Your users will get their time from you via NTP still, of course.) This isn't required, but for that fresh BAM! taste, it's recommended. Mind the delay calculations if you're writing the client side of it yourself [php.net], the WWWait will have a little bit more effect here depending on your setup.
Oh yeah, bam it up again, Elzar! Knock it up another notch!
If you want to make it quick and dirty, there's no reason to go through the SOAP/WSDL hoops
Come on, you wimp! Work those web acronyms! Quit holding out on us!
but a far more interesting question is what can the usa do to stop china from selling goods based on stolen technology in their own country?
They are the US's third-biggest trade partner, which means we wield a pretty big stick. Right now, China provides us mainly with cheap goods, which we can get from lots of other countries if we have to. If we were to, for example, try to kick them out of the WTO, they would lose lots of export dollars. Not saying it would kick them back to the dark ages or anything, but it would certainly make them sit up and take notice.
the anwser for china is to invest in R&D. it is what all advanced nations do.
The problem is that China isn't quite there yet. They aren't reimplementing decade-old technology because they want to, they're doing it because it's the best they can do right now. Which is actually really impressive, but again, they just aren't there yet.
If China were to rely on its own internal R&D, it might never catch up with the major industrialized nations, and that's unacceptable to Chinese leadership. (And it should be!) They need to get closer than they are now before they can start trying to be more self-sufficient.
I really think the cold hard fact of the situation is that, for all the progress China has made, it's soon going to hit a bar. For example, if they're ten years behind us now, I don't know they'll ever get closer than five years. And the reason is their government. Once that goes, China will finally be able to realize its potential. And yeah, I recognize that its potential will probably involve grinding America into dust - as an American I'm not entirely sanguine about that - but if it's a free country, I know we'll be able to get along. Just like, despite our well-documented problems with France and vice versa, there's barely been a blip in our relations with Europe. Democracies really can't stand to be enemies, no matter how hard they try.
Well, since I got modded into oblivion, I guess I may as well reply as myself.
I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself. In your situation, I would've done exactly the same thing. What I am saying is that if you had to shoot someone, you probably would've felt pretty lousy. I know I would've. And that's a good thing, because it means that, while you may be forced into doing violence at times, you don't want to do it. And in such a clear-cut case of self-defense, if you still felt bad, it probably means you'd go out of your way to avoid violence. Which is exactly the right thing to be feeling (in, as always, my opinion).
That was my point. Even if you're acting in self-defense, you are probably not going to be entirely comfortable with it. This is your recognition that violence is just wrong. In some cases, the alternatives are even worse (family, etc), and so you may be forced to go with the lesser of several evils. But I don't think we should ever mistake the lesser evil as being good or even merely neutral.
So by all means, defend yourself if you have to. I guess I just wanted to underscore that it should always be a last resort, at least in your mind.
I think the elevators where I work are magic. That's the only explanation I've come up with.
I work on the fourth floor, but the break room is on the fifth. Our bank of elevators covers the first through twentieth (or so) floors. If I'm feeling lazy - and I usually am - I ride the elevator from four to five, grab some coffee, then ride back down to four. Now you would expect that the elevator would go "park" while I'm getting coffee, right? But it doesn't. It's always waiting there for me. So I head back down to four. At first I figured, "It just waits ten minutes when it hasn't got anything else to do." But it doesn't do that either. As soon as I get out on four, the elevator whizzes off to park. (I know this because one time I stayed on it and it went up to six, where it waited with doors closed.)
Upon mentioning this to a coworker who uses the parking garage, he noted a similar behavior there. The lower levels of the garage fill up first, and the elevators track that by "parking" higher and higher as the day goes on.
I don't know if they're predicting the future, but there is some sort of magic going on there. Possibly gnomes and some giant clockwork machinery in the basement. Whatever the actual explanation, it really is pretty awesome. Although I must admit to a mild depression that elevators are smarter than I am.
Violence against anyone is wrong, unless it's in self-defense.
It's wrong then, too. This is a somewhat philosophical point, but just because a thing is legal, that doesn't make it morally right. Laws are supposed to be the grease that keeps a society running smoothly, and by necessity that means the law is going to permit some immoral acts for the sake of pragmatism.
I wouldn't normally make this point, but a big problem in today's society is that too many people think the law is morality. Those who don't think that usually feel morality ought to be the law. Law and morality can coexist if we try!
The government is the biggest, baddest monopoly of all. It's also an insidious one because there is no direct correlation between its fees (taxes) and its expenditures. If your cell phone company, for example, charges you a ruinous rate, you can see exactly how ruinous it is. You can then decide whether their cell service is really that important to you, and if it's not, you can cancel and take your money elsewhere. If it's your government providing your service, not only can you not take your money elsewhere except by moving (which can have very high costs), you also have no idea how much of your yearly "bill" is actually going to the service. It's like paying your rent, electric, water, sewer, garbage, telephone, Internet, and cable bills all at once, with no idea how much goes to each. Your rent may be $500/mo or it may be $5000/mo. And of course, if you don't want telephone service - maybe you have a cell phone - you have no way of saying "Don't bill me for this, because I'm not using it." You're paying for it whether you use it or not.
So those are some of the reasons why governments providing services is usually a very bad thing. Now for what I think would be the right way to handle broadband, and yes, it does include government intervention.
Basically, the government would own the fiber and some of the supporting hardware (routers etc). It would buy it all at first and pay for it via loans or bonds or whatever else (but not taxes). It would then turn around and lease the fiber to private companies at cost, plus some more to pay off the initial investment in, say, five or ten years. Obviously companies could lease part of the network - for example a high-speed link between two offices - or some of the bandwidth of the entire network (an ISP). All maintenance and upgrade costs would be split up among the interested lessees. The government would be involved in this only as an arbiter and guarantor of quality of service (i.e. it ensures a base level of maintenance and that there is enough bandwidth for everyone who wants it).
(One important part is that this has to be leased at cost. No more, no less. If the government makes a profit, it will dump it into other projects: see Social Security. If it loses money regularly, it will try to raise it via taxes or by diverting funds from other projects. It's really critical that this be a self-sufficient, not-for-profit program. Obviously with floating costs, lessee turnover, etc., some years this will turn a profit and some years it will take a loss. But with good planning this should be manageable, and it goes without saying that any profits should be set aside to cover future losses or, hell, refunded directly. As long as the program isn't running an annual loss, most lessees would be content to pay the remainder at the end of the year if they were given refunds years when it made money. If you are running in the red every year, then you need to consider the possibility that people in your area really don't find this a valuable service and settle for providing high-speed Internet access just in libraries or other centralized areas.)
The neat part is that this really opens up the market to small area businesses by knocking out the enormous initial investments. It also allows the fiber to be "multi-use" through multiple providers: you can get Internet, phone, and cable TV over the same fiber from three different companies.
Of course, this will never happen. Either it will be blocked by the big companies or it will become yet another socialist pork project (because we really need more of those). But Slashdot is the forum for subjunctive dreaming!
That is near the danger level. Typical for a desktop system is 25-35C at idle, going up to 50-55C during peak use. Most thermal cutoffs (extreme downclocking, automatic shutdown) activate at or near 75C. I would be worried, with your system, that hot days and heavy use would cause lockups or the aforementioned throttling. Even if that doesn't happen, consistent operation at those temperatures is going to markedly reduce the life expectancy of your hardware.
Nah. Comcast now offers 4Mbit/s, and I actually get it. Typical for cable is 2-3Mbit/s. Many DSL users are stuck with less - 768Kbit/s to 1.5Mbit/s - but the sort who are most likely to subscribe to this service probably are at 1.5M or higher already for other reasons. (And if they aren't, a service like this may convince them to upgrade anyway.)
Typical bitrates for slightly-downsized (to 640px wide) DVD rips are 1Mbit/s (standard for TV shows, 150MB for "30" minutes, 350MB for "1 hour") to 1.5M (two CDs for a two-hour movie), including audio. My DVD backups are higher-bitrate since I keep them 720px wide with AC3 audio, but with two-pass XVID encoding I don't go above 2Mbit/s for anything except unusually long movies (LOTR, basically). The picture quality is close enough to DVD that I doubt anyone except videophiles would complain. Hell, even they probably wouldn't complain since they'd be renting.
Yes, it really is possible to stream near-DVD quality movies over the Internet using widely-available, popular, and mostly affordable broadband. Even budget DSL users can get in on the game. SVCD-quality video (480px wide) can be delivered using MPEG4 (XVID et al) at half to a quarter the SVCD bitrate (~1.3Mbit/s) with no visible loss in quality, putting it well within reach of anything which deserves the name "broadband" (~350Kbit/s to ~675Kbit/s). It's not DVD, but if you are using Netflix as a preview service for movies you might want to buy, it'd definitely do the trick.
The only part of the business model that is tricky is Netflix's end, specifically bandwidth costs. They can charge per-month right now because (a) it costs them essentially nothing to ship 30 DVDs instead of 5; and (b) there is a de facto limit on how many DVDs can be rented in one month due to shipping times. But bandwidth costs money, meaning heavy movie-watchers will cost Netflix big bucks, and since there's no shipping it means they can watch five different movies every day (if they really want to). They may have to start charging on a per-viewing basis, or at least a per-title basis. Basically pay-per-view with a bigger selection, so I'm not saying the model is unworkable, but... Perhaps they could go with a sort of composite plan. $30/month would get you, say, 20 "free" movies, and every movie past that might cost $3. I think I'd sign up for that, actually.
No, you're wrong. Or at least misleading, depending on how you mean "authoritative." For the first two levels at least, all nameservers are only authoritative for immediate subdomains. So the root name servers are authoritative for the top level domains of com, org, edu, uk, etc. The TLDs have their own nameservers which are authoritative for the next level down (e.g. cnn.com, slashdot.org, harvard.edu, co.uk). Each of those subdomains must have at least one nameserver which is authoritative for those subdomains. Most domains only have the one name server (plus backups), but not all do.
Don't believe me? Fire up nslookup (no arguments) on a Windows machine and type set norecurse and press enter. Then type it.slashdot.org a.root-servers.net. You will get a referral to the.org DNS servers. If you then try it.slashdot.org tld1.ultradns.net you will get a referral to the slashdot.org DNS servers. If you try it.slashdot.org ns3.vasoftware.com you'll get an (authoritative) answer.
If you prefer Unix - and who doesn't? - you can get the same results with less typing via dig +trace it.slashdot.org, which will show you the path a recursive query will take. Note that the buck usually starts with the root servers. The only time it doesn't is if you can have a clear path up and down the tree of authoritative replies. Which does not usually happen.
if they are going to go we should stop forcing them to use the technology that really isn't fit for the task.
You're illustrating the difference between the perfect world and the real world. In a perfect world, the tools we have would always be the best tools for the job. But in the real world, it never quite works out that way. At work I have to do a fair bit of disassembly and reassembly of servers, most typically hot swap trays and drives. Those things are in there tight, and we only have like one screwdriver (that we can find anyway). So many times I'm there putting about 600lbs of force trying to get the too-small screwdriver to turn the screw without stripping it. The real world: you make do with the tools you have. Like that incredibly un-political, but absolutely accurate, remark Rumsfeld made: "You go to war with the army you have, not the one you want."
This is not to say we shouldn't try to improve our tools. Like at work, it would be a good idea to get several different-size screwdrivers. All I'm trying to say is that there's a point where you have to stop and say "This is good enough for now." Even if there's stuff that you know is wrong, you just let it be, try to work around it, and deal with it for a while. Because 95% of a solution now is better than 99% in ten years, which, frankly, is why we are still limping along with the shuttle at all. Much like fusion power, a 99%-perfect solution is always ten years in the future.
The shuttle was well designed in the beginning, but all the modifications to baselines due to budget pork, politcal conprimises, and simple age have made it unfit for it's duties.
No government project is ever going to be free of budget pork and political compromises (the two are mostly the same thing: "I'll support your bill if you give me $50 million for highway projects"). It is, to beat a dead horse, part of what distinguishes the real from the perfect world.
First, I wouldn't be too quick to label him a hero. He's got bigger plans in mind, like being governor of NY. A lot of these sorts of things are pure publicity stunts to get him name recognition.
Second, his tactics for "doing good" are problematic at best. He is using popular sentiment to alter the meaning and scope of existing laws, often in ways that the authors of those laws never intended. In doing so, he's bypassing the checks and balances of our government. The judicial branch is supposed to enforce laws, not write them (and Spitzer is effectively writing or rewriting law). If you want a new law written, or an existing law changed, that's supposed to be handled by the legislative branch.
Third, as I implied earlier, Spitzer is tapping into peoples' fears and anger to get stuff done. How many good decisions have you ever made when you were afraid or angry? Hell, consider the popular Slashdot target of the PATRIOT Act. The bill might still pass if it were introduced today, but it would certainly face a much rockier path. Most people here hate Bush not just for supporting the bill in the first place, they hate him for exploiting our fears post-9/11 to get it passed. Well, Spitzer's doing the exact same thing. Except instead of playing on the fears and anger of Congresscritters, he's playing on the fears and anger of a jury.
No matter how much good Spitzer may be doing, he is doing it in the absolute wrong way. And if he is ultimately successful, it will only encourage emulators who will further degrade our government. Unless he changes his tactics, I will never support anything he wants to do, even if (as in this case) I would really like to see it happen.
He's not talking about "Serenity," he's talking about "Out of Gas." Technically spoilers, but nothing you don't learn from the first five minutes of the episode:
It starts with Mal clutching a piece of machinery, then falling to the deck where his blood drips through the grate. Followed by a flashback to when he buys Serenity (the ship) and enlists the crew (not the passengers, whose enlistment is depicted in "Serenity" the pilot).
"Out of Gas" is the best episode in the series, but only if you've watched all the ones leading up to it and so have an attachment to all the characters already. It is the worst episode to watch first.
100 posts and a +5 mod for the parent, yet I'm the first one to point this out. Does that seem right to you?
Hack a commercial website. Find an interesting page, then replace it with your own. The replacement page includes JavaScript to (a) display the "login" popup; and (b) redirect to the real page. Information from the login popup is redirected to a collection or harvesting site and perhaps even forwarded back to the legitimate site (so you don't have to login twice, which would make some people suspicious).
You really think most people end up on malicious sites intentionally?
OK. Couple problems here. First, your analogy is... dubious. See the other reply to your post. Second, you are using your conclusion (software patents are bad) to prove itself (patenting ideas is ludicrous/stupid). Third, you are insulting the guy you hope listens to you by implicitly calling him stupid. How to win friends and influence people... Fourth, you are appealing to some broad philosophical principle. Unless you are actually debating that principle, you should leave it out entirely. You have a nice, narrow topic - software patents - stick to that.
What I would do is go at this problem from three directions.
First, explain why software patents are bad. This is where you need to come up with examples. Patently (no pun intended) absurd patents are good targets for this. Other good examples include companies in your home state being sued for software patent infringement. In this latter case, it's more important that they are companies in your state getting sued - it's not really relevant whether the patent is a good one or not.
Second, explain why getting rid of software patents are good. Ask John Kerry and Bob Dole about the efficacy of running on a platform of "Vote against X." You also need to show what positive things will come from your proposal. You can do a little philosophical handwaving here because there's never been a time we haven't had software patents; but you can extrapolate a little, or find examples in other countries, which should be compelling.
Finally, anticipate arguments you will get from proponents of software patents. You shouldn't incorporate them into your presentation unless they are obvious, but they will help you refine your work. Look at it this way. If you say "Some people might say X, but..." you are coming across as defensive, argumentative, and negative. But if you account for the counterargument, and then build your argument to exclude it entirely, you just seem positive, certain, and well-prepared. Head off any objections before they happen, in other words. You can't do this for everything (of course), but it's important that you not end every point with "but here's what the other guys will say and why they're wrong."
I do agree with other posters that your presentation should be as short as humanly possible while still getting the point across. There's the attention span issue. If your Congresscritter gets bored, your chances of success drastically diminish. And software patents are a pretty dry topic even for people really interested in them.
Oh yeah. And note how this post roughly follows the outline I suggested. I don't bother with part 3 for Slashdot posts.
You start out by saying that most people aren't defending their rights, then follow up by saying that the will of the majority isn't being followed. You can't have it both ways. Fret about the gradual dissolution of our various civil rights if you wish (I know I do), but believe it or not, it is what most people want. They've decided that health insurance, jobs, education, and all the other political buzzwords are more important than personal liberty.
It sucks that we're in the minority on this one, but, well, that's democracy for you. The wisdom of the Founding Fathers has managed to postpone the inevitable, but it can't hold it back forever against what is, effectively, a 60-year majority so large that most people don't even realize there are alternatives.
There is also Sophos AV, which supports Windows, MacOS X, NetApps, Linux on Intel and Alpha, FreeBSD, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, SCO, OS/2, OpenVMS, and NetWare. I had never heard of them until going to college, where Sophos was their "mandatory AV product" for all students, and haven't heard of them since. But I was pretty impressed by their product. Of course, I've gotten exactly one virus in my entire life, and it was a harmless DOS-era boot-sector virus acquired from a friend, so I was impressed mainly by how lightweight Sophos is. And obviously its supported-OS list is pretty remarkable.
So? IBM is making money off stuff like Linux. Big deal. I'm saving a ton of money from Linux. If IBM wants to pay some programmers to make Linux better - so that IBM can make more money off it - good for them. The net result is that I save even more money by using Linux. Those who want big-name backing for their software safe money too, just not as much, and they're happy too. Everyone wins. It seems like an ideal situation.
I rather suspect that this is more about a European distate for "American multinationals" than anything else. Am I overly sensitive, or does that phrase read like a curse word?
Now we can give you yet another reason not to talk to your date.
Let's be honest here. If you're taking your date to a place like this, you're not getting any no matter what you do. So you may as well play some HL2 while awaiting the inevitable.
Well, if you aren't seen to be moving forward, you're preceived as moving backward. A name change can be used to suggest a break from the past or a fresh start; a name change back can be used to indicate "We fucked up, we're going back to what worked." The name change itself, of course, means absolutely nothing, but it can be an especially visible indicator of a shift in corporate strategy.
This is especially visible in mergers. Compaq+HP became just HP, which was supposed to mean that they were keeping the HP culture. (This turned out be a really bad lie, but that was the story.) I forget now who made up Verizon originally, but they wanted to indicate a break from their stodgy Baby Bell history. I frankly think the only people they're trying to impress are the ones who are too smart to fall for this sort of gimmick, but, well... I think a lot of the shit companies do is stupid and counterproductive, so what do I know.
I guess their logic is that it costs them fairly big money to pull of a name change, so it indicates their intent more than a mere press release would. Saying "We're changing our corporate stategy" is worth less than the paper or electrons it's printed on. Saying that and then backing it up with $30 million hopefully shows you are at least somewhat serious. (Serious about bilking your investors out of their money, perhaps, but serious about something.)
No, it's not difficult. The way I see it is as an alternate form of compensation. When the government doesn't mandate vacation days, you, as an employee, can negotiate with a prospective employer to get something that you both think is fair. For example, you can agree to get one less week a year of vacation time in exchange for a slightly higher salary. If the employer doesn't agree, then you go find one who will.
Believe it or not, most people do not take jobs based simply on salary. They consider the benefits package, location, and a host of other factors. It's very common - in the States anyway - for someone to take a lower-paying job because it doesn't require him to move or because it has a better health insurance program. The employee says, "It'll cost me $X to move and get insurance on my own, and that's more than the amount I'm 'losing' by taking the lower-paying job. So this is the best job to take."
It helps out the employee by letting him choose the best job for his unique situation; it helps the employer by giving it the freedom to offer the package it can afford. Thus people who are maybe "marginal" applicants can get jobs where otherwise they couldn't (because nobody could afford to take a chance on them). That's how I got my job. No severance package, retirement, or anything else, but in exchange I got a job, with zero experience, that usually needs five years of experience.
Note that I'm not saying our way is better than the European way. But many Europeans don't seem to understand that there are some advantages to the free(r)-market approach, and I wanted to explain some of them.
Automated systems for conventional aircraft and big carriers has been done for a while, but getting a hovering Harrier, helicopter, or future JSF to land on a pitching deck of a smaller ship is a different matter.
I'm not sure I follow how this is supposed to be harder than landing a jet on a carrier. I have no doubts whatsoever that it's a difficult process no matter what your vehicle, don't get me wrong. But with a VTOL aircraft you primarily worry about adjustments in one dimension (altitude). With a traditional aircraft you have to worry about two (forward velocity plus altitude). With a helicopter, for instance, as long as you "float" over the deck without hitting anything, you can land anywhere. With a jet, you have to hit a very small patch of deck to catch the tailhooks and arrest your forward motion.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, I may be wrong. An aircraft's altitude is controlled significantly by its forward speed. (Go faster, you go higher; go slower, you go lower.) Perhaps it is mainly a one-dimensional problem. Still, I don't see how landing a jet is markedly easier than landing a helicopter.
I guess I can summarize this post by saying, "I'm ignorant. Someone with more than a handful of hours of flight time, please enlighten me." (Yes, I have flown single-engine Cessnas, but only the aforementioned handful of hours. Takeoff but not landing, and certainly not on an aircraft carrier. My "knowledge" there is mainly from my father, who was a Navy fighter pilot in the late 1940s, so that "knowledge" doesn't even extend to jets.)
If you were to throw out your requirement for an AMD64, you would find a billion acceptable laptops. Remember that server and workstation-grade CPUs are power-hungry, heat-dumping monsters. That's going to adversely affect battery life, which you can get around by putting in more or bigger (or both) batteries. But the market for AMD64 laptops is so small compared to, say, Pentium-M laptops that it's not really cost-effective for most places to do.
My advice is to drop either your AMD64 requirement (the Pentium-M really is an awesome chip) or your 3-hour battery life requirement (2 hours is probably the best you can hope for, and even then expect to pay through the nose for it).
My Pentium-M laptop manages 2.5 hours on battery playing 3D games and about 3-3.5 hours watching DVDs. As a point of reference.
Boeing still seems to be pinning its hopes on midsize wide bodied aircraft that fly between smaller airports. All I can say is, for Boeing to be right an awful lot of people need to be very wrong about the way the world is going.
I think you have it exactly backwards. The trend lately has been toward exactly this sort of thing: direct flights across fairly short distances. This is why the big US airlines are dying; 9/11 only sped up the process. Southwestern and Airtran, to name two fairly big ones, are demonstrating a far more cost-effective way to do flights, and Airtran uses mostly 737s and smaller planes.
(Incidentally, the "smaller airports" aspect is almost a side effect. Budget airlines don't avoid major hubs, they just make less use of them. It's basically an illusion created by the fact that major airlines go almost exclusively through major hubs except for the last-mile leg.)
The direct flight path is much more complex for air traffic controllers, but it is actually far superior. First, for travelers, because they don't have to fly 500 miles out of their way to a hub just to change flights; second, for airports, because it spreads out the traffic load instead of concentrating it on a handful of major hubs; third, and somewhat marginally, for airlines, because it cuts total travel times and lets them scrimp on services (legroom, first class, etc).
The A380 and 747, or at least planes like them, will always have a place on long flights, like New York City to Los Angeles or NYC to London, but remember that most air traffic isn't like that. It was at one point, but not any more: the advent of $80 plane tickets has changed that forever.
The main concern is: Right now, airlines are using 747s, or whatever equivalent models there are, to get the job done. Airplanes are very expensive. Is it really cost-effective to throw out your existing solution for one which might not be appreciably better? Obviously Airbus is betting that the A380 is appreciably better and Boeing is betting it's not. Every article I've read on the subject comes down on the side of Boeing, mostly for the reasons I gave above, but I guess the market will tell us in five or ten years who's right. It is unquestionably a big gamble (which is nothing new, new airplane designs are not exactly coming out at a breakneck pace precisely because everyone is afraid to make that gamble).
This sort of thing is common in RFCs too. "Clients MUST implement this feature; clients MUST NOT implement this feature; clients SHOULD implement this feature."
Now all we need to do is get scientists, Internet RFC authors, and lawyers together... "This comment MUST be MODERATED favorably: moderators SHOULD choose PLUS FIVE (+5) insightful." In the future, all professional publications will look like 1337-speak, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
If China were to rely on its own internal R&D, it might never catch up with the major industrialized nations, and that's unacceptable to Chinese leadership. (And it should be!) They need to get closer than they are now before they can start trying to be more self-sufficient.
I really think the cold hard fact of the situation is that, for all the progress China has made, it's soon going to hit a bar. For example, if they're ten years behind us now, I don't know they'll ever get closer than five years. And the reason is their government. Once that goes, China will finally be able to realize its potential. And yeah, I recognize that its potential will probably involve grinding America into dust - as an American I'm not entirely sanguine about that - but if it's a free country, I know we'll be able to get along. Just like, despite our well-documented problems with France and vice versa, there's barely been a blip in our relations with Europe. Democracies really can't stand to be enemies, no matter how hard they try.
I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself. In your situation, I would've done exactly the same thing. What I am saying is that if you had to shoot someone, you probably would've felt pretty lousy. I know I would've. And that's a good thing, because it means that, while you may be forced into doing violence at times, you don't want to do it. And in such a clear-cut case of self-defense, if you still felt bad, it probably means you'd go out of your way to avoid violence. Which is exactly the right thing to be feeling (in, as always, my opinion).
That was my point. Even if you're acting in self-defense, you are probably not going to be entirely comfortable with it. This is your recognition that violence is just wrong. In some cases, the alternatives are even worse (family, etc), and so you may be forced to go with the lesser of several evils. But I don't think we should ever mistake the lesser evil as being good or even merely neutral.
So by all means, defend yourself if you have to. I guess I just wanted to underscore that it should always be a last resort, at least in your mind.
I work on the fourth floor, but the break room is on the fifth. Our bank of elevators covers the first through twentieth (or so) floors. If I'm feeling lazy - and I usually am - I ride the elevator from four to five, grab some coffee, then ride back down to four. Now you would expect that the elevator would go "park" while I'm getting coffee, right? But it doesn't. It's always waiting there for me. So I head back down to four. At first I figured, "It just waits ten minutes when it hasn't got anything else to do." But it doesn't do that either. As soon as I get out on four, the elevator whizzes off to park. (I know this because one time I stayed on it and it went up to six, where it waited with doors closed.)
Upon mentioning this to a coworker who uses the parking garage, he noted a similar behavior there. The lower levels of the garage fill up first, and the elevators track that by "parking" higher and higher as the day goes on.
I don't know if they're predicting the future, but there is some sort of magic going on there. Possibly gnomes and some giant clockwork machinery in the basement. Whatever the actual explanation, it really is pretty awesome. Although I must admit to a mild depression that elevators are smarter than I am.
I wouldn't normally make this point, but a big problem in today's society is that too many people think the law is morality. Those who don't think that usually feel morality ought to be the law. Law and morality can coexist if we try!
The government is the biggest, baddest monopoly of all. It's also an insidious one because there is no direct correlation between its fees (taxes) and its expenditures. If your cell phone company, for example, charges you a ruinous rate, you can see exactly how ruinous it is. You can then decide whether their cell service is really that important to you, and if it's not, you can cancel and take your money elsewhere. If it's your government providing your service, not only can you not take your money elsewhere except by moving (which can have very high costs), you also have no idea how much of your yearly "bill" is actually going to the service. It's like paying your rent, electric, water, sewer, garbage, telephone, Internet, and cable bills all at once, with no idea how much goes to each. Your rent may be $500/mo or it may be $5000/mo. And of course, if you don't want telephone service - maybe you have a cell phone - you have no way of saying "Don't bill me for this, because I'm not using it." You're paying for it whether you use it or not.
So those are some of the reasons why governments providing services is usually a very bad thing. Now for what I think would be the right way to handle broadband, and yes, it does include government intervention.
Basically, the government would own the fiber and some of the supporting hardware (routers etc). It would buy it all at first and pay for it via loans or bonds or whatever else (but not taxes). It would then turn around and lease the fiber to private companies at cost, plus some more to pay off the initial investment in, say, five or ten years. Obviously companies could lease part of the network - for example a high-speed link between two offices - or some of the bandwidth of the entire network (an ISP). All maintenance and upgrade costs would be split up among the interested lessees. The government would be involved in this only as an arbiter and guarantor of quality of service (i.e. it ensures a base level of maintenance and that there is enough bandwidth for everyone who wants it).
(One important part is that this has to be leased at cost. No more, no less. If the government makes a profit, it will dump it into other projects: see Social Security. If it loses money regularly, it will try to raise it via taxes or by diverting funds from other projects. It's really critical that this be a self-sufficient, not-for-profit program. Obviously with floating costs, lessee turnover, etc., some years this will turn a profit and some years it will take a loss. But with good planning this should be manageable, and it goes without saying that any profits should be set aside to cover future losses or, hell, refunded directly. As long as the program isn't running an annual loss, most lessees would be content to pay the remainder at the end of the year if they were given refunds years when it made money. If you are running in the red every year, then you need to consider the possibility that people in your area really don't find this a valuable service and settle for providing high-speed Internet access just in libraries or other centralized areas.)
The neat part is that this really opens up the market to small area businesses by knocking out the enormous initial investments. It also allows the fiber to be "multi-use" through multiple providers: you can get Internet, phone, and cable TV over the same fiber from three different companies.
Of course, this will never happen. Either it will be blocked by the big companies or it will become yet another socialist pork project (because we really need more of those). But Slashdot is the forum for subjunctive dreaming!
That is near the danger level. Typical for a desktop system is 25-35C at idle, going up to 50-55C during peak use. Most thermal cutoffs (extreme downclocking, automatic shutdown) activate at or near 75C. I would be worried, with your system, that hot days and heavy use would cause lockups or the aforementioned throttling. Even if that doesn't happen, consistent operation at those temperatures is going to markedly reduce the life expectancy of your hardware.
Typical bitrates for slightly-downsized (to 640px wide) DVD rips are 1Mbit/s (standard for TV shows, 150MB for "30" minutes, 350MB for "1 hour") to 1.5M (two CDs for a two-hour movie), including audio. My DVD backups are higher-bitrate since I keep them 720px wide with AC3 audio, but with two-pass XVID encoding I don't go above 2Mbit/s for anything except unusually long movies (LOTR, basically). The picture quality is close enough to DVD that I doubt anyone except videophiles would complain. Hell, even they probably wouldn't complain since they'd be renting.
Yes, it really is possible to stream near-DVD quality movies over the Internet using widely-available, popular, and mostly affordable broadband. Even budget DSL users can get in on the game. SVCD-quality video (480px wide) can be delivered using MPEG4 (XVID et al) at half to a quarter the SVCD bitrate (~1.3Mbit/s) with no visible loss in quality, putting it well within reach of anything which deserves the name "broadband" (~350Kbit/s to ~675Kbit/s). It's not DVD, but if you are using Netflix as a preview service for movies you might want to buy, it'd definitely do the trick.
The only part of the business model that is tricky is Netflix's end, specifically bandwidth costs. They can charge per-month right now because (a) it costs them essentially nothing to ship 30 DVDs instead of 5; and (b) there is a de facto limit on how many DVDs can be rented in one month due to shipping times. But bandwidth costs money, meaning heavy movie-watchers will cost Netflix big bucks, and since there's no shipping it means they can watch five different movies every day (if they really want to). They may have to start charging on a per-viewing basis, or at least a per-title basis. Basically pay-per-view with a bigger selection, so I'm not saying the model is unworkable, but... Perhaps they could go with a sort of composite plan. $30/month would get you, say, 20 "free" movies, and every movie past that might cost $3. I think I'd sign up for that, actually.
Don't believe me? Fire up nslookup (no arguments) on a Windows machine and type set norecurse and press enter. Then type it.slashdot.org a.root-servers.net. You will get a referral to the .org DNS servers. If you then try it.slashdot.org tld1.ultradns.net you will get a referral to the slashdot.org DNS servers. If you try it.slashdot.org ns3.vasoftware.com you'll get an (authoritative) answer.
If you prefer Unix - and who doesn't? - you can get the same results with less typing via dig +trace it.slashdot.org, which will show you the path a recursive query will take. Note that the buck usually starts with the root servers. The only time it doesn't is if you can have a clear path up and down the tree of authoritative replies. Which does not usually happen.
This is not to say we shouldn't try to improve our tools. Like at work, it would be a good idea to get several different-size screwdrivers. All I'm trying to say is that there's a point where you have to stop and say "This is good enough for now." Even if there's stuff that you know is wrong, you just let it be, try to work around it, and deal with it for a while. Because 95% of a solution now is better than 99% in ten years, which, frankly, is why we are still limping along with the shuttle at all. Much like fusion power, a 99%-perfect solution is always ten years in the future.
No government project is ever going to be free of budget pork and political compromises (the two are mostly the same thing: "I'll support your bill if you give me $50 million for highway projects"). It is, to beat a dead horse, part of what distinguishes the real from the perfect world.Second, his tactics for "doing good" are problematic at best. He is using popular sentiment to alter the meaning and scope of existing laws, often in ways that the authors of those laws never intended. In doing so, he's bypassing the checks and balances of our government. The judicial branch is supposed to enforce laws, not write them (and Spitzer is effectively writing or rewriting law). If you want a new law written, or an existing law changed, that's supposed to be handled by the legislative branch.
Third, as I implied earlier, Spitzer is tapping into peoples' fears and anger to get stuff done. How many good decisions have you ever made when you were afraid or angry? Hell, consider the popular Slashdot target of the PATRIOT Act. The bill might still pass if it were introduced today, but it would certainly face a much rockier path. Most people here hate Bush not just for supporting the bill in the first place, they hate him for exploiting our fears post-9/11 to get it passed. Well, Spitzer's doing the exact same thing. Except instead of playing on the fears and anger of Congresscritters, he's playing on the fears and anger of a jury.
No matter how much good Spitzer may be doing, he is doing it in the absolute wrong way. And if he is ultimately successful, it will only encourage emulators who will further degrade our government. Unless he changes his tactics, I will never support anything he wants to do, even if (as in this case) I would really like to see it happen.
It starts with Mal clutching a piece of machinery, then falling to the deck where his blood drips through the grate. Followed by a flashback to when he buys Serenity (the ship) and enlists the crew (not the passengers, whose enlistment is depicted in "Serenity" the pilot).
"Out of Gas" is the best episode in the series, but only if you've watched all the ones leading up to it and so have an attachment to all the characters already. It is the worst episode to watch first.
100 posts and a +5 mod for the parent, yet I'm the first one to point this out. Does that seem right to you?
You really think most people end up on malicious sites intentionally?
What I would do is go at this problem from three directions.
First, explain why software patents are bad. This is where you need to come up with examples. Patently (no pun intended) absurd patents are good targets for this. Other good examples include companies in your home state being sued for software patent infringement. In this latter case, it's more important that they are companies in your state getting sued - it's not really relevant whether the patent is a good one or not.
Second, explain why getting rid of software patents are good. Ask John Kerry and Bob Dole about the efficacy of running on a platform of "Vote against X." You also need to show what positive things will come from your proposal. You can do a little philosophical handwaving here because there's never been a time we haven't had software patents; but you can extrapolate a little, or find examples in other countries, which should be compelling.
Finally, anticipate arguments you will get from proponents of software patents. You shouldn't incorporate them into your presentation unless they are obvious, but they will help you refine your work. Look at it this way. If you say "Some people might say X, but..." you are coming across as defensive, argumentative, and negative. But if you account for the counterargument, and then build your argument to exclude it entirely, you just seem positive, certain, and well-prepared. Head off any objections before they happen, in other words. You can't do this for everything (of course), but it's important that you not end every point with "but here's what the other guys will say and why they're wrong."
I do agree with other posters that your presentation should be as short as humanly possible while still getting the point across. There's the attention span issue. If your Congresscritter gets bored, your chances of success drastically diminish. And software patents are a pretty dry topic even for people really interested in them.
Oh yeah. And note how this post roughly follows the outline I suggested. I don't bother with part 3 for Slashdot posts.
It sucks that we're in the minority on this one, but, well, that's democracy for you. The wisdom of the Founding Fathers has managed to postpone the inevitable, but it can't hold it back forever against what is, effectively, a 60-year majority so large that most people don't even realize there are alternatives.
There is also Sophos AV, which supports Windows, MacOS X, NetApps, Linux on Intel and Alpha, FreeBSD, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, SCO, OS/2, OpenVMS, and NetWare. I had never heard of them until going to college, where Sophos was their "mandatory AV product" for all students, and haven't heard of them since. But I was pretty impressed by their product. Of course, I've gotten exactly one virus in my entire life, and it was a harmless DOS-era boot-sector virus acquired from a friend, so I was impressed mainly by how lightweight Sophos is. And obviously its supported-OS list is pretty remarkable.
I rather suspect that this is more about a European distate for "American multinationals" than anything else. Am I overly sensitive, or does that phrase read like a curse word?
This is especially visible in mergers. Compaq+HP became just HP, which was supposed to mean that they were keeping the HP culture. (This turned out be a really bad lie, but that was the story.) I forget now who made up Verizon originally, but they wanted to indicate a break from their stodgy Baby Bell history. I frankly think the only people they're trying to impress are the ones who are too smart to fall for this sort of gimmick, but, well... I think a lot of the shit companies do is stupid and counterproductive, so what do I know.
I guess their logic is that it costs them fairly big money to pull of a name change, so it indicates their intent more than a mere press release would. Saying "We're changing our corporate stategy" is worth less than the paper or electrons it's printed on. Saying that and then backing it up with $30 million hopefully shows you are at least somewhat serious. (Serious about bilking your investors out of their money, perhaps, but serious about something.)
Believe it or not, most people do not take jobs based simply on salary. They consider the benefits package, location, and a host of other factors. It's very common - in the States anyway - for someone to take a lower-paying job because it doesn't require him to move or because it has a better health insurance program. The employee says, "It'll cost me $X to move and get insurance on my own, and that's more than the amount I'm 'losing' by taking the lower-paying job. So this is the best job to take."
It helps out the employee by letting him choose the best job for his unique situation; it helps the employer by giving it the freedom to offer the package it can afford. Thus people who are maybe "marginal" applicants can get jobs where otherwise they couldn't (because nobody could afford to take a chance on them). That's how I got my job. No severance package, retirement, or anything else, but in exchange I got a job, with zero experience, that usually needs five years of experience.
Note that I'm not saying our way is better than the European way. But many Europeans don't seem to understand that there are some advantages to the free(r)-market approach, and I wanted to explain some of them.
The WSJ reports it, but no link to the WSJ's actual story? Well, here it is.
Hmm. Now that I think about it, I may be wrong. An aircraft's altitude is controlled significantly by its forward speed. (Go faster, you go higher; go slower, you go lower.) Perhaps it is mainly a one-dimensional problem. Still, I don't see how landing a jet is markedly easier than landing a helicopter.
I guess I can summarize this post by saying, "I'm ignorant. Someone with more than a handful of hours of flight time, please enlighten me." (Yes, I have flown single-engine Cessnas, but only the aforementioned handful of hours. Takeoff but not landing, and certainly not on an aircraft carrier. My "knowledge" there is mainly from my father, who was a Navy fighter pilot in the late 1940s, so that "knowledge" doesn't even extend to jets.)
My advice is to drop either your AMD64 requirement (the Pentium-M really is an awesome chip) or your 3-hour battery life requirement (2 hours is probably the best you can hope for, and even then expect to pay through the nose for it).
My Pentium-M laptop manages 2.5 hours on battery playing 3D games and about 3-3.5 hours watching DVDs. As a point of reference.
(Incidentally, the "smaller airports" aspect is almost a side effect. Budget airlines don't avoid major hubs, they just make less use of them. It's basically an illusion created by the fact that major airlines go almost exclusively through major hubs except for the last-mile leg.)
The direct flight path is much more complex for air traffic controllers, but it is actually far superior. First, for travelers, because they don't have to fly 500 miles out of their way to a hub just to change flights; second, for airports, because it spreads out the traffic load instead of concentrating it on a handful of major hubs; third, and somewhat marginally, for airlines, because it cuts total travel times and lets them scrimp on services (legroom, first class, etc).
The A380 and 747, or at least planes like them, will always have a place on long flights, like New York City to Los Angeles or NYC to London, but remember that most air traffic isn't like that. It was at one point, but not any more: the advent of $80 plane tickets has changed that forever.
The main concern is: Right now, airlines are using 747s, or whatever equivalent models there are, to get the job done. Airplanes are very expensive. Is it really cost-effective to throw out your existing solution for one which might not be appreciably better? Obviously Airbus is betting that the A380 is appreciably better and Boeing is betting it's not. Every article I've read on the subject comes down on the side of Boeing, mostly for the reasons I gave above, but I guess the market will tell us in five or ten years who's right. It is unquestionably a big gamble (which is nothing new, new airplane designs are not exactly coming out at a breakneck pace precisely because everyone is afraid to make that gamble).
Now all we need to do is get scientists, Internet RFC authors, and lawyers together... "This comment MUST be MODERATED favorably: moderators SHOULD choose PLUS FIVE (+5) insightful." In the future, all professional publications will look like 1337-speak, I guess.