It's obvious how it makes sense: the Presidential candidate with the most votes gets to be President. As it should be.
If you REALLY want every vote to count, what we need is less power in the hands of the President and more for Congress (especially the House of Representatives), since there you get proportional representation. Of course, then the nation might get bogged down in indecision. But based on recent events, I'd say we've erred on the side of too much centralized power.
Oh, good. I keep hearing anecdotes about paper usage actually going up with increased paper usage, and I find it hard to understand. Where I work, everything is driven by email and web apps - and this is (quasi)-government work, not a silicon valley startup. Mainly I print something when I want to guilt myself into getting around to reading it by letting it sit on my desk making a mess, but it doesn't work.
Good grief, I think paper emails might be for real. This is horrible. Come on people, think of the trees. If you spend a few minutes learning how to use the archive and search functions on your mail program you'll realize how worthless printouts are. But I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.
Right, it's not as if this type of event is new or unique. The Bush administration was caught a few times leaking information/lies to the press, which were published unsourced in reputable news outlets, then the administration cites the press in a press briefing or a public address.
Re:They may have told the current employees...
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FAA Network Hacked
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Blissfully retired, no kidding. Air traffic controllers retire with full pay after only 25 years, don't they? It's like a military pension without having to move every 3 years and risk getting shot.
Simple. So simple I find it hard to believe that no one else has mentioned the reason yet:
Japan and France (and places like them that score consistently high in terms of connectedness and bandwidth) have significantly higher population density than the US.
This comes up every time this is discussed, and is debunked every time:
The U.S. population density may be 31/km^2 compared to France's 113/km^2 or 337/km^2 for Japan, but a lot of that is Alaska and Texas and whatnot. California has a population density of 90.27/km^2 - rivaling France - yet does not have France's broadband speed - and considering that California is one of America's technological "bread baskets," this is a serious problem. On the other coast, New Jersey has a population density of 438/km^2 - and New Jersey's broadband is not better than the rest of the nation. Additionally, even considering that nationwide population density number, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, have lower population densities and both faster broadband speeds and greater household penetration.
Huh? The "high-growth" company would be dead in a year. Cash cows is all MS has. Burning money on XBox and Zune just something they do since otherwise they'd have to give the profits to shareholders.
We should be getting close to where you can put the whole system - CPU, RAM, video card - all on one chip. That should slash costs for packaging and interconnects. It should be fast, too, since the system RAM basically becomes all cache.
The Democrats trying to use this as a do everything bill hiring more teachers, nurses, cops, and the like is *not* stimulus, its not a bad thing to do but every teacher you hire has an indefinite growing expense. Are you going to fire all these teachers when the package has run its course or have you just increased the ongoing expense of government?
State government revenues are down due to the recession, that is why they're facing laying off teachers and cops. It should be a temporary expense for the fed gov., if the economy recovers the states will take those expenses back.
The problem with extrapolating this thinking into the modern age is that a road continues to perform its function for 50 years while broadband goes obsolete in a couple of years.
I disagree. First, roads require continual maintainence at great expense. Second, I do not believe the demand for bandwidth is infinite. Once we have enough for a few high-definition streams to each household, demand will level off.
And yet in other countries, as TFA also points out, it is competition and NOT regulation which has delivered high speeds at low prices
The article claims such a thing, but does nothing to support that claim. I will quote the claim in full: "In contrast, most other advanced countries have numerous providers, using many technologies, competing for consumers."
The obvious and unanswered question is, why do countries like Japan and France have more and better options for bandwidth? It is because the telecom industries there are controlled by libertarians? I doubt it. My guess is the opposite.
I don't think x86 has much overhead performance-wise or power-wise, so the premise of this story and most of the the comments is a canard. If the laptop had a super-slow single core x86 chip, it would run all day, too. Though perhaps Intel doesn't price their slowest ULV cpus competitively with these arm chips. Perhaps Intel should use a tiny corner of their current chips for a 386 that can run with the rest of the CPU powered down.
So how does TrueCrypt handle laptop suspend? Being a software solution, it wouldn't even necessarily know the laptop had been suspended, correct? It might seem a minor point, but when/if I lose a laptop, there's a strong probability it will be suspended to RAM at the time. Is the common approach simply to pop up a password-protected screensaver?
My problem with TrueCrypt - and all software solutions - is how do they handle suspending a laptop to RAM? Apparently the keys are not overwritten in RAM until you unmount the partition, which means closing down all applications that access the sensitive data. I couldn't live with that. Instead the apps should be suspended, the encryption keys overwritten, and the apps not resumed until after the user inputs the password upon resume.
IMHO the idea that NVidia would try to be a direct competitor to Intel and AMD in the CPU market is simply absurd. All the comments here are about patents. Forget patents for a minute. The idea that anybody could just round up some chip designers and pop out an Intel-beating chip is ludicrous. The chances of an upstart even matching AMD are nil, and AMD's market position isn't exactly enviable.
The only way I can see Intel eventually having serious competition is if China makes it a national priority to compete.
How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really? On the one hand, I'm always hearing about these issues on slashdot and I can certainly see why they occur. On the other hand, I use wikipedia to get information all the time and it hardly ever seems to be an actual problem. I gather most of the fighting is over a relatively small number of entries that everybody knows to be controversial. You can hardly blame wikipedia for not having the final, undisputed truth about conflict in the middle east and other such things.
In any case, where there is debate, I'd rather see a concise presentation of both sides rather than trawl through a lengthy edit trail or a bunch of metadata. Gathering gobs of information is relatively easy, what's valuable is condensing it into a usable form.
$9M in 49 cities around the world without a trace, but the joke's on them, because we know it wasn't a real flash mob. And isn't that really what matters?
And for every trend there is a counter-trend. For "authenticity" buffs there are the indie bands whose voices warble to detuned thrift-shop guitars recorded on audiocasette in a tool shed.
NFL games are much, MUCH better with a PVR. Mainly due to ads, but also timeouts and other delays. If I start watching an hour after the game starts, I catch up near the end and watch it live. (It's good to catch up in case the game goes into overtime which is not recorded because it's unscheduled). That said, I didn't catch up quite as quickly during the superbowl since I watched halftime and some of the ads (by choice).
I would have agreed a few years ago, but the last two Superbowl matchups have been excellent, exciting games.
For that matter I thought Springsteen did a great job with the halftime show, no gimmicks or voiceovers.
...our ISP's in the UK, USA etc seem to be having real problems dealing with the bandwidth usage of their customers who have paltry 10Mbps connections. Do the Koreans not use bittorrent or usenet?
My theory is that once there's enough bandwidth for people to get all their HD video needs met by the Internet, the total amount of bandwidth required/used will level off. In other words, viewers' eyeballs become the bottleneck in the system, and those are not increasing in bandwidth exponentially. So while US/UK providers think they are looking into the abyss of infinite demand, I believe a symmetric 50 mbps (approx) service to every home would "solve" the bandwidth problem.
So, wait a minute, what's your solution again - make sure no prison guards ever break the rules? That'll work. I suppose your approach to setting login passwords is "just leave 'em blank. Dishonesty is a social problem, not a technical one, and people should be honest enough not to use each others' accounts." Sure they should, but - more to the point - it ain't gonna happen.
By the way what does "poverty industrial complex" mean?
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If you REALLY want every vote to count, what we need is less power in the hands of the President and more for Congress (especially the House of Representatives), since there you get proportional representation. Of course, then the nation might get bogged down in indecision. But based on recent events, I'd say we've erred on the side of too much centralized power.
Oh, good. I keep hearing anecdotes about paper usage actually going up with increased paper usage, and I find it hard to understand. Where I work, everything is driven by email and web apps - and this is (quasi)-government work, not a silicon valley startup. Mainly I print something when I want to guilt myself into getting around to reading it by letting it sit on my desk making a mess, but it doesn't work.
Good grief, I think paper emails might be for real. This is horrible. Come on people, think of the trees. If you spend a few minutes learning how to use the archive and search functions on your mail program you'll realize how worthless printouts are. But I guess I'm preaching to the choir here.
Right, it's not as if this type of event is new or unique. The Bush administration was caught a few times leaking information/lies to the press, which were published unsourced in reputable news outlets, then the administration cites the press in a press briefing or a public address.
Blissfully retired, no kidding. Air traffic controllers retire with full pay after only 25 years, don't they? It's like a military pension without having to move every 3 years and risk getting shot.
This comes up every time this is discussed, and is debunked every time:
Huh? The "high-growth" company would be dead in a year. Cash cows is all MS has. Burning money on XBox and Zune just something they do since otherwise they'd have to give the profits to shareholders.
We should be getting close to where you can put the whole system - CPU, RAM, video card - all on one chip. That should slash costs for packaging and interconnects. It should be fast, too, since the system RAM basically becomes all cache.
State government revenues are down due to the recession, that is why they're facing laying off teachers and cops. It should be a temporary expense for the fed gov., if the economy recovers the states will take those expenses back.
I disagree. First, roads require continual maintainence at great expense. Second, I do not believe the demand for bandwidth is infinite. Once we have enough for a few high-definition streams to each household, demand will level off.
The article claims such a thing, but does nothing to support that claim. I will quote the claim in full: "In contrast, most other advanced countries have numerous providers, using many technologies, competing for consumers."
The obvious and unanswered question is, why do countries like Japan and France have more and better options for bandwidth? It is because the telecom industries there are controlled by libertarians? I doubt it. My guess is the opposite.
I don't think x86 has much overhead performance-wise or power-wise, so the premise of this story and most of the the comments is a canard. If the laptop had a super-slow single core x86 chip, it would run all day, too. Though perhaps Intel doesn't price their slowest ULV cpus competitively with these arm chips. Perhaps Intel should use a tiny corner of their current chips for a 386 that can run with the rest of the CPU powered down.
In my day we just called them botnets.
So how does TrueCrypt handle laptop suspend? Being a software solution, it wouldn't even necessarily know the laptop had been suspended, correct? It might seem a minor point, but when/if I lose a laptop, there's a strong probability it will be suspended to RAM at the time. Is the common approach simply to pop up a password-protected screensaver?
My problem with TrueCrypt - and all software solutions - is how do they handle suspending a laptop to RAM? Apparently the keys are not overwritten in RAM until you unmount the partition, which means closing down all applications that access the sensitive data. I couldn't live with that. Instead the apps should be suspended, the encryption keys overwritten, and the apps not resumed until after the user inputs the password upon resume.
The only way I can see Intel eventually having serious competition is if China makes it a national priority to compete.
In any case, where there is debate, I'd rather see a concise presentation of both sides rather than trawl through a lengthy edit trail or a bunch of metadata. Gathering gobs of information is relatively easy, what's valuable is condensing it into a usable form.
$9M in 49 cities around the world without a trace, but the joke's on them, because we know it wasn't a real flash mob. And isn't that really what matters?
Besides, MS can always undercut Apple in price. If Linux ever gains widespread acceptance, where is Microsoft's price floor then?
And for every trend there is a counter-trend. For "authenticity" buffs there are the indie bands whose voices warble to detuned thrift-shop guitars recorded on audiocasette in a tool shed.
Give me a break. There are billions of mosquitoes flying around, with or without the help of people. The same cannot be said for bullets.
NFL games are much, MUCH better with a PVR. Mainly due to ads, but also timeouts and other delays. If I start watching an hour after the game starts, I catch up near the end and watch it live. (It's good to catch up in case the game goes into overtime which is not recorded because it's unscheduled). That said, I didn't catch up quite as quickly during the superbowl since I watched halftime and some of the ads (by choice).
I would have agreed a few years ago, but the last two Superbowl matchups have been excellent, exciting games. For that matter I thought Springsteen did a great job with the halftime show, no gimmicks or voiceovers.
My theory is that once there's enough bandwidth for people to get all their HD video needs met by the Internet, the total amount of bandwidth required/used will level off. In other words, viewers' eyeballs become the bottleneck in the system, and those are not increasing in bandwidth exponentially. So while US/UK providers think they are looking into the abyss of infinite demand, I believe a symmetric 50 mbps (approx) service to every home would "solve" the bandwidth problem.
By the way what does "poverty industrial complex" mean?