Why should the rich have any greater right to jeopardize human and environmental health and safety? Especially when comparing the wealth of people in different parts of the world; you can't say that the comparative net worth of a particular American vs. a particular Indian have anything to do with individual merit.
This is what I keep wondering about the US insistence that we do nothing about the environment until China takes action first - even though our per capita CO2 emissions are still 400% of theirs! We might be willing to freeze our emissions at current levels if they freeze theirs at what are (to us) levels from the 1930's? Please.
Yes, I do understand. As an American I find the prospect of equal access to natural resources for everybody on earth very frightening, because I am accustomed to our position of privilege. But I won't try to rationalize that selfish and irrational sentiment.
I'm wondering whether youtube serves up more mainstream commercial videos (as people might assume from reading the article), or more of the "viral" content for which youtube became famous. In itself, the fact that the most popular videos were commercial does not answer this question. Imagine there are 1000 videos on youtube - 100 "mainstream" and 900 "viral." Now imagine 1100 people visit youtube. 900 choose randomly from the viral videos (for an average of 1 viewing each) while the other 200 choose a mainstream video at random (for an average of 2 viewings each). In this case, all the most popular videos are mainstream even though 80% of the viewings are viral.
I'm not sure what your point is? If you're saying the gaming companies don't take money from the military to make customized versions of their games for training, or that the military doesn't use games for recruiting, then you're wrong.
The loudness war is a real shame in itself though, especially since most(?) people now listen to albums on the mp3 player instead of 3 minute radio tracks from different artists jumbled together, thus the tracks have already been purchased and there's no need for them to get in a volume arms race.
Maybe sound engineers should produce the music properly, then send radio stations a special crappy remastered version with no dynamic range.
Inefficient as in ammount of data transferred (as you seem to be implying), then I don't see how that can possibly be the case.
The network structure of the Internet resembles a tree. The leaves are endpoints such as your home. The nearer the leaves, the higher the cost per byte. Bandwidth on the backbone (near the root of the tree) is far cheaper than bandwidth to your curb. The problem with P2P is that every byte goes both up and back down the tree. Dedicated servers, on the other hand, are placed further up the tree, so each byte simply comes down, traversing the tree only once. That is the basic efficiency problem with P2P.
You have it backwards. Appliances are resource hungry largely because they are dumb. You have lights and air conditioners running hour after hour because they don't know nobody is home. You have sprinklers going because their owners don't know how much water to use for the region given recent and predicted weather patterns. You have a refrigerator with the compressor running constantly because it's too dumb to know its door is ajar, or its coils are dirty, and it has no way to tell anybody what is wrong. You have people making extra trips to the supermarket in SUVs because they forgot to buy paprika for a recipe, and new cars rolling off assembly lines because people forgot to change their oil. It's all about information. Information can save so much energy, the resources to store and transmit that information pale in comparison.
The infrastructure for most of it already exists; all you need is a pervasive wireless data network, which cellphones have now provided.
Infrastructure aside, we do need smarter clients; more gps-aware cellphones (so I can be warned before taking a route where all the cars are moving slowly), and other connected appliances (so my AC will shut off when I'm over 2 miles away from home, or I can punch a button telling my car I want the seats to be nice and warm in 5 minutes). It's more a problem of company policy than infrastructure. Fortunately, the cellphone networks seem to be opening up. Perhaps in another couple of years it will seem entirely natural to have a clients other than cellphones (e.g. thermostats, cars, whatever) on them.
I do think "virtually" trying on clothes is a dumb idea and will never catch on.
I was amazed at the video, but I wonder if it could withstand flexing, such as sitting on a laptop or PDA? Also, though it seems pretty shatter resistant, how scratch-resistant is this? Might make a neat wristwatch from it.
You can get "more" news in a half-hour of NPR than you would find by combining what's presented on all the major networks, CNN, and or offered up and re-interpreted by the cable-channel pundits in a given 24-hour cycle.
Actually I agree with that entirely. Although I mentioned and visit cnn, I agree it's 99% just little updates to current events as they occur by the hour. I listen to NPR on the way home from work every day - on my mp3 player, so I can skip to the more interesting stories. (And yes I am a "member"). Still doesn't make me long for the newspaper though.
I do still like the evening news though, mainly NBC - video adds a lot to some stories. But if that's not substantive enough for you, there's the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour.
Pundits, they are not news. And neither do I consider them entertaining, they're just dreck.
People who don't want to have to sit in front of a computer to do so?
Laptops are cheap enough, and easier to flip through than a newspaper. The paper reigns supreme only for the 15 minutes before the airplane reaches 10,000 feet:)
Not saying newspapers are superior, just listing advantages, and one of the reasons I've considered getting a subscription.
Well, that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it. Personally I've recently cancelled my newspaper subscription; evening news on the PVR + the web (mainly cnn and craigslist) is simply better, and doesn't pile up in my garage. No fuss, no muss.
With film, you don't incur this cost. It's lossy in an analog sense, but if somebody looks at a film reel 2,000 years from now -
- what you will see is a little pile of black powder. Preserving even the top few classic films from only 70 years ago is already a huge challenge, they're pretty far gone.
I don't see why a botnet client would even need to run as root. So long as the user in question can run 'at' or cron, it can still install itself. I'll grant, a rootkit could conceal itself better with root access, but I doubt very many people would notice an extra process running anyways. (I think I'd call my trojan "bash").
I wonder how long it will take ISPs with an anti-bittorrent agenda to block their proxies...
Why would they? And for that matter, why would they care who visits bittorrent sites in the first place (which is the premise of this service)? Visiting a bittorrent website doesn't use any special amount of bandwidth. And if the users do go on to actually use bittorrent, it's easier just to detect and throttle that when it happens.
It's a throwback to the earlier days of computers, when storage formats came and went much more quickly, and only a few hundred to a few thousand of each type were ever created.
Millions of DVDs have been produced. They'll be readable for many years and can be easily duplicated.
Don't know about china, but I do seem to remember this technique from a "Lord of the Rings" movie:) They were lighting fires atop towers rather than any complex signaling though.
And I guess Native Americans' smoke signals would count also.
First off Goldman Sachs is a terrible example you used.
Goldman Sachs perfectly illustrates the point that CEOs who do well can make vast sums of money very quickly. Since the company is doing well and the CEO pay is small relative to the company, what's the problem? Simple. Since there's no corresponding personal downside for bad performance, the CEO is financially motivated to "go long," putting the company at risk. That's what the leadership over at Merril Lynch did for several years, and they raked it in. It turned out to be a bad bet, but so what? The millions paid in bonuses for past years' "good performance" is long gone, only to be repaid by investors and (if there's a mortgage bailout) the taxpayer.
CxOs have a huge downside. Most get one shot and that's it.
Being paid hundreds of millions to go away is not a huge downside. They're set for life and don't need another shot.
Yes, top execs are by and large paid a lot, but they do take their lumps (relatively speaking) when the situation demands it.
Actually they don't, that's the point. At the very worst, they might leave the company with only the money they made before getting fired (like any other employee). If they do well on the other hand (as at Goldman Sachs currently) they can make a vast fortune in a year or two (unlike any other employee). Standing to make a fortune without also standing to lose your shirt means you're gambling with somebody else's money. That's bad, because it promotes risky behavior.
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This is what I keep wondering about the US insistence that we do nothing about the environment until China takes action first - even though our per capita CO2 emissions are still 400% of theirs! We might be willing to freeze our emissions at current levels if they freeze theirs at what are (to us) levels from the 1930's? Please.
Yes, I do understand. As an American I find the prospect of equal access to natural resources for everybody on earth very frightening, because I am accustomed to our position of privilege. But I won't try to rationalize that selfish and irrational sentiment.
I'm wondering whether youtube serves up more mainstream commercial videos (as people might assume from reading the article), or more of the "viral" content for which youtube became famous. In itself, the fact that the most popular videos were commercial does not answer this question. Imagine there are 1000 videos on youtube - 100 "mainstream" and 900 "viral." Now imagine 1100 people visit youtube. 900 choose randomly from the viral videos (for an average of 1 viewing each) while the other 200 choose a mainstream video at random (for an average of 2 viewings each). In this case, all the most popular videos are mainstream even though 80% of the viewings are viral.
I'm not sure what your point is? If you're saying the gaming companies don't take money from the military to make customized versions of their games for training, or that the military doesn't use games for recruiting, then you're wrong.
Why do you think that?
Maybe sound engineers should produce the music properly, then send radio stations a special crappy remastered version with no dynamic range.
So what data rate is 1x for Blu-Ray? I'd assume "x" is different than for, say, CDROM.
Fandango is also terribly expensive for what it is. I guess life is pretty easy when your only competition is Ticketmaster.
Ever driven in Manhattan? I can't imagine a faster way to cut through traffic. Good luck getting away in your macho SUV!
You have it backwards. Appliances are resource hungry largely because they are dumb. You have lights and air conditioners running hour after hour because they don't know nobody is home. You have sprinklers going because their owners don't know how much water to use for the region given recent and predicted weather patterns. You have a refrigerator with the compressor running constantly because it's too dumb to know its door is ajar, or its coils are dirty, and it has no way to tell anybody what is wrong. You have people making extra trips to the supermarket in SUVs because they forgot to buy paprika for a recipe, and new cars rolling off assembly lines because people forgot to change their oil. It's all about information. Information can save so much energy, the resources to store and transmit that information pale in comparison.
Infrastructure aside, we do need smarter clients; more gps-aware cellphones (so I can be warned before taking a route where all the cars are moving slowly), and other connected appliances (so my AC will shut off when I'm over 2 miles away from home, or I can punch a button telling my car I want the seats to be nice and warm in 5 minutes). It's more a problem of company policy than infrastructure. Fortunately, the cellphone networks seem to be opening up. Perhaps in another couple of years it will seem entirely natural to have a clients other than cellphones (e.g. thermostats, cars, whatever) on them.
I do think "virtually" trying on clothes is a dumb idea and will never catch on.
I was amazed at the video, but I wonder if it could withstand flexing, such as sitting on a laptop or PDA? Also, though it seems pretty shatter resistant, how scratch-resistant is this? Might make a neat wristwatch from it.
I do still like the evening news though, mainly NBC - video adds a lot to some stories. But if that's not substantive enough for you, there's the MacNeil Lehrer News Hour.
Pundits, they are not news. And neither do I consider them entertaining, they're just dreck.
I'll bet that magnet didn't do a thing.
A rather silly argument, since any point on earth can be hit with an ICBM.
I don't see why a botnet client would even need to run as root. So long as the user in question can run 'at' or cron, it can still install itself. I'll grant, a rootkit could conceal itself better with root access, but I doubt very many people would notice an extra process running anyways. (I think I'd call my trojan "bash").
Millions of DVDs have been produced. They'll be readable for many years and can be easily duplicated.
And I guess Native Americans' smoke signals would count also.
Where I work they just cut the internal mail service from 10 to 4 times per week, due to lack of demand. Can't say I've noticed!