Nationalizing it like the UK's health care, where they recently discovered that doctors were letting old people die rather than get treated because the doctors did better financially treating younger, healthier patients? No thanks.
Check your facts. Longevity is longer in the UK than here and they pay far, far less. The free market is better for most things, but health care - judging by the statistics - doesn't seem to be one of them.
Anyways, it sounds horrible to "ration" health care, but the fact is, nothing is infinite. Even if all of us did nothing but work in the health care industry, or pay 100% of our salaries to it, there would still be a limit. Where do you draw that line? Do you really want to give a $60K quadruple bypass to an 80 year old with a 50% chance of dying on the table and a 90% chance of living less than 2 years? The US insistence on rationing health care according to ability to pay instead of the expected benefit (measured in expected lifespan and quality of life) is exactly our problem.
Oh and by the way, I would not support nationalizing the Internet. These little "oh no! We're going to run out of bandwidth!" articles come out two or three times per year ever since I can remember. I would support either regulation or deregulation (I'd have to look into it!) to make the residential market more competitive.
for example, X11 - it could be improved, but at least it was designed with network transparent applications in mind
X11 is a complete failure over the Internet. It's not just securing the protocol, that could be layered on. The problem is deeper; X11 is overly synchronized. Try running a web browser across the Internet using X. It's unusable. The first time you get an animated banner, it stalls, uploading every frame in full. Now try VNC (or even Remote Desktop on Windows), it works fine. You only see every 20th frame of the animation (in fact only fragments of frames) because it doesn't enforce synchronization. But the result is the app is usable.
I should never have to chase down dependencies -- ever.
The cause for this problem is the existence of different packaging mechanisms on Linux. It's hard for me to imagine you've been using.deb's for very long and still think you'll always be able to find everything you want in that format. No distro can package every application because there are too many applications. And most applications can't build every package format because there are too many packagers. It's a mess and nobody out there has it solved.
Ding ding ding! Slashdot would be a lot more grounded if we didn't so consistently assume people are stupid. Why not at least give them the benefit of the doubt by reading the article? I'd say the main difference between Estonia's system and ours is that there you at least have to produce some ID.
As was demonstrated with the PSP (which, at this point in its life, sold better than the PS3) is that people buy gaming systems to play videogames and movie-playback is a secondary feature.
That explains everything -- Sony must have intentionally hobbled the PS3 with a mediocre GPU and a lousy selection of games in order to make sure people would think of it as a movie player:)
Agreed, bittorrent is fine when I miss a TV show or am not sure if a movie will be good, but it's not going to be replacing an actual DVD for me.
Won't replace a DVD, or an HD-DVD? I think NTSC DVDs are within striking distance for downloads within the next couple years. A 4 gig Xvid recompress of an HD-DVD or Blu-ray rip may well surpass a 7 gig DVD in quality.
I wouldn't assume for one moment that YouTube's commercial content channel will be just like today's "funniest home videos" ad-sponsored channel.
Which is a shame, since youtube is about the only video source that consistently works for me on Linux. But we all know Hollywood will never distribute movies that way.
Watching the last election cycle, I learned exactly why we have a president who focuses on oil: because that's what the American people care about most deeply. Despite tens of thousands dying in Iraq, most of the news coverage and most of the carping I heard personally was about the energy crunch. Look at this graph. Now tell me why NASA is not at the top of the President's agenda.
I run Fedora Core 5 on my laptop I can tell you right now it doesn't swap because I haven't created any swap space. (Ha!) With 1 "measely" GB I can run XP in VMWare while keeping 20 tabs open on Firefox, running OpenOffice, etc. etc. I'm not buying this "several gigs required to do nothing in particular." Just beause a gig of RAM is so cheap now, doesn't mean it's not still not a lot of memory.
I hesitate to say "1 GB should be enough for anybody" (famous last words) but I don't see any normal app on the horizon that would require that much. (Except games. They can gobble up any hardware you throw at them).
It's a good plan if there is a payoff. I'm very skeptical about needing (or even wanting) 4GB of RAM before you're even doing anything in particular. What's the payoff? What do you like about Vista?
Would you rather risk getting spam with lower risk of losing/delaying messages you actually wanted to get, or would you rather risk losing/delaying legitimate messages with lower risk of spam? You can't have both, no matter how loudly you scream.'
This is misleading. There's no reason one spam filter cannot provide both higher sensitivity and higher specificity than some other inferior spam filter. Once you pick a filter then, yes, there is a tradeoff in selecting your decision boundary.
While we're throwing out percentages, my biggest surprise reading the article was something I could have just looked up: the market cap of google is about 50% that of microsoft, and over 300% that of yahoo! It amazes me that within just a few years, an ad-sponsored website (yes, that's all google is) could reach half of Microsoft's size!
Besides, we don't feel strongly enough about it to stop importing over a million barrels per day of Venezeulan oil at 70 bucks a pop. That's $25 billion dollars annually. As much as I love OSS I think $25BN might even be a little more valuable to them. Then again if national values had anything to do with money we wouldn't be sending $250BN/year to China.
"Fringe, anti-corporate bent"? Obviously. Otherwise Wikipedia wouldn't exist in the first place. To a businessman, the market was already saturated, between MS Encarta and Brittanica. Innovative ideas don't come from businessmen. Only after something catches on can it be exploited to the point that it's just barely worthwhile (i.e. "fully monetized").
But compared to other computers, blade servers have a higher density of processors to other expenses (especially if you include server space), so your $100K buys more CPUs. I know it's certainly arguable which is the most relevant metric, but look at it this way: the Eniac pulled 150,000 watts. Since computers are so much more efficient now, the total burden from computers must have fallen, right? Wrong. Because the economics now allow google to run 200K computers (a guess, since it's a secret). Sure, if google had to run on Enacs, it would have to be plugged straight into the sun. But the total amount of computation "required" is not fixed after all.
Another nitpick, they claim servers use more electricy than TV. But looking at the graph, half the electricity they're counting for the servers is cooling. Did they count the electricity used to cool the TVs? Might sound silly since we don't think about "cooling" TVs, but if you're running AC, any appliance you use adds to the heat burden.
It's a bogus statistic anyways, just another liberal whacko with his panties in a bunch. Did you rta? "US servers now use more electricity than color TVs." Clearly they're scrabbling to invent an impressive statistic by discounting black & white televisions. There must be thousands of those still out there! We might as well just give up making computers more efficient.
I imagine that in the not too distant future some perfectly healthy geek will have one of these implanted.
Sure, but not instead of a perfectly good eyeball. Triclops, anyone?
Actually, I hope implants aren't the only way. Just give me the wearable version.
Our brains are highly evolved to make use of our eyes, so I doubt there's much to be gained by cutting open healthy people for direct access to nerves.
I know if I sold a promise to upgrade and received payment for it, I am pretty sure I am obligated to provide it!
Lawyer: calm down, we have granted you an OEM upgrade licence to Vista, just as we promised.
You: So where is it?
Lawyer: It doesn't have a location, it's a license.
You: So what does that mean?
Lawer: It means we fulfilled our legal obligation. Good day.
10. OMFG Crisis! Free market sux0r! Obviously we need a big government to spend 1 trillion dollars to provide 1GB/s service to everyone (even though many people can pay ~30/month for cable/DSL and simply choose not to)!***
I can think of worse things than infrastructure to spend a trillion dollars on. But heaven forbid we should allow government money to be spent on that. Nobody wants to be an "infrastructure President," it doesn't even confer any emergency powers.
There is basically no new market to gain by increasing the speed of the internet connection
That assumption will prove false as soon as somebody takes the plunge and offers a good video on demand service.
Also, the nature of the industry makes it almost impossible for a startup to come in, up the ante and increase the speed of the internet.
And the nature of the industry is largely a function of the laws governing that industry. It is not just a force of nature, as those exploiting the current system always want you to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyways, it sounds horrible to "ration" health care, but the fact is, nothing is infinite. Even if all of us did nothing but work in the health care industry, or pay 100% of our salaries to it, there would still be a limit. Where do you draw that line? Do you really want to give a $60K quadruple bypass to an 80 year old with a 50% chance of dying on the table and a 90% chance of living less than 2 years? The US insistence on rationing health care according to ability to pay instead of the expected benefit (measured in expected lifespan and quality of life) is exactly our problem.
Oh and by the way, I would not support nationalizing the Internet. These little "oh no! We're going to run out of bandwidth!" articles come out two or three times per year ever since I can remember. I would support either regulation or deregulation (I'd have to look into it!) to make the residential market more competitive.
Not really. The mars rovers are engineered very conservatively. Whatever they're uploading to the rover was probably done here on earth 20 years ago.
Word and Excel won't be going web based. Outlook on the other hand...
Ding ding ding! Slashdot would be a lot more grounded if we didn't so consistently assume people are stupid. Why not at least give them the benefit of the doubt by reading the article? I'd say the main difference between Estonia's system and ours is that there you at least have to produce some ID.
You said "it's not going to be replacing an actual DVD for me." Don't blame me if you meant to say HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
Which is a shame, since youtube is about the only video source that consistently works for me on Linux. But we all know Hollywood will never distribute movies that way.
Watching the last election cycle, I learned exactly why we have a president who focuses on oil: because that's what the American people care about most deeply. Despite tens of thousands dying in Iraq, most of the news coverage and most of the carping I heard personally was about the energy crunch. Look at this graph. Now tell me why NASA is not at the top of the President's agenda.
I hesitate to say "1 GB should be enough for anybody" (famous last words) but I don't see any normal app on the horizon that would require that much. (Except games. They can gobble up any hardware you throw at them).
It's a good plan if there is a payoff. I'm very skeptical about needing (or even wanting) 4GB of RAM before you're even doing anything in particular. What's the payoff? What do you like about Vista?
While we're throwing out percentages, my biggest surprise reading the article was something I could have just looked up: the market cap of google is about 50% that of microsoft, and over 300% that of yahoo! It amazes me that within just a few years, an ad-sponsored website (yes, that's all google is) could reach half of Microsoft's size!
Besides, we don't feel strongly enough about it to stop importing over a million barrels per day of Venezeulan oil at 70 bucks a pop. That's $25 billion dollars annually. As much as I love OSS I think $25BN might even be a little more valuable to them. Then again if national values had anything to do with money we wouldn't be sending $250BN/year to China.
"Fringe, anti-corporate bent"? Obviously. Otherwise Wikipedia wouldn't exist in the first place. To a businessman, the market was already saturated, between MS Encarta and Brittanica. Innovative ideas don't come from businessmen. Only after something catches on can it be exploited to the point that it's just barely worthwhile (i.e. "fully monetized").
But compared to other computers, blade servers have a higher density of processors to other expenses (especially if you include server space), so your $100K buys more CPUs. I know it's certainly arguable which is the most relevant metric, but look at it this way: the Eniac pulled 150,000 watts. Since computers are so much more efficient now, the total burden from computers must have fallen, right? Wrong. Because the economics now allow google to run 200K computers (a guess, since it's a secret). Sure, if google had to run on Enacs, it would have to be plugged straight into the sun. But the total amount of computation "required" is not fixed after all.
Another nitpick, they claim servers use more electricy than TV. But looking at the graph, half the electricity they're counting for the servers is cooling. Did they count the electricity used to cool the TVs? Might sound silly since we don't think about "cooling" TVs, but if you're running AC, any appliance you use adds to the heat burden.
It's a bogus statistic anyways, just another liberal whacko with his panties in a bunch. Did you rta? "US servers now use more electricity than color TVs." Clearly they're scrabbling to invent an impressive statistic by discounting black & white televisions. There must be thousands of those still out there! We might as well just give up making computers more efficient.
Actually, I hope implants aren't the only way. Just give me the wearable version. Our brains are highly evolved to make use of our eyes, so I doubt there's much to be gained by cutting open healthy people for direct access to nerves.
You: So where is it?
Lawyer: It doesn't have a location, it's a license.
You: So what does that mean?
Lawer: It means we fulfilled our legal obligation. Good day.