What right does American politicians to decide whether or not there should be an XXX TLD?
I'd say they have more right than anybody else to represent the people under them, because they are elected (or report to elected officials). Are the ICANNN beaurocrats supposed to exercise their own will in a bubble with no input from the rest of the world?
I support open access to documents used in making public policy decisions, but the plaintiff is only trying to prove something I would assume anyways - that the US government took a side. I think representing US interests in international disputes is the proper role of the government - who else is in a position to do so? And I would equally assume that all other governments did the same.
The only problem is when the democratic process is subverted, so the politicians don't actually represent the will of the people. But the lawsuit isn't even trying to prove that. Besides, making up some new process outside of government won't make it somehow immune to subversion; more likely the opposite.
Still, this can be seen as more of a failed experiment than a conclusive result.
Which one are we talking about, national defense, or occupation and nation building?
IMHO the idea of a smaller force, highly trained, highly mobile, and highly lethal has not been disproved for defensive purposes. Better weapons and communications do allow you to kill and disorient more enemies.
But nation building is entirely different. The goal of converting Muslims to westernism and providing social services is totally different than armed defense, or even armed conquest.
So the "Iraq problem," in my opinion, is that it's the wrong mission. The easiest way to lose a war is to start a bad one in the first place, of course your people will lose the will to fight, if they have a brain. Look back to Gulf War I. We didn't have to win the hearts and minds of Saddam's troops, they were occupiers and all we had to do was make them run away or die. But now we're on the wrong side of that equation.
But it's not about filling top positions in American companies with foreigners. That won't happen. The way top brass gets "outsourced" is when their company is crushed by foreign competition, run by people who are powerful in their own circles. Like what happened to IBMs PC business.
I would really like to see what "evidence" they put up as to how a computer can pose a security risk at all.
Maybe it's not really about security.
Often, discussions about outsourcing turn to the possiblity of "outsourcing" top management, and why not? How long will other countries be willing to do all the work and let the US skim off all the profit by maintaining just the top layer of management? Why put the Nike swoosh on the shoes at all, some percentage of consumers must be smart enough to buy the same shoes for $15 without all the expensive US bullcrap on them. And that's what Lenovo is, a Chinese brand.
But this is my prediction: when the powerful people start getting outsourced, then you will see some real protectionism. And here it is.
How much is 400 pounds? It used to be that it was about $575, which wouldn't be so bad (compared to the US price, that is). But apparently that's now $800, which is awful. But is that just a sign of the weak dollar, or does it mean that 400 pounds is a lot harder to earn in Great Britain now?
Put another way, the Wii at $250 seems like a fair deal to me if it is good. But if that means it will cost the equivalent of $350 in Great Britain, that doesn't sound so good.
No kidding. MS will probably be happy to accept a court-mandated delay of Longhorn just to give them an excuse for further delay. Like when Half-Life 2 was leaked and Valve said "aw, shucks, we were almost ready to release it, but now we'll have to push it back, just because of those darned hackers (whew!)"
The one saving grace here is that most of us have far more downstream than upstream, and upstream can be effectively throttled.
Here is my bandwidth shaping script for linux. It does work, but I admit I still get a little bit of choppiness when running p2p. (Maybe a smaller MTU would help?)
But the great-grandparent above was correct that you can't do much if your upstream truly varies moment to moment. In that case you'll get queueing within your cable modem, which you cannot prioritize.
I believe the catch is the "free" hardware box you get when you sign up - in order to quit without repaying them for it, you have to return it with *everything* - box, instructions, ethernet, cable, everything. In theory, I believe you can quit without a fee if you manage to do this.
They feel the phone service is at fault, when they actually need to reboot their modem.
The need to reboot the Vonage box is the single biggest complaint I have. (I call it the "Vonage" box rather than the "SIP" box because it is locked down to Vongage and useless for general VOIP usage, which is my second biggest complaint. I should be able to make Internet to Internet calls having nothing to do with Vonage, which is just a VOIP to POTS bridge service after all.)
Contrary to the experiences / assumptions of some, after over a year of service I have found my Internet service is *far* more stable than my vonage service; that is, 9 times out of 10 when Vonage doesn't work, my Internet connection is working just fine. Sometimes, momentarily unplugging the Vonage box will fix it, which is ridiculous.
A final annoying thing is that, in over a year of service, Vonage has *nothing* noticeable to me to improve the service. For instance, the voicemail is somewhat simplistic in that you can't set up different voicemail boxes for different people. That would be so easy to do, and cost them nothing extra to operate, yet they don't.
I agree, they are a "platform" company. But forced to choose between hardware and software, I think they'd have more luck selling OSX for general PCs (which is pretty much what they are doing nowadays as their hardware is fairly standard) than they would selling PC hardware running Windows in head-on competition with Dell and HP.
Neither does Windows, but it doesn't matter, really, because applications tend to be mostly self-contained and independent. And because libc, or whatever serves as its equivalent on Windows, doesn't change every other month. I question whether these tall, teetering dependency towers in Linux are really worth it. Granted, everything is fine so long as you stay within a given predefined package set somebody else has put the hard work into integrating, but heaven help you if you need an application that isn't on one of those 6 CDs. I like how mplayer just rolls in a bunch of libraries that it needs into its own source distribution. It may mean a duplicate copy of libavcodec on my hard drive and a few extra KB of memory if I run both mplayer and ffmpeg at the same time, but do I really care? No, I do not.
You are saying that economic development does not matter because society will still hit the carrying capacity, however much higher. But the facts contradict this. Very many of the most wealthy societies (Japan, Europe, and more slowly the USA) are dying out because affluent people prefer big homes and toys for themselves over raising families. (Are there any affluent societies with very high birth rates in the world?) Immigration obscures this effect since obviously there will still be people living in all of these places 200 years from now, but not mainly the descendants of those who lived there 100 years ago. Without even going into whether that's good or bad, that is what's happening, so affluence may indeed be a remedy for overpopulation.
It all depends on what you believe the main contribution and technical risk of Blu-Ray to be. As I said, I don't think it's the codec, we have those coming out of our ears. If somebody showed up at a trade show to demo yet another video codec playing back from a hard drive nobody would even notice. Rather, I think the main question is who can really manufacture a high-capacity optical disc players and media, and do it cheaply. Sony's problems in getting this done are reportedly contributing to the delays and high cost of the PS3, which is intended to be the biggest-selling Blu-Ray player of the next few years. Yet if Sony is demoing Blu-Ray without a Blu-Ray drive, that implies to me that they aren't because they can't. Even if that's not strictly true, it looks very bad for them not to be able to demo their own technology.
Now I don't know what was at the booth, but it is certainly possible that they were showing off their software Blu-Ray player with the content burned onto a DVD.
Which would definitely constitute a rigged demo. We've had the ability to play high-bitrate movies from hard-drives for years, so why does anybody care about Blu-Ray? Because it's a removable optical media with enough capacity for full-length high bitrate movies. So if that's not what they were demoing, it certainly was a rigged demo.
How about if Sony burned a DVD-R with a movie in the same codec and bitrate as BLU-RAY will use? I can't see why that wouldn't work, so long as you only have to record about 1/2 hour of video.
The G4 laptops were fine when first released, but are you saying they weren't lagging badly for the last couple years of their existence? Before the MacTels were announced, G4s had been competing for a couple of years against 2 GHz Centrinos. Today's Core Duo does beat the Centrino from 2 years ago, but the increment is more like 50%, not 500%.
Again, I don't blame Apple for trying their hardest to market what they had to work with at the time. But shifting to a competing technology to realize a sudden 5x speedup speaks for itself.
Good point, they never admitted the G4 PowerBooks were dog slow until the day they announced the MacTels. And please don't accuse me of trolling when Apple themselves is now claiming a 5x increase in speed!
Doesn't sound like Microsoft is Open-Sourcing any of its own work, just exercising the freedom others have (unilaterally) granted to them to modify OSS products. But at least it may give the products more legitimacy in the eyes of PHBs.
1) This article is about the call records (number, duration) - not the contents of the calls
So, how does that make it not spying? Do we get to see the call logs of the President and Congress from their private phones? Or even their taxpayer supported calls on government time? Dick Cheney won't even tell us with whom he consults to form our national energy policy. So tell me again, how the identities of contacts are not sensitive information?
For that matter, the administration might find it interesting to datamine another certain social network you may have heard about, the Democratic Party. Oh how sweet it is to blow the lid off your opponent's marital infidelity or his brother's shady business dealings a couple weeks before an election.
Besides, if you just know your political opponent would be weak on terrorism, isn't defeating him really a matter of national security, even if it requires a bit of spying?
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I support open access to documents used in making public policy decisions, but the plaintiff is only trying to prove something I would assume anyways - that the US government took a side. I think representing US interests in international disputes is the proper role of the government - who else is in a position to do so? And I would equally assume that all other governments did the same.
The only problem is when the democratic process is subverted, so the politicians don't actually represent the will of the people. But the lawsuit isn't even trying to prove that. Besides, making up some new process outside of government won't make it somehow immune to subversion; more likely the opposite.
IMHO the idea of a smaller force, highly trained, highly mobile, and highly lethal has not been disproved for defensive purposes. Better weapons and communications do allow you to kill and disorient more enemies.
But nation building is entirely different. The goal of converting Muslims to westernism and providing social services is totally different than armed defense, or even armed conquest.
So the "Iraq problem," in my opinion, is that it's the wrong mission. The easiest way to lose a war is to start a bad one in the first place, of course your people will lose the will to fight, if they have a brain. Look back to Gulf War I. We didn't have to win the hearts and minds of Saddam's troops, they were occupiers and all we had to do was make them run away or die. But now we're on the wrong side of that equation.
But it's not about filling top positions in American companies with foreigners. That won't happen. The way top brass gets "outsourced" is when their company is crushed by foreign competition, run by people who are powerful in their own circles. Like what happened to IBMs PC business.
Often, discussions about outsourcing turn to the possiblity of "outsourcing" top management, and why not? How long will other countries be willing to do all the work and let the US skim off all the profit by maintaining just the top layer of management? Why put the Nike swoosh on the shoes at all, some percentage of consumers must be smart enough to buy the same shoes for $15 without all the expensive US bullcrap on them. And that's what Lenovo is, a Chinese brand.
But this is my prediction: when the powerful people start getting outsourced, then you will see some real protectionism. And here it is.
Put another way, the Wii at $250 seems like a fair deal to me if it is good. But if that means it will cost the equivalent of $350 in Great Britain, that doesn't sound so good.
Note that's CPU hours, not hours on the whole cluster. Fire up 500 nodes and the free ride will be over real quick :)
No kidding. MS will probably be happy to accept a court-mandated delay of Longhorn just to give them an excuse for further delay. Like when Half-Life 2 was leaked and Valve said "aw, shucks, we were almost ready to release it, but now we'll have to push it back, just because of those darned hackers (whew!)"
Here is my bandwidth shaping script for linux. It does work, but I admit I still get a little bit of choppiness when running p2p. (Maybe a smaller MTU would help?)
But the great-grandparent above was correct that you can't do much if your upstream truly varies moment to moment. In that case you'll get queueing within your cable modem, which you cannot prioritize.
I believe the catch is the "free" hardware box you get when you sign up - in order to quit without repaying them for it, you have to return it with *everything* - box, instructions, ethernet, cable, everything. In theory, I believe you can quit without a fee if you manage to do this.
Contrary to the experiences / assumptions of some, after over a year of service I have found my Internet service is *far* more stable than my vonage service; that is, 9 times out of 10 when Vonage doesn't work, my Internet connection is working just fine. Sometimes, momentarily unplugging the Vonage box will fix it, which is ridiculous.
A final annoying thing is that, in over a year of service, Vonage has *nothing* noticeable to me to improve the service. For instance, the voicemail is somewhat simplistic in that you can't set up different voicemail boxes for different people. That would be so easy to do, and cost them nothing extra to operate, yet they don't.
I agree, they are a "platform" company. But forced to choose between hardware and software, I think they'd have more luck selling OSX for general PCs (which is pretty much what they are doing nowadays as their hardware is fairly standard) than they would selling PC hardware running Windows in head-on competition with Dell and HP.
Neither does Windows, but it doesn't matter, really, because applications tend to be mostly self-contained and independent. And because libc, or whatever serves as its equivalent on Windows, doesn't change every other month. I question whether these tall, teetering dependency towers in Linux are really worth it. Granted, everything is fine so long as you stay within a given predefined package set somebody else has put the hard work into integrating, but heaven help you if you need an application that isn't on one of those 6 CDs. I like how mplayer just rolls in a bunch of libraries that it needs into its own source distribution. It may mean a duplicate copy of libavcodec on my hard drive and a few extra KB of memory if I run both mplayer and ffmpeg at the same time, but do I really care? No, I do not.
You are saying that economic development does not matter because society will still hit the carrying capacity, however much higher. But the facts contradict this. Very many of the most wealthy societies (Japan, Europe, and more slowly the USA) are dying out because affluent people prefer big homes and toys for themselves over raising families. (Are there any affluent societies with very high birth rates in the world?) Immigration obscures this effect since obviously there will still be people living in all of these places 200 years from now, but not mainly the descendants of those who lived there 100 years ago. Without even going into whether that's good or bad, that is what's happening, so affluence may indeed be a remedy for overpopulation.
It all depends on what you believe the main contribution and technical risk of Blu-Ray to be. As I said, I don't think it's the codec, we have those coming out of our ears. If somebody showed up at a trade show to demo yet another video codec playing back from a hard drive nobody would even notice. Rather, I think the main question is who can really manufacture a high-capacity optical disc players and media, and do it cheaply. Sony's problems in getting this done are reportedly contributing to the delays and high cost of the PS3, which is intended to be the biggest-selling Blu-Ray player of the next few years. Yet if Sony is demoing Blu-Ray without a Blu-Ray drive, that implies to me that they aren't because they can't. Even if that's not strictly true, it looks very bad for them not to be able to demo their own technology.
How about if Sony burned a DVD-R with a movie in the same codec and bitrate as BLU-RAY will use? I can't see why that wouldn't work, so long as you only have to record about 1/2 hour of video.
Again, I don't blame Apple for trying their hardest to market what they had to work with at the time. But shifting to a competing technology to realize a sudden 5x speedup speaks for itself.
Good point, they never admitted the G4 PowerBooks were dog slow until the day they announced the MacTels. And please don't accuse me of trolling when Apple themselves is now claiming a 5x increase in speed!
Doesn't sound like Microsoft is Open-Sourcing any of its own work, just exercising the freedom others have (unilaterally) granted to them to modify OSS products. But at least it may give the products more legitimacy in the eyes of PHBs.
For that matter, the administration might find it interesting to datamine another certain social network you may have heard about, the Democratic Party. Oh how sweet it is to blow the lid off your opponent's marital infidelity or his brother's shady business dealings a couple weeks before an election. Besides, if you just know your political opponent would be weak on terrorism, isn't defeating him really a matter of national security, even if it requires a bit of spying?
You're in sorry shape if chance miscommunications actually help you on average.