Actually, I sincerely appreciate the heads-up. I like to know what Real is pushing, so I can make an effort to protect my end users from it.
This one sounds like it would be even more tempting to the gullible than most of the dross they've produced in the past, so I'll have to keep a sharp eye out for it. Indeed, it might be a good idea to preemptively deploy some halfway decent DVD copying software, even on business PCs that have no legitimate need for it, just to keep the users from thinking they want this thing.
> > You wouldn't expect to get absolutely unlimited electrical power for a flat monthly rate.
> Actually most electric companies offer what you just said was not possible.
Uh-huh, sure. Go out next week and get yourself some beefy electrically powered equipment, something that will increase your usage by a few hundred percent from one month to the next. (You know, equipment that performs the Hall-Heroult process or something along those lines.) Hook that up in your basement and start running it in the afternoons, and see what happens to your unlimited power and flat rate. It will not take six months before your electric bill goes up, I can tell you that for free.
If your electric bill doesn't change from month to month, it's because the estimate (based on past usage) has remained reasonably similar to your current usage.
> As soon as one side can say "You need us, we don't need you"... one becomes a customer.
Either that, or the other side says, "We disagree, and we won't pay. Disconnect us if you want." Call the bluff, in other words.
Then AT&T has to decide if they really want to have this conversation with their costomers:
AT&T: Yes, what seems to be the problem? Cust: There's something wrong with our internet connection through you. We can't seem to reach Google. AT&T: Well, can you reach the rest of the internet okay? Cust: Yes, but we can't reach Google. AT&T: Well, that's Google's problem. Our network is fine. Cust: How can it be Google's problem? Everyone *else* can get Google! AT&T: I'm sorry, it's Google's problem. Cust: My neighbor gets Google on his Time Warner connection just fine. AT&T: I'm sorry, it's Google's problem. Call them. Cust: I can't call Google about this! Google isn't contracted to provide us with internet service. Cust: You *are* contracted to provide us with internet service. We're calling *you*. AT&T: I'm sorry, it's a Google problem. Have you tried Yahoo?
This conversation is unpleasant enough when the customers in question are home users with few options, but when you're on the phone with a larger customer, it becomes another whole kind of uncomfortable.
It's a game of chicken. If the other guy backs down before you do, you win. But if you don't back down *and* the other guy doesn't back down either, there's going to be pain on both sides. Both sides are betting the other guy will back down first.
> It had Firefox stored passwords on it and other things I would consider "personally classified".
Yeah, but while it would be inconvenient for you if someone got those things, it's not worth a huge amount of money to anyone to do it. Your personal passwords just aren't worth the kind of effort (and money) that would be needed to do extreme forensics. That doesn't mean there isn't such a thing as data that would be worth that kind of effort and expense to someone.
If I had to dispose of a drive containing, say, the full design schematics for a new and highly classified model of covert surveillance satellite that my company was planning to sell to the military for several billion dollars a pop, I'd wipe the drive a few times with random data, then take it to a metal shop and grind it to the consistency of talcum powder, just on the off chance that there *might* be some highly-funded company or agency capable of recovering any of the data from a drive that's merely wiped. Then maybe I'd blow the dust through a fan from a few thousand feet over a large body of water, on the grounds that it changes the odds of recovery from mere total physical impossibility to something more like absolute unimaginability. I mean, in a situation like that you just want to be more than a little bit certain.
But yeah, if it's records of my personal finances (which come to five digits), email from friends, some passwords for a few web services and things, and maybe a couple of credit card numbers, I'd probably just reformat the drive with a different kind of filesystem and let it go at that. (I'd probably format it NTFS, since that's the most common filesystem that I never use myself. Though I might format it FAT32 if it was previously something else.)
Your level of paranoia may vary, depending on the value of your data.
> website looks like is a web-page assignment from an 1980's HTML tutorial.
That would be a neat trick, considering that HTML was first put forward in the early nineties (1992, IIRC, though most people, even most people with internet access, were not aware of it until more like 1994).
A money order. In the western world (or at least in North America) they're the most common method of paying by mail when the recipient won't take a check. (Second most common is to wrap cash in something opaque. A lot of people are afraid to do this on the grounds that the cash would be stolen out of the mail, but people do it all the time and I have never heard of an instance where the money was stolen. I suspect that the chances of having your check cashed and the merchandise never sent are just as high; I've had that happen to me twice.)
However, any challenge of this nature that asks the participants to send in money up front is inherently suspicious, unless the outfit running the challenge is very well-known in the industry (e.g., Sandisk, Samsung, the NSA, Phil Zimmerman, Bruce Schneier,... you know, someone the participants would already associate with hard drives and/or computer security before the challenge is announced). If the outfit running it is totally unheard-of, it's even more dubious. As far as I know some clown just registered the domain 16systems.com for the express purpose of announcing this challenge and collecting as many instances of $60 as possible. Okay, so that's pretty unlikely with the prize being only $40. If the whole thing were totally imaginary, they'd make the prize at least a few hundred dollars to entice more entries and thus collect more deposits. Unless, of course, what they're really doing (call me a cynic if you must) is researching what risks people will take for the prospect of small gains...
Meh, maybe the real goal of the challenge is to get their domain linked from slashdot at least once, and maybe twice if somebody actually accepts the challenge.
> If you were a data recovery company, you would gain an ENORMOUS reputation if you were to complete the challenge.
Only if the challenge, and the outfit offering it, has achieved significantly more notoriety than the existing reputation of the data recovery company. If you're a startup running out of your parents' garage, that might be the case... but for any serious data recovery corporation, it's not worth laughing at.
Eh, before XBox there was Sega, and before Sega there was Intellivision.
Competition is good, but it doesn't really matter very much which companies are doing the competing. There's only room for so many major game consoles at once -- I would say somewhere around three in any given generation. When more companies than that try to introduce new consoles at once, some of them fail (e.g., Atari Jaguar). So I would say that if Microsoft were to exit the market, there's a high probability somebody else would step in.
Not that I think Microsoft is likely to exit the market in the immediate future. They aren't known for exiting markets, generally, for one thing. I suspect it would be inconsistent with their overall corporate strategy.
> First off: Mario is not a "kiddie" game. It's a platformer, but that doesn't make it childish.
Being a platform game doesn't make it childish, but that doesn't mean it isn't. The Super Mario franchise has always been aimed squarely at the underage market -- not really young children (that was Duck Hunt), but older children and perhaps younger teens. That doesn't mean there aren't adults who enjoy it. Of course there are. There are adults who enjoy playing Candyland and Mousetrap and any other children's game you care to name. But Mario is... a magical princess to rescue, mushrooms that make you grow, stars that protect you, enemies specifically designed to look goofy, most of which are animals or personified inanimate objects, wooden sailing ships that float in the air, and so on and so forth.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the XBox 360, though.
> Second: Zelda, Smash Bros, Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3, and Mario Kart are kiddie games?
I would have classified Mario Kart as a kids' game. Not sure about Paper Mario, as I've never seen that one. Zelda is aimed at teens, Metroid at teens and young adults...
Note that I'm not agreeing necessarily with the grandparent post in its entirety. I'm only saying that the Super Mario franchise, specifically, is indeed aimed mainly at children.
> Are you one of those gamers who defines "kiddie" to be "doesn't include lots of gore and/or swearing"?
Heh. Scrabble is an example of a game that's geared for adults and contains no gore, and no swearing unless you choose to play those kinds of words. Bridge is mainly popular in the over-50 crowd, and contains no gore or swearing whatsoever (err, I suppose if you allow table talk you could introduce swearing that way, but it wouldn't be relevant to the game). Chess, though also popular with teens and some children, is mainly a game for adults, and the closest it gets to gore is when a piece is captured and removed from the board...
Yeah, me neither, but then, my knowledge of hockey is about on par with my knowledge of cuneiform writing. When I was a kid, I thought hockey was played outdoors on grass. I didn't find out otherwise until I saw that movie about the lawyer who has to coach a group of kids for community service and teaches them to quack like ducks. I'm from Ohio, and hockey isn't exactly a major sport around here. The major sports around here are football, football, football, more football, cheerleading (in conjunction with football), and marching band (also in conjunction with football). Occasionally you run into somebody who's into basketball or baseball on the side, but that's niche stuff. Sometimes gradeschool kids play soccer in the Y leagues, but once they hit middle school they're old enough to play football. Some older men play golf, but they *watch* football (if they watch sports at all). High schools also have teams for wrestling and cross country, but they aren't permitted to interfere with football.
Hockey... I think maybe they play that in Europe someplace? Not sure. Never heard of anyone playing it around here.
I'm sure most other hockey fans are probably much more intelligent. Maybe even all eight of you.
I mean, seriously, *hockey*? What next, beach lacrosse? Full-contact fly fishing? Jai alai? World championship fooseball? Intramural underwater pole vaulting? Indoor soccer?
I wouldn't even bet money (without checking) that there'd be information about hockey on hockey.com, much less on slashdot.org.
> Would you like to have the electricity cut off at your house when you go over some amount in a month?
With electricity, you pay by the kilowatt-hour, so if you use more you pay more. Would you want an internet service that worked that way, where you're billed by the kilobyte? The ISPs wouldn't need the caps then... The analogy with electricity is broken. You wouldn't expect to get absolutely unlimited electrical power for a flat monthly rate.
Note that I'm not saying the monthly bandwidth caps are the right solution. Personally I'd much rather have my connection throttled to a certain amount per second than have a monthly cap and potentially be cut off toward the end of the month.
As for peer-to-peer traffic, it needs a lot of bandwidth and generally doesn't care about latency, so it *should* be handled that way in the queueing disciplines, i.e., delayed rather than dropped when there's congestion. Whereas, something like VOIP should never be delayed; it should be sent through immediately if possible, or else dropped. This is just standard type-of-service stuff.
> Are you saying we can't extrapolate > anything about the past from the present?
Not at the level evolutionism tries to do, tens of orders of magnitude beyond the edge of the observed data. It's preposterous. To believe it, you have to turn your brain off and just accept what you're told without question.
> What is clear, however, is that Evolution is a scientific theory.
No, it isn't. It's a very popular philosophy, but it is not a scientific theory. Technically evolution is not even qualified to be called a hypothesis, because a hypothesis by definition has to be capable of being tested by experimentation. Evolution is not capable of being tested by experimentation, at least not without time travel capability. It *certainly* isn't a scientific theory. In science, a theory is constructed only after many rounds of hypothesis and testing. Evolution was not constructed from hypothesis and testing. It was (and is being) constructed by many rounds of speculation and debate. It's philosophy. In scientific terms, evolution is non-falsifiable.
It's not even a particularly *interesting* philosophy. String theory may be non-scientific, but at least it captures the imagination. Evolution is just utterly pointless.
> Well, you see, that's the beautiful thing about things like science and math. Sometimes things are simply wrong.
If we were talking about well-established physics, you might have a point.
Origin theory, however, is a thornier problem. Special creation is totally non-falsifiable. So is evolution. The whole debate is right up there with string theory in terms of being completely opaque to the scientific method. I don't think they should be teaching *anything* in science class that can't be tested by properly blinded controlled experiments.
So I guess my position is exactly the opposite of Palin's: she says teach both in science, I say leave them both for college philosophy, and teach *science* in science class.
Indeed. As a web developer, I don't give a used piece of dental floss what IE does with corporate intranet pages. For all I care it can display them in IE4-compatibility mode with a mandatory 0.5Hz blink and lime green color override on all the text.
As long as actual *web pages* display reasonably, I'll be happy. (I haven't tested the IE8 beta yet. I'm planning on it, but I haven't done it yet. Cut me some slack, the beta was only released this week. I'm getting to it.)
I suppose the people who develop corporate intranets might have other opinions. But don't most of them have the level of control necessary to mandate how the browser options have to be configured on every PC in the enterprise? If so, then it's probably pretty much a non-issue for them too. In fact, they could do nothing right now, and then if they at any point in the future want standards mode, all they've got to do is flip the group policy switch (or whatever) that changes the setting. Sounds... ideal.
But as I said, I don't care about corporate intranets. As long as actual web pages render reasonably, I'm good.
I rather doubt that. Spanish is a relatively easy language to translate into from English, orders of magnitude easier than Japanese. I think the list of languages for the beta was chosen deliberately, and Japanese and German were chosen at least partly because they're very widely used on the internet. (English, of course, is always included because Microsoft is headquartered in the US, though it probably would be chosen anyway for other reasons.)
Almost anything you say in Klingon can sound like swearing to people who don't know the language, especially if you say it with the right tone and vigor.
My favorite Klingon phrase is "cho- itchu" (probably misspelled badly, but that's roughly how it's pronounced), which loosely translates as "beam me up" or, more literally, "energize". In one of the movies, Kirk picks up this phrase from a Klingon chap (Kahn, IIRC) and then repeats it later for tactical reasons. I like it for its sound, and for the meanings it can imply in other contexts.
There's nothing particularly African American about pronouncing "ask" as "ax". It's just basic sloppiness, that's all. Yeah, they do that stuff in the 'hood, but they also do it in the boondocks where the population is five nines caucasian -- in rural northern Morrow county, for example. For those of you not from Ohio: Northmor is as hick as it gets. 4H is the number one extra-curricular activity, way bigger than sports. School doesn't start up in the fall until after the county fair. They have a drive-your-tractor-to-school day. Flannel plaid is always in style. "Libary" has only one r. And they "axe" each other questions.
> That's in the EU. Off the top of my head I would say it's second (possibly first) in North America,
Extremely distant second, even if you draw the edge of North America clear down to the isthmus, which is not usual. It's kind of like saying Gaelic is the second (possibly first) most widely spoken language in Britain. And among North-American web developers (this is, you'll remember, a *beta* release of a web browser), the second language might actually be French, though it's difficult to be sure.
> and certainly first in South America.
Perhaps, but South America is not known for its large number of web developers.
> Given the population of India is over a billion and Hindi is the national language
It's one of a dozen or so national languages. (India is a complicated place, both linguistically and politically.)
> Almost all indians speak it as a 2nd language.
It would be more accurate to say that almost everyone who speaks Hindi speaks it as a second or third language. India is linguistically like rural sub-Saharan Africa, in that nearly everyone's first language is an obscure local dialect, so then many of them have to learn a "major language" (such as Hindi or Tamil or one of the others) in order to be able to talk to people from a few miles away.
Hindi is probably the single most widely spoken language in India (the only other possible contender being English), but more than a fifth of the population (mostly in the southern part) speaks Dravidian languages, and Hindi is only one of several Sanskrit-derived languages (spoken in the northern part of the country), and not everyone speaks a major language at all -- there are many people who just speak the local dialects.
In terms of cooling, the most cost-effective thing is the proverbial Big Fat Heat Sink, and the second-most cost-effective is fans. Actual air conditioning is not a cheap thing, especially when the room has a bunch of heat-generating devices (like, e.g., servers) in it.
So the question becomes: where is this building located, and what does the ambient outdoor temperature run to?
In addition to the things you say, which may well be true, German and Japanese also happen to be the first languages for a large number of internet users, including a fair number of web developers, including the ones for some large multinational corporations who are major customers for Microsoft and, incidentally, are responsible for a number of fairly popular websites. Arabic, being mostly used in third-world countries, just doesn't have the same kind of user/customer base as German and Japanese. You have to go pretty far down the Alexa rankings to find an Arabic website at all, much less one whose developers aren't also literate in English. It's true that a fair number of people speak Arabic, but since most of them aren't developing major high-traffic websites, they may have to wait for the actual final release, possibly even longer.
Indeed, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Hebrew has more internet users than Arabic, despite having a lot fewer speakers altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I sincerely appreciate the heads-up. I like to know what Real is pushing, so I can make an effort to protect my end users from it.
This one sounds like it would be even more tempting to the gullible than most of the dross they've produced in the past, so I'll have to keep a sharp eye out for it. Indeed, it might be a good idea to preemptively deploy some halfway decent DVD copying software, even on business PCs that have no legitimate need for it, just to keep the users from thinking they want this thing.
> > You wouldn't expect to get absolutely unlimited electrical power for a flat monthly rate.
> Actually most electric companies offer what you just said was not possible.
Uh-huh, sure. Go out next week and get yourself some beefy electrically powered equipment, something that will increase your usage by a few hundred percent from one month to the next. (You know, equipment that performs the Hall-Heroult process or something along those lines.) Hook that up in your basement and start running it in the afternoons, and see what happens to your unlimited power and flat rate. It will not take six months before your electric bill goes up, I can tell you that for free.
If your electric bill doesn't change from month to month, it's because the estimate (based on past usage) has remained reasonably similar to your current usage.
> As soon as one side can say "You need us, we don't need you"... one becomes a customer.
Either that, or the other side says, "We disagree, and we won't pay. Disconnect us if you want." Call the bluff, in other words.
Then AT&T has to decide if they really want to have this conversation with their costomers:
AT&T: Yes, what seems to be the problem?
Cust: There's something wrong with our internet connection through you. We can't seem to reach Google.
AT&T: Well, can you reach the rest of the internet okay?
Cust: Yes, but we can't reach Google.
AT&T: Well, that's Google's problem. Our network is fine.
Cust: How can it be Google's problem? Everyone *else* can get Google!
AT&T: I'm sorry, it's Google's problem.
Cust: My neighbor gets Google on his Time Warner connection just fine.
AT&T: I'm sorry, it's Google's problem. Call them.
Cust: I can't call Google about this! Google isn't contracted to provide us with internet service.
Cust: You *are* contracted to provide us with internet service. We're calling *you*.
AT&T: I'm sorry, it's a Google problem. Have you tried Yahoo?
This conversation is unpleasant enough when the customers in question are home users with few options, but when you're on the phone with a larger customer, it becomes another whole kind of uncomfortable.
It's a game of chicken. If the other guy backs down before you do, you win. But if you don't back down *and* the other guy doesn't back down either, there's going to be pain on both sides. Both sides are betting the other guy will back down first.
> It had Firefox stored passwords on it and other things I would consider "personally classified".
Yeah, but while it would be inconvenient for you if someone got those things, it's not worth a huge amount of money to anyone to do it. Your personal passwords just aren't worth the kind of effort (and money) that would be needed to do extreme forensics. That doesn't mean there isn't such a thing as data that would be worth that kind of effort and expense to someone.
If I had to dispose of a drive containing, say, the full design schematics for a new and highly classified model of covert surveillance satellite that my company was planning to sell to the military for several billion dollars a pop, I'd wipe the drive a few times with random data, then take it to a metal shop and grind it to the consistency of talcum powder, just on the off chance that there *might* be some highly-funded company or agency capable of recovering any of the data from a drive that's merely wiped. Then maybe I'd blow the dust through a fan from a few thousand feet over a large body of water, on the grounds that it changes the odds of recovery from mere total physical impossibility to something more like absolute unimaginability. I mean, in a situation like that you just want to be more than a little bit certain.
But yeah, if it's records of my personal finances (which come to five digits), email from friends, some passwords for a few web services and things, and maybe a couple of credit card numbers, I'd probably just reformat the drive with a different kind of filesystem and let it go at that. (I'd probably format it NTFS, since that's the most common filesystem that I never use myself. Though I might format it FAT32 if it was previously something else.)
Your level of paranoia may vary, depending on the value of your data.
> website looks like is a web-page assignment from an 1980's HTML tutorial.
That would be a neat trick, considering that HTML was first put forward in the early nineties (1992, IIRC, though most people, even most people with internet access, were not aware of it until more like 1994).
> I am asked to ship a US Postal money. A WHAT?
... you know, someone the participants would already associate with hard drives and/or computer security before the challenge is announced). If the outfit running it is totally unheard-of, it's even more dubious. As far as I know some clown just registered the domain 16systems.com for the express purpose of announcing this challenge and collecting as many instances of $60 as possible. Okay, so that's pretty unlikely with the prize being only $40. If the whole thing were totally imaginary, they'd make the prize at least a few hundred dollars to entice more entries and thus collect more deposits. Unless, of course, what they're really doing (call me a cynic if you must) is researching what risks people will take for the prospect of small gains...
A money order. In the western world (or at least in North America) they're the most common method of paying by mail when the recipient won't take a check. (Second most common is to wrap cash in something opaque. A lot of people are afraid to do this on the grounds that the cash would be stolen out of the mail, but people do it all the time and I have never heard of an instance where the money was stolen. I suspect that the chances of having your check cashed and the merchandise never sent are just as high; I've had that happen to me twice.)
However, any challenge of this nature that asks the participants to send in money up front is inherently suspicious, unless the outfit running the challenge is very well-known in the industry (e.g., Sandisk, Samsung, the NSA, Phil Zimmerman, Bruce Schneier,
Meh, maybe the real goal of the challenge is to get their domain linked from slashdot at least once, and maybe twice if somebody actually accepts the challenge.
> If you were a data recovery company, you would gain an ENORMOUS reputation if you were to complete the challenge.
Only if the challenge, and the outfit offering it, has achieved significantly more notoriety than the existing reputation of the data recovery company. If you're a startup running out of your parents' garage, that might be the case... but for any serious data recovery corporation, it's not worth laughing at.
Eh, before XBox there was Sega, and before Sega there was Intellivision.
Competition is good, but it doesn't really matter very much which companies are doing the competing. There's only room for so many major game consoles at once -- I would say somewhere around three in any given generation. When more companies than that try to introduce new consoles at once, some of them fail (e.g., Atari Jaguar). So I would say that if Microsoft were to exit the market, there's a high probability somebody else would step in.
Not that I think Microsoft is likely to exit the market in the immediate future. They aren't known for exiting markets, generally, for one thing. I suspect it would be inconsistent with their overall corporate strategy.
Too bad they don't have the laziness and impatience to go with it!
> First off: Mario is not a "kiddie" game. It's a platformer, but that doesn't make it childish.
Being a platform game doesn't make it childish, but that doesn't mean it isn't. The Super Mario franchise has always been aimed squarely at the underage market -- not really young children (that was Duck Hunt), but older children and perhaps younger teens. That doesn't mean there aren't adults who enjoy it. Of course there are. There are adults who enjoy playing Candyland and Mousetrap and any other children's game you care to name. But Mario is... a magical princess to rescue, mushrooms that make you grow, stars that protect you, enemies specifically designed to look goofy, most of which are animals or personified inanimate objects, wooden sailing ships that float in the air, and so on and so forth.
I'm not sure what this has to do with the XBox 360, though.
> Second: Zelda, Smash Bros, Super Paper Mario, Metroid Prime 3, and Mario Kart are kiddie games?
I would have classified Mario Kart as a kids' game. Not sure about Paper Mario, as I've never seen that one. Zelda is aimed at teens, Metroid at teens and young adults...
Note that I'm not agreeing necessarily with the grandparent post in its entirety. I'm only saying that the Super Mario franchise, specifically, is indeed aimed mainly at children.
> Are you one of those gamers who defines "kiddie" to be "doesn't include lots of gore and/or swearing"?
Heh. Scrabble is an example of a game that's geared for adults and contains no gore, and no swearing unless you choose to play those kinds of words. Bridge is mainly popular in the over-50 crowd, and contains no gore or swearing whatsoever (err, I suppose if you allow table talk you could introduce swearing that way, but it wouldn't be relevant to the game). Chess, though also popular with teens and some children, is mainly a game for adults, and the closest it gets to gore is when a piece is captured and removed from the board...
> You know what they say: everything could be solved by adding another layer of abstraction...
Ah, well, in that case, maybe someone should be working on implementing a Perl interpreter in Objective-J...
> I had no idea there was slashing in hockey.
Yeah, me neither, but then, my knowledge of hockey is about on par with my knowledge of cuneiform writing. When I was a kid, I thought hockey was played outdoors on grass. I didn't find out otherwise until I saw that movie about the lawyer who has to coach a group of kids for community service and teaches them to quack like ducks. I'm from Ohio, and hockey isn't exactly a major sport around here. The major sports around here are football, football, football, more football, cheerleading (in conjunction with football), and marching band (also in conjunction with football). Occasionally you run into somebody who's into basketball or baseball on the side, but that's niche stuff. Sometimes gradeschool kids play soccer in the Y leagues, but once they hit middle school they're old enough to play football. Some older men play golf, but they *watch* football (if they watch sports at all). High schools also have teams for wrestling and cross country, but they aren't permitted to interfere with football.
Hockey... I think maybe they play that in Europe someplace? Not sure. Never heard of anyone playing it around here.
> he does not represent all hockey fans
I'm sure most other hockey fans are probably much more intelligent. Maybe even all eight of you.
I mean, seriously, *hockey*? What next, beach lacrosse? Full-contact fly fishing? Jai alai? World championship fooseball? Intramural underwater pole vaulting? Indoor soccer?
I wouldn't even bet money (without checking) that there'd be information about hockey on hockey.com, much less on slashdot.org.
> Would you like to have the electricity cut off at your house when you go over some amount in a month?
With electricity, you pay by the kilowatt-hour, so if you use more you pay more. Would you want an internet service that worked that way, where you're billed by the kilobyte? The ISPs wouldn't need the caps then... The analogy with electricity is broken. You wouldn't expect to get absolutely unlimited electrical power for a flat monthly rate.
Note that I'm not saying the monthly bandwidth caps are the right solution. Personally I'd much rather have my connection throttled to a certain amount per second than have a monthly cap and potentially be cut off toward the end of the month.
As for peer-to-peer traffic, it needs a lot of bandwidth and generally doesn't care about latency, so it *should* be handled that way in the queueing disciplines, i.e., delayed rather than dropped when there's congestion. Whereas, something like VOIP should never be delayed; it should be sent through immediately if possible, or else dropped. This is just standard type-of-service stuff.
> Are you saying we can't extrapolate
> anything about the past from the present?
Not at the level evolutionism tries to do, tens of orders of magnitude beyond the edge of the observed data. It's preposterous. To believe it, you have to turn your brain off and just accept what you're told without question.
> What is clear, however, is that Evolution is a scientific theory.
No, it isn't. It's a very popular philosophy, but it is not a scientific theory. Technically evolution is not even qualified to be called a hypothesis, because a hypothesis by definition has to be capable of being tested by experimentation. Evolution is not capable of being tested by experimentation, at least not without time travel capability. It *certainly* isn't a scientific theory. In science, a theory is constructed only after many rounds of hypothesis and testing. Evolution was not constructed from hypothesis and testing. It was (and is being) constructed by many rounds of speculation and debate. It's philosophy. In scientific terms, evolution is non-falsifiable.
It's not even a particularly *interesting* philosophy. String theory may be non-scientific, but at least it captures the imagination. Evolution is just utterly pointless.
> Well, you see, that's the beautiful thing about things like science and math. Sometimes things are simply wrong.
If we were talking about well-established physics, you might have a point.
Origin theory, however, is a thornier problem. Special creation is totally non-falsifiable. So is evolution. The whole debate is right up there with string theory in terms of being completely opaque to the scientific method. I don't think they should be teaching *anything* in science class that can't be tested by properly blinded controlled experiments.
So I guess my position is exactly the opposite of Palin's: she says teach both in science, I say leave them both for college philosophy, and teach *science* in science class.
This is, needless to say, not a popular view.
> Sounds good enough for me
Indeed. As a web developer, I don't give a used piece of dental floss what IE does with corporate intranet pages. For all I care it can display them in IE4-compatibility mode with a mandatory 0.5Hz blink and lime green color override on all the text.
As long as actual *web pages* display reasonably, I'll be happy. (I haven't tested the IE8 beta yet. I'm planning on it, but I haven't done it yet. Cut me some slack, the beta was only released this week. I'm getting to it.)
I suppose the people who develop corporate intranets might have other opinions. But don't most of them have the level of control necessary to mandate how the browser options have to be configured on every PC in the enterprise? If so, then it's probably pretty much a non-issue for them too. In fact, they could do nothing right now, and then if they at any point in the future want standards mode, all they've got to do is flip the group policy switch (or whatever) that changes the setting. Sounds... ideal.
But as I said, I don't care about corporate intranets. As long as actual web pages render reasonably, I'm good.
I rather doubt that. Spanish is a relatively easy language to translate into from English, orders of magnitude easier than Japanese. I think the list of languages for the beta was chosen deliberately, and Japanese and German were chosen at least partly because they're very widely used on the internet. (English, of course, is always included because Microsoft is headquartered in the US, though it probably would be chosen anyway for other reasons.)
Almost anything you say in Klingon can sound like swearing to people who don't know the language, especially if you say it with the right tone and vigor.
My favorite Klingon phrase is "cho- itchu" (probably misspelled badly, but that's roughly how it's pronounced), which loosely translates as "beam me up" or, more literally, "energize". In one of the movies, Kirk picks up this phrase from a Klingon chap (Kahn, IIRC) and then repeats it later for tactical reasons. I like it for its sound, and for the meanings it can imply in other contexts.
There's nothing particularly African American about pronouncing "ask" as "ax". It's just basic sloppiness, that's all. Yeah, they do that stuff in the 'hood, but they also do it in the boondocks where the population is five nines caucasian -- in rural northern Morrow county, for example. For those of you not from Ohio: Northmor is as hick as it gets. 4H is the number one extra-curricular activity, way bigger than sports. School doesn't start up in the fall until after the county fair. They have a drive-your-tractor-to-school day. Flannel plaid is always in style. "Libary" has only one r. And they "axe" each other questions.
> That's in the EU. Off the top of my head I would say it's second (possibly first) in North America,
Extremely distant second, even if you draw the edge of North America clear down to the isthmus, which is not usual. It's kind of like saying Gaelic is the second (possibly first) most widely spoken language in Britain. And among North-American web developers (this is, you'll remember, a *beta* release of a web browser), the second language might actually be French, though it's difficult to be sure.
> and certainly first in South America.
Perhaps, but South America is not known for its large number of web developers.
> Given the population of India is over a billion and Hindi is the national language
It's one of a dozen or so national languages. (India is a complicated place, both linguistically and politically.)
> Almost all indians speak it as a 2nd language.
It would be more accurate to say that almost everyone who speaks Hindi speaks it as a second or third language. India is linguistically like rural sub-Saharan Africa, in that nearly everyone's first language is an obscure local dialect, so then many of them have to learn a "major language" (such as Hindi or Tamil or one of the others) in order to be able to talk to people from a few miles away.
Hindi is probably the single most widely spoken language in India (the only other possible contender being English), but more than a fifth of the population (mostly in the southern part) speaks Dravidian languages, and Hindi is only one of several Sanskrit-derived languages (spoken in the northern part of the country), and not everyone speaks a major language at all -- there are many people who just speak the local dialects.
In terms of cooling, the most cost-effective thing is the proverbial Big Fat Heat Sink, and the second-most cost-effective is fans. Actual air conditioning is not a cheap thing, especially when the room has a bunch of heat-generating devices (like, e.g., servers) in it.
So the question becomes: where is this building located, and what does the ambient outdoor temperature run to?
In addition to the things you say, which may well be true, German and Japanese also happen to be the first languages for a large number of internet users, including a fair number of web developers, including the ones for some large multinational corporations who are major customers for Microsoft and, incidentally, are responsible for a number of fairly popular websites. Arabic, being mostly used in third-world countries, just doesn't have the same kind of user/customer base as German and Japanese. You have to go pretty far down the Alexa rankings to find an Arabic website at all, much less one whose developers aren't also literate in English. It's true that a fair number of people speak Arabic, but since most of them aren't developing major high-traffic websites, they may have to wait for the actual final release, possibly even longer.
Indeed, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Hebrew has more internet users than Arabic, despite having a lot fewer speakers altogether.