Thing is, Best Buy doesn't even *try* to compete with some of those companies. Newegg is a perfect example: Best Buy doesn't even offer for sale the kinds of computer components that are Newegg's bread and butter. When was the last time you walked into Newegg and asked which aisle the motherboards are in? Yeah, right. It's a completely different market. Best Buy uses a "Geek Squad" as part of their marketing, but they're not selling to computer geeks. They're selling to end users. Newegg isn't even interested in trying to compete in that market. They sell to people who laugh at the ineptitude of Best Buy's Geek Squad. Newegg and Best Buy aren't competitors any more than McDonald's and Pampered Chef are competitors.
The only reason they'd sue Newegg is if they feel they have to document a history of defending their trademark, to guard against possible future "genericized mark" arguments from other parties. I consider this promotion of otherwise-unnecessary litigation as a form of mark maintenance to be the worst feature of extant trademark law.
If they're the ones used for forecasts more than two days into the future, I'm in favor of cutting the funding. We're not getting any practical use out of them. Three-day weather forecasts aren't significantly more precise or accurate than what you can get from the farmer's almanacs, or what any intelligent, observant person who's lived in the area for a few years can tell you by virtue of what month it is.
The one-day forecasts ("What's it going to do tomorrow?") are occasionally useful (if, like, you're planning to visit the Big Room and want to know what it'll be like out there -- obviously if you stay indoors all the time it's somewhat less critical). I'm willing to continue funding the one-day forecasts. The two-day forecasts are pretty marginal, but I *might* be talked into continued funding for them, arguably, on the grounds that maybe with enough more decades of practice the meteorologists will get better enough that the accuracy might improve.
But the three-day and five-day ones are just pointless. Forget the satellites and just roll some dice. It won't have any impact on the accuracy.
> In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully
Sure. Ants are particularly prolific even as insects go. They can take hundred-to-one losses against virtually anything and still win by sheer numbers.
Off the top of my head the only creature I can think of that can consistently wipe out entire colonies of ants and prevent them from coming back is a human.
In other words, the analogy is stupid.
The security technology may or may not be stupid. It's hard to tell, because unfortunately the article doesn't SAY ANYTHING about how it actually works, or even what it does. It just gives you the inane meaningless less-than-half-baked analogy in way more detail than is useful.
> We need to... start asking for efficient, interstate mass transport, like maglev... It can be done,
It can be done, but there's relatively little point in doing it here.
The US is not Japan. 90% of our population is not concentrated on 10% of our land. Americans like to have yards and tend to want to live in small enough communities that they can actually get to know the majority of the people in town. When a city gets bigger than about fifty thousand people or so, most of the population moves away to "bedroom communities". We're a LOT more spread out than Japan.
Suppose we did build a bullet train linking the major cities. Presumably the main line would run New York to Chicago to Denver (just because it's on the way) to Los Angeles, and then you'd have branch lines to Miami (with stops in D.C. and Atlanta) and Seattle (with a couple of stops along the way) and one of the cities in Texas. If I wanted to ride it, I'd have to drive for almost six hours to get to the station -- and that's *close* by US standards. A lot of people would have to drive several times that far. And it would only *go* to a very limited number of places, which usually wouldn't be very close to anywhere I want to go.
Even if they ran branch lines to EVERY major city (which would cost about eleventy gazillion times as much to do here as in Japan, because we have a much larger number of major cities, and they're a lot farther apart), I'd still have to drive for an hour and a half to get to downtown Columbus. It wouldn't be worth going that far out of my way to ride the thing except *possibly* in situations where I would otherwise fly. And again, that's *close* by US standards -- I live in the ninth most densely-populated state, out of fifty, and within Ohio I'm not in the most rural region of the state (the southeastern part). A lot of people would have to drive for two or three hours to get to a major city.
I know it sounds cool to be able to hop on a fast train and go 300 mph to someplace on the other side of the country. Believe me, the basic idea sounds cool to me too. But it's just not practical in the US. Our population-density profile is wrong for it.
There's something about the plan that the summary isn't telling you: they're not linking Tokyo and Osaka by bullet train for the first time. It's more of a technology upgrade. They've had nozomi shinkansen (pronounced "no-zo-me-sheen-kahn-sane") making said trip in under two and a half hours, reaching speeds somewhere in the (rough estimate alert) neighborhood of 200 mph (though they can't average their top speed due to curves and acceleration and stuff), since the early nineties. You pay through the nose for the fastest train service, but it's available if you've got money. Before the current fastest service was introduced there were slower versions, going back to the sixties. Some of the slower lines are still in operation and are naturally somewhat more affordable to ride than the newest fastest one.
According to the linked article, the new line will allow speeds over 300 mph and make the trip in under 100 minutes. I assume the quoted speed is a minimum for when the service is rolled out initially and that they'll find ways to improve it and shave a few minutes off the trip after they get it initially working (as they have done in the past with existing train services).
I don't know for sure what his *intentions* are, but unless Greenlight Capital has a controlling interest in Microsoft, making headlines (and whatever short-term consequences that might have for the stock price) is all he can really be expected to actually *accomplish*.
And I don't know about you, but if I had a controlling interest in Microsoft, I'd be calling for changes a lot more substantial than just swapping out the CEO.
All the usability in the universe isn't particularly meaningful without memory protection and preemptive multitasking, unless you are *extremely* picky about what software you run (or unless you only ever want to run one program at a time per computer, in which case you scarcely even need an OS).
I worked with various versions (6, 7, 8, 9) of the classic MacOS on a number of occasions in a variety of settings (starting before I ever saw Windows) on various hardware. It was a painful and frustrating experience every single time, because the mean time between lockups was so excruciatingly low as to make it virtually impossible to ever actually get anything meaningful accomplished. If anything it may have even been worse than Windows 3.x (which would really be going some, because Windows 3.x was about as stable as a three-legged elephant on roller skates).
Is it absurd to expect students who don't have any prior reading experience to be well prepared to study Literature after a single 15-week course (i.e., LIT 1)? Is it unreasonable to tell students who have never bothered to read a book before they enrolled in college that maybe their complete lack of any apparent interest in literature is an indication they should select a different field of study?
I mean, come on. Of all the different courses of study available in college, computer programming is one of the *easiest* for kids to experiment with on their own before they get to college and have to decide whether they really want to major in it or not. It's easier to get started on your own with programming than with foreign language (unless you happen to live near a community of native speakers), biology or chemistry (unless one of your parents has a quarter-million-dollar lab in the basement), performance music (again, unless one of your parents has built a semi-pro studio in your house), or even horticulture. You can get all the equipment you need to get started for less than the cost of one semester's worth of college textbooks, and the available documentation, EVEN if you don't have internet access and must rely on the public library, is better for computer programming than for almost any other major field of study.
Also, computer programming is very much a *thinking* field (as opposed to a rote field like accounting, which basically anyone can do if they can stomach the tedium). You can't just go through the motions. You have to be genuinely interested, or you won't be any good at it.
A *lot* of junior-high kids fool around with (simple) programming in their spare time just to see what it's like. If you *didn't*, maybe you don't have such a strong interest in computer programming, and maybe you should rethink whether majoring in it is such a good idea.
Before I got to college, I had experience doing several different kinds of simple programming (including text processing, basic text-based user interfaces, graphics, and sound) in a couple of different languages (three if you count batch programming as a language). I had spent *hundreds* of hours playing with programming, learning to make the computer do different kinds of stuff.
My computer was more than ten years old when I got it used, so my total investment was $400. (I know, I know, you'd never pay $400 for a ten-year-old system today. This was a few years ago, okay? It came with PC-DOS 3.3, and Kris Kross was singing about making people jump right around the time I bought the thing.)
And I didn't even end up going into application development. I'm just a network administrator. Most of the code I write is system automation, glue code, or basic web stuff.
That's different, and you know it. Surgery has consequences. If you experiment with it and screw up, you can't just fix the silly syntax error and hit "compile" again and have everything be as if the mistake was never made.
If this hits a significant percentage of students, it could make for an "interesting" correlation between use of Windows 7 and what kinds of grades the students get.
So do I, occasionally. (If I hadn't used it at all, would I be complaining? I don't complain much about software I don't use. I just don't use it.)
> It may not have all the useless bells and whistles of the Windows client,
Not having seen the Windows version, I can't comment on that.
I did eventually manage to get Skype to work on Debian, but every time I upgrade my system it breaks again. Opera doesn't break. Opera even gets magically upgraded when I do a dist-upgrade. Skype does not, and it stops working, and then I have to *mess* with it again, which is usually a rather protracted process. It gets old.
I really just wish there were a good competitor or two -- preferably with interoperability, so you can call users on the one service from the other.
Skype has never supported Linux very well. It doesn't use a standard widget set, so it completely ignores your system colors. The documentation is worthless. Sound doesn't work half the time unless you, like, kill -9 all other processes that have ever played a sound in the history of your login session, uninstall and reinstall the Skype client, and wave a dead chicken over/dev/dsp before every calling session. (Heaven forfend you should have Pulse installed on a system where you want to run Skype...) Even getting Skype to install typically means tracking down different versions of various libraries than what shipped with your distro, and then the first time you do a dist-upgrade it's broken again. If you don't use it pretty much every day, it's just plain not worth the trouble to keep it running.
I've seen Windows-98-only software that runs better on Linux, using Wine. Heck, I've seen Windows-98-only *games* that run better in Wine than the "native" Linux version of Skype.
I say, good riddance. I hope Microsoft discontinues support for Skype on *all* platforms, in favor of NetMeeting or some other dross nobody uses.
I have no idea what he's even talking about. I assume "SyFy" is a corruption of "Sci-Fi", as in "science fiction", but I don't know what Caprica or SG:U or Alphas or Red Faction are, and Atlantis as far as I know is a mythical lost city in ancient Greece. I guess it has something to do with networking, but are these server names, or what? He says "cable network" at one point, so maybe he's talking about home-user-oriented ISPs like Time Warner? Or maybe it's some MMORPG thing? I don't know. I'm lost.
If I had to bet (and if there were a way to actually settle the question definitively), I'd lay odds on the current population of the entire universe being somewhere between six and ten billion, if you count only sentient beings.
> Unless the Human Race spreads to other worlds, systems, and galaxies, we are dead as a species.
Then we are dead as a species.
We don't have the technology we would need to colonize *Mars*, much less anything more remote. Nevermind about travel and communications, we don't even have what we'd need to build a self-sustaining colony once we get there. Any colony we could make would be totally dependent on a continuous influx of supplies from Earth. If anything happens to Earth we're all toast, no matter where we live.
That's for the forseeable future, of course. If in the future we develop technologies we currently cannot fathom, then that could change. Potentially.
Your proposal does not in any way address the problem that the article was talking about. In fact, you seem to be arguing in favor of making said problem worse, purely for the sake of making it worse.
My point is that gen-ed classes don't belong in a PhD program. Doctorate degrees are focused on a particular subject *by design*. They're *supposed* to be like that. So the problem that the article is complaining about (which _is_ a real problem) is not a flaw in the doctorate programs.
The degree that has become meaningless, I would argue, is not the PhD.
It's the B.A. that has become utterly meaningless, because ninety-some-odd percent of the people awarded the degree haven't completed anything resembling the curriculum that the degree traditionally required. The Bachelor's programs are the problem -- that and the high school education kids these days don't really get any more.
Public IPv4 addresses will continue to be available to people who need or want them. (Most home users don't actually have any use for them. Really. I know, you do. So do I. Most folks don't.)
I'm pretty sure they'll remain very affordable for the forseeable future, too. It's not like they're actually scarce. There are trillions of them that aren't being used. They're not available for allocation because they have already been allocated to various parties, but they're collecting dust, and if they were worth anything -- anything at all -- some of them would surely become available rather quickly.
IPv4 addresses only *appear* to be scarce because they were handed out for free (often in ridiculously large blocks) for the first several decades of the network's existence, and consequently a lot of people are sitting on WAY more of them than they have any actual use for.
They're not going to be expensive, because they're not scarce enough for that. If you look at the Nortel/Microsoft deal, it works out to $11.25 per address. That's a bulk or wholesale price, but it's also a price for *permanent* sale of the address space, not for limited-time allocation like what ISPs provide for normal customers. Based on that, one supposes you could rent a public IPv4 address for a while (like, a year maybe) for less than that. Of course, the market is just beginning to develop, so the final price may end up being a little higher or lower than that, but you get the idea: we're not talking an extra twenty bucks a month on your internet bill for one address. If an ISP tries to charge you through the nose like that, you just go to a different ISP. It's going to be more like a dollar a month, give or take, for one public IPv4 address (which you can use for mundane purposes like shelling into your home computer from work or vice versa -- obviously if you run a public server that gets any significant traffic you're going to have bandwidth costs, but that's always been true).
Cheap but not completely free, that's what public IPv4 addresses are ultimately going to be.
If IPv6 had been designed in a sane manner, so as to be something that might ever actually get deployed on anything like the same scale as IPv4, it would've run into the same problem in a couple more decades, because even though its address space is much larger, it's still finite. Nothing finite can remain completely free indefinitely, because people take WAY WAY more than they can ever actually use.
PhD programs are *supposed* to be narrow and largely inapplicable to other disciplines. That's why it's normal to get multiple PhDs in different subjects.
The real problem is that secondary and undergraduate education (culminating in the Bachelor's degree), especially the gen-ed core, has been watered down and neutered until it's essentially non-existent. Kids are routinely graduating from college -- from major universities -- without even so much as (what we used to think of as) a high-school-level education outside their major.
You have PhD students who can't even carry on an intellectual conversation with somebody outside their major, not because their PhD program isn't general enough but because their undergraduate program was severely lacking.
"What, you want to talk about _history_? Your course work has to do with wars between with the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Seleucid empire? Man, you've lost me already before you even say anything. I majored in biomed. The only Greek ruler I've ever heard of is Alexander the Great, and if you tell me he was Macedonian I will look at you like a cow staring into headlights."
(I'm not picking particularly on biomed majors or lack of knowledge of ancient history. The problem is much more general than that.)
Maybe Masters and Doctorate programs should have standardized (non-field-specific) entrance exams you have to pass, or else they send you back to take more undergrad classes first.
If you're going to assume that they won't do a thorough physical search, you might as well just put a second hard drive in the computer but disconnect the data cable. Any search too cursory to find it in a hollow book won't find it in the spare internal drive bay either.
This approach fails badly, though: if they do any kind of serious physical search, the gig is up.
Actually, the real problem is that normal usage of the drive would typically change where some files are stored and how they are fragmented. If you used it on your main system drive (i.e., the filesystem whereupon the OS is installed), merely booting up your operating system would very likely make some of your hidden data irretrievable.
(There's also the small matter of FAT32 no longer being terribly useful on hard drives, but in principle the method would be applicable to other filesystems, though the implementation details would be significantly different.)
Besides that, the scheme is unnecessarily complicated. There are easier ways to hide encrypted data in plain sight and plausibly deny its significance. I mean, seriously, have you never heard of a log file or a browser cache? Heck, use the seconds fields in the timestamps in the Received: headers in a big fat folder full of old email. It ain't that hard.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, Best Buy doesn't even *try* to compete with some of those companies. Newegg is a perfect example: Best Buy doesn't even offer for sale the kinds of computer components that are Newegg's bread and butter. When was the last time you walked into Newegg and asked which aisle the motherboards are in? Yeah, right. It's a completely different market. Best Buy uses a "Geek Squad" as part of their marketing, but they're not selling to computer geeks. They're selling to end users. Newegg isn't even interested in trying to compete in that market. They sell to people who laugh at the ineptitude of Best Buy's Geek Squad. Newegg and Best Buy aren't competitors any more than McDonald's and Pampered Chef are competitors.
The only reason they'd sue Newegg is if they feel they have to document a history of defending their trademark, to guard against possible future "genericized mark" arguments from other parties. I consider this promotion of otherwise-unnecessary litigation as a form of mark maintenance to be the worst feature of extant trademark law.
If they're the ones used for forecasts more than two days into the future, I'm in favor of cutting the funding. We're not getting any practical use out of them. Three-day weather forecasts aren't significantly more precise or accurate than what you can get from the farmer's almanacs, or what any intelligent, observant person who's lived in the area for a few years can tell you by virtue of what month it is.
The one-day forecasts ("What's it going to do tomorrow?") are occasionally useful (if, like, you're planning to visit the Big Room and want to know what it'll be like out there -- obviously if you stay indoors all the time it's somewhat less critical). I'm willing to continue funding the one-day forecasts. The two-day forecasts are pretty marginal, but I *might* be talked into continued funding for them, arguably, on the grounds that maybe with enough more decades of practice the meteorologists will get better enough that the accuracy might improve.
But the three-day and five-day ones are just pointless. Forget the satellites and just roll some dice. It won't have any impact on the accuracy.
> In nature, we know that ants defend against threats very successfully
Sure. Ants are particularly prolific even as insects go. They can take hundred-to-one losses against virtually anything and still win by sheer numbers.
Off the top of my head the only creature I can think of that can consistently wipe out entire colonies of ants and prevent them from coming back is a human.
In other words, the analogy is stupid.
The security technology may or may not be stupid. It's hard to tell, because unfortunately the article doesn't SAY ANYTHING about how it actually works, or even what it does. It just gives you the inane meaningless less-than-half-baked analogy in way more detail than is useful.
> We need to ... start asking for efficient, interstate mass transport, like maglev... It can be done,
It can be done, but there's relatively little point in doing it here.
The US is not Japan. 90% of our population is not concentrated on 10% of our land. Americans like to have yards and tend to want to live in small enough communities that they can actually get to know the majority of the people in town. When a city gets bigger than about fifty thousand people or so, most of the population moves away to "bedroom communities". We're a LOT more spread out than Japan.
Suppose we did build a bullet train linking the major cities. Presumably the main line would run New York to Chicago to Denver (just because it's on the way) to Los Angeles, and then you'd have branch lines to Miami (with stops in D.C. and Atlanta) and Seattle (with a couple of stops along the way) and one of the cities in Texas. If I wanted to ride it, I'd have to drive for almost six hours to get to the station -- and that's *close* by US standards. A lot of people would have to drive several times that far. And it would only *go* to a very limited number of places, which usually wouldn't be very close to anywhere I want to go.
Even if they ran branch lines to EVERY major city (which would cost about eleventy gazillion times as much to do here as in Japan, because we have a much larger number of major cities, and they're a lot farther apart), I'd still have to drive for an hour and a half to get to downtown Columbus. It wouldn't be worth going that far out of my way to ride the thing except *possibly* in situations where I would otherwise fly. And again, that's *close* by US standards -- I live in the ninth most densely-populated state, out of fifty, and within Ohio I'm not in the most rural region of the state (the southeastern part). A lot of people would have to drive for two or three hours to get to a major city.
I know it sounds cool to be able to hop on a fast train and go 300 mph to someplace on the other side of the country. Believe me, the basic idea sounds cool to me too. But it's just not practical in the US. Our population-density profile is wrong for it.
There's something about the plan that the summary isn't telling you: they're not linking Tokyo and Osaka by bullet train for the first time. It's more of a technology upgrade. They've had nozomi shinkansen (pronounced "no-zo-me-sheen-kahn-sane") making said trip in under two and a half hours, reaching speeds somewhere in the (rough estimate alert) neighborhood of 200 mph (though they can't average their top speed due to curves and acceleration and stuff), since the early nineties. You pay through the nose for the fastest train service, but it's available if you've got money. Before the current fastest service was introduced there were slower versions, going back to the sixties. Some of the slower lines are still in operation and are naturally somewhat more affordable to ride than the newest fastest one.
According to the linked article, the new line will allow speeds over 300 mph and make the trip in under 100 minutes. I assume the quoted speed is a minimum for when the service is rolled out initially and that they'll find ways to improve it and shave a few minutes off the trip after they get it initially working (as they have done in the past with existing train services).
I don't know for sure what his *intentions* are, but unless Greenlight Capital has a controlling interest in Microsoft, making headlines (and whatever short-term consequences that might have for the stock price) is all he can really be expected to actually *accomplish*.
And I don't know about you, but if I had a controlling interest in Microsoft, I'd be calling for changes a lot more substantial than just swapping out the CEO.
If it's unlocked by default, there could be unfortunate security implications.
If it were merely *unlockable* (e.g., by setting a jumper), that would be better.
All the usability in the universe isn't particularly meaningful without memory protection and preemptive multitasking, unless you are *extremely* picky about what software you run (or unless you only ever want to run one program at a time per computer, in which case you scarcely even need an OS).
I worked with various versions (6, 7, 8, 9) of the classic MacOS on a number of occasions in a variety of settings (starting before I ever saw Windows) on various hardware. It was a painful and frustrating experience every single time, because the mean time between lockups was so excruciatingly low as to make it virtually impossible to ever actually get anything meaningful accomplished. If anything it may have even been worse than Windows 3.x (which would really be going some, because Windows 3.x was about as stable as a three-legged elephant on roller skates).
Indeed.
Is it absurd to expect students who don't have any prior reading experience to be well prepared to study Literature after a single 15-week course (i.e., LIT 1)? Is it unreasonable to tell students who have never bothered to read a book before they enrolled in college that maybe their complete lack of any apparent interest in literature is an indication they should select a different field of study?
I mean, come on. Of all the different courses of study available in college, computer programming is one of the *easiest* for kids to experiment with on their own before they get to college and have to decide whether they really want to major in it or not. It's easier to get started on your own with programming than with foreign language (unless you happen to live near a community of native speakers), biology or chemistry (unless one of your parents has a quarter-million-dollar lab in the basement), performance music (again, unless one of your parents has built a semi-pro studio in your house), or even horticulture. You can get all the equipment you need to get started for less than the cost of one semester's worth of college textbooks, and the available documentation, EVEN if you don't have internet access and must rely on the public library, is better for computer programming than for almost any other major field of study.
Also, computer programming is very much a *thinking* field (as opposed to a rote field like accounting, which basically anyone can do if they can stomach the tedium). You can't just go through the motions. You have to be genuinely interested, or you won't be any good at it.
A *lot* of junior-high kids fool around with (simple) programming in their spare time just to see what it's like. If you *didn't*, maybe you don't have such a strong interest in computer programming, and maybe you should rethink whether majoring in it is such a good idea.
Before I got to college, I had experience doing several different kinds of simple programming (including text processing, basic text-based user interfaces, graphics, and sound) in a couple of different languages (three if you count batch programming as a language). I had spent *hundreds* of hours playing with programming, learning to make the computer do different kinds of stuff.
My computer was more than ten years old when I got it used, so my total investment was $400. (I know, I know, you'd never pay $400 for a ten-year-old system today. This was a few years ago, okay? It came with PC-DOS 3.3, and Kris Kross was singing about making people jump right around the time I bought the thing.)
And I didn't even end up going into application development. I'm just a network administrator. Most of the code I write is system automation, glue code, or basic web stuff.
That's different, and you know it. Surgery has consequences. If you experiment with it and screw up, you can't just fix the silly syntax error and hit "compile" again and have everything be as if the mistake was never made.
If this hits a significant percentage of students, it could make for an "interesting" correlation between use of Windows 7 and what kinds of grades the students get.
> I use Skype on Linux.
So do I, occasionally. (If I hadn't used it at all, would I be complaining? I don't complain much about software I don't use. I just don't use it.)
> It may not have all the useless bells and whistles of the Windows client,
Not having seen the Windows version, I can't comment on that.
I did eventually manage to get Skype to work on Debian, but every time I upgrade my system it breaks again. Opera doesn't break. Opera even gets magically upgraded when I do a dist-upgrade. Skype does not, and it stops working, and then I have to *mess* with it again, which is usually a rather protracted process. It gets old.
I really just wish there were a good competitor or two -- preferably with interoperability, so you can call users on the one service from the other.
> Yes, the dependency problems are quite annoying but it's
> almost impossible to ship closed source on Linux without it.
Opera seems to manage it alright.
> SyFy is the new name for an American television network
People still watch television in 2011?
People on Slashdot, who presumably have halfway decent internet access, still watch television in 2011? Seriously?
Do you also read newspapers and go to drive-in movies? Do you send telegrams? Mail personal letters using envelopes and stamps? Send smoke signals?
I was hoping someone could tell me what the topic was.
(As it happens, someone did. Turns out it has to do with television. I'm almost sorry I asked.)
Skype has never supported Linux very well. It doesn't use a standard widget set, so it completely ignores your system colors. The documentation is worthless. Sound doesn't work half the time unless you, like, kill -9 all other processes that have ever played a sound in the history of your login session, uninstall and reinstall the Skype client, and wave a dead chicken over /dev/dsp before every calling session. (Heaven forfend you should have Pulse installed on a system where you want to run Skype...) Even getting Skype to install typically means tracking down different versions of various libraries than what shipped with your distro, and then the first time you do a dist-upgrade it's broken again. If you don't use it pretty much every day, it's just plain not worth the trouble to keep it running.
I've seen Windows-98-only software that runs better on Linux, using Wine. Heck, I've seen Windows-98-only *games* that run better in Wine than the "native" Linux version of Skype.
I say, good riddance. I hope Microsoft discontinues support for Skype on *all* platforms, in favor of NetMeeting or some other dross nobody uses.
I have no idea what he's even talking about. I assume "SyFy" is a corruption of "Sci-Fi", as in "science fiction", but I don't know what Caprica or SG:U or Alphas or Red Faction are, and Atlantis as far as I know is a mythical lost city in ancient Greece. I guess it has something to do with networking, but are these server names, or what? He says "cable network" at one point, so maybe he's talking about home-user-oriented ISPs like Time Warner? Or maybe it's some MMORPG thing? I don't know. I'm lost.
If I had to bet (and if there were a way to actually settle the question definitively), I'd lay odds on the current population of the entire universe being somewhere between six and ten billion, if you count only sentient beings.
> Unless the Human Race spreads to other worlds, systems, and galaxies, we are dead as a species.
Then we are dead as a species.
We don't have the technology we would need to colonize *Mars*, much less anything more remote. Nevermind about travel and communications, we don't even have what we'd need to build a self-sustaining colony once we get there. Any colony we could make would be totally dependent on a continuous influx of supplies from Earth. If anything happens to Earth we're all toast, no matter where we live.
That's for the forseeable future, of course. If in the future we develop technologies we currently cannot fathom, then that could change. Potentially.
Your proposal does not in any way address the problem that the article was talking about. In fact, you seem to be arguing in favor of making said problem worse, purely for the sake of making it worse.
My point is that gen-ed classes don't belong in a PhD program. Doctorate degrees are focused on a particular subject *by design*. They're *supposed* to be like that. So the problem that the article is complaining about (which _is_ a real problem) is not a flaw in the doctorate programs.
The degree that has become meaningless, I would argue, is not the PhD.
It's the B.A. that has become utterly meaningless, because ninety-some-odd percent of the people awarded the degree haven't completed anything resembling the curriculum that the degree traditionally required. The Bachelor's programs are the problem -- that and the high school education kids these days don't really get any more.
Public IPv4 addresses will continue to be available to people who need or want them. (Most home users don't actually have any use for them. Really. I know, you do. So do I. Most folks don't.)
I'm pretty sure they'll remain very affordable for the forseeable future, too. It's not like they're actually scarce. There are trillions of them that aren't being used. They're not available for allocation because they have already been allocated to various parties, but they're collecting dust, and if they were worth anything -- anything at all -- some of them would surely become available rather quickly.
IPv4 addresses only *appear* to be scarce because they were handed out for free (often in ridiculously large blocks) for the first several decades of the network's existence, and consequently a lot of people are sitting on WAY more of them than they have any actual use for.
They're not going to be expensive, because they're not scarce enough for that. If you look at the Nortel/Microsoft deal, it works out to $11.25 per address. That's a bulk or wholesale price, but it's also a price for *permanent* sale of the address space, not for limited-time allocation like what ISPs provide for normal customers. Based on that, one supposes you could rent a public IPv4 address for a while (like, a year maybe) for less than that. Of course, the market is just beginning to develop, so the final price may end up being a little higher or lower than that, but you get the idea: we're not talking an extra twenty bucks a month on your internet bill for one address. If an ISP tries to charge you through the nose like that, you just go to a different ISP. It's going to be more like a dollar a month, give or take, for one public IPv4 address (which you can use for mundane purposes like shelling into your home computer from work or vice versa -- obviously if you run a public server that gets any significant traffic you're going to have bandwidth costs, but that's always been true).
Cheap but not completely free, that's what public IPv4 addresses are ultimately going to be.
If IPv6 had been designed in a sane manner, so as to be something that might ever actually get deployed on anything like the same scale as IPv4, it would've run into the same problem in a couple more decades, because even though its address space is much larger, it's still finite. Nothing finite can remain completely free indefinitely, because people take WAY WAY more than they can ever actually use.
PhD programs are *supposed* to be narrow and largely inapplicable to other disciplines. That's why it's normal to get multiple PhDs in different subjects.
The real problem is that secondary and undergraduate education (culminating in the Bachelor's degree), especially the gen-ed core, has been watered down and neutered until it's essentially non-existent. Kids are routinely graduating from college -- from major universities -- without even so much as (what we used to think of as) a high-school-level education outside their major.
You have PhD students who can't even carry on an intellectual conversation with somebody outside their major, not because their PhD program isn't general enough but because their undergraduate program was severely lacking.
"What, you want to talk about _history_? Your course work has to do with wars between with the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Seleucid empire? Man, you've lost me already before you even say anything. I majored in biomed. The only Greek ruler I've ever heard of is Alexander the Great, and if you tell me he was Macedonian I will look at you like a cow staring into headlights."
(I'm not picking particularly on biomed majors or lack of knowledge of ancient history. The problem is much more general than that.)
Maybe Masters and Doctorate programs should have standardized (non-field-specific) entrance exams you have to pass, or else they send you back to take more undergrad classes first.
Yes, it was a mistake. The book was only supposed to cost $23 _thousand_, not $23 _million_.
What really happened, I think, is that they mixed up the textbook cost with the tuition.
If you're going to assume that they won't do a thorough physical search, you might as well just put a second hard drive in the computer but disconnect the data cable. Any search too cursory to find it in a hollow book won't find it in the spare internal drive bay either.
This approach fails badly, though: if they do any kind of serious physical search, the gig is up.
Actually, the real problem is that normal usage of the drive would typically change where some files are stored and how they are fragmented. If you used it on your main system drive (i.e., the filesystem whereupon the OS is installed), merely booting up your operating system would very likely make some of your hidden data irretrievable.
(There's also the small matter of FAT32 no longer being terribly useful on hard drives, but in principle the method would be applicable to other filesystems, though the implementation details would be significantly different.)
Besides that, the scheme is unnecessarily complicated. There are easier ways to hide encrypted data in plain sight and plausibly deny its significance. I mean, seriously, have you never heard of a log file or a browser cache? Heck, use the seconds fields in the timestamps in the Received: headers in a big fat folder full of old email. It ain't that hard.