They had a cap, but once you hit the cap you just had your speed reduced.
So up to X gb (I think it was 5, which is low, but it was a wireless service) you had the full 1.5 mbps speed. After that, they dropped you to 300k, or you could pay extra to increase your cap that month.
I think that you need a much larger cap on cable for it for fair (maybe 5-10g for the cheap, grandmother style connection, 50g for the $40 standard one) and just drop your speed to 1-2 mbps when you hit that so it's harder for you to keep going over. I think people would complain a lot less about bandwidth caps if they were softer caps like that - at least, living with it for a few months, it was worse than being uncapped, but it was entirely usable and bearable.
War games are no different from any previous work of art depicting war.
Stories that gloss over the ugly parts and glorify heroes will inspire people to try to become them.
Stories that talk of the horrors of war will make young men feel that they need this horror to have real feeling.
Before every major war there were poems about the glory of battle. After every one there were songs of how terrible it was. Neither of them has ever stopped a war. Only the memories of those who lived it have done that, and only as long as they were young enough to fear going back again.
I'd say that there is a broad range of what can be considered "crunch time", and we need to define our terms.
Honestly, as a developer, part of me loves a week's worth of crunch time. Just going in until its done, and being that focused. Some people focus a lot better with that kind of a deadline.
But it has to limited (you have to know when it's over, and it can't last too long. I'd say more than 2-3 weeks is too long), it has to be reasonable (crunching to add a last feature before it goes to QA, or to squash those last couple bugs, as opposed to implementing core parts of the system), and it has to be paid.
Your spouse can live without you for a week at a time if she has warning, and you both know it's going to result in either a lot of vacation after the project's done or a lot of extra cash for projects. You just can't do it day in and day out with no end in sight, and no extra pay for it. That's the sort of thing that will destroy teams and families.
Sorry to misuse a legal term. It was not intentional.
What I meant was that some cases are closer to a reasonable doubt than others, or more obviously sociopathic.
Someone who shoots someone in a drug deal, they're a bad person probably and should go to jail for a long time. But there's a reasonable chance they can reform or something.
A guy spends twenty years kidnapping hitchhikers and eating them in his basement, maybe we should just shoot him and get it over with.
Even in the case of murder, there are degrees of evil, and degrees of proof.
You know, I've been wondering - doesn't Sun worship really make the most sense of pretty much any religion?
Unlike Jehova, I can actually prove that the sun is the source of all life on this planet, that it nourishes and sustains me and other living things, and that the world will end because of its actions.
We like to make fun of prehistoric religions, but sometimes I think they're actually pretty rational.
What I disagree with are the people who think that locking someone in a tiny cell for the rest of their natural life is more humane than killing them.
Now, I think we need to be really careful, because you *can* reverse a life in prison penalty (and give them whatever is left of their life after you've just shitted on 20 years of it), but in cases where there is a preponderance of evidence, honestly the death penalty seems more humane to me, unless you're going to make a prison a nicer place to live than most of the people in Saddam's country had, and that seems a little ridiculous as well.
That being said, I think the current methods of execution in the US are criminal (none of them are based in any way on reasonable science, and are not considered humane ways to kill a dog, let alone a human), and the system corrupt (there is far too strong of a correlation between how little money a state spends on public defenders and how many people they execute), so I'm all for trashing our current implementation. But that doesn't mean that sometimes the most reasonable thing to do to someone is to kill them.
I understand this is slashdot, but did *anyone* RTFA?
He's not comparing the cost of laying copper cable to the cost of laying Fibre.
He's comparing the cost of upgrading the boxes connected to the *existing* copper wire cable network to support up to 160 Mbits to the cost of laying NEW fibre.
Which is a reasonable comparison, given that these are our two options to get that kind of speed out to most people in the country right now. He is saying that it is ridiculous that to get that high speed we have to wait for verizon to spend $800 instead of Time Warner spending $20, because Time Warner refuses to spend that $20.
Time Warner could be giving us Japan-like speeds everywhere that their network currently reaches, but they are refusing to because they have a monopoly in those local areas, and therefore no incentive to improve a service that only competes with their over services.
I love how someone made a law and suddenly 16 and 8 year old girls are morally equivalent when it comes to sex.
Biologically, we are completely ready to start having sex by 13-14 at the latest, and our bodies start wanting to. There is very little physical distinction between a picture of an attractive 15 year old and an attractive 18 year old. It is not sick to want to fuck 16 year olds - we have, in fact, been doing it for our entire history. You used to be married by then.
It may be a bad idea, with young women and men being unable to deal with the responsibilities and consequences that come with sex. But it isn't unnatural.
I'm all for protecting children, but 16 year olds are only children because we decided to force them to be. It isn't this new culture that is sexualizing teens. It's our nature revolting against the unnaturally long childhood that middle class wealth has allowed us to force on ourselves. We evolved to be out learning to be an adult and getting ready to start a family by that age, not sitting in class and pretending to be asexual until we get married at 22.
I'm sick of this "global warming will decimate humanity" bullshit. Unless you actually meant the original meaning of decimate (to take one tenth) as opposed to the current standard usage.
If I accept that it is a problem, that it is caused by mankind, and that the ice caps will recede a bit and coastal areas will be flooded. (Right now I accept completely that they have observed a warming trend that could be linked to man-made carbon emissions and which may continue in the future.)
That in NO way correlates with destroying mankind. It correlates very strongly with yet another set of human migration waves which could potentially be very disruptive to economic purposes. But it could also just mean that we can grow a ton of grain in Alaska and the California desert becomes prime beach front real estate. Even the worst predictions I have seen will give people years to move and adjust. It's not like one day the whole ice cap is just going to be gone and a 100 foot wave will ride over Florida.
Humanity has been dealing with climate change for thousands of years. There have been many studies linking major historic and prehistoric migrations to natural differences in climate.
I'm not saying it's a good thing. But I see no reason people won't adjust. And in the mean time, I agree 100% with Dyson's argument that we need to make sure that we consider the real human cost of reducing CO2 emissions.
Not to mention, what do you do when your paper is due in 10 minutes, you lost your last hard copy, and your PC is in a dorm that is a fifteen minute walk away?
There was a very interesting study I read comparing corruption in the US during its economic rise to the corruption in African governments during their current economic failures.
They found that the level of corruption (as measured by some international standard) was not significantly different between the two, but that the scope of what that corrupt government could do was significantly different.
The US government prior to World War I took up less than 9% of the country's GDP. In most African countries, that number is greater than 50%. The more government touches the more dangerous its corruption becomes.
A very good point - but Hindus and Buddhists aren't the ones trying to sabotage science education in the US, which is what normally starts these arguments.
Overall my listening experience has improved - DVD's, CD's, and video games sound great now. I just had to go through my music collection and weed out all of the old 128 kbps crap I had downloaded in the early days of napster.
Fertility clinics exist already, the embryos exist already, and are already "dead" or going to "die."
It is like forbidding organ donation and transplant because they don't want people killed for their organs.
As in the previous case, there is a reasonable compromise (no killing people for their organs, limits on the organ market) that is pretty much already in effect (no having an abortion to create stem cells, no massive stem cell farms, just reusing waste products).
That is what I don't get - they aren't trying to shut down fertility clinics, they're trying to ban research on the reuse of embryos that are for all intents and purposes already sentenced to "death" under their worldview.
The real core of the threat is emerging markets, and this is where their "piracy is number 1, linux is number 2" thinking comes from.
There are hundreds of millions of people in India and China who will be getting enough income to purchase a computer or computer time in the next decade. Windows at $100 a pop is a much bigger deal to them than it is in the US, when that could be a full month's salary.
Almost all of the massive piracy statistics you here are coming from those areas. You can buy pirated copies of windows at normal shops for a dollar or two.
In fact, one could easily argue that pirated copies of windows are one of the largest barriers to Linux adoption as well.
These areas of the world hold the largest potential in this sort of field, where there is already large amounts of market saturation in western countries. And that's why they don't consider Apple a threat - it is very likely you will never see copies of mac os x being sold in shanghai for a buck each.
Typical? Not one of my coworkers is still on his first xbox 360. Some are on their third.
The thing is, most people are going to have some sort of PC anyway. Obviously you do, because you're on the internet. Now, *if* that PC is a desktop (which if it isn't, you already spent enough on it to build a killer gaming desktop), it will cost you about $100 every year or two to be able to play almost any PC game that comes out at fairly high settings, and starting about a year ago they will look better than the console version. For me, that comes out to cheaper than or comparable to a console ($300 up front). And I can play all my old old games any time I want, because they're still compatible, as opposed to being locked out of anything but just the last generation.
YMMV, but just because some people spend thousands of dollars every year on a dick length competition for PC gaming doesn't mean that is required. The vast majority of developers are forced to target people with machines much lower than that - therefore, if you have a machine a bit lower than that, you're fine.
Both consoles and PCs have their strengths and weaknesses, but this money sink weaknesses people seem to project onto PC's is a bit of bullshit.
The civilization studies I've read believed that once a civilization began any sort of rapid empire building it was already past its peak, and the increased militarism was a symbol of its decline. You can see it in quite a few civilizations.
A country needs some border wars to keep them strong and organized, but if they progress to invading the rest of the world they are on the way out.
But still displays penetration that is better than most more "modern" standard issue sidearms... I doubt a 40 S&W would have penetrated either, and the 9mm has significantly less power (it's just close enough and you can carry twice as many rounds). A 10 mm or one of the magnum cartridges might have, but few people actually use those because they'll beat the crap out of your hand.
Of course this test ignores the essential fact that pistols and long arms are hugely different items. The musket is more analogous to a modern shotgun firing slugs, which penetrates much better than any handgun you are likely to find.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry, once word gets out that Ontario has vast reserves of untapped wind power, we'll be invading them within the month.
We are strongly influenced by our environment, but the strongest constant factor in your environment is you.
So you may be depressed because your environment sucks, but who else is going to fix it?
They had a cap, but once you hit the cap you just had your speed reduced.
So up to X gb (I think it was 5, which is low, but it was a wireless service) you had the full 1.5 mbps speed. After that, they dropped you to 300k, or you could pay extra to increase your cap that month.
I think that you need a much larger cap on cable for it for fair (maybe 5-10g for the cheap, grandmother style connection, 50g for the $40 standard one) and just drop your speed to 1-2 mbps when you hit that so it's harder for you to keep going over. I think people would complain a lot less about bandwidth caps if they were softer caps like that - at least, living with it for a few months, it was worse than being uncapped, but it was entirely usable and bearable.
War games are no different from any previous work of art depicting war.
Stories that gloss over the ugly parts and glorify heroes will inspire people to try to become them.
Stories that talk of the horrors of war will make young men feel that they need this horror to have real feeling.
Before every major war there were poems about the glory of battle. After every one there were songs of how terrible it was. Neither of them has ever stopped a war. Only the memories of those who lived it have done that, and only as long as they were young enough to fear going back again.
I'd say that there is a broad range of what can be considered "crunch time", and we need to define our terms.
Honestly, as a developer, part of me loves a week's worth of crunch time. Just going in until its done, and being that focused. Some people focus a lot better with that kind of a deadline.
But it has to limited (you have to know when it's over, and it can't last too long. I'd say more than 2-3 weeks is too long), it has to be reasonable (crunching to add a last feature before it goes to QA, or to squash those last couple bugs, as opposed to implementing core parts of the system), and it has to be paid.
Your spouse can live without you for a week at a time if she has warning, and you both know it's going to result in either a lot of vacation after the project's done or a lot of extra cash for projects. You just can't do it day in and day out with no end in sight, and no extra pay for it. That's the sort of thing that will destroy teams and families.
Or even easier, just leave a noose and a stool in their cell, let them sort it out themselves.
Sorry to misuse a legal term. It was not intentional.
What I meant was that some cases are closer to a reasonable doubt than others, or more obviously sociopathic.
Someone who shoots someone in a drug deal, they're a bad person probably and should go to jail for a long time. But there's a reasonable chance they can reform or something.
A guy spends twenty years kidnapping hitchhikers and eating them in his basement, maybe we should just shoot him and get it over with.
Even in the case of murder, there are degrees of evil, and degrees of proof.
You know, I've been wondering - doesn't Sun worship really make the most sense of pretty much any religion?
Unlike Jehova, I can actually prove that the sun is the source of all life on this planet, that it nourishes and sustains me and other living things, and that the world will end because of its actions.
We like to make fun of prehistoric religions, but sometimes I think they're actually pretty rational.
What I disagree with are the people who think that locking someone in a tiny cell for the rest of their natural life is more humane than killing them.
Now, I think we need to be really careful, because you *can* reverse a life in prison penalty (and give them whatever is left of their life after you've just shitted on 20 years of it), but in cases where there is a preponderance of evidence, honestly the death penalty seems more humane to me, unless you're going to make a prison a nicer place to live than most of the people in Saddam's country had, and that seems a little ridiculous as well.
That being said, I think the current methods of execution in the US are criminal (none of them are based in any way on reasonable science, and are not considered humane ways to kill a dog, let alone a human), and the system corrupt (there is far too strong of a correlation between how little money a state spends on public defenders and how many people they execute), so I'm all for trashing our current implementation. But that doesn't mean that sometimes the most reasonable thing to do to someone is to kill them.
But that means all of the cams will have crappy Australian subtitles!
I understand this is slashdot, but did *anyone* RTFA?
He's not comparing the cost of laying copper cable to the cost of laying Fibre.
He's comparing the cost of upgrading the boxes connected to the *existing* copper wire cable network to support up to 160 Mbits to the cost of laying NEW fibre.
Which is a reasonable comparison, given that these are our two options to get that kind of speed out to most people in the country right now. He is saying that it is ridiculous that to get that high speed we have to wait for verizon to spend $800 instead of Time Warner spending $20, because Time Warner refuses to spend that $20.
Time Warner could be giving us Japan-like speeds everywhere that their network currently reaches, but they are refusing to because they have a monopoly in those local areas, and therefore no incentive to improve a service that only competes with their over services.
I love how someone made a law and suddenly 16 and 8 year old girls are morally equivalent when it comes to sex.
Biologically, we are completely ready to start having sex by 13-14 at the latest, and our bodies start wanting to. There is very little physical distinction between a picture of an attractive 15 year old and an attractive 18 year old. It is not sick to want to fuck 16 year olds - we have, in fact, been doing it for our entire history. You used to be married by then.
It may be a bad idea, with young women and men being unable to deal with the responsibilities and consequences that come with sex. But it isn't unnatural.
I'm all for protecting children, but 16 year olds are only children because we decided to force them to be. It isn't this new culture that is sexualizing teens. It's our nature revolting against the unnaturally long childhood that middle class wealth has allowed us to force on ourselves. We evolved to be out learning to be an adult and getting ready to start a family by that age, not sitting in class and pretending to be asexual until we get married at 22.
I'm sick of this "global warming will decimate humanity" bullshit. Unless you actually meant the original meaning of decimate (to take one tenth) as opposed to the current standard usage.
If I accept that it is a problem, that it is caused by mankind, and that the ice caps will recede a bit and coastal areas will be flooded. (Right now I accept completely that they have observed a warming trend that could be linked to man-made carbon emissions and which may continue in the future.)
That in NO way correlates with destroying mankind. It correlates very strongly with yet another set of human migration waves which could potentially be very disruptive to economic purposes. But it could also just mean that we can grow a ton of grain in Alaska and the California desert becomes prime beach front real estate. Even the worst predictions I have seen will give people years to move and adjust. It's not like one day the whole ice cap is just going to be gone and a 100 foot wave will ride over Florida.
Humanity has been dealing with climate change for thousands of years. There have been many studies linking major historic and prehistoric migrations to natural differences in climate.
I'm not saying it's a good thing. But I see no reason people won't adjust. And in the mean time, I agree 100% with Dyson's argument that we need to make sure that we consider the real human cost of reducing CO2 emissions.
Not to mention, what do you do when your paper is due in 10 minutes, you lost your last hard copy, and your PC is in a dorm that is a fifteen minute walk away?
Buddhism is too fractured to be defined as a whole as one or the other. Pure Land Buddhism certainly fits every description of a religion I've heard.
Ahh, democracy in action.
There was a very interesting study I read comparing corruption in the US during its economic rise to the corruption in African governments during their current economic failures.
They found that the level of corruption (as measured by some international standard) was not significantly different between the two, but that the scope of what that corrupt government could do was significantly different.
The US government prior to World War I took up less than 9% of the country's GDP. In most African countries, that number is greater than 50%. The more government touches the more dangerous its corruption becomes.
A very good point - but Hindus and Buddhists aren't the ones trying to sabotage science education in the US, which is what normally starts these arguments.
Overall my listening experience has improved - DVD's, CD's, and video games sound great now. I just had to go through my music collection and weed out all of the old 128 kbps crap I had downloaded in the early days of napster.
I couldn't hear the difference for years listening on my computer speakers and earbuds.
Then I bought a decent $70 set of headphones (Grado Labs, in case anyone cares) to listen with at work and my whole mp3 collection sounds like crap.
At least the few CD's I own sound amazing, though :(
I would say it is even worse than that.
Fertility clinics exist already, the embryos exist already, and are already "dead" or going to "die."
It is like forbidding organ donation and transplant because they don't want people killed for their organs.
As in the previous case, there is a reasonable compromise (no killing people for their organs, limits on the organ market) that is pretty much already in effect (no having an abortion to create stem cells, no massive stem cell farms, just reusing waste products).
That is what I don't get - they aren't trying to shut down fertility clinics, they're trying to ban research on the reuse of embryos that are for all intents and purposes already sentenced to "death" under their worldview.
The real core of the threat is emerging markets, and this is where their "piracy is number 1, linux is number 2" thinking comes from.
There are hundreds of millions of people in India and China who will be getting enough income to purchase a computer or computer time in the next decade. Windows at $100 a pop is a much bigger deal to them than it is in the US, when that could be a full month's salary.
Almost all of the massive piracy statistics you here are coming from those areas. You can buy pirated copies of windows at normal shops for a dollar or two.
In fact, one could easily argue that pirated copies of windows are one of the largest barriers to Linux adoption as well.
These areas of the world hold the largest potential in this sort of field, where there is already large amounts of market saturation in western countries. And that's why they don't consider Apple a threat - it is very likely you will never see copies of mac os x being sold in shanghai for a buck each.
Typical? Not one of my coworkers is still on his first xbox 360. Some are on their third.
The thing is, most people are going to have some sort of PC anyway. Obviously you do, because you're on the internet. Now, *if* that PC is a desktop (which if it isn't, you already spent enough on it to build a killer gaming desktop), it will cost you about $100 every year or two to be able to play almost any PC game that comes out at fairly high settings, and starting about a year ago they will look better than the console version. For me, that comes out to cheaper than or comparable to a console ($300 up front). And I can play all my old old games any time I want, because they're still compatible, as opposed to being locked out of anything but just the last generation.
YMMV, but just because some people spend thousands of dollars every year on a dick length competition for PC gaming doesn't mean that is required. The vast majority of developers are forced to target people with machines much lower than that - therefore, if you have a machine a bit lower than that, you're fine.
Both consoles and PCs have their strengths and weaknesses, but this money sink weaknesses people seem to project onto PC's is a bit of bullshit.
The civilization studies I've read believed that once a civilization began any sort of rapid empire building it was already past its peak, and the increased militarism was a symbol of its decline. You can see it in quite a few civilizations.
A country needs some border wars to keep them strong and organized, but if they progress to invading the rest of the world they are on the way out.
So says "A Study of History" anyway.
But still displays penetration that is better than most more "modern" standard issue sidearms... I doubt a 40 S&W would have penetrated either, and the 9mm has significantly less power (it's just close enough and you can carry twice as many rounds). A 10 mm or one of the magnum cartridges might have, but few people actually use those because they'll beat the crap out of your hand.
Of course this test ignores the essential fact that pistols and long arms are hugely different items. The musket is more analogous to a modern shotgun firing slugs, which penetrates much better than any handgun you are likely to find.