The best would be to say they were smart and lucky. They were lucky that the competition delayed getting a product to catch on. They were smart to quickly get to market a product that would catch on. This is the way the world works: having the luck to be in the right place at the right time and then having the ability to get the most from that opportunity.
It's pretty basic economics, I learned it in the introduction to microeconomics course I took.
The simple model is that a producer is going to use the marginal revenue (the revenue from making one more unit) and the marginal cost (the cost to make one more unit) and where these two intersect is when the money brought in will be less than the cost to produce. The demand curve is then used to set the price from the number of units produced.
Normal theory only uses the marginal cost and the demand curves to determine the number produced and the price, which will always be a lower price and more produced than the method above because with the standard method, the number of units produced is set to where the marginal revenue is zero, which is the break even point.
No one wants to break even, they want to maximize profit, so everything costs more than it does to produce. This results in less production and higher costs.
Don't forget that the FCC also will monitor, fine, and prosecute anyone who uses licensed spectrum without a license. Otherwise, someone, say me, could just put up an antenna in my home and easily make no cellphone work within a mile (oh yeah, I live in a city). There is no other way to create a contract that would bind every single person from setting up interfering equipment (either on purpose or accident).
Though, this is not to say the cost of monitoring and pursuing unlicensed broadcasters is as much as the fees, but it must be included in any economic analysis as it does add value to the spectrum.
I think if there was a bad implementation, that the government wasn't getting their fingers into, they would be opening themselves up to lawsuits that would hopefully crumble the company.
Big businesses are likely to start using these to encrypt confidential data on laptops, maybe even desktops. So if they find out through a data leak via one of these drives and it's not encrypting with the encryption advertised and that's what lead to the leak, then the drive maker is going to get sued for the cost of the leak, the cost to replace every single drive the company used (possibly with a competitor's), and probably some more on top of that for being so stupid. Oh, and then every other business customer will sue to have all their drives replaced with ones that will actually protect their data.
Think of companies like Microsoft or IBM finding out the huge number of drives they bought for every single laptop they have isn't actually protecting the data they need by law to protect.
I would only worry that the manufacturer or the government has a backdoor because the government would probably protect the manufacturer then.
The whole DHMO thing is really an unfair example, as it involves misleading scare tactics (100% of people who consume it die, for example). That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them.
Which people do, sometimes intentionally, sometimes just because of the natural bias people have to look at what pleases them. I think it's necessary to teach people to actually think about not only what their being told, but how their being told it. A fact not only has to be true, it has to be meaningful.
The motherboard is already at the limits and you still need more.
or
You're dealing with some application programmed by cavemen that insists on having a disk (or swap) to write things to and the clever (yet still moronic) programmers decided to check whether you are trying to cheat. I've delt with some pretty shitty programs, so I don't doubt it's happened.
Let's bootstrap moon production. Why lug tons of materials up there when we could figure out how to build most of what we want using materials already present on the moon. Leave the expensive task of cargo hauling to components that would cost too much to get the manufacturing equipment there. Let's see if we can get a near self sustaining habitation there before we think of sending more people.
This is what your system sounds like: I have card with memory contents A. The reader then reads A, writes B to the card, reads B from the card and is happy. I push a button on my modified card, it's now stores A.
Your fancy hashes, signing, whatever are all stored in the memory contents on the card. What you need is a way to know that A is invalid data and should never be read from the card ever again (putting a timestamp in the data will ensure going back to a previous balance won't write the same data to the card).
The problem is that you have to store that A is invalid in a trusted place, which is not on the card. All that your fancy PKI has done it made it possible to know that the data on the card was written by a trusted source at some point in the past. The problem is how does it know it's what it should be right now.
To say what numbsafari pointed out in a different way:
If you're code is getting confusing enough to make it hard to know which block is getting closed, the solution is not labeling the closing of the blocks, but to encapsulate parts of your code into functions so the overall program flow is clear.
The only place where this could be appropriate is in C preprocessor statements or similar, but then you should be questioning if you're doing too much with them.
Everyone is ignoring the security problem with this, the unencrypted versions should be destroyed! What better way to do that then by overwriting with an encrypted version of the partition!
That's why any software that licensed to an IP address gets a private address from me. It's complete crap that companies think IP addresses couldn't change.
I don't think many slashdotters are privy to the actual costs of internet connections. I work in the networking department at my work where we had a T3 (45 Mbps). We've moved to leased fiber to a co-loc and now have 250 Mbps for less. It's the same ISP, all we did was take the phone company out and costs went way down.
The cable and phone companies are able to charge so much because they are the only last mile connection in many places. Having a data connection (phone, TV, internet) that the government (controlled at the town/state level) treats like the roads would be great.
My model would have the government run single-mode fiber to every house and bring it all together in a building in each town (or maybe larger). It would then be the responsibility of a company to actually give service over the fiber to homes. This would allow people much more flexibility, so if a group of people want to just share 100 Mbps from a big ISP, they have the power to do so.
Look up Godwin's Law, it says nothing about losing the argument! It merely conjectures that the probability of Nazi comparisons increases with the thread depth.
My opinion is that the snow argument is not a rational one, but has been a very strong part of the sales pitch for these vehicles nonetheless.
The snow that came December 13 this year, it easily took people driving out of Boston over 5 hours to get home. I take the train, it was only 25 minutes late that day. This is with the MBCR's mismanagement (I also think some idiots in cars blocked some train crossings).
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
How was the program used?
Did the program output "true" iff it could four color the finite set of representative graphs or did it output a four coloring for each of the graphs?
One case is a mystery if it actually ran with a correct process, the other is comparable to verifying a person's proof. The big problem is that computers could easily create output that could take years to verify by hand.
One way would to have a computer verify the proof, but then it's back to the first issue: did it run properly? The way to check if a human missed something is to have another human check, so why not have independently developed proof verifiers that can run on different computers check the proof?
The problem is with the GPL camp saying how they are somehow "more free".
This requires an answer to "Who's more free?"
IIRC, the GPL came about when Stallman used a piece of software, liked it, but found a bug. He could not fix the bug, the developer for whatever reason would not modify the software to remove the bug. This lead to his vision of giving users the freedom to change the behavior of the software they use. This is where the new clauses in the GPLv3, they are additions to ensure users can modify the behavior of the software they use.
I wonder how many GPL people you could get to admit this distinction instead of just sticking to "we're more free".
There are exactly three entities that can put lines up on your local phone poles or in the conduits: local power company, local mega-baby bell, and local cable contract holder. That's it. Nobody else.
Not to be anal, but to tell a good story:
The fire department can run cables too. There was a school system that wanted to run fiber to network it's buildings together and so they could aggregate an internet connection. None of the companies you listed (not really the power company, though, not in the business) would do it without charging offensive amounts. So the local fire department had the school system buy the fiber and with the fire trucks, ran the fiber along their space on the telephone polls.
The problem with marketing is that it is not about selling what you have, it's about selling what the person wants to buy. If there's a discrepancy between the two, well, that's not your department. Complaints is three doors down, across the hall from Abuse.
Don't forget the legal department.
There's this legal thing, promissory estoppel that has come over to the US from English common law, and hasn't been taken out. Where I work I think we got another company's legal department to reel in a sales representative.
If more people knew the law, marketing departments would be unable to get away with so much. Even though the big companies know how to stay close enough to the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Without email, files on the network, network printers, whatever corporate apps you have, internet... what good is that PC?
Everyone can set all that up at home, it'll just run itself!
Right?
The best would be to say they were smart and lucky. They were lucky that the competition delayed getting a product to catch on. They were smart to quickly get to market a product that would catch on. This is the way the world works: having the luck to be in the right place at the right time and then having the ability to get the most from that opportunity.
That's only because it can take a lot of work to convince people that:
I hope you have read Richard Feynman on Cargo Cult Science and his experience in the textbook selection process.
It takes lots of work to come to real answers, which seems to be too much effort for most people.
It's pretty basic economics, I learned it in the introduction to microeconomics course I took.
The simple model is that a producer is going to use the marginal revenue (the revenue from making one more unit) and the marginal cost (the cost to make one more unit) and where these two intersect is when the money brought in will be less than the cost to produce. The demand curve is then used to set the price from the number of units produced.
Normal theory only uses the marginal cost and the demand curves to determine the number produced and the price, which will always be a lower price and more produced than the method above because with the standard method, the number of units produced is set to where the marginal revenue is zero, which is the break even point.
No one wants to break even, they want to maximize profit, so everything costs more than it does to produce. This results in less production and higher costs.
Don't forget that the FCC also will monitor, fine, and prosecute anyone who uses licensed spectrum without a license. Otherwise, someone, say me, could just put up an antenna in my home and easily make no cellphone work within a mile (oh yeah, I live in a city). There is no other way to create a contract that would bind every single person from setting up interfering equipment (either on purpose or accident).
Though, this is not to say the cost of monitoring and pursuing unlicensed broadcasters is as much as the fees, but it must be included in any economic analysis as it does add value to the spectrum.
I think if there was a bad implementation, that the government wasn't getting their fingers into, they would be opening themselves up to lawsuits that would hopefully crumble the company.
Big businesses are likely to start using these to encrypt confidential data on laptops, maybe even desktops. So if they find out through a data leak via one of these drives and it's not encrypting with the encryption advertised and that's what lead to the leak, then the drive maker is going to get sued for the cost of the leak, the cost to replace every single drive the company used (possibly with a competitor's), and probably some more on top of that for being so stupid. Oh, and then every other business customer will sue to have all their drives replaced with ones that will actually protect their data.
Think of companies like Microsoft or IBM finding out the huge number of drives they bought for every single laptop they have isn't actually protecting the data they need by law to protect.
I would only worry that the manufacturer or the government has a backdoor because the government would probably protect the manufacturer then.
The whole DHMO thing is really an unfair example, as it involves misleading scare tactics (100% of people who consume it die, for example). That's not presenting an opposing idea and letting people come to their own conclusion, but rather intentionally presenting well-known facts in extremely misleading and overcomplicated ways in an attempt to trick them.
Which people do, sometimes intentionally, sometimes just because of the natural bias people have to look at what pleases them. I think it's necessary to teach people to actually think about not only what their being told, but how their being told it. A fact not only has to be true, it has to be meaningful.
The very simple answer:
The motherboard is already at the limits and you still need more.
or
You're dealing with some application programmed by cavemen that insists on having a disk (or swap) to write things to and the clever (yet still moronic) programmers decided to check whether you are trying to cheat. I've delt with some pretty shitty programs, so I don't doubt it's happened.
100 GB tapes? They're made that small?
Let's bootstrap moon production. Why lug tons of materials up there when we could figure out how to build most of what we want using materials already present on the moon. Leave the expensive task of cargo hauling to components that would cost too much to get the manufacturing equipment there. Let's see if we can get a near self sustaining habitation there before we think of sending more people.
This is what your system sounds like: I have card with memory contents A. The reader then reads A, writes B to the card, reads B from the card and is happy. I push a button on my modified card, it's now stores A.
Your fancy hashes, signing, whatever are all stored in the memory contents on the card. What you need is a way to know that A is invalid data and should never be read from the card ever again (putting a timestamp in the data will ensure going back to a previous balance won't write the same data to the card).
The problem is that you have to store that A is invalid in a trusted place, which is not on the card. All that your fancy PKI has done it made it possible to know that the data on the card was written by a trusted source at some point in the past. The problem is how does it know it's what it should be right now.
The only place where this could be appropriate is in C preprocessor statements or similar, but then you should be questioning if you're doing too much with them.
Now you've made me want to click it. There's candy!
Everyone is ignoring the security problem with this, the unencrypted versions should be destroyed! What better way to do that then by overwriting with an encrypted version of the partition!
I can think of one: CheckPoint.
That's why any software that licensed to an IP address gets a private address from me. It's complete crap that companies think IP addresses couldn't change.
I don't think many slashdotters are privy to the actual costs of internet connections. I work in the networking department at my work where we had a T3 (45 Mbps). We've moved to leased fiber to a co-loc and now have 250 Mbps for less. It's the same ISP, all we did was take the phone company out and costs went way down.
The cable and phone companies are able to charge so much because they are the only last mile connection in many places. Having a data connection (phone, TV, internet) that the government (controlled at the town/state level) treats like the roads would be great.
My model would have the government run single-mode fiber to every house and bring it all together in a building in each town (or maybe larger). It would then be the responsibility of a company to actually give service over the fiber to homes. This would allow people much more flexibility, so if a group of people want to just share 100 Mbps from a big ISP, they have the power to do so.
Look up Godwin's Law, it says nothing about losing the argument! It merely conjectures that the probability of Nazi comparisons increases with the thread depth.
The snow that came December 13 this year, it easily took people driving out of Boston over 5 hours to get home. I take the train, it was only 25 minutes late that day. This is with the MBCR's mismanagement (I also think some idiots in cars blocked some train crossings).
How was the program used? Did the program output "true" iff it could four color the finite set of representative graphs or did it output a four coloring for each of the graphs? One case is a mystery if it actually ran with a correct process, the other is comparable to verifying a person's proof. The big problem is that computers could easily create output that could take years to verify by hand. One way would to have a computer verify the proof, but then it's back to the first issue: did it run properly? The way to check if a human missed something is to have another human check, so why not have independently developed proof verifiers that can run on different computers check the proof?
Dolomite, duh.
This requires an answer to "Who's more free?"
IIRC, the GPL came about when Stallman used a piece of software, liked it, but found a bug. He could not fix the bug, the developer for whatever reason would not modify the software to remove the bug. This lead to his vision of giving users the freedom to change the behavior of the software they use. This is where the new clauses in the GPLv3, they are additions to ensure users can modify the behavior of the software they use.
I wonder how many GPL people you could get to admit this distinction instead of just sticking to "we're more free".
Not to be anal, but to tell a good story:
The fire department can run cables too. There was a school system that wanted to run fiber to network it's buildings together and so they could aggregate an internet connection. None of the companies you listed (not really the power company, though, not in the business) would do it without charging offensive amounts. So the local fire department had the school system buy the fiber and with the fire trucks, ran the fiber along their space on the telephone polls.
Don't forget the legal department.
There's this legal thing, promissory estoppel that has come over to the US from English common law, and hasn't been taken out. Where I work I think we got another company's legal department to reel in a sales representative.
If more people knew the law, marketing departments would be unable to get away with so much. Even though the big companies know how to stay close enough to the law.